Be My Guest

Image: Elaine Tin Nyo, The Beast Menu, 2009, edition of 16 hand-typed menus, dinner of beasts, singing rabbits, a dancing bear and a circus dog, held in the studio of Michael Ballou, NY.

March 21 - June 6, 2021

Featuring Kiera Boult, Claudia Mattos, Rea McNamara, Elaine Tin Nyo, Jazmín Urrea, Monica Uszerowicz
Curated by Noor Alé

Please join us this coming spring and summer for a series of monthly casual conversations that will bring together artists, writers, and curators speaking about notions of community, spirituality, and ethics through mediated engagements with food and drink pairings. Before each conversation, participants will receive a menu with instructions to gather affordable ingredients in order to prepare the recipes for each engagement in their homes.

In our first conversation, LA-based artist Jazmín Urrea will speak about her practice's engagement with the presence of food deserts — areas with limited access to nearby affordable grocery stores — and the ways it disproportionately impacts Latinx communities in LA. Urrea will also be problematizing the trope of the American Dream in 90 Day Fiancé, a popular reality TV show that follows international couples through the complications of their K-1 fiancé visa process in the US. Writers Claudia Mattos, Rea McNamara, and Monica Uszerowicz are dedicated fans of BTS — Bangtan Boys, a seven-member South Korean boy band — and they will be chatting about kinship and care as it relates to this global fandom phenomenon. Artist and cultural worker Kiera Boult will read tarot cards for interested participants and will teach us how to make markikis — her version of a dirty martini. And lastly, artist and writer Elaine Tin Nyo will be discussing the ethics of consuming animals and examine the ways in which cultural food practices have been othered by the West.

All events are free and recipes can be altered to accommodate health needs. If registrants have any questions please contact Matthew Kyba, Curator of Exhibitions at curator@vac.ca

Curator Biography:

Noor Alé is a curator, art historian, and writer. She is the Associate Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. Her curatorial practice examines the intersections of contemporary art with geopolitics, decolonization, and social justice in the Global South. She has contributed to curatorial research, exhibition management, and public programmes at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Art Dubai. Alé holds an MA in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art, and a BA in Art History from the University of Guelph. Alongside Claudia Mattos she co-founded AXIS, an independent curatorial laboratory dedicated to exhibiting socially-engaged contemporary art. She was awarded curatorial residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Shanghai Curators Lab.

Events Calendar

Mucho y Más: Antojitos con Jazmín Urrea
Sunday, March 21 at 3:30 pm EDT / GMT-4
Pair this talk with chamoy apples and agua de fresa

Jazmín Urrea will be discussing her installation practice which calls attention to the prevalence of food deserts in her hometown of LA. She will also share her thoughts on 90 Day Fiancé through an analysis of four couples whose lives were documented before, during, and after acquiring a K-1 fiancé visa in the US. In her analysis, Urrea will address issues relating to culture shock, the dystopian reality of the American Dream, bureaucratic ordeals couples endure to receive the visa, and accusations partners face of just wanting a “green card.”

About the artist:
Jazmín Urrea’s multimedia practice examines symbols prevalent in Latinx communities. She received her MFA in Photography and Media from the California Institute of the Arts, and a BFA in Photography from CSU Long Beach. Urrea’s work was exhibited at the CURRENT:LA Public Art Triennial, Studio Museum in Harlem, the J. Paul Getty Museum, University Art Museum Long Beach, and SADE LA. In 2020, she was awarded the Rema Hort Maan Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. She currently lives and works in South Los Angeles, California.

Kocktails with Kiki
Saturday, April 17 at 7:30 pm EDT / GMT-4
Pair this talk with markikis (dirty gin martini)

Kiki welcomes viewers to take a seat at her kitchen table for hot gossip and kocktails. During this iteration of Kocktails with Kiki, she will be sharing her secret recipe for success: markikis (dirty gin martini) and tarot cards, walking viewers through the basics of how to read the cards and the pleasures of brine. In this session, Kiki will read tarot cards for 2 interested participants who want to speculate upon their future with us in an open-format discussion.

About the artist:
Kiera Boult is an interdisciplinary artist and performer from Hamilton. She employs camp and comedy to question and address issues that surround the role and identity of the artist and the institution. She holds a BFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD. Her work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Hamilton, and Trinity Square Video. She has participated in the Art Gallery of York University’s final Performance Bus, 7a*11D’s 7a*md8 – ONLINE, and Life of a Crap Head’s Doored. In 2019, Boult received the Hamilton Emerging Visual Artist Award. Her work was recently featured in Canadian Art’s Chroma issue. She is currently Vtape’s Submissions, Collections & Outreach Coordinator.

Food ethics with Elaine Tin Nyo
Sunday, May 16 at 12 pm EDT / GMT-4
Pair this talk with dumplings and cocktail
Conceptual artist, writer and cook Elaine Tin Nyo invites you for a virtual visit to a rustic french cooking school (The Kitchen at Camont) to chat about our complex relationship with our non-human relatives: pets, domestic livestock, zoo animals and wild animals. How do they define us? Why are some so cute? Why are some so delicious?

About the artist:
Elaine Tin Nyo is a conceptual artist with a kitchen and a studio in the southwest of France who employs food as a vehicle to explore issues of mortality and responsibility. Using performance, video, photography, cooking and writing, she reframes the everyday rituals of food and its preparation so we may reflect on the inherent beauty and value of the seemingly mundane moments of our lives. Her photographs, food, videos, installations, and performances have been presented at MoMA, Victoria & Albert Museum, New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and Bronx Museum. Tin Nyo has received project support from Creative Capital Foundation, The Phillips Collection, and Seoksu Art Project, among others. In addition to her visual arts background, she has learned at the side of home cooks and restaurant chefs on three continents. In addition to her visual arts background, she has learned at the side of home cooks and restaurant chefs on three continents.

Pandemic ARMY: Reflecting on BTS’s Parasocial Kinship
Sunday, June 6 at 7:00 pm EDT / GMT-4
Pair this talk with Soju Yogurt Cocktail or Soju Lemonade Cocktail, and K-POP corn

To be ARMY—which yes, actually stands for “Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth”—is to be amongst the millions and millions of loyal and passionate fans of BTS, who debuted in June 2013. Since the first lockdown, the K-pop idol group has garnered even more fans, largely in part to their frequent exchanges of visual content and its many meanings with their global fandom. This so-called fan service has had a generative effect, fostering a massive online communal space ripe with collaboration and collective care. Over a special Korean-inspired cocktail, curator Claudia Mattos, writer, curator and public programmer Rea McNamara and writer and photographer Monica Uszerowicz talk bias, fan cams, and #StayConnected hashtags in order to understand what it means to be “Pandemic ARMY,” and how artists, curators and organizations might learn—from a global pop sensation—about connectivity, solidarity, and responsive hybrid on- and offline social experiences.

Please enjoy these articles and playlists that are inspired by BTS:
1. BTS at the VAC (YouTube)
2. BTS at the VAC (Spotify)
3. How BTS’s Internet Presence Feeds “ARMY” Meme Production by Rea McNamara
4. The Public and Private Lives of BTS Blur on Tour by Monica Uszerowicz

Claudia Mattos is a curator and art historian based in Miami, Florida. She is the Director at the gallery David Castillo, Miami. Previously, she served as Assistant Curator of Media Arts and Live Events at The Baltimore Museum of Art where she curated exhibitions of works by Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin as well as the art collaborative DIS. She has contributed to exhibitions, curatorial research, and writing at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Curators International, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and Performa. She earned an MA with distinction in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London; and a BA in Art History and Visual Studies from Cornell University. In 2022, Claudia will be a Researcher-in-Residence at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.

Rea McNamara is a writer, curator and public programmer based in Toronto. She has curated multidisciplinary projects for The Gardiner Museum, The Wrong Digital Art Biennale, and the Drake Hotel, and founded the limited-run art party series Sheroes (2011-2012), which engaged with the collaborative process of fandom culture through music, performance, installation and internet-based art. Her work has been presented at The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Gallery of Toronto, Nuit Blanche Toronto, and Moogfest. In addition to her curatorial and programming practice, she has written extensively on art, culture, and the internet for frieze, Art in America, Canadian Art, Study Hall, The FADER, Art F City, VICE, NOW Magazine, and more. She is currently the Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellow for Curators at Hyperallergic.

Monica Uszerowicz is a freelance writer and photographer based in Miami, Florida. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Believer, BOMB, Burnaway, Cultured, Filmmaker Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Pin-Up, and elsewhere, and her photographs have been exhibited globally. With the support of a 2020 Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, she is currently working on a series of essays about Caribbean and Floridian artists whose work intersects with ecological activism and addresses the effects of climate change.