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Donna
Akrey, Blair Brennan, Graham Gillmore, Jason de Haan, Colleen Heslin,
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, Laurie Ljubojevic, Joshua Lovelace,
Michael Maranda, Sherwin Tjia Saturday,
December 1, 2007 to Saturday, January 19, 2008 Too Many Words is an exhibition that brings together a diverse selection of artists who take the role of reading as a central preoccupation and site of creative inquiry. Using a variety of strategies, the artists in this exhibition share a common engagement with the ways in which reading is enacted, experienced and represented in contemporary life, as well as their own artistic practice. The works in Too Many Words cast a critical eye upon not only what we read or the role of reading in society, but also how reading is done: the experiential underpinnings of this phenomenon. The paintings, video, drawings, sculptures, text-projects and book-works that comprise the exhibition push our more commonplace expectations of reading—entertainment and knowledge, signification and meaning, transmission and reception—into conceptions of representation, subjectivity, nostalgia, authorship, literary inspiration, nostalgia, cultural memory, consumerism and obsession. In this exhibition the private and public faces of the words that surround us are conflated. As Too Many Words suggests, the overwhelming profusion of words which gives rhythm to everyday life involves an ongoing barter between the solitary, individual pleasure of reading and the blunt, passionless facades presented by words in our public environment. Too Many
Words is a world of the diaries and public pronouncements, branding
irons and famous books, household items and newspapers, haiku, textual
performance and language systems; it is an exhibition about the pleasures
and pitfalls of the literary, and literate, imagination. DONNA AKREY is a multi-disciplinary artist currently living in Montreal. She received a BFA from Concordia University in 1998 and a MFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2002. Her work has been shown throughout Canada in both gallery and public settings. She writes: “I think of some of my sculptures and installations as gigantic understatements, ruminations on the spectacle of the unspectacular." BLAIR BRENNAN was born in Edmonton where he continues to live. He received a B.F.A. from the University of Alberta in 1981. His work has been twice featured in the Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art and in recent thematic group exhibitions including Wordsmiths (Cambridge Art Gallery, 2006) and Making it Like a Man (Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, 2004). His most recent solo exhibition, Sacra Privata, was shown at SNAP Gallery (Edmonton) in the summer of 2007. GRAHAM GILLMORE graduated from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver in 1985. His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and art fairs internationally, including at the Helen Pitt Gallery in 1986. He is represented by Monte Clark Gallery in Vancouver and Toronto, and by Mary Boone Gallery in New York. JASON DE HAAN lives in Calgary. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibition in Australia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as recent exhibitions in Canada at Stride Gallery (Calgary), Third Space (Saint John), Trap/Door (Lethbridge), eyelevelgallery (Halifax) and Modern Fuel (Kingston). COLLEEN HESLIN is a Vancouver-based painter, photographer and illustrator. Her work has been recently at Access Gallery and Antisocial in Vancouver, Hotcake Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and in the publications Ripe, Only and the Vancouver Review. IBGHY & LEMMENS have worked collaboratively since 1999. Their projects have been shown extensively across Canada, as well as in Spain, Hungary and Estonia. Ibghy (b. 1964, Montreal) studied philosophy at Concordia University and economics at École des Hautes Études Commerciales. Lemmens (B. 1976, Ascot Corner, Quebec) received her MFA from the University of British Columbia in 2007. They live in Vancouver. LAURIE LJUBOJEVIC (b. 1976, Victoria, British Columbia) studied at Queen’s University (Kingston, ON) and at the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, before completing a Master’s in Visual Art and Theology from the University of British Columbia in 2006. She has had recent solo exhibition at the Other Gallery (Banff, AB) and at CAP House (Kobe, Japan), and has participated in group exhibitions at eyelevelgallery (Halifax), Dalhousie University, Imagine Gallery (Beijing), Truck (Calgary), Gallery Koyanagi (Tokyo) and the Basel Art Fair. JOSHUA LOVELACE is a Canadian writer and artist living in New York. His work has been shown at SOIL Gallery (Seattle) and 5433 (Montreal) as well in the publications Surf and Manual for Advanced, both published by Intrepid Tourist Press. MICHAEL MARANDA graduated from the University of Rochester with a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies. His work has been shown at Art Metropole, YYZ and Akau Inc. in Toronto, as well as at the Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatoon), Axe Neo-7 (Hull, QC), Galerie B-312 (Montreal), the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, and the Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina). He is the founder of Parasitic Ventures Press and lives in Toronto. SHERWIN TJIA is a Montreal-based artist. He has written four books and illustrated two. |
-- Jason de Haan, Lord of the Flies, 2007 |
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John
G. Boehme, Gathy Falk, Jason W. Fitzpatrick, David Khang, Glenn Lewis
& Kate Craig, Glynn Davies-Marshall, Eric Metcalf, Oraf Oraf, Randy
& Barenicci, Ikbal Singh, Victoria Singh Friday,
October 11th to Saturday October 28th The art object, since the death of painting in the late 1960s, might admittedly be, living in the uncertainty of a true pedigree, and unsettles any ranking of the fine arts. This small exhibition will continue this lineage while viewing art objects in relation to performance art. Time-based performance art is informative, otherworldly, sensuous, outrageous, sometimes unscripted and at other times, in the words of some people, “just plain weird”. It is based in presentation concepts which evoke ‘time’ and ‘body,’ often losing much in translation through documentation: “You just had to be there!” Not so with these artworks. The object, or the art object, is not what comes to mind in relation to performance. Although our immediate thoughts will land on a theatre of the absurd vision, these works extend the idea of performance and allow the viewer an intimate interaction. While the term ‘props’ comes to mind, these works extend to the performed object, and can be considered a tool of the performance concept: an object which extends the idea; an object which takes on iconic territory resulting from the performative work; objects which could be considered an artwork endowed with the artists’ individual reflections created through the performance act. Performance artists many times utilize ‘objects’ during the event, integral to the development, and execution, of the performance. This exhibition bridges the “having been there” of performance art and the critical discourse around object making—art works in their own right.
Gathy Falk’s work has worked across the disciplines of sculpture and performance since the 1960s. She has exhibited and performed internationally. Jason W. Fitzpatrick has been involved with artist-run culture for many years as the Co-founder of the 536 collective in Vancouver, and The Space in Saint John, New Brunswick. He has shown at grunt gallery, CSA Space, the Belkin Satellite and Helen Pitt Gallery in Vancouver, as well as in exhibitions in recent exhibitions in Toronto, Halifax, Calgary, Windsor and Seattle. David Khang received his MFA from the University of California at Irvine in 2004. Recent performances and exhibitions have been staged at the Western Front and grunt gallery in Vancouver, as well as Franklin Furnace (New York), Alternator Gallery (Kelowna), and Latitude 53 (Edmonton). Glenn Lewis & Kate Craig: Glenn Lewis is one of the founders of the Western Front, has worked variously in performance, film, video, photography, ceramics, sculpture, and writing, and has exhibited internationally. The late Kate Craig was one of the pioneers of video art in Vancouver, and a prolific performance artist who was sometimes known as “Lady Brute” whose projects were exhibited throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Glynn Davies-Marshall is a processed-based artist, with a MA in Fine Art from the Leeds Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom. Eric Metcalf was born in 1940 in Vancouver. His recent projects have been shown at the Kamloops Art Gallery, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Charles H. Scott Gallery (Vancouver), and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. In 2006, Metcalfe was awarded The Audain Foundation Award for lifetime achievement. Oraf Oraf is a Vancouver artist. Randy
& Barenicci are an enigma. |
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Bill
Pechet |
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Madoka
Hara, R. Kikuo Johnson, Kaori Kasai, Cindy Mochizuki, Jillian Tamaki Curated
by Alia Nakashima Saturday,
August 4 to Friday, August 17, 2007 Between what’s said and unsaid is an exhibition of drawings and works on paper by Nikkei (Japanese descent) artists from Canada, USA, and Japan. This show looks at drawing as storytelling, drawing as exploration, drawing as play and process. From the sequential storyboards of graphic novels to more elusive reverberations between ink, image and narrative, common threads appear. Linked by a loose attention to subjects of youth culture, melancholic daydreaming and the complexities of nostalgia, these works posit a subtle temporal reversal where the “negative space” of our notions of Drama and Event—the mundane, forgettable and decidedly un-dramatic epiphanies of day-to-day life—is favoured over more defined notions of causality, conflict and climax. As this exhibition suggests, the accessibility and tactile immediacy of this medium remains well-suited to experimentation and discovery. Set within the Powell Street Festival’s larger theme of Asobi (play), Between what’s said and unsaid provides an unpredictable, associative counterpoint to the regulated tick of structured time.
Madoka Hara moved to Canada from Japan in 1998 after completing study in Child Education. Her self-taught drawing skill and craft-loving spirit brought her to an Interactive Media program to produce an online storybook. Her animations have been shown previously at the Powell Street Festival, and her illustrations have been published in the Vancouver Review. Jillian Tamaki graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2003. Her illustrations have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Maclean's, The Walrus, and many other publications around North America. In October 2006, Conundrum Press (Montreal) published a compilation of comics, published and unpublished work entitled Gilded Lilies. R. Kikuo Johnson was born in 1981 on the island of in Maui. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, he moved to Brooklyn, New York where he currently draws comics and plays the ukulele. Some of his clients include The New Yorker, The New York Times, Premiere magazine, Nickelodeon and more. Kaori Kasai, graduated from art school in Tokyo, lived in San Francisco, Hong Kong, Vancouver and now Numazu. She creates her own world of eccentric creatures and personalities which bloom into the void. Curator Alia Nakashima is an animation producer and graduate of Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. She has been a board member and volunteer for Powell Street Festival for the past 13 years. |
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Joey
Dubuc Saturday,
June 30 to Saturday, July 28, 2007 Dubuc’s recent work has been seeking connections between procedural poetics, narrative theory and conceptual art. hE BLESSES hIS gOOSE is a world of puppets, maquettes, sculptures, and images developed from the narrative possibilities available in the limited lexicon of words that can be written upside-down on a calculator. The protagonist of this landscape, BILL hEgEL (or 73634 7718) is a sometimes charming despotic goose that rules the isles of hELL through a monopoly on oil (both ShELL and ESSO), as well as a whole host of common consumer products. He is an entrepreneurial dreamer, roaming the fine line between the commendable search for the good life and its double: greed, disappointment, and madness. Using the textual strategies of OULIPO and a mytho-poetic approach to the visual, Dubuc fashions an improvisational story-line from within the strictures of a largely predetermined linguistic cosmology. Akin to listening to radio feedback in the hopes of finding any voice from beyond, any meaning whatsoever—whether diabolical, ridiculous, or utterly schizophrenic—hE BLESSES hIS gOOSE is a lulling, fragmented glimpse into issues of over-consumption and the global energy crises. Seeking out meaning from the mundane, the project asks if a simple trick played in high school can be filled with potential, like maybe the calculator (a ghost in the machine) is really trying to tell us something. JOEY DUBUC is an artist and writer living in Vancouver. He has exhibited his work in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Brisbane. His novel, Neither Either Nor Or was published in 2003, and his work has been featured recently in Matrix, The Walrus and in Alphabet City: Suspects. |
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Emilie
O'Brien and Adriana Riquer The work of Emilie O’Brien (Vancouver) and Adriana Riquer (Mexico city) shares an interest in the interplay between ideas of real and speculative space. For this two-person exhibition the artists display a series of individual and conceptually overlapping elements which hypothesize possible sculptural correlatives to some of our most formless impulses—memory and intuition, obsession and boredom among them. The work in More or Less is marked by a shift from the sine qua non of art, the making of form, to a practice predicated on form's undoing. For the last number of years, O’Brien has been working in a constructive manner with fabric and plastics, creating objects and spaces that subtly reposition the language of Modern sculpture—the vertical, the instantaneous, the solid and the rarified—into a syntax and aesthetics of softness which hold notions of process, entropy and permeability in equal measure. For More or Less, O’Brien presents a new, large-scale fabric shelter-like construction and accompanying video which evoke the complexities of fold physics as well as the emotive and sociological impact of these materials and forms. With a strong reference to the body and the domestic, O’Brien’s works explore how meaning is created in the physical and seek out the provisional spatial “moments” where collective memory is held. Turner’s practice involves an interest in repetition, simulation and the potentiality of formal exercises to highlight what the artist calls “the confrontation of reality” inherent in daily objects. In much of her recent work, Riquer looks for ways in which two distinct objects can occupy the same place at the same time. For the exhibition, the artist displays a series of sculptures that reflect the transformative nature of both their base materiality and making. Working with highly recognizable everyday objects—blackboards, stationary bicycles, and post-it notes—the artist underscores the innate tension of everyday, consumer items: their disposability, interchangeability, and the distinct sense that one thing could as easily be another. And yet, with a sensibility similar to O’Brien, Riquer Turner works to prevent her pieces from being subsumed by their referents: the transformation that characterizes her work points to their indecipherability, acting as an effort of declassification. Emilie
O’ Brien works have been shown in various galleries in
Canada. She also presently works as a restoration artist at the Vancouver
Art Gallery. |
Emilie O'Brien
Adriana Riquer |
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Samantha
Anderson, Francesca Bennett, Scott Billings, Emily Kai Bock , Rebecca
Brewer, Angela Chen, Christopher Donnelly, Roland Eickmeier, Kayla Guthrie,
Jeremy Hof, Steven Hubert, Diana Kim, Varian Loo, Manolo Lugo, Nicholas
Matranga, Daniel Oates, Neal Rockwell, Maxwell Simmer, Warren Stagg,
Shiloh Sukkau, Keith Wecker Saturday,
April 28 to Saturday May 12, 2007 |
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Jane
Benson Jane Benson’s prolific art practice is fueled by a fascination with the transformative potential of representation and the reinvention of context. Her works are marked by a careful attention to the connotative subtext of various materials and a furtive critical engagement with issues of appropriation, authorship and the design of culturally significant objects. Benson’s UNDERBUSH is a large-scale installation comprised of hundreds of hanging foil garlands which drape from the gallery ceiling in a dense canopy of web-like tendrils. Normally flashy and metallic, these readymades have been meticulously spray-painted the tones of the military palette (olive, brown, tan and black), transforming the typically celebratory, tinsel festoon into a muted lattice of organic funereal reverie. A second element of the installation—a set of deconstructed and reassembled camouflage fatigues—conversely refigures one of our most ominous and carefully constructed cultural artifacts into an almost friendly attire of foliage. The delicate beauty of UNDERBUSH—its engagement with high design and the tropes of decoration—is at once relished and destabilized: the heavy mood and oppressive sense of deception which underpins Benson’s project provides a mesmerizing backdrop for its engagement with the ways our cultural systems and inherent power structures define our understanding of our surroundings.
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Mark
Dahl Saturday,
February 10 to Saturday March 10, 2007 Mark Dahl’s recent body of public text posters and performative gestures display a pointed curiosity with the workings of binary relationships and dialectical thinking. His distinctively plain posters, which have been easily recognizable on the streets of Vancouver over the past years, reflect both the necessary, unavoidable role of binary oppositions in defining our concepts of reality and their potential for limiting, stifling or reducing the human experience. His site-specific texts locate a poignant, contemplative and often humorous balance point between the poles of many of our defining structures—institutions, political systems, public spaces and sociological landscapes—which challenge and unravel our sometimes tidy dualisms: action and repose, expectation and outcome, attention and distraction, community and individual, the abstract and the concrete. Suitably his sayings carry a simultaneous charge of bewildering vagueness and resounding clarity, part flat declaration, part mesmerizing koan. While referring to the history of linguistically-driven art—concrete poetry, truism, graffiti and manifesto—Dahl’s works reveal a highly individual sensibility which seems, at times, closer to the experiential haiku of Basho or the serious play of Dada than much contemporary text-based practice. For the Helen Pitt Gallery, Dahl has created four new pieces in video, text and photography which transpose his normally public work into the gallery context. These works directly reference the condition and context of their making, while placing the viewer in an active role of animating their meaning. These projects appeal simultaneously to our anonymous roles within larger, indifferent systems of language and cultural structures as well as the direct, personal experience of daily life.
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