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
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.
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Off-site
Prelude.....Venus Lives! opens February 19 2025 to May 18 2025 at our offsite located on 320 Carrall St, Vancouver, BC V6A 1K2.
Artist Statement
Prelude……Venus Lives! is a public art project that serves as a precursor to the upcoming exhibition and symposium, Emblematic Elusions: Facets of the Black Venus, set to take place at Gallery Gachet’s physical space in the fall of 2025. Using diverse artistic methods—including critical explorations of African cinema, investigations into the assemblage of Black female cultural identity and existence in the southern United States, and meditations on Afro-futuristic and historical visual languages—artists Afi Venessa Appiah, Kariyana Calloway, and Pegnoisis visualize the registers of Black feminist subjectivity and explore the erotic as an emancipatory praxis.
Prelude.....Venus Lives! is supported by the Hastings Crossings Business Association, and presented in parternship with Artspeak Gallery.
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.