Syrus Marcus Ware

The times, are they a changin’? Can activist art gain a foothold in conceptualist Vancouver?

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It’s quite a jolt to see Syrus Marcus Ware’s bold and stunning large-scale works at Vancouver’s Wil Aballe Art Projects. Recent exhibitions at the decidedly contemporary gallery have tended to feature finely tuned, low-key conceptual works. Ware turns that approach upside down with both scale and an absence of theoretical riffs.

Ware is well known as a community activist and educator in Toronto, where he’s involved with Black Lives Matter and other equity causes. As an artist, he’s largely concerned with attracting a broad audience to ideas around community. As such, his show, Irresistible Revolutions, on view until Feb. 27, is very much an invitation to reflect on what diversity, activism and resilience look like, writ large, at this moment – and what they may look like in the future.

For this exhibition in Vancouver, Ware offers an iteration of previously commissioned and exhibited works. There are large-scale black-and-white portraits of community activists, a single-channel distillation of a larger public art video project, and one big bold textile piece designed to function as a lead banner at protests.

The video, Ancestors, Can You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future), evolved from an eight-channel video installation commissioned in 2019 by the Toronto Biennale and the Ryerson Image Centre for the Salah J. Bachir Media Wall, a grid of arts-dedicated LED screens at Ryerson University. 

It might be termed an Afro-futurist video installation. Ware uses a mix of historical images from the segregation and Cold War eras with Rosa Parks et al., while young and old people of colour in the future, seemingly thriving, ask if we can hear their voices.

Old-school video technology interference and glitches give way to images of what would be the great-grandchildren of today’s generation signalling they have survived what Ware calls the “Black death spectacle” – racism as well as ongoing political and environmental breakdown – and are reaching back in time to declaim their resilience and survival. Clocking in at just over three minutes, the video’s message is simple and concise. I could see this easily evolving into an ongoing series for public spaces. 

In contrast to the gallery’s recent exhibition by Victoria-based artist Charles Campbell, which was anchored with an Afro-futurist conceptual piece of imagined architecture for Jamaica’s Cockpit Country, there’s less to decode here. Ware offers a hopeful missive whose production predates the pandemic and the recent tumult of protests around the world. But its historical clips remind us that precarity has been the norm.

Ware’s exhibition also includes several enormous graphite portraits on paper suspended from the ceiling. They feature a number of queer/trans/racialized activists with West Coast connections – Rodney Diverlus, QueenTite Opaleke, Dr. OmiSoore Dryden and Thandi Young. 

Each is beautifully rendered with subjects in mid-gesture, presumably drawn from photographs. They are warm, open and, somehow, conversational, with a slight tension between the scale and the medium’s delicacy. I’m curious to imagine them as colour photographs or paintings.

The eye-popping textile banner collapse/survive was created as part of The Future Is Floating, a collaborative BIPOC residency between Vancouver and Sydney, Australia, in early 2020. The banner has seen service in two climate-change events and a protest for Invasion Day 2020 – an Indigenous response to Australia’s Jan. 26 national day that’s aimed at resisting ongoing colonialism.

In the gallery’s confines, the banner fairly bursts off the wall, outsized in its impact. It reminds me of the pink and black Silence = Death posters circulated by AIDS activists in the late 1980s. The banner, in tandem with the activist portraits, makes for a big show that’s unabashedly embracing.

Seeing such political work in a space normally given to conceptual art makes me think Vancouver may be moving towards an expanded continuum of art on gallery walls. The catalytic and commingling events of 2020 may well be shifting programming at contemporary art galleries toward more overtly political, activist-oriented art. After all, step outside the gallery, and you find yourself on the street, where things are changing. Fast. ■ 

Syrus Marcus Ware: Irresistible Revolutions at Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver from Jan. 23 to Feb. 27, 2021.

Correction 5/2/21, 5:10 p.m. An earlier version of this article stated erroneously that this is Ware's first exhibition in Vancouver. The post has been corrected.

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