Vernacularities

Curated by Emelie Chhangur

Award-winning writer and artist Emelie Chhangur is a leading voice for experimental curatorial practice in Canada, known for her long-term collaborative projects performatively staged within and outside gallery contexts and for her decade-plus-long tenure at AGYU. She is currently Director/Curator of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, where she collaborates with the architectural practice, KPMB to envision new museum architectures through a community-engaged design process for Agnes Reimagined.

In one way or another, each work in this diverse selection derives inspiration from the
everyday—or our encounters with its resonant afterlives! These “vernacularities”—a word I’ve
made up to describe the glorious works in this special collection—are subjective and open to
change. Giving exuberant form to lived experience or defiantly challenging the status quo of its chosen medium, the works I’ve selected hold embodied, inherited, reclaimed, resilient, resistant, and recast bits of history, present moments, and imagined futures together in a hybrid, interstitial and unusual shape, both uncomfortable and seductive. These are artists to follow with an ex-
centric curiosity.