James Welling

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition of early work by American artist James Welling.

Welling emerged as a seminal figure in the “Pictures Generation,” an influential group of artists including Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. Working in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they were acclaimed for their pioneering use of photography and for opening up a new set of questions about art and the nature of representation. This exhibition, and the publication that accompanies it, are titled *The Mind on Fire* to evoke a febrile time of energy, thought and production from that period.

James Welling came to photography after working in painting, sculpture, dance, performance, conceptual art, film, and video. The experimental and ephemeral works Welling produced from 1969 to 1986 demonstrate a range of ideas, reference points and concerns that at times seem incompatible to each other. In his earliest watercolours and super 8mm films such as *Sculpture*, *1970*, *Film*, *1971*, made near his parent’s home in Connecticut, as well as other work produced at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh from 1969 to 1971, we see traces of contrasting styles stretching from Abstract Expressionism to Post-Minimalism. The extent of these references and methods remind us that Welling’s work cannot be easily compartmentalized. In the early 1970s Welling became interested in a range of different modes of documentation — Xerox, microfilm, photo-offset printing, maps, statistical data, advertising, and scientific imagery. The wide-ranging ephemera presented in this exhibition chart these influences and shifting ideas, clues and hints, full of potential to be mined in the future.

Throughout the period of work comprising the exhibition Welling sought his own voice by insisting on the validity of such contrary models rather than prioritizing one over the other. Welling adopted this approach in order to problematize the rehearsed formulations of modernist theory so that his photographs of aluminum foil and drapery offer shifts and changes in readings from their inherent ambiguity and the evocative titles that point beyond the literal. In 1982 Welling wrote “…my aspiration [is] to produce images which are both densely associative and self-referencing.” This clear statement of intent and a selection of other early writings reproduced in this book shed light on this intense and decisive period of work. They show how Welling drew on his longstanding preoccupations and his grounding in conceptualism as he moved into photography with *Hands* (1975), *Los Angeles Architecture and Portraits* (1976-78) and *Diary of Elizabeth and James Dixon (1840-41)/ Connecticut Landscapes* begun in 1977.

Welling described his earliest photographs as images where many lines of thought and emotion could intersect. Poetry was an important template for this idea. Welling began reading poetry at Carnegie Mellon, starting with Wallace Stevens and Robert Lowell. Stevens’ lush modernist vocabulary and his ideas about abstraction were extremely important early influences as was Lowell’s use of personal and family imagery. In Los Angeles, Welling discovered the work of Rainer Maria Rilke and Stéphane Mallarmé. Through Mallarmé in particular, Welling discovered that it might be possible to convey an effect without an object, thus providing the generating principle for his photographs made after 1979. As Rosalind Krauss succinctly stated in 1989 when discussing Welling’s early photographs in *Photography and Abstraction*, he “created as much delay as possible between seeing the image and understanding what it was of.”

Throughout the period of *The Mind on Fire*, painting remained a resource to Welling; his interest in scale, surface, materiality, tactility, and process evolved directly from his engagement with small paintings that preceded his photographic work. These qualities came to the fore in solo exhibitions at Metro Pictures and Cash/Newhouse in New York in 1981, 1982 and 1985, and in his photographic series with aluminum foil, drapes, tiles, and gelatin. These works were contact printed to gain what Welling described as “a facsimile effect,” involving no enlargement from the negative. As Welling stated at the time, “the [small] image convinces me of its truth in a way larger images cannot.”

Welling’s relationship to the spaces in which he lived and worked influenced his photographs from the earliest taken in Los Angeles, to the pivotal images that emerged after his move to New York. In 1976 Welling photographed his loft and the restaurant in which he worked for *Polaroids*. His experience as a cook in New York was crucial for his *Aluminum Foil* and *Drapes* photographs and the downtown music scene in New York played an important role. After meeting musicians Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and Kim Gordon in New York City at the end of the 1970s, he attempted to create photographic equivalents to the concentrated and immersive sonic environments of their concerts. The exhibition and publication *Mind on Fire* brings together around one hundred of Welling’s early, experimental and abstract works from this period, statements that surround the mechanical and philosophical parameters of photography, being tested through a variety of photographic papers, films, cameras; materials in flux and subject to a myriad of simultaneous meanings.

This exhibition has been developed in partnership between MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporànea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.  Special thanks also to David Zwirner, New York; Maureen Paley, London; Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid, Regen Projects, Los Angeles; and Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris.


### Biography

James Welling was born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut. A major survey, titled James Welling: Monograph, was recently held at the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio and accompanied by a large-scale catalogue published by Aperture. The exhibition opened at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in September 2013. Also opening in November 2013 will be a comprehensive overview at the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. Welling’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the University Museum of Contemporary Art, UMASS Amherst, Massachusetts (2013); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (2012); Minneapolis Institute of Arts (2010); Horticultural Society of New York (2007); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2002); Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2002); Sprengel Museum Hannover (1999); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1998); and the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (1998). In 2000, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio organized a major survey of his work, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 2009, Welling’s work was featured in the critically acclaimed historical survey *The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984* at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and in 2008, he participated in the Whitney Biennial. In 1992, his work was included in Documenta IX. Welling is Area Head of Photography at UCLA and in the Fall of 2012 was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University. His work is held in major museum collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in Los Angeles. He is represented by David Zwirner, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris; Maureen Paley, London; Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid.



ProgramGuideWelling+Ringborg2013.pdf

Chunks of a shiny, deep black gelatinous substance are scattered across a stark white surface. 

thumbnail_00-HEADER-Welling.jpg

00-HEADER-Welling.jpg

James Welling’s artworks installed in a gallery. Five black and white images of hands and four small photographs hang on the wall. A series of black wire sculptures sit on the floor.

thumbnail_01-JamesWelling-2013.jpg

01-JamesWelling-2013.jpg

James Welling’s artworks installed in a gallery. In this image, 36 small black and white images, each framed, are mounted on the wall. Several black wire sculptures sit on the floor in front of the wall.

thumbnail_02-JamesWelling-2013.jpg

02-JamesWelling-2013.jpg

James Welling’s artworks installed in a gallery. 13 framed photographs hang on the wall. One of the pictures is reddish in tone, with the others all black. Some wire sculptures are visible, installed on the floor.

thumbnail_03-JamesWelling-2013.jpg

03-JamesWelling-2013.jpg

James Welling’s artworks installed in a gallery. Four framed colour photographs hang on the wall. A vitrine sits in front of the wall, containing books, images and objects.

thumbnail_04-JamesWelling-2013.jpg

04-JamesWelling-2013.jpg

Watercolor paintings, landscape photographs, and handwritten instructions on a sheet of paper appear in a vitrine.

thumbnail_05-JamesWelling-2013.jpg

05-JamesWelling-2013.jpg

Four small black and white photographs appear in a corridor leading to a larger gallery, where many works are installed. 

thumbnail_06-JamesWelling-2013.jpg

06-JamesWelling-2013.jpg

The Mind on Fire

Meriç Algün Ringborg

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Turkish artist Meriç Algün Ringborg, her first in a museum in North America, comprising a new large-scale commission sited across the façade of our building. Visitors are invited to “read” the gallery, the work wrapping around the outside as individual phrases envelop the physical structure.

Through the appropriation of methodologies that include collecting, systematizing and list-making, much of Algün Ringborg’s practice centres on notions of cultural identity, language, belonging, and the adjoining bureaucracies. In 2012 *Billboards* were presented in the exhibition *Show Off* that took place in Malmö and Nicosia consecutively. The questions shown derive from *The Concise Book of Visa Application Forms* (2009), the work inserting queries for private information into the public realm. At a time when immigration is at the forefront of topical news stories, the project gained significant resonance.

*Line No.1 (Holy Bible)* (2010) was first realized at Index in Stockholm, the complete contents of the Bible running as a single line of text at eye level around the gallery room. A second version at Witte de With, Rotterdam incorporated different versions and translations aside from the King James Version of 1611 first used in Sweden, to create a topography of vertical lines mapping across the space. In this work, two authoritarian components are integrated, a “line” and the Holy Bible, in an attempt to raise questions on constraints, borders and control. A horizontal line running around a room is said to have the distinct psychological effect of coercing a person to be below or at eye level with it. The band within the gallery building, in this instance made up of scripture from the Bible, suggests an institutional critique, a cultural space as a place embodying more secular systems of value and belief. Permeated in general consciousness, and disregarding specific individual beliefs, the Bible was employed by Algün Ringborg not for its content, but rather for its history as an instructive text. Moreover, the authoritative position of the artist is also acknowledged by further demanding the viewer’s immersion through producing the text at a near illegible scale. In attempting to read, one is inevitably required to adjust body and sight to the form of the work, whilst being influenced by its textual content and commanded by the horizontal line.

The new work at the Contemporary Art Gallery takes the English dictionary as its starting point. Using only selected definitions of specific words, this ambitious commission appears as a series of inter-related sentences notionally composing mini-narratives and realized in a way that seems to incorporate different voices and characters. As such the work evolves out of the dictionary akin to a fragmentary novel or short story, a series of episodes branching out into a loose meta-narrative concerning writing as a creative act as implied through the use of this “found” language.

Vancouver, a city renowned internationally for the significance of its visual arts that conceptually re-pictures space and assigns meaning of the global in the local, provides a stimulating and challenging context for this piece by Algün Ringborg. Shown outside, the work intervenes in the urban fabric, addressing the narratives implicit in everyday routine and our daily lives. Furthermore its sitting on the external surface of the gallery incites an evocation of the porosity of meaning that may emerge from such a public institution, through a contemplation of and dissemination of ideas seeping into the public domain. One might anticipate visitors and viewers are prompted into a personal reflection on reading the text based on recollection of previous encounters and exhibitions.

Production support for the exhibition is generously supported by SAHA Association.

### Biography

Meriç Algün Ringborg was born in Istanbul and now lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Recent solo exhibitions include *The Library of Unborrowed Books*, Art in General, New York (2013); *A Hook or a Tail*, Frutta, Rome (2013); *Becoming European*, Wunderkammer, Meessen De Clercq, Brussels (2012); *Prompts and Triggers: Meriç Algün Ringborg, Line No.2 (Holy Bible)*, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2012); and *The Concise Book of Visa Application Forms*, Gallery Naïve, Stockholm (2010). Recent group exhibitions include *The Time of Our Image*, Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia; *The Nordic Model ®*, Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden; *ABCDEFGHI*, Marabouparken, Stockholm; *Sequences*, Reykjavík; *When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes*, MoCA, Detroit; Signs Taken in Wonder, MAK, Vienna; *Incremental Change*, Galeri NON, Istanbul; *Detective*, Andreas Huber, Vienna; *When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes*, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco; *Show Off*, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö; *An Incomplete History of Incomplete Works of Art*, Francesca Minini, Milan; and the 12th Istanbul Biennial. Algün Ringborg is represented by Galeri NON, Istanbul.



An overhead view of a black typewriter on a wooden desk surrounded by open books, papers, pens and a bowl of sunflower seed shells.

thumbnail_00-HEADER-Ringborg.jpg

00-HEADER-Ringborg.jpg

Meriç Algün Ringborg’s text-based artwork installed in the CAG’s exterior window spaces. The texts are written in a small font. They are typed in black and printed on an ivory-colored background. 

thumbnail_01-MericAlgunRingborg-2013.jpg

01-MericAlgunRingborg-2013.jpg

Meriç Algün Ringborg’s text-based artwork is installed in the CAG’s exterior window spaces. English sentences and words are Italicized and listed on an ivory-colored background.

thumbnail_02-MericAlgunRingborg-2013.jpg

02-MericAlgunRingborg-2013.jpg

Meriç Algün Ringborg’s text-based artwork is installed in the CAG’s exterior window spaces. English sentences and words are printed in a small font and listed on an ivory colored background. 

thumbnail_03-MericAlgunRingborg-2013.jpg

03-MericAlgunRingborg-2013.jpg

Detail image of Meriç Algün Ringborg’s text-based artwork installed in the CAG’s exterior window spaces. A part of the text lists English words such as setting, separation, and surprising.

thumbnail_04-MericAlgunRingborg-2013.jpg

04-MericAlgunRingborg-2013.jpg

Metatext

Mungo Thomson

As part of our contribution to Capture, Vancouver’s first annual city-wide photography festival, we present a new installation by American artist Mungo Thomson. Central to Thomson’s artistic proposition is that of context — be it institutional, cultural or that of everyday life — and it is through the breadth of his individual works that we are prompted to grasp the many challenges to our perception in the things we encounter daily. For Thomson is interested in the space between things, the subtext or background that consistently draws our attention. He has made works which record notional “silence” — the sound of a room when no one is in it, the applause between songs on every live recording by Bob Dylan — produced works in a range of media based on TIME magazine, and made interventions into spaces which causing us to re-evaluate our expectations, such as *Coat Check Chimes*, his contribution to the 2008 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, where Thomson replaced the 1,200 coat hangers in the Whitney Museum’s coat check with custom-made, musically tuned coat hangers that were modeled on orchestral triangles.


When we look at the stars we are actually bathed in the light of the past, and for Thomson this is another way to think about the history while simultaneously considering the “contemporary” — that which constitutes our present is a set of signals between which there are gaps. *Negative Space* is an ongoing series of photographic murals of inverted astronomical imagery sourced from the Hubble Space Telescope. Thomson works with the Hubble archive in an ongoing way, generating a negative image every time the Hubble generates a positive one. Through a simple command in Photoshop, blacks become whites, whites become blacks, and all other colors are transformed into their complement. These images are then made into site-specific photographic murals for empty walls and installed like wallpaper, indoors and out, temporary and permanent. The project also includes an artist book, an original font, and a screensaver.

Work at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station is presented in partnership with Capture and the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC.

### Biography 

Mungo Thomson lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions and projects include SITE Santa Fe (2013); Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2013); Aspen Art Museum (2012); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2008); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2007); and Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAMeC), Bergamo, Italy (2006), among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions such as The Pacific Standard Time Public Art and Performance Festival (2012); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2009); the 2008 Whitney Biennial; and Performa, New York (2005). Thomson’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others. Thomson is represented by Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris.

A photographic mural in vinyl is installed on the windows of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. Black dots scatter across a semi-translucent background of softly focussed yellows, blues and greens. 

thumbnail_00-HEADER-Thomson.jpg

00-HEADER-Thomson.jpg

A photographic mural in vinyl is installed on the windows of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. Black dots scatter across a semi-translucent background of softly focussed yellows, blues and greens.

thumbnail_01-MungoThomson-2013.jpg

01-MungoThomson-2013.jpg

thumbnail_02-MungoThomson-2013.jpg

02-MungoThomson-2013.jpg

A photographic mural in vinyl is installed on the windows of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. Black dots and star-forms scatter across a semi-translucent background of softly focussed yellows, blues and greens.

thumbnail_03-MungoThomson-2013.jpg

03-MungoThomson-2013.jpg

thumbnail_04-MungoThomson-2013.jpg

04-MungoThomson-2013.jpg

Negative Space

Mike  Nelson

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Canada of work by the renowned British artist Mike Nelson. Comprising two significant new commissions, the exhibition includes an ambitious series of sculptures produced in partnership with The Power Plant in Toronto, and a new photographic work made in association with the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, its starting point family photographs taken between 1957 and 1972 by the distinguished Canadian anthropologist Dr. Wilson Duff.

Nelson is best-known for his labyrinthine architectural installations that unfold as narrative structures, where the viewer moves through rooms like a reader turns pages in a novel. These immersive environments are often seemingly abandoned, devoid of figures, yet imagining the unseen occupants of these intricate spaces is central to the viewer’s experience. For *I, IMPOSTOR*, Nelson’s major work for the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), much of the elaborate space appeared vacated, with the exception of a small room where lines of drying black and white photographs hung from wires that crisscrossed the ceiling. These images documented a seventeenth century caravanserai, photographed within the very building that housed a previous installation by Nelson during the 2003 Istanbul Biennale. The darkrooms within the Venice piece were a reconstruction of those adapted “found” spaces in the Eminönü district of Istanbul, the architecture within the British Pavilion a disjointed facsimile from memory and from the photographs of the caravanserai. Visualizing this ghostly photographer supposedly moving through the same space as the viewer, simultaneously suggested the architecture as narrative, but confused time and space; a shift of cities and decades shadowing personal and world histories. It presented a fractured and multi-layered narrative, a set of atmospheres that similarly inform Nelson’s discrete sculptural works.

While his cultural references are broad, touching on particular moments in science-fiction, literature and the Beat era, much of Nelson’s work can be linked through an archetypal figure of the lone wanderer. For the Contemporary Art Gallery, Nelson revisits ideas and forms first seen in *The Amnesiacs*, a serial project begun in 1996, which references a narrative involving an imaginary cast of characters — a group of “outsiders” to the mainstream who uncannily resemble a disembodied late twentieth-century biker gang, albeit without bikes. These quintessential outlaws of myth and literature, as depicted in the popular imagination of North America, are paralleled here with another favourite genre; that of the hunter or fur trader, exploring both groups’ economic underpinning of these romantic façades, and the resulting conflicts involved in the expansion of territory.

In this new work it is as if a beachcomber has gathered material from the ocean, imagined by Nelson as a gigantic intelligent entity, much like that of Lem’s planet “Solaris,” sifting the debris as a means to uncover truths about contemporary culture and our place within it. The roving characters, *The Amnesiacs*, have come together as interpreters, deciphering the collected material by creating assemblages akin to some form of disjointed memory or flashback, that when brought together may effect communication or reveal hidden meaning, the potential for a new and unified system of understanding. Nelson originally developed these thoughts after the unexpected death of his friend and collaborator, Erlend Williamson. In 1996 he had fallen to his death whilst climbing in the Scottish Highlands, at the time that Nelson was working on his first incarnation of what would become *The Amnesiacs*. Williamson, an artist and mountaineer whose family ancestry was of Orcadian descent, will contribute again; this time parts of his own narrative, and the very materials that surrounded him — those that remain present in his absence — will be woven into the fabric of the work.

Each of the new works is derived from the Canadian landscape: one is quite literally built with flotsam and jetsam collected off local shores, while the other re-imagines it. The second new piece is a sequence of projected 35mm slides produced during recent road trips across British Columbia and into Alberta, images that appear out of time. Collectively they trace another movement across the landscape as well as capture momentary pauses, underlining human interventions to the land. Nelson’s interest in the photographic depiction of the Canadian landscape came through seeing a series of slides from Dr. Wilson Duff’s family trips across the province, presented at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. As an anthropologist Duff was dedicated to understanding Northwest Coast cultures, even such private holidays were spent viewing aboriginal festivals or visiting the workshops of totem pole carvers. These images resonated with Nelson as much as the objects in the museum, as a language to be unraveled. They were of a time and place, but already displaced. In relation to this, Nelson has made a work that talks about the land itself and the artistic traditions inherent within it, especially those borne out of North America in the twentieth century and their re-translation as part of a British oeuvre. Nelson unearths the possible re-reading of such activities as cultural imperialism within both strands of the movement — an accusation that could ultimately be reflected within the activities of the artist himself.

CAG acknowledges the generous support of Rick Erickson and Donna Partridge, Jane Irwin and Ross Hill, and Randy and Julia Heward. With thanks to the Erlend Williamson Art Foundation.

### Biography

Born in Loughborough, UK in 1967, Mike Nelson lives and works in London. His solo exhibitions include *408 tons of imperfect geometry*, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2012); *I, IMPOSTOR*, British Pavilion, 54th Biennale di Venezia (2011); *A Psychic Vacuum*, Creative Time, New York (2007); *Triple Bluff Canyon*, Modern Art Oxford (2004); and *Nothing is True. Everything is Permitted.*, ICA, London (2001). Recent group shows include: *September 11*, MoMA PS1, New York (2011); *Altermodern*, Tate Britain, London (2009); *Eclipse: Art in a Dark Age*, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2008); *Psycho Buildings*, Hayward Gallery, London; and *Turner Prize*, Tate Liverpool (2007). He is represented by 303 Gallery, New York; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin; Matt’s Gallery, London; and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.


ProgramGuideFall2013.pdf

A sculpture resembling a clown. A plastic jug from which orange fibres emerge is fastened upside down on a wooden stick with a red bow tied to it. A bright orange clown-like nose is held on by wire.

thumbnail_08-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

00-HEADER-Nelson.jpg

A red sleeping bag lies on the floor of a lobby under a display case cover. Coins are placed on one edge of the sleeping bag. Behind, wooden double doors are installed at the entrance to a gallery.

thumbnail_01-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

01-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

A large screen is installed in a darkened gallery space. Projected on screen is an image of a forest at daytime. In the foreground, a simple fire pit and log are visible on the forest floor.

thumbnail_02-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

02-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

Large sculptures of found materials fill a gallery space. A tall ladder cart holds a huge rock, driftwood branch, and tire. Other sculptures of lumber, driftwood, rope, and metal surround it.

thumbnail_03-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

03-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

Large sculptures of found materials fill a gallery space. The overall installation mimics a camping location. Two fake bonfires, ropes, and other wooded objects are visible in this image.

thumbnail_04-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

04-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

A grey cap hangs from a short wooden beam installed vertically on a gallery wall. The cap has a black plastic snap which is modified to make the cap look like a cow’s face.

thumbnail_05-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

05-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

A red cap hangs from a short wood stick installed vertically on a gallery wall. The cap is tied at the back, making its form resemble a bird resting on a tree. 

thumbnail_07-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

06-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

A sculpture made from a plastic milk jug stuck upside down on a wood stick, from which arm-like metal rods extend out horizontally. Feathers attached to a wire band hang from the upper part of the jug.

thumbnail_06-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

07-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

Large, rough wooden shelves are installed in a gallery space. Many objects such as a box,  clothes, a stack of rope, shoes, a shoulder bag, and notebooks are piled up on these shelves. 

thumbnail_09-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

08-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

Detail image of large, rough wooden shelves installed in a gallery space. Assorted camping supplies, such as a stack of red rope, bars of chocolate, and earmuffs are placed on the wooden shelves.

thumbnail_10-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

09-MikeNelson-2013.jpg

Mike Nelson

Monika Sosnowska

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first exhibition of work by Polish artist Monika Sosnowka in Canada. Best known for her ambitious architectural and sculptural installations that simultaneously embrace and resist the spaces they occupy, Sosnowska’s exhibition obliquely references her hometown of Warsaw and the economic shift that has occurred since the collapse of communism in 1989 to the present day.

Characteristically the artist’s sculptures recall familiar objects transformed in some way—dysfunctional stairways that join one floor to the other yet serving no purpose or large-scale metal cubes and girder structures twisted and wedged into existing gallery spaces. At the Contemporary Art Gallery we present a series of new painted steel sculptures, redolent of broken market vendor stands, referencing actual forms salvaged from Jarmark Europa Stadium, originally the site of a large market that sold everything from imitation Nike training shoes to pirated CDs and DVDs. The market opened with the onset of capitalism and ended last year when the stadium was destroyed to make way for a new national stadium that was built in time to host Euro 2012.

For the Polish Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, *1:1* comprised a metal frame structurally based on the elementary building principles common to much of the postwar tenement housing in Poland. Built to scale within the confines of the 1930 exhibition space, this massive frame was visually crushed to fit within the pavilion building. The black metal structure echoed the formal values of the existing architecture, while its twisted and bent form drew attention to the confines of the room creating unexpected configurations that challenged our perception of the space overall.

Even though Sosnowska’s work is often physically and conceptually tied to the condition of architecture it still retains its object-like quality. *The Garden* (2011) is a series of objects that exemplify this very nature: one sculpture built from a twist of metal pipes, another of bent aluminum cut and curled into a form resembling an industrial fan. In contrast to her larger-scale pieces these works, like the new forms comprising the exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, collectively evoke a sense of architecture through absence and suggest that as with all social structures, it is subject to change over time. For example, a tilted cross extruding from a block of concrete appears to have been ripped from an existing structure, a larger whole; another, through its folds of metal mesh, recalls debris torn from a demolished building. The objects exist as autonomous wholes, but each appears to have been severed from an already existing structure, retaining a physical link to a larger formal system.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge.

### Biography

Monika Sosnowska (b. 1972 in Ryki, Poland) currently lives and works in Warsaw. Sosnowska has participated in major exhibitions including *The Power of Fantasy: Imagination at Work*, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2011); *ILLUMInations*, Arsenale, Venice Biennale (2011); *elles@centrepompidou*, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); *Monika Sosnowska/Andrea Zittel*, Schaulager, Munchenstein, Basel (2008) and *W Polsce; Czyli gdzie? / In Poland, That is Where?*, Center for Contemporary Art Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw (2006). Her solo exhibitions include *Fire Escape*, Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (2011); *Stairway*, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel (2010); *Monika Sosnowska*, Modern Institute, Glasgow (2008) and *Projects 83: Monika Sosnowska*, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006). She was the recipient of the Bâloise Prize at Art Basel in 2003, as well as the Polityka’s Passport Award and shortlisted for the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize in 2012. Sosnowska is represented by Galerie Gisela Capitan, Cologne; Hauser and Wirth, Zurich, London and New York; Kurimanzutto, Mexico City; and The Modern Institute, Glasgow.



ProgramGuideSummer2013.pdf

A free-standing, steel sculpture installed on a gallery floor. The entire sculpture is painted green and its shape resembles a bent, distorted staircase.

thumbnail_03-MonikaSosnowska-2013.jpg

00-HEADER-Sosnowska.jpg

Five green, metal sculptures installed in a gallery. The sculptures resemble architectural frames and forms, distorted and bent. One of them, hanging from a ceiling, has a distorted hemisphere shape.

thumbnail_01-MonikaSosnowska-2013.jpg

01-MonikaSosnowska-2013.jpg

Five green, metal sculptures installed in a gallery. The sculptures resemble architectural forms that have been distorted and bent.

thumbnail_02-MonikaSosnowska-2013.jpg

02-MonikaSosnowska-2013.jpg

A free-standing, steel sculpture by Monika Sosnowska installed in a gallery. The form resembles a steel frame for a three-step stair. The frame is bent and its surface painted green.

thumbnail_04-MonikaSosnowska-2013.jpg

03-MonikaSosnowska-2013.jpg

Two free-standing sculptures are placed on the floor. They are made of steel frames and are painted green. The form of both sculptures resembles a distorted staircase.

thumbnail_05-MonikaSosnowska-2013.jpg

04-MonikaSosnowska-2013.jpg

A steel sculpture hangs from a gallery ceiling. The sculpture is painted green, its form two concentric circles. The circles are misshapen and bent, with metal rods protruding outwards from one.

thumbnail_06-MonikaSosnowska-2013.jpg

05-MonikaSosnowska-2013.jpg

Kay Rosen

This is the first solo institutional exhibition of work by American artist Kay Rosen in Canada. Renowned for her text-based works, presented across a range of formats and scales, Rosen uses space and colour to assert the physical property of language and elaborate new meaning from familiar phrases, often with characteristic wry humour. For Rosen words are both subject and material; playing with their visual representations through meticulously considered typography, colour and layout, she employs puns, anagrams and vernacular phrases to create visual connections which examine the structures and mechanisms of language as well as our encounters with it. Before becoming a visual artist, Rosen studied comparative and applied linguistics, a background which continues to inform her thinking.

For this new commission, Rosen has created two new works including a large-scale intervention across the front of the building. *CUTOUT* is just that, a formal play on double meaning that quite literally describes the very action and construction of its making. Letters are reversely cut from sheets of coloured vinyl, using the black appearance of the window glass itself to define their form and enabling the cut-out letters to become what they spell. Furthermore, Rosen makes a simple cut into one letter of a word to generate another. Deceptively straightforward, in this way the “C” from “cut” was once an “O” that formed the word “out.” Both emphasizing and tracing this action, dashed lines mark the area removed.

Rosen often renders something that was once invisible visible. For example, a simple colour change of the two last letters in ABCDEFGHI in the mural *Hi* (1998) exposes a pre-existent word within the systematic order of the first nine letters of the alphabet. This slight shift of emphasis has the potential to affect pronunciation, turning our usual listing of letters into ABCDEFG ‘Hi.’ Different versions of this work have also used the physical properties of a building to reveal the alphabet’s potential to form words through minimal gesture; in this case by segregating “H” and “I” from the rest of the letters around an outside corner. Whereas the poetics in Rosen’s work position it within the lineage of Concrete Poetry where linguistic signs form the structure of an object or picture to be perceived rather than a text to be read, her work is equally grounded within conceptual practice. Situated around the corner from *CUTOUT*, a second work reveals a different aspect of Rosen’s practice. Visual presentation is not used to merely emphasize specific meaning, but to articulate formal gestures that unfold spatially over time. Where one piece is focused on “rescuing words from meaning,” the other uses language to generate strong imagery, making evident the social structures that determine its reading.

While a formal syntactical interpretation dominates much of the discourse surrounding Rosen’s work, many pieces convey political comment. *Duck in the Muck (aka Exxon Axxident)* from 1989, has been remade in a new version for one of our picture windows. Originally a list of ten different spellings of “Duck in the Muck” alternating with an equal number of misspelled “Quacks,” for the Contemporary Art Gallery, Rosen has reduced the text, added vibrant layers of colour, and uses the window frame as a means to divide the text into six component parts: one duck in the muck surrounded by variant quacks. Although the title references the Exxon Valdez crude oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989, Rosen has chosen the work for its topical relevance to this part of the world. As a vast and extensive system of oil pipelines stretching from Alberta across British Columbia and into the United States are being established, Rosen draws our attention to recent history, and an image of potential dangers to come.

### Biography

Kay Rosen (born 1949, Corpus Christi, Texas) currently lives in Gary, Indiana and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been shown extensively, including solo exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum (2012); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2011); the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand (2004); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1999); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1994); and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (1990). She has also been included in notable group exhibitions such as *Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language*, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); *Prospect 1 New Orleans* (2008); and the 2000 Whitney Biennial.  Her work is included in numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, Turin. She is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York and Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston.



A graphic grid made of red, yellow and red rectangles. Crackling lettering in the same colours occupies each rectangle reading “CWAK,” “QUAC,” “KWAQUE,” “DUC IN THE MUK,” “QWAQ” and “CUACK.” 

thumbnail_00-HEADER-Rosen.jpg

00-HEADER-Rosen.jpg

Kay Rosen’s text-based work is installed on CAG’s exterior windows. Yellow vinyl sheets cover the windows. In each window, a letter from the word “CUTOUT” has been excised from the vinyl. 

thumbnail_01-KayRosen-2013.jpg

01-KayRosen-2013.jpg

Detail image of Kay Rosen’s work on CAG’s exterior facade. Yellow vinyl covers the windows. A capital letter “C” has been cut out of the vinyl on one window, with a “U” cut from the window next to it.

thumbnail_02-KayRosen-2013.jpg

02-KayRosen-2013.jpg

Kay Rosen’s text-based work installed on CAG’s exterior facade. Yellow vinyl sheets cover the windows. In each window, a letter from the word “CUTOUT” has been excised from the vinyl.

thumbnail_03-KayRosen-2013.jpg

03-KayRosen-2013.jpg

Kay Rosen’s work is installed on CAG’s exterior facade. Red, blue, and yellow vinyl sheets cover each panel of a window. Letters such as CWAK, QUAC, and KWAQUE appear in each panel.

thumbnail_04-KayRosen-2013.jpg

04-KayRosen-2013.jpg

CUTOUT

Itee Pootoogook

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in a public institution of work by Canadian artist Itee Pootoogook.

A resident of Cape Dorset, Nunavut, Pootoogook belongs to a generation of Inuit artists who are transforming and reshaping the creative traditions that were successfully pioneered by their parents and grandparents during the second half of the twentieth century. In his large-scale graphite and coloured pencil drawings, Pootoogook shows us an image of modern northern life quite different from the one we are accustomed to seeing both historically and in much Inuit work. In this vast and often inhospitable region, instead of traditional subjects such as igloos and parka-clad hunters and their prey, we are shown an everyday world, one made up of recognizable contemporary accoutrements including snowmobiles, boats, soft drinks and television sets.

Pootoogook makes images of places, people and things, observed with prosaic intimacy. Here at the Contemporary Art Gallery we focus not on works involving portraits of family and friends but on those images that picture the things which structure daily routine in this part of Canada — buildings, landscape and the means to travel to other parts of the country. Working from photographs, Pootoogook’s drawings appear to be situated within a documentary tradition, yet despite their overall “snapshot” composition, the transformation of media results in an ambiguity to these notionally familiar scenes. That the drawings themselves are often a composite of several source photographs further underlines the constructed nature of the images.

While the artist’s training as a carpenter may account in part for the attention to line, edges and planes, there is an economy to the work which defies such simple reasoning. Blocks of pure colour, palette shifts away from the merely naturalistic, areas of paper left raw, and expanses of flattened space, all combine to create an abstraction which recalls a range of Western art historical references. The apparent sophistication of Pootoogook’s images causes them to transcend any attempt to label or classify within generic assumption and thereby thoroughly resist our impulse to conveniently locate them within conventional practice. While focusing on the commonplace, the artist’s work shifts our perception of the factual; understated, deliberate restraint foiling any tendency toward the grandiose or heroic.

The exhibition features a number of images representing northern architecture, a theme that is especially important to Pootoogook. In some cases, works such as *Burnt Garage* (2011) show a modern structure in barren northern landscapes, countering any romantic reading in its straightforward honesty, while serving as poetic testament to daily human resilience. In other works, Pootoogook focuses on the rectangular forms of doors, steps and exterior walls, revelling in their formal clarity and abstract elegance. Through the *Window (a) Low Hill Could Be* (2008), *Apartment #342* (2010) and *Reflections* (2011) present images of windows, at once smart and knowing in their pictorial reference to surface, framing, viewing and the picture plane itself. Simultaneously they convince as actual representations of glass, wood and metal.

*First Air, The Airline of the North* (2011), *Calm Weather* and *3 Ribs of Whale* (both 2012), all similarly depict forms in the landscape, their shapes emerging from the white or black of the paper itself as a material suggestion of snow and rock. Respectively these drawings show the fin of an airplane, the horizon of sea and land, and skeletal remains, and yet each hovers between the figuration suggested by their titles, a depiction of light and shadow, and a formal series of marks and gestures on the paper ground.

There is stillness to much of Pootoogook’s drawing that suspends any sense of time despite the clearly contemporary nature of the imagery. The notion of a captured moment can be seen in pieces such as *Long After Midnight* (2010) the transitional nature of the world in which we all live suggested by the cabin, perhaps abandoned, against the evening sky. The artist’s work can be seen to evoke a time passing, the day’s turning, retrieving it for generations to come but signifying a continual state of flux, a fundamental understanding of the inevitability that the structures we inhabit and the lives we lead will undoubtedly be outstripped by the landscape that surrounds us.

Offsite, a specially printed version of a drawing of the landscape is presented large-scale at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, its physicality altering as light changes throughout the day, its imagery deliberately playing with and gaining meaning from the specificity of the site.

Work at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Canada Line is presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program – IntransitBC.

### Biography

Itee Pootoogook (born 1951, Kimmirut on Southern Baffin Island) is from the third generation of a famed family of artists from Cape Dorset, Nunavut. Pootoogook’s first solo show An Arctic Lens was held in 2010 at Feheley Fine Arts in Toronto. Recent exhibitions include: *Nunannguag: In the Likeness of the Earth*, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario (2009); *Inuit Modern: The Samuel and Esther Sarick Collection*, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2011); *Slow Sight: Itee Pootoogook and Tim Zuck*, MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie, Ontario (2012); and *ON VIEW: Looking at Looking with Itee Pootoogook*, Marion Scott/ Kardosh Projects, Vancouver (2012). His drawings are held in public collections at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. He is represented by Marion Scott Gallery/Kardosh Projects, Vancouver and Feheley Fine Arts, Toronto.



A drawing of a one-story building with panel siding rises above a blank, snowy ground. The siding is teal green except for a section in the middle where it is marked with brown, orange and black. 

thumbnail_00-HEADER-Pootoogook.jpg

00-HEADER-Pootoogook.jpg

Multiple drawings by Itee Pootoogook hang on the walls of a gallery. In total, twelve framed drawings are visible in this photo. Several of these drawings show buildings standing in natural landscapes.

thumbnail_01-IteePootoogook-CAG-2013.jpg

01-IteePootoogook-CAG-2013.jpg

Multiple drawings by Itee Pootoogookhang on gallery walls. Nine framed works are visible in this photograph. Several depict doorways, with others focusing on abstract landscapes.

thumbnail_02-IteePootoogook-CAG-2013.jpg

02-IteePootoogook-CAG-2013.jpg

Multiple drawings by Itee Pootoogook hang on gallery walls. Six framed works are visible in this photograph. They depict built structures and natural landscapes. 

thumbnail_03-IteePootoogook-CAG-2013.jpg

03-IteePootoogook-CAG-2013.jpg

Multiple drawings by Itee Pootoogook hang on gallery walls. Seven framed works are visible in this photograph. Several of them depict buildings in snowy landscapes. 

thumbnail_04-IteePootoogook-CAG-2013.jpg

04-IteePootoogook-CAG-2013.jpg

An abstract landscape drawing in vinyl by Itee Pootoogook is installed on the glass facade of Yaletown-Roundhouse station. Wavy forms resembling cloud, hill and sky formations dominate the drawing.

thumbnail_05-IteePootoogook-Station-2013.jpg

05-IteePootoogook-Station-2013.jpg

thumbnail_06-IteePootoogook-Station-2013.jpg

06-IteePootoogook-Station-2013.jpg

Buildings and Land

Nancy Holt

Nancy Holt is one of the leading artists of her generation and a pioneer in conceptual site-specific art, and film and video work. She is one of a group of important international artists who initiated the Land Art movement in the late 1960s. The Contemporary Art Gallery brings together a selection of photographs from 1967 onwards, many seen for the first time, alongside pivotal film works.

Holt deals with themes centering on memory, perception, time, and space. She uses the natural environment as both medium and subject with a focus on the cyclical time of the universe, the daily axial rotation of our planet Earth and its annual orbit around the sun. Photography has always played a central role within her work, both as a way of engaging with the landscape and as a way of documenting site-specific projects.

This exhibition includes major photographic pieces, including early work such as *Concrete Visions* (1967); *Trail Markers* (1969), an important project made on Dartmoor while visiting the UK with the artist Robert Smithson over forty years ago; a series of photographs entitled *Light and Shadow Photo-Drawings* (1978); and photographs by Holt of her most famous work, *Sun Tunnels* (1973–76); among others. Vancouver itself could not be a more appropriate location for this exhibition, the city renowned for its setting within magnificent natural surroundings, the ongoing photographic legacies in picturing within international visual arts practice, and also being the site for the seminal *Glue Pour* (1970) by Robert Smithson, Holt’s late husband.

### Biography

Nancy Holt was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1938 and currently lives and works in Galisteo, New Mexico. She has received five National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two New York Creative Artist Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of South Florida, Tampa.

Holt has produced site-specific environmental works in numerous public places around the world including Sun Tunnels in northwestern Utah, USA; *Stone Enclosure (Rock Rings)* in Bellingham, USA; *Astral Grating* in a New York City subway station, and *Dark Star Park*, in Arlington, USA, among many others. She has also completed large-scale land reclamation projects including *Sky Mound* (1988) in the *New Jersey Meadowlands*, and *Up and Under* (1998) in Nokia, Finland. Holt’s works, including her films and videos, have been seen in exhibitions at major institutions internationally including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; New Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; and Dia Center for the Arts, New York.

In 2010, Columbia University’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery in New York held the major retrospective exhibition *Nancy Holt: Sightlines*. It then travelled throughout 2010-13 including Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago; Tufts University Art Gallery at The Aidekman Arts Center, Medford, USA; Santa Fe Arts Institute; and Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City. The exhibition was accompanied by an extensive monograph of the same name edited by Alena J. Williams.


ProgramGuideSpring2013.pdf

An abstract black and white image depicting two semi circles of light on a dark background. 

thumbnail_Holt-Light_Shadow-30x19.5-10.jpg

Holt-Light_Shadow-30x19.5-10.jpg

Mounted on a lobby wall, near the entrance to a gallery, is a square-shaped photograph depicting a green landscape as seen through a small tunnel.

thumbnail_01-NancyHolt-2013.jpg

01-NancyHolt-2013.jpg

A set of eight black and white abstract photographs are mounted on a gallery wall. Two framed, photographic works are mounted on the adjacent, left-hand wall.

thumbnail_02-NancyHolt-2013.jpg

02-NancyHolt-2013.jpg

Two photographic works on a gallery wall. In one frame, two photographs of the same person lying on a concrete structure. In the other, a series of 16 photographs of one person walking on a beach.

thumbnail_03-NancyHolt-2013.jpg

03-NancyHolt-2013.jpg

Three, framed black and white photographic works mounted on a gallery wall. In front of the wall, a glass vitrine displays a series of works on paper.

thumbnail_04-NancyHolt-2013.jpg

04-NancyHolt-2013.jpg

A series of black and white abstract photographs are installed on a wall. A single-channel video of a landscape is projected on the other wall.

thumbnail_05-NancyHolt-2013.jpg

05-NancyHolt-2013.jpg

Selected Photo and Film Works

Erin Shirreff

Erin Shirreff’s solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery will be the first presentation dedicated exclusively to the artist’s film and video work. It may seem a somewhat unexpected focus given Shirreff’s definition of herself as a sculptor. And yet her investigation into the language and perception of materiality has less to do with the presentation of physical objects than specifically to that of our experience of forms — how sharing the same space with a “thing” varies from looking at its representation.

Shirreff is known for reproducing sculpture as images or making sculpture that distills the essence of a photograph, playing these two elements against one another as a means to prompt and test the viewer’s response. In *Knives* (2008) for example, she modeled a variety of knife-like forms from Plasticine, subsequently presenting them as a series of black and white photographs; her most recent sculptures made from ash and cement resemble photographs, their surfaces giving way to reveal themselves as planes an inch thick as we move around them.

Such preoccupation with the properties and potency of sculpture in relation to photographic reproduction grew out of Shirreff’s consideration of the work of Tony Smith; *New Piece* from 1966 made from black painted steel, in particular held a fascination, so much so that she made a pilgrimage to see it in person. Her actual experience of the work however revealed an unexpected level of engagement, making her question the limitations of sculpture as well as her own abilities as a viewer. She comments, “It left me wondering whether the encounter, sharing the same material space as the object, was somehow more difficult, perhaps more intimidating, complicated, or somehow overwhelming, and that I didn’t equal it. What was clear was that I wasn’t able to let myself be as absorbed into the physical encounter as I was by the experience of the image. That remove offered by the reproduction opened up this contemplative space.”

Each of the four works presented at the Contemporary Art Gallery focus on an image of a building, sculpture or landscape and seek to similarly evoke such a quality. Typically these silent videos are made from subtle combinations of stills or, in the case of *Sculpture Park (Tony Smith)*, by the camera panning across a static object. The original images are further transformed by simple means such as the tracking of daylight across their surfaces, by modifications through colour alterations or other such analogue effects. Changes can also play with the illusion of three dimensions as the pieces unfold. *Lake* uses an image of Lake Okanagan in B.C. where Shirreff grew up and her family still lives, the picture taken from an early 1980s tourism magazine. For this work Shirreff re-photographed the original image many times sequencing these as a series of stills, deploying subtle shifts in colour and light to alter the original hand-painted quality.

These nuanced adjustments appear in all of Shirreff’s videos. Some modifications highlight the qualities of the original photograph, revealing dust on its surface or illuminating the glossy quality of the paper, reinforcing its status as object. In drawing attention to the material properties of the initial image used, Shirreff builds a tension between the subject and the formal values of its representation. Whether it is a photograph of a Medardo Rosso sculpture from 1896 or the United Nations Building in New York, the thing or scene being represented is no longer the point of focus. Shirreff challenges our understanding of the nature of images themselves, their intrinsic qualities and our encounter with them.

The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa and Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, collectively marking the first comprehensive exhibition of Shirreff’s work in Canada.

### Biography

Erin Shirreff was born in Kelowna, British Columbia in 1975. She graduated with a BFA from the University of Victoria (1998) and an MFA from Yale University (2005). She currently lives and works in New York City. Shirreff has had solo exhibitions internationally in Madrid, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, London, and Vancouver. Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions such as *Standing Shadows,* Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid (2012); *Science on the back end*, Hauser & Wirth, New York (2012); *Le silence. Une fiction*, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (2012); *Today*, Lisa Cooley, New York (2012); *The Locker Plant*, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, USA (2011); *A Promise is a Cloud*, Public Art Fund, MetroTech Center, Brooklyn (2011); *The Anxiety of Photography*, Aspen Art Museum (2011); *Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography*, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2010); *Greater New York*, MoMA PS1, Queens (2010); *S-N-W-O*, Drei Raum für Gegenwartskunst, Cologne (2010); *The Fifth Genre: Considering the Contemporary Still Life*, Galerie Lelong, New York (2010); *I am not so different*, Art Palace Gallery, Austin (2009); *Dark Fair*, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2009); and *Creswell Crags*, Lisa Cooley, New York (2008). Her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Guggenheim. She is represented by Lisa Cooley, New York.



An image of a hilly, rocky landscape dotted with evergreen trees surrounding a blue lake. 

thumbnail_00-HEADER-Shirreff .jpg

00-HEADER-Shirreff .jpg

A single-channel video is projected on a large screen in a gallery. The screen is installed at an angle, jutting out to the right from the wall. On screen, a city skyline rises above a body of water.

thumbnail_01-ErinShirreff-2013.jpg

01-ErinShirreff-2013.jpg

A single-channel video is projected on a gallery wall. The video depicts a hilly, rocky landscape dotted with evergreen trees surrounding a blue lake. 

thumbnail_02-ErinShirreff-2013.jpg

02-ErinShirreff-2013.jpg

thumbnail_03-ErinShirreff-2013.jpg

03-ErinShirreff-2013.jpg

A  single-channel video plays on a monitor mounted vertically on a gallery way. The video depicts an oval sculpture on a plinth in soft lightning, revealing a textured surface.

thumbnail_04-ErinShirreff-2013.jpg

04-ErinShirreff-2013.jpg

Pictures

Ciprian Mureșan

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo institutional exhibition in North America for Romanian artist Ciprian Mureșan.

Artistic and literary works are the starting point for Mureșan who appropriates them in a reflective project that intersects with the recent history of Romania and other Eastern European countries and, more generally, ponders the realities of the contemporary world. Included in the show are two newly commissioned pieces by the Contemporary Art Gallery with our partners FRAC Champagne-Ardenne and Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva: an installation, *Recycled Playground*, which gives the exhibition its title and overarching tone, and a companion video *Protesting Against Myself*. A selection of other significant works is also presented. Juggling humour and critique, the artist highlights the structures and processes of all forms of power.

Mureșan’s videos, drawings and installations often reuse iconic works of art or literature, re-contextualized to present an ironic take on the governing ideologies and power structures at large, whether political, social or economic. Through characteristic dark humour, Mureșan evokes the realities of present day societies, their ambivalence toward recent history and political change with consequent loss of traditions and local products, and a broader Eastern European fascination with the cultures of the West. *Protesting Against Myself* (2011) is a 30-minute video compiled from short scenes filmed in a dumpster which improvises as a stage for a puppet show. While the conversation between the two characters centres on revolt and protest in the very specific context of Romania since the fall of Ceausescu, its implications on the current state of global politics are all too easily understood.

*Recycled Playground* (2011) was inspired by the rusting remains of a train the artist saw daily in an abandoned park in Cluj-Napoca where he lives and works. Here the piece conjures a childhood fantasy to create a train set which is at once disenchanted and tinged with melancholy comprising as it does three garbage cans trundling around the gallery room. Similarly suggestive of an end to optimism is the photograph, *Leap into the Void, After Three Seconds* (2004), a remake of Yves Klein’s *Saut dans le vide* (1960). However instead of showing Klein mid-air, arms outstretched, Mureșan’s version shows the artist lying flat on the ground in a Cluj street.

While the actual situation in Eastern European countries is a starting point, it is one that forms a far-ranging reflection on a contemporary world characterized by a demise of utopian thinking and the domination of models of entertainment — a consensual, globalized culture of consumption. With reference to such forms, humour and play become the vehicles for the propositions within Mureșan’s work. *The Second Invasion from Mars* (2010) comprises a table of 21 books by authors such as Homer, Artaud, Kafka, and Kundera. Inserted into each book is a drawing inspired by the science fiction story from 1967 of the same title by writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Now regarded as a parable of the Soviet system, the story dissects the mechanisms of totalitarianism with a wry wit parallel to that of Mureșan. In many works within the exhibition, the central figure of a child is pictured or evoked. *Choose* (2005) is one such video, a short 45 seconds looped. The artist’s son is pictured deliberating on Pepsi and Coca-Cola, a damning depiction on ongoing transformation, branding and consumption. The young boy becomes a metaphor for an almost ambient reception of certain dominant ideology, a symptom of contemporary life of increasingly standardized thought and homogeneity of identity.

This exhibition has been organized in collaboration with FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, France and the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland.

### Biography

Ciprian Mureșan was born in Dej, Romania and lives and works in Cluj-Napoca. Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Hussenot, Paris; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, France; David Nolan Gallery, New York; *Incorrigible Believers*, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; *The Unbelonging*, Prometeo Gallery, Lucca and Milan; *How I Wonder What You Are*, Plan B, Berlin; and Wilkinson Gallery, London. Group exhibitions include *Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies* in Contemporary Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; *European Travellers*, Mucsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest; *Never odd or even – a text spaced exhibition*, Museet for Samtidskunst / Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark; *Rearview Mirror: New Art from Central & Eastern Europe*, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton and The Power Plant, Toronto; *Rewriting Worlds: Dada Moscow*, The 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art;* After the Fall*, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, USA; *The Seductiveness of the Interval*, The Renaissance Society, Chicago; 17th Sydney Biennale; *The Generational: Younger Than Jesus*, New Museum, New York; 53rd Venice Biennale; *Where the East Ends*, Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, Germany; *Monument to Transformation, Fragment #7: Communism Never Happened/ Vocabulary*, Tranzit, Bratislava, Slovakia; *Dada East? Romanian Context of Dadaism*, Zacheta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; *Signals: A Video Showcase – Mash Up*, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, USA; and *Fusion // Confusion*, Museum Folkwang Essen, Germany. He is represented by Plan B, Cluj/ Berlin, Andreiana Mihail Gallery, Bucharest, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles and David Nolan Gallery, New York.



ProgramGuideWinter2013.pdf

A close view of many small graphite drawings hung in a grid. Each drawing is the same depicting an interior view containing chairs, tables, ladders and other furniture.

thumbnail_00-HEADER-Muresan.jpg

00-HEADER-Muresan.jpg

Five garbage bins are connected via metal train couplers. A pair of tires are attached to the bottom of each bin to make them mobile. They align on a black rail built inside a gallery space.