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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 what makes art happen!

Collector-turned-gallerist Wil Aballe is many things: a coma survivor and a patron of the arts rank high among his more eccentric titles. Most of all, however, he is a problem-solver.  ”I found I was hanging out in so many artists’ studios and thinking, this work is really good, how come I’m not seeing it in any shows? I kept on seeing a lot of work that has never been in an exhibition, and spaces kept on closing,” Aballe recalls in his usual good-natured manner.

His gallery, Wil Aballe Art Projects, is operated straight out of his own home. It’s a unique concept in our city, though it’s definitely not a one-off phenomenon: galleries such as Yactac and Lee Plested’s The Apartment have also found success with this model. For Aballe, it was not just an obvious solution in a city where the real estate market often prices galleries right out of business. It was also a way to connect potential buyers with the ability to see themselves living with the art on their own walls, in their own homes.

“Matthew and I were hanging out in this place,” he says, gesturing towards his brightly-lit, immaculately clean one-bedroom apartment. “And I was thinking, what if I turned my apartment into an exhibition space? It’s small, but the walls are good. Do you think people would show up and start to take it seriously?”

Though he humbly defines his initial presence in the Vancouver scene as that of a “casual art-goer”, since arriving in the city six years ago, he has built a formidable collection of works by emerging artists that is centred around his keenly-defined taste and knack for sussing out new talent. Marina Roy and Natasha McHardy’s Shell Game, which opens tonight, certainly doesn’t break from the pattern of high-quality exhibitions that have been cycling through Aballe’s living space since the gallery opened its doors in January this year, though it does deviate from Aballe’s inclination towards abstract painting.

“I have to say that the program for this year was so largely abstract, when I first thought about it in the fall, I showed somebody and they said, you’re going to be known as the abstract gallery!” Aballe recounts. “And I asked, is that bad? It’s what a lot of kids are doing in Vancouver nowadays. But he said, people will be going in with a perception that no matter what, you are going to be showing abstract art.”

“That’s why you brought us in,” jokes McHardy.

Having lived in the same building for years, you could say that Marina Roy and Natasha McHardy have been collaborating long before becoming the artistic duo Roy & McHardy in 2003. “We’re basically sisters,” McHardy says, chalking up a lot of thematic similarities in their work to a closeness in their friendship that has allowed for near-constant discussion of art in the context of the rest of their lives. “We even took Portuguese together, which wasn’t such a good idea.”

It’s easy to see how McHardy’s and Roy’s lively dialogue found its way into the video works that defined their collaborative efforts for several years, which were always centred around power structures, gender roles, and theatricality with a slapstick, D.I.Y. spirit. However different these video productions were from either of their independent practices, the parallels that run beneath their current bodies of work remain clear— a surprise, even, to both artists after they saw their work hung together for the first time.

“In a way, you’re creating the sets, and I’m creating the things within the sets — the characters that are interchangeable within them,” Roy points out.

Shell Game marks the inaugural exhibition of Marina Roy and Natasha McHardy together, not as Roy & McHardy, but as two independent artists. For all their similarities, their works are also starkly contrasted against each other. Where McHardy uses richly coloured materials to create warm, but emptied, environments, Roy mines a naive drawing aesthetic to create crinkled vellum sheets packed with objects and characters sourced from an encyclopedic image archive.

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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 what makes art happen!   This week’s article is by guest contributor Agnes Wisden.

WORDS: AGNES WISDEN

Once the sun comes out and the dark rainy winter days are farther in between, the bicycles start to be dusted off and the city streets become alive with cyclists exercising, commuting, and taking leisure rides on their steeds of choice. Riding a bike adds its own adventure and wanderlust to the morning commute, and if yours takes you anywhere near and around Strathcona and Chinatown, you may have seen Jonathan’s Igharas‘ self-made pedal-powered music machine, The DJ Trike, in its more stationary, daytime incarnation. By night, it’s an entirely different beast: Igharas’ invention has appeared on Third Beach for sunset dances, filled the downtown streets with spontaneous late-night parties, and made a scene for political gatherings over the past few years, always taking passers-by by surprise. People lose themselves to the beat, the environment, and the spontaneousness of it all: it is, quite literally, a party on wheels.

Currently, Igharas is running a Kickstarter campaign, The DJ Trike Soundtravel Project, which will give the DJ Trike a complete design overhaul and see it undertake a cycling roadtrip from Vancouver to Los Angeles (an leg-burning distance that spans over 2985 km), throwing parties along the way. Igharas hopes to bring the connective possibilities of music that he’s experienced though his design down the West Coast and beyond, all while raising awareness for sustainable, pedal-powered energy and transport. In return for support, Igharas is offering unique one-one DJ lessons and, for keen non-Vancouverites, the commitment of the Soundtravel project to head to your city in particular.

It’s no surprise to learn that Igharas is both a designer and DJ himself. In its first incarnation, the DJ Trike came about as an idea for Igharas’ final thesis that fused his multiple passions into a single project. Inspired by utility tricycles in Asia, it is entirely self-powered, down to its ability to broadcast its pop-up parties live. Its mission is “about letting go and expressing your soul,” Igharas says, which is exactly what he hopes to continue doing with this Kickstarter campaign. More than halfway to his funding goal, he is tantalizingly close to bringing his inspiration and dream to the next level.

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 what makes art happen!   This week’s article is by guest contributor, Elliat Albrecht.

WORDS: ELLIAT ALBRECHT

The subjects of Vancouver artist Andy Dixon’s paintings are mysterious counts, reclining women, hunting dogs and lords departing on horses. The extravagant settings are as if Gatsby’s garden were crossed with the estates of Italian royalty: an imaginary mixture of new American money and old European wealth. One imagines that the girls in his recent works on canvas are driven to parties in stretch limousines, that the rich men’s wives and daughters are always pretty and that the help cleans the pool while tigers sun themselves in the yard. Someone is inside sleepily smoking on a plush chaise lounge and a peacock wanders towards the fountain. However, his regal subjects are not treated in the classical way that they’re used to; there is no illusionistic blending of colour, no romantic shadows, rich drapery or peachy skin tones.  Dixon depicts such lavishness of lifestyle with a similar abundance of colour and paint; his images are composed of highly saturated candy-coloured hues and erratic line. Olympia, After Manet, 2012 depicts the iconic woman lounging on a couch with skin a rainbow of colours against an Easter egg blue background. The viewer is awash in the disparate combination of art history and kinetic bright colour. His aesthetic vocabulary is intuitive and quickly executed with an urgency that he attributes to his early history in punk music, while the work is rooted in a devotion to excess: of money, of mark, of gesture, of colour. Dixon denies any shyness with his medium; where his subjects come forward to flaunt their luxury with an unapologetic boldness, the artist meets them with paint.

An exhibition of Andy Dixon’s new work, The Luxury of Observing Luxury, is opening tonight at No Remorse Studios, 55 Water Street, Vancouver, from 6-9:30pm. RSVP.

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 what makes art happen!

It is pertinent that Safar/Voyage, the recently-opened exhibition of contemporary Middle Eastern art curated by Dr. Fereshteh Daftari, is at the Museum of Anthropology and not, say, the Vancouver Art Gallery or the CAG. The exhibition’s post-colonial concerns are enriched by the surrounding presence of the museum’s permanent collection  — a testament to the consequences of colonialism in itself. Certainly, a striking impression is made when one emerges from the stands of artifacts and into the exit-red glow of Mona Hatoum’s Hot Spot (2006). Hatoum’s red-hot, steel-and-neon globe provides a far neater introduction to the exhibition than the didactic wall text. It concisely encapsulates the anxiety of displacement and perpetual global emergency, which Fereshteh Daftari connects to the title of a previous Hatoum exhibition: “The entire world is a foreign land.”

Though Safar/Voyage is regionally-specific on paper, the themes that the exhibition is really addressing transcend geography. Narratives about voyage, diaspora, trauma, and desire aren’t exoticised inasmuch as they are foundational stories of immigrants today. As Daftari puts it in his catalogue essay, ‘Passport to Elsewhere’, “Safar/Voyage is a proposition, framed as an open-ended experience, enabled through encounters with fragments of itineraries and a choice of paths.”

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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 what makes art happen!

It’s a simple premise: Gillian Wearing is dancing. But not in a club, on stage, or in somebody’s bedroom as her favourite record plays: she is dancing to the noise of a hundred people milling about in the middle of a shopping arcade, floppy-limbed but energetic, endearing in her total abandon. The video is discoloured and grainy, her mode of dress undeniably nineties. Mounted on the very same equipment that showcased the work at the Vancouver Art Gallery following her ’97 Turner Prize win, Gillian Wearing’s Dancing In Peckham (1997) seems firmly dated.

The questions that Dancing in Peckham raises about how individuals remain discrete within a community are, however, just as relevant today. Most passers-by caught in-frame ignore Wearing with determination, as if to avoid encouraging her with a glance. There is something ritualistic, and even a little taboo, about Wearing’s wild movements as the lone instigator within a stream of hurrying people. Currently being exhibited around the corner from the crossroads of poverty and yuppiedom in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Dancing in Peckham makes us think about privilege, deviance, and social invisibility as well.

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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 what makes art happen!This week’s guest article is brought to you by Agnes Wisden, an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Vancouver.

WORDS: AGNES WISDEN

Co-produced by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Cologne’s Ludwig Museum and New York’s Jewish Museum, “CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps” is the first retrospective exhibition of an artist, writer, designer and educator who is the only comic-book artist to win a Pulitzer prize. This traveling exhibition is made up of a composite of original sketches, notes, concept drawings, and final production drawings that spans Spiegelman’s working artistic history.

Provided from a short documentary video in the upper gallery hallway are we told that Spiegelman was knowledgeable about his desires at eleven to be a cartoonist, and went to copying anything and everything he could. MAD magazine, an iconic publication full of gags and jokes for a younger audience, was what Spiegelman read diligently until he began making his own comic strips for a college newspaper. Beginning the retrospective exhibition on the third floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery is the start of his career of becoming one of the most well known comic artist’s of american art. Wallpapered in a grid are illustrations for tempting candies and yak-yak jokes for the wall assemblage of the Wacky Packages he created for Topps Bubblegum , and his later independent work known as the Garbage Pail Kids.

The exhibition is intentionally laid out to mimic the way a comic is read. It is chronologically laid out as a sequence of images and words to compliment the architecture of the gallery and carry notions of narrative. As much as this is the desired outcome of the exhibition, the opening night is having people read over each other and zigzag through.  Leading away from the drawn kids and novelties does the exhibition head in his 1967 move to San Francisco, and how his style evolves through the underground comic scene that was apart of the radical sixties culture. It was here he met the influential and established comic artist’s, Robert Crumb and S.K Wilson. This is also where Spiegelman also starts adding more sexuality to his strips, and the psychoanalytical characters emerge that are present through the rest of his career. …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>