Arts & Culture

Candie Tanaka and Toni Zhang McAfee at Vancouver Lipont Art Centre on No. 3 Road, south of Cambie Road.

Chung Chow

Calling all artists to Converge!

By Lorraine Graves

Published 10:37 PDT, Wed May 3, 2017

Candie Tanaka dispels the stereotype of a typical library employee. The former dock-worker is a professional artist, writer, and impresario as well as executive director of ICOAAT, International Centre of Arts and Technology.

Candie Tanaka dispels the stereotype of a typical library employee.

The former dock-worker is a professional artist, writer, and impresario as well as executive director of ICOAAT, International Centre of Arts and Technology.

Billed as “an evening of Lit + Art + Video Games,” Converge offers an exciting new take on the arts.

“We have a brand new space right near Aberdeen Station,” Tanaka says. “We need artists so we’re calling on all artists in Richmond. What kind of artists? Any visual artists, including gamers plus creators and readers of literature. We have lots of wall space and we want to fill it up for Converge.”

According to Tanaka, artists can apply, getting in under the wire for the early March deadline for submissions by emailing icoaat@gmail.com

The Vancouver Lipont Art Centre also defies a stereotype. Once a No. 3 Road Acura car dealership, its spacious windows, high ceilings and wall of windows now seem custom-made to be a cutting edge commercial gallery.

So the first call is to artists of all sorts, visual artists, writers and musicians to sign up to present at the March 18 event. The second call is to the general public to attend.

One of the confirmed Vancouver artists, Deanne Achong, whose work has been in galleries world-wide, will present Slow Takes, two long-exposure photographs taken with a film camera. In these works, she tackles the concept of time. Achong says, “In today’s world of Instagram, Snapchat and the like, everything is almost instantaneous—including the sharing of the image. This project invites the audience to consider notions of time, and movement, where the blur created by the movement of the subject freely sitting during the longer exposure is part of the finished image.”

Much like the slow food movement, using slow film with the portrait subject sitting for anything from five to 30 minutes for their portrait lets the sitter savour both the moment and the results. Achong will also be taking slow portraits at the Converge event with the sitters able to download or acquire their slow portraits as a reminder of the event and Achong’s artistry.

With a list of over 10 writers coming to read from their original works, musicians performing, as well as a host of visual artists the evening promises to be a great evening to mix, mingle, nibble and sip your way through a visual and auditory feast.

All are welcome to attend Converge on Saturday, March 18 from 7 to 11 p.m., no one turned away. It’s pay-what-you-can with a suggested donation of $5 with the money collected going to the performers, artists, writers and to cover the cost of the snacks. There will be a cash bar as well so it should be a rocking event.

Converge is a chance to gorge on the visual arts, music, performance art, spoken word and we’ll even have a huge video screen for gamers. It’s a whole festival in one evening.