Manuel Axel Strain | Take As Needed

Interurban Art Gallery, 1 E Hastings | Saturday, February 8 | 3pm-5pm

A community conversation in association with Manuel Axel Strain’s Needed Medicine, currently on exhibit nearby at Gallery Gachet, 9 W Hastings

Free Event | Smudging will be offered | Refreshments will be provided at 3pm

The conversation will begin at 3:30pm to make time for those who would like to visit the exhibition at Gallery Gachet (across Carrall Street) before gathering at Interurban.

All are welcome to join us for a community conversation on the artwork and themes of Needed Medicine, a solo exhibition of new sculpture, drawing, video, and performance work by Manuel Axel Strain currently at Gallery Gachet. Needed Medicine locates mental health within contexts of colonialism, intergenerational trauma, and cultural resurgence. For Take As Needed, Strain has invited E. Condesa Strain, Charlene Vickers, Hagere Selam (shimby) Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, and Stephanie Gagne to share their responses to the exhibition. Possible topics will include addiction, different modes of recovery and healing, institutional and cultural knowledge systems, connections to ancestral land, intergenerational transmissions, and Indigenous-Settler relations.

Artist Biography
Manuel Axel Strain is a 2-spirit interdisciplinary artist with Musqueam/Simpcw/Syilx heritage based in the unceded territory of the Katzie/Kwantlin peoples. They use their lived experience to inspire social and political change in the colonial state of Canada. This leads them to examine the construction of First Nations identities — in particular the internal conflicts that arise from imposed identity constructs and the legacies of colonization. They work with painting, photography, sculpture, performance, and installation. Strain’s work is mainly concerned with assimilation, religion, spirituality, intergenerational trauma, and healing. Their goal is to move beyond the binary opposition of the colonizer and the colonized to establish new ontologies for First Nations identities.

Our  guests for Saturday’s community conversation:

Charlene Vickers
Charlene Vickers is a contemporary Anishinabe artist based in Vancouver Canada. Born in Kenora Ontario and raised in Toronto, her works explore her Ojibway ancestry through painting, sculpture, performance, and video examining memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands. Trained as a painter, she graduated from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1994), Simon Fraser University, BA (1998) and MFA (2013.) Her work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Amsterdam. Her work is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and the Royal Bank of Canada art collection. Vickers most recent solo exhibitions include, Chrysalis Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver BC, Speaking With Hands and Territories, SFU Galleries and Coverings at Macaulay and Co in Vancouver. Group exhibitions include: The Map Is Not The Territory at the Portland Art Museum, I continue to Shape at The Art Museum at U of T in Toronto and An Assembly of Shapes at Oakville Galleries. Upcoming exhibitions are Art Toronto 2019, solo booth with Macaulay and Co. and group exhibition with the Biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine 2020 in Trois Rivieres, Quebec.

Hagere Selam ‘shimby’ Zegeye-Gebrehiwot
Hagere Selam ‘shimby’ Zegeye-Gebrehiwot is a transnational diasporic dyke born and predominantly based in Treaty One Territory (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada). They are a lens based artist that moonlights as a media anthropology/entomology undergrad; and community-centred arts facilitator/administrator/programmer/writer.

Stephanie Gagne
Stephanie Gagne is a Vancouver-based artist. She received a bachelor of fine arts degree in visual arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and a master of fine arts degree in interdisciplinary studies from Simon Fraser University. Her interests include popular culture, sexuality, neighbourhoods and childhood nostalgia. Stephanie’s interdisciplinary projects involve sculpture, photography, drawing and video.

She currently works at the Polygon gallery and is an undergraduate teaching assistant in media history at Emily Carr University. Recent projects include “Ball and Chain” commissioned by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program and presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery plaza. She has curated multiple group exhibitions, such as In Circulation and Exposure, for Capture Photography Festival. Her event “Plastic Picnic” was part of the Canada 150+ celebrations in Stanley Park and celebrated the diverse perspectives that shape our past and current understandings of home.

E. Condesa Strain
E. Condesa Strain is of Musqueam, Syilx and Secwepemc descent currently enrolled in the Indigenous Legal Studies Program at Paul Allard at the University of British Columbia. Being a young First Nations mother has created a strong interest in criminal defence, family and aboriginal law. She graduated as valedictorian from Douglas College with a Bachelors of Arts in Criminology with honours. Her honours project was a qualitative study on the experience of elders working with offenders. During her undergrad she worked in the Indigenous student services as a Student Assistant. As well as a practicum at Cwenengitl Aboriginal Society working with traditional modes of healing for Indigenous men with Substance use disorder. Condesa is currently working at the Indigenous Community Legal Clinic working to provide legal service and advice to Indigenous people.

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Gallery Gachet is located in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver on the unceded and occupied territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Gallery Gachet has a mandate to support artists and offer art programs addressing mental health and socio-political marginalization, while promoting art as a means for survival, cultural participation, and human rights.

Accessibility info: Interurban Art Gallery is a wheelchair accessible space. There is a washroom with stalls and a washroom with urinals; both will be gender-inclusive. This is a blind and low-vision friendly event (it won’t be described, but can be participated in without description). We regret that we are not able to provide sign language interpretation for this event, and that we cannot guarantee a scent-free space. Please be aware that Gallery Gachet’s programming often contends with lived experiences of trauma, mental distress, and marginalization.

Please contact Gallery Gachet if you have any further questions or needs: programming@gachet.org 604.687.2468

Thank you to our funders: City of Vancouver, Vancouver Foundation, Province of BC, Canada Council for the Arts, the Lacey Prize 2019.