Browsing “The Opening Series”

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!

If some alarmist art critics are to be believed, painting is dead. Still others claim photography is dead. Thankfully no one is actually listening, least of all Vancouver-based artist Ian Wallace, a large portion of whose body of work is currently on display in Ian Wallace: At the Intersection of Painting and Photography at the Vancouver Art Gallery until February 24, 2013.

‘Lookout’, 1979 (detail), 12 hand-colour silver gelatin prints. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery Acquisition Fund. Photo: Tomas Svab, Vancouver Art Gallery.

Wallace is a very influential figure in the Vancouver visual arts community, having taught a number of now well-known artists at either the University of British Columbia or the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University). Not only were people like Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham and Ken Lum students under Wallace, but many became friends and peers. Wallace, Graham and Wall at one point played in a punk band together called U-J3RK5 (pronounced “you jerk”) with Kitty Byrne, Colin Griffiths, Danice McLeod, Frank Ramirez and David Wisdom. Many of Wallace’s works feature these and other notable members of Vancouver’s cultural community as his models, from Lookout in 1979 right up to the new versions of At The Crosswalk from 2011, commissioned specifically for this exhibition.

‘My Heroes in the Street II’, 1986, photolaminate, acrylic on canvas 183 x 336 cm, Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Gift of Ydessa Hendeles, 2009. Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery.
…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

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!

1967, Paris, cover for Harper’s Bazaar

Fashion photography today tends to be heavily edited and stylized, often at the expense of realism. While sometimes it looks cool, it often leaves me wondering if I could ever hope to wear the same clothes with anything resembling style. As a photography nerd, it also makes me long for the simple but stunning fashion photography of the 1960s, 70s and 80s by such innovators as Richard Avedon, Herb Ritts and Helmut Newton, using nothing but film. Thankfully I can satiate myself right now with a visit to Presentation House Gallery (PHG) in North Vancouver to view the stunning work of another excellent photographer from that period, Frank Horvat. Horvat and exhibition curator Vince Aletti had a live conversation at Emily Carr University last Saturday afternoon touching on a number of highlights from Horvat’s long career, parts of which I’ll draw from in discussing his photography and exhibition.

Born in Italy in 1928, Horvat began working as a freelance photographer shortly after the end of World War II. At first he focused on freelance reportage, travelling to India and Pakistan to photograph as much as he could of what was happening in other parts of the world. For Horvat, photography was a way to explore the things around him that he was curious about, to seek answers to questions he was only beginning to form.

1962, Calcutta, India, Beggar Assembly

After a couple of years in London working for LIFE and Picture Post magazines, …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

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!

Art and design frequently intersect, being that they are both creative fields. It’s not always clear where one begins and the other ends, and this is certainly true of work by the late Tobias Wong, currently on display at the Museum of Vancouver. Wong was originally from Vancouver, but ultimately ended up in New York where he studied sculpture at Cooper Union. He died too young in 2010 at the age of 35, of what the authorities ruled a suicide, though his family suspected the death was related to his severe sleep-walking problem.

Wong was on a steady climb to fame, helped by his use of fancy design objects and notable brands in his work. From his buttons in the Burberry tartan at New York Fashion week in 1999 to a Starck Bubble Chair turned into a lamp in 2001, he capitalized on the notoriety of these names and subverted or altered them in some way. There is little doubt that he would have been someone to watch had his promising career not ended so tragically. His work has previously been exhibited at MoMA, but the MoV exhibition is the most comprehensive show to date.

The opening was PACKED to the rafters, and I ran into both art and design friends and colleagues. It’s definitely an exhibit that will appeal to a wide variety of people with its mixture of everyday objects and humour. They also have a stellar list of programming in conjunction with the exhibition, including a show & tell of his work with family members, a night of creating art inspired by Wong, and (MUST GO TO THIS) an all-day pop-up tattoo parlour on December 8th. All this to say, if you haven’t been to the Museum of Vancouver in a while, I think it’s time to give this oft-overlooked space a visit.

THE OPENING is all about introducing the fascinating, quirky and wonderful people working in and around the visual arts in Vancouver. Each week, we’ll feature an artist, collective, curator or administrator to delve deep into who and what makes art happen!

We’re profiling something a little different this week on The Opening – films. But not just any films. Two incredible visual arts documentaries that will be airing in Vancouver in the next week as a part of the 2012 DOXA Documentary Film Festival: Marina Abromovic: The Artist is Present and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. Both films deal with artists who were hot international topics recently and should help make their impact on not just the art world, but the world at large more clear.

Film still ‘Marina Abromovic: The Artist is Present’ by David Smoler. Courtesy DOXA.

Serbian performance artist Marina Abromovic has long been known for her intense performances which test the comfort of the audience as much as herself. She uses performance as a means of fostering a relationship with the audience while she explores the limitations of the body and mind under varying stages of duress. From 1976-1988 she was in an intense relationship with another performance artist, Ulay. As a pair they worked as twins of one another, exploring ideas of conciousness and their relationship to the space around them.

From March 14 to May 31, 2010, The Museum of Modern Art in New York staged an enormous retrospective of her performance work, both solo and during her time with Ulay, called Marina Abromovic: The Artist is Present.She hired and trained numerous other performance artists to stage these works, which ran every day during the museum’s opening hours. The entire exhibition culminated in the longest piece of performance art in her career: Abromovic sat in a chair on one side of a small table, with a chair on the other side for anyone to sit on for as long as they liked. Patrons lined up for hours to sit with her, some decrying the whole idea as a farce and others feeling as though they had reached transcendence. The performance even led to an online 8-bit version by artist Pippin Barr that operates in real time (play here).

Film still ‘Marina Abromovic: The Artist is Present’ by David Smoler. Courtesy DOXA.
…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

THE OPENING is all about introducing the fascinating, quirky and wonderful people working in and around the visual arts in Vancouver. Each week, we’ll feature an artist, collective, curator or administrator to delve deep into who and what makes art happen!

It’s a damp Sunday evening in February when I arrive at 147 Main street to interview Nicole Ondre and Vanessa Disler, two friends and graduates of Emily Carr who partnered together to open Exercise in the fall of last year.

The entrance near the corner of Powell and Main is unassuming to say the very least – there is no signage, no special sandwich board or window treatment to indicate the arrival of this fresh and bold new artist run space straddling the edges of Chinatown, Gastown and the DTES.

The Opening at Exercise, photo by Jennifer Kim

Nicole greets me at the door and we’re immediately in the storefront portion of Exercise that serves as the gallery and exhibition space. There is tarp on the floor and paint on the walls and my rods and cones are instantly juiced in anticipation for Yunhee Min’s exhibit, “Spectra: fixtures, attachments, and ornamentals” that is being set up.  But more on that later.

Further in from the gallery we pass through the middle section reserved for artists’ studios.  After interrupting and being introduced to a painter at work I follow Nicole and Vanessa into the back and we settle ourselves in the inviting candle-lit, wood-paneled lounge comme salon. Just back from a trip to LA, I can feel the inspiration and excitement buzzing from the two partners who’d spent much of their time visiting the small, unique artist run centres there. A number of paintings surround us. I am particularly taken by the one dominating the eastern wall with its large swaths of black.  It is Vanessa’s work, and it is energetic, ambitious, and spirited – much like Exercise itself.

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>

THE OPENING is all about introducing the fascinating, quirky and wonderful people working in and around the visual arts in Vancouver. Each week, we’ll feature an artist, collective, curator or administrator to delve deep into who and what makes art happen!

Bryan Newson is the Manager of the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program. He and his staff have been responsible for bringing you everything from Ken Lum’s Monument for East Vancouver to Rodney Graham’s Aerodynamic Forms in Space, and hundreds more. I met with Bryan a few weeks ago to discuss how he got involved in the creation of the program, what it does, and where it’s headed in the face of budget cutbacks.

Inges Idée ‘Drop’

Can you tell me about what the Public Art Program does for the City of Vancouver?

The Public Art Program is designed to bring artists forward in planning and development processes that are in this city’s jurisdiction. This includes finding ways to incorporate artists, their artwork and contemporary art practices, into new facilities such as libraries or community centres. It also provides a mechanism for requiring major private developments such as the larger of the new condos and things coming into the city, to commission new artworks in association with their new developments.

Additionally, it looks after things like what do you do when the government of the Northwest Territories wants to donate an Inukshuk for English Bay. What’s the process for handling that, who needs to be consulted? That’s actually a gift of state… you just accept those. But if somebody just wants to donate an artwork, and we spend quite a bit of time wrestling with this issue, we go through a few things: What is the artwork? What is its artistic provenance? Is it a good artwork (by which we simply mean does this work merit long-term placement on city land)? The real issue being, there is nothing more valuable than public space or public land. There’s tremendous pressure on that land, all sorts of agendas for it. I like to think of this part of the Public Art Program (the part that’s not dealing with commissions either for the city or for the private sector, but the part that’s figuring out what to do with donations), I see that as a way of protecting public space, or at least bringing some rigor to the discussion about what should go up on public space.

Do you get a lot of art by donation or is most of it by commission?

We used to. When the program started there was a whole tradition, and most of the artwork that was out in the city was donated by somebody.

The Vancouver Biennale (which is I believe three non-profit entities working in some relation to each other), bring in some major artworks and site them around the city. They have approached us seeking permission to site the works on a long-term basis. Up to 30 years was the original request, but I think we’re talking about 20 years now. We’re coming to an agreement with the Biennale about that. The downside is it means we would take a piece of public space, there would be an artwork there for up to 20 years that people would become familiar with, and then it would disappear. Or it could actually disappear at any point if the Biennale decides to take it elsewhere. The good side is that we’ll go through a process of determining the appropriateness of the work and whether it merits the space it’s in (and I think in most cases we’ll be determining yes it does), and the public gets, at no cost to the city, an artwork for 15-20 years to look at.

At no cost to the city other than the upkeep of the land I’m assuming?

The upkeep of the artwork will be at the cost of the Biennale, because it is selling and fundraising work. They’re fundraising right now to try to raise $1.5 million for a piece. If we owned the work, we would be responsible, but if they own the work they are responsible for its upkeep and maintenance and its insurance. Most of these works would be surrounded by a mowing strip. Some of these works are so popular that the grass does not grow! So it is easy for the Parks people to continue to maintain the space around them.

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas ‘Abundance Fenced’

…READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>