Vancouver's Soft Launch wants you to rethink what a gallery is for

The first thing you need to know about Soft Launch — the new exhibition at Vancouver's Libby Leshgold Gallery — is that it might not actually be an exhibition at all.

"We call it an exhibition, but I think it's actually better to think of it more as a series of artist residencies," says Vanessa Kwan, director and curator of exhibitions at Emily Carr University, where the gallery is located. "It's not necessarily about putting objects on display that you can visit during gallery hours — it's more about giving over the gallery space to artists first to reach out so they can kind of experiment."

The focus of Soft Launch, according to Kwan, is to rethink what a gallery is for. Over the course of six weeks, three artists — loscil, Justine A. Chambers and Ryan Tacata — will use the space to create new works in performance and sound, and then present them for audiences.

For Kwan, the idea of performing in a gallery space has been of interest to them for a long time.

"I used to work at the Vancouver Art Gallery many years ago curating performance travel spaces," they say. "So it was there that I kind of got really attached to this idea of bringing performers into white cube spaces to kind of push the edges of what we expect these spaces to do."

"I just got hired last year and I started about five months ago. So one of my big questions about the space is what can it do — not just showcase objects or pieces on the wall?"

Kwan says that the title, Soft Launch, reflects the fact that they don't actually know what the possibilities of the space are.

"It's not expected to be a decisive statement of any kind. I feel like we're kind of exploring the space together and figuring out what it can do," they say.

Dance artist Justine A. Chambers will take over the space starting March 24, to create a piece called Zephyrs, which will explore ways to make gesture more tangible. Her plan is to fill the space with theatrical haze, and then have two dancers move and gesture to see how the haze is affected. 

"How do we see action?" she says. "How is it changing the air between us? How can we change the air between us with gesture? And I thought, 'We can make a huge cloud in the space that is meant to move and dissipate, and then we can control how it dissipates.'"

She adds that, since the start of the COVID pandemic, "the air between us has become such an intense space," and that she hopes Zephyrs will help us think about that space a little differently. 

"I'm trying to find a softer way of considering the space between us," she says. "A more generous and less legal or threatening way of thinking about the air between us."

Performance artist Ryan Tacata will close the series by installing 400 square feet of white carpet. Then, he's going to invite people to do a variety of activities on it, including a garage sale, breakfast for therapy dogs, and a father wrestling with his children. He's also going to invite some undergrads to come in and watch movies while eating Cheezies.

At the end of his time in the space, he's going to perform a new piece himself called Curtain Speech, in which he will read an increasingly elaborate, hour-long content warning that two performers will act out. He says that as a performance artist, while he respects the need for content warnings for some things, he finds they can be "slightly prescriptive of audience interpretation."

"Typically the content warning is much more heavy than the work itself," he says. "I also find that by putting these things in as a warning, we're often reifying stigmas around things by saying like, 'Oh, you should be afraid of this kind of content.'"

The content warning itself will go into kind of a reductio ad absurdum place, with things like "continuous vomiting with conspicuous teeth" and "testicles draped over the left thigh."

For their part, Kwan is hoping that Soft Launch will be the first of many performance-based shows at the gallery.

"I could see this turning into a really large-scale performance showcase over time, something that happens annually," they say.

"I could see this also as just kind of breaking apart some of our expectations. I mean, the Libby Leshgold is in Emily Carr University. This is a place for research and a place for exploration, and a place for lifelong learning for artists. I want it to be expected that we might encounter artists who are actively exploring new parts of their practice in the gallery space in real time." 

Soft Launch is on now at the Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University to the end of April.