Artist Talk and Reception | Curl Mapped: Contemplating Black representation, documentation and care with Rebecca Bair and Erin Brown-Osterman

ADMISSION
Free

In person at the Anvil Theatre, located on the 3rd floor of the Anvil Centre and virtual via Zoom
No registration necessary
More event information here

Please note the event time is in Pacific Standard Time

Join us on Thursday, April 27 for a talk and opening reception with Rebecca Bair on her new installation at the Anvil Centre, Curl Mapped.

Rebecca Bair is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver – the traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples – and is a graduate from the Masters of Fine Arts program at Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2020) where she was awarded the Governor General’s gold medal for her academic achievements. During that same time, Bair was shortlisted twice for the Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize, and longlisted twice for the Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award. Since graduating her work has been featured in Canadian Art Magazine, and NUVO magazine. She has been in group shows including Where Do We Go From Here?, Vancouver Art Gallery (2020); Facing Time, Surrey Art Gallery (2021); The Cinematic, Wil Aballe Art Projects (2021); and Rebecca Bair: Deep Conditioning, West Vancouver Art Museum (2022) amongst many others. Bair is a sessional professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and she has been a mentor to both artists with developmental disabilities and Black youth in Surrey. In 2021/2022, she was a teaching fellow through the AICAD fellowship at the Ontario College of Art and Design University where she taught at undergraduate and graduate levels, in addition to supervising a master’s thesis in curatorial studies. In the summer of 2022 she was an artist in residence at the Burrard Arts Foundation. Rebecca is the founder of a Black owned and operated artist run centre and community space in Surrey called BLAC (The Black Arts Centre). 

Bair produces work that contributes to a re-imagination of representation for Black women on Turtle Island. Refusal and resilience are strategies Bair often employs across multiple art forms – installations, video, drawing and photography. These media are hybridized as the work finds itself at the intersection of visualization and intent. Personal contemplation through experience, ancestry, self or the diasporic community is integral to her practice. Bair’s use of abstraction and non-figuration intervenes in the history of colonial exclusion, and the colonial imperative to consume images of Otherness. Bair uses signifiers such as hair, skin, and the sun to examine legacies of settler colonialism and  slavery, while contributing visualisations of resiliency.