If you have had the pleasure of waiting for the 99 bus outside our doors in the pouring rain, perhaps you have noticed the amazing art we are showing in the windows! We are proud to introduce to you – Asian Dick …
ARTIST STATEMENT
Asian Dick is a two-person art collective consisting of Jamie Armstrong and Alex M.F. Quicho. We make drawings, paintings, and prints about tender hearts and troublemakers. Personal anecdotes, family histories, and self-constructed symbols are used to speak about wider narratives of youth culture, disturbance, nostalgia, and the possibility of collective experience.
We are interested in the dialogue that happens when we bring our disparate practices into a forced relationship. We find resonance in both the disjuncture between the works and the serendipitous connections that are made by pitting these subjects against each other. Together, we force ourselves into uncomfortable spaces.
No Hard Feelings is the beginning, not the end, of our explorations. Within the work, we have located consistent themes about the idealism and discomfort of youth, and the need to both detail and generalize sources of violence, trauma, and personal history. These concerns are manifested in the decisive blocking out of identity in our photo-based images, and in the meticulously personal inscription of our drawn representations of things that may or may not exist.
Weirdness is a key term here, as is shyness, as is fronting. Both toughness and tenderness become ciphers for a hidden reality – they become ways to say what we can’t actually say.
BIO
Though the true beginnings of Asian Dick remain largely unknown, founding (and only) members Jamie Armstrong and Alex M.F. Quicho are fairly certain that it had something to do with a chance meeting at a McDonalds drive-thru after both getting ten-dollar haircuts at MasterCuts. They spent their teenage years getting drunk and making work together in their parents’ garages, and started an ill-fated rap group that fell apart when they realized that Alex couldn’t rap. No Hard Feelings at Black & Yellow marks the first exhibition of their consolidated body of work.
Jamie Armstrong is a mixed-media artist born and raised in Vancouver, B.C. He is currently pursuing his bachelor degree in Fine Arts with a concentration in painting, and is in his fourth year at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. He has shown work in group shows at Chapel Arts, the Concourse Gallery, the Fall Gallery, and The Cheaper Show, and has been featured in publications such as The Flood Magazine, Working Class Magazine, and the Jealous Curator.
Born in Boston, USA, Alex M.F. Quicho grew up in Manila, Philippines before immigrating to Vancouver, B.C. in 2000. She attended Concordia University in Montreal to pursue her Bachelor of Fine Arts before transferring to Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2011, where her objective remains mostly the same. She has shown work most recently in the Mont-Royal woods, and in a repurposed jewellery store/pop-up gallery called GIA PHAT in Montreal.
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Black& Yellow Gallery is a year-round project space located in Room 106 of East Hasting’s Waldorf Hotel (1489 East Hastings Street). Since opening in March 2011, our mandate has been to provide emerging artists with the opportunity to exhibit their work. We maintain a strong commitment to showcasing innovative, challenging, and fearless art. The gallery is not limited to any particular media or disciplines and instead encourages diversity from show to show. Over the past 18 months, Black & Yellow has shown work by respected and progressive artists such as Brad Harms,Office Supplies Incorporated, Paul de Guzman,Sarah Jane Holtom,and Graham Landin. Black & Yellow is supported by The Cheaper Show and the Emerging Arts Foundation.
