Programs & Events
Programs & Events
Panel Discussion: What Water Teaches
Saturday, November 12, 2022
1 – 3 pm PST
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Register HERE.
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Centre A is pleased to present a panel discussion, What Water Teaches, encompassing water’s health, agency, and role in intergenerational dialogues in relation to Indigenous epistemologies and community building as part of the ongoing work towards climate justice through decolonization. The conversation will be held between Kayah George ‘Halth Leah’, Audrey Siegl, and Rita Wong. The online program is presented in conjunction with Centre A’s current exhibition, Ed Pien: Tracing Water.
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Kayah George ‘Halth-Leah’ (she/they) carries the teachings of her Tulalip and Tsleil-Waututh Nations and has been on the front lines fighting against the Trans Mountain pipeline for more than half of her life. She is a young Indigenous environmental leader, activist, and filmmaker. Kayah has spoken globally about climate justice and shared the teachings of her nations to honor and care for the earth. She has worked with several environmental organizations, including Indigenous Climate Action (an Indigenous-led organization guided by a diverse group of Indigenous knowledge keepers, water protectors, and land defenders), to build capacity for an Indigenous-led divestment movement. Kayah is currently working on a short film that shares the intrinsic connection the Tsleil-Waututh people have to the ‘Burrard’ Inlet.
Audrey Siegl works with teachings and medicines passed on to her from her Musqueam family and ancestors. Lots of this medicine comes from the healing work she was blessed to witness and was shared with her by the Old Timers who raised her. The connections that they made, the ways they loved, cared & made a place for her in this world are why and how she does what she does. She has worked extensively with teachings and medicines across Turtle Island and is rooted in West Coast and Musqueam medicines. She is proud and honoured to carry on the work of her grandparents and ancestors.
Rita Wong is a poet-scholar who attends to the relationships between water justice, ecology, and decolonization. She has co-edited an anthology with Dorothy Christian entitled Downstream: Reimagining Water, based on a gathering that brought together elders, artists, scientists, writers, scholars, students and activists around the urgent need to care for the waters that give us life. A recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop Emerging Writer Award, Wong is the author of current, climate (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2021), beholden (Talonbooks, 2018, with Fred Wah), undercurrent (Nightwood, 2015), perpetual (Nightwood, 2015, with Cindy Mochizuki), sybil unrest (Line Books, 2008, with Larissa Lai), forage (Nightwood, short-listed for the 2008 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry, winner of Canada Reads Poetry 2011), and monkeypuzzle (Press Gang, 1998).
Wong works to support Indigenous communities’ efforts towards justice and health for water, having witnessed such work at the Peace River, the Wedzin Kwa, Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek, the Columbia River, the Fraser River, the Salish Sea, and the Arctic Ocean watershed. She understands that when these waterways are healthy, life will be healthy too, and that we cannot afford to endanger and pollute the waters that sustain our lives.
Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected].
Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.
Centre A Presents: A Collective Investigation
Saturday, October 29, 2022
1 – 3 pm PDT
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Register HERE.
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Presented as part of Art Book Month with the Vancouver Art Book Fair, A Collective Investigation invites participants to explore the contents of Centre A’s Reading Room, home to a sizeable collection of artist books, exhibit catalogues, and monographs related to Asian and diasporic Asian art. Participants are encouraged to prepare a research or personal question in advance. As they examine the library’s contents, they will be given numbered index markers to place beside a page from a book that offers insight into their question. The books are then lined up in the order of the index markers they contain. As their markers emerge from the pile, each participant will present their findings, taking turns to construct a narrative – similar to a game of exquisite corpse. Conversation may ensue as relevant or recurring themes and patterns surface with each presentation.
This activity allows participants to establish personal connections to the archive while learning about each others’ interests, potentially forming new relationships. Following the workshop, Centre A staff will scan the selected pages to compile into a PDF that serves as a record of the event and a map of the intersections between a specific audience’s attention and the library’s contents. Participants will receive a copy of this PDF as a memento.
Join us!
This event is being held as part of Art Book Month organized by Vancouver Art Book Fair. Art Book Month consists of community organized events supported by VABF and hosted in Vancouver, online and worldwide by artists, curators, collectives and institutions who are actively creating and presenting work in this medium.
Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected].
Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Tropical Cafe: 2022 Centre A Holiday Art Market
Application Deadline: November 6, 2022
It’s that time of the year again! Centre A is bringing back its thematic Holiday Art Market after last year’s inaugural edition.
With a cold winter approaching after a warm fall, you won’t have to get on a plane to change your scenery! Come enjoy the sun and tropical vibes at Centre A and shop art for the holiday season!
This year’s theme is Tropical Cafe, and we will be transforming the gallery into a cafe-like space that will be furnished with artworks submitted to us by local and regional artists. The Tropical Cafe is not only a gathering place, but also a site for exchange, ignition, and clashes of ideas and ideals.
Artists are encouraged to submit works that explore (or not) the concepts of tourism, labour, commercialized exoticism, and the way it is associated with rest, leisure, and luxury.
The selected artworks will be featured and on display at Centre A (Unit 205, 268 Keefer Street, Vancouver, BC V6A 1X5) for silent auction from November 26 to December 17, 2022.
Submission is free, and will be juried by the Centre A curatorial team. Works of all mediums and scales are welcome.
An opening party will be held on Saturday, November 26, 2022. Mark your calendars!
Go HERE to complete our online submission form.
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Selection process:
– All selected artworks must be ready to be dropped off at Centre A for installation by Saturday, November 19, 2022.
– Accepted artists will receive a complimentary Centre A membership for a year.
– Accepted artworks will be bid on in the gallery during the exhibition period.
– Accepted artworks must be priced between 20 and 500 Canadian Dollars.
– Accepted artists will receive 60% of the selling price of their artwork(s) sold during the exhibition. The remaining amount will go towards supporting Centre A.
— The selling price is determined by a silent auction, while the Artist determines the starting bid. The artwork will not be sold lower than the starting bid.
Get in touch with us at [email protected] if you need assistance with your submission.
Centre A is excited to partner with The Cinematheque for their program, Wayne Wang x 3, a triple screening of American director Wayne Wang’s films from October 13 to 17, 2022, at the Cinematheque (1131 Howe St, Vancouver, BC V6Z 2K8).
“One would be hard-pressed to find any filmmaker who not only daringly chronicled Chinese life in a time when it was unthinkable in American cinema, but also parlayed all that into one of the more eclectic careers in Hollywood.” (Brandon Yu, New York Times)
Wayne Wang is having a moment. Again. The trailblazing Chinese American director, who immigrated to San Francisco from Hong Kong at 18, broke ground in the early 1980s with his arthouse hit Chan Is Missing, the first Asian American indie to score widespread distribution in the United States. Ten years later, Wang gained an unprecedented foothold in Hollywood and made history with The Joy Luck Club, the first Asian-centring film to be helmed by an Asian American and released by a major studio. Today, as a fresh crop of Asian American filmmakers are making strides in the industry, Wang is being championed anew for his role in opening doors for these long-marginalized creators—not to mention empowering them to tell stories rooted in uniquely Asian American experiences. That it took Hollywood twenty-five years to greenlight another Asian-ensemble picture after the success of The Joy Luck Club—that being 2018’s “surprise” blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians—just goes to show how loath studios are to free up seats at the table. This triple-shot program includes brand-new restorations of two of Wang’s best films from the 1980s—neo-noir breakthrough Chan Is Missing and X-rated sledgehammer Life Is Cheap… But Toilet Paper Is Expensive—along with revival screenings of this best-known work, the 1993 multigenerational melodrama (and guaranteed tearjerker) The Joy Luck Club.
Read more about the program and buy tickets HERE.
Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected].
Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.
Artist Talk: Ed Pien
Saturday, October 8, 2022, 2 – 4 PM PDT
This artist talk will take place on Zoom.
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Register HERE.
Centre A’s executive director/curator Henry Heng Lu will be in conversation with Centre A’s current exhibiting artist Ed Pien about his practice and research in relation to his exhibition, Tracing Water. A Q&A will follow.
Tracing Water presents an extensive assembly of work by Toronto-based artist Ed Pien. Ranging from drawing to lithography to prints and video, the works span over 20 years and explore and incorporate water in these artistic creations.
Find out more about the exhibition HERE.
Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected].
Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.
Centre A Speaker Series 2022: Souvankham Thammavongsa
Saturday, October 15, 2022, 1 – 2 pm PDT
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We will conclude our 2022 Speaker Series, with an online reading and Q&A session with award-winning author Souvankham Thammavongsa!
Register for the talk HERE.
Find out more about the Centre A Speaker Series 2022 HERE.
During the talk, Thammavongsa will discuss her book HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE and perform a short reading of her book. After the reading, attendees will also have the opportunity to ask questions about the book during the Q&A. Attendees are encouraged (but not required) to read HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE prior to the talk.
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Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of four poetry books, and the short story collection HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE, winner of the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN America Open Book Award, out now with Little, Brown (U.S.), McClelland & Stewart (Canada), and Bloomsbury (U.K.), available in French, with foreign rights sold in China, Korea, Poland, and Turkey. Her stories have won an O. Henry Award and appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Granta, and NOON. She has also written book reviews for The New York Times, and edited the anthologies Best Canadian Poetry (2021) and The Griffin Poetry Prize (2021). She is known for her PowerPoint videos on Zoom about writing, most recently one titled “I Am Not That Interesting.” Currently, she is working on her first novel. She was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, and was raised, and educated at public schools, in Toronto.
Photo Credit: Steph Martyniuk
Centre A would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council for supporting the Centre A Speaker Series.
Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected].
Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.
FLOWER AND DESK IN SPRING Film Screening
Thursday, June 2, 2022, 5 – 7 PM PDT
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Centre A presents the screening of FLOWER AND DESK IN SPRING, a collection of videos with simple and elegant approaches to educational filmmaking and videography featuring a variety of flowers, geometry, and the use of classical, experimental, and anime opening music.
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Programmed by Steff Hui Ci Ling
“When I started putting the program together, I thought about the times when I worked at a gallery and sat behind a desk while listening to the muffled audio of a video work looping in the black box yonder. I wanted to assemble a program that would be pleasant to listen to if it could be heard from the office throughout the workday, or if the sound happened to bleed through the walls to the neighbouring business inside Keefer Mall. The total screening time is 76-minutes on loop, but since visitors may not be able to view it from the beginning, my other goal for the program was to put together something that would maintain geometric or organic forms on screen throughout, so there would always be an inviting or curious shape or colour (or sound) to greet the visitor.”
Steff Hui Ci Ling is an occasional producer of criticism, pamphlets, stories, essays, exhibitions, reviews, bluntness, anecdotes, shout-outs, wrestling storylines, proposals, applications, jokes, readings, minimal poems, poems, dinner, compliments, and diatribes. She is a student, cultural worker and guest living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Currently, she is an MA Candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University and working as a teaching assistant in Labour Studies. For fun, she designs and co-edits STILLS: moving image tract and organizes a Marxish Study Group. Her books are NASCAR (Blank Cheque, 2016), CUTS OF THIN MEAT (Spare Room, 2015), and MIXED MARTIAL ARTS (House House Press, forthcoming).
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Program:
Bruce and Katharine Cornwell, Trio for Three Angles (1968), 8 minutes
Barry Doupé, Thalé (2009), 5 minutes
Bruce and Katharine Cornwell, Journey to the Center of a Triangle (1976), 9 minutes
Lily Jue Sheng and Rita Ferrando, Ikebana (2022), 13 minutes
Bruce and Katharine Cornwell, Congruent Triangles (1976), 7 minutes
EnergizedClippy, Attack on Angles Anime The Final Season OP – My Congruent Angle War (2020), 2 minutes
Barry Doupé and Yota Kobayashi, Shikisou (with visuals) (2012), 12 minutes
EnergizedClippy, Congruent Angles Anime OP – A Cruel Angle’s Thesis (2016), 2 minutes
Bruce and Katharine Cornwell, Similar Triangles (1975), 8 minutes
Bruce and Katharine Cornwell, Dragon Fold (1978), 8 minutes
EnergizedClippy, No Math No Life Anime OP – This Angle (2022), 2 minutes
Bruce and Katharine Cornwell, Trio for Three Angles (1968), 8 minutes
Bruce Cornwell became interested in math films after he saw Disney’s Donald in Mathmagic Land (1959) and thought he could make a better film. Most of Bruce and Katharine Cornwell’s work is now out of distribution, however, much of it is now accessible online to watch and download through YouTube, the Internet Archive and their son Eric’s Vimeo channel, who released some of his parents work under Creative Commons in 2014. The Cornwells made three sequels to Trio, which was the last hand-animated film before switching over to making most of their films on a Tektronix 4051 Graphic Computing System. The subsequent computer-generated triangle trilogy, Congruent Triangles, Similar Triangles and Journey to the Center of a Triangle, is included in this program too.
Barry Doupé, Thalé (2009), 5 minutes
Doupé’s computer animation Thalé is named after the thale cress, arabidopsis thaliana, mouse-ear cress, or arabidopsis, which is a small flowering plant native to Eurasia and Africa. The title flora is a popular model organism in plant biology to understand the molecular biology of plant traits including flower development and light sensing. That is one pedagogical flower! The rotating fictional flowers in the animation incorporate geometric forms inspired by sex toys and Doupé’s most excellent imagination.
Bruce and Katharine Cornwell, Journey to the Center of a Triangle (1976), 9 minutes
Journey to the Center of a Triangle was made on the Tektronix 4051 which only produced black and green vector images, so a creative and elaborate process of layering multiple exposures and optical printing took place during the programming to achieve a variety of coloured dots necessary to be visually distinct and beautifully instructive in the final scene, “The Grand Tour.” Much of that vibrance was lost in the translation from 16mm to VHS scanning, and now viewed on a modern computer screen, it has an even more limited colour gamut. Their son Eric Cornwell asks us to “Please imagine it all in bright, brilliant colours.”
Lily Jue Sheng and Rita Ferrando, Ikebana (2022), 13 minutes
The process of putting the program together actually began with Lily Jue Sheng and Rita Ferrando’s Ikebana. In this film, there are lines read from one of four source texts, instructional or informative books about ikebana (the Japanese art of flower arranging), ”Ikebana presents three main branches,” oh, like a triangle, I thought, “the past, the present and the future.”
Ikebana shares a similar occupation with the films in the Cornwell’s Trio for Triangles while offering its own combination of animation, music, with documentary verité of an ikebana showcase to bring a lightness and action to the educational material.
Bruce and Katharine Cornwell, Congruent Triangles (1976), 7 minutes
Congruent Triangles makes a number of cameos in the program, but a complete viewing brings together the full triangle lesson, while performing an echoing and evolving form expressed in Yota Kobayashi and Barry Doupé’s concept of Shikisou. To a score described as “Bach meets Third Stream Jazz musical score” the congruent triangles ripple out like a Busby Berkley ensemble to produce a hemp-like pattern on the screen in the film’s final act.
EnergizedClippy, Attack on Angles Anime The Final Season OP – My Congruent Angle War (2020), 2 minutes
While I was researching the different versions of Journey posted online, I came across EnergizedClippy’s video in the related videos’ column on YouTube. Attack on Angles Anime The Final Season OP – My Congruent Angle War is a parody of the opening theme song for the final season of Attack on Titan (2013–present). The creator combined footage from Cornwells’ Journey to the Center of a Triangle and Congruent Triangles with the opening song for the very popular anime, My War. As described under the video’s page, “Math tutorials are still the best anime, and is even more hype with the final season!”
The titles of EnergizedClippy’s math tutorial x anime OP (the acronym used to refer to opening credit or opening music) videos combine the titles of Cornwell’s triangle films and the paired song. There are three in total dating from 2016 to 2022, which are all included in this program, as well. These videos reminded me of the interesting ways that people procrastinate when they are studying difficult subjects. These songs lend a melodrama to the otherwise serene triangle films, like a humorous missive from a night of cramming before a big math test.
The program’s title, FLOWER AND DESK IN SPRING, follows in EnergizedClippy’s rhetorical fun and is a hybrid between some of the subject matter of the program — flowers, the seasons, studying math (most likely at a desk) — and the poetic name of a popular Yunnan-style restaurant in the West End, Flower and Horse in Spring, where Henry and I ate once. I think it was over this meal when he asked me to submit an idea for The Living Room.
Barry Doupé and Yota Kobayashi, Shikisou (with visuals) (2012), 12 minutes
The Japanese word “shikisou” means a cyclical gradation of colors (“hue”) as well as “appearance” or “visible figure”. In addition to these definitions metamorphosis is a key concept within Shikisou. There are an infinite number of rhythms in the universe. Some are familiar and comprehensible, others, incognito. Each rhythm echoes from the ones before it, “in a continuous evolution of polyrhythmic and cyclical patterns that are the temporal foundation of the universal symphony.” Shikisou refers to a cycle of seasons to measure time, but expresses the symbolism and emotional assignment that seasons often extend by portraying approaching figurative “sound events” associated with memories of each season. Even though it adheres to a profound principle, something determinative and grandiose like a genesis of rhythm and its resultant patterns, and there is tension between cyclical and non-cyclical layers of sound, the pulsing orb seems to contain and express something less threatening than disorder and more poetic than a scientific axiom.
Shikisou brings to mind the colourful dots in the final scene in Trios, the ones that indicate, but also decorate, the lessons of the triangle. As well, the way the shapes in the Cornwells’ films seem to move and morph as if they tirelessly rehearsed the choreography before committing these movements to the animation process in a similar way to the pulsing orb protagonist of Shikisou. Shikisou also makes use of a form to represent time (the metric of the four seasons), which reminded me of the three main branches of an ikebana arrangement representing the past, present and future.
EnergizedClippy, Congruent Angles Anime OP – A Cruel Angle’s Thesis (2016), 2 minutes
After I discovered Attack on Angles, I wondered if this was some sort of internet trend, however EnergizedClippy seems to be the progenitor and sole producer of the hybrid anime OP x educational films, of which there are three. The first video was 2016’s Congruent Angles Anime OP – A Cruel Angles Thesis. It uses a combination of footage from Journey and Congruent Angles with A Cruel Angel’s Thesis (1995) from Neon Genesis Evangelion. There are lots of joyful and thankful remarks in the comments but the one pinned at the top is pretty good: “Get in the math class, Shinji.” Meanwhile, in the YouTube comments for the Cornwells’ Congruent Triangles, a user states that this is their favourite episode of Evangelion.
Bruce and Katharine Cornwell, Similar Triangles (1975), 8 minutes
Similar Triangles is the first in the Cornwells’ triangle trilogy. In this lesson, we are taught about triangles sharing corresponding angles and proportional sides.To a soothing folk guitar number, this lesson provides an entrancing demonstration of contracting and expanding concentric patterning and pyramidic configurations
Bruce and Katharine Cornwell, Dragon Fold (1978), 8 minutes
The extended title of this film, Dragon Fold and Other Ways to Fill Space is an upbeat visual cabaret of demonstrations in how infinite line segments, infinite closed curves, or a single closed curve multiply to gradually create denser and denser space filling patterns on the screen. Featuring the Sierpinski curve and the eponymous dragon curve.
EnergizedClippy, No Math No Life Anime OP – This Angle (2022), 2 minutes
The popularity of 2016’s Congruent Angles had a second surge of popularity in 2022. As a token of gratitude to their viewers for the 1-million views, the now relatively inactive account posted No Math No Life Anime OP – This Angle. As with the earlier videos, No Math No Life uses footage from the Cornwells’ Journey, Congruent Triangles, in addition to Dragon Fold, and introduces some contemporary source material including videos on linear algebra and fourier series by commensurately serene 3Blue1Brown, a sincerely helpful math edutainment YouTuber. The background music, This Game, was the opening credits for the 2014 anime, No Game, No Life, which was not renewed for a second season because of a controversy about plagiarism. This is EnergizedClippy’s first edit made entirely with Adobe Premiere CC 2018, instead of Vegas Pro.
IMPORTANT NOTES REGARDING YOUR VISIT:
- Face masks or face coverings are encouraged when not drinking or eating. We also encourage you to sanitize your hands before and after visiting. Masks and hand sanitizer are available for you as needed.
- Due to Sun Wah Centre’s security measures, please locate the security guard posted at the front gate to be let into the building. Otherwise, please call Centre A at (604) 683-8326 during the event hours.
Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected].
Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.
