athut / Words Bounce Reading Series

add to outlook add to google calendar remind me

Sunday, March 31st, 2019
2:00 PM to 3:00 PM

athut / Words Bounce reading series

Whess Harman, Selina Boan, Christian Vistan, Emma Metcalfe Hurst

Organized by SPIT

March 24, 2 pm

Sonnet L'Abbé & Fred Wah

March 31, 2 pm

Join us for two special afternoons of poetry on the occasion of athut / Words Bounce, the final exhibition in a year in which Nanaimo Art Gallery asks the question: how can we speak differently? In Hul'q'umi'num, the language of the Snuneymuxw people: scekwul yuxw 'alu kws nec's tu sqwal ct.

These readings will be held in the gallery within Patrick Cruz's installation Step Mother Tongue. Cruz's dynamic installation utilizes painted glyphs and symbols inspired by graffiti, cave drawings, alchemical symbols, and written languages, including the pre-contact Tagalog syllabary Baybayin to engage with cultural and linguistic hybridities. Whess Harman is mixed race, trans/non-binary queer/2SQ artist from the Carrier Wit'at Nation and a graduate of the Emily Carr University's Bachelor of Fine Arts program. They are currently living and working on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations in the Skwachays Lodge Artist Residency Program.

Selina Boan is a poet currently living on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh land. In 2017, she won the National Magazine Award for Poetry and recently won Room's 2018 Poetry Contest. Her work has been published widely and was included in the 2018 Best Canadian Poetry Anthology. She is currently at work on a collection of poems exploring her Cree and European heritage.

Christian Vistan is an artist currently based in Nanaimo, on traditional Snuneymuxw territory. His work has been shown nationally in Vancouver, Salt Spring Island, and Winnipeg, as well as internationally in the US, and Philippines. He is currently the Curatorial Intern at Nanaimo Art Gallery.

Emma Metcalfe Hurst hails from Vancouver on Coast Salish land where she writes, makes, organizes, listens, and records. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design and is currently the Project Coordinator for Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week. From 2016-2017, she held the position of Curatorial Intern at Nanaimo Art Gallery.

Sonnet L'Abbé is a poet living in Nanaimo, where is a professor at Vancouver Island University. She is author of three books of poetry, A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, and Sonnet's Shakespeare (forthcoming, 2019). She was the editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2014, and her chapbook, Anima Canadensis, won the 2017 bp Nichol Chapbook Award.

Fred Wah is a writer and poet living in Vancouver. He has published numerous collections of poetry, fiction, and criticism, most recently Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962-1991. He has been editorially involved with a number of literary magazines over the years, such as Open Letter and West Coast Line. In 2011, he served as Canada's 5th Parliamentary Poet Laureate, and in 2013, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.

SPIT is a collaborative project that engages with text, writing, and publishing through writing workshops, site specific events, new collaborations, performances, podcasting, readings and publishing experiments. SPIT is organized together by Emma Metcalfe Hurst and Christian Vistan.