John Anderson, American Type Culture Collection, Sean George, Adam Harrison, and the Neighbours Project
Cut & Paste: Considering the Idea of New Media
May 8 – June 26
Opening Friday, May 7 @ 7pm.
This exhibition will be accompanied by a publication (a collection of six texts) available at the Gallery.
Conversations with the artists are available now.
Read a conversation with John Anderson, American Type Culture Collection, Sean George, Adam Harrison, the Neighbours Project
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Vancouver International Digital Festival.
(June 25-26, 2004 – www.vidfest.com)
In my essay [“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”] I tried to articulate positive moments as clearly as you managed to articulate negative ones. […] Your analysis of the psychological types produced by industry and your representation of their mode of production are most felicitous. I see more and more clearly that the launching of the sound film must be regarded as an operation of the cinema industry designed to break the revolutionary primacy of the silent film, which generated reactions that were hard to control and hence politically dangerous. […] What I liked about the conclusion to your essay is the reservation about the idea of progress which is indicated there. […] I should like to get at its roots and its origins. But I am well aware of the difficulties.
— Walter Benjamin, from a letter to Theodor Adorno, Dec. 9, 1938.
This exhibition showcases 5 artists/collectives from Vancouver. Their works investigate operations and ideas removed from those of a “conventional” new media art show. Rather than serving as an exposition of the pleasures and novelty derived from new forms, or a celebratory illustration of technologies, all of the art is critically engaged with the effects/affects of so-called new media upon social relations, the symbolic orders of cultures, and the popular imagination. The politics of representation — traced back to the beginnings of Modernity -surface repeatedly.
Questions will arise about how the idea of new media is constituted, what constitutes it, and why. How does the idea of new media operate with the wide-spread loss of belief in the objective truth value of documents in our digital-imaging age? What function does the idea of new media serve in a postmodern context — one in which information continues to grow exponentially as a dominant commodity market? Involving interactive correspondences, multi-channel video, audio components, projection, photography and paper collage, the work will be eclectic in media and conceptualization despite this shared dialogue.
Biographical Information:
American Type Culture Collection consists of Vancouverites Eryn Rodgers (an artist working in drawing, photography and painting) and David Henderson (a director working in documentary and music video). The art collective you can trust. Since 2003.
John Anderson: Anderson’s activities largely and stupidly continue to evade the production of static material objects produced in limited amounts for speculative investment. His work in various mediums appears in forms which are contemporaneous with the communications technology of their times; in this way, his work shares traits with the work of artists of classical times. Also traditional in his practice is the engagement with contemporary life and the use of art to present content which is didactic to life. He has curated exhibitions at YYZ, the VAG, the Or and Helen Pitt Galleries.
Sean George is an artist and animateur at the Vancouver Art Gallery. His photo-based work Investigates relationships between process, repetition, fragmentation and representation.
Adam Harrison is an artist living and working in Vancouver, BC. Working principally in photography, his pictures underline the possibilities and limitations of the photographic image through the examination of problems within the history and potentials of pictorial art.
The Neighbors Project is an anonymous and expanding collective. Networking. We connect with each other locally and globally through new media as well as conventional communications. The Neighbors Project launches its first community initiative: Social Service Agency. SSA takes the form of a kiosk — providing goods and services needed and exchanged daily for the survival of comfort.
