archive

curatorial-talk

The Or Gallery is pleased to present a curatorial talk by Montreal curator Mark Lanctôt. Lanctôt graduated with an MA in Art History from the Université de Montréal in 2002. He has been a curator at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal since October 2006, during which time he’s curated solo shows by Yannick Pouliot, Tacita Dean, Marcel Dzama, Runa Islam and Daniel Young & Christian Giroux as well as an exhibition of works from the Musée’s Collection entitled .other spaces. He’s co-curated the definitive retrospective of Canadian abstract artist Claude Tousignant and is once again part of the curatorial team behind the Musée’s Québec Triennial. He’s also coordinated a presentation of Israeli artist Guy Ben Ner’s Treehouse Kit and Canadian photographer Arnaud Magg’s travelling exhibition Nomenclature. Forthcoming for the Musée, he is preparing a major solo presentation of the work of Montreal painter Pierre Dorion.

~Image:
François Lemieux
the lesser-known architecture of canada I (sic), 2011
Wall painting
&
the lesser-known architecture of canada II (sic), 2011
Selected correspondance and trees
Installation view, _Québec Triennial_Courtesy of the artist~

Exhibition

Or Gallery is pleased to present Raymond Boisjoly, Jordy Hamilton, Laura Piasta: Studies in Decay, a group exhibition curated by Jonah Gray.

The dark overtones in both the subject matter and colour palette of the artworks in this exhibition are the effects of a kind of realism that is more concerned with conveying the realities of contemporary experience than with naturalistic depiction. However, the gloomy image of history these works register—one of violence and repetition with few prospects for change—never slips into pessimism. Instead, they draw their force from seeking to split the difference between affirming the possibilities of contemporary experience and calling attention to its frequently disastrous outcomes.

Vancouver-based artist Raymond Boisjoly’s recent series of images, collectively titled The Writing Lesson, uses visual conventions associated with black metal music to create logos for indigenous place names such as Chilliwack, Massett and Nanaimo. Boisjoly lays out these Anglicized words with dripping, thorny embellishments and what he calls a “forced symmetry.” Like the band wordmarks to which they refer, Boisjoly’s decrepit tangles of letters often verge on illegibility. This iteration of Boisjoly’s ongoing project will be the largest yet, printed on a tarp, and taking its shape from the name Spuzzum, an unincorporated settlement north of Hope, BC.

Jordy Hamilton, an Ontario-born Vancouver-based artist, will exhibit a collection of appropriated images, including a video and a series of 4 × 6 inch photographic prints. These documents record instances of an event held at the artist’s family home in conjunction with an annual barbecue and trap shooting competition. Each year, the assembled picnickers would take aim at a beat up old motorcycle, propped in a field with its motor running, and shoot it until it burst into flames. The photographs are vintage prints that sequentially depict a motorcycle catching fire; the videos are digital transfers from cassette that reveal the degraded image quality of the originals.

Laura Piasta is a Vancouver-born artist currently based in Umeå, Sweden. Her sculpture, Crystallized Jean Jacket, consists of a denim jacket, hardened from having been soaked in saltwater and hung to dry, a process that leaves a delicate crystalline patterning all over the fabric. Pinned to the wall, the jacket’s slumping shape has a pathetic anthropomorphism, but also evokes the conspicuous absence of the body or bodies it might formerly have clothed.

Walter Benjamin held that the world continually tends towards decay. In the spirit of his inquiry into this process, each of these works offers a meditation on decay, while simultaneously seeking to uncover the transformative potential hidden within the patterns of everyday life.

This exhibition was made possible through support from the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia.

Image: Jordy Hamilton, Freedom Machine, 2011. Detail.

Exhibition

The Or Gallery Berlin is pleased to present ΔΤΧ (Delta Tau Chi) featuring the work of Jan Christensen, Pieterjan Ginckels, Jenipher Hur, Marco Schuler, Kathy Slade and Fine Art Union. The show is guest-curated by artist Håvard Pedersen as the second installment of his series of exhibitions based on North American college fraternities and sororities as understood through Hollywood film of the last four decades.

Pedersen’s initial project, The Lambda Lambda Lambda & The Omega Mu at 1612 Gallery (Vancouver), was an open-call exhibition based on the marginalized but gregarious fraternity and sorority portrayed in the 1984 comedy Revenge of the Nerds. In recognition of the “Tri-Lambs’” open acceptance policy, Pedersen eschewed the typical curatorial role of selecting artists, and adhered to a strict policy of accepting any and all artists willing to exhibit their work.

ΔΤΧ, in turn, takes its name from the 1978 comedy National Lampoon’s Animal House. The film’s protagonists are members of the similarly estranged fraternity, Delta Tau Chi (“The Deltas”), an eclectic group of misfits at odds with the oppressive and conformist campus edicts imposed by the college dean. Despite their poor social standing and tenuous agency, the Deltas ultimately (though somewhat inexplicably) triumph against conformity by a steadfast assertion of their identities and individualism, and through persistent gestures of irreverence.

The premise of this exhibition is thereby to construct a group of individuals, not unlike the original fraternity, where there exists no common thread trough which to read the work. Rather than joining the artists in a unified context or shared argument, the exhibition focuses on their individual artistic approach as a notion to associate and organize freely apart from the myth of fraternal implications. Christensen’s meticulous process of painting, Hur’ infatuation towards object-narcissism or Schuler’s persistent captivation of his physical ventures illustrate the characteristics of the judicious intuition of misfits, contrary to their surrounding world of archetypal protagonists and their fellowship bound together by social class and conviction.

Or Gallery Berlin is a satellite project of Or Gallery (Vancouver), established in December 2010. ΔΤΧ marks its fourth exhibition. This project was developed during a curatorial-residency supported by Cultiva Express and Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond, Norway.

In Kooperation mit der Botschaft von Kanada/In collaboration with the Embassy of Canada

Exhibition

Artist Talk
at Emily Carr University of Art & Design (room 301)
Thursday, Septemeber 8, 6:30PM

Opening reception
Friday, September 9, 7PM

The Or Gallery is pleased to present Creative Destruction, an exhibition by New York-based artist Matthew Buckingham. Central to the exhibition is a new video installation work titled Where Will We Live? produced at the Or Gallery in July of this year. The work is based on an assignment designed by the artist’s father, Edward Buckingham, for his grade 4 classes. Students are asked to create an “inventory list” of an imagined present or future city. Using simple paper construction techniques each student creates a number of buildings, roughly in scale with each other. At the end of this exercise the group is asked to physically fit the city together, deciding which buildings “belong” next to which, subsequently forming a model city that reflects and expresses their ideals. To produce this work, Matthew Buckingham collaborated with students of an Arts Umbrella summer class, planning and creating their city over four consecutive days.

The title work of the exhibition, Creative Destruction (2006), a small text-based sculptural work, shares a critical investigation into cities. The work presents a short paragraph as a condensation of the economic idea of “creative destruction,” theorized by Werner Sombart and Joseph Schumpeter, and later analyzed by David Harvey.

Utilizing photography, film, video, audio, writing and drawing, Buckingham’s work questions the role that social memory plays in contemporary life. His projects create physical and social contexts that encourage viewers to question what is most familiar to them. His work has been seen in one-person and group exhibitions at ARC / Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Camden Arts Centre, London; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Hamburger Bahnhof National Gallery, Berlin; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitechapel, London and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He was a 2003 recipient of the DAAD Artist in Berlin Fellowship.

This project is made possible with special support from the BC Arts Council Special Project Assistance – Innovations program. Additional thanks to Arts Umbrella, Ian Barbour, Erin Boniferro, Stephanie Damgaard, Pete Hagge, Sarah Hoemberg, Jessica Jang, and Josh Olson.

Very special thanks to Ella Arnatt, Ari Bone, Andres Corina, Liron Gertsman, Jiwon Har, Liam Hayden, Laura Joyce, Soojin Kang, Sofia Patterson, Caroline Pillon, Kathryn Seifert, and Sarina Yagihara.

Performance

Special off-site project: 202-3540 W.41st Avenue (just east of Dunbar)

The Or Gallery is pleased to present performances by New York artists, Andrea Merkx and Nathan Gwynne/The Ice Machine and Swift for the closing reception of the Or’s destination-based art project for Vancouver’s Dunbar-Southlands neighbourhood curated and produced by Vancouver/New York based artist-curator Barb Choit. Works by Adam Brickell, Jen Weih, Igor Santizo, John Anderson, Aaron Carpenter, Beth Howe, and Sylvain Sailly will continue to be on view in the space, including a new installation for the closing by Sailly.

Andrea Merkx (b. 1978, Albuquerque NM, lives and works in New York) will present the North American debut of a new performative lecture, Red Line. Merkx leads us through a multi-media lecture with live and pre-recorded narration, music and video as we follow several cultural trajectories, overlapping with a the building of highways in Europe, the project of Suburban development and car culture in America as it relates to institutionalized racism and the rising popularity of science fiction as it captured the ‘public cultural imagination’ in the late 20th century.

THE ICE MACHINE AND SWIFT (Nathan Gwynne and Graham Watling, both living and working in New York) have been sending ice cubes to the Dialog space from the various locations that they are visiting this summer on their band’s tour: Brooklyn, Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, Mainz, Ober-Olm, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Berlin, Newark, Seattle and others. To commemorate the closing of The Unspeakable Compromise of the Portable Work, these ice cubes will be refrozen and then used to cool a celebratory drink.

The Unspeakable Compromise of the Portable Work is a series of exhibitions and events produced and curated by Choit in an open studio setting situated in a 1000sq. ft. office space near Vancouver’s Dunbar Street. The offices are also currently partially occupied by Dialog Medical Systems Inc., a Vancouver based software company that produces billing software for doctors and dentist, now in the process redefining it’s business model in the face of a rapidly shifting technological marketplace.

Taking cues from the seminal 1979 article The Function of the Studio by French conceptual artist Daniel Buren, The Unspeakable Compromise… will involve a collaboration between Choit and a diverse range of artists to produce an ever-changing configuration of artworks, performances and artifacts that investigate and illuminate multiple economies and reveal thresholds between production and display within a combination production / exhibition space. The project will present artists as workers, ultimately; workers that are subject to the same fluctuations and outside influences as others in information economy workforces.

The offices of Dialog Medical Systems Inc. are located at 202-3540 41st Avenue West, in Vancouver’s Dunbar-Southlands neighbourhood. The office building itself is home to a number of businesses (predominantly service-industry and health related) including – Dentists, Doctors, Travel Agents, Mineral Extraction companies, Software companies, Investment companies, Physiotherapists, Laboratories, Acupuncturists and an Asian Women’s Health Center.

_{Adam Brickell Untitled 2011 digital c-print 11 × 17 inches (DETAIL)
Sylvain Sailly Paper Stack (Friendly Reminder) 2009-2011 video loop projected on wall dimensions variable (DETAIL)}

News

The Or Gallery’s main Vancouver location is now closed for the summer, and will re-open Friday, September 9th at 8PM with a new solo exhibition by New York artist Matthew Buckingham.

While the gallery is closed, we will be presenting our new Summer Reading series of small works of fiction. Approximately each weekday, a new page of the story will be presented on the front door of the gallery, replacing the previous page.

For our inaugural 2011 project, we are pleased to present Virginia Woolf’s short story An Unwritten Novel, selected by Matthew Buckingham.

Residency

The Or Gallery is pleased to welcome New York artist Matthew Buckingham to Vancouver. During his time at the Or Gallery, Buckingham will be producing a new video work to premier at the Or Gallery in an exhibition opening September 9, 2011.

Utilizing photography, film, video, audio, writing and drawing, Buckingham’s work questions the role that social memory plays in contemporary life. His projects create physical and social contexts that encourage viewers to question what is most familiar to them. Recent works have investigated the Indigenous past and present in the Hudson River Valley; the “creative destruction” of the city of St. Louis; and the inception of the first English dictionary. His work has been seen in one-person and group exhibitions at ARC / Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Camden Arts Centre, London; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Hamburger Bahnhof National Gallery, Berlin; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitechapel, London and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He was a 2003 recipient of the DAAD Artist in Berlin Fellowship.

This project is made possible with special support from the BC Arts Council Special Project Assistance – Innovations program. Additional thanks to Arts Umbrella, Ian Barbour, Erin Boniferro, Stephanie Damgaard, Pete Hagge, Sarah Hoemberg, Jessica Jang, and Josh Olson.

Very special thanks to Ella Arnatt, Ari Bone, Andres Corina, Liron Gertsman, Jiwon Har, Liam Hayden, Laura Joyce, Soojin Kang, Sofia Patterson, Caroline Pillon, Kathryn Seifert, and Sarina Yagihara.

Launch

Vancouver Anthology was a revelation when I first read it and remains an essential and inspiring document twenty years later. It is a model of how histories can be generated from the still-living past and forwarded as a guide to the future. Each of these essays is evidence of original and independent thinking by artists and writers who have worked at the heart of the Vancouver scene. It is first-rate and first-hand art history. – Ian Wallace, artist

This book is required reading for those wishing to grasp why art in Vancouver is bent in certain directions but not others. – John O’Brian, Professor of Art History, University of British Columbia

Twenty years after the publication of its first edition, the Or Gallery is pleased to announce the launch of the second edition Vancouver Anthology, edited by acclaimed Vancouver artist Stan Douglas.

The essays collected in this book were first presented in the autumn of 1990 as part of a lecture series entitled Vancouver Anthology: Lectures on Art in British Columbia, a forum in which each contributing writer could test his or her research on the question of art and politics in public, before their papers were sent to print. The papers documented a range of Vancouver cultural practices, including the emergence of artist-run centres, experimental performance and video, feminist activity, collaboration, sculpture, painting, art criticism, conceptual art and landscape, as well as critical reflections on perceptions of aboriginal cultures.

Vancouver Anthology has been out of print for several years. Earlier attempts to reprint the book were thwarted due to lost or destroyed design files and production films. In the absence of a second printing, scarcity and high-demand drove up prices for existing volumes, making the book unaffordable to artists and to students in particular. The new edition, which has been over two years in production, was recreated using early text files of the essays and by sourcing and re-scanning images from their original negatives and transparencies. A new design by Derek Barnett pays tribute to Douglas’s 1991 original, yet provides the opportunity to move to a larger hardcover format. Most significantly, the second edition features a new afterword by Douglas, reflecting on sociopolitical changes since the anthology’s beginnings in 1990.

Essays in the book include: A Particular History: Artist-Run Centres in Vancouver by Keith Wallace; Daring Documents: The Practical Aesthetics of Early Vancouver Video by Sara Diamond; Expanded Consciousness and Company Types: Collaboration Since Intermedia and the N.E. Thing Company by Nancy Shaw; Independent Film After Structuralism: Hybrid Experimental Narrative and Documentary by Maria Insell; Some Are Weather-Wise; Some Otherwise: Criticism and Vancouver by William Wood; A Working Chronology of Feminist Cultural Activities and Events in Vancouver: 1970–1990 by Carol Williams; Sculpture and the Sculptural in Halifax and Vancouver by Robin Peck; Painting and the Social History of British Columbia by Robert Linsley; Discovering the Defeatured Landscape by Scott Watson; and Construction of the Imaginary Indian by Marcia Crosby.

Vancouver Anthology is co-published by the Or Gallery and Talonbooks, Vancouver. Printing and production of the second edition project was generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, British Columbia Arts Council, and the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts in British Columbia.

Vancouver Anthology may be purchased online here:

Special-Project

Special off-site project: 202-3540 W.41st Avenue (just east of Dunbar)

Open Saturdays only: 12-5PM

The Or Gallery is pleased to present a new destination-based art project for Vancouver’s Dunbar-Southlands neighbourhood by Vancouver/New York based artist-curator Barb Choit. The Unspeakable Compromise of the Portable Work is a series of exhibitions and events produced and curated by Choit in an open studio setting situated in a 1000sq. ft. office space near Vancouver’s Dunbar Street. The offices are also currently partially occupied by Dialog Medical Systems Inc., a Vancouver based software company that produces billing software for doctors and dentists, now in the process redefining its business model in the face of a rapidly shifting technological marketplace.

Taking cues from the seminal 1979 article The Function of the Studio by French conceptual artist Daniel Buren, The Unspeakable Compromise… will involve a collaboration between Choit and a diverse range of artists to produce an ever-changing configuration of artworks, performances and artifacts that investigate and illuminate multiple economies and reveal thresholds between production and display within a combination production / exhibition space. The project will present artists as workers, ultimately; workers that are subject to the same fluctuations and outside influences as others in information economy workforces.

The offices of Dialog Medical Systems Inc. are located at 202-3540 41st Avenue West, in Vancouver’s Dunbar-Southlands neighbourhood. The office building itself is home to a number of businesses (predominantly service-industry and health related) including – Dentists, Doctors, Travel Agents, Mineral Extraction companies, Software companies, Investment companies, Physiotherapists, Laboratories, Acupuncturists and an Asian Women’s Health Center.

Artist included in the exhibition are John Anderson, Beth Howe
, Adam Brickell, 
Aaron Carpenter, 
Nathan Gwynne + The Ice Machine and Swift, 
Andrea Merkx, 
Sylvain Sailly
, Igor Santizo
, Jen Weih.

Over the course of the exhibition, the space will continue to serve as a studio space for the participating artists, allowing the artists to modify and add to their works in the exhibition over time. Choit and the artists will also maintain a blog over the course of the exhibition, hosted at portablework.orgallery.org

The Unspeakable Compromise of the Portable Work marks the third project in the Or Gallery’s Economies/1 series

Exhibition

The Or Gallery is pleased to present Bronze Tinfoil Ball, a new exhibition by Vancouver artist Kelly Lycan.

The exhibition features a single artwork: a small bronze cast of a crumpled ball of aluminum (‘tin’) foil, presented on the floor in the middle of the gallery. The work is part of Lycan’s ongoing interest in the beauty of ordinary objects; beauty that she aims to make apparent through her practice of displacing objects from their original context.

Gilded in aluminum leaf, the bronze sculpture looks nearly identical to its familiar namesake, and it is principally the heavy weight of it that reveals its true material. The bronze ball is produced with the same lost-wax technique used in Classical Greek statuary and much traditional sculpture. The ‘heroic’ connotation of bronze, emphasized by the lighting and design of the exhibition space to resemble early 20th Century museum galleries, is contrasted by the ‘disposable’ connotation of a small ball of foil. This humorous gesture reflects Lycan’s critical practice of examining how value is created across personal, consumer, and artistic worlds and how material objects contribute to the formation of identities and ideologies.
Kelly Lycan is an installation and photo based artist residing in Vancouver, Canada. She received her Bachelor of Fine Art from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and her Master of Fine Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. Lycan has exhibited in solo and group shows in Canada and the US. She is a member of Instant Coffee, a service oriented artist collective that builds social structures, where ideas, materials and actions are explored. Instant Coffee has exhibited Canada, South America, Europe and the USA.

Bronze Tinfoil Ball marks the second project of the Or Gallery’s Economies/1 series, examining systems of value and exchange in contemporary art.

Exhibition

Or Gallery Berlin presents two new exhibitions opening June 10, both of which employ subtle alterations and superimpositions to work against a simple understanding of the picture.

Rachelle Sawatsky’s Mixed Pictures is part of the artist’s recent series of works employing 35mm slides, most of which have been acquired second-hand via online sales and other sources. Using the simple tools of a hole-punch, matting tape and doubled projections, Sawatsky produces a series of antagonisms in the images; at times painterly, other times only barely perceptual. In one instance, a series of amateur photographs taken aboard a U.S. naval ship is contaminated by a tiny green shape superimposed over each of the slides. Through the course of the photographs, this small blemish in the image transitions from a minor distraction to a focus of the viewer’s attention, principally by remaining an unchanging element in the picture frame.

Hadley+Maxwell’s …Um (2006) is a video of nearly 11 minutes in length depicting a lit light bulb on the end of a simple short black cord. Playing out a kind of absurd and minimal drama, the bulb is subjected to a series of “experiments that probe the theatrical and poetic possibilities of a bare light bulb, a projection and a shadow”. The video is projected through a real bulb that hangs unlit in the space, offering a static one to one counterpart to the video image. At times the physical bulb seems illuminated by its video twin, other times it hangs solemnly like a comedic “straight man” in contrast to its writhing “funny man” video partner. …Um was originally shown as part of the artists’ 2006 solo exhibition Deleted Scenes at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery.

Rachelle Sawatsky is based in Vancouver, Canada. Hadley+Maxwell have been collaborating since 1997 and are based in Berlin, Germany.

In Kooperation mit der Botschaft von Kanada/In collaboration with the Embassy of Canada

Exhibition

Or Gallery Berlin presents two new exhibitions opening June 10, both of which employ subtle alterations and superimpositions to work against a simple understanding of the picture.

Hadley+Maxwell’s …Um (2006) is a video of nearly 11 minutes in length depicting a light bulb on the end of a simple short black cord. Playing out a kind of absurd and minimal drama, the bulb is subjected to a series of experiments that probe its theatrical and poetic possibilities. The video is projected through a real bulb that hangs unlit in the space, offering a static counterpart to the video image. At times the physical bulb seems illuminated by its video twin, other times it hangs solemnly like a comedic “straight man” in contrast to its writhing “funny man” video partner. …Um was originally shown as part of the artists’ 2006 solo exhibition Deleted Scenes at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery.

Rachelle Sawatsky’s Mixed Pictures is part of the artist’s recent series of works employing 35mm slides, most of which have been acquired second-hand via online sales and other sources. Using the simple tools of a hole-punch, matting tape and doubled projections, Sawatsky produces a series of antagonisms in the images; at times painterly, other times only barely perceptual. In one instance, a series of amateur photographs taken aboard a U.S. naval ship is contaminated by a tiny green shape superimposed over each of the slides. Through the course of the photographs, this small blemish in the image transitions from a minor distraction to a focus of the viewer’s attention, principally by remaining an unchanging element in the picture frame.

Hadley+Maxwell have been collaborating since 1997 and are based in Berlin, Germany. Rachelle Sawatsky is based in Vancouver, Canada.

In Kooperation mit der Botschaft von Kanada/In collaboration with the Embassy of Canada

Special-Project

As its contribution to The Fair , the Or Gallery presents the 16th installment of its 88-part Science Fiction series.

Installed in room 117 of the Waldorf Hotel, Science Fiction 16/ Raised on a Diet of Broken Biscuits features Dan Starling’s 2011 video work Commodities Start Talking at Millionaire Fair, Untitled (Display Box) from Karin Bubaš‘s 2002 Exotic World photographic series, a rare edition of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, assorted American currency, plus Or Gallery editions pertaining to notions of the speculation and economies.

The title of the exhibition is derived from the 1995 pop song Mis-Shapes by the UK band Pulp.

OFFSITE LOCATION
A special project at The Fair: International Contemporary Art in Vancouver at the Waldorf Hotel, 1489 East Hastings St., Vancouver

Please see www.artaftermoney.com for project hours.

Exhibition

The Or Gallery is pleased to announce Who That Happens, a new sculptural installation by Berlin-based artists Hadley+Maxwell.

Who That Happens is part of an ongoing investigation of the theme Improperties, a term the artists have coined to describe a desired shift in material sensibilities, both in the act of artistic making and its reception. The cut, from the Latin root of the word decision, is used as a formal device to bring together a series of works that focus on the undecidable status of the human: a being that defines itself as both not-animal and not-divine. In these works, the figure of the cut is presented as a literal manifestation of the decision. However, the cut, or separation, is also the means by which metaphysical ideas such as spatiality, contingency, mortality, and otherness can be figured as interior boundaries within a sense of being-together in the world. In this exhibition the emphasis is on the wandering nature of human subjectivity, expressed not only in the arbitrary nature of the placement of the cuts, the multiplication of surfaces, but also the mobile character of the materials used (for instance, objects found in flea-markets or purchased on e-bay). Ultimately, this structure allows for a wandering interest, historically and intuitively, in the making and presenting of this growing body of work.

Hadley+Maxwell have been collaborating since they met in Vancouver in 1997, working in a variety of media including video, installation, and sound. Stemming from their commitment to collaboration, their work examines mediation as the threshold between the individual and the social. Their writing has appeared in publications including Fillip, Art Lies!, Public, C Magazine, Capilano Review and F.R. David. Recent solo exhibitions include The Lemonade is Weak Like Your Soul, Kunstverein Göttingen (Germany, 2009), Improperties, Smart Project Space (Amsterdam, 2010); and “who can resist a Human? who doesn’t finger lies?” YYZ (Toronto, 2010). Recent group exhibitions include Strange, the first time I’ve heard of a piano with four legs (Hey, I keep falling down!), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver); Quebec City Biennial; Kurt, Seattle Art Museum; and It’s the End of the World as We Know It, La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France, (all 2010); The Bell Show, Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin; Light in Darkness, Western Bridge, Seattle; The End of Money, upcoming, Witte de With, Rotterdam (all 2011); and Surrender, the 4th Marrakech Biennale, upcoming, 2012. Hadley+Maxwell are represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.

Exhibition

The Or Gallery is pleased to announce Science Fiction 15, the latest exhibition in its series of 88 Science Fiction related exhibitions planned over a 260 year period, and the second exhibition of the newly established Or Gallery Berlin satellite.

Science Fiction 15 takes up a similar focus on speculation proposed in the exhibition Science Fiction 01 at the Or Gallery in Vancouver (June 27 – August 1, 2009), but places somewhat more emphasis on material, fractured sense of time and space and altered, even hallucinatory, perspectives as components of the genre.

Science Fiction exhibitions numbered 02 through 14 include last summer’s When a day you know to be Wednesday, starts off sounding like Sunday, you know there is something seriously wrong somewhere, a project for the International Chilliwack Biennial loosely organized around apocalypse and John Wyndham’s novel Day of the Triffids, plus a number of older Or Gallery exhibitions recently and retroactively included in this series. A list of these exhibitions will be available at the gallery.

In Kooperation mit der Botschaft von Kanada/In collaboration with the Embassy of Canada. Image: Steven Brekelmans Signs (Beginning & End), 2010

Exhibition

Presented in an installation context, Komma (after Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun) is a 16mm film based on Hollywood script writer Dalton Trumbo’s seminal anti-war novel. The project re-imagines Dalton Trumbo’s work through its syntactical idiosyncrasy.

Set around the time of World War I, the novel with its—then particularly inconvenient—anti-war message, was first published in 1939. The book came into true prominence during the Vietnam war era, after its author had re-emerged from McCarthyist blacklisting throughout the 1950s.

The central device of Trumbo’s novel is the body of the protagonist, a young American soldier who, incredibly, has lost his face and both arms and legs during combat. Unable to see, speak, hear, smell, or act, he is fully conscious, but seemingly completely without agency. As he struggles to come to terms with his personal tragedy, he strains to communicate with ‘the outside world.’

The entire book was written without commas, though all other punctuation conforms to established conventions. The term comma is derived from Greek komma, meaning ‘something cut off.’ The film marks the location where commas would appear according to the Chicago Style Manual.

Antonia Hirsch lives and works in Berlin and Vancouver. Her practice consistently engages with systems—geographical, quantitative, syntactic—that underwrite the most basic understandings of the world. She questions the often invisible hierarchies of these epistemological structures by relating them to more familiar territory: embodied experience. Her work has been exhibited at Program, Berlin, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Power Plant in Toronto, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, and as part of Frieze Projects in London, UK, among others. Her work can be found in public collections such as that of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank, and the Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry, Miami Beach. Her work is currently on view at the National Gallery of Canada as part of It is What It Is, Recent Acquisitions of New Canadian Art; at the Neue Sächsische Galerie, Chemnitz, Germany, as part of Gullivers Sechste Reise, and at Republic Gallery in Vancouver with Stoppages, starting February 18. More information on the artist’s practice can be found at antoniahirsch.com.

symposium

Presented by The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and the Or Gallery

Reception and Keynote address by Nato Thompson
Co–hosted by fillip magazine
Friday, January 28 6—8pm

Full day Symposium
Saturday, January 29 9:30am—5pm; Closing Reception 5—6pm

Admission : Friday $15; Friday & Saturday $40/$20 students (includes lunch)
Details at pushfestival.ca

A SYMPOSIUM EXPLORING THE SPATIAL POETICS OF VANCOUVER

“ …mapping has emerged in the information age as a means to make the complex
accessible, the hidden visible, the unmappable mappable. As we struggle to steer
thorough the torrent of data unleashed by the Internet, and to situate ourselves in a world in which commerce and community have been redefined in terms of networks, mapping has become a way to make sense of things…” – Janet Abrams and Peter Hall

The city has come of age in this spatial construct. Terminal City—the colonial outpost of Vancouver—celebrates its quasquicentennial in 2011. One hundred and twenty–five years into the project, recent art, architecture and performance works have begun to critically position themselves and respond to the spatial condition of the city. For Vancouver, this period of introspection has coincided with a cultural shift in contemporary mapping practices, a shift that reflects a fundamental change in how we think about and represent our relationship to the spaces we inhabit. Changes in the global, economic, environmental and digital worlds have created the platform, and the necessity, for interdisciplinary strategies to understand these new spatial references.

Cartographic Exploits: Marking Territory in the Contemporary City brings together an interdisciplinary group of cartographers, architects, designers, writers and artists—the symposium will discuss the significance of this current trend and explore how these practices are shaping our own understanding of the city and making new interpretations possible.

SCHEDULE

FRIDAY JANUARY 28, 2011
• 5.30 – 6.00PM Registration


• 6.05 – 6.15PM Welcome : Annabel Vaughan | UBC SaLa


• 6.15 – 7.00PM Keynote Lecture : Nato Thompson | CREATIVE TIME NYC


• 7.00 – 08.00PM Opening Reception

SATURDAY JANUARY 29, 2011

• 9.30 – 10.00AM Registration


• 10.00 – 11.00AM Artist Talk : Martin Chaput + Martial Chazallon | PROJET IN SITU [FRANCE]


• 11.30AM – 1.00PM Moderator : Kelty Miyoshi McKinnon | PHILLIPS FAAREVAG SMALLENBERG [VANCOUVER]
  1] Martin Kinch [Pod Plays] | NEW WORLD THEATRE [VANCOUVER]
  2] Volker Gerling [Portraits in Motion] | DAUMENKINOGRAPHIE [BERLIN]
  3] Kate Hennessy | SFU – SCHOOL OF INTERACTIVE ARTS AND TECHNOLOGY [VANCOUVER]

1.00 – 2.00 LUNCH

• 2.00 – 3.00PM Artist Talk : Marco Casamonti + Andrea Destro + UBC students | ARCHEA [ITALY/BEIJING]


• 3.30 – 5.00PM Moderator : Erick Villagomez | RE:PLACE MAGAZINE [VANCOUVER]
  1] Marco Casamonti | ARCHEA [ITALY/BEIJING]
  2] Peter Reder [City of Dreams] | PETER REDER CO. [LONDON]
  05.15 – 05.30 Closing Remarks : UBC Student | UBC SaLa
  05.30 – 08.00 Closing Reception | UBC SaLa

Cartographic Exploits is generously supported by Vancity, the City of Vancouver’s 125th Anniversary Grants Program with the participation of the Government of Canada, the Italian Cultural Institute, the UBC School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture, Studio Archea, Fillip Magazine, the Consulate General of France in Vancouver and Cultures France.

Exhibition

Marina Roy’s exhibition What’s pushed out the door comes back through the window sets up an arena of discursive activity between human, animal, myth, psychoanalysis, literature, and biopolitics. The artworks—two and three dimensional works as well as moving image—cull their inspiration from the grotesque, a stylistic term that comes from the Latin grotto, meaning small cave. The original caves were in fact rooms and corridors of the Domus Aurea, an unfinished palace Nero had started in 64 AD but which was buried after his death and then forgotten over fifteen centuries before they were rediscovered. The walls of the rooms were covered in a decorative interweaving of plant, animal, human and mineral imagery. One of Roy’s approaches is to sift through literature and found imagery to uncover and reconstruct a metaphorical network of unconscious corridors and rooms, hinting at the many ways civilization has reconfigured bios to political ends. The work points to how repressed desire and trauma always find a way back through the window, just as ‘nature’ finds ways of reasserting itself despite human/cultural control.

Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist who works across a variety of media, including drawing, painting, video, animation, sculpture, and writing. She has exhibited work in Canada, the United States, Europe and India. Incorporating raw and found materials, image and text, her work strives to create an allegorical visual language that reveals the ideological structures that bind us. The foundations of her research are in psychoanalysis, biopolitics, human-animal distinction, linguistics, and art history. In 2010 she was recipient of the VIVA art award. In 2001 she published sign after the x (Artspeak/Arsenal Pulp), an encyclopedic book which revolves around the letter X and its multiple meanings in Western culture. She is currently researching and writing a new book about human-animal distinction, biopolitics, and the letter Q, titled Queuejumping. Marina Roy is associate professor of visual arts at the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, at the University of British Columbia.

What’s pushed out the door comes back through the window marks the first exhibition in the Or Gallery’s new Berlin satellite space, Or Gallery Berlin.

Exhibition

Several Circles is a dual-channel 35mm film installation that explores the “revolutions” that link the 19th century riverboat steam engine with the 20th century internal combustion engine. Reflecting writer Mark Twain’s famed quote, “The past does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes,” the project articulates a meandering relationship between shared forms of rotary-driven mechanical power that bookend a hundred year arc of American industry. This project forms a narrative that begins approximately with the emergence of steam-power, and continues speculatively with its transformation. Several Circles similarly addresses a shift from celluloid film based cinematic production, to one that is increasingly dominated by digital video; the triumph of the microchip over the mechanical production and presentation. The work is set to a soundtrack of Detroit techno, a musical form that emerged with the advent of drum machines in the 1980s (a period that roughly corresponds with the decline of the city’s automobile industry) and one that still features prominently in clubs and “party boats” of today.

Several Circles is a special commission by the Or Gallery made possible with the generous financial support of Arts Partners in Creative Development.

Mark Soo is a visual artist who lives and works in Vancouver. Since graduating from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Soo has exhibited both nationally and internationally with past exhibitions at venues including the Vancouver Art Gallery; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver; Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo; Western Bridge, Seattle; Galerie Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; and the Charles H. Scott Gallery at Emily Carr University, Vancouver. Upcoming exhibitions include presentations at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, and the Or Gallery, Vancouver. In 2009, Soo was the recipient of the Shadbolt Foundation VIVA Awards.

Mark Soo would like to thank Sean Arden, Ian Barbour, Eli Bornowsky, Marianne Bos, Chris Brabant, Ed Chan, Robin Coope, Peter Courtemanche, Mandy Ginson, Beau Kerner, Kara Lawrence, Andrew Lee, Khan Lee, James Liston, Paul Kuranko, Jonathan Middleton, Kim Nguyen, Josh Olson, Natalie Sorensen, Stan Douglas Studio, Rob Symmers, Michael Turner, Eliot Vivian, Jen Weih, Erik Whittaker, Western Front, and everyone else who generously contributed to this project.

Or Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the City of Vancouver, our members, donors, and volunteers. Or Gallery is a member of the Pacific Association of Artist-Run Centres (PAARC).