–

“Survival is the art of staying alive. Mental attitude is as important as physical endurance and knowledge. You must know how to take everything possible from nature and use it to the full, how to attract attention to yourself so that rescuers may find you, how to make your way across unknown territory back to civilization if there is no hope of rescue, navigating without map or compass.”

– John Wiseman, SAS Survival Guide

In his 1986 publication, SAS Survival Guide, John Wiseman organizes skills and knowledge gleaned from his service in the British Special Air Service into a palm-sized instructional handbook. Spanning subjects from trap-building to toxic flora to the usage of wreckage to create rescue signals, it can be terrifying in its frankness, with many sub-sections boxed in red warning against danger or death.

The work brought together in Wastelands taps into the wonder, danger, fear and fascination that lies behind our contemporary relationship to nature. Looking to the social geography of Vancouver as a model, artists Natasha Broad, Alex M.F. Quicho, and Daniel Marcus Tatterton use dark humour, loose cartographies, animals, objects, dreams, and memories to explore the absurdity of a thriving cosmopolis perched on the edge of great wilderness. Together, these works arise from a disjunctive landscape where the wild and our recreational Vancouverite view of it co-exist: the place where cougars maim mountain-bikers, mothers get lost for days on casual hikes, and deejays die in the snow just minutes from their Whistler residences.

Natasha Broad’s body of work highlights relationships in the natural world. For Wastelands, she will be creating drawings of locally-found birds juxtaposed with survival equipment. The animal/object relationship will, at first glance, be a direct one – for example, a woodpecker perched on a wood-marking awl. Behind the immediate satisfaction of image-play, however, Broad’s work moves us to question the dynamic of the human-animal relationship, and provide a closer look into the accidental relationships that living creatures form with the inanimate objects that we leave behind. http://maushunt.com/

Alex M.F. Quicho makes large-scale graphite drawings that incorporate evacuated natural and architectural structures within a void of negative space. Clusters of objects such as knives, lychees, condom foils, pop cans, drug baggies, axes, and so on, are scattered across this inverted landscape as careless litter or perhaps a trail of breadcrumbs left by especially delinquent adventurers. As such, these drawings become a record of not only accident and abandonment, but also of depravity and delinquency – the dangerous, attractive calling-cards of contemporary youth culture. http://www.amfq.net/

Daniel Marcus Tatterton, alias DMT, makes drawings and prints which are hallucinatory, maze-like, and packed with survival structures and occult characters. These are often installed in altar-like format together with gathered materials and small hand-made objects. For Wastelands, Tatterton will be creating a darkly humorous and highly psychoactive survival guide, which will be displayed in both zine and spread format at the exhibition. http://egodaeth.tumblr.com/

Presented in conjunction with Art Waste 2013. http://artwaste.tumblr.com/

Sad Mag presents a dance party with your favorites 80s, new wave and electro-pop covers. Vancouver music legends (or soon-to-be legends) will be singing their hearts out to songs by The Talking Heads, New Order, Cut/Copy, The Organ, The Knife, Humans and many more.

++THE KINGSGATE CHORUS
++CITY OF GLASS
++Plus a DJ set by Phil Intile of MODE MODERNE

Saturday May 18th, 2013
Doors at 8:30pm
Cover is $8
Remington Gallery, 108 e hastings

The Gam Gallery (next door) will also be showing a sneak preview of artwork from the next issue. Come see what happens when bands take disposable cameras on tour. On view until June 1st.

Photographs by Lauren Zbarsky, Alex Waber, Brandon Gaukel, Matty Jeronimo, HUMANS (Robbie Slade), MODE MODERNE, AUSTRA and CITY OF GLASS.

NEW gallery hours: Fri & Sat 1 to 5 pm

ACCESSIBILITY INFO****Both the Gam and Remington are street level on Hastings St. There is (usually) parking on Columbia and there is a ground floor washroom!

Our good friend Rob Leveroos is opening Safe/Guard at the Cultch in one week, first presented at the Gam in 2011!

A Visual Poem & Dinner Table Battle

Created and performed by Robert Leveroos
in collaboration with Mirae Rosner (Feast)

Safe/Guard: inspired by traditional flood stories where an alchemist builds and destroys the world. Told without text, the work engages found objects, movement, sound and light. Glass bottles, wooden boxes, and rubber gloves, repurposed to make your imagination spin.

Feast: civility and carnal instinct butt heads in a delicate dance exploring the balancing act we play at dinner with loved ones. Developed through contact improvisation and storytelling, this work places everyday objects and family heirlooms centre stage in a delightfully strange visual feast born from a book of children’s science experiments.

Sound by Elliot Vaughen
Lighting by Kyla Gardiner

May 21: 9.30pm-Pay What You Can
May 22. 8.15pm
May 23: 8:15pm
May 24: 8.15pm
May 25: 9.30pm
May 26: 7.30pm

For more info, visit https://www.facebook.com/events/447520588664415/?fref=ts

In The Greenhouse Basement @ The Cultch

1895 Venables St.

www.revolverfestival.ca

Tickets $14 plus service charges
Available through The Cultch Box Office
tickets.thecultch.com 604.251.1363

Saturday April 20th

10am-4pm

ADMISSION BY DONATION

The Wise Hall
1882 Adanac St Vancouver, BC V5L 4E5

The Eastside Flea is an on-going market in East Vancouver featuring a diverse array of vendors from handmade goods, vintage clothing & antiques, art, craftsmen items, garage sale, and more!

The remaining Spring markets in April and May will take place indoors, following which we plan to move them OUTSIDE for the summer to an exciting new location!

Admission into the market is by donation, and is all ages! Please bring the family, friends, anyone you know… we’ll have something for everyone!!

This is a community-oriented event, with all types of vendors, from people with extra knick-knacks around the house to local businesses.

If you are interested in becoming a vendor at the Eastside Flea, or want more info, please send an email to eastsideflea@gmail.com

Can’t wait to see everyone at the Flea!!

Ryan Bekolay: You Are Here
26 April- 10 May, 2013
opening reception: 26 September, 7 pm

Ryan Bekolay’s first solo exhibition in Canada, You Are Here, explores the current relationship between technology, nature and humans. Using a variety of media such as topographical maps, a flag, animation and photography, the artist draws the viewer into a layered consideration of everyday mediators of reality such as politics, religion and mapping. A dark sense of humour pervades Bekolay’s works, from photographs of banal urban landscapes to Fred Flinstone and Barney Rubble driving in a landscape generated in Google Maps, all of which hints at the alienation experienced in contemporary culture and the spectacle used to fill the gaps.

Ryan Bekolay was raised in rural Central Alberta where he spent his formative years observing life in the pastoral surroundings of the prairies where he developed a strong spiritual connection with nature in the shadow of traditional faith. Leaving home at seventeen, he has lived in regions across North America and in his experience has seen the extremes of dogmatic religious fundamentalism and the vicissitudes of solitary spirituality, the simplicity of country life and metropolitan idealism, all of which have shaped his optimism for the future and his creativity in the present.

http://ryanbekolay.tumblr.com/

Hello our Gam gals and guys,

We would like to invite you to a very special event. Games night like you have never seen it. Spring is in the air and we have competition on the brain, so we are thinking about slaying early and starting with a chess tournament.

Saturday March 30th, 6:00 pm start time, round robyn.

Then we will continue on as usual, with an array of games. Feel free to bring your own games to add to the mix!

We’ve got sets of all shapes and sizes.
We’ve got music, mood and booze.
We’ve got a Saturday too happy cry over.
Now all we need is you.

3 dollars to play,
Zero to chill.

Whiskey all night long.

Come as early as you want, stay as long as you wish.
All our love,
The Gam Bats

The Landscape of Abstraction
Maegan Elise, Barbara Hinton Wood and Mel King
March 15 – April 19, 2013

Opening Reception: March 15, 8 – 11 pm

The Landscape of Abstraction brings together three distinct artists who each explore the complexity of our relation to nature through abstract painting. These artists employ the logic of composition and rhythm in painting as a parallel to the dynamic processes found in nature, moving beyond the tangible and toward the spiritual or emotional qualities of nature that may nevertheless be experienced directly.

Maegan Elise’s paintings blur the lines between interior and exterior worlds and play with the conventions of landscape painting. These semi-abstracted fragmentations of locations (whether real or imagined) draw upon memory and the viewer’s psychological interpretation of both the artwork and the physical environment.

Barb Hinton Wood’s work is about reconciling the man-made and natural elements of life. The workings of the city exacerbate a feeling and a reality of extremes, which play out on a personal, community, systemic and global scale. Using formal tension, she draws on organic influences, understanding that they carry knowledge of natural cycles, rhythms, patterns, history of the land and a connection to culture and traditions. Through this exploration duality falls away and it becomes clear that things are much more fluid and expansive than they first appear.

Containers of Collapse is a series of paintings by Mel King that employ Chlorella – an ancient type of super algae – as well as incense ash as pigments in her geometric yet ethereal works. King explores painting as a phenomenological experience that derives its power from nature. This is achieved through a rhythmic interplay of forms that moves beyond the simplicity of positive and negative space in composition. The materials used similarly signal a relation to their natural origins. Chlorella is lauded for its health benefits in digestion, while the incense ash is a combination of natural fragrances and Moldavite – a substance that is extra-terrestrial in nature and possibly formed by a meteorite colliding into Earth and fusing with existing rock to form a new kind of crystal.

Image (from left to right): Mel King, Barbara Hinton Wood, Maegan Elise

GAM GAMES NIGHT

Friday Feb. 8th, 8:00 pm

Chess! Cards! Cribbage! Table Tennis! And anything else that your crazy brain can bring to the table.

We’ve got sets of all shapes and sizes.
We’ve got music, mood and booze,
We’ve got hecklers and hackers to holler at,
Now all we need is you.

3 $ to play
ZERO to hang

With everything we’ve got, we will share it will you, at about 8:00 in the evening.

Lovingly,
The Gam-ers

Rent is $275/month