Exhibitions
Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art + Design
En Route: mobile forms of art and education
ECU Outreach Program (1979 to 1985), Kamias Triennial (2014), Avenue/Duplex (2014 to 2019), Ian Wallace, Laiwan, Moniker Press
Organized by Bopha Chhay, Troy Johnson, Vanessa Kwan with Kristy Waller
En Route: mobile forms of art and education brings together historical and contemporary source materials, media and artworks. Beginning in the Emily Carr University Archives, this exhibition takes inspiration from a period from 1979–1985, when a now-legendary Outreach Program at ECU was most active. Selections from this period focus on a travelling Printmobile program, a series of distance-learning Telecourses and a touring BC Young Artists Biennial. These histories and practices explore the significance of artist-led classrooms and informal learning environments and the impacts and legacies they have had across communities.
Presented alongside these programs is the work of ECU faculty, alumni, and community members whose work embodies themes of expanded learning beyond the classroom. Specific moments include Ian Wallace’s Visiting Artist Program (1979–89), Laiwan’s establishment of Or Gallery (1983), Patrick Cruz’s inaugural Kamias Triennial (2014), the establishment of Avenue (East Hastings Street) and Duplex at (Fraser Street), and Moniker Press (2014–present). En Route is above all a celebration of the possibilities of a porous classroom, and the many ways artists have experimented with the form through practices of mutual support, space creation, and radical dissemination.
100 Years in the Making | This exhibition has been curated in support of ECU 100, Emily Carr University of Art + Design’s centennial anniversary.
Public Programmes
Opening Reception
Thursday, September 11, 6–8 PM
Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University of art + Design
Artist Talk
A conversation with Ian Wallace and Dr. Trish Kelly
Thursday, October 16, 6 PM
Reliance Theatre, Emily Carr University of art + Design
Exhibition Tour
A walkthrough of En Route with ECU Archivist, Kristy Waller
Thursday, October 23, 11:20 AM–12:20 PM
Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University of art + Design
Panel Discussion
Avenue/Duplex (2014 to 2019) and Kamias Triennial (2014)
Wednesday, October 29, 6–8 PM
Open Studio
Erica Wilk of Moniker Press
Saturday, November 1, 2–4 PM
Moniker Press, Sun Wah Centre
biographies
Kamias Triennial: Patrick Cruz
Patrick Cruz is an artist, educator, and an albularyo, also known as a faith healer. Cruz considers the role of spirituality, improvisation, intuition, and play as emancipatory tools to reify embedded colonial frameworks and ideologies in art making and collective dreaming. His works are informed by the intersections of clown philosophy, magic, and the occult, and their syncretic manifestations and relationships in contemporary life. Most recently, Cruz has been making works using material retrieved from past-life regressions to navigate and side-step cultural and ancestral identity.
Cruz attended Emily Carr Institute between 2006 – 2010. In 2021, he received the prestigious Thirteen Artist Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and in 2015, he won the national title in the 17th RBC Canadian Painting Competition. He is a cross-appointed Assistant Professor in Arts, Culture and Media in Studio Art at the University of Toronto Scarborough and Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. He is the founder and co-director of the Kamias Triennial, along with curators Su-Ying Lee and Karie Liao, co-curator of Ben Flores Fan Club Collective with Christian Vistan, collaborator at Boring Earth with Laila Fox, and one of the 19 members of the artist-run collective the Plumb.
Avenue/Duplex (2014 to 2019): Scott Kemp, Kara Ditte Hansen, Jordan Milner
Scott Kemp (b. unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations | Vancouver, BC) has shown artwork in solo and group exhibitions at galleries and DIY art spaces in Canada, America, Sweden and Germany. He holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and an MFA from the department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University. Prior to grad school he worked as a Plastics Fabricator, a Gallery Preparator and a Sign Maker. More recently he has worked as a Sessional Instructor teaching Sculpture and Extended Media.
Kara Ditte Hansen is an artist who works with film, video, collage and installation. Her artistic practice looks at human and non-human relationships with the material of the earth, systems of extraction and waste, and how these seemingly external materials collide with the interior worlds of individuals. She received her MFA from the Cinematic Arts program at University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee and her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Her films have been screened at such venues as the 13th Seoul Media City Biennale, DOXA Documentary Film Festival, e-flux screening room, Prismatic Ground, Vancouver International Film Festival, Gene Siskel Film Center, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Cosmic Rays, Light Matter Film Festival, Onion City Film Festival, and Antimatter.
Jordan Milner received his BFA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2013). He was a founding member of Duplex Artist Society, a collective space facilitating exhibitions, music events, and readings (2015-2021). Recent exhibitions include Grafting Perennial Phantom at Glass Box Projects (2019) and Boreal Chorus in Crossfade at Afternoon Projects (2021). His practice is divided between the psychoterratic impact of our living in the industrial world and the output of these felt experiences through painting, sculpture and sound. Jordan continues to live and work in Vancouver BC.
Since 1965, Ian Wallace (b. 1943, Shoreham, England; lives/works: Vancouver) has been active as an exhibiting artist, writer, and educator. He has been an influential figure in the development of an internationally acknowledged photographic and conceptual approach to artistic practice. Wallace uses photography and painting to investigate the relationship between these and other media, with a focus on the production of narrative, cinematic, literary, and otherwise.
A photojournalistic investigation of the urban and suburban landscape persists from his early photography to his recent painting. For example, Street Reflections (1970–2007), captures a scene where the street meets its reflection in a glass storefront in five consecutive shots. Similarly, in Construction Site (The Tower) II, 2015, the mirrored façade of a condo building confuses what is real and what is reflected, in a photolaminate print which operates as an image caught in a field of hard-edge geometric abstraction.
After graduating with a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of British Columbia, Wallace taught art history at the university from 1967 to 1970, and then at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design from 1972 to 1998. In 2014, he was awarded the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2013, Wallace was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada, and was honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. In 2004, he was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award for the Visual Arts.
LAIWAN is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator with a wide-ranging practice based in poetics and philosophy. Born in Zimbabwe of Chinese parents, her family immigrated to Canada in 1977 to leave the war in apartheid Rhodesia. Her art training began at the Emily Carr College of Art & Design (1983), and she returned to academia to receive an MFA from Simon Fraser University School for Contemporary Arts (1999). Recipient of numerous awards, including the 2023 VIVA Award, 2021 Emily Award from Emily Carr University, recent Canada Council and BC Arts Council Awards, and the 2008 Vancouver Queer Media Artist Award, Laiwan served on numerous arts juries, exhibits regularly, curates projects in Canada, the US, and Zimbabwe, is published in anthologies and journals, and taught for twenty years at the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College (VT/WA, USA). She is based on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations and currently works in the Department of Arts, Reconciliation and Culture at the Vancouver Park Board.
Moniker Press is a risograph print and publishing studio that works collaboratively with artists to produce small editions of books, zines and print ephemera. Located in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Moniker Press is run by artist Erica Wilk whose practice often incorporates photography, collage and video mediums. Born and raised in amiskwaciy-wâskahikan, Treaty 6 territory (so-called Edmonton, Alberta) Erica relocated to Vancouver to pursue their BFA at Emily Carr University (2011). Founded in 2014, Moniker Press has slowly evolved into two functioning facets— a print-for-hire shop and publishing project. Moniker Press is a platform for collaboration, education and experimentation. Moniker Press supports projects that are visually engaging but also offer new, radical, and unexplored perspectives on current topics and issues.
Kristy Waller (she/her) has worked as the archivist at Emily Carr University of Art + Design since 2019. She holds a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia’s Archival Studies program. Her primary work has been with non-textual records, specifically audiovisual materials, and artists’ records. She has focused on projects that centre Community Archives and collaboration in the digitization, preservation, management, and accessibility of AV materials, photographs, and ephemera. From 2018 to 2024 she taught a course on non-textual and audiovisual records at the UBC iSchool.
