Stir Cheat Sheet: Zines to punk protests, 5 gallery shows stirring things up this spring

A massive ode to zine culture, plus Ian Wallace, Pussy Riot, and more

By Janet Smith

From the action “Putin peed his pants”, 2012. Photo by Denis Sinyakov. Showing in Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot's Russia at The Polygon Gallery.

Robert Ford with Trent Adkins and Lawrence Warren, Thing, no. 4, Spring 1991, offset zine, Collection Steve Lafreniere, Courtesy Arthur Fournier, Photo: Brooklyn Museum, Evan McKnight

FROM THE UNDERGROUND rebellion of the golden age of zines to an entire exhibit devoted to the Kremlin-bashing protests of Pussy Riot, art galleries are hosting shows with a true sense of subversion this season.

At the same time, with the Capture Photography Festival in full swing, photo-based art is taking the spotlight, with big names including Ian Wallace and Jin-me Yoon.

Here are just a handful of highlights from the shows hitting galleries this season.

#1

Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines

Vancouver Art Gallery, May 12 to September 22

This major exhibition from the Brooklyn Museum celebrates the rich history of artists' underground zines in North America, exploring their vibrant growth over the past five decades. The show traces the DIY mags’ integral ties to punk, queer, feminist, and other movements. The titles alone tell a story: Nitrous Oxide, Race Riot, International Graffiti Times, Homocore, Vile and File… We could go on. Alongside zine covers and content, you’ll see work in other media, from painting, through to photography, collage, film, video, and more. The show is expansive, with close to a thousand zines and artworks by 100 artists, many from the heydays of the 1970s to 1990s. The New York Times called the exhibition “an extraordinary exhibition of dissident and countercultural takes”.

#2

Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot's Russia

The Polygon Gallery March 22 to June 2

In February 2012, five women dressed in neon-hued balaclavas staged a punk performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, protesting corruption between the Russian Orthodox Church and leader Vladimir Putin. Sentenced to two years in a penal colony, the punk-feminist protest group Pussy Riot has managed to stage many more provocative stunts against the Kremlin for over a decade, most recently raising its voice against the war in Ukraine. In this first museum survey of the collective’s work, member Maria Alyokhina assembles videos, photographs, testimonies, song lyrics, and reflections. First shown at Reykjavik’s Kling & Bang, and curated with Ragnar Kjartansson and Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir, the exhibition has been shown in museums from Denmark to Montreal. Part of the Capture Photography Festival.

Ian Wallace, Brenners Park-Hotel & Spa, Baden-Baden I, 2014, photo laminate and acrylic on canvas, 61 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Catriona Jeffries.

#3

Home and Away: Ian Wallace

West Vancouver Art Museum, March 13 to May 4

Here’s a chance to contemplate the importance of place to this iconic local artist, featuring drawings and watercolours from his youth—say, an early painting of John Lawson Pier—alongside new photographs taken from the same vantage points in West Vancouver. The works juxtapose with the pioneering photo-conceptualist’s well-known “Hotel Series”, depicting the home—or studio—away from home for an internationally exhibited artist, with references to everything from art history to Mondrian colour-blocking. Part of the Capture Photography Festival.

Adad Hannah, What Fools These Mortals Be (still), 2022, three-channel video installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist, Equinox Gallery, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain.

#4

Otherwise Disregarded

Audain Art Museum, April 21 to September 9

In an exhibition that seems tailor-made to the upheaval in the world right now, four outstanding artists tackle social, political, and environmental issues through photo-based work and video. What sets these complex, multilayered works apart is the way Adad Hannah, Jin-me Yoon, Jake Kimble, and Michelle Sound process and try to understand these challenges through a personal lens. Look no further than Cree and Métis visual artist Sound’s deeply personal Foster Care, a monochrome snapshot on paper, paired meaningfully with dyed porcupine quills, embroidery thread, seed beads, vintage beads, and caribou hair tufting. Or Hannah’s stunning tableaux-vivantes video installation What Fools These Mortals Be, a collaboration with The Circle Project and 14 formerly incarcerated women, reimagining Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The show has been put together by Kiriko Watanabe, Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky curator at the Audain Art Museum, and Emmy Lee Wall, executive director and chief curator at Capture Photography Festival.

An image from the ReStack’s video trilogy Feral Domestic.

#5

Feral Domestic

To April 6 at the Western Front

The multichannel video trilogy Feral Domestic (2017–22) sits at the mesmerizing centre of this exhibition by Dani and Sheilah ReStack, with its flowing fragments of documentary footage and restaged scenes with family and friends. Those sequences, which mine the ReStacks’ relationship and range from the mundane to the joyful and the tense, blend with imagery from the natural world and experiments with colour and sound. Elsewhere, you can see the duo, new artists-in-residence at the Front, explore similar themes of queer desire, the domestic space, and planetary crisis via drawings, photography, and writing.

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