Vanessa Brown + Mike Bourscheid at gr_und in Berlin

16th of December 2023 to 31st of January 2024

gr_und 
Seestr. 49 13347 Berlin-Wedding

8 Canadian Artists to Check Out This Fall

Canada has a rich creative history and boasts some of the most exciting artists in the world today.

BY : ROBB JAMIESON- SEP 26TH, 2023

HANGAMA AMIRI

An Afghan-Canadian artist who works mainly in mixed-media textiles, Hangama Amiri layers fabric, carefully sews all the details and uses acrylic paint and inkjet printed chiffon to create pictorial scenes. Amiri’s attraction to these materials is thanks to members of her own family—her mother taught her how to sew, and her uncle is a tailor. These textile works can appear on the wall with raw edges or as 3-D sculptures, the materials referencing her youth in Kabul like a mental quilt. She depicts women’s lives across interior, commercial, public and advertisement spaces. Hands are up close in intimate situations, carefully holding another person or in the process of sharing food or being painted with henna. Amiri’s complex colourful pieces are labour-intensive and reveal more details the longer you look at them.

VANESSA BROWN

Now working throughout Europe, Vanessa Brown grew up in Richmond, B.C., and built a practice working in steel sculpture and installation, recently adding metal casting, stained glass, fabric and video. Brown’s colour palette—whether in her beautifully painted large-scale sculptures or her stained glasses—is always sophisticated and harmonious. In her work, the human body lurks: Gigantic earrings allow us to appreciate the hooked curve of the metal ear loops at such a scale that they are a little terrifying. Flower shapes are rendered in steel, and real flowers are cast in metal. Symbolic depictions of wineglasses, keyholes, teardrops, eyes, rings, claws and moons bring us back to the charm bracelets and cereal bowls of our youth but with more adult image choices.

MARLON KROLL

Montreal-based German-Canadian artist Marlon Kroll has shown widely in the past few years at galleries including Montreal’s PHI Centre, Afternoon Projects in Vancouver and Galleria Acappella in Naples, Italy. Using coloured pencils and acrylic on muslin over wood panels, Kroll creates paintings that range from the figurative to the more abstract. These colourful works reach out into the visual world of spirituality and the spectral and are paired with found objects and skeletal wooden sculptures, which often echo shapes seen in the paintings. His sculptures work to surprise with hidden elements in their corners and nooks. Sound is also of interest to Kroll, who has used speakers, horns and record players as ways of connecting to the unseen and amplifying the spirit world.

MARIA HUPFIELD

A transdisciplinary artist of Canadian and Anishinaabe heritage, Maria Hupfield is now based in Toronto after having lived in Brooklyn, N.Y., for many years. She has exhibited across North America in major art spaces, including the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Canada, and operates at the fluid intersection of performance, sculpture and design. Her wearable sculptures—which can include noisemakers and flowing fabric—are activated and personalized by her performer’s body movements. (When not being worn, they’re displayed on wooden structures alongside videos of the performances.) Hupfield often uses industrial grey felt as her main construction material and also recreates everyday objects, like headphones and winter boots. The grey felt reminds the viewer of its historic use in blankets and boot linings and of the work of German performance artist Joseph Beuys. Hupfield is very interested in instigating thoughts of community and Indigenous feminism and disrupting colonial spaces. She co-owns Native Art Department International—a collaborative long-term project that organizes exhibitions, screenings and collective-art-making—with her husband, artist Jason Lujan.

SHUVINAI ASHOONA

Based in Kinngait, Nunavut, Shuvinai Ashoona comes from an extensive family of artists, most notably her grandmother Pitseolak Ashoona and her cousin Annie Pootoogook. Shuvinai has shown extensively in Canada and internationally and most recently was included in the 2022 Venice Biennale’s Milk of Dreams group exhibition. Her unique pencil and ink drawings, which are often very large, captivate the viewer with intricate textures and colours. Some of her pictorial spaces depict contemporary Arctic life, and with some of her work, she transports us into a dreamlike outer space where humans, real and mythical beasts and hybrids of the two frolic with and twist into one another. Tentacles wrap, connect and capture, and planet earth is often used as a character’s head. These depictions are so playful that you’ll want to jump in, but they still have ominous undertones.

LOTUS LAURIE KANG

Toronto-based Lotus Laurie Kang has garnered wide acclaim for her site-sensitive installation work, in which she places large-scale photo paper on the floor or hangs it from industrial metal studs. The photo paper changes as it is exposed to the environment of each space it is exhibited in. Time, light, humidity and even the viewers’ bodies are recorded in the abstract surfaces of the light-sensitive materials, in much the same way that our own skin reacts to environmental change. Kang often displays sculptural elements like aluminum-cast cabbage leaves, sardines, lotus roots and Asian pears, making permanent food that neither is consumed nor rots away. While experiencing these installations, one can’t help but think about how everything is in flux, including our own bodies. Kang recently had a show at Toronto’s Franz Kaka gallery (which currently represents the artist), and her latest installation, Molt, is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through February 11, 2024.

OREKA JAMES

Oreka James’ paintings focus largely on mark-making and carefully outlined depictions of the body. The borders of her paintings are often decorated with repeated sharp shapes, which are reflected in starburst-like sculptural work. The Toronto-based artist, who’s had recent shows at Montreal’s Pangée and Toronto’s Cooper Cole, pivots between nailing unstretched canvas directly to the wall and creating custom frames that converse with the paintings instead of fencing them in. The natural world is important to James and appears in earth-tone pigments, actual earth placed on the ground around sculptural pieces and the sandlike cardboard papier mâché used in her custom frames and sculptures. Themes of Afro-Caribbean folklore and storytelling intertwine with what it means to search for spirituality and identity, while painted hands reach out to grasp at sunbursts of bright, pure energy—the electrical charge within us all.

JASON DE HAAN

Alberta-based artist Jason de Haan specializes in sculptural installations, video and collage. Objects that result from forces of nature—like meteors, minerals and fossils —are central to his interests. These by-products, created hundreds of thousands of years ago, highlight the briefness of our human timelines. An avid digger of fossils, de Haan places the ones he finds on top of humidifiers so they slowly disintegrate over time, and he likes to create work in nature by, for example, placing gold rings on saplings so they’re eventually overtaken by the trees as they grow or making a pavilion-like sculpture to feed migratory hummingbirds. De Haan also finds meaning by incorporating personal items that belonged to family members into his work, amplifying the idea of human connection and how objects can be used to express the poetry of existence.

E Portrait vum Museker Jérôme Klein, d'Ausstellung vum Mike Bourscheid & Vanessa Brown an d'Irem Sosay

De Jérôme Klein spillt a ville verschidde Formatiounen, ma huet awer och säin eegene musikalesche Projet. Mir hunn hie bei senge Concerten am Kader vun der Fête de la musique begleet.

Am Pomhouse an am Waassertuerm leeft den Ament d’Ausstellung vum Mike Bourscheid a Vanessa Brown, zwee eegestänneg Projete mat gemeinsamen Themen.

A mir léieren déi jonk Musekerin Irem Sosay kennen, déi elo deemnächst hir alleréischt EP erausbréngt.

PHOTOGRAPHY NOW

The Hand That Topples The Tower
Mike Bourscheid » Vanessa Brown »
Exhibition: 6 May – 20 Aug 2023
Sat 6 May 11:00

"The hand that topples the tower"
Vanessa Brown and Mike Bourscheid

Exhibition: 6 May – 20 August 2023

During this summer season, the CNA is delighted to present The hand that topples the tower – a two-person exhibition by Vanessa Brown and Mike Bourscheid at Waassertuerm + Pomhouse. From 6 May to 20 August the two different artistic approaches will come together on the emblematic former industrial site in Dudelange to immerse the visitor in a multi-media experience.

In the exhibition space at the foot of the tower, Luxembourgish artist Mike Bourscheid will present his new photographic series Mutual Feelings through which he tackles the dichotomies that structure our vision of the world. The interior of the former water tank will be dedicated to the artist’s Sunny Side Up and other sorrowful stories, consisting of a projection of his new film Agnès, in which he takes on different roles, accompanied by sculptures presenting several costumes from the film. Meanwhile, the old pumping station Pomhouse will host Canadian artist Vanessa Brown's >>>000 / Gravity, which includes evocative projections and installations exploring the concept of holes as symbolic representations of human desire, the relativity of time, and our place in the galaxy.

Vanessa Brown
">>>000 / Gravity"

Gravity, gravitas. To have weight. To be held in place. >>>000 / Gravity by Vanessa Brown is an invitation, an affective installation that mediates the tension between the logics that govern our physical world (physics), those that govern our psycho-social space, and the desire to reach beyond both; to eclipse time and space.

Three larger-than-life upright projections invite embodied engagement. Reference to the verticality of the cellular phone screen creates immediate experiential familiarity. Akin to scrolling, Brown’s captured and found images move from one into the other, overlayed precisely in a defined video collage. Although possible, the videos are not intended to be watched as discrete elements, but to be experienced in tandem with each other. The audio, a stunning commission by Michelle Helene Mackenzie, is similarly designed as a spatialized experience intended for bodies in motion.

Both the photocollage textiles and the moving video collages work with interstitiallity, those spaces between the real and the fantastic, or, as in the case of The Other Sun, the real and the ideal. In the titular video works, snow falls up, and surreal lunar-like landscapes are traced with the camera-eye. Scenes of scuba divers underwater and metalworkers pouring molten metal invite reflection on the solidity of reality, as instances where humans circumvent limitations, find holes to loop through.

As a portal between the "governed" world and the impossible, the fantastic, and the liminal one we all coinhabit to greater or lesser degrees, the Looney Tunes cartoon reappears throughout the three projections: as an animated, pulsating portal, or roadrunner unsuccessfully placing his famous black (escape) hole. At one point we watch While E. Coyote paint a road into solid rock. Roadrunner comes upon it unsuspectingly. With this moment of discovery played on loop, Roadrunner is destined to live the instant on repeat, leaving us to wonder if cartoon or real space dictates. Is this escape or entrapment?

When I was a kid, I used to have the very real feeling that I could breathe underwater. I was also certain that I lived a whole other life when I slept. This "other me" was completely knowable, I knew her age, how she dressed, where she lived. In >>>000 / Gravity, Vanessa Brown invites us to a world of portals, to contemplate the limits and possibilities of our experience. Most of all she invites us into experience. Imagine breathing iiiiiiiiin and then ouuuuut of a cartoon straw—the kind that, when you suck on it, you inhale the entire sky, and with it, the stars and planets. If you can imagine that, then you might be able to approximate how to say the title, >>>000 / Gravity.

Text by Sarah Nesbitt

Mike Bourscheid, Agnes, (2022), video still,

Mike Bourscheid
"Mutual Feelings"
Sunny Side up and other sorrowful stories

Because the clown fell, his nose is red, colour of accident. Thus, "The smallest mask in the world" is a badge of clumsiness. It speaks of tumbles taken and blood spilt, of a life that does not go unscathed. In French, "se casser le nez" (to break one’s nose) means to fail. Like that of the clown, Mike Bourscheid’s multi-coloured nose expresses itself silently. Changing from blue to red, from yellow to green, it underlines an identity in flux. An identity one might even perceive as blinking, like a string of twinkling fairy lights, or a faulty bulb.

The nose is not the only organ imbued with a magic power. In the film Agnès, feet and hands have their own locks of hair. And though they don’t have a face, they are inhabited by an intentionality: they bawl each other out, help each other, form a community. Thus, Bourscheid lends to both organs and things a kind of non-human agency. In so doing, the artist blurs the distinction between object and subject. He lays bare the force inherent in things, what the philosopher Jane Bennett calls thing-power. Though matter may lack a beating heart, it is not lifeless for all that.

In fact, Bourscheid takes issue with the dichotomies that structure our vision of the world. Over and above the subject/object relation, he destabilizes, for instance, the opposition between human and animal. In the photo series Mutual feelings, the resulting bewilderment generates the unknown. We find ourselves confronted with what as yet has no name.

The hairy creature posing in front of the camera may seem like a werewolf, but she is also made-up, manicured and hairstyled. This juxtaposition of codes thwarts our expectations. It has to be said, the monstrosity that Bourscheid portrays is neither hideous, outrageous, nor extremely cruel. It simply eludes definitions and stereotypes. Hence, it throws us off balance. In fact, monsters are not necessarily bloodthirsty creatures, just unknowable: they do not exist in language. And moreover, if we insist on wanting to name them, we run the risk, as Derrida warns, of transforming them into puppets.

So instead, let us circumscribe them and admire, rather, the systems of interference that Bourscheid puts in place by way of the silent power of costumes and accessories. By questioning the structuring oppositions that rule our relationship to the world, Bourscheid forces us to read the real differently.

Text by Daphné B.

Mike Bourscheid: from the series Mutual Feelings – Sunny Side up and other sorrowful stories

Vanessa Brown: from the series >>>000 / Gravity

Vanessa Brown: from the series >>>000 / Gravity

VTph Magazine
Mike Bourscheid & Vanessa Brown
The hand that topples the tower

CNA Centre national de l´audiovisuel

Waassertuerm+Pomhouse 
1b, Rue du Centenaire
L-3475 Dudelange
Luxembourg

Exhibition:
from 06.05.2023
to 20.08.2023

During this summer season, the CNA is delighted to present The hand that topples the tower – a two-person exhibition by Vanessa Brown and Mike Bourscheid at Waassertuerm + Pomhouse. From May 6 to August 20 the two different artistic approaches will come together on the emblematic former industrial site in Dudelange to immerse the visitor in a multi-media experience.

In the exhibition space at the foot of the tower, Luxembourgish artist Mike Bourscheid will present a new photographic series Mutual feelings through which he tackles the dichotomies that structure our vision of the world. Beyond the object/subject relationship, it also looks at the opposition between human and beast. The interior of the former water tank will be dedicated to the artist’s Sunny Side Up and other sorrowful stories, consisting of a projection of his new film Agnes, in which he takes on different roles, accompanied by sculptures presenting several costumes from the film.  Meanwhile, the old pumping station Pomhouse will host Canadian artist Vanessa Brown’s  >>>000 / Gravity, which includes evocative projections and installations exploring the concept of holes as symbolic representations of human desire, the relativity of time, and our place in the galaxy.

(Press: CNA/Adapted from exhibitions texts on Vanessa Brown: That Other Hunger (2022) and Mike Bourscheid: Sunny Side Up and other sorrowful stories (2023), by Zoë Chan for Richmond Art Gallery)

In the framework of EMOP 2023 Luxembourg

www.cna.public.lu

DESCRIPTIONS

Mike Bourscheid
In his work Sunny Side Up and other sorrowful stories presented inside the water tower, Mike Bourscheid melds family anecdotes, fictional tales, domestic work, and tropes of masculinity. Bringing together several sculptural works and a short film starring the artist himself, his work functions as a stage or set ready to be activated. Bourscheid’s signature sense of play and pathos percolates through this series of carefully hand-crafted and bespoke costumes, props, prosthetics, and puppets—many of which were originally featured in the film. The daily actions of the body in the household and the performance of care in general, the routine that shows itself in repeated laundry, dishwashing, keeping order or sweeping the floor, is playfully staged. With his usual meticulous craftsmanship, Bourscheid produced props, such as gloves and socks, to which he latch-hooked hair like a wig: tools that appear to be extremely cumbersome for working in the household and at the same time artistically comment on the loving, admittedly often absurd, devotion to everyday objects and rites.

Born in Luxembourg, Mike Bourscheid studied at the Université d'Aix-Marseille and at the University of the Arts in Berlin. He respresented Luxembourg at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and his recent exhibitions include Haverford Center Philadelphia (USA), Kunstverein Braunschweig (Germany), LIAR NYC (USA), Nanaimo Art Gallery (Canada), Casino Luxembourg – Forum d'Art Contemporain and Kunstpalais Erlangen (Germany).

Vanessa Brown
The idea of the hole is a potent point of access for Vanessa Brown’s exhibition >>>000 / Gravity, which features a series of video works, textiles, and a commissioned sound work by composer Michelle Helene Mackenzie. Brown mines the depths of this surprisingly rich subject matter in her eclectic research that includes pop culture, geographical craters, caves, black holes, and the body’s orifices. c Brown traces the inspiration for this series back to her childhood and her early enthrallment with the Looney Tunes portable hole. In this animated cartoon universe, the hole alternates between objecthood and void. Brown’s installation also references holes of many other types, encompassing those found in outer space, geography, and the body’s anatomy. The artist's integration of sound and video alongside textiles creates an immersive installation that sparks a sense of magic and awe. As much a philosophical and existential voyage as it is an artistic one, her exhibition oscillates between inner and outer worlds, transforming the hole into a powerfully imagined site of longing and escape, respite and refuge.

Vanessa Brown graduated with the Chancellors Award from Emily Carr University. She has exhibited in Canada, Germany, Luxembourg, Denmark, the USA, and Mexico, with solo and two-person exhibitions at The Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond; The Esker Foundation, Calgary; Patel Brown, Toronto; Projet Pangee, Montreal; The Western Front, Vancouver; NADA, Miami; The Armory Show, New York; and group exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Fellner Louvigny, Luxembourg; Artpace, San Antonio; and MOLAF at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. She currently based in Luxembourg and in xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Səl̓lwətaʔ/Selilwitulh and Sḵwx̱wu7mesh land, also known as Vancouver, Canada

GALLERIES WEST

Vanessa Brown:
Artist meditates on voids both real and imaginary
by Yani Kong 

October 3, 2022

“I used to think that holes, like words, were empty,” says Vanesa Brown, in her video, That Other Hunger. “But now I think they are full, full, full.”

The video is  part of Brown’s solo exhibition of the same name, on view until Nov. 6 at the Richmond Art Gallery in Metro Vancouver. Brown, who grew up in Richmond and is based in Europe, meditates on the hole as portal or escape hatch, as well as a source of unsatisfied desire – a place of longing as much as a site to hide something unfinished. 

Her work has a humorous edge, taking as one of its starting points the portable hole from Looney Tunes cartoons. In that animated world, a hole can be made from anything, placed anywhere at any time, and can be carried around like a super-tool to use when you want to vanish or make someone else disappear. In this way, her works channel a childhood fascination with secret passages. 

Brown’s three-channel video, >>>000 / Gravity, is distributed around the gallery’s central room. The divided screens offer an opportunity to pass through gaps between them, another type of chasm. On one screen, a pulsing purple void engulfs the eye, drawing viewers in to watch Wile E. Coyote chase the Road Runner. The clever bird sends its predator down a black hatch seemingly pulled from nothing. Other screens look out toward nature or the cosmos, helping us consider passageways not as magical portals, but as thoroughfares already present in the universe. 

Two digital collages made earlier this year, The Sun and Hole Drama, offer yet another perspective on the void. Here, the medium of the works is vital: they are printed on gauzy fabric perforated by tiny holes. Viewers are invited to look directly into the sun in one, and a star as it expands into a supernova in the other. But rather than meet this image as the limit of the gaze, the diaphanous material elongates the field of vision, allowing you to look through these cosmic events and out toward something else. 

Brown’s work asks abstract questions but is demonstrably figurative. There is no mistaking the subject of her inquiry. 

The video That Other Hunger, located at the far end of the gallery, caps this show and refines its artistic aims. As different images of voids, both real and imaginary, intersect, transform or transition into each other, Brown voices questions about desire, time’s relativity and the place of humanity in the wider cosmos, leaving one with existential disquiet, itself a metaphorical hole.

In the narration, Brown identifies the hole as the threat of pleasure, placing a finger on the kind of psychoanalytic anxieties holes can produce: What if this hole has no bottom? A beautiful soundscape by Brown’s collaborator, Michelle Helene MacKenzie, warmly cushions such unanswerable questions, serving as a balm for any fears the hole may provoke. ■

Vanessa Brown, That Other Hunger, at the Richmond Art Gallery in Richmond, B.C., from Sept. 9 to Nov. 5, 2022.

BERLIN ART LINK
Studio Visit with Vanessa Brown
by Nadia Egan, photos by Ériver Hijano

It’s a warm Spring afternoon as Vanessa Brown greets us in the courtyard of her Kreuzberg studio. Tucked away from the hustle and bustle of the main street, this little nook feels like a haven of tranquillity. We make our way upstairs, passing the studios of neighbouring artists along the way. Vanessa’s studio—where she has been working for the best part of the last year–is bright and airy, profiting nicely from the midday sunshine as it bathes in its soft glow. The room is partitioned by a central wall, acting as a division between her working and living space. Visiting just a few days before she heads off again to her next venture, we take the opportunity to sit down together and talk about the process and inspiration behind her works.

With a practice that is predominantly workshop-based, Vanessa has centred her work around the medium of steel, occasionally integrating items such as textiles and stained glass. Though originally drawn to video and sculpture while studying back in Vancouver, she recounts how metal was the first time a material really spoke back. For something so heavily associated with industry and war, she was amazed to discover that such a material could also be so slight and malleable. “People would mistake my work for cardboard or paper sculptures,” she laughs, emphasising the delicate appearance the material can take. Wanting to move away from the uniform industrial processes surrounding metal fabrication, she set about finding ways to see her own hand in the process. Rather than choosing the clean cut lines inherent to mass production, she demonstrates how she would use a plasma cutter and cut freehand, not caring that the lines wouldn’t be perfect. “I like to see a trace of myself in the art,” she explains, adding that you can still see the brush strokes from the oil paint that she used to paint her sculptures.

In the corner of Vanessa’s studio a large sculptural installation grabs our attention. Hanging from three separate hooks, delicate aluminium sculptures are suspended from a metal chain. Glimmers of sunlight bounce off their silvery surfaces as they turn slightly in the breeze. We listen attentively as Vanessa explains the inspiration behind her work ‘Amazonians’ (2021), taking us back to her time spent around Copenhagen. Initially intended for 2020, yet postponed one year due to the pandemic, Vanessa undertook a residency at a bronze foundry in Denmark. A few weeks into the residency, and after showing a keen interest in statues, she was recommended to the Royal Cast Collection—a collection of over 2000 plaster casts and sculptures. Allowed to work directly with the materials on offer, she made a series of foil impressions—most notably the two Amazonians and the bust of Hera that we see in her installation. Fascinated with mythology, this inclusion of the Amazonians and Hera is something important to Vanessa. Combined with Hera as the goddess of the household, the Amazonians act as a “community of women”—a beautiful sentiment that she is still in the process of exploring. We were amazed to hear that she had landed on using just a simple tin foil to craft these works. Despite their fragile constitution, they appear substantial. She tells us a little dolefully that as foils are bound to change and transform, the ones before us have become crunchier and more brittle looking than at the start. To us they still look radiant.

Next to this sculptural installation, an array of smaller pieces crafted from various metals lie scattered across her desk. We are drawn to a set of reliefs and casts—one of bronze and the other aluminium. I pick up each work, weighing them in my hands. I’m stunned to feel the difference in weight and density, despite the works being of equal size. A particular favourite of hers, Vanessa takes the aluminium work and begins to describe its process. Returning to her days at the foundry, she talks about her opportunity to work in lost-wax and sand casting methods. The lost-wax process, in which molten metal is poured into a mould that has been created by means of a wax model, also forms the basis for the future work of the busts seen in ‘Amazonians.’ Explaining how she took a real lily and applied this process, we are dumbfounded by the delicacy and precision achieved.

While the works before us appear dainty and slight, it is the practical, industrial element that Vanessa enjoys the most. Spending time in the more industrial suburbs of Copenhagen, she was continually surrounded by auto businesses and Bauhaus-esque stores. She recounts how her studio space was a whopping two and half times the height of her current space, prompting the need for heavy duty brackets and chains to hold up each work. Talking about her experience of working in similar warehouse environments, the conversation leads us on to one of Vanessa’s recent works—a public art commission entitled ‘These Hands’ (2022). The work features two large scale hands adorned with colourful rings and nails, situated on the facade of an industrial building. This juxtaposition between what is considered traditionally feminine and masculine is what brings particular interest to this work, with Vanessa delighting in the work’s placement.

Before we head off, Vanessa guides us down into the basement and introduces us to her workshop. A whole world apart from the light and breezy space of her studio, she gears up and gets straight to work. It’s here that we really see her come to life—the passion and excitement with which she describes her practice is intoxicating. Using her aluminium cast as a model, she fastens it into a clamp and begins to grind and hammer away. Absorbed in her tools, we watch and come to truly appreciate the enormous amount of effort behind each of her works. Of particular admiration is the fact that Vanessa makes all the materials herself. Finding pleasure in fabricating her works from scratch, they act simultaneously as a form of therapeutic escape.

THE TYEE

Contemplating the Void Through Art:
Vanessa Brown’s exhibition ‘That Other Hunger’ bores into deep existential questions
by Dorothy Woodend

At some point in embryonic development, human beings are only a single orifice, a hole, as it were. The blastopore later becomes the anus and if things go well, other characteristics also develop, although some people remain giant a-holes their entire lives.

So, holes are us, in some sense.

That Other Hunger, Vanessa Brown’s solo exhibition at the Richmond Art Gallery, takes the concept of the hole and goes deep. Born in Richmond, Brown has exhibited widely in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. She grew up close to the current Richmond Gallery location, swimming at the old Minoru Pool. Although her principal medium is steel, she has worked in a variety of different media including sculpture, textiles, film and installation.

The number of different holey and unholy iterations in That Other Hunger range from multi-purpose variety to the more esoteric type. One of the most familiar is the all-purpose black ovoid that Wile E. Coyote uses in his endless pursuit of the Road Runner in Warner Bros. cartoons. This is one magic hole. Used one way, it’s a pathway to escape. Slapped on a wall, a bridge or roadway, it’s a means to make a quick exit. Used another way, it’s a trap. Sometimes it’s both.

In addition to this handy-dandy existential void, there are endless amounts of other openings: sinkholes, underground pools, the Pantheon’s Oculus, black holes and even Hole’s iconic riot grrrl album Live Through This.

That’s a lot of holes. But as Brown explains when she first started thinking about such openings, it only made more show up! “I see them everywhere. They kept coming to me,” she tells me.

But as she recounts, it was an early fascination with cartoons, in particular the Road Runner, that became a predominant theme in the show. The Road Runner Show’s storyline, if you will recall, takes place in a surreal world, where a sufficient amount of belief can turn a hole into “a channel across time and space,” as the show’s description reads.

On large panels that recall Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey monolith, these narratives play out in looped bits of cartoon zaniness. Loosed from their original narrative moorings, they cycle through repetitions of catch-me-if-you-can. The effect is strangely sobering, even a mite grim. It reminded me that as I child I found The Road Runner Show terribly bleak. There were no happy endings here, no closure at all, just endless hunger and ongoing failure in a dusty desiccated landscape. Fun for kids!

This aspect is heightened in the show, thanks in part to the soundscape from collaborator Michelle Helene Mackenzie. Sonorously ominous, it creeps into the experience, colouring even the most benign stuff with a layer of disquiet.

But Brown has a very different take. She believes that poor old Wile E. Coyote is something of an optimist, able to persevere in the face of perpetual loss. This difference in interpretation is a key part of the exhibition. Holes lend themselves to all manner of protean stuff. Viewed in one direction, they’re a pitfall, a thing to drown in. Viewed another way, they become a portal of escape, like The Shawshank Redemption tunnel out of one reality and into another.

In addition to the large-scale panels, there are textile works, peppered with a buckshot of tiny perforations, and wound round with images sourced from both art history and the natural world. With so many different and densely layered ideas and well as objects, some more literal than others, the bigger question snakes out. What is it all about?

As Brown explains, the aperture of a camera lens and the pupil of a human eye are also openings through which perception pours. Herein lies the biggest indicator that holes, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, are how the light gets in.

This is especially true of the Oculus (from the Latin meaning eye), the portal built into the Pantheon Ceiling. Constructed in 125 BCE, the Pantheon in Rome is still the largest unsupported dome in the world, capped off with an opening that serves multiple practical functions: sun dial, window fixture, bird entranceway.

As a means to bring light into the structure, the hole of the Oculus contains all kinds of different symbolic implications as well: it’s a symbol of the continuum between Earth and the heavens, an eye cast upwards towards a more celestial realm, a link between the divine and the prosaic. Ultimately, a portal towards some greater kind of understanding.

That Other Hunger functions along these lines as well, intermingling profundities with more goofy stuff. In one section, there is the star-tangled expanse of the cosmos, in another a metal crab dangling from a rope.

The entrance of crustaceans into the show comes as something of a palate cleanser. In between the two main gallery spaces there is a third, middle space. Brown calls this interstitial place the Red Room. If the intent is to offer a fulcrum point between the two main galleries, it is a curious point of intersection, populated by metal sculptures of various sea creatures (shrimp, crab, mussels) bathed in deep red light. I’m not exactly sure what it means, in light of the overall theme, but it’s strangely charming and weird (in a good way).

Did Brown mean for these differing sections in the show to function as a kind of physical narrative, moving the audiences from one experience to another?

“I would say that dividing the spaces into three different sections came largely as a response to the architecture in the Richmond [Gallery],” she explains. “The floorplan of the gallery sort of resembles a vision diagram, and there I found another connection to vision, pupils, apertures, cameras... holes!”

In looking for any kind of ultimate meaning, there is a hesitation about killing to dissect, and the artist herself is somewhat circumspect about how ideas arrive. The inside of a hole can contain multitudes or nothing at all. You see what you want to see, a little like Schrödinger’s box?

That Other Hunger, 2022. Vanessa Brown. Image courtesy of the artist and Patel Brown.

This ambiguity is especially apparent in the video installation that takes pride of place in the third gallery space. The film elements contain a veritable cosmos of holes with the artist narrating over a series of images including a human hand chucking stuff into the void. Whether these different items — a hammer, a red rubber boot, a colander, a tennis racket, a book about Freud — have any connection to each other is unclear. Just as you’re searching hard for some bit of narrative meaning, they come boomeranging back out of the blackness.

The impulse to piece them together into some greater meaning is immediate, but the very lack of connectivity defies any easy or facile answers. The film is both fascinating and also a wee bit frustrating. It’s a quality that runs throughout the entire show.

The bottomless blackness contains all kinds of potential answers, but in order to get them, one must enter into the ultimate void, the big hole that awaits us all.

But before we get there, the current world with all its crustaceans and cartoons is still here, demanding contemplation in all its holy, holey glory.

Mystic Toolkit
at Artpace San Antonio
Curated by Anaïs Castro

In January 2020, mere weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic took over the entire world, I presented the first iteration of Mystic Toolkit at Stewart Hall Art Gallery in Pointe-Claire (Quebec). This was an exhibition informed by the spiritual renaissance of the late 2010s and meant to shed light on the potential that lies therein to influence the practice of working artists.  

Two years later, in a radically altered global context that has left no one untested or unshaken, Mystic Toolkit picks up the conversation again. In this new context, it is perhaps not surprising that alternative spiritual practices have achieved an accrued prominence. Bringing together the work of seven artists working across a variety of mediums ranging from sculpture, painting, photography, and performance, Mystic Toolkit is a quiet invitation to celebrate daily rituals of coping, healing, and grieving that have become indispensable in recent times. Despite their own idiosyncratic visual vocabulary and practice, the artists included in this exhibition all share the recognition for the mystical forces that affect our daily lives and pay tribute to the daily rituals and repeated gestures that keep us wholesome.  

The exhibition conceptualizes the home as a sanctuary, a place of recollection and refuge. Our home is at once a haven of comfort and self-care, but during lockdown it has also held us captive. As our lives are increasingly scattered into both physical and virtual spaces, some of the artists in the exhibition have reached out to find a spiritual space online. Social media has allowed a sort of “being together” despite strict social distancing mandates. Other artists refer to tarot games as a means of making sense of the world, while others turn to charms and trinkets as tokens of hope. Some have imbued their work with a punctual and regular practice as a way of making order at a time of chaos. Despite the variety of approaches, all of the artists participating in Mystic Toolkit attempt to navigate through what is unquestionably one of the most disruptive crises in modern history via a genuine recognition of the mysterious forces that orchestrate the world. 

Participating artists include Alicia Adamerovich, Vanessa Brown, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Erika DeFreitas, Julian Yi-Zhong Hou, Rachael Starbuck, and Shanie Tomassini. Despite their own idiosyncratic visual vocabulary and practice, the artists included in this exhibition all share the recognition of the mystical forces that affect our daily lives and pay tribute to the daily rituals and repeated gestures that keep us wholesome.

–Anaïs Castro, Guest Curator

51Cth
Artist talk with Canadian artist Vanessa Brown, Swedish artist Julia Bondesson, moderated by curator Lotte Løvholm

Double artist talk session
22.11.2021.
Day: Monday the 22nd of November
Time: 11 - 15
Adress: Industrivej 51c, 4000 Roskilde ( 5 min walk from Trekroner station)

We’re happy to invite you to a double artist talk session at our workshop in Trekroner. The first talk is with our current artist-in-residence, Canadian artist Vanessa Brown, who will give us a glimpse of what she has been working on during her six weeks long stay by opening her studio. The second talk is with Swedish artist Julia Bondesson, who currently has a solo show at Moderna Museet in Malmö.  Both conversations will be moderated by curator and editor Lotte Løvholm. Language spoken will be english.

Vanessa Brown works in sculpture and installation, primarily using steel. She is interested in challenging steel’s associations with industry and monument, by focusing on its subtler qualities such as its versatility and slightness. Her work explores ideas around craft, constructs of gender and labour, gestures of comfort, ideas of escape, and liminal spaces such as holes and dreams.

Julia Bondesson combines aesthetics with psychology in her works. Gently, they take possession of the room, like entities seemingly at rest. Bondesson explores the symbiosis between body and soul. Her inspirations include Chinese philosophy and embodied cognition, where development is furthered through active cooperation between the senses and the physical body. With performative works, the artist takes an animistic approach, blurring the boundary between object and subject. Bondesson refers to the performative action and her collaboration with the sculptures as a dance that gives rise to an intimate and emotional relationship between them. The sculptures become ambivalent characters – both objects and living beings – vessels travelling between the static and active states. And maybe the permanence of the sculptures also reminds beholders of their own transience.

Text in relation to Julia Bondesson’s exhibition Cradle My Bones, currently on view at Moderna Museet Malmö

Lotte Løvholm is an independent curator and editor based in Copenhagen. She holds a BA in Theatre Research, an MA in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies and is a postgraduate of Konstfack’s CuratorLab. She is interested in collaborations and co-curtating in her practice as an independent curator, where she edits art books, writes articles, curates exhibitions, performance programs and seminars at the intersection of aesthetics and ethics.

51Cth is a newly formed artist run association dedicated to keeping the sculptural and contemporary art field thriving and evolving. 51Cth is located in a large old industrial complex with common workspaces and private studios. 51Cth consist of 14 independent artist and a professional bronze caster foundry (Broncestøberiet Peter Jensen ApS). 51Cth aims of becoming a facilitator for progressive work in a sculptural setting, where one has access to the required facilities as well as the professional expertise needed for using them. This takes place in a forum that supports and encourages professional artists to exchange their experience and knowledge with each other in a focused working environment as well as through group critiques, artist talks and similar activities. 

51Cth is supported by The Obel Family Foundation and The Islands of Denmarks’ Arts Foundation.

ARTORONTO.CA
SLUMBER at Patel Brown

by Olivia Mariko Hsuen-Ferris

When I entered the exhibition space for Vanessa Brown’s solo show SLUMBER at Patel Brown, I found myself wholly surprised by an exhibition I had already ‘walked through’ online. In fact, ‘surprise’ is a word I used over and over during my half-hour viewing.

With only a few weeks left, SLUMBER reopened to the public on March 9th, offering limited viewing appointments after Toronto lifted its lockdown restrictions. SLUMBER is Vanessa Brown’s first solo exhibition with Patel Brown, featuring five large-scale sculptures in the main gallery space and a few smaller works in a side room. In this exhibition, Brown “engages a slowness in the viewer’s eyes” in wood and steel sculptures that reveal themselves to viewers in delayed layers.

The first sculpture that is visible from the gallery entrance, “Mantle” (2021), hits with the full force of its monumentality, the scale of which is difficult to capture through photographs and online exhibitions. Steel lines of black, blue, brown, and ochre, swim their way above the curved platform on which they sit. Behind them, a tall and dark black triangle is painted on the wall, popping off the gallery wall with such strength that I initially thought it too was a steel piece independent of the wall—one of many surprises. The largely black lines take refuge in this deep black background, only revealing themselves in short bursts of colour or through careful searching. The longer you look, the easier it is to trace the trajectories.

In “Sun Lethargy” (2020) two figures lay under a lusciously hot sun. The wood sculptures, of solid blue and orange, are all soft curves, sometimes ambiguous and sometimes clear about the human features they model. The solid colours, green, blue, orange, and yellow, serve to make the elements independent of each other; they all inhabit the same universe but don’t bleed into each other. Rather, one can peer through the negative space of one figure to glimpse a piece of the other. There is something that is extraordinarily alluring and soothing about these figures. The ease with which they fill the space—maybe due to their lethargic poses and the sultry climate—lures you in and begs you to join them in their world of slow sunbathing.

As with all of the sculptures, “Fugitive Pond” (2021) plays around with its negative space, featuring droplet-shaped holes that from a distance appear like painted white elements—another delayed reveal. Yet, unlike the others in the main room, “Fugitive Pond” is without a painted backdrop, and thus, looks lonely. Even the silhouette it forms screams loneliness, somehow resembling the figure of a shawled woman stooped over in grief. This sculpture requires company, asking its viewers to crouch—or stoop, as it does—and gaze through the negative spaces.

A dimly lit second room, equipped with a curtain to shut out the bright light that floods the main space, is yet another gifted surprise. In a corner is a series of steel sculptures with candles, titled “Mnemonics” (2020-2021), casting shadows of cats and whales that dance across the floor and walls—though this took a moment to notice. It would be another two minutes until I observed that each one of these steel sculptures had a real candle and that these were the only sources of light in the room. The idea that someone had the task of lighting and replacing these candles was so delightful to me. Perhaps this delight was a product of our current automated, distanced world in which the evidence of labour is a sweet rarity. The title “Mnemonics” is particularly engaging—what are we trying to remember? Or is it that the “Mnemonics” carry their own independent memories? The candles themselves, too, suggest something about memory and time. They burn slowly, and over time they recede, leaving record of the time they spent lit. As members of the exhibition, they serve as a record of the hours that gallery visitors filter in and out. I wondered how different this room looked during the city lockdown, and then, enjoyed imagining the ceremonial lighting of the candles once the gallery reopened for visitors—like a celebration of rebirth.

Brown’s sculptures surprise viewers in their use of scale, negative space, and hidden gems—or not so much ‘hidden’ as ‘obscured’. They are meant to be peered at from all angles and thoroughly searched. Ultimately, this exhibition succeeds in stopping viewers from slipping into states of ‘gallery fatigue,’ refreshing them over and over again. Small, sweet surprises are generously scattered in SLUMBER, rewarding viewers who gaze slowly and rigorously. Vanessa Brown‘s solo exhibition provides unexpected small delights and, if you can safely make it to a gallery appointment, should be viewed in person even by those who have already seen the online exhibition.

*Exhibition information: Vanessa Brown, SLUMBER, (extended dates) February 23 to March 28, 2021, Patel Brown, 21 Wade Ave, Toronto. The online exhibition is available on the Patel Brown website. Patel Brown is offering viewing appointments that can be booked for the remainder of the exhibition.

NADA

New Art Dealers Alliance announces new board members and welcomes 24 new gallery members

NADA is pleased to announce new board members Danny Baez of Regular Normal, Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels of We Buy Gold and Jack Shainman Gallery, and Aron Gent of Document, and welcome 24 new Gallery Members, hailing from 12 cities in 7 countries, to its international community of art galleries, non-profits, and artist run spaces.

“We’re thrilled that Danny, Joeonna, and Aron will share their valuable guidance and leadership in their new roles on NADA’s board,” said NADA Executive Director Heather Hubbs, “It’s as important as ever to provide meaningful connection and opportunities for galleries and artists around the world, and we look forward to sharing a year of unique opportunities with our new members.”

NADA’s recent programming has continued to spotlight important conversations in support of contemporary artists. Recently, NADA hosted a discussion with artists Mark Thomas Gibson and Mario Moore about Gibson’s printmaking process, themes, and Gibson’s ongoing project: “Everyone Should Have One On Their Wall,” of which NADA’s new fundraising edition is the latest installment. A recording of the conversation is available to watch here.

More information on NADA’s initiatives and membership can be found at newartdealers.org.

New​ Gallery​ Members

062, Chicago
65GRAND, Chicago
A.D. NYC, New York
Gallery Artbeat, Tbilisi
Aspect/Ratio Projects, Chicago
Baby Blue Gallery, Chicago
Bode Projects, Berlin
BROADWAY, New York
Patel Brown Gallery, Toronto
Dinner Gallery, New York
Everybody, Tucson
Goldfinch, Chicago
Good Naked, New York
Km 0.2, San Juan
LVL3, Chicago
MICKEY, Chicago
New Release, New York
New Works Projects, Chicago
Nicoletti Contemporary, London
Tatjana Pieters, Ghent
Real Pain Fine Arts, Los Angeles
Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal
Towards Gallery, Toronto
Voloshyn Gallery, Kiev

About​ Danny​ Baez

Danny Baez is the Co-Founder and Director of MECA International Art Fair in San Juan, Puerto Rico and Co-Founder and Board Member of the ARTNOIR Collective. He firmly believes in the power of building upon community and has organized various exhibitions in New York since 2010; he recently opened REGULARNORMAL in New York City.

About​ Joeonna​ Bellorado-Samuels

Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels is the founder of We Buy Gold, a roving gallery presenting exhibitions, commissioned projects, and public events, and a Director at the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. She is on the curatorial team of The Racial Imaginary Institute, a member of National Advisory Council of The Center for Art & Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art and was a founding Director of For Freedoms, the first artist-run Super PAC which uses art to inspire deeper political engagement for citizens who want to have a greater impact on the American political landscape.

Aron​ Gent

Born in 1985, Aron Gent is an artist, gallerist, and professional printmaker residing in Chicago, IL. He received a degree from Columbia College Chicago and has been a lecturer and educator at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, the Hyde Park Art Center and Columbia College Chicago. Gent is the founder of the print studio and commercial gallery DOCUMENT, a board member for the Society for Contemporary Art(SCA) and has been a founding board member for Chicago-based organization ACRE since 2010.

About​ NADA​ Membership

Being a member of NADA means being a part of an alliance and collective of international galleries, nonprofit art spaces, advisors, curators, and other professionals working with contemporary art. NADA Members are committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive, and equitable arts community; and NADA aims to ensure that gallery owners of every race, gender expression, sexual orientation, disability status, and socioeconomic class have access to joining NADA Membership. NADA provides programming and benefits for its members year-round.

NADA’s member network currently includes Gallery Membership, comprising galleries and artist-run spaces; Non-profit Membership, comprising non-profit organizations, museums, and institutions; Individual Membership, for professionals working with contemporary art; and Friends of NADA Membership, for art collectors and patrons.

For more information about NADA Membership, click here.

About​ NADA

Founded in 2002, New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) is a not-for-profit 501c(6) collective of professionals working with contemporary art. Its mission is to create an open flow of information, support, and collaboration within the arts field and to develop a stronger sense of community among its constituency. Through support and encouragement, NADA facilitates strong and meaningful relationships between its members working with new contemporary and emerging art. In addition NADA hosts annual art events in Miami and New York, including NADA Miami, the New York Gallery Open, and NADA House.

STIR MAGAZINE

Vancouver Art Gallery's Where do we go from here?
makes space for bold new BIPOC voices

The facility sees the wide-ranging show of Black, Asian, and Indigenous works as a first step to opening doors

By Janet Smith

IN CHANTAL Gibson’s installation Untitled Redacted Text, black ink appears to ooze out from the pages of a stack of red Canadian Encyclopedia volumes, dripping down their sides. It’s a vivid representation of the way Black voices have been redacted from history--including art history.

It’s just one of many striking new works in a new exhibit called Where do we go from here? at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

The title’s open-ended question is one everyone seems to be asking in the dying days of 2020, a year of not only pandemic-enforced reflection but of Black Lives Matter protests and massive socio-cultural shifts.

In the case of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the question comes on the eve of its 90th anniversary, as it looks at what the next nine decades should look like. 

The bold and wide-reaching show of recent work by BIPOC artists attempts to start the complicated process of answering that question, through a range of media. Amid the work are vibrant embroidered textile works, moccasins crafted from cardboard beer boxes and denim, photographic portrait series, and more.

Jessie Addo’s Chapter 43, 2018 (detail), courtesy of the artist.

The death of George Floyd and the BLM movement “shone a light on the existing biases in the art world,” said VAG interim chief curator Diana Freundl,  at a press preview of Where do we go from here?. She added the exhibit, with its purposely open-ended title, not only questions the Eurocentric bent of art institutions, but reflects the VAG’s “plans for adjusting these biases.”

The show is a collaboration between six VAG curators--including Freundl, assistant curator Zoë Chan, assistant curator Mandy Ginson, Indigenous advisor Tarah Hogue, assistant curator Siobhan McCracken Nixon, and associate curator Stephanie Rebick--as well as guest curator Nya Lewis, of BlackArt Gastown.

“It’s not just about calling out the institution. It’s also about what’s next,” Lewis tells Stir. “The question is: Does your gallery accurately represent the Canadian art canon? We’re missing out on great art. When our work or stories—BIPOC artists’ or curators’—are absent, what happens? It’s about looking at the reality of why we aren’t there and how exclusion is perpetuated.”

Lewis, who is also a writer and artist, has created a site-specific, text-based installation that introduces visitors to the exhibit in the facility’s neo-classical third-floor rotunda. It features panels of text in formal black typography on white (the voice of authority, or the institution, she says), “interrupted” by phrases in reverse white on black (“WE ARE NO MYTH”; “WHERE THEY DIDN’T SPEAK OUR NAMES, SPEAK THEM”--phrases inspired by conversations Lewis said she had with the community, her mentors, and artists in their studios). 

Look down to the baseboards around the rotunda, where Lewis has listed the titles of national exhibits that have featured the work of Black curators and artists, including that of the seminal 1989 show by Buseje Bailey called Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter. It asserts the history of Afro-diasporic art in this country and defies any misconceptions that Black curators and artists don’t exist in Canada.

"The question is: Does your gallery accurately represent the Canadian art canon? We’re missing out on great art."

Among the loaned pieces by Black artists that Lewis helped bring to the show is a series of photos by Toronto artist Jessie Addo, whose cinematic-feeling portraits capture the Black urban male in new ways--in contemplation, going about his life. They’re placed along a swath of black that runs along one wall, bringing to mind not onlya strip of film but also notions of interrupting the space. In 2018’s Chapter 43, a man in gold chains and tattoos makes eye contact with the viewer as he relaxes on his concrete apartment balcony.

“It was extra special to be able to include an artist from Scarborough, whose work reflects my upbringing and surroundings. I'm from Scarborough, and those were taken five minutes from the house I grew up in,” Lewis explains. “This work, and so many others in the exhibit, adds a layer of agency and authenticity to the presented voice, shifting the way we think about Black aesthetic.”

Elsewhere, Lewis is just as excited about wall-spanning, multicoloured embroidered quilt panels by Ontario-born Vancouver artist Jan Wade--part of the VAG collection. A mix of African and North American embroidering techniques, its title Breathe makes reference to the last words of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man killed in 2014 after being put in a chokehold by New York City Police. Each meticulous stitch reads as a life-sustaining breath. 

Charlene Vickers’ Sleep Walking. Photo by Barb Choit, courtesy of Macauley & Co. Fine Arts

In another room, Tafui’s giant black-and-white Patois, on loan for the show from the artist, is both striking abstract art and an ode to precolonial art- and mark-making. 

The diversity of the media and messages within the show’s pieces by Black creators are just part of an even wider array amid the other artists of colour here. 

A standout is artist Charlene Vickers’ Sleep Walking, an installation featuring a circle of 12 1920s bedroom chairs, each with a neatly folded blanket with a pair of moccasins on it. Look closely, and you’ll see the often beautifully beaded footwear is crafted from such unexpected materials as Kokanee beer boxes or denim. Though crafting the moccasins is a way for the artist to reconnect with her Anishnabe heritage, their materials comment on everything from the appropriation of Coast Salish wilderness to sell beer to the commodification of Indigenous craft for tourists. Sometimes they’re emblazoned with letter beading the spells out more political assertions (“Reclaiming Your spirit / Work Hard”). But there’s also a haunting absence to the empty moccasins as well.

Audie Murray’s Bundled Objects, 2019, quartz, cinder, braided fabric Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery

Other highlights include Saskatchewan-born Métis artist Audie Murray’s Bundled Objects, cinderblock forms and raw quartz wrapped in brightly coloured fabric--an installation that uses the language of traditional braided rugs to speak to everything from overdevelopment to resource extraction.

Elsewhere, Lauren Brevner and James Nexw’Kalus-Xwalacktun Harry mix Indigenous carving with elements of traditional Japanese art; one piece, Sna7m (Strong Spirit), mixes yellow cedar and copper-leaf design with the exquisite patterns of yūzen and chiyogami.

There is much more. And that diversity of voice, form, and material speaks to the multipathed road ahead for the Vancouver Art Gallery, as it tries to open its spaces to a broader range of voices--in this facility, and beyond to its planned new structure. The gallery stresses that Where do we go from here? is the beginning of a long process.

“We are…presented with a unique opportunity to further conversations on the future of Vancouver Art Gallery—and art museums in general,” the VAG’s new CEO and director Anthony Kiendl said in a press statement at the show’s launch. “This program provides a rich reference for building an art museum that is increasingly relevant to our communities, ultimately breaking down barriers to accessibility.”

For Lewis, that already means an ongoing relationship that will continue into the future. “Part of my mandate, in working with institutions, is to create sustainability plans that strengthen their ability to engage BIPOC curators and artists with integrity,” Lewis says. “I really hope that will help to shift the way we value artists of colour and open the doors to these types of exhibits and more.”   

- - -

Janet Smith is an award-winning arts journalist who has spent more than two decades immersed in Vancouver’s stage, screen, design, and gallery scenes. She sits on the Vancouver Film Critics’ Circle.

THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY

Where do we go from here?

Where do we go from here? presents recent acquisitions from the Gallery’s permanent collection, as well as select loans from local artists, produced in the last five years. The works are varied in terms of media and subject matter, yet collectively offer contemplations on the past, present and future—across time, bodies of land and space. Some of the artists engage directly with the legacies of the Canadian modernist enterprise, while others attempt to destabilize inherited beliefs and accepted historical narratives.

The exhibition proposes that we think critically about the role of both art and exhibition-making in the production of narratives about our past, present and future. It encourages us to reconsider our understanding of history (personal, local, national) and progress (artistic, cultural, social), while articulating perspectives that challenge colonial systems of knowledge and methods of representation. 

An open, collaborative endeavour by six members of the Gallery’s Curatorial department with Guest Curator Nya Lewis of BlackArt Gastown, the exhibition presents neither a singular vision nor a linear narrative. The works were selected by curators with varying interests and experiences, and the resulting exhibition is an opportunity to reflect on the future and the Gallery’s place within it. Titling the exhibition with the question, “Where do we go from here?,” is intended to serve as an acknowledgement of its amorphous, open-ended nature, while envisioning a future program and collection that more accurately represents the communities that we serve.

Participating artists include Jessie Addo, Rebecca Bair, Lauren Brevner and James Nexw’Kalus-Xwalacktun Harry, Vanessa Brown, Gabi Dao, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Chantal Gibson, Maureen Gruben, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Ocean Hyland, Nanyamka (Nya) Lewis, Cindy Mochizuki, Audie Murray, Gailan Ngan, Tafui, Charlene Vickers, Jan Wade, Tania Willard, Hyung-Min Yoon and Elizabeth Zvonar. Many of the artists are presenting work at the Gallery for the first time.

PERMANENT COLLECTION

I fully pledge for the pleasure of the domestic

In response to Vanessa Brown and Anna Torma

Areum Kim

I fully pledge for the pleasure of the domestic. Here’s an excerpt from a writing of someone who obsessively works to anchor experience onto banal, everyday objects:   

A CHAIR.
A window in a wise veil and more garments shows that shadows are even […]
 

A FEATHER
A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little
leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.

A SUBSTANCE IN A CUSHION
What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it.
[…] In any kind of place there is a top to covering and it is a pleasure at any rate there is some venturing in refusing to believe nonsense.1

Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, published in 1914, is a short book of prose around mundane objects, told through a highly experimental use of language, fragmentation and cryptic logic. Even though meaning is abstruse and mystic in this modernist text, there is an apparent sensibility towards the quotidian. Objects are told through feelings. Objects are saturated with subjectivity. Impressions are delicious. Objects open to experience beyond the current instant of use (or gaze, or being near) are collaged together in unexpected ways. The everyday is caressed with tender domesticity and comfort of familiarity. Images and feelings are sutured together into a hectic collage, birthing a new texture to the everyday. 

I found similar sensibilities arising in Brown’s steel sculptures, handled with surprising pliability and dexterity, that lure us into an intimate, quotidian experience of pleasure. Take for example, Late Night Break (2017), a small-scale still life of a wine bottle, stemmed glass, fruits and a lit cigarette, cut from a thin sheet of steel, painted in midnight hues. Ohr by the Garden Shed (2017), as part of her Charms series, collects steel cut-outs of a keyhole, green snake, puce goblet, yellow disk, vase, and a fish, lined up on a thin steel rod. Like charm bracelets that are personalized with various combinations of small charms, the steel cut-out pieces are modular, adhered to the rod by magnets. Both Charms and Brown’s sculpture bookmark an event or a moment through the abbreviated gesture of an image. Brown utilizes a method akin to cinematic jump cuts, giving conceptual distance between the titular word and steel content, triggering associations that are shaped by the textual layer, viewer’s own personal experiences, and the affective dimensions of soft steel. Here’s another excerpt from Stein: “A PETTICOAT/ A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.”2

The recent work Late Night Trip to the Jeweller’s (2018) is a larger than life tableau of an event. A giant clock looms over the scene like the moon. Jumbled numbers, closed eyelids on the clock face, drooping hour and minute hands—the identity of time is dissolving. At this mysterious hour, two tulle nightgowns bearing delicate metal scraps and dried flowers emerge as the two main characters. Two pairs of earrings greet these nighttime visitors, looming larger than human bodies. Next to them, a large sheet of metal leans against the wall, etched with coded inscriptions. As the title denotes, the installation points to a dreamlike reality or to a real-like dream, filled with connotations of plot and ambiguous imagery.  

In The Greenhouse, the love prosody between sturdy tulle and paper-thin metal continues. Unlike Brown’s other works, the surface of steel-cold herbage is left without paint. The reflective surface welcomes the purple drape-filtered light. The foliage is cut with delicate, astute technique that might fool us that this is as easy as cutting paper with scissors. Amongst the strange material balance, the mobile hangs in suspension, waiting for an itinerant moment of a gentle nudge. In this artificial garden, it remains still.  

Most of Brown’s subject matter is decidedly quotidian, grounded in the very personal sphere of the home. The small sculptures are shaped from the vantage point of a confined, personal space: late night breaks, gardens, plants, still life’s all possess a quiet interiority. The steel passes through the touch of the artist’s hand, maintaining a close relationship with the scale of one’s body. The affective dimensions of soft steel, merged with the everyday encounters, produce a delicious kind of logic. It could be argued as beauty. The daily moments are given a sculptural form, through an attuned gaze that latches onto the pleasures found in the daily activities or in the contemplation of one’s surroundings. The works seem to abide by a subtle mandate that grounds pleasure to a widely accessible, easily encountered experience. Pleasure makes the quotidian walk the lines of the novel. 

The sybaritic savouring of the personal space abides by a guiding principle: we demand pleasures of the home. Take Vancouver, where the artist lives and works, a city in a nefarious housing crisis. In a place where the basic pleasures of homemaking is an extravagance, the domestic, personal moments conveyed by Brown’s sculptures also feel luxurious. They evoke the privilege to have a comfortable space where one goes through breakups, be a plant mom and a gardener, endures fever dreams, takes midnight cigarette breaks. An entitlement to domestic bliss, as skeptical as this phrase sounds, is to be demanded in an economic model where (good) shelter is luxury. Take Virginia Woolf’s proposition for the one requirement for the ability of a woman to write and speak: a room of one’s own.3 Now this phrase rings true not only in the gendered divide of who gets the right to space and to speech, but also in the class divide.

While Woolf fought for women’s own creative space to be carved out of the very domestic space that is maintained through women’s labour, the craft tradition was driven by the desire to decorate that domestic space. The Hungary-born, New Brunswick-based artist Anna Torma is a librarian of the detritus of daily life. Through techniques such as embroidery, appliqué, quilting, drawing, collaging, and dyeing, Torma takes textiles, a material so thoroughly part of the everyday, and estranges them from ubiquity. Torma collects details from everyday life, such as doodles, her own children’s drawings, words, and scraps from other works, as well as various found textile fragments that circulate the domestic sphere. In Abandoned Details I – VII (2018), such shards of life are neatly organized into a grid. We see human figures, monsters, animals, plants, household objects, abstract blobs, limbs, and words. In this extensive collection, the crumbs of everyday are raised to mythological status.  

Torma’s work honours women’s labour and craft that happened in the domestic sphere, outside of the canon of art history. While art history unfolded in the public sphere, women’s work took place in homes. Even commercial craft was a male arena whereas women’s embroidery remained domestic. Textile historian Mária Varjú-Ember traces the emergence of Hungarian embroidery to the Middle Ages. Early accounts are attributed to queens who maintained women’s embroidery workrooms in the courts or monasteries. In the meantime, textile work produced for commercial purposes were created by “professional” craftsmen. 17th century Hungary witnessed widespread domestic embroidery by noblewomen, who taught their family and friends, shared samples and skills, and collected patterns together.4 Even though women’s work stayed inside the home, it engendered a certain sociality that erupted out of the boundaries of the domestic realm. This European textile tradition fostered a communal space for production: “singing, chanting, telling stories, dancing, and playing games as they work, spinsters, weavers, and needle-workers were literally networkers as well. Spinning yarns, fabricating fictions, fashioning fashions…5” A unique, decentralized form of knowledge dissemination occured through relationships and the sharing of space.

Such a lineage of women’s voices are literally layered in Torma’s monumental work Carpet of Many Hands (2012-18). Two sizeable quilts hang from the ceiling and drape onto the floor. Layers upon layers, we see both found and made textiles such as printed fabric, crocheted fragments, lace, appliqués, patches, and fragments of needlepoints. Like the scroll that preceded the codex (the bound book), the quilts are a document of stylizations, visual languages and quotations. Countless unnamed voices reverberate in these quilts, composing an ode to women’s labour; an ode to the kitsch drive towards home decoration. It is a sensibility of excess that stems from a vibrant attitude towards life—homemaking as essential to existing, homemaking coming before art, as a creative practice that is closer to skin. Quilts are often gifts exchanged between family members (sometimes as a gesture, regardless of skill-level — as I remember my grandmother who “quilted” two large red and yellow towels together into a blanket and gifted them to me when I was born). Between the fabric, needle, and thread exist many layers of knowledge, passed down between generations, with an undwindling love for the home and kin. 

Lisa Robertson defines the poetics of the vernacular as that which begins in the home: 

“[it is] the collectively accessible speech of the household and the street, distributed unilaterally rather than intentionally acquired via a disciplined pedagogy of grammar, and transformed in open bodily exchange. […] A vernacular is not structured according to a valuing hierarchy or an administration of history; it is improvised in tandem with the rhythmic needs and movements of a present-tense yet tradition-informed body among other bodies, each specific.”6

Here, Robertson understands the vernacular speech as a form of expression that grows laterally within the home, among the network of family and friends. The two active ingredients are the casual setting in which language is modified, and the bodily relationships that allows this prolific propagation. The sensibility of the vernacular is quite akin to the way craft operates. Take the coven of women chatting, gossiping, singing, and sharing knowledge as they each held their needlework on their laps. The vocabulary of their craft was responsive to the multitude of voices, which grew and shifted organically, even though the work was still rooted in tradition and skill. A decentralized form of learning took place in the casual relationships between family members. Daily practice and informality mark both domestic craft and vernacular speech. Enabled by the very individuality, craft and vernacular speech both reinvent themselves daily through dialogue and relationships. Carpet of Many Hands nods to this vernacular expansiveness. It records the visual language of folk, craft, and kitsch that are embedded in daily life. Collected into a set of quilts, these pieces of ordinary textiles become a dictionary of the vernacular. I can almost hear the murmur of voices between all the layers in these two quilts. “Vernacular speech can only begin and never achieve closure.”7 The quilts’ linearity seems to nudge towards a continuum, as if the two textiles can continue forever.

Vernacular speech is defined by the motions of becoming untethered from tradition. Brown’s work with steel is concerned with the material’s tactility as well as its cultural meanings sowed by tradition. There is a heightened awareness in the gendered tradition of steel, in its implication in machinery and industry. On the other hand, the circulation of steel objects, like charms, jewelry, and other small trinkets, use matrilinear routes, passed down from mothers to daughters. Brown’s construction highlights pliability, softness, slightness, delicacy, dexterity. Steel circulates in our daily sphere, ubiquitously found in cars as well as pots and pans. Conflating machinery and personal objects, steel is riddled with contradictions. Brown brings both qualities to the fore, changing scale of her work from the corporeal to the monumental. There is always a bit of associative confusion that occurs when I look at Brown’s thinly cut steel. How soft is this hard material?

In the same way, Torma steps away from the decorative subject matter of embroidery in Pedagogical Charts I – II (2016), in which taxonomies and Enlightenment-based knowledge systems are put under scrutiny. With images and text, Torma spins off of encyclopedic charts to categorize her own embodied experiences and her own ways of knowing. Disciplines like anatomy, taxonomy, science, linguistics and grammar are articulated with needle and thread. Chart Itransforms the sterile anatomical drawings and language to something very visceral and textural with fabric and embroidery. Puce bowels, numbered organs and latin anatomy terms fusing with floral and fauna, the scientific way of knowing a human body passes through the digestive tract of identity.

The namesakes of Brown’s and Torma’s exhibitions, The Witching Hour and Book of Abandoned Details conjure a place and an object. The place where light is extinguished and magic imbues, dangerous and formidable women roam. And there is a document that distills hundreds of unnamed voices and hands, those abandoned by history and its hierarchy but their work withstands today. A mythology is engendered. The feminine is soft but its sum is greater than the sum of its softness. Hard work is soft, soft work is hard.

 —

Permanent Collection is Esker Foundation’s online publishing initiative. For each season of exhibitions, Esker commissions a response from compelling voices within or beyond the visual arts. We ask contributors to reflect on our current exhibitions as a means of generating new ideas about and connections between the artworks from a new perspective. We see Permanent Collection as an expanded exhibition space that explores the points of resonance between and within exhibitions and disciplines. As a non-collecting institution, Esker is defined by the conversations, ideas, and research that emerge around our exhibitions and programming – this is our model for a permanent collection. 

SFU GALLERIES
The Pandemic is a Portal

Curated by Karina Irvine, Christopher Lacroix and cheyanne turions

The Pandemic is a Portal

June 22 - July 31, 2020
@sfugalleries

Simranpreet Anand, Anna Banana, Vanessa Brown + Francey Russell, Lacie Burning, Margaret Dragu + Justine A. Chambers + Kage, Lucien Durey, Jessica Evans, Elisa Ferrari, Sharona Franklin, Michelle Helene Mackenzie, Megan Hepburn, S F Ho, Julian Hou, Hazel Meyer, Cindy Mochizuki, Cecily Nicholson, Carmen Papalia + Heather Kai Smith, Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross, Jayce Salloum, and Nicole Kelly Westman.

In this time of shared crisis it is necessary to renounce a return to normalcy — which was already a catastrophe for so many — and to move towards an otherwise world, one rooted in care.

Drawing from the thinking of Arundhati Roy, The Pandemic is a Portal considers what is changing about our social and political realities, and what futures our responses move us toward:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.

This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.[1]

In sharing news of the galleries’ closures in mid-March, we reiterated our commitment to gathering publics in ways that engage with our social and political environments as historical inheritances, contemporary realities and speculative futures. We also expressed a desire to use these distanced times to critically interrogate how we form community, who we form it with, and how we can do better. If we accept Roy’s proposition, that the pandemic is a portal, then how can our responses to this time prepare the ground for forms of community to come — forms that are more just and more unsettled than the forms of community we’ve left behind?

We asked artists and writers to respond to these questions from within the experience of pandemic illness, which is distinct for all. Their responses will be shared on SFU Galleries’ Instagram account throughout the exhibition’s run.

Schedule
Monday, June 22: Sharona Franklin, Tellurian Dinner

Tuesday, June 23: Cindy Mochizuki, 雪 / Snow 

Thursday, June 25: Lacie Burning, -attat

Saturday, June 27: Jayce Salloum, beyond now

Sunday: June 28: Margaret Dragu / Justine A. Chambers / Kage, NEW NORMAL: an embodied novel, chapter 4, the bed is a portal 

Tuesday, June 30: Simranpreet Anand, 𝒜 𝓌𝒽𝑜𝓁𝑒 𝓃𝑒𝓌 𝓌𝑜𝓇𝓁𝒹 ✿.｡.:* ☆:*:. 𝔻ⓞｎ'Ｔ уᵒ𝓊 ᗪ𝕒Řє 𝐜𝐥𝐎𝔰Ⓔ ⓨ𝐨ｕя єʸ𝔢ｓ) .::.☆.:｡.✿

Thursday, July 2: Carmen Papalia / Heather Kai Smith, Score for a Temporary, Collectively-Held Space

Saturday, July 4: Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross, Napping Against Capitalism

Monday, July 6: Jessica Evans, Pig Pen and Chalet Style

Wednesday, July 8: Julian Yi-Jong Hou, Ketamine Clear

Friday, July 10: Elisa Ferrari, In Increments of 13

Sunday, July 12: Megan Hepburn, Uncertain Yield

Tuesday, July 14: Nicole Kelly Westman, oversharing obscure sentimentalities

Thursday, July 16: Michelle Helene Mackenzie, In Violet Air

Saturday, July 18: S F Ho, Water

Sunday, July 19: S F Ho, Fire

Tuesday, July 21: Lucien Durey, Blue Feather with Skittles

Thursday, July 23: Hazel Meyer, The Weight of Inheritance " cruising Joyce's house

Saturday, July 25: Cecily Nicholson, a voice that will clamour

Monday, July 27: Jayce Salloum, this time

Wednesday, July 29: Anna Banana, Invitation to The Pandemic is a Portal

Friday, July 31: Vanessa Brown / Francey Russell, Carry me over this threshold

Following the exhibition, the works will be shared in a zine, distributed by post, as a kind of correspondence art that reaches people where they take shelter. If you would like to receive a copy, please send a message with your mailing address to sfugallery@sfu.ca by July 6, 2020.

Curated by Karina Irvine, Christopher Lacroix and cheyanne turions

[1] Arundhati Roy, “The pandemic is a portal,” Financial Times Apr 3, 2020: https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca (accessed May 8, 2020).

C MAGAZINE
AUCTION 2020

03 - Jun. 16 2020 / Auction
C Magazine Contemporary Art Online Auction 2020

The 16th Annual C Magazine Contemporary Art Auction features artworks generously donated by artists whose work reflects C Magazine’s mandate to provide a vital international forum devoted to the advancement of important conversations in contemporary art, led by Canadians.

With works by Ibrahim Abusitta, Lois Andison, Raymonde April, Sonny Assu, Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Omar Badrin, Trevor Baird, Jeff Bierk, Diane Borsato with JP King, Vanessa Brown, Paul Butler, Mark Clintberg, Jane Corrigan, Brandon Dalmer, Brett Despotovich, Brenda Draney, Michael Dumontier, Azadeh Elmizadeh, Embassy of Imagination, Scott Everingham, Sameer Farooq, nichola feldman-kiss, Brendan Flanagan, Dominique Fung, Ella Gonzales, Heather Goodchild, Rodney Graham, Claire Greenshaw, Maggie Groat, Maureen Gruben Meghan Harder, Alexa Hatanaka, Stefan Herda, Antonia Hirsch, Patrick Howlett, Lili Huston-Herterich, Luis Jacob, Kablusiak, Laurie Kang, Parker Kay, Jean-Paul Kelly, Alexia Laferté Coutu, Eli Langer, Khan Lee, Katie Lyle, Qavavau Manumie, Caroline Monnet, Caroline Mousseau, Jennifer Murphy, Shelley Niro, Robert O’Halloran, Emmanuel Osahor, Nick Ostoff, Luke Painter, Roula Partheniou, Ed Pien, Birthe Piontek, Geoffrey Pugen, Elise Rasmussen, Kelly Richardson, Scott Rogers, Claire Scherzinger, Brittany Shepherd, Fin Simonetti, Dana Slijboom, Derek Sullivan, Orest Tataryn, Erdem Taşdelen, Alex Tedlie-Stursberg, Patrick Thompson, Haley Uyeda, Justin Waddell, Ben Walmsley, Syrus Marcus Ware, Shaheer Zazai

Funds raised at the C Magazine Contemporary Art Auction will directly support the publication of C Magazine and the presentation of related educational programming. C Magazine commissions more than 120 artists, writers and thinkers each year, and presents the work of hundreds more.

Please join us for the online auction

Preview Catalogue 
auction.cmagazine.com

Bidding Opens: Wednesday, June 3 at 6 PM EST
Bidding Closes: Tuesday, June 16 at 8 PM EST

Register to Bid
onlineauctions.waddingtons.ca

The first 15 bidders will receive the Gattuso Edition.

Early bidders help support the artists and champion C Magazine! Join us on Wednesday, June 3rd at 6pm EST to bid online. We’ll also be streaming live during the launch, so you can ask about anything related to the auction! 6-9 PM EST at auction.cmagazine.com/ama

The Gattuso Edition Rag bag by Anne Low, generously supported by La Fondation Emmanuelle Gattuso.

Gattuso Edition
Anne Low
Rag bag
2020
Hand woven and hand dyed silk, ink on rice paper, copper, walnut
4 × 4.5 × 2”
Edition of 50, varied

This year’s auction is presented with the generous support of our sponsors, including La Fondation Emmanuelle Gattuso as Artists’ Sponsor, Waddington’s Auctioneers and Appraisers, Superframe, Museumpros Art Services and Toronto Image Works.

Charitable tax receipts are issued for donations and art purchases in excess of their market value by C The Visual Arts Foundation (charitable no. 88643 1162). Participating artists will also receive a portion of the sales.

The Terms and Conditions of the C Magazine Online auction differ from those of our auction host, Waddington’s (onlineauctions.waddingtons.ca). For the C Magazine Auction, a buyer’s premium of 10% will be added to your invoice. No HST is applicable. When possible, C Magazine will provide shipping or delivery options, and their cost will be added to your invoice. C’s staff will invoice you directly at the email you register with at Waddingtons. Please review the full Terms & Conditions.

Questions? Please contact Kate auction@cmagazine.com

IN MY TIME OF QUARANTINE

Organized by Simon Hauck

A collection of things created and shared during the COVID-19 pandemic.
(in no particular order) contributions by:

1. Dylan Townley-Smith  2. Jack Kenna  3. Terry-Dayne Beasley  4. Daniel Hoffman 5. Fiona Zhao  6. Laura Baldwinson  7. simon hauck  8. Alex Gibson 9. Laura Levesque 10. Emily Hermant  11. Graham Landin  12. Marika Vandekraats 13. Kelly Lycan 14. Vanessa Brown 15. Brigitte Patenaude  16. Geoffrey Farmer  17. Chrome Destroyer  18. Devon Knowles 19. Liam Johnstone  20. Liz Saunders 21. Dana Qaddah  22. Chelsea Yuill 23. Jack Morris 24. Jocelyne Junker 25. Stefan Obusan  26. Annie Briard  27. Maria-Margaretta  28. Pierre Kaufman  29. Sahand Mohajer 30. Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes

THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY

ARTISTS ON ARTISTS:
VANESSA BROWN AND TOM HSU ON CINDY SHERMAN

ARTISTS ON ARTISTS: VANESSA BROWN AND TOM HSU ON CINDY SHERMAN
TUE NOV 26 7 PM
1ST FLOOR

Join us for a tour of the exhibition Cindy Sherman with Vancouver-based artists Vanessa Brown and Tom Hsu. Together, they will offer close readings and unique insight into Cindy Sherman’s work, with special consideration to the lasting influence of her practice on the medium of photography, image-making and the ideas of subject and illusionism.

Vanessa Brown is an artist who works in sculpture and installation.  Primarily working in steel, she is interested in challenging the medium’s historical associations with industry, war and monument by focusing on its subtler qualities, such as pliability, versatility and slightness. The imagery in her work draws on various sources including landscapes, historical crafts, recurring symbols from her dreams, feminized labour, gestures of comfort and ideas of escape. Brown graduated with a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2013, and was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award.

Tom Hsu is a visual artist who uses photography of the everyday to investigate the curious condition of space. Hsu sees the camera as a double-edge device which allows him to share but also to hide. He currently lives and works in Vancouver and holds a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

MONOPOL MAGAZINE
STRONG BUY

Von Annika von Taube

So manch bedeutende Kunstammlung hat mal klein angefangen. Viele Sammler mögen beim Erweb der ersten, möglicherweise vom Munde abgesparten Arbeit nich einmal gewusst haben, dass sie damit den Grundstein für ihr späteres Sammlungsimperium legten. Zumal ed sich dabei im Zweifel eher um eine raumgreifende Skulptur.

Klein anfangen, groß denken und sich dabei nicht Geld- und Platzmangel abhalten lassen: Wer mit dieser Haltung mit dem Sammeln beginnen möchte, findet bei der kanadischen Künstlerin Vanessa Brown die perfekte Arbeit dafür. Bei ihren “Ashtray Earrings” (enstanden in Kooperation mit dem ebenfalls kanadischen Schmucklabel Wasted Effort) handelt es sich nämlich nicht einfach nur um wie Aschenbecher geformte Ohrringe, sondern um Miniaturenachbildungen einer ihrer großformatigen Skulpturen, die häufig wie flüchtige Skizzen häuslicher Stillleben wirken und dabei aus handfesten Materialien gemach sind.

Auch ihre Ohrring-Skulpturen oszillieren zwischen Fragilität und Handfestigkeit. Sie sind keine Gebrauchskunst, aber Kunst, die man gebrauchen kann, und das gleich zwiefach, als Schmuck und als Aschenbecher. Was die Ausgabe dafür auch dan rechtfertig, wenn die Haushaltkasse keinen Posten für Kunstkäufe beinhaltet - man nimmt einfach das Geld, das für den Posten Hausrat oder Bekleidung vorgesehen war. Oder für Zigaretten, um noch auf einen weiteren möglichen Nutzen hinzuweisen: Rauchern dienen die Aschenbecher-Skulpturen womöglich sogar als Entzugshilfe, verweisen sie doch darauf, wie viel nachhaltiger man sein Geld investiert, wenn man das Rauchen gegen das Sammeln eintauscht, Außerdem stehen einem diese Ohrringe besser zu Gesicht als der Konsum vin 350 Zigaretten, was etwa dem Gegenwert des Preises von 124 US-Dollar pro Paar entspricht. Und, wenn man mal ausrechnet, was man im Laufe eines Lebens so spart, wenn man nicht raucht, kann man sich statt der Miniature vielleicht sogar das Original leisten. Wobei hier auf keinen Fall ein Plädoyer gegen das Rauchen geführt werden soll, den gäbe es keine Raucher mehr, würde auch diese schöne kleine Arbeit wahrscheinlich nicht existieren.

Edition von 20, erhält als Paar (124 US-Dollar) oder einzeln (62 US-Dollar) zzgl. Versand bei wastedeffort.ca

MKG127
Somebody

Curated by Liza Eurich

SOMEBODY
MKG127
July 6th - Aug 17th, 2019
Opening Saturday, July 6, 2:00 – 5:00 PM

MKG127 is pleased to present Somebody a group exhibition curated by Liza Eurich with work by Lorna Bauer, Deanna Bowen, Vanessa Brown, Kara Hamilton, Karen Kraven, Graham Macaulay, Ella Dawn McGeough and Geoffrey Pugen

Somebody looks at work that engages with figuration through gestures that depict traces of activity, accessories, or fragmented representations of its form.

These renderings point to manifestations of self that are in continuous states of flux, constituted through processes of erasure, accumulation and revision. They are adjacent to the illustrative and intact, separate from any notion of fixity. Instead, their malleability foregrounds agency and favours the possibility of impermanence and fluidity.

Though tactile and material in their approach, these works speak to the absence of their subject, and to the temporality of the constructed self. The figure is not replete; it is formlessness being continually reshaped, a process that is illuminated through the objects and imprints that persist. Vestiges of iterative selves have the potential to seed new thoughts and formations elsewhere. In this shifting of contexts, it is not the form itself that is of significance, but these moments of/in transformation.

Lorna Bauer recently presented her work at Franz Kaka, Clint Roenisch Gallery, The Loon (Toronto); Darling Foundry, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, Gallery Nicolas Robert  (Montréal); CK2 Gallery (New York); Model Projects (Vancouver), Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery (Athens) among other venues. Bauer has participated in numerous national and international residencies, including stays at Despina-Largo das Artes, Rio de Janeiro; funded through the Conseil des arts de Montréal; The Couvent des Récollets, Paris; the Quebec-New York Studio Residency funded through the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec; The Banff Centre, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida), working with Josiah McElheny. Writing on Bauer’s work has been featured in publications such as Artforum, Canadian Art, C-Magazine, Le Devoir among others media outlets. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, The Montréal Council for the Arts and the Quebec Council for the Arts. Most recently Bauer was awarded the 2018 Barbara Sphor Memorial Award that supports the development of Canadian contemporary photography. She is represented by Gallery Nicolas Robert in Montréal.

Deanna Bowen is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist whose auto-ethnographic practice examines race, migration, historical writing and authorship. In recent years, Bowen’s work has involved rigorous examination of her family lineage and their connections to the Black Prairie pioneers of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Creek Negroes and All-Black towns of Oklahoma, the extended Kentucky/Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan.
The artistic products of this research have been presented most recently at the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Western Front (Vancouver), Gallery 44 (Toronto), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), Mercer Union (Toronto), Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, the Banff Centre, the Royal Ontario Museum of Art (Toronto), the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia). Her 2017 Mercer Union (Toronto) exhibition ON TRIAL The Long Doorway was awarded the 2018 Ontario Association of Art Galleries’ Monographic Exhibition of the Year award. Bowen has also received numerous awards, grants and fellowships including the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize, 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a 2017 New Chapter Grant; and most recently, a 2018 Canada Council Concept to Realization Grant. Opening at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto this fall is God of Gods: A Canadian Play, curated by Barbara Fischer.
Bowen’s first solo exhibition with MKG127 will open October 12 and run until November 9, 2019.

Vanessa Brown is based in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam,Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish land. Brown graduated with a BFA from Emily Carr University, Vancouver in 2013 and was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award. She has exhibited in Canada, Germany, Luxembourg, the USA, and Mexico, notably with solo and two-person exhibitions at The Esker Foundation, Calgary; Arsenal, Toronto; Projet Pangée, Montreal; The Western Front, Vancouver; The Armory Show, New York; and group exhibitions at the Nanaimo Art Gallery; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and King Street Station, Seattle. She is represented by Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran in Montréal.

Kara Hamilton studied architecture at the University of British Columbia and art at Concordia University and Yale. She has shown extensively in North America and Europe, at such spaces as Salon 94, EFA Project Space, Kate Werble Gallery, in New York; Siegel House, in Marfa, USA; Taut and Tame, in Berlin, Germany; Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, in Winnipeg; G Gallery, Cooper Cole Gallery, AGO, in Toronto. She is director of Kunstverein Toronto and is represented by Cooper Cole Gallery.

Karen Kraven is a Montreal-based artist working with photography, sculpture and installation. Recent solo exhibitions include Pins & Needles at the Toronto Sculpture Garden, Deadstock, Maw Gallery, NYC (2017), Slack Tide, Parisian Laundry, Montreal (2016), Flip Flop Punch Front, Mercer Union, Toronto (2015) and Razzle Dazzle Sis Boom Bah presented at the ICA, Portland, Maine and the Darling Foundry, Montreal (2014/5). Her work has also been included in exhibitions in Marseille, Mumbai and Baltimore. Reviews have been published in C Magazine, Canadian Art, Momus and Artforum. Her work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, TD Bank Group, RBC, Banque Nationale and private collections. Karen Kraven is represented by Parisian Laundry in Montréal.

Graham Macaulay completed an MFA at Western University (London ON) in 2018. He received his BFA from the University of Victoria (Victoria BC) in 2014, after which he was awarded a BC Arts Council Early Career Development grant. He has recently exhibited at Forest City Gallery and DNA Gallery (London ON); Untitled Arts Society and Stride Gallery (Calgary AB); Xchanges (Victoria BC). He is currently based in Toronto ON.

Ella Dawn McGeough‘s practice involves making, writing, organizing, and teaching–often collaboratively. She has a BFA from UBC (2007), an MFA from Guelph (2013), and is currently pursuing a PhD at York. Recently, her work has been presented at the AGYU, Varley Art Gallery, Goodwater Gallery, Kikospace, the 2nd Kamias Triennial, Moire’s Catwalk, Critical Distance, Usdan Gallery – Bennington College, and Forest City Gallery among others; has participated in residencies at Banff Centre, Flaggfabrikken in Bergen Norway, and Trelex in Peru’s Tambopata National Reserve; and has curated numerous projects in Toronto. Her writing has been published by Arsenal, Public Journal, Moire, C Magazine, ESP, Open Studios, and Susan Hobbs. She is from Vancouver (unceded territories) and lives in Toronto.

Geoffrey Pugen is a multidisciplinary artist living in Toronto, Canada. He explores relationships between real and staged performance, the natural and the artificial, and tensions of virtuality, through altering and manipulating image material. Working with video, performance, sculpture and photography, Pugen renders situations that examine our perceptions of how history, documentation, and simulation intersect. His videos and art have been exhibited at galleries and festivals in Canada, the USA, Australia, Argentina, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, South Korea, the UK, Portugal and Japan. His next solo exhibition at MKG127 will open in January 2020.

The exhibition continues until August 17.

BORDER CROSSINGS
The Art of Simultaneity: Vanessa Brown’s Unlikely Combinations

By Lee Henderson

The Art of Simultaneity: Vanessa Brown’s Unlikely Combinations
Lee Henderson   ·   Articles   ·   Issue 150   ·   May 2019

The Vancouver-based artist Vanessa Brown works in the wonderful world of contradictions and illusions. Like a poet, a jeweller, a stage designer, a couturier, her art centres on the accessories; present in it is a spiritual, feminist tribute to accessories. Her art is there, and not there. Active in the negative spaces, she traces the outlines of shapes in metalwork and other materials. It is airy art made with heavy materials. It looks lightweight but is dense, solid, sturdy. It is strong, fragile, resilient and delicate—minimal but busy. It is sculpture about painting, line art made of welded metal. It is highly discursive without having anything definitive to say. These are metaphorical and empathetic objects and yet they remain totally elusive. Brown’s art is not the middle paragraphs of an essay or the conjoined recursive quotes from postmodern homage.

There are reference points, but her art is not the machine parts for conceptual theory-making engines. It is completely beguiling and mysterious yet open and gregarious in its own kind of sublimely silent conversation. It might even seem that Vanessa Brown’s visual art talks and listens. When looking at it I’m reminded of what Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña once wrote: “An object is not an object; it is a witness to a relationship.”

Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1981 to Canadian parents and raised in Vancouver, BC, Vanessa Brown worked for many years in the hospital system as a care provider and social worker, exploring various creative outlets at the same time, including art and writing. I met her around 2006 or 2007, when she registered for a fiction workshop I taught one evening a week at University of British Columbia’s Writing Centre. And in the years after that we often saw each other at art openings or around our shared neighbourhood of Strathcona. During these years she worked part-time as an artist’s assistant and exhibition installer. It wasn’t until I left the city and moved to Victoria that Brown chose to focus full-time on visual art, and over the next few years I followed her progress over social media—first on Facebook and then Instagram, where she maintains a tightly curated account of her own work and that of artists she admires or is working alongside. She received her bachelor’s degree from Emily Carr University in 2013. While there, she studied with artist and teacher Richard Clements, who introduced her to wood- and metalworking, and it was out of those classes that Brown produced her first pieces in the style she now continues to employ. Immediately upon graduating, she received invitations to show. In the past four years, she has been included in over 25 group shows, and has had six solo shows, including at the Western Front and Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver, the Esker Foundation in Calgary, Arsenal Project Space in Toronto and, most recently, Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran in Montreal, which gave Brown a solo show in 2019, as well taking her work to this year’s Armory Show in New York.

Brown works in metal, welded and plasma-cut sheets, bent rods and pipes. She works in fabric, robes, shawls, yarn. Materials that could be inconsequential she makes monumental. What typically has grandeur is minimized. There is rigidity and pliability. Soft sculpture and sharp sculpture, her work is simultaneously both. Late Night Break, 2017, is a still life in cut steel painted a smoky, evening blue and features a wine bottle, cigarette and fruit. Her three-dimensional objects are sometimes thinner than two-dimensional art. Her sculptures are often flatter than canvases. Vanessa Brown creates opposites that attract, unlikely combinations. A sculpture of two giant ashtrays doubles as earrings. Two black sheath nightgowns are from 2018—Robe for Daydreaming and Robe for Sleepwalking. One has eye-shaped cut copper accessories hanging from the front pockets by earring hooks; the other is decorated with dried flowers. Flowers and plants are one preoccupation in Brown’s artwork, earrings are another. These recurring motifs contribute an elusive mystical aspect, an allusive alchemy, in concordance with her predilection for rings, cigarettes, hooks, moon and lentil shapes, candles and dresses. Many of her works incorporate objects that look inspired by the separate pieces of a long-lost charm bracelet.

There is Stained Glass Earring + Stand, 2018, oversized earrings in shades of blue, pink and yellow stained glass hanging in the form of an abstract face with the earrings as the eyes, teardrops dripping down, in a style that echoes Paul Klee.

There is The Greenhouse, which appeared at the Esker Foundation in Calgary, AB, in 2018 as part of her show called “The Witching Hour.” Here, unpainted sheets of brushed steel were cut into the shapes of plants and flowers hanging in pots along an unconventional armature forming a sculpture that echoes Alexander Calder’s mobiles as much as Betty Woodman’s ceramics.

Reverse Photosynthesis (Candleholder) from 2019 is a large P shape made of steel rods whose colours shift subtly like a sunrise from midnight blue through a lush green to a summer yellow. Two painterly daffodil-ish yellow flowers, which Brown likens to the kind found in a van Gogh painting, made of metal shaped with a plasma cutter, hang upside down from the bottom of the loop in the P, and a single beeswax candle burns at the top of the vertical column. The P shape might relate to the word “photosynthesis” or to the pliability of meaning itself.

One of Brown’s most iconic works is Ashtray Earrings, 2018. They are the size of two coffee tables, with a giant filtered cigarette, also made of steel, resting on one. The ashtrays are also a set of giant, unwearable earrings. Ashtray Earrings appeared in her fall 2018 solo show, “Late Night Trip to the Jewellers,” at the Esker Foundation and Arsenal Contemporary in Toronto. The combination reminds me that both are accessories of a kind, both objects of style and fashion that carry their own aesthetic and history within fashion and culture. Earrings and cigarettes both draw attention to the face and both are objects of attraction. I’ve never smoked a cigarette, but I like to watch people smoke. I understand why it’s a meditative act, a short leave of absence, a moment of reflection. Smoke is an amazing, mystical substance and a source of fascination for how it twists and turns, coils and stretches out, balloons and then disappears without a trace. Positing bad advice, “Everyone should be forced to smoke,” the singer Joni Mitchell told her biographer, Michelle Mercer.

Brown’s solo show at Wil Aballe Art Projects in 2016 was titled “The Hand of Camille,” a reference to the artist Camille Claudel, who is often forgotten to art history, while her lover and collaborator, Auguste Rodin, remains a canonical figure. And while there are no direct references to Claudel’s work in Brown’s pieces, the plaster sculpture of a hand holding flowers references the title of the show, which in turn refers explicitly to the sometimes overlooked artist. With this exhibition, Brown explores the relationship between her own interests as an artmaker and the position of women throughout art history. Virginia Woolf put it most succinctly in her 1929 book A Room of One’s Own when she wrote, “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,” a famous enough line that there’s even an American award given annually to a woman artist named for this quote. Will this ever cease to be true? Progress, slow as it is, seems to suggest things have improved in the past hundred years more than they had in the previous thousand years of art history, where almost every artist’s signature bears the name of a man. In a conversation we had over Skype, Vanessa Brown described for me how she sees that, throughout history, wealth is passed down through a patriarchal lineage, while heirlooms—the objects of life—are passed through the matrilineal line. Charm bracelets, vases, dresses, jewellery are all shared from mother to daughter. In the “hierarchy of arts,” as Brown put it to me, the monumental is masculine, while the modest is feminine. The handiwork of art—craft—is a feminine essence, and the industrial-scale, factory perfect product is seen as masculine. Brown plays with these notions, inverting and subverting them with the monumental ashtray earrings and the modestly sized mig-welded steel sculptures. When I think of her efforts to honour her foremothers, I’m also reminded of an interview the artist Louise Bourgeois did with a Yale University student named Alexis Rafael Krasilovsky in 1971, which was printed in Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father, a book of Bourgeois’s writings and interviews published in 1998. Krasilovsky asked her, “Do you see art as a man’s world?” and Bourgeois answered, “Yes. It is a world where both men and women are trying to please men in power.” Krasilovsky follows this up with the question, “Do you think there is a specific style or aspect of a style which women artists share?” Bourgeois answers, “Not yet. Before this takes place women will have to forget their desire to please the male power structure.” This is a daunting prognosis to assess, but it is to be hoped that successive waves of feminism, since this ’70s interview, might have given some of this power to the women and charged them with a fresh sense of vision.

Marianne, 2017, is an ambitious set of five works on and around a low, slab-like white plinth. The eye is first drawn to the welded steel outline of a large tea infuser in the shape of a watering jug. Inside the infuser there is a plant hanging upside down from the lid, but upon a closer look, this sprig turns out to have leaves made of cut steel and a stem made from a steak knife. In front of this infuser is a small purple and blue shag rug. Half the rug is latch-hooked on the reverse side so that its stitching is exposed and the letters M and B are more visible. Small, silver, steel-cut moon shapes are scattered on the rug. Next to this rug is another ashtray, a large chair sized ashtray with a cigarette resting on it. Like the Ashtray Earrings that come after it, this ashtray in black steel is something else as well; it looks a lot like an artist’s seat. Marianne is named for the Bauhaus artist Marianne Brandt, painter, collagist and renowned metalwork sculptor, and the first female student of László Moholy-Nagy. Her initial job was to hammer little moon shapes out of steel, like the ones that are spilled over this hooked rug. Brandt’s later designs include the same objects Brown uses: ashtrays and tea infusers in the iconic Bauhaus style.

Marianne Brandt joins Camille Claudel as an artist-inspiration, a kind of creative grandmother acknowledged by name in Brown’s art practice. Brown’s artwork pays tribute to a shared sensibility with these women—perhaps she’s been able to forget what Bourgeois, back in 1971, hoped women artists would forget. Certainly, you could eliminate all men from Brown’s sphere and focus entirely on the influences of women artists— the impressionists Mary Cassat, Berthe Morisot, Meret Oppenheim, Eileen Agar, Louise Bourgeois, the Bauhaus women; and contemporary affiliations with the work of Cecilia Vicuña, Betty Woodman, Karen Kraven and, in Canada, Gabriel Beveridge, Nadia Belerique, Colleen Heslin, Luanne Martineau, Valerie Blass, Aganetha Dyck and many others. Vanessa Brown’s incredible body of work so far is a promise of more, and of more names surfacing, from art’s past, present and upcoming. When we reflect on the present day, though, the existential struggles we are faced with against a kind of retrograde power in ascendancy can be demoralizing, and environmental and economic emergencies can put in question our collective fortunes. What will tomorrow bring? But we can’t wait for a better day; we must support each other now. In researching Camille Claudel on the Internet, I came across a quote attributed to her that struck a chord: “Send me a hundred francs on our future deals, otherwise I will disappear in a cataclysm.”

Lee Henderson is a contributing editor to Border Crossings. His most recent novel, The Road Narrows as You Go, was published in 2014 by Hamish Hamilton.

PODIUM
Cherrypickers

Curated by Vincent Crapon & Stilbé Schroeder

olivier adeline
tessy bauer
solanne bernard
laurianne bixhain
camilla bliss
mike bourscheid
aline bouvy
vanessa brown
hugo canoilas
claire decet
aline forçain
samuel françois
julia frank
philomène hoël
steph huang
alexei alexander izmaylov
sophie jung
ronan lecreurer
catherine lorent
gaëlle loth
luisa mè
christoph meier
ute müller
suzan noesen
mary-audrey ramirez
pablo rodriguez blanco
letizia romanini
lorette sagouis
eric schumacher
sarah staton
mu tian
vince tillotson
transitus immobilis
u.r.a.m.i
guillaume vandame
nicholas vargelis
marianne villière
demelza watts

34 Rue du Curé, l-1368, Luxembourg City
Friday from 14:00, Saturday & Sunday 11:00 - 18:00

BORDER CROSSINGS| Vol 38. No 2. Issue 150

BORDER CROSSINGS ACHIEVES A LANDMARK WITH ITS CURRENT PUBLICATION

Next year Manitoba will celebrate 150 years as a Canadian province. In our 38th year, Border Crossings, the Winnipeg-based international arts magazine, has just reached that milestone. We have now published Number 150, and the issue embodies the range our readers have come to expect from the magazine.

In this issue Border Crossings looks at the way in which humans layer their interactions and engagement with animals and the landscape, with other artists, and with audiences. The issue also considers the ways in which bodies are presented, treated and adorned.

On the occasion of her touring exhibition, “Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental” at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, the artist looked back at her 30 year-long career and Border Crossings talked with her. The exhibition was mounted first at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and is currently at the Musée Art Contemporain in Montreal.

Border Crossings talks with young Vancouver-based artist Vanessa Brown whose work is a feminist tribute to accessories. “Her art talks and listens”, says writer Lee Henderson. With references to the female artists—Louise Bourgeois, Camille Claudel, Marianne Brandt, Aganetha Dyck and Valerie Blass who inspire her, Brown presents stunning installations and sculpture.

Montreal-based South African artist Trevor Gould discusses the importance of the double in his work, as well as the complexities of the interaction between nature and culture. “I’ve been looking back on my work and two things always seem to come together in some kind of opposition–you have black and white, primate and human, you have belief and reason.”

Also in this issue Irene Bindi on the formative avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas, as well as an article by Stephen Horne on Annette Messager in the inaugural exhibition at the Giacometti Foundation, and a Borderview on Noam Gonick’s and Bernie Miller’s public art piece; “Bloody Saturday”, a commemoration of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike.

In our Crossover section there are reviews on the exhibitions of; Dana Schutz, Dana Claxton, Mickalene Thomas, Bahar Noorizadeh, Theaster Gates, Nep Sidhu, Paul Klee, Julie Nagam, David McMillan, Hervé Guibert, Mamma Andersson, and others.

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PERIPHERAL REVIEW | Speculative Methodologies: Veils of a Bog at The Western Front

By Gillian Haigh

Just beyond the small reception area of the Western Front, a black doorway called to me. Inside, a chorus of echoing crickets and croaks harmonized with an unworldly drone. The noise beckoned me into the tenebrous space, pulling me through the doorway into a cloth hallway cloaked in total darkness. The room opened up to reveal a dimly lit space with three large metal mobiles laden with collections of fabric, moss, dried leaves, flowers, photographs, and other found objects. The materials hung, some sweeping the floor or wall as they slowly rotated on chains. These strangely figurative compositions, coupled with the otherworldly symphonic hum of the soundscape, welcomed visitors to sink into the bog.

Veils of a Bog is a collaborative exhibition between Vanessa Brown’s sculptural practice and Michelle Helene Mackenzie’s Post-Meridiem (2018) soundscape composition. Hosted by the Western Front, an established artist run centre in Vancouver BC, Veils of a Bog is an experimental installation that investigates the liminal landscape of a bog as a place of decay and new life—a space that is both unnerving and calming, repulsive and enticing.

From a distance in the partial darkness the large, slowly revolving mobiles seemed figurative, with ovoid shapes near the top and limbs branching out from the centre. The growing noise of the bog drove me forward, and as I moved closer, the materials revealed themselves: draped gauze and ribbon created curtains that caught the dim yellow light. Watching the mobiles turn, I came across a paperclip and a fishing lure so matted into the mesh, it looked as if it had been dredged up from the bog’s depths. Moss sprung from the metal armature like a vigorous weed and bundles of dried grass were carefully attached to the rotating frame, brushing the walls as it passed. Indistinct photographs—reminiscent of limbs—were suspended and turned slowly between image and blank back-sides. The competing yet harmonizing sounds of bog critters combined with the unnatural droning tones aided in transforming the exhibition into a fully immersive ecological landscape.

Within the exhibition, the relationship between the representational and the real became blurred, therefore not only imitating the elements of a bog, but also redefining them as a metaphorical space of liminality. In the dim light, the forms of the mobiles themselves oscillated between signifying structures in a forest, or figures, be it human or something more ghostly. The darkness heightened Mackenzie’s soundscape, calling upon a summers evening with the familiar sounds of crickets chirping, frogs croaking and the warble of birds calling out in the night. From the organic symphony of the marsh emerged the underlying drone, growing into waves of sound that, at times, drowned out the various chatter of the bog’s creatures. The origin of this unnatural noise is unclear—at first I believed it might be something mechanical—but the drone’s ethereal quality and shifting monotonous complexity suggested otherwise. Together, Brown’s use of industrial and organic materials merged with Mackenzie’s enveloping soundscape to perform the unfixed, unsettling, and often contradictory space of the bog.  Even though the exhibition is hardly an accurate representation of a natural bog, it more directly addressed its ‘veils’—its mysterious and mystical nature. The work called for getting lost in this metaphysical space.

Contemplating the work, I recalled Rachel Jones’ essay “On the Value of Not Knowing: Wonder, Beginning Again and Letting Be.” In her essay, Jones took the theme of ‘not knowing’ as a strategy for art making and encouraging criticality. Similarly, Mackenzie and Brown pursued the unfamiliar and unresolved. Their assemblage of textiles, organic matter, images, and sensory mediums indicated and encouraged what Jones called “thinking and making without knowing where one is going”. (1) The installation seemed to be fashioned in an improvisational manner, by reacting to materials and listening to the forms they would and would not hold.

Similarly, I as a viewer, was asked to let go of my rational and codified understanding of the collected materials and instead interpret how they might perform the uncanny aspects of a bog. Particularly, the exhibition called upon a type of ‘material intelligence’ which “implies not only human intelligence about matter, but the intelligence of matter, understood as adaptive and self-organising”. (2) Within both the visual and auditory works in the exhibition, the balance evoked between natural and unnatural, beauty and decay, and fascination and revulsion metaphorically echoed the duality and precariousness of the bog’s unrefined obscurity. Framing the bog as a space straddling extremes, as well as the work’s entrenchment in the metaphorical, both challenged structuralist ideas of truth and rationalism. As Jones maintains, passage into the unknown, not yet encoded, or unfamiliar “hints at an entirely different way of coming to know someone or something, involving an attunement of the senses to that which is other and irreducible to those frameworks”. (3) Brown and Mackenzie’s work demands the viewer let go of knowing and give time to feel, ruminate, and digest. The viewer becomes a component to the ecosystem, breaking down old material to produce something new.

Considering a more general context of this work, I can’t help but think of Vancouver as an urban space. Similar to a bog, Vancouver is a city distinguished by its dualities; it is a place of extreme wealth and poverty, of rising mountains and stretching seas, of industry and nature, and of a short colonial history and a long Indigenous one. Just as a bog is built on a bed of decay, the land has a history that is entrenched into the ground we stand on. But through the strange unworldly drone of the city, it is easy to ignore the duality of the land, and the complex history which lays beneath the concrete.

Veils of a Bog embraces the undetermined, suggesting there are more complex, transformative, and unsettled ways of thinking. The shifting duality of the bog creates an incomprehensible diversity of meaning that asks to be examined without expectation. Vanessa Brown and Michelle Helene Mackenzie call for an attunement of the senses to confuse and challenge that which is already encoded. This proposition, although framed within the representation of a bog, can be expansively applied to examine our political and environmental landscape, particularly in many Canadian cities, where space has become a privileged and colonial commodity.  Mackenzie and Brown ask as we move through the bustling city, that we pause and listen to the complexity of the land—how the trees whisper a history in the breeze, and faint crickets and croaks emerge from the shadows.

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1. Jones, Rachel. “On the Value of Not Knowing: Wonder, Beginning Again and Letting Be” On Not Knowing: How Artists Think. London: Black Dog Publishing(2013), 1.

2. Jones. “On the Value of Not Knowing: Wonder, Beginning Again and Letting Be”, 2.

3. ibid.

Veils of a Bog ran from September 14 – October 20th, 2018 at the Western Front in Vancouver.

Feature Image: Installation view of Veils of a Bog (2018). Photo by John Dean, courtesy of the Western Front.

SCULPTURE MAGAZINE | Vanessa Brown at The Esker Foundation

By Maeve Hanna

Purple, pastel blues, greens, pinks, and iridescent white inhabit the works in Vanessa Brown's recent exhibition "The Witching Hour." Brown presents a synthesis of delicacy and brute strength, demonstrating a fine balance between feminist aesthetics and traditional sculpture. Her work exemplifies a feminized practice epitomized through steel, a material associated with industry, "male" sculpture, and warfare.

"The Witching Hour" was at once a dreamscape, a jewelry store, and a wonderland of opulence and mystery. A boudoir scene greeted viewers on entering the gallery. An oversize clock frowned over the scene, winking away the time; two sheer kimonos made from mesh fabric hung from steel frames; and delicate earrings made of glass and steel, sized for a giant, dangled from a frame, while another pair rested on the floor. Two oversize ashtrays, one with a cigarette in place, completed the tableau. Hanging nearby, a large tablet etched with symbols spelled out a mystifying dream sequence in a language understood only by the artist. Macro vs micro played into this mise en scène, with intimate, small-scale objects blown up in scale. This deliberate shift transported viewers across a threshold into a word where personal moments are reimagined as a psychic escape from reality.

Leaving the installation, which was titled Late Night Trip to the Jewellers, viewers entered a gallery that doubled as a virtual jewellery shop. Here, Brown scaled down her work, unveiling another aspect of her practice. Smaller sculptures in pearlescent hues, resembling vases and centrepieces, sat on plinths. Rods strewn with various sculptures punctuated the space, offering Brown’s version of charm bracelets. These elongated forms took on an almost mystical effect while again playing with scale. Stretched and unfurled, they told stories through the sequence of the attached pieces. For Brown, the body, especially the femail body, is a salient reference point; her works demonstrate what is achievable with the body while also speaking to what the body knows.

There is an aspect of whimsy in Brown’s abaility to exaggerate with material and scale while also playing with subject matter. Within these scenes, which evokes what she calls interstitial spaces, viewers found themselves between reality and reverie. Moving through the exhibition, viewers happened upon a larger-than-life mobile engaged in a dace of form and shape as it twisted in the purple light of an imagined greenhouse. The greenhouse, while seemingly simple, disrupted the binary between masculine and feminine that often defines the materiality of sculptural work.

“The Witching Hour” was an accomplished show. Each carefully curated environment was designed to submerge the viewer in an alternate consciousness. The result was an envisioning of what could be seen as a form of armour. Brown infuses a material that evolved from strength and virility with delicacy, intimacy, and emotionality, reinterpreting the role of steel in contemporary art.

CANADIAN ART
Vanessa Brown + Michelle Helene Mackenzie

Review by Michael Turner

Vancouver’s fascination with real estate has some town-talkers conversant in topics that extend beyond rock-star developer and rezoning applications to include architecture, history, and more recently, geography. Case in point: a couple of years ago, over coffee at Le Marché St. George (formerly Gareth Moore and Jacob Gleeson’s corner-shop/social structure St. George Marsh), I witnessed an elderly resident explain to a grumpy house hunter that the block’s sidewalks are buckling because the neighbourhood was built on a swamp. While Vancouver’s Tea Swamp is by no means the focus of Vanessa Brown and Michelle Helene Mackenzie’s recent collaboration “Veils of a Bog,” its system is: a gothic wetland of mosses and ericaceous shrubs powered by an ostinato of regeneration and decay.

The exhibition took its title from a trio of slowly rotating assemblages by Brown, each comprising of a seven-and-a-half-foot vertical steel rod suspended from the ceiling of the darkened gallery. Hanging from shorter rods that branch off these frames, like notations on a musical staff, are oil and gouache paintings, charcoal drawings, dried flora (flowers, bulrush, grass), branches, moss, shrimp hooks, ribbon, netting, beads, paper clips and shells. An array of amber-gelled lights cast a glow on the installation in equal parts autumn chiaroscuro, and sepia-toned photography. On the ceiling and near the corners of the floor, speakers emitted Michelle Helene Mackenzie’s Post Meridiem (2018), a multi-channel composition of found sounds associated with bog fauna, a single woofer and four more speakers on the floor do the same for an oscillating ground-bass growl.

Visitors to this soothing installation were offered a choice of wooden stools or beanbag chairs on which to sit and commune with the elements— or read them, as the case may be. I found myself doing a bit of both, my body slowed down by an artificial and historically distant sun, my mind accelerated by a desire to make sense of the exhibition’s strange assemblages. Indeed, if an installation can evoke a punctum, this could be it: not a vibration, nor a propositional visitation, but an in-between place, a contradiction. Like the bog itself, Brown and Mackenzie evoke a place associated with rot, one that enables new life forms, medicinal cures, fuel for fires. After hearing that Le Marché St George is on swampland, I went online and learned that during the Second World War, the US Government purchased peat from another Lower Mainland swamp, Burns Bog, toward the making of its firebombs.

“Veils of a Bog” is a strange title consistent with the work’s witchy nature. What powers its assemblages is elusive: it appears sonically, mysteriously, in the installation’s rolling score. Is this rolling related to buckling sidewalks? Something to think about next time you pass that way.

ARSENAL CONTEMPORARY
Of Earrings, Tears and Jewellers: The Sculptures of Vanessa Brown

by Anna Kovler

Resting somewhere between dream and reality, Vanessa Brown’s sculptures test the boundaries of the familiar. What we normally encounter on a small scale, like a pair of earrings or a cigarette, take on impossibly strange proportions in her metal and glass works. The oversized earring clasp jumps out first. Immediately recognizable as that loop that enters the earlobe, securing ones earrings in place, the detail stirs uncanny feelings, suggesting another dimension where objects mysteriously bend and shift. Unanswered questions arise. Are these still earrings? Even at that scale?

It is said that jewellery says something about a person. Standing nearly ten feet tall, Stained Glass Earrings + Stand (2018) might feel imposing if not for its pastel shapes and slender steel lines. Yet below the soft surface other meanings dwell. On one earring, the shape of an eye discreetly cries light blue tears, hinting at more complex realities below the surface of objects of costume or decoration.

Brown’s sculptures hail from a liminal space, like the moments between a state of sleep and wakefulness, when the dream you are in isn’t fully over but you’re not in the real world yet. Her oversized ashtray earrings refer to the similarly ambiguous space of a cigarette break. “I always understood smoking as a break,” she notes, “the break would be my little way of going outside and pulling aside the zipper of reality. I think of this installation as ways to access other places, like a portal, and communicate from those spaces as well.”

Working with metal on a large scale and embarking on collaborations with jewellers, Brown’s practice addresses the gendered history of artistic labor. For her 2016 exhibition The Hand of Camille, the artist took inspiration from Camille Claudel, a sculptor known for the emotional intensity and heroicism of her figures. During her career however, Claudel was limited in the scope and scale she could work on, as women artists were still severely disadvantaged at the end of the 19th century.

The exhibition currently on view is part of the installation Late Night Trip to the Jewellers, which was shown at the Esker Foundation earlier this year. As the enigmatic title suggests (what can one possibly do at the jeweller’s at night?), these works offer playful, surreal and sincere mediations on everyday objects and the psychic spaces they inhabit.

—
Vanessa Brown’s Pages From Late Night Trip to the Jewellers opens at Arsenal Contemporary Toronto on October 26, 2018 as part of the Art Toronto West End Gallery Crawl and runs until December 22, 2018. It was produced with support of the Esker Foundation Commission Fund.

CANADIAN ART
Four Canadian Galleries Selected for NYC’s Armory Show

by Leah Sandals

The exhibitors’ list for the 25th anniversary edition of New York’s Armory Show was released on Monday, and there are four Canadian galleries due to participate.

Two of these galleries—Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran of Montreal and Miriam Shiell Fine Art of Toronto—are new to the Armory. Two others—Daniel Faria Gallery of Toronto and Parisian Laundry of Montreal—have shown at the Armory previously.

Antoine Ertaskiran of Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran tells Canadian Art that 2018 was already a busy year of new fairs for the gallery, including MiArt in Milan and Art Los Angeles Contemporary in LA. And he’s looking forward to the Armory in 2019.

“We’ll be showing works by [Vancouver’s] Vanessa Brown and Michael Stamm, a young artist from New York,” Ertaskiran says. “New York is a major capital of the art world, but it’s part of our mission to be exhibiting at important fairs to be able to showcase Canadian talent and to grow the gallery.”

Brown works mainly in sculpture, while Stamm will be presenting wall works, “so we can have a nice dynamic booth, especially for our first participation,” says Ertaskiran. Ertaskiran will be in the Presents section of the fair, which focuses on galleries less than 10 years old presenting work by emerging artists.

Though Ertaskiran, like Faria and Parisian Laundry, focuses on contemporary art, fellow Armory newbie Miriam Shiell specializes in secondary-market 20th-century art. As a result, Shiell will be part of the Insights section of the fair, which is dedicated exclusively to 20th-century artworks.

“Robert Motherwell, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Milton Avery” are a few of the artists Shiell hopes to focus on at her Armory booth. “Also a small group of black and white works on paper, like Dubuffet and Miro and Matisse. And an Arp sculpture as well.”

“New York is still a huge financial centre, and hopefully there will be action there,” says Shiell. She says since she started her gallery in 1978, the business has changed considerably, with more and more clients focusing on fairs. “I’ve never been a big fan of art fairs, but these days because the gallery business has changed so much,” she says. “Basically I feel like I’ve got the inventory, so I have to pick up make the effort and go to market.”

As for the other two Canadian galleries at the fair: Parisian Laundry will be part of the Focus section curated by Lauren Haynes, who is also curator of contemporary art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. That Parisian Laundry booth will focus on recent paintings by Yukon-based artist Joseph Tisiga. Daniel Faria Gallery will be in the Presents section of the fair. The Armory Show runs March 7 to 9, 2019, in New York.

by Leah Sandals
NOVEMBER 29, 2018

Leah Sandals is news and special sections editor at Canadian Art. A graduate of NSCAD University and McGill University, she has also written for the Toronto Star, National Post and Globe and Mail. She welcomes tips, corrections and comments any time at leah@canadianart.ca.

ARTORONTO.CA | Wild Inside

Review by Nathan Flint

Wild Inside | Clint Roenisch Gallery
Curated by Pamela Meredith
October 26 ~ November 24, 2018

Wild Inside at Clint Roenisch Gallery is a group exhibition inspired by the broad potential and specific act of guerrilla gardening in an urban environment undertaken by the gallerist in front of their location on St. Helens Avenue.

Before entering the gallery and seeing the current show, guests see the facade of the building, a former commercial facility with a large retractable overhead door, now featuring numerous natural wood structures, benches and logs that house garden beds and growing foliage. This area is as much a site of production as it is aesthetic since it generates vegetation growth, artistic inspiration and potential for reclaiming environments from the hard, brutal landscape of the modern urban dwelling.

Upon entering, we pass the lounge area which maintains a similar aesthetic of reclaimed materials and eco-design.

Under the vinyl sign Wild Inside, Vanessa Brown’s Ovule sits on a plinth. A plaster cast of a hand is grasping a dried sprig of an unidentified plant referred to in the exhibition catalogue as “flowers”.Ovule is the word for an immature germ cell that becomes a seed after fertilization. The hand seems mutated or interdimensional, either like it has grown new fingers or it is an image locked between two states of movement or maybe multiple hands are overlapping while grasping for the same thing. The piece could be interpreted allegorically as an imagined, post-apocalyptic mutant picking what may be some scarce plant for nutrition, or perhaps it speaks about the desperation of the current times or for how we all are so quick to pluck native weeds to maintain our unnatural and finely groomed lawns and gardens. Regardless of interpretation, it is a great beginning of the rest of the exhibition.

In the front gallery space, we see a collection of work by artist HaeAhn Kwon, featuring a peculiar material; baked bread. The flour used to make the bread was mixed with dirt and is shown alongside or as a part of found objects. Kwon manages to incorporate the physical materiality of both the urban and garden aspects of the exhibition’s theme through their use as reclaimed or up-cycled objects. Her sculptures meld the discarded elements of culinary arts with the discarded pieces of industrial design. The end results are assemblages that surprisingly either share or contrast textures. In Bleed Water, bread, dirt, stone and a garden hose nozzle are all rendered with the same Sienna textured spray paint to homogenize the sculpture. The uniform colour and texture draws a comparison between the materials beneath the paint as well as suggests exposure to the outdoor elements. In Femme Vital the bread is mounded to prominently feature a circular hole in the middle and is adorned with thin gold chains reminiscent of necklaces. This work demonstrates a stark juxtaposition between the rather grotesque mound of the dirty bread-like substance and the elegance and femininity associated with the jewelry. Kwon’s pieces come across simultaneously as a mere novelty or playful use of the materials, and also as elusive poetry.

Tania Kitchell’s Sideroad Plantain is a collection of sculptures humbly placed in the corner of the white cube gallery with their own monochromatic white palette nearly blending into the background. Upon close examination, the pieces are a beautiful rendering of plants. They are 3D printed and made of ABS plastic. The work is uncanny and verges on disturbing, since they bear such a strong likeness to real plants, but also deviate from the real with fragments of computer rendering and unnatural colouring. Other versions of this work, exhibited in other contexts and forms, reveal the artist’s intent to model species of plants that have been discovered in Arctic territories where they not native but populating the area due to human activities. The alien-like aesthetic of the all-white plants are intentional as we associate the Arctic with white snow. Introducing foreign species can be detrimental to the balance of nature but can also be hopeful in the dead, greyness of urban environments, where plants manage to penetrate and change in order to maintain their presence in habitats that we think of as uninhabitable.

Tania Kitchell’s work also demonstrates the resilience and strength of plant life. In the series titled after various rooms, we see weeds, grasses and flowers growing in tiny patches of domestic spaces. To me, the work seems to suggest a necessity of cohabitation with nature, instead of dominating or ostracizing it. The work ties itself beautifully to the inspiration of Clint Roenish’s sidewalk garden and brings the idea and importance of gardening to a very personal and accessible space – the home.

Lorna Bauer has a suspended sculpture titled Bromeliad (Margaret Mee), in the corner of the gallery. The piece is a representation of a plant from the bromeliad family (the same as the pineapple) and features a long, spiraled root made from pink glass. A common air plant, the bromeliad is cast in bronze and glass, two dense, heavy materials which are a complete inversion from the typical lightness of the real plant. The title of the work pays homage to the late botanical artist Margaret Mee whose work had a significant role in environmentalism, particularly in the Amazon. Some members of the bromeliad family have adapted to extremely harsh climates, from rainforests to deserts and even man-made environments, such as growing on telephone poles and other structures for support.

In her photographic series Sitio Roberto Burle Marx, Bauer has captured beautiful images that use glass reflections to create double images of architecture and the gardens of Sitio Roberto Burle Marx in Brazil. The significance of Roberto Burle Marx and this UNESCO Heritage site named after him is profound, since the park hosts over 3,500 species of plants from the Brazilian rainforests. Burle Marx is an activist for conservation of the rainforest and, as a landscape designer, has left an indelible mark on public gardens throughout the world. The photos themselves are beautiful pictures that show how gardens and architecture can so easily meld into and complement each other, creating beauty, function and sustainability.

Maryanne Casasanta’s video piece Morning And Its Summer is a 7 minute 23-second long video that features a hand tracing the patterns formed by woodworms under the bark of trees. The tree trunk the artist is engaging with is presumably the same that audiences passed by in front of the gallery, an integral part of the gallery’s sidewalk garden. The work is mesmerizing and simulates the haptic, tactile senses of navigating through touch. The gesture of tracing the lines in the wood demonstrates the performative potential of using naturally generated forms as a blueprint for directing human movement.

Casasanta’s remaining pieces are a set of four archival prints that depict a woman’s shadow on a peach-coloured backdrop with a flower in the foreground covering either the nipple or crotch of the figure. The titles of the pieces are Italian words for rose, sun, honey and violet. The figure casts a very strong silhouette, reminiscent of commercial models in magazines and advertisements, and emphasize the traditionally feminine features and curves. The plucked flowers and their placement on the body may signify the puritanical notion of virginity and the act of being “deflowered” by the viewers gaze. The ambiguity of meaning, its soft aesthetic and the use of stock imagery gives the series elegance and charm.

In the central space of the gallery are Vanessa Brown’s Robe for Sleepwalking and Robe for Daydreaming. The two pieces stand side by side facing the guests as they walk in. Situated on circular plinths and hung on black wire dress forms, the works are the most significant pieces in the room. They resemble invisible or disembodied twin figures in night robes waiting patiently to be approached. Robe for Sleepwalking is adorned with beads, shells and copper, while Robe for Daydreaming is decorated with dried, plastic and pressed flowers. Both pieces are presented as sculptures but feel like remnants of wearable art or costumes from performances. One can imagine wearing the pieces and attempting to enact the activities suggested by the titles. Together they seem to evoke a desire to remain between the waking life and the dream world, never fully in either and never fully removed. The decorations on the robes are presumably charms to respectively promote wakefulness or sleep, such as alchemical symbols or flowers from alternative medicine practices.

The exhibition is a wonderful collection of artworks that demonstrates how small acts, such as building a garden and taking care of plants, can be used to reflect the broader cultural and environmental issues we face today. No small act of resistance or kindness goes unnoticed and the exhibition celebrates this fact with enthusiasm, intelligence and fascinating aesthetic explorations.

—

*Exhibition information: Wild Inside / Lorna Bauer, Diane Borsato, Vanessa Brown, Maryanne Casasanta, Tania Kitchell, HaeAhn Kwon, organized by Pamela Meredith, October 26 ~ November 24, 2018. Clint Roenisch Gallery, 190 St Helens Avenue, Toronto. Gallery hours: Wed – Sat, 12 – 6 p.m.

ARTSPEAK RADIO DIGEST | CFRO 100.5FM Tuesdays 9-10pm | Episode 2

Interview with Erik Hood

HOSTS: BRADY CRANFIELD, GABI DAO, EMMA METCALFE-HURST, AUTUMN SCHNELL, BOPHA CHHAY, ERIK HOOD
September 18–November 27, 2018

Artspeak Radio Digest is a three month long program, run in partnership with Vancouver Co-op Radio a community radio station based in the Downtown Eastside since 1973. Taking the form of an audio journal, ARD is an expanded approach to the organization’s publishing program. Each show has been conceived as an issue of an audio journal. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the digest format will feature new commissions, sound works, poetry, radio plays and music amongst other forms utilizing radio as a medium. The program will be collectively produced and hosted by Brady Cranfield, Gabi Dao, Emma Metcalfe-Hurst and Autumn Schnell with support from Bopha Chhay and Erik Hood.

The form of radio can seem overtly nostalgic. Why radio? Why now? Artists have long harnessed airwaves as a medium. Radio has long provided a distinct alternative for the presentation of artistic practice outside of the gallery. Radio shifts focus from the visual to the aural, challenging visual primacy in artistic practice. Co-op’s programming has included shows by artists since it’s founding. These include the long-standingSoundscape, first founded by Hildegard Westerkamp, The HP Radio Show hosted by Hank Bull and Patrick Ready and Lux Radio Players.

Airwaves as a medium presents other challenges. Seemingly intangible, airwaves do not escape commodification, as corporations jockey for licensing rights. Actively working to counter commercial interests, Co-op’s community based programming remains distinct in its prioritization of perspectives, forms and voices not heard through conventional media avenues. Public broadcast regulations dictate what we can say and play during certain hours, as we’re obligated to abide by national broadcasting standards. There are things we can say, things we can’t say and things we won’t say. In Canada, after 9pm, restrictions and quotas ease up. Be sure to tune in weekly to CFRO 100.5-FM beginning Tuesday, September 18, 2018 from 9 to 10pm PST for the first issue of Artspeak Radio Digest.

Thank you to our partners at Vancouver Co-op Radio, Robert Moya and Kimit Sekhon.

ARD is part of year of programming at Artspeak that considers ways of learning and studying together as a collaborative process and practice. Upcoming programming will challenge the role of the artist-run center, notably asking how it can contribute to creating space allowing for new forms of engagement to reimagine current limits in cultural production and shape alternative practices. Before the rain really sets in, we’ll take a short hike to Mount Seymour where Co-op’s Transmitter has been located since 1982.

EPISODE 02
+ ARD modus operandi by Bopha Chhay
+ Erik Hood interviews Vanessa Brown
+ Jen Weih introduces The Foreshore Listens with Bopha Chhay
 + Second part of Brady Cranfield’s interview with Vincent Tao

CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY
30th Annual Gala and Art Auction

Saturday, November 3, 2018

Thank you!

We wish to extend a heartfelt thank you for your generous support of the Contemporary Art Gallery’s 30th Annual Gala and Art Auction.

Your participation provides crucial support for our learning, exhibitions, residencies and public outreach work. We applaud your commitment to the arts and culture of the city that enables us to achieve what we set out to do each year. It creates the lasting impact and legacy that touches many lives in significant ways as the Contemporary Art Gallery continues its work for Vancouver, here and beyond.

We look forward to seeing you at the Contemporary Art Gallery in the future as we continue to make exciting projects, events and programming.

We express our sincere gratitude to all of the artists, their representing galleries, individuals, sponsors and our dedicated volunteers who have made this event possible.

-Brett Clark

ARSENAL TORONTO
Pages from Late Night Trip to the Jewellers
Project Space

OCTOBER 26 – DECEMBER 22, 2018
VANESSA BROWN

Pages from Late Night Trip to the Jewellers at Arsenal Contemporary Toronto Project Space
Curated by Jenna Faye Powell
Public Opening
Friday, October 26th

Arsenal Contemporary Toronto is proud to present Vanessa Brown’s exhibition Pages from Late Night Trip to the Jewellers produced with support of the Esker Foundation Commission Fund.

CLINT ROENISCH
Wild Inside

Curated by Pamela Meredith

Wild Inside
Curated by Pamela Meredith
Clint Roenisch Gallery
26 October - 24 November

Lorna Bauer, Diane Borsato, Vanessa Brown, Maryanne Casasanta, Tania Kitchell, HaeAhn Kwon

Wild Inside is about this space, the sidewalk, and the street. It is about the gallerist. It is about the artists and their preoccupations, and it is about me. It is about you as you pass into the gallery. Exhibitions are always about these things, and more.

The impulse to create a garden on the sidewalk as Clint has done is ambitious (and yet humble), generous, and subversive. It’s a grounding gesture; an engagement with creating something authentic, mindful, and concrete (out of the concrete). Roenisch’s guerilla garden provides a touchstone for he and his family, for artists, viewers, the community, and for Wild Inside.Each of the artists in the exhibition unearths the potential of the garden as a nourishing, curative, creative, radical endeavor. HaeAhn Kwon presents sculptural seed mounds that fuse the structural with the generative. Tania Kitchell’s living room garden plots suggest benign, creeping reclamation. Lorna Bauer’s photographs exalt and synthesize the work of Brazilian modernist landscape architect Burle Marx. Vanessa Brown’s Robes For Sleepwalking and Daydreamingare suffused with botany and hint at other, liminal worlds. Maryanne Casasanta’s erotic blossoms and shadow-play are fecund and suggestively ripe, while Diane Borsato’s opening-night-only organic Arrangements mark the fleeting beauty and formal rigour of ikebana. Altogether the exuberant and the ornamental, the manicured and the messy, the porosity of interior and exterior, is foregrounded and excavated.

– Pamela Meredith

AKIMBO
Veils of a Bog at The Western Front

by Steffanie Ling

VANCOUVER
STEFFANIE LING
VEILS OF A BOG AT WESTERN FRONT
September 19, 2018

After passing through a darkened vestibule, we emerge into copper light and are greeted by three spinning mobiles, Vanessa Brown’s cohort of sculptures collectively titled Veils of a Bog, submerged in the sonic bath of Michelle Helene Mackenzie’s multi-channel sound composition Post Meridiem. Three tiers of horizontal steel rods with notches at the tips spin like outstretched arms with their palms up. Organic matter such as dried flowers, branches, and bulrushes orbit with human designs like photographs and drawings. Seeing the mechanized rotation of Brown’s mobile sculptures as slow-motion pirouettes imply that they have bodies, but also that they possess personalities and excitements transmitted through the movement of the selected materials and surface treatments. Composing the sculpture’s anatomy are sheer textiles that are suspended like an excerpt of fog. Large photographs of Byzantine sculptures, mostly women and sections of their clothes, hang from the summit of the sculpture giving its steel skeleton a kind of skin that bears the representation of a body. 

Mackenzie’s sound composition seems to fulfill the representation of a substance that preserves the movement and atmosphere in the exhibition room. The positioning of two audio elements locates us, the audience/visitor/interloper, in their bog. Firstly, field recordings of animals and insects are positioned high above the sculptures and play across four speakers. Second, a low frequency drone emits from four speakers and a subwoofer that are positioned against the walls and floor of the gallery. This arrangement steeps the infrastructure with the setting, further encasing our experience in the worlding of Brown and Mackenzie’s works. Mingling recognizable organic sounds with a less figurative or descriptive sound presents a sonic analogue to the sculpture’s materialism. Post Meridiem was produced as a site-specific accompaniment to Brown’s body of work, a score for the sculptures, but the notion of a “site-specific” is treated with a compelling flexibility. The “site” has been dislodged from geographic specificity and is comprised of a world that is reconstituted when these works come together to facilitate it. 


Veils of a Bog continues until October 20. 
Western Front: https://front.bc.ca/ 
The gallery is accessible. 


Steffanie Ling's essays, criticism, and art writing have been published alongside exhibitions, in print, and online in Canada, the United States, and Europe. She is an editor of Charcuterie and co-curator at VIVO Media Arts Centre. Her books are Nascar (Blank Cheque, 2016) and Cuts of Thin Meat (Spare Room, 2015). She is Akimblog’s Vancouver correspondent and can be followed on Twitter and Instagram @steffbao.

GALLERIES WEST
Vanessa Brown and Michelle Helene Mackenzie Veils of a Bog

The Western Front
Opening: September 13 @ 7 - 9pm
September 14 - October 20th, 2018

Peaty and tannic, soft and saturated with water, a bog is place brimming with life forms, yet built up on a bed of decay. Veils of a Bog is a collaboration between artists Vanessa Brown and Michelle Helene Mackenzie that combines Brown’s material practice in sculpture with Mackenzie’s multi-channel sound compositionPost Meridiem. Slowly rotating in a dark gallery, three steel armatured mobiles, clad with paper, fabric, leaves and moss are suspended in an aural wash of crickets, toads, birds and a blanket of droning tones to imagine the bog as a meditative and regenerative place.

In her sculptures, Brown often uses steel as the primary material. Eschewing its heavy, industrial connotations, Brown wields sheets of metal into light, pliable forms, at times figurative, and at other times more abstract, with form being defined more by line and silhouette than by mass and volume. With Veils of a Bog, an armature of steel rods is used to support collaged elements as hanging sculptures that don't so much represent a bog as they evoke it. In Michelle Helene Mackenzie's composition that accompanies Brown's sculptural forms, the sounds most representative of a bog—the chirps of crickets and frogs—cascade down from the ceiling where they are enveloped in a four-channel drone.

Together, Brown and Mackenzie's work presents the bog as a comforting space, the lights are set at a warm, dim glow and the gallery is furnished with soft seating allowing viewers to literally sink into the space. But as calming as the environment is, Brown and Mackenzie's bog is also a space of ambivalence, echoing the tension inherent in an ecosystem where an abundance of rotting organic matter teems with life.

Veils of a Bog was produced for Vanessa Brown's solo exhibition The Witching Hour, which opened at Calgary's Esker Foundation in May, where it received support from the Esker Foundation Commission Fund. The installation is coming to the Western Front fresh from the exhibition in Calgary, giving Brown and Mackenzie's hometown audiences an opportunity to view their work.

Artist Biographies:

Vanessa Brown is an artist who works in sculpture and installation. Her primary medium is steel and she is interested in challenging its historical associations with industry, war, and monument, by focusing its subtler qualities such as pliability, versatility, and slightness. The imagery in her work draws from various sources including landscapes, historical crafts, recurring symbols from her own dreams, feminized labour, gestures of comfort, and ideas of escape. Vanessa Brown is based in Vancouver on the unceded territories of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people. Brown graduated with a BFA from Emily Carr University, Vancouver in 2013 and was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award. She has exhibited in Canada, Germany, the USA, and Mexico, notably with solo and two-person exhibitions at The Esker Foundation, Calgary; Erin Stump Projects, Toronto; Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver; and group exhibitions at the Nanaimo Art Gallery; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and King Street Station, Seattle.

Helene Mackenzie is a writer and interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with sound, video and text. She uses modular synthesizers, found sound, field recordings, digital processing, video, text, and archival research to explore sonic gesture, modes of perception, and acoustic imaginaries. This has culminated in site-specific sound installations, video, sound works, performances, and writing. Mackenzie holds a BA from Simon Fraser University, and spent five years pursuing a PhD in Literature from Duke University, where she studied with Fredric Jameson, Anne Garréta, and others. While there, she researched questions around the violence and cultural amnesia that devours female genius, time and temporality, early twentieth century French literature and film, and the history of sound studies, sonic philosophy, and the sonic arts. Mackenzie’s works have been performed and exhibited in San Francisco at Kadist Gallery, in Brooklyn at The Hand, in Calgary at Esker Foundation and in Vancouver at Western Front, 221A, VIVO, Sunset Terrace, The Fishbowl and Polygon Gallery. Her work has also been released in conjunction with writing via The Operating System (Brooklyn), The Cultch's Soft Cedar and The Capilano Review's Small Caps (Vancouver).

THE WESTERN FRONT
Veils of a Bog
Vanessa Brown + Michelle Helene Mackenzie

Peaty and tannic, soft and saturated with water, a bog is place brimming with life forms, yet built up on a bed of decay. Veils of a Bog is a collaboration between artists Vanessa Brown and Michelle Helene Mackenzie that combines Brown’s material practice in sculpture with Mackenzie’s multi-channel sound composition Post Meridiem. Slowly rotating in a dark gallery, three steel armatured mobiles, clad with paper, fabric, leaves and moss are suspended in an aural wash of crickets, toads, birds and a blanket of droning tones to imagine the bog as a meditative and regenerative place.

Veils of a Bog was produced with the support of the Esker Foundation Commission Fund

Artist Biographies:

Vanessa Brown is an artist who works in sculpture and installation. Her primary medium is steel and she is interested in challenging its historical associations with industry, war, and monument, by focusing its subtler qualities such as pliability, versatility, and slightness. The imagery in her work draws from various sources including landscapes, historical crafts, recurring symbols from her own dreams, feminized labour, gestures of comfort, and ideas of escape.

Vanessa Brown is based in Vancouver on the unceded territories of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people. Brown graduated with a BFA from Emily Carr University, Vancouver in 2013 and was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award. She has exhibited in Canada, Germany, the USA, and Mexico, notably with solo and two-person exhibitions at The Esker Foundation, Calgary; Erin Stump Projects, Toronto; Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver; and group exhibitions at the Nanaimo Art Gallery; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and King Street Station, Seattle.

Michelle Helene Mackenzie is a writer and interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with sound, video and text. She uses modular synthesizers, found sound, field recordings, digital processing, video, text, and archival research to explore sonic gesture, modes of perception, and acoustic imaginaries. This has culminated in site-specific sound installations, video, sound works, performances, and writing. Mackenzie holds a BA from Simon Fraser University, and spent five years pursuing a PhD in Literature from Duke University, where she studied with Fredric Jameson, Anne Garréta, and others. While there, she researched questions around the violence and cultural amnesia that devours female genius, time and temporality, early twentieth century French literature and film, and the history of sound studies, sonic philosophy, and the sonic arts. Mackenzie’s works have been performed and exhibited in San Francisco at Kadist Gallery, in Brooklyn at The Hand, in Calgary at Esker Foundation and in Vancouver at Western Front, 221A, VIVO, Sunset Terrace, The Fishbowl and Polygon Gallery. Her work has also been released in conjunction with writing via The Operating System (Brooklyn), The Cultch’s Soft Cedar and The Capilano Review’s Small Caps (Vancouver).

AKIMBO
Vanessa Brown: Late Night Trip to the Jewellers

by Lindsay Sorell

CALGARY
LINDSAY SORELL
VANESSA BROWN AT ESKER FOUNDATION
August 15, 2018

It could be Esker Foundation’s revolving entrance door, but my breath is taken away by the theatrical display that greets me from a semi-circular dais. Two sheer black housecoats stand upright with sleeves extended as if actors from The Costume Institute. They hang on simple steel stands, reminiscent of kimono displays, with earrings hung inside and outside on their fabric. Some are made of dried flowers and others of sculpted metal, like charms to be carried with the wearer of the coat. Then, after getting context from these human-scale housecoats and earrings, we enter a giant world.Next to the housecoats, hanging on an enormous stand, are two large-scale, pastel-coloured earrings, complete with massive ear hooks. Next to the earrings lie two more on the dais, face-down, displaying a secret compartment on their backs to hold a single cigarette. Behind them, leaning against the wall on the dais, is a gravestone-shaped piece of metal engraved with symbols: wine glasses, a teardrop, a snake. These motifs repeat throughout the exhibition. Above all, a clock on the wall is too tired to observe, its eyelash-rimmed eyes sleeping, its numbers askew, and its hour and minute hands absurdly long. 

This piece, titled Late Night Trip to the Jeweller’s and part of Vanessa Brown’s exhibition The Witching Hour, is the recounting of an artist’s “stress-induced fever dream” where language is a system of symbols, and information or stories must be passed along the inside of garments. The work is stunning for its playful imaginativeness and skilful craftsmanship. It revels in the humorous impracticality, the anti-usefulness, of its objects: earrings too big to be worn, a clock that doesn’t work, a housecoat primarily meant to transfer messages. All of Brown’s steel and MDF sculptures follow this theme of humorous myth-making, ghostly silhouettes, and child-like – but large-scale – charms. The exhibition is an extended nightmare of a still life. 

The staged presentation of the work and its highlighted relationship to the body calls to mind the artist’s expressed interest in fashion and, in particular, the minimalist, gender fluid ‘anti-fashion’explosion of the 1990s in Paris that included Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto. These designers, both having moved from Japan to France, played a transformative anti-Imperialist role in fashion at the time, rejecting trends and traditionally gendered silhouettes for more minimal works, often with unfinished, scrappy hems or variations on the kimono. The role of wearable art in collapsing gender roles and flipping the gendering of professions runs parallel to Brown’s use of steel. She contextualizes steel as feminized and jewellery as de-feminized, and challenges associations with scale as carrying a gendered power. Reactionary now to our time, The Witching Hour realizes the mythical space between three and four a.m. when the dreams and spells of women can thrive. 


Vanessa Brown: The Witching Hour continues until September 2. 
Esker Foundation: https://eskerfoundation.com/ 
The gallery is accessible. 


Lindsay Sorell is an artist and writer who recently collaborated with the Advanced Toastmasters of Calgary for the IKG Live 1 performance festival and completed two solo exhibitions of new work:Exercises in Healing at Contemporary Calgary and Buddha, Why Am I Alone? at AVALANCHE! Institute of Contemporary Art. She is currently working on a large-scale watercolour painting of food and is the editor of Luma Quarterly. She is Akimblog's Calgary correspondent and can be followed on Instagram.

GALLERIES WEST
Vanessa Brown: The Witching Hour

The Esker Foundation | Vanessa Brown: The Witching Hour
Opening Reception: Friday 25 May, 6 - 10 pm
MAY 26, 2018 TO SEP 2, 2018

Curated by Shauna Thompson

Vanessa Brown works in the space between strength and fragility through an alchemical fusing of steel, pigment, glass, and textile. Her work is hybrid and multidimensional: sculpture flirting with painting, symbolic narrative collage, a physical gestalt of states of consciousness. The Witching Hour brings together new installations and recent works, ranging in scale from larger-than-life to intimate. It is a proposal in material, colour, light, and sound; an invitation into an emotively charmed circle where magic, fantasy, and humour offer coded strategies to consider material histories, our connection to the natural and supernatural worlds, and gendered systems of labour, communication, and value.

Through a number of interrelated installations, Brown welcomes us into the liminal space between dreaming and consciousness, between the visionary and the here-and-now. Working primarily with steel, her imaginative formal constellations critique and counter the material’s traditional associations with the monumental, masculine, and its use in aggressive industry and military efforts. For Brown, the allure of steel rests in its subtler qualities, such as its malleability, adaptability, and delicateness attributes that allude to the rich territory of feminized narratives and material associations.

The exhibition leads us through a series of fantastic scenarios: a midnight trip to the jeweller’s piercing parlour; the comforting embrace of the bog; and within the light-filled, nurturing garden shed. The symbology of each scene—through material and form—is a dense and surreal system of storytelling. The entrance into Brown’s speculative reality—through the jeweller’s piercing parlour—greets us with a shop floor arranged with all of the accessories one might need for an otherworldly journey: robes for sleepwalking and daydreaming wait on their hangers for absent bodies; oversized earrings oscillate between the figurative and the abstract. Our state of consciousness is uncertain; an exhausted clock slumbers over our heads. While she is asleep, the rules of time and space have slipped. Against the wall rests a menu of options incised into steel, written in an unfamiliar symbolic language. The act of engraving is reminiscent both of tattooing into skin and also of engraving jewellery; the gesture of committing important information to metal as a method of communicating with and for the future.

Though their scale is large, the forms that these objects assume draw their reference point back to the human body. Practices of communicating coded messages through objects displayed on the body is one that recurs in Brown’s practice. Though the hierarchy of metalworking has historically relegated jewellery to a questionably subordinate realm of artisanal craft because of its bodily use, its metaphorical language, in particular, that of charm bracelets, is historically powerful and often feminized.

Typically worn to denote or commemorate personal narratives, milestones, and rites of passage, charms are often given and received as heirlooms, and unlike other valued forms of property—such as land and currencies, which have historically been passed down a patrilinear line—charm bracelets and jewellery tend to be passed intergenerationally through the hands of women.

Moving away from these works, we are drawn toward a chorus of amphibious croaks. Slipping into the dimness of a meditatively droning bog, we encounter the hypnotic movement of clusters of objects. Undulating as if caught in a slow eddy, these elements are suspended in front of us within a romantic, semi-apocalyptic swamp. The aura here is ambiguous, though the invitation to rest and stay awhile is clear. In the gentle flow, we find organic detritus, planetary reflections, and the debris of art history which has been liberated from the museum and sunken with us into the murk. The rotation of the mobiles gestures to a cyclical sense of time, and perhaps, the cycles of life and death. We are brought in close, enveloped by colour and sound: shrouded inside of an internal space, maternal and womblike, but unclearly prenatal or posthumous.

Vanessa Brown would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council.

She would also like to acknowledge and thank her studio assistants Joseph Band (metal), and Iman Hassan (textiles/robes), along with Michelle Mackenzie for her sound composition Post Meridiem for Veils of a Bog.

THE ESKER FOUNDATION | Vimeo

Vanessa Brown: The Witching Hour
Exhibition presented at Esker Foundation, Calgary:
May 26 to September 2, 2018.

Vanessa Brown would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council.

She would also like to acknowledge and thank her studio assistants Joseph Band (metal), and Iman Hassan (textiles/robes), along with Michelle Helene Mackenzie for her sound composition Post Meridiem for Veils of a Bog.

Works featured:
'Late Night Trip to the Jeweller’s,' 2018.

'The Greenhouse,' 2018.

Sculptures: 'Snake Gate,' 2018; 'Bottle with Ribbon', 2016; 'Ohr by the Garden Shed,' 2017; 
'Sun Milk,' 2017; 'Spring Equinox,' 2018; 'Fragonard’s Window,' 2017; 'Ivans,' 2016; 'Late Night Break,' 2017; 'Newspaper in Flight,' 2017; 'Cosmic Screen,' 2017; 'Break Ups,' 2017; 'Home in the Fall,' 2017.

'Veils of a Bog,' 2018. with Michelle Helene Mackenzie, Post Meridiem for Veils of a Bog, 2018. Multi-channel sound work, 26 minutes 24 seconds loop.

Creator: Aquiles Ascencion.
© Esker Foundation and the artists, 2018.
Music: Retro Dreamscape by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution
license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Source: twinmusicom.org/song/283/retro-dreamscape
Artist: twinmusicom.org

Esker Foundation
4th floor, 1011, 9th Avenue, SE, Calgary, Alberta, T2G 0H7, Canada.
eskerfoundation.art
@EskerFoundation

LOCAL DROP MAG
The Greatest Stories Ever Told 

Story by Christina Wong

A golden thread, sheets of metal, and scraps of cloth: these are the treasures you have been told lie waiting for you within the red-brick building called the Atlantic Avenue Art Block. As you approach, you are greeted by the sight of a woman working, tirelessly coiling a golden thread on the wall. She is completely focused on her work, tightly wrapping the thread into a spiral that is part of a greater set of spirals. Each spiral is a carbon copy of the other, and while it might seem as though they were manufactured by a machine, it is clear that each dot was meticulously created by the hands of an expert craftsman. Heedless of the bustle around her, she continues her work, the summer sun radiating into the glass-enclosed space. With this sight, you begin your adventure at the Esker Foundation, which has transformed and refreshed itself for the summer season.

The Project Space on the main floor now hosts a minimalist workshop, decorated with nothing more than a numerical counter, a tool cart, and the artist’s uniform. With these elements, Calgary artist Jolie Bird sets the stage for her performance-based installation, 1597; Harmonious Frequencies. Consisting of golden dots of wrapped string set in a pattern to mirror the Fibonacci Sequence, 1597; Harmonious Frequencies is an interactive piece that will be completed over the course of 12 weeks. By creating the piece through a performance, Bird gives viewers a glimpse into the intricacies and investment that goes into the creation of art. The most interesting facet of this work is that Bird wanted to activate the Project Space for a moment before letting the entire work go and leaving no trace of the installation behind.

The fourth-floor gallery space has also been stripped down to reveal an open-concept area that takes you away from the bustle of Inglewood to an airy dreamscape of larger-than-life installations. The first, Vanessa Brown’sLate Night Trip to the Jeweller’s, is a landscape of oversized objects: a sleepy clock that spans the entire height of the gallery, colourful earrings perched on a jewelry stand that could only be worn by a giantess, and two dark robes lined with jewels and plant life that would be a challenge for any mere mortal to wear. With this and all of her work in the exhibition, Vancouver-based Brown welcomes you to her storybook world, comprised of three interconnected, immersive scenes where you are asked to take the lead role in the artistic narrative.

This quality of storytelling is particularly pronounced in Brown’s Charm series of sculptures. Made of flat, painted steel planes, these figures are silhouettes of their practical equivalents, as if they were cut out of the pages of a metal storybook. Despite their construction from flat metal, each of these sculptures is given a level of dimension in their arrangement, with other shapes and figures revealing themselves as your perspective changes.  By creating these transforming objects, Brown has created a narrative that both surprises and delights as the sculpture’s true nature is revealed.

Seamlessly integrated with Brown’s dreamy, storybook reality is Anna Torma’s vibrant  narrative in textile art. A series of hand embroidery and textile collage, Torma’s  installation is a chaotic collision of collective memory. On display are works inspired by her children’s drawings, pieces from collaborations with family, and remnants from past projects that come together to create stories that are both foreign and familiar. Complex, anatomical diagrams are presented with words spelt backwards, fire breathing dragons dance alongside wolves with human heads, and roaring bears are mixed with words in Hungarian, and it’s these collected landscapes that give insight to that delicate balance between preserving history and creating progress.

The most captivating of these pieces is Carpet of Many Hands, a textile collage of found fabrics from domestic linens, printed pieces, and decorative samples. Spanning two panels that drape along the floor, Carpet of Many Hands is an ode to the small things that are often cast off because of their seemingly inconsequential nature.  Pastoral images are captioned with comic book speech bubbles while lace panels partially obscure tribal-like drawings, and while each of the fabric pieces may not be very impressive on their own, together they create a powerful story of love, social norms, and life as an immigrant in Canada. Through this colourful and larger than life installation, Torma reminds us that it is not a thing, a phrase, or an image that matters, but the interconnectivity of these things that makes for an interesting story.

In that sense, the Esker Foundation’s Summer 2018 Exhibitions are an ode to the stories that make up life itself and a chance to see ourselves as the creators and keepers of our own story. We are questioned through Brown’s work about what type of protagonist we are and what perspectives we take on our challenges. We are shown through Torma’s work that no story is complete without all of the details and to value all of the little things. We are reminded through Bird’s work that despite the beauty and the effort that is put in to create something meaningful, it will one day be stripped away. If all that remains are our stories, then this summer’s exhibitions at the Esker Foundation are a fantastic example of how we must honour those stories, no matter how insignificant the details or fantastic the outcomes.

The Almanacs | 90.9FM CJSW

May 17, 2018

INTERVIEW: Esker curator, Shauna Thompson with a preview of the summer exhibitions Vanessa Brown, Anna Torma, And Jolie Bird, opening at the Esker Foundation on Friday, May 25th 2018.

http://cjsw.com/program/the-almanacs/podcast/20180517/

ARTFORUM
Vanesa Brown: The Witching Hour

ESKER FOUNDATION

1011 – 9th Avenue S.E. Fourth Floor, www.eskerfoundation.art
Tue - Sun 11am to 6pm, Thu - Fri 11am to 8pm

Vanessa Brown
The Witching Hour
May 26 - September 2, 2018

Vanessa Brown works in the space between strength and fragility through an alchemical fusing of steel, pigment, and glass.

E-FLUX
The Esker Foundation | Summer Exhibitions Vanessa Brown, Anna Torma and Jolie Bird

May 26–September 2, 2018

Opening: May 25, 6–10pm
Talk with Anna Torma: May 26, 1–2pm
Talk with Jolie Bird: June 15, 7–8pm
Talk with Vanessa Brown: June 22, 7–8pm

Esker Foundation 
4th floor, 1011 9th Avenue, SE
Calgary Alberta T2G 0H7
Canada
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–6pm,
Friday 11am–8pm

T +1 403 930 2490
info@eskerfoundation.com 

CANADIAN ART
Must-Sees This Week: May 24 to 30, 2018

A Métis art survey in Edmonton, a landmark Rafael Lozano-Hemmer show in Montreal, and a Feminist Land Art Retreat foray in Vancouver all make the list

MAY 24, 2018

BY CANADIAN ART

Lots of great art exhibitions and events are taking place across the country this week. Here are our recommendations for debuting shows and events, and a few reminders about shows that are closing. Visit our Exhibition Finder for more listings of worthwhile shows that are already open.

EDMONTON

The new exhibition “Li Salay” opens at the Art Gallery of Alberta on May 25. Co-curated by Amy Malbeuf and Jessie Ray Short, the show celebrates the work of Métis artists across Canada and considers the boundaries of Métis artistic practice. Developed from extensive cross-country research by the curators over the past two years, this group show features artists Lori Blondeau, Katherine Boyer, Dayna Danger, Rosalie Favell, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Casey Koyczan, Tim Moore, Audie Murray, Sheri Nault, Sherry Farrell Racette, Les Ramsay, Jewel Shaw and Amanda Strong.

To coincide with the exhibition launch, a two-day symposium will take place on May 25 and 26 at the gallery to foster dialogue around issues surrounding the exhibition.

Elsewhere, paintings by Jonathan Forrest debut in “Colour Coherence” on May 24 at Peter Robertson Gallery. A reception will be held from 7 to 9 p.m.

MONTREAL

The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal unveils work by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer on May 24. Known for his large-scale installations and innovative use of technology, his work will be surveyed over the past decade and will consider its poetic and political implications—highlighting the artist’s continuous emphasis on relationality and “co-presence.”

Meanwhile, Art45 launches the photography show “Hidden Stories” on May 25, which tackles questions of space, place and urbanity. The five featured artists are Benoit Aquin, Claude-Philippe Benoit, Angela Grauerholz, Karina Nimmerfall and Sylvie Readman.

The Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery presents the video installation Le retrait (2018) by artist Olivia Boudreau off-site at 5445 Gaspé Avenue from May 29 to June 9. On May 30, the solo show “Vuja de” by Gianni Giuliano opens at Galerie Erga, while Galerie D’Este presents a solo feature of engravings by Ludmila Armata in “Field Walk Works.”

To mark the end of her residency at the Darling Foundry, Argentinian curator Renata Cervetto will give a presentation about her work and time spent in Montreal on May 24 at 6 p.m.

In closings, Nadia Myre‘s “Tout Ce Qui Reste – Scattered Remains” ends on May 27 at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal.

VANCOUVER AND AREA

Work by Aleesa Cohene launches at Western Front in “I Don’t Get It” on May 24. Showcasing a new body of work by the artist, this show takes race, constructions of identity and the role of images as its primary focus. Using movie footage as a medium, Cohene critically reviews whiteness as portrayed in white Hollywood cinema.

Feminist Land Art Retreat’s latest exhibition “Free Rein” opens at the Audain Gallery with a reception and artist talk on May 30 at 7 p.m. Curated by Amy Kazymerchyk, the show will present FLAR’s video work No Man’s Land—which makes reference to the western genre, gendered work, earth art as well as colonial allegories—and their new work Transmissions on the outdoor Pattison billboard.

Over at Griffin Art Projects, “zero, ground” debuts on May 26—a group exhibition that collectively explores the potentials of darkness. Works by artists Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham, Antonia Hirsch, Kathy Slade, Wolfgang Tillmans, Andy Warhol and Beate Terfloth, among others, will be featured. Terfloth will give an artist talk on opening day at 2 p.m., which will be followed by a reception from 3 to 5 p.m.

Meanwhile, Equinox Gallery presents the group show “Works on Paper” on May 26, featuring artists Sonny Assu, Renée Van Halm and Etienne Zack. Also opening at the gallery are new paintings by Gathie Falk in the solo show “The Things We Grow.”

Presented by 221A, a double-feature screening of two films by Casey Wei—Murky Colors(2013) and Vater und Sohn/Father and Son/父与子 (2014)—will show at the Cinematheque on May 27 from 2 to 5 p.m.

In New Westminster at the New Media Gallery, artist Carol Sawyer will respond to the centre’s current exhibition “TRACE” as part of an experimental response series.

TORONTO

A new show about Rita Letendre’s public art debuts at YYZ Artists’ Outlet on May 25. Organized by Adam Lauder, “Toronto Public Art” will look at the legacy of the murals and large-scale paintings Letendre executed in Toronto when she relocated to the city in 1970. Down the hall and in link with Trevor Paglen’s current exhibition “Surveillance States,” Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art hosts a screening of Spiral Jetty (1970) by land artistRobert Smithson on May 26 at 2 p.m.

Curator Ryan Rice presents the guest lecture “How Many Times Do I Have To Tell You?” at Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts on May 30 at 7 p.m. In this talk, Rice will discuss elements of his work and career in link with Indigenous presence in contemporary art. Meanwhile, OCAD University hosts the panel discussion “STANCE: The possible role of design & designers” with design leaders Luigi Ferrara and Dori Tunstall, moderated byRodrigo Barreda, on May 30 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. The panel is part of the programming for the current exhibition “STANCE: Design Against Fascism” at Sur Gallery, and will explore the role of design in political and economic contexts.

The annual ReelAbilities Film Festival: Toronto kicks off on May 29, showcasing international films about Deaf and disability cultures. Twenty-five films will be presented across different venues in the city until June 4. Workman Arts simultaneously presents the symposium “#BigFeels: Creating Space for Mental Health in the Arts” from May 28 to 30. This event will query ways to better support artists with lived experiences in mental health through panel discussions, workshops and one-on-one conversations. An opening reception will take place on May 28 at Artscape Youngplace, with the remainder of the event unfolding at Artscape Wychwood Barns.

Meanwhile, Erin Stump Projects presents two new shows on May 25: “An Ear in a Pond” by Katie Lyle and “Where is the Compass” by Anna-Sophia Vukovich. Over at Loop Gallery, two other shows debut later on May 26: John Ide’s “What Paper Remembers” andAdrienne Trent’s “The Nature of Reality and the Reality of Nature.” Elsewhere, new work by Kristiina Lahde debuts in “Out of Line” at MKG127 on May 26, furthering the artist’s engagement with found materials.

Over at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Arthur Jafa will give a talk about his practice on May 30 at 7 p.m. as part of the CONTACT International Photography talks series.

In closings: “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” at the AGO, the group show “Weight of Light” at the Art Museum and Lorna Bauer’s “The Hand of Mee” at Franz Kaka all wrap this week.

PETERBOROUGH

Artspace launches the show “future generations” by Tsēmā Igharas on May 25 with a reception from 7 to 10 p.m. In this show, Igharas premises methods of care and resistance in link with Indigenous futurity. The following day on May 26, the artist will lead a free bead-making workshop from 1 to 3 p.m.

WINNIPEG

The travelling exhibition “SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut,” curated by Heather Igloliorte, launches at the Winnipeg Art Gallery on May 25. Featuring 47 artists, this landmark exhibition celebrates the art of Labrador Inuit. The next day on May 26, Igloliorte will lead a tour of the exhibition and give a talk at 2 p.m.

Meanwhile at PLATFORM Centre, the solo show “If You Have a Similar Story Keep it to Yourself” by performance and video artist Bridget Moser also opens on May 25, with a reception at 7 p.m. Moser will give an artist talk about her practice the following day on May 26 at 1 p.m.

Co-hosted with Urban Shaman Gallery, Martha Street Studio presents an artist talk withJamison Chās Banks on May 26 at 2 p.m. The artist will discuss his practice, specifically his printmaking, in link with the upcoming exhibition “Crypsis: Eradication Methods Laboratory” opening at Urban Shaman on June 1.

CALGARY

The New Gallery debuts the group show “bust/boom” on May 25. Curated by Noa Bronstein and Deborah Wang, this exhibition will explore the representation of economic cycles, and features artists Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, An Te Liu, Gordon Matta-Clark and Hwayeon Nam.

Elsewhere, two new shows kick off at the Esker Foundation on this same day: Vanessa Brown’s “The Witching Hour” and Anna Torma’s “Book of Abandoned Details.” A reception for both shows will be held from 6 to 10 p.m. on opening day. Meanwhile, Jolie Bird’s performance-based installation 1597; Harmonious Frequencies continues its showing in the centre’s Project Space.

Artist Ron Moppett will give a talk about his latest work in link with the current exhibition “Tarps & Ties” at TrépanierBaer Gallery, on May 26 at 2:30 p.m.

OTTAWA

Artist Catherine Richards will perform the first iteration of the participatory performanceShroud/Chrysalis I at the Ottawa Art Gallery on May 26 from 1 to 4 p.m. Participants are invited to partake in the work and renegotiate their relationships with technology.

Over at Gallery 101, Tania Price will lead the “Finger croknit Improv Carpets” workshop on May 30 from 7 to 9 p.m., where participants will be invited to experiment with textile materials and different techniques.

MOOSE JAW

The Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery launches two new exhibitions on May 25. “Arbor Vitae” will feature ceramic installations by Winnipeg artist Grace Nickel, while the group show “Vessel” will showcase ceramic works by Saskatchewan artists from the centre’s collection.

SASKATOON

Artist Peter Morin gives a talk about his practice at AKA artist-run on May 29 at 7 p.m

MEDICINE HAT

The Art Gallery of the Esplanade Arts and Heritage Centre presents two exhibitions this week: “Alberta and the Group of Seven” and “Jude Griebel Ground-Figure: Sculptures 2013-2018.” Both shows are part of the Medicine Hat Art Walk circuit on May 25, which commences at 7 p.m.

ST. CATHARINES

The Rodman Hall Art Centre presents the group show “Carry Forward” this week. Curated byLisa Myers and organized by the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, this exhibition looks at the troubled history of documentation and what counts as a public record. Participating artists include Deanna Bowen, Dana Claxton, Marjorie Beaucage, Maika’i Tubbs, Nadia Myre and more. An opening reception will be held on May 24 at 7 p.m., including an exhibition tour with curator Myers at 7:30 p.m.

ST. JOHN’S

“Meryl McMaster: Confluence” opens at the Rooms Provincial Art Gallery on May 26. Curated by Heather Anderson, this photography-based travelling exhibition will display artworks from three different series by the artist.

Over at Christina Parker Gallery, “The Impression of Something Real” will showcase new paintings by Mike Gough. The show launches on May 25 with a reception at 5:30 p.m.

HALIFAX

The MSVU Art Gallery launches the group show “Material Remains” on May 26, curated by Ingrid Jenkner. The various textile works assembled will consider the associations of these materials with gender politics and connotations of domesticity.

THE ESKER FOUNDATION
Upcoming Exhibitions
Vanessa Brown: The Witching Hour 

THE ESKER FOUNDATION: Upcoming Exhibitions | Vanessa Brown: The Witching Hour 

May 26 – September 2, 2018

In the witching hour you’re alone, moving through a wet forest, a bog, a bayou – all heavy shadows, furtive shimmers and iridescence. An enchanted painting. You are not afraid, surrounded by a coven of symbols, a humidity of forms; there is magic in the murk, in the meaty croak and full-throated drone of an army of frogs, a knot of toads. You are attuned to the emotional kinship among objects, to the possibility of a midnight emergence. The stage is set; a bewitched scenography poised in the moment before an action. In this tactile sensory environment, life is pliable, contingent. The latent potential of a tableau of forms whispers to you a complicated narrative. Objects could come alive in the middle of the night; there could be life in inanimate things.

Vanessa Brown works in the space between strength and fragility through an alchemical fusing of steel, pigment, and glass – sculpture flirting with painting, a symbolic narrative collage, form as gesture or character. This exhibition brings together new installations and recent works, ranging in scale from grand to intimate. It is a proposal in material, colour, light, and sound; a coming-into-being, an invitation into an emotively charmed circle.

OVERLY DEDICATED PODCAST 
Episode 4: Vanessa Brown

Hosted by Claire Scherzinger
March 19th 2018

Vanessa Brown and I discuss why you shouldn't have to have an MFA to make it in this world, snakes and symbology, as well as her exciting upcoming show at the Esker Foundation.

Photo Credits: Vanessa Brown, Mike Bourscheid, other images retrieved from https://www.vanessa-brown.com/

Music Credits: Emily Scherzinger, intro and outro music; sample taken from Sigur Ros, "Saeglopur."

FRIEZE.COM 
The Esker Foundation 

FRIEZE.COM | Esker Foundation 

UPCOMING EXHIBITION

26 MAY – 2 SEPTEMBER
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY 25 MAY, 6–10PM

VANESSA BROWN

In the witching hour you’re alone, moving through a wet forest, a bog, a bayou – all heavy shadows, furtive shimmers and iridescence. An enchanted painting. You are not afraid, surrounded by a coven of symbols, a humidity of forms; there is magic in the murk, in the meaty croak and full-throated drone of an army of frogs, a knot of toads.

You are attuned to the emotional kinship among objects, to the possibility of a midnight emergence. The stage is set; a bewitched scenography poised in the moment before an action. In this tactile sensory environment, life is pliable, contingent. The latent potential of a tableau of forms whispers to you a complicated narrative. Objects could come alive in the middle of the night; there could be life in inanimate things.

Vanessa Brown works in the space between strength and fragility through an alchemical fusing of steel, pigment, and glass – sculpture irting with painting, a symbolic narrative collage, form as gesture or character. This exhibition brings together new installations and recent works, ranging in scale from grand to intimate. It is a proposal in material, colour, light, and sound; a coming-into-being, an invitation into an emotively charmed circle.

BIOGRAPHY

Vanessa Brown works in sculpture, painting, and photography. Her primary medium is steel and she attempts to parse its associations with industry, weaponry, and brutality, and its subtler qualities such as pliability, versatility, and slightness. The imagery in her work draws from various sources including landscapes, historical crafts, recurring symbols from her own dreams, as well as the work and biographies of other female artists. She is based in Vancouver on unceded Coast Salish Territories. Brown graduated with a BFA from Emily Carr University, Vancouver in 2013 and was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award. She has exhibited in Canada, Germany, the USA, and Mexico, notably with solo and two- person exhibitions at Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver; Erin Stump Projects, Toronto; and group exhibitions at the Nanaimo Art Gallery; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and King Street Station, Seattle. 

NUT II
A.I.R. Gallery, NY

NUT II |A.I.R. Gallery, NY

NUT II Book Launch
March 24th, 2018 4-6P
at A.I.R. Gallery (155 Plymouth St, Brooklyn, NY)

Please join us at 4pm on March 24th, at the historic A.I.R. Gallery for the launch of "NUT II."

"NUT" is an all women’s publication devoted to celebrating and fostering the female artist community. The project takes its name from the Egyptian sky Goddess who, every night, swallows the sun and births it anew, performing the perpetual cycle of life and death. The impetus for "NUT" was a desire to harness personal traumas into positive outcomes as a process of healing and renewal.

Our goal is twofold: first to give form to a beautiful collection of great art made by women, and second, as a means of raising funds to support women globally. All proceeds generated by "NUT" are donated to the Global Fund for Women, an international organization whose mission is to “find, fund, and amplify the courageous work of women who are building social movements and challenging the status quo.” 

More info: www.globalfundforwomen.org

The book’s 5 x 7 in. format features a collection of 64 detachable high-quality prints of works on paper by women artists. A limited edition will be available for purchase at the launch and subsequently viawww.nutpublication.com and www.anteism.com.

For more information please email nutlaunch@gmail.com