Vancouver Art Gallery gets ready to host Art Party, its biggest bash in years
The VAG’s Sirish Rao explains how the multisensory event will enliven the venue from rotunda to rooftop, in conjunction with new Fashion Fictions exhibition
Toddy.
Vancouver Art Gallery presents Art Party x Fashion Fictions on May 26 from 8 to 11 pm
WHEN MEXICAN ARTIST Pedro Reyes was in Vancouver recently to install PACE IN SPACE!, his installation at Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite public-art space on West Georgia Street, the exhibition—consisting of brightly coloured creatures that look like cars with legs—launched with what could be compared to The Ministry of Silly Walks from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Megaphone in hand, the multidisciplinary artist led about 100 people from the VAG to the site next to the Shangri-La Hotel, shouting out instructions like: “Pretend someone is chasing you!” and “Now pretend you’re moving very slowly underwater.” It was quite the sight for anyone going by the group on the major downtown thoroughfare.
“People on the street and in their cars were stopping to take pictures,” says Vancouver Art Gallery director of public engagement and learning Sirish Rao, who loved every minute of being part of the throng and who adds with a laugh: “They discovered an act of collective embarrassment.
“It was embodied play,” he adds. “People are more receptive and more imaginative and more able to see past the constraints of our own constructions with play.”
Rao’s belief in the power of playfulness extends far beyond that one-off quirky outdoor stroll. About four months into his role at the VAG, he says that play is in fact a core tenet of his mandate.
“In so many ways, galleries have been questioning themselves, from initially having been designed as palaces and fortresses to recognizing that they can be more of a public square or a place of gathering, and I think that is my work,” Rao says in an interview with Stir. “My work is led by a personal mission statement that really comes down to belonging, healing, and play.”
Those principles all form the underlayer of the biggest event the Vancouver Art Gallery has hosted in years: Art Party, which takes place the evening of May 26. It’s the first bash at the gallery since pre-pandemic times and also the most ambitious celebration to date since Rao joined the team. An evolution of the gallery’s former fuse events, the boundary-breaking happening will see the entire facility come alive in multiple immersive, artistic ways. In this case, don’t expect silly walks but perhaps impromptu cat walks of sorts, as Art Party is happening in conjunction with the VAG’s new exhibition, Fashion Fictions. Taking place the night before the show’s launch, Art Party will give attendees a first glimpse of the exhibit exploring the intersection between contemporary art and design before it opens to the public. (Fashion Fictions runs from May 27 to October 8.)
Every activation at the Art Party is in dialogue with or response to Fashion Fictions, which unbuttons how fashion defines visions of the future through experimentation and innovation.
Think live models featuring bedazzling work by Indigenous fashion designers, instantaneous visual projections, roving performances by local and visiting artists, DJs, innovative live music, immersive soundscapes, interactive art installations (including drawing with water and mixed-media projects with paint, clay, and fabric), bars serving cocktails, and much more. People won’t know what they might run into around each and every corner.
Sirish Rao.
Rao, the visionary cofounder and former artistic director of Indian Summer Festival—which was recently awarded the Lieutenant Governor’s Arts and Music Award for Visual Art—has high hopes for what’s sure to be an electrifying event.
“The Art Party is really our way of having a mini Vancouver Met gala,” Rao says. “There will be a red carpet…an entry experience, which invites everyone to dress the part, to make themselves a site of expression and come to the party that way. It invites people to engage with the gallery in a multisensory experience, to interact with it in a more playful way, in a way of celebration.”
Fashion Fictions features couture, streetwear, sneakers, headgear, and other pieces of wearable art that meet at the intersection of art and style. The show’s title comes from a well-known 2009 essay by artist and technologist Julian Bleecker called Design Fiction, in which he expands on the term first coined by critic and theorist Bruce Sterling “to argue that the most innovative, transformative work is produced in the spaces between fact and fiction, the present and the near future, and the scientific and the fantastical”, according to a VAG release. “All of the designers in Fashion Fictions occupy these liminal spaces, using fashion as a means to unite seemingly disparate sentiments and to propose new possibilities for aesthetics, bodily forms and, more ambitiously, how we exist in the world.”
Participating artists and designers include Adidas, Balenciaga, Barry Ace, Chet Lo, Comme des Garçons, Craig Green, Orlando Dugi, Ying Gao, Alexander McQueen, Issey Miyake, Caroline Monnet, Nike, Alice Potts, Stina Randestad, Maison Margiela, Marine Serre, Maiko Takeda, Moncler, Junya Watanabe, Rick Owens, and Robert Wun, among others. (Read more about the exhibition here.)
At the Art Party, Toddy, a drag performer, comedian, and musician, will be interviewing guests on a red carpet as they enter the gallery, with everyone encouraged to don their most fashion-forward outfits. Trained as an opera singer, Toddy—who performed with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in its 2022 Symphony of Terrors concert—mixes classical music with pop culture. They have appeared at major comedy festivals such Just for Laughs Toronto and will be releasing a debut glam rock-inspired album this fall.
Joleen Mitton. Dress by Lauren Goodday; wings by Yolonda Skelton.
Tarun Nayar, a global TikTok star who makes electronic music out of natural elements like mushrooms, ferns, leaves, and shrubs, will be performing live. Nayar, who presented his immersive indoor-outdoor concert experience called Modern Biology at the 2022 Indian Summer Festival, uses plants’ bioelectrical impulses to create otherworldly scores.
In the rotunda, Siksika Nation member Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, the Santa Fe-based contributing curator for Fashion Fictions, will be directing freeze modelling of pieces by featured designers Orlando Dugi and Himikalas Pamela Baker. Dugi, who’s also from Santa Fe, takes inspiration from part of the creation story told to children in Dińe culture and is known for elaborate tambour beading and embroidery. Baker is the Squamish, Kwakiutl, Tlingit, Haida founder of Touch of Culture, whose collection includes family pole dresses.
On the rooftop, Joleen Mitton, the Plains Cree/French/Scottish founder of Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week, will direct Good Medicine. This component of the fete will showcase Indigenous fashion and wearable culture by Gitxsan Nation textile artist Yolonda Skelton and Corey Bulpitt of the Naikun Raven clan, who mixes hip hop and Haida art in a vast range of genres, including clothing and jewellery.
A saxophone player will make his way throughout the gallery, playing music inspired by Fashion Fictions’ displays.
Attendees will also be able to check out other featured exhibitions at the VAG, including Shary Boyle’s Outside the Palace of Me, which reimagines the gallery as a collective performance space.
An event like no other in Vancouver, it all goes back to play, healing, and belonging.
“Play is so needed,” says Rao, who serves on the boards and advisory councils of several organizations, such as Vancouver International Film Festival, Simon Fraser University’s India Advisory Council, and the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at UBC. “It says so much about the curiosity of us as a species and the plasticity it gives to our minds.”
“I think belonging is an extremely important piece, because so often large institutions have been designed to exclude or to make very few people comfortable in that space,” he says. “I really am very keen to diversify who feels at home there.
“Healing is really what art has shown us to be so crucial, especially through the height of the pandemic, where all of us sought solace in art,” he adds. “We know intuitively that art heals; we feel better when we see or hear a piece of art.
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