Elizabeth Zvonar

In this new body of work Vancouver artist Elizabeth Zvonar pursues the connections between Cubism, representations of the 4th Dimension and rubber bands as metaphors for time. “I find that at the end of a journey, which of course is neverending, I have found things out.” This quote from British playwright Harold Pinter, is an apt description for *On Time*, an array of sculptures and collage works that act as possible portals into implausible places. 

*On Time* delves into the realms of science, philosophy and religion by examining how the desire to move between realms—earthly, spiritual or dimensional—is portrayed through invention, ritual and, ultimately, image. Zvonar’s reflection on Cubism and its relationship to Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, as well as her consideration of counter-cultures such as the beat generation and hippy culture, focuses on a common desire to transcend the physical limits of temporal reality. Whether it is the simple gesture of “thumbs up“ or a picture of a popular music icon, she captures this ambition by drawing on familiar images. Through her use of scale, mix of materials and combination of imagery, Zvonar manages to render the familiar somewhat absurd.  She captures a humour that taps into an optimism and innocence that seems to belong in some other realm. 



Interview: Jenifer Papararo and Elizabeth Zvonar

A collage of two overlapping hands making a butterfly hand gesture in front of a picture of an orange and blue nebula. 

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A thin table with a circular glass top. Seven cubes sit stacked on top of each other. A framed image of two people with long hair reading a book. Their faces are replaced with colourful stripes. 

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A long white rectangular block leans against twelve black mannequin arms that are attached to its sides. On the back wall, a hand protruding out the wall, holds on to long brown ribbon.

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Installation shot of Elizabeth Zvonars work in a gallery. Three images hang on a different wall. A small table with cubes on top sits to the left, a large and long rectangular block sits to the right.

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Installation shot of Elizabeth Zvonars work in a gallery. Three images hang on different walls. Small tables with cubes on top sit throughout the space, a large rectangular block sits to the left.

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On Time

Lee  Lozano

Bruce  Nauman 

Sarah  Lucas

Repetition, exaggeration and processes of making are common threads that tie the works together in *Face Up*. The exhibition brings together particular works exemplary of each artist’s working process and practices. Each of the works are exaggerated caricatures of recognizable gestures, left open and ambiguous to override static meaning.

Done in repetition and in different materials, these works come together as representations of somewhat grotesque gestures. Lee Lozano’s serial pulling out of nose hairs is strange, funny, crude and beautiful, but the three works also register with a certain sting. Lozano captures something base and obsessive in this repeated face poking. Bruce Nauman’s approach is more comical. He is making faces, distorting himself into expressions that don’t transmit decipherable emotions. Growing out of performance works, Nauman’s suite of prints use the idea of performing arbitrary activities as a material to manipulate in an effort to make a connection to the viewer while understanding that it may mean nothing at all to his audience. Nauman’s prints in conversation with the Lozano works on paper and canvas, begin an absurd conversation that is taken further by Sarah Lucas’ sculpture, which comes from a series of works meticulously crafted from unsmoked cigarettes. Vulgar, blunt and self-conscious, this piece adds a tension to the exhibition that is unapologetic for its compulsiveness and crude representation of the female form. With an economy of means, Lucas has captured the full slump of a heavily bosomed woman, who seems resigned to her position in the centre of the room.

*Face Up* is co-curated by Jenifer Papararo and artist Elizabeth Zvonar. The work of these three artists is combined to articulate Zvonar’s interest in representations of the body, specifically how the body or images of the body can be broken down into single gestures


A black and white photocopy of the bottom half of a person’s face. This person puts index fingers in their mouth and pulls lips widely to both sides, showing their teeth. 

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Five close up images of a mouth and hands hang on the wall of a gallery. A chair sits off to the side with a bra attached to the back support. The bra is holding two round objects. 

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Three framed illustrations hang on two gallery walls. A chair sits on its own in the middle of the room with a bra attached to the back support. The bra is holding two round objects. 

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Detail shot displaying a chair with a black bra clasped on the back support of the chair. Two balls are held inside the bra. Both balls are covered by white and orange rolled paper resembling cigarettes.

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A wooden chair is installed on the grey floor. A black bra is clasped on the back support of this chair and holding two large balls, which are covered by rolled white and orange paper. 

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Lee Lozano, Sarah Lucas, Bruce Nauman

Face Up

Evan Lee

Ming  Wong

Rodney Graham

Kerstin Cmelka

Mark  Leckey

General Idea 

Martha Wilson

Martin  Kippenberger

Andrea  Fraser

Christos Dikeakos

One white cube, regardless of scale, can signify the aims of Minimalism, or the use of a particular blue can encapsulate the entire practice of an artist. Direct reference to art movements, individual art works, artists, philosophers, architects, musicians or other key historical moments is a common strategy in contemporary art production. The reference is a useful tool. Formal references are often used to establish the artist’s line of research, situating their thinking in specific art historical discourses and within a larger economy of meaning. The artists in *Playing Homage* employ the reference in a considerably different manner. Instead of drawing on formal references, the artists situate themselves as the referent, beginning with the artist as maker. In each of the works the artists use themselves as part of the symbol, personalizing the referent, using their bodies or other personal items to direct attention to the subjectivity of the maker. Here, the artist is the subject matter.

The persona of the artist is presented as integral to the work and in most cases the representation of this figure, the construct of an archetype and its historical mediation is the work. Several of the artists in *Playing Homage* directly take on the specific identity of another artist, while others play a more generalized character. Some of the works are remakes or restagings of earlier works in which the artists become, quite literally, actors playing a role, while in others there are more prescriptive articulations of what it takes to be an artist. What is central to all of the works is that the figure of the artist is the focus, used to draw out their influences, define their critical positions, and to address their own subjectivities as makers. They put the very notion of creative production under question, asking how do they come to define themselves as artists? What does it mean to produce? And how significant is the relation between the identity of the maker and their product?

In taking the persona of the artist as a primary subject of representation, many of the artists in *Playing Homage* themselves become the focus of their own criticism. As if it were an actual television broadcast, General Idea’s video *Press Conference* (1977) announces that they are artists. Like it was real news with a sense of urgency and critical consequence, they stage a mock press conference, generating questions from journalists that ask the Canadian collective what it means to be artists and why they have the right to claim that status. In *Premiere*, Martha Wilson directly addresses the camera while “playing at being an artist;” reading deadpan from a script, she claims that the most important part of her performance is that she convinces her audience that she is an artist. Kerstin Cmelka takes the criticism to dramatic effect in her video *Change*, which is an adaptation of Wolfgang Bauer´s play *All Change* from 1969. Playing one of the main characters herself, Cmelka seduces the unsuspecting victim, who is to be made over as an artist and used by a calculating gallerist and scheming art critic to mock and manipulate the art market.

There is an obvious cynicism in all three of these video works, but the resolve of the skeptics is tested by the fact that they all explicitly define themselves as artists. In this paradox, there appears to be a conspicuous line between sincerity and satire, conflating the desire to be genuinely what they represent and yet retain a critical distance that is suspect of being typecast as the romantic artist. This uncertain line between spoof and aspiration is nowhere more evident than in the practice of Martin Kippenberger, which is represented by a selection of his exhibition posters where Kippenberger as a persona is put forward instead of the work to be exhibited. Whether he is playing the role of the punk rock bad boy or the overweight aging playboy, Kippenberger inserts his own image into most of the posters, positing himself not just as the artist, but also as the content. In several of the designs, he uses cliché representations or a list of established artists to reference himself as the creative maker or to scoff at the very notion of an artist type. There is a comedy to the unrelenting representation of himself in his chosen profession, but this send-up also reflects doubt.  In this uncertainty is sincerity. Kippenberger was fascinated with the artist as personality, most directly with that of the painter. He was dedicated to his art making and criticism; we might venture that Kippenberger’s unrelenting performances as the artist come from a fear of being complicit with or representative of this archetype.

In one sentence, *Playing Homage* is about artists inhabiting the role of the artist. The idea for the exhibition started in consideration of the work of Rodney Graham, who often transforms himself into myriad characters. Graham is a performer and in much of his film work he plays a central character: the marooned pirate in *Vexation Island* (1997); the cowboy grifter in *How I Became a Ramblin’ Man* (1999); the musical prisoner in *A Reverie* (2003); a rambling police officer in *Loudhailer* (2003); or the joker and the fool in *City Self/Country Self* (2000). In each role Graham is a caricature of a type, and there is a clear distinction between himself and the roles he takes on, but where this line between character and actor seems to disintegrate is when he “plays” the painter. In *My Late Early Styles (Part I, The Middle Period)* (2007 – 09), his large format photograph exhibited as part of *Playing Homage*, his role and his artistic identity are more overtly connected. In front of a wall of abstract paintings hung in salon style fashion, Graham poses as a painter. He is in character, but he is also representing himself. Even though there is an obvious humour in this piece, and in most of Graham’s work, it is vague whether or not Graham uses *My Late Early Styles* to poke fun at himself as an artist, or painters in general, or is used earnestly to embody the ideal persona of the painter (or perhaps all three), but what is certain is that Graham is a painter: all the works on the wall behind him are made by him. Like Kippenberger’s posters, this image was first intended to promote an exhibition, but unlike the late German artist’s imagery, Graham’s piece features many of the works he exhibited. Where Kippenberger put the artist’s subjectivity first, Graham presents both the artist and the work together, balancing the subject of the artist with the formal conceits of abstract painting. Here meaning rests in the relationship between the artist’s subjectivity and his product.

For *Made in ‘Eaven* (2004), Mark Leckey uses the product of one artist to reflect his own production. Using Jeff Koons’s *Rabbit* (1986), Leckey reflects his empty apartment through the sculpture’s polished stainless steel surface. Leckey’s apartment is his studio, which he uses as the stage for early videos such as *We Are (Untitled)* (2001), or references in his performance *Cinema in the Round*. The video camera seems to pan around *Rabbit*, but can’t be seen in the reflection. Leckey is a fan of Koons’s work and *Rabbit* in particular, but the work of the famous pop artist isn’t really here. It is computer generated, fabricated by Leckey and used by him as a means to self-construct his own identity as an artist. By representing his place of production in the convex lens of a work he admires, Leckey spins a romantic but distorted tale of his artistic identity, one that is wrapped around or warped by the famous work it is reflected by. The video is transferred to 16mm and for *Playing Homage* is transferred back to digital video, to be played on a small monitor that sits on a tall pedestal.  The transfer to 16mm carries with it a nostalgia that acts as another filter, romanticizing the persona of Leckey the artist as well as signifying the romantic in him.

The defining of one‘s artistic identity through the work of another is an integral element of *Photographic Nude Studies by the Artist and his Father* (c.1950/2009) by Evan Lee, who draws on a very personal narrative. For this new work, he uses his father’s amateur photographs from the 1950s as the starting point to examine his own interest in photography. Lee remakes several of his father’s black and white studio photographs of female nudes, rebuilding the sets, fabricating props, matching lighting, reconstructing the general aesthetic properties of the original images. The precision with which Lee copies his father’s work seems tantamount to his understanding of his father’s drive to pursue photography. The attempted mimicry by the younger Lee embodies an earnestness that is also present in the original works. The more successfully Lee captures the likeness of the originals, the closer he is to capturing his father’s sincerity, and so rehearsing the role of the amateur photographer.

Andrea Fraser uses imitation to capture artistic subjectivity. In her video installation *Kunst Muss Hängen* (2001), she reenacts a speech given by a drunken Kippenberger at an art opening. Fraser performs the talk in the original German, a language she doesn’t speak, but has memorized. Fraser does not put forward the subject of Kippenberger’s talk for discursive purposes, but instead offers the artist himself as the site for consideration. Her studied use of German is not so much about capturing Kippenberger’s precise meaning as it is about the representation of an archetype that is fraught with romantic notions of free-spiritedness and resistance, but also carries with it the real edge of self-destruction. Even though Fraser’s performance is critical of this romanticized character, her use of German is a way to give tribute to an artist who self-reflexively epitomized the artist’s personality.

Giving tribute or paying homage is often wrapped up in the identity of the one making the offer. To pay homage is a personal act. Both Christos Dikeakos and Ming Wong insert themselves into the narratives of the artists they honor. For *Angst essen / Eat Fear* (2008), Wong remakes *Angst essen Seele auf* (1973), a feature length film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, into a twenty minute video in which he plays all the characters. Wong is moved by the complex and layered subject matter of the original film as well as Fassbinder’s skilled articulation of the issues it presents: a multitude of concerns including relations between race, gender and generations. In remaking this film, Wong proves himself a skilled actor, concise editor and capable director, inscribing his identity as the primary maker on to each aspect of the original. Under the imagined directorship of Fassbinder, Wong plays every role and as such switches race, gender and age, making his face the representation of each.

Dikeakos’s homage plays closer to art history, celebrating an artist who has been referenced in work by other artists countless times, and who has been cited by artists and writers as an influence *ad infinitum*. Marcel Duchamp is the center of Dikeakos’s three works for the exhibition, but in his drawing *Puis-je-fumer* (2008), Dikeakos moves beyond using Duchamp’s work as a reference. In this drawing, Dikeakos inserts himself into art history, positioning himself across from the famous artist. The two are separated by Bicycle Wheel and are looking each other “directly” in the eye while smoking cigars. Dikeakos, through computer software and meticulous rendering, has exaggerated their similarities, bringing himself closer to the likeness of Duchamp and vice versa. They are similar in appearance and equals in conversation.  To sit across from Duchamp is part of the fantasy, but the desire is also to be on par with him.  This fantasy of role playing is an imaginative process that resonates with Duchamp’s own manner of making. Dikeakos is an artist and through art history is already in conversation with Duchamp. What Dikeakos brings forward relates more to Duchamp as an artistic subjectivity than it does to his work.

In many ways this cultivation of the artist persona is more reified than questioned in Dikeakos’s drawing, but like in all the works in the exhibition there is a narcissistic reflection or doubling that occurs when the artist persona is presented as subject matter.  What is determined by making the artist the subject?  In *Playing Homage* we see the artist presented in varying roles and forms from cliché to role model and in each representation there is a reflection back to its maker. Whether they use themselves or their personal histories, each artist addresses their relation to the archetype and to the notion of creative production.

By Jenifer Papararo


A black and white photograph of two people sitting face to face. They wear identical suit and hold cigarettes to mirror each other. Behind them, Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture titled Bicycle Wheel sits on the floor.

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A tv on a plinth in the corner of a gallery. Large scale photographs hang on either side. One photo shows a person standing in front of a wall of paintings, the other photos are black and white.

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Installation shot of the group show Paying Homage. There is a couch facing a tv, a projection playing directly on the wall, and another wall covered with blue text and a blue chair sitting in front. 

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Two framed photographs hang side by side on the left side of a corner wall. On the right side, large blue french text is written on the wall. By the same wall, a blue chair and sculptural object sits.

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A projection on a gallery wall overlaying two paintings. The projection shows a person with their hand partially raised, giving a talk. The subtitles reads “people surprised and astonished.” 

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A large scale framed photograph hangs on a gallery wall. The image depicts Rodney Graham posing as a painter in front of a wall of abstract paintings hung in salon style. He is leaning by a chair.

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A projection on a screen in a dark room of a gallery. The screen shows two people sitting in a bed. There are subtitles in both English and German that reads “ thinking makes one sad. Although…”

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Kerstin Cmelka, Christos Dikeakos, Andrea Fraser, Rodney Graham, General Idea, Martin Kippenberger, Mark Leckey, Evan Lee, Martha Wilson, Ming Wong

Playing Homage

Gareth Moore

Kevin Schmidt

Owen Kydd

Michael Drebert

Mike McLean & Laura Trunkey

Kara Uzelman

The Contemporary Art Gallery opened a unique group exhibition that brought together six British Colombia artists who use the journey as a way to engage with landscape traditions. In *Sentimental Journey*, all the artists went on expeditions, traversing the landscape to collect inspiration and gather materials to document their experiences. The works in Sentimental Journey were both real and fictive representations of often undetermined treks. Many of the works had an optimism that was tied to the landscape, the desire to be outside and the character of the artist/wanderer.

The art works in this context brought forward the tight relation between the journey and its presentation, embracing the romance of the journey while also recontextualizing and privileging the terms of storytelling in order to question sentimentality. *Sentimental Journey* captured sentiments of eighteenth and nineteenth century Romanticism.  Most of the artists in the exhibition kept true to this tradition, using the journey as their primary source of inspiration, translating their journeys materially to create a new experience in its own right. As many of the works in the exhibition showed us, our visual fields are saturated with representations of landscapes, but here the artist’s to reinvigorate our perception of nature through their distinctive working methods.

### Essay by Jenifer Papararo

Romanticism developed across Europe as a movement in visual art, literature and music; it was defined as a return to nature and a search for true understanding of the self. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was identified as a pioneer of Romanticism, crossed the Alps alone on foot, expressing his experience in his autobiography, *Confessions*, published in 1782. The purpose of his long and isolated journeys, Rousseau states, was “to show to my fellow-men a portrait in every way true to nature, and this man I shall portray will be myself.” This desire to find an authentic self is defined by the attempt to break with societal constraints that limit choices and actions and, accordingly, limit the ability to understand and convey the experience of the true self.

This notion of the Romantic thinker—focused on finding and defining the true inner self—reaches across place, time and disciplines. We can easily point to this figure again and again in the visual arts. The romantic artist lingers and is now an identifiable character and at times a caricature of the artist in general. Common to much contemporary art discourse since the mid-twentieth century is a suspicion of this romantic figure and what it represents. Romanticism has always had its critics. Terms such as *sentimental*, *idealistic*, *spiritual*, *individualistic* and *emotional* have commonly been used to undermine the political gestures of Romanticism. Romance is a distraction, interfering with realism and its revolutionary intent. In relation to contemporary art the term is often used derogatorily, disassociated from the political and defined by self-interest; as a movement for the individual. This is characterized by Rousseau’s statement, “Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not made like any that exist.”

*The Wanderer* (1818) by the German painter Casper David Friederich represents a paradigm of this physical and spiritual journey. A lone figure, his back to the picture plane, stands on a mountainous peak above the clouds, observing the vast valley below. Is this isolated figure in a landscape, shown within nature’s awesomeness, enough to convey the experience? Do Friederich’s intentions move beyond evoking the individualistic nature of these transcendental moments and our isolation as humans? Or does he simply intend the work to replicate the experience of awe for the viewer, hoping the representation itself elicits this feeling? A primary question for many artists in this exhibition might have been: Is the pictorial portrayal of the journey enough to capture the interests of a viewer? This led to other questions, such as: Should what is displayed replicate the journey? Does it even need to? Does it represent the experience, or is it a thing unto itself? Are process and presentation so intertwined that they become one, or do they function so differently that there will always be a huge gap between them?

Within the ideals of historical Romanticism, the artwork, like nature, should be experiential. Symbolically, according to the Romantics, nature carries a charge that elicits a transcendental response. This response corresponds, fundamentally, to a sense of awe. I have no doubt that the natural world still carries the power to inspire awe, but it is also hard to ignore how mediated our experiences are. Thus in a true Romantic sense, the goal of a work of art is to elicit emotional response. *Sentimental Journey* was a group exhibition of local artists whose working methods capture sentiments of eighteenth and nineteenth century Romanticism. Most of the artists in the exhibition kept true to this tradition using the journey as their primary source of inspiration, translating their journeys materially, to create a new experience in its own right. As many of the works in the exhibition showed us, our visual fields are saturated with representations of landscapes, and the artist/explorer character is now relegated to the role of day tripper, seeming more performative than earnest.

The Enlightenment’s ideas of reason and rationality are foils to the true Romantic. The precisely ordered ideals and experiences of the Age of Reason become caricatures, something to react against and resist with intuitive response. Who would rationally use a ball as reason enough to embark on a two-month journey from Canada’s west coast to northeast India? Who would enter the woods blindfolded or attempt to build an anti-gravity machine? While not all the artists in *Sentimental Journey* make nature their works’ primary subject, each begins a journey motivated by creative impulse. The work tended to be about their experiences and how those are exhibited, raising questions about the way the artist’s experience translates materially to the viewer through the objects or information presented. For some of these artists, their work must not only recount their travels but also be reenacted, yielding an impact that conveys their journey’s essence, while for others it is more of a slow burn—playing out over many objects and images, unfolding as narrative.

It is clear there is a new Romanticism in the air. It is being wholeheartedly embraced and not filtered tightly through reason or ordered precisely. Of course there are questions. The Romantic figure of the lonely artist who focuses on self-discovery is still a character seen, with some suspicion, as self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing. And nature’s ability to produce a transformative sense of awe that gives the individual a deeper understanding of the self has lost some of its edge. Yet, each work in the exhibition carries an optimism that was tied to Romantic notions of creativity.

Essay: "Sentimental Journey," Jenifer Papararo

A round glass jug sits on an iron support. Water fills one third of the bottle. 

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A dark room with a bench in front of a projection on a screen. It depicts tree tops and distant mountains. In the middle of the frame, a tree with a hole showing the mountains in the back.

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An image of a glass vase suspended in the air with string alongside another glass vase on a stand in a gallery. On the back wall, a framed illustration hangs. The frame is half gold, and half white. 

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Installation shot of the group show Sentimental journey. A pitched camouflage tent sits on the right side of a gallery. On the left, three images hang on the wall and a tv sits in a corner. 

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On the left corner wall, a salon style assortment of framed images, text, notes and objects hang on the wall of a gallery. On the right side, three images hang on the wall and a tv sits in the corner.

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A variety of objects are placed on top, inside, and underneath a display case in a gallery space. Along with that, rolled up fabric hangs off the bottom of the case while shoes sit at the bottom. 

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Michael Drebert, Owen Kydd, Mike McLean & Laura Trunkey, Gareth Moore, Kevin Schmidt, Kara Uzelman

Sentimental Journey

Québec City artist collective BGL is comprised of Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère and Nicholas Laverdière, who have been working together since 1996.  Their large scale installations combine comedy and social critique, using humour as a means to engage audiences, to investigate the formal properties of installation and sculpture, and to address global and local political issues.  Comedy is a well-known political strategy and form of protest; we find it currently most prevalent in popular television or on the web, and in art historical terms in the absurdities of Dada.  In much the same way BGL use ridiculous puns, absurdist gestures or one-liners to address current social issues, most notably in relation to ecology and environmentalism. They do this by deftly blending popular culture references with art history. For their exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, they depict Johnny Cash’s burning ring of fire and the clichés of camping through the aesthetic constructs of Alexander Calder’s abstract hanging mobiles and floor stabiles.

 It is no coincidence that BGL uses trees for their first solo exhibition in “Beautiful British Columbia,” where the natural environment is its most exploited resource, manufactured as product and marketed as lifestyle. For BGL the tree is a twofold symbol. It stands for Romanticism where as subjects, we build a relationship to nature. And the tree represents a breaking point where it is disembodied from nature and turned into product. The trees they used to build these pieces of a tree were already removed from nature and taken from their origin. They brought their own wood from Quebec into tree-rich BC. 

### Biography

BGL is an artist collective based in Québec City, and is comprised of three artists Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère and Nicholas Laverdière, who have been working together since 1996.  They have exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Musée d’art moderne, Lille Métropole, France; and Mercer Union, Toronto. They participated in the 2007 Montrèal Biennial, and were finalists for the Sobey Art Award in 2006.  In 2008 they exhibited as part of *Caught in the Act* at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and were commissioned by No. 9 to create a public art work in Toronto’s Don River.  Their work has been featured in *Canadian Art*, Toronto and *Parachute*, Montreal. They are represented by Diaz Contemporary Art, Toronto and Parisian Laundry, Montreal.



Essay: "bgl: Solid as Wood," Jenifer Paparao

A silver stockpot is placed on a gallery floor. A dark brown form fills the inside of this pot. Orange and pink flame-shaped pieces surround the pot. 

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Two large tree branches are in the gallery. One branch hangs from the ceiling and the other sits on the ground. The branch on the ceiling has a chainsaw with a red handle hanging off it. 

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Detail shot of a large tree branch with artificial leaves attached onto it.  The branch is a light pine colour, and the paper cut out leaves are either light or dark green.

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A large cooking pot sits on top of rows of plastic fire. Each row of fire varies in shades of red and yellow. Each row gets longer the further back it goes. 

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MARSHMALLOW + CAULDRON + FIRE =

Tim Gardner

Canadian artist Tim Gardner is well-known internationally for his figurative works based on personal snapshots of family events, vacations with friends and day to day activities.  Mostly realized as intimate and precise watercolour paintings and oil pastel drawings, his early work used photographs of his older brother and friends as source material, capturing the sometimes excessive leisure activities of these post adolescent men engaged in sporting activities or partying.

For his solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, his first in Canada, Gardner places new emphasis on landscape and watercolour.  In this new work, the landscape becomes a subject matter to formally engage with the properties of watercolour as a medium that offers a unique immediacy.  This temporality is also implicit in the nature of the snapshot which is more about capturing a moment than formal precision.  Yet, Gardner’s watercolours are precise and the snapshots he chooses considered over time.  There is a gestation period, where the snapshot has to develop the patina of time, before Gardner will even consider it as a source.

The figure still plays an important role in these new works. Gardner often incorporates a muted or isolated figure within an otherwise prominent Canadian landscape.  A literal relation between figure and ground becomes an important method to draw parallels between the manner in which nature is represented and how it is encountered on a day to day basis.


### Biography 

Tim Gardner will have his first solo show in Canada at the Contemporary Art Gallery in April 2009. He has had solo exhibitions at The National Gallery, London; Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London; 303 Gallery, New York; and Galleria Il Capricorno, Venice. Gardner has been in several group exhibitions at galleries such as SFMoMA, San Fransisco; The Parrish Art Sueum, Southhampton and the Sommer Gallery, Tel Aviv. Tim Gardner has been written about by Jennifer Higgie for Frieze, and Christopher Riopelle, curator of post-1800s painting at the National Gallery, London. He has also been featured in periodicals such as Art Forum, Art in America, Flash Art and Border Crossings.





Interview: Tim Gardner and Stephen Waddell

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Five framed paintings hang gallery walls. One hangs on the free standing middle wall, and the other four hang on either side of the side walls. The watercolour paintings depict landscapes. 

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Four framed paintings hang on the wall. The paintings depict intimate moments in people's lives. Moments such as people sitting around a table and someone looking at a sunset. 

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Four framed paintings hang on the gallery wall. The paintings dipic outdoor settings such as a person stunning in front of a lake, a shot of a car driving under a bridge and a person in a pool. 

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Six framed paintings of various sizes hang on either side of a corner gallery wall. On the left, there are four paintings of the same size. On the right wall, two paintings of different sizes hang.

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Jeppe Hein

*Please Do Not Touch the Artwork*, is a familiar museum rule. Danish artist Jeppe Hein renders it glowing red neon. Placed in one of the Contemporary Art Gallery’s street front windows, it confronts the gallery visitor before they enter the space, and sets the tone for what was to come. For Jeppe Hein’s first exhibition in Canada, he presents three works that physically address the viewer’s relation to the art object. Hein’s work has been situated within an extended lineage of Minimalism. It is defined by its close examination of the formal and spatial concerns of the Minimalists as a sincere attempt to develop their concerns and reinvigorate a discourse, not for its historical relevance, but as a still vital energy for contemporary sculptural thought. His two works for the gallery space challenged the convention of the sculpture as a static object. Each offers an opportunity for viewers to experience art outside of the traditional passive role of the art viewer. Both pieces sit still and silent until they are engaged by audiences who, in viewing the artwork, trigger outbursts of sound and movement.

*Please Do Not Touch the Artwork*, in glaring red neon, is the first thing to be seen upon entering Jeppe Hein’s exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery. Confronting the visitor at the entrance to the gallery, it is a strict reminder of one of the rules of etiquette usually expected in the context of an art gallery. It was also an instruction that a visitor to the exhibition might find difficult to follow.

The forms and materials of Hein’s work are self-evident and literal, declared in their tacit presence as well as their unadorned titles. Shaking Cube is, literally, a shaking cube: an aluminum volume of modest size – a mere half-meter on edge – it is programmed to shake when a visitor comes near. But such self-evident features are not all or sufficient to account for the work and its effect on a viewer. Despite the notice in the work’s title, the shaking of the cube takes the visitor by surprise; it seems an unwarranted and uncanny behavior in an object that is the epitome of solidity and stability.

In contradiction to the modernist axiom that a rose is a rose is a rose, for Hein the cube is not merely a cube but the elementary form of sculpture in the minimalist mode. Hein has made many cubes. Constructed of aluminum, neon or broken mirrors; with sensor arrays that respond to the viewer’s presence and electronic parts that cause them to walk or collapse or burst into flames; these cubes nevertheless recall the manufactured aesthetic of Minimal Art. Within a current aesthetic discourse that takes relationality and performativity as a matter of course, Hein’s revisiting of the minimalist canon inspires a historical double-take. Like the minimalists before him, Hein works with the presence of the object, the space that it occupies and the physical participation of the spectator as a unified ensemble. He has taken the “theatricality” of minimalist sculpture so derided by Michael Fried and turned it into an opportunity for the viewer to play with the work. To say that Hein’s work is playful seems obvious but requires that a certain distinction be made: the work is playful not merely as a kind of amusement but in a more serious sense of discovering and using the sources of perceptual pleasure.

More importantly, Hein has taken the materialist, literalist agenda of minimalism to launch his own investigation of “the real.” It is a challenge to conceive the material reality of *Invisible Cube*. Using motion sensors and alarms to define a cubic space within the otherwise empty space of the existing gallery, Invisible Cube can’t be perceived until the viewer walks into it, causing alarms to sound. The more viewers there are in the space, the more obvious this mechanism becomes. Upending the museum convention of alarming the space immediately in front of pictures in order to keep visitors from getting too close to the artwork, here the visitor has to stay close to the wall to look at the work displayed there. Beyond a narrow perimeter in front of the wall, the visitor comes into full body contact with the work itself. No matter how much a visitor might wish to respect the “proper” decorum of not touching the work, such an imperative is impossible if one is to experience the work at all. Through this Hein affirms the active role of the spectator in the creation of the work, while accommodating the possibility of non-engagement. Making it something of a game sustains the condition of non-judgement.

On the other hand, it could be argued that walking into the alarmed space isn’t actually touching the work, there being no palpable physical sensation for the visitor in the event. In either case, non-compliance with *Please Do Not Touch the Artwork* might provide an uneasy satisfaction for the non-conformist, or cause discomfort for the obedient, but the conundrum cannot be ignored. Thus the material reality of the work encompasses the pre-existing space, the social conventions that govern its use (including the request to refrain from touching the work), the specific interaction of visitors with these elements, and the social and ethical positions of an individual that might inflect their response. This last element shows the distance Hein has moved from the precepts of minimalism, from a situation that was theorized strictly within phenomenological bounds, to creating situations – relational and performative in the ways that even minimal art subscribed to – that open onto a broadly positive humanistic dimension.

### Biography

Jeppe Hein was born in Copenhagen, he currently lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts, Copenhagen and Städel Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt. He has exhibited at Barbican Art Centre, London (2007); Sculpture Center, New York (2006); Zero Gallery, Milano (2006); Yvon Lambert, Paris (2005); Sculptureparc Bodø, Norway (2005);  and MOMA, New York (2004). 


A cube sits in the middle of the gallery space. The cube is sand coloured and its size is about toddlers height. The glass window at the corner of the room shows the outside street scenery. 

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A sand-coloured cube sits in the middle of the gallery space. The cube is slightly shaking. The cube is about toddlers height. The window at the corner of the room shows the outside street scenery. 