Artipedia - Arts News

Yvette Poorter, KNOCK ON WOODS, 2008

The Helen Pitt Gallery presents:

KNOCK ON WOODS: A Roving International Artist Residency
Yvette Poorter

Closing reception and video presentation: Saturday, June 21 at 7:00 pm
Artist talk: 7:30 pm

Please join us for the reception concluding the KNOCK ON WOODS residencies at the Helen Pitt Gallery. For the past week, the gallery has hosted 12 short-term residencies of local artists, writers, yogis, musicians and people who do other things too.

With Knock on Woods, Rotterdam-based artist Yvette Poorter has created a nomadic version of her previous residency projects This Neck of the Woods (2005-07) and A Week in the Woods (2001-03). After a number of European stops, Poorter is now in the process of touring the project to a number of Canadian cities. Poorter will also be presenting this project at Open Space (Victoria), Mercer Union (Toronto), Modern Fuel (Kingston) and Quartier Ephemère (Montreal) over the next months.

Knock on Woods International Residency is a constructed space that dedicates itself to offering local and international artists of all sorts a sense of rootedness and respite from a hectic and bewildering globalism. The residency is a para-site that consists of a rustic tent-cabin and a forest of tree-flags. Functioning as a sculpture, an architectural intervention, an archive, a series of collaborations and a traveling circus, KOW suitably can be seen in more nebulous terms: a cross-roads, a zone, a state of mind.

Artists were invited to do a residency with Knock on Woods for a minimum of four and a maximum of 24 hours. Any kind of work/non-work was advocated: out-come-based projects, pointless exploration, rest or respite.

For more information on the background for this project, the artist, and a link to Knock on Woods, please visit http://thisneckofthewoods.net/

YVETTE POORTER is a Canadian/Dutch artist currently based in Rotterdam. Her sculpture, video, photography, text-works, actions and installation have been shown extensively in North America and Europe, as well as in Japan. Recent solo exhibitions include The Vegetarians at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (Victoria BC), ICI3 at Buro Dijkstra (Amsterdam), and Forty-Hour-Work-Week at Sox36 (Berlin). Previous versions of Knock on Woods were staged at TENT (Rotterdam) and Ouve, O Seculo (Lisbon). In 2005 Poorter was part of the photography exhibition Duplicitous, at the Helen Pitt Gallery.

Helen Pitt Gallery artist run centre
#102-148 Alexander Street
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6A 1B5
www.helenpittgallery.org
Contact: Lance Blomgren, Director/Curator

http://www.eddiefigueroa.com

“ Ecuador ” is a fundraising show for the School of Photography.

• Find beautiful images being sold and signed by Eddie Figueroa Photography

• Buy raffle tickets for wall size photo mural

• Enjoy Ecuadorian cuisine: Seafood “Cevich” Shimp Cocktails

• BBQ “Carne en Palito” Grilled meat kebabs

Date: Friday, July 4, to Sunday, July 13, 2008.

Location: The Great Hall, 1087 Queen Street West

Time Daily: 4: 00 p.m. to 11: 00 p.m.

Bring you appetite and your love of photography.

www.eddiefigueroa.com

Showroom

Centre A is pleased to present Showroom, a project by Kristina Lee Podesva and Inge Roecker in collaboration with Michelle Allard, Marianne Bos, Patrick Chan, Paul de Guzman, Vanessa Kwan, Gwenessa Lam, Heidi Nagtegaal, Alex Pensato, Ryan Peter, Jordan Strom

Exhibition: June 6 - July 12, 2008

About the project:

Showroom is a platform for addressing the relationship between art and public space through the framework of a condominium showroom/construction site. As a collaborative effort undertaken by artists, architects, curators, and the public, the project engages with urgent themes of contemporary culture, spatial practice, and artistic production through an installation, symposium, and series of public forums. Inspired by Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here project and the [Un]Common Place: Art, Public Space, and Urban Aesthetics, Showroom facilitates discussion and analysis between cultural institutions, artists, interdisciplinary groups, and individuals involved in looking at the impact of urban (re)development in Vancouver and beyond.

About the participants

Kristina Lee Podesva is an artist, writer, and curator based in Vancouver. Her work has appeared in exhibitions and publications in Canada, the US, and Europe. She is a the founder of colourschool and a co-founder of Cornershop Projects.

Inge Roecker is the principal architect of ASIR architekten and an assistant professor of architecture at the University of British Columbia. She is also co-founder of Living Lab.

Michelle Allard is a visual artist living in Vancouver. She has exhibited work in Canada and held residencies in France, Japan, and Canada.

Marianne Bos is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Strathcona, Vancouver.

Patrick Chan is a designer and theorist with a special interest in design research methodology and urban studies. Currently, he runs a design-build business with Vancouver-based architect/structural engineer Varouj Gumuchian and furniture-designer Michael Beber.

Paul de Guzman is an artist currently living in Vancouver and has exhibited across Canada, in New York, and Europe.

Vanessa Kwan is an artist who recently exhibited “The Storm and The Fall” at Access Gallery in Vancouver.

Gwenessa Lam is a visual artist based in Vancouver. She recently completed a residency at the Macdowell Colony in New Hampshire.

Heidi Nagtegaal is a Vancouver-based artist.

Alex Pensato is an artist living and working in Vancouver.

Ryan Peter is completing his MFA in Visual Art at the University of British Columbia.

Jordan Strom is the curator of “Interior’s Design,” which will be opening at the Republic Gallery in
June 2008. He is also the editor of Fillip and a guest curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Centre A gratefully acknowledges the generous support of its patrons, sponsors, members, partners, private foundations, as well as government funding agencies, including the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the City of Vancouver through the
Office of Cultural Affairs.

For more information:
Media contact: Makiko Hara, Curator
makiko.hara@centrea.org
604-683-8326

Exhibition Dates: June 6 - July 12, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, June 6, 8 pm
Symposium: Saturday, June 7, 10 to 6:30 pm
Doors open at 9:45 am

Centre A Gallery Hours:
Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 -18:00
Sunday-Monday closed
2 West Hastings, Vancouver, BC, V6B, 1G6
Tel: 604-683-8326 Fax: 604-683-8632

Billy Mavreas, Wallet…, c-print, 2008.

The Helen Pitt Gallery artist run centre presents:

[Workaday02]
Billy Mavreas: AND ANOTHER THING

Friday May 23 to Saturday June 14, 2008
Reception: Friday, June 6 at 8:00 pm

Montreal-based artist and cartoonist, BILLY MAVREAS, presents AND ANOTHER THING as the second installment of the Helen Pitt Gallery’s Workaday series, a three-exhibition experiment addressing issues of creative process, labour and the performative gesture. For each of these exhibitions, the artists involved will be spending three weeks working live within the gallery space to develop a new project or body of work in situ. Viewers are invited to drop in regularly to witness the evolution of these projects and see the artists at work.

Working largely with a photocopier, but also with sculptural elements and found objects, Mavreas will be creating an improvised, collaged installation that defies the divisions of writing and drawing; narrative and semiology; anthropology and science fiction.

At the Helen Pitt Gallery, Mavreas will, in his own words, undertake “a radical expansion of ideas. An accumulation and sloughing off. A shared play and a solo manic exercise. A turn or phrase, a rant, a monologue, a listening, an encouragement. The texture of things noticed or felt. An array of tenses, dislodged temporal streams. Layered noise. Hidden information. Buried text. Lost meanings. Worlds within worlds.”

Throughout the exhibition, audience members will be invited to participate in Mavreas’ exhibition by coming with photocopiable items (objects, original artwork, pocket or wallet contents) to be incorporated in Mavreas’ project.

Notoriously difficult to pin down, Mavreas’ process-based practice does nonetheless suggest a critical response to Modernism’s severity, reductionism and paradoxical dialectics, engaging instead with its less ordered, more expansive traditions of mysticism and transcendentalism developed by such diverse figures as Wassily Kandinsky, John Cage, René Daumal, and Aleister Crowley. And yet, Mavreas’ work is entirely his own. His distinctive creative universe—often populated with bunnies with keen knowledge of dimensional portals and time travel, gourd-like blobs that conflate the phallus/vagina dichotomy, talismans and runes—evokes a social urgency, a reconsideration of language and action, and ultimately seeks a metaphysical understanding to the hard edges of thought, reason and the structure of contemporary life.

BILLY MAVREAS is a Greek-Canadian artist living in Montreal. For almost twenty years, Mavreas has produced rock posters, comics, artist books, visual poetry, installation, mail art, web art, performance, essay writing and guerilla consultancy. His artwork and various projects have been shown and published internationally. He is the author of The Overlords of Glee (conundrum press, 2001), Hell Passport Commentary (Perro Verlag, 2006) and the upcoming Inside Outside Overlap (Timeless Books, 2008) among many others. Mavreas is also the proprietor of his enduring project, Monastiraki, a Mile-End magickal curiosity shoppe and art gallery.

HELEN PITT GALLERY
#102-148 Alexander Street
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6A 1B5
http://www.helenpittgallery.org
Contact: Lance Blomgren, Director/Curator

DRASKO BOGDANOVIC: INTROSPECTRE, 2007

It’s our great pleasure to announce that Toronto Photographer Drasko Bogdanovic has won yet another accolade, this time from the Ontario Society of Artists!
Introspectre, the artist’s moody yet luminous image of a male nude, won the Curry’s Prize for Artistic Merit at the society’s recent juried show. The winners were announced this past Wednesday at a ceremony and reception opening the 134th annual show, open to May 23 at the John B. Aird Gallery at the Provincial Courts, 900 Bay Street in Toronto. Only a month earlier, a specially printed edition of Introspectre became one of the highest bids at SNAP! 2008, the AIDS Committee of Toronto’s annual gala and auction.
To celebrate, the artist is developing a new edition of ten chromogenic prints on Bamboo 290 paper. Bamboo 290 – made from 90% bamboo fibres and 10% cotton – combines spiritual photography with environmental friendliness. This natural warm-toned and OBA free genuine art paper offers maximum aging resistance. It guarantees an extremely large colour gamut and a high colour density.
Drasko Bogdanovic was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia in 1977. An early fascination with the Hollywood magazines and black & white photography of the distant West instilled an early glamorous aesthetic and a constant desire to juxtapose Classical posture with natural light, especially in his later nudes. A classically trained musician and self taught painter, Drasko picked up a camera as a teenager soon after emigrating to Canada as a means to capture images that he might later portray on canvas. Even his early work on this medium made attempts to develop a graphic aesthetic that he would only recognise and realise some years later when he turned to photography exclusively. Today his landscape and architecture photography capture cities’ geometry, immutable personalities and intrinsic emotions; his photography has appeared in domestic newspapers and magazines and has been featured in local and national advertising campaigns.

Arch & Company Fine Arts provides curatorial services to individual, small business, corporate and institutional collectors wishing to enrich their corporate culture and improve public relations by building purposeful collections and public exhibitions of Fine Art in the workplace. For more information on how your organization can inspire Creativity by installing art in your workplace call us at 1.866.557.7169 or visit our Virtual Gallery at www.Archart.ca.

Heirloom Tomato Shovel 2007 glazed clay 6 1/2 x 22 1/2 x 11 1/2 in.

VICTOR CICANSKY
NEW WORKS IN BRONZE AND CERAMIC
May 3 - 31, 2008
Artist Talk: May 3rd, 2:30 pm

On Saturday, May 3rd, the Mira Godard Gallery is pleased to open an exhibition of new bronzes and ceramic sculpture by Victor Cicansky. The artist will be in attendance. The artist will give a talk at the galery on May 3rd, 2:30 pm.

Born in Regina in 1935, Victor Cicansky received a B.A. from the University of Saskatchewan and an M.A. from the University of California at Davis. He is the recipient of many Canada Council grants and awards including the Victoria and Albert Award for sculpture and the Saskatchewan Order of Merit.

Cicansky’s work is found in many Canadian and international public and corporate collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Tokyo, the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, the Department of External Affairs, Shaw Communications, Nestle’s and the Royal Bank of Canada.

The artist lives and works in Regina, Saskatchewan.

For further information please contact the gallery at (416) 964-8197, via e-mail at godard@godardgallery.com, or visit our web site:
http://www.godardgallery.com

Mira Godard Gallery 22 Hazelton Ave. Toronto M5R 2E2

Elora Single #1 2007 Silver Print 20 1/2 x 30 1/4 in. Edition of 10

JANE HINTON: Northern Light
April 26 - May 17, 2008

On Saturday, April 26th, the Mira Godard Gallery is pleased to open an exhibition of new photographs by Jane Hinton. The artist will be in attendance.

Hinton’s knowledge of classical and contemporary art became the foundation for the experimentation with the camera and the development of her unique multiframe images, and her most recent infrared photographs exhibited for the first time in this current exhibition.

I describe myself these days as sketching with my cameras and infra-ered film produces images that appear painterly, creating a new take on a familiar subject with glowing light and almost surreal quality.
- Jane Hinton

Jane Hinton was born in Victoria, British Columbia and raised in Toronto. She studied drawing and painting at St. Martin’s College of Art, London, England and later at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. Her photographs have been exhibited throughout North America and Europe. Hinton’s work is included in numourous collections including the Museum of Fine Art Houston; Helmut Gernsheim Collection, Switzerland; Scotiabank Group Fine Art Collection, Toronto; and Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada, Toronto.

The artist currently lives and works in Toronto.

For further information please contact the gallery at (416) 964-8197, via e-mail at godard@godardgallery.com, or visit our web site:

http://www.godardgallery.com

Aaron Carpenter: The Art of Richard Tuttle (2008)

The Helen Pitt Gallery presents

Workaday01:
Aaron Carpenter: THE ART OF RICHARD TUTTLE

Friday, April 11 to Saturday, May 3, 2008
Reception: Friday, April 25 at 8:00 pm

Aaron Carpenter’s THE ART OF RICHARD TUTTLE is the first installment of the Helen Pitt Gallery’s three-exhibition Workaday series, addressing process, labour and the performative gesture. For each of these exhibitions, the artists will be spending three weeks working live within the gallery space to develop a new project.

Carpenter’s project is an exhibition of replicas, duplicates, imitations and likenesses of artworks by the American artist Richard Tuttle (b. 1941). Using the catalogue from Tuttle’s 2005 retrospective at SFMOMA as a working manual, Carpenter will be keeping regular office hours in the gallery in an attempt to reproduce, in some manner, all of the 317 works catalogued therein. Locating a specific intersection between ideas of artistic homage and durational performance, THE ART OF RICHARD TUTTLE investigates notions of appropriation and authorship while providing a context for re-imagining the assumed connection between labour, commodity and the finished product.

For all three of the Workaday exhibitions, viewers are invited to drop in regularly to witness the development of these projects. The official reception for THE ART OF RICHARD TUTTLE will be two weeks into Carpenter’s Herculean effort.

AARON CARPENTER is an artist living in Vancouver.

Helen Pitt Gallery artist run centre
#102-148 Alexander Street
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6A 1B5
http://helenpittgallery.org
Contact: Lance Blomgren, Director/Curator

April 18th at Gibsone Jessop Gallery in Toronto

The Rising Tide investigates China’s meteoric march toward the future through the work of some of its most talented emerging artists, whose work reflects the country’s rising influence as an economic, political and cultural force in the global arena.

www.therisingtidefilm.com

http://www.bettermail.ca/m/133/14760/63fd9228dca46903f947274b900ace78

Although artists in rapidly developing China enjoy more freedom than they ever have before, they also face problems they never anticipated. In Robert Adanto’s documentary The Rising Tide, performance and video artist Chen Quilin, anime-inspired video artist Cao Fei, conceptual photographer Wang Qingsong, and a wide array of other Chinese artists speak of the spiritual and intellectual dilemmas they face in a society where almost everything is in constant flux. Adanto’s surprisingly grim film highlights both the vitality and urgency of China’s burgeoning new culture while allowing its subjects to speak of the darker and more painful aspects of change. [Info Source]

– Gerry Mak for Flavorpill

Eric Deis, “Laundry”, 46″ x 50″, Archival Pigment Print.

Eric Deis and Jeremy Isao Speier
“Salvage”
April 4 – 26, 2008
Elissa Cristall Gallery

Reception Friday April 4, 6 pm - 9 pm

VANCOUVER, BC — Elissa Cristall Gallery is pleased to present “Salvage” an exhibition featuring Vancouver artists Eric Deis and Jeremy Isao Speier. The exhibition will run from April 4 to 26, 2008.

Salvage is an exhibition of photography and kinetic sculpture by Vancouver artists Eric Deis and Jeremy Isao Speier. Through two distinct styles and media, these artists reconnect the discrete fragments of urban living to render an extraordinary view of the city’s unwritten histories. Deis’ large-scale photographs immerse the viewer into a vivid vista of colour and detail of urban life. Speier’s fragments extracted from urban life are rebuilt and re-contextualized in his dynamic sculptures.

Through contemporary landscape photography, Deis’ images critically examine how we relate to the place and time in which we live and the impact we as humans have on our environment. In “Laundry”, Deis captures the mental state of Vancouver’s Downtown East-side with an image of a four-storey alder tree conspicuously covered in articles of clothing.

Speier uses obsolete and self-made technology, narratives, images and visual models to transform manufactured objects into kinetic sculpture. Speier developed his new series of work using hand-made electronic circuits, a 556/Logic timer-chip (the brain) and a relay (magneto-switch), during his recent residency at the Western Front.

Eric Deis is an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Emily Carr Institute. He is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego (M.F.A.) and Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, Vancouver. His artwork has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, and Europe. He is a recipient of the 2007 Visual Art Development Award from the Vancouver Foundation.

Jeremy Isao Speier, a Japanese-Canadian, is a graduate of Emily Carr College of Art & Design. His work has been exhibited in Canada in numerous solo and group exhibitions. He is a three-time award recipient of the Filmmakers Assistance Program from the National Film Board of Canada.

Contact:
Elissa Cristall Gallery
2245 Granville Street
Vancouver BC
V6H 3G1
604.730.9611
http://www.cristallgallery.com