MKG127 is pleased to present Supply Chain Issues, a group exhibition including work by Sonny Assu, Hank Bull, Josh Callaghan, Germaine Koh, Khan Lee and Paul Walde.
That the world has changed significantly during the last few years is stating the obvious.
Besides the most profound effect the pandemic has had on human health and wellness, it has also had a serious effect on global economies. With rapid inflation and costs rising, “supply chain issues” is a phrase that has grown familiar to explain many difficulties.
A supply chain encompasses everything from the delivery of source materials from the supplier to the manufacturer, through to its eventual delivery to the end user.
The artists in this exhibition delve into these issues, making work using found materials that address various aspects along the chain of manufacturing, transportation, packaging, waste and the effects of all of the above on the environment.
The pandemic has been incredibly traumatic, with many significant historic traumas exposed during this time.
Sonny Assu (Ligwiłda’xw of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations) was raised in North Delta, BC, over 250 km away from his home ancestral home on Vancouver Island. Having been raised as your everyday average suburbanite, it wasn’t until he was eight years old that he discovered his Kwakwaka’wakw heritage. Later in life, this discovery would be the conceptual focal point that helped launch his unique art practice. Sonny has had work in two previous exhibition at MKG127 : Toolkit in 2012 and Record Shop in 2018. In 2020, Sonny created Black Lives Matter, a large work for the gallery’s exterior light box.
Assu explores multiple mediums and materials to negotiate western and Kwakwaka’wakw principles of art-making. Often autobiographical, humorous, solemn and/or political, his diverse practice deals with the realities of being Indigenous in the colonial state of Canada.
Sonny received his BFA from the Emily Carr University in 2002 and was honoured with the University’s distinguished alumni award, the Emily Award, in 2006. In 2017 he successfully defended his MFA thesis exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery (We Come to Witness) for Concordia University. Assu received a BC Creative Achievement Award in First Nations Art in 2011, has been named a Laureate for the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL – Indigenous Art Awards in 2017, and is an Eiteljorg Contemporary Arts Fellowship recipient for 2021.
Sonny’s work has been accepted into The National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Eiteljorg Museum, Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Guelph, The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Museum of Anthropology at UBC, The Seattle Art Museum, The Burke Museum, Audain Art Museum and in various other public and private collections across Canada, the United States and the UK.
After living and working in Vancouver and Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal), he has settled in ƛam̓atax̌ʷ (Campbell River, BC).
Hank Bull was born in 1949 in Moh’kins’tsis /Calgary and grew up in southern Ontario. He became interested in art at an early age, encouraged by his high school instructor, David Blackwood. After travels in Europe in 1968, he studied in Toronto under Robert Markle and Nobuo Kuobota. Hank previously had work in the exhibition, rockpaperscissors at MKG127 in 2009.
In 1973, he moved to xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam)/Vancouver to join the newly formed artist-run centre Western Front. In this interdisciplinary setting, he produced performance, video, radio and telecommunications projects. He travelled in Asia, Africa and Europe, organized international artist-exchange projects and helped to develop a Canadian network of artist-run centres. He worked in collaboration with a wide range of artists, including Kate Craig, Eric Metcalfe, Glenn Lewis, Michael Morris, General Idea, Robert Filliou, William S. Burroughs, Clive Robertson, Mona Hatoum, Antoni Muntadas, Steve Lacy, Tari Ito, Rebecca Belmore, Germaine Koh, Khan Lee, Andrew James Paterson, Cornelia Wyngaarden and many others.
He became involved in a form of ongoing event-based art production which connected artists across difference, fostered the interaction of audience and performer, and joined art to life. He has helped to mentor quite a few younger artists and curators. Throughout his career, he has continued his individual practice of painting, music, photography, video, sound and sculpture. He still lives at the Western Front and spends a fair amount of time in the territory of shíshálh Nation, as a member of the Storm Bay Art and Conservation Society.
Josh Callaghan (b. 1969, Doylestown, PA) holds an MFA in New Genres from the University of California, Los Angeles and a BA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of North Carolina Asheville. He has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Harmony Murphy Gallery, Los Angeles; Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles; Haas & Fischer Gallery, Zurich; and Bank Gallery, Los Angeles. In the fall of 2021, Callaghan’s interactive public artwork Social Block was on view at Flatiron Plaza in New York City, presented as part of Armory Off-Site by the Armory Show with the New York City Department of Transportation and the Flatiron/23rd Street Partnership. In 2019, his work was on view in the group show Weather Report at the Aldrich Museum of Art, Ridgefield. Callaghan has been featured in group presentations with Current LA: Water, Public Art Biennale, Los Angeles; Vapegoat Rising, Arturo Bandini at Ballroom Marfa, TX; Made in Space, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; and Frieze Sculpture Park, New York. His work has been written about in publications including Art & Object, Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Interview Magazine, LA Weekly, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His previous academic appointments include Senior Lecturer in the Fine Arts Department at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Callaghan lives and works in Los Angeles.
Germaine Koh is an artist and curator based on the west coast of Turtle Island. Her work adapts familiar situations, everyday actions and common spaces to encourage connections between people, technology, and natural systems. Her ongoing projects include Home Made Home, an initiative to build and advocate for alternative forms of housing, and League, a participatory project using play as a form of creative practice. She was the City of Vancouver’s first Engineering Artist in Residence from 2018 to 2020, and Koerner Artist in Residence at the University of British Columbia for 2021. Germaine was included in the very first exhibition at MKG127 in 2007 and was the curator of ToolKit, the first exhibition at our current location in 2012.
Khan Lee was born in Seoul, Korea. He studied architecture at Hong-Ik University, before immigrating to Canada to study fine art at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. He works in performance, media, sculpture and drawing. His practice involves experimentation with form and process in order to express inherent relationships between material and immaterial content. He is a founding member of the Vancouver-based artist collective ‘Intermission’ and is presently a member of ‘Instant Coffee’ artist collective with whom he has contributed to several exhibitions at MKG127. His work has been exhibited nationally, and internationally. Lee lives and works in Vancouver BC.
Paul Walde is an interdisciplinary artist living in Victoria, Canada on lək̓ʷəŋən territory where he is a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Victoria. For the past 30 years, his work has been engaged with addressing environmental issues including: exploring non-human activity and communication, global warming, deforestation, land use, endangered species, and the artworld. Originally trained as a painter, Walde’s music and sound compositions have been a prominent feature in his artwork for over 20 years. He is best known for his interdisciplinary performance works staged in the natural environment, and documentation of these events is frequently used as the basis of Walde’s sound and video installations which have been the subject of exhibitions nationally and internationally.
Recent and current exhibitions include: Glacial Resonance at the Kamloops Art Gallery (2023), Alaska Variations at Indexical, Santa Cruz, CA (2022); HYPER-POSSIBLE: The 3rd Coventry Biennial at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, UK (2021-2022); and Ecologies: Song for the Earth at Musée des Beaux-arts de Montréal (2021)
Walde is a graduate of Western University (BFA) and New York University (MA). In addition to current grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council, he is the winner of The Prescott Fund Award from the National Arts Club in New York City and the Kenny Doren Award from ED Video in Guelph.
A founding member of Audio Lodge, a Canadian sound art collective and Experimental Music Unit a Victoria-based sound and music ensemble, Walde is also a member of Awi’nakola: Tree of Life, an Indigenous led research group bringing together artists, scientists, and Indigenous knowledge keepers to seek tangible solutions to deforestation and climate change.