Sojourner Truth Parsons

For more than ten years now, the paintings of Sojourner Truth Parsons have trafficked in the saturated and sensorial. Plumbing the space between abstraction and legibility, feeling and form, the language of Parsons’ work is an intuitive one. Building depth through accretion, collapsing interior and exterior realms, and traversing a shifting set of references — from the history of dance to the Gee’s Bend quilts of Alabama to her garden in the Catskill Mountains — her paintings give shape to intensities both atmospheric and embodied. 

*Louise* brings together a selection of works produced by the Vancouver-born, New York-based artist over the past several years, surveying the dexterity of her movement between figuration and form and her canvases’ elemental approach to sensation, texture and tone. Titled after the work of poet Louise Glück — known for her decades-long meditation on the illusions and agonies of the self — the exhibition traces the enduring emotional registers, both individual and collective, that occupy Parsons’ time in the studio: desire, loss, isolation, redemption, resurgence.

#### Biography
Sojourner Truth Parsons (b. 1984, Vancouver) lives and works in New York and the Southern Catskill Mountains. Her recent solo exhibitions include Pilar Corrias, London; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Foxy Production, New York; Various Small Fires, Seoul; The Journal Gallery, New York; and Oakville Galleries, Canada. Recent group exhibitions include *Painting Energy: The Alex Katz Painting Foundation Collection*, Portland Museum of Art; *The New Bend*, curated by Legacy Russell, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Los Angeles & Somerset; *Downbeat*, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; *Springweather and people*, Bortolami, New York; and *This is America*, Kunstraum Potsdam. Parsons was artist in residence at Denniston Hill; the Santa Fe Art Institute; The Rooms, Newfoundland; and the Ross Creek Center for the Arts, Bay of Fundy. Among other collections, her work is held by the Long Museum, Shanghai; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Portland Museum of Art; Royal Bank of Canada; and the Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels.

Exhibition material

Large print exhibition material

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Louise

Charles Atlas

Charles Atlas has been a leading figure in film and video for more than fifty years. Known for his relentlessly innovative engagements with genre, technology and form, the New York-based artist has pushed at the boundaries of moving images from the earliest moments of his career, when he was filmmaker-in-residence at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In the decades since, Atlas has honed an expansive practice that bridges moving images, installation, theatre, and performance, achieving widespread acclaim for his pioneering films and videos and his landmark collaborations with artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Marina Abramović and Ahnoni and the Johnsons. 

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Atlas presents *Hail the New Puritan* (1985–86), an "anti-documentary" that follows Scottish dancer and choreographer Michael Clark in a highly stylized day-in-the-life as he and his company prepare for a performance. Shot in the thriving queer, punk and post-punk countercultures of 1980s East London — with appearances from figures such as Leigh Bowery and Mark E. Smith of The Fall — *Hail the New Puritan* toes the tenuous boundary between fantasy and reality, capturing a dazzling culture of self-fashioning and world-making, and the potent energies of a rapidly shifting social landscape. 

#### Biography
Charles Atlas (b. 1949, St. Louis, MO) has lived and worked in New York City since the early 1970s. In 2024, the ICA Boston presented *About Time*, the first U.S. museum survey devoted to Atlas’ work. Other recent solo exhibitions include *The Mathematics of Consciousness*, a 100-foot long video installation commissioned by Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2022); *Charles Atlas: Ominous, Glamorous, Momentous, Ridiculous*, Fondazione ICA Milano, Italy (2021); and *Charles Atlas: The past is here, the futures are coming* and *The Kitchen Follies*, The Kitchen, New York (2018). Atlas’ work is included in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; and De Hallen Haarlem, The Netherlands. In 2024, Atlas’ archive was acquired by The Getty Research Institute.

#### Acknowledgements
*Charles Atlas: Hail the New Puritan* is generously supported by Claudia Beck.

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Hail the New Puritan

We’re working on our [upcoming exhibitions](/exhibitions-and-events/upcoming). Check back soon! [Visit our archive](/exhibitions-and-events/archive/all) to see past exhibitions and events.

Closed for installation

Join CAG’s Executive Director Matthew Hyland for a walkthrough of the current exhibitions.

### Accessibility
ASL interpretation is available on request. Requests can be accommodated up to 5 days in advance. Please contact [learning@cagvancouver.org](mailto:learning@cagvancouver.org) to book or for more information.

### RSVP
No advance registration required.

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with Matthew Hyland

Curatorial Tour

Douglas Watt

One Saturday each month, CAG invites a guest host to lead walkthroughs of our current exhibitions, offering their insights and response to the works on view. In October, we welcome Douglas Watt to speak on the work of Charles Atlas.

### Accessibility
ASL interpretation is available on request. Requests can be accommodated up to 5 days in advance. Please contact [learning@cagvancouver.org](mailto:learning@cagvancouver.org) to book or for more information.

### RSVP
No advance registration required.

### Biography
Douglas Watt (b. 1990, St. Catharines) is an artist living and working in Vancouver's Davie Village on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. He holds a BA (Art History) from Carleton University, Ottawa; an MFA from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver; and was a visiting student in Criticism & Curatorial Practice at OCAD University, Toronto. He has presented solo exhibitions at Unit 17, Vancouver (2019), Tara Downs, New York (2021), and Pumice Raft, Toronto (2024). His work has been featured in Artforum and BlackFlash Magazine. Watt co-edits the publication *Porthole* with Hamish Hardie.

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Douglas Watt on Charles Atlas

Saturday Session

The Contemporary Art Gallery is thrilled to announce the 2025 CAG Gala, a lively four-course dinner helmed by one of Vancouver’s most prominent chefs.

Led this year by Jean-Christophe Poirier, acclaimed chef and owner of Michelin-starred restaurant St. Lawrence, the CAG Gala offers guests a singular dining experience in an intimate environment. Bringing together arts patrons, business leaders, philanthropists, and friends from across the region in support of CAG, this one-of-a-kind event is not to be missed.

Saturday, November 1, 2025
The Kent, 534 Cambie Street
$425 per guest

[Buy tickets](https://contemporaryartgallery.app.neoncrm.com/eventReg.jsp?event=7& "button")

Proceeds from this event support CAG’s artistic and educational programming, which the gallery has been committed to offering free of charge for more than fifty years.

Can’t join us for the gala, but want to support CAG?

[Make a donation](https://contemporaryartgallery.app.neoncrm.com/np/clients/contemporaryartgallery/donation.jsp?campaign=209& "button")

For sponsorship or ticket inquiries, please contact support@cagvancouver.org.

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CAG Gala 2025

One Saturday each month, CAG invites a guest host to lead walkthroughs of our current exhibitions, offering their insights and response to the works on view. In November, we welcome Elizabeth McIntosh to speak on the work of Sojourner Truth Parsons.

### Accessibility
ASL interpretation is available on request. Requests can be accommodated up to 5 days in advance. Please contact [learning@cagvancouver.org](mailto:learning@cagvancouver.org) to book or for more information.

### RSVP
No advance registration required.

### Biography
Elizabeth McIntosh is a painter who uses abstract and figurative techniques to work through questions of representation, the limits of perception, and the status of images. For more than two decades, she has reinvented familiar forms via playful yet exacting decisions, creating works that oscillate from the abstract into the surreal and representational, from the illusionistic mind to the sensational body. McIntosh’s solo exhibitions include Oakville Galleries, Canada; Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver; CANADA, New York; Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles/Berlin; Diaz Contemporary, Toronto; Division Gallery, Montreal; and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Group exhibitions include Galería Pelaires, Mallocra, Spain; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Bonavista Biennale; Vancouver Art Gallery; Arsenal Contemporary, New York; Venus, Los Angeles; and Logan Center, University of Chicago. In 2013, she received the VIVA Award from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts, Vancouver.

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Elizabeth McIntosh on Sojourner Truth Parsons

Join CAG’s TD Assistant Curator Aretha Pereira for a walkthrough of the current exhibitions.

### Accessibility
ASL interpretation is available on request. Requests can be accommodated up to 5 days in advance. Please contact [learning@cagvancouver.org](mailto:learning@cagvancouver.org) to book or for more information.

### RSVP
No advance registration required.

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with Aretha Pereira

Justine A. Chambers

One Saturday each month, CAG invites a guest host to lead walkthroughs of our current exhibitions, offering their insights and response to the works on view. In January, we welcome Justine A. Chambers to speak on the work of Charles Atlas.

### Accessibility
ASL interpretation is available on request. Requests can be accommodated up to 5 days in advance. Please contact [learning@cagvancouver.org](mailto:learning@cagvancouver.org) to book or for more information.

### RSVP
No advance registration required.

### Biography
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.

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Justine A. Chambers on Charles Atlas

Join CAG’s Curator Godfre Leung for a walkthrough of the current exhibitions.

### Accessibility
ASL interpretation is available on request. Requests can be accommodated up to 5 days in advance. Please contact [learning@cagvancouver.org](mailto:learning@cagvancouver.org) to book or for more information.

### RSVP
No advance registration required.

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with Godfre Leung

One Saturday each month, CAG invites a guest host to lead walkthroughs of our current exhibitions, offering their insights and response to the works on view. In February, we welcome Chantal Gibson to speak on the work of Sojourner Truth Parsons.

### Accessibility
ASL interpretation is available on request. Requests can be accommodated up to 5 days in advance. Please contact [learning@cagvancouver.org](mailto:learning@cagvancouver.org) to book or for more information.

### RSVP
No advance registration required.

### Biography
Chantal Gibson is a poet-artist-educator living on the lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her practice is grounded in materiality and research creation. Exhibited widely across Canada, her altered historical texts and installations imagine voices silenced by cultural and institutional erasure. 

Gibson is the author two poetry collections: *with/holding* (Caitlin, 2021) and *How She Read* (Caitlin, 2019), a decolonial critique of the Canadian classroom centering Black womanhood, winner of the 2020 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC) and the Pat Lowther Poetry Award (Can). 

Recipient of the 2021 3M National Teaching Fellowship, Canada’s highest award for post-secondary teaching, Gibson teaches in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.

Exhibitions

Talks & Events