Scott Massey, Two Yellow Lines, 2006
Scott Massey, Two Yellow Lines, 2006

Curtis Grahauer, Andrew Kent, Scott Massey, Alex Pensato,
Kara Uzelman, Danna Vajda

LatentCity

Guest curated by Werner Whitman

Saturday, October 21 to Saturday, November 11, 2006
Opening Reception: Friday, October 20 at 8:00pm

LatentCity brings together the recent work of six diverse Vancouver artists who share an interest in the relationship between the materiality of the urban environment and the psychological traces it leaves on its inhabitants. Conceived as an inversion of Freud’s notion of the mind as a city, these artists present an archeological view of our built environments that suggests the opposite—the city as mind.

The works in LatentCity—spanning installation, drawing, photography and video—locate the distinct yet hazy communicative pulses and impulses resonating from the grey matter of the built environment. Using a variety of artistic and investigative strategies, the artists in this exhibition engage the city in much the same way a psychoanalyst studies a subject or an anthropologist attempts to resurrect a sense of context from the relics of past civilizations. And yet this type of analysis is far from perfect science. As LatentCity suggests, the possibility of fully understanding the subject is constantly confounded by miscommunication, misreading and problematic issues of psychological transference and projection. In LatentCity the idea of the city remains a half-imagined fiction; the artists’ investigations into the various facets of city life are ultimately investigations of self.

The works in this exhibition move through a conceptual, associative landscape marked by haunting industrial zones, backyard excavations, neighbourhood karaoke, Arthur Erickson, Zabriskie Point and buildings that come to you in your dreams.