WELCOME TO
ARCHIVE CITY

Artist Bios

ABOUT ARCHIVE CITY

As a memory collection agency, Archive City explores the ways in which cultural memory becomes materialized in collections and archives. We aim to develop an ongoing dialogue about memory work and community development with audiences, artists, and researchers in various locations, locally and internationally. We are interested in the process of memory work being performed in the present moment and we take special interest in privileging unexpected or non-traditional forms of remembrance. Lois Klassen, Cindy Mochizuki, and Jaimie Robson are interdisciplinary artists who have combined their experiences in community-based and media production projects to investigate local memory and its possible representations. We work collaboratively on all levels of production, both conceptual and technical elements. Our community-involved performance as an art and memory collection agency recalls earlier work of early Vancouver art collectives such as the N.E. Thing Company. And it follows the contemporary practices of artists such as Katherine Shozawa’s Memory Boxes.

In her artworks and interventions, Lois Klassen considers the mechanisms of community development and representation. Since 2001, she has hosted Comforter Art-Action, an ongoing material response to human displacement that has involved over 200 individuals and groups from over 20 countries. Her project Time Keepers and Story Makers, which linked a First Nations school with a neighbouring rural Manitoba school, was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts Millennium Grant. Klassen has provided artist in residence programs for Artstarts (2007), Vancouver School Board (2004-6), and Artcity (Winnipeg, 2007). Her videos, installations and performances have recently been exhibited at CityScape (North Vancouver, 2008), VIVO Media Arts Centre (2006), The Western Front (2006), Transportale (Berlin, 2003), and aceartinc (Winnipeg, 1999). Her ad hoc publishing house, Light Factory Publications produces chapbooks and multiples. She will teach at the 2008 Summer Book Arts Intensive (ECI). Klassen currently serves as a Board Director for VIVO Media Arts Centre in Vancouver. In 2003 Lois completed a Post-graduate Certificate in Digital and Interactive Media in (ECIAD). She worked for almost 15 years, she worked as a community-based Occupational Therapist.

Cindy Mochizuki is an interdisciplinary artist interested in relationships between memory and history, and the construction of narratives that combine both the documentary and the imagined. She has been the Public Programs and Outreach Coordinator at VIVO Media Arts Centre (2006) and has curated a series of programs through the Powell Street Festival Society including Spatial Poetics (co-founded with Miko Hoffman, 2000). She was the coordinator of the Lost and Found (2007) web project that documents the work of three artists examining the disappearing histories of the Squamish Nation, Hogan’s Alley, and Japantown in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. She has served on many advisory boards for non-profit organizations and has directed two animated films at the National Film Board in Montreal, PQ. She has been a sessional instructor in the Asia-Canada Program at SFU and will be teaching a course in the Fall at ECU. She is currently the artist in residence at Theatre Replacement and is also coordinating a national human rights conference celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement. She holds a MFA from the School For Contemporary Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies.

Jaimie Robson’s artistic practice extends beyond gallery environments into social/public spaces: inviting dialogue between contemporary culture-making, pedagogy, community involvement, and public art. As co-founder of the non-profit arts organization Media Undefined, Robson co-developed and produced Our Community Story, a living history project that involved youth and seniors in Vancouver’s Hastings Sunrise Neighbourhood. This project involved 14 youth and 35 seniors and 6 mentoring artists resulted in the public presentations of 9 multi-media works that animated the Hasting Street corridor. In 2007, she was selected to create a sculptural seating area for the grounds of Hastings Elementary School, and since then has recently been commissioned to co-create a public art seating area in Hastings Sunrise Neighbourhood (2008). Robson performs with Thrice Upon, a performance trio that creates site-responsive installation-theatre. She has performed at the Firehall Arts Centre (2006, 07) and Vancouver East Cultural Centre (2006). A graduate from ECIAD (2002), she has participated in artist in residence programs in Vancouver, Alberta, and Istanbul. She serves on the board of Kiwassa Neighbourhood House.