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Guillaume Leblon
October 14, 2016 to January 1, 2017
B.C. Binning and Alvin Balkind Galleries
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition by French artist Guillaume Leblon in a Canadian museum. His practice is characterized both by its diversity and the artist's shrewd manipulation of space. While he creates powerful, discrete objects, films and paintings, the presentation in Vancouver choreographs his works into a larger spatial narrative within the gallery venue exuding a potent sense of ephemerality and the uncanny.
Creating fictional landscapes or altering an existing space has long been Leblon's favoured technique for fuelling uncertainty and doubt in order to undermine the stark purity and perfect finish of the museum. At CAG Leblon transforms our gallery rooms with a major intervention. Plywood alterations to the floors and walls modify our perception of the space not only physically but also through the changes in acoustics, and so, by means of such a gesture of immediate and deft simplicity, we engage in a shared make-believe and the experience of a space redefined. Our awareness of the space is further shifted by a shelf that runs around the gallery wall perimeter, its changing height creating an odd disorientation disturbing our sense of sureness.
Interspersed among these new floor surfaces and along the sloping shelf is a selection of new and recent works which characteristically create a poetic universe, a world of its own, extending Leblon's ongoing propositions with a more tangible figurative presence. We are transported into a different realm, embracing an active, mobile, open relationship with the world. Questions arise concerning established associations – historically, culturally and socially constructed – between the exceptional and the normal, the manufactured and the existent, the personal and impersonal, the ephemeral and the permanent, the old and the new, the dead and the alive. The gallery becomes a landscape, a site somewhere between what is almost known and barely known.
This atmosphere or narrative impulse is created in other ways too. Incorporating familiar objects into his sculptures, from tables and shelves to industrial materials and processes such as plywood and casting, Leblon presents enigmatic constructions and subtly affected combinations which have a powerful, seductive, material presence. While his works refuse a single reading, Leblon having a non-hierarchical approach to his materials, they often conjure images of the ruin and the passage of time, the notion of the vanitas bringing the present and the past into contact. Leblon transforms everyday components into sculptures that attain a relic-like quality or the aura of a classical statue.
For this new exhibition Leblon brings together a group of works that evoke the suggestive potential of the body through the material and image of the resolved pieces themselves. A blank face without features, detached arms without hands, a clothed torso; each of these new evocative sculptures comprises a sort of shell or envelope for an absent body, a hollow core that speaks to questions of memory, dreams, fragmentation and possibility. This body of work also marks a transition in process and materials for Leblon. Over the years, the artist has shifted from working with found materials, remnants and organic matter to foundry work in materials like aluminum, marble and sand. Always invested in temporal concerns, Leblon sees this mutation in process as a transformation of the work's relationship to time.
While absence of the body is suggested, sometimes an imprint reveals a human form with shapeless contours, where the body is sensed by the viewer, or clothing and other fragments are employed where, ironically, there may remain traces of cigar ashes or of wear. The sculptures perform like characters within some larger narrative. Likely Political Circumstances (2016) is a man's jacket hovering phantom-like above dismembered arms as if held upright by an invisible thread, a scene of some violent action; Brother and Brother II (both 2016) both present a vessel form, also suggestive of hollowed out partial skulls, evoking a sliced through container whereby we might contemplate its former function or the potential to hold something be it matter or an idea.
This interest in transformations manifests itself in works that hint at a kind of alchemy for the artist. In these new works, Leblon uses forms that are made from hand blown glass or newer technologies, for the first time producing objects using 3D printing, the final sculptures retaining textural and visual evidence of its original humble material. Despite Leblon's notionally post-apocalyptic world his installations and collections of sculptures teem not only with innumerable, partially perceptible thoughts, but also with movement and life.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Institut Français and the Consulate général de France in Vancouver.
The exhibition is generously supported by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill.
Guillaume Leblon was born in Lille, France and currently lives and works in New York. Selected solo exhibitions include carlier | gebauer, Berlin (2016); Panorama, Marseille (2015); MassMoCA, North Adams; Institut d'Art Contemporain (IAC) Villeurbanne; Galerie Projecte SD, Barcelona; Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris (2014); Contemporary Art Museum of Sérignan, France (2012); Fondation Paul Ricard, Paris (2011); Le grand café, Centre d'art contemporain, Saint-Nazaire (2010); MUDAM, Luxembourg (2009); Centre d'art contemporain Culturgest, Porto; Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporaneo, CGAC, Santiago de Compostela (2008); Kunstverein Düsseldorf; Centre d'art contemporain – Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, France (2006), amongst many others. Leblon has participated in group exhibitions, most recently at Fondation d'entreprise Hermès, Paris and Brussels; Punta della Dogana, Venice; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Biennale de Lyon; Secession, Vienna; Bétonsalon, Paris; Gallery LABOR, Mexico City; Kunsthalle Saint-Gallen; Museum MARTa, Herford; Le Plateau, FRAC Ile de France, Paris; Fridericianum, Kassel; and CAC Vilnius. In 2011 he was nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp, Paris.
Leblon is represented by Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris; carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Galerie Projecte SD, Barcelona.MORE
White, Steel, Slice, Mask
Window spaces
September 10, 2016 – January 1, 2017
Bear Claws Salad Hands
Off-site: Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Canada Line
September 10, 2016 – March 19, 2017
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents an ambitious new multi-venue commission by collaborators Dutch artist Mirjam Linschooten and Canadian artist Sameer Farooq, interrogating the ways in which cultural diversity is narrated and represented. Working together for over a decade, the duo's interdisciplinary practice creates community-based models of participation in order to reimagine a material record of the present. Utilizing installation, photography, design and writing, they investigate the tactics and methods of anthropology to examine various forms of collecting, interpretation and display. The result is work that reveals how institutions speak about our lives, evoking an archeology of the present often existing beyond the framework of the gallery. Their expansive projects develop intricate, speculative archives repurposing found objects and language to expose ruptures within cultural representation, questioning the invisibility of the archivist and interrogating the inherent value bias in collecting.
Over the past year Farooq and Linschooten have undertaken a series of cumulative research trips via the Burrard Marina Field House Studio Residency Program toward the development of installations at CAG, the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station and the Museum of Anthropology (MOA). Core to the various commissions are participatory workshops led by the artists with the Native Youth Program (NYP) at MOA, a program for Indigenous youth from Greater Vancouver where students engage in various aspects of working within a museum context, leading public tours, completing research projects and participating in presentations. Farooq and Linschooten invited NYP participants to consider their personal narratives in relation to the anthropological museum's displays, identifying key elements for examination in the Multiversity Galleries. Throughout the histories of colonialism and capitalism innumerable cultural objects have entered museum collections around the world detached from the communities and physical bodies they belong to. Ripped from context and trapped behind glass, rearranged and discombobulated, the cultural authenticity, specificity and vitality of these objects are dismembered into taxonomies of otherness. Within the window spaces at CAG, Farooq and Linschooten consider such acts of ethnographic curation. Reflecting tensions between local communities and their representation in museums, Farooq and Linschooten focus on ongoing cultural forms that persist in contemporary culture. Replicating, yet also subverting, the supposed objective aesthetic of museum vitrines, Farooq and Linschooten have installed a collection of mass-produced cultural objects purchased from shops across the lower mainland, notionally representative of Vancouver's largest immigrant communities. Display mechanisms such as shelves, hooks and bars are used to disrupt and unsettle the objects, disturbing the meticulous arrangement and suggestive of the uneasy relations between the conserved and custodian, artifact and everyday object, revealing the unintended violence of display.
At Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Farooq and Linschooten repurpose found language from a local souvenir shop highlighting the active commodification of culture. During their time in Vancouver the artists discovered Hudson House Trading Company, a typical tourist store in Gastown selling a plethora of Canadian 'knick-knacks' that capitalize on perceptions of Vancouver's identity via a collection of cultural reproductions for sale. Through the simple act of reproducing the language of the store's inventory list and applying the names of a selection of items directly onto the station windows, the Canada Line façade operates like an advert exaggerating the wholesale co-opting of culture as currency.
The re-appropriation of found images, objects and language developed into public installations both exaggerate and subvert the ethnographic strategies of representation and implicate such practices into a larger system of commodification utilized to propagate cultural hierarchy, difference and discrimination.
Projects are generously supported by the BC Arts Council Innovations Program, the Mondriaan Fund and the Hamber Foundation. Farooq and Linschooten's collaboration with the Native Youth Program is developed in collaboration with the Museum of Anthropology. The project at Yaletown- Roundhouse Station is presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program — IntransitBC.
The interdisciplinary practice of Sameer Farooq (Canada) and Mirjam Linschooten (Netherlands) can be situated as an expanded documentary practice, presenting counterarchives, new additions to museum collections or making buried histories visible. Their work has been exhibited in various countries, including: Belgium, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Montenegro, Morocco, Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland and Turkey. Recent projects include The Figure in the Carpet, Blackwood Gallery, Toronto (2015); Faux Guide, Trankat, Morocco (2014); The Museum of Found Objects, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2011); The Museum of Found Objects, Sanat Limani, Istanbul (2010) and Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue, Artellewa, Cairo (2014).MORE
Montreal-based, Kanien'keha:ka artist Skawennati joins us for the first phase of her Field House Residency.
In collaboration with the Museum of Anthropology, Emily Carr University of Art + Design and the Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF), a branch of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), she will be leading an intensive workshop called Skins participating in MOA's Native Youth Program.
Skins will involve six Indigenous youth currently participating in the Native Youth Program, part of an ongoing relationship between CAG and MOA. Hosted at ECUAD, the workshop will begin with an exploration of storytelling as oral tradition folding into how stories can be told in new ways through 'machinima' (a portmanteau of "machine" and "cinema"). Using Second Life, an online virtual environment, participants will learn script development and storyboarding, avatar/character creation, virtual set design, filming and editing in a virtual world. Skins aims to expand Indigenous presence online, provide new design skills and impart understanding of narrative structures while also questioning notions of identity and stereotype. The Skins workshop aims to empower Indigenous youth to use new technologies to tell their stories.
She will also begin work toward a new commission to be realized in 2017.
Skawennati is known for her pioneering new media projects that address history, the future and change. They include the on-line gallery/chat-space and mixed-reality event CyberPowWow (1997–2004); a paper doll/ time-travel journal Imagining Indians in the 25th Century (2001); and TimeTraveller™ (2008–2013), a multi-platform project featuring nine machinima episodes. Born in Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, Skawennati is Co-Director with Jason E. Lewis of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research network of artists, academics and technologists investigating, creating and critiquing indigenous virtual environments. This year, AbTeC launched IIF, the Initiative for Indigenous Futures.
This project was made possible through the support of the BC Arts Council's Youth Engagement grant.
The Field House Studio Residency Program is generously supported by Vancouver Park Board and the City of Vancouver, along with many private and individual donors. For 2016–2019 we acknowledge the generous support for the Field House Studio Residency Program by the Vancouver Foundation.
For further details about the program, all forthcoming residencies and associated events visit our website at www.contemporaryartgallery.ca and follow the blog at www.burrardmarinafieldhouse.wordpress.comMORE
Amaara Raheem
May 16 to June 8, 2016
In partnership with Access Gallery and Burrard Arts Foundation's Twenty-three Days at Sea, CAG hosts artist Amaara Raheem at the Burrard Marina Field House for a one month production period.
Twenty-three Days at Sea offers a unique residency aboard a cargo ship sailing from Vancouver to Shanghai. Raheem, Sri Lankan born, and now based between Melbourne, Australia, and London, UK, is an in(ter)dependent dance artist. Feeding off her own experience of in-betweenness, Raheem's practice investigates the aesthetics and ethics of mobility, placing language, objects and movement in parallel, in order to embody flux. Currently a PhD Candidate in the School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Raheem is ultimately interested in questioning the coherence of systems that humans create to "know" the world around them, creating arrangements that offer uncertainty, play and new possibilities.
Following the residency, Raheem will feature in the group exhibition Twenty-three Days at Sea, Chapter One: Nour Bishouty, Christopher Boyne, Elisa Ferrari and Amaara Raheem which opens at Access Gallery on May 27, 2016.
In Conversation: Amaara Raheem with Kimberly Phillips
With performance by the artist
Thursday, June 2, 2016, 7:00 PM
Burrard Marina Field House Studio, 1655 Whyte Ave
Amaara Raheem is 'Twenty-Three Days at Sea's' fourth artist-in-residence. A Sri Lankan born dance artist, based between Melbourne, Australia, and London, UK, Raheem's practice places her own body in fluid states to investigate the aesthetics and ethics of mobility. Raheem departed for Shanghai on the MV Hanjin Geneva on April 19, and upon her return from Asia in May, the Contemporary Art Gallery will host her at the CAG Burrard Marina Field House Studio to process the experience and produce her work for the exhibition, which opens May 27, 2016.
At this event, held in her temporary place of residence at the CAG Field House, Raheem and Access Director/Curator Kimberly Phillips will converse about the role of anticipation and imagination in her preparations for the residency voyage, and Raheem will perform a new work in response to her time at sea. More information to follow at accessgallery.ca.
Amaara Raheem is a Sri Lankan born, Melbourne and London based dance artist. Her practice investigates the ethics and aesthetics of mobility, placing language, objects, and movement in parallel, in order to embody flux. She is currently a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture and Design and RMIT Melbourne.
Twenty-Three Days at Sea: A Travelling Artist Residency is an Access Gallery initiative, produced in partnership with the Burrard Arts Foundation and the Contemporary Art Gallery. Partial sponsorship of the sea voyages is graciously offered by Reederei NSB, assistance in Asia by China Residencies and Art Contraste, and at the Port of Vancouver by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Access is grateful for the ongoing support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia government through the BC Arts Council and BC Gaming, the City of Vancouver, and our donors, members, and volunteers.MORE
Isabel Nolan
The weakened eye of day
July 29 to October 2, 2016
B.C. Binning and Alvin Balkind Galleries
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major new body of work by Irish artist Isabel Nolan, conceived as a single project across successive evolving presentations at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Mercer Union, Toronto and CAG.
Nolan's work encompasses text, sculpture, drawing and textiles, and often begins with the close scrutiny of individual literary or artistic works, or evolves out of consciously erratic and diverging enquiries into the aesthetics of varied fields. Ranging from cosmology, to theories and systems of medicine detailing the makeup and workings of the human body or to illuminated manuscripts, all provide potential stimuli for investigation. The exhibition takes its title from the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy's The Darkling Thrush (1899), in which the sun, described as "the weakening eye of day", is a dismal star drained of its force by a gloomy pre-centennial winter afternoon. As the sun's gaze weakens, so flags the spirit of the poet who, until interrupted by birdsong, sees only the inevitability of death in the cold world around him. The show thereby examines how light manifests as a symbol in our thoughts, obsessions and pursuits, and oscillates around a series of ideas as a material account of the known and unknown strangeness of the world, from the formation of the planet's crust to the death of the sun and the enduring preoccupation with light as a metaphor for truth, hope and optimism.
Writing is an important tool for Nolan, and at the beginning of the show, a single sculptural form appears perhaps as the protagonist of an improbable story. Rock founded place (2014) is a large-scale scrolled text written by Nolan that imagines the viewpoint of the oldest rock in the world, whose exposure to deep time and the precariousness of existence is profoundly different to our own. In this world, time, knowledge and forms of life are recognizable yet play utterly different histories and roles than in our own civilization.
Throughout the exhibition, individual pieces unfold to both seduce and disarm. Nolan uses this as a device to cause us reflection upon our relationship to light as a means by which the world is framed. She provides opportunities to reveal the contingency not only of our own world, but also of our myriad ways of knowing and being in it. Underpinning this is a desire to examine and capture in material form the occasions of intensity that can define our encounters with the objects around us; inexplicable and unsettling moments that leave us with a heightened awareness of what is means to be alive. For the artist this exploration happens through making things; whether these things are sculptures, textiles, photographs or texts. Monumental or intimate in scale, they are presented to us as tentative and precarious markers of the experience of our place beneath the sun.
Across all spaces at CAG, discrete works trace a progression reflective of different human attempts to understand our place in the universe. From Rock founded place we might move to consider a small-scale abstract painting such as Dreams of no thing, no time (2014), the enigmatically diagrammatic steel construction Somewhere between Andromeda and Vulpecula: Sky Atlas (2014) or Fourfold sorrows (Jesus you look so sad) (2015), an impressive woven carpet connecting wall to floor. Contemplating these and other pieces such as the collection of brightly coloured ceramic vessels, Nothing new under the sun (2014), all combine to reflect Nolan's interest in the way colour and light are used to express religious or spiritual sensibilities. Elsewhere, the intimate drawings Based on my recent observations (1–7) (2014) and the large-scale photograph The view from nowhen (2014) are informed by modern cosmology, wherein scientific theories and technologies articulate our contemporary relationship to the universe. And as we meander through the space of the gallery, we are finally confronted by what at first appears a somewhat surreal image, this mural of two donkeys photographed in Bully's Acre, a former public cemetery located near the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin. Referred to in myth and folklore from around the world as well as embodying different symbolic references in classical and ancient cultures and across different faiths, these donkeys provide a provocation that cannot be met: a stubborn and inscrutable view from a world that can never be fully known.
As with all of Nolan's oeuvre, the works in The weakened eye of day reveal, through their very subjective and intimate nature, the arbitrariness and inherent absurdity of attempting to tackle the enormity of these subjects through the process of object making. Yet the objects are made and for Nolan they also find, with varying degrees of (un)certainty, their place under the sun.
Originated by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, this new selection of work for the exhibition is presented in collaboration with Mercer Union, Toronto and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.
The exhibition is supported by the Culture Ireland programme for 2016 celebrating Ireland's Centenary.
We also acknowledge the generous assistance of Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.
Isabel Nolan lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. Recent solo exhibitions include Mercer Union, Toronto (2016); Launch Pad, New York; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2015); Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2014); The Return Gallery, Goethe Institut, Dublin; Musée d'art Moderne de Saint-Etienne (2012); The Model, Sligo (2011); Gallery Side 2, Tokyo (2010); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; ARTSPACE, New Zealand (2008); Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2005). Nolan represented Ireland at the 2005 Venice Biennale in a group exhibition, "Ireland at Venice 2005". Other recent group shows include Lofoten International Arts Festival (LIAF), Svolvær, Norway; Artspace, Sydney (2015); Wallspace Gallery, New York (2014); Palais de Tokyo, Paris; David Nolan Gallery, New York; Villa Datris, Fondation pour la Sculpture Contemporain, France; Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2013); EVA International, Limerick (2012); Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2011); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2010); Accademia d'Ungheria, Rome; The Daejeon Museum of Art, South Korea; Bielefelder Kunstverein, Germany; Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland; AkkuH, Hengelo, The Netherlands; Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, Northern Ireland; SMART Project Space, Amsterdam (2009); Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Stroom Den Haag (2007). Work is held in public collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art; The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Allied Irish Bank; Arts Council of Ireland; Kildare Co. Council and various private collections in Europe and USA. Nolan is represented by Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.MORE
Window Spaces
Wrapping around the gallery building, the new commission Some words, some more words (2016) by British artist duo John Wood and Paul Harrison, continues their ongoing investigation into the world that surrounds us, the objects we encounter and use daily, and our fundamental engagement with the physical universe in all its sometime or seemingly futile existence. Characteristically playful, phrases are deliberately juxtaposed and positioned against each other to create a fragmentary narrative, drawing our attention to the familiar made strange by altering perceptions of the surrounding architecture and revealing the what and how of how we read language.
John Wood and Paul Harrison live and work in Bristol, UK. Notable solo exhibitions include Von Bartha, Basel; NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; Carroll/Fletcher, London (2015); Museo de Antioquia, Medellin, Columbia (2014); Frist Centre, Nashville, H&R Block Artspace, Kansas and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2011-12); Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland; University of California, Santa Barbara (2010); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2009); PICA, Perth (2008); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2007); Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK (2005); Tate Britain, London; MoMA, New York; MIT, Boston (2004) and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2002).MORE
Jérôme Havre
Untitled (2010)
April 15 to August 31, 2016
Off-site: Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Canada Line
This exhibition is part of Capture Photography Festival.
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a new commission by Jérôme Havre, the artist's first project in Vancouver. Originally from France, Havre's work considers representation, circulation, transmission and translation of black identities, interrogating racialized stereotypes and ideologies projected onto bodies.
Drawing directly onto a found family portrait, Untitled (2010) is a blunt gesture. The image depicts a family posed against a vintage car in a tropical landscape, its warm hues of analog colour giving entry to a past generation. Havre disrupts the scene, scrawling doodles of mask-like forms in white-out directly on to each family member's face, erasing identity and subjectivity, reforming these physical bodies as alien figures.
Masks are objects held in high esteem in western culture. Through centuries of colonial violence and capitalist extraction these specific objects sit in private and museum collections around the world detached from the action, ritual, communities and physical bodies that they were made for. Disembodied heads without voice, these masked bodies are "stilled," re-contextualized as stand-ins to represent otherness, here a reflection on western perceptions of blackness.
Jérôme Havre lives and works in Toronto having completed his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Since 2001 he has exhibited in Europe, Africa and North America, including most recently Talking Back, Otherwise, Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto; Paradis: La fabrique de l'image, 14N 61W, Martinique; Land Marks, Peterborough Art Gallery, all in 2015. Havre is currently artist in residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario.MORE
Jochen Lempert
Field Guide
May 6 to July 17, 2016
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first major museum exhibition in Canada devoted to the celebrated German photographer Jochen Lempert. Trained as a biologist, Lempert photographs plants, animals and other natural phenomena with both scientific acumen and a poetic appreciation of natural beauty. His approach is scientific as well as humorous. Always working in black and white, his work engages with a diverse range of subjects and genres, ranging from everyday views to abstracted details. Photographic series alternate with single pictures, highly contrasted images with almost blank papers, through which multiple links and subtle associations are woven.
Ranging from medium-sized to small and tiny prints, the exhibition comprises Lempert's now classic repertoire of flora and fauna, and focuses on a range of work produced over the last five years that examines the indexical nature of photography itself, notions of time and connections to the history of image making, mutability, classification and materiality. The subject of interest of Lempert's work—animal life—is complemented by his exploration of the properties and materiality of the photographic image, as revealed in its developing and printing processes. While seemingly serendipitous, Lempert nevertheless pursues a very clear goal and aesthetic. His is a very careful, subtle world.
In Vancouver the exhibition is generously supported by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V. Organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver in collaboration with the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Jochen Lempert lives and works in Hamburg, Germany. Selected solo exhibitions include Cincinnati Art Museum (2015); ProjecteSD, Barcelona, Spain; Overbeck-Gesellschaft Verein von Kunstfreunden e.V., Lübeck, Germany; Städtische Galerie Nordhorn, Germany (2014); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico; Norma Mangione gallery, Torino, Italy (2013); Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; Rochester Art Center, Rochester (2012); Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Front Room. Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Saint Louis (2010); Domaine de Kerguéhennec Centre d'Art Contemporain, Bignan, France; Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal (2009). His work has recently been included in group exhibitions at Fotomuseum Antwerp, Belgium; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Germany; Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, Austria; Fondation D'Enterprise Ricard, Paris; The Photographers' Gallery, London; Marian Goodman, Paris; Biennial for Contemporary Art; FRAC Bretagne, Rennes, France; Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany; and the Paris Triennial, amongst many others. His work is held in many public collections including: Fundació "La Caixa", Barcelona, Spain; Colección Banco de España, Madrid, Spain; CNAP, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, France; FRAC Bretagne, Rennes, France; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Fondation Norac, Rennes, France; Les Abbatoirs–Musée d'art modern et contemporain and Frac Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse, France; Museum Ludwig Köln; Museum Folkwang Essen; and Kunstmuseum Bonn, amongst many others. In 2005 Lempert was the winner of the Edwin-Scharff Preis, Hamburg and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2014. He is represented by ProjecteSD, Barcelona.MORE
Saturday, April 9, 2016, 7pm
Off-site: Pyatt Hall at VSO School of Music, Vancouver
Ticket available at: www.picatic.com/CAGglass
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a new performative sound work with Norwegian/US artist/musician Camille Norment in collaboration with Victoria's Experimental Music Unit: Tina Pearson, George Tzanetakis, and Paul Walde.
Norment performs with a glass armonica, a legendary eighteenth century instrument that creates ethereal music from glass and water. Combined with EMU's reputation for sonic investigations of relationships between the natural world, sound and music, and between notation, improvisation and attention states in music making, Norment and EMU will develop a work that resonates with local history.
Songs for Glass Island will use US visual artist Robert Smithson's failed 1969 proposal for the Strait of Georgia, Glass Island (or Island of Broken Glass) as point of departure. Granted permission by the Canadian Government, Smithson planned encrusting Miami Islet west of Fraser Point in 100 tons of broken glass. However, as public pressure against the idea mounted from environmentalists and anti-Americanists, it was suspended by a governmental telegram. Aside from drawings, letters, and plans, the only physical artifacts which remain are studies which Smithson called "maps." What would have been Smithson's first "permanent" earthwork morphed via the idea's failure into the famous Spiral Jetty made the following year.
Throughout March and April, Norment will be in residence at the University of Victoria where she will be writing and rehearsing with EMU members. Using glass in various forms as their primary instruments, they will prepare a set of inter-related works including newly developed instrumentation, that imagine the possible sounds, stories, textures and ecologies of Smithson's fabled island. Reflecting the themes in structure and content, sound will weave viscerally through this glass world, the project residing in realistic and fantasy scenarios provoked by Smithson's proposal: glass as a material; glass in acoustic and marine ecology; inevitable mounds of post-catastrophe glass shards; and metaphors associated with glass, such as glass ceilings, broken barriers, reflection, transparency and invisibility.
Through the creative process, the juxtaposition of the practices of sound and experimental music performance in glass will create a visually stunning and sonically captivating audiovisual concert-length program that will debut in progress at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and be followed by its premiere performance in Vancouver presented by CAG at Pyatt Hall. Recordings of these works and performances will be subject to a subsequent audio publication.
CAG will also partner later this year with Norment and the Montreal Biennale.
Camille Norment is a multidisciplinary American artist living in Oslo, Norway. Her work has been the subject of numerous international exhibitions and performances including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013) and a commissioned artwork and performance for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2012). In 2015 she presented Rapture, a site-specific, sculptural and sonic installation in the Nordic Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. She regularly performs and records with the Camille Norment Trio in which she plays the glass armonica.
EMU is a sound ensemble of LaSaM Music from Victoria, British Columbia featuring performer/composers Tina Pearson, George Tzanetakis, Paul Walde and producer Kirk McNally. During the past four years EMU has developed a reputation for sonic investigations of relationships between the natural world, sound and music, and between notation, improvisation and attention states in music making.
Songs for Glass Island is presented in partnership with LaSaM Music, Victoria and is supported by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway through its program for International Support, The Canada Council for the Arts, The University of Victoria through its Distinguished Women Scholars Fund, the Orion Fund in Fine Arts and the Department of Visual Arts.MORE
John Wood and Paul Harrison
February 12 to April 24, 2016
B.C. Binning Gallery and windows
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Canada by British duo John Wood and Paul Harrison. Their practice unfolds as a way of observing the human condition, an ongoing investigation into the world that surrounds us, the objects we encounter and use daily, and our fundamental engagement with the physical universe in all its sometime or seemingly futile existence.
Comprising various everyday objects, drawings, photographs and videos, the exhibition provides a survey detailing recent propositions for the artists where narrative comes seeping in: taste, politics, aspiration, planning, individual and collective dreaming and ambition appear, literally and metaphorically, opening up on to the world outside. Time, as perceived in an action on video, lengthens from seconds into decades within the sculptural forms, and the focus widens from a momentary encounter in a studio to a project in a landscape or a vision of things to come. As viewers we become implicated in their tragicomic world of absurdist humour leading to both simultaneous delight and sombre reflection on the failures of human endeavour.
The installation contains a selection of new sculptures using tools, drawing equipment and other useful items in various media. For example, two propelling pencils share a single lead; another pencil has been sharpened right down to the rubber end and remains housed in its sharpener; a length of string is measured against a ruler; two balls of string, one un-wound then re-wound, the other original, and a single glue stick, stuck head first onto a wall. The humour is dry and the jokes visual; the familiar made strange by altering perceptions.
Connecting these sculptural works is a selection of videos, typical of their practice while sharing a pared-down set of qualities. 10×10 (2011) and Semi Automatic Painting Machine (2014) deconstruct the very nature of the moving image and its means of presentation, investigating narrative structure, representation, transformation and the history of cinematic worlds through various devices that reference both digital and analogue production. Their most recent video Erdkunde (2015) playfully connects out from the studio into the "real" world. By encompassing a world of things it causes us to reconsider the sculptures on show and the geography these suggest, an essential optimism within the futility of ongoing attempts, a testament to our ability to overcome obstacles, to forge ahead for a better world.
Long has Wood and Harrison's work being concerned with the body, characteristically employing a vocabulary that connects into the spatial concerns and material world of choreography and contemporary dance, and is a practice that engages with attributes such as trust, cause and effect, action and reaction, and the physical arena and dimensions in which movement and gesture occurs. To this end, alongside the exhibition we will premiere a major new live performance later this year, a first for Wood and Harrison, who are working with Ballet BC to develop an ambitious joint commission, a new dance work, complete with movement, direction, costumes and staging.
The art-dance commission is produced in collaboration with Ballet BC with support in part from the Kickstarter community in partnership with Art Basel Crowdfunding Initiative.
John Wood and Paul Harrison live and work in Bristol, UK. They have many notable solo exhibitions including Von Bartha, Basel; NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; Carroll/Fletcher, London (2015); Museo de Antioquia, Medellin, Columbia (2014); Frist Centre, Nashville, H&R Block Artspace, Kansas and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2011-12); Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland; University of California, Santa Barbara (2010); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2009); PICA, Perth (2008); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2007); Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK (2005); Tate Britain, London; MoMA, New York; MIT, Boston (2004) and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2002). They have also participated in group exhibitions worldwide: Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2015); OK Centre for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; Tokyo Station Gallery; Itami City Museum of Art; Kochi Museum of Art; Okayama Museum of Art (2014); Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (2013); MOBY, Israel; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2011); Centre d'Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona (2010); Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2008); Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva (2007); Hayward Gallery, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006); Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh (2005); Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2002); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2003); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1998) among others. Work is held in various public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris; MoMA, New York; Ludwig Collection, Aachen; Tel Aviv Museum; Kadist Foundation, Paris and Tate, London. John Wood and Paul Harrison are represented by Carroll/Fletcher, London; Von Bartha, Basel; Martine Aboucaya, Paris and Vera Cortes, Lisbon.MORE
Patrick Staff
The Foundation
February 12 to April 24, 2016
Alvin Balkind Gallery and off-site
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents The Foundation, a new and expansive body of work by artist Patrick Staff, their first solo exhibition in Canada. The project, which centres around a major film installation but also comprises sculpture, print, and text, explores queer intergenerational relationships as they are negotiated through a body of historical materials. The film combines footage shot at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles—home to the archive of the erotic artist and gay icon and a community of people that care for it—with choreographic sequences shot within a specially constructed set.
The legacy of Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991), better known as Tom of Finland, spans multiple generations; his work made a considerable impact on masculine representation and imagery in post-war gay culture. The foundation was established in 1984 by Tom and his friend Durk Dehner to preserve his vast catalogue of homoerotic art, whilst endeavouring to – to quote the organization's website – 'educate the public to the cultural merits of erotic art and in promoting healthier, more tolerant attitudes about sexuality.' Today, Durk runs the organization and lives in the house, along with a handful of other employees and artists.
Rather than focusing on Tom of Finland's work, Staff's film evokes the foundation as a set of relations. It explores how a collection is formed and constituted and the communities that produce and are produced by a body of work. Through observational footage of the house, its collections and inhabitants, the foundation is revealed as a domestic environment, a libidinal space, an archive, an office and a community centre; a private space which is also the home of a public-facing organization and the source of a widely dispersed body of images. In the work, Staff foregrounds their own identity and personal dialogue with the different communities of the foundation to consider how ideas of inheritance and exchange are complicated by gender identity and presentation; in this context, of a younger trans person within a context dominated by the overtly masculine, male identity of an older generation. The documentary style footage of the foundation is intercut with a series of scenes, which are shot in a set incorporating aspects of the building's architecture and technologies and operate within the register of experimental theatre. These sequences, featuring interactions with an older actor, use choreography and prop to explore the body as a site for the construction and deconstruction of subjectivities.
Through a varied, interdisciplinary and often collaborative body of work comprising film, dance and performance, Staff considers ideas of discipline, dissent, labour and the queer body, frequently drawing on the historical narration of counter-culture, radical activity and alternative forms of community building. This new work is the product of several years' research and dialogue with the Tom of Finland Foundation and is Staff's most ambitious and large-scale project to date, bringing together languages of film and live performance with sculptural materiality to explore the body as a political, living archive. The Foundation explores the complexities of cultural artifacts and collective identities, via an examination of ownership, appropriation, responsibility and desire.
For Vancouver CAG has developed a new broadsheet publication and an associated film screening event co-programmed by Staff with Canadian curator and writer Robin Simpson. Continuing the format of Staff's recent screening-performances Dreams of Travel (2014) and Uniform Smoke (2015), this expanded public programming brings together a number of voices that generate resonances with the politics and interpersonal relationships that constitute the project, rather than describing or fixing the meaning of the work. Grounded within a Canadian context, it seeks to forge a connection among Trans/Queer contexts, production, dialogues and communities. The broadsheet contains specially commissioned texts by Juliet Jacques, Paige Sarlin and Staff and Simpson and will be distributed city wide, in Vancouver, as well as in Toronto via defunct Xtra newspaper boxes.
The Foundation is co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London; Spike Island, Bristol; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Co-produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London and Spike Island, Bristol.
With thanks to the Tom of Finland Foundation.
The Foundation is supported by Arts Council England Grants for the Arts, The Elephant Trust and the Genesis Prize.
The broadsheet publication and screening project is supported by The British Council.
Hazel Meyer
Muscle Panic
Sunday, January 31, 2016; 2pm
B.C. Binning Gallery
Hazel Meyer's projects explore seemingly disparate yet overlapping preoccupations — intestines and athletics, feminism and the absurd, anxiety and textiles — using scale, language, repetition, gentle confrontation and ecstatic immersion. Recent projects include solo exhibitions at MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie and Art Metropole, Toronto; group exhibitions at Doris McCarthy Gallery, Scarborough and Trifecta Gallery, Las Vegas; publications with Little Joe (UK) and Idea Exchange, Cambridge and residencies at Embassy of Foreign Artists, Geneva and Scrap Metal Gallery, Toronto.
Hazel Meyer's mutable body of work, Muscle Panic, considers the performance of the athletic. Evoking the imagery of momentous sports history, the bodily gestures and actions of a drill or warmup and the aesthetics of the gymnasium, Meyer instigates an arena of sweat and queer desire. Multiple iterations of Muscle Panic have taken the project from a rogue basketball gym built in an abandoned barn to a clandestine locker room to a warehouse-like gymnastics studio. Simultaneously an installation and a performance, Muscle Panic transforms the banal and austere white cube into a hot physically charged site for emotional and physical exchange. For CAG, Meyer has developed an installation of imagery and objects evoking the potentially queer sensibilities of the athletic. The installation will become the set for an afternoon event in which performers animate the set through a series of drills exploring endurance as gendered phenomena within sport.MORE
Margaret Dragu
The Library Project: Interdisciplinarity as the Catalyst of Knowledge
Saturday, January 30, 2016; 11am–2pm
B.C. Binning Gallery and Reading Room
The Library Project is an ongoing series of participatory events exploring the body as a source and site of knowledge. Interrogating the strategies of contemporary academic and corporate forms of group knowledge exchange and skill building such as the TED Talk, conference, workshop and lecture, each performance playfully explores personal history, archive and pedagogy. Inspired by the Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate, Malala Yousafzai's
call to action at the UN, "Let us pick up our books and our pens. They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world. Education is the only solution." The Library Project seeks to develop a space and platform for knowledge sharing through performative acts. For CAG, Dragu will host a daytime intensive workshop considering the idea of trans-interdisciplinarity. Alongside this in our reading room we present the video archive of the five previous iterations at the Bickersteth Library, Hart House, University of Toronto; Richmond Public Library; Kamloops Art Gallery; Your Kontinent: Richmond International Film & Media Arts Festival and Month of Performance Art, Berlin.
Margaret Dragu works in video, installation, web-based/book-publication and performance. Spanning relational, durational, interventionist and community-based practices, her performances have been presented in galleries, museums, theatres, nightclubs, libraries, universities and sitespecific venues including parks, botanical
gardens, and public parade routes across Canada, the United States and Europe. An innovator and pioneer in Canadian art, Dragu was the recipient of the Governor General's Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2012.MORE
Cindy Mochizuki
Saturday, January 30 and Sunday, January 31, 2016; 10am and 3:30pm daily
Off-site: Embark from Yaletown Ferry Dock, Quayside Marina, 1088 Marinaside Crescent and disembark at Burrard Marina Field House, 1655 Whyte Avenue
Paper introduces us to K, a woman who runs a small, family restaurant off a mysterious island along the shores of Japan. One evening, just before closing, a man appears at the door for a meal. What follows is a series of strange events that allows K to peer into a portal created by a tiny hole in her paper menu. A second chapter of Rock, Paper, Scissor an ongoing trilogy of multi-media experiences set in the time frame of 1900–2100, Paper bridges Canada and Japan through migration, water and the natural resources of coal, lumber and iron. The original Japanese version of Paper was completed in 2013 through AIR 475 artist-in-residence program in Yonago, Tottori, Japan.
For the CAG, Mochizuki has produced the English version of the audio narrative experienced on a boat ride across False Creek. The journey will culminate in a traditional chagayu (tea porridge that integrates salmon and rice) often consumed by Japanese Canadian fishermen on lengthy fishing trips out at sea.
Cindy Mochizuki creates multi-media installation, performance, animation, drawings and interdisciplinary collaborations that integrate historic ephemera and stories present within public and private archives. Interested in the methodologies of memory work and experimental narratives, her projects invoke a timeless space of both fiction and documentary. Recent exhibitions and projects include Shako Club, grunt gallery (2015), AIR 475, Yonago, Japan (2014), Fictive Communities Asia, Koganecho Bazaar, Koganecho, Japan (2014), and On the Subject of Ghosts, Hamilton Artists Inc. (2013).MORE
*PLEASE NOTE: DOUG will be performed for one night only; on Friday Jan 29. Doors open at 6pm.
Janice Kerbel
Friday, January 29, 2016; 7pm
B.C. Binning Gallery
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the North American premiere of Janice Kerbel's Turner Prize nominated DOUG, a musical composition and performance.
Employing recognizable conventions from a variety of disciplines — from theatre to sport to music — Kerbel's practice utilizes existing structures while challenging expectations and traditional use. Events normally considered impossible to depict are given form that is both surprising and strangely familiar.
Commissioned by The Common Guild, Glasgow and first presented at the Mitchell Library in 2014, an ensemble of six vocalists leads the audience through a nine song cycle of imagined disasters, translating "accident" into musical form. Reflecting the acts themselves, some pieces are violently
short, others unfold at length. Voice and the structures inherent in music are used to give shape to these visceral moments, while Kerbel's lyrics take the form of a series of rhythmic verse outlining a sequence of events going from bad to worse with titles such as Blast, Fall, Hit, Crash and Slip.
The performance is presented with musica intima and supported by Vancouver New Music. Text by Janice Kerbel. Composition by Janice Kerbel in collaboration with Laurie Bamon and Philip Venables. DOUG was initially conceived as an online project for Film and Video Umbrella.
Janice Kerbel lives and works in London, has exhibited internationally since the late 1990s and participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennales. Recent projects include The Turner Prize, Tramway, Glasgow; Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver (2015); DOUG, Common Guild, Glasgow (2014); Kill the Workers, Chisenhale, London; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe and Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre (2011); See it Now, Art Now, Tate Britain (2010); Remarkable, commissioned for Frieze Projects (2007); and Nick Silver Can't Sleep, commissioned by Artangel/BBC Radio 3 (2006) and presented live at Art Now Live, Tate Britain (2007). Kerbel is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver, greengrassi, London; Galerie Karin Guenther, Hamburg; and i8, Reykjavik.MORE
Olivia Boudreau
Lying Bodies, Standing Bodies
Daily from: Tuesday, January 26 to Sunday, January 31, 2016; 12–6pm
Alvin Balkind Gallery
Parts of Olivia Boudreau's diverse practice are performance and video works capturing gradual movement in real time. For example, Box (2009) is a twenty-two hour fixed frame record of a horse in its stable or Pelages (2007) documents a woman in an ash-coloured fur coat attempting to remain on her hands and knees for five hours. Simple compositions present bodies caught in the passage of time; actions unfold a range of gestures at a glacial pace capturing changes in light and movement that provoke a diversity of interpretations for the viewer.
At CAG we present Lying Bodies, Standing Bodies (2014), a performance structured as a durational loop. One performer stands observing another lying on the gallery floor. When the standing performer is tired, he or she lies down indicating to the other to get up and stand. The period of each interval is determined by the performers, a continual role reversal described. Set in the Alvin Balkind gallery, the viewer happens upon this intimate act in progress.
Olivia Boudreau has been featured in various exhibitions across Canada and Europe including solo exhibitions at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Concordia University, Montréal, Galerie Néon in Lyon, France and at the LOOP Festival in Barcelona. In 2011 she participated in the second Québec Triennial at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and was awarded the Pierre Ayot prize. Boudreau was longlisted for the Sobey award in 2012 and 2014.
'Lying Bodies, Standing Bodies' was initially produced and presented in the context of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Program in Support of Artistic Production, Concordia University.MORE
For the first of six live performance events at the CAG in January 2016 we present a new work by Tiziana La Melia.
Developed from the artist's own writing, Tiziana La Melia's performances investigate the slippages between language and form, evoking a tension between the written and the aesthetic visual experience of performance. Creating intricate installations and objects that also operate as props, sets and costumes, La Melia develops compellingly simple vignettes that allude to a range of references from the art historical and literary to the personal and incidental, leaving the viewer to contemplate a layered and malleable composition.
For CAG, La Melia has produced a new performance Staring at the Ceiling which enacts a professional photo shoot for a set of earrings designed by the artist. Her audience become witnesses and participants in a photograph that aims to capture the glint and flash of an object captured in motion. The piece is performed in two parts, splitting physical action and spoken word.
Tiziana La Melia lives and works in Vancouver, BC and works in painting, installation, film and writing. Recent exhibitions include Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Mint, Columbus; Mercer Union, Toronto; Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, Vancouver; The Apartment, Vancouver; Xspace, Toronto; Western Front, Vancouver, and SBC Galerie, Montreal. La Melia's writing has appeared in Night Papers V, Bartleby Review, Setup Magazine, Millions Magazine, Pelt and West Coast Line among others. Selected readings and screenings of her work include Wendy's Subway, New York; Model, Vancouver and Trieze, Paris. In 2014, she was the Writer in Residence at TPW R&D, Toronto and the winner of the RBC Canadian Painting Competition.MORE
Telus Garden Building
Fourth Floor, 510 West Georgia St.
Open Monday to Friday, 8am – 4pm
Commissioned by TELUS, Re-Visions is a new permanent, site-specific five-channel media installation developed by eight local emerging artists facilitated by the CAG and Cineworks. Mentored by Jem Noble, Brian Lye and Josh Hite, Re-Visions seeks to produce new representations of place through the group's diverse responses to our city in motion. The installation engages with themes of temporal and spatial transformation, the landscape of Vancouver portrayed through constant, yet fluctuating changes in infrastructure, community and communications. Playing with the idea of a contemporary "city symphony" — an experimental documentary genre that mimics city rhythms in an attempt to create a portrait of everyday city life — the installation turns to repetition and abstraction, rather than literal representation.MORE
Continuing in our window vitrines are a new set of eight sculptures by British artist Ryan Gander, part of the ongoing series A lamp made by the artist for his wife. Made from ingenious combinations of everyday objects they evince a smart way with the art of storytelling in an immensely complex yet subtly coherent body of work which in its blend of the personal with the historical, delivers an emotional pull that is not only intellectually arresting, but also affecting in its humour. We take delight in these assemblages of disparate objects, that while provoking a myriad of associations, function as a collection of innovative lighting designs.MORE
From fall 2015 to Spring 2016, CAG presents a six-month independent study residency with locally based artist, Fabiola Carranza. Considering the intertwining of art practice, community organization and public programing, Carranza is using the Burrard Marina Field House as a studio space from where to conduct her own research and to collaborate with CAG on a series of public programs. The artist's multi-faceted practice focuses on issues that arise from the historical and cultural specificities of her source materials, be it photographs, poems or found objects, whereby she attempts to draw out humour and pathos through a combination of intuitive experimentation and study.
Using the space as a site to examine open learning and discussion, and as a means to foster her own artistic development, Carranza's programming extends the use of the field house to the immediate members within her artistic community alongside bi-monthly studio visits with both CAG staff and other artists working with the gallery. Events have seen invitations made to a series of artists, poets and musicians, including for example, poetry workshops for visual artists led by local writer Marguerite Pigeon, and a stream of music/art events coordinated by Sydney Hermant.
Events have included:
Ceramics Workshop with Nathalee Paleonelli.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
Turkish Coffee Readings with Dilara Akay: poster commission by Derya Akay.
Saturday, November 28, 2015
Cochineal Dye Vat Workshop and Napkin Sewing. Cochineal Vat Workshop led by Sydney Hermant.
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Epic Dresses: Where Poetry and Women's Work interweave.
Seminar with Marguerite Pigeon
Wednesday January 27, 2016
J'ai Faim, J'ai Froid (I'm Hungry, I'm Cold) – Sing for Your Supper
Open Mic with MC Casey Wei and special guests Monique Levesque and Nikki Never.
Organised by Sydney Hermant.
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Scott is an interdisciplinary artist working across writing, illustration, performance and sculpture. In , he began a comic book series, Wendy, the story of a fictional young woman living in an urban centre, who aspires to global success and art stardom but whose dreams are perpetually derailed. The position of the underdog, outsider and shape shifter is central to this body of work and the influence of feminist icons such as Elle Woods in Legally Blonde or artist, punk poet, experimental novelist and filmmaker Kathy Acker lingers.
Scott's two panel installation at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, A Home Underground (Excerpt II) (2015) evolves from a new Wendy volume in which the eponymous character moves to Vancouver. Evoking the malaise of urban life, we see Wendy pictured moving through the city, a foil or reflection of the daily commuter passing through the station. Considering the two possible viewing positions for the work, inside the station descending the stairs or outside walking by, Scott has developed a recto-verso installation referencing the alter-ego/duality Wendy embodies, and the antagonism between mind and body. In this case, Wendy navigates Yaletown on her smart phone, juxtaposed with her inner self drilling head first into Vancouver's sub terrain — a representation of existential frustration.
Presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program — Intransit BC.
Scott currently lives and works in Montréal. For the Images Festival 2015, Scott produced Wendy Live! where a cast of English, Japanese and Mohawk-speaking performers enacted the newest Wendy book before its 2016 North American English-language release. Alongside his comic work, Scott produces work involving printmaking and sculpture and is represented by Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, Vancouver. He recently completed a residency at the Koganecho Bazaar, Yokohama, Japan.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery is delighted to host this year's RBC Canadian Painting Competition which since , with the support of the Canadian Art Foundation, has been a unique initiative, helping bridge the gap from emerging to established artists.
The jury panel consists of: Hugues Charbonneau — Director, Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montreal; Melanie Colosimo — Director, Anna Leonowens Gallery, NSCAD University, Halifax; John Zeppetelli — Director and Chief Curator, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montréal; Iga Janik — Curator, Cambridge Galleries, Cambridge; Georgiana Uhlyarik — Associate Curator, Canadian Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Jinny Yu — artist and Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts, University of Ottawa, Ottawa; Eli Bornowsky — artist, RBC Canadian Painting Competition Finalist Alumni (2007, 2008, 2010), Vancouver; Garry Neil Kennedy — Senior Artist, Vancouver; and Lisa Kehler — Director, Lisa Kehler Art + Projects, Winnipeg.
The exhibition will be closed on November 16, 17, 18 and 19. The winners will be announced at the
CAG on November 18.
For more information, visit www.rbc.com/paintingcompetitionMORE
Throughout spring and summer 2015 the CAG is hosting a series of artists-in-residence, each continuing research toward participatory projects to be realized throughout 2015–2016. The Field House Studio is an off-site artist residency space and community hub organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery. This program moves beyond conventional exhibition making, echoing the founding origins of the gallery where artists were offered support toward the production of new work, while reaching out to communities and offering new ways for individuals to encounter and connect with art and artists. Running parallel to the residency program are an ongoing series of public events for all ages.
The interdisciplinary practice of Farooq and Linschooten aims to create community-based models of participation in order to reimagine a material record of the present. They investigate tactics of representation — the ideas and values of organizations, claims about what a cultural group is and ought to be, protocols of approaching an object and images of who the intended viewer is — and use installation, photography, documentary filmmaking, writing and the methods of anthropology to examine various forms of collecting, interpreting and display. The result is work that counterbalances how institutions speak about our lives, producing counter-archives; new additions to collections or buried history made visible. Related to these questions Farooq and Linschooten will begin development towards a Vancouver-specific public project engaging the ways Vancouver frames its multiculturalism via ethnographic museum display.
Farooq and Linschooten have exhibited in various countries including Belgium, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Montenegro, Morocco, Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland and Turkey. Recent projects include Faux Guide, Trankat, Morocco; The Museum of Found Objects Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario; The Museum of Found Objects Istanbul, Turkish Ministry of Culture; Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue, Artellewa, Egypt. Most recently the duo completed a residency and exhibition at Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga, Ontario which explores the complex space of social codes, ideological agendas and decisions, both conscious and unconscious, of museum display.MORE
Liz Magor
Six Ways to Sunday #06:
Peep Hole Art Centre, Milan, Italy
Via Stilicone, 10, Milano, Italy – www.peep-hole.org
September 24 to December 5, 2015
In autumn 2015 the Contemporary Art Gallery has been invited to take over Peep-Hole in Milan for the final instalment of their Six Ways to Sunday initiative.
On this occasion, CAG will present a major solo exhibition of work by Vancouver based artist Liz Magor. One of the most celebrated and influential figures of her generation, the exhibition will focus on a selection of recent and new work, and in a nod to the immediate historical context of Arte Povera in that area of Italy, primarily include a series of blankets including an ambitious new piece, alongside other sculptures incorporating fabric samples, clothing and labels.
The 1980s proved to be a momentous time in Magor's career when her work was included in the Sydney Biennale (1982), the Venice Biennale (1984) and at Documenta 8 (1987) in Germany. During this time the artist's work shifted towards an investigation of the social and emotional life of objects and their capacity to hold and reflect personal and collective histories and identities. Characteristic of her ongoing practice, the blanket works investigate the ontology of ordinary or familiar objects, which she remakes or repurposes, and presents in new contexts. These "serviceable objects" as she calls them, are redolent with association, discarded yet still imbued with and reflective of shared meaning.
Kim Beom
December 5, 2015 to January 17, 2016
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Canada of work by Korean artist Kim Beom. Comprising a survey of work spanning over twenty years and made across a range of material and form, the exhibition presents characteristically humorous and inquisitive takes on the way we come to see and know things.
Kim is a key figure of his generation in South Korea, his ideas based in the shift created when image-making moves from language to physical form. He fundamentally resists any singular definition, partly through the eclecticism of media—drawing, video, sculpture, performance—as well as taking on seemingly disparate subjects encompassing such things as the entire body of work of a modernist Korean poet or the domestication of dogs. Regularly recalling moments in popular culture and often visualizing wordplay or puns that tip language into the absurd or create comic forms, works such as the untitled series of drawings and related video from 1991-96 are as refreshingly intriguing as they are disarming in their charm and curiosity with the world that surrounds us.
Visitors to the exhibition are welcomed by a modest canvas into which has been cut a short text. Greeting (2007) may appear almost straightforward in its appeal, captivating in the openness of its invitation, and yet it suggests the impending experience of the exhibition as an open field where the viewer can apply or should determine their own impressions.
Perception and illusion are key to Kim's practice. While much of his work is figurative in the sense that there are recognizable representational components depicted, this lack of ambiguity is called into question whereby the stability of image or language and its ability to communicate are set in motion. In speaking about his paintings, many of which are raw canvases that have been cut into, Kim talks about this blankness as acting like "a screen for the imagery in the viewer's mind." In Man Standing (1995), two footprints in metal rings are attached to the surface of the work displayed flat on the floor. Here we are asked to complete the image, conjuring the subject, imagining ourselves in the space of the piece itself.
This idea of fluid meaning can also be seen in other works that involve a notional transformation in some way – be it functional, a tautology between image to object, or a perceptual shift in the mind of the viewer. Such inventive changes may be considered witty or surreal, and achieved via the most economical of means. An Iron in the Form of a Radio, a Kettle in the Form of an Iron, and a Radio in the Form of a Kettle (2002) brings together the three household items which retain their familiarity of form and yet, as described in the title, change their function. As objects they retain their base characteristics but nonetheless are simultaneously something else, becoming other than, or more than, that which they appear to exclusively exemplify.
Such improbable transformation in both the imagination of the artist and by extension the audience can be seen in Untitled (Plants from the Places) series (2007- ongoing). Here Kim cuts photographic images of plants from magazines and newspapers sticking them together to form new "plants" that continue to grow by the addition of other pieces of green paper. Through this reusing the artist completes the cycle – trees are cut down, made into pulp which then becomes paper and is returned to being a plant. In other works, this cultivation of change is suggested by Kim with a mix of both humour and unease.
How meaning is made, who constructs it and for whom it is intended is seen more directly in works such as A Rock that was taught it was a Bird (2010) in which an absurdist gesture has an actor attempting to teach a rock to fly, unperturbed by its seeming lack of response. Yet by soaking up this instruction is the rock not altered in some way? Objects Being Taught They are Nothing But Tools (2010), is a large scale sculptural work that has common household objects placed on model chairs facing a blackboard in a familiar classroom-like setting. The objects are assembled in front of a pre-recorded, televised lecture in which the teacher's head is cut off and his voice dubbed so that in a speeded up, squeaky voice, the orator emphatically and gravely iterates the utility of "students" and, therefore, the futility of attempting to become anything more. Tools do not go to the hospital to see doctors, the voice points out, as humans do. They are instead serviced and fixed, or simply replaced. So it goes for the student. Education is a process that involves some notional form of change: knowledge is imparted and one's identity and views on the world around us are (in)formed. Conventional structures of learning are undermined and replaced by questioning the fabric of our collective and individual perceptions.
Kim Beom, born in 1963 lives and works in South Korea. Solo exhibitions include: Kim Beom: The School of Inversion, Hayward Gallery, London (2012); Kim Beom: Animalia, REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles (2011); Objects Being Taught They Are Nothing But Tools, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, (2010); Kim Beom, Artsonje Center, Seoul (2010); Beom Kim, Sun Gallery, Seoul (2007); Flower, Trans Hudson Gallery, New York (2000); Utility Objects, Trans Hudson Gallery, New York (1997). Group exhibitions include: 2013 California Pacific Triennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2013); Time Mutations, UB Art Galleries, University of Buffalo, Buffalo (2013);Tireless Refrain, Nam June Paik Art Center, Korea (2013); Unknown Forces, MSGSU Tophabe-I Amire Culture and Arts Center, Istanbul (2013); (Im)Possible Landscape, PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2013); Media City Seoul, Seoul Museum of Art (2012); City Within the City, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne (2012); Tell me, Tell me: Australian and Korean Art 1976-2011, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2011); A Rock That Was Taught It Was A Bird, Artspace, Auckland (2010); The Malady of Writing. MACBA, Barcelona (2009); Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2009); The Demon of Comparisons, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2009); The Cover of a Book is the Beginning of a Journey, Arnolfini, Bristol (2008); Always a little further, 51st Venice Biennale, Venice (2005); 8th International Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul (2003); Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo (2002); Beyond Landscape, Artsonje Center, Seoul (1999). Work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Cleveland Museum of Art; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in the United States; the Museum für Kommunikation, in Bern, Switzerland; and the Seoul Museum of Art, the Ho-Am Art Museum, Artsonje Center, and the Horim Museum, in Seoul, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, in Gwachun, Korea.
Ryan Gander
Make every show like it's your last
September 11 to November 1, 2015
The CAG presents an ambitious exhibition with UK artist Ryan Gander comprising a shifting selection of new and recent works centered on the artist's ongoing conceptual investigations and playful cultural cross references.
Ideas of concealment, accessibility in every sense, and of a deliberate obfuscation to send our minds challenged and reeling, has been a constant ploy for Gander. Works are characterized most typically by a conceptual as well as formal rigour, often drawing together a layered range of sources and referents. For example in the video and associated off-site poster campaign, Imagineering (2013), there is a clear sense of play in the way work is constructed, and play as both an intellectual mode as well as a physical activity. The series of sculptures I is … (2013) evince a smart way with the art of storytelling in an immensely complex yet subtly coherent body of work which in its combination of the personal with the historical, delivers an emotional pull that is not only intellectually arresting, but also affecting in its humour, its delight in suggesting a dialogue between seemingly disparate objects or provoking associations tinged of sadness.
Organised by the CAG and produced in collaboration with Frac Île de France — Le Plateau, Paris; Manchester Art Gallery, UK; Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland; OK Offenes Kulturhaus / Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado and Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.MORE
Walter Scott
July 1 to 31, 2015
Scott is an artist from Kahnawake whose work is based in writing and illustration and is known for his ongoing comic book series, Wendy, which follows the fictional narrative of a young woman living in an urban centre, whose dreams of contemporary art stardom are perpetually derailed by her fears and desires. In July, Scott will begin research towards a new Vancouver-specific commission exploring collaborative performance and script writing. He will also be leading workshops with the Native Youth Program at the Museum of Anthropology. Scott will also be working along side artist Keg de Souza on the summer youth program EXCHANGE.
Scott currently lives and works between Toronto and Montréal. For the Images Festival 2015, Scott produced Wendy Live! where a cast of English, Japanese and Mohawk-speaking performers enacted the newest Wendy book before its 2016 North American English-language release. Alongside his comic work, Scott produces work involving printmaking and sculpture and is represented by Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, Vancouver. He recently completed a residency at the Koganecho Bazaar, Yokohama, Japan.
Mungo Thomson
Time, People, Money, Crickets
July 10 to August 30, 2015
B.C. Binning, Alvin Balkind Galleries and gallery façade
Live Performance: Cricket Solos for Clarinet, Piccolo, Percussion, and Violin
Friday, July 10, 8.30pm onwards
Emery Barnes Park, Vancouver
Richards and Davie Streets
The Contemporary Art Gallery presented a major solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Mungo Thomson.
Time, People, Money, Crickets brings together a survey of work produced during the past five years, complemented by an extensive monographic publication. Combined, exhibition and publication provide an expansive opportunity to tease out the nuance and complexity of Thomson's practice across his many media and forms.
Central to Thomson's artistic proposition is an embrace of context—be it situational, institutional, mass cultural or art historical—and it is through the intelligent breadth of his individual works that we are prompted to examine the perceptual mechanics of everyday life in relation to a wider historical and cosmic scale. The exhibition includes key works in film, sound, sculpture, performance and publication that approach perception and cultural mediation with economy and wit, often relying on existing forms of recognition and distribution.
The exhibition features several large-scale mirror works from Thomson's ongoing series TIME: person-sized, silkscreened mirrors bearing the iconic logo and red border of the international weekly news magazine. The mirrors are based on individual covers of the magazine that reference a variety of cultural and cosmological notions of time and history, forming a broad cumulative network of objects. Installed together, they form infinity spaces and kinesthetic configurations in which the viewer, the viewing context and other TIME mirrors are reflected and reversed endlessly, and the viewer finds themselves pictured within that network. Such associations are further elaborated by a new iteration of Thomson's ongoing series Negative Space, photographic murals of inverted astronomical imagery sourced from the Hubble Space Telescope, here specially designed for the glass canopy that defines the entrance and exterior of the gallery.
Thomson's Crickets (2012-13) is an ambitious musical score for orchestra based on the chirping of crickets. Transcribed from a French compilation of field recordings from around the world—France, Cameroon, Senegal, Martinique, Borneo, Thailand and Venezuela—and produced in collaboration with Los Angeles composer Michael Webster, the score contains 25 movements, such as 12. Reunion Island, the Cirque de Cilaos at 1300 m. altitude, February 1998, nightfall in a banana plantation. Seen in an HD video, and shown alongside the sheet music, a 17-player classical ensemble simulates a chorus of crickets in flute, clarinet, violin and percussion. Crickets explores the distinctions between silence, sound, noise and music, using the aural backdrop that crickets represent—so ubiquitous that they have come to stand in for silence, and, in the context of performance, failure. Thomson and Webster have also developed Crickets for solo performers—individual musicians scattered around a park, each simulating the sound of a single cricket with a different instrument. Working with Vancouver New Music, CAG will present a live performance of Cricket Solos for Clarinet, Piccolo, Percussion, and Violin in Emery Barnes Park.
Other works in the exhibition play with the context of the gallery or museum itself. Mail (2013) is the simplest intervention into the CAG's everyday infrastructure. For the duration of the exhibition, once delivered, the mail remains on the floor, unopened, gradually becoming an obstacle to physical passage as well as to institutional function. Untitled (Margo Leavin Gallery, 1970– ) (2009) is a Super-16mm stop-motion film animation that flips through all the contacts in the business card rolodexes of Los Angeles' Margo Leavin Gallery, which was founded in 1970 and closed in 2012, and where Thomson showed for over a decade. Consisting of thousands of contacts, each with their own particular relationship to the operation of the gallery – artists, framers, electricians, collectors, customs agents, florists, critics, exterminators – each card gets a single film frame, the film running at 24 frames per second. It is a kinetic portrait, pairing analogue technologies, of a group of people randomly and uniquely brought into orbit together around a single cultural enterprise.
People (2011) is an ongoing series of photographs of visitors to art exhibitions with the art on view removed in Photoshop, leaving only people staring into the voids of empty white rooms. These images are taken from the web as well as privately commissioned by Thomson from professional events photographers. In 2011 Thomson produced a magazine collecting these uncanny images modeled on the American tabloid "People". Originally distributed unannounced by mail, it is exhibited here as a free takeaway for visitors.
Void and Observer (2013-15) is a series of sculptures modeled on the phenomena of 'error coins'—rare and collectible coins that result from a production mistake at the US mint, in which a blank coin planchet is mis-struck by the die that carries the coin image. In Thomson's reworking of the phenomenon, made with 3D printing and jewelry casting, these coins take on a cosmological dimension, as an off-center John F. Kennedy appears to be contemplating the void of the unstruck side of a half-dollar, and as other error coins in other US denominations resemble planetary bodies in phase or eclipse. Kept in the pockets of the staff of the CAG and displayed upon request, the coins will orbit and revolve around each other throughout the day.
Mungo Thomson: Time, People, Money, Crickets is organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver and SITE Santa Fe. A new 200-page monograph of Thomson's work, Time, People, Money, Crickets, published by CAG with SITE Santa Fe is available at the gallery, special exhibition price of $25.
Mungo Thomson lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions, performances and projects have taken place at ArtPace, San Antonio (2014); SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe (2013); The Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2013); The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2012); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2008); The Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France (2007); and Galeria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAMeC), Bergamo, Italy (2006), among others. Selected group exhibitions include The 2nd CAFAM Biennale, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, China (2014); A Guest Without A Host Is A Ghost, Beirut and Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, Egypt; Imitatio Christie's, Galleria Zero, Milan (2014); Turn off the Sun: Selections from La Colección Jumex, Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ (2013); Public Diary, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan (2013); The Pacific Standard Time Public Art and Performance Festival, Los Angeles, USA (2012); Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), Istanbul, Turkey (2011); Exhibition Exhibition, Castello di Rivoli, Torino, Italy (2010); Compilation IV, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany (2009); The 2008 Whitney Biennial (2008); and PERFORMA05 (2005). Thomson's work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and FRAC Ile-de-France, Paris, France, among others. Thomson is represented by galerie frank elbaz, Paris, France.
Maddie Leach
June to July, 2015
Taking up residency earlier this year in June, Maddie Leach began research towards a Vancouver-based project. Leach's practice is one that seeks ways of making artworks as a means to interpret and respond to specific context, through a lengthy process of enquiry and social interaction establishing relationships between form, materials, locations, histories, events, individuals and communities.
Leach was nominated for the Walters Prize 2014 for If you find the good oil let us know (2012–2014), created during a two year residency at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, a town known for its oil and gas exploration on New Zealand's North Island. The project centered on 70 litres of supposed 'whale oil'. With layered and complex associations to whaling from indigenous sustenance to colonial/capitalist industry, whale oil speaks to New Zealand's past and evokes its new economic boom in crude oil exploration. Leach sought to return this mythic substance to the sea, beginning a tangential journey that ended with a cube of cement made from the firing of 70 litres of mineral oil relocated to the seabed several kilometres off the coast. Through such ephemeral aesthetic actions and an unfolding public dialogue, this search for the authenticity of the 'whale oil' connected fragmented industrial and cultural narratives central to the context of New Zealand. Sharing her unfolding research, Leach then invited fourteen individuals to offer written letters as responses to the work, the only stipulation being to begin the letter with 'Dear.' The texts became a series of 'Letters to the Editor' in the Taranaki Daily News developing a curious narrative composed by multiple authors, from scientists to sailors, cement workers to oil-industry executives.MORE
Shannon Bool
Michelangelo's Place
May 1 to June 28, 2015
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the second part of a new commission in 2015 with Canadian artist Shannon Bool. Bool typically references a wide variety of art historical objects in her work, commenting on the role of decorative arts within art history, as well as on the change in meaning that occurs through the replication and alteration of significant cultural forms. Central to her practice is the paradoxical examination of the depth and psychological weight that surfaces carry, which she underlines in unorthodox material processes.
Located near to the gallery entrance is Michelangelo's Place, the final version in a series of carrara marble benches Bool has recently produced. The sculpture references the benches found circling the elevated Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence, built in 1869 to showcase copies of Michelangelo's most famous works and to provide a panoramic view of the city.
At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Bool's sculpture references the benches' scale and appropriates the graffiti that covers them. The graffiti, some of which is over 100 years old and ranges from tourist scribbles, love declarations and Italy's first Labour Party, is mirrored to emphasize its materialization and the artist's handwork. These energetic gestures of incision, gouging and defacing subvert the benches' functionality by drawing attention to the individual experiences of the Piazzale's visitors who chose to leave their own marks instead of consuming the magnificent views of the renaissance. The carrara marble, signifying wealth and high renaissance material values is subjected instead to the every day banality of Florentine life and tourism, where the public turns away from its master narrative and carves its own signature.
Shannon Bool lives and works in Berlin. Solo exhibitions include: The Fourth Wall Through the Third Eye, Galerie Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf; Walk Like an Etruscan, Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto (2013); The Inverted Harem II, Bonner Kunstverein (2011); CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, France; The Inverted Harem, GAK-Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen (2010); RMIT Project Space, Melbourne, Australia (2008). Group exhibitions include MMK2 Boom She Boom, Works from the MMK Collection, Frankfurt (2015); The Klöntal Triennale, Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland (2014); Soft Pictures, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaugengo, Turin (2013); Painting Forever!, KW, Berlin (2013); Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto (2013); the Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2012); 7×14, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Rock Opera, CACP Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux (2009); Drawing on Sculpture: Graphic Interventions on the Photographic Surface, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2007); Make Your Move, Projects Arts Centre, Dublin; Spiralen der Erinnerung, Kunstverein in Hamburg; Carbonic Anhydride, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2006). Work is held in the collections of The National Gallery of Canada, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Fondazione Sandretto, Turin, MMK Museum fur Modern Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Lenbachhaus, Munich, and the Saatchi Collection, London. She is represented by Kadel Willborn Gallery in Düsseldorf and Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto.MORE
Throughout spring 2015 the CAG is hosting a series of artists-in-residence, each continuing research toward participatory projects to be realized throughout 2015–2016. The Field House Studio is an off-site artist residency space and community hub organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery. This program moves beyond conventional exhibition making, echoing the founding origins of the gallery where artists were offered support toward the production of new work, while reaching out to communities and offering new ways for individuals to encounter and connect with art and artists. Running parallel to the residency program are an ongoing series of public events for all ages.
Harrell Fletcher
March 2015
Fletcher will develop research rooted in his recent walking projects toward a new piece for Vancouver. In 2013, at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, he developed a four day walk with a group of museum staff, scientists and members of the public. Over forty miles, from the museum across the Bay to Emeryville and the top of Mt Diablo, each participant presented topics related to the areas they were travelling through. Each day featured several official stops while countless unofficial observations added to the experience, additional members of the public connected with the core group at more than a dozen points along the path. By extending the museum's curiositybased learning into the surrounding landscape, the project aimed to transform the everyday world into an open classroom, working toward a greater integration of the cultural institution within its surrounding community.
Fletcher has produced a variety of socially engaged collaborative and interdisciplinary projects since the early 1990s. His work has been shown at SFMoMA, de Young Museum, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Yerba Buena Center, all in San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum; The Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, and The Sculpture Center, all in New York; PICA, Portland; The Seattle Art Museum; Signal, Malmö, Sweden; Domain de Kerguehennec, France; Tate Modern, London and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. His work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and was the 2005 recipient of the Alpert Award in Visual Arts. From 2002 to 2009 Fletcher co-produced Learning To Love You More, a participatory website with Miranda July. His 2005 exhibition The American War originated at ArtPace in San Antonio, travelling to Solvent Space, Richmond, VA; White Columns, NYC; The Center For Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, Boston; PICA, Portland and LAXART, Los Angeles among other locations. Fletcher is an Associate Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University, Oregon.MORE
Keg de Souza
Appetite for Construction
September 10 to November 4, 2016
Off-site: 544 Main Street, Vancouver
Upcoming events:
Drop in hours: 1-5pm
Last weekend – Saturday, October 29 and Sunday, October 30
Closing reception: Friday, November 4, 6-9pm.
We welcome back to Vancouver Australian artist Keg de Souza, on her final visit to the city, de Souza presents a public project exploring food culture as a metaphor for urban displacement. Throughout October, de Souza will operate from a temporary space in the former Park Lock Dim Sum/Seafood Restaurant on the second floor of 544 Main Street in Chinatown. From this location she will initiate a food mapping installation developed via a series of public events, workshops and discussions centered on this disused space, the last original building standing on the corner of Main and Keefer.
Participants are invited to contribute items that represent the changing urban fabric of the Chinatown/DTES area through its food culture. Each participant's items will be vacuum bagged and used to create a tile in the construction of a temporary structure within the Chinatown space. The numerous vacuum bags will create a patchwork surface that represents various community members, and their insights into local food culture and gentrification. Items could range from: menus from new upmarket establishments; packaging from iconic restaurants of the area, soup kitchen fliers, info on urban farming or even something grown from an urban farm. In Vancouver, De Souza is developing a series of community based workshops throughout 2015-16 engaging participants in a critical dialogue regarding local food production. De Souza is working closely with various local urban farmers, food security activists and community members to explore the food politics within the city as both evidence of and a metaphor for urban displacement through gentrification.
Over the past eighteen months de Souza has been conducting research in Vancouver hosting a series of events experimenting with tactics of public engagement. In 2015, her handmade inflatable dome became a temporary space at the Burrard Marina Field House for a public picnic engaging Canadian colonial narratives via a consideration of national food traditions. Meeting with local chefs, food activists and residents de Souza prepared a truly Canadian feast as a source for an afternoon of unfolding dialogue that the artist mapped directly onto the floor of the dome. A starting point for the discussion was the ephemerality of the event itself. De Souza hosted a second event, an urban foraging expedition culminating in jam making, experimental mapping and a discussion exploring local foods, cultural preservation and the continuing effects of colonization in contemporary Vancouver. The event featured two local guest collaborators, Lori Snyder, an Indigenous Herbalist specializing in urban foraging for wild, edible and medicinal plants; and Lori's partner, Steve Snyder, a master jam maker for the last 15 years. This two-day event began with a foraging tour led by Lori Snyder focusing on the native blackberry, the introduced blackberry and other native plants. Participants foraged on the banks surrounding the Field House which are covered with wild Himalayan Blackberries — an invasive, 'colonizing,' non-native species in Vancouver. On the second day, Steve Synder led a jam making session with the foraged berries. While communally making jam, de Souza led a discussion focused on the act of preserving these locally dominant berries, questioning whose culture is in fact preserved and how this can be linked to colonial narratives. This discussion culminated in an experimental mapping of the dialogue.
Australian artist de Souza investigates the politics of space informed through a formal training in architecture combined with her experiences such as squatting in Redfern, Sydney. De Souza's work emphasises participation and reciprocity, and often involves the process of learning new skills and fostering relationships to create site and situation-specific projects. For over ten years she has self-published her hand-bound books and 'zines under the name All Thumbs Press.
Recent exhibitions include; Redfern School of Displacement for the 20th Biennale of Sydney; Abundance: Fruit of the Sea, Bounty of the Mountains for the 2016 Setouchi Triennale (2016). Temporary Spaces, Edible Places: Vancouver and Preservation, Contemporary Art Gallery; Temporary Spaces, Edible Places: New York, AC Institute, New York (2015). Temporarily in Architecture, Food and Communities, Delfina Foundation, London; Temporary Spaces, Edible Places, Atlas Arts, Isle of Skye, Scotland; If There's Something Strange In Your Neighbourhood … Ratmakan Kampung, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2014). The 5th Auckland Triennial, 15th Jakarta Biennale and Vertical Villages at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney (2013).
This project is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. With special thanks to Left of Main.
The Field House Studio is an off-site artist residency space and community hub organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery. This program moves beyond conventional exhibition making, echoing the founding origins of the gallery where artists were offered support toward the production of new work, while reaching out to communities and offering new ways for individuals to encounter and connect with art and artists. Running parallel to the residency program were an ongoing series of public events for all ages. The Field House Studio Residency Program is generously supported by Vancouver Park Board and the City of Vancouver, along with many private and individual donors. For 2016–2019 we acknowledge the generous support for the Field House Studio Residency Program by the Vancouver Foundation.
Follow the Field House blog at www.burrardmarinafieldhouse.wordpress.comMORE
Julia Dault
Blame It On the Rain
May 1 to June 28, 2015
BC Binning and Alvin Balkind Galleries
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition by Toronto-born, New York–based artist Julia Dault. Through a selection of new and recent works, the exhibition reveals the importance to Dault of balancing spontaneous gesture with responsiveness to rules, logic and the constraints of materials. Physical negotiations are central to Dault's textured paintings and improvised sculptures; both are exhibited in Blame It On the Rain.
Dault is interested in 'embodied knowledge' — how making is thinking — and reinserts the artist's hand into a minimal aesthetic primarily interpreted as distanced and industrial. The artist's rule-based painting involves responding to mass-produced elements — patterned silks, pleather, unmixed paint straight from the tube — with unconventional tools, such as squeegees, rubber combs and sea sponges. The limitations of these objects create quasi-standardized gestures that allow Dault to skirt the line between expressive abstraction and cool, machine-like facture. Erasure of her paintings' topmost layers, which allows viewers to 'see into' the painting process, is as important to Dault as paint application.
Exploration of artistic labor recurs in Dault's sculptures. Always improvising on site and working alone, the artist manipulates and coerces Plexiglas, Formica and other industrially produced materials into imposing curved forms, then affixes them to the gallery wall using straps and cords. Dault's efforts can be understood as 'private performances' in which her physical capabilities are juxtaposed with the properties of the materials she employs. Each sculpture is titled with a time stamp that reflects the duration it took to complete the piece. In this gesture, as with her paintings, she hopes to underline the durational nature of the art-making process.
Dault's work fuses the emphasis on process found in both Abstract Expressionist painting and post-Minimal sculpture. One unifying element is the artist's fascination with patterns, and with the slippages and imperfections that reveal the human origins of what appears mechanical. Another is the search for variety within strict limitations. By devising expressive gestures through rules and reasoning indicative of post-Minimal and Conceptual art, Dault is part of a generation of artists acknowledging histories and legacies of art making while revitalizing abstraction today.
The exhibition complements Color Me Badd, presented at The Power Plant, Toronto in 2014-2015. The two institutions are working together on the first major monograph of Dault's work, to be published by Black Dog Publishing later in 2015. The publication is made with generous support from the RBC Emerging Artist Project.
Julia Dault lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has held solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2015); The Power Plant, Toronto and China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles (2014); Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich and Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto (2013); and White Cube Bermondsey, London (2012). She has also participated in group shows which include: Elevated, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2014-2015), Americana: Selections from the Collection, Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2013–2014); Outside the Lines, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2013–2014); In the Heart of the Country, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Inner Journeys, Maison Particulière, Brussels (2013); The Ungovernables, New Museum, New York; Roundtable, the Ninth Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2012); and Making Is Thinking, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2011). Her work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Saatchi Gallery, London; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Dault is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto; and China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles.MORE
Opening: Thursday, February 28 – 7-10pm
All welcome.
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents Medium-Based Time by Berlin-based Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw, featuring a black and white 16mm film of transgender voguer Leiomy Maldonado, an HD video installation that reworks archival ethnographic film into a dystopian science fiction narrative, and a new series of light-activated UV prints in the windows of our street façade.
The exhibition centres on Variation FQ (2011-13), in which Shaw worked with legendary voguer Leiomy Maldonado to produce a film that explores aspects of subculture, dance, gender, power and special effects. "Vogue" is a primarily black and latino, gay subculture that evolved out of the drag balls of New York in the 1980s and includes a fluid, yet raw dance style based around miming the poses of models from high fashion magazines.
The film sets Leiomy starkly lit against a black void performing her signature freestyle dance teetering between elegance and violence. As the film progresses, Shaw introduces step-and-repeat style visual effects, originally created by Canadian animator Norman McLaren in his 1968 ballet film Pas de deux. In Pas de deux, this optical printing technique embellishes the seduction between a male and female ballerina as typically choreographed for the stage. In Variation FQ, the use of special effects creates a ghostly layering and repetition of Leiomy's image in her most virtuosic gestures and extends the experience of abandon evident in the consequences on her human body. Leiomy's performance is accompanied by Shaw's original soundtrack that combines a minimalist piano score with contemporary chopped and pitched audio techniques. This merging of classical composition with manipulated pop a cappella MP3's is emblematic of Shaw's fascination of the interdependence between high and low taste cultures.
Shaw's practice amplifies conceptual strategies within the transcendence-seeking experiences of popular culture, as well as in the speculative nature of scientific mapping of these phenomena. In keeping with this ongoing interest in and around altered states, we premiere Quickeners (2014), a pseudo-documentary that puts the role of truth telling into crisis.
Set five hundred years in the future, Quickeners tells the story of Human Atavism Syndrome (H.A.S.), an obscure disorder afflicting a tiny portion of the Quantum Human population to desire and feel as their Human Being predecessors once did. A species wirelessly interconnected to The Hive, Quantum Humans have evolved to operate solely on pure rational thought and they have achieved immortality. Quickeners is set against a cinéma vérité aesthetic, reworking archival documentary footage from a gathering of Pentecostal Christian snake handlers to illustrate the story. As the film unfolds, an authoritative Quantum Human narrator comments on what we witness: indecipherable testimonials, sermons, songs, prayers, convulsive dancing, speaking-in-tongues, serpent handling and ecstatic states that Quantum Humans define as "Quickening".
Incorporating elements of science fiction, ethnographic survey, neuroscience and belief systems, Quickeners collates these disparate themes into a succinct whole to discuss varying notions of evolutionary progress with clinical indifference. This alchemical fusion suspends belief of the fantastic situation by its use of familiar, outmoded technology, meticulous audio editing and subtitles. As the piece builds to a cathartic climax of media techniques and special effects – caught in limbo between ritual documentary and music video – the Quantum Humans surrender to this evolutionary throwback of perceived biological transcendence, while the film attempts to incite a similar phenomenological response in the viewer.
Alongside these film/video works in our window vitrines hangs Degenerative Imaging (In The Dark) (2015), a new series of light-activated, glow-in-the-dark vinyl cut-outs that reference star and planet stickers. Though presumably designed with the aspiring child astrologer's bedroom in mind, these stickers are also commonly found adorning the walls and ceilings of the teenage psychonaut; more likely used to "trip out" than to plan a trip. Rather than the cosmos, Shaw's source material comes from 3D SPECT scan renderings of the degenerative effects of cumulative mind-altering substance use on the blood flow and metabolism of the human brain. The representational language of neuroscience, or at least the populist aesthetic familiar in health and pharmaceutical advertising, is reformatted here as a mechanism to enhance altered states while viewing their supposed biological effects on the brain. The prints are charged by fluorescent light once per hour, causing them to glow strongly and then fade, glow and fade; static time-based mediums on repeat.
Variation FQ is generously loaned by the Rennie Collection, Vancouver
Quickeners was co-produced by the Contemporary Art Gallery with the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève for the BIM 14 and Johann König, Berlin, with the generous support of a grant from BC Arts Council: Special Project Assistance – Innovations; the Fmac and the FCAC.
Exhibition is supported by Inform Interiors and Best Film Service Inc.
This exhibition forms part of the Capture Photography Festival, running from April 2 to 29.MORE
Lotte van den Berg
Cinema Imaginaire
February 4 to 6, 3pm and February 7 to 8, 10:30 am and 3pm
110-750 Hamilton Street (meeting point)
150 min, no intermission, $36
604 605 8284 ext.200
It happens in small groups, at an outdoor location. You will be given a series of assignments — say, focusing on a given object, or watching a certain person walk down the street. It's not nearly as simple as it sounds and, as they say, results may vary. You may gain a sense of how your sight has been conditioned over a lifetime. You may realize, with dismay, how little you actually notice of what crosses your eyes every day. You may discover something beautiful, even revelatory, that you'd ignored a thousand times in your life. What van den Berg gives us is a sensory adventure, a reminder of how much our perception can be altered, and, on a simpler level, a reintroduction to the pleasures of the senses. There's beauty all around us — all you have to do is look. Please note: This performance involves walking, and takes place in parts outdoors, rain or shine.
Presented with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.
Lotte van den Berg works in the realms of theatre, cinema and dance, performing in North America, Europe and Africa. Her work
is defined by its concern for everyday reality and for uniting theatre and audiences. Her current projects are Cinema Imaginaire and Building Conversation; in both works audience members become active participants. Past works include Les Spectateurs (2010) and Agoraphobia (2011–2012).
Creator: Lotte van den Berg | Dramaturg: Sodja Lotker | Guide: Howard Lotker | Producer: Antwan Cornelissen | Publicity: Karin van de Wiel | Manager: Anneke Tonen | Location Scouts: Other Sites* Developed in collaboration with Het Huis Utrecht and part of Festivals in Transition / Global City Local City with support of the Culture Programme of the European Union. Funded by the City of Utrecht and the KfHeinfun. Supported by Performing Arts Fund NL.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery presented the first solo exhibition of Canadian artist Krista Belle Stewart, the culmination of fall 2014 residencies at the Nisga'a Museum and Western Front comprising new works developed in Nisga'a and at her ancestral home in Douglas Lake, BC.
Stewart's practice reclaims personal and cultural narratives from archival material, situating them in dialogue with contemporary Indigenous discourse and engaging the complexities of intention and interpretation. In relation to this reframing of documents, Stewart's new installation considers First Nations women's self-representation and sovereignty. Working with her personal stories and those of the women she met in Nisga'a, Stewart investigates how cultural knowledge is created and exchanged, weaving together new lens-based works with archival photographs and objects from Nisga'a.
Central to the exhibition was an ongoing project, a bucket filled with distinctive dried clay from land owned by Stewart on the Douglas Lake reservation, and passed down to her from her mother's family. Not only is this a physical connection to her heritage but also a response to the continued dispossession of First Nations women's land rights. The projections in the exhibition depicted two geographically and culturally diverse landscapes, showing personal stories rooted in an understanding of place evoking a diversity of embedded experiences on Indigenous land.
In 1998 the Nisga'a Nation signed a treaty with the BC and Canadian governments that recognized their land sovereignty and right of self-government, the first to be signed in the province since the 1850s. Such recent challenges to government control of Indigenous lands, also including the current fight against Kinder Morgan and the Northern Gateway pipelines and "Idle No More", highlight a growing urgency in First Nations communities to detach from Canada's colonial confines. Although delineated by the Canadian government, both reservation and sovereign lands offer potential in developing new and revived connections with pre-colonial First Nations economic and political traditions.
Opened in 2011 in the town of Laxgalts'ap (also known as Greenville), the Nisga'a Museum holds over 300 repatriated cultural objects that have been absent from the community for over a century. It is a multifarious space operating as a potential economic driver in the community as both a monument to and entry point into Nisga'a culture, while also existing as a site seeking to develop intimate dialogues among contemporary Nisga'a and their ancestors. While hosting a permanent installation that utilizes the tropes of colonial histories through the development of a linear and didactic narrative of Nisga'a culture, it is also an institution evolving through engagement with local community. Lacking detailed archival notes on each object, the museum has focused on connecting Nisga'a oral histories with these artefacts through tours and ongoing conversations with community elders. The Nisga'a is made up of four pdeek (tribes): Laxsgiik (Eagle), Gisk'aast (Killer Whale), Ganada (Raven), and Laxgibuu (Wolf). With ceremonies, customs and histories specific to each tribe there are layers of conflicting interpretations and information for many objects in the collection. Through the repatriation of their material cultural history is emerging a contemporary revival of precolonial traditions, asserting the museum as platform for active knowledge exchange across generations and offering opportunities for personal and collective decolonization.
Alongside new works Stewart selected pieces from the Nisga'a Museum including an image showing a Nisga'a woman in a full chief's regalia surrounded by men dressed in traditional and western clothing. Originally shot by Benjamin Haldane, a Tsimshian photographer from Alaska who travelled throughout the Nass Valley area in the early 1900s actively documenting the people of his community until his death in 1941. Recording a time of great cultural and social upheaval on the northwest coast his images of families, social events and traditional ceremonies such as potlatches (illegal at the time) document a contemporary and evolving culture. Haldane's photographs offer an example of First Nations self-representation, a counter to the more usual colonial-settler's gaze.
There is a kinship between Haldane's and Stewart's practices through the production of complex and diverse documents of First Nations self-representation. Within this Stewart infiltrates male-centered narratives of colonial culture and reasserts connections to pre-colonial matriarchal traditions while considering the tensions present between the institution as colonial support structure and a living entity shaped by the community it represents.
This project was made possible with the generous support provided by the First Peoples' Cultural Council, British Columbia Arts Council, the Nisga'a Nation through the Nisga'a Lisims Government. Production was supported through a Media Arts Residency at the Western Front. Additional assistance provided by Budget Car and Truck Rental, Terrace.
Krista Belle Stewart is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation, living and working in Vancouver and Brooklyn. Exhibitions include Fiction/Non-fiction at The Esker Foundation, Calgary and Music from the New Wilderness, Western Front, Vancouver. At Western Front, Stewart produced a collaborative multimedia performance working with, circa 1918, waxcylinder recordings by anthropologist James Alexander Teit of her great-grandmother, Terese Kaimetko. A string quartet responded live to Stewart's loops of these traditional Okanagan songs presented alongside visual projections. Most recently, Stewart was commissioned by the City of Vancouver as part of the "Year of Reconciliation," Public Art Project at the entrance to the Canada Line City Centre Station at Granville and Georgia where Stewart's Her Story, a public photo mural and video installation, utilized footage of a CBC documentary entitled Seraphine: Her Own Story, a scripted interpretation of her mother's journey from residential school to becoming BC's first Aboriginal public health nurse. This work was also exhibited in Where Does it Hurt? at Artspeak. Stewart juxtaposes the 1967 film, in which her mother plays herself, alongside a video of her mother's Truth and Reconciliation Commission interview, generating a conversation between depiction and lived experience.MORE
Shannon Bool
The Flight of the Medici Mamluk
January 23 to April 19, 2015
Off-site: Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Canada Line
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents an ambitious new commission at the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station by Canadian artist Shannon Bool. Originally from Vancouver Island, she attended Emily Carr University before studying in New York, Frankfurt and moving to Berlin.
Bool typically references a wide variety of historical and monumental decorative objects in her work, from Michelangelo's David to the ornamentation on Etruscan tombs. While the Tuscan themes in recent projects specifically developed during her 2013 residency at the Villa Romana in Florence, her reinterpretation of these objects is characteristic of her practice in commenting on the role of decorative arts within art history, as well as on the change in meaning that occurs through the replication and alteration of significant and well known items.
For the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Bool has worked with a photographer to document the 16th Century Egyptian Medici Mamluk carpet, recently rediscovered stored in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Italy. Mamluk style carpets figured significantly in Mediterranean commerce, appearing in Venetian paintings of this time, and are characterized by a central medallion surrounded by a variety of smaller geometric motifs, forming a kaleidoscopic appearance, the palette limited to red, blue, green and yellow tones. In many such carpets the vast and complex patterns suggest notions of eternity and evoke cosmic associations with Buddhist thought. While undoubtedly they should not be read as some form of direct mapping of philosophical intent, the designs themselves may be influenced by such ideas from central Asia and also reflect patterns in Moorish architecture which connect to similar philosophical readings of mathematical logic and infinity.
By combining patterns from and with historical vernacular objects, Bool's interventions play with the mechanical reproduction of geometric sources and iconography. In previous work taking impetus from floor surfaces, Bool made Casino Runner (Aztec Inn) by blowing up a segment of a cheap wall-to-wall carpet encountered at a Las Vegas casino hotel. The original carpet was laden with random appropriations from ancient Aztec culture and Anatolian ornaments, which the artist underlined in having her version hand woven by Turkish weavers. The casino itself is a throwback to the iconic Art Deco monument, the Aztec Hotel that still operates in Monrovia, California. American Art Deco used the powerful geometry of ancient Mexican civilizations to break from European aesthetic traditions. Bool's carpet, exquisitely hand-knotted by traditional village weavers in Anatolia, Turkey, heightens – even fetishizes – the production values combining the sublime and hysterical experience of entering a casino with the distinctly Eastern reading of a Western sensibility.
Here, Bool has painstakingly pieced together images of the Mamluk carpet for the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, itself unusual due to its gigantic size and pristine condition, to reproduce the whole carpet at almost exact scale across the glass façade of the building. Amazing in its detail, intricacy and partial signs of use, the image records literally and metaphorically both the patterns and passages of time, in much the same way as the busy station is itself an embodiment of a space of people passing through. Suspended in the everyday space of the station and tilted as if afloat, the work shows some of the mathematical and geometrical sensibilities that are seldom acknowledged but directly influenced renaissance thought.
This will be the first new commission by Bool with the Contemporary Art Gallery during 2015, a second project to evolve for late spring.
Presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program – IntransitBC.
Shannon Bool lives and works in Berlin. Solo exhibitions include: The Fourth Wall Through the Third Eye, Galerie Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf; Walk Like an Etruscan, Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto (2013); The Inverted Harem II, Bonner Kunstverein (2011); CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, France; The Inverted Harem, GAK-Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen (2010); RMIT Project Space, Melbourne, Australia (2008). Group exhibitions include MMK2 Boom She Boom, Works from the MMK Collection, Frankfurt; The Klöntal Triennale, Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland (2014); Soft Pictures, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaugengo, Turin; Painting Forever!, KW, Berlin; Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto (2013); the Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2012); 7×14, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Tactical Support, Gallery Tracy Williams, New York; Rock Opera, CACP Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux (2009); Drawing on Sculpture: Graphic Interventions on the Photographic Surface, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2007); Make Your Move, Projects Arts Centre, Dublin; Spiralen der Erinnerung, Kunstverein in Hamburg; Carbonic Anhydride, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2006). Work is held in the collections of Berlinische Galerie Landesmuseum Fur Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Berlin; MMK Museum fur Modern Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Lenbachhaus, Munich, and the Saatchi Collection, London. She is represented by Kadel Willborn Gallery in Düsseldorf and Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto.MORE
Only a Free Individual Can Create a Free Society is a new film installation by German artist Grace Schwindt which revisits discussions she witnessed as a child surrounded by individuals in Frankfurt, Germany. The dialogue running through the film is from an interview that Schwindt conducted with a leftwing activist influenced by the 1960s and 1970s political landscape, shaped by the Frankfurt School, the Outer Parliamentary Opposition and the Baader Meinhof Gang.
Rather than aiming to gain a better understanding of the past, Schwindt attempts to take a system apart — to undo it. Nothing is assumed to be neutral and every movement, word, gesture or colour is understood to have cultural, social, political or economic implications. The artist constructs her own processes of translating language into vivid material, choreographing dancers, set, props, costume, lighting, sound, camera movement and words as elementary forms carrying symbolic power. Each element is equally important and should be read together as a melody where the words or functions of 'chair' or 'terrorism', 'clothing' or 'freedom' have equal status.
At feature film length Only a Free Individual Can Create a Free Society is the product of an extensive rehearsal period with eleven dancers and a dramaturge over a period of five weeks using diagrams to map out a detailed choreography. The film features highly coloured and geometric costumes using aluminium, cardboard, silk and velvet, as well as extensive post-production to create a narrative that questions how freedom was, and is, understood, who has access to it and what political and social structures need to be in place to create a free society. Alongside the installation the exhibition included a newly commissioned sculptural piece, redolent of images pictured in the film. Constructed from salt crystals, bronze and ceramic, it has a bodily suggestion, evoking a sense of place and subject through its shape, materiality and form.
Only a Free Individual Can Create a Free Society' was commissioned by FLAMIN Productions through Film London Artists' Moving Image Network, Eastside Projects, Birmingham; The Showroom, London; Badischer Kunstverein; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Site Gallery, Sheffield; Tramway, Glasgow; ICIA, University of Bath; and Zeno X Gallery. Supported by Arts Council England, Hessian Film Fund and The Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
Presented with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.
Grace Schwindt (born 1979, Germany) is an artist based in London working with film, live performance and sculpture. Her theatrical sets for film works use minimal architectural elements and props to mark a location, in which she places bodies including her own. Using a tightly scripted choreography in which every move relates to institutionalised systems she investigates how social relations and understandings about oneself are formed, often through acts of exclusion and destruction. The artist's interviews with individuals often serve as a starting point for fictionalised dialogues delivered by performers. Represented by Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp, her work is distributed by Argos Centre for Media and Art. Recent solo presentations include South London Gallery; ICA, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Spill Festival, Basement, Brighton; Collective Gallery, Edinburgh and White Columns, New York. Schwindt was shortlisted for this year's Jarman Film Award.
Running time: 80 min
Screening times: 12pm, 1.30pm, 3.00pm, 4.30pm daily during gallery opening hoursMORE
Contemporary Art Gallery and Ballet BC: Build a unique art-dance commission
The CAG and Ballet BC in association with the Art|Basel Crowdfunding Initiative are excited to announce a new project.
For our project, selected by independent jury for Art|Basel's curated page on Kickstarter, we are commissioning visual artists John Wood and Paul Harrison to team with the renowned dancers of Ballet BC, to produce a collaborative cross-disciplinary performance combining the very best in both contemporary dance and visual art.
Read more about the project here: http://bit.ly/cagXbbc
Or go to the Art|Basel Crowdfunding Initiative page here: https://www.kickstarter.com/pages/artbasel?ref=artbasel
The funds will be used to bring the visual artists to Vancouver for an intensive development period during spring and fall 2015 with the premiere in 2016.
The collaboration between CAG and Ballet BC recognizes the distinctive contribution each of us brings to the project, making the whole much bigger than the sum of its constituent parts. Our supporters are a major part of this, extending that partnership into a broader sense of sharing and building a real community involvement in this dynamic venture.MORE
When Sky Was Sea
November 21, 2014 to January 11, 2015
B.C. Binning and Alvin Balkind Galleries
The Contemporary Art Gallery presented the first large-scale survey exhibition in North America of work by renowned Japanese artist Shimabuku. Demonstrating the breadth of the artist's practice, works revealed an essential correspondence to things elsewhere in a wider world, insisting on our grasp of the continuity that exists between art and (non-art) life. As he travels the world, interacting with strangers, and conversing with nature, Shimabuku instigates moments of poetry, humour and surprise.
Including pieces dating back to the mid-1990s, when he first emerged as an artist in Japan, through to presenting a wide variety of more recent work for which he has since become internationally celebrated, the exhibition exemplifies an extraordinary curiosity and freedom of expression. Shimabuku uses installation, video, photography, drawings, sculpture and events alike to convey his intense fascination with the natural world—equally the animal and vegetable realms—and the countless manifestations of human culture within it. His artistic proposition is essentially one of storytelling and discovery. He encourages us to assume an "alien" identity whereby we break with established habits of perception and enjoy experiences as if they are happening to us for the first time.
From the beginning, incongruity has characterised much of Shimabuku's work, seen in early performances such as Tour of Europe with One Eyebrow Shaved (1991) or Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere (1994), the gentle surrealism of the works is compelling. Shimabuku is not so interested in discovering the reasons why, instead preoccupied, through a joyful approach, with unions of myth or mystery and the everyday. This is epitomized by Something that Floats / Something that Sinks (2008), a work through which the artist draws our attention to the fact that some pieces of fruit and vegetables float in water or appear to swim, while others sink. It is wonderful and ostensibly miraculous.
The inversion of the way things are conventionally seen to be is crucial to Shimabuku's practice. He is interested in what is normal being made strange and often picks up the theme of the journey in his work, the means by which difference occurs through translation in both time and space. The photograph Cucumber Journey (2000) commemorates a two week performance travelling slowly north on British canals while learning to pickle vegetables. He has stated, "I think cooking and art are similar. They are both about unexpected meetings of far-away ingredients, to create something delicious, something good". In his video Then, I decided to give a tour of Tokyo to the octopus from Akashi (2000) we see him with an octopus in a fishtank taking a Shinkansen train to Tokyo. There they make touristic visits to the Tokyo Tower and the famous Tsukiji fish market before getting back on the train for a return trip so that the octopus can be submerged again, back home in the Akashi Sea. The artist refers to this work as his Apollo project, involving as it did an adventure far from the natural habitat of the octopus – the fishtank being the equivalent of a spacecraft – isolated from the surrounding atmosphere so that the octopus could survive its voyage into unfamiliarity. We easily imagine how weird our world must have seemed to the octopus whilst being reminded of how "wonderful" such a creature is from our point of view.
The involvement of others, not only in the consumption but also the production of his work, marks Shimabuku out as a major figure in the recent development of relational art practice. He has produced many events, interventions and performances that are very open to audiences, to the point that they become active participants. When the Earth Turned to Sea (2002) requires dozens of volunteers to fly Chinese fish kites, the result is a shoal of fish in the sky – or a flock of fish – and so the world is turned upside down. Passing through the rubber band (2000), similarly invites gallery visitors to step through the stretching loops, a simple act of fun and wonder via the most modest of means, as in all of his works the marvellous emerges from the mundane.
The exhibition is complementary to and produced in partnership with Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland.
Shimabuku (1969, born in Kobe, Japan) lives and works in Berlin. Selected solo exhibitions include: Sea and Flowers, Barbara Wien Wilma Lukatsch, Berlin; City in the sea, Air de Paris, Paris; Flying Me, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2014); Something that Floats/Something that Sinks, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK and Noto, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2013); Leaves Swim, Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona, Spain (2012); Man should try to avoid contact with alien life forms, Centre international d'art et du paysage de l'Île de Vassivière, Vassivière, France; On the water, CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux (2011); The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2009); DAAD galerie, Berlin; Wilkinson Gallery (2007); Swansea Jack Memorial Dog Swimming Competition, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea (2003); Then, I Decided To Give a Tour of Tokyo To the Octopus From Akashi, Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris (2002); America, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (1994).
He has participated in several group exhibitions including: The Great Acceleration, Taipei Biennial , Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2014); Aquatopia, Tate St. Ives and Nottingham Contemporary, UK; Re: emerge, Sharjah Biennial 11, UAE (2013); Mount Fuji does not exist, Frac Île de France – Le Plateau, Paris (2012); Impossible Community, Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Kaza Ana/Air Hole: Another Conceptualism from Asia, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; International Triennale of Contemporary Art, Yokohama (2011); Eating the Universe: Food in Art, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (2009); Between Art and Life, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Genève, Switzerland; Experimenta FOLKLORE, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany (2008); Beautiful New World: Contemporary Visual Culture from Japan, Long March Project, Beijing, China; How to live together, MAC: Museo de Arte, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2007); How to live together, 27th Bienal de São Paulo; Berlin-Tokyo Tokyo-Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; International 06, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2006); Expat-Art Centre, ICA, London + Musee de Art Contemporain, Lyon, France (2004); Utopia Station, 50th Venice Biennale, Venice (2003); Facts of Life, Hayward Gallery, London (2001); Elysian Fields, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2000); Space, Witte de With, Rotterdam (1999); Everyday, 11th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (1998). Shimabuku is represented by NoguerasBlanchard Gallery, Barcelona and Madrid; Air de Paris galerie de'art contemporain, Paris and Barbara Wien Wilma Lukatsch Gallery, Berlin.MORE
Thank you to all who attended the CAG's 26th Annual Gala and Art Auction on Saturday, November 8.
The event was a huge success and a very fun night!
In case you missed it…go to www.cagauction.com to view all the works that were auctioned and which are now part of new collections.
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first Canadian solo presentation of work by Swedish artist Gunilla Klingberg, two new interrelated large-scale commissions across the gallery façade and off-site, both challenging and exploiting the opportunities presented at each location.
Klingberg's practice is characterized by the intersection of received knowledge, folk beliefs, popular culture and divergent cultural activities. Her work draws our attention to how complicated the connections between these systems are, but it also plays with the things that arise in this encounter, a pivotal feature being an interest in what is produced by the hybridization of distinct cultures, traditions and geographies. The disparate and heterogeneous are interwoven creating meanings that mutate to form a new context.
At the gallery and the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, two murals of seemingly quasi-oriental pattern appear to evoke cosmic mandalas, transforming the individual spaces and enveloping the viewer in light and colour, shifting patterns and reflections. Klingberg's work surrounds us. We are seduced, made part of a special atmosphere, immersed within the work rather than just looking at it. Her interest in using patterns and movement to manipulate our seeing, to influence our state of consciousness and our sensory impressions, has links with Op Art and the psychedelic movement of the late sixties, appropriate touchstones in the recent history of the counter culture in this part of the world.
However, what at first glance appears to recall a certain set of values and moments in time has another dimension, a different shared experience. If we look more closely we see that the intricate ornamentation, the symmetrically repeated symbols of these murals, is made up of something much more mainstream, corporate logos from Canadian low cost and high street stores. Concepts are intertwined: while science might appropriate metaphors from mythologies or New-Age ideas borrow from the language of the natural sciences, here spirituality merges with everyday consumer culture. Klingberg suggests that they are analogous, that both seem to promise the same thing: a state in which nothing is uncomfortable or threatening – the possibility of total, rapid satisfaction of our needs and desires, accessible to everyone. The images are so familiar that we no longer think about them, yet they present a subconscious influence uniting us in a no-man's land between the public and the private. She evokes a spirit of community, or of communality, and poses questions regarding what it would be to have something in common.
Amid the proliferation of progressively similar goods it is the small, meaningful differences that count. The world around us is increasingly transformed into a surface filled with signs—computer screens, urban space, advertisements, the pages of newspapers— the most tangible properties being disposability and change. It is these surfaces that concern Klingberg. Our urban environment, its dwindling public places increasingly invaded by homogenous architecture and development, the objects we own, all constitute an intricate system of codes, messages and ideologies, our choices and participation tantamount to consuming. The boundary between art and design is often drawn along the line of utility and usefulness. But the edge becomes increasingly elastic when the difference between the values of these forms depends not so much on their functionality as on their seductiveness or power of rhetorical persuasion. Thus Klingberg's work moves further than a mere critique of brand fetishism, the lure of contemporary global labels, beyond just pointing things out and rejecting them. It poses the awkward question of whether being alternative to a mainstream or on the "outside" is any longer possible. Might a more critical and appropriate assessment lie in revealing and acknowledging the subtle and insidious way in which we are all drawn into a sense of fascination with the things that surround us. Through her work we find ourselves in a situation in which we feel the power of images and beliefs being examined. We are all complicit.
The exhibition is supported by Iaspis, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee's International Programme for Visual Artists.
Jürgen Partenheimer
The Archive – The Raven Diaries
September 12 to November 9, 2014
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Canada of work by acclaimed German artist Jürgen Partenheimer. Reflecting the diversity of the artist's practice, the exhibition comprises works on paper, text, printmaking, ceramics and sculpture, produced in Vancouver in spring 2014 during his recent residency as the Audain Distinguished Artist-in-Residence, hosted by Emily Carr University of Art + Design .
Partenheimer's work is essentially abstract; his drawings and paintings are remarkable for their fragile beauty, whilst sculpture and ceramic work, suggesting some usefulness, remain elusive with respect to any specific function. His visual language, the particular form of poetic abstraction, and his life-long interest in notions of representation with consideration of locality, space and place, suggest a key resonance with artistic practice in the city, asserting continuity between these forms and an experience of daily life.
The imaginary archive that gives the exhibition and associated book its title provides the framework for the exhibition based on the oeuvre of the artist. They are the visible expression of both intellect and emotion carrying traces of their process, temporality and correspondence with other objects. To this end, in Vancouver the exhibition has a subtitle, The Raven Diaries, referencing the symbol and characteristics of the Raven to west coast First Nations culture, while simultaneously drawing analogies to similar figures in cultural myths elsewhere in the world, and especially to the role of the artist as trickster, representative of a catalyst for change in life, for creativity and humour.
Additionally, a selection of Partenheimer's ceramic works will be on view at the Museum of Anthropology, UBC, Vancouver in the Koerner European Ceramics Gallery. Reflecting Partenheimer's interest in the interconnectivity of cultural disciplines, in October we will host performances of electro-acoustic music by Vancouver Electronic Ensemble as part of the Vancouver New Music Festival.MORE
Upcoming at the Field House
Upcoming at the Field House
Broken City Lab
January to April, 2014
Broken City Lab is an artist-led collective that works through collaborative social practice and creative research to understand the ways in which locality is shaped and enacted in the city. Taking the form of events, workshops, installations, and interventions, their projects aim to connect various disciplines and critique, annotate and re-imagine the cities that they encounter, and have unfolded in collaboration with numerous organizations and institutions. They currently operate CIVIC Space in downtown Windsor, Ontario, a 24-month long project exploring the intersection of art and civic life. As part of the Field House Studio Residency members will embark on site-specific research towards a new project that explores and makes visible issues at the intersection of education, public space and civic life. This new project will develop a sequence of programming that circulates in and around the Burrard Marina Field House.
Broken City Lab's work recently appeared in the th International Venice Biennial of Architecture as part of the Grounds for Detroit exhibit and the collective was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award. Previous projects have included working with the City of Windsor's Transit Authority to install community-created text-based art in its buses; interactive outdoor projections detailing hundreds of ideas for saving the city; the design and distribution of removable micro-gardens; interactive text-based performance soware; large-scale messages projected across an international border; artists hosted for an interdisciplinary storefront residency project; a foot long message painted on a parking lot visible from planes and satellites; and leading numerous psycho-geographic walks, DIY workshops and community brainstorming sessions in cities all
across Canada.
For this residency, we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Province of British Columbia through the BC Creative
Communities Award and the generosity of many private and individual donations. The Field House Studio Residency Program is generously supported by the Vancouver Park Board and the City of Vancouver. Broken City Lab acknowledges support from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, City of Windsor and Ontario Trillium Foundation.
Broken City Lab
Saturday, February 15 , 2pm
The Field House Studio at Burrard Marina
In partnership with SFU Philosophers Café, Broken City Lab will
host an artist talk and discussion at the Burrard Marina Field
House Studio.
Marie Lorenz – visit and upcoming 2014 project
This December 2013, Marie Lorenz will visit Vancouver to begin research for a project to be completed in May 2014 at the Burrard Marina Field House.
Marie Lorenz's work combines psycho-geographic exploration with highly crafted, material forms. In her ongoing project The Tide and Current Taxi, (http://www.tideandcurrenttaxi.org/) Lorenz ferries people on the East and Hudson Rivers surrounding New York City in a boat she has specially made. Lorenz studies tidal charts of the New York Harbor and uses river currents to direct and drift the boat throughout the waterways of the City. The act of floating adds a specific presence to one's own observation: the viewer maintains an awareness of their own balance and form as they absorb the details in their surroundings. This kind of observation creates something new out of something familiar. For Vancouver Lorenz will begin to develop ideas and discussion toward constructing a new vessel and mapping local waterways in which the community will play an important role as participants.
Previously at the Field House
Canadian artist Raymond Boisjoly was our inaugural resident artist at the Burrard Marina Field House Studio. For six months Boisjoly occupied the Field House, using it as a studio and a place for community engagement.
Please see the related blog posts on the right for more news about his residency at the Field House. Click here for the CAG Field House Blog
The Field House Studio is an off-site artist residency space and community hub organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery. This initiative seeks to support artists whose practice moves beyond conventional exhibition making, echoing the founding origins of the gallery where artists were offered support toward the production of new work. Our goal in presenting art outside of the boundaries of our exhibition spaces is to reach out to communities, offering new ways for individuals to encounter and connect with art and artists, expanding audiences as well as strengthening our commitment to nurturing artists through example, context and commissioning.
Running parallel to the residency program is an ongoing series of public events for all ages.
Speaker Series: Artists in Public
This summer the CAG launched a new series inviting creative and cultural producers to share their theories, thoughts, and experiences of developing projects in the public realm.
Justin A. Langlois
Saturday, August 17, 4pm
Field House Studio at Burrard Marina
Langlois discussed his work as co-founder and research director of Broken City Lab, an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research collective and non-profit organization working to explore locality, infrastructures and creative practice leading towards civic change. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Windsor. In the fall of 2013, he will join the Faculty of Culture + Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Zoe Kreye and Catherine Grau
Unlearning Weekenders
Saturday, June 22, 4pm
Field House Studio at Burrard Marina
This first talk presented collaborators Zoe Kreye and Catherine Grau who were working on a public project throughout Vancouver entitled Unlearning Weekender, a project by Goethe Satellite @ Vancouver, created in cooperation with Dance Troupe Practice, Windsor House School, Public Dreams and Revised Projects. They discussed the series of workshops which invited the public to create rituals as a means of challenging invisible social structures aiming to strengthen community bonds.
Family Days at the Field House Studio
Free drop-in art activities for all ages which responded to the work of Raymond Boisjoly and CAG exhibitions.
Saturday August 24 – A free all ages drop-in art activity: making pin-wheel windmills.
Saturday July 27 – We welcomed art makers of all ages to the Field House, participants learnt the basics of printmaking by making their own styrofoam relief prints.
Saturday June 29 – All ages of visitors dropped by the Field House for a marine mobile workshop, constructing easy-to-make kinetic sculptures which took the marine world as a theme.
The Field House Studio Residency Program is generously supported by the Vancouver Park Board and the City of Vancouver. The inaugural residency with Raymond Boisjoly was supported by the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Advanced Education, Innovation and Technology.
Upcoming at the Field House
Upcoming at the Field House
Broken City Lab
January to April, 2014
Broken City Lab is an artist-led collective that works through collaborative social practice and creative research to understand the ways in which locality is shaped and enacted in the city. Taking the form of events, workshops, installations, and interventions, their projects aim to connect various disciplines and critique, annotate and re-imagine the cities that they encounter, and have unfolded in collaboration with numerous organizations and institutions. They currently operate CIVIC Space in downtown Windsor, Ontario, a 24-month long project exploring the intersection of art and civic life. As part of the Field House Studio Residency members will embark on site-specific research towards a new project that explores and makes visible issues at the intersection of education, public space and civic life. This new project will develop a sequence of programming that circulates in and around the Burrard Marina Field House.
Broken City Lab's work recently appeared in the th International Venice Biennial of Architecture as part of the Grounds for Detroit exhibit and the collective was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award. Previous projects have included working with the City of Windsor's Transit Authority to install community-created text-based art in its buses; interactive outdoor projections detailing hundreds of ideas for saving the city; the design and distribution of removable micro-gardens; interactive text-based performance soware; large-scale messages projected across an international border; artists hosted for an interdisciplinary storefront residency project; a foot long message painted on a parking lot visible from planes and satellites; and leading numerous psycho-geographic walks, DIY workshops and community brainstorming sessions in cities all
across Canada.
For this residency, we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Province of British Columbia through the BC Creative
Communities Award and the generosity of many private and individual donations. The Field House Studio Residency Program is generously supported by the Vancouver Park Board and the City of Vancouver. Broken City Lab acknowledges support from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, City of Windsor and Ontario Trillium Foundation.
Broken City Lab
Saturday, February 15 , 2pm
The Field House Studio at Burrard Marina
In partnership with SFU Philosophers Café, Broken City Lab will
host an artist talk and discussion at the Burrard Marina Field
House Studio.
Marie Lorenz – visit and upcoming 2014 project
This December 2013, Marie Lorenz will visit Vancouver to begin research for a project to be completed in May 2014 at the Burrard Marina Field House.
Marie Lorenz's work combines psycho-geographic exploration with highly crafted, material forms. In her ongoing project The Tide and Current Taxi, (http://www.tideandcurrenttaxi.org/) Lorenz ferries people on the East and Hudson Rivers surrounding New York City in a boat she has specially made. Lorenz studies tidal charts of the New York Harbor and uses river currents to direct and drift the boat throughout the waterways of the City. The act of floating adds a specific presence to one's own observation: the viewer maintains an awareness of their own balance and form as they absorb the details in their surroundings. This kind of observation creates something new out of something familiar. For Vancouver Lorenz will begin to develop ideas and discussion toward constructing a new vessel and mapping local waterways in which the community will play an important role as participants.
Previously at the Field House
Canadian artist Raymond Boisjoly was our inaugural resident artist at the Burrard Marina Field House Studio. For six months Boisjoly occupied the Field House, using it as a studio and a place for community engagement.
Please see the related blog posts on the right for more news about his residency at the Field House. Click here for the CAG Field House Blog
The Field House Studio is an off-site artist residency space and community hub organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery. This initiative seeks to support artists whose practice moves beyond conventional exhibition making, echoing the founding origins of the gallery where artists were offered support toward the production of new work. Our goal in presenting art outside of the boundaries of our exhibition spaces is to reach out to communities, offering new ways for individuals to encounter and connect with art and artists, expanding audiences as well as strengthening our commitment to nurturing artists through example, context and commissioning.
Running parallel to the residency program is an ongoing series of public events for all ages.
Speaker Series: Artists in Public
This summer the CAG launched a new series inviting creative and cultural producers to share their theories, thoughts, and experiences of developing projects in the public realm.
Justin A. Langlois
Saturday, August 17, 4pm
Field House Studio at Burrard Marina
Langlois discussed his work as co-founder and research director of Broken City Lab, an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research collective and non-profit organization working to explore locality, infrastructures and creative practice leading towards civic change. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Windsor. In the fall of 2013, he will join the Faculty of Culture + Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Zoe Kreye and Catherine Grau
Unlearning Weekenders
Saturday, June 22, 4pm
Field House Studio at Burrard Marina
This first talk presented collaborators Zoe Kreye and Catherine Grau who were working on a public project throughout Vancouver entitled Unlearning Weekender, a project by Goethe Satellite @ Vancouver, created in cooperation with Dance Troupe Practice, Windsor House School, Public Dreams and Revised Projects. They discussed the series of workshops which invited the public to create rituals as a means of challenging invisible social structures aiming to strengthen community bonds.
Family Days at the Field House Studio
Free drop-in art activities for all ages which responded to the work of Raymond Boisjoly and CAG exhibitions.
Saturday August 24 – A free all ages drop-in art activity: making pin-wheel windmills.
Saturday July 27 – We welcomed art makers of all ages to the Field House, participants learnt the basics of printmaking by making their own styrofoam relief prints.
Saturday June 29 – All ages of visitors dropped by the Field House for a marine mobile workshop, constructing easy-to-make kinetic sculptures which took the marine world as a theme.
The Field House Studio Residency Program is generously supported by the Vancouver Park Board and the City of Vancouver. The inaugural residency with Raymond Boisjoly was supported by the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Advanced Education, Innovation and Technology.
Upcoming at the Field House
Upcoming at the Field House
Broken City Lab
January to April, 2014
Broken City Lab is an artist-led collective that works through collaborative social practice and creative research to understand the ways in which locality is shaped and enacted in the city. Taking the form of events, workshops, installations, and interventions, their projects aim to connect various disciplines and critique, annotate and re-imagine the cities that they encounter, and have unfolded in collaboration with numerous organizations and institutions. They currently operate CIVIC Space in downtown Windsor, Ontario, a 24-month long project exploring the intersection of art and civic life. As part of the Field House Studio Residency members will embark on site-specific research towards a new project that explores and makes visible issues at the intersection of education, public space and civic life. This new project will develop a sequence of programming that circulates in and around the Burrard Marina Field House.
Broken City Lab's work recently appeared in the th International Venice Biennial of Architecture as part of the Grounds for Detroit exhibit and the collective was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award. Previous projects have included working with the City of Windsor's Transit Authority to install community-created text-based art in its buses; interactive outdoor projections detailing hundreds of ideas for saving the city; the design and distribution of removable micro-gardens; interactive text-based performance soware; large-scale messages projected across an international border; artists hosted for an interdisciplinary storefront residency project; a foot long message painted on a parking lot visible from planes and satellites; and leading numerous psycho-geographic walks, DIY workshops and community brainstorming sessions in cities all
across Canada.
For this residency, we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Province of British Columbia through the BC Creative
Communities Award and the generosity of many private and individual donations. The Field House Studio Residency Program is generously supported by the Vancouver Park Board and the City of Vancouver. Broken City Lab acknowledges support from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, City of Windsor and Ontario Trillium Foundation.
Broken City Lab
Saturday, February 15 , 2pm
The Field House Studio at Burrard Marina
In partnership with SFU Philosophers Café, Broken City Lab will
host an artist talk and discussion at the Burrard Marina Field
House Studio.
Marie Lorenz – visit and upcoming 2014 project
This December 2013, Marie Lorenz will visit Vancouver to begin research for a project to be completed in May 2014 at the Burrard Marina Field House.
Marie Lorenz's work combines psycho-geographic exploration with highly crafted, material forms. In her ongoing project The Tide and Current Taxi, (http://www.tideandcurrenttaxi.org/) Lorenz ferries people on the East and Hudson Rivers surrounding New York City in a boat she has specially made. Lorenz studies tidal charts of the New York Harbor and uses river currents to direct and drift the boat throughout the waterways of the City. The act of floating adds a specific presence to one's own observation: the viewer maintains an awareness of their own balance and form as they absorb the details in their surroundings. This kind of observation creates something new out of something familiar. For Vancouver Lorenz will begin to develop ideas and discussion toward constructing a new vessel and mapping local waterways in which the community will play an important role as participants.
Previously at the Field House
Canadian artist Raymond Boisjoly was our inaugural resident artist at the Burrard Marina Field House Studio. For six months Boisjoly occupied the Field House, using it as a studio and a place for community engagement.
Please see the related blog posts on the right for more news about his residency at the Field House. Click here for the CAG Field House Blog
The Field House Studio is an off-site artist residency space and community hub organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery. This initiative seeks to support artists whose practice moves beyond conventional exhibition making, echoing the founding origins of the gallery where artists were offered support toward the production of new work. Our goal in presenting art outside of the boundaries of our exhibition spaces is to reach out to communities, offering new ways for individuals to encounter and connect with art and artists, expanding audiences as well as strengthening our commitment to nurturing artists through example, context and commissioning.
Running parallel to the residency program is an ongoing series of public events for all ages.
Speaker Series: Artists in Public
This summer the CAG launched a new series inviting creative and cultural producers to share their theories, thoughts, and experiences of developing projects in the public realm.
Justin A. Langlois
Saturday, August 17, 4pm
Field House Studio at Burrard Marina
Langlois discussed his work as co-founder and research director of Broken City Lab, an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research collective and non-profit organization working to explore locality, infrastructures and creative practice leading towards civic change. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Windsor. In the fall of 2013, he will join the Faculty of Culture + Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Zoe Kreye and Catherine Grau
Unlearning Weekenders
Saturday, June 22, 4pm
Field House Studio at Burrard Marina
This first talk presented collaborators Zoe Kreye and Catherine Grau who were working on a public project throughout Vancouver entitled Unlearning Weekender, a project by Goethe Satellite @ Vancouver, created in cooperation with Dance Troupe Practice, Windsor House School, Public Dreams and Revised Projects. They discussed the series of workshops which invited the public to create rituals as a means of challenging invisible social structures aiming to strengthen community bonds.
Family Days at the Field House Studio
Free drop-in art activities for all ages which responded to the work of Raymond Boisjoly and CAG exhibitions.
Saturday August 24 – A free all ages drop-in art activity: making pin-wheel windmills.
Saturday July 27 – We welcomed art makers of all ages to the Field House, participants learnt the basics of printmaking by making their own styrofoam relief prints.
Saturday June 29 – All ages of visitors dropped by the Field House for a marine mobile workshop, constructing easy-to-make kinetic sculptures which took the marine world as a theme.
The Field House Studio Residency Program is generously supported by the Vancouver Park Board and the City of Vancouver. The inaugural residency with Raymond Boisjoly was supported by the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Advanced Education, Innovation and Technology.
Headlines & Last Lines in the Movies transforms the façade of the Contemporary Art Gallery, wooden cladding covering its frontage and south east corner. Resembling a construction site, the structure becomes the ground for the work; the title a precise description of itself.
In this new mural, Brüggemann writes headlines from current newspapers, from local to global, in combination with excerpts of last lines from popular films. "Forget it Jake, its Chinatown" could be spray-painted next to "Enbridge Pipeline Rejected", the juxtaposition of appropriated texts creating both a familiarity and an oddly appropriate pairing suggestive of narratives that may exist to connect current news items with scripted dialogue. With one text residing in the real, the other in the fictive, in combination they create a barrage of information that Brüggemann unifies into a totality of black text. The overlay forms a graphic field that is only partly legible, language creating an immersive installation that draws colloquial phrases into dense cacophonic arenas. The work seems declaratory, but what it is trying to communicate is drowned out by volume, intensity and opacity.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a survey exhibition of work by Canadian artist Kelly Richardson, best known for her immersive projection works which create environments prompting a questioning of our relationship to the natural world.
The universe Richardson constructs can seem somewhat bleak, devoid of all but the strangest forms of life, and notionally touching upon issues within ecological discussion and environmental debate. Yet if we consider nature not as omniscient, but mediated, appropriated, subjugated and vulnerable, then by examining any simple concept of the "natural", Richardson actually makes the interrogation even more urgent. Immense and unsettling projections show animated scenes of primordial swamps or forests, desolate moonscapes or eerie holographic trees flickering in and out of view. And yet the videos are open-ended, drawing us in to develop our own narratives for these unsettling scenes, which could be humanity's last attempt at caring for a ruined planet. Even though she leaves the questions unanswered, it's clear that she is suggesting we should project farther into the future than we're comfortable doing, a quality enhanced in understanding how these works are made. A particular quality in Richardson's videos– in addition to technical facility and her embrace of beauty as a way to prime us about the disturbing undercurrents snaking through her otherwise seductive work – is the way she seems to look back from the future.
The exhibition comprises a selection of recent major projections and photographs. In the large-scale, multi-screen installation of Leviathan (2011) we are confronted with an all-encompassing projection. Through the image and its reflections on walls and floors, it occupies or rather infiltrates the space, implicating us as audience as we simultaneously behold and are contained within the image. It asserts itself, with its Biblical title, as suggestive of some kind of apocalyptic flood, the swirling water appearing to almost envelop and swallow up the viewer. The works too are in many other ways absorbing; they elicit a terrible beauty through the seduction of surface. And yet this slow, churning motion becomes almost hypnotic, a narcotic mesmerizing image, an illusion perhaps not at odds with the evocation of a notional poisonous or toxic liquid; a substance that is at once of our world but at the same time transforming, of becoming somewhere else.
Richardson's work touches also on the notion of the sublime, that mixture of awe, hope and fear that reveals something uncomfortable about the depth and darkness of human desire. While technically pristine, in part through the process of computer manipulation and invention of form, her work has precedents in sources as seemingly disparate as the romantic landscape paintings of the late 18th century or the B-horror and science-fiction films of the 1970s and 80s. She has stated: "I'm interested in that contradiction at this critical time in human history when current predictions for our future are not just unsettling, but terrifying."
The notion of the artificial is brought to bear in contemplation of what might be considered natural, in part reinforced by the visual polish of the moving images, which reach the point where most viewers are unable to distinguish between what is real and what is computer-generated. In Orion Tide, (2013) we see rocks and foliage littering the ground, convincing us of some form of scrub land. Then an eerie, distant sound warns us of that which follows, the slow eruption of a lit pod from the surface. Trails of flame and smoke lead the eye up through the dark sky and then out of sight, followed by another and another and another. Are they escape pods —final humans abandoning all hope— or are they a death rattle of a dying planet? Richardson deftly avoids simplistic environmental and sci-fi cliché with a painterly sense of narrative mystery.
The exhibition is developed in collaboration with the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, UK; Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, UK; Towner, Eastbourne, UK and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. An extensive monograph accompanies the exhibition.MORE
The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes is a group exhibition of recent film and video that seeks to interrogate notions of uncertainty within the documentary format. Work by ten artists engages with the conventions of source footage, narrative voice and re-enactment, questioning perceptions of such devices, while also reclaiming them in order to redefine their intent and potential. Not all works critique these characteristics, but each examines the consumption of knowledge and truth, using the body as form and performance as a site, to address where meaning may reside.MORE
CAG Window Spaces and off-site at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Canada Line and Fieldhouse Studio Residency Program.
In partnership with the City of Vancouver Fieldhouse Studio Residency Program, the Contemporary Art Gallery presents Canadian artist Raymond Boisjoly as our inaugural resident artist. For six months he will occupy the Burrard Marina Field House, using it as a studio and a place for community engagement, coinciding with the launch of As It Comes, two new interrelated public works. The title appears at the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station as a discrete piece, humorously foreboding, and more comic than terrifying, presented in brightly coloured vinyl like a credit from a B-list horror film. Linked to the text in the gallery windows, Boisjoly removes all suggestions of the past, not to deny what has become history, but with the intent to restore belief systems that are still intact.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major new commission for the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station by influential Vancouver–based photographer Marian Penner Bancroft.
Since the late sixties, Penner Bancroft has defined herself as a photographer, dedicating her practice to the medium, meditating on its conventions while also considering the dematerialization of the art object; combining conceptual art strategies as well as pushing the presentation and production of the photographic image into more immersive forms. She is known for drawing attention to the lines between where an image begins and what constitutes an image – at times using the physical framing device as a tangible three-dimensional photographic field.
The subject of Penner Bancroft's work often resides in the personal, following her family, tracking their daily movements both real and, in the case of her ancestors, imagined. She embeds these inquiries into images of the landscape, using visual traces of a colonial transit to and across Canada as part of an individual yet generalized narrative of immigration and displacement. In recent years she has widened the scope of her research to include the histories of the fur trade, farming, music and religion in relation to the landscape and mapping.MORE
Kevin Schmidt's solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery presents a survey of recent works including two major new pieces, EDM House and High Altitude Balloon Harmless Amateur Radio Equipment, both made in 2013.
Schmidt is an artist who has consistently developed a body of work that addresses notions of a displaced spectacle, often within a consideration of the sublime. This ongoing proposition is tackled not so much through exclusive references to landscape, of being awestruck at the point of apprehending such beauty and wilderness, but by juxtaposing seemingly disparate elements within these environments. Works are often situated in remote locations, where Schmidt stages remarkable events which transfer elements of urban culture into untouched natural contexts. In this way, he simultaneously examines both the seductive elements of contemporary cultural production and the constructions that surround the idea of nature.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery opened a unique group exhibition that brought together six British Colombia artists who use the journey as a way to engage with landscape traditions. In Sentimental Journey, all the artists went on expeditions, traversing the landscape to collect inspiration and gather materials to document their experiences. The works in Sentimental Journey were both real and fictive representations of often undetermined treks. Many of the works had an optimism that was tied to the landscape, the desire to be outside and the character of the artist/wanderer.
The art works in this context brought forward the tight relation between the journey and its presentation, embracing the romance of the journey while also recontextualizing and privileging the terms of storytelling in order to question sentimentality. Sentimental Journey captured sentiments of eighteenth and nineteenth century Romanticism. Most of the artists in the exhibition kept true to this tradition, using the journey as their primary source of inspiration, translating their journeys materially to create a new experience in its own right. As many of the works in the exhibition showed us, our visual fields are saturated with representations of landscapes, but here the artist's to reinvigorate our perception of nature through their distinctive working methods.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents an ambitious new neon commission across our building façade with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, as part of a larger partnership of presentations, performances and events with British artist Tim Etchells. Arguably best known for his work with Forced Entertainment, Etchells has developed his own practice as an artist outside of their ground-breaking performances, his solo work is diverse, moving from a base in performance into visual art and fiction. Through writing, producing neon, video and text, collaborations with the photographer Hugo Glendinning on photographic work, and performance projects with an ever-expanding group of artists from around the world, including Franko B and Vlatka Horvat, Etchells opens up new possibilities to approach related ideas via different routes by working across these different media and contexts.
In all aspects of his practice Etchells is often concerned with live-ness and presence, with the unfolding of events in time and place. The site where things happen could be an LCD monitor or a computer screen, a stage, the space of a page, a gallery, a found location, a street, or some private space — a room or a car for instance — in which a person might listen to the radio or read a text. Who Knows is typical of Etchells' approach in that something happens — there is an encounter, a process, the unfolding of an event and its implications, and an exploration of the dynamic relationship between the work and the viewer. Who Knows reveals a fascination with rules and systems in language and in culture, in the way these structures are both productive and constraining. Individual phrases of 'I know', 'You know', 'We know', 'They know', produces a playfully paranoid flavour, yet a tone that takes on something of the surveillance, snooping, watching topic, that's even more on our minds since the information leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden in May of last year. Through the repetition of phrases, the text stages or implies an event or an idea that is at once unravelled and assembled. The mechanisms and economies of this process — of exposure and concealment, construction and deconstruction, appearance and disappearance — are at the heart of what Etchells does.
In addition to this installation we co-present a series of performances — The Quiet Volume with Ant Hampton and Sight Is The Sense That Dying People Tend To Lose First with Jim Fletcher — and public talks involving Etchells detailed elsewhere in this bulletin. Collectively these form our hosting of Tim Etchells as PuSh Festival 2014 artist-in-residence. Presented in partnership with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, Vancouver.
Born in 1962, Tim Etchells is based in Sheffield and London, UK and is the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, a theatre company founded in 1984. With Forced Entertainment he has directed, written, and occasionally performed in, dozens of critically acclaimed performance works that have been shown at major festivals and theatres around the world.
Recent solo exhibitions include Sketch and Butchers (both London); Netherlands Media Art Institute and de Appel, Amsterdam; Void Spaces, Site Gallery, Sheffield; Sparwasser HQ, Berlin; Art Sheffield 2008; ArtFutures, Bloomberg SPACE, London; Exit Art, New York; Kunsthaus Graz; Manifesta 7, Rovereto, Italy; Acts of Voicing, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; Aichi Triennale, Aichi Arts Center, Nagoya and Lonely at the Top: Modern Dialect, MuHKA, Antwerp. Etchells co-curated and commissioned work in the Performing Sculpture section of the DLA Piper series This is Sculpture at Tate Liverpool (2009) and took part in the Gothenburg International Biennale, What a Wonderful World; After Architecture, CASM, Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona and The Malady of Writing, MACBA, Barcelona in 2009. His books include a critical exploration of contemporary performance and theatre as well as an introduction to his work with Forced Entertainment titled Certain Fragments (Routledge, 1999), a book of short stories, Endland Stories (Pulp Books, 1998), an ironic dream dictionary, The Dream Dictionary for the Modern Dreamer (Duckworth, 2004), and a novel titled The Broken World (Windmill, 2009).MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Canada by French artist Aurélien Froment, comprising an ambitious body of newly commissioned work.
Froment has produced an exhibition which focuses on the series of educational toys (Spielgaben or play gifts) designed by Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852), the German founder of the original Kindergarten. Froment's longstanding interest in Fröbel was aroused by the openness of the system of objects he devised, which has paradoxically resulted in both their survival and disappearance. For Froment as for Fröbel, each shape begets another, each form foreshadows a second; all images are keys to other images. Replicas have been produced based on historical artifacts, presenting for the first time in an exhibition, the play gifts in the complete sequence as imagined by their author. The objects are presented alongside an ensemble of photographs, which map Fröbel's pedagogy, while drawing connections with earlier, as well as future uses of the geometric grid. Fröbel Fröbeled is therefore an exhibition on Fröbel, with Fröbel — an exploration of his art, as well as a reflection on what lies beneath his system of objects.
Drawing on the ideas of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the experiences of Swiss pedagogue Johan Pestalozzi, Fröbel advocated for a practice of education where the child and the teacher are co-workers, with play and self-activity at the center of the learning process. To this end Fröbel introduced activities such as singing, dancing, gardening, map making and created a series of educational toys, the play gifts. He brought together existing children's toys (wooden blocks, woollen balls, sticks), stripped of any signs suggesting pre-determined educational purposes such as letters, numbers, figures or colours and sequenced these within an overarching system of relationships in which each toy foreshadows the next while being transformed. A soft woollen ball turns into a hard wooden sphere; a sphere into a cube via a cylinder; a cube is divided into smaller cubes and so on, until volumes become surfaces, surfaces become lines and lines are segmented towards infinity. Continuity and opposition systematically order the world of Fröbel's gifts. Since the mid-nineteenth century, many educationalists and manufacturers appropriated the influential Kindergarten material and while establishing it as a prominent feature of modernity, the consistency of Fröbel's ideal was slowly diluted, lost or abandoned.
Throughout his career, Fröbel continually refined his play gifts to achieve the greatest scope through their different forms, relations and applications. They constitute a modest but complex body of works, used for object lessons and often accompanied by analogies and stories, something tangible to enhance the understanding of something conceptual.
Individual sets comprised balls, blocks, sticks, paper folding and weaving, peas and clay. From simple geometrical shapes could appear a chair, a worker's house, a train, a ruin or a flower, as well as introducing abstract notions such as unity and interconnectedness. Each gift would be used in short sessions of directed play. Collector and scholar Norman Brosterman states in his seminal book Inventing Kindergarten, that "unlike the building blocks, mosaic toys, and traditional crafts that were their forebears, the gifts were never available for entirely 'free play'. Their use was always related to the three realms: forms of nature (or life), forms of knowledge (or geometry, mathematics and science) and forms of beauty (or art)." The potential of each toy and its associated applications were therefore multiplied according to their ability to represent, demonstrate or to be arranged in a pleasing way.
In the exhibition, each gift is also used and depicted by Froment in a number of different ways. To the three realms proposed by Fröbel — nature, knowledge and beauty — Froment suggests to add two others — cultural forms and material forms — revealing aspects of the gifts' own history while reflecting on its mediation within a contemporary public art gallery. In some of the accompanying photographs, the gifts are staged based on engravings featured in Fröbel's own manuals and literature that followed. Representing a throne, a church, a castle, a cross or a sentry box, the photographs draw the imaginary atlas of an archetypal world rooted in the nineteenth century. Whether photographed by Froment like diagrams, models, products or architecture, they perform, alongside their related toy, some of the instructions provided in the early handbooks while potentially becoming again loose instructions themselves. Divorced from their original publication context and captions, freed from their layout, the constellation of images in the exhibition unfolds as another gift.
If the first series of photographs notionally illustrate uses of the play gifts while mapping a model world, other predominantly small-scale images relate more specifically to the biography of the German pedagogue. Fröbel lived and worked close to his birthplace in Thuringia, central Germany. He founded his first institution for early childhood education in 1837 in the small town of Bad Blankenburg where two years later, he coined the term 'Kindergarten'. Juxtaposed with the graphic educational material, this series of views of the countryside near Jena (the former East Germany near the Czech Republic border) show a reality without clear narrative, yet situates geographically, socially and culturally the genesis of Fröbel's project. Through this Froment implies a complex relationship between the objects, images, ideas, places and us as audience. The work becomes the vehicle to draw our attention to changed contexts and so perceptions shift. We contemplate ideas not in a void but think while practising.
Alongside the exhibition in Vancouver, the CAG is working in partnership with DIM Cinema at The Cinematheque to present Interludes: Aurélien Froment. Complementing the exhibition, the films selected by Froment often use the format of instructional videos. Taking place on January 20, 2014 at 7.30 pm, works to be screened include The Apse, the Bell and the Antelope (2005); Pulmo Marina (2010); Théâtre de poche (2007); Fourdrinier Machine Interlude (2010); Camillo's Idea (2012).
The exhibition is made in collaboration with Villa Arson, Nice, France; Spike Island, Bristol, UK; Frac Île de France — Le Plateau, Paris, France; Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany. A publication will be developed in 2015 bringing together this new commission and the various presentations in the exhibition tour.
Research toward the production of this work is funded by a grant from programme 'Hors les murs' 2011 of the Institut Français. The exhibition is supported by the Consulat Général de France à Vancouver and Institut Français.
Born in 1976 in Angers, France, Aurélien Froment lives and works in Dublin. Solo exhibitions by Froment have been presented at Le Credac, Ivry-sur-Seine; Musée départemental de Rochechouart; Centre culturel français, Milan; Marcelle Alix, Paris; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz; Bonniers Konsthalle project room, Stockholm; The Physics Room, Christchurch; Motive Gallery, Amsterdam; Frac Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; Module du Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Project Arts Centre, Dublin and Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers.
Group exhibitions include The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th Biennale di Venezia; Curiosity, Turner Contemporary, Margate; Mind is Outer Space, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York, (2013); Descriptive Acts, SF MoMa, San Francisco; Tactics for the Here and Now, Bucarest Biennale 5; In the Holocene, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Hapax Legomena, Mercer Union, Toronto (2012); A Terrible Beauty is Born, Biennale de Lyon; Our Magic Hour, Yokohama Triennale; Dystopia, CAPC, Bordeaux (2011); 2 1/2 Dimensional, deSingel, Antwerp; 10,000 Lives, Gwangju Biennale; Art Parcours, Basel (2010); Paper Exhibition, Artist Space, New York; From the Gathering, Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver; The Space of Words, Mudam, Luxembourg (2009); The Way in which it Landed, Tate Britain, London; Word Event, Kunsthalle Basel; The Great Transformation, Frankfurter Kunstverein; Inaugural festival, Nam June Paik Center, Seoul (2008).
Froment is represented by Marcelle Alix, Paris and Motive Gallery, Brussels.
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Canada of work by the renowned British artist Mike Nelson. Comprising two significant new commissions, the exhibition includes an ambitious series of sculptures produced in partnership with The Power Plant in Toronto, and a new photographic work made in association with the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, its starting point family photographs taken between 1957 and 1972 by the distinguished Canadian
anthropologist Dr. Wilson Duff.
Nelson is best-known for his labyrinthine architectural installations that unfold as narrative structures, where the viewer moves through rooms like a reader turns pages in a novel. These immersive environments are often seemingly abandoned, devoid of figures, yet imagining the unseen occupants of these intricate spaces is central to the viewer's experience. For I, IMPOSTOR, Nelson's major work for the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), much of the elaborate space appeared vacated, with the exception of a small room where lines of drying black and white photographs hung from wires that crisscrossed the ceiling. These images documented a seventeenth century caravanserai, photographed within the very building that housed a previous installation by Nelson during the 2003 Istanbul Biennale. The darkrooms within the Venice piece were a reconstruction of those adapted 'found' spaces in the Eminönü district of Istanbul, the architecture within the British Pavilion a disjointed facsimile from memory and from the photographs of the caravanserai. Visualizing this ghostly photographer supposedly moving through the same space as the viewer, simultaneously suggested the architecture as narrative, but confused time and space; a shift of cities and decades shadowing personal and world histories. It presented a fractured and multi-layered narrative, a set of atmospheres that similarly inform Nelson's discrete sculptural works.
While his cultural references are broad, touching on particular moments in science-fiction, literature and the Beat era, much of Nelson's work can be linked through an archetypal figure of the lone wanderer. For the Contemporary Art Gallery, Nelson revisits ideas and forms first seen in The Amnesiacs, a serial project begun in 1996, which references a narrative involving an imaginary cast of characters — a group of 'outsiders' to the mainstream who uncannily resemble a disembodied late twentieth century biker gang, albeit without bikes. These quintessential outlaws of myth and literature, as depicted in the popular imagination of North America, are paralleled here with another favourite genre; that of the hunter or fur trader, exploring both groups' economic underpinning of these romantic façades, and the resulting conflicts involved in the expansion of territory.
In this new work it is as if a beachcomber has gathered material from the ocean, imagined by Nelson as a gigantic intelligent entity, much like that of Lem's planet 'Solaris', sifting the debris as a means to uncover truths about contemporary culture and our place within it. The roving characters, The Amnesiacs, have come together as interpreters, deciphering the collected material by creating assemblages akin to some form of disjointed memory or flashback, that when brought together may effect communication or reveal hidden meaning, the potential for a new and unified system of understanding. Nelson originally developed these thoughts after the unexpected death of his friend and collaborator, Erlend Williamson. In 1996 he had fallen to his death whilst climbing in the Scottish Highlands, at the time that Nelson was working on his first incarnation of what would become The Amnesiacs. Williamson, an artist and mountaineer whose family ancestry was of Orcadian descent, will contribute again; this time parts of his own narrative, and the very materials that surrounded him — those that remain present in his absence — will be woven into the fabric of the work.
Each of the new works is derived from the Canadian landscape: one is quite literally built with flotsam and jetsam collected off local shores, while the other re-imagines it. The second new piece is a sequence of projected 35mm slides produced during recent road trips across British Columbia and into Alberta, images that appear out of time. Collectively they trace another movement across the landscape as well as capture momentary pauses, underlining human interventions to the land. Nelson's interest in the photographic depiction of the Canadian landscape came through seeing a series of slides from Dr. Wilson Duff's family trips across the province, presented at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. As an anthropologist Duff was dedicated to understanding North West Coast cultures, even such private holidays were spent viewing aboriginal festivals or visiting the workshops of totem pole carvers. These images resonated with Nelson as much as the objects in the museum, as a language to be unraveled. They were of a time and place, but already displaced. In relation to this, Nelson has made a work that talks about the land itself and the artistic traditions inherent within it, especially those borne out of North America in the twentieth century and their re-translation as part of a British oeuvre. Nelson unearths the possible re-reading of such activities as cultural imperialism within both strands of the movement — an accusation that could ultimately be reflected within the activities of the artist himself.
Mike Nelson is represented by 303 Gallery, New York; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin; Matt's Gallery, London; and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.
We acknowledge the generous support of Rick Erickson and Donna Partridge, Jane Irwin and Ross Hill, and Randy and Julia Heward.
With thanks to the Erlend Williamson Art Foundation.MORE
At the Contemporary Art Gallery we present a solo exhibition by Turkish artist Meriç Algün Ringborg, her first in a museum in North America, comprising a new large-scale commission sited across the façade of our building. Visitors are invited to 'read' the gallery, the work wrapping around the outside as individual phrases envelope the physical structure.
Through the appropriation of methodologies that include collecting, systematizing, and list making, much of Algün Ringborg's practice centres on notions of cultural identity, language, belonging, and the adjoining bureaucracies. In 2012 Billboards were made for the exhibition Show Off that took place in Malmö and Nicosia respectively. The questions presented derive from The Concise Book of Visa Application Forms, 2009, the work inserting queries for private information into the public realm. At a time when immigration is at the forefront of topical news stories, the project gained significant resonance. Line No.1 (Holy Bible) (2010) was first realized at Index in Stockholm, the complete contents of the Bible running as a single line of text at eye level around the gallery room. A second version in the larger space at Witte de With, Rotterdam incorporated different versions and translations aside from the King James Version of 1611 first used in Sweden, to create a topography of vertical lines mapping across the space.
The new work at the Contemporary Art Gallery has the English dictionary as its starting point and using only selected definitions of specific words, this ambitious commission appears as a series of inter-related sentences which compose mini-narratives, realized in a way that seems to incorporate different voices and characters. As such the work evolves out of the dictionary akin to a fragmentary novel or short story, a series of episodes branching out into a loose meta-narrative concerning writing as a creative act as implied through the use of this 'found' language.
Vancouver, a city renowned internationally for the significance of its visual arts practice that conceptually re-pictures space and assigns meaning of the global in the local, provides a stimulating and challenging context for this piece by Algün Ringborg. Shown outside, the work intervenes in the urban fabric, addressing the narratives implicit in everyday routine and our daily lives. Furthermore its siting on the external surface of the gallery incites an evocation of the porosity of meaning that may emerge from such a public institution, through a contemplation of and dissemination of ideas seeping into the public domain. One might anticipate visitors and viewers are prompted into a personal reflection on reading the text based on recollection of previous encounters and exhibitions.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery presented the premiere of The Pixelated Revolution a new performance by Lebanese actor, director, and playwright Rabih Mroué. Mroué's storytelling pits facts against propaganda imbued with a particular sense of humour and a visual sensibility. By means of a semi-documentary style of theatre, his often-controversial work draws attention to issues and events overlooked in the current political climate of the Middle East. Taking the form of a lecture-performance about the usage of mobile phones during the Syrian revolution, The Pixelated Revolution examines the contemporary and recent phenomenon of photographs made during such events of conflict, broadcast and shared via Facebook and other virtual communication tools, as a means to direct and communicate events to the world.
Presented in partnership with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and grunt gallery.MORE
As part of our contribution to Capture, Vancouver's first annual city-wide photography festival, we present a new installation by American artist Mungo Thomson. Central to Thomson's artistic proposition is that of context – be it institutional, cultural or that of everyday life – and it is through the breadth of his individual works that we are prompted to grasp the many challenges to our perception in the things we encounter daily. For Thomson is interested in the space between things, the subtext or background that consistently draws our attention. He has made works which record notional 'silence' – the sound of a room when no one is in it, the applause between songs on every live recording by Bob Dylan – produced works in a range of media based on TIME magazine, and made interventions into spaces which causing us to re-evaluate our expectations, such as Coat Check Chimes, his contribution to the 2008 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, where Thomson replaced the 1,200 coat hangers in the Whitney Museum's coat check with custom-made, musically tuned coat hangers that were modeled on orchestral triangles.
When we look at the stars we are actually bathed in the light of the past, and for Thomson this is another way to think about the history while simultaneously considering the 'contemporary' – that which constitutes our present is a set of signals between which there are gaps. Negative Space is an ongoing series of photographic murals of inverted astronomical imagery sourced from the Hubble Space Telescope. Thomson works with the Hubble archive in an ongoing way, generating a negative image every time the Hubble generates a positive one. Through a simple command in Photoshop, blacks become whites, whites become blacks, and all other colors are transformed into their complement. These images are then made into site-specific photographic murals for empty walls and installed like wallpaper, indoors and out, temporary and permanent. The project also includes an artist book, an original font, and a screensaver.
The project at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Canada Line is presented in partnership with Capture and the Canada Line Public Art Program – IntransitBC.
This project heralds a more comprehensive exhibition of Thomson's work to be presented at the Contemporary Art Gallery in 2014-15 produced in collaboration with SITE Santa Fe and accompanied by the first monograph to examine Thomson's practice.MORE
Marie Lorenz – Tidal Dérive
September 1 to 7, 2015
Fraser River: Hope to Richmond, September 1 to 3
Salt Spring Island to Isle-de-Lis/Rum Island, September 5 to 7
Schedule may change depending upon water and weather conditions. Click here for a map and itinerary of the journey. www.contemporaryartgallery.ca/blog/map
The Contemporary Art Gallery welcomes New York-based artist Marie Lorenz back to Vancouver. Join Lorenz on a week-long journey down the Fraser River and around the South Gulf Islands using the tides and currents as a guide.
In 2014, Marie Lorenz participated in a CAG residency at the Burrard Marina Field House Studio which included the construction and launch of a boat created from salvaged wood found around Vancouver and the lower mainland coast line. Driftboat has since travelled to Northern California where Lorenz completed tidal dérives in San Francisco and most recently along the Russian River, Guerneville, California. From September 1 to 7, Tidal Dérive will unfold as an ambitious multi-day trip along the Fraser River (Hope to Richmond) and between the Southern Gulf Islands. Along the route Lorenz will invite participants to boat with her.
Studying tidal charts of the area, Lorenz uses tides and currents to direct the journey. This simple act offers the unique and unfamiliar experience of viewing river banks, harbours, industrialized landscapes and cities from the water. The experience and movement of floating, powered by natural forces, allows for keen observations and further exploration. As Lorenz describes:
"I believe that the act of floating has an impact on observation. The viewer maintains an awareness of their balance and form as they absorb the details in their surroundings. This kind of observation creates something new out of something familiar. My boat projects are an attempt to un-know the metropolis by continually exploring it"
Launching from Hope, BC on September 1 and arriving in Richmond on September 3, the voyage uses tidal currents and historic canoe routes. Participants will join Lorenz on this exploratory journey camping overnight in river-side towns and regional parks, navigating the currents while continuing on from Salt Spring Island on September 5, travelling to Portland Island and Isle-de-Lis, returning September 7.
We are reaching out to canoers and kayakers interested in accompanying artist Marie Lorenz on the week-long journey: Tidal Dérive. To RSVP or for further information contact: email@example.com or call us directly at 604 681 2700.
We acknowledge the generous support of the U.S. Consulate General Vancouver.
BIO: Marie Lorenz was born in Twentynine Palms, California and grew up traveling with her military family. Lorenz has received grants from Artists Space, the Harpo Foundation and the Alice Kimball English Travel Fellowship. In 2008 she was awarded the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize for the American Academy in Rome. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, CA, to MoMA PS1, in New York City. She has completed solo projects at Jack Hanley Gallery in New York; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK and Artpace in San Antonio, Texas. Her ongoing project The Tide and Current Taxi (www.tideandcurrenttaxi.org) is an exploration of the coastline in New York City.
Since 2002, Lorenz has been exploring the waterways of New York City and other cities in North America in boats that she designs and builds; her work combining psycho-geographic explorations with highly crafted material forms explores the intertidal zone. Read more on her ongoing project 'The Tide and Current Taxi', www.tideandcurrenttaxi.org. For more information on artist Marie Lorenz go to www.marielorenz.com.
Public events:
Launch event in Hope, BC Time: 9am Place: 'Put in' at Wardle Street and 7th Avenue.
Talks and Tours: Our Working Waterfront/Tidal Dérive Thursday, September 3, 5-7pm, free
Our Working Waterfront Guided Tour with Curator, Oana Capota – 5pm New Westminster Museums & Archives 777 Columbia Street, New Westminster
Tidal Dérive Artist Talk with artist Marie Lorenz – 6pm Samson V Maritime Museum 880 Quayside Drive, New Westminster Join an evening of exploring the Fraser River through two unique public programs: A tour of Our Working Waterfront, 1945-2015 at the New Westminster Museum and Archives led by Curator, Oana Capota (5-6pm) followed by an artist talk and public conversation with artist Marie Lorenz (6-7pm). Lorenz Tidal Dérive is a multi-day float along the Fraser River and Southern Gulf Islands in a boat Lorenz made from driftwood found along Vancouver's shoreline. Lorenz' The vessel will be on display.
About the Burrard Marina Field House Residency Program: Burrard Marina Field House Studio: 1655 Whyte Avenue, Vancouver. (Located below the Burrard Bridge, near Vanier Park) The Field House Studio is an artist residency space and community hub organized by the CAG. Since 2013 the CAG has hosted several national and international artists including: Raymond Boisjoly, artist collective- Broken City Lab, Brendan Fernandes, Marie Lorenz, Harrell Fletcher, Sameer Farooq & Mirjam Linschooten, Maddie Leach, Keg de Souza and Walter Scott. Read more about the artist-in-residency projects here: http://www.contemporaryartgallery.ca/blog-category/field-house-studio/ The Field House Studio Residency Program is generously supported by the Vancouver Park Board and the City of Vancouver. We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of many private and individual donors toward this program. For more details about the Field House Studio Program, all forthcoming residencies and associated events visit our website at www.contemporaryartgallery.ca and follow the Field House blog at www.burrardmarinafieldhouse.wordpress.com
Tidal Dérive
Itinerary – September 1 – 7, 2015
HOPE, BC: September 1st; Put in @ 9:00am, arrive earlier to prepare
Boat Launch at corner of Wardle St. and 7th Ave. in Hope, BC
Travel: 9:00am – 2:00pm
Stop: Fraser River Ecological Reserve
Camp: Kirby Historic Site (near Harrison Mills)
KIRBY SITE: September 2nd; Launch @ 9:00am
Travel: 7:00am – 12:00pm
Stop/Camp: Derby Reach Regional Park
DERBY REACH: September 3rd; Launch @ 9:00am
Travel: 7:00am – 12:00pm
Stop: Arrive at New Westminster mid-morning
Continue: to coast final point will be determined by tidal flow
September 4: Commute to Salt Spring Island via Ferry.
SALT SPRING ISLAND: September 5th; Put in at Fulford Harbour @ 7:00am
Travel: 7:00am – 12:00pm
Camp: Shell Beach Campsite, Portland Island
PORTLAND ISLAND: September 6th; Launch @ 7:00am
Travel: 7:00am – 12:00pm
Camp: Isle de Lis (Rum Island) (only 3 self-service sites)
ISLE-De-LIS/RUM ISLAND: September 7th; Launch @ 7:00am
Travel: 7:00am – 4:00pm
Return to: Salt Spring Island
Further information on the project:
Over the past two years Marie Lorenz has participated in a sequence of residencies at the CAG Burrard Marina Field House resulting in the development of a new Pacific-based series of projects centred on the launch of a handmade boat constructed from driftwood found along Vancouver's coast line. The boat has since travelled to Northern California where Lorenz completed "tidal derives" in San Francisco with Southern Exposure and most recently along the Russian River with Look Up Gallery in Guerneville, California.
In September the project will culminate in a multi-day dérive with the boat along the Fraser River (Hope to Richmond) and between the Southern Gulf Islands, Lorenz inviting participants to join her along the route. Studying tidal charts of the area, the artist uses tides and currents to direct and drift the navigation of ocean and rivers. This simple act of journeying along the contemporary ecosystem and industrialized commercial port of Fraser offers a different and unfamiliar experience of space for city residents who travel over these bodies of water daily. The experience of floating, of movement controlled by natural forces, adds a specific dimension to one's own observation: the viewer made aware of their own balance and form as they absorb the details of their surroundings, creating something new from something familiar. The journey will be live-streamed via (website) for the land-bound audience to follow, providing a mediated representation of the visceral experience of the expedition.
Since 2002, Lorenz has been exploring the waterways of New York City in boats that she designs and builds, her work combining psycho-geographic explorations with highly crafted, material forms that explore the intertidal zone. She envisions a city harbour as a giant centrifuge, spinning things in the tide and redistributing them around its shore; reorganizing things that we value and representing things that were thrown away. The tide examines the nature of each object with its own incomprehensible order; Lorenz's driftwood boat a way to gather and record evidence in collaboration with the tide.
The CAG was delighted to welcome back New York-based artist Marie Lorenz to the Burrard Marina Field House as artist-in-residence during May-June 2014.
For this residency, Lorenz is fabricating a new vessel – a handmade boat – from driftwood found along the coastline of the lower mainland and the City of Vancouver. Lorenz first visited Vancouver in December 2013 to begin research for the residency and she has returned again this month to construct and launch of her exciting site-specific project Driftboat.
Lorenz' artistic practice explores the intertidal zone of cities. She envisions a harbour as a giant centrifuge, spinning things in the tide and redistributing them around its shore. By building and launching a driftwood boat Lorenz is gathering, recording and collaborating with the natural ebb and flow of the environment. Floating out into False Creek and English Bay in the 'driftboat' begins a new kind of dialogue, working to reveal the tidal harbour of Vancouver.
As part of her residency, and in participation with the Vancouver Maritime Museum, on Thursday, May 29, Lorenz was in conversation with Vancouver artists Rebecca Bayer and Josh Hite talking about beachcombing, along with local sailor and writer, R. Bruce Macdonald and treasure hunter, Phil Macska. The following Sunday, June 1, Lorenz, Bayer and Hite complemented their talk by hosting two beachcombing workshops with R. Bruce Macdonald and Phil Macska.
Driftboat was constructed then launched in early June with participatory special events, finally travelling down the west coast, to San Francisco to be presented in the exhibition Off Shore at Southern Exposure later this summer.
For this residency we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Province of British Columbia through the BC Creative Communities Award and the generosity of many private and individual donations.
Marie Lorenz – 2013 visit and 2014 project
In December 2013, Marie Lorenz visited Vancouver to begin research for a project completed in May 2014 at the Burrard Marina Field House.
Marie Lorenz's work combines psycho-geographic exploration with highly crafted, material forms. In her ongoing project The Tide and Current Taxi, Lorenz ferries people on the East and Hudson Rivers surrounding New York City in a boat she has specially made. Lorenz studies tidal charts of the New York Harbor and uses river currents to direct and drift the boat throughout the waterways of the City. The act of floating adds a specific presence to one's own observation: the viewer maintains an awareness of their own balance and form as they absorb the details in their surroundings. This kind of observation creates something new out of something familiar. For Vancouver Lorenz will begin to develop ideas and discussion toward constructing a new vessel and mapping local waterways in which the community will play an important role as participants.
The Field House Studio Residency Program is generously supported by the Vancouver Park Board and the City of Vancouver. The inaugural residency with Raymond Boisjoly was supported by the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Advanced Education, Innovation and Technology.
Previously at the Field House
Canadian artist Raymond Boisjoly was our inaugural resident artist at the Burrard Marina Field House Studio. For six months Boisjoly occupied the Field House, using it as a studio and a place for community engagement.
Please see the related blog posts on the right for more news about his residency at the Field House. Click here for the CAG Field House Blog
The Field House Studio is an off-site artist residency space and community hub organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery. This initiative seeks to support artists whose practice moves beyond conventional exhibition making, echoing the founding origins of the gallery where artists were offered support toward the production of new work. Our goal in presenting art outside of the boundaries of our exhibition spaces is to reach out to communities, offering new ways for individuals to encounter and connect with art and artists, expanding audiences as well as strengthening our commitment to nurturing artists through example, context and commissioning.
Running parallel to the residency program is an ongoing series of public events for all ages.
Speaker Series: Artists in Public
This summer the CAG launched a new series inviting creative and cultural producers to share their theories, thoughts, and experiences of developing projects in the public realm.
Justin A. Langlois
Saturday, August 17, 4pm
Field House Studio at Burrard Marina
Langlois discussed his work as co-founder and research director of Broken City Lab, an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research collective and non-profit organization working to explore locality, infrastructures and creative practice leading towards civic change. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Windsor. In the fall of 2013, he will join the Faculty of Culture + Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Zoe Kreye and Catherine Grau
Unlearning Weekenders
Saturday, June 22, 4pm
Field House Studio at Burrard Marina
This first talk presented collaborators Zoe Kreye and Catherine Grau who were working on a public project throughout Vancouver entitled Unlearning Weekender, a project by Goethe Satellite @ Vancouver, created in cooperation with Dance Troupe Practice, Windsor House School, Public Dreams and Revised Projects. They discussed the series of workshops which invited the public to create rituals as a means of challenging invisible social structures aiming to strengthen community bonds.
Family Days at the Field House Studio
Free drop-in art activities for all ages which responded to the work of Raymond Boisjoly and CAG exhibitions.
Saturday August 24 – A free all ages drop-in art activity: making pin-wheel windmills.
Saturday July 27 – We welcomed art makers of all ages to the Field House, participants learnt the basics of printmaking by making their own styrofoam relief prints.
Saturday June 29 – All ages of visitors dropped by the Field House for a marine mobile workshop, constructing easy-to-make kinetic sculptures which took the marine world as a theme.
The Field House Studio Residency Program is generously supported by the Vancouver Park Board and the City of Vancouver. The inaugural residency with Raymond Boisjoly was supported by the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Advanced Education, Innovation and Technology.
This is the first solo institutional exhibition of work by American artist Kay Rosen in Canada. Renowned for her textbased works, presented across a range of formats and scales, Rosen uses space and colour to assert the physical property of language and elaborate new meaning from familiar phrases, often with characteristic wry humour. For Rosen words are both subject and material; playing with their visual representations through meticulously considered typography, colour and layout, she employs puns, anagrams and vernacular phrases to create visual connections which examine the structures and mechanisms of language as well as our encounters with it. Before becoming a visual artist, Rosen studied comparative and applied linguistics, a background which continues to inform her thinking.
For this new commission, Rosen has created two new works including a large-scale intervention across the front of the building. CUTOUT is just that, a formal play on double meaning that quite literally describes the very action and construction of its making. Letters are reversely cut from sheets of coloured vinyl, using the black appearance of the window glass itself to define their form and enabling the cut out letters to become what they spell. Furthermore, Rosen makes a simple cut into one letter of a word to generate another. Deceptively straightforward, in this way the 'C' from 'cut' was once an 'O' that formed the word 'out.' Both emphasizing and tracing this action, dashed lines mark the area removed.
Rosen often renders something that was once invisible visible. For example, a simple colour change of the two last letters in ABCDEFGHI in the mural Hi (1998) exposes a pre-existent word within the systematic order of the first nine letters of the alphabet. This slight shift of emphasis has the potential to affect pronunciation, turning our usual listing of letters into ABCDEFG 'Hi.' Different versions of this work have also used the physical properties of a building to reveal the alphabet's potential to form words through minimal gesture; in this case by segregating 'H' and 'I' from the rest of the letters around an outside corner. Whereas the poetics in Rosen's work position it within the lineage of Concrete Poetry where linguistic signs form the structure of an object or picture to be perceived rather than a text to be read, her work is equally grounded within conceptual practice. Situated around the corner from CUTOUT, a second work reveals a different aspect of Rosen's practice. Visual presentation is not used to merely emphasize specific meaning, but to articulate formal gestures that unfold spatially over time. Where one piece is focused on 'rescuing words from meaning' the other uses language to generate strong imagery, making evident the social structures that determine its reading.
While a formal syntactical interpretation dominates much of the discourse surrounding Rosen's work, many pieces convey political comment. Duck in the Muck (aka Exxon Axxident) from 1989, has been remade in a new version for one of our picture windows. Originally a list of ten different spellings of 'Duck in the Muck' alternating with an equal number of misspelled 'Quacks', for the Contemporary Art Gallery, Rosen has reduced the text, added vibrant layers of colour, and uses the window frame as a means to divide the text into six component parts: one duck in the muck surrounded by variant quacks. Although the title references the Exxon Valdez crude oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989, Rosen has chosen the work for its topical relevance to this part of the world. As a vast and extensive system of oil pipelines stretching from Alberta across British Columbia and into the United States are being established, Rosen draws our attention to recent history, and an image of potential dangers to come.MORE
A special version of a landscape drawing, Sky at Night by Itee Pootoogook is presented large-scale at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Canada Line, its physicality altering as light changes throughout the day, its imagery deliberately playing with and gaining meaning from the specificity of the site.
A resident of Cape Dorset, Nunavut, Pootoogook belongs to a generation of Inuit artists who are transforming and reshaping the creative traditions that were successfully pioneered by their parents and grandparents during the second half of the twentieth century. In his large-scale graphite and coloured pencil drawings, Pootoogook makes images of places, people and things, observed with prosaic intimacy. The solo exhibition Buildings and Land at the Contemporary Art Gallery, focuses not on works involving portraits of family and friends but on those images that picture the things which structure daily routine in this part of Canada — buildings, landscape and the means to travel to other parts of the country.
The project is presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program – IntransitBC.MORE
Erin Shirreff's solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery will be the first presentation dedicated exclusively to the artist's film and video work. It may seem a somewhat unexpected focus given Shirreff's definition of herself as a sculptor. And yet her investigation into the language and perception of materiality has less to do with the presentation of physical objects than specifically to that of our experience of forms – how sharing the same space with a 'thing' varies from looking at its representation.
Shirreff is known for reproducing sculpture as images or making sculpture that distils the essence of a photograph, playing these two elements against one another as a means to prompt and test the viewer's response. In Knives (2008) for example, she modeled a variety of knife-like forms from Plasticine, subsequently presenting them as a series of black and white photographs; her most recent sculptures made from ash and cement resemble photographs, their surfaces giving way to reveal themselves as planes an inch thick as we move around them.
Such preoccupation with the properties and potency of sculpture in relation to photographic reproduction grew out of Shirreff's consideration of the work of Tony Smith; New Piece from 1966 made from black painted steel, in particular held a fascination, so much so that she made a pilgrimage to see it in person. Her actual experience of the work however revealed an unexpected level of engagement, making her question the limitations of sculpture as well as her own abilities as a viewer. She comments, "It left me wondering whether the encounter, sharing the same material space as the object, was somehow more difficult, perhaps more intimidating, complicated, or somehow overwhelming, and that I didn't equal it. What was clear was that I wasn't able to let myself be as absorbed into the physical encounter as I was by the experience of the image. That remove offered by the reproduction opened up this contemplative space."
Each of the four works presented at the Contemporary Art Gallery focus on an image of a building, sculpture or landscape and seek to similarly evoke such a quality. Typically these silent videos are made from subtle combinations of stills or, in the case of Sculpture Park (Tony Smith), by the camera panning across a static object. The original images are further transformed by simple means such as the tracking of daylight across their surfaces, by modifications through colour alterations or other such analogue effects. Changes can also play with the illusion of three dimensions as the pieces unfold. Lake uses an image of Lake Okanagan in B.C. where Shirreff grew up and her family still lives, the picture taken from an early 1980s tourism magazine. For this work Shirreff re-photographed the original image many times sequencing these as a series of stills, deploying subtle shifts in colour and light to alter the original hand-painted quality.
These nuanced adjustments appear in all of Shirreff's videos. Some modifications highlight the qualities of the original photograph, revealing dust on its surface or illuminating the glossy quality of the paper, reinforcing its status as object. In drawing attention to the material properties of the initial image used, Shirreff builds a tension between the subject and the formal values of its representation. Whether it is a photograph of a Medardo Rosso sculpture from 1896 or the United Nations Building in New York, the thing or scene being represented is no longer the point of focus. Shirreff challenges our understanding of the nature of images themselves, their intrinsic qualities and our encounter with them.
The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa and Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, collectively marking the first comprehensive exhibition of Shirreff's work in Canada. Each venue presents unique exhibitions, drawing out varied strands in her rich body of work, and have come together to produce her first monograph. The publication features essays by Sandra Dyck and Jan Allen and an interview with the artist by Jenifer Papararo.MORE
American artist James Welling emerged as an important figure in the 'Pictures Generation', an influential group of artists working in New York in the 1980s, famous for their pioneering use of photography. This exhibition brings together a hundred and fifty of Welling's early, experimental and abstract works from this period. The exhibition is presented in partnership with MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporànea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first exhibition of work by Polish artist Monika Sosnowka in Canada. Best known for her ambitious architectural and sculptural installations which simultaneously embrace and resist the spaces they occupy, Sosnowska's exhibition obliquely references her hometown of Warsaw and the economic shift that has occurred since the collapse of communism in 1989 to the present day. Characteristically the artist's sculptures recall familiar objects transformed in some way – dysfunctional stairways that join one floor to the other but to no purpose or large-scale metal cubes and girder structures twisted and wedged into existing gallery spaces.
At the Contemporary Art Gallery we present a series of new painted steel sculptures, redolent of broken market vendor stands, referencing actual forms salvaged from Jarmark Europa Stadium, originally the site of a large market that sold everything from imitation Nike training shoes to pirated CDs and DVDs. The market opened with the onset of capitalism and ended last year when the stadium was destroyed to make way for a new national stadium that was built in time to host Euro 2012. Collectively these series of objects evoke a sense of architecture, yet through absence they poignantly suggest that as with all structures we inhabit or that give form to our daily routines, social space is subject to change over time.
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, which will exhibit the works from September 28 – November 24, 2013.
Sosnowska is represented by Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Hauser and Wirth, Zurich, London and New York; Kurimanzutto, Mexico City and The Modern Institute, Glasgow.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in a public institution of work by Canadian artist Itee Pootoogook. A resident of Cape Dorset, Nunavut, he belongs to a generation of Inuit artists who are transforming and reshaping the creative traditions that were successfully pioneered by their parents and grandparents during the second half of the 20th century. In his large-scale graphite and coloured pencil drawings, Pootoogook shows us an image of modern northern life quite different from the one we are accustomed to seeing both historically and in much Inuit work. In this vast and often inhospitable region, instead of traditional subjects such as igloos and parka-clad hunters and their prey, we are shown an everyday world, one made up of recognizable contemporary accoutrements including snowmobiles, boats, soft drinks and television sets.MORE
Nancy Holt is one of the leading artists of her generation and a pioneer in conceptual, site-specific art and film and video work. She is one of a group of important international artists who initiated the Land art movement in the late 1960s. The Contemporary Art Gallery brings together a selection of photographs from 1967 onwards, many seen for the first time, alongside pivotal film works.
Holt deals with themes centering on memory, perception, time and space. She uses the natural environment as both medium and subject with a focus on the cyclical time of the universe, the daily axial rotation of our planet Earth and its annual orbit around the sun. Photography has always played a central role within her work, both as a way of engaging with the landscape and as a way of documenting site-specific projects.
This exhibition includes major photographic pieces, including early work such as Concrete Visions (1967), an important project made on Dartmoor while visiting the UK with the artist Robert Smithson over forty years ago, Trail Markers (1969); a series of photographs entitled Light and Shadow Photo-Drawings (1978); and photographs by Holt of her most famous work, Sun Tunnels, 1973 – 76 among others. Vancouver itself could not be a more appropriate location for this exhibition, the city renowned for its setting within magnificent natural surroundings, the ongoing photographic legacies in picturing within international visual arts practice, and also being the site for the seminal Glue Pour (1970) by Robert Smithson, Holt's late husband.
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo institutional exhibition in North America for Romanian artist Ciprian Muresan.
Artistic and literary works are the starting point for Muresan who appropriates them in a reflective project that intersects with the recent history of Romania and other Eastern European countries
and, more generally, ponders the realities of the contemporary world. Included in the show are two newly commissioned pieces by the Contemporary Art Gallery with our partners FRAC Champagne-Ardenne and Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva: an installation, Recycled Playground, which gives the exhibition its title and overarching tone, and a companion video Protesting Against Myself. A selection of other significant works is also presented. Juggling humour and critique, the artist highlights the structures and processes of all forms of power.
CAG Window Spaces and off-site at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Canada Line and Fieldhouse Studio Residency Program.
In partnership with the City of Vancouver Fieldhouse Studio Residency Program, the Contemporary Art Gallery presents Canadian artist Raymond Boisjoly as our inaugural resident artist. For six months he will occupy the Burrard Marina Field House, using it as a studio and a place for community engagement, coinciding with the launch of As It Comes, two new interrelated public works. The title appears at the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station as a discrete piece, humorously foreboding, and more comic than terrifying, presented in brightly coloured vinyl like a credit from a B-list horror film. Linked to the text in the gallery windows, Boisjoly removes all suggestions of the past, not to deny what has become history, but with the intent to restore belief systems that are still intact.MORE
The screenings of work by Smith and Robakowski brought together two filmmakers who interrogate the language and mechanics of film itself. They share an interest in the world unfolding around them and in front of the camera, examining occasions and incidents with a humour which undercuts the rigorous nature of their work. Both reveal the narrative potential within the everyday while simultaneously making us aware of the actual and constructed nature of the images we are viewing.
Józef Robakowski is a pioneer of independent Polish film. From the early 1970s he interrogated the language, material and mechanics of film, combined with a long-standing interest in conceptualist avant-garde traditions filtered through an insistence on authenticity and personal identity. Presented were a series of pieces produced between 1970 and 2009 including From My Window, 1978 – 1999 (2000) shot from Robakowski's apartment. By filming the world around him and narrating everyday events in his own, often wryly humorous voice, he deployed a kind of personal resistance to the political situation imposed upon him.MORE
Based on ideas suggested in a visit to the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese garden in Vancouver, for their first commissioned performance in Canada, French artists Hervé and Maillet brought a humble object into the gallery — a gongshi — a form redolent of or somehow manifest as a 'scholar's stone', a repository of information and knowledge. Traditionally gongshi are not very big, you can transport them easily. They are not made by man, but by natural elements, yet they can appear artificial, and at the same time sum up the passing of time and the actions of nature. They could be considered to resemble the wandering of the mind.
The performance was generated through an intensive few days of rehearsals leading up to the actual event with Hervé and Maillet working closely with a team of CAG volunteers and local participants who performed and assisted in presenting the work to the visitors and audience.
Generously supported by Institut Français and the Consulat général de France à Vancouve, and presented with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.MORE
The screenings of work by Smith and Robakowski brought together two filmmakers who interrogate the language and mechanics of film itself. They share an interest in the world unfolding around them and in front of the camera, examining occasions and incidents with a humour which undercuts the rigorous nature of their work. Both reveal the narrative potential within the everyday while simultaneously making us aware of the actual and constructed nature of the images we are viewing.
British filmmaker Smith's work is associated with 'structural film', an experimental and analytical approach focused on the illusionary nature of the media itself, specifically looking at its 'material' qualities such as the projected light, the film strip and the projection apparatus. The series of films shown here from the 1970s and 1980s including his iconic The Girl Chewing Gum (1975), demonstrate how Smith expands on the concerns of structuralist practice through new means, including the use of narrative structure, the relationship between sound and image, humour and a close engagement with popular culture.MORE
What stories simmer just beneath the surface of the public spaces that we dwell in? What characters are the strangers we
brush shoulders with? What characters are we? Argentinean artist Mariano Pensotti's ingeniously voyeuristic work Sometimes I think, I can see you places writers in public spaces and uses them as literary surveillance cameras. Over the three weekends of the 2013 PuSh Festival, a group of Vancouver writers including Michael Turner, Lisa C. Ravensbergen, Adrienne Wong, Kay Slater, Charles Demers, Anakana Schofield, OZ and Caitlin Chaisson, were stationed in the lobby of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the atrium of the Vancouver Public Library Central Branch equipped with laptops connected to projection screens. Their directive? To write a live account of whatever it is they saw — or imagine they saw — in these urban surroundings. Through the eyes and minds of these various writers, speculations unfolded, narratives were woven, and the anonymous individuals around us became implicated in a series of beautifully spontaneous fictions.
Mariano Pensotti is known internationally as one of the foremost directors in contemporary theatre. His work El pasado es un animal grotesco was presented on a revolving stage in the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at PuSh, and his work La Marea presented outdoors in the streets of Gastown at PuSh 2011.
Presented with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, The Playwrights Theatre Centre and Vancouver Art Gallery, and supported by Vancouver Public Library.
Produced with Ciudades Paralelas, a co-production between HAU Berlin and Schauspielhaus Zürich, in collaboration with Goethe-Institute Warschau and Teatr Nowy.
January 18-20, January 25-27 and February 1-3, 12-4 pm.
Located at the Vancouver Public Library, Central Branch Atrium and Vancouver Art Gallery, Lobby.MORE
Knowledge, Kindliness and Courage is the first solo exhibition in North America of Turner Prize nominee, Nathan Coley. This major presentation includes Unnamed (2012), a new commission in the gallery and We Must Cultivate Our Garden, installed on the roof of the Pennsylvania Hotel in the Downtown East Side at Carrall Street and East Hastings Street.
Presented off-site We Must Cultivate Our Garden (2006) a largescale illuminated text work held aloft on a scaffolding structure, evokes just such concerns. Taken from the last line of Candide by Voltaire, the statement is powerful and complex. The use of the plural 'we' is inclusive, conveying the sense that a joint effort is necessary for an endeavour to have any effect. The imperative 'must' lends an active, almost dictatorial tone. The words 'cultivate' and 'garden' are loaded with metaphorical weight: we can cultivate our minds, our souls, our relationships as well as the soil. Our 'garden' might constitute a house, a spirit, a child or a patch of land. In some ways it can be considered a call to arms, suggestive that a hunger for knowledge and understanding can be satiated through investigation and hard work rather than reliance on fate, tenuous beliefs or social standing. Coley is interested in the idea that the sentence is open to multiple forms of translation and interpretation, this element of ambiguity crucial whereby the onus is placed on the viewer to locate a meaning which interests them. Indeed, through his work, the artist reveals the unconscious of the architecture and cityscapes he interrogates, investigating social as much as physical constructions. Or as Coley says, 'It's in your imagination.'
Knowledge, Kindliness and Courage is the first solo exhibition in North America of Turner Prize nominee, Nathan Coley. This major presentation includes Unnamed (2012), a new commission in the gallery and We Must Cultivate Our Garden, installed on the roof of the Pennsylvania Hotel in the Downtown East Side. Unnamed forms the centerpiece to the exhibition, over 30 recycled headstones informally gathered together, supported on stout cedar batons. These 'ready-made' objects produce a powerful presence resonating with Coley's ongoing investigations as to how our environment speaks of collective desires and beliefs through its embodiment of social histories.MORE
This was the first solo exhibition in Canada for Shanghai based artist Xu Zhen who has emerged as one of the most inventive and provocative artists working in China today. A co-founder in 1998 of the influential artist-run space BizArt Art Center, he has also organized seminal exhibitions including Art for Sale (1999) staged at a Shanghai shopping mall. His work is characterized by tackling authoritarian gestures and clichés of human ambition often with a wry sense of humour that counters any notion of value.
The Contemporary Art Gallery presented an installation, a cluster of small sculptural pieces, slightly-larger-than-life-size replicas of a mosquito. At first glance the gallery room appeared empty and yet closer inspection revealed the space occupied by insects which appeared to be sucking blood from the building, glowing red as they drink in the nutrition needed. This creature is an effective symbol and with context vital to meaning, Xu Zhen offers a subtle and witty take on cultural politics.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery worked with Vancouver artist Gareth Moore to co-commission a project comprising seven new films, screened offsite and a series of related posters in the window spaces at the gallery.
For Children's Films Moore approached a number of international artists to produce short films for children, each person free to focus on any particular topic, shaping the content and form of their respective piece. Artists invited consist of some from Europe as well as other Vancouver based practitioners familiar to our local audiences. Moore then collated the two to five minute pieces into one longer work, providing it with open and closing credits, each section acting as a discrete but interconnected episode.
Akin to the early days of cinema with travelling magic lantern shows, weekly screenings of the 16mm films took place in different locations throughout the city of Vancouver such as community centres, schools and a tent in Emery Barnes Park in downtown Vancouver.MORE
For the first exhibition of work by Nairy Baghramian in North America the Contemporary Art Gallery presented Class Reunion, an ambitious eighteen piece sculpture comprising a variety of abstract forms. Consistent throughout the artist's practice, it references literature, theory and modernist design to comment on current issues of materiality, manufacture and display, while examining aspects of social and political relationships.
As a collection of posed characters Class Reunion forms an uncanny tableau, the stage shifting between the immediacy of the inherent material qualities – surface, shape and colour – to a more speculative consideration of meaning and content. The viewer's experience moves from a consideration of physicality to an examination of social mores, the specific objects evoking a multiplicity of personalities and social identities.
The word 'class' can signify formal categorizations as well as social and economic structures. While the coming together of forms is familiar, resembling social encounters and playing with our desire to classify things, Baghramian seems to suggest the specification of types, division into groupings and ideas of personality or identity are as fabricated as the individual sculptures we see.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery presented the first North American exhibition by Dublin-based artist Sarah Browne, a survey including the artist's entry for the 2009 Venice Biennale. Using 'the economy' as the basis for her artistic practice, Browne works with small communities of people, documenting resourceful forms of exchange to reveal the hidden social relations that exist in smallscale economic structures, summations of collective intention or desire typically influenced by emotional affects. Within the current context of austerity measures and failing markets, such an undertaking could not be more relevant. By processes such as filmmaking, sculpture and publishing the potential for a more radical resourcefulness is sought as a manifestation of creative opposition to prevailing systems. Vancouver with its immediate history of Vietnam draft dodgers and alternative island lifestyles provided an interesting backdrop for Browne's work.MORE
WAVES by Vancouver based and French born artist Nicolas Sassoon is the second commissioned work for the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station as part of the CAG's offsite exhibition programme. It is part of Sassoon's ongoing body of work using Moiré patterns – a visual blur inadvertently discovered by Swiss photographer Ernst Moiré – whereby two images are overlaid to create a third 'plane'. The resulting optical effect causes the eye to see movement where there is none.
The Moiré pattern designed for the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station is created by physical layering a symmetrical configuration of vertical, curved black lines on top of a coloured pixelated background. With no focal point the mural is activated by the movement of the viewer. As commuters pass by the two overlapping planes, horizontal waves appear to undulate rhythmically across the surface. Initially disorientating, sustained viewing creates an immersive effect, altering our usual encounter with the entrance of the station, erasing its glass side as if revealing another dimension.MORE
American Leg was Josephine Meckseper's first exhibition in Canada. For the site-specific work, Meckseper created eight self-contained window treatments in the Contemporary Art Gallery's street-front vitrines. Originally intended for retail, these window spaces served as ready-made structures for Meckseper's ongoing investigation into consumer society and archaeology of the present.
Meckseper's work unites modernism with the formal language of commercial display, combining mass-produced objects with images and artifacts of recent historical and political events. Consumerism as an unrelenting presence in our daily lives is reflected in the artist's highly polished sculptural installations which offer a critique of capitalist economy and lay bare some of its contradictions.
In her installation for the CAG, she refined each window into austere compositions of single sculptures centred against a black background. A repeated vertical text graphically set in a typeface referencing German Jugendstil added a further critical dimension as well as carried a personal resonance for Meckseper. The text's aesthetic was appropriated from elements of early 20th Jugendstil architecture in Worpswede, Germany where her great great uncle, Heinrich Vogeler lead a utopian artist movement. Meckseper's connection of contemporary consumer culture to Jugendstil is its development as a form of aesthetic and political resistance to the mainstream.MORE
This was the first solo exhibition in Canada of work by Los Angeles based artist Matthew Monahan. The survey for the first time brought together three distinct phases of his practice: early works using drywall, more recent pieces from the series utilizing large sheets of glass and industrial ratchet straps more usually seen securing heavy loads, and these combined with new works in cast bronze often standing atop columns or structures made from materials found in the foundry – bricks from smelting ovens, large sheets of metal. Running throughout was Monahan's interest in the interplay between two and three dimensions, between drawing and materiality, infused with personal mythology and a self-reflective look at the conventions of museum display.
Selected from work made during the past eight years, Monahan's figurative sculptures and drawings evoke artifacts from another time or era. With their battered, weathered surfaces and contorted, fragmented bodies, they could be ancient totemic figurines, tribal masks or chunks of Greco-Roman statuary. But instead of marble, wood or stone, Monahan imbues less weighty materials like Styrofoam, wax and paper with a sense of substance, meaning and artificial patina. Some figures perch on rectangular pedestals of unfinished drywall, whose raw edges and exposed fixings interrupt any impulse toward preciousness; others are contained within glass cases simultaneously acting as container, plinth and discrete element within the overall sculptural composition.
The Contemporary Art Gallery presented the first solo exhibition in a public institution of the work of Chinese artist Guo Fengyi (1942-2010).
Self trained, Guo Fengyi belongs to an older generation who's embracing of Chinese folk culture combines with traditions of wisdom and myth. Her large-scale drawings comprise intricate details and obsessive mark-making to articulate ideas of spiritual and metaphysical significance.
She began drawing after illness brought her to the healing practice of Qiquong (a traditional Chinese health practice as a means to cultivate qi energy within the body). Combined with her study of theories of mysticism, she began having visions which she felt compelled to translate into drawing. Fengyi's subject matter encompasses these traditional concepts of thought with cosmology, acupuncture energy maps, divination and dynastic sites – all systems which are disappearing in a modernizing China. Her works are charged in every sense, bringing together notions of creativity as acts of everyday life. Redolent of fields of energy and magnetic auras, drawings manifest as suggestions of the human form, otherworldly beings and internal body parts, mapped against diagrammatic evocations of invisible worlds surrounding and influencing our existence.MORE
Frances Stark's pivotal feature length video My Best Thing is a digital animation, which traces the development of two sexual encounters that progress into conversations about film, literature, art, collaboration and subjectivity. It is a personal narrative that considers the artist's use of online sex-chat rooms as vehicles for her creative process. The poignant conversations Stark captures are often comic, heightened by the animation itself where she used Xtranormal, a free 3D-movie making software, to render herself and her male counterparts as cartoons, naked except for fig leaves, speaking in computer-generated voices. In conveying the complexity of her interests Stark manages to imbue these commonly disparaged internet sites, as well as their users, with positive, productive and social characteristics.
A publication co-published by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Koenig Books, London, and the Walter Philips Gallery, Banff accompanied the exhibition. It features a text by prominent British curator Mark Godfrey who addresses Stark's resolve in representing her broad, and at times clashing, interests from her recently found enthusiasm for the controversial dancehall musician Beenie Man to her homage for the highly respected feminist painter Sylvia Sleigh.MORE
Typically Massey's work accentuates and amplifies natural phenomena, often heightened through artificial means or via slight manipulations, exploring notions of time and space, and the mutable connections between them.
In Via Lactea (above Glacier Lake) Massey deftly combines 171 narrow-field photographs of the night sky on the same strip of film, achieved by making minor adjustments to camera angle over a lengthy period of time. Even though the image is artificially constructed, the luminous pattern of the starry night-time sky retains its convincingly poetic expanse while throwing into question the veracity of the photographic image. Its blueness is much closer to that of a daytime sky and as such connects to the location whereby it greets passengers as they arrive or depart at the station. By linking notions of celestial navigation – wayfaring – to more contemporary means of travel, Via Lactea throws into flux a consideration of temporality and site.
Scott Massey lives and works in Vancouver. He studied photography at Emily Carr University of Art & Design. His work is in private and public collections including Visual Art Collection, Office of Foreign Affairs (Canada), the Rennie Collection,Vancouver and the Surrey Art Gallery.
Presented by the Contemporary Art Gallery in partnership with Canada Line Public Art Program – IntransitBC.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery presented the first major exhibition of Vancouver artist Scott Massey. With the discrete work Aurorae sited in the windows and Via Lactea (above Glacier Lake) at the Canada Line station, Massey linked both locations through two new pieces dealing with shifts in notions of time and place and the mutable connections between them. Typically Massey's work often accentuates and amplifies natural phenomena, often heightened through artificial means or via slight manipulations. His interest in challenging our perception of the natural world or urban landscape is exemplified in a series of photographic and light works.
Looking for a Missing Employee is a thoughtful and provocative performance puzzle in which Mroué follows the true story of a man who disappears from his low-level post at the Ministry of Finance in Beirut, never to be seen again. Merging storytelling with live sketching, the artist takes us on a perplexing search for the 'truth', littered with a sea of documents, clippings, photos and found objects. The material accumulates under multi-camera live feeds as we are exposed to the ways media shapes public perception, rumours, accusations, political conflicts and scandals. What unfolds is a commentary on the phenomenon of disappearance and proof that "between the truth and a lie, there is but a hair."
Supported by The Roundhouse. Presented in partnership with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and grunt gallery. This tour is made possible through the collaboration of P.S. 122 (New York), On the Boards (Seattle), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) and The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh).
Rabih Mroué, Looking for a Missing Employee
The Roundhouse, January 26–28, 8pm
Post-show discussion led by Vanessa Kwan, January 27
The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the Canadian premiere of two new films, by British artist Andrew Cross.
The Solo features Carl Palmer, legendary rock drummer of the 1970s supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer, performing a series of specially composed drum solos in a work that explores the relationship between drummer and drum kit. The film examines different aspects of percussion, with the solo snare drum giving way to brushes, cymbals, hands, felt beaters, and finally a full drum kit solo. Through a process of rigorous editing, sequences of tightly framed images are constructed; Cross' minimalist style giving rise to a consideration of the shifting nature of cultural value.
Ensemble is Cross's latest collaboration with 1970s progressive rock musicians, focusing on a group once dubbed Europe's biggest cult band: The Enid. Throughout their 36 year checkered history, The Enid have both captivated and confounded audiences, always defying clear categorization. In this characteristically restrained film—contradicting the conventions of the "rock-umentary" with the unlikeliest of rock stars—Cross presents an intimate portrait of enigmatic founder Robert John Godfrey together with current band members at their studio and collective home in Northampton, England, and their recent concert with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
In partnership with PuSh Festival and SFU Woodward's.MORE
This was the first exhibition in Canada of work by British artist Robert Orchardson. Inspired by science fiction films and the work of architects and designers who engage with ways of thinking about the future, Orchardson is all too aware of the inherent paradox in visualizing the unknown, any attempt immediately foiled as it becomes instantly familiar. In setting out to imagine 'things to come', such endeavours unavoidably speak to us of the here and now. For Orchardson, his artistic proposition compels us to reassess utopias of the past, this revisiting however more than a mere act of longing. Instead it implies a restaging of unfulfilled possibilities as he grapples with fresh meaning and opportunity.
Approached through a triangular opening at the CAG, the wall construction pervaded the whole gallery, reinforcing the deliberate sense of entering another world. Against this, the series of coloured objects resemble the amorphous motifs that feature in paintings by surrealist artist Yves Tanguy. The result was an environment that speaks of competing implications of potential and redundancy; abstraction versus figuration; the immediate present as opposed to somewhere else.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery presented the exhibition Endless Renovation an evolving installation by Corin Sworn, which combined found objects and texts, light and shadows, storytelling and speculation. With this work, Sworn transformed the Alvin Balkind Gallery into a set animated by audio and images.MORE
The CAG presented the first exhibition in North America devoted entirely to the vignettes of British wood engraver, artist and naturalist Thomas Bewick. Born in Cherryburn, near Mickley, Northumberland in 1753, Bewick worked in Newcastle until his death in 1828. Clearly influenced by his childhood on a small farm on the banks of the river Tyne, Bewick's love of the countryside is reflected in his detailed woodcuts of animals, birds and rural scenes. Amongst his most ambitious projects were illustrations for General History of Quadrupeds (1790) and History of British Birds (two volumes, 1797 and 1804), both of which also included a great number of vignettes. Bewick referred to these as 'tale-pieces'. Intended as illustrations of "some truth or point of some moral" they provide an invaluable insight into social history while also demonstrating the artist's imagination and wit. As such these narrative works provided an interesting counterpoint to the work of many internationally established artists in Vancouver, engaging in image making which critically examines and reflects on the city and conditions which surround them. The presentation of historical work is intended to challenge our understanding of what a contemporary art space should show and as such reinforces the notion that everything was once contemporary, retaining meaning for future generations, just as much as what is contemporary now will inevitably become historical.MORE
To create is to relate was the first exhibition in Canada of the influential work of Sister Corita Kent who came to fame for her silkscreen prints while teaching at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles in the 1960s. The exhibition developed in association with the Corita Art Center, Los Angeles and MOCFA, San Francisco focuses on Corita's work from this period when we see the rapid visual move from a muted palette to one where figurative style is replaced by an increasing use of large areas of intense abstract colour. Mixing advertising slogans and poetry in her silkscreens and commandeering nuns and students to help make ambitious installations, processions and banners, Corita's work is now recognized as some of the most striking – and joyful – American art of the 60s. The exhibition also shows a shift in the manner Corita brings words into her compositions often fragmented whereby they become image. The size of the serigraphs also increases and for Corita the absorption of the burgeoning media signage, commercial systems and slogans she saw play an important role in the development of her work. She embraced the urban environment, the commonplace becoming far from empty wasteland, rather a vehicle for hope and rejoicing. In someday is now (1964) for example, the partial block letters clearly derive from SAFEWAY supermarkets; somebody had to break the rules (1967) has the phrase jumbled but taken from a laundry detergent of the day.
Corita's work and its community engagement marked a decade of utopian thinking but were rooted in the belief that direct action can cause real change. As such she asserts the continuum between daily life and art through her work, and challenges our expectations of what and how we encounter art. This lack of division between form and activity makes for a compelling argument against the notion of detached art experience both for artists and the audience. In this way, it chimes with the Contemporary Art Gallery in our belief that art and its conventions should not be divorced from our everyday experience and have meaning to everyone.MORE
Federico Herrero is well-known as an abstract painter who uses unconventional locations and surfaces as a context for his large scale graphic murals. While Herrero at times works inside galleries, he often works with difficult sites whether it is the horizontal expanse of an exposed rooftop or the narrow corner of the custodian's closet. His work, through form, colour and context directly addresses the division between art and social life, attempting to build a bridge between art as a specialized commodity and its larger place in the community. To address these concerns and extending our exhibition programme into the streets, the Contemporary Art Gallery commissioned Herrero to design a mural for our windows, using his formal vocabulary as a visual membrane, bringing our presence directly into the city. Also working with Autobox Media, the CAG designed a program, using Layar Reality Browser to create a virtual mural to be applied on selected sites throughout Vancouver. The artwork is accessible through any smartphone. Please go to http://offsite.contemporaryartgallery.ca for full details.MORE
A Way To Go was the first part of the "GPS PROJECT" generated through the Education Program of Contemporary Art Gallery.
The word "Alley" comes from the original French root word "Allée" which literally translates as; A Way To Go. This was a walking journey project that consisted of using the GPS mobile device to navigate an alternative route through the downtown core by only taking alleyways and shortcuts. The passage was less distracting than crowded streets and avoided being a target for consumers by staying off the main roads. These routes are named after brief encounters with objects and/or subjects found in each individual alleyway rather than being named after important political figures or national historical references like most main roads in Vancouver. The names of the alley were included in the GPS map application. Through this journey, the participants came across site-specific installations, images activated by the GPS device, video clips and information about hidden spaces in the back alley.
Examples of this were images taken from inside an abandoned Japanese Auto Centre that has no access to the general public. Also an installation that was installed behind the fenced up corner in an underground parking lot to prevent homeless over-night staying, another example were details about a recycled water container underneath the Emery Barnes Park. This project continued to unfold describing more hidden objects/subjects in the allies of Vancouver's downtown core over the following 3 months.
This program is generously supported by TELUS, 2010 Legacies Now and the Canadian Art Foundation. With thanks to Hannah Hughes and Autobox.MORE
In 2011 the Contemporary Art Gallery presented Flesh and Blood, a major touring exhibition of recent work by Canadian artist Shary Boyle. The exhibition, curated by Louise Déry, director of the Galerie de l'UQAM, was launched at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, travelled to the Galerie de l'UQAM, in Montreal and then to its final presentation in Vancouver. The installation at the Contemporary Art Gallery featured three new works by Boyle exclusive to Vancouver.
Flesh and Blood reflected the artist's vision and versatility and included drawing, painting and porcelains, creating an installation that drew upon ancient mythology, fiction and fantasy in an exploration of psychological and emotional conditions.
A number of characteristics are key to understanding Boyle's work: stylistic contract and ornamental excess, the mechanisms of seduction, an evocation of a weird, theatricality of subject and manifestation of social politics. Her examinations of scenes and subject matter associated with childhood and adolescence, in turn reference surrealist landscapes, fairytales, cartoons and illustrated novels that recall fantastic worlds or prophetic futures.MORE
For American artist Sharon Hayes' first solo exhibition in Canada, the CAG presented In the Near Future (2005-2008) her multifaceted and dynamic installation, incorporating 13 slide projectors and nearly 250 different images. The numerous images were gathered from audience members over four years as part of performances Hayes staged in six cities.
Hayes invited onlookers to document her enactment of 13 lone protests. In select public sites she picketed with placards bearing anachronistic and ambiguous slogans. Some she made up, altered or directly appropriated from bygone protests, such as, "Who approved the war in Vietnam?" is a phrase originally used in 1962 at the Charter Day Protest at the University of California and "I am a Man" a slogan taken from the civil rights movement during the Memphis Sanitation strike in 1968. Each performance is a paring down of the basic strategies of street protest – the way text, body, and place and time go together to define a subject and create a common language. Hayes' discursive and aesthetic investigation in the history of protest chimes directly with the recent success of mass protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, and the worldwide support for the Libyan revolt.MORE
For their first solo exhibition in Canada, the CAG presented Beyond Guilt – The Trilogy (2003-2005) a collaborative video series by Israeli artists Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir.
The work's currency rests in its daring and mischievous blend of sex and politics and its jumbling of subject and author. The trilogy begins with Beyond Guilt #1 shot in the bathrooms of night clubs in Tel Aviv where the artists record themselves negotiating sexual encounters. In Beyond Guilt #2, through an online chat room, the artists invited men to a hotel room where discussions of sexual preferences lead to talk of experiences in the army and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And in the final video, they invited a sex worker to a hotel room, gave her their camera and asked her to document their meeting.
In all three, Sela and Amir are instigators on and off camera, acting as provocateurs as well as ready and willing participants. Beyond Guilt – The Trilogy is at times difficult to watch. The artists create risky scenarios by negotiating sex inpublic places and inviting strangers into their hotel room. Yet, Sela and Amir have managed to anaesthetize situations that are out of the ordinary, filled with unknowns and potential risk. They capture a banality within the sensational, neutering much of the provocation. Sela and Amir's conflation of sex and war isn't what one would expect – a depiction of spectacle and drama. It is of the everyday and seems to represent a possible tactic for coping with life in Tel Aviv. In a nation continually at war, surrounded by violence, this seems most viable.MORE
Roy Arden is well known for his austere photographs of Vancouver's cityscape. His solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery shed light on the other aspect of his practice which is centred on found images, collage and the archive. Entitled UNDERTHESUN, the exhibition commanded all three of the Contemporary Art Gallery's exhibition spaces, including its two galleries and the windows vitrines and a pictorial artist's publication was produced. The exhibition included works in multiple media including; drawing, painting, collage and digital collage, video and sculpture.
Whether in his online work, artist's blog and digital collage or his intimate handmade collages, Arden 's incessant digging through the image archive always seems focused on finding the root causes for our present condition. Arden's subject as always is history and specifically, modernity. His recent adventure with multiple media seems like a search for new diagnostic tools that can offer him insights that could not be revealed through photography alone.MORE
Although McIntosh is primarily known for her painting, she also works in collage. Violet's Hair, for the first time brought together her work in these two distinct mediums. As well as exhibiting five recent paintings in the B.C. Binning Gallery, she built two large-format collages: one wrapped the exterior of the gallery, using the window vitrines, and the other filled the Alvin Balkind Gallery in a unified form. This was not the first time McIntosh worked with collage on this scale, but it was the first instance she built a structure as the ground.
Her collages and paintings carry a similar language, one of solid planes, layered forms and bold colours. They inform each other, running in tandem, offering a visible language that simultaneously exemplify the flexibility with which McIntosh handles many possible choices and the solidity of her final decisions.MORE
Following A Line was as "in following a line of investigation." But here the line had no delineated starting or end point. Through lectures, films, PowerPoint presentations, archival images and signage, the works in this group exhibition in some way challenged these instructive forms and educational methods of presenting information.
The difficulty of representing knowledge, and the need to demonstrate one's understanding was common to the work in Following A Line. Many of the artists in this exhibition worked from an archive of images and texts, which they had compiled over years of research, but it wasn't essential to any of the artists to make this explicit or to lay out their research in an accessible form. Research can be defined as a search for knowledge or any systematic collection of information that is applied to a particular subject or a more general system of understanding. Research-based is a term that is frequently used to describe a type of art practice that focuses on the terms of research, using them as strategies for making art that both challenges the conventions of how information is gathered and presented.
This exhibition explored the traditional genre of still life and how it is a sustained practice within contemporary visual art making. The number of artists and works was large for the exhibition spaces of the Contemporary Art Gallery, and yet it seemed small in relation to the subject. The quantity of works reflected this genre's continued importance in current art production and discourse, and was conceptually tied to conventional formal aspects of still life, gathering together many objects for contemplation.MORE
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun refers to his drawings as preliminary studies serving as background work and the measuring-stick for developing the forms and ideas that have come to identify his style and distinguish his pictorial inventiveness. Neo-Native Drawings and Other Works features three decades of drawings extending from 1980 to 2009. The most recent tree studies (2004 – 2009), as well as ovoid portraits (2002 – 2005), figurative works (1985 – 2009), etchings (1993 – 2009), watercolours (1980 – 1993), and a number of sketchbooks comprised the first exhibition to focus on Yuxweluptun's works on paper.
Yuxweluptun refers to his work as a discourse. In his work, art and politics intermix with a Salish cosmology to critique and transform the conditions arising from colonial displacement, returning the notion of an empty newly discovered land to an indigenous sense of place. In this way a cultural landscape becomes known, if not fully understood, through the myriad forms that are central to Yuxweluptun's image making. While his work often lays out the terms of a grim pedagogy addressing racism and abuse of the land, Yuxweluptun explores these ideas with a liberating and playful humour.MORE
An ideal context for an examination of the competitive nature of group exhibitions was during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. In order to take stock of the current state of artistic interventions in the physical space or institutional workings of a gallery, guest curator Eric Fredericksen brought together an international roster of artists for An Invitation to An Infiltration.
Elizabeth Zvonar's work often uses iconic images from pop culture to reference art historical works, mixing images through collage or rendering popular forms in traditional materials. Through collage and sculpture Zvonar manages to connect the aesthetic, social and conceptual conventions of art history with those derived from the larger pool of popular culture.
On Time, Zvonar's show at the CAG, carried this collision of representation into the realm of science, philosophy and religion by examining how the desire to move between realms, earthly, spiritual or dimensional, is portrayed through invention, ritual and, ultimately, image. This new work embodied Zvonar's interested in the connections between Cubism, representations of the 4th dimension and rubber bands as metaphors for time. "I find that at the end of a journey, which of course is neverending; I have found things out." This quote by British playwright Harold Pinter, is an apt description for On Time, which included an array of sculptures and collage that act as possible portals into implausible places. Zvonar's reflection on Cubism and its relationship to Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, as well as her consideration of counter-cultures such as the beat generation and hippy culture, focuses on a common desire to transcend the physical limits of temporal reality. Whether it is the simple gesture of the thumbs up or a picture of a popular music icon, she captures this ambition by drawing on familiar images. Through her use of scale, mix of materials and combination of imagery, Zvonar manages to render the familiar somewhat absurd. She captures a humour that taps into an optimism and innocence that seems to belong in some other realm.
Repetition, exaggeration and processes of making were common threads that tied the works together in Face Up. The work of three artists was combined to articulate how representations of the body could be broken down into single gestures. In three works by Lee Lozano, she repeats the same gesture over and over through oil painting and pastel drawing. Bruce Nauman's silkscreen print suite Studies For Holograms captures five different contorted facial expressions emphasized by the use of acid yellow, grey green and inky blacks. Sarah Lucas's Cigarette Tits, from her notorious cigarette sculpture series of the early 2000's, is an iconic female form made from the meticulous and repetitive stacking of cigarettes, capturing the full slump of a heavily bosomed female form through an economy of means. Each of the works is an exaggerated caricature of recognizable gestures, left open and ambiguous to override static meaning.MORE
Playing Homage was an international group exhibition in which the artist was the subject matter. Central to all of the works in the show was a focus on the figure of the artist, used by each artist as a reference point to address their own subjectivities as makers, as institutional critique, and in sincere homage to an historical cast of artists and to the cult of the artist persona.
Several of the artists in Playing Homage directly took on the specific identity of another artist, while others play a more generalized character. Some of the works were remakes or restagings of earlier works in which the artists became, quite literally, actors playing a role, while others dictated what it meant to be an artist. The exhibition brought together new and older works, including My Late Early Styles (Part I, The Middle Period) (2007 – 09) by Rodney Graham, an image first conceived for the pages of Artforum (2007), but never previously realized as a large format photograph, and General Idea's little known video, Press Conference, which was taped at the Western Front, Vancouver in 1977. Also included was Mark Leckey's Made in 'Eaven (2004), shown as part of his winning exhibition for the 2008 Turner Prize, and Andrea Fraser's sharp re-articulation of a Martin Kippenberger speech in Kunst Muss Hängen (2001). Martha Wilson's premiere video from 1972, a selection of posters by Kippenberger, and new work by Kerstin Cmelka, Christos Dikeakos, Evan Lee and Ming Wong were also included.MORE
bgl is an artist collective based in Québec City. The acronym bgl is the first initial of the surnames of the three artists Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère and Nicholas Laverdière. They create large scale installations, public art projects that are responsive to the intended environment or surrounding culture. Combining humour and social critique, using popular consumer culture to address global and local political issues, they have worked together for over ten years, exhibiting widely. Most recently they participated in the Montréal Biennial, were nominated for the Sobey Art Award and have had a solo exhibition at Diaz Gallery in Toronto.MORE
Canadian artist Tim Gardner is well-known internationally for his figurative works based on personal snapshots of family events, vacations with friends and day to day activities. Mostly realized as intimate and precise watercolor paintings and oil pastel drawings, his early work used photographs of his older brother and friends as source material, capturing the sometimes excessive leisure activities of these post adolescent men engaged in sporting activities or partying. For his solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, his first in Canada, Gardner placed new emphasis on the landscape and watercolour. In this new work, the landscape became a place to formally engage with the properties of watercolour as a medium that offers a unique immediacy.MORE
"Please Do Not Touch the Artwork," is a familiar museum rule. Danish artist Jeppe Hein rendered it glowing red neon. Placed in one of the Contemporary Art Gallery's street front windows, it confronted the gallery visitor before they had entered the space, and set the tone for what was to come.
For Jeppe Hein's first exhibition in Canada, he presented three works that physically addressed the viewer's relation to the art object. Hein's work has been situated within an extended lineage of Minimalism. It is defined by its close examination of the formal and spatial concerns of the Minimalists as a sincere attempt to develop their concerns and reinvigorate a discourse, not for its historical relevance, but as a still vital energy for contemporary sculptural thought. His two works for the gallery space challenged the convention of the sculpture as a static object. Each offered an opportunity for viewers to experience art outside of the traditional passive role of the art viewer. Both pieces sat still and silent until they were engaged by audiences who, in viewing the artwork, triggered outbursts off sound and movement.MORE
Shannon Oksanen works in a variety of media from video to drawing. She has a growing international reputation and has participated in group exhibitions at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2004), VTO Gallery, London, England (2004), 303 Gallery, New York (2005) and The Charles. H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver (2006). Oksanen had participated in There are Those: Drawing by Six Artists at the CAG. For her solo exhibition, she presented a new 16mm film and a painting series. The film continues her interest in showmanship sports following in the line of works such as Break Away and Vanishing Point that focus on figure skating and surfboarding. Here waterskiing becomes the subject matter, which Oksanen sets back in time through the filter of the medium and layers of melancholy music. Her painting series continues her interest in portraiture.MORE
Keep the IS in FEMINISM is a collection of new Feminist slogans commissioned for the Contemporary Art Gallery's street front vitrines. For this project we invited prominent feminist artists along with emerging artists both female and male to "reinvent the 'f' word: feminism," a directive taken from the renowned New York artist and activist collective Guerilla Girls.
Clip/Stamp/Fold was the first exhibition of independent architectural magazines produced in the 1960s and 1970s. It was curated by renowned architectural theorist Beatriz Colomina and a group of PhD students at the Princeton University, School of Architecture. The exhibition was first presented in New York at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2006. It has since met great critical acclaim especially for remaining geographically specific to each city where it is presented. While the concept and presentation elements are portable, the archival magazines vary, being sourced from local collections. Since its debut in New York, it has traveled to the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; Documenta 12, Kassel; AA, London; and Norsk Form, Oslo with plans to go to Madrid and Barcelona.
With the help of architectural critic and curator Adele Weder, the CAG researched and assembled from local collections architectural magazines for exhibition. Clip/Stamp/Fold also included custom wallpaper featuring images of the magazines, facsimiles of historical magazines for viewers to peruse, and a historical timeline examining the social and political contexts behind many of the collected magazines.
For Clip/Stamp/Fold 6, the CAG organized a comprehensive program of talks, inviting architects, writers and publishers from the region to respond to the exhibition. Beatriz Colomina gave public a lecture on the exhibition on October 14.MORE
Robotic Chair is the culmination of a twenty-year exploration of kinetic sculpture. Modeled on a simple wooden school chair, the Robotic Chair has the extraordinary capability of falling apart and then putting itself back together again. In order to accomplish this amazing act the Robotic Chair is equipped with a mechanical robot embedded in the seat and a computerized vision system. Using state-of-the-art technology, the chair is a metaphor for life's process – falling down, and picking yourself up; falling apart, and putting yourself back together, over and over again. Max Dean realized Robotic Chair in collaboration with engineer and systems architect Raffaello D'Andrea and industrial designer Matt Donovan.
Max Dean's works have been shown frequently both in Canada and internationally. Exhibitions include the Plateau dell'umanita, Venice Biennial, 2001; Voici, 100 years of contemporary art at Palais des Beaux-Arts (Bozar) in Brussels, 2000; and dAPERTutto at the Venice Biennial, 1999; as well as exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, ZKM in Karlsruhe and Kiasma in Helsinki.MORE
In all of his sculptural installations, Samuel Roy-Bois sets the viewer in motion or, more accurately, makes the viewer aware of their movements. He may guide you to walk across a raised floor that in response amplifies your footsteps, or to walk in circles to look into the window of a rotating room. The artist's simple directions ground the body of the viewer in space and in relation to material reality. For his solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Roy-Bois drew a map that should be followed with all the expectations of a traveler on a quest. He created a new work that took the viewer through a passageway into a dark place to find a treasure. To set the stage for this journey, the artist used the gallery's street front windows to transform a common household building material into an overall colour-field.
Roy-Bois is originally from Quebec City and is currently living in Vancouver. His installations have been shown across Canada and internationally, most recently in Divertissements at Point ephémère in Paris, 2007; Improbable and ridiculous at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal in 2005; and Faire l'independence at Quartier éphémère in Montréal, 2005.
This solo exhibition presented works from 1997 to 2006 in paint, film and photography by Vancouver artist Stephen Waddell. Waddell began his career as a painter but eventually came to concentrate on photography. Studying at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia, he moved to Berlin in 1998 but now maintains a studio in Vancouver and spends time living and working in both cities. Waddell's early paintings focused on anonymous urban spaces, these were usually unpopulated, lonely scenes that seemed like memories of experiences of derealisation. He used the camera to make studies for his paintings and these snapshots and polaroids led him to take up photography full-time. Waddell also made super 8 film studies of urban pedestrians that paved the way for his tableau-scaled photos of solitary figures for which he has become known. These photos are largely unposed studies of strangers caught at work, in transit or at leisure that reinvent the Impressionist project of 'the painting of modern life'. Like other painters turned photographer, Waddell's indifference toward criteria established within a strictly photographic tradition permitted him to breathe new life and purpose into the medium. His works are better understood as pictures than photographs in that they draw as much from the history of painting as the history of photography.
Guest curator: Roy ArdenMORE
Letter to the Editor was a poster project by Allison Hrabluik that was in part an exercise in distribution. Only fifty identical posters were produced with the goal of slowly and subtly dispersing them through Vancouver in somewhat unexpected places. What started in one of the Contemporary Art Gallery's street front windows slowly spread out over the course of two months. In this time frame, the artist personally approached selected common use businesses, asking them to hang a poster from inside their windows. The poster format was a break from Hrabluik's animation and video work, but retained a narrative format typical to her early work. The poster was a collage of images of small animals, dolls, twigs and bugs, some of which she reproduced as watercolour paintings while others she left in photographic form. The content at first appeared sweet, but turned foreboding as one began to notice that all the animals are dead and the dolls glare unblinkingly.MORE
For over 25 years, FASTWÜRMS, a collaborative art team formed in 1979 by Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse, have been durable generators of DIY culture in Toronto and have been able to maintain a diverse and dedicated audience, and a distinct lineage of imitators and followers. They have built a practice that collides the rigour of conceptual art with pagan rituals and popular aesthetics, creating a fresh language of their own where they are alien witches who make films, video, installations, performances and teach at the University of Guelph, Ontario. With a sobering humor and a love of their community they have produced large public commissions and participated in the 2006 Sao Paulo Biennial. FASTWÜRMS have produced solo projects in Toronto's many Queen Street West galleries and spaces, including Paul Petro Contemporary Art, X Space, the Gladstone Hotel, the late ZsaZsa Gallery, as well as internationally, including Southern Exposure Gallery (San Francisco), Osaka 90 (Osaka, Japan), Canadian Cultural Centre (Rome), Seoul Museum of Contemporary Art (Korea), Ideal Copy Office (Kyoto, Japan), and in La IV Bienalle de Poesia Visual (Zapata Subway Station, Mexico City).MORE
Through large scale sculptural installations, Håkansson has built a practice that links scientific research to cultural production, reworking scientific studies within the sterile white walls of the gallery. Håkansson formally reconstructs experimental apparatuses that are originally designed to measure factors such as environmental patterns and the unique physiological movements of animals. For example, for Wind Tunnel, he rebuilt a structural device used to test bird flight patterns in the confines of the art gallery. As Vancouver is well-known for its specialized and well-funded research on environmental issues, in particular marine life, the CAG brought Håkansson to Vancouver in May 2006 to begin his research. He returned in September 2007 to begin recording Orca sounds for his upcoming exhibition.MORE
For Kristan Horton's first exhibition in Vancouver, the Contemporary Art Gallery presented a selection of 38 photographs from Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove. The doubling of the title of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film is the first key into this ambitious project in which the artist reproduces scenes from the film Dr. Strangelove as sculptures. Using various commonplace items from his studio (a glue-stick, garbage bags, cutlery, felt markers and dirt to name only a few) Horton constructed the overall composition of each scene. He then placed, side by side, a black and white photograph of his improvised constructions with a reproduction of the original film still, amalgamating them into a single printed image.MORE
Vancouver based artist Elspeth Pratt produced an abstract sculpture for the gallery's street front windows. Using common building materials, Pratt constructed a cohesive composition to create a unified design over nine windows. In general Pratt uses forms and materials that align closer with architecture than the history of visual art. At times she directly references the space she exhibits in, but more often her abstract sculptures carry direct references to other, more ubiquitous architectural spaces. World Traffic's (2004) curving cardboard dome and grated base reflects the now pervasive shape of many new airports. Her wall piece Pendulum (2000), which uses a stick, sponge and wire to precariously balance a protruding block of wood and suspend a carved piece of pink foam, is characteristic of a cantilevered stadium balcony. For Bluff, her work for the Contemporary Art Gallery, Pratt did both. She responded directly to the space, but also made reference to more general and proverbial architectural forms.MORE
Drawing holds a particular place in the hierarchy of art media. It is a method for sketching; a way to solve problems, a mode of research; a part of a larger practice and a place to begin. It is traditionally distinguished as being made with a pencil, pen, charcoal, marker or crayon, usually consisting of lines, patterns or shading. There are Those was an attempt to look more deeply at the process of drawing and those reasons to draw. We used this exhibition to answer questions like why are we seeing so much drawing, why are we interested in it and how are artists using it? This group exhibition was a small selection of Vancouver-based artists who use drawing as part of a larger practice, but who also use it in a particular way, as a means to slow down their thinking process. All the works in this exhibition were labored, generally overdrawn. They had a slightly obsessive character, either through exhaustive detail, repetitive gestures, or the obvious working and reworking of a motif. All the works made reference to historical material, either stylistically or thematically.MORE
A Shallow Flight of Stairs, Robin Peck's solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, consisted of a single large scale work using all eight standard size acrylic sheets. Peck worked through many different configurations to bring the separate pieces of material together in a composition that responded to the gallery as a frame and in consideration of the way a viewer moves around the work in the exhibition space. The relation that was created by assembling the similar but slightly differing material was one that was contingent on the architecture of the gallery but with the primary concern of putting the viewer in motion. The sculpture and architecture were static and activated by the viewer's movement, which revealed subtle incremental changes in perspective caused by the differing thickness of each transparent sheet.MORE
The CAG presented the first Canadian exhibition by Russian born artist Pavel Pepperstein. Pepperstein has an eccentric practice in which he mixes painting, drawing and writing to build idiosyncratic iconographies and elaborate chronologies that both reflect a hazy past and predict a fantastic future. His series of paintings and drawings, Landscapes of Future depicts an absurd timeline of a not so plausible future. Many of the pieces in this body of work link figures from Russian mythology and fairy tales with signs and symbols from critical theory, literature and current politics, creating a bizarrely abstract representation of society as we know it that hovers between optimism and anxiousness. Pepperstein aptly situates this series within the genre of landscape painting. In general, the individual works either directly incorporate the common tropes of this genre or move toward total abstraction; for example, 2388 depicts the year lakes will begin to fly and 3017 abstractly represents the fight between 'The All' and 'Nothing.'MORE
Derek Brunen's project for the gallery's street front windows was recognition of and an invitation to the casual passersby who might not take notice of the Contemporary Art Gallery and its many activities. For Blind, Brunen tailored an array of secondhand curtains. Windows are a logical place for curtains, but they are out of place on the CAG's uniform retail-like vitrines, under the cement tower and in the still developing neighbourhood. Curtains are an outdated mode of window dressing and not common to urban condos where blinds and shutters are more often pulled closed than drapes drawn. In Yaletown, in the densely populated downtown core of Vancouver, Brunen faced the curtains out, aesthetically arranging them into a united composition that took both texture and colour into consideration. By covering the windows he concealed what was behind them, but by creating a considered composition and directing the colour-field toward the street he asked the accidental spectator to investigate what is behind the curtain. Blind was an invitation to look.MORE
This group exhibition gathered works by six Canadian artists who bring abstraction to the edge of representation. Eli Bornowsky, Eli Langer, Kika Thorne, Holly Ward, Geoffrey Farmer and Derek Sullivan all question the use of abstraction through their own formal explorations. Many of the works directly referenced and represented Modernist paradigms. In some ways the works were like caricatures of Modernism, simplifying and exaggerating its familiar and canonized aesthetic concerns. Vivid colours, bold forms, elaborate compositions become tangible objects that relate to intangible ideas, materializing abstract ideas through abstract forms. This investigation into form for form's sake is not to set Modernism up as a foil, but was used to bring out the specific qualities of aesthetic exploration, using form as a viable and particular method to communicate specific ideas.MORE
Euan Macdonald isolates ideas, making them manifest with simple gestures and through simplifying the visual field. For Nebula, his solo exhibition at the CAG, Macdonald presented a 16mm film loop of a nebula captured through the telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles. Unlike the human eye, which cannot translate colour at such distances, film and video cameras can read the multiple colours particular to nebulae. Yet Macdonald still chose to forget the awesome spectrum of color, portraying the cluster of stars in black and white. He removed information not just to represent how the human eye sees, but to draw attention to the means of representation in order to create a lull between spectacle and sublime understanding. As part of Nebula, the CAG co-published a limited edition artist bookwork with Verlag Fur Moderne Kunst, Nurnberg that consist of an amalgamation of stills and drawings.MORE
These emerging Vancouver-based artists have recently come together as collaborators. In combining their practices they have created a specific dialogue, one that centers on a formal exchange and a continued interest in simplifying the terms of their visual surroundings in an attempt to see what the other sees. For their exhibition at the CAG, Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky presented a sculptural series of these formal conversations, which used base materials to geometrically represent common and household objects. They continued this dialogue in the windows in two dimensional terms, graphically rendering and extending their conversation.MORE
Concrete Languagebrought together contemporary art works that explore the visual and spatial relations in language. The project was conceived to examine the visual dynamics of language, creating a contemplative moment that is outside the way we commonly use or view language. Each of the artists: Michael Baers, Fiona Banner, Filipa César, Martin Creed, Antonia Hirsch, Denise Oleksijczuk, Ian Grais, Vibeke Tandberg, Ron Terada, Ian Wallace, Lawrence Weiner, Laurel Woodcock, Cerith Wyn Evans, YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES and Elizabeth Zvonar, in this international group exhibition builds relations between text and visual material that moves beyond typical didactic or diagrammatic functions. Instead, the artists meld word and aesthetics to locate meaning at the meeting point, leveling the site of impact by creating an overt and immediate inter-dependence between what is being said and how it is visually perceived. Co-curated by Jenifer Papararo and Christina Ritchie.MORE
Vancouver-based artist and writer Roy Arden curated an exhibition of work by internationally renowned artist Hans-Peter Feldmann. Feldmann has had profound influence on the shape of contemporary conceptual art and photography, paralleling text and image and redefining methods of exhibition and distribution. For Feldmann's first solo exhibition in Canada, and in order to introduce local audiences to the breadth of the artist's work, Arden selected an array of Feldmann's signature bookworks, posters and smaller works. The exhibition also included 100 Years, an ambitious photographic series of 101 black and white portraits of people ranging in age from 8 months to 100 years old. The formal composition of the images strongly relate to work of the early 20th century photographer August Sander. In conjunction with the exhibition, the CAG published Birgit Doing Her Make Up, a bookwork comprised of 72 successive photographs.MORE
In his budding career, Christian Kliegel has deftly managed to mesh the grand gestures of monumental sculpture with more subtle and personalized actions. Since 2003, the artist has routinely detoured from his day-to-day travels to gather the material for Production Postings, an on-going project. Kliegel compiled a vast collection of location signs used by film and television production companies to direct crew and extras to film shoots. Each production uses a cryptic code to identify itself, but the general design and style of these brightly coloured signs are formulaic and a ubiquitous part of Vancouver's urban landscape. Kliegel filled the Contemporary Art Gallery's twelve street level windows with over three hundred of these signs, creating a vibrant spectacle that is reminiscent of the industry's commonplace, but excessive and showy presence in the city.MORE
Vancouver-based artist team Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens (Hadley+Maxwell) examine the relation of politics to aesthetics. For their project, I Love You, they combined graphics from the Atelier Populaire, a French workshop who produced posters for the May '68 riots, and text appropriated from Wings' 1976 hit Silly Love Songs. The resulting works played image against word, testing the power and effect of the activist graphics against the clichéd pop lyrics. For Screen Test, their solo exhibition at the CAG, Hadley and Maxwell produced three new works that continue to build a tension between politics and aesthetics, reflecting on issues of taste and its historical construction. They have exhibited their collaborative work across Canada at the Kyber Center in Halifax, Artspeak and Western Front in Vancouver and have been included in group exhibitions at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and the Vancouver Art Gallery.MORE
In partnership with Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) the CAG mounted When Hangover Becomes Form, an installation by Rachel Harrison and Scott Lyall curated by New Orleans-based art critic and historian Daniel Adler. The collaboratively conceived installation included an array of found objects, appropriated texts, photographs, drawings and handcraft sculptural elements arranged with a non-hierarchical composition. The collection of objects, images and texts contained no narrative connections that are fixed or fully revealed. With no obvious focus to the work, viewers were discouraged from using an isolated portion of the composition as an interpretive key to the work, and were encouraged to approach the installation as a speculative and intuitive encounter that revealed multiple semantic layers. Harrison and Lyall developed their practices within a parallel dialogue, but this was their first material collaboration. Harrison has exhibited at the 2003 Whitney Biennial and had major solo exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Bergen Kunsthall in Bergen, Norway and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Lyall has exhibited nationally and internationally at Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto, Greene Naftali Gallery in New York and KunstWerke in Berlin, with his first major solo exhibition in Canada at the Art Gallery of North York, 2002.MORE
To Be Sorted: Blank/Circle to Square/Organizing Principle was a series of three consecutive vitrine displays with objects from the collection of Micah Lexier, with each display accompanied by one of the artist's works. Lexier, a Canadian artist based in New York, has developed his practice out of a reconsideration of the quasi-documentary strategies of early conceptual art, retooled to accommodate his concerns with time, identity and difference. Lexier has a sustained interest in the ephemeral products of conceptually based practices and over the years has amassed an extensive collection of such materials, along with thousands of anonymous products that share similar graphic and aesthetic qualities. Three separate groupings of material from this collection were selected, each group was accompanied by one work by the artist, obliquely demonstrating their reciprocal qualities.MORE
Myfanwy MacLeod's work is trademarked by her wry sense of humour, and her layered referencing of consumer and popular culture. Using the language of cartoon-style drawings and sculpture, MacLeod brings together a blend of art historical references and a humorous take on the self-absorbed and entertainment-saturated culture in which we live. For Where I Have Lived and What I Have Lived For, Macleod drew inspiration once again from the world of popular culture, this time beginning with Scottish folklore. At Glenfiddich artist residency programme in Duff Towns, Scotland (summer 2005), Myfanwy produced a series of photographs of the interiors of derelict houses in and around the Glenfiddich Distillery. These photographs, which investigate the idea of the supernatural, start the artist's exploration of vernacular representations of the otherworldly.MORE
Andrew Reyes is an artist who lives and works in Toronto. He was included in the show News From Nowhere, curated by Derek Sullivan at the Susan Hobbs Gallery in June 2005 and included in the inaugural show at Diaz Contemporary in September 2005, Toronto. For display in the CAG's street front windows, Andrew Reyes produced 120 photographic posters. In general, Reyes' photographic work plays with the aesthetics of advertising, using visual effects to enhance or clean up otherwise mundane or dreary scenes. His series Day Place/Spray Palace (2002) is composed of nondescript generic images from his work place. With a few simple gestures, the careful addition of a couple of flares and sparkles, and by saturating the image with colours, Reyes transforms his ordinary work place into an ideal setting.MORE
Clement Greenberg described collage as "a major turning point in the evolution of Cubism, and therefore a major turning point in the whole evolution of modernist art in this century." Bit by Bit incorporated the work of emerging artists who continue to explore this material practice. All the artists in the exhibition apply conventional notions of collage, physically collecting, combining, cutting away, covering up and layering found images and commonplace materials – one piece at a time – to create new images and thus to construct new meanings. Whether the artists are boldly forming an aesthetic moment or overtly putting forward a political agenda, each element within the overall collage is considered a separate piece of information that combines with other pieces to generate something whole, and it is this tenuous and apparent relation between the pieces and the whole that gives this material practice its potency and continued relevance. As part of Bit by Bit, the CAG published a special issue of I Got Killed I Got Killed I Got Killed in World War Three.MORE
To Be Sorted: Blank/Circle to Square/Organizing Principle was a series of three consecutive vitrine displays with objects from the collection of Micah Lexier, with each display accompanied by one of the artist's works. Lexier, a Canadian artist based in New York, has developed his practice out of a reconsideration of the quasi-documentary strategies of early conceptual art, retooled to accommodate his concerns with time, identity and difference. Lexier has a sustained interest in the ephemeral products of conceptually based practices and over the years has amassed an extensive collection of such materials, along with thousands of anonymous products that share similar graphic and aesthetic qualities. Three separate groupings of material from this collection were selected, each group was accompanied by one work by the artist, obliquely demonstrating their reciprocal qualities.MORE
Kamloops based artist Donald Lawrence's ambitious process based sculptural and photographic works often combine the creation of elaborate, antiquated methods of outdoor exploration in combination with methods to document the ongoing processes the sculptures incite. He had made a canoe that doubles as a darkroom and a sled that converts into a survival tent/hut. Lawrence is fascinated with turn of the century technologies of exploration and survival, and joins his research into these often nostalgic histories with an active re-mapping of their present day potentials. For the Contemporary Art Gallery, Lawrence proposed a large scale installation based on a number of old iron clad ship's boilers that sit on beaches on the west and east coasts of Canada. Functioning at the cusp between valuable antique and disintegrating flotsam, the boilers provided Lawrence with a trope to examine distinctions between treasure and garbage, memory and lost history.MORE
To Be Sorted: Blank/Circle to Square/Organizing Principle was a series of three consecutive vitrine displays with objects from the collection of Micah Lexier, with each display accompanied by one of the artist's works. Lexier, a Canadian artist based in New York, has developed his practice out of a reconsideration of the quasi-documentary strategies of early conceptual art, retooled to accommodate his concerns with time, identity and difference. Lexier has a sustained interest in the ephemeral products of conceptually based practices and over the years has amassed an extensive collection of such materials, along with thousands of anonymous products that share similar graphic and aesthetic qualities. Three separate groupings of material from this collection were selected, each group was accompanied by one work by the artist, obliquely demonstrating their reciprocal qualities.MORE
Daniel Olson uses performance as a means to ignite his material production. The Montreal-based artist transforms existing objects with somewhat discrete interventions, at times enhancing or exaggerating their use value. For example, he adds a bell to a wooden walking stick, which can be rung with the simple flick of the thumb; he adheres a magnifying glass to a music box, exposing its inner workings; or melds a fan to a music-maker so both operate simultaneously. For Twenty Minutes' Sleep the artist revisited earlier installations where he combined objects, sound, video, photographs and performance, to create an office space that sets the stage for a shifting cast of characters.MORE
Ceal Floyer's art practice has developed out of a playful approach to the tenets of minimalist sculpture. Using familiar objects and common figures of speech, she upends conventional meanings, creating works that are both elegant and absurd. Her small gestures, reductive reasoning and literalist approach to materials yield works that exploit the sometimes surprising outcomes of a perfectly logical process. This exhibition included new works created especially for the CAG.MORE
As the Hammer Strikes is a groundbreaking video installation. Originally produced in 1982 in 16mm film, this complex triptych details a real time conversation between the artist and a hitchhiker he picked up in Southern Ontario. For the exhibition at the CAG, John Massey used three screens to convey the minutiae of communication, visually portraying misunderstandings and thought processes. Toronto artist John Massey has been working for over 25 years, having gained a national and international reputation in the early 1980s. Through a wide variety of media, including photography, film and sculpture, Massey's work often plays with the ambiguity between reality and fiction. His work has been widely exhibited, with shows in Germany, the United States, the UK, France, Australia, as well as in Canada; and is held in many collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, Paris; and the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto. John Massey received the 2001 Gershon Iskowitz Award for lifetime achievement. He currently teaches in the Visual Studies Programme at the University of Toronto.
Curator: Jenifer PapararoMORE
Daniel Barrow is an illustrator and storyteller. Barrow has developed a signature animation technique that applies antiquated methods using an overhead projector. Through live performances, he animates a narrative sequence of charismatic illustrations. For Don't Let This Happen, his first solo exhibition in Vancouver, Barrow harmoniously joined a variety of media, devising a self-sufficient means of animation using an overhead projector, a fan, some water and plastic beads in combination with his illustrations and video work. As part of his exhibition at the CAG, Barrows performed Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry, a story set in Las Vegas based on the life experiences of Scott Thorson, Liberace's young boyfriend. Daniel Barrow is a Winnipeg-based media artist working in performance, video and installation. He has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad. He creates and adopts comic book narratives into a "manual" form of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings. Barrow refers to this practice as "graphic performance, live illustration, or manual animation."
Curator: Jenifer PapararoMORE
Damian Moppett's practice questions notions of mastery. For his exhibition at the CAG, Moppet brought together three distinct crafts: drawing, ceramics and music. He is interested in the idea of learning a craft, but wants to avoid the exterior and traditional criteria with which proficiency or mastery is judged. He spent six months learning how to throw clay pots working up from a simple hollow container to a more complex tea pot. His drawings reference vernacular and illustrative styles. He uses them as a form of documentation of his art practice and as a means to literally represent his cultural influences. He incorporated music into the exhibition through a series of four videos that highlighted all the technical skills needed to set up a rock band. The music becomes secondary to the material need to make music. Within each medium he presents a modest level of skill and attempts to avoid the creation of a spectacle in part by privileging the process over the finished object and by avoiding, to a certain degree, the tropes of each medium.
– Jenifer PapararoMORE
The Spiders are comprised of Vancouver artist Damian Moppett and Toronto artist Zin Taylor. A collaborative outfit, The Spiders have adopted the sub-cultural administration of fashion in order to operate and produce work. For this exhibition, the street-front windows of the CAG contained a variety of ephemera (posters, buttons, stickers, displays, recordings) documenting The Spiders output over the last couple of years. For this special occasion, a limited edition necklace reading "The Spiders" was made from bent silver wire in a spider-like font and was available for purchase at the time of the exhibition.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery presented the North American debut of For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons sur la Société Industrielle, a new body of work by internationally respected Los Angeles artist Christopher Williams. Williams is strongly associated with a group of Vancouver artists known for the development of Photo Conceptualism. Like them, his approach comes out of the history of conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s, which used language and photography to address issues related to painting and sculpture. Williams has self-consciously adopted the production values of fine art or "straight" photography into a practice that explores sculptural ideas using photography and installation.MORE
This exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery assembled a wide spectrum of Shearer's recent work with the aim of profiling its many convergent strains. The centerpiece for the show was a recent sculptural installation in the form of a steel garden shed inside of which a guitar P/A system played a heavy metal guitar solo specially commissioned by Shearer. The 'music' was amplified and distorted by the metal of the shed, creating a keening shrine to angry, cloistered youth.
Vancouver based artist Steven Shearer works in a broad range of disciplines including painting and collage, and continues to investigate the vernacular aesthetics of the 1970s as a site for looking at the emancipatory energies and sometimes revolutionary potential of teens and youth. He has assembled a growing archive of photographs, mostly downloaded from the web, of amateur record and tape collections, guitars and other totems of youthful rebellion and identification. He has also produced a number of works anthologizing images of '70s teen pop idols like Shawn Cassidy, whose androgynous sexuality and rapid climb into and then out of the heights of teen fandom is used for its autobiographical metaphors.
Exhibition text:
Steven Shearer is a collector of content, which he gathers in the form of images and lists. His accumulation and selection is derived from a researched interest in popular modes of representation that is specific to forms that have not yet established themselves or conformed to a set of established conventions. Within his collection there is often a subject matter that reflects a certain time period, and acts as social commentary, which at times Shearer defines through a personal history. But the overarching commonality running through his collection lies in formal concerns, in the manner, form or context in which a subject is represented.
Shearer has compiled an assortment of images from early teen magazines, at a time when the emerging genre was still experimenting with ways to represent its subject matter. The marketing power of a single image was not fully realized. Instead these fan magazines presented more of a scrap book approach that incorporated a large portion of non-professional and non-staged photographs. In the early days of fan magazines when their numbers were limited, they published a seemingly endless number of images, creating icons through sheer quantity with almost blatant disregard for the quality of the image or its layout on the page. Using this abundant resource of material, Shearer looks for particularities, selecting like images through similarities in poses, action or framing devices, reconfiguring them into groupings in order to find new ways of seeing and reading the imagery.
In Kaleidoscope (2001), one of Shearer's early and now signature collage works, he compiles predominantly frontal shots of the 70s heart throb Leif Garret into a large and tight grid-like pattern without cropping or altering them; an approach he repeats in a number of works in this exhibition. Shearer reformats these images of a common subject matter into a monumental scale, a single field of hundreds of found images. Even though Shearer rarely alters the images, the overall collage creates a highly mannered effect that looks like it has a rigid structure imposed on to it: each four-sided image is framed by an almost symmetrical white border. Shearer does not want to deny the content of the individual images and tries to maintain the integrity of the original source material, while also considering the composition of the reconfiguration as a whole. It is a matter of proximity. From a distance the work appears as a color field, even the harshness of the negative spaces softens, melding the individual images instead of dividing them.
Shearer pushes this play with distances in List (2004), a large scale print of thousands of extreme underground black/death metal recordings sourced from tape trader lists. From a distance the columns of titles, band names and tape descriptions have a formal quality reminiscent of large scale abstract paintings. It is not until you stand directly in front of the work that the pattern breaks into columns, and then lines, and then words. Shearer uses a painterly approach, giving information a physical presence and even though the text is discernable at a certain vantage point the amount of information in its sheer volume is almost indigestible in anything other than its formal representation.
Part of Shearer's collection is dedicated to images of handicrafts originally published in craft specific magazines from the late sixties and early seventies. With the craft imagery in particular, Shearer takes the most liberties, removing them from their background and adjusting their shape and size. He then reproduces them as silk-screen prints, reanimating them using a craft based technique and giving them a renewed context. Countless hours were spent making these beloved and be-laboured crafts, but when it came to their representation, like the countless images of teen idols, there was a carelessness; the work was usually self-photographed under poor conditions, and badly reproduced.
Slumber is the latest piece in Shearer's large format collages. It breaks in content from his earlier works, moving away from youth and music cultural references to a less self referential subject matter and a direct pointing to the history of portraiture. For Slumber, he has culled images from the web, compiling photos of people sleeping. Shearer is specific about his sleepers. All of them are captured photographically sleeping, but usually not in bed or lying down. They are all caught in unlikely and often comical and mannered positions, half-sitting in chairs, slumped over tables or propped against walls with contorted bodies, twisted necks, and gaping mouths. He then combines these multiple images into a rigid structure that in a way conflicts with the subject matter, arranging them into a loose grid and finding a way to display the images in a painterly manner. For Shearer, the self-published images that he finds on the web are reminiscent of the amateurish and haphazard reproductions of early fan and craft magazines.
Sheds — the typical aluminum tool sheds found in almost every suburban back yard — are also a worthy subject matter for Shearer's collection. Using his signature method of collage, he creates a grid of nondescript backyard sheds. Within this assembly of like images, he inserts a single image of a longhaired teenager playing a guitar. Adding this one inconsistency gives the shed new meaning. It now has the potential to become the practice ground for the guitar playing youth, a fertile ground for creativity and a place of freedom. For his exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Shearer brought this possibility into the gallery by assembling a "performance space" from prefabricated panels for such sheds. For the majority of the exhibition the shed sat closed with only slivers of light escaping from its cracks. On one occasion only, the sculpture became active via prerecorded death metal riffs specifically constructed to blare from within the closed aluminum walls causing the shed to vibrate and shudder in response to the different notes.
As much as Shearer is constantly looking for content he is also looking for innovative modes of display. He often returns to traditional forms of representation in order to recontextualize his collections. For Dirtyface (2003-4), Shearer unites seven images from his collection of teen idols in a series of seven silver point drawings. The old school technique creates a weird rift in time, converting the familiar 70s pop stars into 19th century street characters: from Adam Rich look-a-like (the youngest sibling from the television series "Eight is Enough") to chimney sweep. In a similar manner, Longhairs, a series of crayon drawings, depicts five longhaired men, all shirtless. The medium and Shearer's particular choice of characters transforms the contemporary low resolution jpegs to echo models of historical portraiture. He also reworks select images on canvas, moving deftly between painting, silkscreen and collage. The use of traditional mediums and the meditative focus of these hand made images contrast and compliment the glacial accumulations of printed images in Shearer's archive.
There is something so optimistic and obsessive about all the subjects he chooses to collect, something that is reflected in his own act of collecting, and extended to the manner in which he presents his archive. How to give these things, his collection of images and text, a physical form or body? In their origin the items in his collection were neglectfully presented and reproduced, and in acquiring these images he can take the role of their caretaker, attempting to create a new context and aesthetic form in which to represent them or by using them as source material for traditional forms of image making.
– Reid Shier
Alex Morrison's practice spans a variety of media in work that examines the relationships between urban and domestic space, memory, and the struggle for subjective identity. His new work, Free Room, translated these themes into a three-channel DVD work based, in part, on Lindsay Anderson's cult classic film, If, of 1968. Freely interpolating from the film's depiction of the claustrophobic relationship between alienated youths, Free Room was set in a single room where the characters discuss, joke and plot, about sex, politics and death – the elements of a projected free life. Using images clipped from a variety of magazines, the three characters mapped out a set of identifications and the means to deflate them; they appropriated images in order to domesticate their rhetorical force. The work illustrated this transitional point of experience, a plane of action that is divorced from both the compliance of childhood and the complex morality of independent choice.
Accompanying Free Room in the exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, was a selection of silkscreen posters and drawings, together called Gesucht! (Wanted!). Similar in theme to *not the actual apartment (2001), these works dealt with idealized architectural space as lifestyle.MORE
Marina Roy is a Vancouver based artist and writer whose works combine interests in historical book illustration with psychoanalytic theory and word play. Past works include a series of illustrations the artist crafted on the fore-edges of books, which illustrate the books' titles while making overt sexual puns about their subject matter.
For her exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Roy presented an ambitious series of new paintings using glass and mirrors. In these works, abstract 'blobs' of paint are poured onto sheet glass; Roy then created representational paintings inspired by 18th and 19th-century illustrational styles on the reverse side of the painted glass. Arranging a mirror behind the glass, the illustration can be glimpsed hovering behind the monochromatic blob. Parallels with Rorschach tests bring to mind and literalize the often sexual nature of suggestion.
Several of the images in the paintings have been used in the accompanying video animation. Using kinetic devices such as bodily emissions or expanding clouds, the relationships between background and foreground are blurred or trade places, operating in much the same way as they do in the mirror painting structures. All of the images are figurative and make reference to landscape traditions, exploiting our abiding interest in nature and human nature.MORE
An optimistic dependency lies at the core of collaborative art production. There is value in using each other – borrowing someone else's ideas, co-opting an aesthetic, applying an existing formula, utilizing another's tools – that generates a confident interdependence and creates a complicit generosity that is not so much about giving over one's ego as it is about defining it within a shared social context. Each of the projects for Social Transmission was built from an undefined assemblage of adaptations, reconstitutions, incorporations and re-enactments. The four members of Revolutions on Request presented an aesthetic ideal, a discussion and idea of art making which was represented by a diverse collection of products and mediums that, when presented together, coalesce into an overall design. In a similar manner, Massimo Guererra used and offered his material production as a language to form social interaction. His objects and installations simultaneously carried the residue of and the potential for building relations. assume vivid astro focus is a name to be used, an erratic collective, an individual, a space for exchange. It is or they are constantly incorporating the work of others and amassing a mix of references, from pop psychedelic to Aubrey Bearsdley, in the name of sharing. In all three projects, usage became a viable means to produce work, giving way to a material accumulation, an aesthetic gathering that idealistically transmits the social.
Jerry Pethick (born London ON 1935, died Hornby Island BC, 2003) was an artist whose work probed the historical and conceptual cross-pollination of ideas about the nature of visual experience with scientific and technological inquiry into optics. He was a pioneer in the field of holography and much of his early work took the form of optical-sculptural bricolage. Since the early 1970s his work often took the form of quasi-sculptural "arrays" – compositions of serial photographs and Fresnel lenses that generated ethereal three-dimensional images. Such arrays were often accompanied by sculptural elements that served to extend the "virtual" aspect of the images into the "real" space of the viewer.
Pethick was a tireless researcher into the early history of photographic imaging technologies. (His notebooks and essays make mention of Edison, principally his efforts to claim the invention of the motion picture camera for himself, though he liberally adopted the work of many others.) On the basis of these writings, one might speculate that Pethick's arrays were inspired by the ganged cameras developed by Auguste Le Prince, Eduard Muybridge and Jules-Etienne Maray. One of Pethick's earliest arrays is featured in this installation.
In this, her first solo exhibition in North America, Kirsten Pieroth showed a series of works dealing with various interpretations of the term "inventing." The artist researched facts and fables on the life of American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, who still holds the record for the most patents registered. Through these works the myth of his productivity and creativity gets transferred into general questions about artistic production.
I regret that a previous engagement prevents me from accepting your kind invitation to dinner at your home, on Thursday evening, September seventeenth, is a sentence taken from a letter written by inventor Charles Edison. Pieroth's interest in, and subsequent research into the life of Edison led to the discovery the inventor often made excuses to avoid attending social functions. Pieroth then wrote to the American Patent Office requesting a patent on behalf of Edison for the invention of the "excuse." This and other letters to Edison scholars formed the basis of the exhibition. A number of sculptural elements derived from photographs about or of Edison extended this exhaustive body of research tangentially to question the authenticity and subjectivity of historical records.
This exhibition proposed a look beyond obvious differences to examine commonalities of intention, technique, and effect in the distinct work of two artists. Vancouver artist Neil Campbell's abstract, quasi-geometric paintings are scaled to the human body, and despite their apparent flatness, are performative in nature. They exact a calculated effect on viewer's bodies and senses. Far from 'abstract', the experience is both physical and spiritual.
Beau Dick is a Kwakwaka'wakw chief, one of the most accomplished and talented traditional carvers and artists on the West Coast. Actively engaged in all aspects of Kwakwaka'wakw culture, he is highly regarded as a teacher and mentor. Dick has concentrated on studying and revivifying the traditions of carving, dance and storytelling, and this exhibition presented several of Dick's masks in the admittedly compromised and alienated context of the Contemporary Art Gallery, far from their purpose integrated into rituals of dance and Potlatches. Dick mitigated these circumstances by preparing a dance for the exhibition opening.
The work of both Campbell and Dick share a basis in bold graphic design and theatrical effect. Supernatural shed light on these parallels while questioning the aesthetic apartheid which separates the conditions under which similar artworks have been (and continue to be) displayed, with the aim of producing a serious dialogue on the relationship between artistic cultures and traditions.
Nestor Kruger's meticulously rendered monochromatic wall paintings have, over the past three years, explored the nature of optics and the specifics of place. Kruger is interested in overlapping architectural contexts, and in one project painted a progressively generating series of interiors of a gallery in Montreal onto the walls of a gallery in Halifax, and then in relay, a further series of paintings of the Halifax gallery in the gallery in Montreal. This 'dialogue' continued back and forth, twinning and altering perceptions of both sites. Kruger's work at the Contemporary Art Gallery continued in this vein, and elaborated the gallery's architectural surround as a template and support for an ambitious series of reflexive paintings.MORE
Luanne Martineau joins interests in early twentieth century social realism with midcentury modernism to produce works that speak to ongoing biases and entrenched exclusions. She uses turn of the century comic books for their racist depictions of a North American immigrant polyglot as sources for elaborate drawings. Martineau copies select bits from these comic books on tracing paper, building up large palimpsests of marks whose aggregate quality is abstract, but which on close inspection reveals traces of illustrative realism, exaggerated stereotypes and received prejudices. In her exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Martineau planned a suite of drawings accompanied by a large sculptural installation. Working with outdated manufacturing technologies for fabricating textiles – such as flocking and felting, and employing an antiquated knitting machine, Martineau has recently been crafting a series of large, soft sculptures that play base, comic referents off of high modernist ideals.
In Catalogue, Terada occupies and exaggerates the means by which an institution such as the Contemporary Art Gallery exists by making private patronage the content of an artwork. In the artist's words: "Public institutions devoted to contemporary visual art maintain themselves through public and private philanthropy—granting organizations, members of the gallery, volunteers, and other donors being but a few—which necessitate relationships that are in need of renewal and upkeep. With the support of a number of contributors, I wish to expose and alter the mandate of such an institution—and the mechanisms by which it realizes this mandate—within the context of an exhibition." To realize this goal, Terada sought the participation of patrons to support and facilitate the cost of producing an artist's catalogue.
The exhibition had two distinct public components, the first mounted within the Contemporary Art Gallery's Alvin Balkind Gallery and its street front window vitrines. Here, vinyl signage acknowledges the support of those who contributed to the project. The names and company logos, as a result, comprise the visual component, the "art" as it were, of the gallery's display.
The second component is the accompanying exhibition publication, which was for sale at the gallery's reception desk. Rather than assume a supplementary, explanatory or documentary role to work displayed in the gallery, the production of this catalogue is an artwork. The catalogue looks and functions like any other publication would within the typical frame of an exhibition, but by highlighting patronage of the exhibition it hopes to expose and exploit the conventions such promotional and explanatory vehicles rely upon in their efforts to contextualize and legitimize artist's work. Despite appearances to the contrary, then, Terada intends to cast suspicion on the catalogue (and with it himself and the gallery), and in doing so raise questions about the objectivity and truth value such publications engender and maintain.MORE
Pascal Grandmaison is a Montréal artist whose video projections and photographs combine interests in conceptualism with commercial trends in rock video and advertising. The video Solo (2003) features slow panning, tight close-ups on musicians playing instruments. The fluid pace is at odds with the frenetic and hyperkinetic tradition built by promotional mediums like MTV and allows for a stripped down, anti-heroic view. Manner (2003) is a suite of large scale photographs depicting drum skins, their beaten surfaces showing evidence of the violence of their use. A selection of these photographs was featured alongside Running (2003), a DVD video projection showing a person's leg and foot upside down. The running shoe on the foot moves to a slow, rhythmic beat, jumping imperceptibly from the pressure of the blood pumping through the leg. With these two works, Grandmaison's articulation of physical activity takes the form of nuanced documents of its effects and aftermath.
Pascal Grandmaison combines interests in conceptualism with commercial trends in rock video and advertising. His recent works use large scale photography and video installation as mediums and often feature series of related images. A sense of process and the suggestion of a slow elapse of time runs through the artist's works, and their meticulous attention to detail supports a strong, contemplative mood.
Running (2003) and Manner (2003), the works that were on display at the Contemporary Art Gallery, transcribe the effects of durational activity. In Manner, drum skins exhibit the abuse of hours of service, while the video Running shows a foot, its rhythmic motion imperceptibly hinting at past activity. Here, Grandmaison's articulation of physical activity takes the form of nuanced documents of its aftermath. The artist often employs a dialogue with cinematic production. The extreme size of his photographs monumentalizes everyday subjects, while his videos utilize close-up framing and languid pacing to cut against the hyper-kinetic traditions employed by contemporary media.
Was the person whose foot we see in Running just 'running,' so that the blood pumping through their leg, and making the trainer beat, a sign of it? While an answer to this question might be possible, it may be more accurate to approach the video, and Grandmaison's other works, as documents of the time and space often edited out of much contemporary representation.MORE
Dan Graham is one of the most important contemporary visual artists practicing today. His work over the past four decades is widely recognized for its lead in the advent of conceptualism as an art movement. His work was also instrumental in the development of Vancouver based photo-conceptualism, and his long involvement and friendship with a number of locally based artists has been of enormous influence.
While his work is featured in collections around the city, Graham has, surprisingly, never been afforded a solo show in Vancouver. This was the first opportunity to assemble a group of the artist's works here, and featured an important early film work, Body Press (1970-72). Body Press shows two naked performers—one male, one female—each holding a 16 mm film camera and standing inside a mirrored cylindrical room. The performers rotate the cameras around their own bodies in a spiral motion, all the while pressing the cameras against their own flesh. The two films are shown projected on opposite walls of the gallery, and impart a hallucinatory transcription of a 'dance' between actor, camera, mirror and viewer. Other works in the exhibition were drawn from collections here in the city and featured an early artist proof of Homes for America, Graham's powerful invocation of parallels between suburban tract housing estates and serialized, modernist design first published in Arts Magazine in 1966.MORE
In celebration of its 30th Anniversary, the Contemporary Art Gallery presented an exhibition and project honoring its early years. On February 23, 1973, the Artists' Gallery opened its doors at 555 Hamilton Street. Later to be renamed the Contemporary Art Gallery, the Artists' Gallery was initiated by an arts advisory committee under the umbrella of the City of Vancouver. Central to its early mandate and philosophy was the promotion and creation of local visual arts.
During this time the City of Vancouver began a program, with assistance from the Federal Local Initiatives Program (LIP) to purchase works by local artists. In support of this ambitious project, the Artists' Gallery was conceived as both a depository and exhibition space. The Contemporary Art Gallery continues to act as custodian for over 3000 collected works, many dating from the early to mid 1970s when the bulk of the collection was assembled.
The history of this important collection of art, of the Artists' Gallery, and of the early years of the community that shaped what would become the Contemporary Art Gallery will be showcased this summer in an exhibition featuring works from the collection.
Project Organizers: Reid Shier and Shawn PreussMORE
Scott McFarland is a photographer whose images are highlighted by meticulous staging and high-production values. McFarland documents a discrete range of subjects in ongoing suites, and his close attention to the minutia of his subjects allows for an empathetic yet critical viewpoint. The exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery concentrated on one of these projects: a large body of photographs documenting a rural cabin on the Sunshine Coast of BC. The series combines portraits of individuals with close familial ties to the cabin, an exterior shot of the cabin at night and a number of interior details, including rich and uncanny depictions of the cabin's accretion of furnishings.MORE
The work of Jemima Stehli explores issues relating to the performative self and identity in photography. Using the studio as the site of production and part of the central image, Stehli positions her own nude body as the subject and object simultaneously. The creative process the artist privately undertakes in her studio is revealed and suggests the intricate systems at play in making herself over into the object. She employs a complex strategy that introduces ambiguity in an attempt to affirm her own identity as a female artist and as a subject in the contemporary context. The exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery presented new work by Jemima Stehli that continue her use of the performative process of image making to investigate notions of female subjectivity. At once highly constructed and random, Stehli makes use of various stagings to offer important questions about the degree of control she has over her own image. Stehli's images are somewhere between performance and object, still-life and action painting.MORE
Toronto artist James Carl likes to mix things up – to confound references and test limits and then step back and watch things get funny. He combines a precise examination of the lexicon of sculpture with an abiding interest in the artifacts of public social life, filtered through the ubiquitous technologies and materials of contemporary industrialism. Plot, the installation that he prepared for the Contemporary Art Gallery, could be a story, a secret conspiracy, or a piece of real estate. Or perhaps the title refers to the activity of plotting the coordinates of the digital renderings that adorn various surfaces of artworks as well as the gallery and its exterior. Combining sculpture with graphic work, Plot demonstrates Carl's contrary approach to traditional artistic methods and materials, and the ways these things are both conditioned and altered by expectation and use.MORE
Lucy Pullen's work is marked by its conceptual curiosity and disparate, wide-ranging form. Her work has developed from an interest in performative and collaborative practices, and often takes the form of documents or remnants of staged actions. A video produced in collaboration with Sandy Plotnikoff, for example, documents a 1997 sculptural performance in which the two overturned pails full of rubber balls onto a street in Halifax from the roof of a two story car park. Pullen's meticulous double-line drawings which were showcased I this exhibition, are composed on metallic paper. From a distance, the intricate patterns of the drawings appear computer or machine-made, but on close inspection are seen to be laboriously rendered in free hand.MORE
In Our Love is Like the Earth, the Sun, the Trees and the Birth Martin Boyce created an environment that formed a quiet, poetic sensibility. The title is taken from a verse of a song by the seminal 1980's Manchester band New Order. Sculptures reminiscent of a modernist day bed are used in both exhibitions, as is a series of fluorescent light sculptures that evoke young tree-like saplings. Ventilation Grills for an Apartment Building (2002) is interspersed along the gallery walls, etched with words from a poem by John Donne. The stanza reads: "License my roving hands, and let them go, Before, behind, between, above, below". The three suspended objects in In Dreams (2002), an Alexander Calder-like mobile, are from a cut up and reworked leg splint designed by Charles and Ray Eames for the US Navy in 1942.
Isabelle Pauwels is a Vancouver artist with an abiding concern about the effect of architecture on social relation. In collaboration with Vancouver's Trapp Editions, the Contemporary Art Gallery published an artist's bookwork by Pauwels. Unfinished Apartment for Rent details, in seven screenplays, the interaction between a series of fictitious apartment dwellers. Forced through financial constraints to assemble furniture from the walls of their individual accommodations, these renters sacrifice more and more privacy as they cannibalize their dwellings for creature comforts. Pauwel's bookwork was displayed in an installation designed by the artist.MORE
Ian Skedd is an artist interested in the dynamics of light as they intersect with architectural space. For the Contemporary Art Gallery's window vitrines, Skedd built large wooden enclosures, with lateral incisions at intervals that mimic window slats. The light from the gallery's fluorescent fixtures illuminated and animated these structures. Skedd's work explored distinctions between its appearance during evening hours, when light spilled from within the enclosures through the slats, and the more imposing structural qualities evident during the day; when it may appear as a hoarding around a building under construction.MORE
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas brought together a variety of works by artists whose creative methods "showed" violence, implicated danger or threatened retribution. Michelle Normoyle's provocative and ongoing series of photographs documented the chaos of her child's room after play. Peter Lojewski's occupation as a licensed practical nurse provided subjects for a series of roughly drawn but eloquent paintings depicting hospital wards, others that invoked revenge fantasies against disparate cultural and historic figures. By expanding on these themes, the exhibition located aestheticizing depictions in acts of control, catharsis and elegy. As the palindrome title suggests, the exhibition drew parallels between depictions and suggestions of violence, and the impulses of mastery and aesthetic delight with which they often co-exist.MORE
The Contemporary Art Gallery was pleased to announce the Canadian premiere of Vancouver based artist Stan Douglas' film work Journey into Fear (2001). Douglas is one Canada's most internationally acclaimed artists, and this marked his first exhibition in his home town since 1998.
Journey into Fear takes its name from two movies. The 1940 original features Orson Welles' Mercury Players. A 1975 remake was one of the first motion pictures ever shot in Vancouver by a local crew. It starred Sam Waterston and Vincent Price in a shipbound suspense thriller. Douglas' work is a DVD video installation that stages an antagonistic exchange between a woman and man in a cyclical, ever mutating loop, a formal device characteristic of Douglas' recent practice. Set on a container ship en route to Vancouver, the work examines the 1970s as an historical moment of flux between internationalism and globalism, to which the ship acts as stage and metaphor. The DVD was accompanied by a suite of photographs of Vancouver set locations, including Douglas' 16 foot long depiction of the south side of the 100 Block of West Hastings Street.MORE
Geoffrey Farmer's installation The Blacking Factory was comprised of three interrelated works: a prop newspaper box, a sculptural installation in the form of a large truck trailer and a film work depicting a window of the Contemporary Art Gallery shattering from an explosive concussion. With these works Farmer utilized the technological expertise of the film industry to create analogies between increasingly sophisticated mechanics of display and the artifice behind the social production of meaning and value. The truck trailer was fabricated in mimicry of those used by movie production companies—an increasingly common sight on the streets of Vancouver—and alluded to the transportation of such necessities as props, lighting systems and costumes necessary to the creation of illusions. The film work rehearsed a set piece found in a wide spectrum of Hollywood films—from action-adventure to thriller—and utilized the unexpectedness of this violent genre staple within and about the gallery to prompt reflection about the context of our perception.MORE
Judy Radul's performance works engage and investigate the nuances of public life, in particular the broad etiquette of social interaction. Radul installed a series of costumes based on her observation of Vancouver street fashions in the windows of the Contemporary Art Gallery. The project stemmed from Radul's extensive research into the methods actors use to 'get into character' while preparing for a particular performance. Vancouver Costume synthesized the idea of the 'theatrical rehearsal' with the artist's development of characters drawn from local observation. Accompanying the clothing arrayed in the gallery's street front display was a video drawn from Radul's voyeuristic public interrogation.MORE
Dream Home consisted of a suite of small paintings and a pair of constructed architectural models based on images and plans taken from Vancouver real estate advertisements. The models depict the interiors of two residences, one the largest, the other the smallest, which were on the market on a given day last year. Van Halm's gouache paintings illustrated the exteriors of a number of other houses for recent sale.MORE
Pae White made particular reference to the space-defining mobiles of Alexander Calder, and to the Vera designs for Marrimekko fabrics from the 1960's, in order to exploit the history of biomorphic abstraction and its role in the transformation of "high art" concepts into "disposable" stylistic trends. Her colour and light-infused sculptures are often disposable, constructed of paper and string, while at other times her work might be realized in ephemeral forms, as magazine advertisements or shopping bags. This was the first exhibition of her work in Vancouver.MORE
Secular Practice was part of a multi-disciplinary; multiple venue project entitled Moving Ideas – Hoopoe Curatorial Presents an India-Canada Dialogue. Versions of this project have been presented in Toronto and Montréal. Participating organizations in Vancouver included Charles H. Scott Gallery, Western Front, Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, The Roundhouse and others. The visual art component of the project focused on issue-based work that has emerged in India in recent years.
One of Canada's most respected photo-based artists, Grauerholz' recent series of Giclée prints were digitally output images of books damaged in a fire in the home of the artist several years ago. Reproduced in a large scale, the images had an eerie sculptural depth and vivid colour, which monumentalized and memorialized the destruction of a lifetime's collection.MORE
Monumental in scale and civic ambition at its inception, the architectural installation of Le Corbusier's at Firminy, an old French mining town, was never finished due to local industrial decline. In recent years it has suffered from political manipulation and physical neglect. The juxtaposition of historical importance against an aura of failed modernist utopianism was documented in this large-scale photographic series.MORE
In both over-sized wall-drawings and miniature sculptures, Scottish-born, New York-based artist Jill Henderson's funky bog creatures ooze through the seams of ordinary architectural space. Her installation in the gallery's street level windows, Highwideshallow, both described the physical dimensions of the windows and repopulated the neighborhood with her colorful homunculi.MORE
Brian Jungen transforms everyday commodities into convincing sculptural objects, often with references to First Nations art and culture. At the CAG, Jungen created two new works: One recast the lowly and ubiquitous shipping palette in precious and symbol-rich polished red cedar. Jungen also erected a construction hoarding outside the gallery, with cut-outs looking out to the city skyline and toward the city's rapid re-development.MORE
In collaboration with the Charles H. Scott Gallery, CAG presented an exhibition of Cai Guo-Qiang, one of China's most internationally recognized artists. His works insert traditional Chinese ideas and materials into contemporary Western idioms, contrasting the values of these disparate cultural systems. His work for the CAG began with a four-day performance in Vancouver's Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden, an authentic full-scale classical Chinese garden. Fog machines were installed in this garden, creating a misty landscape that was painted on site by four traditional ink-brush painters. The paintings were displayed subsequently in the Binning Gallery, alongside an additional work created collaboratively by all five artists.MORE
The work of Germaine Koh marries conceptual strategies with mundane everyday motifs and actions. For her first solo exhibition in Vancouver she produced two works. Prayers [2000], translated keyboard strokes from the CAG's office computers into smoke signals outside the gallery. … [2000] rained thousands of ball bearings onto the floor of the Balkind Gallery from tracks slung across its ceiling.MORE
This was one of the exhibitions featured at the opening of the CAG in its new facility at 555 Nelson Street. Vancouver artist Ken Lum is internationally recognized for his photo/text reworking of contemporary advertising and signage. His new work for the CAG simulated outdoor signs for 'Mom & Pop' businesses such as restaurants and muffler shops, combining stereotypical advertising language with personal, political and socially charged declarations.MORE
Visual Stimulants presented three artists whose work had an intense visual impact and was seemingly abstract in appearance. Angela Leach, Ken Singer and Jeremy Stanbridge were part of a young generation of artists whose artwork directly or indirectly alluded to historical forms of abstraction – in this case modernist painting from the 1960s. Although the art from that period stressed the formal properties of colour and support, and avoided references to narrative or representation, the artists in Visual Stimulants in large part questioned the autonomy of abstract painting and return it to the realm of the everyday. Visual Stimulants presented the work of three artists: Angela Leach from Toronto, and Ken Singer and Jeremy Stanbridge from Vancouver and was curated by Keith Wallace.MORE
The work in Pathology was concerned with domestic technologies as well as urban planning, and how the two relate to a desire for health, pleasure and the prolongation of life. The exhibition consisted of various works that were connected by their minimal aesthetic, architectural references, and everyday use-value. The centrepiece consisted of a cluster of more than sixty clean-mist humidifiers and negative-air ionizers. Theoretically, these machines created a "charged" atmosphere that improved the way we feel. Their clean, almost abstract, design was suggestively architectural, and Liu's arrangement of these machines mimicked an architecture model of urban design. Humidifiers and ionizers are promoted as preventing everything from parched sinuses to furniture damage, and as most users lack an understanding of the technological principles, these "machines for improved living" have a psychological function as much as they have a physical one. Also in the exhibition were loosely-hung samples of wallpaper which Liu had imprinted with Rorschach-like patterns derived from an overhead view of Levittown, an early post-war example of ideal suburban planning. Pathology was An Te Liu's first solo exhibition.MORE
Documents and Lies was an exhibition organized and circulated by Optica in Montréal. The exhibition presented the work of artists living in the UK. Although not photographic, the works pointed towards a number of photographic notions about truth and reality. Their particular use of traces – reproduced, modified or simply invented – allowed for the transition from a universal history to another, more personal one. By generating doubt, these projects produced a displacement of what is commonly understood by "document." The exhibition included drawing, painting, sculpture and an installation. Curated by artist André Martin, this exhibition provided an artist's perspective.MORE
In this exhibition by Kelly Mark the fascination with the mundane was coupled with a desire to document and bring a sense of order to things. The work Broken Meter, for example, consisted of a grid of photographs documenting ideosyncratic notes left at broken parking meters. Placed presented photographs of objects, ranging from styrofoam cups to pieces of crumpled paper, that had been specifically "placed" or tucked into spots rather than simply being tossed away. Sniff was a video loop of the artist's cat sniffing an array of objects placed in front of him. Origami Transfer was comprised of dozens of bus transfers that had been obsessively folded and shaped into miniature sculptures.MORE
Liz Magor is a Canadian artist who lives in Vancouver. She began exhibiting her work in 1973 and has been included in numerous prestigious international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennial, Sydney Biennial, Documenta VIII in Kassel, and inSITE in San Diego/Tijuana. While she is widely known across Canada and beyond, this was Magor's first solo exhibition in a public gallery in Vancouver in a decade.
Magor is primarily recognized for her sculptural work – although she has developed significant projects in other mediums such as photography – which is expressed in various forms ranging from full-scale installations to individual pieces. Stores presented her most recent sculptural work and incorporated non-traditional materials such as silicone rubber and pigmented plaster and resin. With these materials, she made casts of objects with startlingly realistic results. However, while the large pile of rocks placed on the floor is convincingly real, the discovery of actual junk food stashed within its hollow cavity renders the mantle of reality questionable, bringing forward a focus on the work's materiality.
Magor's sculptures at first resemble literal, easily accessible representations, but the play between what is real and what is an illusion, and the curious combination of food with other unrelated objects, complicate their apparent simplicity. The minimal yet evocative presentation suggests narratives and the activity of unknown personae obsessed with squirreling things away as insurance against anticipated disasters or shortages. It also implies larger social/psychological issues about the relationship between the desire for security in the face of unidentifiable fears, and the fundamental question of what people store away and why.
Eleanor Bond is recognized internationally for her large-scale oil paintings of urban landscapes in which a labyrinth of forms include both the actual and the imaginary. Although Bond's paintings do not represent a specific built environment, their starting point is a specific urban place, space and landscape. This exhibition presented 2 works produced from research undertaken in Vancouver during February of 1999. Bond spent ten days walking and driving throughout Vancouver and its environs making photographic and video documentation which influenced the painting of Glass City and Tent City. – Curator, Petra Watson.MORE
Ed Pien has gained recognition for his large-scale works that extend traditional notions about drawing. He achieves this by developing gallery installations that retain the intimacy of the drawing process. For Beyond Here, Pien presented a large installation approximately seventy-five feet in length and consisted of ink on layers of Chinese paper and Japanese silk tissue. The translucent quality of the paper allows the drawings that lie beneath the surface to read as shadows, which intermingle with the more legible images on the surface. The contrast in scale between the expanse of paper, the large drawings, the small drawings, and the vibrantly coloured tunnels creates a dynamic relationship between the viewer and the work. One can perceive the piece as one entity or as a series of individual drawings.
In his work, Pien explores the concepts of fear and vulnerability through referencing both historical and contemporary events as well as combining Eastern and Western mythologies. In Beyond Here his drawings depict strange, hydridized creatures that are engaged in an imaginary journey that reads from left to right across the gallery walls. While not a formal narrative, the figures suggest a dream-like transformation from a state of conflict to one of liberation and self-empowerment. Pien's work is both seductive and unsettling. While the paper offers an impression of softness and warmth, it is extremely fragile. The figures project sensuality in the way they are rendered, but are ambiguous in their interpretation.MORE
Vancouver-based curator Seamus Kealy organized an exhibition of Vienna-based artists through the University of British Columbia in collaboration with the CAG. This project offered an international exchange and collaboration and was aimed to involve and address younger artists. With this exhibition we aimed to create a dialogue between two seemingly disparate art communities of Vancouver and Vienna. Unterspiel brought together work that challenged prevailing limitations of contemporary art and as such, considered the function of the museum and other cultural institutions, and the ephemerality of the avant-garde and then the historicization of such activities. The exhibition considered Austria's complex and often contradictory art traditions, many young Vienna-based artists continue to tackle notions of identity and cultural difference, and challenge institutional and social structures perpetuating class-confirming policies. Participating artists included Patrick Baumueller, Severin Hofman, Marlene Haring, Hans Schabus, Catrin Bolt and the collective Monochrom.MORE
Hammertown was a touring exhibition that highlighted a young generation of Canadian artists, with a focus on West Coast practice, and on artists who had recently come to prominence. The artists all shared an interest in widely available commodities, cultural products and popular media, and often re-inscribed these materials with personal, politicized meanings. The exhibition's engagement with landscape was a touchstone for works that propose a dialogue with social histories and ideas of place.
Location: Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, England (April/May, 2003)
October 5 – November 14, 2002
Catalogue with text by participating artists; co-published with The Fruitmarket Gallery, UKMORE
The eight artists who participated in Promises all made work that seemed to be somewhere in between one thing and another, presenting a potential of continually becoming something else. Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg's Fruit Bowls resided somewhere between sculpture and photography, while Joe Scanlan's work, Coffer, was both a practical, functional object and the realization of more formally motivated ideas. Daniel Olson's short performances collected in Philosophical Moments punctured the film noir ambience of the video with a kind of quizzical prankishness that underscored the provisional nature of expectations, and experience. The promise of these works was in their potential for just such unexpected outcomes.MORE