archive

Exhibition

This is the second exhibition dealing with sexual identity. The exhibition took the form of two concurrent installations, one is Bruce Hugh Russell’s Sala dell’ermafrodito and the other is G.B. Jones’s Bad.Good.

Toronto artist, G.B. Jones’ Bad.Good. showcases drawings, which co-opt the style of Tom of Finland by using all female characters, along with the 1992 video The YoYo Gang. As the originator, with Bruce La Bruce, of the Toronto ‘zine J.D.‘s and a member in the band Fifth Column, Jones production aggressively differentiates her lesbianism from a theoretical position and grounds it in a street vernacular.

Exhibition

This is the second exhibition dealing with sexual identity. The exhibition took the form of two concurrent installations, one is Bruce Hugh Russell’s Sala dell’ermafrodito and the other is G.B. Jones’s Bad.Good.

Bruce Hugh Russell’s Sala dell’ermafrodito is centered on the historical European representations of hermaphrodites as a method of describing legacies of western cultural attitudes toward alternate sexualities. Russell exhibits original 16 and 17th century prints and 19th century bookworks alongside historical images silkscreened on t-shirts which depict the ‘hermaphrodite’ as a constantly shifting signifier in European culture for homosexuality and ‘deviant’ sexual practice. Russell’s installation also questions contemporary museological procedures which today isolate and marginalize these themes under a veneer of aesthetic and historical sanctity

For his installation, Sala del’ermafrodito, artist and curator Bruce Russell has assembled groups of images which trace the representation of the hermprhodite in European society over the last 500 years, with emphasis on the years following the first contact with the New World. The installation derives its titled from a room built to house the Hermaphrodite by Bernini in the Villa Borghese in Rome and will centre on two photographic reproductions of the room’s ceiling fresco, which will be suspended in the gallery over a mattress resembling the one carved for Bernini’s sculpture. Russell combines this image with nine original 16th and 17th-century prints of ‘hermaphrodites’, as well as three 19th-century sexology manuals appropriated for the installation and opened to photographs and medical illustrations of actual hermaphrodites.

This pan-historical approach will located the development of the image of the hermaphrodite, and with it European cultural attitudes toward non-heterosexuality. Prior to first contact with the New World, homosexual identity was an unconceptualized idea, and homosexual activity was largely seen as the sinful and dangerous activity of the heterosexual libertine. When confronted with Native cultures where non-heterosexual identities had validity and place, a rift began to develop in Old World cultures, and a plethora of written and visual representation emerged in response to the curiosity and, often, revulsion toward what these identities might be. This installation will present images that move from allegorical narrative toward depiction based on scientific method, and through this show how the progression of dominant European cultural and social conventions digested and synthesized what was obviously a schismatic social taboo.

The exhibition will also question museological conventions that separate artist/curator, image/artifact and publication/exhibition by purposely interrogating the boundaries that have limited these categories within discreet parameters. Using the vehicle of a contemporary installation to bring historical material forward we are facilitating a thematic which questions the methods by which this material enters popular discourse. In the context of an increasing conservative retrenchment within museum culture, there has been an absence in addressing the historical roots of social attitudes toward homosexuality and the changing and deeply contingent aspect of sexual identity itself. Outside of an Artist-Run Centre, the Or feels that this work has no other place in Vancouver.

Bruce Russell graduated as a visual artist from the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design) in 1978. He has since devoted much of his time to practices as a critic, writer and curator. He has curated extensively, beginning when he was a board member of the Articule gallery in Montreal between 1982 and 1984, and his exhibition Pentimenti: Process in Contemporary Canadian Architecture will be at the Ottawa Art Gallery between February and April of 1997. He was the Visual Arts and Designer editor for MTL magazine between 1987 and 1988 and has since published numerous critical essays and reviews. He has also contributed to a number of catalogues, most recently in The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy, (National Gallery of Canada, 1996). The exhibition Sala del’ermafrodito derives from a paper he presented at an international lesbian and gay studio conference, La ville en rose held at the Université de Québec à Montréal in 1992. He lives and works in Ottawa.

Exhibition

The Or Gallery is proud to present the first of a series of exhibitions to bring together two artists sharing thematic and formal links. Larry Krone and Corinne Carlson used both of the Or’s exhibition spaces to create an installation of multi-media works investigating process, memory and identity. The works chosen for the show centered on compulsively realized text pieces which acted as semi autobiographical portraits of thought. The artists share a concern with words and phrases which often get stuck in the head, with song lyrics which keep repeating themselves in the brain, and illustrate a process of identification which is outside of our ability to author. Their installation stress subjectivity as a complex process of abjection and determination

Corinne and Larry:

I’ve known Corinne for a long time and when Larry’s work was described to me I knew I wanted to do a show with the two of you. I’d always felt Corinne had been working in somewhat of a vacuum, at least when she was here in Vancouver, and that part of the reason why she hadn’t received the critical attention I thought she deserved was that there had been a lack of context for looking at her stuff-there had been no other artists working in a similar vein. Larry’s work was the first that I’ve seen that seemed to share similar methods.

There is a duality at work that I find difficult to describe. It isn’t lingual or textual, even though words play so much a part of both your practices. I think the words you use illustrate the words inside your head, the words that repeat themselves over and over in your brain, and this is why the ‘text’ pieces are neither oral nor ‘written’. I also think songs are so important in both of your work because they operate on this level. But the duality for me resides in the processes you use to illustrate the almost indescribably personal systems of ‘thinking’, of the processes of memory, of problem solving through daydreaming-basically the mechanics of thought. You both present these in terms of very public modes of address-advertising, songs, comic books-conveying your ideas in these commodified and depersonalized reference systems. This is heightened by the way in which the pieces are accomplished, through a compulsive realization of huge tasks Corinne’s spirals and Larry’s hair works and comic book beading-which turn each of you into these producers of your own administrative weirdness. There’s an echo of the systems you refer to in how you make the objects, you’re workers manufacturing your own obsessive ideas.

This is not an uncommon strategy, but I think your use of it is something different. You’ve each taken the old idea of how social and cultural worlds determine who we are (what we buy, how we dress, how we become identifiable, blah blah blah) and extended it by showing what a huge effect they have on how we think, how we construct ideas and how we realize those ideas. What I think is great about this is that what you’ve chosen to make work about is not censored notions of what you think you’re thinking, but those little phrases and songs that truly do get stuck in the revolving door. I think this paradoxically says a lot more about ‘identity’ (a word that should be taken out and beaten up) than anything we assume to be really personal could or would, that even through our abject and blatant conditioning by what’s around us we can’t help but subconsciously and consciously recombine, personalize and fetishize what we’re given.

Reid

Exhibition

The OR Gallery is proud to exhibit Vancouver artist and writer, Robin Peck’s, new work in Sculptures of Gypsum Crystals. Peck is concerned with a class analysis of art making practice, particularly within a modernist legacy. He exhibits sculptures based on the arbitrary and organic crystalline structure of gypsum crystals, sculptures which are themselves fabricated from gypsum plaster. The sculptures deal with the implicit irony of an artwork whose facade doesn’t conceal its method of fabrication—an artwork that if broken would simply result in more sculptures—and acts as a both critique and metaphor of the hidden components of labour and the arbitrary value placed on artistic objects.

Exhibition

Rough Bush

Patricia Deadman
Stan Douglas
Deanna Ferguson
Philippe Raphanel
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

curated by Reid Shier

July 13 to August 10, 1996

The OR Gallery is proud to present Rough Group, a group exhibition with Patricia Deadman [Ontario], Stan Douglas, Deanna Ferguson, Philippe Raphanel and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun [Vancouver], describing contemporary practices, both written and visual, toward the social specificity of land use. Timed to coincide with the mammoth Group of Seven exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Rough Bush investigates the collision of differing cultural claims and competing mythologies to the Canadian landscape. Through a grouping of five artists who foreground the historical, social and economic legacies which have and continue to define land for very specific interests, it critiques an historical vision, buttressed by the mythos of nationalist art, that presupposes early Canada as an exploitable tabla rasa.

Profit-sized pink came azure
met silver of some virtues set in rock
unloosened with iron. this was none for me I
did not answer. But would have
would there were a way to crumbel.
Blend them. Nipped the loot thither.
Beyond cool snow lilies what was much
as love to see upon might tether.

Deanna Ferguson
From Rough Bush

Land of the Free
Words such as wilderness, forest, nature and bush collectively describe, if often haphazardly the world beyond the city’s frontiers. The word landscape, used to describe the visual and literary representations of such places, powerfully connotes their centrality within a western imaginative tradition. Such words describe civilization’s other, a fictive realm beyond the prosaic particularities of urban struggle; above all, they delineate a zone of strict ideological neutrality. Considerations of the use to which a forest or wilderness might be put, whether through resource extraction or its ideological opposite, eco-tourism, generally fall outside descriptions of the place itself. The land can be logged, hunted in, hiked through, photographed, painted, viewed, or left alone, but from the city’s vantage it remains “outside”, mysteriously beyond and above economic exigencies. Unlike land in the cities, the wilderness is presumed to be held in a kind of common trust, preserved by an act of collective regard. An example of the results of such attitudes occurred during the last week of June. When activists from Greenpeace attempted to blockade logging operations in Clayoquot Sound, the Nuu-chah-nulth chiefs evicted them for not first asking permission to mount their protest. Though the activists morally separate themselves from the uses to which the land was put, they cannot so easily transcend a view of it as common cultural property, equally accessible to all, as essentially unreflective as the loggers whose livelihoods they seek to eradicate.

Why, therefore, do words such as wilderness and forest, which would appear to be merely descriptive and neutral, evoke not only the places they denote, but imply a transcendence of the social and economic realms? Cities, within our present economies, are understood to be local and temporal sites of competing claims based in exchanges of capital and subject to fluxes in power, status, and class division. Why is the natural world presumed to be above these structures? The fact that an ecosystem can be, although is rarely anymore, a self governing system, means little when seen in the light of the pervasiveness of human intervention. Simply because the natural world is not a densely human social arena does not place it outside a political economy. The bush, like all real estate, is owned.
So to ask why the wilderness is a site of such imaginary freedoms is to ask why such freedoms are seen as necessary. One answer posits the city dweller as a circumscribed and limited individual, bound to the strictures of work, beholden to social and cultural parameters usually outside of her or his direct control. In opposition are the limitless forests beyond the city gates, the vast and liminal spaces of the wilderness, where social control is distant and unimportant, where the relationship of person and environment is unmediated and free. In this model the forest acts as counterpoint and balm to city pressures, a place where the weary citizen can recharge psychic batteries and return to the workplace recharged and recreated.

But if this trope rests on the assumption that there exists some type of freedom in the wilderness, that the forest can offer something which the city can’t, then what, other than it being the ‘not city’ does this mythology rest on? If the wilderness were simply a place without buildings, a big gravel field, who would go? Obviously the forest’s attractions are not a moot point, and I, like a lot of people I imagine, have felt awe and wonder, replete with a desire for preservation, when standing in front of a thousand year old Cedar or a forest of Arbutus. But seeing something which I don’t usually see, and wishing that it not be destroyed, can’t be the crux of the matter, it brushes over the powerful place which the wilderness as a whole holds in a civic, especially. western, imagination. What, other than an alternate ecology does it offer? What happens during the encounter between a person living in the city and a landscape outside of it?

The fact that this relationship is often spoken of (but rarely experienced) as a solitary one is a key clue to its meaning. Nature books and guides, travel magazines and tourist brochures all speak about an experience of the wilderness as one which makes a person seem small in comparison to the grandeur and expanse of nature. The awe and wonder of standing in front of thousand year old Cedar is not simply because I rarely see it, but because it makes me feel minuscule in comparison to its age and size. There is an active pursuit of spaces where one is overcome by feelings of incidentalness, of being lost within something overpowering, of gaining a sense of something outside and beyond the corporal body.

And by pursuing an experience which mitigates feelings of individuality of sensing there is something else, it paradoxically confirms a notion that that individuality exists. By being in a place which underscores an individual relationship with a larger whole, it confirms a feeling, essential to life in the city, that there is such a thing as individual agency. Within a culture which rests on an ideology of free individualism in order to justify and sanctify its economy, where individual enterprise is the grand mythology of North American society-where’ anyone’, if they work hard enough, can succeed-a notion of individualism must be fostered. The idea of a wilderness outside the city consolidates the individualistic ego by offering it an imaginative place to reside.

Of course in order for this grand metaphor to succeed, the wilderness can’t therefore be claimed by someone else. It must remain common property. The reason 67% of British Columbians responded to a February Insight Canada pole about land claims by saying they thought aboriginal peoples were being unreasonable has probably little to do with whether or not any of them will ever step foot on the areas being contested. They would simply rather not have someone other than ‘their government’ and by extension them, exert any claim to the ‘wilderness’. Knowing that this land is in fact someone else’sthough if they asked they would probably encounter little difficulty in enjoying it-destroys the most important, and most fallacious, mythology of all, that the wilderness is a place unclaimed, a place which beckons whenever one might tire of the office and need a little “recharging”, a place where individuality can roam, rampantly, free.

Reid Shier, July 1996

Speak yet again tho who old cloud O
Lord thy north word rejoice with grain again.
Financially infinite. Price distant then cost disappeared,
muddle through, all night, liver pool, several degrees
different still.

Deanna Ferguson
From Rough Bush

I would like to thank the artst who have garciously agreed to participate in this exhibition: Patricia Deadman, Stan Douglas, Philippe Raphanel, Lawrence Yuxwelupton and Deanna Ferguson. A special thanks to Deanna for the us of “Rough Bush” for the title of show. finally my thanks to Robert Linsley for his poscards, to Jakc and Maryon Adelaar and Glenn Alteen who loaned works for the exhibition, and to Bob MacIntyre, Jen Hamilton, Helen Geddes, Steve Shearer and Peter Cullye, whose help has been invaluable.

Reid Shier

Exhibition

Home Alone is Geoffrey Topham’s first solo exhibition. The exhibition is an installation incorporating a wide variety of media which explore repressed cultural narratives of homoeroticism.

Exhibition

A retrospective of the Or Gallery featuring a selection of works by board members and curators. Organized by Wendy Elliott, Helen Geddes, Frances Grafton.

Exhibition

Anne Mosey- Media Release

A Paradise, A Veritable Garden

The OR Gallery is pleased to present an installation by Austrailian artist Anne Mosey. This new work negotiates the position of colonization in relation to the exploration and expoitation of land.

The installation includes text and imagery from Mosey’s great great grandfather’s journal; the English explorer Peter Egerton Warburton and also imagery in the form of sets of pressed flowers, both Engish and Central Austrailian, with their Latin and Warlpiri (an aboriginal language) names. This use of botanical specimens refers to the contrasts experienced by the explorere between the flowers of his home ins Cheshire, England and the plants nad flowers he has experienced on his jouneys across Central Australia in 1872-4. The idealised garden of his childhood home acted as the measure by which all other unfamiliar plants were judged and dismissed. This installation focuses on the expectations and memories carried by the English exporers as they travelled across australia and how that affected their ability and desire to view the landscape and its plants. Mosey, who lives in Cetral Australia, ahs retraced her ancestor’s journeys over the past years and produced a body of work based on this research.

There is a pulibcation including xcerpts from Warburton’s journals accompanying this exhibition.

NOTE: This is the final exhibition in the 1994/95/96 programming by Janis Bowley at the OR Gallery.

Catalogue-

In 1873 my great great grandfather, Colonel Peter Egerton-Warburton travelled by camel with six white men and one Aboriginal from the centre of Australia to the far west coast, being the first Europeans to do so. His journal records his attitudes to the landscape he travelled across. His feelings were coloured by the fact that the journey took eighteen months instead of the projected three months and that there was a constant and desperate search for water and food. The Aboriginal member of the party saved their lives on several occasions. The country was a semi-arid desert, with thousands of parallel red sand dunes.

I have driven or walked across much of his track with Aboriginal friends over the last eight years and I have come to a far greater understanding of the nature of their rich and haunting country and to their view of it as a garden providing a constant source of foods available for gathering.

In 1994 I went to England to see the garden that Warburton grew up with at Arley Hall in Cheshire. I found a garden of brilliant colours with planned formal walkways and sculptured yew hedges, dating fron’! 1750.After leaving Arley Hall as a young man,Warbuton lived in India and Australia. I believe that the images, shapes and colours of his childhood garden may have affected his view of these landscapes.

Aconitum; Monkshood; Woifs-bane – Handsome plants with mostly smooth, palmately divided foliage and spikes of curious helmet-shaped flowers. They make pleasing contrasts with heleniums) phlox and chrysanthemums.

The country traversed was in the main, barren and inhospitable – a dreary waste, a howling wilderness.

Actinomeris; North American Sunflower – Hardy herbaceous perennials of the sunflower type. Flower in sun or semi-shade.
May 5th – Started Northwest by West over sandy scrub. Nothing but spinifex, mulga and casuarina forest all day. Not a scrap of feed or a drop of water in the country.

Alstoemeria; Peruvian Lily; Lily of the Incas – They make fine bright subjects for the border and may be grown in any situation. Cultivation should reach three feet.

May 24th – It was a most uncomfortable place for us) the ants swarmed over everything and over us. We drank the health of ‘the Queen’, this being her Majesty’s birthday.

Althae; Hollyhock – A fine landscape plant is the hollyhock) a general favourite with most gardeners. A native of China) it came to Britain from the Orient about 1573 and has been a popular garden plant ever since.

June 6th – The setting sun of the previous day had painted the prospect ahead in fairer colours than the reality of the rising sun confirmed. Reached the camp by 7pm.

Aquilegia; Columbine – the dainty columbine are almost too well known to need description and there can be few who will not appreciate their charms in the border.

June 27 – I sent the camels on, and went with one companion to the top of a small ironstone hill; the view was anything but cheerful.

Delphinium; Larkspur – There can be but few who do not admire their stately habit and wondeiful blue colour range.

July 19th – Six natives came to the camp. They were fine, well made men, most of them bearded and considering the wretched hand-to-mouth life they lead, were in very fair bodily condition.

Gentiana; Gentian – A very large family) many fastidious and difficult to grow. Some appreciate sun but others prifer partial shade.

August 10th – We had great expectations of this place, but distance had deceived us. The hill is rubbish and we obtained no hopeful view from it. There are signs of some natives on some yam-ground near it.

Excerpts taken from: Journey Across the Western Interior of Australia’ by Colonel Peter Egerton-Warburton, C.M.G. (1875), ‘The Herbaceous Border’ by Prances Perry, EL.S. (1948)

1996

Press Rlease:
We would like to invite you to contribute to this upcoming event which aims to bring critical focus to important contemporary issues related to land-use, eco-thics and natural history. Australian artist Neil Berecry maintains a primarily non-exhibition practice and therfore is using the OR Gallery as a location ofr activities in of inquiry, research, and exchange. You are welcome to present existing projects, documentation, readings / story-telling, develop ideas, contributed to conversation and partake in variety of emibibings. Your participation may be made over the four weeks or during the Special Events. We are open to suggestions and encourage creative input.

The centreal focus within the gallery is a large Round Table form which spiral the activities, both speculative and concrete, wih an aim to provoke social and cultural change. You may take part in a Fax exchange between historic sites in Sydney and Vancouver which links traces of the 19th century with contemporary ideas, to be produced as a limited edition books. We are also seeking participants in an international exchange which is investigating issues of genetic diversity and gene manipulation and currently we are trying to find insects to test recipes as a way of further addressing food issues.

Berecry has stated:“I will be attempting to read the tea leaves of the past and trace the fossilised footsteps of former trackers of ‘untruth’. There will be occasions for the telling of tales around table; of voyages, discoveries, recollections. Art will be there too – who knows?”

The OR Gallery publication will be a set of ‘field notes’; a culmination of the events contributions and processes. These notes will also be included as an insert into >GAP<, the Australian publication of Synapse Art Initiatives of which Neil Berecry is the Co-ordinator.

Berecry developed an evolving installation which sighted the gallery as an interactive venue for the investigation of land use, eco-ethics and natural history. A founder of Synapse Art Initiatives, an Australian artist collective which stresses non-exhibition practices, Berecry set up a fax exchange with this collective from an office he staffed in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. Gallery goers became involved in round table discussions with the artist and Australian participants and they and other artists were invited to install work in the gallery during the course of the show.

Exhibition

A Dis-regard is a collaborative installation from Margaretha Bootsma and Jill Sabre addressing the impact of competing economic and social interests on place and neighborhood, the artists employ archival material and found objects from the Or Gallery’ s locale in order to uncover its cultural archeology. Lost history’s specific to the building housing the gallery were uncovered and brought to attention, pointing out the disintegration of the area’s manufacturing and retail base and the larger dynamics of destruction and gentrification which are taking place in the surrounding area.

catalogue essay by Alison Jennings

“This map is useless now, a quaint articulation of the past. Eden dies; green thoughts in a green shade Cannot withstand tectonic pressures of an urgent time.”

alterations: reprotecting the space

This installation is a collaboration by DIS-REGARD; two Vancouver artists, Jill Sabre and Margaretha Bootsma. The artists have worked on similar installations, addressing issues of place and neighborhood and the impact humans have on these spaces.

At the heart of their collaborative work is a high degree of archival research, which excavates the hidden histories often “lying” behind closed doors of institutions, revealing through exposed layers the foundations of contemporary issues such as urban decay, demolition and gentrification.

The artists experiment with found discarded materials from the immediate environment, juxtaposing these materials with other elements to “re-present” them in a newly perceived way. They also use drawing, usually associated with classical imagery, to resurrect the object from its earlier discarded context.

Their newest work expresses concerns over the rapid changes that continue to take place on one of Vancouve(s oldest city streets – the 100 block of West Hastings Street. The installation alterations: reprotecting the space echoes, in both a concrete and abstract manner, the alterations to the surrounding buildings and neighborhood and indicates a way to reprotect or repair the spirits of the place; spirits such as the Three Sisters of Fate, symbolized by the treadle sewing machine in the middle of the gallery. According to Roman mythology, Clotho, the spinner, spun the thread of life; Lachesis, the Disposer of Lots, assigned destiny to every human; and Atropos cut the thread at death.

A 10-foot door, (constructed of found wood and metal recycled from another installation) is hinged to the wall, where its irregular shape is repeated in the excavation. Inside the excavated wall are archival material and found objects collected from the street and surrounding neighborhood. These often inaccessible archival facts, along with the fragments, bespeak the overlooked relationships and lost concerns over home and place/stability and family/neighborhood and function.

Standing opposite the door excavation is an Industrial Era treadle sewing machine, on which the needle penetrates an old map of Canada and a patchwork of stitched fragments of street maps from the 1880’s to the present. The maps are torn and ripped to represent the chaotic discourse on civic development and its disintegrating impact on forest and urban environments.

An image of a woman sewing in a local garment factory, is a recurring motif on the patchwork, which refers to the “stitching together” or manufacturing of change, while the woman herself harkens back to when the gallery was a tailor shop (the basement still stores clothing and machines from that time).

The machine also indicates the unalterable feng shui of the space as a place of assembly and manufacturing. The ancient Chinese concept of feng shui refers to the harmony between a space and its users, a building and its environment, which contributes towards human destinies.

Although the mercantile heritage of the 100 block of West Hastings Street is still seen in the building facades, the neighorhood is now marginalized, carelessly dismissed and uncared for. Many of its inhabitants are forced to find temporary shelter in the darkened alley, where the thread of life is cut. Despite these disintegrating effects, the community continues to survive.

In the installation, the front and back facades of two buildings from the West Hastings block are projected directly onto the gallery walls, which are covered in draped canvas (a familiar art material). These large photographic slide images (IS’x2S’) envelope the viewer in a reprotected space, providing an intimate, safe place to experience the outer skin of the buildings while standing within the safety of an inner shell.

The artists have also knotted the canvas to create a strong sculptural space, a metaphor for the entanglement of time (the “thread of life”) that holds these buildings intact, but restricts them to simplistic solutions-demolition or gentrificationboth of which would destroy the unique character of a neighborhood as old and experienced as this one.

Alison Jennings, Seattle, Washington
Margaretha Bootsma and Jill Sabre are Vancouverbased artists.