Fiona Bowie : Slip/host, Opening Friday, March 16, 8pm
Fiona Bowie, Slip/host
Slip/host, a solo exhibition by Vancouver-based artist Fiona Bowie, features an immersive video, sound and sculptural installation that shifts between two parallel worlds. The installation takes its inspiration, in part, from the social realism of Ed Keinholz’ State Hospital, an immersive tableau that the artist completed in 1966, and also the sparse caricature landscapes of the popular British television series “Teletubbies.” An eccentric host of characters in Slip/host includes the The Big Lump, the Gargantuan Head and Two-Headed Moon.
In Bowie’s installation the dystopia and brown drudgery of the Big Lump’s world, called “Host”, is countered with “Slip”, a quirky cartoon-like molecular environment, which resides in the body of the The Big Lump, a character whose habitual routines are undertaken relentlessly. The Big Lump, whose limited daily routine is internalized through his thoughts which seemingly only cycle from glutonous desires for food to paperwork and back again, works out of a nameless warehouse in an industrial park. Through gurgles and flabberwacks, The Big Lump’s presence is audibly felt throughout the environs of the other characters. The sage narrator, Gargantuan Head, looms large as he floats in the sky of Slip. The Gargantuan Head weaves a tale of cause and effect and references the actions and nature of both realms.
Slip/host plays with conventions of media, narrative, and scale and draws on the reciprocities between two disparate worlds to reconsider notions of consciousness, consumption, beauty and oblivion.
Fiona Bowie is a visual artist who has exhibited both nationally and internationally at VandeVelde, Brussels; Consolidated Works, Seattle; Galerie Mladychu u Recickych, Prague; Presentation House, North Vancouver; Vancouver Art Gallery; and the Belkin Satellite, Vancouver. Upcoming projects in 2007 include a public arts commission for the City of Vancouver. Alan Cumming plays both the Gargantuan Head in Slip and it’s parallel antithesis The Big Lump.
The artist would like to acknowledge the generous support of Alan Cumming for making this project possible as well as Panavision Canada, Danny Nowak, Jeff Carter, George Majoros, Fiona Mowatt, Vittorio Palmisani, Corin Sworn and Ahmad.
The Western Front gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council through the Government of British Columbia, the City of Vancouver, and our members and volunteers. The Western Front is a member of the Pacific Association of Artist-Run Centres (PAARC).
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