Façade Festival 2019
Lindsay McIntyre + Howie Tsui

Façade Festival is a week-long, monumental public art project and cultural event that takes place from sunset to midnight every evening from September 8 to 14 on the Georgia Street façade of the Vancouver Art Gallery, above the šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl’e7énk Square.

A selection of BC contemporary artists have been commissioned to create 10 stunning, site-specific works of art. Using the technology known as ‘projection mapping,’ the works have been tailored specifically for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s iconic architecture and will be projected over its Georgia Street façade, covering the building with moving, dynamic artwork. Façade Festival is an immersive, large-scale artistic experience that will be shared by tens of thousands of attendees.

The project speaks to the pervasiveness of digital forms in modern life and contemplates the role that new technologies play in contemporary art, while engaging the public in a grand architectural intervention free of charge.

Façade Festival is presented in partnership between Burrard Arts Foundation, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and technical partner Go2 Productions, with support from the City of Vancouver, the Department of Canadian Heritage, QuadReal Property Group, Tourism Vancouver, Viva Vancouver, Can Design, the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, and Savoury City Catering & Events.

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 10
LINDSAY MCINTYRE + HOWIE TSUI

LINDSAY McINTYRE 

ABOUT THE PROJECT: Lindsay McIntyre’s projection “If These Walls” was shot in Birtle (Birdtail), Manitoba, at the site of the former Birtle Indian Residential School, one of the last remaining residential school buildings from this long, dark era of recent Canadian history. The work examines this site and how the presence of these remaining buildings loom in the minds of all Canadians but especially those who experienced, and continue to feel the effects of, the longstanding harm that these systems created. Most of the footage in “If These Walls” was shot on hand-processed, 16mm film, with permission on Treaty Two territory in Birtle, Manitoba. All text included in the work was extracted, photographed off the page, and reassembled from the many volumes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Lindsay McIntyre is a film artist from Edmonton of Inuk and Settler descent.  She holds an MFA in Film Production from Concordia in Montreal and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from The University of Alberta. Her process-based practice is largely analog in nature and deals with themes of portraiture, place, form and personal histories.  Working primarily with 16mm film and experimental, handmade and documentary techniques, she also makes her own 16mm film hand-coated with silver gelatin emulsion. Interested simultaneously in the apparatus of cinema, portraiture, representation and personal histories, she bridges gaps in collective experience and remains dedicated to integrating theory and practice, form and content.   She was a member of The Double Negative Collective, the recipient of the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for Excellence in Media Arts for 2013 and a REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award from the Hnatyshyn Foundation in 2017.  She applies her interest in film chemistry, analogue technologies and structure to make award-winning short 16mm films and expanded cinema performances which have been programmed around the world including at Ann Arbor, Anthology Film Archives, Pleasure Dome, Mono No Aware, Rotterdam, WNDX, imagineNATIVE, Images, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Raindance, One Flaming Arrow and Black Maria and can be found in several permanent collections. She taught at the University of Alberta before transplanting to Vancouver to teach Film + Screen Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

HOWIE TSUI 

ABOUT THE PROJECT: Howie Tsui’s Façade Festival project ‘Mingled Skins’ synthesizes a pair of works to cast a haunting presence onto the Vancouver Art Gallery site. A morphing image cycle of grotesque avatars from Tsui’s “of Shunga and Monsters” series—created by the artist through a process of automatic/unconscious collage and drawing—will be projected in the centre of the Gallery building. The project also integrates a video capture of Tsui’s newest work “Parallax Chambers,” a follow-up to his “Retainers of Anarchy,” an ambitious, algorithmically driven animation sequence exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2017. Together, these two series conflate the anarchic societies of martial arts fiction (‘mouhap’) with the self-organized communities that formed within the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City—a tenement that was situated in an ungoverned zone between the borders of China and Hong Kong. The works are framed by a backdrop of contour lines that depict both landscape and set pieces from Cantonese operas, with a palette that recalls the neon lights of Hong Kong’s past.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Vancouver-based artist Howie Tsui (Tsui Ho Yan / 徐浩恩) was born in Hong Kong and raised in Lagos, Nigeria and Thunder Bay. He works in a variety of media to construct tense, fictive environments that subvert canonized art forms and narrative genres, often from the traditional Chinese literati class. Tsui synthesizes diverging socio-cultural anxieties around superstition, trauma, acculturation, and otherness through a distinctly outsider lens to advocate for liminal and diasporic experiences. He holds a BFA (2OO2) from the University of Waterloo and received the Joseph Stauffer Prize (2OO5) from the Canada Council for most outstanding young artist. His work is in the public collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa Art Gallery, City of Ottawa, Global Affairs Canada and Centre d’exposition de Baie-Saint-Paul.