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Post REMApril 11, 2014
Evan Broens, Jason Gowans, Michael Morris, Patryk Stasieczek, Matt Trahan Curated by Wil Aballe Canadian Art Gallery Hop Main Street Tour Burrard Arts Foundation | BAF Studio Post rem, a Latin phrase, literally means “after the thing” and is defined as “logically subsequent to the existence of particulars”. The word “post” in art typically connotes a reference to a movement; not here. Post rem, the exhibition, will look at moments when chance occurrences become the source of inspiration from which contemporary artists derive their work. Evan Broens’ work originated from a photograph he took of a wall with a mismatched yellow tone of painted over graffiti. The form it created caught his attention and lingered with him for two years. The conceptual framework for this work was to research this form and visit all the possibilities this shape could be, eventually constructing a spectrum of possibilities. The meaning of the work is multivalent; in one form, the abstract shape has been transformed into an enigmatic poem. Patryk Stasieczek’s Negative-Positive; Negative (inverse) is a photographic work arrived at through a meditation of surface, space, and the properties of the photographic act in relationship to its material. Composed in a traditional darkroom setting, this diptych speaks to the process of analog production and its stages through installation. Both works are duplicates of the other; one speaks to the conditions of the apparatus while the other performs the referent. While approaching the concept of photography through a versed methodology, his practice negotiates the possibilities left within a progressively obsolete method of photographic image production. Similarly, Jason Gowans has been developing work within new realms of photography with his new series, A Law That Is Implied Without Being Said. Using the physical processes of photography, he offers something we weren’t expecting: an expansive landscape with a white void that casts an inexplicable shadow. The compositions appeal formally, but jar narratively.These silver gelatin photographs, made in the darkroom from 4×5 negatives and contact printed on paper, are inspired by the idea of the penumbra. The penumbra is the outermost portion of a shadow and the space between light and dark. The word, however, takes on another meaning in legalese. A penumbra is a law that is implied without being explicit. It presents itself as black and white, but is in fact open to interpretation. The penumbra is the space where an argument is made. Michael Morris’ Screen Test: Jean Harlow are eight cibachrome photographs from 1976 that have been recently discovered in storage where they have been for the last 38 years! The photos were printed from the original slides shot in 1965, which have been lost, making each photograph unique. A movie poster of Jean Harlow fell into a private swimming pool where wind and water currents created a distorted and transformed image of the dead star. This series underlines the artist’s fascination for LA and Hollywood, in particular. These photos are also reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s “noir” classic book of scandals, Hollywood / Babylon. Matt Trahan’s work examines the material possibilities of drawing by challenging some of its most fundamental precepts, including the relationship between positive and negative space, figure and ground, and the discreteness of line. He also uses drawing as a framework for highlighting the beauty of certain mundane objects that appear to have an inherent artfulness or delicacy. This work often branches out into the realms of sculpture, painting, and photography, while simultaneously emphasizing the importance of mark-making as a conceptual starting point. In this show, he will exhibit a sculptural grid of of coloured pencil shavings, originally arrived at accidentally, happened upon while creating the meticulous, minimalist drawings for which he is best known. Artist Biographies Evan Broens has exhibited both nationally and internationally – most recently at Platform Stockholm (Sweden) and Dynamo Arts Association (Vancouver). Broens completed his studies in Sculpture at the Alberta College of Art & Design in 2005. In 2012 he was artist in residence at the DRAWinternational Residency in southern France, and in 2013 participated in the thematic residency Another World in the Studio at The Banff Centre, Canada. Jason Gowans received a BFA in photography at Concordia University. He is a photo-based artist, co-founder of Gallery 295 and founding member of The Everything Company art collective. Recently solo projects include: Dumb as a Painter with Tonik Wojtyra, Gallery 295; Three Wrongs Don’t Make a Right with The Everything Co, Access Gallery; Five Landscape Modes, Gallery Fukai. Recent group exhibitions include: Magenta Flash Forward, Romancing the Anthopocene with The EverythingCo, Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, Toronto, Nouvelles Geographies, Galerie Perception Park, Paris and Chief on top of the Chief, Miracle & Connelly presents, Vancouver. Michael Morris is a painter, photographer, video and performance artist and curator. His work is often media based and collaborative, involved with developing networks and in the production and presentation of new art activity. He is a Canadian, born in Saltdean England in 1942. In 1969 he founded Image Bank with Vincent Trasov, a method for personal exchange between artists; 1973 he was co-founder and co-director of Western Front Society, Vancouver; 1981, he was invited with Trasov to Berlin as guests of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm DAAD; 1990, he and Trasov founded the Morris/Trasov Archive, currently housed at Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, to research contemporary art. Morris has curated numerous exhibitions. His work in represented in private and public collections nationally and internationally Patryk Stasieczek is a visual artist living in Vancouver, BC. He is in the final stages of the Master of Applied Arts program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. He holds a BFA in photography and philosophy from Concordia University in Montréal, and has exhibited nationally, participating in exhibitions at Gallery 295, Galerie Les Territoires, Eastern Bloc, and the FOFA Gallery. Matt Trahan is an artist currently living in Victoria, BC. He holds a BFA from The University of Western Ontario (2009) and an MFA from The University of Victoria (2012). His recent exhibitions include Come Undone at the Visual Arts Building of the University of Victoria; Breathing Dust, Michael Audain Gallery, Victoria; and surface to air, Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria BAUHAUS PRIMARY COLOURS 11 x 14″ The understanding and appreciation of colour in the modern world is largely due to the Bauhaus experiment in art, architecture and design in Germany and the United States in the 20th century. “Bauhaus primary colours”, a limited edition silk screen print by Michael Morris commissioned by Wil Aballe Art Projects for the opening of the Burrard Arts Foundation. The work acknowledges the artist’s debt to the past in the context of the present.
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The Seasons Have Changed But We Have NotApril 10, 2014 - May 10, 2014
Sean Alward Opening Thursday, April 10, 2014, 7-9 p.m. For its April slot, WAAP is proud to announce a show by 6 artists, 4 from Vancouver, 1 from Toronto and a 5th from Auckland, New Zealand. This spring exhibition will use plant and flora imagery to explore perennial matters such as economic policies, financial crises, the art market and immigration. Time is simultaneously slowed down and sped up in Sarah Smuts Kennedy’s Principle of Hope, a stop-motion animation described by the artist as a ‘poetic drama of cause and effect’ that documents the life cycle of six colonies of chia seedlings, a rediscovered Aztec super food traded as currency and banned by the colonising Spanish. Principle of Hope follows the utopian impulse using the aesthetic strategy of modelling possible ‘what if’ scenarios, in this case the cause and effect implications current global economic policy of growth has on resource use and demand. Jeffrey Hallbauer’s exposure to flowers as a florist allowed him to reflect upon the way flowers mimic many aspects of contemporary life, such as beauty, money, manipulated nature, mortality, the reproductive cycle, etc. With his new series of flowers, there is a persistence of the beauty that surrounds rife with contradictions and allegory that relates to other works in this exhibition. Michael Drebert will exhbit a sculptural work using white lilies, specifically the scent of the lilies’ blossoms as a way of enabling a sensual but also formal experience. Cut flowers bring the essence of the outside inside, through the freshness of their blooms, but also the inevitable and necessary degradation of their matter. Brad Tinmouth’s sculpture, Tulipiere, is derived from his research on Tulipmania. Tulip mania was a brief period of time where Dutch tulip bulbs fueled what is considered the world’s first speculative economic bubble. Tulips plagued by a colour breaking virus that caused vibrant streaks of colour to appear in the flowers petals began selling in a newly amassed speculative contract-based market. In 1637, a single Semper Agustus bulb (red and white blended petals) had reaching a peak price of ten times the wages of a skilled worker. As tulip price plateaued these contract holders found themselves holding highly inflated paper shares of still ungrown bulbs and no clients willing to pay the over-inflated reseller’s price. This caused a major crash in the market leaving thousands with nothing but beautiful ‘broken’ tulips. Interestingly, because the price of tulips had risen to such heights, it became such that it was much more affordable to purchase a painting of tulips than it was to buy actual tulips, fueling the art market that resulted in the Golden Age of Dutch painting. Two transmounted cibachrome prints from Christopher Rodrigues’ series of Still Lifes refer to the oil paintings of Dutch masters Coenraat Roepel (Still Life with Flowers, 1721) and Rachel Ruysch (Still Life with Flowers on a Marble Tabletop, 1716). The cibachrome medium is an additionally significant choice as the silver particles of the photograph echo the metallic particles mixed into the paints by these masters. The use of Photoshop as a medium allows for techniques that resemble collage and painting while “borrowing” pixels of color from images found on the Internet using search engines and scanned from his own paintings; he entirely absents the camera from the artistic process. Sean Alward’s work utilizes the inherent light sensitivity of plants in order to make photo prints. In one body of work, leaf surfaces act as an analogue for photographic paper and chlorophyll assumes the role of silver halide. For his Double Invasive series, the artist took samples of English ivy and Norway maple, plants considered by local ecologists to be invasive, and used their leafy surfaces to “photograph” indigenous ferns such as lady fern and Athyrium filix-femina. The leaf prints are then scanned as a way of “fixing” the fugitive images from the leaves. In a second series, Salal, Alward made a photo emulsion of extracted plant chlorophyll applied to sheets of paper. On these surfaces he made solar contact prints, then scanned the results to “fix” the fugitive images, and printed them again on paper. This project originated while reading a diary entry made by the Scottish botanist David Douglas, who wrote that the first thing he saw and touched when he landed on the coast near the mouth of Columbia River in 1825, was salal (gaultheria shallon). This date coincidentally corresponds with the early photographic experiments of Nicephore Niepce in France, who is credited with creating the world’s first fixed photographic image. Sean Alward completed his BFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and MFA at the University of British Columbia. He has exhibited in Canada, internationally, and lives in Vancouver, B.C. He recently presented a two-part solo exhibition called A Vertical City Goes Both Ways at Access Gallery in 2013. Michael Drebert graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and completed his MFA from University of Victoria. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Western Front, Helen Pitt Gallery, Hard Scrabble Gallery and Blanket Gallery, among others. Brad Tinmouth is an artist living and working in Toronto, Canada. He graduated from York University. His work deals with sustainable and efficient systems. He aims to make everyone as happy as he is. Tinmouth is the Studio Manager for Kent Monkman and was co-director of Butcher Gallery from 2009-2013. His work has been shown at Cooper Cole and Nuit Blanche in Toronto, Pierre François Ouellette art contemporain 221 in Montreal, Esam Caen in France, Preteen Gallery in Mexico and Dokfest in German. He has an upcoming solo exhibition at OhMyDays Gallery in Singapore in the summer of 2014. http://bradtinmouth.com Jeffrey Hallbauer completed his BFA in 2009 at Emily Carr University. In 2010, he had his first solo show Maddy at GAM Gallery in Vancouver. He has participated in numerous group shows, including at Radical Spirits, Leo Koo Gallery and with the Gropps artist collective. Hallbauer works mainly in painting and sculpture and is interested in making the mundane profound. Born in Derby, England 1974, Christopher Rodrigues was awarded his BA in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto in 2011. His first solo show at RARE Gallery, New York 2011 was an exhibit of nine imagined planets. Rodrigues has exhibited work in group shows at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the Hunterdon Art Museum, New Jersey and The Rymer Gallery, Nashville; locally at the Pendulum Gallery, Port Moodie Arts Centre, Chopra Yoga Center and the Vivarium Gallery, a window-front gallery he co-founded. While continuing to work within the traditions of contemporary still life and landscape, his practice examines the overlapping fringes of traditional and digital painting. www.christopherrodrigues.com Sarah Smuts-Kennedy completed her MFA in 2012 at the University of Auckland. Her solo exhibitions include Shape Analysis, Rm, Auckland (2013); Principle of Hope, Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne (2012); UNEARTHED: Encroachment of the Commons, Wollongong Regional Gallery, Wollongong, NSW (2011); Another Day in Paradise, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney (2009); Pyramid Scheme, The John Paynter Gallery (2009); Cliffhanger, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney (2008); Ether, Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi, India (2006); Ascension, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney (2004). Her work is held in the collections of Art Bank, Sydney, Deutsche Bank, Sydney, Macquarie Group Collection, Sydney, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle and Wallace Art Collection, Auckland, Ten Cubed Collection, Melbourne, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. www.sarahsmutskennedy.com
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