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Tag Archives: Rennie Collection
Kerry James Marshall: a 'song' of racism in multiple media
Racism and social justice are two themes often found in the works featured at the Rennie Museum (formerly Rennie Collection). Local real estate marketer, Bob Rennie has been showing works there from his collection since at least 2009 when I wrote my first commentary about it (December 4, 2009).
Kerry James Marshall, the latest artist to have his work featured (June 2 – November 3, 2018), carries on the tradition while making those artistic 'themes' his own n a breathtaking (in both its positive and negative meanings) range of styles and media.
Here's a brief description of some of the works, from an undated Rennie Museum press release,
Rennie Museum presents a survey of works by Kerry James Marshall spanning thirty-two years of the artist's career. Kerry James Marshall: Collected Works features pieces from the artist's complex body of work, which interrogates the sparse historical presence of African-Americans through painting, sculpture, drawing and other media. …
The sculptural installation Untitled (Black Power Stamps) (1998) [emphasis mine], Marshall's very first work acquired by Bob Rennie, aptly sets the tone of the exhibition. Five colossal stamps and their corresponding ink pads are dispersed over the floor of the museum's four-story high gallery space. Inscribed on each stamp, and reiterated on the walls, are phrases of power dating back to the Civil Rights Movement: 'Black is Beautiful', 'Black Power', 'We Shall Overcome', 'By Any Means Necessary', and 'Burn Baby Burn'. The sentiment reverberates through the three 18 feet (5.5 metre) wide paintings installed in the same room, respectively titled Untitled (Red) (2011), Untitled (Black) and Untitled (Green) (2012). Exhibited together for the first time in North America, the imposing paintings with their colours saluting the Pan African flag echo the form of Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III (1967).
Commanding attention in the center of another room is Wake (2003-2005) [emphasis mine], a sculptural work that focuses on the collective trauma of slavery. Draped atop a blackened model sailboat is a web of medallions featuring portraits of descendants of the approximately twenty African slaves who first landed in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. Atop a polished black base evoking the deep seas, the medallions cascade over and behind the mourning vessel in a gilded procession, cast out in the boat's wake. The work commemorates an entire lineage of people whose lives have been irrevocably affected by the traumatic history of slavery in the United States, while simultaneously celebrating the resilience and vivacity of the culture that flourished from it.
Garden Party (2004-2013) [emphasis mine] is a long-coveted painting that Marshall re-worked over the course of almost ten years. Created in a style that harkens 19th century impressionist paintings, the work depicts a scene of leisure – an array of multi-ethnic friends and neighbours casually gathered in a backyard of a social housing project. Painted on a flat canvas tarp and hung barely off the floor, the image highlights an often-overlooked perspective of the vibrant everyday life in the projects and invites its viewers to join in the gathering.
In a dimmed room is Invisible Man (1986) [emphasis mine] – a historic work and one of the first to feature Marshall's now iconic black on black tonal painting. Referencing Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel of the same title, Marshall's work literalizes the premise of black invisibility. Only distinguishable by his bright-white eyes and teeth, and the subtle warmth that delineates black body from black background, Marshall's figure, like Ellison's protagonist, subverts his own invisibility, using colour as an emblem of power rather than of submission. The work's presentation at Rennie Museum provides an opportunity for viewers to explore the full mastery with which Kerry James Marshall layers his various shades of black.
As always, you book a tour or claim a space on a tour (here) to see the latest exhibition and are guided through the gallery spaces. What follows is a series of pictures depicting the Marshall pieces in that first room (from the Rennie Museum's photographic documentation for Marshall's work), Note: There are five pages of documentation and I encourage you to look at all five,
Installation View. Courtesy:: Rennie Museum
Blot, 2014. acrylic on pvc panel 84 × 119 5/8 × 3 3/8 inches (213 × 304 × 9 cm). Courtesy: Rennie Museum
Sculpture (Ibeji), 2006. wood, fabric, beads 24 × 12 × 14 inches (61 × 30 × 36 cm) Courtesy: Rennie Museum
Heirlooms and Accessories, 2002. 3 inkjet prints on wove paper, rhinestone encrusted wooden artist's frames each: 56 5/8 × 53 3/4 inches (144 × 137 cm) Courtesy: Rennie Museum
I've placed the pieces in the order in which I viewed them. Being at the opening event on June 2, 2018 meant that rather than having a tour, we were 'invited' to look at the pieces and ask questions of various 'attendants' standing nearby. The 'Blot', with all that colour, immediate drew my attention and not having read the title of the piece, I commented on its resemblance to a Rorschach Inkblot. It was my only successful guess of the visit and I continue to bask in it.
According to the attendant, in addition to resembling said inkblot, this piece also addresses abstract expressionism and the absence of African American visual artists from the movement. In this piece as with many others, Marshall finds a way to depict absence despite the paradox (a picture of absence) in terms.
'Heirlooms and Accessories' is an example of Marshall's talent for depicting absence. At first glance the piece seems benign. There is a kind of double frame. The outermost frame is white and inside (abutting the artwork) a diamante braid has been added all around it to create a double frame. The braid is very pretty and accentuates the lockets depicted in the image. There are three white women pictured in their lockets and beneath those lockets and the white paint lay images of African Americans being lynched. The women, by the way, were complicit in the lynchings. It was deeply unsettling to learn this as my friend and I had just moments before been admiring the diamante braid.
Marshall's work seems designed to force the viewer to look beneath the surface, which means stripping away layers, which with 'Heirlooms' means that you strip away the whitewashing.
As a white woman, the show is a profoundly disturbing experience. Marshall's range of materials and mastery are breathtaking (in the positive sense) and the way he seduces the (white) viewer into coming closer and experiencing the painting, metaphorically speaking, as a mirror rather than a picture. Marshall has flipped the viewer's experience making it impossible (or very difficult) to blame racism on other people while failing to recognize your own sins.
The third piece in the room, the sculpture is a representation of a standard of beauty still not often seen in popular culture in North America. Weirdly, it reminded me of something from a December 21, 2017 posting on the LaineyGossip blog,
[downloaded from http://www.laineygossip.com/princess-michael-of-kent-racist-jewelry-greets-meghan/48728]
I don't know well you can see this, but it's an example of 'Blackamoor jewellery'. The woman wearing it is Princess Michael of Kent and at the time the picture was taken she was on her to a Christmas 2017 lunch with the Queen of England. The lunch is where she was to meet Meghan Markle who describes herself as a woman of mixed race and is now the Duchess of Sussex and married to the Queen's grandson, Harry. For anyone unfamiliar with 'Blackmoor art' here's a July 31, 2015 essay by Anneke Rautenbach for New York University,
… Blackamoors—a trope in Italian decorative art especially common in pieces of furniture, but also appearing in paintings, jewelry, and textiles. The motif emerged as an artistic response to the European encounter with the Moors—dark-skinned Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East who came to occupy various parts of Europe during the Middle Ages. Commonly fixed in positions of servitude—as footmen or waiters, for example—the figures personify fantasies of racial conquest.
I trust Princess Michael was made to remove her brooch before entering the palace.
The contrast between Marshall's sculpture emphasizing the dignity and beauty of the figure and the 'jewellery' is striking. The past, as Marshall reminds us, is always with us. From Rautenback's July 31, 2015 essay (Note: A link has been removed),
Gaudy by nature, and uncomfortably dated—a bit like the American lawn jockey, or Aunt Jemima doll— … Blackamoors are still a thriving industry, with the United States as their no. 1 importer. (In fact, the figurines are especially popular in Texas and Connecticut—search "Blackamoor" online and you'll find countless listings on eBay, Etsy, and elsewhere.) Unlike their American counterparts, which focus mostly on romanticizing scenes from the era of slavery, these European ornaments often depict black bodies as exotic noblemen. And not everyone considers them passé: As recently as September 2012, the Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana invited outrage when it included a caricatured black woman figurine on an earring as part of its spring/summer collection.
Encountering bias and (conscious or unconscious) racism in one's self is both deeply chastening and a priceless gift. It's one that comedienne Roseanne Barr seems determined to refuse (from a June 14, 2018 article by Marissa Martinelli for Slate.com (Note: Link have been removed),
Barr […] suggested on Thursday [June 14, 2018] that it is only "low IQ" people who would interpret describing a black woman as "Muslim Brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby" as racist. The real explanation is apparently much deeper:
Roseanne BarrVerified account @therealroseanne
Rod Serling wrote Planet of The Apes. It was about anti-semitism. That is what my tweet referred to-the anti semitism of the Iran deal. Low IQ ppl can think whatever they want.
8:08 PM – 13 Jun 2018
Low IQ people and Rod Serling's screenwriting join Ambien and Memorial Day on the growing list of entities that Barr has used to justify the racist tweet over the past two weeks. The one person whose name you will not find on that list of people responsible for what Roseanne Barr said is Roseanne Barr herself.
Even with such an obvious tweet, Barr can't (consistently) admit to and (consistently) apologize for her comment. It may not seem like a gift to her but it is. Facing up to one's sins and making reparation can help heal the extraordinary wounds that Marshall is making visible.
You may have noticed that I called this show 'a song of racism'. It's a reference to poetry which in ancient times was sometimes referred to as a song (Song of Solomon, anyone?). It was also a narrative instrument, i. e., used for storytelling for an active, participatory audience.
Marshall tells a story in allusive language (like poetry) and tricks/seduces you into participating.
On that note, I have one last story to tell and it's about the placement of Marshall's artworks in the first floor room. It's my story, yours and Marshall's might be different but he has inspired me and so …
The 'Blot' or Rorschach Inkblot is a test, which tells a psychologist something about you and how you apprehend the world. It's the first piece you see when you enter the Rennie Museum space and it sets the tone for all that is to come. What you see says much about you.
The women, in the sculpture and the lockets, provide contrast and, depending on your race, hold a mirror to you. What is 'other' and what is 'you'?
There was religious imagery in much of Marshall's work elsewhere and I was particularly struck with the hearts that appeared in some of his paintings. I was reminded of the 'sacred heart', a key piece of religious iconography usually associated with Roman Catholicism although other religions also use the imagery.
It is a symbol of love and compassion although I've always associated it more with guilt. (My mother favoured the version featuring the heart pierced with a crown of thorns.)
Getting back to "What is 'other' and what is 'you'?" Marshall seems to be hinting that after guilt and suffering, forgiveness is possible.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
As for Marshall, he is a thoughtful artist asking some difficult questions. I hope you'll get a chance to see his work at the Rennie Museum. As I write this, every tour through June is completely booked and first set of July tours is getting booked fast. You'd best keep an eagle eye on the Visit page.
ETA June18, 2018: Kerry James Marshall was in Vancouver and gave this talk about his work just prior to the show's opening: https://vimeo.com/274179397 (It runs for roughly 1 hr. and 49 minutes.)
This entry was posted in poetry, pop culture, Vancouver, Visual Art and tagged a song of racism, abstract expressionism, African American visual artists, African-Americans, American lawn jockey, Anneke Rautenbach, Aunt Jemima doll, Barnett Newman, black invisibility, Black is Beautiful, Black Power, Black Power Stamps (1998), Blackamoor jewellery, Blackmoor art, Blot 2014, Bob Rennie Kerry James Marshall, Burn Baby Burn, By Any Means Necessary, compassion, crown of thorns, Duchess of Sussex, Garden Party (2004-2013), guilt, Heirlooms and Accessories 2002, Invisible Man (1986), Kerry James Marshall: Collected Works, Love, lynching, Marissa Martinelli, Meghan Markle, Moors, New York University, Pan African flag, Princess Michael of Kent, Queen of England, racism, Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, religious iconography, Rennie Collection, Rennie Museum, Rod Serling, Roman Catholicism, Rorschach Inkblot test, Roseanne Barr, sacred heart, Sculpture (Ibeji) 2006, slavery, social justice, Song of Solomon, storytelling, Untitled (Black), Untitled (Green) (2012), Untitled (Red) (2011), Wake (2003-2005), We Shall Overcome, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III (1967) on June 15, 2018 by Maryse de la Giroday.
A dance with love and fear: the Yoko Ono exhibit and the Takashi Murakami exhibit in Vancouver (Canada)
It seems Japanese artists are 'having a moment'. There's a documentary (Kusama—Infinity) about contemporary Japanese female artist, Yayoi Kusama, making the festival rounds this year (2018). Last year (2017), the British Museum mounted a major exhibition of Hokusai's work (19th Century) and in 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute benefit was inspired by a Japanese fashion designer, "Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between." (A curator at the Japanese Garden in Portland who had lived in Japan for a number of years mentioned to me during an interview that the Japanese have one word for art. There is no linguistic separation between art and craft.)
More recently, both Yoko Ono and Takashi Murakami have had shows in Vancouver, Canada. Starting with fear as I prefer to end with love, Murakami had a blockbuster show at the Vancouver Gallery.
Takashi Murakami: a dance with fear (and money too)
In the introductory notes at the beginning of the exhibit: "Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its own Leg," it was noted that fear is one of Murakami's themes. The first few pieces in the show had been made to look faded and brownish to the point where you had to work at seeing what was underneath the layers. The images were a little bit like horror films something's a bit awry then scary and you don't know what it is or how to deal with it.
After those images, the show opened up to bright, bouncy imagery commonly associated with Mrjakami's work. However, if you look at them carefully, you'll see many of these characters have big, pointed teeth. Also featured was a darkened room with two huge warriors.At a guess, I'd say they were 14 feet tall.
It made for a disconcerting show with its darker themes usually concealed in bright, vibrant colour. Here's an image promoting Murakami's Vancouver birthday celebration and exhibit opening,
'Give me the money, now!' says a gleeful Takashi Murakami, whose expansive show is currently at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Photo by the VAG. [downloaded from https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2018/02/07/Takashi-Murakami-VAG/]
The colours and artwork shown in the marketing materials (I'm including the wrapping on the gallery itself) were exuberant as was Murakami who acted as his own marketing material. I'm mentioning the money It's very intimately and blatantly linked to Murakami's art and work. Dorothy Woodend in a Feb. 7, 2018 article for The Tyee puts it this way (Note: Link have been removed),
The close, almost incestuous relationship between art and money is a very old story. [emphasis mine] You might even say it is the only story at the moment.
You can know this, understand it to a certain extent, and still have it rear up and bite you on the bum. [emphasis mine] Such was my experience of attending the exhibition preview of Takashi Murakami's The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
The show is the first major retrospective of Murakami's work in Canada, and the VAG has spared no expense in marketing the living hell out of the thing. From the massive cephalopod installed atop the dome of the gallery, to the ocean of smiling cartoon flowers, to the posters papering every inch of downtown Vancouver, it is in a word: huge.
If you don't know much about Murakami the show is illuminating, in many different ways. Expansive in extremis, the exhibition includes more than 50 works that trace a path through the evolution of Murakami's style and aesthetic, moving from his early dark textural paintings that blatantly ripped off Anselm Kiefer, to his later pop-art style (Superflat), familiar from Kanye West albums and Louis Vuitton handbags.
… make no mistake, money runs underneath the VAG show like an engine [emphasis mine]. You can feel it in the air, thrumming with a strange radioactive current, like a heat mirage coming off the people madly snapping selfies next to the Kanye Bear sculpture.
The artist himself seems particularly aware of how much of a financial edifice surrounds the human impulse to make images. In an on-stage interview with senior VAG [Vancouver Art Gallery] curator Bruce Grenville during a media preview for the show, Murakami spoke plainly about the need for survival (a.k.a. money) [emphasis mine] that has propelled his career.
Even the title of the show speaks to the notion of survival (from Woodend's article; Note: Links have been removed),
The title of the show takes inspiration from Japanese folklore about a creature that sacrifices part of its own body so that the greater whole might survive. In the natural world, an octopus will chew off its own leg if there is an infection, and then regrow the missing limb. In the art world, the idea pertains to the practice of regurgitating (recycling) old ideas to serve the endless voracious demand for new stuff. "I don't have the talent to come up with new ideas, so in order to survive, you have to eat your own body," Murakami explains, citing his need for deadlines, and very bad economic conditions, that lead to a state of almost Dostoyevskyian desperation. "Please give me the money now!" he yells, and the assembled press laughs on cue.
The artist's responsibility to address larger issues like gender, politics and the environment was the final question posed during the Q&A, before the media were allowed into the gallery to see the work. Murakami took his time before answering, speaking through the nice female translator beside him. "Artists don't have that much power in the world, but they can speak to the audience of the future, who look at the artwork from a certain era, like Goya paintings, and see not just social commentary, but an artistic point of view. The job of the artist is to dig deep into human beings."
Which is a nice sentiment to be sure, but increasingly art is about celebrity and profit. Record-breaking shows like Alexander McQueen's Savage Beauty and Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between demonstrated an easy appeal for both audiences and corporations. One of Murakami's earlier exhibitions featured a Louis Vuitton pop-up shop as part of the show. Closer to home, the Fight for Beauty exhibit mixed fashion, art and development in a decidedly queasy-making mixture.
There is money to be made in culture of a certain scale, with scale being the operative word. Get big or get out.
Woodend also relates the show and some of the issues it raises to the local scene (Note: Links have been removed),
A recent article in the Vancouver Courier about the Oakridge redevelopment plans highlighted the relationship between development and culture in raw numbers: "1,000,000 square feet of retail, 2,600 homes for 6,000 people, office space for 3,000 workers, a 100,000-square-foot community centre and daycare, the city's second-largest library, a performing arts academy, a live music venue for 3,000 people and the largest public art program in Vancouver's history…"
Westbank's Ian Gillespie [who hosted the Fight for Beauty exhibit] was quoted extensively, outlining the integration between the city and the developer. "The development team will also work with the city's chief librarian to figure out the future of the library, while the 3,000-seat music venue will create an 'incredible music scene.'" The term "cultural hub" also pops up so many times it's almost funny, in a horrifying kind of way.
But bigness often squeezes out artists and musicians who simply can't compete. Folk who can't fill a 3,000-seat venue, or pack in thousands of visitors, like the Murakami show, are out of luck.
Vancouver artists, who struggle to survive in the city and have done so for quite some time, were singularly unimpressed with the Oakridge development proposal. Selina Crammond, a local musician and all-around firebrand, summed up the divide in a few eloquent sentences: "I mean really, who is going to make up this 'incredible music scene' and fill all of these shiny new venues? Many of my favourite local musicians have already moved away from Vancouver because they just can't make it work. Who's going to pay the musicians and workers? Who's going to pay the large ticket prices to be able to maintain these spaces? I don't think space is the problem. I think affordability and distribution of wealth and funding are the problems artists and arts workers are facing."
The stories continue to pop up, the most recent being the possible sale and redevelopment of the Rio Theatre. The news sparked an outpouring of anger, but the story is repeated so often in Vancouver, it has become something of a cliché. You need only to look at the story of the Hollywood Theatre for a likely ending to the saga.
Which brings me back around to the Murakami exhibit. To be perfectly frank, the show is incredible and well-worth visiting. I enjoyed every minute of wandering through it taking in the sheer expanse of mind-boggling, googly-eyed detail. I would urge you to attend, if you can afford it. But there's the rub. I was there for free, and general admission to the VAG is $22.86. This may not seem like a lot, but in a city where people can barely make rent, culture becomes the purview of them that can afford it.
The City of Vancouver recently launched its Creative Cities initiative to look at issues of affordability, diversity and gentrification.
We shall see if anything real emerges from the process. But in the meantime, Vancouver artists might have to eat their own legs simply to survive. [Tyee]
Survival issues and their intimate companions, fear, are clearly a major focus for Murakami's art.
For the curious, the Vancouver version of the Murakami retrospective show was held from February 3 – May 6, 2018. There are still some materials about the show available online here.
Yoko Ono and the power of love (and maybe money, too)
More or less concurrently with the Murakami exhibition, the Rennie Museum (formerly Rennie Collection), came back from a several month hiatus to host a show featuring Yoko Ono's "Mend Piece."
From a Rennie Museum (undated) press release,
Rennie Museum is pleased to present Yoko Ono's MEND PIECE, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York City version (1966/2015). Illustrating Ono's long standing artistic quest in social activism and world peace, this instructional work will transform the historic Wing Sang building into an intimate space for creative expression and bring people together in an act of collective healing and meditation. The installation will run from March 1 to April 15, 2018.
First conceptualized in 1966, the work immerses the visitor in a dream-like state. Viewers enter into an all-white space and are welcomed to take a seat at the table to reassemble fragments of ceramic coffee cups and saucers using the provided twine, tape, and glue. Akin to the Japanese philosophy of Wabi-sabi, an embracing of the flawed or imperfect, Mend Piece encourages the participant to transform broken fragments into an object that prevails its own violent rupture. The mended pieces are then displayed on shelves installed around the room. The contemplative act of mending is intended to promote reparation starting within one's self and community, and bridge the gap created by violence, hatred, and war. In the words of Yoko Ono herself, "Mend with wisdom, mend with love. It will mend the earth at the same time."
The installation of MEND PIECE, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York City version at Rennie Museum will be accompanied by an espresso bar, furthering the notions of community and togetherness.
Yoko Ono (b. 1933) is a Japanese conceptual artist, musician, and peace activist pioneering feminism and Fluxus art. Her eclectic oeuvre of performance art, paintings, sculptures, films and sound works have been shown at renowned institutions worldwide, with recent exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. She is the recipient of the 2005 IMAJINE Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2009 Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, among other distinctions. She lives and works in New York City.
While most of the shows have taken place over two, three, or four floors, "Mend Piece" was on the main floor only,
Courtesy: Rennie Museum
There was another "Mend Piece" in Canada, located at the Gardiner Museum and part of a larger show titled: "The Riverbed," which ran from February 22 to June 3, 2018. Here's an image of one of the Gardiner Museum "Mend" pieces that was featured in a March 7, 2018 article by Sonya Davidson for the Toronto Guardian,
Yoko Ono, Mend Piece, 1966 / 2018, © Yoko Ono. Photo: Tara Fillion Courtesy: Toronto Guardian
Here's what Davidson had to say about the three-part installation, "The Riverbed,"
I'm sitting on one of the cushions placed on the floor watching the steady stream of visitors at Yoko Ono's exhibition The Riverbed at the Gardiner Museum. The room is airy and bright but void of colours yet it's vibrant and alive in a calming way. There are three distinct areas in this exhibition: Stone Piece, Line Piece and Mend Piece. From what I've experienced in Ono's previous exhibitions, her work encourages participation and is inclusive of everyone. She has the idea. She encourages us to go collaborate with her. Her work is describe often as redirecting our attention to ideas, instead of appearances.
Mend Piece is the one I'm most familiar with. It was part of her exhibition I visited in Reykjavik [Iceland]. Two large communal tables are filled with broken ceramic pieces and mending elements. Think glue, string, and tape. Instructions from Ono once again are simple but with meaning. Take the pieces that resonate with you and mend them as you desire. You're encourage [sic] to leave it in the communal space for everyone to experience what you've experienced. It reminded me of her work decades ago where she shattered porcelain vases, and people invited people to take a piece with them. But then years later she collected as many back and mended them herself. Part contemporary with a nod to the traditional Japanese art form of Kintsugi – fixing broken pottery with gold and the philosophy of nothing is ever truly broken. The repairs made are part of the history and should be embraced with honour and pride.
The experience at the Rennie was markedly different . I recommend reading both Davidson's piece (includes many embedded images) in its entirety to get a sense for how different and this April 7, 2018 article by Jenna Moon for The Star regarding the theft of a stone from The Riverbed show at the Gardiner,
A rock bearing Yoko Ono's handwriting has been stolen from the Gardiner Museum, Toronto police say. The theft reportedly occurred around 5:30 p.m. on March 12.
The rock is part of an art exhibit featuring Ono, where patrons can meditate using several river rocks. The stone is inscribed with black ink, and reads "love yourself" in block letters. It is valued at $17,500 (U.S.), [emphasis mine] Toronto police media officer Gary Long told the Star Friday evening.
As far as I can tell, they still haven't found the suspect who was described as a woman between the ages of 55 and 60. However the question that most interests me is how did they arrive at a value for the stone? Was it a case of assigning a value to the part of the installation with the stones and dividing that value by the number of stones? Yoko Ono may focus her art on social activism and peace but she too needs money to survive. Moving on.
Musings on 'mend'
Participating in "Mend Piece" at the Rennie Museum was revelatory. It was a direct experience of the "traditional Japanese art form of Kintsugi – fixing broken pottery with gold and the philosophy of nothing is ever truly broken." So often art is at best a tertiary experience for the viewer. The artist has the primary experience producing the work and the curator has the secondary experience of putting the show together.
For all the talk about interactive installations and pieces, there are few that truly engage the viewer with the piece. I find this rule applies: the more technology, the less interactivity.
"Mend" insisted on interactivity. More or less. I went with a friend and sat beside the one person in the group who didn't want to talk to anyone. And she wasn't just quiet, you could feel the "don't talk to me" vibrations pouring from every one of her body parts.
The mending sessions were about 30 minutes long and, as Davidson notes, you had string, two types of glue, and twine. For someone with any kind of perfectionist tendencies (me) and a lack of crafting skills (me), it proved to be a bit of a challenge, especially with a semi-hostile person beside me. Thank goodness my friend was on the other side.
Adding to my travails was the gallery assistant (a local art student) who got very anxious and hovered over me as I attempted and failed to set my piece on a ledge in the room (twice). She was very nice and happy to share, without being intrusive, information about Yoko Ono and her work while we were constructing our pieces. I'm not sure what she thought was going to happen when I started dropping things but her hovering brought back memories of my adolescence when shopkeepers would follow me around their store.
Most of my group had finished and even though there was still time in my session, the next group rushed in and took my seat while I failed for the second time to place my piece. I stood for my third (and thankfully successful) repair attempt.
At that point I went to the back where more of the "Mend" communal experience awaited. Unfortunately, the coffee bar's (this put up especially for the show) espresso machine was not working. There was some poetry on the walls and a video highlighting Yoko Ono's work over the years and the coffee bar attendant was eager to share (but not intrusively so) some information about Yoko and her work.
As I stated earlier, it was a revelatory experience. First, It turned out my friend had been following Yoko's work since before the artist had hooked up with John Lennon and she was able to add details to the attendants' comments.
Second, I didn't expect was a confrontation with the shards of my past and personality. In essence, mending myself and, hopefully, more. There was my perfectionism, rejection by the unfriendly tablemate, my emotional response (unspoken) to the hypervigilant gallery assistant, having my seat taken from me before the time was up, and the disappointment of the coffee bar. There was also a rediscovery of my friend, a friendly tablemate who made a beautiful object (it looked like a bird), the helpfulness of both the gallery assistants, Yoko Ono's poetry, and a documentary about the remarkable Yoko.
All in all, it was a perfect reflection of imperfection (wabi-sabi), brokenness, and wounding in the context of repair (Kintsugi)/healing.
Thank you, Yoko Ono.
For anyone in Vancouver who feels they missed out on the experience, there are some performances of "Perfect Imperfections: The Art of a Messy Life" (comedy, dance, and live music) at Vancity Culture Lab at The Cultch from June 14 – 16, 2018. You can find out more here.
It certainly seems as if there's a great interest in Japanese art, if you live in Vancouver (Canada), anyway. The Murakami show was a huge success for the Vancouver Art Gallery. As for Yoko Ono, the Rennie Museum extended the exhibit dates due to demand. Plus, the 2018 – 2020 version of the Vancouver Biennale is featuring (from a May 29, 2018 Vancouver Biennale news release),
… Yoko Ono with its 2018 Distinguished Artist Award, a recognition that coincides with reissuing the acclaimed artist's 2007 Biennale installation, "IMAGINE PEACE," marshalled at this critical time to re-inspire a global consciousness towards unity, harmony, and accord. Yoko Ono's project exemplifies the Vancouver Biennale's mission for diverse communities to gain access, visibility and representation.
The British Museum's show (May 25 – August 13, 2017), "Hokusai's Great Wave," was seen in Vancouver at a special preview event in May 2017 at a local movie house, which was packed.
The documentary film festival, DOXA (Vancouver) closed its 2018 iteration with the documentary about Yayoi Kusama. Here's more about her from a May 9, 2018 article by Janet Smith for the Georgia Straight,
Amid all the dizzying, looped-and-dotted works that American director Heather Lenz has managed to capture in her new documentary Kusama—Infinity, perhaps nothing stands out so much as images of the artist today in her Shinjuku studio.
Interviewed in the film, the 89-year-old Yayoi Kusama sports a signature scarlet bobbed anime wig and hot-pink polka-dotted dress, sitting with her marker at a drawing table, and set against the recent creations on her wall—a sea of black-and-white spots and jaggedy lines.
"The boundary between Yayoi Kusama and her art is not very great," Lenz tells the Straight from her home in Orange County. "They are one and the same."
It was as a young student majoring in art history and fine art that Lenz was first drawn to Kusama—who stood out as one of few female artists in her textbooks. She saw an underappreciated talent whose avant-pop works anticipated Andy Warhol and others. And as Lenz dug deeper into the artist's story, she found a woman whose struggles with a difficult childhood and mental illness made her achievements all the more remarkable.
Today, Kusama is one of the world's most celebrated female artists, her kaleidoscopic, multiroom show Infinity Mirrors drawing throngs of visitors to galleries like the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Seattle Art Museum over the past year. But when Lenz set out to make her film 17 long years ago, few had ever heard of Kusama.
I am hopeful that this is a sign that the Vancouver art scene is focusing more attention to the west, to Asia. Quite frankly, it's about time.
As a special treat, here's a 'Yoko Ono tribute' from the Bare Naked Ladies,
This entry was posted in Vancouver, Visual Art and tagged Alexander McQueen's Savage Beauty, Andy Warhol, art, Bare Naked Ladies, Be My Yoko Ono, British Museum, Bruce Grenville, Canada, City of Vancouver, Creative Cities initiative, development, Dorothy Woodend, DOXA (Vancouver), fashion, fear, Fight for Beauty exhibit, Gardiner Museum, gender, Heather Lenz, Hokusai, Hokusai's Great Wave, Hollywood Theatre, Ian Gillespie, IMAGINE PEACE, Infinity Mirrors, Janet Smith, Japan, Japanese folklore, Jenna Moon, Kanye West albums, Kintsugi, Kusama—Infinity, Line Piece, Louis Vuitton handbags, Mend Piece, Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute benefit (gala), Oakridge redevelopment, Perfect Imperfections: The Art of a Messy Life, politics, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, Rennie Collection, Rennie Museum, Rio Theatre, Selina Crammond, Sonya Davidson, Stone Piece, Superflat, survival, Takashi Murakami, Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its own Leg, Tara Fillion, The Riverbed, Vancouver Art Gallery, Wabi-sabi, Westbank, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono on June 15, 2018 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Ian Wallace show: the frame/box within the frame/box within the frame/box (at the Rennie Gallery in Vancouver, Canada until Sept. 30, 2017)
The opening reception for the Ian Wallace exhibition (Ian Wallace: Collected Works, May 27 to Sept. 30, 2017) at the Rennie Collection was a celebration of both Ian Wallace and Bob Rennie's donation of 197 art works to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa marking Canada's 150th anniversary. Here's more about the gift from a May 9, 2017 Rennie Collection notice (received via email),
In celebration of Canada's 150th birthday, we are donating 197 paintings, sculptures and mixed-media pieces made by some of the most well-known and established Canadian and international artists working today to the National Gallery of Canada!
This is the largest gift of contemporary art ever received by the National Gallery, with major pieces created by internationally renowned artists, such as Colombian Doris Salcedo, as well as important Vancouver based artists Brian Jungen, Damian Moppett, Rodney Graham, Ian Wallace [emphasis mine], and Geoffrey Farmer, who is Canada's selection for the 57th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.
Getting back to the Ian Wallace exhibition,
"The Idea of the University" (1990) Courtesy: Rennie Collection
The commentary that follows are my impressions of the show, your mileage may vary.
What I found most intriguing was the 'squareness' of it all with its prevalence of frames/boxes. For example the image above is framed with red and white (paint on plywood) at the sides and within the image, there's the window, the calendar, the photograph, a markedly squarish electric typewriter, a box on the desk, the cabinet behind the typist, and the books on the cabinet. One image could be a coincidence but when you're surrounded by room after room with these framed/boxed images of more frames and boxes, well, happenstance has to be rejected.
Wallace is a photographer-artist, one of the individuals in Vancouver, Canada, who founded photoconceptualism (I sometimes mistakenly refer to this as photorealism). As you may have guessed from my parenthesized comment, I'm not a big fan of this movement or school. However, I've found that enjoyment or fandom isn't necessarily the point where contemporary art is concerned. My experience is that contemporary art is largely intellectual rather than sensual. Sculptures, paintings, textiles, etc. are more sensual by nature where many contemporary pieces begin their existence in a machinist's shop or via a piece of equipment such as a camera or as an algorithm.
To attend an exhibition of contemporary art, explanation is needed and thankfully the Rennie provides a tour guide providing insight into the artist and their work. In Wallace's case (kudos, by the way, to Sydney who led the tour I attended), he's a professor of art history whose main means of expression is photography and much of his focus is on the production of art.
For me though, it was all about square edges, frames, and boxes—an obvious association given that you frame your subject (inadvertently or not) when taking a photograph. There are images and pieces that don't fit into my 'square' obsession but the number in this exhibition that did is amazing and dizzying. I got to the point where I was giddy enough to think of each room as yet another box/frame and we were the subjects leading to these questions: who is seeing, who is being seen, and what is being seen?
The fourth question: how we were seeing the images came up in the context of the show, more specifically, when viewing Wallace's 'Poverty 1980 – 1984' series. It's considered one of Wallace's earlier works and like many of his pieces is a series of images. According to Sydney, Wallace is critiquing how we view poverty. In his view, poverty and images of poverty are often glamourized and to draw attention to that he had friends dress up as bohemians from an earlier period and pose in some of Vancouver's dicier streets and alleyways. It's not easy to see the images as they are indistinct and washed over in one colour or another.
Before commenting on this piece, I've got an excerpt from the Rennie Collection's undated [?} press release,
Rennie Museum is pleased to announce a solo exhibition featuring rarely and never–before seen historic works of renowned Vancouver artist Ian Wallace. Highlighting Wallace's perennial exploration of social issues, the works presented will also examine the crux of his artistic process: the intersectionality between public and private, personal and universal, process and production, abstraction and representation. The exhibition runs May 27 to September 30, 2017.
Included in the exhibition will be Poverty 1980 – 1984, a multimedia installation comprising of film, painting, and photography. Initially enacted in 1980 as a 16mm film commenting on the tradition of documentary film–making, the Poverty project offers variations on a single theme. By employing friends and colleagues to act out scenes of bohemian scarcity in Vancouver, Wallace creates fictionalized simulacra—an aestheticized model of poverty derived from our collective, often over–embellished, social conscious. [emphasis mine] The film stills are then abstracted through repetition and presented amidst monochromatic colour fields, prompting viewers to review their own cognitive processes.
I think I understand what is being described in the news release and I agree that poverty can be 'aestheticized' or made glamourous. In fact, there's a term for it 'poverty porn'. I first heard the term in relation to a series of images taken by Lincoln Clarkes and his series, Heroines (from his Wikipedia entry; Note: Links have been removed),
Heroines (Anvil Press) [3] is an epic photographic documentary of 400 addicted women of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, which won the 2003 Vancouver Book Award (in a tie with Stan Douglas), and was the subject of numerous philosophical essays (by Leigh Butler, Margot Leigh Butler, and Paul Ugor, among them). The London Observer said Clarkes' book offered "beauty in a beastly place." Globe and Mail called it "intimate, compelling and undeniably unsettling," while The Toronto Star called it "incredibly powerful."
Clarkes, who'd been a high end fashion photographer, took photographs of female addicts (hence heroin/heroine) living in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, an area which by then was and still is a national and international disgrace. Within the Downtown Eastside community there was a great deal of controversy over Clarke's work hence the whispers about 'poverty porn'.
I gather Clarkes' initial impulse was to treat the women with respect and kindness and to try framing 'addicts' in the same way as he would a high fashion model rather than as one of the 'wretched of the earth'. Unfortunately as the work evolved, it appeared to become a career stepping stone for him and any other concerns seemed to drop out of view. In the end, I couldn't escape the impression that these women had been used again as unintentional as it may have been.
Getting back to Wallace, I see his point but I don't understand how his hard-to-see images of fake bohemians in streets and alleyways that are unrecognizable even to a local make his point about glamourizing poverty. Presumably, Wallace's images were taken in the Downtown Eastside, which in the 1980s was not nearly in the straits it is today. The social safety net cuts that came in the mid to later 1980s and the diminishment of the federal transfer funds to the provinces weren't yet the stuff of nightmares for social activists.
In retrospect, Wallace's images seem weirdly prescient, a kind of 'fiddling while Rome burns 'view of the future which is now our present day but, for me, they don't exactly deglamourize poverty or give us a view of an "… over–embellished, social conscious." In fact, there's something a bit odd about seeing this piece in a gallery that is housed in the same building as Rennie's real estate marketing business in a rapidly gentrifying area just a block or two away from where those 'poverty images' were taken. Add in the fact that the tour was made up of a relatively middle class group of people staring at poverty when the reality is block away the whole thing becomes head-spinning as these questions whirl who is seeing, who is being seen, and what is being seen?
The last piece I'm going to mention is the multi-panel "The Idea of the University" (1990). The piece brought back memories as I once worked at the University of British Columbia where Wallace took his images. It was a walk down the lane of 'old technology' with microfiche readers, electric typewriters, card catalogues, etc. Sydney Marshall (tour guide Sydney) has written a July 25, 2017 essay about the piece on the Rennie Collection's website,
Without contest, my favourite artwork by Ian Wallace is The Idea of the University (1990). Installed in Rennie Museum's monumental four-storey high exhibition space, the sprawling canvasses are almost as immense as their depicted subject: the University of British Columbia. It's likely that I appreciate it so much because like Wallace, I also studied at U.B.C., sitting in the same lecture hall that he used to teach in. This sentimentality seems to be shared; local visitors will often stop to point out former professors, or remember old buildings that have since been demolished. The piece is an exercise in collective memory. Functioning like a time capsule, it allows viewers to reflect on developments from the past to present. This is, however, just one aspect of a multi-faceted piece. By using the competing technical modes of painting and photography to depict university spaces, Wallace challenges the notion that painting is the only valid form of artistic production within academia. Historically, art production has operated within a technical hierarchy, with painting as the most revered medium due to the artistic labour it necessitates. The 20th century's shifting social climate ultimately sees a redistribution of this hierarchical power. In response to the increasing corporatization of the university space, anti-institutional dissent permeated universities across the North American continent – U.B.C. included. For Ian Wallace and his contemporaries, this manifested as a desire to dispute traditional designations of painting as the most inherently valuable way to produce art. With his work, Wallace recontextualizes the medium, placing it in direct conversation with its subsidiaries: photography, writing, and thinking. In doing so, he subverts the idea that a technical hierarchy needs exist at all, equating multiple forms of production across a broad spectrum of intellectual and artistic interests.
Ian Wallace
The Idea of the University I-XVI, 1990
Conceived for a special exhibition at the U.B.C. Fine Arts Gallery in 1990, the work features sixteen photographs of university spaces and personnel in various states of candidness, each flanked with bars of white and multicoloured monochrome. In its entirety, the work looks cinematic – as if it were a filmstrip of image stills pulled from a promotional clip. This is not to say the images are typically beautiful because, by all accounts, they're not. The depicted spaces are not inherently exciting. Some photographs are oddly cropped, others slightly out of focus; these formal details are irrelevant to the medium's intended purpose: its subject. Photography, as a medium, offers to art that which painting cannot. The photograph is able to capture the totality of 'the everyday' as it exists in a moment, bringing banality into focus and calling the viewer to engage with it further. Visible beauty no longer designates whether a work is 'art' or 'not art'; instead, it is the depth of concept that provides this justification. The valorization of these images as 'art' is additionally supported by their proximity to monochrome painting. The white monochrome acts as grounding, a symbolic representation of the white-walled gallery space typically designating a work of art. The multicoloured inclusions operate similarly. Different on each canvas, the monochrome bars provide an aesthetic and historical reference to modernism that further situates the opposing photographs within an established artistic context. By referencing this history, Wallace is able to push the limit of acceptable artistic production, using the predetermined power of modernism to elevate the comparatively new medium of photography.
It should be noted that a key component of The Idea of the University is missing from its visual representation: Wallace's catalogue essay. The writing has become a near immovable companion to the work, as it explains precisely why the artist has chosen to explore the subject of the university. In it, Wallace identifies the contemporary university as an abstracted space, caught between its founding principles and modern-day realities. The university is supposed to be a universalizing space, providing equal opportunity to acquire 'truth' and knowledge to everyone that passes through its metaphorical gates. Wallace almost immediately invalidates this idea by identifying the discrepancy between this ideal image and its actuality*. Instead of a collective organization united in the unhindered production of knowledge, the contemporary university exists as an ideology-producing institution that services a number of specific political and socioeconomic interests*. For Wallace, the same designation could be given to the discourse of art – a supposedly universal field that relies almost entirely on individual notions of taste and arbitrary economic determinations. The Idea of the University works as an evaluation of both the university and the discourse of art, but Wallace very intentionally leaves the canvasses open-ended. Instead, he presents the failures (or at least, potential failures) of these systems in his writing, using its visual counterpart as a stimulus by which the viewer can judge the validity of his propositions for themselves.
Just as Wallace succeeds in neutrally depicting the university space, so too does he succeed in avoiding a singular narrative of exactly how knowledge is produced. He chooses not to privilege one form of 'work' over another, but does show immense regard for practice in general. Some empty and others full, most of the photographed spaces feature a single figure engaging in various forms of intellectual labour: reading, searching the web, or completing administrative tasks. All of these engagements are qualified as 'work' that contributes to the ultimate output of the university. This is paralleled by Wallace's own technical expansions of artistic labour. He challenges traditional perceptions of painting and photography by combining the two, then supplementing the combination with writing. In this sense, it is neither the visual nor the written work that takes precedence, but the idea that all of these productive forms are equally valid. In essence, Wallace's presentation of simultaneous forms of labour democratizes realms of production within art, decentralizing painting as the foundation upon which art must be based. Not only does artwork not need to be painted, it doesn't even have to be visual. To Ian Wallace, a radical thought is as legitimate an artistic gesture as a visible brushstroke.
* Wallace, Ian. "The Idea of the University." UBC Fine Arts Gallery, 1990. Page 23. Print.
The production of art and the production of knowledge would seem to be the dominant themes of this Ian Wallace exhibition and, I suspect, his life.
Anyone interested in seeing the show for themselves, can go here to save a space on one of the tours (for this show they are on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays). It is also possible to book separate tours for groups of eight or more here.
This entry was posted in Vancouver, Visual Art and tagged 57th International Art Exhibition, Bob Rennie, Brian Jungen, Courtesy: Rennie Collection, Damian Moppett, Downtown Eastside, Geoffrey Farmer, Heroines, Ian Wallace, Ian Wallace: Collected Works, La Biennale di Venezia, Lincoln Clarkes, National Gallery of Canada, photoconceptualism, Poverty 1980 - 1984, poverty porn, Rennie Collection, Rodney Graham, Sydney Marshall, The Idea of the University (1990), UBC, University of British Columbia on July 28, 2017 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Solange Knowles and the Rennie Museum in Vancouver, Canada on April 27 and 28, 2017
Tickets ($35 CAD?) were sold out in less than an hour. Drat! On the upside, the Rennie Museum (formerly the Rennie Collection) is one of nine venues in nine cities hosting Solange Knowles' music tour of art museums. (Not my usual topic but I have covered shows at the Rennie many times throughout the years.) This tour is discussed in Emilia Petrarca's April 24, 2017 article for W magazine,
While Knowles isn't formally touring for A Seat at the Table, she will continue on the festival circuit and is also working on a performance art-inspired "museum tour," which she'll perform at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as well as the Guggenheim Museum in May [2017].
On wanting to be more than just a singer:
"Singer is probably at the bottom of the barrel in terms of what I'm trying to achieve as an artist. Visually, through many mediums—through dance, through art direction, through color theory—there are so many things that I've dabbled in that I've yet to immerse myself in fully. But I think right now, I'm creating the live show and music composition, production, and creating from the ground up is when I feel the most at home."
On her history as a dancer:
"I used to want to be a modern dancer when I was younger and go to Juilliard and do the whole thing, but I had a knee injury when I was 15. I was actually dancing for Destiny's Child. And that was how I started to write, because I thought I was going to be an [Alvin] Ailey girl [emphasis mine] somewhere."
On styling the costumes for her festival shows and museum tour:
"I'm touring two shows this spring/summer/fall, and one takes place in museum lobbies. For me, Donald Judd's idea that we take on our surroundings as a part of the art itself really, really punctured me in the way that I look at performance art. It's really rare that an artist gets to perform in daylight, unless it's at a festival. So I really wanted to play with creating a strong color palette. I've been playing around with a lot of neutral tones since the record came out and Issey Miyake has been a huge influence. We're also wearing a lot of Phillip Lim and really comfortable, moveable fabrics. On stage, I've really been empowered by the color red. I think it's associated, especially with women, as this fiery, super volatile, and strong-willed color. Almost stubborn, if you will. So we're wearing all-red for our festival shows and playing with the lighting for all the moods red can express. Color theory is this really nerdy side of me that I've been wanting to explore more of."
It's impossible to emphasize Alvin Ailey's impact enough. Prior to him, there were no African American dancers in dance It was thought African Americans had the wrong body type until Alvin Ailey proved them wrong. (The topic of body type and dance is bizarre to an outsider, especially where ballet is concerned. It lends itself to racism but is rampant throughout the world of modern dance and ballet. I followed the topic for a number of years.)
Getting back to Solange Knowles, Tavi Gevinson's Sept. 30, 2016 article for W explores her then new album 'A Seat at the Table',
Solange's new album, A Seat at the Table, is so many things at once: an antidote to hate, a celebration of blackness, an expression of the right to feel it all. After a move to Louisiana and period of self-reflection, the artist joined forces with a range of collaborators to put her new discoveries to music. Hearing it for the very first time, my heart went in and out of slow motion: swelled at a layered vocal, stopped at a painfully apt choice of words, sped up with a perfect bass-line. Mostly I was struck by A Seat at the Table as a nurturing force among the trauma of anti-blackness; a further exploration of questions posed by Solange on her Twitter, last summer: "Where can we be safe? Where can we be free? Where can we be black?"
So much of your album explicitly discusses racism and celebrating blackness, and one of the interludes talks about taking all the anger and metabolizing it through the work. Does that start with you through the lyrics or the sounds?
The writing process of this album was not more unique than any of my other processes, in that it typically starts with the melody idea and the words evolve based off of what I listen back to. Nine times out of ten, you're freestyling, but you're piecing the puzzle pieces together after you settle on a melody that you like. I definitely had concepts I wanted to explore. I knew that I wanted to make a song experiencing and communicating the exhaustion, the feeling of being weary and tired and energetically drained. I knew that I wanted to discuss this idea of the "angry black woman" in society, and dissect a conversation that I've had one too many times. I knew I had these concepts that I wanted to communicate, but I was resistant to letting them lead the creative process. So the first layer of making the album, I just jammed in a room with some incredible musicians. It was a great energy in the room, because it was not so much like, 'I'm going to make this album about this specific thing. It was just music-making. Then, I took that music and I went to New Iberia for that time, and I needed that insular time to break down what I was saying, what I was going to communicate and how I was going to do that. From there, I spent that summer writing lyrics. It was an interesting process because I'm a mother and I had to balance making an album and raising a preteen. And having my hands in all these different pots, so it was either all or nothing to me. I spent three months in New Iberia, and I recorded some of the album in Ghana and Jamaica. I had to have these isolated experiences creatively in order to turn off and listen to myself.
For all of the continued awareness of systemic violence and oppression, there isn't a lot of talk about that psychological toll of racism, at least in white circles and white media. That is so heavy in the album, and I'm really excited for people to have that to turn to.
That is such an ignored part of the conversation. I feel there were a lot of traumas that I had to experience during this creative process, that I didn't identify as traumas until I realized just how much weight and how many triggers [there are] like constantly seeing the images of young black people lifeless in the street, and how many cries of mothers that you're constantly hearing on a daily basis. Outside of those traumas, just the nuances that you have to navigate through everyday as a black person living in this country. It absolutely has a psychological effect on you. There are clinical and scientific studies that show the brain dealing with the same type of PTSD that we know of in other traumatic instances and experiences, but society has not yet come to terms with applying it to race. But I have a lot of optimism in the fact that we're even able to have this conversation now. This isn't something that my mom and one of her white friends would be discussing in their time. It's not always easy, and it's not always comfortable, and the person leading it usually gets a lot of shit for it, but that's with any revolution.
Here's a little information about the upcoming Vancouver show from an April 21, 2017 news item on the Georgia Straight (Note: Links have been removed),
Solange Knowles, woke artist, activist, feminist, and producer of one of 2016's most critically acclaimed albums, has announced that she will be playing a show at Vancouver's Rennie Museum (51 East Pender Street) on April 27.
The singer published an image to her Instagram page yesterday (April 20), revealing that Vancouver is one of nine cities she will be stopping in over the next two months. Shortly after, the Rennie Collection, one of the country's largest collections of contemporary art exhibited at the Wing Sang building in Chinatown, shared on its social media pages that Knowles will be conducting a "special performance".
"Her album [A Seat at the Table] is very artistic," Wendy Chang, director at the Rennie, tells the Straight by phone. "She's on the West Coast this week and, because she has nothing planned for Vancouver at all, we thought we'd take advantage of that and have her perform and have all proceeds go to a charity."
Chang reveals that the "very small, very intimate" performance will benefit the Atira Women's Resource Society, a DTES–based nonprofit that provides safe housing and support for women and children affected by violence.
Not much else has been confirmed about the last-minute show, though given the venue and the sold-out act Knowles plans to present at New York's Guggenheim Museum in May, fans can expect an interdisciplinary set that explores blackness, prejudice, and womanhood both visually and sonically.
In March, Knowles also debuted "Scales", a performance project "examining protest as meditation through movement and experimentation of unique compositions and arrangements from A Seat at the Table", at Houston's Menil Collection. More recently, she appeared at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
In addition to Vancouver, Knowles is making stops in cities such as San Francisco, Mayer, Arizona, and Boston between now and June [2017].
I did find a review for Knowles' April 21, 2017 show in Portland, Oregon (from Emerson Malone's April 22, 2017 review for DailyEmerald.com,
The unsinkable Solange Knowles played the headlining slot for Soul'd Out Music Fest, a soul and R&B music festival based in multiple venues around Portland, on Friday, April 21, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. The festival's events from April 19–23 have included Travis Scott (who brought Drake out to get cozy in the crowd); Giorgio Moroder, The Ohio Players and Cory Henry and the Funk Apostles.
One of the most admirable elements of Solange's live show is the impeccable choreography. It's so precisely designed that every subtle movement, every head nod and jazz hand-wave, was on cue. At times the group would form a tight chorus line and sway back and forth in unison, with everyone (save the trombonists) continuing to play.
When she demanded that everyone dance during the bubblegum-pop hit "Losing You" from her 2012 EP "True," the entire hall erupted at her behest. The encore performance "Don't Touch My Hair" — Solange's exhortation of the casual fetishization of black women — was phenomenal. She turned her back to the audience and acted as conductor, commanding the musicians with loud, grandiose gestures. As the drummer smashed the cymbals, she mirrored him, thrashed her limbs and windmilled her arms.
Following the show, even one of the Arlene's security guards — who just spent the last hour dancing — was quietly weeping and speechlessly shaking her head in awe. Solange isn't just a firebrand individual, and her show isn't just an opulent, elegant triumph of performance art. She is a puppet master; we're marionettes.
Unfortunately, the Solange Knowles' Vancouver show sold out within minutes (yes, I know I'm repeating it but it was heartbreaking) and I gather from the folks at the Rennie Museum that they had very little notice about the show which is being organized solely by Knowles' people in response to my somewhat grumbling email. Ah well, them's the breaks. In any event, there are only 100 tickets per performance available so for those who did get a ticket, you are going to have an intimate experience with the artist and given the venue, this will be a performance art experience rather than a music show such as the one in Portland, Oregon. There will be three performances in Vancouver,. one on Thursday, April 27, 2017 and two on Friday, April 28, 2017 (you can see the listing here). Enjoy!
This entry was posted in Music, performing arts, pop culture, Vancouver, Visual Art and tagged A Place at the Table, Arizona, Atira Women's Resource Society, Boston, Emerson Malone, Emilia Petrarca, Guggenheim Museum, Houston, Lucy Lau, Menil Collection, Miami, New York, Pérez Art Museum, Portland Oregon, Rennie Collection, Rennie Museum, San Francisco, Scales, Solange Knowles, Tavi Gevinson, Wendy Chang, Wing Sang Building on April 26, 2017 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Two tales of mashup visual art shows in Vancouver (Canada): part 1 of 2
I've been to two new exhibitions in Vancouver (Canada) and while both could be described as mashups, only one uses the word in its title. Before getting to the shows, here's a little bit about mashups for anyone who's not familiar with word.
A mashup definition
Generally speaking a mashup is when you bring together multiple source materials to create something new. Here's a list of different types of mashups, from the Mashup Wikipedia entry,
Mashup may refer to:
Mashup (music), the musical genre encompassing songs which consist entirely of parts of other songs
Mashup (video), a video that is edited from more than one source to appear as one
Mashup (book), a book which combines a pre-existing text, often a classic work of fiction, with a certain popular genre such as vampire or zombie narratives
Mashup (web application hybrid), a web application that combines data and/or functionality from more than one source
Mash-Up (Glee), a musical theater performance composed of integrated segments from other performances as popularized by the American television series Glee
Mash Up (TV series), a television show on Comedy Central starring T.J. Miller.
Lotus Mashups, a Business Mashups editor developed and distributed by IBM as part of the IBM Mashup Center system
Band Mashups, the former name of the video game Battle of the Bands
While the book mashup seems relatively new, there have been other older literary mashups such as cut-up technique (Note: Links have been removed),
The cut-up technique (or découpé in French) is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.
Arguably although problematically, the exquisite corpse could be included as a literary mashup (Note: Links have been removed),
Exquisite corpse, also known as exquisite cadaver (from the original French term cadavre exquis) or rotating corpse, is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun", as in "The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge") or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed.
The technique was invented by surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Surrealism principal founder André Breton reported that it started in fun, but became playful and eventually enriching. Breton said the diversion started about 1925, but Pierre Reverdy wrote that it started much earlier, at least before 1918.
In any event, music mashups (also called remix amongst other things) seem to have predated any other mashups, from the Mashup (music) Wikipedia entry,
A mashup (also mesh, mash up, mash-up, blend, bootleg[1] and bastard pop/rock) is a song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental track of another.[2] …
The practice of assembling new songs from purloined elements of other tracks stretches back to the beginnings of recorded music [emphasis mine]. If one extends the definition beyond the realm of pop, precursors can be found in musique concrète, as well as the classical practice of (re-)arranging traditional folk material and the jazz tradition of reinterpreting standards. In addition, many elements of mashup culture have antecedents in hip hop and the DIY ethic of punk as well as overlap with the free culture movement.
Recorded music seems to have started sometime in the 1870's, from the History of Sound Recording Wikipedia entry,
The history of sound recording – which has progressed in waves, driven by the invention and commercial introduction of new technologies – can be roughly divided into four main periods:
the "Acoustic" era, 1877 to 1925
the "Electrical" era, 1925 to 1945 (including sound on film)
the "Magnetic" era, 1945 to 1975
the "Digital" Era, 1975 to the present day.
It seems the musicians got there first. That settled, it's time for the visual art exhibition that's a mashup in principle if not in name. (Although Robin Laurence in part 2 makes a compelling case for the 18th century visual artist, Mary Delany and her 'paper-mosaiks' (scroll down about 75% of the way; it's in the subsection titled 'Reviews and commentaries from elsewhere').
Rennie Collection
While he's made his money as a Vancouver real estate marketer, Bob Rennie is better known internationally as someone who is passionately committed to the visual arts. Crowned as one of the top 200 art collectors in the world by ArtNews, Rennie rated both a profile in ArtNews and a mention in the ArtNet News April 30, 2015 article, Top 200 Art Collectors Worldwide for 2015, Part Two. According to his entry on Wikipedia, there's also this (Note: Links have been removed),
Rennie chairs the North America Acquisitions Committee (NAAC) at Tate Museum in London,[5]is a member of the Tate International Council and sits on the Dean's Advisory Board to the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia (since 2006). In recognition of his dedication to the arts and the arts community, he received an honorary doctorate of letters from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2008, and was appointed to the university's Board of Governors in 2009.
Rennie joined the Board of Trustees at The Art Institute of Chicago in 2015.[6]
The current exhibition at the Rennie Collection (where pieces from his extensive art collection are displayed) is untitled and unique. The show was curated by Rennie himself (from the Rennie Collection Jan. ??, 2016 news release),
Rennie Collection is proud to present a major group exhibition featuring 41 prominent and emerging artists. Bringing together a variety of practices and media, this survey aims to reveal the chaos of the world by addressing enduringly pertinent issues, from migratory displacement to an in-depth examination of identity and history. The exhibition runs from January 23 to April 23, 2016 [ETA April 4, 2016: The show has been extended to Friday, May 20, 2016.].
"This is our twelfth exhibition at the Rennie Museum, with works from the collection. Although we never burden our shows with a formal title, the working title for this install− which mines 41 artists from the collection − is 'chaos'. Given the chaos of the world, I wanted to bring tough topics into conversations.
From the first work that ever entered the collection, Norman Rockwells On Top of The World (1933) – a utopian world that I thought actually existed outside my childhood home in Vancouver's eastside – through to Bob Beck's Thirteen Shooters (2001) showcasing the Columbine killers – the world stopped sixteen years ago hearing the news of a school massacre – my concern today, and a focus of the exhibition, is on elevating the topics in the show. We just don't stop anymore upon hearing the news.
For anyone familiar with the Rennie Collection, it is in a heritage building in one of the oldest parts of Vancouver. The building houses both the 'gallery' and Rennie's real estate marketing business. Visits (tours) to see an exhibition must be booked; there is no 'dropping in'.
When I attended, over 15 of us were booked for a visit, we were introduced to the exhibit by Whitney (a student from the University of British Columbia art history programme). Usually you get an introduction to every single piece in the exhibit but with over 41 artists represented and, I believe, 53 pieces being shown that proved to be impossible. That said, there is one piece which is likely to be everyone's starting part and that is the camel or more precisely, John Baldessari's 2013 Camel (Albino) Contemplating Needle (Large) on the ground floor by picture window where passersby can look in from the street.
The piece looks like a giant lump of camel-shaped plastic, smooth and white. The artist has coloured in the eyes which from most angles seem to be gazing not at the needle before it but heavenward. It is as you've likely guessed a reference to the saying about rich men having as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel has of passing through the eye of a needle. Whitney informed us that the saying can, more or less, be associated with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (If you look on Wikipedia (Eye of a needle) entry, you'll find it can also be associated with the Bahá'í faith.) By the way, the saying is written on the gallery wall in Arabic.
It seems telling that the first piece is about rich men and their difficulty getting to heaven in a show curated by a rich man (Rennie's stated intention seen later in this post does not resemble my response to the piece). Then, further into the gallery's first floor, there are pieces by Jota Castro titled 'Motherfuckers never die'. One of the pieces features a list of art collectors, both individual and corporate (not including Rennie), with the title prominently featured as the headline. It suggests a highly self-critical view both personally and socially, which is borne out through the rest of the exhibition.
Upstairs, the second floor is an overwhelming experience given that its three galleries are loaded with the bulk of the items. One of the more engaging pieces for me was 'Animal Farm '92 (after George Orwell)', 1992 by Tim Rollins and K.O.S.
Orwell's book 'Animal Farm' has been ripped apart so the pages could be glued to a huge canvas or some other surface. Over top of the book's pages, artists have rendered political figures of the period as animals. The usual suspects are present: the US president, China's president, France's president, Japan's prime minister and, more excitingly, leaders who are largely unknown outside their own countries. It was fascinatingly comprehensive.
The Tate (UK art gallery) has an image which shows you what I'm trying to describe but in no way conveys the scale,
Animal Farm – G7 1989-92 Tim Rollins born 1955 Lent from a private collection 2000 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/L02312
You could spend hours contemplating the geopolitical and social implications both then and now. As well, the piece has an interesting story of its own as can be seen on the Tim Rollins and K.O.S webpage on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press website,
In August 1981, artist and activist Tim Rollins was recruited by the principal of Intermediate School 52 in the South Bronx to develop a curriculum that combined art-making with lessons in reading and writing for students classified as "at risk." On the first day of school, Rollins told his students, "Today we are going to make art, but we are also going to make history." This book unfolds that history, offering the first comprehensive catalog of work created collaboratively by Rollins and several generations of students, now known as the "Kids of Survival."
Rollins and his students developed a way of working that combined art-making with reading literature and writing personal narratives: Rollins or a student would read aloud from classic literary texts by such authors as Shakespeare and Orwell while the rest of the class drew or wrote on the pages being read, connecting the stories to their own experiences. Often, Rollins and his students (who later named themselves "Kids of Survival" or K.O.S.) cut out book pages and laid them on a grid on canvas before undertaking their graphic interventions. This process developed into the group's signature style, which they applied to literary texts, musical scores, and other printed matter. This book and the accompanying major museum retrospective document the history of the groundbreaking practice of Tim Rollins and K.O.S., with full color images of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. These include a caricature of Jesse Helms with an animal body drawn on the pages of Animal Farm; graffiti-like images painted in acrylic on the pages of Frankenstein; a gleaming pattern of fantastical golden horns on Kafka's Amerika; and a series of red letter A's on The Scarlet Letter.
As promised, social issues dominate this Rennie Collection show throughout. Ai Wei Wei's 'Coloured Vases' (2009) with industrial paint covering and cheapening seven Han era dynasty vases, Brian Jungen's mishapened and blackened Ku Klux Hood ('Untitled', 2015), and Judy Chartrand's 'If this is what you call "Being Civilized" I'd rather go back to "Being Savage …"' hotel bowls (2003) which ahs drawings of cockroaches included with the decorative imagery, call viewers to take into account their own biases. Wei Wei's vases are cheap and garish, it's on learning that Han era vases are beneath the paint that the viewer is forced to reevaluate the piece and his or her own judgment. Chartrand's cockroaches blend in with the decor and it takes a minute or two to recognize them for what they are and recoil. The experience is a bit shocking and for locals who recognize the names of the three hotel bowls represented, the link to the Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is searing. Jungen's second piece (Untitled) in this show is on the floor, the shape not readily seen, and the colour black. Once Whitney told us it was meant to represent a Ku Klux Klan hood, we were presented with a problem. When something as iconic as a white, cloth, KKK hood is represented by a misshapen lump of solid black plastic and is on the floor unrecognizable as a hood, one has to resolve cognitive dissonance.
The show ends on the third floor where the Norman Rockwell print 'On Top of the World' (1933) mentioned in the news release is bracketed by two pieces by Anton Kannemeyer 'W is for White' (2007) on the left (once also known as the 'sinister' side) & 'B is for Black' (2007) on the right. Rennie's first art purchase representing an idealized world he (and many others) have aspired to is bracketed by Kannemeyer's pieces, which feature definitions for white and black found in the Oxford English Dictionary and are illustrated with crude racist images. The effect is of one more disturbance added to a series experienced in this show. One final discombobulating experience (I'm not sure if it's intentional *ETA March 8, 2016 1720 hours: Yes, it is according to Wendy Chang of the Rennie Collection*) is due to a permanent installation seen from the rooftop, Martin Creed's strangely reassuring neon words 'EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT'. All you have to do is go to the door which opens onto the roof and turn your head to the left and you can either view the Creed piece through the glass door or step out onto the roof.
If there's any doubt that Rennie intends to disconcert and disturb the viewer, a January ??, 2016 Rennie Collection news release clarifies the matter,
Social commentary and artist's approach to reporting the news has always interested me – Gilbert and George's Bomb from 2006, or the questioning of commerce in the backroom photos of Amazon by Hugh Scott-Douglas, John Baldessari's albino camel bringing ancient proverbs into question [my response was not that as noted earlier], and Glenn Ligon's 'fallen America'. I felt it was time to stop looking at the world's chaos in isolation and let you see into the world in accumulation. If you leave sad, tense or somewhat suffocated, then I have… you know, I don't know really what I have done, other than reminded us that when one of us has a problem, we all have a problem. [emphasis mine]
Thank you so much for questioning the world with me…"
Bob Rennie
Here's an image of Rennie with the Martin Creed piece visible behind him,
[downloaded from http://www.artnews.com/top200/bob-rennie/]
Finally, Rennie's comment that one of us having a problem means we all do brought to mind this,
Part 2 covers the mashup at the Vancouver Art Gallery and more.
This entry was posted in Vancouver, Visual Art and tagged 'Animal Farm '92 (after George Orwell), Ai Wei Wei, André Breton, Animal Farm, Anton Kannemeyer, B is for Black, Bahá'í faith, Band Mashups, blackened Ku Klux Hood (Untitled), Bob Rennie, Brian Jungen, cadavre exquis, Camel (Albino) Contemplating Needle (Large), Christianity, Coloured Vases, Consequences (parlour game), cut-up technique, decoupage, découpé, exquisite cadaver, exquisite corpse, free culture movement, George Orwell, hip hop, If this what you call "Being Civilized" I'd rather go back to "Being Savage ..., Islam, John Baldessari, Jota Castro, Judaism, Judy Chartrand, K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), Lotus Mashups, Martin Creed. EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT, mash Up (TV series), mash-Up (Glee), mashup (book), mashup (music), mashup (video), mashup (web application hybrid), mashups, Motherfuckers never die, musique concrète, Norman Rockwell, On Top of The World, Oxford English Dictionary, Pierre Reverdy, punk, Rennie Collection, rotating corpse, surrealists, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., W is for White, William S. Burroughs on March 8, 2016 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Part 1 of this piece featured definitions for the word mashup and a commentary on the current (Jan. 23 – April 23, 2016 [ETA April 4, 2016: The show has been extended to Friday, May 20, 2016.]) Rennie Collection show which is a mashup in all but name. This part is going to focus on the Vancouver Art Gallery's show 'Mashup: The Birth of Modern Culture' (Feb. 20 – June 12, 2016). There will also be mention of a couple of precursor mashup shows and there will be a few comments about artists, mashups, and curators.
Mashup: The Birth of Modern Culture
Immediately, you hear the sounds of the show bleeding into the Vancouver Art Gallery's (VAG) lobby. With 371 works representing 156 artists, it is the largest and most ambitious show in the gallery's 85-year (founded in 1931) history. (20% of the works are from the VAG's collection and the other 80% are from elsewhere.)
The first mashup experience is a wall of screens (reminding me of a movie 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' starring David Bowie as an alien who like to watch multiple television sets arranged as a wall of screens) where pieces in the show flash on in a mesmerizing fashion. If you stay long enough in front of the bank of screens, you will see the entire show cycle through. It's an appropriate beginning for a show that overwhelms the senses and in many ways reflects modern culture.
Each floor hosts a different 'age' with the first floor representing 'The Digital Age: Hacking, Remix and the Archive in the Age of Post-Production', the second floor the 'Late Twentieth Century: Splicing, Sampling and the Street in the Age of Appropriation', the third floor the 'Post-War: Cut, Copy and Quotation in the Age of Mass Media, and the fourth floor the 'Early Twentieth Century: Collage, Montage and Readymade at the Birth of Modern Culture. Somewhat counterintuitively you go backward in time.
The press tour I attended was trotted through the not quite ready for prime time show pretty briskly two days before the opening so your experience may vary from what I am about to describe. In fact, it's a certainty it will, given the wealth of works shown.
By contrast with the Rennie Collection show which focused on social issues, this show is focused, although some of the artists do address social issues, on the art history of the last hundred years or so.
In a sense, Marcel Duchamp provides the through-line for the show. Sherrie Levine's 'urinal' (cast in bronze with a gold patina) evokes the 'original' version in a fashion I read as teasing,
Sherrie Levine's Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), 1991, cast bronze and artist's wooden base,Glenstone Photo: Tim Nightswander/Imaging4Art.com
Here's an image of the original,
The original Fountain by Marcel Duchamp photographed by Alfred Stieglitz at the 291 (Art Gallery) after the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibit. Stieglitz used a backdrop of The Warriors by Marsden Hartley to photograph the urinal. The entry tag is clearly visible. [downloaded from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_%28Duchamp%29]
Here's a description of the 'fountain' and its place in contemporary art history, from the Fountain (Duchamp) entry in Wikipedia (Note: Links have been removed),
Fountain is a 1917 work produced by Marcel Duchamp. The piece was a porcelain urinal, which was signed "R.Mutt" and titled Fountain. Submitted for the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, in 1917, the first annual exhibition by the Society to be staged at The Grand Central Palace in New York, Fountain was rejected by the committee, even though the rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee. Fountain was displayed and photographed at Alfred Stieglitz's studio, and the photo published in The Blind Man, but the original has been lost. The work is regarded by art historians and theorists of the avant-garde, such as Peter Bürger, as a major landmark in 20th-century art. 17 replicas commissioned by Duchamp in the 1960s now exist.[2]
Mashup has a Marcel Duchamp 'fountain' on the VAG's fourth floor. Levine's piece can be found on the second floor. So, this Duchamp 'throughline' takes us almost from the present into the past.
One installation that seemed interesting but wasn't ready at the preview was a music room (on the second floor) featuring David Byrne's and Brian Eno's album, 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts'. The album's Wikipedia entry has this (Note: Links have been removed),
Recorded by Eno and Byrne in between their work on Talking Heads projects, the album combines sampled vocals, African rhythms, found sounds, and electronic music,[6] and has been called a "pioneering work for countless styles connected to electronics, ambience, and Third World music".[2] The extensive use of sampling on the album is widely considered ground-breaking and innovative, though its actual influence on the sample-based music genres that later emerged continues to be debated.[7][8]
Also on the second floor is a roomlet of bookcases (floor to ceiling) featuring copies of a 1376-page book titled 'S, M, L, XL'. by Rem Koolhaus (internationally renowned Dutch architect) and Bruce Mau, a Canadian graphic designer. It made a bit of a splash when it was published in 1995 but its Wikipedia entry is somewhat muted. Perhaps its prominence in Mashup is in part due to Mau's Massive Change show which was premiered at the Vancouver Art Gallery in October 2004.
One of my favourite pieces (due to its bright colours and movement) was by Robert Rauschenberg, [Revolver II] on the third floor,
Rauschenberg – Revolver II – Silk screen on plexiglass – 1967 Courtesy: fibonaccisusan
This piece has an interesting history as described in a Jan. 25, 2014 (?) post by Susan Happersett on her fibonaccisusan website concerning Math Art,
E.A.T Experiments in Art and Technology 1960 – 2014 is the current exhibition on display at the Payne Gallery at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This small show documents the collaborations of artists with scientists and engineers from Bell Labs in NJ. Two Bell Labs engineers, Billy Kluver and Fred Waldhauer, started working with artists, providing them access to the newest technology. In 1966 they helped bring together 30 scientists and engineers with 11 artists to produce a cutting edge performance art series called 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering in NYC. Through these partnerships, the engineers were trying to do two things. They wanted to address the effects of technology on society, and they were looking for new ways to explore this technology. Not all of the work was performance art, it also included sculpture, drawing and architecture.
What does this have to with Math Art? If you look at the time line for these collaborations you see that in 1966 computers were the new technology. Some of the art work done in these experiments was based on Mathematical algorithms.
Robert Rauschenberg was one of the artists closely involved with E.A.T. One of his projects was a series of six "Revolvers". "Revolver II" from 1967 is on display in the center of the gallery. It consists of 5 plexiglass circles that have been printed with silk screen. They rotate independently when one of five buttons is pushed. Because the circles are transparent, the different rotations (1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 circles at a time) create interesting geometric patterns.
'Revolver II' has a control box so you can push a switch and make things happen.
While it's not stated explicitly, technology is an important motif in this show as the technologies of different periods make some of these art pieces and installations possible.
While the infamous (in some circles) Duchamp 'Fountain' can be found on the fourth floor, it was another of Duchamp's pieces there which caught my attention. 'La boîte-en-valise' largely because it reminded me of a dollhouse. New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) devotes a webpage to the 'boîte',
Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise, or box in a suitcase, is a portable miniature monograph including sixty-nine reproductions of the artist's own work. Between 1935 and 1940, he created a deluxe edition of twenty boxes, each in a brown leather carrying case but with slight variations in design and content. A later edition consisting of six different series was created during the 1950s and 1960s; these eliminated the suitcase, used different colored fabrics for the cover, and altered the number of items inside. Each box unfolds to reveal pull-out standing frames displaying Nude Descending a Staircase and other works, diminutive Readymades hung in a vertical "gallery," and loose prints mounted on paper. Duchamp included in each deluxe box one "original." In The Museum of Modern Art's Boîte-en-valise, this is a hand-colored print depicting the upper half of The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, or Large Glass (1915-23). Among the reproductions found in the box is L.H.O.O.Q., a rectified Readymade created by taking a cheap print of the Mona Lisa and adding a moustache, goatee, and lascivious pun (understood when the letters L-H-O-O-Q are pronounced rapidly in French to mean "she's got a hot ass"). Duchamp's boxes, along with his altered Mona Lisa, address museums' ever-increasing traffic in reproductions and question the relative importance of the "original" work of art.
Here's an image of one of the many 'boxes' appearing in an April 20, 2012 article by Brady Carlson for New Hampshire Public Radio,
Marcel Duchamp, Box in a Valise (Boîte-en-valise, Series F), 1966, mixed-media assemblage.
Courtesy Hood Museum of Art
The 'boîte' in the VAG's Mashup came from the Art Gallery of Ontario and according to the show's lead curator, Bruce Grenville, this is the last time, due to fragility, the piece will be loaned out.
Both the Rennie Collection's 'untitled' mashup and the VAG's 'Birth of Modern Culture' mashup are overwhelming experiences. The issues raised in Rennie's curatorial outing (it took him five years and it's his first attempt) are difficult, complex, and, at times, quite confronting. And while art history might seem like a more sedate topic, the VAG's mashup (10 years from when Grenville first had the idea including three years to execute the plan) reflects the frenetic, frantic pace and noise (both literally and informationwise) of contemporary life. Both shows do beg repeat viewings.
These shows also pose a question about the role of artists and the role of curators. If a mashup, as I noted in part one, "… is when you bring together multiple source materials to create something new" and curators are bringing these pieces together to create something new, then is the curator also the artist?
Rennie could argue that he has brought pieces together in a way which reflects each artist's concerns and demonstrates how different artists approach the same social issues. So, he's less an artist and more a curator who has found a way to highlight each artist while reflecting contemporary concerns.
By contrast, the curators at the VAG (Bruce Grenville, Daina Augaitis, and Stephanie Rebick took a creator's approach to their show and in some ways could be viewed as subverting the artists.
Rennie and the VAG curators have facilitated their own subversion as viewers mentally construct their own show from the works on display. While, it could be said that viewers always construct their own shows, the sheer number of pieces in the VAG's Mashup and Rennie's 'untitled chaos' demand it.
Previous Vancouver art gallery/museum mashups
Surrey Art Gallery (Surrey is in the Vancouver metropolitan area) had a mashup in 2007, Cultural Mashups, Bhangra, Bollywood + Beyond (PDF). Plus the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology had a mashup show sometime in the mid-1980s that was a revelation to me. Objects were brought together in completely unexpected ways to showcase similarities of disparate cultures across time. Sadly, I don't recall the title of the show.
Going to the Rennie Collection and VAG shows
As noted in part one, you have to book a tour for the Rennie Collection but the show is free. Scheduled tours are given on Saturdays, Sundays, and Thursdays.
The VAG show costs $24 for adults and $55 for families. Seniors and students do get a break, it's $18 for them. In addition seniors (65+) can pay by donation from 10 am to 1 pm on Mondays: March 7, 2016, April 4, 2016, May 2, 2016, and June 6, 2016. There are no show passes but you can purchase a membership which if you go often enough to the VAG can be a good deal. Tuesday nights used to feature a donation entry fee after 5 pm but that seems to have been eliminated.
Reviews and commentaries from elsewhere
Robin Laurence who writes about visual art for the Georgia Straight newspaper and many other publications has two pieces, a Feb. 10, 2016 preview of the show (MashUp charts modern culture's mad mixing; The Vancouver Art Gallery's monumental new show links everyone from Picasso to Basquiat and Tarantino) and a Feb. 23, 2015 review (MashUp reveals the pivotal role of women in pioneering of modern art methods). I particularly appreciated this bit in her review,
Despite the large number of women among the show's 28 collaborating curators, female artists are dramatically underrepresented in MashUp. By my count, they number 36 out of the 156 listed in the show's media kit. Nonetheless, an interesting subtheme emerges here: the important, if not always acknowledged, role women played in pioneering collage and photomontage techniques.
On the VAG's fourth floor, where the early-modernist works are installed, a couple of didactic panels alert us to the photo-collages that were produced by aristocratic English women during the Victorian era. "Decades before the collage experiments of…the 20th century European avant-garde," the text tells us, "the manipulation of photographs had already become a popular technique."
The greatly enlarged example of a genteel-pastime precursor to photomontage is a late-1870s work by Kate Edith Gough. Her homely watercolour scene of a pond is given a surreal twist by cut-out photos of women's heads mounted onto the necks of painted ducks. The effect is unsettling–a precursor to surrealism.
The show doesn't allude at all to Mary Delany, the 18th-century "gentlewoman" credited with inventing mixed-media collage, an art form she described as "paper-mosaicks". An accomplished amateur artist, Delany created, in her 70s and 80s, an extraordinary series of botanical drawings using cut paper and watercolour mounted on a black ground. (Not only are they extremely beautiful and dazzlingly detailed, they are also scientifically accurate.) But perhaps she was too botanically inclined and too far in advance of the modern era to be considered here—more's the pity.
Point taken Ms. Laurence and just in time for International Women's Day, March 8, 2016.
Kevin Griffin of the Vancouver Sun chimes in with a Feb. 23, 2016 review on his blog where he provides more information about the Sherrie Levine piece mentioned earlier in this part,
An example of how the idea of the readymade has changed over time is Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp) by Sherrie Levine. Unlike Duchamp's urinal, Levine's wasn't bought in a store but is a copy cast in bronze, a traditional sculptural material. By 1991 when she made the work, Levine appropriated Duchamp's original but made it out a material that suggests that what was once a radical art gesture has now become tamed by art history.
While the VAG show received extensive coverage internationally prior to its opening, as of this day, March 8, 2016, I haven't found many reviews other than a few local ones and one in the national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, by Marsha Lederman in a March 4, 2016 article,
During a period of intense experimentation between 1912 and 1914, Picasso and Georges Braque began to incorporate non-traditional materials in their compositions – wallpaper, newspapers, musical scores and other found materials – essentially inventing collage. This launches an entirely new mode of representation, something that will take on many forms and terms – assemblage, collage, détournement, appropriation, sampling, ripping and hacking (to name a few).
The impact of this radical move was tremendous and the VAG show demonstrates that it has reached far beyond visual art. You see it in architecture and design, in film; you hear it in music – an interconnectedness that links artists, eras, genres and mediums.
"Everything you see around you is really based in a kind of mashup, remix, sampling kind of sensibility," says Grenville, who conceived the exhibition.
"We do like to encompass the historical but to see it from the contemporary perspective. And so trying to make sense out of mashup culture, we had to go back in time to see it and to understand: Where does this originate? How is it connected?"
The exhibition is organized chronologically in four sections, each with its own floor. On the first floor, the contemporary – the digital age. Here you can lie back on blue pillows in German filmmaker Hito Steyerl's video installation Liquidity Inc. (2014) and let the story of economic loss, mixed martial arts – and water – wash over you; blue judo mats act as sound buffers, also part of the installation.
You can watch an armed Ronald McDonald take Big Boy hostage in French graphics and animation studio H5's animated short Logorama (2009) – which uses more than 2,500 logos.
While there are a few others, the last review I'm including here is Helen Wong's March 2, 2016 article for Sad Mag (Note: I found her article on March 7, 2016 after I finished my set of impressions and found she and I shared more than one; we have not communicated with each other),
In the exhibition preview Grenville stated their goal was to ensure their visitors would return again and again. By creating such a massive and comprehensive show, there is no choice but to return. Frankly, going and seeing the exhibition in one go is overwhelming and exhausting. [emphasis mine] There is so much work to see that by the time you finish, your thoughts resemble the mashup of the exhibition. In a way, the design of the exhibition presents a mashup in itself where hundreds of works are presented to the viewer, giving you the responsibility of picking out what's important. I found that this also mirrors modern day society as information and images are given to us at a speed quicker than ever. We are prone to distraction as our attention spans decline.
What follows is a segue of sorts into the New York art scene which disconcertingly brings to mind the current situation with the VAG's interest in moving to a purpose-built space and its current show.
Contemporary art museum scene
For anyone who's interested in the Vancouver art scene, it's hard to miss the Vancouver Art Gallery's current drive to raise $350M for a new space. This desire for a newer, bigger box is not confined to Vancouver as Jerry Saltz points out in his April 19, 2015 piece for the Vulture where he explores the drive for bigger and better in New York City's art scene (Note: Links have been removed),
… museums have changed — a lot. Slowly over the past quarter-century, then quickly in the past decade. These changes have been complicated, piecemeal, and sometimes contradictory, with different museums embracing them in different ways. But the transformation is visible everywhere. Put simply, it is this: The museum used to be a storehouse for the art of the past, the display of supposed masterpieces, the insightful exploration of the present in the context of the long or compressed histories that preceded it. Now — especially as embodied by the Tate Modern [Note: The Swiss architects responsibe for the Tate Modern have been retained for the proposed new VAG space], Guggenheim Bilbao, and our beloved MoMA — the museum is a revved-up showcase of the new, the now, the next, an always-activated market of events and experiences, many of which lack any reason to exist other than to occupy the museum industry — an industry that critic Matthew Collings has called "bloated and foolish, corporatist, ghastly and death-ridden."
The list of fun-house attractions is long. At MoMA, we've had overhyped, badly done shows of Björk and Tim Burton, the Rain Room selfie trap, and the daylong spectacle of Tilda Swinton sleeping in a glass case. This summer in London you can ride Carsten Höller's building-high slides at the Hayward Gallery — there, the fun house is literal. Elsewhere, it is a little more "adult": In 2011, L.A.'s MoCA staged Marina Abramovic's Survival MoCA Dinner, a piece of megakitsch that included naked women with skeletons atop them on dinner tables where attendees ate. In 2012, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art paid $70,000 for a 21-foot-tall, 340-ton boulder by artist Michael Heizer and installed it over a cement trench in front of the museum, paying $10 million for what is essentially a photo op. Last year, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago mounted a tepid David Bowie show, which nevertheless broke records for attendance and sales of catalogues, "limited-edition prints," and T-shirts. Among the many unfocused recent spectacles at the Guggenheim were Cai Guo-Qiang's nine cars suspended in the rotunda with lights shooting out of them. The irony of these massively expensive endeavors is that the works and shows are supposedly "radical" and "interdisciplinary," but the experiences they generate are closer, really, to a visit to Graceland — "Shut up, take a selfie, keep moving."
In this way, an old museum model has been replaced by another one. Museums that were roughly bookish, slow, a bit hoity-toity, not risk-averse but careful, oddly other, and devoted to reflection, connoisseurship, cultivation, and preservation (mostly of the past but also of new great works) — these museums have transformed into institutions that feel faster, indifferent to existing collections, and at all times intensely in pursuit of new work, new crowds, and new money. We used to look at these places as something like embodiments and explorations of the canon — or canons, since some (MoMA's and Guggenheim's modernism collections) were narrower and more specialized than others (the Met's, the Louvre's). But whatever long-view curating and collecting museums do now — and many of them still do it well — the institutions that are sucking up the most energy are the ones that have made themselves into platforms for spectacle, as though the party-driven global-art-fair feeding frenzy had taken up residence in one place, and one building, permanently. Plus, accessibility has become everything. More museums are making collections available online — sad to say, art is sometimes better viewed there than in the flesh, thanks to so much bad museum architecture and so little actual space to display permanent collections. Acoustiguides have become more and more common, and while there's much good they can do, it often seems their most important function is crowd control — moving visitors through quickly to make room for the next million.
The museums of New York can already feel alien with this new model taking over. And we're really at the beginning rather than the end of the transformation. All four of Manhattan's big museums — the Met, MoMA, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim — have undertaken or are involved in massive expansion, renovation, and rebuilding. …
It's a fascinating read for its perspective on the New York art and international art scenes. Well worth reading.
After reading Saltz's piece and recalling the VAG's expansionist plans, I am beginning to wonder if their Mashup spectacle is a precursor for their future contributions to Vancouver's art scene. Is quiet contemplation going to disappear from our public galleries and museums?
Part 1 which includes definitions for mashups and a review of the Jan. 23 – April 23, 2016 [ETA April 4, 2016: The show has been extended to Friday, May 20, 2016.] is here.
This entry was posted in Technology, Vancouver, Visual Art and tagged [Los Angeles] Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), [New York] Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz, Bell Labs, Billy Kluver, Björk, Boîte-en-valise, Brady Carlson, Brian Eno, Bruce Mau, Cai Guo-Qiang, Carsten Höller's building-high slides. Hayward Gallery, Cultural Mashups Bhangra Bollywood + Beyond, Daina Augaitis, David Bowie, David Byrne, E.A.T Experiments in Art and Technology, fibonaccisusan, Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, Fred Waldhauer, Georges Braque, Guggenheim, Guggenheim Bilbao, H5, Helen Wong, Hito Steyerl, Jerry Saltz, Kate Edith Gough, Kevin Griffin, La boîte-en-valise, Liquidity Inc., Logorama, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Michael Heizer. [Chicago] Museum of Contemporary Art, Louvre, Marcel Duchamp, Marina Abramovic, Marsden Hartley, Marsha Lederman, Mary Delany, MashUp charts modern culture's mad mixing; The Vancouver Art Gallery's monumental new show links everyone from Picasso to Basquiat and Tarantino, MashUp reveals pivotal role of women in pioneering of modern art methods, Mashup: The Birth of Modern Culture, Massive Change, Math Art, Matthew Collings, Moravian College, Museum of Anthropology, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Ontario Gallery of Art, Pablo Picasso, Payne Gallery, Pennsylvania, Peter Bürger, Rem Koolhaus, Rennie Collection, Revolver II, Robert Rauschenberg, Robin Laurence, S M L XL, Sherrie Levine, Stephanie Rebick, Surrey Art Gallery, Survival MoCA Dinner, Susan Happersett, Tate Modern, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Warriors, Tilda Swinton, Tim Burton, University of British Columbia, Vancouver Art Gallery, Whitney Museum on March 8, 2016 by Maryse de la Giroday.
An exploration of the grotesque: Glenn Brown and Rebecca Warren at the Rennie Collection
Before launching into my impressions of the current show (Oct. 26, 2013 – March 29, 2014) at the Rennie Collection (located in Vancouver, Canada) I'm providing an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on the word grotesque (Note: Links have been removed),
The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "grotto", which originated from Greek krypte "hidden place",[1] meaning a small cave or hollow. The original meaning was restricted to an extravagant style of Ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered and then copied in Rome at the end of the 15th century. The "caves" were in fact rooms and corridors of the Domus Aurea, the unfinished palace complex started by Nero after the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64, which had become overgrown and buried, until they were broken into again, mostly from above. Spreading from Italian to the other European languages, the term was long used largely interchangeably with arabesque and moresque for types of decorative patterns using curving foliage elements.
Since at least the 18th century (in French and German as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, fantastic, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks. In art, performance, and literature, grotesque, however, may also refer to something that simultaneously invokes in an audience a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as empathic pity. [emphases mine] More specifically, the grotesque forms on Gothic buildings, when not used as drain-spouts, should not be called gargoyles, but rather referred to simply as grotesques, or chimeras.[2]
While my understanding of the word is rooted in its meaning since the 18th century, I couldn't resist the look backwards to ancient Rome and Greece. In any event, the heading for my post abut the Rennie Collection's current exhibition concerns the grotesque which is "strange, fantastic, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting" and which "invokes in an audience a feeling of uncomfortable bizarreness as well as empathic pity."
The entry to the show (main floor) gets the experience off to a deceptive start. The Rebecca Warren (she's a sculptor) piece showcased here is a series of three vitrines (boxes) with plexiglass covers protecting the artwork within. Arranged in a row, they are small, oblong boxes mounted at about 5 ft. (?) high on the wall. Rusty nails protrude at odd angles from the boxes, electronic devices of some sort are mounted below the boxes and there are bits of found objects and relatively unshaped clay on top of the boxes, as well as, twigs, more found objects, a neon object, and clay objects inside the boxes, behind the plexiglass covers.
Samantha (or Sam), an Emily Carr University of Art + Design student, sculptor, and our guide (one visits the Collection as part of a group at a prearranged time), provided some context for viewing this piece and the rest of the show. She was very illuminating and, unfortunately, it has been some weeks since I viewed the show and retain only bits and pieces remain (somehow this seems reflective of the vitrines). The one piece of information that I retain about Warren's first piece is that the middle box has a layer of dust covering the objects within. Sam noted this is deliberate and the artist has specific instructions about how much dust there should be on the objects and on the base of the middle box in the row.
One moves deeper into the first floor's display areas to view Brown's first piece, a painting, a rather strange painting. It had a weirdly yellowish cast and it's main feature looked like a skull to me but others saw something else, a bit like Rorschach test where everything is open to interpretation.
We proceeded upstairs to a glorious room with dizzyingly high ceilings where the rest of Warren's pieces were shown,
Rebecca Warren sculptures. Courtesy: Rennie Collection
I don't think the photograph, which shows three of the eight (?) sculptures in the room, quite conveys the impact of walking into a space occupied by these lumpen things with twisted and partial spinal columns, breasts in peculiar places, and other oddities shaped out of a type of clay that is fragile and obviously deteriorating.
The exhibit has a contrasting piece, one made of bronze and cast in a square of sorts. Interestingly, Warren likes to work with pom poms and there are two rather small examples, one each affixed to two different pieces. As I recall, Sam told us it was meant to be humorous and Warren keeps a large supply of pom poms on hand for when she might want to add one to a piece.
There are two more rooms on the second floor and those housed Glenn Brown's work,
Glenn Brown, The Ever Popular Dead (after 'Jupiter Cloudscape' 1982 by Adolf Schaller), 2000. Oil on canvas: 85 5/8 × 132 5/8 inches (217.49 × 336.87 cm) Courtesy: Rennie Collection
If it looks like science fiction, that's because it is. This piece was inspired by some science fiction art associated with Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, both a television series hosted by Carl Sagan and a book by Sagan. (Note: All of this type of information was provided by our guide, Sam, who also did some extra research to buttress her presentation, which was interactive. Thank you for doing that Sam.)
This painting, along with Brown's other work in this show, rendered me physically nauseous. There was something about the colours and swirls and, possibly, the juxtapostion with Warren's work that left me feeling ill. (Art can have physical effects. Stendhal famously passed out when visiting Florence, Italy due to a surfeit of art. Apparently, he's not the only one; you can read more about Stendhal syndrome in this Wikipedia entry.)
Brown's other paintings featured 'portraits' of odd looking people. You could almost recognize the portrait but the person was rendered in odd colours or it was the back of someone's head—a head which featured many eyes and other oddities, calling to mind science fiction tropes about aliens.
While Brown was referencing classical work, for the most part, he, like Warren, rendered it as a grotesquerie. He even had a picture of two dogs seated at what appears to be a table. At one time, Brown worked in one of the Tate Museum's (in London, UK) stores and the most popular items for purchase was a print of these two dogs which Brown reproduced in shades of a bilious green.
One of the interesting contrasts in the exhibition, other than sculptor/painter contrast, is that Warren's work has human origins where Brown's subject matter seems extraterrestrial. Adding to that impression is Brown's painting style. There is no sign of a brush stroke; his paintings look as if they were digitally rendered, an effect made possible by his use of paintbrushes containing only a few hairs.
There were two pieces from Brown which didn't fit this 'extraterrestial and inhuman' theme as I've described it. One piece, which bore a resemblance of sorts to Warren's work, was a mound of material that was splattered and laden with paint sitting in the middle of one of the two rooms holding Brown's work. Despite its sculptural quality, Brown describes the piece as a painting. The other piece was a painting which was cantilevered from the wall, like a pop-up which mimics the shape of what it being depicted. It was the one 'pretty' painting of Brown's pieces. Titled 'Zombies of the Stratosphere' (1999), it depicts someone rowing a boat to a forested island. The yellow in the picture reputedly gets its colour from urine. I now belatedly wonder if the first painting we saw on the bottom floor and which I described as having "a weirdly yellowish cast" also features this paint.
The Brits (Brown is from Britain) have a phrase "taking the piss" which I gather means 'mocking'. It seems that in the one 'pretty' painting, Brown is almost literally 'taking the piss'. Whether he's mocking the art world or the fools who wander around art exhibits and/or purchase prints of dogs (considered banal subjects by many artists) from the Tate is not obvious to me. Well, it's never good to take yourself too seriously so there's not much point to getting my 'knickers in a twist' over the matter, especially since I have no way of knowing if that was the artist's intention.
In the end and after the nausea subsided, I was left with the notion that I was looking at two possible futures, one in which humans return to dust (Warren's work) or we cease to be human as we understand the term (Brown's work).
There's not much time left to see the current exhibition, it ends March 29, 2014 and last I looked both scheduled tours were fully booked. You could try to organize and book your own tour, keep checking to see if someone cancels, or go here to see some images from the show.
Finally, I'm not sure either artist could be described as trying to "invoke empathic pity" as per Wikipedia's 'grotesque' but here's a video (originally an 8mm film) using the old Kansas song, Dust in the Wind as a soundtrack, which may that effect on you,
Like Warren's work it looks rough and unpolished. Here's what uselessdirector who uploaded the video had to say about it,
Uploaded on May 30, 2006
Filmed in 1977 by my dad, this music video nearly became "dust in the wind" until it was restored from its failing 8mm format.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Adolf Schaller, Glenn Brown, Jupiter Cloudscape, painter, Rebecca Warren, Rennie Collection, sculptor, Stendhal syndrome, The Ever Popular Dead, Zombies of the Stratosphere on March 27, 2014 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Vancouver's (Canada) Rennie Collection negotiates its first group exhibition
The first ever group show at the Rennie Collection (The Wing Sang Building, 51 East Pender Street, Vancouver, BC V6A 1S9) ends tomorrow,, Oct. 5, 2013. Luckily, there are still a few spots left in the scheduled 1 – 2:30 pm tour (as of Oct. 4, 2013 at 11:30 am PDT).
Le Cannibale (parody, consumption and institutional critique) (2008) Courtesy: Rennie Collection
Coincidentally (or not), Vancouver's Contemporary Art Gallery is offering an exhibition (Sept. 13 – Nov. 3, 2013) of Mike Nelson's work, one of the featured artists in the Rennie Collection's current group show.
Here's more from the Rennie Collections July (?), 2013 press release,
Rennie Collection is pleased to present an exhibition of works by a selection of internationally renowned artists: Pablo Bronstein, Aaron Curry, Andrew Grassie, Louise Lawler, Mike Nelson, Roman Ondak and Ian Wallace.
While all of these artists have their own distinctly unique styles and practices, the exhibit creates a unifying dialogue surrounding a conceptual questioning of the museum as an entity and ideas regarding space and movement. These works, pertaining to or involving centers of artistic presentation such as museums or galleries, have been dubbed in the canon of art history as "institutional critique".
In Six Affordable Neo-Georgian Futures for the Metropolitan Museum (2009), Pablo Bronstein (b. 1977) focuses on the architectural side of institutional technique. His interests lie in how architecture has the ability to intervene in personal identity and inform our movements, behaviours and social customs. Using pen and ink on paper and adopting the styles of various architects and movements, his invented monuments become plausible inventions, both paying homage to and critiquing the emblems of civil engineering.
The critical eye of Aaron Curry (b. 1972) may not at first glance be decipherable. The Monad Has Wheels (Wooden Knight) (2010) is one of the slotted-together plywood sculptures for which Curry is well known. Its surfaces, covered in the same wallpaper pattern that also covers the exhibition room walls and thus camouflaged ineffectually against its background, raises questions and meditates formally on preconceived notions of flatness and volume. Curry draws attention to the symbiosis between gallery space and art itself.
There is a rhythm to Andrew Grassie's (b. 1966) work that plays on the public and private lives of works of art as they exist in a collection. In his series of small paintings entitled New Hang, Grassie challenges the roles of both artist and anthropologist, personally selecting and installing works from the Tate collection to photograph and subsequently paint as his subjects. His technically complex method of working results in an imagery, such as in Tate: New Hang 10 (2004-05), that questions the very essence of the exhibition.
Louise Lawler's (b. 1947) delicate photographs subtly mediate on the many different lives of an artwork. Whether displayed on a gallery wall such as One Mondrian: At the Art Institute of Chicago (1982) or resting peacefully amongst a cornucopia of items as in Objects (1984), the meaning of each artwork is refreshed and expanded through each different location. Lawler's unique perspective allows us to share in the secret life of art, altering and enriching the viewer's experience.
Mike Nelson's (b. 1967) Le Cannibale (parody, consumption and institutional critique) (2008) is a burial ground of damaged plinths which serve as a reminder of an exhibition long-since past. The plinths are created from destroyed walls comprising of another artwork that Nelson exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, London in 2008. As Nelson states, "When something is physically broken, we do not forget about it. We are reminded of the memories associated with it". His work speaks to the ultimate temporality and artifice of the gallery or museum space.
Where the viewers detached in Lawler's work, Slovakian artist Roman Ondák (b. 1966) utilizes the gallery visitor as a key component. Shown for the first time in Canada, Measuring the Universe (2007) is an interactive piece previously exhibited at Tate Liverpool and MoMA, NY. Over the course of the exhibition, attendants mark visitors' heights, first names, and dates of the measurements on the gallery walls. The mark making becomes the measure of man. By inviting people to actively participate, Ondák creates a work of art from a prosaic everyday behavior while questioning the roles of art objects and spectators, production and reception.
Ian Wallace (b. 1950) works in a space occupied by both painting and photography, highlighting the discourse between the two mediums. Using abstract painting as a grounding for the photographic image, Wallace presents us with an intersection of images and histories that prompt a reconsideration of how viewers view works of art. In the Museum (Peter Halley Series III) (1989) references aesthetic and social issues through the exchange systems of the studio, the museum and the street.
Now for my impressions of the show. Ondák's piece which is the first one to be encountered seems to function as a map at least as much as it functions as a set of measurements. In some places names are obscured as multiple names have been written over top of one another while others stand out (toddlers don't have much competition for wall space).
From Ondák's piece, visitors proceed upstairs to a room dominated by Mike Nelson's Le Cannibale. Navigating my way through the room where Nelson's installation is located was at first intriguing and then weirdly oppressive in what seemed an increasingly apocalyptic environment the longer I stood there.
The next installation and piece was a like a visit to another planet. Given the red colour on the walls and on Aaron Curry's device/sculpture 'The Monad Has Wheels (Wooden Knight) (2010)', the other planet is Mars and they're having a serious rain storm (grey droplets on the red background which covered the walls and the device). Our guide, Jon (?), had completely different take on this installation and so may you.
Ian Wallace has a single piece (a photograph of the space between two paintings on a gallery wall) in a room shared with Andrew Grassie's work (two small paintings, executed in tempera, of gallery exhibitions). In their own ways, both artists seems be asking the viewer to re-examine the gallery space and asking the questions, 'How and what do we see?'
I'm sorry to say I don't have a strong impression of Louise Lawler's work and I think that's partly because our guide, Jon, didn't discuss it on the tour; i"m not sure why. Forgetfulness? Maybe the pieces weren't fully assembled? (Other than this blip, Jon was probably the most successful guide (of the ones I've experience) at engaging the tour audience and that is difficult to do.)
The basement, which usually signals the end of the tour, featured fantasy architectural drawings (Six Affordable Neo-Georgian Futures for the Metropolitan Museum [2009]) by Pablo Bronstein. The artist developed drawings which could provide a base for a new museum. In the fantasy world where I sometimes live, I'm going to pretend the curator chose the basement in an hommage to Gaston Bachelard and his book 'The Poetics of Space' where he celebrated and explored the meaning, in a very French and philosophical way, of various spaces, including basements and attics) within building structures.
If you do get a chance to see the show, I'd be happy to see your comments about it.
One final and unrelated bit: I wrote an article about visual artists and marketing for the September/October 2013 issue of Preview: The Gallery Guide (which covers British Columbia, Alberta, Washington state, and Oregon). I concentrated mostly on promotion and pricing.
This entry was posted in Vancouver, Visual Art and tagged Aaron Curry, Andrew Grassie, Ian Wallace, Louise Lawler, Mike Nelson, Pablo Bronstein, Preview: The Gallery Guide, Rennie Collection, Roman Ondak, Visual Artists as Entrepreneurs and Marketers on October 4, 2013 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Constructing and deconstructing identity: buck, beck, and more in Vancouver, Canada
I finally got back to the Rennie Collection located in Vancouver, Canada (it's been a little over a year since my last visit [Mar. 22, 2012 posting about the Damian Moppett show]). The current show running from Mar. 2, 2013 – June 8, 2013 features Robert Beck/Buck. From the Rennie Collection's (March 2013?) news release,
In 2008, Robert Beck changed his surname by a single vowel to Buck. [emphasis mine] This act of artistic self-nomination, a work of art itself, was precipitated by what he had achieved through his work as Beck, which was often autobiographical in content and persistently diverse in form. As an alias, Buck appealed to the artist for its precision and associations: stag, son, cash, to throw off. To substantiate this artistic transfiguration, Buck created the shrine (from e to u), 2012, a makeshift memorial of candles, flowers, and stuffed animals. [emphasis mine] The transitory work, susceptible to entropy and the elements, provocatively re-frames the now-common practice in which a community marks the site of a violent event, a fatality or loss, as a place of collective mourning.
Working in various mediums (drawing, sculpture, photography, and video) the artist utilizes many artistic procedures, including appropriation and installation. [emphasis mine] He has returned repeatedly to the universal themes of family, memory, identity, authorship, and loss. While his own singular experiences are central, Beck wittingly withholds information to solicit the viewer's own unique associations. Beck has described his work as a way to "create an index by which I could make sense of earlier, often traumatic experiences […] so to transcend them. Evidence of this riddles my work: bodies, holes, camouflage, mimicry, memorials, erasure, guilt, corruption, sex, and death – even my own! And so much of it is haunted by the presence (or is it the absence) of the Father." Beyond his own father, Beck is referring to the Name-of-the-Father, a psychoanalytic term, via the Church, that designates one's given name, as well as the symbolic order of things.
Several works by Beck are again relevant in the wake of recent shootings in the United States, notably at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and the Century movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. The thirteen images of teen shooters in Beck's Thirteen Shooters, 2001 echo Andy Warhol's 1964 mural Thirteen Most Wanted Men. In 2004, Beck fired a 12-gauge shotgun into three 25-lb buckets of mortician's wax to create 01/25/04 ‐ Shots No. 12, 13, 14. Traces of a violent event, the resulting holes in the wax evoke an injured body, yet the "wound filler" substance also implies its repair. The work exemplifies Beck's ability to exploit the meaning inherent in materials, and suggests why his work evolves from one medium to another.
Beck's scrutiny of violence in American culture extends beyond its effects to its causes, and thus envelopes private realms like home and family. The title Screen Memory, 2004, a series of five silver-gelatin photographs refers to Sigmund Freud's 1899 essay concerning the paradox of childhood memory, wherein consequential, often traumatic events are not usually retained, while trivial ones are.
Robert Buck, The Shrine (from e to u), 2000/2012
Flowers, candles, stuffed animals, balloons, thrift store artifacts, etc. [Downloaded from http://www.renniecollection.org/exhibitions/beckbuck/index.php]
First off: I had a professor of communication who cured me (and I imagine many others) of ever using mediums as the plural form of medium. This is paraphrasing what he said, "If you want to contact your dearly departed, you may want to speak to several mediums. Otherwise, the plural of medium is media." Thank you to Paul Heyer who now teaches at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.
Buck's show aroused in me (for the most part) the kind of response I have to reading a literary piece, which is a little disconcerting. The distinction for me and it is a rough distinction between writers and other artists is the way in which the minutiae of our lives is conveyed or reflected back to us. Reading a book or a story is a private and solitary experience whereas viewing a visual arts exhibition or attending a dance or theatre performance are intended to be public or group experiences.
As usual with the show at the Rennie Collection, I was part of a tour; it is possible to make other arrangements but it's easiest to sign up for a tour. This particular tour (Buck/Beck) starts twice although none of us were aware of that. My first experience of the show along with everyone else's was the encounter with the shrine that's outside on the street in front of the building as per the photograph in the above. It's a bit disconcerting to realize that you started the tour before you entered the building.
The tour guide, Cemre (pronounced gem reh, I think) started us with the bathroom wall. Buck (formerly Beck) removed part of a bathroom wall with graffiti which he has overpainted and is now mounted on a wall just like any other art work. The words aren't visible but you know what is usually scrawled bathroom walls. It almost seems as if you're being invited to scrawl something on that wall in your imagination if nowhere else.
The other piece that caught my attention was a set of images contained within a single picture frame. The images were cropped and laid out in the style that would remind someone of an old-fashioned photo album. All of the images were parts of scenes, mostly parts of bodies that have been clothed in white dresses and formal wear. Cemre asked us if we knew what the photographs were about. Someone identified the images as being from one or more weddings. He saw parts of white dresses and veils and didn't notice that the bodies were those of children. The photos depicted, as any Catholic will tell you, First Holy Communion. This wasn't the only game Buck and Gemre played with us and, while that first one was obvious to me, I missed my fair share of cues later. Before going further, I have to extend my compliments to Cemre because she was careful not to embarrass or put someone on the spot. Her decision to engage us in an interactive storytelling session with us was very helpful in this regard.
The next piece that really caught my attention was the chalkboard (30 ft [or more] x 20 ft [or more[) covered in words that had been erased but were still visible beneath the chalk dust (it's on the 2nd floor of the Rennie Collection). Then as we proceeded further, there was an installation composed of printing plates bookended by newspaper/media images of boys on both of the far walls of the room. Buck's (or Beck's) 13 shooters on one side and a lone boy on the other. Seeing those images is particularly poignant in the wake of the recent Boston Marathon bombing but they function primarily as an eerie reminder of evil and violence. The images are eerie because most of the boys look like 'regular' kids and if we hadn't been informed they were all shooters, we would have never guessed. As for the boy on the other side, he and his brother claimed to have killed their father—but they did not. In fact, a friend of their father's, with whom both boys having sexual relations, had committed the murder.
In the next room, we saw representations of pictures that were in Buck's family home along with a sculptural installation. The most interesting, for me, was the picture of Jesus, all greyed and pixellated, which came from Buck's mother's room. It was very fuzzy but I'm pretty sure it was the Sacred Heart, which is a very specific Jesus image and one which is charged for me personally (I went to a school called the Convent of the Sacred Heart for a few years). The Sacred Heart image, I'm most familiar with has the heart, which is external to the chest, with a crown of thorns signifying his crucifixion and his love for humanity. As a child I took that image for granted but wandered somewhat from my Catholic roots over the years and after a break of several years saw a Sacred Heart image and realized it's a very peculiar image.
Nearby in yet another room of the Rennie Collection's 2nd floor is a portion of a urinal wall. Like the portion of the bathroom wall downstairs, it too has words scrawled on it. Unlike the bathroom wall, these words are not covered up. Interesting juxtaposition and that's all I've got for that one.
In retrospect, I don" know how we missed it for so long but there was a hidden image within Buck's reproduction, from a hunting book his father had given him, of an image illustrating how to skin an animal . The 'hidden' picture within Buck's reproduction was a Ku Klux Klan hood (and it's obvious once it's been pointed out) but it took minutes before anyone 'saw' it. Cemre commented that the only time it has been identified within seconds was when someone from the US saw it.
At the end of the tour, it turns out there are two endings. Cemre ended the show in the basement with a huge painting featuring a huge bee (and I think flowers too). She then directed us to look at a painting that she hadn't discussed when she was started the tour. She didn't discuss it any further and we were left to seek it on our own. I won't spoil the surprise other than to say, it references aspects of the show's Catholicism, death, and rebirth themes.
I think what Buck makes clear in his work is that how one sees and what one sees is very much rooted in one's identity/ies and culture(s), which we both construct and, sometimes when we change our names, deconstruct. I think one of the reason's I found Buck's approach curiously literary is that he uses words differently than most artists who tend to view words and typography as objets d'art rather than meaningful cultural and personal communication.
Overtly, Buck has worked with duality. Two beginning, two endings, two names, etc. but it's not quite that neat and tidy, not least because I suspect Buck/Beck is an unreliable narrator. I do encourage you to visit the show if you have the time. No. I have no relationship to the people at the Rennie Collection.
This entry was posted in Vancouver, Visual Art and tagged Beck//Buck, Rennie Collection, Robert Beck, Robert Buck on April 26, 2013 by Maryse de la Giroday.
Poetics of space, Damian Moppett, memory, and relationships
I was introduced, kicking and screaming all the way, to Gaston Bachelard's book, The Poetics of Space in one of my first courses at university. It was, as I remember it now, a kind of meditation on structures such as houses, shells, nests, etc. and the relationship between those structures and our memories and consciousness. From the Poetics of Space, Beacon Books, 1958 (1970 printing),
A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house.
To bring order into these images, I believe that we should consider two principal connecting themes: 1) A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiates itself in terms of verticality. It is one of the appeals to our consciousness of verticality. 2) A house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality.
The Rennie Collection (where the Moppett show is being held until April 21, 2012) is housed in one of Vancouver's historically important buildings, the Wing Sang Building. The building houses both the Rennie Collection of art (gallery/museum) and Bob Rennie's businesses (real estate marketing and real estate sales). The consequence of co-locating two of Rennie's primary pursuits (art and real estate) is that the verticality of the building or more specifically, the gallery/museum is emphasized since the gallery occupies only 1/2 or less of a building that has been split along its vertical axis.
Damian Moppett, the Vancouver-based artist whose work is being shown, has a giant mobile (referencing Alexander Calder) hanging from the highest ceiling on the building's top floor (each of the three rooms on that floor enjoys a different ceiling height) further emphasizing the verticality.
The giant mobile, titled 'Breaking the fall' (I hope I remembered that title correctly; ETA Mar.23.12 The title, according to Aaron Carpenter's article for New York Arts Magazine is 'Broken Fall'), has a flaw. One of the pieces has fallen onto the floor and the mobile no longer balances perfectly. One of the themes in Moppett's work is that art is not perfection, it takes work and he often makes that work and/or flaws visible. The pictures (cartoons/doodles) on the main floor of the gallery show the pencil lines and other marks that would usually be removed from a finished piece.
Our guide, Karen, offered a set of references for the cartoons/doodles. A student at the University of British Columbia (visual arts dept.?), she mentioned a few names that escape me at this point. For me, they were reminiscent of images from Pan's Labyrinth (a 2006 film directed by Guillermo del Toro),
I found this image somewhere (not sure exactly where). It's either a still from or a poster for Pan's Labyrinth.
Moppett's images are more benign but both sets of images (Moppett's and del Toro's) could be described as surreal.
Pottery (found on the gallery's 2nd floor and integrated in sculptures), a form that Moppett has taken up recently, extends the notion of imperfection. These piece are not the kind of thing one would usually find in a fine art gallery by virtue of the fact that they are, both, beginner's pieces and pottery, i.e., craft work.
The film, which is found in the basement, is yet another commentary on imperfection. Photographed on Salt Spring Island, the film documents Moppett in a forest as he builds a trap. It mimics the shape of a sculpture (which you'll see on the 2nd floor gallery), is flimsy, and will never function properly.
Karen informed us the film is a commentary on Canadian artists and landscape art (think 'Group of Seven', Emily Carr, Tom Thomson, etc.), which serves to create and extend the myth of the pristine Canadian wilderness while it is exploited. A kind of chimera if you will, artists creating a utopia that doesn't exist anywhere except in the imagination while reality presents an opposing perspective.
I thought the film was the least successful of the pieces and I'm not sure why I think that. It seems to me that it has something to do with physicality and one's sense of Moppett's hand in all of his pieces.The trap that Moppett constructs is not accessible to us and so the physicality which is present in his other work disappears. It also seemed, in an odd way, that Moppett became prey to the same impulse to idealize nature that he was critiquing. The images of the forest are gorgeous and subsume what I think he was trying to portray. Maybe one of these days, he or a curator could include the trap as part of the installation rather than showing only the film.
While Moppett comments on imperfection, it should be noted that he has mastered the crafts of drawing and painting, unusual in artists trained in the 1990s (and later) many of whom have never mastered (or, if my information is correct, learned) those skills/crafts, historically associated with art. That's something else you'll find in Moppett's work, historical references to art.
For anyone who might be concerned that you need an art history degree to look at the art; good work doesn't punish you for your ignorance or, on the other hand, render itself cliché if you're knowledgeable because it evokes universal feelings, quandaries, struggles and more. Shakespeare's work is appreciated around the world in many languages because its power is not in the English language itself but in what his language evokes; although you might need a little help understanding things at first since daily life (to which he refers) has changed mightily since Shakespeare's time. [I changed preceding sentence, the original is appended to the end of this posting.]
I particularly appreciated the correspondences between the pieces. Shapes, colours, themes, and characters were seen in multiple drawings, paintings, and sculptures. For example, seeing a caryatid in a painting in one room, coming across the caryatid as a sculpture in another room, having the guide mention the role caryatids play in classic art and then mixing in my own references to caryatids (admittedly few) suggested a set of relationships that were new to me.
Before I go on, here's a caryatid and a description from Wikipedia,
Caryatid from the Erechtheion (British Museum)
A caryatid (Greek: Καρυάτις, plural: Καρυάτιδες) is a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.
The relationships that were new to me, were the ceilings. The first caryatid (painting) was on the 2nd floor in the room with the tallest ceiling, the second caryatid (sculpture) was in the room with the shortest ceiling. The movement from two dimensions in a room with a soaring ceiling to three dimensions in a room where the ceiling seems to press down on a figure that in classical art is an architectural feature designed to hold things up evoked a set of rich relationships.
The building which I've always perceived as quite vertical became even more so. The tour took place on International Women's Day and so the image of women holding things up took on a particular resonance, especially since one of the caryatids was in a building that had housed four of the owner's wives. The reference to a classical Greek architectural feature in an historically important building in Vancouver's Chinatown provided an interesting juxtaposition.
Each person brings their own references and experiences to the show or any show for that matter. I think what distinguishes Moppett's show at the Rennie Collection is a kind of openness. You can see the references, you can see the imperfections, you can see the artmaking process and those factors allow for a different kind of engagement.
Moppett is the first local artist (I understand he is represented by Catriona Jeffries) to be featured at the Rennie Collection. There's not a lot about Moppett online (in common with many artists he prefer to leave the writing to someone else; ETA March 23, 2012: Ooops, I found more. You can find links to other reviews and commentaries of Moppett's work here in the Rennnie Collection's Mar.14.12 news listings) but I did find this about a 2007 show in Paris (from the French language article on Artnews.org),
Pour cette exposition Damian Moppett présente un ensemble de nouvelles oeuvres comprenant neuf peintures et deux sculptures. Plusieurs constantes marquent la pratique de Moppett comme artiste. D'abord, un électrique et personnel catalogue de références : à des œuvres et à des artistes particuliers du passé et du présent (Calder, Brancusi, Rodin, Rauschenberg, Fischli and Weiss..); à des œuvres dans son atelier ; au phénomène de la culture populaire et à des pratiques culturelles, en marges du monde de l'art. La première étape de Moppett est de recueillir et de documenter ses références, sources en fonction d'un ensemble de critères subjectifs qu'il applique toutefois de façon systématique ; les documents assemblés (qui seront ou non exposés) forment alors une archive extensible de références.
Rough translation: His show included nine paintings and two sculptures. He referenced a number of artists in his work, as well as, popular culture and artmaking practices on the fringes of the art world.
As for the 'consciousness of centrality' mentioned in the Bachelard quote, I'm going to take liberties and apply that notion to Moppett's work. In Bachelard's description of a house there's an interplay between the basement and the attic and the consciousness and memories one brings to both places. In the Rennie Collection building, we toured the main floor, top floor (three rooms of varying ceiling heights), the basement where Moppett's works were displayed and the roof where they were not.
One's consciousness and memories are affected by 'place'. By that token, the film meant to evoke Canada and landscape art is in the basement/Canadian subconsciousness and our notions of the pristine north. Had the film been shown elsewhere in the building, or in the world for that matter, another set of memories, subconscious or otherwise, would have been evoked.
The show ends in another month and you can signup for the tours here or you can book an appointment, which is done for groups of 10 or more.
On a completely other note: During the summer, the Royal BC (British Columbia) Museum will take over the space for its first show ever in Vancouver.
Here's a little more about what they'll be doing, from the March 9, 2012 Royal BC Museum news release,
Curious is the overall theme of four new and concurrent summer installations created by the Royal BC Museum: Intimate Glimpses, Artifact|Artifiction, Magic Lantern and Bottled Beauty [June 14 to September 3, 2012]. Each is built around unique items and stories from the 125-year-old provincial museum and archives, based in Victoria.
Intimate Glimpses
Emily Carr – the evolution of an artist
One of Canada's most beloved artists, Emily Carr (1871-1945) was famous for her depictions of First Nations villages and monumental art, the forests and landscapes of British Columbia. This exhibition draws on the extensive collections of the Royal BC Museum and BC Archives to explore Carr's youth and the early period before she became recognized. It includes more than 30 of Carr's paintings, early sketches, and illustrated 'funny books.' A timeline places Carr's art alongside national and international events with many photographs of the young artist and her family as well as displays of clothing, objects and artifacts from the same period. Letters, diaries and sketches reveal intimate glimpses of her private life, friendships and activities as a young woman. New research and findings are presented and some of the material in this exhibition will have never before been on public view.
Artifact|Artifiction
Test wits with our curators
Just for fun, visitors are invited to pick up a game card and play a mini-version of the Royal BC Museum's annual gala game. Each of 14 items on display in this room will come with a curator's statement – but is it Artifact? or Artifiction? All items are from the museum's collection, but the tale told about each may be true or false. Visitors can practice as warm-up for
the entertaining fundraising evening held each October at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria. At that event, gala-goers can quiz curators and archivists before answers are revealed and prizes awarded. Those playing the game over the summer will get the satisfaction of their score and of learning a few new things about BC's history.
British Columbia seen through glass
In a time before colour photography, black images on glass were hand-tinted and projected by a "magic lantern." The 1850s to 1930s was the era of lantern slides and most were made to instruct or entertain audiences. A row of enlarged backlit slide images of people and places in BC, selected from thousands in the Royal BC Museum collection, will fill a hallway gallery near an original lantern slide projector. Images include strawberry pickers in Saanich, a hiker on Grouse Mountain and a giant Nuu-chah-nulth canoe on Nitinat Lake.
Bottled Beauty
Creatures from the collection
One hundred creatures the colour of pale peanut butter, pickled in jars then artfully uplit in a darkened room, have a strangely beautiful effect. A Western Fox Snake, Bell-headed Tailed Jelly and Great Basin Pocket Mouse are just three specimens from the Royal BC Museum's "wet collection," thousands of animals preserved in alcohol, some of them dating back to the 1800s. Specimens like these provide the museum's natural history experts and researchers worldwide with information on climate change, species diversity, and wildlife and habitat conservation.
Unlike the usual shows, admission will be charged.
Editing change Mar.23.12, original sentence: Good work allows you to be ignorant or knowledgeable because it speaks to you or stimulates you.
This entry was posted in Vancouver, Visual Art and tagged caryatids, Curious, Damian Moppett, Gaston Bachelard, Guillermo del Toro, Pan's Labyrinth, Poetics of Space, Rennie Collection, Royal BC Museum, Wing Sang Building on March 22, 2012 by Maryse de la Giroday.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl