Maryam Jafri Automatic Negative Thought Rolande Souliere Frequent Stopping IV and V Exhibition Guide Maryam Jafri Automatic Negative Thought July 5 – September 22, 2019 B.C. Binning and Alvin Balkind Galleries In my practice, I would say form and content are not so easy to separate. - Maryam Jafri Automatic Negative Thought is the first major solo exhibition in Canada of works by Copenhagen and New York based artist Maryam Jafri. Working across a breadth of media including video, sculpture, performance and photography, her practice draws from diverse traditions of literature, theatre, pop and conceptual art. Central to Jafri’s concern is a questioning of the cultural and visual representations of history, politics and economics, often investigating topics such as food production and consumption, the coded rituals of nation-states, cultural memory and copyright law, as well as the impacts of graphic design, branding and display. Across both gallery spaces, Automatic Negative Thought focuses on our contemporary culture’s fixation on the individual, be it through “wellness” and self-care or the ownership of images, suggesting the ways in which these trends are often accessed through consumerism and materialism, and entangled with underlying conditions of economic instability. Bringing together both found and original material, Jafri uses such strategies of appropriation to expose economic, political and social systems that sustain our post-industrial society. Maryam Jafri, Where We’re At, 2017 Courtesy the artist and Laveronica arte contemporanea, Modica Rolande Souliere Frequent Stopping IV and V April 5 – September 22, 2019 CAG Façade and off-site at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station The multi-media practice of Australia-based Anishinaabe artist Rolande Souliere entangles the visual language of hard-edged geometric abstraction with that of contemporary traffic signage to consider how colonial infrastructures mark both spaces and the people inhabiting them. Her solo exhibition, Frequent Stopping IV and V, presents two new large-scale, site-specific works across the street level façade of the Contemporary Art Gallery and off-site at the nearby Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. These installations draw from Souliere’s ongoing body of work that creates interventions using caution tape and street barrier patterns in immersive installations. Souliere has a long history of working with the materials and metaphors of the road. She strips these seemingly universal symbols from their usual contexts and separates them from their role as wayfinding aids to suggest the extent to which authorities dictate our movements on the land. The Frequent Stopping series points to the ways in which our perception of boundaries shift according to perspective and to the fact that so many Indigenous land claims—despite being first pressed decades or even centuries ago—have yet to be resolved. Especially in Vancouver, which sits upon the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, Souliere’s ultra-visible, highly public interventions mark space in a gesture that speaks of permanent visibility and reclamation. They delineate lines that cannot be drawn and redrawn. Rolande Souliere, Frequent Stopping IV (detail), 2019 Photography by SITE Photography Exhibition Guide