Terry Ray Brown
Westering

Friday, November 4-Saturday, December 10, 2005
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 4, 2005 at 7:00 pm

Culture is constructed from assemblage. Terry Ray Brown orchestrates a partly manufactured, partly authentic past. The notion of a distinct West Coast existence through the formative events of Brown's years living in the Lower Mainland has become central to his latest works.

Memories embodied through photographs grow into sources to be mediated again by the artist. Encapsulated in the work are the artist and his stories. Residing conjointly with this is a strange sense of familiarity and kinship that can be compared to the connection that occurs when you meet someone from your hometown. One immediately searches for commonalities. To this regard, Brown's work becomes incredibly accessible.

Brown uses all the appropriate vintages of the Canadian past. From the vast landscape to the plaid flannel jacket, "high" art and "low" culture meet. The question of what is "high" or "low" in the work, however, is somewhat indeterminable, as it remains a personal vestige.

Terry Ray Brown is a Fourth Year student at the Emily Carr Institute, graduating in 2006. Currently, Terry's work has consisted of the integration of his drawn and painted images on to everyday forms.

-- Curated by Charlotte Matthews

Made to Fit illustrates the artists need to alter the world around them. Fabiola Carranza, Charlotte Matthews and Tabitha Osler are compelled to personalize impersonal objects. The works in this show originated with an epistemological inquiry, a what would happen if . . .  thought. Their experiments materialized in two completely different forms that seem to bounce off each other like the south sides of two magnets.

Tabitha Osler's photoworks act as a filter, pointing the viewers  attention to occurrences she has facilitated. She is a tourist of the amazing and absurd, snapping photos of coincidences. Both staged and improvisational, her tableaus retain a sense of photographic movement and fluidity, although ultimately act as static documentation. Her use of Polaroid highlights the camera s inability to capture detail and adds a certain nostalgic reverie to the work. Osler s interventions are the proof of the whimsical and miraculous.

Carry On, by Fabiola Carranza and Charlotte Matthews, is a large scale photograph of the artists as explorers geared up for adventure. Impractical and embellished, the backpack worn by Carranza was altered to carry Matthews. They present themselves as explorers, but fall short; they never make it to the wilderness. If an epic simile is an extended comparison to make a heroic statement, this is an artificial epic simile, a parody. We are able to take them seriously only to a point, beyond that everything is fair game. If you make fun of yourself, no one else will want to.

Tabitha Osler is a Vancouver-based artist. Using an economy of means, her work adopts a simplistic engagement with the viewer and relies on absurdity, humor, spontaneity, chance, mischievousness and the fantastic. The audience is often led to a questioning of what is normative behavior in both institutions and society. Her site-specific interventions interact with public space offering a cohesion between art and everyday life. Osler is currently in her fourth year at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.

Carranza and Matthews have been working together for more than three years. They feel lucky to have found collaborators as exciting as them selves. This fall they will share an apartment and see what real art is all about. Charlotte and Fabiola like to work in film, video, sculpture, photography as well as others too numerous to list. They will graduate from the Emily Carr Institute on the same day in May of 2006. See www.eciad.ca/~fcarranza.

--Curated by Julia Marshburn

--Tabitha Osler

--Fabiola Carranza and Charlotte Matthews

Michael Drebert

December 10 - January 29, 2005.

We exist in a world with many objects, each performing specific task(s). In our efforts to be efficient objects might only register in terms of performance and utility. Michael Drebert identifies such integral aspects or functions of an object, accentuating or attenuating them until they are disabled.

Through this process, an identification and/or comprehension of these objects is transferred or displaced from a recognition of performative function to a consideration of phenomenological existence. In Candle (2004), a manufactured candle is melted down, the wick frayed, and then both components are recast in a mold of its original form. The wick is embedded in the body, and can no longer be lit. Fallen on its side the candle becomes something new. It becomes its process. Wood Stove (2004) is created from the very material it is meant to destroy. Engaging a world of binaries it is both pathetic and noble, a tragedy and a threat. In this confused object, fire is no longer contained. It is projected. The work stands as a monolithic representation of uselessness.

When all expected function is removed from something that we are exposed to every day, it becomes autonomous, and we must reconsider our comprehension of it as a thing in the world. Michael Drebert’s work provides us with some much needed critical distance from the objects we create.

Michael Drebert is a Vancouver based artist. His work examines the frailty/precariousness of objects and systems in an attempt to highlight notions of use and value within a societal context. He makes objects that appear useful at first glance, and focuses on society's inability to go beyond surface readings. Altering agents that imply use value is an activity driving his practice. Drebert is currently on the Board of Directors at Access ARC in Vancouver while completing a BFA at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.

--Curated by Julia Marshburn

to top