Hosted by the SFU Library, Collecting the Collector & Processing the Process is a two-part archival exhibition that guides you through the work of Barrie Phillip Nichol, better known as bpNichol, a Canadian poet and writer. This exhibit was curated by Dual MAS/LIS student Emma Metcalfe Hurst and Donald Shipton, MA student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University.
bpNichol was born in Vancouver in 1944. From the 1960s through to the 1980s, he led a prolific career as a writer of prose and poetry; the founder of two small presses, ganglia and grOnk; and a performer in the influential sound poetry quartet, The Four Horsemen. Today, Nichol remains a key figure in the history of the Canadian avant-garde. The exhibition unveils Nichol’s process as both a creator and a collector and traces the generative intersection at which these two roles converge.
Emma Metcalfe Hurst is a writer, curator, and researcher who is currently in her third year studying archives and librarianship (MASLIS) at the UBC iSchool. Her areas of interest include community, artist, and performing arts archives, public programming, and intellectual property rights. She has previously worked at Access Gallery, Nanaimo Art Gallery, grunt gallery, Western Front, Artspeak, Unit/Pitt, Co-op Radio, the UBC Music, Art, and Architecture Library, and the Museum of Anthropology. She recently launched the oral history and community archives project, Coming Out of Chaos: A Vancouver Dance Story, and was the project coordinator for Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week. She is currently working as an archivist for VIVO Media Arts Centre and Karen Jamieson Dance.
Donald Shipton is an MA student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. His scholarly interests reside primarily in contemporary Canadian literature and the archive. He is currently studying the chapbooks and ephemera of bpNichol, held in the Contemporary Literature Collection at SFU, with particular attention to their materiality and the possibility of replicating this in digital space.
Curator talk and guided tour of the bpNichol exhibit
Friday, November 4, 2022
3:30 p.m.
Special Collections and Rare Books, Room 7100, W.A.C. Bennett Library (SFU Burnaby)
SFU Library invites you to join the guided tour of their current exhibition, Collecting the Collector & Processing the Process: A Two-Part Exhibition of the bpNichol Fonds, followed by a curatorial talk and reception in Special Collections and Rare Books.
Student curators Donald Shipton and Emma Metcalfe Hurst will guide a tour of their exhibits on the 3rd and 7th floors of Bennett Library. They will speak about their curatorial process working through bpNichol’s archival fonds and about the various materials in the display cases. The tour will conclude with a reception inside the Yosef Wosk Room in Special Collections and Rare Books, where we will listen to a selection of archival audio recordings from the bpNichol fonds.
