Vancouver
posted by Aaron Peck - March 25th, 2008.
As I put the finishing touches on this report, I’m in San Francisco and about to go the CCA Wattis ICA to see Passengers, a group exhibition featuring, among others, two Vancouver artists, Gareth Moore and Tim Lee. But this is a Vancouver roundup, so I won’t review the show; I’ll just mention it in passing and concentrate on some recent action back home.
The colourschool classroom at ECIAD
Earlier this week, I missed Germane Koh’s talk at colourschool. Koh has an exhibition opening in April at Catriona Jeffries Gallery and I would have very much liked to hear her speak, but, like most events at colourschool, the talk happened during my work hours. A project of artist Kristina Podesva, colourschool is a “school within a school,” a ramshackle institution devoted to the interrogation of the five colours. As such, it hosts a series of screenings, talks, and reading groups which began while Podesva was an MFA candidate at UBC. Now that she has completed her degree, colourschool has moved locations and is currently housed at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Lately, it has also facilitated a series of interviews conducted by Vancouver-based Swedish curator Johan Lund. I’ve only managed to attend one of these interviews, a discussion that took place back in October with the Japanese artist Koki Tanaka. colourschool continues to have events, for the most part weekly. Another of Podesva’s projects was launched this past Thursday at the Helen Pitt Gallery. As part of the Pitt’s new, yearlong online projects, Podesva and Alan McConchie debuted a new web-based artwork: Google Emotional Index (GEI).
Gwenessa Lam, Vancouver, 2007, installation view
The main exhibit at the Helen Pitt, Ground Zero Redux, curated by Jeremy Todd, features six young artists. I was initially wary of the premise: the way contemporary artists respond to the term “ground zero” (in the most general sense possible). However, the intuitive leaps between the works succeed. Nick Lakowski’s paintings - 20 Paces North (through construction debris), a razed monochrome, for example - contrasted well with Marlene Yuen’s bookwork installation Praise Church, a pop-up book about gentrification in Mount Pleasant. Gwenessa Lam’s aerial depictions of the downtown peninsula had uncanny references when placed next to Martha González Palacios’s Biblioteca de Babel, a replica of the text of Jorge Luis Borges’ story of the same name hand drawn on vellum. For such a potentially tactless idea, Todd curates the exhibit with subtlety and thought.
Joshua Bartholomew and Cedric Meister, The Liminality Project, 2008, installation view
Ground Zero Redux’s theme was further complimented by Joshua Bartholomew and Cedric Meister’s architectural intervention, The Liminality Project, an Emily Carr student-curated project which transformed the backroom student gallery into the Pitt’s office, leaving an enclosed, empty vestibule in the space where the office is normally found at the front of the gallery.
Isabelle Pauwels, The Embellishers, 2008, video
The season’s exhibition that has spurred the most discussion is Exponential Future, co-curated by Scott Watson and Juan Gaitán at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery. I mention this here because it has generated such a mixture of responses, including, in some more engaging examples, thoughtful consideration. The exhibition features eight young Vancouver artists and considers how their work relates to notions of “the future.” I’m not certain this always succeeds, although I did enjoy the exhibition. Kevin Schmidt’s Wild Signals, a film projection of an empty rave in the Yukon wilderness set to a funky reworking of the four-tone melody from Close Encounters of The Third Kind, is fun but ultimately unsatisfying, while Isabelle Pauwels’s video The Embellishers, which follows two identical twin-sisters living in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, is unnerving and fascinating. The curation takes a wide brush stroke, to be sure, and it offers a view of some young artists in Vancouver (most of whom are well-known, some of whom are not). The accusation, by some, that this exhibition poorly represents current art practices in Vancouver misses the point. There is definitely an attempt to make connections to a tradition here, although not - as it is erroneously believed - to make a general statement on art making in this city, so I don’t think the curators should be held culpable for improperly representing the current local aesthetic, because it was never their aim to make such a totalized statement.
I also think it’s worth mentioning that last Friday, the French political philosopher Jacques Rancíere gave a lecture at the University of British Columbia entitled The Misadventures in Critical Thinking, wherein he considered the role of the critic in the contemporary West. Due to a recent book, The Future of the Image, an issue of Artforum dedicated to him last year, and his seminal book, The Politics of Aesthetics - all devoted to the relationship between politics and contemporary art - a large number of the art community were in attendance. His books have been much discussed for a number of years and his discussion enriched a lot of work on display in the city right now.
Roy Kiyooka, installation view at the Catriona Jeffries Gallery
With so much talk of young artists, it was a welcome contrast to see Process as Work, a group show currently at Catriona Jeffries Gallery that examines the role of process in four - shall we say older - Vancouver artists: Ian Wallace, Damian Moppett, Jerry Pethick, and Roy Kiyooka. I associate the theme mostly with Roy Kiyooka and Damian Moppett and as such, it was nice to see more of Moppett’s current works on paper, most of which have an intriguingly sinister quality. Moppett continues a project begun in 2004 which considers process through an elaborate representation of studio space, works-in-progress, and sketches of modernist art. Likewise, Ian Wallace’s New York series, wherein Wallace juxtaposes photographs of, mostly, Times Square to bars of colour, refers to Mondrian’s famous painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie. I also very much liked Roy Kiyooka’s Winter Masks “On the Road," a film poetically documenting a road-trip Kiyooka took into the Interior of BC in the late seventies. Process is as closely related to the serial nature of Kiyooka’s work as it is to technology and the film corresponds well with a number of accompanying photographs that enhance the poetic quality of the images.
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis (forthcoming, Pedlar Press, 2008). His reviews have recently appeared in Canadian Art and Fillip. He lives in Vancouver.
colourschool: http://www.colourschool.org/
Helen Pitt Gallery: http://www.helenpittgallery.org/
Ground Zero Redux continues until April 5.
Joshua Bartholomew and Cedric Meister: The Liminality Project continues until April 5.
Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery: http://www.belkin.ubc.ca/
Exponential Future continues until April 27.
Catriona Jeffries Gallery: http://www.catrionajeffries.com/
Process as Work continues until March 29.
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