Stir Cheat Sheet: 4 performances to catch at Vancouver Art Gallery’s Art Party
From interactive video to contemporary dance, the bash is loaded with local talent
Chimerik 似不像, Ritual-Spective 迴融,
Vancouver Art Gallery presents Art Party 2024 on May 11 from 8 pm to 12 am
THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY’s Art Party is back, complete with a red carpet, and on the roster is a range of live performances.
Guests will be among the first to see Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines from the Brooklyn Museum, while saying goodbye to the exhibitions Rooted Here: Woven From the Land and J.E.H. MacDonald? A Tangled Garden. Here’s a glimpse at what else the event has in store.
Chimerik 似不像
Chimerik 似不像 (pictured at top) will be on-site with an interactive video installation. Sammy Chien and Caroline MacCaull co-run the interdisciplinary art collective, which encompasses film, video, new media, virtual reality, projection, lighting design, experimental music, sound art, visual arts, contemporary dance, and theatre performance in its work. The company specializes in the audiovisual new-media software Isadora and has collaborated on more than 400 multidisciplinary projects exhibited locally at Vancouver New Music Festival and PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and as far away as the Digital Arts Festival Taipei, ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art), Tokyo Performing Arts Meeting, and beyond. With its interactive video installations and live visuals/projection design, it has worked with mega corporations such as NIKE, Microsoft, and Google. At the same time, the organization consists of artists from underrepresented groups, including people of colour, 2SLGBTQIA+, immigrants, women in technology, neurodiverse people, youth, and more.
At the Art Party, Chimerik 似不像 will present Ritual-Spective 迴融, an experimental media arts project that explores intergenerational dialogue related to artistic, cultural, and spiritual legacy from the lens of an artist child of immigrant-artist parents.
This edition of the interactive video installation will be projected on the gallery’s 1st floor rotunda and was created using elements from more than 50 large-scale paintings by Jackson Chien 簡志雄, artist Sammy Chien’s father. At At 9:15 pm, this intergenerational and intercultural media arts projection will transform into the digital weaving patterns of artists qʷənat, Angela George (səlilwətaɬ/Tsleil-Waututh), Chepximiya Siyam’ Chief Janice George (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh/Squamish), Skwetsimeltxw Willard “Buddy” Joseph (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh/Squamish), and Qwasen, Debra Sparrow (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm/Musqueam), as Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week models complete their final walk.
OURO Collective.
OURO Collective
OURO was formed in 2014 to support and promote street-dance culture, fusing hip-hop, waacking, breaking, popping, and contemporary choreography. The group envisions street dance as an art form that brings people together regardless of their background or dance experience. It offers dance classes, events, and workshops with a focus on youth engagement in smaller B.C. communities while creating dance works for public performance such as the one taking place at the Art Party.
Art Action Earwig.
Art Action Earwig
Offering a performance and a zine-making activity at the Art Party, Art Action Earwig is an interdisciplinary multimedia and performance collective made up of Wryly Andherson, Minah Lee, and Tadafumi Tamura, based between Nanaimo and Vancouver. The group’s work is also situated in South Korea and Japan, where its members’ distant families are located. Art Action Earwig’s artistic practices, which combine multimedia theatre and social intervention or ceremony, delve into pressing social and political matters, including racial tensions, economic disparities, and environmental justice. The company has worked with children through festival workshops, after-school classes, and community-education programs.
Nancy Lee.
Nancy Lee 李南屏
At the Art Party, Nancy Lee 李南屏 will put on a DJ set. The Taiwanese-Canadian interdisciplinary media artist, curator, filmmaker, DJ, and cultural producer focuses on how interconnected people are with their surroundings in their work. Their films and interdisciplinary creations have been presented at Cannes Film Festival, SXSW, MUTEK Japan, Bass Coast Festival, FUSE at Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver Pride, Alberta Electronic Music Conference, Vancouver International Jazz Festival, International Symposium on Electronic Art (Vancouver, South Africa, and South Korea), among other events. In 2018, Lee was nominated for a YWCA Women of Distinction Award for Art, Culture & Design. They are also a coproducer and cofounder of CURRENT: Feminist Electronic Art Symposium, an intersectional and multidisciplinary initiative featuring artistic and educational programming for and by women, nonbinary artists, and artists of colour. 
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