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Gaile
Addison, Geneviève Castrée, Shie Kasai, Nina Katchadourian,
Mathieu Mercier, Mitchell Wiebe Saturday,
November 18th to Saturday December 16th, 2006 ANIMAL!
is a simply-themed, subject-matter-based curatorial project which
looks at our fascination, fear and misunderstanding of domestic pets,
pests and wildlife. This exhibition features an eccentric, non-conclusive
gathering of animal art from six artists from Canada, the United States
and France who have worked with animal imagery, metaphor and concept
as part of their wide-ranging practices—sometimes with actual
animals themselves. Geneviève Castrée is the author of six books including Pamplemoussi (2004) and Roulathèque Roulathèque Nicolore (2001). Her drawings have been shown internationally, including recently at Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York. She also sings and records under the name WOELV. Shié Kasai received a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University in 2001, and a degree from Hokkaido University of Education in Sapporo, Japan in 1997. She has presented solo exhibitions at Articule (Montreal), Far Beyond at Para Globe (Tokyo), Gallery 101 (Ottawa). She has been included in group exhibitions in Japan, the Netherlands and Quebec. Nina Katchadourian was born in Stanford, California and grew up spending summers on a small island in the Finnish archipelago. Her work has been exhibited internationally at places such as PS1/MoMA, Serpentine Gallery, Artists Space and SculptureCenter. The Turku Art Museum in Turku, Finland and the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs recently featured solo exhibitions of her work. She is represented by Sara Meltzer Gallery (New York) and Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco). Mathieu Mercier is based in Paris, France. He is represented by Galerie Chez Valentin (Paris), Mehdi Chouakri (Berlin), Galeria Massimo Minini (Brescia), Jack Hanley Gallery (San Francisco/Los Angeles), Spencer Brownstone Gallery (New York) and Galerie Une (Neuchâtel). Mitchell Wiebe lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His paintings have been shown extensively throughout Canada. He also works as a musician in the band City Field. |
-- Mathieu Mercier, The Dog, 2006. |
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Curtis
Grahauer, Andrew Kent, Scott Massey, Alex Pensato,
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 Erikson, Zabriskie Point and buildings that come to you in your dreams. |
Scott Massey, Two Yellow Lines, 30"x30", C- Print on Acrylic, 2006 |
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David
Diviney
Hollow presents a sculptural and photographic array that draws on a decidedly pastoral vernacular of folk-art and back-woods building, pioneer tales and foundational myths. Comprised of familiar household and consumer products—socks, balaclavas, buckets and low-grade renovation supplies—Diviney’s installation detects an uncanny, humourous, and at times menacing subtext to our often-ignored, gentrified surroundings. His objects and appropriated imagery illicit both the pleasures and pitfalls of the survivalist imagination, the can-do spirit of frontier ingenuity and the deeply psychological weight of physical isolation. As such, Hollow conflates our typical lexicons of the rural, creating a perceptually baffling environment that speaks to the ever-evolving barter between civilization and wilderness, community and self-reliance, as well as the continuing weight of this discourse on the popular imagination. Using sculptural tools, Diviney objects suggest narrative and parodic structures that reference the North American gothic of hillbilly tales, cabin fever and camping horror stories, without ever losing touch of the distinct “thingness” of his creations. Like our built environments, his story-lines are often in a state of entropy, awaiting repair. His objects serve both literally and figuratively as hollows of meaning, collectively formulating one's experience in the gallery space.
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Amy
Lockhart Saturday
July 8 –Saturday, August 5, 2006
Guided by a distinct fascination for the frame-to-frame structure of film making—not to mention the materiality of the medium itself—Lockhart’s installation unearths the mysteries and associative logic of our rigidly linear celluloid journeys, unravels the labyrinthine levels of artifice inherent in the moving picture. For this exhibition, Lockhart transforms the gallery into a kind of fictional animation studio, complete with story-boards, mock-ups, cut-out props and characters. A life-sized Oxberry camera unit assembled from cardboard adds three-dimensional perspective to the backdrop, an object that upon closer inspection houses a TV monitor behind the lens, displaying the artist’s newest film in a literal inversion of perspective. This animation, starring a pair of extensively-jointed and eerily-hypnotic paper hands performing the process of its own collaged creation, adds a further sense of beguilement to this magical if labour-intensive craft. Meanwhile, the final results of such a process are looped in the screening room, providing a point of reflection on the relationship between practice and product. The works in this exhibition, at turns fantastic, disturbing and dreamy, depict an unstable psychic landscape that works within the innate sequential conventions of the artist’s chosen media—comic books and cartoons, as well as their nostalgic connotations—only to defy their linear movement and predictability. Faking It points to the inconsequential, the wayward possibilities of narrative, to suggest alternative possibilities for reading, looking and telling stories, a way of finding something real in the seemingly artificial.
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Pablo
Helguera Friday,
May 26 to Saturday June 10, 2006 With the participation of: Trevor Boddy (architecture critic/urbanist) • Michèle Faguet (curator, Or Gallery) • Charo Neville (independent curator) • Aaron Peck (writer) • St. George Marsh (Jacob Gleeson / Gareth Moore, artists and proprietors) • Conrad Schmidt (coordinator, Work Less Party) • Jeremy Todd (artist) • Elizabeth Zvonar (artist)
From May 19 through September 15 the SPU will make official stops in more than 20 countries, making it the longest ground-covering public art project ever attempted. The journey will be documented in video footage that will result in a documentary to be launched in 2007. For the Helen Pitt Gallery, the debates, programs and roundtable discussions will seek to articulate issues that pertain to local concerns around culture and society, as well as their connections to the ideas of the Americas. With the participation of a diverse series of local collaborators, he project will also seek to locate ways through which artistic practice can acquire an influential role in public life, political, cultural and social discourse, enriching the perspective communities in a productive and propositive manner. The Panamerican Civic Ceremony on will present the results of this dialogue. As an artistic project, the SPU seeks to innovate by combining performative and educational strategies, creating new forms of presentation and debate about political and historical subjects and creating a discussion infrastructure that will break with the usual academic formats, and the predictable means of communication and debate that are normally used in the art world. More information is available at www.panamericanismo.org THE ARTIST: |
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Raymond
Boisjoly, Terry Ray Brown, Mat Bushell, Michael Drebert, Anne Ehrlich,
Erik F. Hood, Andrew Hutchinson, Trevor Lee Larson, David Lehman, Dawn
Johnston, Cameron Kerr, Chloe Lewis, Alex Low, Julia Marshburn, Charlotte
Matthews, Monique Mouton, Tabitha Osler, Nicola Vardaro, Sam Willcocks Diminutive Disposition is a group show of graduating students from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design that takes the idea of scale as its starting point. Following an ever present common thread among the graduating class, the exhibition presents work concerning the tendencies inherent within the miniature as art as well as ideas surrounding the predilection towards unassuming or humble approaches in production. |
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Alex Low, http://www.ikea.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay? |
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Erin
Shirreff and Colin Zaug Friday,
March 3–Saturday, April 1, 2006 Dual II is the second of a two-exhibition experiment that considers the unavoidable cross-readings and interpretations of the duo-show format. The exhibition features new sculpture, drawings and video projection by Erin Shirreff and Colin Zaug. In a series of new works tentatively titled Flat Stories from Ordinary Holes, Erin Shirreff critiques our tendency to project our own psychological agendas onto the world around us. By presenting us with “aggressively simple objects and situations with the aim of triggering trance-like boredom or dumbfounded curiosity,” we are left to face our own longings, anxieties, and expectations. For the exhibition Shirreff presents an eight-hour split screen video/claymation, Day is Long, Night is Longer, and Nothing is Longest, that stars a laptop, a burning candle, and a ceaslessly morphing and turning mound of clay. Avoiding overt references such as rotting fruit or a skull, this contemporary vanitas vanitatum, ostensibly about hours spent in the studio, provides a site for contemplation on the finite and how we choose to whittle away the hours we are granted. Colin Zaug uses common objects and materials—plaster, casters, chicken wire, wood—to produce stark stage-like sets, that on one side present an alluring surface but closer inspection might reveal a messy heap of household items or crude construction. For his sculpture for Dual II, Zaug borrows a signage technique reserved for casino billboard advertisements in the desert: the front of the sculpture is covered in hundreds of floating reflective discs that flutter with the slightest air circulation. This seductive public front shields (and hides) both a structural support and an intimate seating arrangement for two. The piece draws attention to our complicated relationship to our environment, the strange ways choose to navigate it, and warns against the hazards of overcomplication.
Born 1975 in Kelowna, B.C., Erin Shirreff studied at the University of Victoria and later completed an MFA at the Yale University School of Art. She has shown in the Canada, the U.S. and Europe and has attended residencies in Hallein, Austria, and Dawson City. She currently lives and works in New York. Colin Zaug was raised in Cerrillos, New Mexico, where he currently resides. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Art and Design and the University of Victoria, where he completed his MFA. Zaug has exhibited at galleries and institutions including Mercer Union (Toronto), Exit Art (New York), and LACE (Los Angeles). |
-- Erin Shirreff.
-- Colin Zaug |
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Robert
Niven
and James Whitman
Dual I, the first of a two-exhibition experiment into the possible synergies and disconnections of the duo-show format, features sculpture by Robert Niven and drawings by James Whitman. Niven’s Bewildnerness is comprised of a series of “sculptural collages” that seek out the incongruities and subtle paradoxes of everyday life, and its surfeit of utilitarian and consumer material incarnations. His work blends a sharp, investigative edge with a playful acceptance of the haphazard, accidental, and entropic to locate the visible resonances and dissonances between recognizable objects and their relationship to memory. In Niven’s hands, our mundane materials are put in a state of functional limbo. Teaspoons, teeth, sunglass lenses and Pepto-Bismol are reanimated into wasp’s nests, grenades, corn-on-the-cobs, bell jars and whirlpools in an attempt to rouse the latent psychological, cultural and at times art historical associations of second-hand objects. The quotidian is drawn into a new constellation and consequently projects a new phenomenological experience. Whitman’s extensive series of drawings occupy an overlapping conceptual geography of incongruity as that of Niven, but forgoes objective examination in favour of a more temporal inquiry. Whitman’s decidedly representational landscapes—depicting grotesque, yet friendly creatures, improbable topographies, and ritualistic games—belies a delicate process-based approach to drawing, one that puts stock in drawing’s ability to allow for emergences of meaning over its pictorial conclusion. Taken together, Outbuildings and Livestock project a keen sense of narrative tension as, drawing by drawing, Whitman’s world wavers between rising action and repose. THE ARTISTS Originally from Glasgow, Robert Niven has recently exhibited at the Belkin Satellite and The Butchershop Gallery in Vancouver, and at Wetterling Gallery (Stockholm) and Galeria Quadrum (Lisbon). James Whitman’s drawings and bookworks have been shown, individually or as part of the collaborative unit The Lions, at galleries and off-site locations throughout Vancouver, as well as at Truck Gallery in Calgary, Art System in Toronto and most recently as part of The End, at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. |
-- Robert Niven , Stainless Living.
-- James Whitman, Thing King. |
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Amelia
Bauer, Robert De Saint Phalle, 536 Collective (Jeremy Turner, Donato
Mancini and Patrick "Flick" Harrison), Matt Gerring, Laura
Madera, Sandra Meigs, Mariah Robertson, and Tobias Wong Taking its inspiration from the Self-Help and Actualization Movement (or S.H.A.M as author Steve Salerno wryly notes), this exhibition comprises painting, sculpture, performance and digitally based works by eight artists from Canada and the United States. The works in the exhibition consider dichotomies inherent to this pervasive and controversial movement including, striving/acceptance, spirituality/superstition and hope/despair. |
--Sandra Meigs, JOYJOYSORROW.
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