ADDITION: 001

OPENING

001
ANTON CU UNJIENG
LYSE LEMIEUX
CHARLES REA
ALESSANDRA RISI

Soft opening: Wednesday, September 20, 2023
Hours: Thurs to Sun, 12-5 PM, or by appointment
638 Kinghorne Mews
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6Z 3H5

WAAP
www.waapart.com
@waapart

Addition and WAAP Annex is proud to announce its collaborative new location in Yaletown, Downtown Vancouver, Canada, a gallery model that collapses the boundary between contemporary art and design. The intention behind this approach is to cultivate and strengthen cultural discourse on the West Coast by broadening the discursive sphere of art to include the various pragmatic approaches of design and related material practices.

Addition is a consultancy founded and run by Andres Aramburu. Andres has a nearly two-decade experience in design consultancy, operating previously in Vancouver, Calgary and Shanghai.

WAAP Annex is the second location of Wil Aballe Art Projects | WAAP, a Vancouver-based contemporary art gallery operating for the past 10 years. The gallery has established a reputation by showcasing art primarily from the West Coast, internationally, in the US, Mexico and Europe. In April 2024, it is set to open its Brussels location in Anderlecht, Belgium.

The first art exhibition in the Yaletown space, 001, brings together the works of West Coast artists, Anton Cu Unjieng, Lyse Lemieux and Charles Rea. Separately, a pair of works by Peruvian-Italian artist, Alessandra Risi will be featured. These works speak to diametrically discursive ideas around the physical body and the metaphysical, the fictional and the real, the formalist and the political, the mythical and the spiritual, the representational and the abstract, the flat picture and the three-dimensional object.

Lyse Lemieux, whose public artwork, Personnages, is featured on the nearby Grosvener building, has created a series around the object/humanoid personnages called Odradeks depicted by Kafka in a short story based on Slavic myth. Kafka describes the Odradeks as looking like old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colours, pierced by a spool and supported upright by another rod at a right angle.

These large paintings on Arches paper, with applied additions of cut black felt, have been situated in the same room as Anton Cu Unjieng’s tall ceramic totems, some of which are formed using traditional Filipino ceramic methods. They are representative of a defiant people under the previous administration; their spirit perseveres despite systematic and strategic governmental policies to erase and eradicate. These monumental, abstract pillars, the surface of which, often look like they are wrapped and bound in twine, were made in Canada by the artist in solidarity with his “kababayan” back home.

Our communal spirit and the resiliency is further amplified by Charlie Rea’s most recent body of work, a series honouring the essence of his late wife, Mary Jane. Repetitively, he uses the imagery of Buddha and Aphrodite to depict her joie de vivre and life perspective. Figurative forms also emerge, seemingly like people from top-down view of their curved shoulders, a form that also resembles a bean, metaphorically the source and origin of new things, evoking regrowth, rebirth and reincarnation.

These are hopeful works. We hope you will join us in celebrating the inaugural month of our new Vancouver art space.