Opening Friday, December 2, 2011 at 8pm. UNIT/PITT, 15 E. Pender St., Vancouver BC.
Talk: Sunday, December 11, 2pm.
Gallery hours: noon to 5pm, Wednesday through Saturday. Video shown in front window, nightly from 8 to 11pm. Web-based work can be found at http://giveashit.helenpittgallery.org.
We Give A Shit Because We Care is collaborative project that explores stories behind institutions and commemorates artists and cultural workers. It is a part of commissioned series of works, Ill Repute, that honor the history of subcultures, cultures of resistance, underground initiatives, avant-garde shock tactics, and other events and phenomena that have intersected with the Helen Pitt Gallery during its 36-year history.
In the collective spirit of artist-run culture, and in the conceptual framework of late capitalism as a political system of excess, we have conceived of a banal project centred around the concept of human excrement, specifically the excrement of artists and cultural workers. We have asked artists or cultural workers to give us their shit. Our goal is to gather artists’ shit and to formulate their shit/ donations into an archival document.
We have assembled these digital donations — “documents of shit”, which can range anywhere from a media document (photo, audio) of one’s own shit, to a conceptual document on shit, to anything in between, in whatever format desired: performance, sculpture/painting, text, video, and so on. An exhibition of the responses will be accompanied by a book, co-published by UNIT/PITT and Publication Studio Vancouver.
Contributors include Adam Dodd, Adam Gandy, Bill Thomson, Brian Kokoska, Bruce Barber, Chia-Chen Jane Hsu, Chris Von Szombathy, Christina Nicolay and Ya-Chu Kang, Cindy Baker, David Khang, Deyan Denchev, Elisha Burrows, Ella Collier, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Glenn Lewis, Helen Tieger, James Lindsay, James Whitman and Courtney Burke, Jason Field, Jimmy Liang, John G Boehme, Jonathan Russell, Justin Frederick Worhaug, Justine Cheung, Kathleen Ritter, Lesley Anderson, Lucien Durey, Mark Lowe, Mel King, Chad Durnford, Patrick Cruz, Peter Baren, Sally Jorgensen, Shiloh Sukkau, Steven Hubert, Susan Kang, Vanessa Brown, Victoria Singh, YoungSook Park, Bill Vorn, Jasmine Reimer, Katharina D. Martin, Deniz Merdano, Mark Lowe, Rachel White, Davida Kidd, Golboo Amani, Erin Gee, Kate Sansom, Jeremy Green, Heidi Nagtegaal, Jessica Jang, Josh Hite, Michael Macbain, Dylan McHugh, Jennifer Chan, Holly Armishaw, Lara Fitzgerald, Kathleen Beckett, Jeremy Isao Speier, Evan Tyler, Syed Kazmi, Zarah Ackerman, Davida Kidd, Marie-Helene Tessier, Setareh Yasan.
chun hua catherine dong (chunhuacatherinedong.wordpress.com) loves shit, makes shit, and meditates on shit. Every morning she looks at her shit, she is amazed how creative she is.
ek rzepka (x-o-x-o-x.com) is an automated dispenser of love, creation, and nirvana as graphically represented by the excremental outputs of the global village, which in turn is the cause for severe and inconceivable amazement.
We Give A Shit Because We Care is part of the UNIT/PITT series Ill Repute, a Vancouver 125 project with additional support from The BC Arts Council. UNIT/PITT Projects gratefully acknowledges the support of the City of Vancouver, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Canada Council, and the support of our donors, members, volunteers and of our community of artists and cultural workers.
