Front Gallery:

Michael Drebert
Styrofoam Huffer

Friday, September 6th to October 18th
Opening Reception: Friday, September 5th at 8:00 pm
Artist talk: Saturday September 6th at 2pm in the gallery
Curated by: Dawn Johnston


The Helen Pitt Gallery is pleased to present Michael Drebert's project, Styrofoam Huffer, as part of the 2008 SWARM festival.  Drebert departs from his recent practice of “actions” and has returned to material based sculpture to create a large scale installation that challenges notions of usefulness and asks the viewer to question their participatory involvement in social concerns both on a local and global scale.

Drebert's practice frequently questions what constitutes usefulness.  Does it matter that something looks useful, but in actuality it doesn't function at all?  Does something need to function in a preconceived manner in order for it to be useful?  As a way of dissecting this question, he often takes objects, and places, and attempts to change their function.  Oftentimes this alteration renders the thing or place useless, in terms of intended use-value.  His work is both playful but also melancholic, likened to laughter when directed at someone or something's misfortune.

Styrofoam Huffer will consist of a large scale sculpture that will operate as an object that could have potential communal use.  Taking his inspiration from the film Darwin's Nightmare, which depicts children in Africa melting the toxic styrofoam substance for the purpose of numbing their bodies and minds in order to function in unbearable social and political circumstances, he draws upon this particular instance to describe our own collective numbness to the social issues that surround our everyday experience.  This project's intention lies not in a place of judgement or blame-placing, instead it asks us all to question where it is that we fit into the fabric of society, what happens when we all choose to participate in seemingly insignificant actions, and how certain objects or materials can have a function after their usefulness appears to have been taken away.

MICHAEL DREBERT is a Vancouver based artist and graduate the Emily Carr Institute. His work has been shown at the Western Front, the Lobby, and Artspeak, among others.  He will be attending the University of Victoria in the fall to begin his MFA degree.

Web Gallery:

Adam Gandy
Random Standup Routine Generator
(A meditation on how, from the Frankfurt School to Foucault, the great accumulation of post modern social thinking had made me reconsider my choice to dine at the International House of Pancakes.)

Friday, September 6th to Friday November 6th
Opening Reception: Friday, September 5 at 8:00 pm
Available for viewing at: www.helenpittgallery.org
Curated by: Dawn Johnston

The Helen Pitt Gallery is proud to present Adam Gandy's Random Standup Routine Generator as the second instalment of our year-long series of web-based projects.

While we have long worried about the contentious relationship we have with our technology (do we control it, or is it the other way around?), this may not be the most interesting concern about the Internet. What might be the most interesting thing is our expectation that we are building the Internet, and that our contributions are original, insightful, important and desired by others.  But is Wikipedia really a valuable resource if anyone can add to it?  If uneducated enthusiasts can argue opinion on its pages with academic professionals, and the peer review system is just everyone, can we trust its content to be the best possible information?  If Second Life is really an online Utopia™ where anything and everything can happen, then why do most Avatars conform to contemporary ideas about the ideal human body? Why does it have an economy based on capitalism? Why does it so closely resemble the world we already occupy?

Gandy's project has no aims to solve problems, but rather is an experiment in refuting or maybe somewhat redefining our expectations. Built into web development applications is the ability to randomly access words, sounds, files, and images. Button clicks or other forms of interaction by the user generally define these actions. The Random Standup Routine Generator utilizes this form of randomness to generate on-the-fly stand-up comedy routines based on happenstance and edited by topic. While we may want to learn from the Artist’s investigation into the commonness or homogeneity of new millennium comedy, the website will not allow it. There is no interactivity here, no buttons or sliders or pause buttons, and thus no control.  The standup routines simply fold in on themselves, repeating and reassembling themselves into new forms in front of the helpless user.  It is organized chaos, hard to tell whether we control it or vice versa, what better example of our zeitgeist?

ADAM GANDY is an Artist, Filmmaker and Curator who lives and works in Vancouver.  He is a graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.