Presented by: Gallery Gachet & WePress
Gallery Gachet and WePress will bring together 40 diverse participants from Downtown Eastside organizations, connect them with professional artists to make sketchbooks filled with artwork, and share that work and their stories at a public exhibition and art opening. The vision of the project is to help communities of the DTES dispel stereotypes about the neighbourhood and tell their own stories to the broader Vancouver community. It will bring together the best elements of WePress’ community workshops over the past year in letterpress, bookbinding, and block printmaking, and combine them with other media such as journaling, collage, hand-sewing and embroidery. The artists say, “The beauty of the sketchbook lies in its roughness, serendipity, and the unexpected. There is a freedom that comes from the reduced pressure of having to make ‘the one perfect piece’ and the chance to try many things over time.” The completed sketchbooks will be exhibited at Gallery Gachet for one week, with a public opening taking place on April 6, 2018. A host of community partners such as SFU Office of Community Engagement will support dissemination of the project to a wide Vancouver audience.