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Murray, Jeff Tutt, Kristina Kudryk, Keith Manship, Erin Evans An Exhibition
Publication will be available at the Gallery. The Helen Pitt Gallery ARC is pleased to present the exhibition 5 Painters. The Gallery’s mandate and objectives are well served by this introduction to the art of Erin Evans, Kristina Kudryk, Keith Manship, Wil Murray and Jeff Tutt. This exhibition provides professional experience and a public context for the work of these emerging artists in Vancouver. This is something the Gallery has always strived to accomplish with its programming. The Pitt has also concerned itself with practices indifferent to market viability – practices that may be shut out from other public contexts because of their inherent marginality, experimental nature, socio/political directives and/or lack of cultural capital. Painting might seem irrelevant in serving this agenda. In many cases, this perception may be well justified, but of course I don’t feel that way about this exhibition. 5 Painters introduces painting practices in Vancouver that incorporate abstraction while defying easy categorization. Content is not determined by appropriative strategies of reference, irony or revisionist conceptions of “the beautiful”. These painters work with the medium in earnest and have faith that painting can provide autonomy of expression. Now that the proliferation of markets is clearly independent of material production, is painting burdened by ideological value judgements? Certainly these painters are aware that they are not producing “hot” commodities. When language and ideas are increasingly owned by private interests – when the contemporary art market is well fed by critiques of institutions, art, artist identities and the object – when neo and post-conceptual practices are professionally privileged -- can new possibilities for freedom of thought, expression and public conversation be had from painting in earnest? Is painting condemned to a historical role in terms of its critical efficacy and contemporary relevance? In a “post-medium” context, painting may seem to be a sign without a referent – a mark of imagined pasts and romantic fantasies that can only be utilized as such in the present. I believe the practices represented in this exhibition complicate and sometimes problematize such a reductive evaluation of painting’s place in contemporary art. Working “in good faith” with the medium may seem reminiscent of painters, practices and critical writings of the modernist post-war period. If there is a shared sensibility between such historical milieus and the artists in 5 Painters, it has perhaps less to do with a reduction of painting to its inherent properties and more to do with a belief in painting’s possible existence as an art form beyond the mechanizations of the culture industry, kitsch, cliché and simulation. Materiality and process function as a means of concretely investigating modes of perception and the construction of meaning -- not as abstractions -- but as everyday phenomena relating to our bodies, our cultural dispositions and our involvement within a pluralistic culture of consumption. Due to these investigations many questions and ideas about the conceptual relationships between historical consciousness and visceral engagement arise. None of these artists claim to be working with completely non-representational forms. What I find most exciting about this aspect of the exhibition is a common embrace of both the reading of paintings (as semiotic structures or codified sequences of signs) and a sensory experience of them. There is a reoccurring intimation that divisions between the two are unfeasible if we are to be critically aware of our perceptions of the world and how we live in it. Perhaps it is this lack of a hierarchy in intention and desired modes of reception that allows for the unfettered energy and potential these artists display in their work.
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-- Will Murray, 2004
-- Jeff Tutt, 2004
-- Kristina Kudryk, 2004
-- Keith Manship, 2004
-- Erin Evans, 2004 |
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Christine
Stewart The Helen Pitt Gallery ARC facilitates public outreach initiatives, projects, experimentation and dialogue concerning contemporary art and community whenever possible. In between the first two exhibition programs of the 2004 Fall season we will be hosting two SFU MFA Projects: These projects will be open to the public free of charge from Oct. 13 - 16, 12-5pm (Opening Tuesday, Oct. 12, 7pm). There will be a closing reception for the projects Saturday evening, Oct.16. "The
occupation is by the media. We are occupied by teletechnologies and
we must be part of the resistance." March to May is primarily an exploration into the spatial and temporal dislocation of the official Iraq War - March 19th, when the bombing of Baghdad commenced, to the May 1st declaration of victory by George Bush. Sourced from a viewing of over 200 hours of archived television coverage, each photographic image manifests as a durational record of approximately 10 to 15 seconds of selected real-time segments of the televisual event. The extended exposures lend themselves to visual abstraction and, by extension, theoretical and political obfuscation of referent. A purposeful disavowal, whose intent is the denial of a place of purchase. This piece has antecedents in the works of the two avant-gardes, but pushes their inquiries with spatial deconstruction into contemporary artistic concerns with that of the temporal. Here, that is largely seen in the conflation of the real-time it takes to wage wars, stage battles and the hyper-fluidity of satellite transmission. Geography and time-zones play their part. What day is it in Iraq? When did this particular assault take place? Yesterday? Today? Tomorrow? It slips into the surreal. Faith Moosang is an artist who mostly lives and works in Vancouver. She received her BFA from Emily Carr in 1995 and is currently completing her MFA at Simon Fraser's School for the Contemporary Arts. She works in photography, film, video and installation. Her curatorial work with photography has taken her across Canada and she is currently working on a SSHRC grant contemplating the creation of the scenic view. She is also the co-founder of the Nancy Drew Research Institute. The Pearl is a shifting, narrative collage in which multiple truths are presented through a multi-actor, split-screen monologue projection. Essentially an exploration of how narrative and information are conveyed, The Pearl contemplates the negotiation of meaning that occurs within human interactions, and how content is fragmented and manipulated by media. Through handset and keypad, the viewer is invited to trace an investigative path of their choosing. Varied stories – and truths – emerge depending upon the viewer’s point of entry, level of interaction, and interpretation. Finding the truth is elusive. Christine Stewart is a Vancouver based media artist and educator whose work has shown throughout North America and Europe. Her projects address the nature of perception and categorization through digital technology and viewer interaction. She holds a BFA in Film/Video from Emily Carr and is currently completing an MFA at Simon Fraser University. |
--Christine Stewart, 2004
--Faith Moosang, 2004 |
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Nicole
Sanches, Jane Cameron, Mima Preston and Christine D'Onofrio Before the idea of "production in use" was articulated the readymade actualized its premises. The artist's use of objects could produce meanings not intended by the market systems generating them. Their presentation within the socially negotiated space of the art context constituted a new form of production vis-à-vis use. Contemporary postmodern (or perhaps post-postmodern) contexts and processes relating to "production in use" are often discussed in terms of sampling and/or post-production assemblage/editing. This exhibition engages with these practices, historical moments and contemporary cultural phenomena while contesting the political and critical containment of the agency that "production in use" provides within constellations of leisure, domestication, specialization, professionalization and sub-cultural life-style marketing. The practices in this exhibition are critical of the structural determinism of a global consumer culture/market economy. The dominant market within contemporary art (often referred to as the neo-conceptual international style) and its claims of critical efficacy through "production in use" tendencies are problematized by the questions this exhibition elicits about consumption, spectacle and hegemonic containment in general. Signs of historical feminist art practices are frequently referenced in uniquely humorous and invigorating ways. The works of Jane Cameron, Nicole Sanches, Mima Preston and Christine D'Onofrio expose the reductive and reactionary inadequacy of what is currently deemed "post-feminist". There are no explicit rejections or embraces of any kinds of ethical essentialism on the part of these artists. There is, however, an avoidance of any iconoclastic inversions of symbolic orders within historical feminist discourses. They return to coded uses of scale relative to the body, the domestic and craft in ways that reveal new agency in a critique of 21rst century capitalism and the ongoing fall-out/blow-back from the social, political and cultural disasters of Modernism and modernity. Biographical
Information:
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-- Jane Cameron, 2004
-- Nicole Sanches, 2004
-- Mima Preston, 2004
-- Christine D'Onofrio, 2004 |
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Jared
Ferguson, Randy Grskovic, Andrea Juby, Didi Lin, Matt McGale, Heidi
Nagtegaal, Karen Ngan, Peggy Ngan and Gary Wang July 3rd
- 31st, 2004 It doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. There's no connection; it's disjointed and incoherent. Sometimes art leaves the viewer at a loss, unsure about what they are observing. One can attempt to add up all the parts that make up a piece, from those that are of formal and aesthetic concerns to narrative and more academic concerns, but an answer won't be found. For whatever reason part A and part B don't lead you to part C as expected; instead, the result is part Y. Art has this marvelous ability to create and lead the viewer through alternative experiences and thought processes, where situations based on expectations disintergrate to reveal new ideas and meaning. This is an aspect of art that I intend to examine in the exhibit It Doesn't Add Up at the Helen Pitt Gallery. The works in It Doesn't Add Up will deal with the semiotics of art, specifically the intentional disruption of the normative structures contemporary art has led us to expect. In the gallery an appearance of meeting expectations of the viewer will be created, only to be dispelled by further investigation by the viewer. This will draw attention to the gap between the viewers' expectations and the artists' intentions; a space where a series of steps are set in place by the artist can yield new meaning and give the viewer access to another level of comprehension. This space will be acted out and read differently by by each viewer as they will come with their own embodied knowledge to the work. Some will be thrown off by the disconnect the work presents and others will have no problem with the disconnect, adding up the work to discover a new meaning. |
--Didi Lin ,2004 |
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Marsha
Bradfield, Mark Buck, Wesley Cameron, Jessica Eaton, Jillian Pritchard
and Dan Starling This exhibition will be accompanied by a publication by Jillian Pritchard and Dan Starling in relation to their piece, A Doll's House. An Ideal Language focuses on artists who question everyday social interactions with people and how the use of literary text, publishing and the mass media can be subverted and questioned through video, photo, drawing, painting and performance. In a book there is a beginning, a middle and an end; in advertising we read one liners that are collectively understood by the public; in small talk with an acquaintance there are often expected responses and even music is structured with a "good" chorus. What happens when these structures are shifted and re-arranged within a gallery context? Mass culture dissects the concept of an ideal beauty, but this show attempts to engage the viewer to question what might be an ideal language and ask if there is a possibility of understanding and interpreting one.
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-- Jillian Pritchard and Dan Starling, 2004 |
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John
Anderson, American Type Culture Collection, Sean George, Adam Harrison,
and the Neighbours Project 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. 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.
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-- John Anderson, 2005
-- American Type Culture, 2004
-- Sean George, 2004
-- Adam Harrison, 2004
-- Neighbours Project, 2004 |
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Kim
Dawn:
21 Sleeps and No Tomorrow How can you mediate/translate sensory experience when you are disassociated from your own body? How does one connect with one's body when it is a marker of trauma? What might a simultaneous and highly conscious connection to all of the senses induce in relation to forms of contemporary subjectivity? Kim Dawn's new exhibition at the Helen Pitt Gallery activates a consideration of the self in relation to the body that confronts disconnections with our sensorial being. She asks: Where are you in your body right now? The work confronts a disassociation from (and objectification of) the body. In doing so the manufacture of desire within capitalist exchange and the media environments and technologies that facilitate it are put into question. Dawn attempts to breach the role of the subject as spectator and consumer through an engagement with the senses: The goal is to submerge/immerse the viewer in their bodies - to amplify all of the senses simultaneously creating an 'over-whelmence'. This exhibition further develops Dawn's reflections on the body as a site of meaning and agency. This will be one of her most complex interdisciplinary works to date, incorporating performance, installation, video, drawing and sculpture. Biographical
Information: |
-- Kim Dawn, 2004 |
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Elizabeth
Zvonar, Jesse Gray, Vishal Jugdeo, Paul Kajander and Elizabeth Milton The work in this exhibition has been programmed in conjunction with InFest (see www.paarc.ca/infest) and is meant to contribute to the celebration and discussion of international artist run culture. The work questions the necessity of participating in the "totality of advanced capitalism" by imagining/enacting alternative economies. Notions of collectivity, individuality, production and reception are conflated. Featuring the Free Luck Cart and an Alternative Economies Community Panel Discussion by Elizabeth Zvonar and The Meeting by Jesse Gray, Vishal Jugdeo, Paul Kajander and Elizabeth Milton This exhibition will be accompanied by a roundtable discussion about alternative economies mediated by Clint Burnham and organized by Elizabeth Zvonar and the Helen Pitt Gallery. The roundtable is a free event happening on Saturday, February 28th, 2004, at 2pm at ECIAD, Rm. 269, North Building. The exhibition will also be accompanied by a text only catalogue with essays by Kirsten Forkeit, Ted Hamilton and Jeremy Todd. Read here for a conversation with Elizabeth Zvonar and here for a conversation with Jesse Gray, Vishal Jugdeo, Paul Kajander and Elizabeth Milton. Biographical
Information Elizabeth Milton's work combines her interests in performance, music and popular culture with a playful and often humorous approach to making art. She recently participated in exhibition at Video In and plays the keyboard in the band The Neins. Jesse Gray is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice has involved work with video, sound, installation and performance, often exploring the relationship that exists between material culture, personal experience and memory. She was awarded the Helen Pitt Graduating Scholarship in 2002. Paul Kajander's recent work has involved aspects of drawing, text, installation, sound and video typically centred around notions of the performed subject. He was recently published in Front Magazine. Vish Jugdeo has used video and installation to produce work that explores performative or fictional possibilities within built environments and everyday space. He participated in a residency and exhibition, On Location, at the Belkin Satellite in 2003. Elizabeth, Jesse and Vish have all recently received a BFA in Visual Arts at Simon Fraser University. Paul is completing his final semester.
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