Untitled Document

The Unwritten History of a Quixote Nayeob Kim and Susan Kang Saturday, June 7 to Saturday, June 28, 2008 Opening Reception: Friday, June 6, 8pm Allow me modestly to claim that I am much better now at ambiguities. – Saul Bellow in Herzog The Unwritten History of a Quixote features Nayeob Kim and Susan Kang, two artists who approach their work through play that is repetitive, laborious, idealistic and absurd. The idea of the yard sale metaphorically connects Kim and Kang’s process-based practices. At a yard sale, private objects are publicly displayed—objects that often carry a history replete with personal memories. Such objects, so dependant on the hands they fall in, fluctuate in status as containers of cultural myths and are infused with narratives that hold the imagination. Arnold Schoenberg, a major figure in atonal music, developed the twelve-tone technique in which no single note or tonality was given the hierarchical dimensions emphasized in classical western harmony. To aid with the systematic use of all twelve tones, he devised mathematic devices. What intrigues Nayeob Kim about his devices is how they seem mathematically inaccurate, where sounds that seem unfixed and erratic are in actuality carefully considered and ordered. Kim’s project, “Remoter than Egypt,” consists of a series of modest sized oil paintings on board. In an attempt to collapse the ordinary and the extraordinary through democratic reconstructions of a playground (brimming with positivist idealism), she creates archeological shapes that evoke the architecture of Egypt’s glory days. During the last ten minutes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, a montage of tethered everyday structures stream silently before our eyes: dilapidated modernist buildings, cross-walk, pavement, the action of the wind to the trees, a street lamp and the crescent moon. Throughout L’Eclisse these structures, slowly inching their way to the foreground, come to speak louder than the distraught romantic couple of the film (reticent lovers’ who express their malaise in listless meanderings through empty rooms, parks and industrial piazzas). With a subtle nod to Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, Susan Kang's installation evokes the filmmaker's sense of silence and shrewd attention to architectural space. The quietude of her work derives from her choice of materials: over-looked common place technologies such as saran-wrap or pencils. In The Unwritten History of a Quixote, Kang has built a bed of staples on the floor in the shape an eclipse. --Tiziana La Melia NAYEOB KIM is a recent graduate of Emily Carr University. Born in South Korea, she moved to California and now lives in Vancouver. Focusing mostly in painting, Nayeob explores the ordinary and personal within the limited space between now/then, order/chaos, etc. Through jokes, nonsense, comedy and tragedy - the ordinary - in its subliminal mind, develops its own sensitive, intricate system. SUSAN KANG is a Korean–Canadian interdisciplinary artist who graduated from Emily Carr University in 2008. She works in painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. Contrary to many suspicions, Susan Kang does not have an OCD. But none of the above knowledge is of any importance.
Leave Room for the Holy Spirit Nayeob Kim, David Mook, Robyn Croft, Scott Moore, Melanie Coles, Barry Meldrum, Christopher Olson, Tiziana La Melia, Julianne Claire, Rainbow Friberg, Anna Szaflarski, Allison Tweedie, Sarah Hoemberg, Deirdre McAdams, Johnny Burgess, Rebecca La Marre, Samuel Rudolf, Zarah Ackerman, Tegan Moore, Tondela Myles, Susan Kang, Ian Wyatt, Aja Robb Third Annual Emily Carr Institute Off-Site Graduation Exhibition curated by Robyn Croft, Tiziana La Melia and Tegan Moore Friday, May 9 to Saturday, May 17 , 2008 Opening Reception: Thursday, May 8 at 8:00pm Nuns with rulers in hand, supervising teenage slow-dancers, separate the yielding bodies with the stern reminder to “Leave room for the Holy Spirit!” Like the last dance at prom, the works in this exhibition share a quick moment of closeness, a strange intimacy, before the measure between them breaks, the music ends, the lights are shut off, and the students return home. As new grads blossom, nerves, sweat and excitement mix with post-production shock and the melancholy of final rituals. Upon the graduating class’s awkward separation, the work makes room for a whole new spirit.
Samuel Rudolph The Scab of Antiquity Saturday, April 11 to Saturday, May 3, 2008 Opening reception: Friday, April 10 at 8:00pm History often seems to bear out the overriding influence of architecture on art, not the other way around. Our built environments help determine what kind of artistic creations can be made to furnish them, and influence both the context and the quality of these furnishings at any given time. Architecture can highlight whatever is in-sync with the space it creates, but also has the ability to injure, chafe or cause abrasive friction to whatever it houses, or supports. The architectural column—the most recognizable detail of Classical Greco-Roman building—is today, in 2008, a fragmented and ghostly symbol for largely codified ideas relating to Antiquity, Western Civilisation, Sigmund Freud and Greek Mythology. For The Scab of Antiquity, Samuel Rudolph revisits this iconographic emblem of “Civilisation” with an assembly of numerous constructed columns that disclose a sense of striving towards—or perhaps more appropriately, groping towards—the notions of beauty and order these structures typically represent. In Rudolph’s investigation, the icon of the Classical Order is rehabbed, its scab picked, to provide a sculptural dialogue between ideas of art and architecture, authenticity and artifice, as well as order and disorder. Slathering his columns with colour and texture, the artist reveals a keen sensitivity to the materiality of his sculptures and their latent connotative charge; his columns become loaded with a soul-soothing patch-work of optimism often associated with radical subcultures. While the scab is a rough affixation, it owns a certain organic beauty. As this exhibition intimates, the scab of history remains a lingering itch that that can’t easily be scratched off, something that—with some careful prodding—can nonetheless provide creative and conceptual fuel to re-envision the ways in which the past continues to mark the present. SAMUEL RUDOLPH is a practicing LPN (a nurse) who is pursuing an art education at the Emily Carr Institute. He reads cultural theory with vigour, watches YouTube a lot, and spends countless hours analyzing dead baby jokes.
Joshua Bartholomew and Cedric Meister The Liminality Project Curated by Tegan Moore. Saturday, March 8 to Saturday, April 5, 2008 Opening reception: Friday, March 7 at 8:00 pm We have all been confronted with the challenge of stepping over a threshold, whether it’s as trivial as passing over the sill of a doorway or as momentous as graduating from school and entering the “real world.” However great or trivial the action, the act of breaching a threshold involves expectations of transformation and assimilation. The term liminality is derivative of the Latin word limen meaning “threshold” and applies to a state of being in which one is prompted into an indeterminate transitional period or space. The term was conceived in part by Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner who rested its meaning as that which is “neither here nor there, betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony”. This amorphous “space,” whether physical or metaphorical, operates between polarities, most notably between the ephemeral and the finite, and between modes of possibility and restriction. In a balancing act of intervention on the threshold, Cedric Meister and Joshua Bartholomew’s Liminality Project at the Helen Pitt Gallery involves architectural alteration on the flipside of practical design. Using various structural and spatial elements of the gallery, as well as it objects, the project seeks to put the gallery and its attendees in a temporary liminal state. This project undertakes a specifically rendered exchange between the gallery’s office space and back gallery, bringing to light the limits and opportunities set in place by common physical thresholds, like windows and doorways. By reconditioning social spaces and objects, this undertaking levels structural hierarchies in search for, in the artists’ words “an unstructured state of ‘communitas,’” an ergonomically challenging and unexpected equalization of people and place. Bartholomew and Meister's project appreciates the unique sensibilities in the architecture of the space, namely the integrated office space, the narrow back corridor, the back gallery's low ceilings and its doubly interior window. The reframing of the gallery's place for art, visitors, and administration is an institutional inquiry that, while nodding heads at other work like Michael Asher's wall removals and replacements, taps into the personality of the Helen Pitt itself and what it feels like to move through it. CEDRIC MEISTER is a Vancouver-based artist from Basel, Switzerland. He is currently finishing a visual arts degree at Emily Carr Institute majoring in Photography. He has had work published in West Coast Line and has previously shown at LES Gallery. JOSHUA BARTHOLOMEW is originally from Toronto, Ontario, He attended Parson’s School of Design for Architecture in New York before transferring to Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. He is currently in his third year of a Visual Arts program. Bartholomew and Meister’s collaborative work involves formal and conceptual elements from the fields of architecture, film, semiotics, history and institutional critique. The Liminality Project is concerned with the various sociological and aesthetic language systems that are implicated through alternative motives in design processes of labour and product.
Shilo Jones GLUT Saturday, January 26 to Saturday, March 1, 2008 Opening reception: Friday, January 25 at 8:00 pm Jones’ GLUT is an exhibition of sculptural objects in which materials are handled in unusual ways and combined in singular fashion. A visceral softness and paradoxical sense of materiality characterize Jones’ work, which utilize elements of wood or stone carving, plaster, dollar-store kitsch and pop-culture references. In one assemblage, a Flavinesque neon light is bridged across a nest of objects: a puddle of axle grease, Mardi Gras beads, gouged plaster moulds, fake fur, leather, and feathers. GLUT resists the conjecture of much contemporary sculpture that that all objects carry an instantly recognizable code, something that fits smoothly into our daily rituals and rhythms of object-sign exchange. Jones’ sculptural objects undermine such habitual readings; his works use materials in a way that flaunts their obsolescence and ancient physicality. The sculptural objects in this exhibition yield to gravity and touch. They are often soft and wet, and beckon to licentious configurations of materials in ways which work against notions of structure, surface and smoothness which, as noted by writer Renu Bora, tend to signify a “conscious erasure of history.” GLUT openly embraces and examines how, historically and materially, objects came into being. The dichotomy of purity and theatricality in sculpture is blurred; the history of objects become a poetic field from which to sample and reconfigure codes and signs to produce a unique aesthetic encounter. SHILO JONES is a fourth year Visual Arts Major at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His sculptural work is currently driven by a simple love of things. to top

The Unwritten History of a Quixote
Nayeob Kim and Susan Kang

Saturday, June 7 to Saturday, June 28, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, June 6, 8pm

Allow me modestly to claim that I am much better now at ambiguities.

– Saul Bellow in Herzog

The Unwritten History of a Quixote features Nayeob Kim and Susan Kang, two artists who approach their work through play that is repetitive, laborious, idealistic and absurd. The idea of the yard sale metaphorically connects Kim and Kang’s process-based practices. At a yard sale, private objects are publicly displayed—objects that often carry a history replete with personal memories. Such objects, so dependant on the hands they fall in, fluctuate in status as containers of cultural myths and are infused with narratives that hold the imagination.

Arnold Schoenberg, a major figure in atonal music, developed the twelve-tone technique in which no single note or tonality was given the hierarchical dimensions emphasized in classical western harmony. To aid with the systematic use of all twelve tones, he devised mathematic devices. What intrigues Nayeob Kim about his devices is how they seem mathematically inaccurate, where sounds that seem unfixed and erratic are in actuality carefully considered and ordered. Kim’s project, “Remoter than Egypt,” consists of a series of modest sized oil paintings on board. In an attempt to collapse the ordinary and the extraordinary through democratic reconstructions of a playground (brimming with positivist idealism), she creates archeological shapes that evoke the architecture of Egypt’s glory days.

During the last ten minutes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, a montage of tethered everyday structures stream silently before our eyes: dilapidated modernist buildings, cross-walk, pavement, the action of the wind to the trees, a street lamp and the crescent moon. Throughout L’Eclisse these structures, slowly inching their way to the foreground, come to speak louder than the distraught romantic couple of the film (reticent lovers’ who express their malaise in listless meanderings through empty rooms, parks and industrial piazzas). With a subtle nod to Michelangelo

Antonioni’s film, Susan Kang's installation evokes the filmmaker's sense of silence and shrewd attention to architectural space. The quietude of her work derives from her choice of materials: over-looked common place technologies such as saran-wrap or pencils. In The Unwritten History of a Quixote, Kang has built a bed of staples on the floor in the shape an eclipse.

--Tiziana La Melia

NAYEOB KIM is a recent graduate of Emily Carr University. Born in South Korea, she moved to California and now lives in Vancouver. Focusing mostly in painting, Nayeob explores the ordinary and personal within the limited space between now/then, order/chaos, etc. Through jokes, nonsense, comedy and tragedy - the ordinary - in its subliminal mind, develops its own sensitive, intricate system.

SUSAN KANG is a Korean–Canadian interdisciplinary artist who graduated from Emily Carr University in 2008. She works in painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. Contrary to many suspicions, Susan Kang does not have an OCD. But none of the above knowledge is of any importance.

Leave Room for the Holy Spirit
Nayeob Kim, David Mook, Robyn Croft, Scott Moore, Melanie Coles, Barry Meldrum, Christopher Olson, Tiziana La Melia, Julianne Claire, Rainbow Friberg, Anna Szaflarski, Allison Tweedie, Sarah Hoemberg, Deirdre McAdams, Johnny Burgess, Rebecca La Marre, Samuel Rudolf, Zarah Ackerman, Tegan Moore, Tondela Myles, Susan Kang, Ian Wyatt, Aja Robb

Third Annual Emily Carr Institute Off-Site Graduation Exhibition curated by Robyn Croft, Tiziana La Melia and Tegan Moore

Friday, May 9 to Saturday, May 17 , 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 8 at 8:00pm

Nuns with rulers in hand, supervising teenage slow-dancers, separate the yielding bodies with the stern reminder to “Leave room for the Holy Spirit!” Like the last dance at prom, the works in this exhibition share a quick moment of closeness, a strange intimacy, before the measure between them breaks, the music ends, the lights are shut off, and the students return home. As new grads blossom, nerves, sweat and excitement mix with post-production shock and the melancholy of final rituals. Upon the graduating class’s awkward separation, the work makes room for a whole new spirit.

Samuel Rudolph
The Scab of Antiquity

Saturday, April 11 to Saturday, May 3, 2008
Opening reception: Friday, April 10 at 8:00pm

History often seems to bear out the overriding influence of architecture on art, not the other way around. Our built environments help determine what kind of artistic creations can be made to furnish them, and influence both the context and the quality of these furnishings at any given time. Architecture can highlight whatever is in-sync with the space it creates, but also has the ability to injure, chafe or cause abrasive friction to whatever it houses, or supports.

The architectural column—the most recognizable detail of Classical Greco-Roman building—is today, in 2008, a fragmented and ghostly symbol for largely codified ideas relating to Antiquity, Western Civilisation, Sigmund Freud and Greek Mythology. For The Scab of Antiquity, Samuel Rudolph revisits this iconographic emblem of “Civilisation” with an assembly of numerous constructed columns that disclose a sense of striving towards—or perhaps more appropriately, groping towards—the notions of beauty and order these structures typically represent. In Rudolph’s investigation, the icon of the Classical Order is rehabbed, its scab picked, to provide a sculptural dialogue between ideas of art and architecture, authenticity and artifice, as well as order and disorder. Slathering his columns with colour and texture, the artist reveals a keen sensitivity to the materiality of his sculptures and their latent connotative charge; his columns become loaded with a soul-soothing patch-work of optimism often associated with radical subcultures. While the scab is a rough affixation, it owns a certain organic beauty. As this exhibition intimates, the scab of history remains a lingering itch that that can’t easily be scratched off, something that—with some careful prodding—can nonetheless provide creative and conceptual fuel to re-envision the ways in which the past continues to mark the present.

SAMUEL RUDOLPH is a practicing LPN (a nurse) who is pursuing an art education at the Emily Carr Institute. He reads cultural theory with vigour, watches YouTube a lot, and spends countless hours analyzing dead baby jokes.

Joshua Bartholomew and Cedric Meister
The Liminality Project

Curated by Tegan Moore.

Saturday, March 8 to Saturday, April 5, 2008
Opening reception: Friday, March 7 at 8:00 pm

We have all been confronted with the challenge of stepping over a threshold, whether it’s as trivial as passing over the sill of a doorway or as momentous as graduating from school and entering the “real world.” However great or trivial the action, the act of breaching a threshold involves expectations of transformation and assimilation. The term liminality is derivative of the Latin word limen meaning “threshold” and applies to a state of being in which one is prompted into an indeterminate transitional period or space. The term was conceived in part by Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner who rested its meaning as that which is “neither here nor there, betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony”. This amorphous “space,” whether physical or metaphorical, operates between polarities, most notably between the ephemeral and the finite, and between modes of possibility and restriction.

In a balancing act of intervention on the threshold, Cedric Meister and Joshua Bartholomew’s Liminality Project at the Helen Pitt Gallery involves architectural alteration on the flipside of practical design. Using various structural and spatial elements of the gallery, as well as it objects, the project seeks to put the gallery and its attendees in a temporary liminal state. This project undertakes a specifically rendered exchange between the gallery’s office space and back gallery, bringing to light the limits and opportunities set in place by common physical thresholds, like windows and doorways. By reconditioning social spaces and objects, this undertaking levels structural hierarchies in search for, in the artists’ words “an unstructured state of ‘communitas,’” an ergonomically challenging and unexpected equalization of people and place.

Bartholomew and Meister's project appreciates the unique sensibilities in the architecture of the space, namely the integrated office space, the narrow back corridor, the back gallery's low ceilings and its doubly interior window. The reframing of the gallery's place for art, visitors, and administration is an institutional inquiry that, while nodding heads at other work like Michael Asher's wall removals and replacements, taps into the personality of the Helen Pitt itself and what it feels like to move through it.

CEDRIC MEISTER is a Vancouver-based artist from Basel, Switzerland. He is currently finishing a visual arts degree at Emily Carr Institute majoring in Photography. He has had work published in West Coast Line and has previously shown at LES Gallery.

JOSHUA BARTHOLOMEW is originally from Toronto, Ontario, He attended Parson’s School of Design for Architecture in New York before transferring to Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. He is currently in his third year of a Visual Arts program.

Bartholomew and Meister’s collaborative work involves formal and conceptual elements from the fields of architecture, film, semiotics, history and institutional critique. The Liminality Project is concerned with the various sociological and aesthetic language systems that are implicated through alternative motives in design processes of labour and product.

Shilo Jones
GLUT

Saturday, January 26 to Saturday, March 1, 2008
Opening reception: Friday, January 25 at 8:00 pm

Jones’ GLUT is an exhibition of sculptural objects in which materials are handled in unusual ways and combined in singular fashion. A visceral softness and paradoxical sense of materiality characterize Jones’ work, which utilize elements of wood or stone carving, plaster, dollar-store kitsch and pop-culture references. In one assemblage, a Flavinesque neon light is bridged across a nest of objects: a puddle of axle grease, Mardi Gras beads, gouged plaster moulds, fake fur, leather, and feathers. GLUT resists the conjecture of much contemporary sculpture that that all objects carry an instantly recognizable code, something that fits smoothly into our daily rituals and rhythms of object-sign exchange. Jones’ sculptural objects undermine such habitual readings; his works use materials in a way that flaunts their obsolescence and ancient physicality.

The sculptural objects in this exhibition yield to gravity and touch. They are often soft and wet, and beckon to licentious configurations of materials in ways which work against notions of structure, surface and smoothness which, as noted by writer Renu Bora, tend to signify a “conscious erasure of history.” GLUT openly embraces and examines how, historically and materially, objects came into being. The dichotomy of purity and theatricality in sculpture is blurred; the history of objects become a poetic field from which to sample and reconfigure codes and signs to produce a unique aesthetic encounter.

SHILO JONES is a fourth year Visual Arts Major at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His sculptural work is currently driven by a simple love of things.

to top