Strange Agencies
Swarm Opening Reception: Saturday, Sept. 11, 4-9pm, at the Gallery.
An Exhibition Publication with essays by Mark Dudiak, Carly Haddon, Monika Szewczyk and Marina Roy will be available at the Gallery.
Transcribed Conversations available here.
Jane Cameron
Christine D’Onofrio
Mima Preston
Nicole Sanches
Before the idea of “production in use” was articulated the readymade actualized its premises. The artist’s use of objects could produce meanings not intended by the market systems generating them. Their presentation within the socially negotiated space of the art context constituted a new form of production vis-à-vis use. Contemporary postmodern (or perhaps post-postmodern) contexts and processes relating to “production in use” are often discussed in terms of sampling and/or post-production assemblage/editing. This exhibition engages with these practices, historical moments and contemporary cultural phenomena while contesting the political and critical containment of the agency that “production in use” provides within constellations of leisure, domestication, specialization, professionalization and sub-cultural life-style marketing.
The practices in this exhibition are critical of the structural determinism of a global consumer culture/market economy. The dominant market within contemporary art (often referred to as the neo-conceptual international style) and its claims of critical efficacy through “production in use” tendencies are problematized by the questions this exhibition elicits about consumption, spectacle and hegemonic containment in general.
Signs of historical feminist art practices are frequently referenced in uniquely humorous and invigorating ways. The works of Jane Cameron, Nicole Sanches, Mima Preston and Christine D’Onofrio expose the reductive and reactionary inadequacy of what is currently deemed “post-feminist”. There are no explicit rejections or embraces of any kinds of ethical essentialism on the part of these artists. There is, however, an avoidance of any iconoclastic inversions of symbolic orders within historical feminist discourses. They return to coded uses of scale relative to the body, the domestic and craft in ways that reveal new agency in a critique of 21rst century capitalism and the ongoing fall-out/blow-back from the social, political and cultural disasters of Modernism and modernity.
Biographical Information:
Jane Cameron studied Visual Art at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (B.F.A.) and the University of British Columbia (M.F.A.). Her most recent work investigates fashion, language, and everyday activities.
Nicole Sanches is a visual artist based in Vancouver. A supporter of artist run culture, she participates in the community both in Canada and the United States. Examining the connection between the physical boundary of the body and the ever-expanding space of the mind, she uses scopic imagery and found objects to illustrate our need for information and knowledge.
Christine D’Onofrio lives and works in Vancouver. D’Onofrio’s photographic practice focuses on identity, the body, and constructions and representations of femininity. By re-staging objects in the studio, she tests notions and behaviours of the body, and explores their influence upon depicted objects. Having recently completed her MFA at the University of British Columbia, following her BFA at York University in Toronto, D’Onofrio is now actively involved in exhibiting her work. In addition, she teaches studio classes at the University of British Columbia.
Mima Preston’s work is characterized by her ongoing consideration of illusion and materiality. Using installation, costume and performance to explore subjects such as disguise, failure and imitation, Preston brings to the fore discussions of capitalism, commodification and desire within the parameters of fantasy and cultural longing.
