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Contemporary Art Gallery

555 Nelson Street
Vancouver, Canada
Admission always free

Today's hours
12 pm - 6 pm
ArchiveExhibition
5 Apr 19until22 Sep 19

Rolande Souliere

Frequent Stopping IV and V

CAG Façade and offsite at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station

An image detail of black-and-yellow caution tape layered in horizontal striations. To the left, there is a single vertical strip of red-and-white caution tape.

Rolande Souliere, Untitled, 2019. Courtesy the artist.

The multi-media practice of Australia-based Anishinaabe artist Rolande Souliere entangles the visual language of hard-edged geometric abstraction with that of contemporary traffic signage to consider how colonial infrastructures mark both spaces and the people inhabiting them. Her solo exhibition, Frequent Stopping IV and V, presents two new large-scale, site-specific works across the street level façade of the Contemporary Art Gallery and offsite at the nearby Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. These installations draw from Souliere’s ongoing body of work that creates interventions using caution tape and street barrier patterns in immersive installations.

Souliere has a long history of working with the materials and metaphors of the road. She strips these seemingly universal symbols from their usual contexts and separates them from their role as wayfinding aids to suggest the extent to which authorities dictate our movements on the land. The Frequent Stopping series points to the ways in which our perception of boundaries shift according to perspective and to the fact that so many Indigenous land claims — despite being first pressed decades or even centuries ago — have yet to be resolved. Especially in Vancouver, which sits upon the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, Souliere’s ultra-visible, highly public interventions mark space in a gesture that speaks of permanent visibility and reclamation. They delineate lines that cannot be drawn and redrawn.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Julia Lamare

Biography

Rolande Souliere is a member of the Michipicoten First Nation, born in Toronto, Canada and currently living in Sydney, Australia. In 2017 she received a PhD from the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. A selection of Souliere’s international solo exhibitions include Form and Content, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe (2018); Coyote Responds: I Like America and America Likes Me, Or Gallery, Vancouver (2017); Sydney Non Objective (2015); CrossRoads, Urban Shaman, Winnipeg (2011); and Materiality and Otherness, grunt gallery, Vancouver (2008). Recent group exhibitions include niigaanikwewag, Art Gallery of Mississauga (2018); Language as Puncture, Gallery 101, Ottawa (2017); the cross-Canada touring exhibition Beat Nation (2012-2014); the Australia-wide touring exhibition Alterbeast (2014); Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Toronto (2010); and Point of Origin, Artspace, Sydney (2008). Her public art commissions include Bringing Back Wabakinine (2015) in the Bala Underpass, Toronto and the recently completed Mediating the Treaties (2017-18) at Air Canada Park in Winnipeg, commissioned by the Winnipeg Art Council.

Exterior image of CAG with red-and-white and black-and-yellow caution tape installed across the ground floor façade windows. The tape forms zig-zag lines and shapes, covering each window.
Exterior image of CAG with red-and-white and black-and-yellow caution tape installed across the ground floor façade windows. The tape forms zig-zag lines and shapes, covering each window.
An image detail of red-and-white and black-and-yellow caution tape installed across CAG’s ground floor façade windows. The caution tape forms zig-zag lines and shapes.
Exterior image of the Yaletown-Roundhouse station façade covered in a pattern of vinyl rhombus and triangle shapes. Each shape contains patterns of alternating red, white, black and yellow rhombuses.

Documents

Program guidepdf1mbExhibition materialpdf904kbTranscript: Rolande Souliere in Conversation with Kimberly Phillipspdf1mb

Talks & Events

Exterior image of the Yaletown-Roundhouse station façade covered in a pattern of vinyl rhombus and triangle shapes. Each shape contains patterns of alternating red, white, black and yellow rhombuses. Event · OffsiteTalkRolande Souliere
7 Apr 19·3:00 PM

Related Exhibitions

A graphic pattern made up of a purple, blue and green geometric background with various illustrations of buildings, swirling clouds, imaginary birds and plants superimposed on top.Exhibition · OffsiteHow far do you travel?Diyan Achjadi, Patrick Cruz, Rolande Souliere, Erdem Taşdelen, Anna Torma
1 Jan 19until31 Dec 19
An image detail of black-and-yellow caution tape layered in horizontal striations. To the left, there is a single vertical strip of red-and-white caution tape.
Exterior image of CAG with red-and-white and black-and-yellow caution tape installed across the ground floor façade windows. The tape forms zig-zag lines and shapes, covering each window.
Exterior image of CAG with red-and-white and black-and-yellow caution tape installed across the ground floor façade windows. The tape forms zig-zag lines and shapes, covering each window.
An image detail of red-and-white and black-and-yellow caution tape installed across CAG’s ground floor façade windows. The caution tape forms zig-zag lines and shapes.
Exterior image of the Yaletown-Roundhouse station façade covered in a pattern of vinyl rhombus and triangle shapes. Each shape contains patterns of alternating red, white, black and yellow rhombuses.