THIS IS GREAT MATERIAL

July 17 – August 21, 2020
online exhibition & poster series opening July 17   gachetfromaway.org

Artists: Afuwa, Tamara Bond, Krystle Coughlin Silverfox, Marissa Diamond, Mary Phyllis O’Toole

THIS IS GREAT MATERIAL proposes a celebration of collage art as media and practice. Featuring mixed-media work by artists located throughout the region — unceded Esquimalt, Songhees, Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories — the exhibition revels in the form’s capacity for recombination, juxtaposition, layering, and association as modes of healing and reclamation of lifeworlds.

The exhibition borrows its title from an artwork by Tamara Bond, where the exclamation appears as both the work’s title and writing on the canvas. The artists featured in this exhibition draw from their lived experiences, combining found and handmade paper with gold leaf, beadwork, digital imagery, paint, textiles, thread, drawing, ink, printwork, and photography. Afuwa balances diasporic presence and loss with invocations of missing family photographs. Tamara Bond conjures fantastic, densely-populated worlds on the other side of schizo-affective symptoms and carceral mental health forces. Krystle Coughlin Silverfox inverts landscape conventions to reimagine relational land/use. Marissa Diamond reconfigures imagery and materials alluding to bodies to revalue gendered art-making methods and interrogate traditional ideals of beauty. For Mary Phyllis O’Toole, collage is a way to describe and illustrate experiences of schizophrenia and to decrease the stigma to people who live with the misunderstood illness.

THIS IS GREAT MATERIAL considers collage in contrast to the appropriation prevalent in dominant white art histories and distinct from avant-garde narratives that focus on the cut as an aesthetic gesture of political disruption. Adhesion becomes the emphasis, not for the sake of nostalgia or normative wholeness, but toward spaces for resilient lifeworlds and imperfect possibility.

THIS IS GREAT MATERIAL Poster Series

One work by each artist is printed as a poster series. Valuing offline accessibility while following the direction of the DTES Response to discourage unnecessary visits to the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, the posters will be installed as of July 17 at to-be-specified outdoor locations near the DTES as well as undisclosed sites within, where they are accessible to neighbourhood residents and their essential visitors. Please visit gachetfromaway.org for confirmed poster locations, to order copies, or to inquire about artists’ sales.

Gallery Gachet is located in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver on the unceded and occupied territories of the xwməθkwəy’əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (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. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Vancouver Foundation, the City of Vancouver, the Province of British Columbia, and the Lacey Prize 2019.

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For more information about Gallery Gachet exhibitions, public programs, or accessibility please contact programming@gachet.org

Image: Krystle Coughlin Silverfox, Hats’adän echo (Elders teachings), 2020. 18 in x 12 in. Image courtesy the artist.