Opening Reception: Oct 22, 8pm-12pm
Extended Hours: Mon-Fri, 2-8pm. Sat, 12-5pm. Sunday 11-3pm.

THE POLITICS OF ROMANCE curated by Debra MX Zhou.

Tara Arnst, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Sarah Harruthoonyan.
The Politics of Romance is an exhibition featuring three emerging Canadian artists Tara Arnst, Francisco-Fernando Granados and Sarah Harruthoonyan. Through presenting their documentation of live performance as video installation in a gallery setting, the artists explore alternative ways of looking at live performance, the transformative nature of actions and the renewal of meanings.

EARTHLY DELIGHTS curated by Francisco-Fernando Granados

Zarah Ackerman, Francis Cruz & Patrick Cruz and Manolo Lugo.
With hands and tongues, three emerging Vancouver artists embody the intangible for one night of performance in Earthly Delights? The corporeal, the intellectual and the metaphysical mix as they grapple with power, pleasure and the lines between the conscious and the unconscious.

A part of LIVE Biennale 2009

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Debra XM Zhou is a Shanghai-born, Vancouver-based curator. She is a current recipient of Assistance to Culturally Diverse Curators for Residencies in the Visual Arts from Canada Council for the Arts. Besides working for Centre A as the gallery coordinator, she has also worked on projects with Yishu Journal, Richmond Art Gallery, Reel Asian International Film Festival, and VIVO Media Arts Centre.

Francisco-Fernando Granados is a Guatemalan-born, Vancouver-based artist and writer currently working in performance, sculptural intervention and cultural criticism. Through his practice, he aims to create ephemeral spaces where larger socio-political contexts can collude and co-exist with personal narratives. His work has been shown in venues including the LIVE Biennale, VIVO Media Arts Centre, Centre A, the Vehicle project at Langara College Centre for Art in Public Spaces, Gallery Gachet, colourschool and the Vancouver East Cultural Centre.

Sarah Viscardi Harruthoonyan is a Vancouver based designer and artisan born in Tehran, Iran and raised in Athens, Greece and Vancouver, BC. After receiving her Bachelor in Fashion Design and Technology from Kwantlen, Harruthoonyan has been utilizing her skills on freelance projects and with various companies such as the Vancouver Opera, Arts Club Theatre, local film productions, Cirque du Soleil and most recently stage performances in Mexico. Inspired by her adventures in traveling, nature and human behaviour Sarah is continuously expanding on her wearable art collection of garments and accessories.

Tara Arnst is a Toronto based film and video artist, currently completing a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts at Ryerson University, specializing in Documentary Media. Ernst holds an undergraduate degree from Concordia University in Film Production and began her studies in Intermedia at Emily Carr University. Focusing primarily in cinematic art practices, Ernst’s work expands beyond the two dimensional frame to examine the political, psychological, phenomenological impact of the motion picture image. Touching on themes of cultural identity and collective memory Ernst avoids the overtly political, leaving room to explore the complex the psychology of our projected imagination.

Zarah Ackerman, A potential conversation
Zarah Ackerman will be having a potential conversation with artists Douglas Coupland, Michael Turner, and Stan Douglas in hopes of bridging the generational gap that stands between them. Topics will include: the power of potential, internal vs. external voice, psychokinesis, the hand vs. the tongue, projections of the self, storytelling, the body as contained/container, energy transference, and favorite flavours of bubble gum. Zarah Ackerman’s practice revolves around performance and sculptural works that relate to the body and the paradox that it presents as both contained and container. You could say that she is orally fixated and deals with themes surrounding the mouth as a source of pleasure and the maker of speech. Experimentation is fundamentally related to her process and research into materials. She received her BFA from Emily Carr University in Vancouver where she currently lives and works.

Francis and Patrick Cruz
The Cruz Brothers will use touch to contextualize the dynamic relation of power and pleasure. For the past few years, Francis Cruz and Patrick Cruz have collaborated and performed performance pieces that revolve around ideas of cultural displacement and its bearings of marginalization and sibling hierarchy and its production of violence.

Manolo Lugo, WORD IMMEDIATISMS
Manolo Lugo will draw randomly from language to engage in a satisfying and overwhelming dialogue.
Manolo Lugo is a Mexican-born artist residing in Vancouver. He obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in International Relations from the Monterrey Institute of Technology in 1999 and in 2007 a BFA from Emily Carr University. His work borrows from sculptural as well as from photographic discourses, structuring a sensibility around geographical displacement and its impact in the domestic and public spheres. In the work presented for LIVE, his interest in linguistics emerges from the necessity to re-assemble a fragmented and twice-removed self (geographically and linguistically) through the estranged terrains of a foreign language.