Exquisite Pressure x The Biting School
February 16–17, 2024
7:30pm, 7pm doors
$10, No one turned away for lack of $
WHAT LAB 1814 Pandora Street
tickets online or at the door
The Biting School and What Lab are very excited to welcome you to back to Exquisite Pressure! ExP allows artists to try something new, to share their works in progress in front of an audience, gather feedback, and put their investigations to the test. It’s a night to experience new work in a beautiful, brave, and vulnerable early stage.
ExP x Here For Now features the work of:
Art Action Earwig
Eddy Van Wyk
Kaila Bhullar
Curated and hosted by The Biting School. A few words from them:
These works contain: • Deviant, Perverse, and/or Surrealist performance (theatre, dance, performance art, etc). • Maximum 3 artists in a selected team (with a minimum of 1 artist). • All levels of experience welcome (veteran artist to emerging) as long as you’re into experimenting and consider yourself a professional artist. Manifesto: • This work will be incomplete • This work will be experimenting with a question or an itch • This work will be inclusive of extremes • This work will be queer or will queer • This work might be nothing valuable • This work will be 20 min induration or less • This work might only be presentable once • This work might be perishable and unreconstructable
Questions? Email us at studio@whatlab.ca
Accessibility Info
What Lab is located at 1814 Pandora Street. There is no dedicated parking, only street parking. The venue is located on the second floor up one flight of stairs, but there is a ground level accessible entrance through the back of the building. Seating is typically informal, and will include some combination of chairs, floor seating, couches, and cushions. There is one single-occupancy, gender-inclusive washroom. The washroom is not big enough for larger style wheelchairs to completely turn around in while the door is open. We are a trans-inclusive space.
Placate-ring
By Art Action Earwig
What does protection mean to you and the world today? Where does a sense of protection belong? Are you in? Out? Being on the edge? Three members of Art Action Earwig try to create a ring of protection with you, by feeding earth-bound spirits around us. Perhaps it’s an odd potluck where you can (b)ring something to share (if you want!)
Minah brings a traditional ritual song gifted by a Korean shaman. Wryly brings beats and vibes that ring the air. Tadafumi brings whimsies to charm the ring. Rest of the party is up to you.
Co-created & performed by Art Action Earwig: Wryly Andherson, Minah Lee, Tadafumi Tamura
Tiger, Tiger
A small and tender work-in-progress inspired by the music of Wim Mertens in Strategie de la Rupture and a life post psychosis. An ode to healing.
Created and performed by Eddy Van Wyk with support from The Biting School
Body Mods
By Kaila Bhullar
Body Mods is an immersive multi-channel video and sound piece that uses trippy layered visuals and a lo-fi synth sonic composition to create a laidback pensive atmosphere. Viewers are invited to move through the installation at their own discretion and situate themselves in the work as they please, as it is designed in a spatially aware manner that evokes various levels throughout the space through use of projections, a CRT video, and an arrangement of speakers. The work aims at providing a lucid introspective environment for viewers to be cozy and contemplate the intersections between queerness, the body, media, and technology. Thoughts around how intimacy and images manifest through queer bodies and experiences are explored in an abstracted manner, as well as how various technologies inform and disrupt our perception of these themes in everyday life.
about the artists
Placate-ring
Art Action Earwig
Art Action Earwig is an interdisciplinary collective composed of Wryly Andherson, Minah Lee, and Tadafumi Tamura. We live and work on the lands of the Snuneymuxw (Nanaimo) and Snaw-Naw-As (Nanoose) peoples of Vancouver Island and the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations of the Lower Mainland. Our work is also situated in South Korea and Japan where our members’ distant homes and families are. Formed in early 2020 by founding members Minah and Wryly during the early days of Covid-19, we operate in the spirit of mutual aid in pursuing and sustaining art practices through gestures that resist colonial legacies. Earwig’s art practices concern issues close to home and beyond national borders, exploring challenging and inspiring matters of our time that call for action. We celebrate our personal stories and the conversations that come out of different identities. We mobilize creative access to pressing social and political matters that engender divides in our societies.
Tiger, Tiger
Eddy Van Wyk
Eddy van Wyk is a Namibian-born multi-disciplinary artist currently in so-called Vancouver, where they live and create on unceded territories. After studying Presence for 9 years with Master Grotowski teacher Raina von Waldenburg, I am now studying my Masters in Quantum Science. I continue to investigate the meeting points of creativity, spirituality, responsibility and intentional embodiments. After a long period of hustling as an actress, clown, filmmaker, poet and theatre-deviser, I am now focused on integrating my practice with the primacy of consciousness being my worldview. Today you can find me designing and hosting opportunities for collective healing. @hernameiseddy
Body Mods
Kaila Bhullar
Kaila Bhullar (She/They) is a second-generation Indo-Chilean experimental filmmaker + multimedia artist based in the stolen territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh tribes. Largely informed by digitally-based art forms, Bhullar uses art-making as an introspective tool that explores various internal dispositions concerning identity and perception, including contemplations around the existential and political implications of images. As a queer and mixed race individual, they are interested in analyzing cultural binaries and norms, where they use moving images and sound as a means to express the abstractions and tensions within these themes. These inquiries often manifest as collages of varying forms, audiovisual works, and multimedia installations. Some of Bhullar’s recent exhibition and screening history includes The James Black Gallery, 2023; XINEMA, 2023; Massy Arts Gallery, 2022; UNIT/PITT, 2022; and The Small File Media Festival, 2020. Having recently completed their BFA at the SCA (SFU), they have an upcoming residency at the CAG, and is currently creating a video work for Gallery Gachet’s BIPOC New Media Screen.
This presentation is funded in part by
