Stan Douglas

Stan Douglas’ most recent video work, *T.V. Spots*, examines television conventions through tiny narratives depicting commonplace or habitual situations. The spots number twelve in total and run between fifteen and thirty-seven seconds in length. In the gallery they are presented on a video monitor and are shown mixed in with familiar commercial fare. By reserving content, *T.V. Spots* allow the viewer to choose a response — no product, no message is indicated in the exchange. The gallery is currently negotiating with several local television stations in an effort to broadcast *T.V. Spots*. 

*Marnie*, comprising a set of studies for a future film work, is composed of a series of photographs and accompanying scenario text. The project is based on Hitchcock’s 1964 film classic *Marnie*.


Essay: “Habeas Corpus: Stan Douglas’ Television Spots,” Miriam Nicols

A still image from a film on a small screen. The photo is a closeup, the grainy texture of the film is visible. The scene shown is an empty outdoor parking lot at night, with a person at the pay booth.

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The corner of a gallery. One wall is white and shows 6 black and white images of architectural spaces, referencing the Hitchcock film, Marnie. The other wall is pale green and shows a sheet of text.

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A closeup of a film playing on a small, curved screen. The image shows a person in a red t-shirt and shorts at a spray station in a public park. The image on the screen is grainy from the analog film.

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A gallery space with black walls. The wall shows large text reading "Television Spots" and several white artworks on the walls with black and white images and text. 

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T.V. Spots and Marnie

Laura Baird

Laura Baird is a Vancouver artist who has been living in New York City since 1980. Shortly after settling into New York, Baird began work on the stitched carpet that is the centerpiece of this exhibition. The five by seven foot carpet is a stitched rendering of an aerial photograph taken at the site of the Jonestown mass suicide in November 1978. Baird will be present in the gallery during the exhibition, working on the carpet. In addition, a second work entitled *Jonestown Dead* will be displayed. The gallery will be black, with 750 watt spotlights on the work in progress and the *Jonestown Dead* installation.

 In an age when everyone complains about the fact that tragedies in our society simply become “media” events that are quickly forgotten, Laura Baird is reclaiming the human dimension of the Jonestown tragedy, and seeing to it that the nine hundred and twelve dead are not part of another isolated event from our recent history.

The reception on November 18th, is on the 10th anniversary of the Jonestown mass suicide. 


Essay: “Laura Baird: Jonestown Carpet – Jonestown Dead,” Shaun Caley

A closeup of an embroidered carpet, showing the Jonestown massacre. The detail shown includes bodies on the grass and under the shade of the large building shown. 

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A 5 foot by 7 foot carpet on a wall. The carpet shows an aerial shot of the 1978 Jonestown tragedy, and has a decorative border with stylized images of airplanes, cables, toys, soldiers, and more.

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A detailed image of an embroidered carpet, with threads hanging from it. The carpet is based on a bird's-eye image of the Jonestown massacre, and this closeup shows a section with bodies on the grass. 

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Jonestown Carpet Jonestown Dead

Lucy Hogg

Jill Sabre

Mark Vatnsdal

Bill Marshall

Roman Pijanka

The Contemporary Art Gallery will be presenting the work of five young or emerging Vancouver painters. CAG has a commitment to providing opportunities for lesser-known, emerging artists working in our community. All the artists participating in this exhibition are recent graduates from Emily Carr College of Art and Design or the University of British Columbia and their work has not yet had wide exposure. Each artist is engaged in developing their own voice and coming to terms with the issues of making paintings in the late 1980s. The work of all these artists displays a commitment to painting as a viable art form and a willingness to engage in this dialogue.

The paintings in the exhibition range from the more representational work of Lucy Hogg and Mark Vatnsdal, to the more abstract and expressive work of Jill Sabre and the reductive or “pure” abstraction of Roman Pijanka and Bill Marshall. By no means comprehensive, the exhibition will provide the viewer with an insight into the issues and concerns currently explored by younger painters in Vancouver.


A closeup of 2 paintings in black frames. Both are nearly identical, but are painted in slightly different colours. Both show a half-circle with vertical strips, and a black triangle in the centre.

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3 large paintings in a gallery. One is red and black in a frame. The other 2 paintings are bright and colourful, composed of 3 different canvases. On the floor, there is a table and 2 chairs visible.

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A closeup of 2 large paintings on a white wall. The paintings have abstracted backgrounds with detailed patterns in pastel colours on black, showing a bedroom with a red floor, and human figures.

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A closeup of 2 large paintings on a gallery wall, both showing different scenes. One shows 5 people in and around a red car on an airport landing strip. The other shows 2 people in a dark wooded area. 

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Lucy Hogg, Bill Marshall, Roman Pijanka, Jill Sabre, Mark Vatnsdal

Vancouver Painters

Kent Tate

Vancouver artist Ken Tate’s ambitious provocative mixed-media installation, *The Stalker* will be on view at the Contemporary Art Gallery until September 24th. Tate’s installation transforms the gallery space by situating a translucent striding polar bear and a monolithic rock structure in a dimly-lit environment. A sensation of Arctic night is created by having the walls of the gallery painted entirely black. A dull glow emanates from the bear and the rock (the only two light sources except for muted spotlights). Mounds of coarse salt, mimicking snowdrifts, are swept up against the walls of the gallery and the objects placed on the painted white floor.

Tate’s current installation demonstrates his skillful handling of materials and the continuing development of his distinct, sardonic critique of the West's post-industrial collapse. Cut into the rock structure facing the bear is the once ubiquitous “Reddy Kilowatt” symbol — a grinning cartoonish character with a lightning bolt body representative of the unfettered industrial expansion of mid 20th century America. *Lightning Rods*, seven foot long burnt spears rest against the giant rock. Tate’s bear, *The Outlaw*, narrowly missed by one of the spears, is presented here as a creature of the oil industries’ “last frontier.”

Essay: "The Stalker," Merike Talve

At the centre of a dark room, there is a glowing sculpture of a polar bear. A long spear with text is embedded into the rock formation it sits on. In the background, a white wall is faintly visible. 

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A closeup of 3 spears resting against a rock sculpture. Their points are a pearly white, attached by orange wire. On their hilts, the spears have rock texture reading "Shell," "Exxon," and "BP." 

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On one side of a dark room, there is a glowing polar bear sculpture, and a faux stone wall with 3 spears resting against it. The wall shows a lit up character with a lightning bolt body on the other.

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A polar bear sculpture in a dark room is placed to appear to be walking towards a faw stone wall. The wall has a glowing, smiling cartoonish character on it, as well as 3 large spears resting on it. 

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The Stalker

Wendy Dobreiner

Georgiana Chappell

Margot Butler

Ellen Ramsey

Michelle Normoyie

*Repo*, an exhibition of mixed-media works by Georgiana Chappell, Wendy Dobreiner, Michelle Normoyie, Margot Butler, and Ellen Ramsey will be on view at the Contemporary Art Gallery until July 30th. While these five Vancouver artists explore diverse media and production techniques, each of them works with a critical awareness of her role as a woman artist. This exhibition features new works which employ photography, text, painting, drawing, and found objects.

Since first brought together for an exhibition which could not proceed, these women have been meeting regularly as a discussion and study group. The decision to form a cohesive work group after their initial meeting is reflective of the interests they share in collectivities and the reorganization of hierarchical social and artistic structures — the group itself consists of women of varying ages and stages of professional development. In their efforts to find new systems of art-making and new structures within which to work, they have adopted a strategy of “repossession” which forms the basis of the show. Their new works endeavor to repossess mass culture and media imagery through appropriation and manipulation with the intention of disrupting and reorganizing meaning.

*Repo* is reflective of the vital feminist art community in Vancouver, continuing an important tradition of group shows by local women artists such as *Voice Over* at the Contemporary Art Gallery in 1985 and *Unromantic as Monday Morning* at the Surrey Art Gallery in 1987. 


Essay: “Repo,” Merike Talve

A black and white photograph mounted on a black shelf against a light blue wall. The photograph is of a person holding a book and they are only visible from the neck to the waist. 

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A closeup of a narrow white bookshelf against a wall. The top compartment shows a book with an orange cover, with a collage of faces and buildings. In the bottom there is a small poem in a wood frame.

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The corner of a gallery with black marks of paint at the top. Where the walls meet is a small painting of hands and a blue sky. On the floor, there is a patch of grass with a camo-print stroller on it.

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Three large paintings and a photo on the wall of a gallery. The paintings show Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean, each with anatomical drawings and mechanical images collaged on them.

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Georgiana Chappell, Wendy Dobreiner, Michelle Normoyie, Margot Butler, Ellen Ramsey

Repo

Mowry Baden

Since 1982, Mowry Baden has been involved with works which have been called “task oriented sculpture.” In these works the viewer is asked to participate on a physical level by performing a task like riding a stationary bicycle or walking on a treadmill.

The Contemporary Art Gallery is presenting Baden's recent work *Lariat Calais* from June 2 to 25. This two-part work consists of a large cement mixer and a reconstructed silage spout with hydraulic mechanism. Baden's intention is to create analogies between physical experience and visual perception. Baden has said, "we refer to the body to know what we see,” this being the function of memory. Through his sculpture Baden, “put the body in real time”, not relying on memory which he feels is unnecessarily vague. *Lariat Calais* is a poetic summation of many of the concerns Baden has been working with over the years.

Two sculptures in a gallery space. The works are a large, rusty cement mixer and a bright red industrial silage spout.

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A large sculpture on the floor of a gallery. The work is an industrial cement mixer, with a white exterior and a rusty metal interior. The wall in the background can be seen through the centre.

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A sculpture made of a deteriorated cement mixer rests on the floor of a gallery. The exterior is white with rusty metal patches and bolts over the seams, and the interior is entirely rust coloured.

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Lariat Calais

James Klyman-Mowczan

New geometric paintings by Vancouver artist James Klyman-Mowczan will be on view at the Contemporary Art Gallery until May 28. Klyman-Mowczan uses acrylic and modelling paste on board to create precise, geometric images on roughly textured surfaces. His current palette, which developed in the early 1980s, consists of what he calls “industrial or new design” colours — phthalo blue, phthalo green, cadmium red deep, bright solid yellow — primarily unmixed.

Klyman-Mowczan’s intense, eloquent paintings are a thoughtful contribution to the continuing discourse on the role of abstraction in contemporary art. Set apart from the Neo-Geo movement, related to though not replicating the developments of the Modernists of the 1960s, his work uses essential forms from the language of painting — the square, the circle, the triangle — to probe the intuitive, the subconscious and the unknown. To Klyman-Mowczan, these are the three basic forms in nature “…the square is reduced to the vertical and horizontal, the circle to the curve, the triangle to the diagonal. The vertical and horizontal incise space and stretch time, the curve contemplates itself, the diagonal traverses surface.” 


Six large paintings on a wall. They are all on square canvases and show different geometric shapes including circles, squares, triangles, and crosses. They are red, black, white, grey, and yellow.

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Several abstract paintings line the walls of a gallery. Most of the paintings are on square canvases, and show geometric shapes in blue, yellow, white, black, and red.

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Paintings mounted on three different walls of a gallery. Most are on rectangular canvases, but one painting is a vertical cylinder shape. The paintings are white, blue, red, yellow, and black. 

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Su Schnee

A collection of large pastel on paper works produced by Montreal artist Su Schnee will be on exhibit at the Contemporary Art Gallery until April 30. Formerly of Vancouver, Schnee will be remembered for her videos and performances. Her recent body of work deals with landscape through the medium of pastel à l'écu — dry pastel high in pigment — on semi-transparent one hundred percent rag paper. Schnee’s exhibition is an impressive selection of works from the series *Those Who Go Down to the Sea* and *The Awe of the Mountain*. New studies produced during a recent drawing trip to Fiji will also be shown.

Schnee’s *Those Who Go Down to the Sea* depicts the figure placed in and merging with the landscape. *The Awe of the Mountain* deals more directly with the landscape, though fragments of the figure continue to emerge evoking the intricate relationship of people to place: “My work intends to convey weight and strength. I think of weight as a ‘measure of importance’ — an invisible scale that determines the consciousness that we bring to nature as individuals and as a community; I think of strength as ‘rest in motion’ — an expression of gratitude for the vigor, greatness, significance and depth of landscape. From a single human being facing another single human being, I now want to discuss the same topic of humanity facing itself through dilemmas within landscape images.”

A gallery space with two visible drawings on the wall. One of them takes up nearly the whole wall, and the other is fairly small. Both drawings are black and white with mountainous forms.

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A closeup of a pastel drawing on a wall. The drawing is different blended shades of blue, with white and some pale grey-green. At the top of the painting, there is a long, black, diagonal oval.

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A closeup of a large drawing. One side of the drawing shows 2 faces of Black folks and a silhouette of their bodies, embracing. The other side shows a Black body sitting shirtless, facing a dark void.

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A closeup of a small pastel drawing, pinned to the wall with clear tacks. The drawing shows an elder person with dark hair and tan skin in front of a snowy mountain range.  

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Pastel on Paper

Sue Schnee

Deborah Koenker

Deborah Koenker’s sight-related sculptural installation, *Learning From Salmon* was inspired by the writings of Japanese macrobioticist Herman Aihara. Aihara speaks of the single-minded purpose of the salmon, exerting a mysterious molecular memory to return to its birthplace to spawn and die. Aihara reflects upon the difference between the life cycles of the salmon and humans: when humans are retiring from living activity, a salmon takes on its greatest challenge.

Koenker’s installation evokes rather than illustrates these ideas. *Learning From Salmon* continues Koenker’s interest in sight-related sculpture, the kinesthetic involvement of the viewer and the idea of transition as expressed in nature. Sculptural elements found in previous works, such as the ramp, bridge and screen, also reappear. Koenker’s new works leads the viewer through a mesh labyrinth, over wooden ramps and stairs to a space containing two and three-dimensional objects suggested of a bridge, net, platforms and water. Black and white photography, glass, paper, rubber, chain link, and wood are some of the materials the artist uses in this metaphorical recreation of the salmon’s journey.

Essay: "Deborah Koenker: Learning From Salmon,” Merike Talve

A closeup of an artwork in a gallery. The work is a large metal net suspended from the ceiling, with a row of small grey, white, and brown rocks resting in its middle.

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Artworks in a gallery. In the foreground, there is a suspended metal net with rocks. There are small black objects mounted on one wall, and a wooden platform with a closet-like form on top of it.

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Learning From Salmon

Rober Racine

Jocelyne Alloucherie

Roberto Pellegrinuzzi

Holly King

Francine Larivée

Serge Berard

Angela Grauerholz

“To stage an exhibition within the context of photography that is not simply photography, is in part to provoke the partisans of true-to-life documentary who believe that they are recording reality, the landscape of everyday life, and argue that they have in fact in all this time possessed by one thing: “What we have less and less of as we fall asleep, and more and more of when we wake up”, and to remind them that representation is always constructed, never gathered, that to represent landscape now is to understand that this double-dealing has always been inversed, and that it is in fact landscape that is the double.” (Extract from catalogue essay)

Jocelyne Alloucherie presents an installation where contents and frames interact with one another. Angela Grauerholz mixes photographs of real and represented landscapes. Holly King creates tension between imaginary landscapes and the obvious material means of their construction. Francine Larivée contrasts the immense and the infinitely small. Roberto Pellegrinuzzi restores three-dimensionality to an Ansel Adams photograph. Rober Racine presents one page (containing the word “paysage”) from his re-reading and re-writing of the entire French dictionary, *Le Petit Robert*.

This exhibition has been shown in Montreal at Dazibao, it will travel to Center Eye in Calgary and YYZ in Toronto.

Guest Curated by Serge Bérard


An abstract black and white photograph depicting rock and water-like forms. 

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A closeup on an artwork on a wall. The work shows 12 small black and white photos of a sunrise over a body of water and trees, likely from an airplane. The photos are mounted on a black surface.

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2 very large photos mounted on the wall of a dark room. One photo appears to show an erupting volcano with a red sky, and the other shows a mountain-like glacier and water scene. 

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A closeup of two black and white photos in silver frames. One shows a complex gridded-arch ceiling, and the other shows a bird's-eye view of a shipyard. 

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In the corner of a gallery, a large photo set rests on a black wooden stand. The set has a dark blue sky background, layered mountain forms, a black textured surface, and white trees.

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Several artworks on a white wall. 3 are photos of dark trees, 2 mounted with no frame, one in a long wood panel that is painted as a cloudy scene. At the base of the wall there is a dark wood box. 

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Jocelyne Alloucherie, Angela Grauerholz, Holly King, Francine Larivée, Roberto Pellegrinuzzi, Rober Racine

Paysage

Daniel Laskarin

Daniel Congdon

Warren Murfitt

On view at the Contemporary Art Gallery is an exhibition of new sculptural works by three Vancouver artists: Warren Murfitt, Daniel Congdon and Daniel Laskarin. Each of these artists have produced exquisitely crafted objects. Their works make reference to minimalist sculpture and sculptural practice, and employ construction, cinematic and architectural materials and ideas.

Warren Murfitt’s interest in the meaningfulness of both artist’s and construction materials will be the focus of his new work. Murfitt uses aluminum railing and copper in his sculpture *Speak*. The refined geometry of Daniel Congdon’s wall mounted piece retains the gestalt of Minimalist sculpture. Congdon furthers his ideas on the mechanics, both experiential and concrete, of cinema. Daniel Laskarin’s sculpture consists of suspended marble and granite slabs held by steel cables and mounted on rock. The sculptural elements physically and thematically evolve around the image of Gustave Courbet’s *The Stone Breakers*.

Essay: “New Sculptural Works,” Merike Talve

A closeup of a sculpture on a wall. The work is made of a long rectangular metal grid, with 3 diagonal lines across the middle squares. Inside, there is a black plastic sheet and a sideways triangle. 

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A closeup of an artwork in a gallery. The work is made of a low copper box with a tall silver metal rail attached to the top of the box. Behind it, a work mounted on the white wall is visible.

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A closeup of a sculpture in a gallery. It is made of several marble slabs stacked vertically and horizontally, resting on a pile of large rocks. The pieces are attached by metal wire and hardware. 

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Three sculptures in a gallery. The one in the foreground is tall, made of marble and large rocks. Another is mounted on the wall, and the third is a copper box with silver railing on top.

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Two sculptures in the hallway of a gallery. One is made of a low copper box with a tall silver railing placed on top. The other is a long metal frame with a horizontal triangle form in it.