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Speculators of the Final Frontier

**This text originally appeared in SADMAG the Space Issue in December of 2017. 

Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once....

and space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you.

                    -Susan Sontag, At The Same Time: Essays and Speeches, 2007

It is only in recent years, thanks to quantum mechanics, that our perception of space and time has changed. Our hypothesized, inception of the universe is based on an explosive first impression; Big Bang theory is one of the dominant universe creation hypotheses. A theory where a singularity expanded exponentially, doubling in size and mass, several hundred times over, in just a few incremental fractions of a second. 13.7 billion years later, we are still trying to comprehend this micro-instant. It was, after all, a place where time and space existed in dimensions beyond our capacity for comprehension (for now).

Fear not, for there are those who seek to understand the strangeness of time and space. Two such artists and investigators, UK based Jem Finer and Vancouver based Fei Disbrow are adept at transplanting viewers and listeners into altered space-time realities.

In the late ‘90s, Finer conceived of a piece of music that would play for 1,000 years. Longplayer exists as both art object and ongoing musical performance; its composition, lasting for a millennium, and its physical manifestation, designed to play continuously for the millennium. Longplayer started playing midday, December 31, 1999, in London, England. It has been playing for over 17 years now. One can tune-in anytime to hear the current ethereal phase as it unfolds.  

Then there is Disbrow's Eccentric Journeys collage series is made from printed paper cuttings. A planetary aesthetic prevails in this work; groups of abstract texture, pattern and colour form solid structures that emit bountiful ocular signals. They hover above pristine backdrops of white space. The series invites viewers to circumnavigate flat and multi-dimensional aspects of these compositions.

In Finer and Disbrow's work, time is activated in very different ways. When one encounters Finer's piece, they conceive of time beyond their own life-cycle. Finer's ethereal composition compels us to ponder metaphysical constructs of interstellar time, it forces an expansion in the mind. Time is drawn out. Disbrow's work, on the other hand, has a visceral immediacy to it. Her work stops time, each piece implanting an instant and bold retinal impression. Disbrow synthesizes abstraction into a compelling singularity, a force to be reckoned with.  

Expansion and contraction play a key part in reading both works. Both artists play with the notion of space in unique ways. Disbrow explores the void, her planetary entities stranded in isolation. Like a languishing blue dwarf star light years away, each composition is its own spectacular swan song of magazine cuttings, an isolated and imaginative gesture of reconfiguration to dive into. When viewed in series, the works form a cloud of connective thought patterns; their existence intangible but visibly interconnected.  Finer's work sends the viewer inwards, directing them to the resonant frequency of their bodies in relation to other object bodies (singing bowls). Longplayer can be streamed live anywhere with an internet connection. Knowledge of this creates the opportunity for boundless universal experience, but it also comes with heavy existential introspection on time.

Susan Sontag surmises, 'Time exists so that everything doesn't happen all at once.' That is of course, unless you are observing the Eccentric Journeys series by Fei Disbrow. Each collage is a confluence of time projected onto a two-dimensional plane of infinite density - a singularity.  Like the attack and decay of a note, first impressions of Disbrow's work start with a sharp, loud bang, colour and shape vibrate voraciously. As the note decays, other layers become audible (visible); texture, context, and concepts undulate ad infinitum. Finer's work impresses a feedback loop on the listener. For most who encounter Longplayer, it is introduced conceptually first. One becomes overwhelmingly lost in the conception of time as they once knew it... Then they experience the esoteric singing bowl vibrations of the work, and they are brought into a granular and embodied present.

Both artists posit the viewer/listener into a multidimensional space, one where a fraction of a millionth of a second contains a 1,000, if not 13.7 billion years-worth of resonance. Brace yourself... time and space - it's all happening to you, all at once.

About the artists:

Fei Disbrow lives and works in Vancouver. https://fei.viewbook.com/

Jem Finer is an artist who lives and works in the United Kingdom. http://jemfiner.net/

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The Objectness of Objects

This was originally published in collaboration with the Richmond Art Gallery for the exhibition Eternal Return in the autumn of 2017. - Images below were taken by Rachel Topham photography.

A crack here, a stamp or engraving there; objects house trace evidence of not only their individual stories, but also the times and places they come from. Artists utilize these referential qualities to create alternative modes of expression and understanding. Archivists use these reference points to guide restoration, document provenance and situate an artifact in history. Observation exists as apparition in the present, an interpretive arena where personal, cultural and anthropological ideas are endlessly projected and adapted. As such, both artists and archivists are object interlocutors. Their métiers co-exist in a strange loop,i where place, time and meaning expand and contract.

Artists Barb Choit, Kevin Day, Alanna Ho, Anchi Lin and Lucien Durey were invited to investigate the Richmond Museum's Migration Collection. Each artist produced new work in response to their selected collection items. Eternal Return showcases these commissioned works and corresponding artefacts at the Richmond Art Gallery from September to November 2017. This exhibition explores object incarnation via an array of media that includes photography, performance, sculpture, video and sound installation.

Barb Choit's photographic assemblage series, Richmond Reconstructions, reflects on the still life art genre. Richmond Reconstructions references archival documentation, didactic display techniques, centuries-old Pompeii muralsii and reconstruction archaeology.iii Choit rigorously selected museum artifacts and positioned them against faux-fresco backdrops. In presenting viewers with seductive compositions that combine kitsch souvenirs with collected biological specimens and practical household objects, Choit conflates commerce and culture. By bringing together disparate value systems, Choit presents a limitless space for reflection, revealing how symbolism, meaning are fluid and malleable when it comes to object relations.

In study guide (speech to text mis-recognition and vice versa), Kevin Day utilizes the symbolic weight of a universally recognizable school desk and chair from the museum's collection to posit the viewer in a pedagogical setting. The desk faces a wall projection that shows a cursor navigating a fictitious database. Three concurrently running audio tracks bathe the viewer in a cacophony of thoughts, discussions and inner dialogues, prompting the viewer to explore relationships between seeing and listening, knowing and being, detached and embodied. The abstracted husk-like structure of the database paired with the audio stream of ideas directs the viewer/listener into a series of thought spirals wherein one questions the power and politics behind taxonomies, interface operations, knowledge acquisition, and the hierarchal organization of the senses.

After My Garden Grows is an immersive playroom created by Alanna Ho, who regularly examiness the capacity of objects to stimulate imagination. Painted bright red, the playroom walls add a fiery intensity to the installation that also alludes to more disturbing human phenomena such as dark web Red Rooms.iv Ho’s playroom has three components. The first is a sculptural cylinder that looms large above visitors. Red cord runs down its side and onto the floor like tentacles. A low frequency drone emanates from the sculpture’s interior. Ho inventively scales up a tiny traditional Chinese singing cicada toy from the museum's collection. Transforming the artefact into architecture, her ominous sound sculpture creates an entrancing, voyeuristic semi-private space. The second component is a motorized music box sculpture, created in response to piano player scrolls from the museum’s collection. Ad infinitum, it delicately plays both sides of an abstract score plotted onto a Möbius band. While the haptic and aural senses are heightened by the first two playroom components, the third element connects to visual sensibilities. Three floral lithograph reproductions from the Migration Collection are featured on a small red table, and a curious collection of ephemera rlating to the poetry found within the lithographs are displayed around them. Ho's objects and their quirky shifts in scale mindfully place us in a vulnerable state of wonder: the perfect condition for nurturing deep play.

Anchi Lin's three channel intallation explores the term 'preservation' in relation to objects, action and memory. In A Sealer, the installation's first looped channel features Lin performing recursive actions with the wooden handle of a Victor can sealer from the 1940s. The second channel reenacts repetititve gestures that Lin used to perform as a child working in a family factory sealing containers in a layer of protective plastic. In the third channel, the camera explores the various objects and contents preserved by the artist. An industrial object of mass production, the can sealer symbolically represents a pragmatic and proactive approach to living in unstable times. In contemporary times, food deprivation remains a universal concern, and as the artist so eloquently suggests: Safety in numbers, survival in counted cans.5 Lin's gestures in A Sealer also preserve the artist's childhood memories, in which times of hardship are blurred with times of playfulness.

Drawing inspiration from the museum's collection of salvaged bottles from the Richmond area, Lucien Durey explores the complex web of associations between glass objects, the human voice and music. As part of his series, Scarecrow, Visionary, Muse, Musa, Saguaro, Christiania, Durey reconstructs bottle shards, vases and many other glass elements into colourful mobiles. The series also includes recurring vocal performances by the artist during the run of the exhibition that reference pop music, art history and the everyday. By blending symbolism and intermittent performance, Durey highlights the difficulty of revealing personal narratives associated with found objects. At the same time, his performances also lay bare the dynamic power of music, memory and collective unconsciousness to transpose infinite associations onto an object.

The artists of Eternal Return have generated an interactive game of loops, a tangled hierarchy wherein signs, signifiers, and gestures are hyper-transient. Orbiting artefacts and oscillating artworks demonstrate that one cannot go back to the beginning; parameters and context are never identical. But one can visit imagined beginnings and observe how variations of past transmissions modify meaning and structure. In exploring the objectness of objects, it becomes clear that this process is inextricably intertwined with the eternal return.

Sunshine Frère, Guest Curator

i  A Strange Loop is a system that contains what Douglas Hofstadter calls a tangled hierarchy, a structure that is cyclical in nature with no highest or lowest level. Douglas Hofstadter, “I Am a Strange Loop”, (New York: Basic Books, 2008)

ii  Ancient Roman frescos were preserved through eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. A blanket of volcanic ash buried the ancient city of Pompeii. Among Pompeii murals excavated from 1840-1909, several examples of proto-still life paintings have been documented.

iii  Choit's project title Richmond Reconstructions references reconstruction archeology, a process whereby institutions reconstruct ancient scenes in order to attract visitors.

iv  Hidden in the internet's dark web, it is rumoured that 'red rooms' exist. These physical places contain people who have been taken hostage, they're abused and murdered as spectacle in a live-feed format. Red Room users can pay and control the activities of the spectacle.

5  The phrase 'Safety in numbers, survival in counted cans' was created collaboratively by Anchi Lin and Irina Rakina.

Published by Richmond Art Gallery to accompany the exhibition Eternal Return with artists Barb Choit, Kevin Day, Lucien Durey, Alanna Ho and Anchi Lin, September 10 – November 19, 2017.

Printed in Canada by MET Fine Printers, Vancouver.   ISBN: 978-1-926594-27-9  Copyright: Richmond Art Gallery, the artists and author, 2017

The Richmond Art Gallery received a Canada Council project grant as well as a Richmond 150 grant in the support of this exhibition. The gallery gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of the City of Richmond, Richmond Art Gallery Association (RAGA), BC Arts Council and the Province of British Columbia.

Thank you to all participating exhibition artists, the gallery and the Richmond Museum for their collaborative support, eternal enthusiasm and significant contributions to this exhibition.  Thanks also like to thank Rachel Rosenfield Lafo for her contribution and support towards multiple aspects of this exhibition.

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COUNTERACTIVE SUBTERFUGE: Sabotaging the Saboteur

This exhibition text originally appeared in the accompanying exhibition handout for A Stick In The Spokes exhibition at the Charles H. Scott Gallery in July of 2017. It is republished here with permission from the artists. 

Contemporary use of the idiom to put a stick in the spokes means to take action to impede another's progress. The origin of the expression came from the 16th century. Individuals who transported goods in carts would put a stick into the spoke of a wheel as a way to brake when descending. The spoke was a useful tool, enabling both cart and driver to arrive at their destination intact. It is correct to state that the gesture impeded the progress of the cart, but it wasn't an outright act of sabotage, as the current use of the dictum implies. A Stick in the Spokes, the 2017 Low Residency Master of Fine Arts cohort exhibition at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, uses the idiom in both ways, as a tool for understanding and also as an act of sabotage, disrupting our senses and perceptions.

Slow Spin (sculpture with plants, music and mixed media), Places We’ve Been (story sharing performance), 2017, Jennifer Ireland. Photo by Ross Kelly.

Three interconnected works by Jennifer Ireland explore light, space and story-sharing. The first work is a quartet of silent video loops, each one featuring sunlight projected onto a different plant at a certain point in its life-cycle. Enacting the seasonal and cyclic nature of the world through subtle and almost imperceptible shifts in colour, these concurrently running videos are mesmerizing to watch. Similar circadian concepts are reiterated in Ireland's Slow Spin sculpture installed nearby. A family of spider plants outgrow their current habitat in which they are nested, a scattered grouping of handmade clay bowls. Also containing a speaker, Slow Spin projects an effervescent musical offering to plants and humans alike; Mort Garson's 1976 album Mother Earth’s Plantasia, adds a spellbinding dimension to both sculpture and video installation. Ireland's final work, Places We've Been focuses on interpersonal relations. The artist invites visitors to join her in a cozy, blanket and pillow, setting adjacent to her sculpture and video. It is here where stories about place, wilderness and belonging will be shared. These three-works become soft-spoken agents of action, cultivating knowledge, observation and mindfulness, in relation to our natural world.

Godlings, 2017, Hannamari Jalovaara. Installation view, photo by Ross Kelly.

Progress, more often than not, is a long, arduous process. Hannamari Jalovaara's Godlings video series exemplifies these sentiments in more ways than one. Each of the five videos in this body of work is a culmination of multiple laborious techniques and media such as stop-motion animation, collage, and printmaking. The Godlings have come into being through repetitive gestures enacted across multiple types of digital and analog space. From print, to collage, to video, each transformation between media and signal is an investigation into what is lost, gained or changed. The same can be said for each repeated gesture in this process. As a result, these hybrid creatures exist as both originals and multiples. Jalovaara states that the filmic premise is to reflect a “pantheon of nascent gods who are in the early stages of exploring their omnipotence.” Dissected further, the videos reveal but a fractional framework of this skill-learning process. Jalovaara does not show, growth or improvement, the Godlings are trapped in a loop, forever repeating jejune gestures. One grows empathetic towards these anthropomorphic creatures; their bumbling movements remind us that excessive recurrence is critical for development.

BLOODY HELL, 2017, Karin McGinn. Collage and gouache on paper, photo by Ross Kelly. Used by permission of the artist.  

Reality bites in Mis(s)representations, a collage and gouache on paper series. Artist Karin McGinn fuses surrealist scenarios with realistic portrayals of the female figure. At the same time, she exposes a selection of acts and gestures connected to womanhood that are typically meant to be concealed as, culturally, they are often deemed grotesque. McGinn's series, both mirthful and sardonic in sentiment, forms an impressive dam against the tsunami of expectations and ideals that corrupt millions of female minds. Menstruation, body hair and objectification are presented in a raw and cheeky manner. Each piece in the series is a stick in the dam. Each series scenario acts as a lens through which the examination of taboo subjects and double standards break-down the unattainable. McGinn redirects the obsessive-compulsive drive for perfection in society towards a more comprehensive understanding of reality and self-identity.

Sini (Tray), 2017, Mehran Modarres-Sadeghi. From the series Soghat (Souvenir), 2017, photo by Ross Kelly

Soghat (Souvenir), is a collection of six sculptures; collected objects that have been shrouded in layers of thick black string. Artist Mehran Modarres-Sadeghi purposefully selected items that can be found in either Canadian or Iranian cultures. Impetus for this project came from the artist's interest in the intergenerational preservation, or decline, of culture in Iranian immigrants. The individual titles of the works, as well as their obfuscation, serve as symbolic gestures intended to bring to light the complexities of personal and collective identity when different cultures co-habit. Modarres-Sadeghi's souvenirs were originally ascribing to a particular cultural vernacular, through this enveloping process, these everyday objects transform into mysterious and alienated artifacts. Soghat (Souvenir) disrupts modes of perception, imposing interpretive constraints, it also exposes the dubious process of translation and the problematic points where critical information can be lost.

Vase For Sale by Lady Slightly Cracked, 2017, Joni Taylor. Installation view, photo by Ross Kelly 

Joni Taylor employs the genres of comedy and comic illustration in her work entitled Vase For Sale by Lady Slightly Cracked. Taylor's series playfully addresses the invisibility and voicelessness of ageing women. Three large-scale portraits of elderly women, drawn onto plywood sheets, are suspended by wire, their faces come in and out of focus as they swivel around. The backside of each portrait is painted white so as to blend (disappear) within the gallery space. Playing with scale, movement, texture, high-contrast and exaggerated line, Taylor makes the invisible, conspicuous, and unavoidable, the women are larger than life. These women have a genuineness about them, one easily projects familiar aspects of someone they know onto each series character. In shifting the serious constructs of this routinely marginalized issue towards a relatable and more playful context, Taylor's work demonstrates how individuals develop genuine concern for the topic at hand, by humanizing it.

return XI, 2017, Maria Tratt. Pencil and gouache on paper, 38.5 x 51.5 cm, photo by Carbon Life.

Maria Tratt's gouache series entitled Return is apparitional in both strategy and presentation. Human figures are skillfully rendered in high-detail, with the exception of their faces that are empty voids that reflect the same ivory paper background upon which their articulate bodies hover. Landscape and context are mostly missing in these compositions. Peppered in and amongst each work, one can find phantom-like pencil sketches of animals. Their placement sometimes seemingly random, like an afterthought, and at other times, they form an integral part of the narrative with their human counterparts. These painted and sketched realities extracted from past family photographs provoke pangs of curiosity and yearning in the viewer. The Return series summons the plethora of qualities that memory possesses. From vivid, intimate and unforgettable, to fleeting, vague and distant, Tratt modulates all frequencies of memory. Viewers are expected to run the gamut.

The work in this exhibition generates new precepts for understanding marginalization, cultural difference, personal identity, memory, repetition, and trace evidence. All six exhibiting artists highlight many forms of societal sabotage and the impediment of personal and collective progress within a variety of contexts. The work found in A Stick in the Spokes also presents visitors with an aesthetic and conceptual toolkit. In exploring the work, one can engage with a variety of spokes and spanners. Through this interaction, it will become apparent how these tools can be used to overturn preconceived ideas. This exhibition is a societal survival guide, have your sticks at the ready.

Image use granted by artists and photographer Ross Kelly.

For more information on the artists visit:

Jennifer Ireland

Hannamari Jalovaara

Karin McGinn

Mehran Modarres-Sadeghi

Joni Taylor

Maria Tratt

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TANGLED HIERARCHIES: remnants, collective endurance and strange loops

Essay by Sunshine Frère

A strange loop is a phenomenon that occurs when someone, or something, moves either upwards, downwards or through multiple levels of an abstracted hierarchical system. At some point, moving through the system, the person or thing doing the moving, unexpectedly arrives back where they or it started. MC Escher's Lithograph, Drawing Hands (1948) illustrates this concept in a succinct manner. These types of experiments form what author Douglas Hofstadter describes as a tangled hierarchy, “a complex system where beginning and ending are undefined, and even the direction or movement of a system is not apparent”i.

The Course of a Distant Empire, is an installation by artist Jay Senetchko, it consists of five large-scale paintings. The artist invites the viewer to navigate a maze of strange loops within this series. Tangled hierarchies of communal polytely and historical referencing, conflate past, present and future. All tenses collide, forming a cacophonous vortex.

A cluster of human figures feature prominently in all five paintings, the majority of them carve out a large elliptical shape in the foreground on each canvas. The group is not exactly a unified anomaly, they are more of a loose configuration of active beings, in close proximity. Process and polytely feature overtly; each individual, or small group, is focussed on the completion of a particular task: the removal of debris, the building of a fence, barbecuing, thinking, clearing snow, or even, simply relaxing. What we observe is a collective of people working, but not necessarily symbiotically towards a common goal. This central foregrounded space is simultaneously everyone's, and yet, also, no one’s; a busy commons of sorts where intertwined cycles of action and non-action recur throughout the seasons. An interesting tension is established between the individual and the collective in this series.

A sea of red poppies coats a huge portion of the surface of What the Thunder Said, a bewitching depiction of summer. The people of the commons perform contemplative gestures, relaxing on a blanket, stopping to chat, daydreaming. Traces of productivity hang in the air, the laundry is being put out to dry, truck parts, buckets and fan belts are left in limbo - part of a project that is finished, or something to start, it is not clear. This scene is arguably the most pastoral of the series; visual tropes form tethers that connect it to genre painting and even abstraction. Senetchko's colour palette, particularly in reference to the clothing on the figures, is a nod, not only to Malevich's abstract Peasant Paintings, but also to genre painters like Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and Ukrainian painters such as Nikolai Pimonenko and Vladimir Makovsky. Nature is in all its splendour at this point in the painted polyptych cycle; bright blossoms, lush greenery, and a big blue sky demonstrate the season's awe-inspiring presence.

A Game of Chess features many work strategies unfolding. Someone examines a smoking truck engine, whilst others transform tree trunk cut-offs into shingles, and others still, stack and roll away log piles. Nearly everyone is focussed on a productive task, preparing for the winter ahead. As a sun sets over a crisp sky, autumn casts a shadow into the valley. Productivity also runs throughout Death By Water. Most individuals are working away; there is an attempt to revitalize the melted cross-walk, and to salvage parts from the truck. Someone is framing up a house, whilst someone else is sowing seeds in a field in the distance in preparation for spring.

Both of these paintings are haunted by a past genre of themselves. In socialist realism, painters portrayed daily life in a celebratory manner propagating life under communist rule as idyllic; paintings often featured a happy and productive proletariat. Ukrainian and Russian painters such as Arkadiy Plastov and Tatiana Yablonskaya depicted farming folk hard at work and loving every minute of it. Senetchko used found imagery of Ukranian immigrants, as well as Ukrainians working in the Carpathian Mountains as source material for some of his figures. Productivity is infused in the painting as is pastoralism, but the sentiment of joyful labour has been subsumed by a practical and pragmatic focus. The artist introduces disparity as a harbinger of reality in these works. Absent in socialist realist painting is the messiness of productivity which is amply represented within Senetchko's work. The remnants of failed attempts are multifarious: a smoking truck, a broken down fence, the fragments of a collapsed house, old parts and tools strewn about. The neat and orderly fashion of production lines is eclipsed with a chaotic bric-a-brac collection of objects and individuals working through specific tasks, often in too-close-for-comfort proximity.

There is a vibrancy of colour found in The Fire Sermon. The painting's blood red sunset suggests the peak of summertime, heat is felt throughout the composition. It can be found in the glowing embers of a smouldering fire and in the watery white lines of a melted cross-walk. The colour red is peppered throughout, found on a jerry-can, clothing, beer cans and a barbecue.  In this work, individual appearances are at their most contemporary. Clothing design coupled with the way items are worn, serve as queues that speak to our present everyday. A tangled hierarchy presents itself in the form of understanding action and inaction within the painting. Is the fence being built, or taken apart? Are people waiting to go somewhere, or just arriving? What is going on with the scattered back lawn detritus, the result of a big party, or simply collective negligence over time? Transformation subsists in a tangled manner as well, represented in the form of the between states of the objects scattered throughout the composition.

In the heat of the summer, a tiredness and sense of boredom permeate. The individuals depicted in The Fire Sermon seem disconnected to a greater degree than any of the others in this series of paintings. Lost in solitary thought, passed out, and minimally engaged in menial chores; there is a lot of waiting and hanging around. This particular piece finds some roots within social realismii; individuals perform mundane tasks, and apathy prevails. Excess is reflected in overindulgence with alcohol, the pile of burning timber, the melted cross-walk and carelessness with cleaning up after oneself. These signs serve as subtle indicators signalling the demise of the immediate surrounds, and also, perhaps the planet and humanity itself. Reality has seeped onto the canvas, leaving one to wonder... are boredom and apathy coping mechanisms for survival in today's world?

The Burial of the Dead is the only painting where the group of individuals appear to be working collectively towards a common goal. This is also the only painting where the entire group is uniformly clad. Dark snow suits contrast against the white snow and grey-blue sky; the suits share a resemblance to biohazard outfits, we do not see skin, faces or hair: all is covered up. Nearly everyone is facing away from the viewer. It seems just as likely that these people are on a quest to find the source of an outbreak. A pile of debris burns off on the side of the open area, the houses that once stood so tall and majestic in the background have collapsed, or been dismantled: relics of a previous civilization. One cannot say if the state of the scene occurred through human intervention, natural decay or negligence. Paralleling the clothing and individual uniformity, the landscape is unified under a blanket of snow. The cold presence of winter is ubiquitous: frozen mountains, frosted trees, icy sky, and a barren snow capped truck.      

Senetchko's Course of a Distant Empire, series cycles through the canon of painting, merging genres, and coalescing time. Seasons and states of being act as pendulum swings, propelling eyes back and forth, over the polyptych spread. Several additional elements in this series invoke a non-linear way of reading the painting suite. These reinforce the set of strange loops that pirouette across the series, giving poly-rhythm to the work.

In all works of this series, landscape and perspective remains uniform, the mountains, stacked like bookends on either side of the sky, loom large. Line the series up in a row, side by side, and the peaks and valley of each painting form an undulating wavelength that has no endpoint or beginning.  Circularity and repetition is prevalent across the suite. From the earth's seasonal rotation and the constant fluctuating state of projects to the recurring placement of circular items, such as tires, buckets, hubcaps, and logs. Beginnings and endings integrate into multiple recursive loops.

Doubling occurs frequently in this series: twin houses, twin peaks, couples sitting together, people working in pairs, the lines of a white fence next to the white lines of a crosswalk. A contrapuntal cadence further expands the series, parallel dimensions open as past and future are projected simultaneously.

Quite possibly the most salient strange loop within this suite is the symbolism and life-cycle of the pick-up truck. It is a haunting talisman that stays the course. In spring, the truck appears as an abandoned red husk. Its mechanical components spread across the painted foreground like excavated bones. In fall, now purple, the truck is running, but its eventual demise is foretold. In summer, the truck is depicted in two extreme states: in pristine condition, and also as a long abandoned relic where nature staged a coup on its core, flowers blossom and cascade outwards from both the engine and interior cavities. The state of the truck in winter is indiscernible; pillows of snow hide a large portion of the body. It seems likely that the snow removal is occurring so the vehicle can be used. In this series, which constantly reconfigures activities and individuals, the truck remains a constant; however, unlike the stoic and seemingly unchanging mountains, it is an entity of fluidity. It serves as an anchor in the paintings, a primordial symbol of life, death and change.

Senetchko also incorporated the truck an abstracted homage to Théodore Géricault's Raft of Medusa. He references Géricault's triangular composition, particularly notable in The Fire Sermon painting. Géricault's pyramid composition alludes to the struggle of man and nature; the figures within each triangular grouping representing either rescue and salvation, or death and tragedy. Senetchko sees the truck a both raft and lifeline, for him the characters on the truck are: “the survivors of a societal shipwreck, riding a conspicuous symbol of mobility.” The pick-up thus becomes a problematic vessel of salvation. In The Course of a Distant Empire, salvation is not always what it seems. The pick-up's transformation loop, through which it is absorbed back into nature by way of deconstruction, decomposition and growth, emphasizes the impact and indifference between mother nature and humanity. Senetchko guides us into murky territory, salvation comes in crashing waves, with one crest threatening human annihilation, the following one promising human ingenuity. Then, yet another wave crashes down, in swirls planetary collapse, followed by an undulation of mother nature's resilience.

Senetchko's series title connects back in time to Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire, a five-part painted series focussed on pastoralism as the ideal phase of human civilization. In his era, Cole was known to have quoted Lord Byron's Canto IV when promoting his series to his contemporaries. A verse from Byron's canto eloquently highlights history's own strange loop:

There is the moral of all human tales;

'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past. First freedom and then Glory – when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption – barbarism at last. And History, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page...

Senetchko's series is also intertwined with the words of a modern writer. T.S. Eliot wrote Wasteland, an abstract poem that teeters between healing transformation and grim breakdown. The titles of each painting by Senetchko correspond to the five chapter titles found within this modernist poem. Hundreds of literary, historical and British societal references form their own interconnected web of strange loops within Eliot’s poem. Many have written about and attempted to decode it, line by cryptic line. With the lens of the present, Eliot's work is modernist triumph of hybridity. Sampling, references and appropriation collectively form both old and new meaning. The constant switching, transforming and reintegration of ideas, has an immediate resonance within our current world, where all forms of culture are endlessly cut up and collaged back together again.

This perpetual assemblage style of investigation is fascinating and hypnotic: it captures the attention of virtually all of society, keeping everyone fully distracted. As much as we are provided with limitless possibilities, we are also paralyzed by the power of too much choice, too many products and channels, and way too many opinions. Senetchko's expansive investigation into our contemporary condition essentially distils this cut-copy-paste schism down to a critical intimation. One best illustrated by one of the last lines found within Elliot's Wasteland:

These Fragments I have shored against my ruins

Senetchko's characters are practical, resourceful and resilient. But they are also wasteful and lazy; no one is perfect. Through historical tropes and visual representation, these individuals reflect a heartiness. It is this pragmatism that sustains across the series, used as a tool to combat the senselessness of life. One can see repeated attempts to decode meaning by keeping things in motion. Senetchko plays with excess, there is often detritus hanging about, but there is no real superfluity in the objects strewn from here to there. The objects are often utilitarian in nature, we primarily see industrial objects and items that could be reintegrated into other systems. Salvaging and scavenging the left-overs from previous states of existence is prevalent throughout the polyptych. A pragmatic approach that we are hard pressed to find in the buy more, buy new, buy now world that teems with products, platforms and patents at every corner. Just as with Eliot, Senetchko's characters are shoring found fragments against their ruins. The fragments are not lost - not forgotten - they are collected, stored and eventually reintegrated within the tangled hierarchy of this ever-unfolding strange loop.

But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process.

We can only control the end by making a choice at each step.

-Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

**originally published in conjunction with Jay Senetchko’s exhibition: The course of a Distant Empire in the fall of 2017.

i  Douglas Hofstadter, “I Am a Strange Loop”, (New York: Basic Books, 2008)

ii  It should be noted that Senetchko's work incorporates elements of both socialist realism and social realism.

Socialist Realism: patriotic in its intentions, this is a genre that glorifies socialist/communist values in the depiction of daily life of the proletariat

Social Realism: paintings that are intended to reflect the current state of working class and poor members of society - without the rose coloured glasses. An intentionally realistic and often critical portrayal of society  

ARTWORKS REFERENCED IN ESSAY:

Drawing Hands, 1948, Lithograph, MC Escher

Girls in A Field, 1928-1929, Kazimir Malevich (left)

Harvest Gathering in the Ukraine, 1896, Mykola Pymonenko (right)

De bruiloft dans in de open lucht (Wedding Dance in the Open Air), c1566, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (left)

Peasant Dinner in the Harvest, 1987, Vladimir Makovsky (right)

Getting Ready to Harvest, 1960, oil on canvas, Tatiana Yablonskaya

Grain, 1949, oil on canvas, Tatiana Yablonskaya

The Raft of Medusa, 1818, Théodore Géricault, oil on canvas, 193.5 x 282”

The Course of Empire Paintings, Thomas Cole, oil on canvas, 1834-1836:

Savage State, The Arcadian Pastoral State, The Consummation of Empire, Destruction, Desolation

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Paracosmic Sun at BGP

How much of what we see is actual? How much is fabricated? What possibilities for being, or communing with each other, might be affected if less normative sights were given more regard?

These questions come from the Paracosmic Sun exhibition write up, they introduce us to the essence of Annie Briard‘s ongoing investigations into enigmatic visual perception. Briard presents exhibition visitors with an opulent array of optical propositions.

Exhibiting at Back Gallery Project until March 7, Paracosmic Sun serves as a compendium of experiment results, most of which were produced last year by Briard whilst at an artist residency in Cadiz, Spain. During her tenure in Cadiz, Briard explored the many viewpoints that the city offered onto the water.

A southwestern port city, Cadiz is known for its large number of watchtowers, many of them still standing. Briard brought with her prisms that she had collected from binoculars, telescopes and other devices. She surveyed the many vantage points of the ancient city from the watchtowers through her sourced lenses.

In her research leading up to the residency Briard explored early scientific theories on how the human eye works. There have been many interesting and often outlandish ideas on how we see. In our discussion, Briard highlighted one such idea that made an impression on her – the notion that there was a crystal in the eye which allowed one to see. A few centuries later, knowledge and experimentation has revealed that the eye works differently.  Conceptually though, the idea wasn’t all that far off. After all, as Briard pointed out, the word crystal can still be found in reference to vision. Crystallin, for example, is the name of the transparent protein that is found in the lens and cornea of the eye. A mystical example of something that we don’t ‘see’, which actually enables sight.

The work in Paracosmic Sun projects and presents multiple temporal states simultaneously, states of seeing and not seeing, and also states where sight extends beyond the normal range or perception. One can see sunlight on the ocean, or the effect of light on the ocean reflected back through a prismatic lens, or one can see a paracosm. Three instances coalesced into a singular image.

Bringing awareness to multiple versions of a present state is something Briard frequently achieves in her work. For example, Horizon RGB at Back Gallery Project is a still object containing a fixed two-dimensional image of a horizon line. The work is activated so that it seems to be moving through Briard’s implementation of light phasing.

This work grew into its own state of being after Briard was unable to reproduce, to her standards, the perfect gradients that appear during sunsets in a single photograph. The prints weren’t cutting it, so she explored alternative ways of seeing gradients and the horizon. Mesmerizing to watch, this light-box installation conjures similar affective qualities to that of looking at a real-life sunset, the pulsating light allows your eyes and mind to explore the ethereal atmosphere of gradients shifting, whilst every once in a while the horizon line comes back into focus.

Briard’s film and video work highlights the tension between still and moving just as her photography works does, in fact they’re often interconnected in a recursive loop, one that is created to intentionally muddle memory and imagination. Should these formats come up short, Briard often finds alternative unique ways of representing time-space-sight-awareness.

A pragmatic interpretation of the exhibition would be that Briard’s imagery focuses on particular points at which the lens that she was experimenting with started breaking down the components of clear singular vision. Paracosmically speaking, Briard has uncovered shimmering colourful doppelgangers that were magically captured using mysterious holographic prisms.

Is what you are seeing actual or fabricated…allow your eyes to reveal and your mind to wander. Paracosmic Sun is on exhibit at Back Gallery Project until March 7th, 2017.

Back Gallery Project will also host an in-conversation event with Annie Briard and Manuel Piña onSaturday February 25th at 2pm.  Briard and Piña will discuss the work in the show, along with ideas surrounding perception, photography and technology. The talk is open to the public.

Work from this series entitled Paracosmic Land can also be seen on one of the public art columns at Aberdeen Canada Line Station. Artists Michael Love and Paolo Majano also have work on the columns at Lansdowne Station as part of the same call. The work of all three artists will be up from February until July, 2017. The project is part of the City of Richmond’s Public Art Programin collaboration with Capture Photography Festival 2017.

Annie Briard PARACOSMIC SUN February 8 – March 7, 2017 Back Gallery Project: 602 E Hastings Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6A 1R1

**This article originally appeared online for Vancouver Is Awesome. (February 2017)

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Juxtapoz X Superflat at the Vancouver Art Gallery

At the start of the 21st Century, artist Takashi Murakami connected a diverse group of artists, sub-cultures and fringe experiments. These concepts and individuals were all part of a movement that he named Superflat. Coinciding with the mass expansion of the internet across the globe, Superflat, with its counter culture and sub-sub-sub genre modus operandi, is a movement that is most definitely millennial resonant and relevant.

Which came first and who influences whom? Pop-culture, street graffiti, traditional craft, fine art, Japanese culture, western culture, consumer culture; all modes merge in the kingdom of Superflat. Here is a space where hundreds of design layers in photoshop collapse into a single jpeg and street graffiti is applied fast and furious. The genre refers to a flattening of traditional hierarchies as well as a physical flattening of flattened forms in fine art, pop art, Japanese graphic art and animation; for Murakami, Superflat also refers to the vapidity and hollowness of consumer culture.

Superflat x Juxtapoz at the Vancouver Art Gallery is curated by Takashi Murakami and Evan Pricco, Editor-in-Chief of Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine. The exhibition features artists who make art, but do not necessarily promote or sell their work within the more traditional platforms of the art market. Juxtapoz magazine and Murakami have promoted many types of artists and alternative creative explorations for years now from street and skate art to Manga and anime; the world of Superflat grew out of alternative genres of culture outside of dominant forms. Something to consider as you are moving through this impressive exhibition: there is a shift in value when these once considered fringe works are shown in an institution and/or accepted into mainstream culture – do they lose their alternative or critical edge?

Artist Lucy Sparrow’s installation Nostalgia Creeps is a perfect encapsulation of Superflat. Sparrow uses felt to make objects that imitate other objects. What you think you are looking at, is a collection of sweets on a candy trolley. There is no sugar involved though. Each and every candy object on the trolly is a soft fuzzy-felted replica of the real thing. Gummy eggs, chocolate bars, even the candy floss, all are a fantastical hyperreal illusion. In 2014, Sparrow utilized an abandoned run down shop and filled it with over 4,000 hand felted and stitched grocery store items, simulation on a grand scale. Art imitating life imitating art; the controls over consumption, production and usage are blurred. Sparrow’s sweetie trolley has a dark and fetishistic side. Like the addictive quality of sugar, your eyes are mesmerized with the trickery involved, you want to see more.

GATS (Graffiti Against the System) is an artist who began street tagging in Los Angeles over a decade ago. The artist works in a variety of media, many platforms often reference street/skating culture. GATS’ characters, presented on the backs of close to 50 skateboards, form a rich and distinct lexicon of his symbolism and style. The installation’s title, and the characters found within, are quite animated and playful. Yet, melancholy and nostalgia linger here as well.

Austin Lee’s paintings could best be described as creepy-cute. Lee’s work straddles the realm of the real and digital, often collapsing one into the other. Smother is a favourite in the exhibition, it is rather hypnotic. There is tension in the work between the paint and the digital aesthetic that Lee has rendered.

Swoon is a street artist who uses wheat paste to transfer fascinating life-size portraits of acquaintances and people in her personal life into the public realm. She started pasting on the streets of New York and Brooklyn. Additionally, Swoon has created and installed works in other cities across the USA. She also works with salvaged materials, creating diorama-like scenarios using vibrant colours and a variety of media such as cardboard, wood, fabric and string. The work pictured above is an example of her aesthetic.

Rebecca Morgan’s jugs reference Southern culture. The hideous faces on the jugs were meant to frighten kids in order to prevent them from seeking out the contents of the vessels, which usually stored alcohol. Morgan is interested in witchcraft, mysticism, Dutch Pastoral tradition and Appalachian folklore, many influences inform her work. The jugs, even though they are sculptural and textured, the caricature faces transport them into a flat cartoon-like realm.

Juxtapoz X Superflat draws inspiration from many sources, but the hierarchy of context all but disappears in this exhibition. Paintings and collage are shown next to ceramics opposite spray-painted walls, design cut-outs and found objects. Curious characters and quirky compositions unify the exhibition. They also reflect the diverse culture, interests and backgrounds of their creators.

Juxtapoz x Superflat runs from November 5, 2016 – February 5, 2017 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. For more exhibition information and gallery opening hours visit: http://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/the_exhibitions/exhibit_juxtapozxsuperflat.html

Vancouver Art Gallery – 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, BC V6Z 2H7

Juxtapoz x Superflat includes work by Nina Chanel Abney, Chiho Aoshima, Urs Fischer, GATS, Kim Jung Gi, Kazunori Hamana, Trenton Doyle Hancock, John Hathway, Todd James, James Jean, Friedrich Kunath, Austin Lee, MADSAKI, Geoff McFetridge, Christian Rex van Minnen, Rebecca Morgan, Takashi Murakami, Kazumi Nakamura, Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor, Otani Workshop, Paco Pomet, Parra, Erin M. Riley, Mark Ryden, David Shrigley, Lucy Sparrow, Devin Troy Strother, Swoon, Katsuya Terada, Toilet Paper Magazine, Yuji Ueda, Yuji Ueno, Sage Vaughn, Ben Venom, He Xiangyu and Zoer & Velvet.

**This Article originally appeared online, it was written for Vancouver Is Awesome. (November 2016)

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SPEAKING VOLUMES WITH YOUR HANDS...

Amongst a tsunami of communication, what voices make it through? What histories are revealed and what is left untold?

Artist Vanessa Brown has several stories to share with you. Pull yourself away from the busy hubbub of the city and head over to Hastings Street to spend some contemplative time with Brown’s solo exhibition entitled the Hand of Camille at Wil Aballe Art Projects.

The steel sculptures in The Hand of Camille may have been produced over the past year, but the story behind each object predates the work itself by centuries. The exhibition swirls viewers into a recursive meditation on the complexities of value and authenticity. Brown’s exhibition also explores art history as well as gender and labour politics.

The artist works intuitively with her materials, her hands and body shaping work as she goes. The resulting sculptures are stunning objects, the exhibition is a must see.

Still Life (detail), 2016, Vanessa Brown (Image by Dennis Ha)

The history of steel is most industrious, loaded with heavy-industry iconography. When one thinks of steel, the mind projects forth images of skyscrapers, railroads, engines, and bridges. Hard edged, sharp, solid and heavy. Can steel be something ‘other’? Can it look and feel like ribbon or paper? Can it occupy a different state; a more embodied one where its’ malleable and pliable qualities are more apparent? These are but a few of the questions that Brown has been working through as she continues to work with steel in her practice.

Moon Cycle (detail), 2016, Vanessa Brown (Image by Dennis Ha)

Brown is hyper-aware of the hand of the artist as she has worked as both artist and installer for other artists over the years. Where would Rembrandt be without his studio assistants to paint drapery, where would Damian Hirst be without his butterfly painting studio technicians? Where would Rodin be without Camille Claudel who sculpted many aspects of his sculptures. Brown specifically references Camille’s hand in the exhibition as Claudel’s work and life-story resonates with Brown’s life and practice.

As Brown researched Claudel’s life-story, the research, Brown’s work history and art practice converged in many ways. What emerged was this exhibition where the divisions between craft, hobby, design, art, and sculpture are muddled. Brown also meditates on the differences and similarities between artist, assistant, technician and craftsperson. This reflects back through some of the aesthetic pairings and juxtapositions in the exhibition.

Brown returns continuously to the idea of claiming space, a key concept underpins many ideas in the work. Camille Claudel fought to claim space as a female in a male dominated sculpture realm in the 1800-1900’s. Although some conditions for female artists have improved, many preconceived ideas and challenges remain. Having a voice as a female sculptor has also worked its way into the works consciously and subconsciously. Today, Brown also claims space in the present for her personal artist practice, one that is separate from her ‘day job’ in the arts. Another fascinating claiming of space by the artist is that of the physicality and ownership of labour in her work, it is an embodied practice. Brown makes sculptures that are: of, for, and from the body.

There are many beautiful gestures in this exhibition.

The artist preserved the trace of a hand that rolled a few meters of ribbon in one sculpture. A silent and visible trace of invisible labour. Brown also highlighted her hand in the production and process by incorporating Ultracal casts of her fingertips in one work, and her whole hand in another.

The exhibition installation resembles a fixed-point perspective composition, one where our eyes are centrally drawn to the key sculpture titled The Eternal Idol: The Left Hand, The Right Hand. Brown’s sculptures are three dimensional, but often speak of flatness. Each work is set up so that it is staggered one after the other, like layers of a collage, or cascading mountains in a landscape. But on the horizon, it is not the sun captivating our attention, we are drawn to a pair of hands, that are flat, fractured and larger than life. The fragments/ligatures also resemble a shadow of two figures, linked together in a monochromatic wash and fixed in place, upright.

We should listen more to our hands. In gestures, a multitude of insight is revealed.

Vanessa Brown’s exhibition The Hand of Camille closes on October 22nd.

For more exhibition information visit: http://www.waapart.com/. To visit the exhibition head to: Wil Aballe Art Projects (WAAP): 688 East Hastings. WAAP is open from Tuesday – Saturday 11am-5pm or by appointment.

For more information about Vanessa Brown visit: http://vanessa-brown.com/Information

Eternal Idol: The Left Hand, The Right Hand (after Rodin), 2016, Vanessa Brown (Image by Dennis Ha)

This Article originally appeared online for Vancouver is Awesome. (October, 2016)

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Something's Happened Here

Exhibition Essay for Expo 86 An Unofficial History 

Pendulum Gallery, August 15 - September 17, 2016

Curated by Sunshine Frère & Chris Keatley

Something's Happened Here

Each memory that we have is both a mutation and a convergence. Memory, is its own event horizon: a point of no return, beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. The latter half of the definition makes sense, no one can conjure your memories, they are specific to you alone. It is often said that you can't relive the past, an obvious statement in the physical and temporal sense. But now, we also know that, even in your memories, you literally can't relive anything. Your mind is constantly recalibrating the far past; in fact, all of the past is only ever a record of a more immediate recollection of itself. Similar to a game of telephone, when we envision an old memory, we are never recalling a specific isolated experience, we are recalling the, most recent, previous memory of that experience...which was actually a memory of the previously recalled version before that, and so on, and so forth.

Intertwined with past experience, overlain with existing knowledge, informed by the humdrum of our current bodily circumstance, and connected to the vibrations of our present mental state, each memory is never remembered the same way twice.

With this in mind, where does one begin to tell the collective story of an event that is thirty years past? Expo 86 spanned over 70 hectares and 164 days, it had over 22 million visitors. Apart from the 2010 Olympics, this event is likely British Columbia’s and Vancouver's largest collectively remembered event in history.

There are the known facts on Expo 86 that can be found on Wikipedia and via several other official information channels. But there are also the millions of memories that were created over the course of the fair's six month run. One can't even begin to imagine the mutations and convergences of these stories over the past thirty years.

It was a surprisingly laborious task gathering, scanning and printing images for this exhibition, over 200 photos were reviewed from 80 different sources. Describing the curatorial methodology and preparation for the show is an even more arduous task. It was a strange process, often guided heavily by intuition. As an 'unofficial history', perhaps the process and explanation are less interesting than final result. Officially, what should be known is that this exhibition represents an unconventional set of interpretations of Expo 86.

Visitors are invited, to wade their way through the pastel short-shorts and knee high socks. The bright primary coloured, lego-like architecture will serve as a visual harbinger, activating personal memories. Soon, these stories of magical ticket fairies, bizarre street performances and unforgettable road trips will resonate in the mind's eye.

Tune into all of these different intensities, let the frequency take hold.

Images featured above are of Mackenzie, Emma and Sunshine Frère who were 7, 9 and 10 when they visited the fair. 

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Sonic Meanderings: MASHUP at Vancouver Art Gallery

The MASHUP exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery is, in one word, BIG.

It spans a century’s worth of art and history and all four floors of the gallery. Try not be too overwhelmed, there are only around 370 works of art to look at by over 150 artists. No big deal. You have two weeks of holiday time to kill… right?

Honestly, that is what you need. There is a lot of ground to cover. With less than a week left to explore this exhibition you need a plan of attack. How does one explore this explosive representation of 100+ years in art and culture in a single visit? Perhaps the answer would be to not over think it. Instead, why not take a sonic dérive through the exhibition.

Give your cones and rods a break, heaven knows they are overworked thanks totwitt-insta-chat-book. Let your ears be your guide and open up to the expansive and subtle power of the oracular. Allow your tympanic membrane, hammer, anvil, stirrup and cochlea to envelop your mind. Here is a proposal to bring forth different type of sensitivity and a new understanding. Feel the vibrations and convert your passive hearing into to active listening.

YOUR SONIC DERIVE STARTS HERE: POUNCE!…. s a u n t e r ….. ATTACK, plink, plonk, meow, thump! Cat video choreography and an innovative piano composition, these co-joined elements could easily go amiss as they are hidden in the corner of the entrance of MASHUP. They are somewhat eclipsed by a visually arresting and pulsating wall of digital screens right at the exhibition entrance. If you walk by these cats, you just might miss the secret to unlocking the key to Mashup.

If you are facing the multi-screen installation, look to the doorway nook on your right to find one of the best works in the show. Cory Arcangel’s remake of Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 11 entitled Drei Klavierstücke (aka Three Piano Pieces) uses coding, youtube, and the cats of the internet, to recreate Schoenberg’s 1909 Opus; a work that was considered a new departure in composition at the turn of the 20th Century.

Arcangel’s piano-feline fuelled video trifecta is a brilliant gem. With so many intersecting conceptual layers it is impossible to know where to begin. By watching and listening, you may think that this is just a collection of random cat videos that are all tied together by the fact that they are all pouncing on piano keys. (There are over 170 featured videos total) However, what you are hearing is a piece of avant-garde composition that caused quite a commotion in its day. The work could be considered a form of aural abstraction, it is not easy to listen to, nor to follow, but try. It may open up something else in your mind entirely.

Stills from Arcangel’s Drie Klavierstücke, 2009

Drei Klavierstück is noted as the point where Schoenberg did away with the last traces of tonality and common-practice harmony in his music, a practice that was deeply embedded in western music for centuries. In 1909, this was quite the radical move.

Works like this create fissures for others to investigate, explore, and question. New ideas emerge, by connecting together multiple experimental concepts.

Flash forward to today, what does that mean when a seminal work is then re-appropriated by a hacker who wanted to see it remade with cats playing the piano from the internet? Given the complex algorithmic analysis involved in replicating the composition with hundreds of videos, some would argue it is a stroke of genius already, but perhaps it will take the context of 100 years from now for us to fully comprehend the significance of this particular remix. All will be revealed, no, wait, scratch that…reconfigured.

This is the heartbeat of Mashup – cut, copy, paste – histories & fictions told, retold, merged, replicated and constantly reinterpreted. Consider time as cyclical not linear, you’ll go further in this adventure if you do.

MOVING ALONG: Also on the first floor, your ears can escape the busy bustle of the visitors to the gallery. Cover them up by putting on a headphone set and explore the Grey Album by Danger Mouse. As you listen, you’ll hear vocal tracks by rapper Jay Z from his Black Album intermingling with songs from the Beatles’ White Album. Released in 2004, the Grey Album was incredibly controversial as it exploded the conversation on sampling and copyright in music in America. Danger Mouse considered this an art project and had intended to produce small limited edition of 3,000 album copies.

Mouse had permission from the two surviving Beatles and Jay Z to do so. But then, Beatles copyright holder EMI caught wind of the project which was fast gaining critical attention, they ordered production and distribution to stop. In a grand gesture of electronic civil disobedience, activist group Downhill Battle posted copies of the album for download for a 24-hour period where over 100,000 copies were downloaded.

Can sampling and riffing be considered as tools and techniques to illustrate a new idea, or is the original sample so powerful, that it cannot be hybridized and amalgamated into a new form? Ultimately, it comes down to perspective… What do you hear? The White Album, the Black Album, or something fluttering between these worlds? A new departure perhaps?

One final aural challenge on the first floor:

Explore the installation titled Plywood City by artist Ujino Muneteru with your eyes closed, no peaking!

Sculpturally the work is fascinating to look at, the artist has created an orchestra out of tools, crates, domestic appliances, a record player, a guitar, bits and bobs, and machinery. Close your eyes and have a listen. You’ll hear a myriad of beats and timbres that ebb and flow throughout the room. Welcome to the wonderfully chaotic world of Experimental Noise Music. Have a friend, or maybe a total stranger, walk you around the room so you can experience the surround sound of the installation. In addition to hearing the noises produced by this orchestra, you’ll likely also experience expressions of awe and wonder from other visitors taking in the piece.

Ujino installation view

Quietly, walk back to the heart of the exhibition, enter into Barbara Kruger’s monochromatic installation in the circular staircase. Remain quiet, taking in the sounds as you walk up the marble stairs. Turn right on the second floor and head up on the escalators to the third floor. You will be skipping the second.

Installation view of Barbara Kruger’s site specific work Untitled (Smashup)

On the third floor, find your way over to the John Cage work which features two small grey speakers flanked on either side of a framed graphic musical score. The work, entitled Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-1958) is a composition that redefined the constructs of what one could call music. The score is actually 63 pages long, and basically, you can think of it as a choose your own adventure piece. Each performative iteration of this work could feature as many or as little performers as deemed necessary, any of the 84 “types” of composition found within the work could be played in part or in their entirety.

John Cage’s Concert for Piano & Orchestra

Have a listen to the piece, consider it’s limitations within this exhibition. It is within a large room with many people wandering about, next to a moving sculpture that makes noise, and the speakers are small and not very powerful. Then consider that, this version of the piece that you hear, with the exception of recording technology, could never be reproduced in the same way. Ever. Even if one tried, the performers would be different people, the location where the piece was performed would have changed and so on. There is no defining ‘version’ of this work, which begs the question, can there ever be for any piece? The idea of this type of open-ended composition and performance has led to the offspring of hundreds, if not thousands, of projects exploring composition, music and time in so many exciting ways. Cage understood the concept of open-source long before it became popularized in computing, art and music in the early 2000’s.

With your mind blown, allow your thoughts settle in your mind as you meander over to the escalators and head up to the fourth floor.

Installation View, third floor, MASHUP.

Look for a room that features wooden frames and collage works on paper. Then locate a piece entitled Ursonate (1922-1932) by poet Kurt Schwitters. The poem is an absurdist work exploring sound through abstraction. Pure nonsense, and intensity. See if you can settle in to listen to the work in its glorious eighteen minute entirety. It is a difficult but fascinating thing to listen to. Schwitters performed the work first in 1925, he continued to develop it over the span of ten years. Schwitters was an interdisciplinary artist he worked in poetry, sound, painting, collage, sculpture, graphic design and installation art.

Once the staccato dust of the vowels and consonants settles…

Make your way along the fourth floor to the room featuring large black box sculptures that have cone like extensions. Welcome to the the Intonarumori room. A space dedicated to presenting working replicas of, futurist composer, Luigi Russolo’s instruments. If you were lucky, you would have had the chance to witness a performance of these instruments. Although these little beasts are silent, you can still hear what they sounded like in original recordings of the original instruments exist online. Russolo invented the Intonarumori in 1914, his first official concert with the instruments caused a riot. Russolo proposed that noise and the hums, bangs, hisses, booms, creaking and rustling of the city could be music. He performed a program comprised of what he called networks of noises. Pause here for a while and ruminate on what these may have sounded like.

Russolo’s Intonarumori, installation view.

Russolo’s provocative gesture of stating that all noise is music came true. In the many decades that have followed, musicians and composers have pretty much experimented with and intermingled any type of noise(s) you can think of; including cats jumping on pianos, abstract sound poetry and electrical appliances. You name it, they have played with it.

This concludes your sonic dérive, an aural mashup of MASHUP. May your ears guide you back through the exhibition and out into the sounds of the street.

All images taken by Sunshine Frere.

This sonic derive originally appeared online for Vancouver Is Awesome, May 2016.

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PHOTOGRAPHS AND FRAGMENTATION

I met with Randy Grskovic about 48 hours after he had arrived in Vancouver from Toronto. He described his first two days back, in what he calls his ‘home city’, as… awesome.

In that short period he had visited more exhibitions than many locals do in a month. Field Contemporary, Gallery Jones, Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Winsor Gallery, Equinox Gallery, the Mashup exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Rennie Collection, and there were probably others as well. This was only the start of Grskovic’s re-immersion into Vancouver’s art-sphere.

Grskovic was back in town to install work that is part of Capture Photography Festival. Capture has taken over nearly all of Vancouver’s exhibition spaces during the month of April. The city is dedicated to photography for the month in a very big way. In our meeting Grskovic discussed his practice and his exhibition at Burrard Arts Foundation. We also chatted about a multitude of other fascinating things. Judging by the energy that he exuded during his interview, there is no doubt that, post-interview and exhibition set-up, Grskovic went on to see another forty exhibitions before he left for Toronto.

Grskovic was an active artist, collaborator and exhibition curator in Vancouver for several years. In 2013, he opted for a change of scenery, job and city and moved to Toronto. So far, so good, he is busy acquiring a new perspective of the Canadian Art scene and immersing himself in darkrooms. His practice has grown and shifted. During our encounter, the many ideas and sensibilities that scatter across his art-making were fascinating to explore as he wove the story of his past into the present.

“I never worked in a darkroom until I moved to Toronto. My practice when I lived in Vancouver was collage. When I went to art school, I already knew how to draw and paint so I ended up taking video art because I wanted to learn a new skill. ‘Young Randy’ thought, if I am paying for school, I might as well be learning a new skill. So I worked a lot with video, then I realized that I really liked working with found imagery… I would build these video sculptures that would play these found images. As I finished school I couldn’t afford to create giant video sculptures, nor did I have the space. Plus student loan payments were coming in. Out of the reality of economy I started making these machines out of paper and also collage works. I was focused on collage work for a long time. But for me, it wasn’t just about the paper, it was also about the publications and their historical context.”

“I worked with magazines like National Geographic or Popular Mechanics, I would cut out machine parts and create these fantastic machines. Then I started thinking beyond that and what does it mean to have a published, printed image. Before an image appears in a publication there is already such a wealth of filters (editors) that it went through, and of course, I also thought about the distribution…I started creating what looked like digital collages based on the replication of the images I was using. It was really interesting, even the printed quality is different between magazine copies, some are more saturated, some have faded. You really notice this when you put them together. Even though they are meant to be identical copies, you see all this variation!”

“I’d also go on Ebay and collect additional editions of different magazines that I wanted more copies of. A lot of this doesn’t show through the work but the process for me is so fascinating. I always hope that people have different access points through the work and then through conversations like this, I can expand on my motivations for making work… As an artist, I don’t think that I make pieces, I hope that I make conversations”.

“Whilst I was looking on Ebay for magazines, I started finding negatives that interested me.” Grskovic enjoyed the contrast between the ubiquitous diffusion of publications versus the personal more intimate presence of these original negatives. Eventually Grskovic’s negative searches led him to glass negatives and into the dark room at Gallery 44 in Toronto. The glass negatives are part of his newest work currently on exhibit at the Burrard Arts Foundation. The exhibition is titled Earth to Earth, Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust.

“In my older paper collage work, I’d scan it and post it on my tumblr. The collage actually looked better on the internet because it became a light box. I think that is a really interesting thing about contemporary art now, people are consuming so much more art through screens as opposed to books. The collage works become personal light box pieces for everyone who finds it. These works were interesting in real life, but they definitely acquired a strong online viewership through their bright online output.”

For Grskovic, the prints he has been working on perfecting in the darkroom were intended to evoke a different effect. Competing with the sexy backlit glow of the digital, he challenged himself to create prints where the analog is more beautiful and seductive than a light box. He may have succeeded, the work at BAF is pretty spectacular.

His selenium toned, monochromatic prints create intense and lush black voids which beguile the viewer. Many works in the show evoke movement through high-low contrast shifts, layering, cuts and breaks. The paper seems reflective and shimmers, it interacts with light sources as the viewer moves from one side of a work to the next.

Grskovic’s art has always been process heavy, these new works are not any different. He is no stranger to spending hours trolling through negatives for sale and tirelessly triaging ‘items to watch’ lists on Ebay. Nor is he afraid to smash a century old original negative and then spend three days, and multiple chemical processes to create a print – only to discover that the process may need to be tweaked, then completely redone should the desired result not be attained.

Through this type of process driven work, meaning and context slowly accumulates. Presentation and editing are key factors, but it is also important to note that a great deal of thought and investigation is spent throughout all of that time in which the artist perfects technique. Grskovic has considered so many angles as part of the context for this body of work. It informs and interprets the canons of art history, internet culture, documentation and capitalism.

The work also explores: memory, greek sculpture, portraiture, interpretation, mimicry, idolization, the role of the artist, the anonymity of the photographer, analogue process and so much more. Conceptually, the work splinters off like a rhizome in all directions.

“In the dark room, I am using light, water, paper and glass. I am using all of these natural materials that have been refined and perfected, it’s scientific, it’s chemistry. How do I bring this process to light? I am making work that I feel is strong conceptually and aesthetically… But I’d like to lift the curtain a little bit on the process… That makes me think of The wizard of OZ! Ha ha!”

“My next goal, after this exhibition, will be to try to communicate more of the process behind the production of photography. I often use Instagram to document this process. I am hopeful that someone, one day, will mess up my photographic ones and zeros just as I’ve done to these negatives, or as I have done with collaged magazine imagery.” It would be an interesting to see what a mashup of a ‘Grskovic smashup’ would look like.

Grskovic’s series work in the second annex room at the Burrard Arts Foundation space, delineates a Memory series that starts with a negative that is smashed once, with each successive printed iteration of the image it has been further smashed until it is obliterated. This suite of images is critical, not only to his exhibition at BAF, it also offers great insight into the artist’s obsessive, process driven and image based practice. Perhaps to fully understand an image, it must be be taken apart, reconfigured and reassembled.

“Humans are always looking for patterns in things and trying to fill in the gaps, so a lot of my work is about approaching the viewer with holes so that hopefully they can fill in the gaps.”

Earth to Earth, Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust is on exhibit at Burrard Arts Foundation until May 14th. BAF is open Tuesday – Saturday noon-5pm.

More about Randy Grskovic: http://www.randygrskovic.com/ More about Burrard Arts Foundation: http://www.burrardarts.org/ More about Capture Photography Festival: https://capturephotofest.com/

This interview originally appeared online for Vancouver is Awesome. (April, 2016) All images are courtesy of Randy Grskovic. 

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THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO LEARN THE ALPHABET

An abstract on The Indexical, Alphabetized, Mediated, Archival Dance-a-Thon! by Sunshine Frère

**This abstract was originally written and published as a risograph publication in collaboration with Erica Wilk of Moniker Press and WAAP (Wil Aballe Art Projects).  All Exhibition documentation images by Michael Love.  More information about Evann Siebens’ practice can be found here: http://evannsiebens.com/**

Impulse. Neurons fire, electrochemical pulsing, eyes blink and focus, legs leap, arms reach, heart is beating, veins are constricting, lungs exhale, throat burns, sweat trickles down. Go, stop.

Intertwine thought with movement and affect, venture deep into the unconscious. Deconstruct this process so intensely that any vestiges of thought are obliterated, there is only room for action. Muscles seize the minutiae of each gesture from the brain. Movement is monumental. To dance is to perform a complex technological act.

What is elastic? What can be updated, abandoned, protected, activated and eternally reinterpreted? What invokes memory recall and identity projection simultaneously? From the socio-political to the technological and cultural, what vibrates amongst a multiplicity of intersecting constructs? It is old, young, outdated and contemporarily relevant. Photographs, registers, diaries, film, video and ephemera... History, mythologies, people and places. The archive is alive.

Look. Listen. I want you to see and hear this. Most important- ly, commit it to memory. This is a movement, a call to action. This, is a modus operandi. It is not like anything that has come before. It is bold, earnest and unapologetic. It means some- thing, right here, right now. Allow this new line to be drawn. Let the decay of past technologies and timeworn methodologies to serve as a marker. That, was how they did it. It is not how it will be done from today. Nor how we will do it in the future. Look. Listen. I want you to understand.

Frozen, attention, closeup, sign, signifier, symbolic, emblematic, problematic, representing, resembling, copy, original, doppelgänger, looking, feeling, observed, inferred, inherent, icon, iconic, visionary, sustaining, suggestive, reductive, distilled, gesture.

Collaboration is acknowledging the interval. The space be- tween your idea and another’s. It is about recognizing the gaps between intention, reality and perception. Deep connectivity is rare and fleeting. It is impossible to describe the exploding energy between one body and another as plural actions become unified. When this happens, it feels as though ideas propagate themselves.

Endurance is a conversation with a situation. By nature, situations are circular yet also iterative and generative. Conversations are omnidirectional. Time is the sole score-keeper. There are no differences between the obsolescence of technology, the stamina of a dancer, the degradation of a film, the propagation of ideas and the rules of inertia. 

The core of TMA (The Mediated Archive) is a hybrid structure dedicated to illuminating multiple composites of the archive. Location, time and performers are presented concurrently but not synchronously. TMA incorporates digital and analog technologies. It is activated across 26 monitors and media players. Each screen acts as a reflexive mirror against the two dimensional lexicon index presented on an adjacent wall. The archive is comprised of a decades’ worth of dance footage (film and video), captured solely by the archivist. Each film in the archive is not a film, it is a collaboration. The camera, a part of the archivist’s corporeal schema, is not following the dancer, nor is the dancer following the camera/archivist, they move in unison, there is no male or female gaze, there are only moments of intensity and sequences of connectivity. The core of TMA acts as a surface zero for the entire archive. All layers, materials, planes, light rays and sound waves radiate outwards from the structure. Gestures and sequencing on each monitor act as free agents, intermingling with the debris of lived experience, a multiplicity of transient pasts and projected expectations.

The corps de ballet is a powerful and collaborative machine. It consists of approximately twenty-four corps (dancers). Each is integrally bonded to all other members. Like a set of lungs, the stage circumference of the corps synchronously expands and contracts. Proprioceptive shifts are detected, measured and adjusted in real time. Collective layers of information are mediated through individual gestures. Any slight variance in delineation, acceleration or stance is immediately noticeable. Each individual is a body within a body. The corps de ballet is a networked and fully integrated, protoplasmic circuit.

Spark. Electricity, wires, cables, connections, circuits, capacitors, limiters, memory, drives, files, code, programming, processing, switches, screens, sound waves, movement, light rays. One, zero. On, Off.

EPILOGUE

Alpha was never clear how to get from A to Z. She always got lost around L,M,N,O,P and no one had ever taken the time to explain the importance of navigating H and Q. Her manual was of no use, it could not transpose phoneme coordinates in any sort of legible manner. Additionally, it never provided a proper structural schematic. Her research became so frustrating that she thought, I’ll never find it. I might as well take it apart and put it away. So that is what she did. She dismantled each component, carefully inspecting how it was positioned and integrated into the system. She took meticulous notes and drafted hundreds of diagrams. The data accumulated for years. Every position was logged and every perspective notated. This deconstruction led to new insight. She presented her findings to the Phonemographical Society, the Lexicon Coven Corpus and the Linguistic Masons. Each party had reservations about different parameters of the experiment. Collectively they all said, “Ms. Bet, this is not a controlled experiment, it will never work.” She persevered. There is no such thing as a controlled experiment, she thought. There is always trace residue, there are always fingerprints. They connect to other maps.

It was only ten years later, after her mysterious disappearance, that her work became known as the canon for language mapping. Alpha never told anyone, but she found Z. She had mapped out the route. It was as clear as day. She laughed that no one had ever seen it before, as it was always there.

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Spectres of Desire at Franc Gallery

Purple haze all in my eyes, don’t know if it’s day or night, you got me blowin’, blowin’ my mind. Is it tomorrow, or just the end of time? – Jimi Hendrix

Spectres of Desire, Installation View

Once something is seen, it cannot be un-seen. Spectres of Desire is Karen Zalamea’s exhibition of photographic work at Franc Gallery. The show’s title implies that all is not what it seems. And indeed, it isn’t. Zalamea invites visitors to “reconsider what photography can be, the forms that it can take, and the different ways that photographs and meaning can be made.”

Visitors embark on an entropic voyage in this space as they explore the chimeric qualities of light and materiality. Zalamea’s glimmering visions stretch beyond the realm of photography. The works quickly become desiring vortices, activating mind, memory, and multiple states of being/sensing.

Light and Variation 3, 2015

When a concept is learned, it is absorbed into a knowledge database, retrievable at will. Once a skill is memorized, it becomes reflex – thought activation no longer required. Zalamea’s work permeates, like a purple haze, between these before and after states. Images unravel before you at an unpredictable pace. Her work swings, swells, hums, falls and shakes. How each piece is explored changes dramatically each time it is re-visited. There is great tension between fixed variables and speculation within this body of work.

Perhaps Zalamea should be thought of as a composer or choreographer, as opposed to photographer. Though the work is focussed in the visual realm, she has created a set of scores that resonate and vibrate. The work awakens within the viewer haptic and sonic impulses; rhythm and movement within. The moiré shimmer of one Light Variation contrasts with the digital flicker of another. The ethereal lightness of being in yet another Light Variation contrasts against the solid presence of geometric volume and weight within a neighbouring work. Anomalies and hyper-precision collide causing disruptive portals, whilst repetition soothes, swirls and softens.

Spectres of Desire, Installation View

It is difficult to describe what you are looking at, when viewing Zalamea’s photographic work. When prompted to divulge the technique behind her compositions, the artist remains general in her description about her analogue process. The impulse is justified. Explaining in detail the underlying processes involved does the complexity of the work no justice.

The strength of this body of work is its liminality. Forget understanding the technique, tools and materials. The ah-ha moment here is correlative to the potentiality within each composition. Embrace abstract thought; let the mind wander.

Light and Variation 5, 2015

And brace yourselves … this could be that time. That time when you live a visceral experience that resonates within the core of your being. Your senses will shift into high alert and your mental processing will explode outwards to the realm of meta-understanding. THIS could be THAT moment.

Spectres of Desire is on exhibition at Franc Gallery until April 9th. Franc Gallery is open Tuesday – Saturday, noon to 6:00pm. This exhibition is also part of Capture Photography Festival.

More information on Karen’s Art Practice: http://www.karenzalamea.com/ More information on Franc Gallery: http://www.francgallery.com/ More information on Capture Photography Festival: https://capturephotofest.com/

Franc Gallery 1654 Franklin Street, Vancouver, BC

Spectres of Desire, Installation View

This article originally appeared online for Vancouver is Awesome. (April 2016). All images courtesy of the artist, Karen Zalamea.

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JIGGERY POKERY

THE WORK OF ANGELA GROSSMANN AND DREW SHAFFER

An essay by Sunshine Frère

Collect, sculpt, sand, paint, sew, disseminate - this is where the likes of Angela Grossmann and Drew Shaffer can be found. Having met in a vintage shop, they bonded over their common obsession with old ephemera and imagery. It was at that time that a game of connections and associations began. Anything and everything became part of the rules of play. Fashion, writing, food, philosophy, photography, gossip, poetry and art - no topic taboo, no stone left unturned. For over a decade now, Grossmann and Shaffer's exchanges have endured and flourished.

Jiggery Pokery is an exhibition of new work by both artists. An expression with two meanings, jiggery pokery can be used to describe objects that have been cobbled together using bits and bobs, but it can also mean to be up to some type of trickery. A truly apt title for Shaffer and Grossmann who, by using whatever they've got on hand to get the job done, transform objects and images into fantastical apparitions. This exhibition is a collaboration of sorts, but most importantly, it is a new way for these two artists to play their game.

THE THINGS YOU THINK ARE PRECIOUS, I CAN’T UNDERSTAND, 2015, Drew Shaffer, 18 x 11 x 14” mixed media

Parameters for the show were drafted early on: Shaffer and Grossmann would make pieces separately, and neither would see the other's work until just prior to gallery installation. Potentially problematic, yes. However, both artists had confidence in the output of each other’s respective practices. Collaboratively, they installed both sets of work in the gallery. These imposed parameters played a part in Grossmann and Shaffer producing a body of work that is comprehensively resolved, yet exploding with probability.

BALLOON, 2015, Angela Grossmann, mixed media collage, 16 x 20 inches, (detail) (left)

Grossmann works two dimensionally, producing complex figurative collages using found photographs, paint, fabric and paper. Shaffer works with found objects, creating surreal sculptures that often seem to possess human qualities. Together, their work hovers in an aether composed of memory, self-projection and emotion.

My work uses likenesses of people who are long gone. So, they've got that echo of being familiar, but at the same time not existing anymore. I think I like to play between that which is still current and that which is gone, but also what remains that we have a connection to.  What is the humanity that crosses over from then to now? It's all about that bridge. - Angela Grossmann

Striped Shorts, 2015, Angela Grossmann, mixed media collage, 20 x 16”

Angela Grossmann's work is embedded within the active process of projection. She is cognitive of the fact that when someone looks at a figurative photographic image, they will always project personal histories and memories onto it. Susan Sontag defines “melancholy objects” as things that are born of distance, or separation from reality.i Preliminary analysis of Grossmann's work reveals that the artist often emphasizes such a separation. Her subjects are of another era, at least four or five decades ago, their vintage hairstyles and clothing transport the viewer back in time. Grossmann also works predominantly with copied black & white photographs - melancholy naturally seeps out of this medium.

Further investigation of the work reveals the critical manner in which the artist's subjects have been torn apart and reconfigured. Grossmann's signature compositional style, which includes multiple perspectives, concurrently overlapping, and intentionally visible traces of process, adds layers of unpredictability and anxiety into the work. Her figures are mutant, each one a hybrid of males, females and inanimate objects. Limbs, appendages and a range of perspectives are expertly corralled together creating a powerfully loaded visualization. Her work highlights movement, fragmentation and ambiguity. Unapologetically extant, these poised characters command attention.

David, 2015, Angela Grossmann, mixed media collage, 16 x 20”

French theorist Roland Barthes observed, “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”ii Thirty years after this observation, viral immediacy and ubiquity of images means that society lives through events collectively - regardless of being present in the single instant of the image taking. Photographic variations of an instant are virtually posted by multiple participants, simultaneously as they unfold. Numerous others immediately have access to the image, sharing it, copying it, or becoming anxious over the fact that they missed the event in the instant it was shared. Today, the isolated-but-simultaneously-shared-experience prevails with maximum intensity and hyper-frequency.  

The energy of this frenzied, insatiable image consumption exists in Grossmann's work. Simultaneity of instances is both implied and compositionally produced. In this case, the artist acts as a shaman of time: she wrestles with a flurry of fragmented faces, body parts and poses, while expertly channeling a plurality of human presences into a series of unique, contemporary deities. Her figures represent collective modulations of the individual. Each one is magnetic, an all-seeing entity with an amaranthine gaze - always becoming, always unfolding. Thus, through constant re-directing of focus, Grossmann heightens and prolongs the viewing experience.  

Puppet, 2015, Angela Grossmann, mixed media collage, 16 x 20”

Brusque, torn paper and tattered fabric remnants stand in high contrast to precise, photocopied body parts and pristine, painted surfaces. Grossmann’s collage work has an elastic quality to it. Visual comparisons between monochrome and colour, or past and present, push and pull the viewer. Sometimes, like a boulder from a catapult, a figure strikes out at the viewer’s conscience with a deep intensity. At other times the artist’s compositions undulate between posed stillness and movement, gently stirring up thoughts and emotions.  

Highly theatrical, Grossmann's work reveals the complex interplay between multiple types of performance: the circus, playing house and dress-up, pin-ups, puppets and dolls. Each concept comes with a set of pre-determined tropes: seduction, innocence, comedy, pathos, vulnerability, control, curiosity, gender-play and identity.  

Grossmann methodically sustains viewer perception in a world where disruption is the social norm. This collage series is powerful. But yet, each figure employs a type of resistance to 'being seen'.  In fact, many types of resistance lie within her figures, they defy one-dimensionality. Refusing to be stereotyped, they object to being fully male or female, they deny standing still, and they will most definitely not accept being a part of a singular narrative.

I'VE DONE EVERYTHING I CAN TO MAKE YOU COMFORTABLE, 2015, Drew Shaffer, 6 x 17 x 6”, mixed media

I am interested in how we choose to define ourselves by what we own. The general view of the object, when desired, is that it is hip. My general view is that it becomes more interesting when it’s not hip anymore, when it’s discarded. It's not trying to prove itself anymore... I often turn the use of a functional object into more of a narrative, or metaphor. It's a different kind of practicality. - Drew Shaffer

In his work, Drew Shaffer explores the complexity of language and meaning across aesthetic and conceptual realms. The titles of his sculptures incorporate puns and double entendres, and are frequently infused with poetic, lyrical and pop-cultural references. It is difficult to know which came first, the sculpture, or the title. Visually, the work reinforces the title's implied meanings, encouraging metaphors in the viewer’s mind. Shaffer's sculptures are accessible and open.

The work featured in Jiggery Pokery explores inter-human exchanges: empathy, love, detachment, mis-understanding and personal struggle. Each work deals with a particular feeling or cognitive sensitivity.  It is inevitable that humour and emotion are folded into the reading of the work. Thus, through the act of projection, the sculptures turn into vulnerable and sensitive entities.

Exhibition Installation View, 2015

Each work has a special aesthetic charm all of its own. Shaffer converts vintage and found objects into something 'other', something seemingly human. Works are imbued with elements of memory, desire and ridicule. Shaffer uses three main strategies to do this: through the word-play of his titles, through shifts in scale, and through the skewing an object’s function. These are works that exaggerate scale, and embrace qualities of absurdity and whimsy, works that transform an object’s function, and activate the imagination, creating dynamic new narratives and meaning. Shaffer is engaged with the ontology of kitsch.iii Each sculpture challenges both its origins and its current existence.

In the work entitled I Hate What You're Doing To Me, the viewer is invited to interact with the sculpture. They become the person who is doing the one thing that the sculpture hates having done to it. In the work I Can't Protect You From Yourself, the work is visibly self-destructing. The title serves as an empty statement, one that speaks truth, but also, gesturally falls flat. All of the works in Jiggery Pokery are symbolic representations of emotional turmoil. As Shaffer states, “They are ridiculous, but then again, so is life! We all put ourselves in these absurd circumstances”.  

I HATE WHAT YOU'RE DOING TO ME, 2015, Drew Shaffer, 30 x 39 x 10”, mixed media

Like Grossmann, Shaffer is invested in and aware of the melancholy that can be attributed to objects; however, his strategy in playing with this concept is different. Preliminary analysis of his work demonstrates that he attempts the opposite of Grossmann; he works to eclipse the symbolism originally attributed to his objects, as opposed to emphasizing it. The familiar becomes uncanny, as the purpose of the object is transposed into an alternative narrative. Push-pins become Pearl Necklaces, shingles and finial transform into faces, and speakers grow ears. Many layers of perception can be teased out of this work; Shaffer intentionally creates work that revels in bemusement. He synthesizes emotions with senses and the power of the past with the force of the new.  All elements crystallize and coerce viewers to scrimmage with reality, imagination and remembrance.

Experiencing Angela Grossmann and Drew Shaffer's works is much akin to trying to conceive of the present tense in the actual present. Change is the only constant; it is impossible to simultaneously experience, define and understand. With every nanosecond crashing into the next, the viewer is eternally adjusting how to sense and think through the jiggery pokery. This exhibition envelops the viewer entirely. It is a game between two artists; it is always in motion. Together, Shaffer and Grossmann welcome you into a timeless prototopia. Almost a place ... definitely a feeling.

Angela Grossmann & Drew Schaffer

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iSusan Sontag, On Photography (USA, Picador, 1977) 49.

iiRoland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York, Hill and Wang, 1982) 4.

iiiCeleste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of Kitsch Experience (New York, Pantheon, 1998)

Olalquiaga's Ontology of Kitsch: The perceptual process that eventually leads to kitsch is that aspect of experience constituted by what consciousness leaves out: the intensity of the lived moment. Anachronistic by definition, the unconscious perception focuses precisely on all those distressing sensations that consciousness cannot afford to indulge. This zealous but transitory moment becomes a "remembrance,” a piercing, fragmentary recollection that can direct perception to the hidden archives of our individual memories, where experiences are stored as atemporal and mythic. Consequently, the unconscious remembrance supersedes the conscious reminiscence's evocative ability, since remembrance can leap beyond the immediate event into the associated dimension behind it, while reminiscence, trapped in its fabricated temporality, must content itself with repeating over and over a reconstructed event.

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Of Myth and Mortar - The Fabricated City

Artist Kevin Lanthier opened an exhibition at Hot Art Wet City just over a week ago, it has received much attention. This is because the subject of the artist’s project is top of mind for many individuals living and working in this city. The Special covers the spectrum of issues that many Vancouverites are critical of and interested in – all of which are connected to the city’s growth. The speed of development, affordability of housing and the rapidly changing architecture of the city are a few of the key subjects that the work traverses.

Visually, Lanthier’s meticulous photo-montaged series delineates forced perspective streets where groupings of residential or commercial architecture are plotted out sequentially.The entrance of each structure faces the viewer. Each series is categorized, inspired by ideas founded in both fact and fiction. With a strong linearity to them, the imagery would work splendidly as a pop-up book, or as an exquisite set of accordion booklets.

East Van Relics, 40 x 100 inches, chromogenic print, edition of 5

Lanthier created interesting stories by connecting different houses types and styles of architecture together. The series, in many ways, acts as a lexicon for distinct ‘Vancouverisms’ in architecture. The artist also explores these subjects thematically and symbolically, adding in environmental and ambient tropes to further expand the narrative of each composition. For example, his Storybook West Side series features fairytale like homesteads strategically placed in front of a green forest, it also includes a colourful sunset behind the forest that extends into the realm of magical realism.

I caught up with Kevin Lanthier to ask him a few questions about this exhibition and his work.

The Old Entertainment District, 40 x 100 inches, chromogenic print, edition of 5

SF: This exhibition is formulated with the context of cataloging or indexing just as much as it is about myth-making and storytelling. Are you interested in systems of categorization? If yes, does this come up frequently within your work?

Although I hadn’t exactly intended to catalogue Vancouver housing styles, I do understand that there’s an inherent aspect of the delineating and organizing of Vancouver houses within the series. I think in this case it’s more a byproduct of my method of distilling the city into strongly thematic scenes to emphasize how we conceptualize it, rather than a hallmark of my work as a whole.

SF: The writing about each montage series that accompanies this exhibition seems to reflect an observational perspective that is somewhat rose tinted. It is clear that you have thought a great deal about the context of each of these spaces within the collective history of Vancouver. You have also carefully considered the odd juxtaposition of neighbourhoods, buildings, class structures and demographics of this city. I am sure that there has also been a significant amount of research involved. How long have you been working on this project? It feels, in some ways biographical and in others also quite personal. Do you see it as one or the other? or both? If yes, please explain?

I’ve been working on the series for about three years. I suppose I see it as a critical biography of the city, however upbeat in tone, but of course the questions I raise come from my own personal experiences and viewpoint. I think all biographies and documentaries carry the biases of their authors, just as history is written by the victors and even theoretical physics experiments are actually affected by the mere act of observation. Whether it was renting a basement suite or eventually purchasing a condo, my own relationship to real estate in the city was certainly an influence, to give one example.

Vancouver Specials, 40 x 100 inches, chromogenic print, edition of 5

The Cult of the Vancouver Special.

SF: There are several artists who have referenced or completed projects on Vancouver Specials. Keith Higgin’s “How To Look At A Vancouver Special” publication in 2010 and Ken Lum’s “Vancouver Especially”installation in 2015 that comments on the extremes of Vancouver’s economic stratospheres come to mind. The Special has become iconic, it has been used to name a local music compilation album and also title abook featuring stories about Vancouver. Are aspects of your exhibition that transcends the collective history of the special, and take it in a new direction?

The Vancouver Specials themselves were for me more of an entry point, as they already have so much cultural awareness surrounding them, as you point out. I’m not sure what I could say about them in and of themselves that hasn’t already been said by others, and likely better than I could, but I do find it interesting how our feelings and reactions to them compares to other housing styles in the city, starting with what I’ve been calling the “New Vancouver Specials”, which seem to elicit almost no reaction. Why was the original design so hated that bylaws prevented their further construction, but what ultimately replaced them was essentially the same but with a new surface aesthetic? They also don’t have basements, they also feature separate, ground level suites, they’re also clearly designed to fit the city lot footprint and building codes to maximize interior space, and finally, they’re no less pervasive. Driving on any East Van street, you’ll see them everywhere if you look for them. I don’t know the current number of houses in the city with that design, but at one point will there be enough of them and will they be unfashionable enough that they will spark similar awareness and scorn? Will they then, some years later, elicit the same nostalgia? Perhaps it’s all cyclical, and time will tell, but a process of tearing down and rebuilding houses for reasons of fashion seems like a poor expenditure of resources, not to mention a hugely unnecessary creation of waste.

The difference I do see in them, however, is in their purpose. Based on my own experiences looking for a place to live, it seems that with these newer houses the purpose of the layout with the separate suites is that they can be rented for needed monthly income to pay the mortgage for these now million dollar houses, as opposed to the original Vancouver Specials, where the suites were more often utilized for multigenerational families to stay together. Being a coping strategy for a ridiculous and unfortunate market situation just doesn’t elicit the same emotional response as being an affordable solution for incoming families. Beyond the comparison of old and new Specials, though, the design of any group of houses affects how we feel about our neighbourhoods, be it the Victorian houses of Strathcona or the Storybook houses on the west side, they’re all “specials” in their own, seemingly much less heralded, way. Hopefully the exhibition transcends the Special by being about a lot more than solely that type of house.

New Vancouver Specials, 40 x 100 inches, chromogenic print, edition of 5

SF: The notion of ‘special’ is connected to many ideas within this body of work. It is the namesake of the original architectural development and also, the term, when connected to construction, can simultaneously suggest superfluousness and practicality. Over the past 8-10 years, architects have either embraced opportunities to renovate these spaces, or torn them down, as they were deemed to horrendous to update. These homes evoke nostalgia, appreciation and also disgust. Vancouverites seem to enjoy polarizing The Special. Where would you say you fit on this ‘special spectrum’?

I think it’s kind of interesting how there’s a cycle of ironic nostalgia that grows into genuine nostalgia, just as the term was originally derisive in nature and now we have a store on Main Street called Vancouver Special and “taking it back”, so to speak. My view has evolved along those lines with my research of them. Like most people with most things, I was quick to judge them. When you first come to take notice of the house style, what first occurs is that their age and material finish (the stucco and stone veneers) seems outdated and unfashionable, and then of course their cookie-cutter nature makes them undesirable to a degree in and of itself as well. But they are unique to and iconic of our city, so at first I think I shifted to liking them on that somewhat tribal level of “okay, they may be ugly cookie cutter houses, but they’re OUR ugly cookie cutter houses!”

But as soon as you look beyond the superficial, and start to consider the value of their design, in terms of how efficiently they use space, and their history, in how they provided such practical and effective housing for so many people, especially new Canadians, you grow to honestly appreciate them and their legacy. How many people who are making significant contributions of our society today grew up in one of these? To what degree did they allow families, especially multigenerational ones, to afford functional, comfortable houses?

Installation View of The Special

SF: You mentioned that Vancouver is a city has many cliches and myths. Are there other old chestnuts that you hope to crack open and explore in future projects?

Yeah, there are a lot of stories in the history of migration around the city that can be seen in our architecture, I’ve really only scratched the surface. I’m also considering how including other visual elements, like perhaps people and wildlife can add to how the stories are told. To end on a poetic note, can you name three types of emotions you hope visitors will experience when visiting The Special?

If I had to pick and choose, I’d say joy, wonder, and thoughtfulness, in that order.  But, if it’s more like annoyance, incredulity, and disdain, I’m good with that too. I’m thankful for any and all emotions people feel in response to the series, it’s all you hope for when you set out to create anything, I think.

Pennylane Shen curated the exhibition at Hot Art Wet City, she shared her thoughts on the work with VIA earlier last week:

Kevin and I worked closely together on this body of work so I was able to see it fully develop over the past couple years. Fortuitously, the completion of The Special has coincided with some hugely topical issues regarding the price of housing, emigration and the cost of living in Vancouver. I felt the fabricated and fictional element of these crafted yet distinct neighbourhoods spoke to these anxieties and the nostalgia we associate with a city that is rapidly changing, perhaps at a rate it cannot keep up with. I chose the gallery Hot Art Wet City, because it is also very distinctly Vancouver, its audience of a generation that has grown up in a city where they cannot now afford housing. Gallery owner Chris Bentzen and I are both examples of this and working in the arts especially, this body of work resonates deeply with us.

Kevin Lanthier: kevinlanthier.com The Special: hotartwetcity.com An interview with Lanthier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SXOh12J4_0

This article/interview originally appeared online for Vancouver Is Awesome. (January 2016)

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Making Private Collections Accessible to the Public

More often than not, private art collections are concealed from the public eye – safely preserved in climate controlled storage facilities. But alas, times are changing…

Over the past six years, a number of art collectors across Canada have founded public galleries in order to showcase their private collections. These same collectors are also establishing arts foundations that provide programming and publishing opportunities. This new trend is an exciting cultural and philanthropic endeavour for all Canadians. It means that hundreds, if not thousands, of works that have been hidden away, will be exhibited and accessible to the public. Local communities will have the chance to learn more about international contemporary art, which will provide new contexts for creating and interpreting local art practices.

Brigitte and Henning Freybe are longtime residents of Vancouver who have collected art for nearly fifty years. Over this time they have amassed an extensive amount of work. Although all pieces in the collection have been researched and carefully considered, the Freybes have ultimately allowed passion to drive their acquisitions. This is what collecting is all about.

From the 1970’s all the way up to the present, many types of media are found within the Freybe’s collection: conceptual art, painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media and video art. The Freybes have been supporting and encouraging many practices for decades now.  Also important, as curator Helga Pakasaar points out, the Freybes maintain a keen interest in supporting emerging practices. Pakasaar, who is the curator of Presentation House Gallery, met with VIA at Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver last week. Griffin Art Projects is the name of the arts foundation recently established by the Freybes.

Pakasaar was invited by the Freybes to curate the inaugural exhibition at Griffin Art Projects. WOOSH is the title of the show. It features contemporary art from two north shore collections: the Frebyes’ and the Browns’ (Kathleen and Laing). Both couples are committed collectors and arts philanthropists. The exhibition includes works from local, national and international artists: Liz Magor, Ron Terada, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Santiago Sierra, Andrew Dadson, Mona Hatoum and Carsten Nicolai among others.

Although WOOSH features works from the Freybe’s collection, Pakasaar was quick to mention that the couple has been adamant that Griffin Art Projects will not be about showcasing works from their collection. It will exhibit a variety of works from many different private collections and promises to bring new perspectives on contemporary art to Vancouver.

This is but one interest of the couple at this early stage in the project. Pakasaar noted that that they are also keen to give back to Vancouver’s vibrant arts community by working with young curators and critics.

One observation of note to take away from the inaugural exhibition at Griffin Art Projects is the theme of the binary. Two sets of couples whose collections are, according to Pakasaar, “two of the best kept secrets in Vancouver. The Freybes and the Browns are very knowledgeable about international contemporary art and make bold moves with their collecting”. both make bold moves in terms of collecting”. In curating the show, Pakasaar tried to demonstrate “the high quality and scope of their remarkable collections, and also, their ongoing support for artists who are still emerging.”

At the entrance to the exhibition, Kris Martin’s work bisects the space. A work that consists of a sign stating “Do Not Cross the Red Line” and a red line of tape installed on the floor. One must repeatedly cross the red line to visit different areas of the exhibition.

There are several other serendipitous duets occurring within the space. Alfredo Jaar’s Three Women explores the role of public identity and imagery. The piece features miniature portraits of Graça Machel, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Ela Bhatt. Each of these women are influential figureheads for the causes that they promote and support, but their activism is not typically recognized outside of their respective sphere’s of influence. Jaar’s work literally shines a light on their identities – there are approximately 20 lights shining onto these three images. This work is part of a larger project that will eventually highlight 300 women who are passionate activists. The piece exposes the disparity between presence and recognition within a global context.

Nearby, Ian Wallace’s instructional work entitled Magazine Piece presents viewers with tear sheets from magazines. Often featured, women who are well-known pop culture icons: super models and celebrities. Both works are act in their own subversive ways. Jaar’s work brings focus onto the seemingly invisible. Wallace’s piece acts as more of a conceptual construct, his work consists of a set of instructions that can be reproduced in sequence with imagery from any magazine from the current era of the time that the piece is being recreated. Thus exposing specific aesthetic tendencies of a certain time and place. When exhibited in proximity to each other the meaning of each work expands into new territory. Binary contrasts, between clarity and obscurity, and value and recognition, can be drawn. Time and effort are also divided differently in each piece, the tear sheets in Wallace’s work suggest a rapid eclipse of time as fashion is fickle. His work, if reproduced in three years time, would have a completely different look and feel in some ways, in others, the tropes of presentation and fashion poetics would remain the same. Jaar’s photographs are meant to stand as monuments that recognize hard work, change and dedication. His work intends to write women more permanently into history. Shown close to one another, these two works create new connections and associations.

Mona Hatoum’s work explores on double imagery. Her wall based work features the words You Are Still Herewritten in Arabic and etched onto the surface a mirror. Viewers confront a reflection of themselves and the meaning of their presence in the world.

A duet of political works installed adjacent to each other share an interesting conceptual dialogue. Sierra’s 100 Beggars, Plaza Estudiantes, Mexico City, confronts viewers with 100 itinerants who were all paid a sum money to be photographed. Yevgeniy Fiks’ work Adopt Lenin features a metal bust of Vladimir Lenin as well as signed and framed adoption papers for the bust. The shift from certificate of authenticity to a certificate of adoption, symbolically turns collectors into parents and the patriotic object-turned-artwork, into a living entity. Both works question the economies of art and capital, systems of value, and the respective roles of artists, viewers, participants and collectors.

In WOOSH, Magor’s work entitled KD – The Original has a doppelgänger. One edition of the work is shown at the entrance of the exhibition, and a second edition can be found towards the back end of the exhibition space. Pakasaar highlights the fact that both collectors, found the work of importance, and have it in their respective collections. The Browns’ and the Freybes’ collections are unique, it is interesting to see what crosses over, and more specifically that this “original” work is part of both collections. An engaging exploration of authenticity that has definitely gone meta.

Griffin Art Projects promises to be an exciting place to visit in the coming months. VIA looks forward to seeing what collectors and artworks will be shown in the future!  WOOSH: From Two North Shore Collections will remain on exhibit at Griffin Art Projects until the 19th of December. Helga Pakasaar will also curate the second exhibition for the space, which will open in the second half of January. Opening hours for Griffin Art Projects are 12 noon until 5pm every Saturday. For those interested in visiting outside of these hours, Griffin Art Projects is also open by appointment. Contact:info@griffinartprojects.ca

Griffin Art Projects is located in North Vancouver at 1174 Welch Street.

Additional Insight into the Canadian private collector/project space landscape:

In 2009, Bob Rennie opened The Rennie Collection as a way to showcase the 40+ artists that he collects comprehensively. The entire collection consists of work from over 200 artists, but it maintains in-depth collections of works by 40+ prominent Canadian and international artists. The Rennie Collection also provides talks, public docent led tours and creates publications for each exhibition. http://renniecollection.org/

In 2011 Scrap Metal Gallery opened in Toronto. Owned by Samara Walbohm and Joe Shlesinger, the gallery shows works from the couples collection, works from other private collections and also features curated exhibitions from other members of the Toronto art community. http://www.scrapmetalgallery.com/

In 2012 The Esker Foundation opened in Calgary. It runs three exhibitions per year. The foundation also runs educational programs, artist talks, and develops publications. The foundation is dedicated to the production of contemporary work, ideas and research. It was founded by Jim and Susan Hill who are also passionate art collectors. http://eskerfoundation.com/

A former shipyard, re-opened in 2012 as a private collection exhibition space by Montreal collectors Pierre and Anne-Marie Trahan, Arsenal Art Contemporain combines private exhibitions with large scale events. Arsenal Art Contemporain expanded to over 80,000 square feet in 2015 when it took over the adjoining space in the shipyard from another business. The space also now houses Division Gallery on the upper level in the building. http://arsenalmontreal.com/

In 2013, Michael Audain announced that he would be building a 25,000 square foot museum to house a portion of the collection he has built over the years with his wife Yoshiko Karasawa. The Audain Art Museum is due to open in early 2016 in Whistler. http://www.audainartmuseum.com/

In 2015 Brigitte and Henning Freybe opened Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver. The project space showcases contemporary art exhibitions from private collections. Griffin Art Projects seeks to promote the important role that collectors and contemporary artists play in BC’s cultural landscape. The space will host exhibitions and events and create publications. The foundation was established to make visual arts widely accessible. http://griffinartprojects.ca/

Opening in 2016, Remai Modern, in Saskatoon, is a museum space that is supported by The City Council of Saskatoon, The Province of Saskatchewan, The Federal Government and philanthropist Ellen Remai. In addition to civic, provincial and federal funding, a 30 million dollar donation from the Frank and Ellen Remai Foundation was promised towards the building of The Art Gallery of Saskatchewan. Additionally, Ellen Remai donated the world’s most comprehensive collection of Picasso linocuts to the museum. It is one of the largest private donations to the arts in Canadian History, hence the renaming of the Art Gallery of Saskatchewan to Remai Modern. http://www.remaimodern.org/

This Article first appeared online for Vancouver is Awesome in October, 2015.

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Transforming Matter

The Suyama Space in Seattle, Washington, is many different things on any given day: an in-between space, a frontier space, a no-man's land, a portal complete with the traces of time, an etherial atmospheric space, an allegorical forest, or even a fractured virtual reality.

Located in the Belltown district of Seattle the building was originally a livery stable, then, for several decades, an auto repair shop. In 1995, it was purchased by George Suyama who redesigned it to house Suyama Peterson Debuchi Architecture studio in the back and two retail spaces in the front. Sandwiched between the high end retail world and a speculative architecture studio, the Suyama Space is a niche expanse of pure potential - activated through site specific arts programming.  

Founding curator Beth Sellars partnered with George Suyama to create exhibitions in the space. It soon became apparent that for artwork to truly thrive at Suyama, it was necessary for it to become more relational to the space. At Suyama, there are strong architectural elements at play: bright sky lights, an open-beam ceiling, and a topsy-turvy wood plank floor. In light of this, the programming encourages artists to act as active collaborators with the physical space, integrating it into their installation. The current exhibition of Elizabeth Higgens O'Connor continues in this vein.

In 2014 O'Connor was invited to visit, interact with and make work at the Suyama space. In January of 2015 the artist opened her exhibition Heart in Throat, Head in Hands; Tongue in Knots, Heart on Sleeve.

O'Connor is a sculptor working predominantly with salvaged and thrift-store materials. Stripping down couches to their bare frames, turning found patterned fabric into resined collage blocks, and using painted cardboard fragments as a scaled epidermis; these are some examples of the inventive ways in which O'Connor retrofits worn, discarded or out-of-fashion domestic items. Her play with materials resulted in the creation of eight animal-like entities. Each character acts as an apparition whose physical manifestation conjures cultural, historical, philosophical references.

One figure closely resembles Falkor the Luckdragon from the Neverending Story, whilst another collapsed character, with its peg-legs and donkey-like face, conjures Pinocchio.  Also part of the parade: a floppy bunny with couch pillows for ears, a sly fox whose stance suggests he is a puppet attached to invisible strings, a doily and bobble-faced cow, and a bewitching coyote with explosive fur made from hundreds of flowers.  

Each of the colourful fabrics, patterns and crocheted items used by the artist houses its own identity via a collective unconscious proxy. They are linked to a web that travels time through multiple historical eras. This web further extends into personal histories, connecting elements and items to individual and familial associations. On inspection of the characters, one is easily reminded of the crocheted table cloth made by their grandmother, or the sheets that were on the beds at their aunt and uncle's place. The unfamiliar rendered familiar and vice-versa.

The work is assembled in such a matter that the inner structures are exposed and celebrated as opposed to seamlessly hidden. Characters are constructed and connected with drywall screws, staples, and bound sections of string. Wooden couch frames seem to prop up each character. In the case of the coyote, they seem to violently impale him. Inner guts on display, skin shredded and organs at the ready. The work is quite visceral, yet, somehow, O'Connor subverts these messy elements converting them into a scene that is incredibly charming and endearing.

Through her use of pastel colours, character posturing, and the intricate and detailed facial rendering of each entity transformation is present. The uncanny is supplanted by the magical, the outdated becomes repurposed and sentiments of helter-skelter shift over into the realm of higgledy-piggledy. The push and pull between value and detritus is the core of what she is presenting, and the tension in-between these states is championed in this exhibition.  O'Connor has stated that she is interested in the under-noticed yet overwhelming and also the marginal yet monumental. These ideas shine through in the work by way of her choice of materials and the pre-loaded concepts that they carry.  

O'Connor could be seen as a bricoleur, a concept that anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss explored in his book Savage Mind. A bricoleur works within a set of parameters, as does O'Connor with her salvaged ephemera.  Strauss once remarked that a bricoleur “may not ever complete his/her purpose but s/he always puts something of herself/himself into it.” This rings true with O'Connor, she highlighted in her artist statement that she is interested in making struggle, vulnerability and weakness visible along with resourcefulness and resilience. Each character with their respective wooden supports, crutches and netting demonstrate the resilience whilst fallen characters like the donkey and the piles of detritus within the room emphasis elements of struggle and decay. Each visitor also, in-turn, becomes a bricoleur mending and hatching ideas on what the work means to them.

O'Connor's art and the Suyama Space play well together.  Similar to the artist's work, the Suyama Space itself is also not without it's own set of pre-loaded architectural and historical fragments. The scene that has been set by the artist is brilliantly situated in this context. The characters feel not as though they have been placed in the space, but almost as though the space has created them. This feels like their home, their point of origin. The interplay between site and installation is highly successful in this exhibition iteration.

The title of the exhibition provides a balanced emphasis on gestures, emotions and puns. Though the title doesn't suggest a direct overarching narrative, the abstracted title highlights the idea that multiple narratives are present, an important factor of the installation as a whole, but also with regards to each individual piece in the show being an amalgamation of many things. Each short phrase of the title emphasises different elements within the installation. Heart in Throat captures the struggle and anxiety found in the work, Head in Hands emphasises the gestures of the quirky characters playing out their narratives. Tongue in Knots and Heart on Sleeve speak to the visual, these puns on communication and emotion support the artist's exploration of memory, life, love, dreams and death.  The title's importance is only revealed after spending time in this unique space.

Heart in Throat, Head in Hands; Tongue in Knots, Heart on Sleeve is a grand proposition of activation.  Calling all Bricoleurs and storey tellers! Travel through time and unravel this complex fable of memory.

Heart in Throat, Head in Hands; Tongue in Knots, Heart on Sleeve

Elizabeth Higgins O'Connor

An exhibition review by Sunshine Frère

January 19 – April 25

Suyama Space

Additional information: 

http://www.elisabethhigginsoconnor.net/  

http://www.suyamaspace.org/                                               

We accept that every person has many biographies... each of which selects some aspect of the live history and discards others. Biographies of things cannot but be similarly partial.  - Igor Kopytoff, The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process

No Objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language... The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress – communications breakdown... The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and re-assembled, postmodern collective and personal self.  - Donna J. Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto

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Dedicated Listening

Sound Art, Sound Composition, Electronica, Sequencing, DJ’s and Synthesizers, these are all elements of several works and presentations at ISEA2015. This article is dedicated to highlighting the critical element that binds all of these works and concepts together: the art of listening.

Sound artist Hildegard Westerkamp has been invited to be a part of two events at ISEA2015, she will be one of the symposiums keynote speakers and one of her compositions will also be diffused over an octophonic sound system as part of a electroacoustic concert at SFU downtown.

Hildegard Westerkamp has lectured on topics of listening, environmental sound and acoustic ecology and has conducted soundscape workshops internationally. As part of Vancouver New Music’s yearly season she has coordinated and led Soundwalks for some years since 2003, which in turn inspired the creation of The Vancouver Soundwalk Collective. Westerkamp is also a founding member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. I caught up with Westerkamp this week and asked her more about the practice of listening.

SF: Based on your artistic practice, would it be safe to assume that you regularly practice the art of listening?

HW: It’s a way of life. It has been and continues to be a process of growth and learning. Yes, it also involves conscious practice, such as in a soundwalk or a deep listening session. But listening is a little bit like breathing. It always IS and it changes. The practice of listening – whether in intentional sessions or just part of daily life – involves staying present to these changes and noticing them, noticing also how our attention shifts between listening to the sound worlds around us and our internal thoughts and chatter.

SF: How often do you set aside time for this practice, is it a regular part of your daily routine?

HW: Listening – with all its different levels and changes – is part of daily life, and I try to be aware as much as possible of how my aural perception shifts continuously between these varying levels depending on the context – with an attentive, focussed foreground listening at one end of the spectrum and a type of background listening, a general aural awareness at the other end. On a daily basis I encounter moments in which I decide to do nothing but listen, sometimes for minutes at a time, sometimes longer. It is a way to connect to a specific situation or context and usually comes as a spontaneous decision, not as a planned time set aside. Yes, this also is a daily practice, as it requires awareness to catch that moment of decision making and focus for the listening itself. Soundwalk or other listening events are of course planned events and are often shared with other people, in groups contexts.

When I compose, my listening focus is intensified beyond a daily practice and often leads me into a state of aural oversensitivity, hearing and noticing too many sounds. The practice at those points is to find a way not to listen in such an intense way, to find quiet or ear protection, and/or do something completely different, like cooking, gardening, moving the body, to calm down the nervous system, ears and body. Similarly if one has been exposed to loud sound environments – and often it is our habit not to listen consciously to that type of sound input – one is in need of finding a similar kind of balance for ears, body and spirit. A regular practice of listening teaches us to recognize such situations and act accordingly.

SF: You speak of perceptual receptivity in listening. One artwork that challenges the idea of perceptual receptivity would be sound composer Jem Finer’s Longplayer (http://longplayer.org/about/), a piece of music that was composed so that it will play for a thousand years. It is a beautiful and poetic exploration of time and listening at different depths and capacities. Listening to the entire piece is impossible, it has already been playing now for over fifteen years. In this case as well, listening is definitely a disruptive practice as you are only able to hear the section of the song that is playing in the current moment that you stream it. Perceptual receptivity is as much an impossibility as listening to the entire composition of Finer’s Longplayer. Why should we listen more?

HW:  Jem Finer’s piece sets the stage for exploring the complexity of our listening perception. If we spend time with this piece, in the same way in which we decide to listen to any piece of music, we take the opportunity to immerse ourselves into the act of listening and thus have a chance not only to get to know the music but also our own ways of listening and our reactions to what we are hearing. Just as in meditation, where the breath may be the object to which to return when our mind wanders, so it is with listening: if our mind wanders away from the listening itself, a practiced listener will notice that moment and return to the practice of focused listening. And so it is in daily life. There are ever repeating contexts in which we can explore our listening, whether it is in a conversation or a lecture, while walking in any environment or sitting in a group meeting, driving in a car or sitting in a bus: how are we hearing these contexts, what sounds are we noticing, which ones are we ignoring or blocking out, what gets our listening attention, what passes us by and so on.

SF: Are you able to share a couple of the most critical benefits of listening?

HW:  Listening connects us to the present moment and the space or environment through which we move. Sound is like a language that speaks to us. If we listen to it, we know more about what is going on around us. That knowledge in turn enables us to understand why we react in certain ways to a sound or soundscape, why we might try to shut out certain sound experiences or why we might want to open our ears further. Knowing what kind of listener we are creates a clear relationship between listener and environment, an important quality when we want to find some sort of balance in our daily exposure to the soundscape, no matter where we are. It also lays the ground for attempting to make changes in the soundscape or in our dealings with it, when we feel invaded by oppressive silences, intrusive noises or whatever else it may be. Listening of course enhances communication and makes us aware when sounds are missing or disappear, both in nature and in any social or community context.

SF: Notes on your upcoming speech imply that “By its very nature listening is a continual and gentle process of opening. We usually know when we are in that place of perceptual receptivity and we know when we have lost it. Listening is never static, cannot be held on to, and in fact needs to be found again and again.  As such, it is disruptive in its nature.”  Are there active ways in which one can dedicate more time to listening? What techniques are there for one to remain in a state of perceptual receptivity?

HW:  Instead of just going for a walk the way we usually do, we can decide to walk and do nothing but listen. When you walk with others, there needs to be an agreement not to speak, but simply to direct our ears towards the sounds of the environment. In order to get in touch with listening we need to DO it. No amount of reading or talking about it will teach us istening. The more conscious we become of the grounding qualities of listening, the easier it may become to decide at any given point in daily life to listen more actively.  However, there is no such thing as a continuous state of perceptual receptivity. Our aural perception naturally goes through different shifts in listening and that includes, relaxing our attention and transforming it into a more general sense of awareness. Because we do not have ear lids, we have to find ways to rest our ears.

More about these events:

The Disruptive Nature of Listening – A keynote speech by Hildegard Westerkamp

Octophonic Soundscape Compositions featuring works by Hildegard Westerkamp, Barry Truax, Ben Wilson, Maurin Liang and Yves Candau.

Both events are happening on Tuesday August 18th in Studio T Room 2240 at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts (149 West Hastings Street, Vancouver), Westerkamp’s speech is from 11:30-12:45 and the concert is from 1pm-2pm.

More information on Hildegard Westerkamp.

This originally appeared as an article for Vancouver is Awesome, September, 2015.