Justine Chambers’ Dancing Life, a Graphic Response by Adriana Contreras

Adriana Contreras' creative process is one of witnessing, deep listening, sense-making, and translation, to weave oral history into visual language. Zooming in and out of stories, Adriana creates large-format graphic responses fromhours of audio recordings of Seika Boye in dialogue with Ashley Perez (2020) and Justine A Chambers (2022), mapping out their artistic trajectories. These visual are a growing series for Seika Boye's archival exhibition It's About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 and Now. This process works to centre artist involvement in the documentation of their dancing lives. The graphic response as a record and art object is offered back to the artist as a gift of thanks for sharing their stories. 

 

Justine A Chambers will create a movement-based work in response to a graphic recording derived from four hours of oral history interviews focused on her dancing life. Her performance will close the exhibition on December 2, 2022. Teck Gallery. 

  • Digital Drawing on Paper

  • Graphic Response to Oral History Interview and subsequent Dance performance to said Graphic Response

  • In-Gallery Installation and performance in Vancouver

Justine Chambers’ Performance Response to Adriana Contreras’ Digital Drawing

Justine A. Chambers’ movement-based work Archives and Heirlooms is created in response to the illustrations that exhibiting artist Adriana Contreras created from four hours of oral history interviews focused on her dancing life that Chambers undertook with curator Seika Boye. Contreras’ large-scale graphics hang in Teck Gallery as part of It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900 - 1970 and Now.

The re-telling of Chambers’ dance history dislodged past movements and stirred up an archive of dance "heirlooms" in the dancer’s body: Archives and Heirlooms is devised through the reactivation of scores from past work, while in real time, Chambers calls up the movements she received as a dancer that have embedded themselves in her body through a lifetime in dance.

This is the second in a series of presentations of It’s About Time that works to centre artist involvement in the documentation of their dancing lives. Contreras’ graphic response as a record and art object is offered back to the dance artist and her community as a gift of thanks for sharing their stories. Chambers’ performance will culminate the exhibition on December 2, 2022 at Teck Gallery.

VIDEO COMING SOON

Artist: Adriana Contreras Correal

Adriana Contreras Correal was born in Bogotá, Colombia and moved to BC with her family in 1998, at the age of fifteen. Artistic expression has always been a central part of her life but became an essential tool for navigating the world as a first-generation immigrant. Adriana completed her BFA at SFU School for the Contemporary Arts in 2006 and has worked and volunteered in numerous local Arts and Community organizations for 20 years. Between 2007 and 2013 Adriana held various administrative roles at the SFU Galleries, assisting with exhibition installation, publication design, communications and caring for the University's permanent collection. In 2013 Adriana made a shift to work supporting Dance Artists as part of the team at New Performance Works Society where she co-curated and produced four dance seasons. The programming included free and pay-what-you-can performances, free workshops and forums, and a successful dance on film program co-curated with Sonia Medel and presented in partnership with the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival.
In 2018 Adriana was selected as one of two Community Scholars with the organization Drawing Change. This an opportunity that allowed her to bring together her knowledge and passion for visual language and communication, her trajectory in migrant justice, health and community building and her desire to expand her artistic practice. In March 2020 Adriana leapt to work as a Graphic Recorder and Facilitator, Illustrator and Designer, independently and as a proud member of the Drawing Change and Fuselight Creative teams.

 

Artist: Justine A. Chambers

Justine A. Chambers is a choreographer, dancer and educator living and working on the traditional and ancestral Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her movement-based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. She is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.