Andrew Reyes

For his first exhibition in Vancouver, Toronto artist Andrew Reyes will cram the street front windows of the Contemporary Art Gallery with a collection of photographic posters from a series he has been creating since 1999. The posters are crisp and stylish, commanding image, text and format with a precise eye for the language of advertising authority. While the glossy, mainstream look is convincing, the subject matter or "product" is often puzzling. Many feature "Andrew Reyes," as though the artist himself were a brand, while others point to precise moments of recent art history with ironic self-regard. Using the poster as a contemporary vernacular, Reyes playfully reveals a dependence on the alienated experiences of popular entertainment and the marketplace for identifying and capturing the evanescent moment of aesthetic apprehension.

Biography

Andrew Reyes (b. 1964, Australia) lives and works in Toronto. His work was seen recently in News from Nowhere, curated by Derek Sullivan at Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto (2005) and was included in the inaugural show of Diaz Contemporary in Toronto (2005), where a solo show is forthcoming in 2006. Reviews have appeared recently in The Globe and Mail (2005), Canadian Art (Summer, 2005) and C magazine (Winter, 2006).