Archives for category: PHOTOS

Grace Gordon-Collins at CAFCA

25/04/2013 //

Our neighbours at the Café for Contemporary Art on East Esplanade have a new show up, and if you’re familiar with stereotypes of female leads in pulp magazines, chances are you’ll have more than a few déjà-vus. In the main space, a strange feeling of recurrence is inevitable, as the same actress / subject seems to reappear in different guises and roles, making the experience of viewing the photos like walking through a parade of sensationalistic paperbacks, while figuring out a glitch that makes their larger-than-life figures more human. The recurring figure is of Alexandria, the artist’s daughter.

The two have also collaborated for ICON, an installation using a speculative love letter from Frida Kahlo to Leon Trotsky.

On another note, there’s now a new way to get to the Presentation House Gallery from this café! The North Shore Electric Bikeway – a name referencing the influence of the BC Electric Railway on the North Shore -is a partnership between the CAFCA and the PHG, building the country’s first and so far only electric bike-share program. Feel like giving it a try? Well, until May 26th, you can! Any prospective members or curious folk with simply ’a bike helmet, some photo identification and a deposit can test drive the country’s first electric bike-share at CAFCA’! Read more about it in this cover story on North Shore Outlook.

Tags arts, transportation

Categories PHOTOS

Wanna take part, but not sure how?

18/04/2013 //

If you’re currently eligible for the Chester Fields contest, and I didn’t get a chance to visit your school, maybe you’re wondering exactly how you’re going to go about sending works for the contest … Maybe you wanna know more about how this contest could benefit you … Maybe you need feedback on the start of a project that inspires you, but you don’t know how to finish …

Well, there’s still time to get support and finish a solid project!!! First off, all the basic info you need to start is available on this page. And if you’re still unsure about your photographic project being eligible or if you want feedback, send me an email at: s.hart@presentationhousegallery.org

Here’s a video to wax nostalgic or give you a quick glance of the exhibition last year, and the artistic process behind a winning entry.

Tags arts, awards

Categories PHOTOS

Three Weeks Left to Finish your Chester Fields Entries!

12/04/2013 //

Source: eachdayaflower.tumblr.com via Sam on Pinterest

DON’T GET SNOWED UNDER!

You have until May 3rd to send us your best photographic work respecting this year’s theme and requirements!

Categories PHOTOS

Transmitting Images of the Sea

12/04/2013 //

Lighthouse in the Sea of Time, 2011, 6 screens video installation (Part I, Part II, Part III)
Shot on 16 mm film – Format 16:9

The Charles H. Scott gallery, in its fifth in a series of exhibitions on the theme of the sea, presents installations and videos exploring maritime traffic and colonial legacies across the Mediterranean Sea.

The show is the only solo exhibition in the series, and features the work of London-based artist Zineb Sedira. Born in France to Algerian parents, Sedira explores the space of the sea by bringing to light, through interviews and archival documents, the ways in which the histories of Algeria and France have met each other from opposite sides of the Mediterranean.

Transmettre en abyme, 2012 Two screens video installation

The Mediterranean became an important subject in Sedira’s art from 2003/04, following her return to Algeria after 15 years of absence caused by the Algerian civil war. This trip led to a new body of work on Algeria and the colonial legacies, mobility and symbolism of the Mediterranean, as a space dividing North and South, Europe and Africa.

In Lighthouse in the Sea of Time, Sedira focusses on lighthouses on the Algerian coastline. Sedira explores the symbolism, aesthetic features and history of these solitary structures, even featuring interviews with contemporary lighthouse keepers, giving us a glimpse of what happens in these towers between sea and land.

In Transmettre en abyme [Abyss Transmission], the artist investigates an archive containing thousands of photos documenting the ships arriving and leaving the port of Marseille, as taken by the ‘ship spotter’ Marcel Baudelaire.

In this exhibition, the artist curiously chooses to investigate these maritime themes through the question of measure: photographs, ships, lighthouse steps are exhaustively counted, ordered and recounted. Sedira plays with these methods as a way to point towards the labour involved in forming and preserving cultural memories.

Transmettre en abyme, 2012
Two screens video installation

The exhibition is on until April 21, 2013. For more information on the exhibition series on the Sea click here, and for more works by Sedira, check out her personal site.

Tags historical photographs, zineb sedira

Categories PHOTOS

Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz

03/04/2013 //

Slavs and Tatars is a collective devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Their enquiries bring to light and recontextualise the often forgotten relations of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians. Their work spans various media and disciplines, and they use material from different cultural registers, from historical documents to contemporary pop culture references.

The exhibition Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz is their Canadian debut. It traces a shared genealogy between Iran and Poland, starting with two transformative moments of the late 20th century: the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the Solidarność movement of 1980 in Poland. Presented in varying forms that range from the newspaper 79.89.09 to public projects, the elements brought together for this exhibition include pająki, banners, river-bed sculptures, photo mural, a fountain and mirrored mosaics.

Can you read what the mirrored mosaic below says? What does its peculiar message mean to you?

Click on the image to learn more about the history of mirrored mosaics and consult the most recent Slavs and Tatars publication

There will be an opening reception for the exhibition, with the artists in attendance, on April 12th at 7 pm.

Of course, Slavs and Tatars don’t intend to speak for people of Slav or Tatar origin, but their identity makes us question how cultural histories are represented, how relationships between them are understood, and how various histories can be brushed under the carpet. It also makes one wonder: who’s actually behind this nebulous collective, spanning vast distances across a continent, and delving into centuries of historical documents? Here’s a glimpse: in this interview, Payam Sharifi takes us through late twentieth-century Iranian and Polish history, and how relationships between these histories were addressed through graphic elements and slogans migrating from one heritage to another.

For more information on this project, and interesting snippets of Iranian and Polish history, why not browse through the Friendship of Nations book? You can downloaded it form the Slavs and Tatars website here!

One project poking fun at how a small cultural difference can take on opposite connotations is Slavs and Tatars’ A Monobrow Manifesto. Below are two images from the work’s installation for the Frieze Sculpture Park, in London’s Regent’s Park and a photo from its encore appearance at the 10th Sharjah Biennale, in the United Arab Emirates.

Slavs and Tatars take us through some of the history of this surprising bridge of hair: ‘The monobrow is an epiphenomenon through which we can demystify the conflict between West and East often accepted as received wisdom. If in the West, the monobrow has been associated with delinquent behaviour (Victorian England) or werewolves (France), in the Middle East and the Caucasus, the monobrow is a sign of virility and sophistication. That is, if in the southern parts of Eurasia, the monobrow is hot, in the US and Europe, it’s clearly not.’ (from the S&T website)

A-Monobrow-Manifesto-2-570x427

Tags art publishing, friendship of nations, middle-east, mirrored mosaic, monobrow

Categories PHOTOS

Artek Children’s Camp: Photos by Michael Love

22/03/2013 //

‘Lenin Statue’. Digital C-Print. 40″ x 50″. 2011.

Have you ever wondered how your educational institutions compare to others in the world? Ever ask yourself what educational institutions looked like, say… in the Soviet Union in the 60s?

The photographs in the current exhibition at Café for Contemporary Art in North Van depict the Artek International Children’s Camp, established by the Soviet government in 1925 by the Crimean Sea in the Ukraine. It is one of the few remaining institutions of the Soviet era. By 1969, it had over 150 buildings including schools, swimming pools, and playgrounds.

It was here that a group called the Young Pioneers – similar to the Boy Scouts – learned about camping skills and more broadly, ideals of the Soviet Union.

Michael Love, Bleachers: Atyek International Children’s Camp, 2011, 101 x 157 cm, digital c-print, courtesy of the artist

As you walk through the exhibition, you’ll notice that the landscapes seem strangely deserted. The grandiose buildings projects of Artek, now ravaged by time, seem uninhabited, immobile and without a soul, without any clues to date the photos such as a person’s dress or tools.

The deserted spaces thus propel us to a faraway time and a distant ideology, under which the camps were used differently. The artist is interested in the distinctions and contradictions between the ideals of the 20s in the USSR, and the contemporary context. The camp is now used by Russia’s nouveau riches, with Soviet planning taking the back stage of this scenic location.

The exhibition ends March 30th, 2013.

Café for Contemporary Art is at 140 East Esplanade, North Vancouver.

Tags esplanade north vancouver, lenin statue

Categories PHOTOS

Last Days of Oppermann/ Pinheiro/ Wex Exhibition!

22/03/2013 //

Anna Oppermann, Raumeprobleme, 1978-84, Mixed media ensemble, Courtesy Anna Oppermann Estate and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

If you haven’t seen the current show at the Presentation House Gallery, there are only a couple days left to check it out!

You’ll find work by local artist Andrea Pinheiro, and the first exhibitions in Canada by two German artists, Anna Oppermann (1940-1993) and Marianne Wex (b.1937), who deserve more visibility, to say the least!

All three artists present works that draw from archival documentation. Across the different media of the show, the accumulation of material in each of the three artist’s works question the relationship of representation to such themes as: how body language is determined in women and men (Wex), the history of atomic bomb detonations (Pinheiro), hoarding and ordering ephemera from a personal history (Oppermann).

Marianne-Wex-Lets-Take-Back-Our-Space-14-1024x826

Marianne Wex, page from “Leg and Feet Positions” in Let’s Take Back Our Space: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, 1979, courtesy Frauenliteratur Verlag

Anna Oppermann: Filiations / Andrea Pinheiro: Bomb Book / Marianne Wex: Let’s Take Back Our Space

Sunday 24 March will be the last day of the exhibition!

Tags body language, german artists in canada, hoarding, taxonomy

Categories PHOTOS

Stan Douglas, Tim Lee with Michael Turner at Satellite Gallery

21/03/2013 //

Villy Svarre, Pacific Great Eastern (PGE) general manager Einar Gunderson (left, head in noose) and Premier W.A.C. Bennett (right with black hat, head in noose) take part in the inaugural arrival ceremonies of the PGE in Williams Lake, B.C. August 30, 1956, courtesy The Province

Discussion between artists Stan Douglas and Tim Lee, with writer Michael Turner as interlocutor.

Saturday, March 23, 3PM

Please join us at the Satellite Gallery for an after-noon with the Vancouver heavy-hitters Stan Douglas and Tim Lee, as they discuss different approaches to working with historical photographs, films and audio-visual materials. Both artists often work with material culture from the past, investing it with new meanings. They will provide insights into their research processes and ideas about media histories. Michael Turner will act as an interlocutor in the discussion; drawing on his extensive knowledge of the cultural life of this city.

This discussion will take place against the backdrop of the NEWS! exhibition, based on the press photography collection of The Vancouver Sun and The Province newspapers.

The Satellite Gallery is located in downtown Vancouver at 560 Seymour Street, 2nd floor (604.681.8425).

Tags historical photographs, media

Categories PHOTOS

Pop Culture Glitches

20/03/2013 //

Local artist Raymond Boisjoly, in his current exhibition at the Catriona Jeffries Gallery, presents photographs that run figures from popular culture through the treadmill of contemporary media.

Extracting his source material from Youtube videos, themselves derived from televised musical performances, Boisjoly has mutated these sources through different tools to create monstrous images, which on first encounter can seem to erase the artist’s presence altogether. The images seem to have been let loose through processes of recycling and re-formatting, haunting the technologies containing them. The ghostly presence of figures mediated through technology remind the viewer that sometimes accidents, even annoying computer glitches, can be beautiful.

The images you will see in the show are derived from performances by the following musicians: Pat& Lolly Vegas (Write Me, Baby, 1965), Buffy Sainte-Marie, (He’s A Keeper Of The Fire,1969) and Sly & the Family Stone (Thank you, 1970). The videos were played on simple video playback technology, then placed on a flatbed scanner. The Red-Green-Blue chunks in the resulting images come from the transfer of the videos to the scanner flatbed.

As you peer closer to the images, the influence of technology recedes, with scratches and fingerprints hinting at the artist’s presence and process.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, (b. 1941, Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan) is a Canadian-American Cree singer-songwriter, musician, composer, visual artist, educator, pacifist, and social activist. Her work has notably focussed on issues concerning indigenous peoples of the Americas. Here’s a tune you won’t hear in the exhibition, although you might recognise glimpses of Buffy from the source material video:

The exhibition is on until 13 April 2013. You can see more exhibition photos here.

Tags buffy sainte-marie, new media

Categories PHOTOS

Online Collection of the Museum of Anthropology

12/03/2013 //

Made by Takao Tanabe in BC, Photographed by Jessica Bushey; click on the photo for more information and to see the image in greater detail!

Staying on the hill of the University of British Columbia, here’s an impressive online archive that’s a great way to complement an actual visit through the culturally diverse artefacts of the Museum of Anthropology:

http://collection-online.moa.ubc.ca/

If you’re wondering what the museum can offer in terms of specific media, national affiliation or other criteria, you might get the most from the site by using the ‘advanced search’ option, then choosing a category, such as ‘carving’, a place, such as ‘Calcutta’ to funnel down your search.

Tags museum of anthropology, national affiliation, university of british columbia

Categories PHOTOS

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