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The Opening - Douglas Coupland at VAG

THE OPENING is all about delving into the fascinating, quirky and wonderful visual arts in Vancouver.

THE OPENING is all about delving into the fascinating, quirky and wonderful visual arts in Vancouver. Each week we’ll feature an artist, cover an exhibition, discuss a lecture and everything else in-between to delve deep into who and

If ours is the era of the diminishing attention span, our advertisement-affected consciousness responding best to fast messages, shareable images and condensed, digestible media, Douglas Coupland’s artistic oeuvre responds to its citizens with a sharp tongue in cheek and a pointed sense of irony.

“I miss my pre-Internet brain” read the sign that features two gallery goers standing beside one another photographed on their smartphones at the opening of Coupland’s solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. I stood back and imagined the possible hashtags as the pictures were posted to Instagram: #metoo #rememberfaxmachines #rippatience #bringbackhomemaildelivery @vanartgallery.

Douglas Coupland has been referred to as Canada’s Renaissance man: an author, critic, theorist, designer, painter, installation artist, lecturer and sculptor; his multidisciplinarity has brought him fame internationally, and at home a reputation as a national icon of cultural commentary. His first novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture has been a global literary success and popularized the descriptor for the post-baby boom demographic since its publication in 1991. It seems that there’s nothing he doesn't do; flyers pasted around the city cheekily read: “Douglas Coupland Works Harder Than You.”

Across his many mediums, Coupland’s chief concerns have included the prevalence of technology in human relationships, social and political implications of mass media, globalization, and the politics of identity. His first solo career survey exhibition at Vancouver Art Gallery features 100 artworks ranging from towering Lego sculptures, paintings, assemblages and installations of hundreds of obsessively gathered found objects. Curated by Daina Augatis with the assistance of Emmy Lee Wall, everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything is set to be a blockbuster exhibition this summer, already having attracted large crowds. It also marks the first time that the Vancouver Art Gallery has allowed for and even encouraged photography in its galleries, offered a downloadable audio-tour app, presented an accompanying public artwork in the courtyard and has actively maintained an exhibition blog and website. An artist’s monograph will also be available for sale in August.

The exhibition is divided into parts throughout the first floor: what Coupland fondly calls Secret Handshake is a room filled with objects that the artist hopes will resonate with familiarity particularly for Canadians. “I want Americans to walk through and not quite know what’s going on,” he says. Playing on esoteric signifiers to represent identity, Coupland brings local viewers in on his private joke while they navigate the room among eclectically assembled "Canadiana" furniture. A giant freezer leaking a little bit of shining blood (meat? remnants of the hunt ?), a coffee table painted with French Canadian slang alluding to the 1970 October Crisis, a hutch made of green highway signs topped with a cast of Terry Fox’s leg (you may remember that Coupland was the artist to install the Fox sculpture at BC place in 2011.) Wood-panelled walls are also lined with neatly displayed items found in Canadian pantries: No-Name canola oil, a box of Kraft Dinner, specifically Northern cleaning products. Contrary to colonial processes of defining oneself by what one is not, Coupland’s presentation of domestic (in both senses of the word) objects look within while subtly suggesting that groups increasingly recognize themselves by what they consume rather than their influence on the rest of the world.

A room of brightly coloured paintings also plays on icons of national familiarity: images from the canon of Canadian art history (Tom Thompson, Lawren Harris, Emily Carr et. al) have been reinterpreted and repainted in flattened, bold hues. The images - identifiable yet slightly foreign, are similar to a separate room of paintings only “viewable” through screens: obscure painted dots on canvas become images of Osama Bin Laden and bodies leaping from the collapsing Twin Towers on September 11th only when photographed through a phone. It's impossible to resist snapping a picture to try the trick out. The images that viewers walk away with on their camera rolls speak to the way that horror, war and trauma is mediated through screens and the distant nature of pre-digested news and media.

One of the most discussed pieces in the exhibition is Gumhead, a seven-foot-tall sculpture of his own head in the courtyard upon which viewers and passerby are invited to stick their chewed gum. When asked why the sculpture was constructed in his own image, Coupland said he didn’t mind people making fun of him. What may be a charming form of self-deprecation, his choice may also speak to his own status as large-looming icon in contemporary Canadian culture.

 

Without regrettably dating myself too much, I don’t even remember my pre-Internet brain. In fact, the Internet and I were born somewhere around the same time. I had an e-mail address in third grade; to my generation, the Internet and reality are incredibly integrated. Coupland’s exhibition speaks both to his generation, mine and those in between: reminding us both that our seemingly inseparable relationship with technology and compulsive consumerism isn't the way it always was. At heart a satirist with a remarkable skill for witty social observation, there are moments in viewing Coupland's exhibition where one actually laughs out loud. It's a refreshing and delightful experience to have in an art gallery: Coupland points at the extreme present and state of contemporaneity in a humorous and attractive way that is certain to be a crowd-pleaser and incredibly popular show for the VAG.

everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything runs until September 1, 2014.