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Exhibition

Or Gallery
Monique Dykstra- Too Thick To Drink, Too Thin To Plow
Gaye Jackson- Travelogue
November 25 to December 23, 1995
Opening: Saturday November 25
Artist Talks: 2pm November 25

The OR Gallery is pleased to present this exhibition of photographic works by Montreal artist Monique Dykstra and Toronto artist Gaye Jackson. Both works exhibited employ photography and text. Unkown to each other, the artists have undertaken challenging jorneys into the landscape and each has produced a body of work based on their record-keeping.

In 1993 Monique Dykstra and Kathleen Usher canoed the 2,000 mile Yukon River in Alaska, photographing and interviewing the people they met along the way. ‘Too Thick To Drink, Too Thin To Plow’ documents their trip in a series of black and white portraits and transcribed interviews of the people they met along their way.

In 1988 and 1991 Gaye Jackson hiked into and out of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. This installation was produced from her photographs and writings.
‘Travelogue’ utilizes manipulated colour photography and spoken text on audiotape to evoke the physical and psychological act of descending into unfamiliar and ‘extreme’ territory.

Dysktra and Jackson will be present at the exhibition opening to discuss their work. A publication will accompany the exhibition.

In the words and images which make up Travelogue, Gaye Jackson takes us on a journey. Part of that journey traces a descent into the Grand Canyon, past its layers which are pictured in the photographs, and referred to in the text. With each step you are carried through another millennium of creation, giving the sensation of becoming “unstuck in time.”

Gaye also shows us another path: one which descends through the surface layers of consciousness, past our initial assessment of the reality which surrounds us, and into a state of openness where we are able to perceive the real and the surreal in the same world.

Travelogue is a work of dualities. In some of the images, hot, violet light bakes the Canyon, giving the sensation of a place prickling with heat. Other images are lush in their colour and texture: a cool, flowing river reflects the sunrise which bathes the Canyon wall in golden light.

Duality also extends to the spoken text. The words, read by the artist with museum-guide neutrality, deliver Canyon facts and safety tips gleaned from hiking manuals. Slipped between these passages are descriptions of surreal encounters with people, animals and the Canyon itself: a man asking for spare change on the pathways falls into a rock and disappears; a small yellow lizard becomes the life of the party. The physical intensity of an encounter within the Canyon may cause you to perceive it in a different light, just as experiencing your environment in varied states of emotion will do. These altered perceptions are valuable and can provide insights into our own existence.

In Travelogue, the Canyon is a grand site for perception. As we descend the canyon walls, and the walls of our consciousness, we become open to our imagination and its potency.

-John Scully,
Exhibition Selection Commitee

Exhibition

Media release-

CAROLE ITTER

October 21 – November 18, 1995 Performance: Friday October 27,8 pm Artist Talk: Saturday November 4, 3 pm

Carole Itter acknowledges the participation of: Dominique Fraikin, Jill Fraser, Maxine Gadd, Madonna Hamel, Beatrix Schalk, Esther Rausenberg, Jehanne Rogowski, Rhoda Rosenfeld, Trudy Rubenfeld, Aki Yakimoto, Helen Yeomans.
with special thanks to: Luke Blackstone, Shawn Chapelle and AI Neil.

There will be an evening performance by Madonna Hamel and other participants on Friday October 27 at 8pm. The OR Gallery is pleased to present Carole Itter’s‘The Float’ to Vancouver audiences. The installation in the gallery functions as a re-working of ideas, materials and documentation which has evolved out of a collaborative performance that took place on Burrard Inlet in 1993. ‘The Float’ expresses Itter’s on-going meditations on resource mis-management; specifically logging practices in BC and also natural cycles, rhythm and collaboration and their effects on the creative process. The artist has stated: “A group of eight performance artists moved a loosely-spilled indoor sculpture work out of the usual gallery setting and into the ocean. This presentation at the OR Gallery shows what happened in the water. By and large, the incoming and outgoing solstice tides determined the choreography of this event We laid out the objects on an extreme low tide, watched them float for six hours, then wrapped a ‘boom’ around them. We slowly moved this floating mass to a fresh water source during which time it was discovered that these objects could also become percussive. The pieces were rinsed, dried off and then stored; are-enactment of a commonplace process, the ritual of gathering and harvesting.” Carole Itter will be present on the opening day, Saturday October 21, from 2 to 5pm. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with a transcript of a conversation between those who created ‘The Float’.

From a tape recorded discussion in June 1993, the following artists were present: Dominique Fraikin, Madonna Hamel, Carole Itter, Esther Rausenberg, Jehanne Rogowski, Aki Yakimoto, Helen Yeomans.

Carole Itter: “I have a sense of passages of sound and passages of silence. This piece needs its sounds and its silences.”

Helen Yeomans: “The first thing I think of is the sound and the quiet; the quality of the sound that Maxine Gadd’ s flute had, the quality of the sound that our drumming on the wooden pieces had. The pace of the slide dissolve seems to relate to the double exposure photographs (Rhoda Rosenfeld’s). What I find about her photographs was that they have the quality of the pace of that day. It felt like there was that residue of us being on the beach in another place and then moving and moving with the water also moving. There was a rocking sensation which soothed me, which made it different from being on land. Maybe we can repeat the sound and somehow engage viewers in the rocking.”

Jehanne Rogowski: ‘’‘The Float’ seemed very much about cycles to me. A lot of it was about acceptance and going with the ebb and flow of it. First we unpacked boxes of stuff on the beach and in the second cycle, the water came in to pick it up and then we started to play on it and them we towed it over to a fresh water source. For me, one of the most interesting parts was when all the pieces started to get washed because I wasn’t aware that was going to happen. Then my experience was one of real acceptance and definitely trust going hand in hand with that. When I saw Carole pick up the pieces and start to wash them, it just seemed so natural to follow that. A lot was about acceptance and going with the tide.

Carole Itter: “I have a really good memory of it, of all of us there and I hang on to that with a very large handle. I know a sort of sadness in that the real thing did happen and now all the rest of it, this stuff, is only documentation. So, how can we push it back out to the viewers?”

Dominique Fraikin: “Watching the video again, my body was back into the rhythm of the tide. The final documentation should try to capture the feeling of how the day evolved. What was important was the pace, which was connec ted to the tide coming in so slowly.”

Madonna Hamel: “Luke Blackstone’s and Trudy Rubenfeld’s video taping was so slow and unobtrusive. It took its time which was very much in keeping with the process. I don’t have an urge to recreate what we did – we can’t do that – but to hold the essence of it and that would be in the pace. The pace and no real structure, that is, no in/struction was given. Everyone had a personal idea and that was also part of the group idea. And following Carole’s original idea, it just sort of happened.”

Carole Itter: “By and large, the incoming and outgoing tides determined the choreography. There was a weak undercurrent which affected the floatation beneficially. A friend of mine, the remarkable dancer and choreographer, Paula Ross looked at my plans for this piece and said “There is no choreography necessary. The ocean will do it all.” I loved her remark; it opened my eyes and reassured me that no direction would be needed.”

Helen Yeomans: ““Pace” and “sound” keep coming up as elements of what transpired, of what stayed with us. And the movement, the swaying.”

Madonna Hammel: “When J ehanne and I got out of the car afterwards and we were walking down the street, we felt like weighted bodies (gesturing the swaying effect).”

Esther Rausenberg: “Luke’s video and Trudy’s video also capture that pacing. He would focus in on a couple of pieces and just follow the movement of those pieces. Some would move
forward; some would draw back.”

Carole Itter: “I had seen video by both of them before this and knew each would be really long and steady with a camera and I kind of knew that that was what ‘The Float’ was going to need. It’s great that they agreed to tape it.”

Madonna Hamel: “It was quite baptismal too. The cleansing and especially the washing off.”

Aki Yakimoto: “Did ‘The Float’ still carry the history of these pieces from when it was a floor piece? Or did it turn into something else?”

Carole Itter: “The title of the floor piece was ‘Western Blue Rampage’. I put that title together thinking of the debris that’s left over from logging practices on the west coast, the rampages that go on in the name of clearcutting, and the way we’ve ignored, for a century or more, good logging practices.”

Dominique Fraikin: “So the piece continues.”

Carole Itter: “Curious because when I was planning ‘Western Blue Rampage’ and working on it – this was a few years ago – I wanted it to undulate. I spent weeks trying and failing to design something on the floor that would make it all undulate. My brother is a mechanical engineer so I went to him for ideas on simple ways to lift the whole thing up slightly off the floor here and there. He gave me some sketches and I looked at all of them and realized that the whole concept immobilized me because I didn’t have the skill to do all that. So I decided – forget it. Yet it has recurred in a way; the ocean undulated it finally.”

Esther Rausenberg: “Yet it wasn’t a static piece when it was a floor piece.”

Carole Itter: “Yes, it was. It was the first piece I’d made that viewers couldn’t touch, couldn’t get at to handle and play with. Come to think of it, young children did anyway, they just walked into it!”

Madonna Hamel: “Interesting that there was a log boom anchored nearby when we had it in the water – as regards to forestry practices.”

Carole liter: “As far as I know, those were waste logs, they will never be milled. The Harbours Board hires a beachcomber who collects them and he just anchors them there all year long. I don’t know what ultimately happens to them.”

Esther Rausenberg: “They become the pineapple bowls and the spice racks! (laughter) When I was drying them off and cleaning them, I really started to look at these pieces and said to myself, “what waste”. I wondered how much more of this stuff is out there.”

Helen Yeomans: “When we were washing and drying them, I was looking at the objects a lot more closely. I was seeing so many stories of my childhood – these bowls, friends’ places that had these objects – it felt like there was a bit of history that was coming back in. I noticed how selective I was, which ones I was going towards because I had seen them before and they were familiar. “

Madonna Hamel: “They became familiar that day because we saw them so often, retrieving them, herding them, playing them – the clock, the shoe, the toy truck, the drawer… “

Carole Hter: “To me, this is so close to quilt making. If you’ve made quilts or your ancestors have, you remember where all these pieces came from “on yeah, that was old Uncle Tim’s bathrobe, and that over there was my summer dress…”“

Dominique Fraikin: “When the objects were on the beach, they became part of the beach, as seaweed or logs. The objects looked as if they came from the sea; nature reclaimed them. When we brought them around to wash them, then all of a sudden they came back to the home and they became objects again. Then they became attached to us.”

Madonna Hamel: “They sort of tamed… not tamed, domesticated. If we could somehow get that sense of that space we had all around us (in an exhibition venue) because even when we were really active in the circle, we were quite aware that there were no walls around us. It never did seem too closed.”

Carole Itter: “We seemed really tiny – it was a very big universe out there.”

Madonna Hamel: “The objects were animated once they got into the water. For example, the beads were like snakes and nothing was heavier than anything else. Everything became buoyant and then when you looked at it later, you definitely knew that this particular drawer is heavier than this little cloverleaf dish. A real difference between weightlessness and weight. Maybe this added to the sensation of being on another planet – those outfits (black and red wetsuits) and then going into a place for most of the day where you are weightless.”

Helen Yeomans: “Weightless. And all we did was wait. Wading. Waiting.”

Dominique Fraikin: “We are all talking about the uplifting experience of this and the cyclical/women space or feeling it created. Yet there’s a serious side connected to it, to logging, to how people gather logs in the water and bring them to the industry. I was constantly reminded of that, especially the way we dragged all these objects to the fresh water. But then it came back to the washing, to the domestic. I’m wondering how this fits in to the big picture. To me, it parallels so much the logging industry yet it is so connected too, to women’s cycles and to domesticity.”

Carole Itter: “Maybe that’s where the surrealism and dadaism comes in. Its one way to present a serious topic. Bizarre too.”

Madonna Hamel: “The cyclical/feminine concerns are not any less serious. They are primal urges actually. That we don’t pay as much attention to the domestic and the cyclical is why we are in this situation with the serious logging infractions. The contrast of urgency versus the slow. Gentle, cyclical nature revivifying itself constantly versus this stopping nature up short. And that’s absurd, the way its done.”

Helen Yeomans: “It felt like the objects were coming home at that point.”

Madonna Hamel: “I liked the element of ‘taking the care’ with those perfect flannel squares of drying cloth. Taking the care.”

Jehanne Rogowski: “And the cloths just appeared!”

Madonna Hamel: “I appreciate entering any kind of domestic reference but this particular domestic chore as a work of art said maybe its not so much that our chores (traditionally as women) are the problem. But that what we do is not taken seriously, and that our chores, our rituals aren’t appreciated. The wiping dry of the objects was funny only because it’s that stereotype. Yet the idea here is that we were not being stereotypical, we were being archetypal. We were celebrating what it is that we do and what it is that we pay attention to. And the details that have meaning for us, the caring and the nurturing that comes with wiping something with a soft piece of flannel. That’s not funny but its that this culture thinks it’s trivial so makes it funny. Maybe we don’t want to stop doing that ritual, we just want to give it the weight it deserves.”

Dominique Fraikin: “The washing and rinsing of the objects was the conclusion to a really nice activity. It was a peaceful finish.”

Exhibition

‘Building Natural History’
Sex and Nature
September 9 to October 7, 1995

The OR Gallery is pleased to present Montreal artis Kevin ‘Building Natural History’ in his first solo show to Vancouver audiences. This exhibition consists of an installation three ‘natural history’ displays wich explore relationships between sexuality and nature. They investigate juxtapositions of scientific historical anatomical drawings of human dissection dating back to the 1550’s with images of rationally ordered nature. The works suggests there is a relationship between controlling nature and sexuality and the three mutations of natural history displays draw fundamental comparisons between the human and earthly body. They created dialogues about how natural histoy institutions present narratvie imagery that seems factual or unquestionable, as if science has a monopoly on ‘truth’.

The works exhibited are 1) Terrae Officium; a video installation including one ton of earth, 2) Garden on Intimate Delights; eight botanical paintings based on anatomical drawings of reproductive systems by Andreas Vesalius (1500’s) and Regnier De Graaf (1600’s) and 3) Dissecting One’s Nature; a 9’ x12’ photograph with 2 prjecting light boxes.

Kevin Kelly’s interest in making installations adressing nature arose from living and stdying in Maastricht, Holland at the Jan Van Eyck Akademie, a country where ‘virgin nature’ does not exist as well as his time working in the silviculture industry in BC. Kelly has a BFA from the University of Vicotia and an MFA fro Rutger University New Jersey and has exhibited in Holland, Japan, New York and across Canada.

The exhibition ‘Building Natural History’ is accompanied by a publication with a short essay by Annie Martin

Building Natural Hisotry

The year is 1539. Andreas Vesalius is working intently, although it is very late in the evening. He has procured a female body from some grave-diggers, and though she is in a state of advanced decomposition, he must make use of this rare opportunity to examine the particularities of the female generative anatomy. The odor in the room is so dense, even the laboratory cat sneezes and shakes its paws. Vesalius is making visual notes of a most remarkable observation. When dissected and exposed, the vaginal canal and womb resemble the penis and testes in their configuration. This discovery elucidates his object, which he now draws with the ease of familiarity. The grave-diggers retire to a tavern to spend a few coins on beer. They recount to the skeptical faces around the table how an ostensibley learned man had that evening purchased a rotten corpse from and unmarked grave. The year is 1995. A suspect is being questioned in connection to the burning of the Houdini Museum in Niagara Falls. “I could no longer tolerate the indignity of no knowing whether it was true. All the boxes forged in impenetrable material, the heavy chains, the knives. Their materiality was undeniable. They were there to be seen, even touched at time. But the uses to which they were put? Their functions? It was too much for me to bear. I put an end to the uncertainty/” The suspect was deemed by investigators to be mentally unstable but not requiring treatment. Her willingness to incriminate herself was ample proof that the Museum had burned by accidental means. Once released, she went for coffee and pancakes at a diner overlooking the falls. Then to the station to buy a ticket for Toronto. The Bata Shoe Museum was scheduled to open its doors that very week. I’m on my way out West again. Though I’m flying into Vancouver, what I feel rising to greet me are primeval forest and ocean. In childhood, I often visited the Provincial Museum and the Coast Temperate installation. I first went there on field trips to the City whil in grade school. Near the Forest lay the Klondike town, but you had to pass through a Mine Tunnel to get there. Those were heady days, running from the Cannery to the Movie Theater and in and out of the British Sailing Ship until we felt dizzy, and a little seasick too. Later, I would gaze with queasy fascination at the waxy Styrofoam Praries and Tundra with their greasy skies and bored, shedding taxidermies. Through long absences I maintain an image; one which, like the museum, will not perish, even when the organic matter which gave rise to the image is gone. The forests in my mind are full of moss and odor. And in them, you will not find a single human being.

Kevin Kelly re-fabricates natural history exhibits and in so doing, invites his public to think critically about the way in which the facts of natural history have been presented to them. More importantly, Kelly encourages us to become conscious of mythologies surrounding these facts. Powerful yet ineffable structure of meaning make it possible for these artifacts to be presented to us in this way, and inform what we might call our ‘intuitive’ reaction to the content and to the method of display. By layering informational fragments from natural history and human anatomy, Kelly bring this consciousness of presentation home to our bodies and to our sexualities. ‘Sex’ and ‘nature’ share a curious mythological proximity, even in the late twentieth century. The personification of nature was female has its detractors and followers. Sex (metonymically, procreative sex) is natural because it is necessary for survival, and by nature, by a strange twist, is sexed- because it survives and proliferates. Kelly’s re-workings of Vesalius’ anatomies drain the uniquely phallic status from the penis by pluralizing genital configurations. The sex of the genitals becomes indistinguishable by formal criteria. Each specimen presents itself as a complex mesh of tissue, vein, cavity and protuberance, leaving gender high and dry as a purely symbolic distinction. In “Garden of Intimate Delights,” nine small paintings in decorative frames present a coquettish lineup of anatomical fragments: a testicle floating in space, a flower-like organism in pink, a uterus with curly ovarian horns, Flying Fallopian Tubes, a balloon-prostate anchored by its ligaments, and a vagina-tent with red veins and peach flesh. Each element hangs in an empty landscape with a putrid sky, both sweet and bitter. “Terrae Orificium” is for its part a mutation, anthropomorphized inert soil which stands for ‘earth’. A succession of magnified human orifices appear, but the oracle divulges no advice, reflecting only our desire to see all things in human terms. “Dissecting One’s Nature” presents the differentiation of the sexes as a horticultural problem, akin to that of cultivating uniform and orderly forests. In their ongoing project of public edification, natural history museums present artifacts (with of often without the simulation of natural context), as tools for the development of knowledge. Contemporary museums are becoming museums without objects, as image technology and robotics blend seamlessly to form a nexus of information. This framework in turn hails a new kind of viewer. The object of these exhibitions is not so much ‘nature’ of the world, as information and style. Now more than ever, we as viewers need to conscious of the structures of presentation which forms us. Knowledge, even of the ‘natural’, requires a context and surrounding field of mythologies. Kelly’s hybridizations of natural history invite us to remember this.
Annie Martin

Exhibition

works by over 100 Vancouver artists

Exhibition

Reid Shier
Cheap
May 27 to June 24, 1995 Opening: Friday May 26, 8pm. Artist talk: Saturday June 17, 3pm

The OR Gallery is pleased to present a solo show of new work by Vancouver artist Reid Shier entitled Cheap. The exhibition consists of paintings and photographs depicting foliage in the immediate area to the gallery as well as various locations throughout Vancouver. The paintings as objects also relate physically to the architectural space of the gallery. Cheap advances and clarifies Reid Shier’s ongoing explorations of the contradictions surrounding the depiction of landscape, not by suppressing such contradictions but by drawing upon their transformative energies. By making Cheap contingent upon the ‘mutilation’ of his paintings (or at least of their privileged status) Shier satisfies the alternative gallery’s demands for criticality and conceptual rigor while decisively reformulating his own relationship with landscape painting’s ambiguous legacy. The resulting works, neither wall paintings nor sculptures, occupy a contested zone of refusal and repudiation. Their rigid angularity turns their lush representations in on themselves, creating a circulatory mirroring which destabilises both their subject matter and the viewer’s expectations. Cheap inhabits a place where reference becomes inference, where beauty and symmetry are externalized impositions, where history is the least of our problems. There is a publication to accompany this exhibition with an essay by Peter Culley. The artist will be present at the Opening and will also give an Artist Talk on Saturday June 17 at 3pm.

Cheap

Peter Culley

Exhibition

The OR Gallery is proud to present a group exhibition of contemporary artists who incorporate traditional needle arts techniques into their work. These constructions embody the artists’ individual explorations of community, social structure and feminist themes.

Gillian Collyer
Halifax, Nova Scotia
‘Smocked Shirts’

Gillian Collyer uses ‘smocking stitch’ in an unconventional manner to transform a series of white men’s shirts. The shirts are on hangers suspended in a series within the gallery. Through this concentrated process of stitching, the artist meditates on her experiences within the corporate world.

I’ve spent a good deal of time in what I’ll call the ‘corporate culture’- the business world. This has always been an alienating experience for me and one that I’ve thought a lot about, since like a lot of people, I have to find ways to make a living that aren’t aways where I’d like to be.

These shirts were my way of dealing with that dilemma over this past summer. I spent my days in front of a computer terminal in a government ministry and in the evenings I worked on the shirts. The gesture was about symbolically inserting myself inot a place where I fel invisible.
This particular type of needlework – smocking- applealed to me for a number of reason. The process is quiet and meditative, requireing patience and concentration. The absurdity of applying a decorative element from girls’ dresses to men’s business shirts was apporpriate and the idea of using this underdog craft had a subversive appeal for me. Historicaly it’s been the needle, not the paintbrush, that has been taken up by women. As I see it, the art world could benefit from a shot in the arm.
Having said that, I would have to add that I don’t see this work as relevant only to women since the problem of finding a place and voice in our society extends across class, race and gender lines. I hope that the shirts have something meaningful to say to a wide range of people.

Cathrine Heard
Toronto, Ontario
‘After Vidius (c.1611), After Bartisch (c.1575), After Vesalius (c.1543)’

Catherine Heard’s installation consists of three stands of the type used for needlework. The cotton panels are embroidered with human hair and depict early anatomical illustrations. Heard explores the persistent concepts associated with female sexuality and psychology.

In my most recent bodies of work I have used the traditional women’s media of embroidery and sewing to explore the persistence of ideals and myths about female sexuality and psychology from the Victorian and pre-Victorian eras into the twentieth century.
In making and exhibiting these works I have become interested in what I have come to call the “disagreeable object” – an object which at once fascinates and repulses, evoking a conflict of emotions. In these works disagreeable objects have been embodied as freaks of nature including Siamese Twins. The female body and mind also may be categorized as “disagreeable” as they have historically been perceived by doctors and anatomists as an aberrant, inferior or imperfect versions of the male ideal. The embroideries presented at the OR Gallery are based on drawings by prominent 16th and 17th century anatomists who model the female reproductive system upon the male.
Certain materials lend themselves to the creation of the “disagreeable object”. In these embroideries, huma hair serves as a substitute for silk. The disembodied hair symbolically links the themes of death and sexuality and evokes an uncomfetable visceral presence. I also reference the Victorian tradition of making mourning jewelry or commemorative pictures from the hair of the deceased. The obsesive nature of embroidery is also key to the neurotic nature of the “disagreeable object”.

Germaine Koh
Ottawa, Ontario
‘Knitwork’

In 1992 Germaine Koh began unravelling used sweaters and re-knitting the wool, on a 2m width, into a continuous length (approx 1m. per month). Accompanying the knitwork is photographic documentation of the, now extinct, garments. This long-term venture is in keeping with Koh’s method of working which includes other found, collected and reconfigured objects (i.e. lumber and snapshots).

Begun on the 21st of February 1992, ‘Knitwork’ is generated by my unraveling used garments (donated, found, or gleaned from thrift shops) and re-knitting their entrails into one, ever-increasingly, long blanket. This ongoing record of te passage of time, effort and particular details acts as its own archive of and monument to the abstracted artifacts that comprise its. Its massiveness is a weighty, recalcitrant, public manifestation of mundane activity and a measure of commitment. Although its accretion of strata comprised of disused good might seem akin to geologic time, its growth is not inexorable; the work will be finished when I cease. At once excessive and banal, rigorous and formless, sublime and absurd, this work is a practical test of the imagination.

Roxane Permar & Wilma Johnson
London, England & Papil, Burra, Shetland
(In collaboration with traditional knitters of the Shetland Islands)

The artists initiated “The Craft Cosy Project” in 1992 which involves community members in the construction of a hand-knitted covering for installation over a croft or stone cottage. Knitters with contribute pieces constructed in traditional ‘Shetland Island’ style which will then be sewn together and attached to a frame surrounding he croft. In this exhibition, the artists will be showing photo documentation of models in the landscape.

‘The Croft Cosy Project’

The artists initiated this ongoing collaborative project in 1992. It aims to involve community members in the construction of a hand-knitted covering for installation over a traditional croft house. Knitters will contribute pieces of traditional Shetland and Fair Isle patterns which will then be sewn together and attached to a frame temporarily surrounding the croft. The OR exhibition consists of colour photo documentation of models in the landscape.
The Croft Cosy brings ideas and concerning nature, the land and the landscape together with those of gender and identity. It places women’s work firmly in the landscape as part of the working life related to the land and sea. It helps to highlight the fact that our landscape is not aural but part of working history. As knitting isa labour-intensive, repetitive activity, so is the working of the and sea. Wile knitting is now largely perceived as a indoor, domestic, leisure activity, in the past women in Shetland knitted while working and walking outdoors. Knitting formed an integral part of crafting life, providing the only steady or stable form of its livelihood.
This project crosses cultural disciplines, bringing traditional craft practices into the sphere of fine art, performance, architecture and engineering. The Croft Cosy Project raises questions across a range of theoretical issues including notion of tradition and history in relation to contemporary culture and society; gender concerns in relation to economic, social and cultural circumstances; and questions of identity in relations to urban and rural centres, peripheral and central locations.

Ruth Scheuing
Vancouver, British Columbia

Ruth Scheuing explores textiles as language and language used in textiles. Using computer loom technology Scheuing has developed a system for weaving letters and text and this installation uses stories and names of women from the Greek myths associated with weaving. There is also an audio component to the installation.

‘Arachne’s Tapestry’

Arachne of Maeonia, wove, at first, the story of Europa as the bull deceived her, and so perfect was her art, it seemed a real bull in real waves…Ovid ‘Metamorphoses’ book VI

Arachne challenged the goddess Athena to a weaving competition and they each completed a tapestry with specific narratives. Athena, as a warning, depicted the power of Gods and Goddesses over humans and showed how humans were punished for forgetting this. Arachne depicted 21 instances of ‘deceptive seductions’ or rapes, deeds done by the Olympian gods to mortal and immortal women.

“And she wove Asterie seized by the assaulting eagle; and beneath the swan’s white wings showed Leda lying by the stream:”

When Athena saw this, she was so angry that the she tore the tapestry apart. Arachne, in her sorrow, tried to hang herself and Athena, no regretting her rash act changed her into a spider, an older and self-governing weaver, but silencing the woman Arachne, making her a lasting symbol for the defiant woman, who dared to challenge laws of the Gods.

This early Greek period interests me for the ways it reflects changing attitudes towards women through stories about their work as weavers, from primordial Goddesses, who as spinners create life, to the Fates, feared for their powers to spin, measure ad cut the ‘thread of life’, to Penelope, who has to lie about her task. Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ is my source for these stories and I like his descriptions as acts of deception and cheating.

“Archne’s Tapestry’ is a reweaving of the original work. It is part of a continuous series of works which started with ‘Penelope’.

I would like to thank the Banff Centre for access to the computer room and use of the Sound Studio; and am grateful to the Canada Council for financial support.
Special thanks go to Mark Patch, for producing the soundtrack and to Janis Bowley and Sandy Vida for lending their voiced for the soundtrack.

Exhibition

‘Not To Code’
solo exhibition
LUKE BLACKSTONE

March 18 to april 15, 1995
Opening: 3pm Saturday March 18
Artist Talk: 3pm Saturday April 1

‘Not to Code’ is an exhibition of kinetic construction by local Vancouver artst Luke Blackstone. We are pleased to provide Blackstone with his first solo show.
“Not To Code’ is fabricated from discarded, mass-produced materials such as typewriters, computers, fuel pumps and cat & cow noise-makers which Blackstone give new life through a subersive approach to technology.
The artist has stated:“I’m concerned with the role that humans play in the ongoing sage in which our environment becomes more hostile to life and more pleasant for technology; a saga too cruel to be a comedy yet too wonderous to be a tragedy. ‘Viral Information Centre’ (an earlier work) is concerned with the sbutle meddling with genetics codes to serve questionable motives/ Recently I dreamt that these entities I had created co-wrote a manifesto and the term ‘human being’ was mentioned only once in a footnote.”

The ‘publication’ for this exhibtion will be issued by one of Blackstone’s constructions. The artist will give a talk on Saturday, April 1st at 3pm.

Exhibition

The Or Gallery is pleased to present, to Vancouver audiences, this solo exhibition entitled ‘fictions’ by Toronto artist Stan Denniston.

The exhibition consists of new and previously shown colour photographic works of landscapes and portraits. The works are largescale, similar in format, with text and augmented framind devices. Denniston’s work challenges our assumptions of the photograph as a ‘truth-telling’ artifact. The texts which accompany the photographs are descriptive, statistical’factual and their proximity to the image conveys credibility. It is the viewer who negotiates the deception. In addition to the disqueting relationship between text and image, Denniston’s work also points to our assumptions of the physical world, particularly the unbuilt environment, with regards to what is ‘natural’ and what is a cultural construct. Both humourous and unsettling, ‘fictions’ explores the balancing act we often go through when evaluating mediated information.

Stan Denniston once flew to Colorado with his camera, rented a car, and went looking for a military airbase that he was convinced he had read about in The Globe and Mail. He couldn’t find the newspaper clipping before he left and couldn’t find the airbase once he got there. Eventually he concluded that the newspaper story had been part of a dream. Rather than go home empty-handed he found a site that he could photograph as ifit were a military airbase – one so well camouflaged you couldn’t see it. The end result was ‘The Natural World’ (1988-91), Denniston’s first in a series of criticalfictions, landscape images overlaid with fictitious texts. With this exhibition, Denniston introduces a new concept – collaborative portraits or personal fictions. These works, like the mnemonic-representational (Reminders), historical-political (KEnt State u., Dealey Plaza), instructional-political (How to Read), and geographical-representational (Colours ojCities) projects, have a seeming truth and truthful seeming that hovers hypnagogically, somewhere between fact and fiction. This meld of documentary and invention also places Denniston’s work within a new Historical Surrealism, an art that is ready to remember, even in an anaesthetized and virtual world. Denniston’s personal fictions, however, have gone beyond the critical framing of fictional landscape sites. He has taken on the portrait at a time when artists can no longer presume to, or be seen to, define or identify their subject, much less speak for them. Mere acknowledgment or disclosure of bias is not enough to avoid the risk of voice appropriation. Rather than avoid the risk, Denniston’s portraits attempt to push the point back on itself, by encouraging his subjects to re-appropriate, through fiction, their own personal history. Each of Denniston’s subjects was invited to invent a new or different history for themselves – participating in the construction of the text, staging of the portrait and selection of the final image. With these inter-subjective fictions, Denniston seems to be saying that it is possible and preferable to have a conversation about what might have been, or could have been, or should be, or may yet become, rather than presume to define or contain it. Within this conversation, the artist is as much reader as author. The privileged authorial perspective is forfeited – but then so, too, are some of the prohibitive strictures that dominate our current discourse on voice and representation. Denniston’s fiction has gone deep within the artifice of image itself by re-staging the real. My contribution to these fictions (and perhaps my self-portrait) is this: these works are an expression of the desire to break through the increasingly fortified introversion of the Modern Self. As evidence, we cannot help but note that a significant majority of Denniston’s collaborators have offered familial unification themes for their public fictions. Jeanne Randolph is, for example, ankle deep in her family. She is standing in a totalimmersion-family-therapy-pool occupied by her husband and son. Michael Fitzgerald and Regan Morris are two gay motorcycle cops who simultaneously discover both their fraternity and their desire for paternity. June Clark-Greenberg is an undercover mother, on the run from a historical past that has now caught up to her children; she must now intervene on their behalf. John Greyson seeks to be out and in at the same time – within the business confraternity of a gay brewers’ association.Jamelie Hassan flirts in the desert of Islamic patriarchy, seeking to pull the rug out from under it through scholarship. And Andrew Lee poses in Hong Kong (a.k.a. Dundas and Spadina in Toronto) with Jennifer Rudder and their son, Tai – except that in this family portrait Andrew is a distracted Hong Kong seed donor reluctantly reunited with the boy and his mother. The stand-in and infertile father is, at the subject’s request, Denniston himself – the camera turned around on the artist, who in this instance is neither author nor progenitor. These pictures are story circles. The subjects answer the question with a question. But they show more, tell more, and share more, than if they had played it straight or tried to hide. Call it personal history cross-dressing. What better way to resist to the magnetic pull of Identity, the monolith the Moderns once thought to be the source of self? Adam Phillips has pointed out, the “aim of analysis is to restore the loose ends – and the looser beginnings – to the story… In order to regain interest in the unconscious we have to lose interest in the idea of the superordinate point ofview.“l Denniston’s new work clearly revels in the “loose ends – and the looser beginnings” (the looser the better) that his subjects have chosen. In Historical Surrealism, personal signifiers freely float within the soup of a social unconscious (a shared space, hot, immediate, like a news-driven internet that we zap into and out of like a lucid dream), rather than a free association of the personal repressed (a private, insular space, where the self holds all the cards and is known to frequently deal from the bottom of the deck.). The Jungian model of a deeply buried archive of time-worn archetypes is nowhere in sight. It is possible now only because of the end of the cold war between Realism and Surrealism. Realism imposed the “literary” 2 which Greenberg feared would kill painting, and reinforced a dependency on what Barthes called “perfidious Analogy” 3. Surrealism became (after Breton) subsumed by and within a detached, abstract avant garde, more samizdat than modern. But now the wall between the photograph as evidence and the photograph as representation has been demolished. Denniston has been to that wall and back again, the euphoria and celebratory jouissance have long since waned, and a new pragmatics has set in to take their place. Denniston’s portraits suggest, in light of the looser set of beginnings these fictions expose, that there may be a way of restarting our conversations, conversations that have been of late prohibited, impossible or incorrect – about desire, about origins, about perceptions. We should not believe everything we dream in the newspapers, but nor should we be suprised if some of it holds true.

Russell Keziere

1. Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life) (Harvard, 1994), p. 7.
2. In 1940 Greenberg wrote about 18th century Romantic Revival painting in “Towards a New Laocoon”: “It was not realistic imitation in itself that did the damage so much as realistic illusion in the service of sentimental and declamatory literature.” The Collected EssO)is and Criticism, Volume 1, (University of Chicago Press) p. 27.
3. “Analogy implies an effect of Nature: it constitutes the “natural)) as a source of truth; and what adds to the curse of analogy is the faet that it is irrepressible: no sooner is a form seen than it must resemble something; humanity seems doomed to Analogy, i.e., in the long run, to Nature.n Roland Barthes by Roland Banhes, (University of California Press, 1994, trans. Richard Howard), p.44

Exhibition

Media Release.. December 15, 1994
Donna Brunsdale : Ambivalencia
JANUARY 7 to FEBRUARY 4,1994
Opening Saturday January 7, 3pm

‘Ambivalencia’will be the first exhibition of the Or Gallery’s 1995 programming. We are pleased to present to Vancouver audiences the photographic work of Calgary artist Donna Brunsdale.

‘Ambibalencia’ as a body of work focuses on the artist’s surroundings that are generally deemed mundane or inconsequential. Brunsdale is particularly interested in those vestiges of gardens or ‘landscaping’ found in the built environment that make reference to and illuminate a relationship to nature that is, among other traits, romantic and sentimental. Brunsdale uses photography as a direct connection to the visible world and a way of maintaining a certain ambivalence. Within this straightforward ‘mundane’ format are elements of humour and melancholy. The time frame of these investigations are not limited and the artist often returns to the site to re-work the subject. The framing materials and text are incorporated to create a context for the image and act as counterweights of suggested meaning. Brunsdale has stated, “‘Jlm6ivafencia’ reflects my interest in the overlooked aspects of life.”

There will be a publication to accompany the exhibition and the artist will be in attendance at the opening.

Donna Brunsdale has a B.F.A. from the University of Victoria and an M.F.A. from York University, Toronto. She is currently on leave from her Insurance job in Calgary to teach Art Theory in Victoria.

“Ambivalencia”

D “Well, I need boots but I’ve decided I just want those standard workkind that are everywhere. I tried some on for – was it $60.00?”
L “Yeah.”
D “So, $60.00 but – were they stitched and glued?”
L “No, just glued.” o
D “So that’s the big thing – they should be glued and stitched. Even better is a layer of cardboard between. But that’s gonna be more. Well, I guess you can pay as much as you want. But I just want something pretty cheap but not falling apart after two months.” o
D “Okay, there, those -”
P “But what about that brown ankle piece?” o
D “Well, I know, yeah – is it really bad?”
P “Yes, it’s not what you want.”
L “It does really stand out.”
D “But they all seem to have that. Why would they just do that?”
L “Well, it would be comfortable. If it was just the leather hitting your ankle it would hurt.”
D “But why brown? Why not just the same colour as the rest of the boot?”
P “Okay, forget those. Keep going.”
……
D “I like that vest. Oh! She has my boots! Those are just what I want! Where did you get them?”
S “Yes, I really like them and they’re only $60.00 right next door.”
D “Oh, yay. Let’s go.”
D “Aagh, it’s so busy I can’t stand it. Where are they? Are those them? But they have that brown thing! I didn’t even notice if hers did. Did they?”
L “I think her pants covered the top.”
D “Oh great. Should I try them on anyway? Maybe none will not have the brown thing. Maybe I should try them just to see. Aagh, it’s so busy and that music drives me crazy. Do they think it’s good to have that beat? It just incites people into irritation.”
D “Well, they’re pretty good. But there’s some kind of pressure on the top of the foot. Ant that brown thing. And that music – I just want to push someone. Well, I have to think about it.”
……
D “Aagh, look, there – no brown thing, perfect. Let’s see – aah, $210.00. See, that’s what you have to pay for no brown thing. And I’m not.”
D “There’s some with no brown thing. Let me just check – $70.00! Okay, here we go, glued and stitched. But they’re men’s. Will they have my size? I need these in ladies size 8. Maybe he can phone another store. These are perfect but they won’t have my size, will they? Of course not.”
……
D “Maybe I should give up and just get the brown thing. It seems impossible. I guess it’s not that important.”
P “Yes, it is important.”
D “But it’s so much pressure and anxiety.”
P “Look, that guy has the boots and his pants cover the top. You can’t even see the brown thing.”
D “Does he have the brown thing?”
P “Yes, but you can’t tell.”
D “I’m just gonna go back and get those at the awful store.”
P “Yes, they’re perfect.”