Charlene Vickers

Contemporary Art Practices: Visual Arts Summer Intensive is a three-week scholarship program for young artists aged 15 to 19. Hosted by [Arts Umbrella](https://www.artsumbrella.com/programs/art/scholarship-programs/visual-art-summer-intensive/) and the Contemporary Art Gallery, the course supports participants in developing an art practice that critically engages with the world around them and exposes them to new and creative approaches to artmaking.

Led by facilitating artist Hyung-Min Yoon, the students were exposed to various methodologies and were engaged in a series of workshops, discussions, and critiques that introduced them to contemporary art practices. They explored linocut printmaking and bookbinding with storyteller and printmaker Marlene Yuen and experimented with digital image-making through Photoshop with contemporary visual artist Evan Lee. Students were also led through a beading and embroidery workshop with Anishinaabe mixed media painter and installation artist Charlene Vickers.

This year, the students were challenged to look into themselves and their generation for the final project. *Intertwined*, a title chosen to express the closely involved relationship between their identity and the society that formed it, showcases the result of the individual artworks of the 2022 Contemporary Art Practices cohort.


### Participating Artists
Candyce Gao, Emily Munro, Aisha Pregara, Winston Li, Makoto Devolin, Emily Dao, Caiana Silvelet, Tatyanna Wilke, Kaitlyn Lu, Miranda Vinti


### Lead Facilitating Artist
Hyung-Min Yoon 

### Assistant Artist
Kit Liu

### Guest Artists
Marlene Yuen, Evan Lee, Charlene Vickers

### Organized by
Patrick O'Neill, Vitória Monteiro, Jesse Wardell

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Visual Arts Summer Intensive 2022

Intertwined

Each season, CAG releases a series of Video Visits that offer short takes on our exhibitions. Presented in five languages — Cantonese, English, French, Mandarin and Spanish — these videos present a variety of perspectives on the work of Charlene Vickers and Faye HeavyShield.
 
### English Video Visits
[Charlene Vickers: Ancestor Gesture](https://vimeo.com/644052137)
[Faye HeavyShield: New Work](https://vimeo.com/642458358)
 
### Visites vidéo en français
[Charlene Vickers: Ancestor Gesture](https://vimeo.com/642461676)
[Faye HeavyShield: New Work](https://vimeo.com/642459013)
 
### Visitas de video en español
[Charlene Vickers: Ancestor Gesture](https://vimeo.com/642461676)
[Faye HeavyShield: New Work](https://vimeo.com/642460285)
 
### 普通话视频之旅
[Charlene Vickers: Ancestor Gesture](https://vimeo.com/644053000)
[Faye HeavyShield: New Work](https://vimeo.com/642459702)
 
### 粵語視頻參觀
[Charlene Vickers: Ancestor Gesture](https://vimeo.com/644051423)
[Faye HeavyShield: New Work](https://vimeo.com/642460926)
 


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Fall 2021

Video Visits

Open Studio is a monthly program for young visitors and families inspired by contemporary art practices and CAG’s current exhibitions. Please join us for an art-making workshop and special performance with artists and musicians Charlene Vickers and Chad MacQuarrie. Offered twice this fall—once in November and again in December—participants are invited to watch Vickers and MacQuarrie perform and then take part in a mixed-media exploration inspired by their performance.

Charlene Vickers is an Anishinaabe artist based in Vancouver. Her painting, sculpture and performance works explore memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands. She is the recipient of the 2018 VIVA Award. Recent exhibitions include a co-presentation with Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun *Lets’lo:tseltun*, Macaulay & Co. Fine Art (2021); Rain Shadow, Nanaimo Art Gallery (2021); *Where Do We Go From Here?*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2020); *Biennale nationale de sculpture Contemporaine*, Quebec (2020); *An Assembly of Shapes*, Oakville Galleries (2018); *Speaking with Hands and Territories*, SFU Galleries (2018); and *Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2016). International group exhibitions include *the map is not the territory*, Portland Art Museum (2019); *Connective Tissue: New Approaches in Contemporary Fibre Art*, MoCNA, Santa Fe (2017); *From The Belly of The Beast*, Grace Gallery, Brooklyn (2017); and *If We Never Met*, Pataka Art Museum, Porirua, New Zealand (2016). Vickers graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1994) and Simon Fraser University (Critical Studies of the Arts, 1998; MFA, 2013)

Chad MacQuarrie is a guitarist, musician and artist, active on numerous fronts of Vancouver’s music scene since arriving here from eastern Canada in 1995. With an emphasis on using jazz and rock styles to explore new forms of practice, MacQuarrie’s experience ranges across a variety of styles, including commercial, classical and traditional genres. These projects include work with Karen Foster, Assertion, The Now Orchestra, Benzene, Carol Pope, Doundounba and many more.


A black and white photograph of Charlene Vickers and Chad MacQuarrie playing guitars inside a house. 

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Sound, Music and Mixed Media with Charlene Vickers and Chad MacQuarrie

Open Studio

In conversation with her exhibition *Ancestor Gesture*, Charlene Vickers will present a new work in performance. Attendance will be limited; pre-registration required.  

### Biography

Charlene Vickers is an Anishinaabe artist based in Vancouver. Her painting, sculpture and performance works explore memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands. She is the recipient of the 2018 VIVA Award. Recent exhibitions include a co-presentation with Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun *Lets’lo:tseltun*, Macaulay & Co. Fine Art (2021); *Rain Shadow*, Nanaimo Art Gallery (2021); *Where Do We Go From Here?*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2020); *Biennale nationale de sculpture Contemporaine*, Quebec (2020); *An Assembly of Shapes*, Oakville Galleries (2018); *Speaking with Hands and Territories*, SFU Galleries (2018); and *Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2016). International group exhibitions *include the map is not the territory*, Portland Art Museum (2019); *Connective Tissue: New Approaches in Contemporary Fibre Art*, MoCNA, Santa Fe (2017); *From The Belly of The Beast*, Grace Gallery, Brooklyn (2017); and *If We Never Met*, Pataka Art Museum, Porirua, New Zealand (2016). Vickers graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1994) and Simon Fraser University (Critical Studies of the Arts, 1998; MFA, 2013).


A large wood sculpture is installed in a gallery space. It is the shape of a house with a large window in the middle. A painting depicting the silhouette of a woman sits in the window.

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Performance

Join exhibiting artists Charlene Vickers and Faye HeavyShield for an in-depth discussion about their respective practices and the concerns that drive them in a conversation moderated by artist, curator and writer Lorna Brown.

### Biographies

Charlene Vickers is an Anishinaabe artist based in Vancouver. Her painting, sculpture and performance works explore memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands. She is the recipient of the 2018 VIVA Award. Recent exhibitions include a co-presentation with Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun *Lets’lo:tseltun*, Macaulay & Co. Fine Art (2021); *Rain Shadow*, Nanaimo Art Gallery (2021); *Where Do We Go From Here?*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2020); *Biennale nationale de sculpture Contemporaine*, Quebec (2020); *An Assembly of Shapes*, Oakville Galleries (2018); *Speaking with Hands and Territories*, SFU Galleries (2018); and *Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2016). International group exhibitions include *the map is not the territory*, Portland Art Museum (2019); *Connective Tissue: New Approaches in Contemporary Fibre Art*, MoCNA, Santa Fe (2017); *From The Belly of The Beast*, Grace Gallery, Brooklyn (2017); and *If We Never Met*, Pataka Art Museum, Porirua, New Zealand (2016). Vickers graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1994) and Simon Fraser University (Critical Studies of the Arts, 1998; MFA, 2013).

Faye HeavyShield is a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy from the Kainai (Blood) Nation in the foothills of Southern Alberta. She is a fluent speaker of the Blackfoot language and studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. HeavyShield has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada, including *Nations in Urban Landscapes*, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; *rock paper river*, Gallery Connexion, Fredericton; *Into the Garden of Angels*, The Power Plant, Toronto; and *blood*, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge. Her work is held in collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg; the Heard Museum, Phoenix; the Glenbow Museum, Calgary; and the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina.

Lorna Brown is Acting Director/Curator at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia and a visual artist, writer, educator and editor, exhibiting her work internationally since 1984. Brown was the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004 and is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, a collective of artists, architects and curators presenting projects that consider the varying conditions of public places and public life. She has taught at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and Simon Fraser University. Brown received an honorary degree from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2015), the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts Award (1996) and the Canada Council Paris Studio Award (2000). Her work is in the collections of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, the BC Arts Council, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank.



Three black and white portrait photographs are placed side by side. From the left to the right, the photographs are of Charlene Vickers, Faye HeavyShield, and Lorna Brown. 

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Charlene Vickers & Faye HeavyShield with Lorna Brown

In Conversation

Presented in partnership with [Art Toronto](https://arttoronto.balluun.com/en-us/widget-detail/329), this panel discussion brings together an intergenerational group of Vancouver-based artists to discuss their histories with community and collaborative practices, the circumstances that brought them to the city, and their current projects in a time of distancing. Moderated by Althea Thauberger, this conversation includes Justine A. Chambers, Yasmine Haiboub, Sandra Semchuk, and Charlene Vickers.

### Watch Online

Watch the panel discussion for free online [here](https://vimeo.com/471945599/1a0beeb71b)

### Biographies 

Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist living and working on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. In her work she privileges what is felt over what is seen, by working with her body as an imperfect recording device to develop a cumulative embodied archive. Recent choreographic projects have been presented at Contemporary Art Gallery (2020), Sophiensaele (2019), Artspeak (2019), Hong Kong Arts Festival (2019), Art Museum at University of Toronto (2018), the Vancouver Art Gallery (2018), Agora de la Danse (2017), Festival of New Dance (2017), Canada Dance Festival (2016), Dancing on the Edge (2015), Dance in Vancouver (2013, 2015, 2019), and The Western Front (2013). Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.

Yasmine Haiboub is an artist, facilitator and curator currently based in Vancouver, the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. She is completing her BFA at Emily Carr University, where she received an Award for Community Engagement. She also co-founded Ground Floor Art Centre. Yasmine’s practice is interdisciplinary and focuses on community engagement and sculptural works. She engages with her immediate surroundings through performative gestures, interactive sculptures and mass accumulation of familiar objects, creating new narratives in public and private spaces. Yasmine is mainly concerned with creating intersectionality through self-awareness, care, hospitality, and self-proclaimed authority.

Sandra Semchuk is a photographer, writer and Governor General’s Award recipient in Visual and Media Arts. She is a storyteller who uses the familial, autobiography and dialogue as the basis for recognition and identity across generations, cultures and species. She collaborated with her late husband James Nicholas, Rock Cree writer and orator to disrupt myths that have shaped settler relations to First Nations. Her book, *The Stories Were Not Told: Canada’s First World War Internment Camps* (U of Alberta Press, 2018) considers legislated racism and the intergenerational consequences of Canada’s first internment camps when so many from the Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman Empires were interned.

Althea Thauberger is an artist, filmmaker and educator known for place-based social documentary projects involving collaborative research and production. The final works — films, videos, audio recordings, and photographs — are reflections on local histories and sociopolitical power dynamics, including ones involved in the production process itself. Thauberger currently has a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, and has recently shown her work at the Art Gallery of Southern Alberta in Lethbridge, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Charlene Vickers is an Anishnabe artist based in Vancouver. Her painting, sculpture and performance works explore memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands. Charlene is the recipient of the 2018 VIVA Award. Recent solo exhibitions include SFU Galleries (2018), aceartinc (2017) and Artspeak (2015), with a forthcoming solo project at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Recent group exhibitions include Portland Art Museum (2019); Oakville Galleries (2018); Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2018); Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe (2017); Pataka Art Museum, New Zealand (2016); and the Vancouver Art Gallery (2016). She graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1994) and Simon Fraser University (BA, 1998; MFA, 2013).

### Relevant links

Justine A. Chambers and Laurie Young, One Hundred More
[tanzforumberlin.de/en/production/one-hundred-more/](https://www.tanzforumberlin.de/en/production/one-hundred-more/)

Ground Floor Art Centre, co-founded by Yasmine Haiboub
[groundfloorac.info/about](http://groundfloorac.info/about)

Portrait of Sandra Semchuk
[youtube.com/watch?v=OWK_4kNb-cE](
http://youtube.com/watch?v=OWK_4kNb-cE)

Sandra Semchuk and James Nicholas, Taking off Skins 
[themedicineproject.com/sandra-semchuk-james-nicholas.html](http://themedicineproject.com/sandra-semchuk-james-nicholas.html)

Charlene Vickers and Neil Eustache, Cool Indians on Main Street
[grunt.ca/cool-indians-on-main-street](http://grunt.ca/cool-indians-on-main-street/)

Charlene Vickers and Marian Hupfield,  Jingles and Sounds for Speaking to Our Grandmothers
[mariahupfield.wordpress.com/2018/08/03/massive-jingle-seattle-art-fair](http://mariahupfield.wordpress.com/2018/08/03/massive-jingle-seattle-art-fair)


Working together apart: Collaborative practices in Vancouver

Talk 

Encompassing a wide range of media — including painting, sculpture, performance and installation — the practice of Charlene Vickers operates as a visionary expression of what the artist terms *embodied territory*. Giving vital form to the lands, histories and relations of her birthplace in Wauzhushk Onigum as they are felt, imagined and carried across distance, Vickers’ works lucidly manifest ancestral connections, cultural reclamations and her territorial presence as Anishinaabe Kwe, while responding formally to the Coast Salish land she has resided upon for the past thirty years. 

In *Ancestor Gesture*, Vickers brings together a selection of new and recent works covering more than ten years of output. From rhythmic abstractions inspired by the quillwork embroidery of her forebears, to a monumental cedar bone bead rendered as a teaching, to a suite of shimmering line drawings that index energy, spirit and breath, the exhibition highlights Vickers’ engagement with a broad spectrum of concerns, spanning meditations on power, protection, kinship, and healing. Presented together for the first time, the works on view reflect the intimacy and insistence of Vickers’ practice, speaking expansively across time, territory and tradition.

Work at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station is installed from September 17, 2021 to March 20, 2022. It is presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program, InTransit BC.

### Biography

Charlene Vickers is an Anishinaabe artist based in Vancouver. Her painting, sculpture and performance works explore memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands. She is the recipient of the 2018 VIVA Award. Recent exhibitions include a co-presentation with Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun, Macaulay & Co. Fine Art (2021); *Rain Shadow*, Nanaimo Art Gallery (2021); *Where Do We Go From Here?*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2020); Biennale nationale de sculpture Contemporaine, Quebec (2020); *An Assembly of Shapes*, Oakville Galleries (2018); *Speaking with Hands and Territories*, SFU Galleries (2018); and *Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2016). International group exhibitions include *the map is not the territory*, Portland Art Museum (2019); *Connective Tissue: New Approaches in Contemporary Fibre Art*, MoCNA, Santa Fe (2017); *From The Belly of The Beast*, Grace Gallery, Brooklyn (2017); and *If We Never Met*, Pataka Art Museum, Porirua, New Zealand (2016). Vickers graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1994) and Simon Fraser University (Critical Studies of the Arts, 1998; MFA, 2013).




ProgramGuideFall2021.pdf

ExhibitionGuideCharleneVickers.pdf

A detail view of a watercolour painting by Charlene Vickers, a geometrically rendered zigzag pattern rendered in a vibrant palette of ochres, golds, greens and blues.

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This is an installation view of Charlene Vickers’ drawings. 15 framed drawings of dense vertical lines made with coloured markers hang in a grid on a white wall. 

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This is an installation view of Charlene Vickers’ solo exhibition. Across from the wall on which a series of drawings are mounted are two tall cylindrical sculptures wrapped in painted fabric.

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This is a close-up view of Charlene Vickers’ sculptures. Tall cylindrical objects are wrapped in fabric, which is painted blue. Some small objects including buttons are attached to the sculptures.

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A set of fifteen tall, thin sculptures are leaning against a gallery wall. Their bodies are made of braided grass wrapped in white cotton. Human hair emerges from the top of each sculpture.

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This is the side view of a set of Charlene Vickers’ wrapped sculptures leaning against a wall. The length of each sculpture varies. Human hair emerges from the top of each sculpture.

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This is an installation shot of Charlene Vickers’ solo exhibition. A large bead-shaped sculpture made of wood sits on the floor. Behind it, a series of spear-shaped sculptures lean against the wall. 

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Twelve tall spear-shaped sculptures carved out of cedar lean against the gallery wall. They are all shaped in the same size and left unpainted. They stand vertically as if to make a fence. 

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Ancestor Gesture

Charlene Vickers
*Diviners Clump | Diviners Three Blue | Diviners Pink Fire*, 2010/2021
inkjet print
20 x 15 inches
Edition of 5 + 2 APs; signed
Unframed

The work of Charlene Vickers operates as a visionary expression of what the artist terms *embodied territory*, giving vital form to the lands, histories and relations of her birthplace in Wauzhushk Onigum as they are felt, imagined and carried across distance. The artist's *Diviners Grasses* series emerged from a practice of daily mark-making undertaken by Vickers several years ago, putting marker to paper as an index to energy, breath and creative life. A centrepiece of her current exhibition *Ancestor Gesture*, these works channel a range of persistent forms, including fire, grasses, hair, and bulrushes. For CAG, Vickers has produced limited edition prints for three of the drawings in this series, offered here at a new scale.

Courtesy of the artist and Macaulay & Co. Fine Art

Charlene Vickers

Exhibitions

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