This exhibition of photographic works by Charles Chalmers, Fred Douglas, Nate Larson, Clea McDougall and Yvette Poorter, returns to the narrative potential of the image in response to the pervasive photographic trend towards photoceptualism and documentary-style, sociological studies. Working in multiple exposures, multiple frames, collage and text/image, these artists investigate the ways images work, how meaning is derived from them, and the ways the brain works at piecing together information. All five artists, working in different locations around the world and in extremely different ways, show the narrative imagination at work. Rather than highlighting the fiction of our modes of representation and mass media, this exhibition revels in the reality of our fictions, our expectations and desires.

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--Yvette Poorter,2005

Meet at the gallery at 9 pm for a par cours tour of Gastown led by Anthony Schrag. By climbing up, hopping onto, and flipping over pedestrian obstacles and urban furniture, Schrag promotes a phenomenological understanding of the urban environment while unnerving audiences. The tour returns to the Helen Pitt Gallery for something unexpected!

-- Anthony Schrag, 2005

Peter Baren
ARK (Featuring Bridge of Sighs, Sleep of Reason and Wailing Wall)

Performance: Thursday, October 27 and Friday, October 28, 2005 at 10:00 pm.
Presented as part of the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art

Presented with the support of The Netherlands Foundation of Visual Arts Design and Architecture and the Royal Netherlands Embassy, Ottawa.

Amsterdam-based artist Peter Baren will be performing this monumental work over a period of two days. ARK is an ongoing performative piece that has continued to evolve and change shape over time, recently in places such as Biel, Cardiff, New York, and Krakow. A multi-sensory opera, Baren’s performances in Vancouver will include nude performers, molasses, fog, drawings, texts and boomerangs, to create an environment that evokes primordial mystery, public yearning, fear and drastic socio-political reformation.

Baren’s practice uses the public assumptions of performance—the promise of drama, duration and theatricality—to evoke a disquieting sense of primordial mystery, public yearning, fear and cultural reformation. Blending props common to show-business with cross-cultural signifiers, Baren’s work creates a site of what Vancouver photographer and art critic Kristoff Steinruck dubbed “radical mystical fundamentalism.” ARK finds a meeting ground between sensual bewilderment and political commentary which points out the constructed nature of our ideas of cultural memory and our sometimes superficial notions of identity. As the Trace Gallery in Cardiff, Wales warns of Baren’s performance: Everything you are about to experience has been put under the spell of a floating device (BLOW BLOW).

Peter Baren has been active in performance art for more that 20 years and has shown his work worldwide, including Franklin Furnace (New York), the Teutonic Castle (Torun), the Shedhalle Zurich, and at the Tel Aviv Biennial of Performance Art. He is the recipient of the Prix de Rome Art & Theatre award.

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Scott Evans, Emi Honda and Jordan McKenzie
The Great Scattered Remnants

September 9-October 8, 2005
Opening Reception: Friday September 9, 7:00 pm

The Great Scattered Remnants is a collaborative, growing environment, constructed by Scott Evans, Emi Honda and Jordan McKenzie, long-term collaborators from Victoria. Using a wide variety of specifically chosen found objects and post-consumer detritus, as well as lo-tech electronics and sound, the artists create a fictive site that splices traditional notions of nature with the surrealist synthetics of our popular, often apocalyptic, imagination. Referencing science fiction, psychedelia and the pictorial tradition of landscape art and Natura Morta, The Great Scattered Remnants is a place where plastics repair themselves, the artificial acts naturally and where we sweat glycolic acid and grow our own acrylic nails. Half dream world, half sociological critique, this exhibition transplants the artists' subconscious into the physical space of the gallery through a complex network of stream-of-conscious installations.

Stephanie Aitken
Headlands: New Paintings

June 30 to August 6, 2005
Opening Reception: Thursday June 30, 7:00 pm

Stephanie Aitken’s series of new, unabashedly beautiful paintings is at once an admiring ode to—and subtle critique of—the Romanticist landscape painting tradition and the idea of the sublime. Comprised of a series of mountains, peaks and vistas, Headlands acts to re-discover the transcendent promise of natural grandeur, not to mention 19th Century painting itself, as a foundation of wonderment, inspiration, mystery and terrifying splendour.

Aitken’s recent work is infused with a fragile tension between the artist’s desire to locate and experience the authentically sublime, without irony, and the melancholic suspicion that such iconographic landscapes—the source of countless tourism pamphlets, postcards and nature books—have largely been drained of their original meanings and connotations. Suitably, Aitken’s paintings hover between pictorial clarity and representational dissolution; her mountainscapes become liminal spaces, defined less by their permanence and solidity than by their fluidity and delicate shifts in gravity.

Guided by a sense of “infinite longing,” described by E.T.A. Hoffmann as the essential trait of Romanticism, Aitken succeeds in restoring a distinct quality of awe and contemplation, dreaminess and bafflement to the often moribund representations of nature we see around us.

Stephanie Aitken's paintings have been shown throughout North America, including, most recently, at Or Gallery (Vancouver), Zsa Zsa Gallery (Toronto), the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Terrain (San Francisco). Stephanie presently works and lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, and at the University of British Columbia.

Adrienne Lai
All the Arms Around You
Barrie Jones:
New Works

April 8-May 14, 2005
Artist Talks at the Gallery, Saturday, April 23, 2 pm

The Helen Pitt Gallery ARC is pleased to exhibit new works by both Adrienne Lai and Barrie Jones. While Jones has been a part of the regional contemporary art community for over 30 years, he has rarely shown in Vancouver. The Gallery is honoured to provide a public context for his most recent explorations concerning markers of identity, authority, authorship, collaboration and portraiture. Lai’s commitment as an artist and teacher to education and investigations concerning ideas of community runs parallel to the mandate of the Pitt. Her most recent project in Vancouver, “I Am the Remix” (at the Western Front), presented Lai as an artist-curator. This exhibition provides a chance to consider Lai’s practice as an artist-producer. “All the Arms Around You” is particularly interesting in this regard. It questions constructions of the individual practitioner within a contemporary art context -- revealing complex collaborative and/or social systems that can direct artistic production and professional assessments of validity, recognition, success and failure.

Jones’ photographs for the show focus on the nature of relationships between clients and employees. Throughout his practice Jones has complicated common assumptions about the identity and role of the artist-photographer by insisting that his portraits are not authored constructions but the results of negotiations with his subjects. The boundaries in his own process of working, between who is a client and who is an employee, between who is an artist and who is a subject, are constantly oscillating. The images in the show are tableaus – what Barrie calls “negotiated documentaries” -- of people engaged in various Spa and fitness treatments. The situation is arranged but the treatments are authentic. The people providing the services are real professionals. The “clients” are people Barrie approaches to play people “like themselves”.

Lai’s “All the Arms Around You” involves three separate returns to a previously unfinished series of photographs. After sending out a questionnaire to everyone on her personal email list concerning their relationships to her and to contemporary art and culture, Lai solicited the Pitt’s Board of Directors to select three candidates from those that were returned. Each of the “final three” provided Lai with specific instructions concerning the completion and installation of her unfinished photo-series. For this exhibition Lai has completed three different works based on these instructions. Alongside the finished projects, the Gallery is providing a display of the ephemera documenting this process, as well as explanatory narrative panels.

Barrie Jones lives and works in Vancouver and teaches at the University of British Columbia. He received a BFA from UBC and an MFA at York University. His work is in various collections including the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Windsor, and the British Columbia Government Collection.

Adrienne Lai is a visual artist, writer, freelance curator, and educator. She graduated with a BFA from Emily Carr Institute in 1998 and received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 2001. Her research interests are located at the intersections of contemporary art, technology, popular culture, language and memory. Her studio practice employs photography both as a medium and as a subject for investigation. Lai has exhibited across Canada and the United States and her writing has been published in Fuse, Parachute, and various exhibition catalogues. This past fall, she participated in the “Informal Architecture” residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

-- Adrienne Lai, 2005

-- Barrie Jones, 2005

Donna Akrey, Collin Johanson, Simon McNally, Erica Stocking
IN EXCESS

February 19 - March 26. 2005
Artist Talks - Saturday., March.12, 2pm

An EXHIBITION PUBLICATION is available at the Gallery. Transcribed Conversations available here.
Erica Stocking
Simon McNally
Collin Johanson
Donna Akrey

Accumulation and abundance no longer transparently signify security, autonomy or strength. How do we negotiate the complex relationships between impoverishment and excess surrounding us today? The Helen Pitt Gallery ARC is pleased to present In Excess, an exhibition of work by four emerging artists involved with related investigations in their everyday lives.

The global political economy has reconfigured any comprehension of what used to be called progress. The works in this exhibition engage with this shared culture of consumption and many of its attributes -- distraction, disposability, nostalgia, simulation, debt, historical amnesia, abjection, obsolescence and deregulation. Can as yet unimagined, collectively beneficial and sustainable models of cultural, economic and technological development be constituted? How can such questions be approached without returning to utopic ideological tropes and their inherent contradictions, violence and historical failure?

The diverse range of practices represented in In Excess share a critical awareness of these conditions and questions. Rather than making claims concerning answers, this exhibition provides viewers with the opportunity to imagine the possible and experience the hopefully rejuvenating effects of critical distance and contemplation. Donna Akrey, Collin Johanson, Simon McNally and Erica Stocking reconsider aspects of the worlds of excess we inherit and how they are changing. They also reflect on how we choose to live with them.

Erica Stocking was born in Toronto, Ontario, and now lives and works in Vancouver, BC. She holds a B.F.A. from the Emily Carr Institute. Her work explores the middle ground through various material translations.

Simon McNally completed his BFA and BA in Art History at NSCAD in 2002. He is presently in the first year of his Master's degree in Art History at UBC. Simon continues his studio practice while he pursues academic studies. His studio is in East Vancouver.

Collin Johanson recently received a BFA from the Emily Carr Institute. Drawing has always been the impetus for many of his photographic and sculptural projects. His work often investigates compromised aesthetics relating to function and accessibility. Attracted to chimerical relationships, he creates characters and surroundings that are playful expressions of dramatically exaggerated abjection, psychosis, morality and persona. Raised in Parksville, Vancouver Island, Collin also spent two years studying visual arts at Mallaspina College. He is currently involved in the Vancouver Art Gang collective planning to publish a quarterly contemporary art magazine called U.E.

Donna Akrey lives and works in Calgary Alberta. Her work reflects her interest in the urban environment, language and communication, body and mind, and the power of the habitual within our dreams and realities. She uses an interdisciplinary approach to articulate ideas, creating large installations and sculptural objects, single channel video, video installation and book works. Utilizing common, surplus and discarded materials such as foam, concrete, found objects, junk mail, wood, rubber and household products etc., she considers some of her works to be gigantic understatements -- ruminations on the spectacle of the unspectacular.

-- Erica Stockling, 2005

-- Simon McNally, 2005

-- Colin Johnason, 2005

-- Donna Akrey, 2005

Kevin Greisch, James Lindsay, Leah Rosenberg
Transfigurations

December 11 - January 29, 2005, every Tuesday.-Saturday, 12-5pm Opening Friday, December.10, 7pm
(closed for the holidays December.19-January.3)
Artist talks- Saturday., January.15, 2pm

An Exhibition Publication is available at the Gallery

Transcribed Conversations available here.
James Lindsay
Kevin Greisch
Leah Rosenberg

This combination of works by Leah Rosenberg, James Lindsay and Kevin Greisch, is meant to trigger, respond to, and play with, current anxieties and dilemmas concerning the control, ownership and determination of life (at both macro and micro/genetic levels) during a period of unprecedented capital concentration within an entrenched global market. The spectacularization of both science and art within a media culture of unverifiability is antagonized and complicated by this provocation of issues and concerns. The uncertainty/flux of our "Trans-Human Era" appears both fantastical and sinister.

Kevin Greisch's sculptures could be aptly described as chimeras. They are assembled from mass-produced appliances, tools, office supplies, children's toys and animals/animal parts. Greisch's formal education as an anthropologist informs the play with symbolic order and the domestication of otherness that occurs consistently within his practice.

James Lindsay's Encryptomatons (2004) consists of four rows of 19 masonite panels, 12"x16" each. Black oil paint mixed with a varnish medium is removed, mostly with cotton swabs, to reveal the white ground and create a figure on each panel. Like most of the work he has made over the past 30 years, Encryptomatons presents the artist's political concerns allegorically. In this instance, each panel supports a representation of the engineered and encrypted DNA/consciousness of an individual human, one of the some six hundred "illegal combatants" held at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan (post-9/11).

Leah Rosenberg interrogates notions of the decorative, craft, kitsch, the familiar and fantasy. Integrating painting and installation in highly idiosyncratic ways she is able to challenge dominant attitudes about beauty and function in art and everyday life. Experimentation as scientific methodology or artistic praxis is playfully conflated/confused. Rosenberg's work offers what she calls "imaginary landscapes" that oscillate between process art and laboratory experiments. Often containing uncanny and fetish-like contents, these landscapes are psychically and viscerally inhabited by "families" of objects/bodies and the absent presence of the artist.

Biographical Information:

Kevin Greisch's works often create new associations through unlikely combinations of everyday objects, natural materials, and electronic parts. His art addresses issues of domestication, ownership, and control. The works to be exhibited at the Helen Pitt are animal-machine hybrids, such as a handheld electric mixer with bird wings, or a lawnmower with a cat's head in place of its engine. Greisch has exhibited in the American Drawing Biennial at the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Virginia, at the Bumbershoot Festival for the Arts in Seattle, at the Harcourt House in Edmonton, as well as in other galleries across Canada, in the United States, and in Japan. His artist projects have also been featured in Front magazine and New Artist Collective magazine.
James Lindsay, a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, has lived in Victoria for 30 years. His community and political interests form the basis for his installations, painting, and writing. Presently, he is completing his Guantanamo / Encryptomaton project, writing, and performing with the Revolutionary Cyborg Wedding Band.

Leah Rosenberg was born in Ann Arbor Michigan in 1979. Growing up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, she developed a deep-rooted appreciation of the open landscape -- often filling it with stuff from her imagination. As time passed, she began realizing the importance of surrounding oneself with a sense of tranquility and beauty. The process of wandering within environments became important as well. It allowed her to pick up oddities along the way. Through the collision of the eclectic materials collected, she creates moments that are vaguely familiar, but slightly different in a fantastical way. Leah has lived in Vancouver for five years and currently lives and works out of her studio/home in Mount Pleasant. Since graduating from Emily Carr Institute of Art in 2003, she has been involved in several locally based group exhibitions, including a two person show at the Third Avenue Gallery in 2003.

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-- Kevin Greisch, 2005

-- James Lindsay, 2005

-- Leah Rosenberg