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STILL WITH US

During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for… Keep fighting. Keep dancing.     

 – Dan Savage

The Victoria Arts Council is pleased to announce its presentation of STILL WITH US: A Legacy of HIV/AIDS in the Arts — an ambitious project, two years in the making, that brings together local and international partners from the literary, performing, and visual arts communities, in association with a leading local health agency. 

This cross-disciplinary project is anchored by an exhibition in downtown Victoria running from 24 October through 1 December 2025. Featuring archival materials, films, and visual art, the exhibit tells a multi-faceted story of loss, advocacy, and hope emanating from the first waves of the AIDS epidemic (1980s through 1990s) and Victoria’s remarkable response. 

This fall, AVI Health & Community Services (formerly AIDS Vancouver Island) is marking 40 years since its foundation by five people who recognized the need to meet the challenge of the AIDS epidemic sweeping through our community. The AVI archive of advocacy and educational materials will be on display alongside original works of contemporary art by the likes of Victoria-born artist Joe Average (1957-2024), among others.

Exciting performance events are scheduled throughout the run of the exhibition at a variety of venues in Victoria including the Belfry Theatre and Pacific Opera’s Baumann Centre, with pop-up performances by the Gettin’ Higher Choir in downtown Victoria.

Greater Victoria Public Library is dedicating a themed display throughout the Fall at their Central Branch.

Now, four decades into the reality of AIDS, with an upsurge in new HIV diagnoses in Canada, and around the world this is a timely event that combines art with education and reflection in an impactful way.

STILL WITH US is a call to action, to remember and to education. “Keep fighting. Keep dancing.”

Image: William Douglas in his work Anima (1990) / Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann, Dance Collection Danse N D J 2013 MR

This unparalleled collaboration would not be possible without the following CO-PRESENTERS: The Belfry Theatre, Dance Collection Danse (Toronto), Dance Victoria, Intrepid Theatre, and Pacific Opera Victoria

COMMUNITY PARTNERS: AVI Health & Community Services, The Bay Centre, Greater Victoria Public Library, University of Victoria, Visual AIDS (New York)

CORPORATE SPONSORS: Castle Consulting Corporation; Tulipe Noire; Prestige Prestige Picture Framing Etcetera; Good Earth Coffee House, Willow Wealth Management

With financial support by: CRD Arts Services, Province of British Columbia (Community Gaming), BC Arts Council, The McLean Foundation, as well as Dance Victoria, Dance Collection Danse, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and Canadian Heritage, with the additional support of incredible and generous private donors.

With sincere gratitude to the following generous donors:

Conrad Alexandrowicz, in memory of Michael Conway
Clayton Baraniuk and Jason Dubois
Scott Elias
Gordon Fulton
A & A King Family Foundation, in memory of Mr. Bruce Slatter
Dr. Allana Lindgren and Ted L. McDorman
Jan McMillan
Dave McMillan and Audrey Inouye
Bob Milne
Bernard Sauvé and Michael Scott Curnes
Michael Shamata
Andy Stephenson
Jon Tupper, in honour of Dr. Norbert (Nobby) Gilmore
Bill Hamar and Stephen White, in memory of so many lost friends

STILL WITH US: A Legacy of HIV/AIDS in the Arts organizing committee: Sean Guist, Dr. Allana Lindgren, Kegan McFadden, Bernard Sauvé, Stephen White

If you are interested in making a financial contribution to STILL WITH US: A Legacy of HIV/AIDS in the Arts, please consider making a donation today.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Exhibition | 24 October – 1 December | Tuesday – Sunday, 12-5
Still With Us: A Legacy of HIV/AIDS in the Arts
Victoria Arts Council’s pop-up venue within The Bay Centre
1150 Douglas Street

Featuring work by Joe Average, Cathy Busby, Margo Farr, Margaret Flood, Peggy Frank, jamie griffiths, Anna Mah, Cookie Mueller, Myfanwy Pavelic, Lynda Raino, and Pam Terry, with selections from the archives of AVI Health & Community Services. This exhibition is curated by VAC Executive Director Kegan McFadden and augmented by the holdings of Dance Collection Danse, reflective of the impact of HIV/AIDS on the dance community, as selected by Christopher House, Guest Curator, and Amy Bowring Executive & Curatorial Director of DCD.

Margaret Flood, location, the views. courtesy of the Artist
Joe Average (1957-2024)
Thinking Cap with HIV, 1997
limited edition print
Courtesy of the Artist’s Estate

Staged Reading and Choral Performance 
Saturday 1st of November, 7:30PM
The Belfry Theatre’s BMO Studio | 1291 Gladstone Avenue
The Wines of Tuscany [1996] by Conrad Alexandrowicz with Gettin’ Higher Choir
By donation

The Wines of Tuscany is a dance-play for two men about wine, opera, love, sex… and dying of AIDS.

photo by Deborah Dunn for original promotion of The Wines of Tuscany, featuring Shaun Phillips and Shawn Macdonald

Panel Discussion
Dancers for Life
Saturday 8th of November, 3PM | Reception to follow (sponsored by Good Earth Coffeehouse)
Victoria Arts Council’s pop-up venue within The Bay Centre
1150 Douglas Street
Free

Dancers For Life  a discussion with the organizers of Victoria’s Dancers For Life Galas with the original organizers, discussing what motivated them to produce the events, highlights and memories from the events themselves and their lasting impact.


Panelists: Kim Breiland, Doug Durand, Stacey Leblanc, Anna Russo Kennedy, and Katrina Jensen | Moderator: Stephen White

Book Display and Reading List
16 November – 1 December
A Legacy of HIV/AIDS in the Literary Arts
Organized by Greater Victoria Public Library Central Branch
735 Broughton St

As part of Still With Us, the Victoria Arts Council has partnered with Greater Victoria Public Library to highlight a selection of their catalogue that speaks to the impact HIV/AIDS has had — and continues to have– on the literary arts.  

All are encouraged to visit the Central Branch to see the display and borrow a title or two from this curated reading list, which includes works in fiction, non-fiction, memoir, poetry, and more by: Alexandra Billings, MK Czerwiec, Peggy Frank, Tomson Highway, Derek Jarman, Rebecca Makkai, Danez Smith, David Wojnarowicz, among others.



Performance Series 
Friday 21st of November @ 7PM | Reception to follow
and Saturday 22nd of November @ 3PM | Reception to follow
The Baumann Centre
925 Balmoral Rd

Tickets are $10 – $100 available through INTREPID THEATRE as part of their Incoming Festival: https://intrepidtheatre.com/shows/still-with-us-performance-series/


STILL WITH US
Featuring: A welcome drum song from Aunty Collective; Saying Goodbye to My Brother, a remount by Lynda Raino of the duet she choreographed and performed with Shawn Costello (1961-1989) in 1988, co-presented by Dance Victoria; an excerpt from  i am beauty, a new verbatim opera by librettist Rick Waines and composer Mary Jane Coomber featuring four vocalists and accompaniment, activating the HIV in My Day oral history research project housed at the University of Victoria; and The Viral Monologues featuring first-person accounts from the frontlines by AVI Health & Community Services affiliates, remounted by Intrepid Theatre.

** A portion of proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to AVI Health & Community Services (recognizing 40 years of support this year).

Saying Goodbye to My Brother (1988), performed by Lynda Raino and Shawn Costello (1961-1989). Courtesy of the Lynda Raino Dance Archive

Poetry Reading
Wednesday 26th of November @ 7PM
Victoria Arts Council’s pop-up venue within The Bay Centre
1150 Douglas Street
By donation

The Living Room: an evening of poetry. Join current and former poets laureate of Victoria, Kyeren Regehr and John Barton, as they read from their work as well as work of poets lost to AIDS-related illnesses.

Book Launch
Saturday November 29, 2025 | 2PM @ Victoria Arts Council’s pop-up venue within The Bay Centre
1150 Douglas Street
By donation

There Are Things That Cannot Be Changed … creative writing is based on actual letters between Rwandan, Emerthe Nakabonye and Canadian Peggy Frank.  The story unfolds from the first letters exchanged between two women who only knew that the other was also living with HIV.

Film Screening
Monday 1st of December (World AIDS Day) | 7PM
Victoria Arts Council’s pop-up venue within The Bay Centre
1150 Douglas Street
By donation

VAC in partnership with Visual AIDS (NY) presents, Day With(Out) Art screening of newly-commissioned films by HIV+ artists, “Meet Us Where We’re At”, featuring: Kenneth Idongesit Usoro (Nigeria), Hoàng Thái Anh (Vietnam), Gustavo Vinagre & Vinicius Couto (Brazil/Portugal), Camilo Tapia Flores (Chile/Brazil), Camila Flores-Fernández (Peru/Germany), José Luis Cortés (Puerto Rico)

Introduced with a performance by the Gettin’ Higher Choir

José Luis Cortés, ¿Por qué tanto dolor? (Why So Much Pain?), 2025. Commissioned by Visual AIDS for Meet Us Where We’re At.

*This marks the 7th year in a row where VAC has brought the Day With(Out) Art screening to Victoria, courtesy of Visual AIDS.

Categories
670 For Street 670 Fort Street News Uncategorized Visual

[window][window][window]

Victoria Arts Council
PROJECT SPACE
670 Fort Street

PLAY by Jamin Zuroski
October – December 2025
presented in partnership with STEPS Public Art and The Bay Centre

Jamin Zuroski’s Play, vinyl installation at Victoria Arts Council’s Project Space

This seal design celebrates the vibrant spirit that comes alive when we lead with curiosity.

It’s a reminder of the playful, open-hearted energy that fuels discovery and innovation. When we embrace learning, growth, and play, we unlock our fullest potential, individually and together.

May these seals inspire us to stay curious, collaborate boldly, and explore fearlessly. The journey of becoming never ends, so let’s keep creating, questioning, and growing, side by side.

– J.Z.

Jamin Zuroski is an Award Winning ‘Namgis First Nations Artist, residing in Victoria, BC. Jamin holds mixed ancestry from Ukrainian and Polish on his father’s side and ‘Na̱mg̱is, Da̱naxdax̱w, Ma’a̱mtagila, Mowachaht, and E’iksen on his mother’s side. One of three siblings from his mother, Cindy Cook, he is the grandchild to Ruth and George Cook. The Gigalgam Cook family comes from Alert Bay, which is located on Cormorant Island. Alert Bay sits on the regional lands of the Kwakwaka’wakw, the Kwak’wala speaking peoples. Jamin currently lives in Victoria, BC, on the lands of the Coast Salish Peoples, though he continues to visit Alert Bay to attend cultural ceremonies and events. He knows that his heritage and desire for community connections is the heartbeat and fuel of his everyday actions.

Jamin was first introduced to learn and practice a variety of West Coast Indigenous design styles in grade seven at James Bay Elementary School. During this time of artistic learning, he instantly became spiritually, mentally, physically, and emotionally connected to the stories and legends of West Coast Indigenous Peoples. For over 25 years, Jamin has worked with numerous artists, community members, organizations, businesses, schools, Friendship Centres, and government on a variety of cultural projects and initiatives. Some mediums he currently works with include cedar wood carving, cedar and glass sandblasting, mural painting, canvas painting, and computer graphics.

jaminzuroski.com

Presented in partnership with STEPS Public Art, Play by Jamin Zuroski [October – December 2025] is the second in a year-long series of presentations reimagining the storefront of the Victoria Arts Council’s Project Space, titled [WINDOW][WINDOW][WINDOW], curated by Kegan McFadden. www.vicartscouncil.ca

July 2025 – June 2026

Unique art presentations across the three windows on Fort Street

Amplifying our public presence over the coming year, the Victoria Arts Council’s Project Space at 670 Fort Street will host four unique window installations by local, national, and internationally-recognized artists. 

Project curator, and VAC executive director, Kegan McFadden notes that the Council’s presence downtown has taken many forms over the decades from traditional exhibitions, to large-scale community projects, to storefront installations. Since opening the Project Space in January of this year, the VAC hosted an evolving exhibition in the form of an experimental reading room/library, titled ANOTHER LIFE, where interpretations of what makes a book and where printed matter enters the realm of contemporary art was the focus.

The project, [WINDOW][WINDOW][WINDOW] builds on the VAC’s partnership with The Bay Centre, and contributes to the long history of contemporary artists activating storefronts for means beyond the commercial, and will be viewable from the street at all times of day and night.

From vinyl wraps to collage to banners and hand-painted imagery, [WINDOW][WINDOW][WINDOW] will showcase one artist at a time in three-month-long presentations from July 2025 – June 2026.

These presentations are supported financially by CRD Arts Services Branch, BC Arts Council’s Community Arts Program, and the Province of BC’s Community Gaming Fund, with additional consideration courtesy of The Bay Centre and STEPS Public Art. 

[WINDOW][WINDOW][WINDOW] is inaugurated with an installation by Vikky Alexander.

Tokyo Showrooms (VAC mock up) by Vikky Alexander

In February of 2014, on a trip to Tokyo, I wandered around the shopping district of Aoyama.

The district was predominantly high end retail boutiques, such as Prada, Comme des Garçons and Roberto Cavalli.   

It had just snowed, a rare occurrence in Tokyo.

Following my 2009 series ‘Paris Showrooms,’ and a much earlier series from1992, ‘West Edmonton Mall’,  I took photographs of the streets as reflected in the shop windows, visually sandwiching the indoor displays with the passersby.

I chose the circular framing device to refer in, a self-conscious way, to scopophilia — the love of looking.

The photographs are characterized by my ongoing consideration of illusion and material desires framed within the language of architecture and design.  The works examine how these formal signs reveal and shape meaning in contemporary culture, bringing to the foreground discussions of late-capitalism and its commodification of culture.  The photographs also foreground a utopian desire within the parameters of fantasy and cultural longing.

These are consistent themes in my work. – VA

Vikky Alexander (b. 1959, Victoria, BC) is a Montreal-based artist celebrated for her ongoing contributions to Pictures Generation strategies of critique by appropriation. Engendering a quietly reflective feminism that investigates the power of framing devices within the architectures of corporate branding, her works assess the fetishistic, bureaucratized and aspirational—generating recombinatory mixtures of appropriated scenes of natural landscapes and typifications of beauty that demarcate the romanticization of nature and the naturalization of romance. Activating a jarring fracture between embodied experience and its idealized presentation, her sensual and stylized works spanning installation, sculpture, photography, and video cumulatively denature the commercial annexation of personal capacities for self-reflection.

Vikky Alexander’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Dia Art Foundation, New York; White Columns, New York; Musée d’ art moderne et contemporain, Genève; Downs & Ross, New York; New Museum, New York; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal; International Center of Photography, New York; Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto; Canada House, London; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Barbican Art Gallery, London; and Yokohama Civic Art Gallery, Yokohama. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the International Center of Photography; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Deste Foundation, among numerous others. A graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, she lives and works in Montreal, Quebec. Upcoming presentations of her work include exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; and Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano.

This special presentation of Tokyo Showrooms will be the first exhibition of Alexander’s work on the Canadian west coast since her survey with the Vancouver Art Gallery, Extreme Beauty, in 2020.

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We need your support today!

With the ever-increasing costs to operate, the VAC is in the very unfortunate circumstance where we now need financial help from our core supporters — the community of artists, educators, and arts enthusiasts we’ve served for decades.

If you’ve enjoyed our programming, or have been one of the hundreds of artists we’ve uplifted through exhibitions and other opportunities, we’re now calling in the favour.

Please donate to the VAC today …
no amount is too little or too much!

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Though we have been able to increase and diversify our revenue stream over recent years, it just isn’t enough to cover costs anymore.

We’ve been there for you since 1968, and together we’ve built something incredible and unique to Victoria … please help us raise the much needed funds to keep the VAC going!

Donate to the VAC today
Categories
GVPL Central News Visual

Roberta Pyx Sutherland @ GVPL Central

2 October – 16 December 2025
GVPL Central Branch
735 Broughton St, Victoria, BC

About the Artist:
For Pyx Sutherland “Painting functions as a spiritual compass. I paint to address the mysterious, a longing to understand the big questions. What are we doing here? Are we connected to something infinite? Do our lives matter? Painting explores these inner dialogues addressing the questions I cannot answer”.

Sutherland’s projects explore the connectivity of all life. They refer to nature at macroscopic and microscopic levels. The work is tactile – to be sensed, touched, and experienced. Found materials transform into sculptural installations, books, and wall works.

Sutherland exhibits internationally and her work is in a numerous public collections including the Canada Council Art Bank. She maintains a studio in Victoria and Hornby Island B.C. Her education includes a BFA (Hon.) from the University of Victoria, study at Emily Carr College of Art and Design, printmaking at the University of Sheffield UK, Ohara School of Ikebana, Shambhala Art teacher training, mandala painting in Nepal and numerous residencies include at the Banff Centre, Bau Institute with annual visits to Caetani House Vernon.

About the Work:
Mushrooms have long history of inspiring us…strange, otherworldly beauties straddling the plant and animal realms, officially within a unique botanical ‘kingdom’.

Mythologies world-wide associated with mushrooms fuel our fascination: natural, but also supernatural, magical, but also dangerous. They are associated with witchcraft, contribute to longevity, cause mysterious deaths, as well as hallucinogenic experience.

An obsession with mushrooms is no longer considered exotic or eccentric, we are well into a “‘shroom boom”. Being our closest cellular relatives’ mushrooms are increasingly appreciated for their healing and nutritional superpowers. Lion’s Mane to improve memory, Chaga and Cordyceps for immunity, Reishi for anxiety, Psilocybin for treating PTSD.

That we see so much of ourselves mirrored in mushrooms may be why they’re resonating so widely right now. Consider how interconnectedness (via sprawling subterranean networks of mycelium), is the very key to their existence. They embody remarkable qualities, resiliency, humility, tenacity, beauty, as well as connectivity.

And mushrooms can give us hope; seemingly small and insignificant, they have transformative powers greater than we imagine. They inspire a sense of wonder at a time when we all long for, even need, to believe in magic.