Feminist Land Art Retreat

To accompany this year’s Celebration of Light international fireworks competition, the Contemporary Art Gallery is working with Feminist Land Art Retreat to present a series of interventions in the traditional viewing experience. From 5 to 7 pm on July 27 and 12 to 2 pm on August 5, (the days preceding and following the festival) an aerial artwork will appear in the sky. Visible from any point in the English Bay beach area, FLAR AIR will announce a playful disruption in the week’s celebrations.

Accompanying the two aerial interventions is a poster campaign distributed throughout Downtown Vancouver promoting FLAR AIRWAVES, a new webcast specially commissioned from three duos of international musicians and artists to accompany each of the three firework displays. By visiting feministlandartretreat.com from 10pm on July 28, August 1 and August 4, festival goers will discover a live broadcast that provides a new way to engage with the summer spectacle.

Organized by Nigel Prince

Generously supported by the City of Vancouver through its Cultural Services Public Art Program.

Biographies

Feminist Land Art Retreat (FLAR) was initiated in 2010 with an advertisement. In subsequent years, FLAR has produced promotional material for public circulation such as posters, T-shirts, postcards, temporary tattoos, and more recently performances and exhibitions. Using conceptual strategies and humour to subvert familiar visual forms and methods of information circulation, their work addresses social and cultural models that construct notions of femininity and nature. Recent solo exhibitions include Free Rein, Audain Gallery, Vancouver; No Man’s Land, ACUD Gallery, Berlin; Heavy Flow: The Re-Release, Ginerva Gambino, Cologne; and Duty Free, Studio for Propositional Cinema, Düsseldorf. In summer 2017 FLAR was artist in residence at Contemporary Art Gallery Burrard Marina Field House.

The Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (OJAI) was founded in 2015 by Chris Dreier (DE) and Gary Farrelly (IRE/BE) and is headquartered in Berlin and Brussels. OJAI’s work explores bureaucracy, administration and the self-generated institution as apparatus that promote collective functioning. The research focuses on power structures embedded in public architecture, and the agency of the self in society’s bigger narrative. The project has its origins in written correspondence between Dreier and Farrelly. Work is manifested in the form of surveys, field trips, publications, performances, videos and a radio show.

Chris Dreier, Director for Finance and Systemic Risk, OJAI NORD (born 1961) comes from Wuppertal, Germany and has been based in Berlin for the last three decades. She is a graduate of Visual Communications from Berlin’s University of Art. In the 1980s, she was a member of experimental music group Die Tödliche Doris. She continues to produce experimental music with band projects Burqamachines, Spade Love and Dexia Defunct. Her visual artwork has been exhibited widely in Germany and beyond including institutional shows at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Wroclaw, Poland; New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe; ISELP, Brussels; Centre Contemporaine, Brest, France; 500X, Dallas; and Damien & the Love Guru, Brussels.

Gary Farrelly, Director for Administrative Heritage and Self-Inventory, OJAI SUD (born 1983) is an Irish artist based in Brussels. Farrelly studied fine art at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and LUCA Arts in Brussels. He has lived and worked for extended periods in Paris and Dallas where he was an artist in residence at The University of Texas. The work has been shown at: Salzburger Kunstverein; Museum of Contemporary Art, Banja Luka; Parking Projects, Tehran; Central Trak, Dallas; Damien & the Love Guru, Brussels; Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht; ISELP, Brussels; and 500X, Dallas.

Michelle Helene Mackenzie (b.1987) is a musician and interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with sound, video and text. She currently uses modular synthesizers, found sound, field recordings, digital processing, video, text, and archival research to explore sonic gesture, modes of perception and acoustic imaginaries. This has culminated in site-specific sound installations, video, sound works, performances, and writing. Mackenzie holds a BA from Simon Fraser University, and spent five years pursuing a PhD in Literature from Duke University. While there, she researched questions around the violence and cultural amnesia that devours female genius, time and temporality, early twentieth-century French literature and film, and the history of sound studies, sonic philosophy and the sonic arts. Mackenzie’s works have been performed and exhibited in Kadist Gallery, San Francisco; The Hand, Brooklyn; Esker Foundation, Calgary; and Western Front, Vancouver; 221A, Vancouver; VIVO, Vancouver; Sunset Terrace, Vancouver and The Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver. Her work has also been released in conjunction with writing via The Operating System, Brooklyn; The Cultch’s Soft Cedar, Vancouber and The Capilano Review’s Small Caps, Vancouver.

Alison Yip was born in Calgary, Canada and currently lives and works in the Netherlands. She works through painting, wall treatments and sometimes writing and sculpture as a way of containing the dissociative and dispersed nature of our cognitive apparatus, our relationships and intrapersonal designs. Utilizing popular decorative elements and everyday materials, her work evokes the commonplace sites of such uncanny or transitional states and moves playfully through various styles of representation and pictorial modes. Yip holds a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design, Calgary. She continued her studies at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany and in 2016 received an MFA from the Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg. Recent exhibitions include Malik’s, Hamburg (2018); MOM Space, Hamburg (2017); Kunsthuis SYB, Beesterzwaag (2017); Gaertnergasse, Vienna (2017); The Vancouver Art Gallery, (2016).

Lucy Stein is based in Cornwall, UK. In 2015 she was a resident at Porthmeor Studio 5 as part of the Tate St Ives Artist Programme. Stein’s work builds on an engagement with British modernist painting, feminist theory and women’s literature. Painting is her primary concern though her work incorporates writing, performance, radio and video. Personal history and art history are given equal significance, and the central theme of a mimetic relationship between the female artist and the landscape bind her ideas together. Stein studied at Glasgow School of Art and de Ateliers, Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include Tate St Ives; Rodeo, London; Gregor Staiger, Zurich; and Gimpel Fils, London together with artist Shana Moulton. Her recent body of work investigates motifs and myths within celticity.

Mark Harwood is an Australian publisher, event curator and sound artist residing in London. Under the guise of Astor he records and performs music that deploys a wide variety of techniques including field recording, musique concrete and pound shop electronics. In a live setting Harwood’s improvised audacity treads the line between pathos and comedy, entertainment and the absurd. He is also known for his collaborations with Aine O’Dwyer, MP Hopkins, Graham Lambkin, Timo Van Luijk, Nell Peto, Kris Lemsalu, and Lucy Stein. Harwood has released four albums under the alias: Alcor, Inland, Lina in Nida, and Astor on the highly regarded American record label Kye, and his own genre-avoiding Penultimate Press label, based in the UK. Inland came second in the outer limits category for records of the year in The Wire magazine’s 2014 summary. Penultimate Press has also published acclaimed releases by Henning Christiansen, Jacques Brodier, Księżyc, Graham Lambkin, Aine O’Dwyer, Joe McPhee, M.P Hopkins, Pancrace, etc.