Charlene Vickers
(Anishnabe)
Charlene Vickers presents paraphernalia, a relational work of the ongoing Cool Indians On Main Street “benchin” project. Since 2007, Charlene Vickers and Neil Eustache invented CIOMS and “benching” as a casual social gathering over coffee, snacks and the photo documentation of passers-by from a bench at the corner of Main and 13th in Vancouver. Charlene invites members of the LIVE and CIOMS community to come together “to Bench” as part of a durational performance inside VIVO and at a second location (at this time and place). Please come-by for the drop-in bench sesh and view the display of bench paraphernalia: doc-ops, tablet-demos, T-shirt and single smokes sales. Hosting, heckling and ego stroking are to be expected.
Biography
Charlene Vickers is an Anishnabe artist living and working in Vancouver. Trained as a painter, she graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (94) and attained a BA from Simon Fraser University in Critical Studies of the Arts (98). She is an MFA grad at Simon Fraser University (2013) and is on the Board of Directors at grunt gallery in Vancouver, BC. Born in Kenora Ontario and raised in Toronto her art explores her Ojibway ancestry through the mediums of painting, sculpture, performance and video exploring memory, healing and embodied connections to ancestral lands. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and the US, and can be seen in the permanent collections at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in Vancouver. In 2015 Charlene exhibited in group exhibitions The Fifth World at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon (curated by Wanda Nanibush) and Custom Made at Kamloops Art Gallery, (curated by Tania Willard.) She recently presented an installation in the window space at Artspeak in Vancouver, B.C. this past August.