The Work of the Work: ECU Faculty exhibition

I’m pleased to be exhibiting in support of the Emily Carr University faculty in their 2020 exhibition The Work of the Work (details below).

In March 2018, I did an intervention outside the Emily Carr University president’s office to draw attention to problematic working conditions for contract faculty. At that time the president enjoyed a bright, spacious 2,000 square-foot suite shared with four administrative staff. Meanwhile, in the basement, 80+ sessional instructors shared a space about a third that size. Occupying about a quarter of this small space were over a hundred Ikea-style shelving cubicles. So I photographed the cubicles and installed the prints outside the president’s office. 

Sessional Office: Proposal for a new arrangement by Terra Poirier, 2018, installation outside ECU president’s office, digital toner prints.

A year later I reactivated the project as a photo-text installation to underline how income and labour precarity for artists and educators is connected to income and housing precarity in Vancouver. I paired the photographs with the words of contract faculty who had contributed to our artist book Non-Regular: Precarious academic labour at Emily Carr University of Art + Design which I produced for my graduating project.

Sessional Office by Terra Poirier with text by S/T, VX, NB, Lily Chester, xxx, Curious Cat, 2019, digital inkjet prints, wood, vinyl text, 65″ x 35″.

I’m pleased to bring this project back to the ECU campus to continue this conversation which unfortunately is still necessary due to the administration’s continued overreliance on underpaid, contract teaching labour. 

On Feb 11 at 11:30 am at ECU, I’ll be giving a talk on the intervention and on the book Non-Regular – details to follow.

THE WORK OF THE WORK
January 31st – February 14th, 2020
Opening Reception:
Thursday, January 30th, 4-7 pm
Emily Carr University of Art and Design
520 E. 1st Ave., Vancouver BC

The Faculty at Emily Carr University of Art & Design are excited to announce their first exhibition at the new campus on Great Northern Way in Vancouver. The show features a wide selection of art, media and design by the University’s distinguished faculty that explores the complex relationships between teaching, creative practice and labour.

A unique feature of this year’s exhibition is The Working Studio where faculty members will publicly share their working processes through demonstrations and pop-up studio spaces.

The theme of The Work of the Work is inspired by the challenging working conditions the faculty face as the lowest paid and highest teaching load instructors of any of the post-secondary art and design institutions in Canada. This is particularly timely as the faculty’s contract expired in April 2019 and are just now entering into the early stages of bargaining with the administration.

The show will be on exhibit from January 31st to February 14th on the second floor on Emily Carr’s campus at 520 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, January 30th from 4pm to 7pm. All are welcome.

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1490533891104861/

Header photo by Sunny Nestler.

Space & Precarity: Artist talk with Pia Massie, Terra Poirier & guests

To close our exhibition at Mónica Reyes Gallery, Pia and I will discuss our projects, followed by a conversation with local artists and activists to consider intersections of space and labour precarity.

Watch this space for list of guests.

About Mattering Map Redux & Sessional Office

This exhibition is their first opportunity to collaborate and also marks their first time showing at Mónica Reyes Gallery.

In 1995 and 1996, Pia Massie worked with Mount Pleasant diners, interviewing the people who owned, cooked and ate in them. This collaboration with her neighbours on the documentation of their workspaces and their lives became The Mattering Map Project, an installation at the grunt gallery.

At the request of Mónica Reyes Gallery, Massie has returned to these locations twenty-three years later and documented what they have become. Coffee has been replaced by craft beer; restaurants have become condos; the community and the commons are under enormous pressure. Like a hungry ghost, the process of gentrification has swallowed neighbourhoods whole, leaving communities fragmented and marginalized.

In this exhibition, Massie and Poirier ask: What do diners and art schools have in common? What do short order cooks and sessional faculty share? What is the public, interactive space for creative communities? How do we hold on to these spaces and the relationships that matter?

In 2018, artist Terra Poirier undertook, in collaboration with sessional faculty and students, Non-Regular, a book about precarious academic labour at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU). Their conversations captured how neoliberal employment practices devalue teaching service and creative work, while eroding academic freedoms. Blocks away from the Mattering Map Project’s former diners, at ECU’s brand new campus, senior administration staff enjoy spacious offices and meeting rooms while more than 80 underpaid sessional instructors share a single, classroom-sized office. Here, too, space is distributed according to capital and power: lecture halls have been named after real estate developers while sessional faculty must fit their work into cardboard banker’s boxes packed onto cubicle shelving. Poirier’s photo-text installation, Sessional Office, sets the words of sessional faculty against the tiny work spaces afforded them.

Massie’s and Poirier’s projects point to a city where culture is a commodity, as are those who produce it.

Artists seeking work/live spaces often function as the first wave of the gentrification of poorer neighbourhoods. Creatives’ “success” in repurposing industrial and abandoned spaces too often contributes to the precarity of these communities and the displacement of their residents. And now, like the short order cooks and day labourer clientele of the former diners, precariously-employed artists, too, struggle to find a place in this city that promised to create a “future with culture at its centre.”1

1. https://vancouver.ca/parks-recreation-culture/culture-plan-2008-2018.aspx

Monica Reyes Gallery, 602 E Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC
T. 604.336.7633

Gallery hours: Wed-Fri 11am-2pm, Sat 12-4pm.

This event is taking place on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Sessional Office at Mónica Reyes Gallery

Non-Regular lives on, in a dual exhibition with activist-artist Pia Massie.

Mattering Map Redux & Sessional Office 
February 7-23, 2019
Opening reception: Thursday, February 7, 6-8pm
Artists talk: Saturday, February 23, 2pm
Mónica Reyes Gallery
602 E Hastings, Vancouver BC
monicareyesgallery.com
FB event

Mónica Reyes Gallery is pleased to present a dual exhibition by artist-educator, activist and filmmaker Pia Massie and interdisciplinary artist Terra Poirier. This exhibition is the first opportunity for these two artists to collaborate and the first time they are showing at Mónica Reyes Gallery (previously known as Back Gallery Project). Opening reception Thursday, February 7 from 6-8 PM. 

In 1995 and 1996, Pia Massie worked with Mount Pleasant diners, interviewing the people who owned, cooked and ate in them. This collaboration with her neighbours on the documentation of their workspaces and their lives became The Mattering Map Project, an installation at the grunt gallery. 

At the request of Mónica Reyes Gallery, Massie has returned to these locations 23 years later and documented what they have become. Coffee has been replaced by craft beer; restaurants have become condos; the community and the commons are under enormous pressure. Like a hungry ghost, the process of gentrification has swallowed neighbourhoods whole, leaving communities fragmented and marginalized.

In this exhibition, Massie and Poirier ask: What do diners and art schools have in common? What do short order cooks and sessional faculty share? What is the public, interactive space for creative communities? How do we hold on to these spaces and the relationships that matter? 

In 2018, artist Terra Poirier undertook, in collaboration with sessional faculty and students, Non-Regular, a book about precarious academic labour at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU). Their conversations captured how neoliberal employment practices devalue teaching service and creative work, while eroding academic freedoms. Blocks away from the Mattering Map Project’s former diners, at ECU’s brand new campus, senior administration staff enjoy spacious offices and meeting rooms while more than 80 underpaid sessional instructors share a single, classroom-sized office. Here, too, space is distributed according to capital and power: lecture halls have been named after real estate developers while sessional faculty must fit their work into cardboard banker’s boxes packed onto cubicle shelving. Poirier’s photo-text installation, Sessional Office, sets the words of sessional faculty against the tiny work spaces afforded them.

Massie’s and Poirier’s projects point to a city where culture is a commodity, as are those who produce it. Artists seeking work/live spaces often function as the first wave of the gentrification of poorer neighbourhoods. Creative workers’ “success” in repurposing industrial and abandoned spaces too often contributes to the precarity of these communities and the displacement of their residents. And now, like the short order cooks and day labourer clientele of the former diners, precariously employed artists, too, struggle to find a place in this city that promised to create a “future with culture at its centre.”1

Terra Poirier is an interdisciplinary artist interested in work, (in)visibility and erasure, all of which inform her long exposure photography, her autobiographical book works, and her social practice projects in a variety of media. She is the editor and designer of the artist book Non-Regular: Precarious academic labour at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, published by UNIT/PITT Projects and made in collaboration with 26 instructors and artists speaking candidly about the conditions of their work. She has a BFA in Photography from ECUAD (2018, awarded the Governor General’s Academic Medal), and received the Saralee James Memorial Award in recognition of her activist art work. In 2017 she was shortlisted for the Lind Prize for Emerging Visual Artists. Terra is also a former video instructor and filmmaker whose films have been exhibited locally and internationally including at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Kansai Queer Film Festival in Kyoto, Paris Lesbian & Feminist Film Festival and the Lesben Film Festival in Berlin.

Pia Massie received an undergraduate double degree from Harvard University in Visual and Environmental Studies and East Asian Studies and an MFA in sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design. She is a multi-media artist whose work has been exhibited in festivals, museums and galleries throughout North America and Europe, including The Museum of Modern Art, and the John Good gallery in NYC; The List Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts, in Lausanne; and the grunt gallery in Vancouver, BC. In 2017-2018, she served as the Artist / Designer / Scholar in Residence, in the Faculty of Culture + Community, at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Her work has received Canada Council, BC Arts Council, and National Film Board support along with awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, Saint Gervais Geneve, and the American Film Institute. She recently completed a sculptural commission for VINES festival, called Bower and Fountain. She has participated in residencies at Banff (Telling Stories, Telling Tales), Boreal Art Nature (Forêt Frontière) and in Geneva, Switzerland and Kyoto, Japan. She has worked as an environmental activist, following in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother, since an early age. After growing up in Brooklyn, NY, she is very grateful to be able to live and work in Vancouver on the unceded Coast Salish Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. 

1. City of Vancouver, https://vancouver.ca/parks-recreation-culture/culture-plan-2008-2018.aspx.

Join us for the launch of “Non-Regular: Precarious academic labour at Emily Carr University of Art + Design”

Tuesday, October 23rd, 6-9pm
ECUAD Aboriginal Gathering Place
2nd floor, Emily Carr University of Art and Design
520 E 1 Ave., Vancouver BC

Copies of the book will be available for purchase, and can also be ordered online.

HOW DOES EMPLOYMENT PRECARITY AFFECT OUR ART AND RESEARCH PRACTICES?

With:
* Deneige Nadeau, ECUAD sessional instructor, Critical & Cultural Studies
* Kristina Lee Podesva, artist, writer, editor and ECUAD sessional instructor
* Terra Poirier, Non-Regular editor and ECUAD grad
* Rita Wong, poet, activist & former ECUAD Faculty Association President

Moderated by Magnolia Pauker, ECUAD lecturer, Critical & Cultural Studies

Reception at 6pm followed by artist’s talk

Books will be available for purchase or you can pre-order them at: https://www.helenpittgallery.org/publications/non-regular/

We gratefully and respectfully acknowledge that we are located on the occupied territories of the xwməθkwəýəm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səÍílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

The ECUAD Aboriginal Gathering Place is wheelchair accessible.

Presented by UNIT/PITT Projects and the Emily Carr University Faculty Association.

A Vancouver Art Book Week and Fair Employment Week event
#VABFartbookweek Vancouver Art Book Fair

Learn more about the book: https://www.facebook.com/nonregularbook

UNIT/PITT gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Canada Council, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the City of Vancouver.