Zine Night Library Talk: Jordan Strom

Join us for a talk with curator and historian Jordan Strom, presented in conversation with the exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines. Strom’s presentation will focus on British Columbia–based art zines, produced in the 1990s and 2000s, that featured collaborative drawing and collective collage. 

Beginning in the late 1990s, a number of artists and informal artist groups used photocopied zines, postal distribution services and a network of small press supportive organizations and institutions as vehicles for shared art making and collaborative practice.  

Building on a history of mimeographed art magazines and mail art of the 1960s and 70s, with deep roots in Vancouver and Victoria, along with punk and post-punk graphic tendencies of some American artists in the 1980s, artists in the southwest of BC, in addition to networks that extended across Canada, developed a raw stream-of-conscious, hand-drawn aesthetic to respond to their rapidly changing times.  

These shared drawing practices fused an unruly amalgam of Pop Art, Fluxus, Funk Art, punk and psychedelic-folk strategies and sensibilities to challenge dominant modes of post-conceptual art photography and sculpture produced by singular artists. Because of their collaborative formation, fugitive materials and diminutive size, these art zines have circulated outside established genres of practice, critical frameworks and art histories.  

This talk will examine the shared visual language of a number of these zines, their creators and the larger underground scene where they circulated on the West Coast. It will consider how these collaboratively drawn books created exchange economies that were not only responding to and connecting with broader art zine communities in central Canada and south of the border, but also reacting to major changes taking place in media culture and the new digital economy at the start of the new century. 

This event will be hosted by Jared Wiercinski, Head Librarian of the Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives. 

Capacity is limited. Registration required.  

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Please note that this presentation and the exhibition contain graphic content and language. Viewer discretion is advised.

This talk is part of a series of programs happening in conjunction with the exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines. Find out more »

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jordan Strom is a curator and writer working on the unceded, ancestral territories of the Coast Salish people. He has been curating exhibitions, writing and publishing on contemporary art for over 20 years. In addition to his work as Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at Surrey Art Gallery since 2009, he has curated exhibitions at Kamloops Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Presentation House Gallery (now Polygon Gallery), Dadabase and Republic Gallery. In 2004, he was the founding editor of Fillip Magazine of Contemporary Art; he worked there as co-editor for close to a decade. He completed a Master of Arts Degree in Critical Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia’s Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in 2014. More recently, as a PhD student in the Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies and School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Strom is working on his thesis project In the Shadow of the Pavilions: Expanded Media Art in the time of North America’s Last World’s Fair.