Artipedia - Arts News

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

Podesva and McConchie, Emotional Google Index (2007-08)

The Helen Pitt Gallery presents

Google Emotional Index (GEI)
A web-based artwork by Kristina Lee Podesva and Alan McConchie

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Beverages served.

The Helen Pitt Gallery artist-run centre is pleased to present GOOGLE EMOTIONAL INDEX as the first of our year-long series of web-based artworks. This interactive project utizilizes and alters the Google image search engine in a subtle act of co-option to provide an ever-evolving database of images associated with the full spectrum of human emotion.

Accessible through our web-site, www.helenpittgallery.org, the GEI interface allows the participant to conduct searches for words indexing emotions far beyond our more general categories—happy, sad, angry or depressed—to help locate points of personal reflection. GEI offers the opportunity for users to explore a vast, real-time archive of individual or group images for discussion, experimentation, intervention and play As a vast, real-time image archive,

While GEI works to expand our sometimes narrow understanding of human emotional states—and highlight the highly abstract, linguistic limitations that allow us to both communicate and understand this nebulous terrain—it also challenges our ideas of the role that the image, pictorial representation, plays in our notions of emotional understanding. As GEI quickly reveals, it is these very representations that compel users to measure and compare their own feelings against what appears in the index.

Within the medium and context of the web, Google Emotional Index specifically draws a contrast between the cacophony of diverse and conflicting representations of emotion online and the narrowing of information through a single channel, specifically the Google search engine. In cataloging images from a variety of sources according to a coherent theme, GEI, among other things, proposes questions about the relationships between emotional understanding, communication, memory and representation—not to the mention the sometimes impersonal structures of categorization that underpin our most personal emotive experiences.

Kristina Lee Podesva is an artist, writer, and curator based in Vancouver, Canada. She is the founder of colourschool, a free school within a school dedicated to the speculative and collaborative study of five colours (white, black, red, yellow, and brown) and cofounder of Cornershop Projects, an open framework for the examination of the relationship between art and economic transactions. In between things, she is Assistant Editor at the Fillip Review.

Alan McConchie is a MSc student in the department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. His current research explores the critical and emancipatory potential of web mashups and mapping on the internet. He is the author of the popular linguistic mapsite PopVsSoda.com.

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

colourschool March postcard

colourschool and Post Autonomy Debate with David Goldenberg | Sat Mar 1 | noon

For this event, a video/skype link to London connects Post Autonomy’s David Goldenberg with colourschool participants, who discuss and debate the limits of participatory practices.

http://colourschool.org/events/colourschool-and-pa

Resisting the University | Wed Mar 5 | 12-2 pm

colourschool attends the UBC Conference “Resisting the University,” presenting in the 12-2 pm session, “Unschooling Oppression: Critical Pedagogy and Alternative Models of Education” at the Student Union Building (UBC) Room 205.

http://colourschool.org/events/open-hours-10

White Reading Group with Eryne Donahue | Wed Mar 5 | 7 pm

In this session, the group continues discussing excerpts from Chapter 2: Coloured white, not coloured.

http://www.colourschool.org/events/white-reading-group-mar

Brown Bag Lunch Discussion with Sabine Bitter, Helmut Weber, Stefan Römer | Fri Mar 7 | 4 pm

colourschool’s Brown Bag events comprise a series of lunch time discussions focused on a given subject or range of subjects. Participants may bring their lunch or take a brown bag provided by colourschool.

For this session, the artists discuss the project Differentiated Neighbourhoods of New Belgrade, which they participated in. The project explores different connotations of the term neighbourhood, in the vocabulary of its urban, architectural, and social context, as well as analyzes the historical development and actual dynamics of urban transformations of New Belgrade neighbourhoods.

http://www.colourschool.org/events/brown-bag-lunch-discussion-with-sabine-bitter-helmut-weber-and-s

Filling in a White Box with Heidi Nagtegaal | Mon Mar 10, 17, 31 | 4 pm

Using textile traditions, knitting, and crocheting, Heidi makes installations and sculptures that mix imagery, absurdity, and tradition. A recent project, Masks for Disappearing, combines fashion and theft, social awkwardness and racial politics by knitting balaclavas in white, tailored to different social uses. In another work, needles are wrapped in rainbow, crotched tubes that cover 3cc syringes, “cozying” a very loaded, dangerous, and pokey object.

Nagtegaal puts into play potential forms and functions of specific materials within colourschool’s space during her research. Visitors are welcome and encouraged to stop by during the course of her research project, which will culminate in… something.

http://colourschool.org/events/filling-in-a-white-box-5

Colour Exchanges: Johan Lundh interviews Germaine Koh | Tues Mar 11 | 7 pm

In place of the artist talk, colourschool presents an ongoing series of artist interviews conducted by Johan Lundh, whose practice adopts the “art of conversation” as a starting point for more dynamic explorations. Johan interviews Germaine Koh for this session.

Koh’s conceptually generated work is concerned with the significance of everyday actions, familiar objects, and common places. Her recent schedule has included shows at the BALTIC Centre (Newcastle), De Appel (Amsterdam), Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), Ottawa Art Gallery, and le Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong), Frankfurter Kunstverein, Bloomberg SPACE (London), the Seoul Museum of Art, Artspace (Sydney), The British Museum (London), The Power Plant (Toronto), the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Plug In ICA (Winnipeg), Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

http://colourschool.org/events/colour-exchanges-interiew-with-germaine-koh

Open Hours | Wed Mar 12,19, 26 | noon to 4 pm

colourschool’s doors are open for research, reading, and screening.

Everyone is welcome to stop by Wednesdays, noon to 4pm or by appointment.

http://www.colourschool.org/events/open-hours

D&G Reading Group or How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Colours? with Vytas Narusevicius | Tue Mar 18 | 7 pm

colourschool’s D&G Reading Group regularly meets to read and discuss texts from One Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s landmark work, which continues to challenge the terms of debate in various disciplines including philosophy, psychology, culture, politics, economics, and art among other fields.

During D&G meetings participants receive excerpts to read and discuss as a group. In addition, all are welcome and encouraged to bring sections to share. For this meeting, we continue our discussion of Chapter 1: Rhizome.

Sipping “Tequilera” en Fuego: An Evening of Astrid Hadad with Francisco Granados Samayoa | Tue Mar 25 | 7 pm

According to Tim Weiner of the New York Times, Astrid Hadad is “outraged” and “outrageous” and the artist behind what “could be one of the most provocative stage acts since the Weimar Republic was in bloom.” As a diva-cum-performance artist extraordinaire, Hadad embodies and mixes the multiple facets of Mexico’s complex identity into performances and images that form a political cabaret, simultaneously embracing and skewering the heritage and stereotypes that both dignify and haunt Mexican national identity.

For this colourschool event, Francisco Granados Samayoa presents videos of Hadad’s videos and discusses them in relation to his own memories, practice, and politics.

http://www.colourschool.org/events/sipping-tequilera-en-fuego-an-evening-of-astrid-hadad

colourschool is located @ [IDS] ECIAD,1399 Johnston Street, Vancouver, BC, V6H 3R9 or online at www.colourschool.org
Email: info@colourschool.org

colourschool is a school within a school dedicated to the speculative research and exploration of five colours: black, white, brown, yellow, and red. Providing a free and open space for critical investigations of colour, identity, artmaking, and knowledge production, colourschool attempts to develop a collaborative colour consciousness through a variety of events including reading groups, film screenings, listening labs, interviews, roundtable discussions, brown bag lunches, performances, and installations among other activities. All are welcome.

PROCESS AS WORK:
Roy Kiyooka, Damian Moppett, Jerry Pethick, Ian Wallace

Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver
29 February – 29 March 2008
Opening Friday 29 February, 7 – 9pm

Catriona Jeffries is pleased to present the forthcoming exhibition of work by Roy Kiyooka, Damian Moppett, Jerry Pethick and Ian Wallace. Process as Work presents a significant body of work by each artist, calling attention to the unique working processes that mark their practices. The work in this exhibition is representative of the four artists’ commitment to continuous and rigorous production and their constant manipulation of ideas, often through serial works. The materiality of the artist’s working process in some cases manifests itself as studies for final works, but congruously exists as completed works which are continually being developed upon through the use of reoccurring motifs and an ever-present referencing between works. The exhibition positions the processes of this inter-generational group of artists in relation to one another and in relation to a broader context of international discourse about approaches to sculpture, painting and photography.

In a complete body of painting/collage works on paper by Ian Wallace from his New York series, created between 1993 and 2001 and never exhibited before, we see Wallace working towards his large format New York photo-monochrome paintings of 2001, from which Jazz Street II will be shown here. Wallace and Pethick have both been intensely interested in the motif of the intersection throughout their practices. Since the 1970s Wallace has explored the social theatre of urban intersections through the juxtaposition of the painted monochrome and photographs which focus on the meeting point of dynamic urban relations: pedestrians, traffic, signage and architecture. In the New York series, Wallace situates the history of the jazz scene in New York on the Broadway Boogie Woogie strip while recalling the minimalism of Mondrian. In what Wallace has termed a practice of “melancholic modernism,” there is a tension between the everyday scenes of the photograph and the absence of referential subject in the monochrome, wherein the white lines of the crosswalk and the painted canvas interplay as real and abstract space.

For Jerry Pethick, the intersection was a meeting point of optical perception. He referenced the intersection in numerous works, pointing to the influence of technology on visual perception through the use of lenses and television tubes as optical devices and recording the occurrence of exes in nature, such as the outgrowth of a tree branch from a tree trunk. Pethick’s opposing coloured vinyl tape markings in the wall installation Intersection, 1971, are the beginning of a series of experiments which he continued to develop in his explorations of holographic space and large format array photographs. The intersecting marks appear again in a series of drawings and sculptural collages from 1965 and culminate in the array camera he created in the 1980s. This camera enabled Pethick to take multiple images of one shot and to create a prolific series of photographic arrays which investigated the intersection of points as a means for calling attention to the way we perceive what we are seeing. This exhibition of a significant body of Jerry Pethick’s work anticipates an important forthcoming solo exhibition at the Catriona Jeffries Gallery to be presented in 2008.

Roy Kiyooka also continually embarked on experiments which led one work into the next, through performance, film and photography. Kiyooka’s work is situated in the everyday. Documenting a road trip he took with students to the interior of British Columbia in 1977 and his stay in a hotel room in Mission, B.C. in 1978, he intertwines poetry and symbolism within these localized moments from daily life, producing scenes which question notions of identity and place. Kiyooka’s subjective snapshots of family and friends configured in grid formats attenuate distinctions between amateur and professional, art and non-art; they are inscribed with a tension between the universality of modernism and the radicalism of the avant-garde. In a series of photographs in which the mask is the main character, there is a relationship to earth art practices through the marking and staging of performances in the snow. At the same time, Kiyooka’s use of multiple still images imparts a cinematic quality which links to his original performative actions and film works.

In Damian Moppett’s ongoing series of drawings and watercolours he works through sculptural forms using one dimensional strategies, drawing attention to the constant interplay between the two. Moppett probes notions of corrupted ideas and imprecision, emphasizing process, not the end product. In his configurations, he plays with our expectation of resolve through the production of studies that are also complete works in themselves, continually disrupting distinctions between high and low art. Recalling Wallace’s photographs taken in his studio, Moppett offers up the messes of his working environment in his drawings, recording the process of working towards his modernist assemblage sculptures, one of which will be presented in the exhibition.

For further information please contact Catriona Jeffries or Charo Neville at (01) 604.736.1554

Forthcoming exhibitions: Germaine Koh: 11 April – 10 May, 2008 Ron Terada: 23 May – 28 June, 2008 Art Basel 39: 4 – 8 June, 2008