Tuesday, July 29, 2025

A BRIGHT MARK LEFT new exhibition at THIS______________Vancouver

A Bright Mark Left


A Bright Mark Left is a collaboration between three Vancouver-based visual artists—Shannon Pawliw, Charlene Vickers, and Jean Paul Langlois. While each artist works across various media, their practices centre on large-scale, colour-saturated painting. The title refers to the afterimage effect: the visual echo of a complementary colour that lingers in your perception—a flash, a burn, a bright silhouette that stays with you.

Colour tells stories, conveys emotion, and shapes perception. Each artist’s approach—whether grounded in ancestral connections, pop culture motifs, or quiet forms of protest—demonstrates how colour can embody histories, identities, and complex emotional landscapes. The resulting exhibition becomes a chromatic language that transcends words, inviting viewers to interpret and connect in deeply personal ways.

Through imaginative, surreal uses of bright colours and references to cultural artifacts such as science fiction, cartoons, and mythic landscapes, the works in A Bright Mark Left position colour as a portal to alternative realities, spaces of belonging, and transformation. Each artist explores colour as a means to transcend boundaries—whether cultural, historical, or conceptual.






Saturday, July 26, 2025

Ovoids Soundings- Hand Sewn, Beaded, Embroidery, Painted Ovoids

 

OVOID SOUNDINGS at Libby Leshgold Gallery, June 2024
dimensions 22' x 16'
 
Included in 2024 group exhibition,  Your Old Way Kind of Vision at Libby Leshgold Gallery curated by Daina Warren. In great company with Siku Allooloo, Catherine Blackburn, and Wally Dion. Organized with the ECU Aboriginal Gathering Place with installation help from Indigenous students. Plus many thanks to Steven Tong, and Jen.  Ovoid Soundings was part of group show Ascending Horizons at McMaster Museum of Art in January,8- June 21, 2025 curated by Alex Jacobs-Blum and Kim Anderson.  

Friday, July 11, 2025

FELLOWSHIP BLOUIN DIVISION MONTREAL

 "FELLOWSHIP" in collaboration with Macaulay + Co.

June 26 - August 23, 2025

At the invitation of Blouin Division, Macaulay + Co co-presents the work of five important Vancouver-based artists. The pieces selected are a meaningful communication between those whose works share a keen interest in form, experience, and materials. Artists: #danaclaxton #laurencrazybullart #michellesoundart  #charlenevickers #lawrencepaulyuxweluptun #blouindivision #macaulayandco #montrealcontemporaryart #vancouverindigenousart 



















Thursday, May 8, 2025

CHARLENE VICKERS BIO 2025

 

Encompassing a wide range of media — including painting, sculpture, performance and installation — the practice of Charlene Vickers operates as a visionary expression of what the artist terms embodied territory. Giving vital form to the lands, histories and relations of her birthplace in Wauzhushk Onigum as they are felt, imagined and carried across distance, Vickers’ works lucidly manifest ancestral connections, cultural reclamations and her territorial presence as Anishinaabe Kwe, while responding formally to the Coast Salish land she has resided upon for the past thirty years.


Recent exhibitions and accolades include 2025 Sobey Award Long List, Indian Theatre, curated by Candice Hopkins at CCS BARD Hessel Museum in Hudson, NY (2023), Reverberations: Contemporary Art and Modern Classics at the Seattle Art Museum (2023), Good Foot Forward, curated by Kitty Scott, Toronto (2023), Big Blue Smudge, The University of Saskatchewan (2022), Ancestral Gesture, a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (September 2021), Rain Shadow at the Nanaimo Art Gallery (2021), Where Do We Go From Here? at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2020), the Biennale national de sculpture Contemporaine 2020 in Quebec, An Assembly of Shapes, Oakville Galleries, I continue to shape, Art Museum, U of T, Toronto, and Speaking From Hands and Earth, SFU Galleries, Burnaby and Ambivalent Pleasures at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver,(2016). International group exhibitions include the map is not the territory at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon (2019), Connective Tissue: New Approaches in Contemporary Fibre Art at MoCNA in Santa Fe, NM (2017), From The Belly of The Beast at Grace Gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y. (2017), If We Never Met, Pataka Art Museum, Porirua, New Zealand (2016). Charlene Vickers graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (94) and Simon Fraser University in Critical Studies of the Arts (98), MFA (2013).- From Macaulay and Co Website

Macaulay + Co. Fine Art |


 On Now: Jan 8- June 20, 2025
Ascending Horizons at McMaster Museum of Art. Curated by Alex Jacobs-Blum and Kim Anderson. Group show with Carrie Allison, KC Adams, Judy Anderson, Hannah Claus, Elizabeth Doxtater, and Marie Watt.


                                  Ancestor Sound Performance gear and Ovoid works

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Sobey Long-List 2025

 

Super thrilled to be a chosen long-listed artist for the Sobey Art Award 2025. Very happy and honored to be recognized in Canada as a contemporary artist and Indigenous Anishinaabe Kwe.  Congratulations to all the artists! We are headed into challenging times and must keep our heads up high. 

Miigwetch folks!  

What is a Big Blue Smudge? BIG TIME MEDICINE!!!

Big Love,

Char Vicky

Tuesday, April 15, 2025

New Haunt Cookbook Mixed Media 2024


                                     Photo Credit: Paul Wong


A video flip-through of my book/scrapbook/cookbook.  Mixed media, paper, drawings, seasonal cards. As part of "She Listens For Her Voices" for the group exhibition Prop House A Collection of One Million Objects was curated by Paul Wong and hosted by Griffin Art Projects.  May-August 2024. Group exhibition with Cathy Busby, Germaine Koh, Parvin Peivandi, Jason Payne, Jay Senetchko, Bagua Bagua Arts Collective, Lisa Baldissera. 

Monday, April 14, 2025

WE ARE INDIGENOUS NOW

                                                             Hangz w. Neil Eustache 2008

Dearest Friends, 

Hello there my dudes. I am a busy woman these days, and all I have to say is: BENCH. BENCH. BENCH. In this blog post Cool Indians on Main Street is fondly remembered; CIOM, sigh.... 

This past week, I was in Mt. Pleasant on Main St. benching by myself and taking in the peeps and sights that the ancestral lands (Squamish, Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh) have to offer. The scenery has changed a great deal since the old days pre 2010s. (Pre 2010 Olympics, TRC, condo dev., Pandemic, global politics Sh*t show) I was hoping for a sense of nostalgia for 15 years gone-by, but it was not felt.  I felt a sad longing for community.

I was looking for something OLD TIMEY.

Where do we gather now?  At auctions, art benefits, galas, awards receptions, art openings?  The views have changed in my experience, but there is still an empty space to offer a seat. An open invitation to bench.  A new opportunity to offer up space for a new group of Benchers.  The bench can be a free arena again.  It was once called the littlest rez on Turtle Island.  What is needed is not a new name for Dude Chillin Park; what I want is a new space to bench where one can sit and occupy space in an Indian/Indigenous manner of presence.  A new venue of occupation could occur where Indian sweater (Cowichan sweater) spotting is simply a pastime and not an official conversation to panel art-speak.  All the familiar faces that once walked by have moved on to find cheaper rents. The days of hangin' and benchin' on the littlest Indian rez are officially over.  The ground, garden, and bench of CIOMS past have been removed/paved over/condo-commodified years ago.  My dudes have moved away, and our bench is forgotten.  I never got into the Dude Chillin Park scene and never found a new bench and lost all those old benchin' buddies. Speculation and bench sightings are happening now and then, but nothing too official. Maybe benchin was meant to be and kept unofficial, as it might have been co-opted as official branding of “community” to sell more real estate? Gentrification benching? Something to laugh about, but happy anecdotes for good times and good Old Timey times sell. This is the Cool Indians on Main St blog update thus far. 

 

Deepest Respect to the Ancestral Lands and benchin (lower case letters intended) Indigenous folks,

Char Vicky


Charlene sits on a Main St. bench smiling, wearing a black jean jacket 4/5/25



Saturday, November 8, 2014

Vital Presence



Within a trace of my presence-within the capture of an image- occupies, indexes, captures attention, bleeds through, reiterates, refreshes connections to somewhere, some place of process, living, breathing, vital organs.

Friday, July 18, 2014

Vestige Vagabond at Brooklyn PPL and MANIFEST! Choreographing Social Movements in the Americas, Encuentro Hemispheric Institute, Montreal June 2014



Hupfield and Vickers present Vestige Vagabond (VV) a mash-up of unexpected visual references and interactive experiences. Using items worn and carried on the body the artists perform and occupy economic and cultural sovereignty through a combination of choreographed movement and free demonstrations. Creative ingenuity and cultural survival mix with humour and animated objects to reflect the strength and adaptability of the human spirit.
Charlene Vickers and Maria Hupfield live on opposite coasts and met via Rebecca Belmore in Vancouver BC at grunt gallery in 2007. Vestige Vagabond was developed for the Not Sent Letters Project by Jeremy Todd, 2010, and commissioned for The 2011 Annual Santa Fe Indian Market by Ryan Rice, Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe NM as programming for the exhibition Counting Coop. VV had the opportunity to perform and participate at street level during MANIFEST! Choreographing Social Movements in the Americas, Encuentro Hemispheric Institute, Montreal 2014.
VV was ecstatic to initialize their most recent creations and ideas at Panoply Performance Lab in Brooklyn, NY in June 2014. Demoing an eclectic arrangement of items including: fringed teacups, red vinyl and gold soft sculpture "guts", jingle belled red boxing gloves,orange cardboard megaphones resembling pylons and two masks of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. VV invited their audience to be active participants asking them to "speak and listen to the mother" through their megaphones, while giving them Mentos candy to eat, and taking part in one-on-one portrait sessions with Hupfield. Vickers further rallied the audience to keep rhythm with plastic shot glasses filled with Indian corn kernels while she accompanied playing mini synthesizers hooked up to a PA.
Charlene Vickers is an Anishnaabe Vancouver based visual artist since 1990. Her paintings and sculptural installation are known to search the edges of performance and video to explore how memory, healing and ties with ancestral lands can be achieved through bodily gesture and archival images. Charlene’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Canadian artist run centres in Vancouver, Winnipeg MN, Richmond BC, Bowmanville and Peterborough ON. Vicker’s beer case and denim mixed media moccasins have traveled to NYC, Amsterdam, Anchorage Alaska and Santa Fe NM. She completed her MFA at Simon Fraser University and is on the Board of Directors at Grunt Gallery in Vancouver, BC.

http://panoplylab.org/space/goings-on/

Sunday, February 2, 2014

The new studio space is great and entertaining too. Sharing with Robert Chaplin.

Monday, June 3, 2013

nish kwe @ 611 Alexander SFU Studios


Summer production has begun! Loving the light, space, viscosity, taping, oil paint smell, riding to studio, coffee and sandwiches and solitude these days.
about this work

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

IN THIS TOGETHER collaborative group show at ACCESS gallery in Vancouver May 5-10


photo credit: Ash Tanasiychuk
Here is a brief description:
Formally:
The piece consists on a performance where Charlene Vickers and Guadalupe Martinez are cutting out words and sentences from photocopied academic texts (bibliography from the seminars and from our research), and making poems with them. The poems, some improvised and some chosen from diverse sources, are glued on the wall, floor, and window of the gallery, appearing as small interventions in the space.
There is a sound piece made from recordings of us reading excerpts of these texts, that Luciana D'Anunciação compiled; and accompanies the performance which in total will last about two hours.
Conceptually:
We want to incorporate some of the given bibliography that we have worked through in our respective MFA programs, and re-activate them through our own experiences, subjectivity, and identities. Through re-configuring and deconstructing the texts, we want to find personal ways to perceive and produce meaning from a place that evokes other ways of approaching, generating, and embodying content.
Title: Conjured Citations
Arists: Charlene Vickers, Luciana D'Anunciação, Guadalupe Martinez
Medium: Performance/Installation
Year: 2013
Conjured Citations stop animation photo documentation!
As part of the In This Together exhibition at ACCESS gallery 222 East Georgia St Vancouver BC May 5-10 2013

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

paintings November 2012

Finishing the fall term of the MFA program at SFU. Making a series of gouche and acrylic paintings on paper.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Exhibition @ Urban Shaman in Winnipeg

I am getting ready for Ominjimendaan/ to remember to be shown in Winnipeg MN.  Opens June 29. 7pm artist talk.  Closes August 11. 

Saturday, February 4, 2012

The Talking Stick Exhibition at the Roundhouse February 20 opening

“The Talking Stick” from Feb 20 - March 3. For this exhibition, 9 Indigenous artists have been asked to exhibit their own version of the Talking Stick, based on contemporary or traditional versions. The artists are Rebecca Belmore, Lance Cardinal, Merritt Johnson, Peter Morin, Dionne Paul, Michelle Sylliboy, Janice Toulouse, Charlene Vickers, and Xwalacktun (Rick Harry).

Monday, January 9, 2012

Upcoming Exhibit at the grunt gallery, Vancouver BC Opens Feb. 23, 7-11


Title: OMINJIMENDAAN/ to remember
Artist: Charlene Vickers
Opening: Thu, 23 February 2012, 7-11pm
Exhibition Dates: Thu, 23 February 2012 - Sat, 31 March 2012

Carvings in wood, grasses wrapped in fabric and hair, and a clan of turtles become signals and searchers to remember those lost or missing.

Charlene Vickers is an Anishinabe artist based in Vancouver BC. She graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (94) and is currently an MFA candidate at Simon Fraser University (2013). Born in Kenora Ontario and raised in Toronto her art explores her Ojibway ancestry and her experiences living and working in urban spaces. Vestige Vagabond, a performance and collaboration with Maria Hupfield was recently presented at the 2011 Santa Fe Indian Art Market hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.