archive

Exhibition

Andrea Stultiens is an artist based in the Netherlands, working principally with photography. Her images come from various sources including the archives of colleagues, private photo albums and local archives, in addition to photographs taken by Stultiens herself. Her work makes use of collected photographic images to construct narratives, to look at the construction of identity in relation to natural and created environs, and the use of amateur photography as a means of shaping personal and collective histories.

All the work in the exhibition ‘Travels and Escapes’ shows the use photography to document, and create different environments as an escape from the daily routine. Her 2003 work In almost every picture, produced with Erik Kessels is a large collection of slides made by taxi driver A.J. Paetzhold. Paetzhold documented trips he made with one particular passenger across Europe. What he was documenting exactly (his taxi, the landscape, the passenger’s holiday) is unclear, giving us the opportunity to project our own narratives onto their travels.

Stultiens has exhibited at the Nederlands Fotomuseum (Rotterdam) and the FotoFestival Naarden. Her project Low Land – High Hills was exhibited at Nieuwland Erfgoedcentrum (Lelystad), and will be presented in an upcoming exhibition at the Evergreen Centre (Coquitlam). She has also recently been nominated for the ING Real Photography Award.

Exhibition

Artists’ talk: Friday September 7. 2pm

In 1927 self-styled prophet and notorious cult leader Brother XII founded the Aquarian Foundation, a theosophical society based in Cedar by the Sea just south of Nanaimo (Vancouver Island). He charged the society with preparing a ‘place of refuge’ where the chosen few would ride out the apocalypse and prepare the way for a new age of mankind. He quickly gathered a group of followers, convincing many of them to hand over their savings to the colony. However, the utopian dreams of the settlement began to dissipate as Brother XII took sole command of the colony from its board of directors, and started acting more and more erratically. Shortly after, the society dissolved amidst allegations by settlers of black magic, violence, cruelty and slave-like conditions. Threatened by multiple lawsuits brought against him by one of the members of the community as well as the government, Brother XII and his mistress fled the country, destroying the colony’s buildings and taking the entire fortune he had amassed from his followers. The last trace of Brother XII was a scrap of paper, left in a hidden cellar, on which he’d written the words: “for fools and traitors-nothing!”

Some 80s years later Cedric and Nathan Bomford have revisited this history by building a series of wooden structures inside the gallery that very loosely reference the original compound. Their interest in this specific history is based on a familial connection: their great, great uncle Bruce McKelvie was a writer and journalist who recorded this history and even directly intervened in the court case, helping to determine its outcome. The narrative is fragmented and spread out across McKelvie’s published account, a few black and white photographs of Brother XII and his followers as well as some of the buildings, and stories that have casually come up in conversation over the years within the Bomford household.

Both artists are more typically associated with the medium of photography. Cedric’s recent photographic and video work, produced while living between Berlin and Malmö over the last two years, examines historically charged architectural subjects in documentary style images that—set alongside a group of staged self-portraits—betray more about the artifice of their construction than the actual subjects depicted. Similarly, Nathan’s previous work consists of photographs of empty theatrical scenes devoid of specific narratives. The mediation of the lens as it represents architecture and urban space and those structures of power to which they bear testimony, has been substituted by the more explicitly gestural mediation involved in physically building an architectural construction from scratch while preserving a photographic sensibility.

The brothers say that this new collaborative project represents a logical progression of their previous bodies of work and shared interests. And in fact, its collaborative nature has extended to their entire family as a massive amount of construction materials were gathered together from relatives’ yards on Vancouver and Bowen Islands and brought over by ferry in a series of trajectories probably similar to those undertaken by Brother XII and his followers. The irony is that all of this is set against the backdrop of a tragically failed utopian experiment based on ‘altruistic aspirations and doctrines of brotherly love.’

Residency

Francisco Toquica (Columbia)
Cain Press vol.1
September – October, 2007
Launch & Drawing/Production Workshop: September 23, 3-9PM
In collaboration with the Intermission Artists Society

Cain Press is a publishing initiative of Colombian artist Francisco Toquica, a participant in the Or Gallery’s artist-in-residence program. Cain Press produces a series of low-budget, offset publications dedicated to drawing. Each issue is guest edited by an invited artist.

Francisco Toquica is an emerging artist from Bogota, Colombia who has just completed his studies at the Academia Superior de Artes de Bogota. Toquica has been active for several years in a variety of independent initiatives including the artist run space, El Bodegón where he is part of the curatorial committee, and Espacio La Rebeca, an independent space founded and directed by former Or Gallery Director Michele Faguet.

Exhibition

Between You and the Thing Itself presents the work of six artists from Vancouver working with photography. This exhibition was organized in a spontaneous manner and was largely influenced by the selected artists’ works as well as the curator’s own interest in photography. In this way the show came together organically without a heavy-handed curatorial premise. The artists in the exhibition do not have any easy categorization and work within a variety of contexts.

Photography acts as the mediator between you (the viewer) and the thing (the object). While all of the artists in this exhibition investigate the nature of photography’s re-framing and its ability to divulge something about the idea of originality and the subject it is depicting, each explores this distancing mechanism inherent in the medium through different means. For example, Kyla Mallett’s Kids on the Brink, is an image of a scanned book cover that shows how the serious matter of teen suicide is packaged by the medical industry for an anxious public. Formal interventions can also produce comic effects, as in Matthew Booth’s printed stills depicting images of stunned viewers witnessing David Blaine’s street magic.

This exhibition includes artists who are not typically grouped together in order to move away from the idea of creating a cohesive group of artists working in a parallel fashion. Rather, the idea is to provide a cross-section of the methods available to photography as a re-framing device. Of interest is the mediation that photography creates because it opens up an imaginative space of speculation—a contemplative space of re-configuring or re-imaging cultural formations.

Robert Arndt examines the means of accessing culture and history through the mediated forms of books, magazines and the internet. His recent work has involved elements of performance, photography and film, and is informed by historical west coast conceptualism and the visual language and authority of cinema. He has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions at Tracey Lawrence Gallery; Artists Space, New York; the Vancouver Art Gallery; Parasite Gallery, Hong Kong; and the Western Front.

Raymond Boisjoly is an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia. His research is concerned with the transformative dynamics of cross-cultural contact as a form of artistic production. An upcoming work negotiates the visual intersection of two cultures, First Nations & Heavy Metal.

Matthew Booth graduated from Emily Carr Institute in 2006. He is a co-editor of Pyramid Power magazine.

Heidi Johansen completed her degree in photography at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2005 after which she moved to New York and later to her native Norway. Exhibitions include two solo shows at Blanket Gallery, Vancouver; a group exhibition at Irvine Contemporary, Washington, DC; and an upcoming solo show at Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles.

Kyla Mallett is an artist based in Vancouver. Since completing an MFA at the University of British Columbia in 2004, her work has been included in exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery; ThreeWalls, Chicago; the Vancouver Public Library, and Artspeak.

Jeremy Todd is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, musician and educator currently working as an interim Director/Curator for the Richmond Art Gallery. In March of this year he completed the feature length digital film “Dear Guy”, a reflection on current understandings and acculturations of Guy Debord’s life and works, and is now developing “Easter Everywhere,” a film project combining dystopic science fiction, pop documentary and epistolary narrative structures.

Exhibition

Helena Producciones is a non-profit, interdisciplinary collective best known for organizing the International Performance Festival in Cali, Colombia. Since 1997, this event has become an important fixture in a city whose recent art production has developed amidst precarious conditions in the absence of any sort of functional institutional apparatus. Within a very broad definition of the idea of performance, the festival has provided a forum for both emerging and established artists from Colombia and abroad. Performances have ranged from: Santiago Sierra’s mounting of an enormous American flag on the wall of the Tertulia Museum (quickly burned and destroyed by angry spectators); to French artist Pierre Pinoncelli’s gruesome amputation of his pinkie finger in protest of the kidnapping of 2002 presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt; to a concert by Las Malas Amistades, a casiotone art school band whose independently produced CDs have attained cult status among college students in the Northeastern US.

In 2006 the collective curated the XI regional ‘art salon’ (a federally sponsored juried biennial) in which they sought to expand the terrain of the visual arts to include a broader arena of cultural and social practices, many of them from the most isolated areas of the Pacific region, for example: a live match between members of the Puerto Tejada school of fencing with machetes (a practice that originates from the appropriation of the Spanish colonizers’ sport by local slaves); documentation of pirate radio stations in El Choco, one of the country’s most violent territories; and a series of works by non-professional artists. Product of an extensive investigation, this exhibition attempted to contextualize cultural objects within those historical and social formations that have been systematically excluded from academic discourse.

The collective is also responsible for ‘Loop’ a semi-weekly television program that aired in Cali from 2000-2001 and that utilized the format of the variety show to disseminate the activities of local artists and punk bands. They have also collaborated on several occasions with Jairo Pinilla, a Colombian director whose low budget horror/thriller films from the early 80s have become cult classics. All of Helena’s projects are engaged with institutional critique and the making visible of countercultural practices deemed irrelevant by mainstream institutions but which drastically outnumber the handful of names that come to mind when thinking about contemporary art in Colombia and among which, ironically, two of Helena’s members may be counted. Perhaps more importantly, the daily spectacle of social and economic conflict specific to the Colombian context often proves to be fierce, even unfair, competition for contemporary art: it is difficult to find work more interesting or complicated than the context that produces it and to which it attempts to critically respond.

Cali has been described as ‘the periphery of the periphery,’ where geographical isolation, economic disparity and cultural malaise exist alongside a relaxed, tropical cultural milieu in which nothing ever really seems to happen. The title of this exhibition, ‘Cali en el espejo’ can be roughly translated as ‘Cali in the mirror,’ and draws attention to an interest in the narrative of a particular place while shunning the idea of configuring a homogenous local scene efficiently packaged and ready for international consumption.

Members of Helena Producciones are: Wilson Díaz, Ana María Millán, Andrés Sandoval, Claudia Patricia Sarria, and Juan David Medina.

Exhibition

Discussions about the work of Jeremy Shaw have typically focused upon the way the artist has successfully utilized techniques of conceptual art, experimental film, music videos, and reality TV to rework primary and produce secondary source materials derived from his own participation in specific manifestations of rave, skateboard and other youth subcultures in the context of Vancouver in the 90s. The current exhibition provides something like the beginnings (thus the title “Best Minds, Part One”) of a move away from any sort of generational specificity to a broader, conceptually messier investigation that encompasses an eclectic set of cultural referents that form part of a history of utopic cultural critique as it relates to and is ultimately absorbed by the culture industry.

Dan Graham’s narrative of collective ecstatic rituals in his iconic Rock My Religion is a reference that runs throughout this exhibition. In a series of silkscreen posters, degraded images of 70s psychedelia, time capsules, and crystal meth labs among other things are repeatedly juxtaposed against a set of slogans in which any expression of unified purpose is obscured by a poetic ambiguity. The precariousness of the medium along with its retro graphic aesthetic intensifies a sense of nostalgia for those failed social experiments that seemed to hold the last vestiges of any sort of real counterculture.

Also part of this exhibition is a re-edited version of the footage of straight-edge hardcore kids performing a violent and cathartic dance familiar to those who have attended performances of Shaw’s parallel music project Circlesquare. This edition is scored with an original composition by the artist, inspired by William Basinki’s Disintegration Loops, a series of recordings of disintegrating tape reels that quite literally document the death of analog technology: the death of one cultural product in favor of another. It is against this backdrop of an eerie and hypnotic choreography that an allusion to death is, moreover, appropriate to describe the kinds of transcendental experiences that are constantly being sought in the midst of so much anger, dissatisfaction, boredom, and despair.

Jeremy Shaw is based in Vancouver. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles; Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver; and Tracey Lawrence Gallery, Vancouver. He has participated in group exhibitions and screenings at Witte de With, Rotterdam; Lisson Gallery, London; Saidye Bronfman Centre For The Arts, Montreal; and Chisenhale Gallery, London. Forthcoming exhibitions include groups shows at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and Monitor, Rome. His band Circlesquare is currently completing a new album to be released in September 2007.

Exhibition

This exhibition is product of an endurance performance in which the artist digs his own grave, documenting the act in video and production stills. The resulting works, a real time high definition video that is six hours in duration as well as a large format print are meant to epically depict an action that is simultaneously and excruciatingly: loaded, cliché, banal, masochistic, silly, pompous, humorous, sincere, and physically laborious. The technological and financial challenges of working in HD video provide another test of endurance, both for the artist and his crew of production volunteers as well as the exhibiting institution whose modest resources seem to demand less ambitious proposals.

Adorno wrote that “museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are the family sepulchers of works of art.” Brunen’s technological experience comes from years of working as an AV technician in the basement of the Vancouver Art Gallery, an activity that has undoubtedly influenced his artistic practice but more importantly, has supported it. The plot site is set against a perfectly constructed Vancouver tableau from which an ever-deepening black hole offers a vertiginous, if not slow, retreat. This is a work that contains varied art historical references that make up the baggage that both burdens and informs the contemporary artist’s desire for novel ideas, social relevance, and economic sustainability. The odds of success seem to be dismal enough to suggest that choosing a career in art is already digging one’s own grave. Which also suggests the futility of an art practice removed from generalized patterns of social consumption as commercial success is the most effective route to widespread visibility beyond the limited sphere of a specific scene.

Like many artists before him, Brunen utilizes an act of extreme physicality to articulate the heroic and pathetic struggles of art making. But left unedited, the drama of the act becomes measured by its parodic nature as well as the tenacity of the viewer, the latter subjected to redundancy and repetition as the plot unfolds.

Derek Brunen graduated from Emily Carr in 2001. He is a former member of Intermission Artists Society and has participated in exhibitions and festivals at CSA Space, Western Front, Video In, 69 Pender and the Prince Takamado Gallery in Tokyo.

Residency

Based in New York City, Felipe Mujica belongs to a generation of Chilean artists who began working in the 1990s, during a critical historical moment characterized by the country’s transition to democracy. He is also one of the founders of Galería Chilena, an artist collective that organized a series of nomadic contemporary art exhibitions in Santiago in the late 1990s.

As ‘Artist in Residence’ at the Or Gallery Mujica worked with a group of deaf actors to re-enact two scenes from Fellini’s “Nights Of Cabiria” using only sign language and gestures. He also presented a talk and slide show at colourschool (UBC) documenting the activities of Galería Chilena and the cultural landscape of Santiago in the 90s.

Exhibition

Kristin Lucas investigates visions of the future, the physical and psychological effects of an accumulation of rapid spread, flash-in-the-pan technology, and the impact of the digital medium on perceptions of time and space. She uses her camera as a diaristic device, into which she unloads her anecdotal, performative mini-dramas. Her work resonates with a sense of social isolation and alienation from the computer/television/electronic media that she posits as a surrogate for personal interaction. The backdrop to Lucas’ work is the empty world of day-time television, cable shopping channels and shopping malls.

Since the late 90s, Lucas has been incorporating gaming scenarios and sci-fi references into video, drawing, photography, web and sculptural works that humorously portray anxieties over the franchising of experience and the influence of control systems on behavior. The subject portrayed in her work is explicitly gendered and this is significant given the recent emergence of an 8-bit ‘scene,’ of which Lucas is a precursor. While very clearly informed by an interest in and knowledge of information technologies, Lucas’ work departs from the idea that an intuitive and imaginative space of play still exists even as it is constantly being mediated and negotiated.

The current exhibition includes previous and new work including video, photographs, poetry, and sculptural constructions. Involuntary Reception is a monologue of a woman self-marginalized from society because she has been inflicted with an EPF (electromagnetic pulse field) that destroys hard drives, kills family pets, and makes leisure activities like swimming potentially fatal to those around her. Magic Eyes Cream Sandwich is a three channel video installation made on the occasion of an anniversary celebration for the artist’s arms, one real and the other cyber. Lo-Fi Green Sigh was shot on location at Biosphere 2 and employs the visual language of B movie sci-fi thrillers against the backdrop of the site’s retro-futuristic architecture; it provides something like the soundtrack for the exhibition. Other works include images from her “Face Series,” a poem from “Decryption Poetry” made from corporate annual reports downloaded off of the internet, and a series of portable transference stations made from an array of disposed and dated consumer objects found during meticulous expeditions to local thrift stores.

Kristin Lucas is a New York based artist currently residing in Oakland. Her work has been exhibited in the 1997 Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and in group exhibitions at MOMA, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; ZKM, Karlsruhe; and the Shedhalle, Zürich among others. She has had solo exhibitions at Postmasters Gallery, New York; Windows, Brussels; Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax; and the ICA, Philadelphia.