archive

Exhibition

Lise Soskolne’s three text-based monochrome paintings in this exhibition were generated by the idea that the birth of cinema displaced painting’s original role as pictorial storyteller – both formally in terms of color saturation, scale and quality of light – but also as a visual document that recounts a story – fictional, historical or mythological. Using titles and credits from films which utilize formal devices such as color, scale or editing to abstract the conventional cinematic narrative, these ‘film still’ paintings collapse the static, non-narrative language of painting together with the textual and inherently narrative implications of film, forcing a variation of pictorial storytelling.

L.A. based artist Yunhee Min will be developing a sight specific installation in both the Or’s rear gallery and on the glass of its storefront vitrines. Like Soskolne, Min is working with hard edged abstraction. She incorporates abandoned household mistints in paintings on specific architectural venues. Titled ‘Home Improvement Paintings’ Min is conducting an on-going investigation of the relationship between color, the object and the specific space it engages, questioning how spaces are defined and for whom. Her installation in the Or’s vitrines for instance, will be developed from photographs of the abandoned store-fronts flanking the gallery on each side and will insert itself temporarily into the rapidly mutating street scape of West Hastings.

Exhibition

Jerry Allen has produced a large body of work, rarely exhibited in galleries, in which he paints or draws large, monochromatic and typographically distinct numbers onto the walls of architectural spaces. Allen is never specific of the number’s meaning, with the intention of inviting a viewer’s own associative references to the work. The ambiguity, however, works in contrast to the dominant, floor to ceiling imposition of the patterns that Allen painted in the Or’s large front exhibition space. Through this investigation, Allen suggests that numbers are perhaps one of the most trans-culturally familiar signifiers, and that any meaning they have must be an entirely subjective experience.

Exhibition

The OR Gallery is proud to present Luanne Martineau’s solo exhibition, Ryan’s Arcade. Graduating in 1995 with an MFA from the University of British Columbia, Martineau produces works that incorporated embroidery on photo-silkscreened canvas. Developing interests in the collision of imagery pilfered from a host of popular sources, from film stills to television to children’s books, Martineau presents a new body of drawings, photo-silkscreens and small sculptures at the Or. The works collage characters from comic books, Goya etchings and children’s televisions shows and books. By averting overt new narratives, Martineau is able re-work the social and historical contexts in which the characters were originally authored.

Luanne Martineau’s Cowtown

Many cities have an emblematic promotional image and for Calgary its the skyline with the Saddledome, the city’s hockey arena, looming in the foreground. As an architectural trope of its western image, the Saddledome perfectly encapsulates a civic narrative, a story which Luanne Martineau’s recent installation Ryan’s Arcade circuitously evokes. Calgary’s paradigmatic story is staged every year during the Stampede. For ten days in July, shop windows are painted with grizzled cowboys, hitching posts, cowboy hats, saddles, sway-backed horses and countless other symbols of the wild west. These clich* depictions of a 19th century history of the American west have taken on their own cultural currency. In Alberta this simple, albeit fictitious past joyfully replays itself in a kind of frenetic erasure of any ‘real’ history as it consolidates a unifying popular myth. Because the Stampede has such a carnivalesque warmth, its embracement within the collective imagination can paradoxically make it difficult to participate in. Martineau lives and works in Calgary, the city where I was raised. Looking at Ryan’s Arcade I remember the surreal displacement I felt when I lived there, the sensation of amnesia necessary in order to be included in the party.

Similar to the painting’s found on the shop windows, Ryan’s Arcade is peopled with characters and imagery collaged from a host of popular sources including cartoons, book illustrations and paintings. Martineau pilfers and recombines characters from The Little Prince, Little Black Sambo, Goya’s drawings, as well as from lesser known sources-almost forgotten turn-of-the-century comic strips like Little Nemo and Buster Brown. Ryan’s Arcade also employs rudimentary and available craft techniques: small framed watercolor landscapes; little oven baked portrait busts made from hobby store Super Sculpey placed somewhat haphazardly on the floor or on small shelves; needlework embroidery over heat transferred photo’s on fabric. I seriously doubt that Martineau is questioning an essentialist binary like home/studio or the kind of gender divisions this mode of working raises. Like the crude images adorning the strip malls and plazas of Calgary in the summer, its more a question of how Martineau can effortlessly invoke narrative with the lowest and most simple techniques.

Perhaps the simplicity of construction parallels a desire for a conspicuous thematic. When Ryan’s Arcade was exhibited in Vancouver, visitors repeatedly asked about Martineau’s sources and if there were a story to her pictures. Without a key to the code of Ryan’s Arcade, it seemed impossible to understand what the artist was trying to say. This hunger for a cohesive tale-for a hidden but extant text-is at the core of Martineau’s project. Her intentional ambiguity, compounded by her use of genre and the structural elements of narrative, instills a powerful desire for meaning. Her choice of mediums refer to sources with unmistakably transparent signification: landscapes based on book illustrations, together with sculptural busts that recall those weird ceramic heads of pirates and pseudo-Dickens characters that populated suburban living rooms in the ’70s. We’ve become so accustomed to the blatant referents of a cartoon or kitsch home decoration, it’s difficult to avoid the impression that Martineau is intentionally hiding her story.

There is a clue, however, in the stereotypical portrayal of the migr-the kilted Scot and bikini-clad Little Black Sambo are the most obvious-which appears repeatedly in Ryan’s Arcade. In Martineau’s drawings, these personalities haphazardly occupy the landscape, heads and bodies interchanging, they are dissonate and unsupportive of each other, both within each image and as a whole. In this context, to look at Martineau’s images and come to a narrative conclusion is impossible. They offer too many possibilities. A place like Calgary, in contrast, is embedded with the cut and paste anthologizing of one cultural stereotype: the cowboy. This figure, patched together from novels and Western movies, is ahistorically re-deployed in an act of civic transcription. Wearing cowboy boots and hats, Calgarians are mirrored in the painted windows, creating for themselves a cohesive and durable story of genesis-but it’s a reflection of imaginative blindness infused with historical forgetfulness. Martineau’s figures work in opposition to this and inhabit a space of alienation. This isn’t because they speak of a crisis, but because her cast of disparate characters refuse to act out a story. They avoid consolidation and, as a result, narrative. Whether for Martineau this is a method of questioning her surroundings, I don’t know, but I do think Ryan’s Arcade is an act of resistance.

Reid Shier
Vancouver

Reprinted courtesy of Mercer Union Gallery / Toronto

Exhibition

Neil Wedman Every Bus Stop From My Place to the Racetrack
Curated by Patrik Andersson

Neil Wedman is known primarily for his paintings and drawings; however, for this exhibition he was invited to produce an installation of photographs which, literally, portrayed every bus stop between his apartment on Vancouver’s Westside and the Eastside thoroughbred race track. Encapsulating a ‘70s conceptual conceit, Wedman portrayed a shifting street vernacular that encompassed a host of neighborhood economic divisions by foregrounding his personal economic habits. The Or continues to support exhibitions such as this where more established artists are given the opportunity to experiment and realize projects outside their regular oeuvres.

For a late 19th century urban flaneur like Edgar Degas, a trip to the racetrack must have presented certain social and aesthetic possibilities illuminating a progressive and excessive side of modernity. More than reenacting this derive as a site for artistic inspiration in the late 20th century, Neil Wedman’s enterprise, Every Bus Stop from My Place to the Racetrack, restages the journey as both a contemporary project for himself and a potential trip for the viewer. Made up of thirty-eight colour photographs mounted in sequence, Every Bus Stop… documents a road well traveled by Wedman whose leisurely habit of going to the racetrack has here been visualized in an enclosed site-specific system.

As a photographic narrative, this work brings into picture the repetitive and chance-ridden nature of everyday urban encounters. The general concept of this project is neither a new nor a novel idea. After all, the title points us directly back to Ed Ruscha’s 1966 artist book Every Building on the Sunset Strip. But, whereas Ruscha’s work was conceptualized against photojournalism and the hedonistic romanticism of “art photography,” Wedman re-examines the project with both historical hindsight and irony as his photographs become unavoidably linked to the aestheticized social predicaments staged by Vancouver’s own flaneur par excellence – Jeff Wall.

Whereas Wall’s elaborate tableaux attempt to “capture” movement through staging and technical mastery, Wedman’s casually produced “snapshots” risk the inclusion of uncontrolled quotidian encounters. This is a gamble that comes with being socially mobile on the bus – a bus that drives a spatial narrative through the different social environments of Vancouver. In Wedman’s photographic cartoon, the Or Gallery is not merely posited as a pit stop on this route, but as an “interruption,” allowing the gallery goer to contemplate their own movement.
Placed in dialectical flux, the gallery goer is en route between Wedman’s designated point of origin (his South Granville home) and his journey’s end (the racetrack). Within this indexical system, each individual bus stop has been photographed without judgment. Despite this apparent objectivity, Every Bus Stop… maintains a subjective posturing as it is Wedman who “chooses” to frame our view between his own place and preferred destination.

As an aim, the racetrack is odd. Like Playland, its PNE neighbour, this is a site gradually transformed into a ruin from an entropic industrial age. By making this his target, Wedman is not only nostalgic, but makes a decisive claim to his own subjective place in the social and economic environment that transforms our landscape. Unlike photographers such as Roy Arden or Thomas Struth, Wedman does not confront his subject straight on. Instead he repeatedly turns his attention to the route that takes him there: A route well traveled. Relying on both structure and chance (he commissioned the photographs), Every Bus Stop from My Place to the Racetrack weaves together an allegorical representation of Vancouver that allows the reader to playfully construct their own picture of both the racetrack and Wedman’s place.

- Patrik Andersson (September 1997)
Every Bus Stop From My Place to the Racetrack was by Stuart McCall during July and August 1997. The Tina Lynch and Jane McCall.

Exhibition

Vancouver has become well-known as a centre from which a number of conceptual and documentary photographers have developed their practice. Among the work of these mostly male artists – Roy Arden and Arni Runar Haralldson to name two – the figure is rarely present and their focus is in rendering the defeatured urban landscape. When figures appear, as in the work of Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, they’re often part of a staged mise-en-scène or formalist tableau. Geiger’s prints represent both a direct engagement with, and a radical departure from this local school. By picturing the social milieu of Vancouver teen-age girls in a complex documentary style, Geiger proposes a more subjective and reciprocal relationship with the women and environments she photographs. Karin Geiger’s exhibition at the Or Gallery in 1997 was received enthusiastically by the visual art community in Vancouver who greeted it as a fresh and critical engagement with established discourses.

Karin Geiger: Plush Toys and Poster Boys contains 23 photographs from a series entitled Inbetween (1997). This body of work takes adolescent girls as its subject. Geiger photographs these girls attending classes and, in their absence, she photographs their school interiors and bedrooms. Her subjects attend two different Vancouver schools: one a public technical school, the other a private academy. Not wanting to succumb to a single method of documentation Geiger uses 35 mm, medium and large format, as well as the variety of photographic genres each format makes possible. She takes colour snapshots, individual and group portraits, black and white documents and interiors: some appear to be subjective, others ostensibly objective; some prints are small, others large.

Geiger takes two distinctly different kinds of photographs in the school: portraits and unoccupied interiors. With their repetition of desks, lockers, benches, doors, institutional colours and fluorescent lights, these interiors project the regular and regulating structures operating within these girl’s lives. However, Geiger’s portraits depict the girls as both conforming and acting out within and beyond the institution’s walls. The order of individual classrooms is disrupted by the awkward bodies of the students, during breaks the corridors become a tangle of legs and uniforms. Small snapshots capture the girls, in everyday dress, smoking together beyond the schoolyard. It was during these smoking sessions that the artist got to know some of the girls and eventually gained access to the private world of their bedrooms.

Geiger’s intimate photographs of the girls’ bedrooms represents their struggles towards adulthood. By pointing her camera into the corners of the rooms and including the ceiling with the frame, Geiger compresses the architecture and forces the display of their individual material lives. Each room becomes a barometer of social class, education, leisure, mainstream consumption and sexuality. Neatly arranged on plush toys line shelves and rest comfortably on beds, a boombox sits on a bed, movie posters and poster boys adorn the walls, books sit on shelves along with designer perfumes and makeup kits. While the girls are absent from these photographs, their rooms portray them as collectors, and as producers of environments actively stating taste.

When seen together, each of these disparate images coheres to the others through the shared subject matter and author. Yet this semblance of coherence is fraught; the photographs tell only a partial story of these girls’ lives, while simultaneously articulating, in the artist’s words, “the camera’s role as an instrument of construction.” The “snapshot” used for the invitation displays the tension between these two modes of inquiry; the camera documents the girls, but it also positions them as the photographer’s “camera-ready friends.” This kind of tension is paradigmatic of the series as a whole.

As a photographer and an adult, Geiger responds to her subjects as both innocent and knowing: they smoke, but they also keep stuffed animals. In her representation of these contradictions and those of photographic practice itself, the artist maintains a critical distance within the project. Inbetween is as much a portrait of the discourse of photography, as it is of teenage girls today.

Plush Toys and Poster Boys:

Karin Geiger photographs adolescent girls. She photographs these girls attending classes. In their absence, she photographs their school interiors and bedrooms. Her subjects attend two different schools: one a public technical school, the other a private academy. The series of both colour and black and white photographs is entitled Inbetween (1995-96). Not wanting to succumb to a single method of documentation, Geiger uses 35 mm, medium and large format, as well as the variety of photographic genres each format makes possible. She takes colour snapshots, individual and group portraits, black and white documents and interiors: some appear to be subjective, others ostensibly objective; some prints are small, others large.

Leaving childhood and struggling towards adulthood, kids reside in a liminal space where they are fully constituted as neither child nor adult. Still living at home, teenage girls perform multiple roles; conventionally they are good girls, daughters and students, but they can also be lovers, mothers, collectors, smokers, users, pool players, adoring fans and runaways. By choosing to photograph them Geiger represents a subculture rarely depicted in the field of contemporary art photography.

The artist’s hybrid approach toward style and content marries the photographic traditions of Larry Clark and Nan Golden with artists such as Hilla and Bernd Becher, and Thomas Ruff. To many her subject matter may appear trivial against the serious photographic practices devoted to architecture, portraiture, interiors, constructed tableaus, dioramas and urban landscape. Yet Geiger incorporates these practices within her project, thereby complicating any simple reading of her work.

Geiger takes two distinctly different kinds of photographs in the schools: portraits and unoccupied interiors. With their the repetition of desks, lockers, benches, doors, institutional colours and fluorescent lights, these interiors project the regular and regulating structures operating within these girls’ lives. However, Geiger’s portraits depict the girls as both conforming and acting out within and beyond the institution’s walls. The order of individual classrooms is disrupted by the awkward bodies of the students, during breaks the corridors become a tangle of legs and uniforms. Small snapshots capture the girls, in everyday dress, smoking together beyond the schoolyard. It was during these smoking sessions that the artist got to know some of the girls and eventually gained access to the private world of their bedrooms.

Geiger’s intimate photographs of the girls’ bedrooms represent their struggles towards adulthood. By pointing her camera into the corners of the rooms and including the ceiling within the frame, Geiger compresses the architecture and forces the display of their individual material lives. Each room becomes a barometer of social class, education, leisure, mainstream consumption and sexuality. Neatly arranged plush toys line shelves and rest comfortably on beds, a boombox sits on a bed, movie posters and poster boys adorn the walls, books sit on shelves along with designer perfumes and makeup kits. While the girls are absent from these photographs, their rooms portray them as collectors, and as producers of environments actively stating taste.

When seen together, each of these disparate images coheres to the others through the shared subject matter and author. Yet this semblance of coherence is fraught; the photographs tell only a partial story of these girl’s lives, while simultaneously articulating, in the artist’s words, “the camera’s role as an instrument of construction.” The “snapshot” used for the invitation displays the tension between these two modes of inquiry; the camera documents the girls, but is also positions them as the photographer’s “camera-ready friends.” This kind of tension is paradigmatic of the series as a whole.

As a photographer and an adult, Geiger responds to her subjects as both innocent and knowing: they smoke, but they also keep stuffed animals. In her representation of these contradictions and those photographic practice itself, the artist maintains a critical distance within the project. Inbetween is as much a portrait of the discourse of photography, as it is of teenage girls today.

Kitty Scott, Vancouver, 1997

Performance

A Mock Trial Exhibition

Exhibition

Truth or Consequences is a two person exhibition consisting of tapestry based works by Ann Newdigate (Saskatoon) and Tass Mavrogordato (London, England). Both Mavrogordato and Newdigate have, independently of each other, created work which refers to the Bayeux tapestry, an 11th century embroidery of contested authorship. Mavrogordato’s work has consistently utilized comic style and graffiti references to illustrate contemporary social realities such as AIDS, urban decay, new technology and the media, and at the Or will exhibit a multi image work entitled ‘Dying For It’. Mavrogordato teaches tapestry at Goldsmith’s College in London.

Newdigate is a multimedia artist who has exhibited and lectured internationally, and has written for Canadian Art and had an essay included in New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies (ed. Katy Deepwell, University of Manchester Press), among other publications. Newdigate utilizes the Bayeux as an example of authoritative historical narration, as a site of constructed truth and propagandaexamining systems and institutions which determine value and through it create history. In ‘Arrival’ Newdigate combines woven tapestry with sound in the form of travelogue.

Exhibition

The Record Shop is Kevin Ei-ichi De Forest’s first first exhibition in Vancouver. DeForest exhibits paintings crafted on old LP album covers as well as sculptural works which explore his mixed heritage through an intersection of Japanese and North American kitsch memorabilia. These analyze cultural identification through economic and commercial systems which feed on one another but which remain culturally distinct.

Exhibition

With My Idea of Fun Myfawny MacLeod created a sculptural installation out of a large balloon crafted to mimic a bleeding doll’s head. Her ‘self-portrait’ is an aggressive and humorous investigation of advertising techniques which utilize lightweight and culturally neutral iconography in hard sell commercial strategies.

Exhibition

Buddy Palace is a group exhibition co-curated by Geoffrey Topham. The exhibition showcases work by recent graduates of the Emily Carr Institute of Art. Linked by their common pop thematics, these four artists herald the emergence of new sensibility in Vancouver. Long dominated by photo-conceptual practices, a new generation of artists are working against the formal and aesthetic coolness of much of this past work by foregrounding a low tech and immediate working method which is critically interrogative of media culture, and foregrounds humour and spontanaity.

Exhibition

New Art from Cuba is installations by three contemporary Cuban artists who form part of the larger exhibition, hosted by six galleries, of current Cuban visual practices in Vancouver during March. Curated by Keith Wallace of the Contemporary Art Gallery and Scott Watson of the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery in tandem with Eugenio Valdez and Juan Molina from Havana. Ponjuan and Francisco are collaborators for whom the assemblage work exhibited at the Or is their last together before dissolving as a pair. Tonel created an ambitious room-like installation, part prison, part gallery, in which he housed paintings, photographs and personal documents. All three artists came to prominence in the 1980’s and are some of the last from their generation still residing in Cuba. All are thematically linked through their analysis of the failure of communist utopianism and the inefficacy of the political state to deal with Cuba’s disintegrating social infrastructure.

Exhibition

The OR Gallery is proud to present Ron Terada’s first solo exhibition, Grey Paintings. Terada displays new drawings and paintings which continue his interest in conjoining pop and minimalist sensibilities. On highly polished grey monochrome surfaces Terada overlays quotes from friends and acquaintances pilfered from his and their high school yearbook. Painful in their naivety and teenage earnestness, the quotes acted in opposition to the cool and formally rigid surface of their Minimalist backdrop.

Ron Terada’s Grey Paintings

For the paintings in this show Ron Terada has cribbed the personal comments of some of his graduation class from their high school yearbook. Is this mean? I think anyone whose sentences float on the artist’s monochrome grey fields would be embarrassed to see their words re-memorialized in paint and on display in a public forum so many years after the fact. Taken out of the queasy context of their nostalgic frame and reintroduced as apparently glib signifiers of a maudlin juvenile sincerity, some are painful to read: “Don’t worry about the future, the present is all thou hast. The future will soon be present, and the present will soon be past.” Ouch.

Questions of appropriation aside, these paintings aren’t crass. Terada builds layers of subtly tinted paint to create thick, unmodulated and incredibly determined surfaces. Two or three colours don’t harmonize to give the ‘appearance’ of a tone of grey, in any one painting the grey is just that grey. The result, an almost sculpted solidity, creates conviction at odds with the contingency and flux of the quotes. In this conflict the paintings are less absolute and the quotes more fixed and unavoidable. Rather than simply being mocked, the words are heroicized as well.

The yearbook memorializes that supposedly transparent moment between adolescence and adult life. Such epithets as “crossing bridges” and “setting off on new journeys” synthesize the experiences of secondary school as essentially formative, as preparation for the ‘real’ world of employment and social responsibility. Like the portraits which distill and homogenize difference, the texts in a yearbook are meant to be looked at in hindsight as harbingers of a potential persona. In the climactic moment of the film Body Heat when Kathleen Turner’s prototypical sociopathic female is unmasked, the elaborate narrative of the film coalesces around her Machiavellian desire, simply stated in her high school yearbook, to “get rich and live in a foreign land”. This statement, like those in any yearbook, act as advertisements of personal definition and future difference. Teenagers have ideas but it takes the economic empowerment of adulthood to enact them.

Terada upsets this. The yearbook paragraphs are no longer signifiers of an initiative potential, stand-ins for competing but as yet unempowered identities. The paintings fix them, disallowing the yearbook’s contextual comforts. Buttressed by their ground’s uninflected grey, the isolated personas we’re given are absent of ‘history’ and consequently devoid of any narrative arc. A result is that the investment in arbitrary concepts of ‘transition’ can be seen as part of mechanisms, like advertising, which manufacture fictional but binding mythologies. In the yearbook this mythology is built on its minute recording of incremental cultural shifts within a safe, unvarying form, and the quote’s revealing self prophesy is the primary hostage to futurity. Terada’s suite of paintings of names without quotes articulates how this is as true for those who try-as if preparing for mild adult embarrassment-to absent themselves from the record as for those who get their hair cut. For Terada the bittersweet ironic recollections of the annual is just another falsifying nostalgia, and if the rosy view of North American adolescence found in films like American Graffiti has given way to the apparently more realistic version of The River’s Edge and Welcome to the Dollhouse, he doesn’t give it much more credence. The indelibility of adolescent experience doesn’t yield to narrative containment, and Terada uses the monochrome knowing it too will fail to isolate its explosive and libidinal energy. Minimalist painting is fraught with its own history of unrealized, and unrealizable, expectation.

by Reid Shier, with thanks to P.C.

Exhibition

Framed is a group invitational exhibition curated by the Board of Directors which proposes and solicits new works investigating the concept of portraiture.