#Charlene Vickers

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Ghosts

Charlene Vickers

from the website "It is Pac-Man and the Ghosts Inky, Binky, Pinky and Clyde! My work is inspired by a retro 80s childhood memory of a summer obsession to perfect the most perfect game of Pac-Man. 40 plus years later my beloved perfect game is still beyond reach and my memory of the pellet chomping creature and his mystic crew of floating pixelated ectoplasmic entities is now softened, fuzzy, and button eyed. I have reimagined the digital creatures of 1982 as hand made sewn colourful felts, with pony bead power pellets, shining shell button eyes and floating ovoid ghostie bodies."

-Charlene Vickers

This piece is part of Lattimer Gallery's 2023 annual Charity Bentwood Boxes auction running from November 25th to December 9th. All proceeds will be donated to the Urban Native Youth Association.

[monsieurschnock]

Mémoire matérielle : l'exposition à découvrir au pavillon de Plural (CA)

Melanie Colosimo, When is a fence a ladder?, 2021-22,The Blue Building Gallery, Photo © Ryan Josey (détail) Du 12 au 14 avril 2024 L’Association des galeries d’art contemporain (AGAC) est ravie d’annoncer aujourd’hui l’exposition Mémoire matérielle, qui sera présentée au Pavillon du deuxième étage de la foire Plural, du 12 au 14 avril prochain. Commissariée par evlyne Laurin, Mémoire…

[kimparisfanfic]

"You KNOW what you did!” Harry screamed. “What I want to know is why! Why did you have to go to the only woman on the ship I have any chance with and tell her that I'm -- that I'm--"

[wutbju]

Rev. William Elwood Parish, age 84 of Flowery Branch, Georgia, passed away on Thursday, June 20, 2019. Rev. Parish was born in Caldwell County, Kentucky on July 12, 1934. As a boy, "Elwood" wanted to be a farmer. As a young man, feeling called into the music ministry, he graduated from Bob Jones University in 1955 and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Following seminary, he began his full-time music ministry in rural Mississippi. 

He and his family continued serving in Southern Baptist churches in northern Florida, Augusta, Georgia, metro-Atlanta, Gainesville, Georgia and Talmo, Georgia. After 54 years of ministry and service, he retired in Flowery Branch, Georgia. Rev. Parish, also known as Woody, Granddad, and Mr. Woody (by the children in his neighborhood), loved his family and spent his free time enjoying his grandchildren, studying the Bible and gardening. 

He is preceded in death by his son, Alan Todd Parish; father, Charles E. Parish; mother, Bertha Salyer Parish; brothers, Jim Parish and Elmo Parish; sisters, Ann Whalen, Dorothy Johnston, and Charlene Vickers. Survivors include his wife Mildred Ann Parish; daughter, Sherra Knowles (Tony); son, Scott Parish; grandchildren, Matthew Knowles, Kirby Knowles (Claudia), Amanda Brown (Brandon), Austin Parish, Ayden Parish; great grandchildren, Gemma Claire Brown, Isla Kate Brown, and many nieces and nephews. 

Visitation and Remembrance for Rev. Parish will be Monday, June 24, 2019 from 4:00 PM until 5:30 PM at Conner-Westbury Funeral Home. A Celebration of Life service will be held on Saturday, July 6, 2019 at 12 noon at Talmo Baptist Church, Talmo Georgia. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations in memory of Rev. Parish to Talmo Baptist Church or the "Pruitt Cares Foundation." Call 1.800.956.5354 or visit www.pruittcares.org.

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Art Review Assignment

Ground Signals Origin of Exhibition: Surrey Art Gallery

Artists: Ruth Beer, Roxanne Charles, Marie Côté, Lindsay Dobbin, Richard Fung, Brandon Gabriel and Ostwelve, Farheen HaQ, Peter Morin, Valérie d. Walker and Bobbi L. Kozinuk, Charlene Vickers and Cathy Busby

Occasionally a commonality of interests comes together to create a period of work that opens our eyes to a hidden reality. This exhibit explores our relationship to the Canadian wilderness within the context of habitation and commodification through the lens of a non-westernized view. The Surrey Art Gallery’s current exhibition, Ground Signals, features several Canadian-based artists exploring the intersection of human habitation and the natural Canadian wilderness. Installations of sound, video, performance art, painting, and handcraft-based arts are among the more than dozen works which seek to re-frame our view of the land away from commodity, entertainment and Colonial identity. Gallery curator Jordan Strom, and emerging artist Roxanne Charles, of the Semiahmoo First Nation, collaborate to prepare an exhibit of works that represent artists both culturally diversified and imbued with a unique perspective of land. There is an overlying theme of non-commodity, activism, the modern and the ancestral within this intersection re-defined. I was fortunate enough to see the October 28, 2017 performance of artist Peter Morin with his work, “Experiments in Time Travel.  This piece is part installation, part performance art and part ephemeral in that it lives in both time and space between mirrored installations in Surrey and Kamloops— a performance that continually reshapes all the components of this installation for a brief time. Circular motions dominate as Morin rips and tears fabric, buzz-cuts his hair, walks the perimeter of the shifting sand circle to the sounds of his partner’s drum. There is a sensation of the hypnotic in watching his movements beneath the flickering imagery of a gigantic video screen transmitting back and forth between Surrey and Kamloops. At the point where he brushes aside the sand to enter the circle, my mind registers a sense of shift, viewing with reverence the common space filled with flat black disks, a drum, deer antlers. His circular walk continues within the circle of sand until the objects and his behavior become a hot mess of disturbance. His keening voice and bowing form are raw emotion that I want to hide from as I can’t help but feel a sense of anguish at the effects of my modern society on our fragile earth. I feel my internal truth: we have lost respect for mother earth. Morin’s performance is a call to examine how I identify with the land. It is my understanding that Morin speaks from a perspective of his aboriginal heritage—people who inhabited this land long before Western culture defined the identity of this land as I came to know it. Morin exposes another identity of Canadian landscapes, hidden by an ingrained colonial view that embraces the commodification of land rather than our reverence for it. I am trying to know what he knows, he is showing me what his ancestors understood. In my search to understand how my awareness of this Canadian landscape has been so influenced by Colonial exposure, by the images available to me within my lifetime, my school experience and experience of Colonial history, I am also drawn to the video installation, Warkworth Castle, by Richard Fung, as part of his Landscapes (2008), video still. My reaction is an ah ha moment to watch the images superimposed upon one another. Scenes of a river with Aboriginal canoes appear and then fade out as the image of a English castle populates the landscape. I witness the “Southern Ontario vistas morphing into English Romantic landscape paintings” as described in the SAG literature. The castle, although it exists in the English County of Northumberland, literally occupies the shoreline of a southern Ontario waterway as a subtext to the Colonial claim on the land and landscapes of Canada. The history of the land prior to two hundred years ago is seen as ephemeral in this video. I was also initially drawn in by the imagery, which was reminiscent of the images I recall seeing in my elementary school books—the images that introduced the history of Canada to third and fourth grade students in the ‘70s. The work initially taps in to a nostalgia, yet Fung’s work, like Morin’s push me to reconsider what I know of this land and wilderness—to accept that there is a different perspective of this land we inhabit, other than the narrative provided me by the institution of western culture. The artists works raise questions of the Colonial narrative of the wilderness was uninhabited before ‘us.’ Geographical locations across Canada from the rain forests and wild pacific coast to the expanse of sandy shorelines of the Maritimes are re-defined by sound and imagery. It is a call to look beyond our romantic and commodified notions of a Canadian wilderness.

[snewaylh]

Charlene Vickers, First Nations Artist, joins Gunargie, Woody, Sarvenaz and Cyrus.

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Charlene Vickers

Mixed-media sculptures

Website

[formlines]

Ovoid Felts 

Charlene Vickers

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March 2, 2012

The rain is still falling as I make my way to East 2nd for the third time in a day. I had gone to Catriona Jeffries for Julie Feyrer's opening, but work is never seen at an opening. I have to go back to view and hear the work in the quietness of the day. To save time I should just stop attending openings all together. I never engage with the work and can never recall any of the conversations had beyond merely having them. But it's in these pockets where faces can be paired to names and we still need faces to go with names. Openings are the messy intersections where work smashes into life for the precariats in this game and they are emblematic of symptoms I do not reject but which I also cannot accept.

When I step back out into the damp drizzle on a darkening afternoon I head over to grunt to check out Charlene Vickers' Ominjimendaan/to remember. I am only there for a few minutes to be with the turtles. The show will travel next to Urban Shaman in Winnipeg and as there are no windows there I wonder which direction the turtle heads will face. But I'm not really thinking about this until sometime after as I'm back on the same block six hours later to see Justin Gradin and Justin Patterson do something together. The vagueness of most performance descriptions is a good trick when intentional, but some people really take it the wrong way. Both Justins have studio spaces at Dynamo and I only knew one of them until I am introduced to the other one during Feyrer's opening.

Here at this performance opening nothing is ready an hour after doors open and Karilynn is already here and not wanting to stay so I suggest we head to the Narrow for a drink. Back into the rain I walk two blocks for one drink though technically I have a double. Once inside we run into Sasha and Lauren who are just coming from Gallery Fukai's opening of Ian Skedd where they weren't sure if anything was actually going on. I get the sense though they just can't be bothered to talk about what wasn't going on as their feet were wet and their jackets were soaked -- though Lauren gets going a little bit when I ask her what she hates most about being back in Vancouver. I could have stayed for another double if I hadn't made the trip to East 2nd with a purpose so I head back to the performance space -- one of these open concept/loft/live/work/gallery/performance spaces that remind me of being 24 again.

The space is crowded now with bodies grouped into small islands and a looping projection of lulling waves on an empty beach that stays on for the entire night. I am no longer in a chatty mood so I hang back leaning against the makeshift wall and stare up at the corrugated steel ceiling that is making everyone so uncomfortably warm. I can hear a chorus of conversations around me that are more rising inflections than anything cognizant and I am not bored but I am suddenly exhausted. As I'm eyeing the exit, the performance begins and Justin P and Justin G appear in black hoods that look like gas masks with smoke stack looking snouts. Wires hang down their throats to pedals on their hips that are further connected to contact mics dangling from their hands. They start playing with garbage, activating, some would say, the perimeters of refuse. They pull staged scraps from a clean steel garbage can placed in the center of the room that could have been dirtier and less staged in its placement. I can see through the mask that Justin P has his eyes closed at times when he tilts his head back to project the bellows of distortion coming from his contact mic. He howls out the excess and howl is just about my favorite word in the English language. Justin G appears more methodical, more concerned with manipulating the mic against surfaces, and it's their contrast in approach that keeps me watching. They stay close to the ground with their masks and their Made in Canada garbage can churning out this soundscape and something decent is happening, not mind blowing -- that is not the point -- but they are decent because they are doing and it doesn't feel like wanking. The piece I feel is too long and it turns out to be only an excerpt of a longer work and album they are taking to Japan.

The lights come on and the girls behind the bar try to transform the MDF cubicle into a dance party, but the space clears and plans are made to head to The Cedar Tavern. My jacket hasn't dried from earlier as I walk to Cedar Tavern with Warren who knows the way and doesn't want to stay in the MDF cubicle any longer either. We've met a few times before but this is the second time we have a conversation about the art game and I once again get super worked up over the rules of the game. I cannot accept many factors of the game, but I don't know if there's a general misunderstanding that displeasure equals quitting and that playing only means compliance. Warren gives me a friendly warning that there will probably be people I have to introduce myself to when I get to the Cedar Tavern, but I save us both the trouble as I buy him a beer for walking with me and I split off.

It's an alleyway speakeasy with an unfortunate art history reference but the works inside do not match that reference. There's a small gallery space along the front with some forgettable paintings hanging on each wall and it becomes the only room in another wise crowded space that never seems able to hold anyone for long. Art showing is never half as interesting as art making, not even in its spatial correlations, and while this was even the subject matter of Feyrer's show with the damning title, we all play along as the gallery space is where the value of the work occurs in exchanges unfolding.

I run into waves of people coming from Samuel Roy-Bois' open house at Langara and the unanimous report was about the copious amounts of food  from pigs in a blanket to a mountain of meatballs. I end up explaining to a Torontonian about the makings of a pupusa and he grew nostalgic for Jamaican patties. Zuzia joins the pupusa conversation as she arrives from Anza with Dawn, Jenny, and Mike. They were playing darts and doing shots and thought of me. She recommends a place off Nanaimo and Hastings for the best pupusas in town and I want to go there now. Aaron had recommended the place on Commercial, but I'm still researching the places on Victoria. It's best when we can sustain conversations about other things, which is maybe the difference between having friends and having peers. I talk about the shapes of the alphabet with someone named John and we learn together that a "m" is the letter "h" doing a back bend. Outside the randomness of conversations is slipping and I run into Justin P again. I tell him I liked his show and I meant it. Those who are left in the middle of the night share good-byes and the rain is still falling as I make my way home.