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Julian Hou and Christian Kliegel
June 23 – July 25 2008
Reception: July 18, 8pm
Julian Hou and Christian Kliegel share a background in critical art practice and are currently pursuing their Masters in Architecture at UBC. For the final installment of the workaday series at the Helen Pitt Gallery, Hou & Kliegel will engage in a process oriented installation that takes the redesign of the exhibition space as its starting point. Discursive sculptures and ephemeral installations will emerge from their material alterations to the gallery throughout the duration of this three-week, performative process.
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The Gallery will remain open as usual during the demolition and construction phases of this project, positioning the act of renovation - and the playful sculpture and installation it yields - as artwork on display in a destabilized gallery context.
Julian Hou is a graduate student of architecture at the University of British Columbia. His current research investigates scene composition and narrative and its implications for domestic architecture.
Christian Kliegel’s installation based work is concerned with contextualizing materials and spaces within a given or chosen framework. He has exhibited locally and internationally since receiving his BFA from Emily Carr in 2004. Christian is a current graduate student of architecture at the University of British Columbia.
Please contact the Helen Pitt Gallery Artist Run Centre at pittg@telus.net / 604.681.6740 for more information.
Knock on Woods: A Roving International Artist Residency
Yvette Poorter
Tuesday June 17 to Saturday June 21, 2008
Closing reception: Saturday, June 21 at 7:00 pm
With Knock on Woods, Rotterdam-based artist Yvette Poorter takes a nomadic version of her previous residency projects This Neck of the Woods (2005-07) and A Week in the Woods (2001-03) on the road throughout Canada, with this scheduled lay-over at the Helen Pitt Gallery. Poorter will also be presenting this project at Open Space (Victoria), Mercer Union (Toronto), Modern Fuel (Kingston) and Quartier Ephemère (Montreal).
Knock on Woods International Residency is a constructed space that dedicates itself to offering local and international artists of all sorts a sense of rootedness and respite from a hectic and bewildering globalism. The residency is a para-site that consists of a rustic tent-cabin and a forest of tree-flags.
Artists are invited to do a residency with Knock on Woods for a minimum of four and a maximum of 24 hours. Any kind of work/non-work will be considered: out-come-based projects, pointless exploration, rest or respite.
Proposals are being accepted from now until June 1st, 2008, for anyone interested in participating in Knock on Woods. Proposals can be very, very short: Describe what you want to do, how much time you may need (4-24 hours), and a preferred date.
For more information on the background for this project, the artist, and a link to Knock on Woods, please visit http://thisneckofthewoods.net/
Please contact the Helen Pitt Gallery at pittg@telus.net / 604.681.6740 for more information or to submit proposals.
YVETTE POORTER is a Canadian/Dutch artist currently residing in Rotterdam. Her sculpture, video, photography and installation have been shown extensively in North America and Europe, and in Japan, most recently at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (Victoria BC), Buro Dijkstra (Amsterdam), TENT (Rotterdam) and Ouve, O Seculo (Lisbon). In 2005 she was part of the photography exhibition Duplicitous, at the Helen Pitt Gallery.
[Workaday02]
Billy Mavreas
And Another Thing
Friday, May 23 to Saturday, June 14, 2008
Reception: Friday, June 6 at 8:00 pm
Montreal-based artist and cartoonist, Billy Mavreas, presents And Another Thing as the second installment of the Helen Pitt Gallery’s Workaday series, a three-exhibition experiment addressing issues of creative process, labour and the performative gesture. For each of these exhibitions, the artists involved will be spending three weeks working live within the gallery space to develop a new project or body of work in situ. Viewers are invited to drop in regularly to witness the evolution of these projects and see the artists at work.
Working largely with a photocopier, but also with sculptural elements and found objects, Mavreas will be creating an improvised, collaged installation that defies the divisions of writing and drawing; narrative and semiology; anthropology and science fiction.
At the Helen Pitt Gallery, Mavreas will, in his own words, undertake “a radical expansion of ideas. An accumulation and sloughing off. A shared play and a solo manic exercise. A turn or phrase, a rant, a monologue, a listening, an encouragement. The texture of things noticed or felt. An array of tenses, dislodged temporal streams. Layered noise. Hidden information. Buried text. Lost meanings. Worlds within worlds.”
Throughout the exhibition, audience members will be invited to participate in Mavreas’ exhibition by coming with photocopiable items (objects, original artwork, pocket or wallet contents) to be incorporated in Mavreas’ project.
Notoriously difficult to pin down, Mavreas’ process-based practice does nonetheless suggest a critical response to Modernism’s severity, reductionism and paradoxical dialectics, engaging instead with its less ordered, more expansive traditions of mysticism and transcendentalism developed by such diverse figured as Wassily Kandinsky, John Cage, René Daumal, and Aleister Crowley. And yet, Mavreas’ work is entirely his own. His distinctive creative universe—often populated with bunnies with keen knowledge of dimensional portals and time travel, gourd-like blobs that conflate the phallus/vagina dichotomy, talismans and runes—evokes a social urgency, a reconsideration of language and action, and ultimately seeks a metaphysical understanding to the hard edges of thought, reason and the structure of contemporary life.
BILLY MAVREAS is a Greek-Canadian artist living in Montreal. For almost twenty years, Mavreas has produced rock posters, comics, artist books, visual poetry, installation, mail art, web art, performance, essay writing and guerilla consultancy. His artwork and various projects have been shown and published internationally. He is the author of The Overlords of Glee (conundrum press, 2001), Hell Passport Commentary (Perro Verlag, 2006) and the upcoming Inside Outside Overlap (Timeless Books, 2008) among many others. Mavreas is also the proprietor of his enduring project, Monastiraki, a Mile-End magickal curiosity shoppe and art gallery.
[Workaday01]
Aaron Carpenter
The Art of Richard Tuttle
Friday April 11 to Saturday May 3, 2008
Kickoff: Friday, April 11 at 8:00 pm
Reception: Friday, April 25 at 8:00 pm
Aaron Carpenter’s The Art of Richard Tuttle is the first installment of the Helen Pitt Gallery’s three-exhibition Workaday series, addressing process, labour and the performative gesture. For each of these exhibitions, the artists will be spending three weeks working live within the gallery space to develop a new project.
Carpenter’s project is an exhibition of replicas, duplicates, imitations and likenesses of artworks by the American artist Richard Tuttle (b. 1941). Using the catalogue from Tuttle's 2005 retrospective at SFMOMA as a working manual, Carpenter will be keeping regular office hours in the gallery in an attempt to reproduce, in some manner, all of the 317 works catalogued therein. Locating a specific intersection between ideas of artistic homage and durational performance, The Art of Richard Tuttle investigates notions of appropriation and authorship while providing a context for re-imagining the assumed connection between labour, commodity and the finished product.
For all three of the Workaday exhibitions, viewers are invited to drop in regularly to witness the development of these projects. The official reception for The Art of Richard Tuttle will be two weeks into Carpenter’s Herculean effort.
AARON CARPENTER is an artist living in Vancouver.
Ground Zero Redux
Julie Andreyev
Martha González Palacios
Nick Lakowski
Gwenessa Lam
Jeremy Isao Speier
Marlene Yuen
curated by Jeremy Todd
Saturday, March 8 to Saturday, April 5, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, March 7 at 8:00 pm
An exhibition publication will be available at the opening reception
"You won't say that I hold the present too high, and if I do not despair of it, it is only because its desperate situation fills me with hope."
-- Karl Marx in a letter to Arnold Ruge, May, 1843
Ground Zero Redux brings together new and recent work by six unique Vancouver artists to explore the complex conceptual, narrative and material trajectories of the term “Ground Zero.” This exhibition—featuring photography, drawing, digital video projection, text and bookwork, assemblage, painting and kinetic sculpture—looks across a diverse range of artistic practice to explore the creative efficacy of Ground Zero, reevaluating the enduring legacy of this term as it relates to our current moment.
Ground Zero was first used as a name for the areas directly below atomic explosions (beginning with the Trinity Test Site, Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945), later signifying reinvention or rebirth through acts of leveling, collapse, total destruction or reduction to essences and tabula rasa-like states. While the violent creative/destructive essentialism of these scenarios has been critically derided across a variety of fields, Ground Zero mythologies continue to influence both the nebulous terrain of political policy, environmental discourse and philosophical inquiry, and the often urgent, definitive nature of our global socio-economic realities and ecological situation. The ongoing spectre of 9-11—its place in our present narratives of protection, justification and preemption, and the resulting fallout of the actualization of these ideas—is a grave example of this. As this exhibition suggests, notions of Ground Zero can also persist in what philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called “bare life”—the reduction of people to Ground Zero-like states through incarceration, expulsion from political community, denial of rights and resources, torture and extreme poverty.
With these complications in mind, artists in this exhibition enact a variety of experiments with ideas of Ground Zero that are not strictly deconstructive, archeological or ironic. Instead, the works choose to critically engage the possibilities of starting over, and restoring points of departure to consciousness.
Julie Andreyev is a Vancouver-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the social/ spatial character of the city and ideas of animal consciousness. Her work has been shown in Canada, the US, Europe and Japan. Andreyev's work is supported by The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, Foreign Affairs Canada, and The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is an Associate Professor of at the Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver, and co-curator of Interactive Futures Conference, Victoria, Canada. Website: www.fourwheeldrift.com
Martha González Palacios is originally from Mexico, where she obtained an architecture degree in 1995 and worked as an architect. She received her BFA from the Emily Carr Institute in 2001 and her MLIS from the University of British Columbia in 2007. Her work has been shown in Vancouver, Bellingham, and Washington DC.
Jeremy Isao Speier is a Japanese-Canadian interdisciplinary artist who graduated from the Emily Carr Institute in 1992. He works in film/video, kinetic sculpture and sound, and installation and has shown extensively across Canada in solo and group exhibitions. In 2008, he will be exhibiting at Elissa Cristall Gallery and Blim.
Nick Lakowski is a Vancouver artist primarily working with paint. He received a BFA from the Emily Carr Institute in 2004 and was a founding and active member of the counterpublics collective from 2003-6.
Gwenessa Lam received a BFA from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from New York University. She has taught at New York University, Emily Carr Institute, University of British Columbia, and the Art Institute of Vancouver. Her work has been shown in Canada and the USA, including the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Queens Museum of Art. She has also been awarded residencies at Skowhegan and MacDowell.
Marlene Yuen received her Bachelor’s in Studio Art in 1998 from the University of British Columbia. Marlene has exhibited at galleries, artist-run centres, and cultural events in Canada and Japan. Although she is a multidisciplinary artist, her current focus is on handmade books. She is an active member of the Canadian Bookbinders & Book Artist Guild and the Alcuin Society. Marlene is currently preparing for her forthcoming artist residency at the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture in Dawson City, Yukon. Please send her cookies.
Jeremy Todd is an interdisciplinary artist, teacher, curator and musician whose work has been shown, published and screened in Vancouver and beyond. He was the Director/Curator for the Helen Pitt Gallery from 2003-05, and in 2007 acted as the interim Director/Curator of the Richmond Art Gallery. He is currently teaching at UBC while developing a second feature-length experimental film.
Click here for a PDF version of the curatorial essay
Judy Cheung
Mind of a City
Saturday, January 26 to Saturday, March 1, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, January 25 at 8pm.
Special performance by Karen and Peggy Ngan at 9pm.
Produced in partnership with Plastic Kinetic Worms, Singapore, and Latitude 53, Edmonton
Judy Cheung's Mind of a City is a participatory installation that works to counterbalance the sometimes negative psychological effects of urban living. Constructed as a series of skill-enhancement and re-conditioning stations, this exhibition offers a nurturing philosophy geared towards helping the participant retain a sense of self-satisfaction and balance within the often alienating, chaotic confines of contemporary city life.
Mind of a City invites viewers to immerse themselves both physically and conceptually into the systematic series of instructions and workstations. Incorporating aspects of psychological therapy, motivational messages, goal-realization strategies, sense-of-humour rehabilitation, meditation and physical exercise, the components in this exhibition will, by the end, help participants achieve something perhaps bordering on enlightenment.
Cheung’s installation reflects on the urban mindscape in terms of our often dubious cultural drives towards “personal fulfillment” and goal-oriented “progression,” providing a platform to critique, rethink and reinvent oneself, as well as some of our more limiting social constructions and pressing social issues. Similarly, this exhibition presents a critical examination of the view that art, as a form of communication, is meant to elate the senses, offer any sense of real catharsis or enact its promise of social reinvention. As an assimilation of intellectual, social, and functional consciousness, the project references a society fraught with repression, anxiety and stress. Simultaneously, the experiential process of attending an ingenious skill enhancement program provides moments of whimsical inspiration in a gallery setting.
JUDY CHEUNG’s work involves the continuous experimentation and investigation of perceptual reality in the realm of social and urban movements. She received her undergraduate visual arts degree from the University of Calgary and an MFA degree from the Pratt Institute, New York. Cheung’s work has been exhibited across Canada, USA, Europe, as well as in Hong Kong and Singapore. In 2006 her on-going project, “Love is in the Air- SkyLink” was shown at the Havana Biennial in Cuba, and her solo exhibition, freeLink, was staged at the Surrey Art Gallery. Cheung currently lives in Vancouver.
The Helen Pitt Gallery greatly acknowledges the support of Lee Valley Hardware and Gailan Ngan Ceramics for the realization of this project.
