Justine A. Chambers

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In the third and final installment of Timelines Talks, artists and cultural workers Justine A. Chambers and Vanessa Kwan will present *crying at work (a score for the future)*, a dialogue that considers how we might adapt to, address, embrace, and inhabit the future ahead. 

Timelines Talks is a series of talks and conversations that invite open reflection on the future of “Vancouver.” Programmed as part of the gallery’s forthcoming Timelines project — which welcomes fifty artists, activists, community leaders, and other thinkers to speak to the social and cultural histories that have shaped the city over the past five decades — these talks look toward the questions set to shape the next fifty years.

### RSVP
This event is free; advanced registration is required. RSVP to secure your seat [here](https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/timelines-talk-with-justine-a-chambers-and-vanessa-kwan-tickets-754078377727)

### Accessibility
This event is held in a second-floor space; there are twenty-six stairs, with a landing and turn after the first eleven stairs. ASL interpretation will be provided on-site. A high-quality livestream of the event with CART captioning will also be available [here](https://vimeo.com/event/3865069).

All attendees are asked to wear masks for this event. Disposable masks will be available at the door. Please contact [learning@cagvancouver.org](mailto:learning@cagvancouver.org) for more information.

### Biographies
Justine A. Chambers is an artist and educator living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her movement based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with dances that are already there – the choreographies present in the everyday. Her work has been hosted by galleries, theatres and festivals locally, nationally and internationally. She is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.

Vanessa Kwan is an artist, producer, and curator with a focus on collaborative, site-specific and cross-disciplinary practices. They are currently Director + Curator, Gallery and Exhibitions at Emily Carr University on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territories (Vancouver, Canada). They have worked in artistic leadership roles since 2003, contributing to organizations such as grunt gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, Access Gallery, Powell Street Festival and Out On Screen. They regularly write, speak and publish on art and culture, and since 2017 have been producing residency projects across the Pacific Rim (Vancouver, Seoul, Melbourne and Sydney) exploring artist-led creative exchange.


Portraits of Justine A. Chambers and Vanessa Kwan

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CAG Timelines Talk - Justine Chambers and Vanessa Kwan.png

Justine A. Chambers & Vanessa Kwan

Timelines Talk

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 

In her new durational work, *And then this also* (2020), exhibiting artist Justine A. Chambers explores issues of distraction, adrenaline, time and care as a working mother and artist. She will perform in the gallery intermittently until 3 pm.

### Biography

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 Sophiensaele, Berlin (2019); Nanaimo Art Gallery (2019); Artspeak, Vancouver (2019); Hong Kong Arts Festival (2019); Art Museum at University of Toronto (2018); Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, Philadelphia (2018); the Vancouver Art Gallery (2018); Burrard Arts Foundation (2018). Agora de la Danse, Montreal (2017), Festival of New Dance (2017); Mile Zero Dance Society (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.


An image of Justine A. Chambers performing choreography in a gallery space. Chambers is wearing a silver jumpsuit. 

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Performance

A detail of various-shaped white ceramic vases sparsely placed on a white plinth. 

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StudioBedroom_05.jpg

Join all ten exhibiting artists in an informal conversation about how artistic practices can be carved out of unlikely times and spaces, and how generative questions arise from constraints.

The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom

Artist’s Roundtable

In the fifth and final project of A New Path to the Waterfall, artist Justine A. Chambers and MaryAnn Persoon’s grade 6/7 class have collaborated to create and lead silent walks throughout the city, responding to the notion of “choreography as a way of seeing the world” (Klein, Valk, Gormly). Inspired by Vancouver based composers and sound artists Hildegard Westerkamp and R. Murray Schaeffer, Chambers and the students have created a final walk reflecting on the ways that bodies are choreographed by the city as a means to question power, everyday dances, performances, patterns and dynamics.

Please join Justine A. Chambers and Ms. Persoon’s Grade 6/7 Class for *the intersectors*, a choreographed walk through the Strathcona neighbourhood. The walk will start promptly at 5.45pm from the classroom, leading visitors outside of school grounds and into the local area.

Thank you to Alana Gerecke for her contributions to the project.  


A photograph of children and adults walking down a narrow alley between houses. 

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20180614-175609-FE2_webUSE.jpg

Justine A. Chambers: the intersectors

A New Path to the Waterfall

*The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom* is a group exhibition that challenges assumptions shaped by our patriarchal, capitalist society about where and by what means “serious” artwork gets produced. The exhibition shares the perspectives of ten Canada-based artists whose practices are attentive to these assumptions, and to the very real temporal, spatial and monetary constraints that bind and shape their work.

Their contributions to the show address a multitude of labours — whether physical, emotional, reproductive or otherwise — that are often inextricable from artistic production. Some question myths of the studio and the “magical” labour of the artist. Others explore unconventional models of authorship, including the entanglement of childcare and creative work. Each, in different ways, asks how we navigate (or resist) our artistic and political inheritances, and how we might seek out alternate role models and alliances through which to better strengthen our creative communities.

Together, the works in *The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom* assert the generative potential of these other spaces and cadences of creation, addressing artists’ feelings of distraction and constraints, and call for acknowledgement of and solidarity in different ways of being —a nd making art — in the world.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Julia Lamare

CAG acknowledges the support of Canada Council for the Arts towards artists' travel.

ProgramGuideWinter2020.pdf

ExhibitionGuideTheArtistsStudio.pdf

BibliographyTheArtistsStudio.pdf

An image of a stage set framed by theatre curtains with brown curtains in the background. On stage is a set of a bedroom containing a bed, carpets, a small table, a room divider, and lounge chair. 

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001 HEADER - Artist_s Studio.jpg

A stack of prints on pink paper sits on top of a white plinth. The prints are of handwritten notes scrawled across the page. 

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Ten ceramic sculptures of various shaped bottles sit on top of a long rectangular plinth. Behind the plinth, a large black and white painting hangs and another sculpture on a tall plinth to the right.

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Two framed drawings on paper hanging on a gallery wall. The one to the right side is larger with blue markings, and the one on the right side is smaller with pink markings.

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Sand is piled against a V-shaped plinth on a gallery floor. Lining the top of the plinth are small colourful sculptures. Behind a large black & white vinyl print of a photo collage hangs on the wall. 

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05-TheArtist’sStudioisHerBedroom-2020.jpg

Three woven, rectangular artworks hang horizontally on the wall. The weavings are made of white paper printed with black marks. 

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A ceramic bowl, wooden sculpture and two colourful glass lampshades sit on a three tier plinth made out of light wood.

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Large blue text on the wall of a gallery space that reads “I’M WORKING BUT I’M NOT WORKING FOR YOU.”

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A TV monitor hangs on the wall with a pair of headphones hanging beside it to the left. There is a wooden stool in front of the monitor. The video  on the screen shows four hands holding each other.  

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09-TheArtist’sStudioisHerBedroom-2020.jpg

In the center of a gallery are mattresses piled with pillows. Behind a curtain with a printed photo of a bedroom stage set hangs from the ceiling and a large stuffed animal bunny lies on the floor. 

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10-TheArtist’sStudioisHerBedroom-2020.jpg

Steven Brekelmans, Justine A. Chambers, Brady Cranfield, Maura Doyle, Claire Greenshaw, Leisure (Meredith Carruthers & Susannah Wesley), Annie MacDonell, Erica Stocking, Damla Tamer

Justine A. Chambers

Exhibitions

Talks & Events