Syrus Marcus Ware - 2068: Touch Change
to
Grunt Gallery 116-350 E 2 Ave, Vancouver, British Columbia V5T 4R8
The opening reception will take place on Thursday, November 1 at 7 pm
As an in situ event the next evening, a dialogue between Syrus and local artist and activist !Kona will take place on Friday, November 2 at 7 PM at grunt gallery.
!Kona explains the facilitated experience: “Rather than a passive, voyeuristic experience, or one based on the extractive nature of question and answer, I look forward our dialogue sparking a conversation where people move from audience to participant in knowledge sharing."
grunt gallery is launching 2068: Touch Change, a new exhibition by Toronto-based artist Syrus Marcus Ware. The exhibition showcases work made by the artist following a residency at the Trans Archives at the University of Victoria and the local archives on Salt Spring Island B.C., where he explored queer and Trans Black histories. The show is curated by grunt gallery’s Vanessa Kwan.
2068: Touch Change is both an archive and a speculation. Beginning 50 years in the future, this new exhibition by Toronto based artist Syrus Marcus Ware proposes an archive whose ‘holdings’ act as a meeting ground for artists and activists across time and space.
Syrus states, “In this exhibition, activists from the past, present and future will meet for the first time on the canvas, as I merge my archival research with interviews and portrait sittings that I did with Black British Columbians while doing my residency in Victoria and Vancouver”.
The exhibition has three main components: a series of large-scale graphite portraits drawn on paper and directly on the walls, a speculative text, and a disseminated printed work that documents materials gathered and accessed in the artist’s research process.
Vanessa explains the impetus to present the work: “It makes necessary connections between creative practices and social justice movements. Syrus's work is rooted in the relationships he makes, and his view of the present-day—and his vision of the future—is based in these ever-evolving networks of human connection; change is a constant, and this knowledge gives us hope.”
The portraits—in many ways the centrepiece of the exhibition—are created through a complex process of visiting and revisiting images and interviews with historic and present-day BIPOC (Black, Indigenous or People of Colour) activist communities. Ware’s investment in the archive is overlaid with a parallel interest in forms of speculative fiction, and he invokes the philosophy of Octavia E. Butler’s now-famous Earthseed movement from her (unfinished) Parable trilogy: “All that you touch/ you Change. All that you change/Changes you” is a resonant theme throughout the artist’s work, as a reference to empathic human connection as the fuel for sustained and sustaining social justice movements. Ware, like Butler, invites us to consider change as a constant, and hope as an ever-expanding network of relations.
BIOGRAPHY:
Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, community activist, researcher, youth advocate, and educator. As a visual artist, Syrus works within the mediums of painting, installation and performance to challenge systemic oppression. He is also a part of the Black Triangle Arts Collective (BTAC), PDA (Performance Disability Art), and a core team member of Black Lives Matter-Toronto. He is a facilitator/designer at The Banff Centre and for 12 years was the Coordinator of the Art Gallery of Ontario Youth Program. Syrus is the inaugural Daniel’s Spectrum Artist-in-Residence (2016/17) and is working on a PhD at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies.