archive

Exhibition

In Synapse, Sutapa Biswas produces a series of B&W photo-murals with superimpositions of her body giving the effect of floating or disembodied female forms that trace the stone surface of an Eastern temple. These works insert themselves into what has now become a familiar discussion of the exotic other.

“Synapse in medical terms is the anatomical relation of one nerve cell with another, the junction at which a nerve impulse is transferred, which is affected at various points by contact of their branching processes. The state of shrinkage or relaxation at these points (synapses) is supposed in some cases to determine the readiness with which a nervous impulse is transmitted from one part of the nervous system to another”…

Biswas stresses “the notion of synapse as a metaphor for the human condition with particular reference to the experience of memory. Synapse here is symbolic of an undefined territory or space. Memory is itself of a shifting nature, vivid in places, with blind spots. Desire becomes an important element in this process. Sometimes connected to real experience, conceptually it is an imagined space or territory.”

excerpts taken from Reading Between the Lines: The Imprinted Spaces of Sutapa Biswas by Moira Roth

- Sutapa Biswas

Catalogue essays by Griselda Pollack, Brian Mulvihill, Moira Roth

Exhibition

In Holding, Marian Penner Bancroft’s installation juxtaposes photographs of the Hatzic Rock, a sacred native site which is not under excavation and rubbings from the land around her home. The archaeological references in her presentation provoke a timely discussion into the nature of these two practices (archaeology and visual arts) as contentious purveyors of cultural representations.

Brochure essay by Jeff Derksen

Publication

Exhibition

Brochure essay by Julie Arnold

There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth than Are Dreamt of in Your Philosophy, Horatio

Photograms are a direct means of producing a photographic image. In the darkroom, objects are placed on photosensitive paper and exposed to light. In this way the intermediate steps involving film and camera are dispensed with. In simple technical language, a photogram is a record of an object’s ability to filter and refract light. In areas where no obstruction oflight occurs, we read darkness; in areas where light has been absorbed, we read lightness. Such is the reverse logic of the photographic process. What we are presented with is a rich, black, two-dimensional surface on which the artist can construct relationships between form, texture, and gradations of light. And this, for the most part, is exactly what has come down to us under various names (Schadographs, Rayographs, photograms) from the history of art and photography. In the 1920s and 1930s such work was seen as a way of moving the medium away from the documentary tradition and into the realm of pure artistic expression – painting with light. In the photograms of Christian Schad, Man Ray, and Laszlo Moholy- N agy the objects chosen are often totally removed from the function they assume in the world beyond the abstract composition. Such were the concerns of a particular strand of modernism. But what use might a contemporary artist find for the process today?

In Laura Lamb’s exhibit, There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth than Are Dreamt olin Your Philosophy, Horatio, strict formal concerns are pushed aside and our propensity for narrative encouraged. The objects of Lamb’s choosing are transformed into beautiful studies of chiaroscuro, but they never totally abandon the identities they hold in the world outside art. These are the objects that fill Goodwill shops and at least one drawer in almost every household. They are commonly the inexpensive, mass-produced kitsch objects – the child’s toy or the dated novelty item. We are accustomed to think of such material as society’s refuse, connoting bad taste and cheap construction. Adherents to this view would seem to ignore the nebulous yet ubiquitous investment people make in inanimate objects, which is, quite often, undeterred by a item’s undistinguished origins. Just as toys can spawn a fantasy world for a child, so too these objects have the potential to evoke associations, emotions, and ideas. This potential is realized in Lamb’s work due to her obvious imaginative attachment to her materials, her command and regard for the pleasures of narrative, and the eerie, visual seductiveness of the photogram.

I have spoken generally about the narrative quality in Lamb’s art. In more precise terms, four of the five works are divided into individual panels that come together as if depicting one scene in a story. Most typically, the moment frozen is one of suspended animation, a myriad of creatures and objects caught in mid-flight, having been blown or pulled by force. In This one, too a tension is created as we watch fragile objects swirl just moments before the inevitable finale. As spectators, we are caught at a particular moment – a course has been set and an end awaits. In compositions such as Remarkable Rocket, the tone shifts to one of macabre glee as the great leveller, death, makes an appearance.

References to and from the visual and theatrical arts abound throughout There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth than Are Dreamt olin Your Philosophy, Horatio. This very title comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a tragedy liberally punctuated by cynical wit. When citing Francisco Goya and his series Disparates, engravings that depict the follies of humankind, it is the Spaniard’s turn of words, when annotating his images, that particularly draw Lamb’s attention. “Was Die Herren Matrosen Sagen” of “The Sailors’ Tango” is the name of a Bertolt Brecht/ Kurt Weill song from the play Happy End. I’ll conclude by citing this reference in some detail, as I believe Brecht’s lyrics reveal much about the tone and sentiment expressed in Lamb’s work. The song begins as the sailors cast off with not a care in the world, their boat well stocked with scotch and cigars:

We’re off on the sea and it’s “Who gives a damn?” Life’s perfect, ‘cause nothing is missing. . . The whole world’s our pot and – we’re pissing!

By song’s end the ship has sunk while within sight of its destination and all on board are lost.

. . . now let me tell you a fact that we all ought to know: When you stand before the throne where Our Lord is sitting, you may have been bragging a lifetime or so, but now, when it matters, you’re shitting.
Ah, the sea is blue, so blue
and all the world goes on its way.
But when your day is over, there is no other day.
Ah, the sea is blue, so blue
you don’t have that long to stay.
Ah, the sea is blue, so blue,
Ah, the sea is blue, so blue.

-Julie Arnold, 1991

Laura Lamb is a Vancouver artist. Her opinion on current cultural event and phenomena can be heard, occasionally, Saturday morning on co-op Radio, Vancouver.

Julie Arnold is an artist and art writer living in Toronto.

Special-Event

Raffle, Silent Auction

Exhibition

The Or Gallery presents Montreal artist, Bill Burns, exhibition, When Pain Strikes, a new series of work centering around the pharmaceutical industry. Bill Burns considers the pill a metaphor for the ingestion of capital through the body. The exhibition consists of large framed cibachromes and 3 miniaturized pill processing plants which are displayed in glass cases.

Brochure compiled by Cathy Busby

When Pain Strikes is accompanied by a satirical text by Cathy Busby

Bill Burns
Bayer Aspirin
For cold or flu Doctors recommend;
1.Rest in bed
2.Drink plenty of fluid
3. Take aspirin to reduce fever and relieve pain… works wonders

New Housing A public housing officer about to tell an elderly couple that they are to be evicted from their condemned rental apartment in less than a week is upset at the coming confrontation. The housing officer comes down with a headache, the kind that afflicts “sensitive people.” He pops two Bufferin. In moments he is calm and smiling.
Housing Official: That’s the way it is. So you’ll have to be out by Thursday.
Home Owner: You know, our kids were born right here.
Announcer: “Bufferin. For sensitive people. It’s much better than plain aspirin.”

The Starter, the Reliever
The starter. . . The reliever. . . Every fifth day, Nolan Ryan rears back his 44-year-old arm and throws 75 fastballs about 90 miles per hour. . . So, it’s not surprising that after the last out is made, the muscle aches begin for Nolan Ryan. Of course that’s just about the time Nolan reaches for Advil. Advil is all the relief he needs. . . You see, he’s discovered that just one Advil is as effective as two regular-strength Tylenol acetaminophen. . . And when he’s not pitching, Nolan has found that Advil works well on headache, backache, and sprains and strains. But Advil doesn’t upset your stomach the way aspirin sometimes can. . . Even if you don’t throw as hard as Nolan, your muscles can ache just as much. . . Today there’s Advil, “the relief” for muscle aches. . . ADVANCED MEDICINE FOR PAIN.

“Mothers cannot get sick!”
“When I have a cold, it settles in my head. . . I have this feeling that I just can’t make it through the day. Well, mothers can’t afford to do this. So, I take a couple of Exedrin . . . and then I can go on about my work.”*

For the relief of the painful discomfort of colds try Exedrin-the extra-strength pain reliever. Tablet for tablet, Exedrin is 50% stronger than aspirin for relief of headache pain-yet just as safe. This added strength goes to work on the aches and fever of colds, too! Exedrin analgesic tablets, the extra-strength pain reliever.

*Exerpts form unrehearsed interview with Mrs. Frances Cipriano

In 22 Seconds
In 22 seconds after entering your bloodstream Anacin is speeding relief to your headache pain. . . strongest in the pain-reliever doctors recommend most. . . Anacin contains more of this pain-relieving medication than any leading tablet.

Anacin is strongest in the pain-reliever doctors recommend most. That’s why Anacin Tablets gives you extra power to relieve headache pain.
With Anacin, relief comes fast! In 22 seconds after entering your bloodstream, Anacin is speeding relief direct to your headache. Not only does pain go quickly, but also its nervous tension and depression. You will experience remarkable “all-over” relief.
Remember, no tablet you can buy has the strong yet safe formulation in Anacin. See if Anacin Tablets, with their smooth, gentle action, don’t work better for you. Buy Anacin today.

Standard Eguipment
“Standard equipment of the 1992 U.S. Olympic Team. Pain is part of any training for the Olympic Games. And Nuprin is standard equipment for pain. The medicine in Nuprin works right at the sight of pain. Nuprin stops pain right where it hurts. Use only as directed. Take one tablet. Two tablets may be used if pain does not respond.”

Jittery Nerves
“Announcer: . . . Anacin has a combination of ingredients to relieve pain fast, calm jittery nerves fast, relax tension fast!
Woman: (sigh of complete relief) What relief!
Announcer: Anacin for fast, fast relief!”

-Information in this pamphlet compiled and edited by Cathy Busby, Montreal, 1991,

Exhibition

The Or Gallery is proud to present Philippe Raphanel’s new exhibition, Lip Synch. Raphanel has been recognized for his large abstract landscape painting. This new work is a critical reflection on his earlier work. Rather than idealize and mythologize landscape in painting, this installation engages in a study of modernist constructions of nature as spaces of specular pleasure. Raphanel takes full opportunity of the experimental nature of an artist-run centre to produce a work that challenges many of the foundations upon which his earlier art practice was built and produced a mixed media installation that would not have been possible in more commercial venues.

Catalogue essay by Scott Watson
Landscape in the New Land, Lecture at SFU, June 20, 1991

Review: Vancouver Sun, june 22 1991, by Ann Rosenberg. ‘Landscape in the New Land’, lecture SFU, June 20 1991

Exhibition

Press Release

For the first time in Canada a diverse spectrum of recent and new work by twenty-five Asian Canadian artists and writers will be brought together in the important and timely exhibit : Yellow Peril: Reconsidered.

Asian is defined by the skin colour yellow. The treatment and portrayal of Asians by the dominant white culture is distinctive from that of other visible minorities – Native Indians, Indo-Canadians and blacks.

Experimental and documentary film, video and photobased artwork grappling with the Asian New World consciousness will be pushed to the forefront on this national tour.

Marginalized themes of sexuality, identity, home, feminist perspectives, institutionalized racism, farming, bilingualism and Hong Kong 1997 are explored in forms embraced by mass media and popular culture, providing an alternative and more accurate view of Asian Canadian artists. The (not so) exotic seen from the point of view of the (not so) exotic becomes familiar.

YELLOW PERIL: RECONSIDERED is a film, video, and photography exhibit which concentrates on Asian-Canadian work displaying a new world consciousness. Twenty-four artists are included in the six-city tour. The purpose of this show is to present new and challenging work, moving it from a position of marginality and placing it in the forefront of attention. The exhibition will provide alternative, more accurate views of Asian-Canadians. The (not so) exotic seen from the point of view of the (not so) exotic becomes familiar.

More traditional media are shunned in favour of the tools of mass media and popular culture: photography, film and video. These media are often accepted as the media of truth; what is contained in them is an accurate re-presentation of something that actually happened. What is often ignored is that the truth of popular media is selective truth. That which is document is, of necessity, not everything that happened. The events recored are less important than who recorded them. Much of the work in YELLOW PERIL grapples with the notion of truth. Whose truth is most often heard? Whose truth is ordinary truth?

The work in this exhibition, brought together for the first time in Canada, represents a broad range of artistic, social, and community concerns held by Asian Canadian artists. Formalist, experimental, and documentary art, by both emerging and mature artists is included.

In addition to the presentation of the work themselves, a publication is available. It documents the work presented, and presents various analyses and criticisms, which, up until this point have been lacking

- ON THE EDGE

Catalogue

Exhibition

Katherine Kortikow’s exhibition, Cypher, consists of large B&W photo-murals bounded by sheets of slate that are bolted to the wall. Her work attempts to destabilize existing representational strategies of the woman.

Brochure Essay Lorna Brown
Exhibition travelled to Gallery 44, Toronto, April 25 – May 16, 1992

Exhibition

Brochure Essay by Lorna Brown

The Gardcn is the most recent in a series of photographic projects by Jan Westendorp concentrating on the subject of public gardens. As distinct from earlier work, the prints in this exhibition are large horizontal rectangles, measuring two by six feet, and are
printed from part of the square-format transparencies. The ‘‘missing’‘ portions will, in some cases, make up a concurrent exhibition at the Manufactory Gallery in Tokyo. This linear format encourages an inclination to scan the surface from left to right and in
closer proximity to walk the path in front of the work much as the consumer of “landscape” parklands travels from “aspect” to predetermined “aspect.” The lush, claustrophobic surface of the cibachromes maintain a charged and emphatic relationship with the gallery wall which functions as a severe frame. This rigid division draws associations to the abrupt boundaries of the public garden walled into the urban context.

The prints are produced from colour transparencies sandwiched together – double exposures or straight shots that contain a visual layering as a result of shadow, reflection or distortion of the perspective. The gardens are photographed methodically, one frame in a sequence is overexposed to be combined with a similar one later on the last frame of each sequence is underexposed to be exposed again at the next site. These final frames form points of transition between scenes, overlapping one doubly constructed viewpoint with the next. The position of the viewer oscillates within and between the layers of perspective as both the surface picture and the submerged image struggle to prevail. Desire for the familiar serene representational balance is frustrated by the pictures’ compressed points of view. Anxiety enters thc composed harmony of managed nature, of seasons cultivated for pleasure.

Westendorp’s practice includes earlier video work with TBA collective* produced quickly with limited facilities and screened on cable television during the late seventies. This work combined with the photo projects places her work on the threshold between the disorienting effects of the urban space and the acknowledged healing effects of orchestrated beauty, or according to her own description, as having one foot on the street and one in the garden. This position is echoed in the fortuitous placement of her work for the recent Transpositions SkyTrain exhibition next to and actually forming a diptych with a Safeway ad that enticed commuters to “say it with flowers.” A subtle disquiet resides in the space between the layered images, a space that contains active compliance in the social construction of nature – the knowledge of which cannot be abandoned.

Lorna Brown

Jan Koot Westendorp is a Fine Arts graduate from the University of British Columbia. She was a founding member of TBA-TV, a non-profit visual artists’ media and productions collective. From 1977-80 she worked as a video artist and program coordinator with TBA-TV, assisting with the broadcast of a weekly television show on Cable l0, Vancouver. Four of her video works were included in the large Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit, Vancouver: Art and Artists, in 1982. Her Nitobe Garden Series, Hidden Gardens Series, and Monet’s Garden Series were exhibited at the Surrey Art Gallery. Westendorp’s next show will be upcoming in March 1991, at the Manufactory Gallery, Tokyo, Japan.

*A non-profit visual artists’ media-production collective working in still photography, video, multi-media and audio-visual productions, as well as mail art and performance art, between 1977 and 1984. 

Exhibition

Brochure Essay by Laura Lamb

Impositions

How should human beings relate to animals? Anglo-American society has developed the ethic of “humane” treatment. To be humane towards animals involves taking responsibility for the living creatures which come under our dominion, and includes minimizing their suffering – to a certain effect identifying with them as fellow human beings – while remaining confident that we have the right to exploit them in any way that will benefit our own species (as long as we do it without unnecessary cruelty). The objects Fran Benton has reproduced come directly out of this ethic. They are pure in their adherence to rationality, and, although anthropocentric, they reject the anthropomorphism and sentimentality that often seem to cling to any discussion of animals.

Benton’s work seems ambivalent about the paternalistic, some would say exploitative relationship we have developed with some creatures that are “other” to the human species. There is nothing in her reconstruction of these carious controlling devices that suggests that they should not exist. Or does she, by drawing our attention to certain facts of this relationship, at least entertain the critique of anthropocentrism embodied in the idea of “animal rights”?

Are we being directed, perhaps, to imagine ourselves into the devices reproduced in this exhibition, thus having our attention drawn momentarily to the truism that humans are animals too?

Unlike similar objects that we use on each other, however, these objects are not designed to torment, humiliate, torture or harm the animals. Consequently neither are they designed to provide pleasure or excitement for either the subject or the user of the devices.

Above all, these objects seem to be about technology, and our use of technology to find practical solutions for any problem we may encounter while attempting to gain control over our environment.

They are articles of absolute practicality, and therefore the antithesis of art according to some definitions. (Again, unlike similar objects we use on each other, which could be said to have an aesthetic aspect.)

What happens when such purely functional devices are reproduced as art objects? Are we looking at them here in the art gallery in order to “appreciate” them as part of the modernist “form follows function” aesthetic? Certainly, the denial of comforting illusionism and the dedication to plain truth that are basic to high modernism are similar to the hardnosed rejection of sentiment contained in these devices of animal management.

Fortunately we are prevented from ascending again the lofty moralist tower of modernism, with its crumbling reductivist foundation, by the undercurrent of absurdity in this collection. There is an awkwardness perhaps inherent in these modest endeavours to manage objects as annoyingly complex as living beasts. The irony is highlighted by the bizarre nature of some of the problems faced by the inventors of these devices (how does one prevent a Ringhal cobra from spitting in one’s eye? how does one apprehend an ostrich?) coupled with the banality of solutions.

It is tempting to see this work as a kind of moral allegory (after all, in our culture that’s where discussion of our relationship to animals always seems to settle). Benton’s work seems able, through irony, to resist such interpretation.

- Laura Lamb

Fran Benton is a 1989 graduate of Emily Carr College of Art and Design, in sculpture. She is currently completing a M.F.A. at the University of Victoria. She will be showing new work at the MacPherson Library Gallery at the University of Victoria in late May 1991.

Laura Lamb is a Vancouver artist and teacher. Her opinion on current cultural events and phenomena can be heard occasionally, Sunday mornings, on Co-op radio.

Exhibition

Brochure Essay by Don Gill

Much of what has occurred during colonial times in North America (and perhaps pre-colonial times as well, but there are other voices better qualified to discuss that than mine) can be extracted from personal historiesy tall tales, oral histories, anecdotes, etc., that come from many sources. History is montage; a multiplicity of voices remembering, testifying, proposing, lyings dismissing, agreeing, negotiating, threatening, demanding, honouring, disagreeing, whining, bitching, complaining, aad nlultiple other forms of clamorous and piquant discussion.

This photographic project titled Sites of Production originated with tile documentation of sites in western Canada, but I have since expanded the scope of the project east to the Atlantic region; south to Mexico and California; and further to Englandy Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Ulster. The individual works that collectively make up Sites of Production are in some way representative of sites that have significance in the character of the various regions and which are activated by their position in history. (This significance of site is reflective of their position in history.)

The colonial history of much of North America has been formed by a boom-and-bust economy. ‘With a reliance on the harvest and export of natural resources on the world market, the story of the search for gold is characteristic of and central to this model. The early search for El Dorado in South and Central America, the gold rushes in the American territories from California north in the 1840s, the Fraser River and Cariboo strikes in the I 850s, the progress north
through the British colonies (later Canada) to the Klondike in 1896 and still further till the sands on the beaches of the Arctic Ocean were mined at Nome, Alaska around the turn of the century; these and other regional economic surges which occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provided the impetus for colonial exploration, settlement, and expropriation, with the subsequent displacement of the aboriginal peoples.

Most of these boom-and-bust settlements disappeared with the minerals, leaving little evidence of their existence except as names on o1d maps. Others went on to become major centres such as Vancouver and Victoria in British Columbia. The names themselves are significant in their role as signification of colonial possession, as well as existing as a code efforts of the recent history of the regions: whether nostalgically colonial (New Westminster), aboriginal (Squamish), or economic (Gold Bridge).* The association of name to site often seems arbitrary and tenuous, particularly in the light of aboriginal land claims and desire for self-determination. Although this project started out very specifically as a concern with western Canada, it should not be seen as restricted to this area; the region does not exist independently of the world and the expansion of the project reflects that fact. The Western Canadian selections started not as a sentimental reflection of times past or passing but rather as an appraisal of life in a region that is suffering from depopulation of the rural areas in favour of urban centres. The countryside is now seen as a playground for urbanites or as a field of corporate management. A site where history is losing intrinsic value in exchange for its value as an attraction for the tourist dollar. This loss is not specifically a regional issue but one of international scope; a symptom that had its origin in the industrial revolution but has yet to become firmly fixed within any written histories.

The raw material of historical construction is derived from the commonplace: family albums, oral history, account books, events of natural history, remnants and fragments of engineering and architectural construction, official and unofficial archives, political clashes, the breaking and mending of social contracts and all the detritus that accumulates with the passage of time. The reading of these entrails (more precisely, who is reading these entrails) determines which particular history will be elevated to the status of authority.

The scrapbook, as a repository ofgathered information, becomes a unique version of history, one that is a particularly personal and idiosyncratic narrative. Photographs, texts, souvenirs, newspaper clippings form a montage of information that ultimately provides a personal open-ended archive, a mnemonic prosthesis, as it were. A repository of collated information from which one can examine and subsequently extract portions for use in other expanded projects; or, as in Sites of Production, leaves from the books can be recreated on a larger, more formal scale.

DON GILL

Don Gill is originally from Cranbrook, B.C. and has lived and travelled in many parts of Canada’s west and north. He received his B.F.A. from the University of Victoria in 1978 and did independent graduate studies in the history and theory of communication at Simon Fraser University in the early 1980s. He is a founding member of the Association for Non-Commercial Culture and is currently working toward an M.F.A. at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.

• G.P.V. and Helen B. Akrigg, in their book British Columbia Place Names, suggest categories for motives of name-givers as follows: 1. Descriptive names, 2. Metaphorical namely :3. Possessive names, 4. Nostalgic names, 5. Episodic names, 6. Memorial names, 7. Honorific names.

Exhibition

Front Magazine, correspondence between Carol Williams and Or board, letter to Robin Peck from George Rammell, June 10, 1992

Exhibition

Lorraine Gilbert’s installation at the Or Gallery consists of several large photo murals which comment on the effects of logging on British Columbia’s landscape. As well as depicting economic devastation, Gilbert disrupts notions of the representation of landscape in fine art photography and painting that usually depicts an idealized and often pastoral beauty and untouched plenitude.

Brochure essay by Lary Bremner

Reworking what have been the largely male traditions of an intentionally that equates nature with a feminine Sublime and portraiture with “essence” and power, Lorraine Gilbert’s recent project is a newly engaged ecological precision, an extension of her previous involvement in what has come to be known as the New Topographies. Her work is revelatory of the naive and suspect pleasure produced by view-camera over-abundance of detail, here exposed as the trace of destructive power.

An eight-year veteran of the “drudgery and exhilaration” that is the seasonal rigour of tree-planting camps in British Columbia and Quebec, Gilbert uses a large format 4“x5” camera in the field, in this case the crewcut, the planting-site slash. In addition, she has constructed a portable studio for portrait work. As a forestry graduate, Gilbert does not condemn the industry but opposes the short-term economic expediency of current logging practices. Her project title, the rhetorically ironic Allowable Cuts, comes from the same neutralizing corporate newspeak that refers to old-growth tress as “unit stands,” forest decimation as the achievement of theoretically “sustainable yields” and tree plantations as “above ground management.” As environmental biologist
Chris Maser has pointed out (in The Redesigned Forest), species-rich first-growth forests are, under the current exploit-and-repair philosophy, rapidly being
replaced by “time constrained and oversimplified monoculture environments.” Likening old-growth to a living laboratory, and our only blueprint for a true forest, Maser argues that the point of irreversible cumulative damage to the ecosytem cannot be predicted by the statistical models forwarded by the profit-motivated “stewards” of our forest lands. As current bumper-sticker wisdom has it, “A tree farm is not a forest.” Faced with the further evidence of mineral erosion, flooding,, and the destruction of salmon spawning-grounds, Gilbert’s photographs help make visible, in the public domain, abuses that may still be corrected. Her project asks, “What degree of exploitation is ‘allowable,’ and who decides?”

That Gilbert should employ “the principle tool of the idealized North American landscape aesthetic” is not surprising. By way of highly detailed and inappropriately “beautiful” images of devastation she reclaims and re-employs the landscape tradition, evoking, of necessity, everything from the expansionist survey
photography of the late 1800s through to the humanist modernism of Ansel Adams. In this context, Gilbert calls into question both current clearest logging practices and photography’s historical complicity with notions of nature’s endless abundance. Her work is conscious of photography’s tendency to synechdotal framing, and its inherent irony: the virtual replacement by the document/simulacrum for the “real” world it purports to depict.

In the ecological context of the altered landscape Gilbert has subtly inverted a number of the expected photographic conventions. In previous installations of her ongoing project (La Terre Promise, and Le Paysage) the referential dissonance set up in work captioned, for example, Luc in Bella Coola, or Planting Crew Going to Work, Invermere, BC. is effected by the minute scale of the human “subjects” all but lost in a recapping of the mutilated topography. One is reminded of the plethora of turn-of-the-century stereoscopic images of the wilderness, particularly the heroic poses of loggers and survey engineers whose very presence, while intended to show the scale of the towering first-growth
frontier, signified Victorian confidence, domination and control. Here, in the large panorama Carolle, posing & planting (four 30“x40” panels), the barren
clearest slopes seem to extend endlessly beyond the frame, threatening even the foregrounded and evident optimism of the putative subject, the young planter.

Gilbert’s portrait work draws the viewer into an easy identification with “document” but her directorial interventions resist the romanticism of an entirely objective gaze. Here portraiture, itself landscape’s coeval, sociological twin, plays with a range of viewer expectations. The sixteen 11“xl4” portraits, comprising a single piece arranged in a grid, remind us of both the statistical nature of the uniformly imposed plantation plots, and of the faceted “species-rich” diversity that is the human “resource.” The temptation to a facile valorization of the “proletarian” planters that was subverted by the hyperbolic mock heroism of Self Portrait (from La Terre Promise) is here extended in this grouping. A taxonomy of portrait styles and intentions – carte de visite to snapshot aesthetic, work-site specific to backdrop formality – acts to diffuse the historical pretentious of portraiture, and provide what Barthes would call a “suprasgmental” syntax. Indeed, Gilbert’s inclusion of biographical information about the planters (the crew family tree, if you like) reveals their broadly middle-class origins. Gilbert’s own active role as a planter gives portrayals of her cc-workers aspects quite dissimilar to the well-intentioned but ultimately condescending bathos of reportage in, for example, the widely disseminated F.S.A. photographs of Depression-era America.

Cross-fading the hard distinctions between portraiture and landscape forms, the humorous iconography of the introductory piece, Shaping the New Forest (30“x40”, colour), says much about the necessary cc-habitation of the mutually interdependent systems, the human and the ecological. It provides, also, clues to a reading of multiple and overlapping subject in the pivotal diptych Cassettes of Tress/Snags, the unplanted tree-plugs in the lush verdancy of the first panel dichotomous with the planter and seedlings dwarfed by the razed and l’ocllp- expanse in the second.

A short video, a study for a future (Spring/Summer ’9 1) project, accompanies Allowable Cuts. Its brief, straightforward sequences of treeplanters at work are interspliced with tightly framed slow-motion shots. The soundtrack, as listened to through earphones, is comprised of ambient planting noises: buzzing of insects and the breathing of planters; scraping of shovels and the purposeful clomping of boots. The silence of the slow-motion hands and torsos conveys a sense of the meditative rhythm that can be part of even the most back-breaking work. The video’s
inclusion here serves as an antidote to the kind of self-congratulatory television advertising that has been the main public relations strategy of British Columbian
logging companies in recent years.

Gilbert, stressing the documentary nature of Allowable Cuts is quick to emphasize that this work is “not about art,” is less self-reflexive and conceptual
than its showing in a gallery context would indicate. However, that a company like MacMillan Bloedel should attempt to enlist for their publicity Gilbert’s more “heroic” portraits (as they appeared in the Spring ’88 issue of the treeplanters’ magazine Screef), while refusing to accept what they termed the “scare tactics” of the clearest landscapes, is telling. In the contentious insistence on form Gilbert reopens the discourses of documentation and divests them of the unquestioned traditions of unlimited access both photographic and economic.

Lary Bremner, 1990 Lorraine Gilbert is a photographer from Montreal who currently teaches at the University of Ottawa. Previously a graduate in Environmental Biology (McGill), she has also studied forestry at the University of British Columbia. Her
most recent work was shown at McMicheal Museum in Klienburg, Ontario, and published in The Landscape/Le Paysage: 8 Canadian Photographers. She will also be exhibiting with Darius Kinsey and Frank Gohlke in Rochester, N.Y. in March, 1991. Lorraine has been planting trees every summer for the past decade.

Lary Bremner is editor/publisher of Tsunami Editions and is a former treeplanter.

Exhibition

Brochure by Phillip McCrum

William Nevens
Paintings

William Nevens’s paintings of contemporary herald signs are like stigma on the
surface of his canvases, acting as scabs of an antiquated language system that, for him, illustrates the dilemma of finding and making meaning in painting. Three Stripes Shaping a Canvas can be seen as both a starting point and finishing point in his inquiry.

This painting, the only abstraction in the exhibition, consists of a shaped canvas that appears to collapse inward. It is supported only by three monochrome colour bars that crisscross the surface in an attempt to maintain the regular rectangular shape of the other five paintings. The other paintings represent a variety of heraldic expression, ranging from the bombastic Coat of Arms of John Paul the Second to the Hells Angels emblem (which looks the most uncomfortable within the confines of the rectangle, needing some kind of skin as ground to be truly appreciated). In between are the arms of the Manitoba R.C.M.P., the Correctional Service of Canada, and the Victoria Cross. Each emblem is painted meticulously and centred on the canvas.

Heraldry is the the science of “armorial bearings,” controlling and denoting position and presence of the bearer of these arms. Historically bestowed by the head of state – monarch, city councils or pope, etc. – they ascribe one’s successes and the reasons for that success, whether it be militaristic, mercantile, or political. A coat of arms determined status, defined difference and, in short, gave the bearer the privilege of political existence. The structure that made up this language of commerce was visual, standardized and complex. It relied primarily on the shield shape as ground, the surface of which was dissected and divided by lines that halved, quartered and crisscrossed. Blocks of colours, abstract shapes such as chevrons, and more literal illustrations such as wines cups and lyres supplied a meaningful syntax describing the bearers and their status.

As a painter, Nevens finds himself locked within the circumscribed structure of modernist discourse. His use of heraldic sign is an attempt to understand this confining structure and to articulate the difficulty in speaking to the issue of painting and, ultimately, the exodus of meaning from the modernist canvas. His shield,Three Stripes Shaping a Canvas, is emblematic of that struggle in representing both the collapse of the canvas and the possibility of recouping meaning within the monochromatic bars.

The extreme standardization of the heraldic system appeals to Nevens, whose
paintings are inextricably connected to the reject of modernism. He attempts an analogistic strategy by placing these figures of heraldic meaning on the ground of the modernist canvas, therefore bringing into question the significance of these anachronistic signs in relationship to himself as painter. Coats of arms determined the language of dominance in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, whereas they now act only as obscure signs of dominance in an ailing culture. Images as antagonistic as the Victoria Cross and the Hells Angels emblem are reduced and revealed by Nevin’s treatment to be equal and devoid of polemic confrontation. These regressive figures, despite their careful painting and privileged composition, end up flat and empty, their condition vacuous.

Simultaneously, Nevens questions the validity of any mark made upon his standardized canvas, whether it be figure or abstract, thus challenging himself with the impossible task of making a mark. The canvas is collarless, flat and mute, yet it holds the authority of art history, resulting in the distress of a collapsing canvas: acrisis of meaning where even the blank slate implodes. Nevens’s answer to this perplexing problem is a “return to the future,” wedgingin three thin bars of monochrome. Less than marcs or emblems, they just hold, not re-establish, the rectangle. This preposes that despite the apparent co-option of modernism into a historical and therefore arcane mode, it still offers, if just as a support, the possibility of establishing an authenticity of meaning.

Phillip Mccrum, 1990 
William Nevens is an artist living and working out of Vancouver. He is a 1988 graduate of Simon Fraser University. Exhibitions include; Helen Pitt Award Winners Show, 1988/1989, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver 1989; Artropolis ’87, Vancouver, 1987; and various Simon Fraser University student shows.

Phillip Mccrum is an artist, working and living in Vancouver. Director of the Or Gallery from 1987-89. He is currently working on a collaborative project with. Gerald Crcede, entitled ‘‘Don’t Call Me Buddy, Buddy.’‘