ARTISTS RESPONSES TO COVID-19

We want to use the website as a platform to share personal statements and video-works gallery artists and guest artists produced as a response to the current situation. Artists share their experiences and thoughts regarding the pandemic from their homes in different cities.

ROBERT KLEYN
from Vancouver, BC

March 23, 2020
ROBERT KLEYN
Artist Robert Kleyn, born in Amsterdam and raised in Vancouver, shares this video with us. "Soap", with a soundtrack by the artist, is a sequence of a few of the over 100 soap pictures Kleyn has produced up to date. Kleyn has been making pictures of soap bars at different stages of their usage since relocating his studio to Vancouver's downtown East Side, Canada's poorest postal code. A sly reference to Francis Ponge's eponymous book of Vichy-era scripts for radio, Kleyn documents the ongoing ritual of cleansing which shapes the soap bars into involuntary sculptures, a ritual which we must now perform with scrupulous care.

April 7, 2020
M.E. SPARKS
M.E. Sparks is an artist currently living between Vancouver, BC and Halifax, NS.
In her recent paintings, Sparks reassembles forms culled from art history, found objects and childhood narrative. Her practice revolves around ideas of observation and obfuscation, as well as the desire to reconfigure familiarized and oppressive narratives within painting discourse. During this time of self-isolation, she is interested in documenting the slowed experience of watching and waiting.


April 9, 2020
MANUELA VIERA-GALLO
Viera-Gallo shares this video with us from Brooklyn, NY. Her point of view has been strongly shaped by the social and political violence that has affected the history of Latin American countries and by a constant state of migration, drawing from preocuppations, anxieties and fears derived from her own experience in her works.
Her artistic practice presents a multidisciplinary body of work that departs from absurdity to manipulate and distort known symbols and imagery into an allegorical, fantastical and darkly comical framework that allows her to take ownership of the subsequent transformation to analyze different processes of political and social instability.

April 7, 2020
NOAH BECKER
Artist, publisher and musician Noah Becker describes from Brooklyn, NYC what it is like to be waking up to another day of pandemic in his city.

March 20, 2020
ANDREA TAYLOR
Multidisciplinary artist with an upcoming show
at the Richmond Art Gallery, shares her thoughts and hopes during self-isolation in Burnaby, BC.

March 20, 2020
JEFF TOPHAM
Canadian photographer, Jeff Topham shares with us this thoughtful video made from portraits he shoots from his apartment balcony in Chinatown, not far from where the gallery is located.
Topham's diverse work has taken him from post-war Liberia to Antarctica, the Arctic and the Amazon basin. His photographs of post-conflict Liberia (where he grew up) and award-winning documentary film and online photo project Liberia 77, about the war-torn country reclaiming its photographic and cultural legacy, were featured at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles and in the first post-war photographic exhibition at the National Museum in Monrovia. For the past 5 years, Jeff has been working as Photographer-in-Residence for Canadian based adventure company One Ocean Expeditions, documenting numerous voyages and leading photographic seminars in the Antarctic and Canadian Arctic.

Music credit: Eddie Vadder.

May 4, 2020
JASON MCLEAN
Jason McLean shares his comments and thoughts during Covid19 after a month in lockdown in Brooklyn, NYC and also passes on the message regarding https://coughpark.bandcamp.com/ project. You too can participate by calling 1.347.601.4266.

May 3, 2020
JAMIE DOLINKO
Jamie Dolinko's video 'Dream Pads' examines intimate, abandoned objects that consume a significant part of human life, our beds. Night after night the mattress absorbs our dormant desires, worries, and fears. It also speaks to a mass simultaneous vulnerability when huge swaths of the population are unconscious at once,
liberated from critical, practical thoughts, and lost in their dreams. Jamie Dolinko is an artist currently living in pandemic Vancouver, spending a fair amount of time in bed.

Music credit: Brian Eno

May 5, 2020
KATHY SLADE
Canadian artist Kathy Slade shares this exerpt of the video "Please Please Please"
presenting an empty Vancouver street coupled with this melancholy song, as her
response to the gallery’s request to artists for their perspectives on the current situation.
The video “Please Please Please” (dvd projection, 11 minutes, 2003), which depicts a point of
view shot as the artist walks from her studio to the Or Gallery (where the work was
originally shown). For the soundtrack, Slade performs a cover of The Smiths’
“Please Please Please,” accompanied by Dan Bejar @destroyer_band on guitar
and piano.

March 27, 2020
WIL MURRAY
Canadian artist living and working in Berlin, Germany shares how it feels like to be waking up in Berlin these days during the COVID-19 pandemic.

March 20, 2020
JAVIERA DA FONSECA
shares her take on the situation from her studio in Ciudad de México.



March 22, 2020
JOSEMA ZAMORANO
Mexican-Canadian artist based in Vancouver is regularly dealing with the role of
visual poetics in making a critique of modern times. In this video he shares his
perspective on the role of art in times of Covid-19.

March 25, 2020
SARAH DELANEY
Canadian painter Sarah Delaney shares her thoughts on the current situation from Vancouver, BC.

March 21, 2020
TALIA SHIPMAN
Canadian Photographer living in LA 
shares her view of the artist's role in unsettling times and how it constitutes a new challenge.

March 20, 2020
MANUEL PIÑA
Manuel Piña shares this video with us from Vancouver, BC.
ANNIE BRIARD
Canadian artist whose work challenges visual perception and draws her inspiration from strange encounters with the visible and a desire to survey these with others. Here she shares her thoughts about the COVID-19 situation from Vancouver, BC.

March 26, 2020


PIA MASSIE
Multi-media artist and environmental activist growing up in Brooklyn, NYC and currently living and working  in Vancouver on the unceded Coast Salish Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, shares an essay that was first published on Adbusters.

March 30, 2020
TIKO KERR
He has been an advocate for many social causes ranging from health and children’s issues to education and housing.
Tiko is a respected figure in our community and we thank him for sharing his thoughts on the COVID-19 situation.

March 22, 2020
PAUL WONG
Multimedia artist Paul Wong shares this video and poem with us. An award-winning artist, curator, and organizer of public interventions since the mid-1970s, Wong is known for his engagement with issues of race, sex, and death. His work varies from conceptual performances to narratives, meshing video, photography, installation, and performance with Chinese-Canadian cultural perspectives.

Thru weeks of doom and gloom in a locked down world .
The shuttered tribes gather daily at sunset to bang pots and pans from their isolated sky cages , and quarantined perches
shouting out to the shamans and medicine gods.
Waiting for the silence.



March 31, 2020