Zoe Leonard

Kablusiak

Rochelle Goldberg

Please join us to celebrate the opening of CAG's summer 2024 exhibitions, *Rochelle Goldberg: Sun Moon Stars* and *Zoe Leonard: View from Below*. 

All ages welcome. Cash bar.                                              

Kablusiak’s *Double Feature* will open on CAG’s Façade and at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station on June 17.     

### RSVP
No advance registration required.

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Summer 2024

Opening Reception

The work of Vancouver-born, Berlin-based artist Rochelle Goldberg finds root in the unstable boundaries between seemingly fixed entities: animate and inanimate, self and other, renewal and decay. Her sculptures often merge ephemeral and enduring matter such as crude oil, bronze, glitter, steel, and seeds to enact installations that project forward and backward in time, combining art historical iconography with allusions to ongoing processes of transformation, contamination and growth.

In *Sun Moon Stars*, Goldberg continues her engagement with Mary of Egypt, a fifth-century saint who has served as a recurring point of reference in her practice. Historically framed as a repentant sinner who turned away from the carnal and material to pursue a life of scarcity in the desert, the artist recasts Mary here in dialogue with the image of another highly determined figure — the 20th-century pinup model — tracing the anachronistic frameworks that tether these icons to both one another and the present moment. The images and forms that Goldberg marshals in this scene are at once fragmentary, suspended and unfixed, pointing us toward continuous cycles of making and unmaking — material, mythical and epistemological — and to the sedimentary structures that have long shaped Western constructions of body, self and environment.

*Sun Moon Stars* (2023) was originally commissioned by Mercer Union, Toronto.

#### Biography
Rochelle Goldberg lives and works in Berlin. Her solo exhibitions include Mercer Union, Toronto; Commercial Street, Los Angeles; Kunsthalle Lingen, Germany; The Power Station, Dallas; GAMeC di Bergamo, Italy; and SculptureCenter, New York. Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at institutions such as Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Oakville Galleries, Canada; Montpellier Contemporain; Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dortmunder Kunstverein, Germany; and Swiss Institute, New York, amongst others. She was Artist in Residence at The Chinati Foundation, Marfa and Atelier Calder, France, and was selected to present for the inaugural Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center, New York (2019). She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, New York.

Exhibition Essay Booklet - Rochelle Goldberg.pdf

CAG - Rochelle Goldberg - Exhibition Guide - Regular Print - P1.pdf

CAG - Rochelle Goldberg - Exhibition Guide - Large Print - P1.pdf

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Sun Moon Stars

Across a career spanning more than four decades, New York-based artist Zoe Leonard has honed a singular artistic vision, coupling a precise engagement with the politics of image-making with acute, often poetic observations of daily life. Addressing themes that include gender and sexuality, mourning, displacement and migration, and the urban landscape, amongst others, her work in photography, sculpture and installation effects a complex consideration of the act of looking and the role of photographic culture in ordering our worlds.

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Leonard presents *View from Below*, a suite of photographs taken at fashion shows in the early 1990s. Produced at a moment when Leonard was engaged closely with the politics of gender, representation and display, these images are part of a larger nexus of works that saw the artist probing the mechanisms that produce and regulate the body. In this series of photographs, Leonard presents multiple and divergent perspectives on the runway, surveying a shifting field of looks among and between models, spectators and photographers, including herself. Registering gazes that are by turns voyeuristic, objectifying and self-possessed, these images compel a broad set of questions around desire, power, performance, and subjectivity.

#### Biography
Zoe Leonard has exhibited widely since the late 1980s. Her work has been featured in a number of landmark exhibitions, including Documenta IX, Documenta XII, and the 1993, 1997 and 2014 Whitney Biennials. She has been the subject of solo shows at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018), MoMA, New York (2015), and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2007–08), among other institutions. Leonard was a finalist for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2010 and was awarded The Whitney Museum Bucksbaum Prize in 2014 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. Her works are held in many public institutions, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Pinault Collection, Venice; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

#### Acknowledgements
*Zoe Leonard: View from Below* is generously supported by Claudia Beck.

CAG - Zoe Leonard - Exhibition Guide - Regular Print - P1.pdf

CAG - Zoe Leonard - Exhibition Guide - Large Print - P1.pdf

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View from Below

Inuvialuk artist Kablusiak embraces the wideness of Inuit experience, encompassing in their work joy, despair, sexuality, and, as an Inuk living outside Inuit Nunangat, displacement. Across an agile practice that includes drawing, sculpture, installation, and video, Kablusiak pushes the conventions of modern Inuit art with wit, irreverence and camp.
 
At the Contemporary Art Gallery, the artist exhibits *Double Feature*, two bodies of work that wryly comment on the absurdities and rituals of art and culture. Addressing the lofty aspirations associated with “high art,” Kablusiak adapts their trademark doodle figures to spell out a message across CAG’s façade, nested among humorous and heartbreaking depictions of everyday life. At Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, the artist presents large-scale photographs of their mischievous Ookpik sculptures. Looking askance at the handcrafted doll’s fetishistic popularity in the Canadian imagination, Kablusiak draws on the respective intimacies of the mass market and the subcultural, emphasizing a place for both in contemporary Inuit life. 

#### Biography
Kablusiak is a renowned multidisciplinary Inuvialuk artist who creates work in a variety of materials including, but not limited to, soapstone, permanent marker, bed sheets, felt, fur, and words. Their work explores the dis/connections between existence within and without Inuit Nunangat, the impacts of colonization on gender and sexuality expressions, trying to make people laugh, and the everyday. Kablusiak holds a BFA in Drawing from AUArts in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, where they are currently based. In all of their creative work Kablusiak seeks to demystify Inuit art and create space for Inuk-led representations of the diversity of Inuit cultures. Their work can be found in the collections of the Indigenous Art Centre, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Art Gallery of Alberta, Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, and Global Affairs Visual Art Collection, among others. Kablusiak was awarded the 2023 Sobey Art Award and is represented by Norberg Hall.

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