Welcoming our 2019/20 Board of Directors

Posted on October 8, 2019 by Brit Bachmann

UNIT/PITT is excited to welcome Roxanne Panchasi, Molly Randhawa and Eleanor Wearing to the Board of Directors, joining Sunny Nestler and Terra Poirier. U/P would also like to thank Emma Metcalfe Hurst and Patrick O’Neill for years of service as Treasurer and Chair respectively, and most recently, for assisting with the hiring of a new Executive Director. 

Sunny Nestler (Chair) is an artist whose work is rooted in drawing and studies mechanisms of biological life using a process that mimics DNA replication and mutation. They also work in video, installation, performance, and painting. Their subject matter cross pollinates biological processes, DIY communities, and unusual landscapes with the political affect of relatedness and adaptation. Sunny completed an MFA at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2013, where they teach drawing and natural science. Sunny is also the programs manager for the Bike Kitchen and has been involved in community bike shops since 2007 as a founder, organizer, mechanic and administrator. Sunny is originally from New York and was raised in Arizona, where they helped run an artists’ collective and underground venue that was a hub for a diverse range of activists, artists and musicians.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University who works on modern French culture, politics, memory, military technologies/imaginaries, and film. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009), and her current research focuses on nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. The founding host of New Books in French Studies (a podcast series on the New Books Network since 2013), Roxanne is the mother of one sassy kid, and the owner of one absurd little dog.

Terra Poirier (Secretary/Vice-Chair) is a photographer and book artist interested in memory, contested space, labour and (in)visibility. Many of her projects are activist interventions or autobiographical graphic narratives concerned with storytelling, agency and the disruption of erasure. Terra is the creator of the 2018 artist book Non-Regular: Precarious academic labour at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, made in collaboration with 26 instructors and artists. Terra’s activist art is informed by her experiences as a queer teen mother, her previous anti-poverty and prison justice organizing, and her day job translating social justice research into accessible forms. She also works with long exposure pinhole photography to explore memory, place, and their disruptions. Terra’s films on mothering, queerness and poverty have screened at festivals worldwide, and she’s mentored through the Gulf Islands Film and Television School, the Access to Media Education Society, and the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. terrapoirier.ca / @t.pois

Molly Randhawa is a writer, editor, independent publisher, events producer, radio host, and curator based in Vancouver, BC. Founder of independent arts collective and publication, Contrast Collective, her focus remains in facilitating open and honest discourse, and cultivating spaces for marginalized artists. 

 

 

Eleanor Wearing (Treasurer) brings experience from the local music community, where she has spent 5+ years as an organizer, musician, writer and radio producer. She has worked at local record label Mint Records, spent time as a volunteer and director for Music Waste Festival, written for Weird Canada, and worked as the Volunteer Manager of CiTR Radio and Discorder Magazine. Eleanor holds a BA in Human Geography from UBC. She is interested in challenging and shifting the predominately white, cis and male artistry in Vancouver’s music community, through examining how it has been supported historically and how it is upheld today. She is also interested in accessibility, and how Vancouver’s arts communities approach this issue in its variety of forms.

Outgoing

Emma Metcalfe Hurst is an artist, writer, curator, recorder, organizer and arts administrator from the unceded Coast Salish Territory of Vancouver. Recent collaborations include Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week with Dan Pon at grunt gallery; SPIT with Christian Vistan on writing, experimental publishing, radio and workshop projects; Artspeak Radio Digest with Artspeak and Vancouver Co-op Radio; Acts of Transfer at the Western Front; and Coming out of Chaos: A Vancouver Dance Story with Karen Jamieson Dance. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and is currently an MAS student at UBC’s iSchool. She held the position of Treasurer at Unit/PITT from 2017-2019.

Patrick O’Neill is an artist and arts educator for youth having previously worked at the Vancouver Art Gallery and Arts Umbrella. He received his BFA in Visual Arts from UBC (located on the unceded, occupied, and traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations) and is currently pursuing his MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art. He engages with local found materials, exploratory mark-making, and various forms of language to produce assemblages, paintings, and text-based work. His practice explores habits of thought and behaviour to consider the self as something inextricably subjective, social, and political.   

 

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Lil Comedy: 8EAST gets a comedy show of its own!

Posted on September 20, 2019 by Brit Bachmann

Click for tickets 

More information and future dates here.

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What’s happening at the PITT?

Posted on September 16, 2019 by Brit Bachmann

I’ve gotten this question a lot, and rightfully so. It’s a good prompt to introduce myself in my own words, and share some Fall/Winter program teasers. 

Before becoming Executive Director at UNIT/PITT, I held positions with local non-profit arts organizations, including The Cinematheque, Capture Photography Festival, Discorder Magazine, and VIVO Media Arts Centre. I completed a BFA at UBC Okanagan in 2013, which instilled in me passion for, and urgency towards, institutional critique. In the last few years, I have worked on projects that interrogate artwashing and gentrification, and more broadly question abuses of power and privilege in the arts. I believe in radical transparency, and will always champion compensation and the fair treatment of artists, arts workers, and community organizers.

This is the intention I bring to U/P. I am conscious of the space we occupy on the threshold of Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside at 8EAST, on unceded lands belonging to the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səlil̓wətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh First Nations. I look forward to facilitating programming that empowers locally based artists and residents.

This summer myself and the board of directors began modifying our mission and vision in conjunction with a three-year Strategic Plan that will see our operations and decision-making made more transparent, as an act of accountability towards the communities we serve. The artist-run centre, demystified.

Over the next few months, U/P will host programs that recognizes people living and working in our immediate neighbourhood. September 21 is the first instalment of Lil Comedy, a new monthly series at 8EAST hosted by An Te Chu, Andrea Jin and Alistair Rogden. Our Retail Residency kicks off with an Agony Klub pop-up, and an evening of music and readings TBA. U/P will be at Vancouver Art/Book Fair Oct 18-20. Wrong Wave returns in November with a lineup curated by NuZi Collective. Tear It Down will also return with original works by five local artists TBA, exhibited on poster kiosks across Vancouver.

If you’ve ever considered becoming involved with U/P, now is the time. I encourage local artists to submit to the CV Bank to get on our radar. If you want to support our programming and also receive special invitations to events, you can buy a membership ($10-50). U/P is a charitable organization, and a donation of $20+ will get you a tax receipt. As opportunities arise over the next year, we will put out calls for volunteers and knowledge-exchange. Or perhaps you want to join the leadership? We are actively recruiting for our board of directors—email [email protected] for more information.

I hope to see you soon,
Brit Bachmann, Executive Director

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Hello! Goodbye! Dance Party July 6

Posted on June 26, 2019 by Brit Bachmann

Join us in celebration and dance to say goodbye! to UNIT/PITT’s outgoing ED Kay Higgins and hello! to our new ED Brit Bachmann! We’re gonna raise $$ to help pay for health care benefits, and also dance our asses off to the selections of DJ Because I Said So. Cash beverages, nice people, good vibes.

Sat, July 6, 2019. 9pm to 2am.

$5-15 sliding scale, no one turned away.

Volunteers needed! Email [email protected]

 

Beginning her tenure in 2010, Kay Higgins has led notable projects such as UNIT/PITT Radio, the 2055 Project for UNIT/PITT’s 40 Year Anniversary, the return of Wrong Wave Festival and ISSUE Magazine, the Art  & Community Reading Group series, the #tearitdown2018 poster project, and more recently the relocation of UNIT/PITT to 8EAST in 2018.

In May we welcomed multi-disciplinary artist, writer and former Editor-in-Chief of Discorder Magazine Brit Bachmann, whose practice includes ceramics, radio art and community organizing. Brit is committed to instigating critical public dialogue, and working with diverse and emerging artists and writers to continue UNIT/PITT’s trajectory for many years to come! 

Hello! Goodbye! also marks UNIT/PITT’S one-year anniversary at 8EAST with NOW Society. Hello! Goodbye! will raise funds towards health care benefits which UNIT/PITT’s Board of Directors have identified as an ongoing priority for the well-being of UNIT/PITT’s staff, and to ensure equitable and sustainable growth and higher working standards within the organization and more broadly, within the non-profit arts sector. 

 

Land Acknowledgement

UNIT/PITT is grateful for opportunities to host events and artist projects, though we respectfully acknowledge that our activities take place on the traditional, unceded and stolen lands of the the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlil̓wətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations.

Accessibility

UNIT/PITT is located at 8 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver. It is on ground-level, no stairs. Our main door measures 34 inches and swings inward. The bathroom is not wheelchair accessible. There will be seating available. Please contact [email protected] to make arrangements to accommodate your needs.

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2010-2019

Posted on June 25, 2019 by Kay Higgins

Public procession from Rereading the Riot Act, a series curated by Anakana Schofield for UNIT/PITT in 2011.

This is almost certainly my last post on the Pitt site. I was the one responsible for the day-to-day affairs of the Pitt starting in early 2010, after some sudden cuts in provincial arts funding, when we were presumed dead by many in our community. Following the shutdown of the Helen Pitt Gallery’s Alexander Street location in late 2009, a dedicated board of directors kept the organization alive, and I was hired in February 2010 to take care of “administration, maybe two days a week” as it was explained to me.

What this gave me was a chance to envision a relaunch of the Pitt, not starting with a blank slate obviously because there was (at that time) 35 years of history behind every move the organization made, but a re-imagining that drew on the parts of its history that seemed to be needed in the moment where we found ourselves.

If you’re expecting me to write an accounting of the things that followed, my apologies. Anyone who would like to see a list of the exhibitions, publication launches, talks, and public actions that happened while I was here can consult our Past Events page, which is reasonably complete. I’m not going to count the number of guest curators, artists, poets, first solo exhibitions and projects, and everything else. (I think it’s a reasonably high number, but really, I’m not counting. It seemed like a lot.)

Here’s what I want to talk about instead: what are our obligations as artists and cultural workers in an era of increasing inequality, environmental collapse, and rising fascism internationally?

No, it’s not an easy question. I don’t have the answers, but it is important that we carry on this discussion, which is already in progress in places, as a group — as maybe, a collective of collectives — and keep trying new strategies and tactics and reflecting on ones we have already tried.

We are trained in art school, and by received ideas about genius, to regard ourselves as being involved in solitary labour, waiting for a big opportunity that will enable us to vault to the next tier of the art world where our individual virtue will be recognized. In other words, almost all of us are being set up for failure and also being set up to consider that failure our own.

This is not what I believe. I believe, based on everything I have seen in my past decades of being involved with the creation of art and music and poetry, that culture is something that we produce collectively. For every exalted genius, there are dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of artists and cultural workers doing the work that enables them to occupy the top of the status pyramid.

One thing we often fail to realize is that the collective structures of art production contain untapped power. If we could refocus even part of the energy we currently spend on maintaining the system that creates individual (usually male) genius as its apex product, and devote it to some of the truly awful problems facing us, wouldn’t that be a good thing? This is part of the promise of artist-run culture, a promise that remains unfulfilled whenever artist-run culture serves as a feeder system and free curatorial research resource for the “legitimate” world of public art galleries and international art dealers, and whenever artist-run culture insists on mimicking stale administrative and corporate structures.

I believe that the most important potential of artist-run culture for affecting the world around us is collective potential. Whether we can learn to work more effectively together, respecting above all the diversity of our community and the wrongs that need to be redressed, is an open question. Best of luck, plus love and respect, to new Executive Director Brit Bachmann, and the board of directors, in working with this question.

Bye for now.

Kay

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