Sandra Semchuk

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 

Let us begin by making some distinctions regarding the material nature of the works we have before us, and by establishing an approximate position for these works within Vancouver artistic practice, both in terms of the stereotypes relating to that practice and the realities of the current proliferation of artistic intentions. Carole Itter’s *Western Blue Rampage* is a floor sculpture composed of discrete objects assembled into a seemingly aleatory mass that on closer inspection displays a graduated sequence of scale. The actual wooden objects are cultural detritus, in the form of surplus goods such as gift shop bowls, beaded curtains, boxes, and drawers, and various industrial and domestic “utensils.” These objects have been stained with both black and green paint, treated with varnish, and then placed in front of a sky blue rectangle painted on the wall behind the assemblage. Sandra Semchuk’s four photographic works in this show consist of non-linear sequences of framed 11 inch by 14 inch Cibachrome photographs. Each work documents a particular event represented as a sequence of moments which are arranged so as to reconstruct the spatial form of the original site.

Position. An interesting aspect of Vancouver visual art practice over the past twenty years has to do with the way that certain tendencies that have existed in nascent form throughout the global village have been developed and thought through in Vancouver prior to their distribution as genesis for these activities, it is easy to establish that the following artworks were “discovered” and encouraged here quite early on: new media explorations, anti-commodity stance, photo-based installations, multi-media performance work, arte povera works, text works, and various manifestations of conceptualist/minimalist practice. These activities could be seen as the background to the situation as it exists in 1990, which I would describe as one in which Vancouver artists may either identified with one of these precursor activities, or by negating these local histories be seen to be working in an internationalist form while retaining the local subject. Two stereotypes appear to have developed from this plethora of activity; firstly the view from Eastern Canada that work is “West Coast'' if it exhibits certain hippyish qualities, and secondly, the view from Europe that characteristic Vancouver work is vaguely photo-conceptualist. These views exist, one hears them expressed, but they are of interest only because they are so utterly useless for the description of the continuum along which intelligence and knowledge function within Vancouver visual art today. I refer her to the tacit and cognitive acceptance of the truth that “alternate” knowledges form the basis of any opportunity our culture possesses for correcting itself and its crises. Carole Itter and Sandra Semchuk have both embraced a non-Western world-view, and it is therefore possible to position their work in a place that is epistemologically heuristic, and rooted in a local context. 

Sandra Semchuk’s photo-work has been described as a kind of reversal of the conventional idea that photography is a “recorder of objective reality.”  As she document the events that she calls “spontaneous rituals” she engages in a complex of subjectivities; beginning with the intuitive choice of the event to be recorded, she proceeds to engage in work that is at once autobiographical, anthropological, socio-psychological, subjective perceptual, and subjectively axiomatic. She attacks some aspects of “documentary” without attempting to subvert the idea of documentary. In her search for “self-knowledge'' she has developed a system of picture making that is perhaps unique, but is in any event a complex set of individual techniques that operate simultaneously to provide the raw photo material from which the work will be made. I understand the process to be a kind of spatially reciprocal interaction with the subject(s) at the time of the shooting, which then becomes the basis for the narrative she contains in the reconstructed space of the image. She has taken on the anthropologist's burden of observing without interfering, while accepting that this is an impossible task.

Semchuk calls this recording process “moving parallel” (to the subject), and she equates her camera movements to the type of gestural action in the brushstrokes of Chinese painting.	It is possible then to see the resulting images as non-referential contour maps, as bent planes with no orientation to any cardinal points save those represented by the actors in her theatrical landscape. The transformation of picture space resulting from these machinations provide Semchuk with a voice to represent her view of meaningful lived experience, and reinforces her idea that the realm of the personal is also the proper realm of the political.

Carole Itter’s *Western Blue Rampage* is a contour map of a very different sort — a view from the air perhaps, of a landscape in which the woods are transmuted into their products, or a beach share the flotsam emanates from the wreckage of over-production and the jetsam appears to result from a ritualistic catharsis of wooden bowls. Itter made this horizontal work after a ten day visit to the Moresby Island chain in the Queen Charlottes during the summer of 1998. The tonality of the work is the tonality of the Charlottes and the ten photographs included in the piece are images she made on the Charlottes during that trip. The blue wall behind the assembled part of the work is the blue of a summer sky, and as such it provides one reading of this work that of a landscape fragment in a treeless environment having the eternal return has taken the form of wood returning to wood.

This work grows from an outrage toward the dominant white/European culture that has invaded North America, and in that way it is unlike her rattles which have been seen in several exhibitions since 1984. The act of gathering material for these works has become an avocation that precedes the vocation of making the work. But it is this gathering of materials that provides a direct connection to the results of excess production, through which the artist recycles “waste,” and steps out of the dominant culture and into that of the oppressed. As Itter has pointed out (in the Fall 1989 *Cap Review*) assemblage artists work with a constantly changing grammar of found-materials, and that this gathering and reworking “runs against consumerism/capitalism.” This work, perhaps more than her rattles, speaks of a respect for the landscape, and refers back to her 1972 project that resulted in the book *The Log's Log* which documents the transit of a British Columbia log to Lockport, Nova Scotia.

- Bill Jeffries


An artwork against a wall in a gallery. The wall is white, with a large blue section in the middle. The work rests on the blue on the wall and is composed of hundreds of repurposed objects. 

thumbnail_01-ItterSemchuk-1990.jpeg

01-ItterSemchuk-1990.jpeg

On the wall of a gallery, there are 29 cibachrome photos arranged in a pyramid-like way. They show small glimpses of people and water.  In the corner of the photo, there is a small wooden side table.

thumbnail_02-ItterSemchuk-1990.jpeg

02-ItterSemchuk-1990.jpeg

A gallery with a wall in the centre creating a division. This wall shows several photos of snippets of ripples on water and hands. The other visible wall has several photos as well, seen at an angle.

thumbnail_03-ItterSemchuk-1990.jpeg

03-ItterSemchuk-1990.jpeg

A closeup of an artwork at the base of a wall. The work is composed of hundreds of discarded objects, including framed photos, ceramic and wooden bowls, beads, industrial gears, and wall shelves.

thumbnail_04-ItterSemchuk-1990.jpeg

04-ItterSemchuk-1990.jpeg

On the wall of a gallery, there are 28 cibachrome photographs in black frames, arranged in an irregular bond pattern. The photos show cropped images of people moving around outdoors, trees, and grass.

thumbnail_05-ItterSemchuk-1990.jpeg

05-ItterSemchuk-1990.jpeg

40 framed cibachrome photos on a wall. Most of the photos are very dark but show glimpses of  things such as a person's face, hands, and a fire pit.

Sandra Semchuk

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