Endless Summer
Katie Kozak and Lucien Durey
April 15th – June 17th 2023
Endless Summer is an exhibition and series of public programs that features the collaborative works of artists Katie Kozak and Lucien Durey. Since 2012, Kozak and Durey have worked together on durational projects that enact care for one another and gratitude toward the places and spaces in which the artworks are realized and exhibited. The resulting artworks and programs contemplate lineage, ancestry, queerness, sustainability, and healing within a context of reimagining place-based relations that serve the social and cultural landscape of their shared communities.
Endless Summer conveys a dedicated period of trust and exchange between artists. The program engages with a longstanding collaborative practice of collecting discarded materials to be reassembled in unexpected ways. This drawing together of collaborative social networks and reciprocal exchange is a continuation of Kozak and Durey’s ongoing practice of collectivity and care.
The project includes new and recent sculptural, photographic, and video works that consider lineages of reciprocity that grow from friendship and familiarity. The public programs extend to include additional artists, musicians, and creative collaborators through workshops, events, and presentations.
Explore Endless Summer by Katie Kozak and Lucien Durey in 3D
Artists
Katie Kozak is a queer artist of Métis and Ukrainian settler descent. Her visual art practice is centered around connectivity to land, relationship, ritual and traces. She begins her process by spending contemplative time in nature, with other living beings. Being with the forest and near water remind her of her father, she has become aware that her values for making and being are deeply tied to him, processing his loss, and reforming connections to family. She believes the body is a vessel of imprinted knowledge of experience, even when unacknowledged. Through ritual and deepening connection to the land she has experienced the body’s ability to translate that knowledge when it’s been needed.
Lucien Durey is a queer artist, writer and singer. He is the son of Americans who immigrated to Northern Saskatchewan in the 1970s. He now lives and works in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. His mixed media and performance-based practice engages with found objects, photographs, sounds, and place. His relationship to material is a maternal trait, influenced by his mother’s reverence for keepsakes and souvenirs.
Curator
Jenn Jackson is a curator, writer, and researcher. She has held a range of roles at post-secondary institutions, galleries and museums and in public art commissioning, connecting relationships and impacts between regional, national and international scales. Jackson has published texts oncontemporary art in catalogues, books and journals and is co-editor of Haunt, a non-profit that produces texts, editions, events, performances and exhibitions. Jackson has curated exhibitions and event programs at Libby Leshgold Gallery, SFU Galleries, Burrard Arts Foundation and 221A in Vancouver, as well as at Portland State University and documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, Germany.
Public Programs
Outdoor Walking Tour at Ambleside Park – May 6th, 2023, 2:30PM
This activity involves beach “combing” (or searching) the walking tour path, beach and the intertidal zone, collecting manmade debris – fragments of objects, glass and plastic, rusted metal, treated wood, and discarded materials. The beach combing gesture will be a mindful service of gratitude for the visited sites. Materials sourced through the beach combing activities will be cleaned, sorted, and used for subsequent scanner programs facilitated by the Gordon Smith Gallery. At the close of the program, all remaining materials will be deposited at the local recycling depot.
Scanner Workshop – May 27th, 2023, 2:30PM
The scanner workshop activity, led by artists Katie Kozak and Lucien Durey, will be a project-based learning experience that shares alternate material processes and technical experiments with everyday consumer grade scanners. The workshop will inspire questions around the scanner as a medium and result in a series of images that push the boundaries of the technologies’ intended use. Materials gathered from previous guided walking tours will be available to participants for use during the program. Each participant will receive a 4×6 print of the scan resulting from the program.
Performance – Lucien Durey & Bess Durey with Special Guests – June 3rd, 2023, 2:30PM
A special vocal performance by exhibiting artist Lucien Durey and his sister Bess Durey responding to the Endless Summer exhibition. Through storytelling and humour, each musical composition will bring forth narratives of friendship and collaboration.
Endless Summer is made possible by the generosity of the following sponsors:
