Drawuary: Don’t Not Draw & Art Cart + Salon Shop: drawing room

Artwork by Jonny Peterson

Franklin St. Studios and Gallery Gachet present

 Drawuary: Don’t Not Draw

Curated by Gabrielle Hill, Evan Sabourin
and Alex Stursberg

 March 23rd – April 20th, 2012 Opening night: Fri March 23rd, 7 – 10pm

This past February, fourteen local artists from the Franklin St. Studios joined forces for the third annual Drawuary. Each participant had to make one drawing every day for the entire month. This year presented an extra challenge; it’s the first year Drawuary has taken place in a leap year. Given the additional twenty-ninth day, each artist had to produce their usual twenty-eight drawings plus one, increasing the grand total of drawings created this year to over four hundred. Curated by Vancouverites Gabrielle Hill, Evan Sabourin, and Alex Stursberg, Drawuary is an exercise in limitations and abundance, ambitions, success, and potential failure.

Curator and artist Evan Sabourin explains: “the show works with ideas of discipline and materials, how much and what is the artist willing to do everyday. The idea is not of a finished product but of the process of daily art-making, showing the evolution of one’s ideas over a month-long span of time.”

While Drawuary focuses on process rather than outcome, the final exhibition itself promises to be impressive. With fourteen contributing artists and over four hundred artworks, the show gives scope and space to the massive scale of the project, speaking to its overarching theme of ambition and artist drives. On a micro level, each individual drawing highlights aspects of the minute: line, form, idea, detail, precision. Previously held at the now defunct Red Gate Gallery, this year Drawuary has found a new home at Gallery Gachet.

Many of the artists this year – including Alex Heilbron, Chloe Gammon, Kurtis Wilson, Gabrielle Hill, Alex Stursberg, and Evan Sabourin – hail from the Franklin St. Studios, a loose collective of emerging artists who share a small warehouse in East Vancouver. Franklin St. Studios formed after the closure of the Red Gate Studios at Hastings and Cambie last year due to rapid development and gentrification in the Downtown Eastside. Also participating this year are Chandra Melting Tallow, Brennan Kelly, Bracken Hanuse, Jonny Peterson, Aaron Rossner, Morag Kydd, Jesse Corcoran, and Drew Mosely.

http://gachet.org/
http://drawuary.tumblr.com/
For more information, please contact curator, Gabrielle Hill (778) 899-4301.

In conjunction with…

Art Cart + Salon Shop:

drawing room

New Works from Gallery Gachet & Oppenheimer Park
Curated by Ali Lohan and Ayaz Kamani

Ayaz Kamani “Escape of Personalities”

March 23rd – April 20th, 2012

The Art Cart Red Ribbon Launch:
Friday March 23rd, 10:30am, at Oppenheimer Park.
Media welcome at 11am. Refreshments served.

The Art Cart’s inaugural exhibition, drawing room will be displayed before Art Cart heads off on its maiden voyage around the city.

At 7pm, celebrate with the Art Cart + Salon Shop artists at Gallery Gachet for drawing room’s opening reception

“Where’s the Drawing Room? …It could be everywhere.
Life on the gentrification fault line has dislodged keystones in the creative community of the DTES. Space once reserved for art making and sharing has been possessed, perhaps by demons. However there exists a medium that evades these demons with its simplicity: drawing. It is an accessible, adaptable and portable form of expression that can be transformed into kindling when warmth supersedes creative posterity. Drawing is simply marks made on something. It is a medium that has survived due to its versatility.

For the following month, Gallery Gachet will pay homage to the resilience of mark making with the Drawuary: Don’t Not Draw Show, by Franklin St. Studios, who lost their studio space at Red Gate to rising rents and creeping gentrification. We will also celebrate the launch of the Art Cart + Salon Shop, as artists from Oppenheimer Park and Gallery Gachet exhibit drawings that speak about artist space and place.

Art Cart is a mobile art gallery and vending cart for the communities of Gallery Gachet and Oppenheimer Park. The Art Cart is a vessel for artists to transport and sell their work, as well as a being a hub for curated exhibitions and projects, community workshops and public events. Art Cart seeks alternatives for “artist space”, and in its own way represents an act of creative survival and resistance. Developed in collaboration between Oppenheimer Park and Gallery Gachet, Art Cart aims to support artist exposure, creative exchange, and art sales. Like drawing, it can be unhinged from convention as it navigates the shifting possibilities for art in the local cultural realm – who makes it, who shows it, who sees it and who sells it.

Salon Shop is an inclusive micro-gallery space located at Gallery Gachet featuring work by Gachet’s collective and volunteer members. As art and cultural spaces and resources are seized and disappear it leaves most artists with limited options. The Salon Shop offers innovative ways to repurpose and share already existing space, especially in light of Gallery Gachet losing their Powell Street studio space back in 2010 and the looming possibility of the loss of their gallery space at 88 East Cordova at the end of 2012.

Art Cart + Salon Shop would like to acknowledge the loss of the many cultural and artist spaces in the Downtown Eastside, and throughout the city of Vancouver, that have not survived the growing un-affordability and inaccessibility of artist spaces in our increasingly wealth driven city.

The Art Cart project was made possible by the City of Vancouver’s Great Beginnings Program and with support from the Community Arts Council of Vancouver.

For more information, please contact Lara Fitzgerald, Ali Lohan or Ayaz Kamani at 604 687 2468, or programming@gachet.org

To see pictures from this exhibition, please visit our Flickr account

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gallerygachet/sets/72157629787194311   

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gallerygachet/sets/72157629423799932