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Exhibition

Kerri Reid takes monumentalism to task with a site-specific installation. In keeping with her labour intensive projects involving craft and pathos, Reid has been carving a large basket out of marble over the course of the Fall. Beginning in November, Reid will spend a month carving a weave into the gallery walls. Using the title of an Irving Stone novel about Michelangelo, Reid adopts the serious nature of the monumental installation while subverting it through expectations of pathos.

This show is hokey. I am taking references from a variety of artistic traditions – stone carving, weaving, frieze and relief, as well as minimalist, formalist, and post-studio strategies – and using them to explore a combination of slightly pathetic conditions. Overly romantic and heroic notions of art and labour are used to make a work about uncertainty, curiousity, self-doubt, lonely desperation, and baskets. -Kerri Reid

Performance

The Or’s contribution to Vancouver New Music initiative Electric City, Open Circuits was curated by then board member Brady Cranfield and includes the work ten artists spanning different decades and discourse in experimental electronic music.

Exhibition

In Autologues: Annex Explorations in Consciousness, meditation and sleep states are articulated through photo-documented actions, an essay and t-shirts. The Autologues project intends to address experience and divergent logic as “media-tized’ performance.”

This was the Or Gallery’s first web-based project and can be viewed through this link: <a href=“AUTOLOGUES

(a web-based performance part of LIVE: Perfomance Biennale)

Or Musique: October 29
Artist talk by Igor Santizo
music by Leonard Paul.

Exhibition

A projected video PleasePleasePlease depicts Slade’s point of view as she strolls through the streets of Vancouver leading from her studio to the Or Gallery as she accompanies herself in song, covering The Smiths’ Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want. The video and new embroidered work on cotton, map ambition and its ephemera by virtue of infamous icons of popular culture such as Morrissey and Roald Dahl’s character from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Veruca Salt.

Performance

Adalgisa Campos and Carole Sawyer artist talk
music by the Eyelickers.

Exhibition

Through the years Brazilian artist Adalgisa Campos has collected an extensive data bank of measurements. Every place Campos has lived, traveled or visited has been meticulously measured: from rooms, halls, bathrooms, elevators, and corridors to bank notes, coins, napkins, cups and tiles.

Absorbing the floor plan of the Or Gallery into the general context of exhibiting in a space far from home, Campos will group and regroup her collected data, comparing and relating the space of the Gallery to her own calculated assessments of lived information and experience. The subsequent result will be a reduced and compiled floor plan in a 1:1 scale relayed to the viewer as a floor-based drawing. The scale will implicate the viewer/participant in a spatial experience, exemplifying the notion that the perception of space is directly related to its representation.

Vancouver-based artist Carole Sawyer has documented the empty interiors of houses in her Vancouver neighbourhood of Strathcona. All of the buildings are in the midst of renovation. Although frozen into artificial stillness by the camera, the rooms are in a state of rapid transformation.

In addition, Campos and Sawyer will participate in a special Or Musique event coupling artists talk with music. The two will discuss their practice and contribute in a group discussion, to be followed be a musical performance by the Eyelickers.

Performance

Or Musique event co-hosted by the Vancouver Art Gallery featuring talks by Danica Phelps and LA based artist Dave Muller, and musical performance by Vancouver ensemble Mimi’s Ami.

Exhibition

New York artist Danica Phelps uses the barter system in order to properly assess the value of art in the everyday, and the everyday in art. For her artist’s project at the Or Gallery, Phelps has initiated a chain of exchange with local artists using her drawings as trade. Her accumulated trade is exhibited alongside ‘Xeroxes’ of her departed work.

OR MUSIQUE
in conjunction with the Vancouver Art Gallery

June 25, 2003
Artist’s Talk with Dave Muller
Artist’s Talk with Danica Phelps
Mimi’s Ami live music

Special-Event

• Dinner cooked for you by grunt gallery curator Glenn Alteen
• A Haircut at Haircats with Vancouver Art Gallery curator Grant Arnold
• A manicure with VAG curator Daina Augaitis at the Renaissance Spa & Wellness Centre
• Movies at the Ridge and lunch at Sophie’s Cosmic Cafe with Konrad Black and March 21
• Martinis at Wild Rice, followed by dancing at the Lotus, Milk and Honey with Fiona Bowie and Western Front curator Jonathan Middleton
• A drawing by Geoffrey Farmer, made while you get your haircut at House of Envy
• An hour at the gym with Rodney Graham
• Be accompanied by Second Opinion Shopping Consultant Colin Griffiths
• Backstage with The Flaming Lips, Destroyer, Modest Mouse with Or curator Sydney Hermant
• A film at the Pacific Cinematheque and dinner at the Villa del Lupo with artist Antonia Hirsch
• Snowboarding at Mount Seymour with Brian Jungen
• Pitch and putt in Stanley Park with Tim Lee
• Bowling at Varsity Lanes with Ken Lum
• A scenic drive in the country with Myfanwy Macleod
• A walk on the beach and picnic with Liz Magor
• Breakfast at Ouisi Bistro with Kyla Mallett
• Ping pong challenge from Jason Mclean and Derek Root
• Oysters and Jazz with Eric Metcalfe
• Rekkid shopping and spinning with Damian Moppett on Elisa Rose’s Co-op
• Radio Broken Record Show
• Go-Karting with celebrated curator Cate Rimmer followed by dinner at the Alibi Room
• Opera with Carol Sawyer
• Rollerskating at Stardust with artists Kevin Schmidt and Holly Ward
• Pool and Beer at the Brickhouse with Contemporary Art Gallery curator Reid Sheir
• Fries at Waazubeez with the Surreal Gourmet
• A day at the Greater Vancouver Zoo followed by dinner at the Whip with Neil Wedman
• Closet cleaning and colours done by Kelly Wood

Exhibition

The second Exploration in Psychic Geography, Saturday Society draws on an earlier influence of the Situationist Internationale: the 17th century writings of Madeleine de Scudery and her novel Clelie which inspired interest in metaphorical mapping.

Working in a variety of media, the artists selected work with the traces, signs and other methods of mapping. This was the second in a series of exhibitions exploring tangents associated with Psychic Geography.

Exhibition

March 29th opening accompanied with musical performance by
THE DEPARTMENT

The first in a series of group shows at the Or exploring tangents associated with Psychic Geography. Stemming from the Situationist Internationale (SI) term psychogeography, Psychic Geography deals with leisure economies, distraction, collaboration, fantasy, and the spiritualization of civilization, all while holding possible utopias at arm’s length. Psychic Geography departs from the SI’s original intent by freeing the geography from a locus. While still remaining locked to spatial relations, it is a cognitive geography, testing the principles of pychogeography within the gallery space.

By using New Wave tropes well past their peak, Jacques Rivette’s film Celine and Julie Go Boating draws on the study of psychology and magic to illustrate the possible journeys of the mind. The three exhibiting artists have been given a cut-up segment of this film as a basis for response.

Psychic Geography as mapping of an immaterial, infinite space – the mind. This is a realm without reference, without horizon, where scale has no meaning. How do we explain terrain? Architecture is a structuring form that delineates exterior from interior. In the film Celine and Julie go Boating the characters discover a conduit that allows them to move through a corporeal architecture into each other’s minds. Generally people use the symbolic (words, facial patterns, pictures) to enable them to express their mental terrain. Unable to display the material landscape, Tony and I have paraphrased its constructions and denotations through symbolic architectures. – Corin Sworn

View the text …who wants to live in the present? (First Supplement)
by J.A. Gaitán

Exhibition

Due to Iceland’s relative isolation, the country’s genetic pool is of immense value to researchers. As a result, in December of 1998 the Icelandic Parliament passed a bill legalizing access to the health records of the entire population to a private company. In the summer of 2001 Vancouver artist Una Knox travelled to Iceland, to research this sale of Iceland’s collective gene pool to Decode Genetics; the partial results are her exhibition In Love With Possibilities. With a projection and series of colour photographs, Knox explores the value of isolation while exposing technologies inherent to both photographic and scientific practices.

“When I make a series of photographs, I think about the act of creating a map – a map as a method of translation for images. The coordinates sit in the film between public and private experience, and become an archeology of the present. We no longer think of the world as solely defined by nations, no longer think of time in a linear progression, and no longer consider our own existence to be mortal. Our genes can and will survive. As allegory, photography interrupts the history of seeing and knowing that structures the history of contemporary society.”
-Una Knox

View the text Mistakes cannot be corrected By Zeigam Azizov

Exhibition

Sonja Ahlers is best known for her graphic book works and installations. Her collected body of work creates an archive of popular culture, dealing especially with nostalgic remnants of her youth spent in 1970s and 80s Victoria, BC. Through the employment of traditional women’s crafts and modern graphic devices, Ahlers’ builds exploded personal narratives with visible contemporary resonance.

For “we didn’t start the fire”, works were selected from outside of Ahlers’ prolific graphic and figurative collection. Drawing on Ahlers aphoristic style, The Or Gallery presents an eclectic and inspired series of her works.

Exhibition

Samuel Roy-Bois is an accomplished Montreal artist whose work explores the subject of utopian architecture. Based on a quote from Gustave Flaubert, “the more telescopes are perfected, the more stars will be in the sky”, j’ai entendu un bruit et je me suis sauvé examines the work of neo-classical architect Etienne-Louis Boullée. Boullée’s work sought to metaphorically reverse the natural order of things by presenting the Universe as contained in human construction. His proposed cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton was a rounded, hollow structure designed to hold the night sky. Impossible to fulfill in 1784, Boullée’s project was never realized.

Using Boullée’s model, Roy-Bois will construct a place within the Or Gallery where the distinction between finite and infinite dissolves.