Browsing “The Opening Series”

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!

Originally hailing from Vancouver, Dr. Cliff Lauson is now Curator at the Hayward Gallery at Southbank Centre in London, UK. A graduate of UBC and formerly the Education and Public Programmes Coordinator at the Museum of Anthropology (1998-2003), Lauson completed his MA in 2004 and Phd in 2009 on the History of Art at University College London. Previous to his position at the Hayward he was Assistant Curator at Tate from 2005-09. While living and working in London, he is still very much engaged in what is happening in Vancouver, having written his dissertation on the so-called ‘Vancouver School,’ and worked with and written about Ron Terada. He is currently curating an upcoming Hayward Gallery exhibit with David Shrigley, and writing about Vancouver-based Damian Moppett for the upcoming Rennie Collection exhibition catalogue. Lauson will be giving a lecture at Emily Carr University next Wednesday, November 23 at 7pm.

Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre (Photo copyright Morley von Sternberg)

How did you become interested in art?

I became interested in art during an exchange year at the University of Glasgow while I was completing my BA degree at UBC. I took my first history of art classes there and was particularly taken with Surrealism. At the end of the year, like many North Americans, I spent the summer backpacking across Europe and I tried to find as many of the works that I had studied to see them first-hand, including the Scrovegni chapel in Padua and large-scale paintings by Jacques-Louis David at the Louvre in Paris, in addition to many paintings by René Magritte.

What were your early impressions of the Vancouver art community while you still lived here?

Growing up in Vancouver, I didn’t pay much attention to the Vancouver art scene, except for the occasional blockbuster exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Like many non-artworld Vancouverites, I was not aware of the impact that Vancouver-based artists had (and continue to have) internationally. Upon returning to Vancouver to finish my BA, I started to follow art in Vancouver more closely. My entry into art and curating however came via my job as the Public Programmes Coordinator at the UBC Museum of Anthropology. The museum studies programme that was established by the late Michael Ames had developed a world-class reputation, and it made the museum a brilliant learning environment even though I was not studying in the Anthropology department.

Why did you decide to leave Vancouver and continue your education in London?

I moved to London because it is an art capital and I wanted to study in place where I could be surrounded by a wealth of artists, exhibitions, and galleries. Its proximity to Europe made it a more appealing city to me than New York. In terms of studying, I found that the emphasis on independent research and frequent teaching in galleries were ways of learning that really appealed to me.

You have been a Curator at Hayward Gallery in London since 2009 – can you tell me a bit about your role there and what projects you have upcoming? Tell me also about the space you are working with and any particular challenges or benefits that it presents.

As Curator I research, develop, and organize exhibitions with primarily, though not exclusively, contemporary artists. The Hayward Gallery is one of the few purpose-built public art galleries in London and is quite large compared to other institutions. Its configuration is essentially the same as it was when it opened in 1968 – five interior galleries and three sculpture courts. Three of the inside spaces are fairly cavernous, so can be quite flexible but one always has to ensure that an artist’s work is presented at its best in those spaces. I am currently preparing an exhibition of work by British artist David Shrigley which will run from 1 February – 13 May 2012. He is best-known for his humorous drawings, but he makes artwork across a variety of media – all are very funny.

Ernesto Neto ‘The Edges of the World’ at the Hayward Gallery (2010)

Has your impression of Vancouver’s art community changed now that you are involved in a larger community in London?

Studying in London really allowed me to see Vancouver’s art and artists from …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!

In the all things digital and computer made, Kim Kennedy Austin feels a little bit lost. As she puts it, “I like that time where things were industrially fabricated, but made by someone who knew how to make it themselves by hand.” The very ethos of everything she creates is a celebration of things made in that spirit, from hand-designed 70’s book covers to mechanical drawings in an unusual colour.

The written word is a part of that celebration, evident in her book cover works but also her affinity for hand-drawn type. A graduate of Emily Carr Institute (now University) in 2001, Austin works at the Vancouver Public Library. While she doesn’t enjoy writing herself, she certainly enjoys reproducing texts she finds in various sources, particularly from old technical manuals. She often uses “found text, whether it’s some sort of antiquated text where just the way they write is so lyrical. From when they are …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!

Vancouver artist Raymond Boisjoly combines an invested interest in text-based works with a black metal aesthetic. A graduate of Emily Carr’s Fine Art’s degree program and UBC’s Master’s program, Raymond’s work is featured in Or Gallery’s Studies in Decay, a group show with Jordy Hamilton and Laura Piasta, curated by Jonah Gray. Raymond is currently a sessional instructor at Emily Carr.

‘The Writing Lesson’ series (2011) sunlight, construction paper, Plexiglas (photo: Blaine Campbell, Republic Gallery)

Congratulations on the Or show. How did it all begin?

It came about through discussions with a friend of mine, Jonah Gray, who’s in the CCST Program at UBC. He had certain interests, like the ability for art to refer to social reality—art that isn’t self-contained, that is somehow a response to some sort of phenomenon ‘out there.’ He was interested in particular works, and we had talked about this body of work I was making.

Your piece is alongside the work of Jordy Hamilton and Laura Piasta, and all three bodies work really well together.

Yeah, it’s definitely a funny group of works. I really like Jordy’s project. It’s totally absurd, just kind of insane. I like the colour of Jordy’s photographs, those vintage consumer colour prints, what age has done to them. They’re yellowed, all of the colours are slightly muted, and the way that the surface has been affected as well, those spots of discolouration. Totally something that I can appreciate.

You’ve got this beautiful object in the crystallized denim jacket, and then a bike getting shot up. Both of these are alongside a text which references a black metal aesthetic. The entire show contains a very youthful and almost angry impression…

Yeah. Or it somehow seems almost vital. As if there’s something kind of active within them.

So much of your work seems to have this contradiction of enchantment and disappointment, positivity and negativity. This is something that you’re always working through?

It’s nothing that I’m pursuing consciously. A lot of it just happens in the process of making the work. This sort of thing, I guess, is just always there. It’s something I usually only recognize in retrospect. Especially with a lot of the more recent text works, where it’s trying to pursue some kind of complicated idea, but then there’s a certain sentiment borne out in it that I don’t know if I did pursue consciously. It’s a very strange feeling. I try to understand my encounter with it, which is hopefully not so different from how other people encounter it: this object that is kind of difficult to absorb, that has some bearing on my understanding of the world, and that doesn’t confirm or deny any sort of idea. It is a generative object to try and think through.

‘The Writing Lesson’ series (2011) sunlight, construction paper, Plexiglas (photo: Blaine Campbell, Republic Gallery)

‘Spuzzum’ is very abstracted. To look at it, there is so much meaning in the form alone, and then in the actual content of the word. This is something that emerges in a lot of your text-based work.

The work exists so that you have to look through the tarp to see the text. The tarp is the most immediate visual phenomenon. There’s text behind it, but the tarp is in front of it. For the work that I just recently showed at Republic, The Writing Lesson, I used trans mounting, mounting an image to a piece of plexi. The plexi necessarily becomes a part of the image. The use of a tarp makes a similar relationship, a necessity of looking through materials to see what the work actually is. …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!

To the novice art aficionado, the paintings Elizabeth McIntosh makes could be described as abstract. She prefers to leave it more open-ended than that however, feeling that painting “exists now as a whole mixture of all the histories [of painting movements] combined together.” Abstraction “just seems like a word that can’t encompass all that painting can now encompass.” Her paintings hover around pattern, decoration, collage and representation that say more about the process of creating the composition than they do about the composition as a whole.

‘Zig Zag’ 2009, approx. 24 x 32 in., construction paper

McIntosh has been painting since she was a teenager, when she took a summer art class and fell in love with the medium. Eventually that love led her to study art at York University in Toronto, and while she painted the whole time, got caught up in the feminist agenda of the 80s and produced a lot of performance work. In one performance she cut herself out of a cardboard box; in another she strapped a tape recorder to her front with a baby harness, which alternated between playing the sound of children booing or cheering while she tried not to show emotion to the sounds. While she enjoyed the performance work she found it “nerve-wracking to get infront of an audience,” and realized in time that she preferred painting and the solitary time doing so in the studio. Many of her fellow students and even some teachers suggested painting was not the medium she should pursue, but McIntosh would not be persuaded and went on to Chelsea College in London to obtain an MFA in painting.

‘Cat’ 2010, 75 x 90 in., oil on canvas

Eventually she ended up in Vancouver, with it’s large but oft-overlooked painting community. To her, painting is a “geeky thing,” equating it with ceramics and the technical knowledge about the medium that only other practitioners care to know or pay attention to. Her paintings are a process that begin and end in different places, but always lead to something new for McIntosh. She had a large show at the Contemporary Art Gallery late last year entitled “Violet’s Hair,” in which she exhibited a group of large paintings in one room, and turned the other room and the outside windows into …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!

Cloud Studies 2, 1998-2010, Polaroids

Artist Mina Totino is easily one of the most thoughtful artists I’ve had the pleasure to interview. An avid reader in general, she has a particular interest in history – art and otherwise. From painting to photography, this interest is reflected in everything she does. Our conversation was peppered with references, from German philosopher and socialist Karl Marx to British Romantic painter John Constable. History “is the reason I’m still interested in painting,” she notes. While Totino works in a number of mediums including photography and drawing, painting is her most frequent medium. As she puts it, “I’ve always been a painterly painter. I’ve always been interested in the matter and the material, probably more than just about anything else.”

Burnt Orange Heresy, 2010, oil on canvas, 157 x 157 cm

Totino’s paintings at first glance could be described as …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!

Everyone please welcome our new contributor, Ruth Skinner! Ruth hails from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and came all the way to the other coast to study photography at Emily Carr University (BFA 2011). You can follow Ruth by her Tumblr, her website, or even on Twitter @rrrskins, though she isn’t used to tweeting yet so we’ll need to work together to coax her into it (she may harm me for saying that). For now, please enjoy her first offering, an interview with artist Bradley Harms.

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Bradley Harms (b. 1971, Winnipeg) uses the language of past painting traditions to address the contemporary cultural experience. Ever mindful of painting’s many histories and -isms, Harms explores both the accord and antagonism between humans and technology. He is at the forefront of Canadian contemporary abstract painting, and has been exhibited widely both within Canada and internationally. Harms earned a BFA from the University of Calgary in 1996 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. He recently met with me for drinks, and politely suffered having a recorder in his face for the better part of two hours.

Installation view at Black & Yellow

How do you feel about your Black & Yellow show now that it’s closing? It was a very crowded opening.
I loved it, because I never actually had a show in the city. I’ve only been here for just bang-on a year now, and it did exactly what it needed to do. It got people familiar with my work. I’m sure people have been familiar with seeing me at openings, and I’m into discourse and dialogue, but no one ever knew what I did. I wanted to just have a little showcasing of the work, or forum, so people could get in front of these things.

Your current show, ‘Total Confusion Fabulous’, is in conjunction with another show in Toronto…
It’s at Angell, the gallery I show with in Toronto. The Vancouver show has seven pieces in it. The one at Angell had twenty-four.

For the Vancouver show, I had the Vancouver Paintings. They’re called The Vancouver Paintings because when I first came here I was just starting to make these text paintings. I found that coming to a city that was steeped in conceptual work and conceptual photography, it gave me the perfect reason to incorporate text of a conceptual nature within the paintings. I find text in work very problematic and troublesome in that meaning is always skewed, and I didn’t want to rely on semantic meaning. So it was the perfect kind of cheeky reason to make a text painting. This city is full of conceptual heavy-weights so I thought, let’s just make a word-play out of their names which also gave me permission to make a text work that I didn’t have to be overly careful with. It was playful right from the get-go.

You must be pretty embroiled in this idea of the Vancouver art scene.
Oh, I’m still confounded by it. I’m still struggling with what it means to make art in this city. Luckily I still have a studio in Calgary that I fly back to. I spend way more time in Vancouver, but every month and a half to two months I go back to Calgary for a couple of weeks to work in the studio there. But yeah, to be in …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>