archive

Exhibition

Clare Gomez Edington’s exhibition, Don’t Let Them See You Coming, consists of a live continuous performance as well as a video surveillance component which addresses issues of voyeurism with a view to inverting the typical male/female dichotomy.

Gomez Edington also collaborated with Patrick Mahon to produce two video interviews which examined issues around the practices of artists who use their partners as subjects for their work.

Publication essay “Secret Origins” by Lisa Robertson in the book Patrick Mahon, Clare Gomez Edington. Publication no Longer Available.

Exhibition

Patrick Mahon’s video and drawing installation, Spectacular Viewhome, deals with notions of voyeurism and exhibitionism within the domestic space of the home.

The artist also collaborated with Clare Gomez Edington to produce two video interviews which examined issues around the practice of artists who use their partners as subjects for their work.

In the book “Patrick Mahon, Clare Gomez Edington”. Publication no Longer Available.

Spectacular Viewhome

The intersecting of the notion of the ‘spectacle’ and ‘the home’ may call to mind what a precious commodity the view of nature, or the city, from the private space of the home has become. At one time, the walls of the parlour were adorned with pictures of exotic locales, images of distant wars, and latterly, works of art intended to transport the viewer aesthetically. Now, the contemporary – affluent – parlour-dweller desires a picture that is also at a distance: a view through his window that makes the world appear more precious, cleaner, and untouchable.

Television is certainly the other ‘window on the world;’ the sometime vulgar, sometimes transporting one that is available to all- especially those not possessing of more priceless views. It too invests the private space with a sense of spectacle, making the extraordinary seem commonplace, and putting the ordinary at a distance. Indeed, it can act as ‘other’. Within the home, becoming the object around which and through which relationships are negotiated.

This exhibition is composed of some of the later works in my project of representing home viewing, using images of my partner and myself engaged as spectators. The emphasis here is on the materiality of the domestic scene, and on the metaphoric personal effects of the viewers. Their costumes of underwear – ‘private skins’ – are implemented to help define the space of the room that inscribes them. As real spectators they are indeed absent, and so is the world within the television monitors, then, steps into the middle of two absences.

This work arises out of concern with wanting to understand the contemporary natures of the private and the public. Sociologist Hanna Arendt viewed the breakdown of the so-called dichotomy between the two s a problem. While I would challenge her notion that property itself is the sole determinant of the private realm, her eloquent expression of what is at stake if privacy is allowed to disappear bears repeating in the context of Spectacular Home.

“The four walls of one’s private property offer the only reliable hiding place from the common public world, not only from everything that goes on it in it but also from its very publicity , from being seen and being heard. A life spent entirely in public in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, no-subjective sense”1

(1) Hanna Arendt, the Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 70-71

Special-Event

Held at the Pitt Gallery, 317 W Hastings st. Commemorative Broadsheet publication.

Exhibition

OR GALLERY
Media Release Oct. 1 , 1992
Frances Grafton
Stripped of Sense
OCTOBER 8 TO 31, 1992
The Or Gallery continues its fall programming with a new installation of drawings by Vancouver artist Frances Grafton entitled Stripped of Sense. This project consists of a series of large format, black and white drawings based upon photographs the artist took of the severed heads of Gothic sculptures, once situated in the Gallery of Kings in Notre-Dame Cathedral, Paris. The stone sculptures were systematically destroyed during the French Revolution because they were mistakenly identified as representations of French kings. In fact, they were representations of the kings of Judah. Had their true identity been known, it is questionable whether their destruction would have been executed so thoroughly. As it is, apart from a few fragments, only the heads remain identifiable. These were discovered by chance in 1977, carefully preserved in a ‘grave’ in a hotel courtyard in Paris. Frances Grafton’s work has been concerned with identity, how we define our edges in the flux of circumstance, how labels are attached and who attaches them. The particular nature of the history of these destroyed figures is not evident in the presentation of the drawings, Frances Grafton regards them as non-specific: what is evident is the senseless violence. This history of victimization by virtue of their identification (in this case mis-identification) as ‘Other’, moves the work beyond the particular.

Stripped of Sense, an installation of new work at the Or Gallery, will be Frances Grafton’s first solo exhibition since graduating with a Masters degree in Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia.

OR GALLERY, 314 W. Hastings, PO Box 1329 Station A, Vancouver V6C 2T2, (604) 683.7395
IU

“I walked along the road with two friends. The sun went down-the sky was blood red – and I felt a breath of sadness-I stood still tired unto death-over the blue-black fiord and city lay blood and tongues offire. My friends continued on-I remained trembling from fear. I felt the great infinite scream through nature.”
Edvard Munch 18951

Catalogue-Stripped of Sense/ Frances Grafton

The palpable silence of Frances Grafton’s drawing installation, Stripped of Sense is derived from an apparent contradiction. On encountering the works, our expectation of a perceptible cry proportionate in volume to the large scale of the visages, is met instead, by a vast silence. These are not, after all, faces within nature, caught like Edvard Munch’s in an oscillating landscape constructed to reflect a romantic personal vision. They are faces drawn with reference to the landscape of the photograph. Indeed the strategies that Grafton has undertaken in realizing StriPped of Sense have made the viewing experience one that cannot be separated from the filmic: the black and white world before talkies, in which sounds of love and protest were similarly inaudible, is here recollected-but not reconstructed. Behind these works is a story, and it is that aspect of Stripped of Sense that threatens to lead us into temptation-the temptation to engage the works based on prior knowledge, rather than with our eyes. The artist has, appropriately, given us the narrative of the mutilated heads that were photographed to become her subject. We learn that the fragmentation of the sculptures occurred during the French Revolution because they were mis-identified as representations of French kings, instead of being properly identified as kings of Judah. Our fascination with this history may cause us to believe it to be the thing that legitimizes the drawings. But we would be mistaken-these are not illustrations of a truth that may be read or told, they are themselves the embodiment of a truth which must be seen to be believed.

It is necessary here to refer to the condition of photography: much critical thought holds that the photograph is an artifact that speaks of death because it represents a moment that no longer is. The work of Christian Boltanski, for example-itself preoccupied with the trace of the visageextends this reading by extreme blurring of the photo to pull the face further away in time.2 By enlargement, the eye-holes of his subjects become huge and skull-like, staring at the viewer with an implied gaze that becomes an absence. In Grafton’s work such an absence also exists, contrived in the intense black areas. However, it is not only a reference to a photographic emptiness drawing us in, but a graphic one, which manifests the surface and pushes us away from itself. And what are we pushed to? To the multi-variant graphite marks, the painstakingly drawn surface that can only be studied gradually, even meditatively. Frances Grafton has constructed a viewing experience that overturns the traditional filmic-some would say ‘masculinist’ one. Our initial reading of tortured and mutilated stone faces, captured photographically, gives way to a powerful awareness of landscape, of living body, and ultimately, of the slow and careful trace of the hand. The artist’s engagement with the shattered representations has returned a teeming topography, rich with possibility. Stripped of Sense is a work of considerable idealism-dare one say hopefulness? Some will see its insistence on placing marks of beauty within a context that recalls violation and loss, as merely problematic. Others will see this contradiction as a challenge to repair what is broken and to rebuild.
-Patrick Mahon, 1992

1 Elizabeth Prelinger. Edvard Munch: Master Printmaker (New York, 1983) p.39
2 Susan Tallman. “A Jewish High School in Vienna, 1931” in Arts Magazine (Oct 1991) p.20

Frances Grafton is a printmaker and visual artist living in Vancouver. She recently completed her M.F.A. at the University of British Columbia.

Patrick Mahon is a printmaker and teacher who is currently working at the University of Alberta.

Frances Grafton
Stripped of Sense
October 8-31, 1992

These images are based upon photographs which I took of the severed and mutilated heads of Gothic sculptures once situated in the Gallery of Kings in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. The stone sculptures were systematically destroyed during the French Revolution because they were mistakenly identified as representations of the king of Judah. Had their true identification been known, it is questionable whether their destruction would have been executed so thoroughly. As it is, apart from a few fragments. only the heads remain identifiable. In 1793, four years after the assault on the Bastille, it was decreed that likeness of the kings of France in Notre-Dame must be toppled and completely destroyed. Until 1977, little was known about the remains for these sculptures; it was assumed that their fate was sealed within the walls of subsequent constructions. In April of that year, a discovery was made completely by chance; 364 pieces of stone, of which 21 were identifiable as heads from the Gallery of Kings, were found carefully preserved in a ‘grave’ in a hotel courtyard in Paris. As yet, there is no information to explain how they became interred. Under the auspices of François Giscaird D’Estaing they have now assumed the status of museum pieces. The heads which are approximately twice life-size are presently the sole occupants of a room in the Musée de Cluny.

I engage in producing a word with these heads as subject matter because of their history of victimization by virtue of their identification (in this case mis-identification) as ‘Other’. Concerns with identity, how we define our edges in flux of circumstance, how labels are attached and who attaches them, have been seminal to my work. However, the history itself is not evident in my presentation of the drawings. I regard them as having become (through the drawing process) non-specific, and therefore representational of any victimized group; it is the senseless violence which is evident. Literally stripped of their sense, the faces I have drawn can only attest to their wounds in silence, but it is a silence which demands to be confronted. Face to face with the images, I am reassured of the necessity of seeking an identity, a sense of being, which is cognizant of the self, and the place of the self within the whole.

Exhibition

The Or Gallery is proud to host Deborah Koenker’s site-specific installation, Bar-Ba-Loot, which is constructed around an arte-povera aesthetic. Her work deals with the environmental issues and she uses a children’s fictional story as a trope which physically and literally winds it way around the work.

Within the four walls and modest scale of Vancouver’s Or Gallery, Deborah Koenker has created an evocative memorial of that which is already lost to us, and a warning, both powerful and silent, of a deadly potential regarding the habitability of this planet. Bar-ba-loot: An Installation manages to be graceful, tender and playful, even while its solemnity seeps deeply into our spirit.

In spite of its highly charged content, Koenker’s installation avoids the common pitfalls many artworks with a strong social/political agenda land squarely into. Often such work forfeits all aesthetic considerations in the service of its message. But never didactic, Koenker’s artwork is an equal marriage of form and content. It is an example of the healthy relationship that is possible when the ideals of modernism and postmodernism unite, as in this installation, where Koenker employs the fruits of modernism’s love affair with form and material to the full benefit of her postmodernist cultural critique.

Consistently throughout Koenker’s work the content is carefully woven into every formal decision she makes and is carried by her use of materials, her choice of imagery, and her elegant, understated style. As in her previous installations, Koenker has inhabited the space here fully with a remarkable economy of means; wherein all the excess has been allowed to simmer away, producing a rich concentration of full-bodied ingredients. The elements blend together to create a whole which could not be suggested by any pairing of its constitUent parts.

This synthesis is perhaps most evident in Koenker’s poignant inclusion of items from a child’s world. Upon one wall of the gallery is an excerpt from a children’s story by Dr.Seuss which warns, in the rhyming whimsy for which he is celebrated, of the consequences of our careless eXploitation of finite, natural resources. Koenker has reproduced parts of this text directly on the wall in a misty blue ink with a children’s alphabet. Compulsively printed by hand from a set of rubber stamps bearing cartooned dinosaurs in each letter’s design, the wall’s surface creates a buoyant appeal that soon gives way to its ominous undercurrent. At once we are reminded of the enormous history oflife on earth through a species which existed millions of years ago, and of the immediate future of this planet through the children whose territory we inhabit, both figuratively, while reading the hand-printed narrative, and literally, as we decide the viability of coming generations here on earth.

Upon the opposite wall, Koenker has stamped the last line of Dr. Seuss’s story and then made it real by creating an artifact described in the story’s ending, and placing it on the floor beneath the text: a row of six river stones, each carved with one letter to form the final word of the story, “unless.”

Evidence of the exigency of Seuss’s warning appears on the remaining two walls of the gallery. Again, hand-stamped in light blue ink with dinosaur letters, is a partial listing, in alphabetical order, of the more than one thousand detail of stamped text on wall creatures found on the International Endangered Species List. Smiling dinosaurs spell Out great varieties of mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and other members of the animal kingdom. Koenker lets the facts speak for themselves, as the very names of these creatures, and their regretful statUs on this list, conjure up their own vivid images. The Bumblebee bat, the Indigo Macaw, the Desert Bandicoot, and their too numerous companions on these walls face the fate of becoming an historical fact and the stuff of children’s fancy, like the dinosaurs whose images sport their names around the room. However, their extinction will not be due to the progression of an ice age or the splashing of a meteor. Instead, it is human behaviour that threatens the future of the row upon row of life forms listed here. Though preventable, their destruction will continue “unless. . . “

In the center of this ethereal, watery text rests a huge sphere made up of driftwood roots, gnarled and interlocked, just as the complex systems upon this planet. It sits commanding the space, dark and foreboding and precariously balanced, in itself a fascinating piece of postminimalist sculpture. But, situated within the enveloping text, the sphere looms at the problem that won’t go away, the stark reality that must be dealt with. The orb’s ponderous materiality contrasts with the floating words upon the walls: a reminder that, though we can neither create or destroy matter, the life which infuses it is vulnerable and dependant upon the maintenance of a delicate balance. A balance, Koenker eloquently reminds us, which is dangerously close to loosing its equilibrium “unless. . . “

Bar-ba-loot: An Installation is itself exemplary of an approach needed to insure against the ills it portends. By working outside the marketplace, both in her selection of found natural materials, and in creating a non-commodity – an installation whose very natUre is ephemeral- Koenker subtly speaks to the issues of waste and consumption which lie at the root of the problem she is addressing. In doing so, she offers up a work which is not merely about a concern for the environment, but which is sincerely borne of this concern. -Sheila Lynch

Deborah Koenker is a Vancouver artist who currently teaches at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design. She received her M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate School in Southern California, and has exhibited in Canada and the United States.

Sheila Lynch is a Los Angeles installation artist and writer, who teaches at Rio Hondo College, California.

Exhibition

Kathryn Walter is concerned with producing site specific works that continue her exploration of urban development. During the month of May the artist travelled from Montreal to Toronto and then made her way to Vancouver for July. In each of these cities she constructed a work that began upon her arrival and commenced at the time of her departure. These works examine the migratory patterns of early Canadian settlement, the role of the train as both metaphor and means of transport and the movement of capital to and from these centres.

Media Release

The Or Gallery completes its summer programming with a new installation by artist Kathryn Walter entitled Regarding Places. This exhibition combines the use of both the Or Gallery space and an office space in the Dominion Building, across the street. Through the duration of the project the artist will be considering different sites in the city. These places will be “mapped” using different forms, with respect to contexts both inside and outside the gallery.

Kathryn Walter has taken up ideas that were put forward by Jean MacRae whose exhibition “Two Walking Days” has been on display at the OR through June. Dialogues between these two artists function as a point of departure for this exhibition. These and other discussions will be included in tests by Jean MacRae, Lisa Robertson, Susan Schuppli and Kathryn Walter in a publication which will be launched at the closing. This project is a work in progress and both the gallery and the office space will be open to the public throughout its duration.

“World in a City” magazine with texts by Lisa Robertson, Jean Macrae, Susan Schuppli, Kathryn Walter. No longer available.

Exhibition

OR GALLERY
Media Release June 2, 1992
Jean MacRae Two Walking Days
JUNE 9 TO 27, 1992

The Or Gallery begins its summer programming with a new installation by Vancouver artist Jean MacRae entitled Two Walking Days. This project consists of twelve blue prints arranged consecutively around the gallery walls. On the left side of each blueprint is a knitted cotton square with a different object/ view imaged onto each one. On the right hand side are knitting instructions on how to achieve each square. The language used in the instructions imitates that of a knitting book, while inserting additional references to site, location, distance and time. The instructions make clear that the activities of walking between time defined sites and outdoor knitting (as a condensation of distance into an object) are meant to reveal a kind of systematic, obsessive measuring of the subjects roaming, as well as, reflecting his/her negotiation of the urban grid. Jean MacRae’s interest in mapping strategies juxtaposes traditional surveying techniques with the phenomenological aspects of how each person maps both mentally and physically, him/herself against the sedimented physical, social and political structures represented in the broad concept of urban space.

Two Walking Days, an installation of new work at the Or Gallery, will be Jean MacRae’s first solo exhibition since graduating with a double major in Geography and Visual arts from Simon Fraser University.

Exhibition

Press Release: Heavy Weather

The Or Gallery completes its spring programming with an audio installation by Montreal artist and video maker Paul Landon. Heavy Weather makes reference to meteorological phenomena both as chaotic, natural events and as eavily coded cultural texts. Rather than considering weather reports as benign and necessary functions of the media, he suggests that their pervasive presence within the texts of radio and television exemplify the media’s rold in creating a dominant discourse that at once maps natural phenomena while ultimately defining and controlling our perception of it.

For the past two weeks Paul has been working within the gallery space recording and mixing sound tracks from various sources. The recorded elements of the installation include weather reports from the ‘public’ sphere of radio and television juxtaposed with a more personal spoken narrative. the physical structure of the exhibition allows the gallery visitor to enter into the space of media and move through different aural zones.

Brochure essay by Phillip McCrum

In the paradigmatic model of modernist art, the cube is the world. All the devices of architecture and content are stripped bare to provide the open space, the clear space, the clean space, where anything exhibited under these conditions takes on a profound position of materiality (as in expense) and exquisite beauty (as in ironic criticality). The cube owes as much to the idealism of the transparent jewelers box as it does to the revolUtion (as in perpetual). And in this world (as in heaven) all things (as in material) are beautiful. But even in the most beautiful of worlds a little rain must fall, a little heavy weather. Paul Landon’s installation Heavy Weather creates a negative landscape, a pastoral, a landscape implied bUt never seen, never materialized but infered, where we hear whispering of the guilty secrets outside of the pensive protection of these ‘white walls’. The landscape is resplendent, grounded by the cube. Speakers hang floating in cumulus groups over the gallery floor. A small metal transformer box placed asymmetrically in the corner houses a tape machine, and acts as the source of carefully haphazard wires which lead across the floor to the walls where they disappear in the transparent wires suspending the speakers, Centered in the gallery umbrellas shapes made of brushed steel with antennae replacing handles converge in a cluster. Some suspended, others placed on the ground, they become satellites hovering over their earth-bound counterparts which sit receptive and accepting of the transmitted information emanating from the cyclopean eye in the sky. Kronos for the memories. The weather of this landscape becomes a disruptive and anomalous force within the aesthetic composition of the artwork. Information hovers over and displaces the serene materialism of the installation. Intangible sound bits undermind the importance of composition and aestheticism in a constant chaotic dull roar. Information, in a McLuhanesque sense, is the commodity of the global village, the real material of the technological world. Information is that stuff that land once was-the real thing!-and the most ubiquitous of this information is the information aboUt weather. The most important, the most congenial and the most trusted, despite its constant failure, is the weather forecast. The most hysteric, the least understood and the most manipulated, is the weather forecast. Consider that in the last twenty years three types of catastrophe theory centre on our way of looking at weather:
1) nuclear winter, the big freeze after the inevitable confrontation, a new ice age where glaciers will once again creep over the earth threatening our existence.
2) global warming, the destruction of the ozone layer. The ice caps melt, and the grain belt dries into a desert under the unrelenting rays of the sun. The ‘outside’ will become unbearable for all but the hardiest creatures.
2) the destruction of the world as we know it from giant meteors that may at any time strike the earth and destroy us as it must have destroyed dinosaurs millions of years ago. Fantasy to keep us enthralled in the potential crises; weather is uncontrolable and ever present.
The weather falls from the speakers as a recording of rain, sound transmitted from the floating umbrellas is a conglomeration of weather reports. A banal format of news, information out of chaos. Easy to test (it is either raining or not raining), important to know, (what should I wear) a fulcrum of communication (how’s the weather? Fine, how’s the weather there?). We are seduced by this benevolent mediation, comforted by ‘the watch’ and the expectation of doom. Softly mixed within the ubiquitous hysteria of the weather forecast is Heavy Weathers counterpoint, the staffing of the landscape. Mingled in the loops of recorded rain and descriptive bumf is the voice, a way out from underneath the bombardment of information, outside of the hyperbole of weird science. Voices reading from journals are acts of empowerment. A simple act of observation is subversive, because it is an act of question and evaluation, a speaking to experience, a position of authenticity, a deconstruction of hierarchic structure. And within this simple act is shelter from the overwhelming frenetic authority of information or the profound materiality of the ‘world’ -a little shelter from the heavy weather. -Phillip McCrum

Paul Landon is currently teaching video at the University du Quebec a Montreal while completing his masters degree in C9mmunications at Concordia. In 1988 he finished a two year term in Audio/Video at the Jan Van Eyck Akademie in the Netherlands.

Phillip McCrum is an artist and writer living in Vancouver.

Special-Event

Benefit at the Strathcona Club

Exhibition

Press Release for Unearthing

The Or Gallery begins its spring program with an installation by Lisa Kokin, visiting artist from Berkeley, California. Her visual art production situates itself at the intersection of personal and collective memory as shaped by the historical consquences and experiences of the Holocaust.

Through her ersatz ethnography, she attempts to restore a voice and subject position to the common objects that are left behind us. her work considers the ways in which histories and identities are actively constructed through the reconstitution of cultural artifacts.

Unearthing is an installation of 23 shovels individually mounted in slabs of clay. Each shovel has an anti-Semitic epithet burnt into the handle or etched onto the blade. The words reference both historical and contemporary Jewish stereotyping, from the unabashadely over ‘kike’ to the subtle but insidious ‘pushy’. Briniging these vernacular texts into the pedagogic space of the gallery sets up a conflicting relationship between two different kinds of languages, so that the discussion of racism is not permitted to dissolve into seamless academic discourse.

Unearthing will be Lisa Kokin’s second solo exhibition in vancouver.

Brochure Lisa Kokin Unearthing

Sentinels: the shovels stand in deep stillness, keeping vigil, silent but not mute. Scorched into their handles and etched onto their blades are words of hatred for Jews. These texts, specific in their anti-Semitism, are testimonies to
the ugly power of the Word in the discrimination against all groups who are defined as Other. They speak with familiarity, of how people everywhere have called the Other inhuman so that they can define themselves as fully human. The obscenities are founded in fear and often in envy, but they are phrases of separation, scorn, and cruelty. To protect the similar we exclude the different; guarding the security of convention and conformity by caution or suspicion, or by denying that which may appear to threaten established boundaries. In a time when many people are advocating diversity and cultural plurality, right-wing groups use the term “political correctness” in a pejorative way to attack such policies. Some of the words scarred into the shovels have fallen into disuse, while others in their seeming banality appear less hostile. Yet what has changed is only the sophistication of the code of condemnation: where once there was “kike” there may now be “pushy” to identify as Jewish a woman from New York. Within the changing vernacular of “otherness” the fundamental tenets of racism prevail.

The shovels stand fixed in earth and clay, evoking ground, burial, graves: the mass graves of the Holocaust. These used objects reconstruct anonymous histories of labour, digging. They disinter the abuse to which people are subjected simply because of the categories to which they belong. The shovels, installed upright throughout the gallery space, recall the body, becoming anti-monuments of unnamed histories.

As found objects retrieved from flea markets and garage sales, these shovels necessarily signify loss or absence and, through implication, the narrative motif of salvage. Yet if one considers the subtext for such an installation, the prospect of restoring a lost voice or subject position to a history of collective atrocity seems an impossible task.

As a child, Lisa Kokin had been shown films of the Holocaust many times. Instead of facilitating her identification with her cultural heritage, the horror of seeing her people’s bones tossed down concentration-camp chuteshadparalyzed her, preventing her from claiming her Jewishness as an intimate part of herself. Only recently has her artwork begun to attend to the elemental themes in her own life.

The first work in a series about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism was an installation of concentration-camp jackets sewn from hog gut, on which she painted stripes and numbers. Hanging stark, translucent, and fragile above gut bags figurative in their placement on the floor beneath them, the jacket’s aesthetic visual presence is disturbingly at odds with their testimonial of human brutality.

Another installation consisted of a stretch of two railway lines with an urn of ashes placed at their apex. Inscribed on the cast-iron plates between each rail was a quote by Lech Walesa claiming that the Jews were responsible for antiSemitism.

Lisa Kokin recently completed an installation on women’s spirituality with found objects that explicitly integrated themes from feminism, goddesses, and Latin-American Catholicism. Currently, she is making handmade books about childhood, women’s lives, Jewishness, feminism, body image and good girls.

Throughout Kokin’s work are the themes of human suffering and intolerance towards groups of other people because those groups are somehow different from a mainstream. Unearthing challenges the viewer to consider the multifarious histories of racism through a collision of languages, the visual, the written, the implied. The work’s strength is not located entirely in the particular and the personal but also in its abilities to evoke the universal. Margaret MacKenzie

Lisa Kokin is an installation artist living and working in Berkeley, California. She has also received extensive recognition as a textile artist and strives to integrate the materiality of her crafts background into her artworks. Unearthing is Lisa’s second solo exhibition in Vancouver.

Brochure essay by Margaret MacKenzie

Margaret MacKenzie is an anthropologist and assistant professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Her recent research, studying the meanings of eating and body weight among women in California, has focused on ideas of self-control and the distrust of pleasure.

Exhibition

Press Release

Henry Tsang
Love Stories

The Or Gallery completes its winter program series on cross-cultural investigations with an exhibition of new works by visual artist and curator Henry Tsang. He has been active in developing a broader context for the consideration of contemporary art practices; in particular those discussions that challenge eurocentric values. As a co-curator of SELF NOT WHOLE, a multidisciplinary exhivition presented at the Chinese Cultural Centre, Henry demonstrated his commitment to extending these discussions beyond the traditional venues for the production and ratification of art. As a memeber of the Association for Non-commercial Culture he produced a site specific surveillance piece for last summer’s PRIVATE ADDRESSES show. His work has also been included in the travelling GOYA TO BEIJING exhibition, commemorating the June 4th 2989 Massacre in Tiananmen Square. Love Stories at the Or Gallery will be Henry Tsang’s first solo exhibition in four years and so it is oc course eagerly anticipated.
Love Stories continues Henry’s explorations of the mechanisms of intra-racial desire.

Exhibition

Marianne Nicolson’s exhibition, House of Gold, is part of the Or Gallery’s series of collaborations between writers and artists whose work engages with and develops a ‘local’ context for a discussion of the politics of difference. As an artist of Kwa’guitl descent, Marianne Nicolson uses visual arts as a mechanism for de-constructing the historical representations of First Nations People. She tries to break down stereotypes and in doing so create an imagery that reflects both the traditional and contemporary experiences of being native. Nicolson created an installation which references both the conventions of Western photography and the conventions of West-Coast Native art making. The organizing principle at work in the piece is the idea of the longhouse which is in turn juxtaposed with an image of the Presbyterian church. Through this relationship the artist attempts to discover the differences and similarities between two mechanisms of institutionalized power – Native and Western. The work is reconciliatory in nature and suggests the possibility of finding some common ground or threads of common experience.

Catalogue essays by Heesok Chang, Kirsten McAllister, Larissa Lai

Exhibition

Part of the Or Gallery’s series of collaborations between writers and artists whose works engages with and develops a ‘local’ context for a discussion of the politics of difference. Jamelie Hassan’s, The Conference of the Birds and Baghdad Commemorative Billboard Project, is well received in part because of its timely reference to the anniversary of the Persian Gulf War and the concurrent Mid-East peace talks and in part to its equally timely discussion of local colour and difference. Hassan has produced a new installation for the gallery as well as a public-billboard project. Both of these works reference the political activities and histories of the Middle-East which has in the past informed a great deal of Jamelie’s art production.

Hassan’s exhibition and Billboard were presented on BCTV in a 10 minute news segment. The artist also gave an informed radio interview and participated in numerous talks through out the city.

Catalogue essays by Heesok Chang, Kirsten McAllister, Larissa Lai, BC TV interview aired during recap of Persian Gulf War