Artspeak is an exhibition and programming space encouraging dialogue between contemporary visual art and writing. Artspeak is committed to intersectional participation and exchange.
233 Carrall St
Vancouver BC V6B2J2
Wednesday-Saturday
12PM to 6PM
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On View
10,000 Flowers Bloom: On Women Artists and the Sources of Self-regard
Opening Reception May 1 6pm
In conversation, Veronica Dorsett, Preetika Rajgariah, and Gio Swaby tend to quotidian aestheticized spaces of adornment and ritual. Textile, illustration, collage, and embroidery breathe life into haptic expressionism, presenting an intimate perspective motivated by the multiplicity of their realities while reflecting on the role of portraiture not only in art's historical intervention but also in its ability to sow meaningful interrogations of women's subjectivity. The exhibition explores the inexhaustible desire to see oneself through visual culture and storytelling, framing self-imaging or portraiture within cross-disciplinary material practices. An intimate study of figure, form, and radical self-making summons an approach to shaping cultural memory through restorative representational acts of care and self-proclamation, conceptualizing a tactile record of existence. The exposition engages self-exploratory rendering that is sensory, coded, and reflexive. A coalescence of new media and traditional practices reveals the dogmatic and transformative potential of personal and collective narratives—the historical, cultural, present self, and imagined futures of womanhood.
Recent Publications
dissident 4: ART ACTIVIST MURMURINGS
"Whose Public is it Anyway?”
In April 2023, Artspeak Gallery in partnership with Capture Photo Festival, presented a public art installation at Broadway-City Hall station, sparking much discussion concerning the ethics of supporting and commissioning Indigenous artists and the possibilities of bridging public engagement of visual art practices with social movements. In this context, Soloman Chiniquay and jaz whitford collaborative work Ake Huchimagachach Ena, Ake Huchimagachach Ade, lived as a cultural memorial, vivid snapshots enlivening the cataclysms of colonial condition with colorful markings that re-root Indigenous accounts of place and land.
In this redacted postscript interview, Artspeak Gallery director/curator Nya Lewis and artist and researcher Tania Williard reflect on the “ask” of public art and future of land-based practices.
Click “digital texts” to read!
Upcoming Programs
Writing Workshop with Mercedes Eng
June 14 2025
11am -2pm at 233 Carrall St. Please RSVP to info@artspeak.ca
The writing workshop asks us to contemplate place and unceded land in relation to our creative production and will engage with the politics of colonial cartography and its counterpoint, community-generated mapping. Durational cartographer Mercedes Eng will activate the workshop by situating participants in the Downtown Eastside where Artspeak gallery is located, as well as the neighbourhoods in/adjacent to the DTES, Chinatown, Japantown, Hogan's Alley, and Strathcona. A variety of maps—visual, memorialistic, poetic, embodied—will be deployed as conversational jumping-off points and writing prompts to consider the colonial origins of mapping; how/when we use maps in daily life; real-estate developers' branding strategies; mapping as surveillance; and community-generated mapping as archive, agency, and resistance to gentrification.
Mercedes Eng a poet, volunteer, and aunty. She is the author of four books, the most recent of which is cop city swagger, a threat assessment of the Vancouver Police Department and sibling to Eng’s Prison industrial Complex Explodes, winner of the Dorothy Livesay poetry prize. She teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she organizes the On Edge reading series.
Off-site
Character City by Deon Feng is on view at Artspeak Offsite, 320 Carrall St, from May 17, 2025 to August 26, 2025
"This is a space with a lot of character in a heritage building and lovely part of Vancouver"
— Facebook Marketplace
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Artist Statement
Installation and text by Deon Feng
Curated by Bel Sihan
Deon Feng is an artist and student in the dual BA program at SciencesPo (Paris Institute of Political Studies) and University of British Columbia. They are informed first and foremost by their own lived experience between Northern China, Canada, and France, as a result of this fragmented biography, their practice is an interdisciplinary mix of photography, installation, theory, and other hybrids.
Bel Sihan (they/them) is an arts and culture worker, and DIY space maker on the unceded lands of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh). Their practice (life, really) mostly includes hosting spaces, animated discussions, and making art with friends. They practice grounding in the truths of Body, Moment, Inheritance. To them, art is a technology of encoding, holding, negotiating, truths in multiplicity.
Offsite is made possible by the generosity of the Cheeky Proletariat. If you are interested in exhibiting in the offsite please email office@artspeak.ca. Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis.