Digital Archive
2025
In this one-hour discussion, Executive Director and Chief Curator Candice Hopkins will discuss the establishment of Forge Project (New York), its transition to a non- profit organisation, its commitment to investing in Indigenous leaders and artists to counter ongoing and historical inequity. Hopkins will also outline her curatorial leadership, current projects and future vision for the Forge Project.
In this Artist in Residency Talk, Claudia Goulet-Blais outlines her research focusing on maternal relationships, exploring the complexities of care and the shifting roles within family dynamics. Working collaboratively with their mother, they examine the nuances of intimacy, distance, and gesture—specifically, the embrace, which has become a recurring motif.
Learn from leading artists, curators and scholars Dr. Lucy Bell, Dr. Mimi Gellman and Dr. Marianne Nicolson, with moderation by Daina Warren, ECU Director of Indigenous Initiatives, as they consider Indigenous collections in relation to the history of collecting in BC, and the ways in which the collecting of Indigenous belongings has been foundational to the history of building collections here, both public and private.
In this one-hour online discussion, Maria Sukkar discusses her journey as philanthropist, how Sukkar came to establish the ISelf Collection (London), in addition to her championing of the visual arts with a focus on photography and the Middle East region. Discussions will include her future vision for the collection as well as philanthropic activities carried out through the collection.
In this roundtable discussion, influential collectors Henning and Brigitte Freybe, Anouchka Freybe and Claudia Beck come together, moderated by VAG co-CEO and Curator-at-Large Eva Respini, to discuss the infrastructure of collections and how resiliency can be fostered in the art scene through future planning.
In this roundtable discussion, we are delighted to feature leading arts philanthropists, collectors, and curators Cathy Busby, Lisa Baldissera, Pantea Haghighi, Houman Sarshar, Melissa Karmen Lee and Karen Tam: as well as moderator Helga Pakasaar. They will discuss how collections support material and immaterial practices, histories, and memories.
In this roundtable discussion, we are delighted to feature leading arts philanthropists and collectors Jane Irwin, Inna O’Brian, and Bruce Munro Wright; as well as artist Shawn Hunt. They will discuss investment and belief in early career talent, mentorship, and crucial financial support.
2024
2023
Join Griffin Art Projects for a virtual panel discussion between three Indigenous curators as they discuss their methodologies and approaches to curation.
Lorilee Wastasecoot (Legacy Art Gallery), Aliya Boubard (Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art), and Jocelyn Piirainen (National Gallery of Canada) will discuss their approaches to the curation of Indigenous art within a field still largely dominated by colonial values of art, culture, and space. Galleries and museums hold a long history of showcasing Indigenous artworks as detached from their creators, as relics of times past, and held to definitions of ‘art’ and ‘value’ not compatible with Indigenous cultures and value systems. In reality, Indigenous art is still widely practiced in both traditional and innovative ways, and Indigenous artists and curators are reclaiming control over how their art forms are shown to the world. Panelists will provide insight into their past projects, curatorial methodologies, and about the overlap between Indigenous art and the Western fine arts world. The discussion will be facilitated by Griffin’s Young Canada Works Indigenous Public Programming and Marketing Intern, Jordanna George, and followed by a Q+A period.
Join “Through a BIPOC Lens” series’ artist in residence, Rain Cabana-Boucher, to learn what she has been up to through her time at Griffin!
Rain Cabana-Boucher, is a Michif/British settler interdisciplinary artist raised in treaty 6 territory, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her family has historic ties to the Michif communities of St-François-Xavier, St. Boniface, and St. Louis, Saskatchewan. She currently lives and works on the stolen land of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaʔ, and xwməθkwəy̓əm Nations. Cabana-Boucher is a recent recipient of the Takao Tanabe prize for emerging British Columbia Painters and the First Peoples Individual Artist grant. Cabana-Boucher explores the autobiographical in relation to place and politics; seeking to navigate the complexities of identity within environments that are rapidly changing under systematic pressures.
Join the recipient of the Griffin Art Projects’ BIPOC Studio Award 2023, Natalie Purschwitz, to learn what she has been up to through her time at Griffin!
Natalie Purschwitz is an artist living and working on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) people. Her research is propelled by material exploration drawing on modes of making that include collecting, accumulating, arranging, editing, and writing. She is curious about the ways in which the landscape is shaped by humans and nonhumans, through systems of organization, networks of support and ruptures within these systems. By reconfiguring everyday objects, elemental substances and other lively combinations, she attempts to create conditions for material events.
2022
As part of this year’s COMBINE Art Fair, this virtual panel invites five curators/gallerists to speak on the importance of gallery-led collaboration within the Canadian arts ecology. With the inclusion of Hugues Charbonneau in this year’s fair, alongside Monica Reyes, Tobin Gibson (Unit 17), and Wil Aballe, the panelists will discuss modes of solidarity between Eastern and Western Canadian galleries and the future of collaboration through COMBINE.
2021
As part of our ongoing Conversations on Collecting series, this two-part miniseries will focus on the impacts that COVID-19 has had on artists, galleries, curators, studios and online entities operating within the complex ecosystem of the international art market in South Africa, Canada and beyond.
Join Latitudes Co-Directors Roberta Coci and Lucy MacGarry for a conversation focused on the challenges, changes and silver linings encountered over the course of the past year amidst COVID-19, and what it means to break down barriers and inequalities in the art world as the founders LATITUDES, the first platform of its kind dedicated to African art.
LATITUDES is an online platform featuring a constantly changing, curated selection of art from the African continent and the diaspora, bringing together artworks presented by galleries, curators, studios, not-for-profit and independent artists themselves.
Building on one of Griffin Art Project’s mandates to examine new currents in contemporary collecting practices, Conversations on Collecting is an ongoing series that considers the methodologies, thematics and narratives that shape collecting practices in Vancouver, Canada and beyond. This mini series is presented in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Society of Vancouver.
Join Linda Zhang, professor in the School of Interior Design at Ryerson University in Toronto ON, live over Zoom to learn about the story and process behind her recent project ChinaTOwn, a multi-player board game that prompts participants to put their heads together to negotiate what is worth including in a community space. Zhang partnered with research technology officer in Ryerson’s Library Collaboratory, Jimmy Tran, to fly drones over Toronto’s Chinatown, photographing 99 individual buildings and subsequently turning each one into a board-game sized model. To play the game, participants must select only 12 of the 99 buildings to include in their hand-picked Chinatown. Centred on questions of heritage preservation within the community, ChinaTOwn asks players to have a conversation about what is important to them and the future of their community, a topic that is relevant now more than ever as Chinatown’s across the country face unprecedented challenges and change.
In the Shadows of Gold Mountain features filmmaker Karen Cho as she travels from Montreal to Vancouver to uncover stories from the last survivors of the Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act, a set of laws imposed to single out the Chinese as unwanted immigrants to Canada from 1885 to 1947. Through a combination of history, poetry and raw emotion, this documentary sheds light on an era that shaped the identity of generations. Following the film, Griffin will be hosting a director’s talk and Q/A live over Zoom with Montreal filmmaker and founder of Story Booth Media, Karen Cho. With over a decade of experience in the film and television industry, Karen is an award winning writer/director of documentary films and TV series. Story Booth Media creates diverse films that explore topics of immigration, social justice, identity and belonging.
Join Griffin’s current artist-in-residence, Navarana Igloliorte, for an artist talk live over zoom to learn more about what she has been up to throughout her time at Griffin Art Projects! “During the Griffin Art Projects residency I plan to hang three large-scale stencils of caribou approximately 8x8 feet each. I will edit video and photos I have filmed of places and food sources of caribou in the past. I am from Labrador where the George River Herd population was traditionally around 750,000, and due to multiple forms of industry over the years, the population dwindled to 5000. Last year, 8100 were counted. In the community I grew up in caribou is not merely a source of food and clothing, but has great spiritual significance. In this connection, making this work is a kind of invocation or act that seeks to activate energy and hope for the caribou to do well again. The videos I edit will be projected on and through the large scale stencils. I am also planning on working on paper integrating watercolour and collage.” -Navarana Igloliorte Currently based in Vancouver, BC, Navarana Igloliorte is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker working in short gauge film, video, painting, printmaking and dance. Igloliorte often works in collaboration with community members or other artists, weaving together teachings, stories, movement and sometimes humour through reflection of our connectedness with nature and each other. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in 2003 and a Bachelor of Education degree at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador in 2005. Since 2004, Igloliorte has frequently traveled back to Labrador where she grew up to work for the Nunatsiavut Government and Sheshatshiu Innu First Nation. Igloliorte’s artwork and films have been exhibited and screened in galleries and film festivals across Canada.
2020
2015–2019
Wetland Senario, a composition by Morris and Timmings based on the musical transcription of field recordings from a marsh on Saturna Island, British Columbia, and performed by the award-winning ensemble music intima. Presented in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Gallery and Griffin Art Projects.
In a series of in-the-moment-moments Charlene Vickers and Chad MacQuarrie activated the gallery space using improvised sound, vocals, and performed action followed by a music set of guitar and electronics. Things to see and hear could included a Jeff Wall portal, a megaphone tutorial, invisible painting making and meditations between guitar and Kaosillator Pad. Vickers and MacQuarrie have been involved in making improvised sound together since 2014, this marked their first exploration combining performance art and music.