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Exhibition

Arm in Arm is an exhibition featuring the work of three UK based artists and three Canadian artists. The artists share fundamental concerns and approaches such as the appropriation of reality and the presentation of their alternative perspectives through the use of mediums such as video, installation, photography and drawing.

Once meaning is found or experienced it is then dissected, scrutinized and reconfigured. The process of taking, reprocessing, and re-presenting results in work that simultaneously engages while it questions, dislocating the familiar in an effort to communicate new or alternative meanings of the world around us.

Exhibition

“Sean Alward and Ryan Taber,” is an exhibition featuring the work of two young artists from the West Coast: the Vancouver-based Sean Alward, a recent graduate of the University of British Columbia, and the Los Angeles-based Ryan Taber, a recent graduate of California Institute of the Arts.

Exploring a range of issues in their own diverse bodies of work, Alward and Taber share an overlapping interest in art and visual culture’s many formalisms and methodologies. For both artists, the way in which artwork and popular images are made and presented provides a kind of natural sticking point, a place where individual biases and cultural norms meet and intersect.

In his paintings and photographs, Sean Award embarks on an often-humorous investigation of traditional portraiture by way of such throwaway mass-culture photographic sources as mugshots and snapshots, travel pics and publicity photos. Alward’s interest in the reinvention of traditional portraiture finds a parallel in Ryan Taber’s own exploration of the tropes of landscape painting, another traditional genre. Taber’s sculptures and drawings investigate the work of such art-historical figures as Piranesi and Bierstadt, drawing not only on the imagery they produced, but also on the literature, science and popular thinking of the eras in which they lived and worked.

The suggestion that emerges from Alward and Taber’s art is a taxonomic one, suggesting connections about how we think about the world and they way we depict it and shedding light on both our art and its makers.

Exhibition

Montana Slavey Cree artist Daina Warren explores her cultural identity through the use of traditional glass beading and hair headdresses.

According to Warren: “In most of these objects I wonder about how much is due to my own creative process, and what is intuitive and lives within my skin. I have a 96 year old Cree grandmother who is an exceptional traditional bead worker and well known for her skill. I was curious about her practice and wanted to find a connection to my family. Most of what I know comes from transference, the transference of knowledge, whether it be through institutions or the elders, the transfer of materials from ‘traditional’ to ‘contemporary’, the transfer of my birth family from their traditional territory to where and who I am now.”

Daina Warren hosted an ongoing open studio in the gallery for the month of July.

Exhibition

Thinking/Judging is a two-part project that explores the work of political theorist/philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), in particular those aspects concerned with the faculties of thinking and judging. Part one will consist of a series of discussions; part two will consist of a mailed out publication based on the discussions themselves.

Exhibition

Out of Office Reply Residency:

Toronto based artist Annie Dunning’s work mixes the imaginary with the everyday, often using humor and sensitivity to create a new relationship between the artwork and the viewer.

The Pigeon Homing Project is an adoption agency for city pigeons. Dunning plays the role of matchmaker, finding suitable parents for the personified flock of ubiquitous city birds. Participants will adopt a life-size representation of the real bird, painted by the artist directly on to the wall of their home. Slowly these outdoor birds will find new places to roost in apartments and houses throughout the city.

Exhibition

The OR Gallery is proud to present Jen Weih’s exhibition. The William H. Reynolds Rotunda is an installation of objects, painting, light, and sound that explore the sculptural and acoustic qualities of the everyday. The work is inspired by the veins of jeopardy and fantasy that connect investment finance, (ever increasingly an aspect of the art system), and carnival. The work considers the ways in which these sites mitigate or magnify risk. The artist is interested in the role of mythologies of effortless getting, absolute possibility and the need to negotiate, or the potential to exploit the threat of disaster.

William H. Reynolds was a real estate developer and speculator whose career stretched from the 19th Century well into the 20th. In 1904 Reynolds opened Dreamland, one of Coney Island’s classic amusement parks. There, you could experience sensational events, both contemporary and historical in the form of exciting thrill rides and captivating theatrical presentations. The San Francisco earthquake, the burning of both Rome and Moscow, episodes of the Boer War, the Galveston Flood and the eruption of Vesuvius were all on offer. Tragically, in May of 1911, Dreamland was destroyed by fire within 18 hours.

By 1925 the soaring economy of the Roaring Twenties was matched by an unprecedented real estate boom in New York City. It was at this time that Reynolds contracted William van Alen to design a building for a plot at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, across the street from the recently completed Grand Central Terminal. Unfortunately, by that time Reynolds’ fortunes had changed and financial distress forced him to lease the property to Walter P. Chrysler. Chrysler continued to work with Van Alen to design the Chrysler Building, a monument to his automobile corporation, the second largest producer of automobiles in the world at the time.

While it was being built the Chrysler Building vied with H. Craig Severance’s 40 Wall Street for title to the tallest building on the face of the earth. In the final hour, the buildings were even, but van Alen had secretly constructed a seven-story spire inside the building. When this was installed Chrysler laid claim to the honour of tallest building and structure in the world. The year was 1930 and things were very much changed compared to the first days of construction in 1928. The grand opening was over-shadowed by the Stock Market Crash of Twenty-Nine and the Great Depression was underway. Then, in 1931 the Empire State Building, masterminded by General Motor’s John J. Raskob, ended Chrysler’s brief claim to the world’s tallest building. However, the Chrysler Building remains a celebrated contribution to the New York skyline.

Exhibition

Billboard at Main and 1st
Billboard at Pacific Blvd and Quebec St

Picture For Women

Anika Yuzak takes pictures of herself. The pictures detail, in snapshots, moments from her life. Yuzak has taken over 200 photographs in a period of 2 years. The images are intimate and informal; they index a type of rehearsal that occurs behind closed doors like test shots they aspire to a potential or ideal while simultaneously being grounded in the candidness of their reality. Within the privacy of her own space, Yuzak is able in a certain confidence to explore different personas, outfits, postures and looks.

For her exhibition at the Or Gallery, she has selected two of these images to be realized as billboards with the sole curatorial criteria indicated by the work’s title; Pictures of myself when I think that I look good. In one image Yuzak is posing in what appears to be a small kitchen space, with one leg raised up in a short skirt, long boots and purple Lakers t-shirt. The photograph documents the outfit for potential future reference and allows the opportunity to see fixed in print what would be lost in the glimpse of a mirror. This attempt to situate oneself within the hierarchy of all images is a necessary process, one that even if standard norms are rejected must be taken up at some point in normal psychological development. This narcissistic exploration further articulates the heightened state of self-consciousness that the modern subject inherently possesses and the dramatic tendencies of its psychological state. By utilizing the gigantic media format of the billboard Yusak advertises the reversal of the commodification of the personal and private life of the individual. Here the only thing being sold is her curatorial criteria and the gesture of mainstream mimicry, one that demands to “show us reality.” Regardless of the sociological reference in reading these images the viewer might be ultimately confronted by the images uncertainty and resistance to interpretation. This resistance in itself might be seen, temporarily, like an impossible void, one that expresses a desire to exist before being signified.

Presented within the gallery is a video in which Yuzak re-performs a role from the movie, S.F.W., 1994 (So Fucking What?) The movie is about an anti-hero played by Stephen Dorff, who after being taken hostage in a convenience store appears on national television for the 36 days of his imprisonment. Filmed continually by the “terrorists”, Dorff’s character becomes a national celebrity for his nihilistic behavior and apathetic ideology which is summed up in his continual use of the phrase, “so fucking what?” Yuzak uses a small scene in which she crudely cuts herself into the movie, assuming the position of Dorff’s girlfriend. Under the assumption that she could act better than the actress Joey Lauren Adams, Yuzak re-performs the dialogue which is a pathetic argument between the two characters…..view the complete text by Geoffery Farmer

Special-Event

Out of Office Reply Residency

Playing off the legacy of Conceptual art’s notion of material transgression, Andrew Dadson creates fleeting, participatory experiences that highlight actions of individuals within the modern metropolis.

In Pink Bank Project Dadson uses spray paint to cover the bankcards of willing participants to the gallery, effacing their logos. This simple action becomes a performance tool for the card carrier, stimulating impromptu discussions each time the card is used in a transaction.

Special-Event

Out of Office Reply

This project is a semi permanent public sculpture in the form of a found boulder placed by Maura Doyle along the False Creek Seawall, This boulder, inscribed with a plaque, is a monument to the erratic movement of rocks from the coastal mountains to the city, over the past 14,000 years.

Exhibition

Lisa Prentice’s installation The Purpose of Shame fails from the get go. By drawing on emotional principle, she operates outside of critical protection. Using materials salvaged from the garbage of local building sites and images from her notebooks that were never meant for public view, Prentice attempts a supra rational (or perhaps just a non-rational ) dialogue with the modernist object(ive). Prentice’s suggestion that “I’ll go first” into the black-lit toke shack, attempts to reassert the galvanizing power of emotion that classical theory has sidelined, but that children and the stoned understand so completely. Frustrated by critical discourse’s devotion to reason even as reason fails, Prentice instead looks to sociology and non-classical psychotherapy as forms that have long upheld the importance of emotions and their transformative effects in social and political practice.

Exhibition

Out of Office Reply Residency

Vanessa Kwan has created a two part installation at the Or Gallery. A book of postcards and a sculptural installation shown in the anteroom of the gallery.The postcards show images of some of the world’s most recognizable cityscapes—among them New York, Tokyo, London, and Toronto—with predetermined shapes cut out of the card. To experience the work, participants must follow the instructions on the back of the card to a specific spot in Vancouver (i.e.: the railing on the south side of Science World), and hold the postcard at a specified angle, at a specified time of day. By looking through the hole of the image, buildings experienced first hand in Vancouver will be integrated, however briefly, into a postcard view of New York (for example).

Exhibition

The shifting narrative of our history is explored through the dreamer fish, a deepwater animal that is viewed in a series of material, mythical and scientific observations. The Dreamer Fish considers the animal’s history as a series of activities and offers the viewer the possibility to experience life as a dreamer fish through an interactive installation.

Exhibition

Office follows the everyday rituals of a life insurance company, where the ideology of security is paramount. With a cast of over 20 characters, Office depicts performers who were shot against a blue screen and inserted into a background generated by the use of a combination of video footage and still photographic imagery.