Mark Jacobs

Ben Brown: Improvising His Way to Clarity

Ben Brown: Improvising His Way to Clarity

Interview by Mark Jacobs Photos by Harley Spade Vancouver-based drummer and composer Ben Brown has enjoyed an impressive career as an in-demand session musician and as the driving beat behind Pugs and Crows, with whom he won the 2010 Galaxie Rising Star Award for Best New Group and the 2013 JUNO Award for Instrumental Album […]

 Mark Jacobs

Hey Kids, Let’s Put-on a Show!

Hey Kids, Let’s Put-on a Show!

Theatre director Sarah Faye Bernstein stages a mini-masterpiece in her living room.

Words by Mark Jacobs Photos by Harley Spade We belong in show business. We gotta start young so we can get some steel in our backbone. Well, gee, we’re developing. You couldn’t teach us a trade: we’ve GOT one. And you couldn’t do without it… Oh, we’re only kids now, but someday we’re gonna be […]

 Mark Jacobs

Site-Specificity: Eight Ounces Half a Pound

Site-Specificity: Eight Ounces Half a Pound

Vancouver’s racialized labour history inspires a sculptural response at Chinatown’s Access Gallery.

There is no shortage of artists who concentrate on site-specific work these days; and there is no shortage of galleries looking to display work that bears the strong formative and associative imprints of having arisen in a particular time and space. But most often, the relocation of the work into the gallery setting cannot help […]

 Mark Jacobs

SPATIAL POETICS XIII: WeMix

SPATIAL POETICS XIII: WeMix

Vancouver’s thirteen-year tradition of artistic mash-up plays to a packed house at The Western Front.

This marks the 13th consecutive year of Spatial Poetics, a celebration of cross-disciplinary artistic collaboration that heralds the beginning of the annual Powell Street Festival. For more than a decade, this event has mashed-up local artists of diverse interests, approaches, and specializations to create new works based on the adventure inherent in the seemingly happenstance […]

 Mark Jacobs

Hot Choir in the City: The Kingsgate Chorus and Mount Pleasant Regional Institute of Sound

Hot Choir in the City: The Kingsgate Chorus and Mount Pleasant Regional Institute of Sound

Jenny Ritter’s Rock & Roll choral groups [give a concert] [throw a party] at the Biltmore.

The Kingsgate Chorus and Mount Pleasant Regional Institute of Sound (MPRIS – and pronounced “Empress”), Jenny Ritter’s two excellent choral groups, represent a fresh departure within Vancouver’s burgeoning community choir scene. They perform a tightly arranged repertoire of pop music covers, not the typical choral catalogue of recycled religious hymns, slave songs, civil rights anthems, […]

 Mark Jacobs

Exuberant Hues: Ben Skinner Colours Back Gallery Project

Exuberant Hues: Ben Skinner Colours Back Gallery Project

Like many art galleries, Back Gallery Project has a generous display window at the front of the building. While not an unusual architectural feature, this window always seems a little special. It is a large, open portal on a particularly blank stretch of East Hastings, illuminating the otherwise forgettable streetscape in ways far more astonishing […]

 Mark Jacobs

Bozzini Lab 2014: Young Composers Shine in Exploration of New Music

Bozzini Lab 2014: Young Composers Shine in Exploration of New Music

Montreal's superb contemporary- and experimental-classical string quartet premiers thrilling new works by emerging Canadian composers.

On a peerless, cloudless, 20º Friday, with the early evening sun still drenching the city and people abandoning their workweek for the beaches and neighbourhood parks in droves, an audience of nearly 60 others filled a dark, black-box-of-a-room deep within SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts. They had come to the Assembly Room of the […]

 Mark Jacobs

Exploring The Expressive Challenges and Opportunities of Improvisational Dance

Exploring The Expressive Challenges and Opportunities of Improvisational Dance

inside the lines | the lines inside @ EDAM Dance

Written by Mark Jacobs Photos provided by Chris Randle Peter Bingham, the Artistic Director of EDAM Dance, has been an early and forceful exponent of improvisational dance, and Contact Improvisation (CI), specifically; so it was, perhaps, no surprise that the six-day run of inside the lines | the lines inside would centre on improvisational work. […]

 Mark Jacobs

An Autobiography Carved from Biography

An Autobiography Carved from Biography

Moyra Davey Presents Her Film “Les Goddesses”

Written by Mark Jacobs Moyra Davey’s 2011 film, Les Goddesses, played at the Western Front to a remarkably full house, which was also treated to a brief, but only minutely-illuminating conversation between Vancouver photographer Marian Penner Bancroft and the artist, following the screening. From the chatter in the intermission between the film and the talk, […]

 Mark Jacobs

Diffractions of the Local: New work by Seven Vancouver-based, Latin American Artists

Diffractions of the Local: New work by Seven Vancouver-based, Latin American Artists

Disparate geographies and contemporary art in Vancouver at Back Gallery Project

Written by Mark Jacobs Photos courtesy Roman, Gabriela Aceves, and Back Gallery Project Diffractions of the Local is a new series of exhibitions at The Back Gallery Project, aiming to celebrate the diverse nonlocal origins of Vancouver’s contemporary art scene. Here’s what The Back Gallery Project has to say about the series: Diffractions of the […]