 Shimabuku

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first large-scale survey exhibition in North America of work by renowned Japanese artist Shimabuku. Demonstrating the breadth of the artist’s practice, *When Sky Was Sea* reveals an essential correspondence to things elsewhere in a wider world, insisting on our grasp of the continuity that exists between art and (non-art) life. As he travels the world, interacting with strangers, and conversing with nature, Shimabuku instigates moments of poetry, humour and surprise.

Including pieces dating back to the mid-1990s, when he first emerged as an artist in Japan, through to presenting a wide variety of more recent work for which he has since become internationally celebrated, the exhibition exemplifies an extraordinary curiosity and freedom of expression. Shimabuku uses installation, video, photography, drawings, sculpture, and events alike to convey his intense fascination with the natural world — equally the animal and vegetable realms — and the countless manifestations of human culture within it. His artistic proposition is essentially one of storytelling and discovery. He encourages us to assume an “alien” identity whereby we break with established habits of perception and enjoy experiences as if they are happening to us for the first time.

From the beginning, incongruity has characterised much of Shimabuku’s work, seen in early performances such as *Tour of Europe with One Eyebrow Shaved* (1991) or *Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere* (1994), the gentle surrealism of the works compelling. Shimabuku is not so interested in discovering the reasons why, instead preoccupied, through a joyful approach, with unions of myth or mystery and the everyday. This is epitomized by *Something that Floats / Something that Sinks* (2008), a work through which the artist draws our attention to the fact that some pieces of fruit and vegetables float in water or appear to swim, while others sink. It is wonderful and ostensibly miraculous.

The inversion of the way things are conventionally seen to be is crucial to Shimabuku’s practice. He is interested in what is normal being made strange and often picks up the theme of the journey in his work, the means by which difference occurs through translation in both time and space. The photograph *Cucumber Journey* (2000) commemorates a two-week performance travelling slowly north on British canals while learning to pickle vegetables. He has stated, “I think cooking and art are similar. They are both about unexpected meetings of far-away ingredients, to create something delicious, something good.” In his video *Then, I decided to give a tour of Tokyo to the octopus from Akashi* (2000) we see him with an octopus in a fishtank taking a Shinkansen train to Tokyo. There they make touristic visits to the Tokyo Tower and the famous Tsukiji fish market before getting back on the train for a return trip so that the octopus can be submerged again, back home in the Akashi Sea. The artist refers to this work as his Apollo project, involving as it did an adventure far from the natural habitat of the octopus — the fishtank being the equivalent of a spacecraft — isolated from the surrounding atmosphere so that the octopus could survive its voyage into unfamiliarity. We easily imagine how weird our world must have seemed to the octopus whilst being reminded of how “wonderful” such a creature is from our point of view.

The involvement of others, not only in the consumption but also the production of his work, marks Shimabuku out as a major figure in the recent development of relational art practice. He has produced many events, interventions and performances that are very open to audiences, to the point that they become active participants. *When the Earth Turned to Sea* (2002) requires dozens of volunteers to fly Chinese fish kites, the result is a shoal of fish in the sky — or a flock of fish — and so the world is turned upside down. *Passing through the rubber band* (2000), similarly invites gallery visitors to step through the stretching loops, a simple act of fun and wonder via the most modest of means, as in all of his works the marvellous emerges from the mundane.

The exhibition is complementary to and produced in partnership with Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland.

### Biography

Shimabuku (1969, born in Kobe, Japan) lives and works in Berlin. Selected solo exhibitions include Flying Me, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Something that Floats/Something that Sinks, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Noto, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Man should try to avoid contact with alien life forms, Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’Île de Vassivière, France; On the water, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; DAAD galerie, Berlin; Swansea Jack Memorial Dog Swimming Competition, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery; Then, I Decided To Give a Tour of Tokyo To the Octopus From Akashi, Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris; and America, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art.

He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including *The Great Acceleration*, Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2014); *Aquatopia*, Tate St. Ives and Nottingham Contemporary, UK; *Re:emerge*, Sharjah Biennial 11, UAE (2013); *Mount Fuji does not exist*, Frac Île de France – Le Plateau, Paris (2012); *Impossible Community*, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2011); *Eating the Universe: Food in Art*, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2009); *Experimenta FOLKLORE*, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany (2008); *Beautiful New World: Contemporary Visual Culture from Japan*, Long March Project, Beijing (2007); *How to live together*, 27th Bienal de São Paulo; *Berlin-Tokyo Tokyo-Berlin*, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; *International 06*, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2006); *Expat-Art Centre*, ICA, London + Musee d'Art Contemporain, Lyon, France (2004); *Utopia Station*, 50th Venice Biennale (2003); *Facts of Life*, Hayward Gallery, London (2001); *Elysian Fields*, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2000); *Space*, Witte de With, Rotterdam (1999); and *Everyday*, 11th Biennale of Sydney (1998). Shimabuku is represented by Nogueras Blanchard Gallery, Barcelona and Madrid; Air de Paris galerie d’art contemporain, Paris; and Barbara Wien Wilma Lukatsch Gallery, Berlin.




ProgramGuideShimabuku+Klingberg2014.pdf

An image of people standing on a grassy landscape flying orange fish-shaped kites on a sunny date. The sky is bright blue, taking up most of the image. 

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A monitor on a gallery wall plays a single-channel video piece. A person wearing a black jacket flies above a beach in the blue sky as if they were a kite.

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Thirteen narrow vases, which are used to trap octopuses in Japan, are placed on a large white pedestal in a gallery. A monitor plays a video of the artist using one of these traps on a boat.

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Multiple artworks installed in a gallery space. Ten framed documents, typed in blue on white sheets of paper, are mounted on a gallery wall. Small objects are displayed in two vitrines.

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A single-channel video is projected on a gallery wall. In the video, an octopus is on a green surface, surrounded by seafood-packing supplies.

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In an alcove under a flight of stairs, a monitor plays a single channel video of Shimabuku chasing pigeons. A framed, two-dimensional artwork is installed on the wall. 

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Four metal bowls are installed on low, white plinths in front of a wall. All of the bowls contain water. There are objects, including oranges and apples, in each bowl. 

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Three framed, colour photographs are installed on adjacent gallery walls. Each is an outdoor scene. A framed text is installed to the left of each photograph.

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When Sky Was Sea

Shimabuku

Gunilla Klingberg

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first Canadian solo presentation of work by Swedish artist Gunilla Klingberg: two new interrelated large-scale commissions across the gallery façade and offsite, both challenging and exploiting the opportunities presented at each location.

Klingberg’s practice is characterized by the intersection of received knowledge, folk beliefs, popular culture, and divergent cultural activities. Her work draws our attention to how complicated the connections between these systems are, but it also plays with the things that arise in this encounter, a pivotal feature being an interest in what is produced by the hybridization of distinct cultures, traditions and geographies. The disparate and heterogeneous are interwoven creating meanings that mutate to form a new context.

At the gallery and Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, two patterned murals appear to evoke cosmic mandalas, transforming the individual spaces and enveloping the viewer in light and colour, shifting patterns and reflections. Klingberg’s work surrounds us. We are seduced, made part of a special atmosphere, immersed within the work rather than just looking at it. Her interest in using patterns and movement to manipulate our seeing, to influence our state of consciousness and our sensory impressions, has links with Op Art and the psychedelic movement of the late sixties, appropriate touchstones in the recent history of the counterculture in this part of the world.

However, what at first glance appears to recall a certain set of values and moments in time has another dimension, a different shared experience. If we look more closely we see that the intricate ornamentation, the symmetrically repeated symbols of these murals, is made up of something much more mainstream: corporate logos from Canadian low-cost and high-street stores. Concepts are intertwined: while science might appropriate metaphors from mythologies or New-Age ideas borrow from the language of the natural sciences, here spirituality merges with everyday consumer culture. Klingberg suggests that they are analogous, that both seem to promise the same thing: a state in which nothing is uncomfortable or threatening—the possibility of total, rapid satisfaction of our needs and desires, accessible to everyone. The images are so familiar that we no longer think about them, yet they present a subconscious influence uniting us in a no-man’s land between the public and the private. She evokes a spirit of community, or of commonality, and poses questions regarding what it would be to have something in common.

Amid the proliferation of progressively similar goods it is the small, meaningful differences that count. The world around us is increasingly transformed into a surface filled with signs — computer screens, urban space, advertisements, the pages of newspapers — the most tangible properties being disposability and change. It is these surfaces that concern Klingberg. Our urban environment, its dwindling public places increasingly invaded by homogenous architecture and development, the objects we own, all constitute an intricate system of codes, messages and ideologies, our choices and participation tantamount to consuming. The boundary between art and design is often drawn along the line of utility and usefulness. But the edge becomes increasingly elastic when the difference between the values of these forms depends not so much on their functionality as on their seductiveness or power of rhetorical persuasion. Thus Klingberg’s work moves further than a mere critique of brand fetishism, the lure of contemporary global labels, beyond just pointing things out and rejecting them. It poses the awkward question of whether being alternative to a mainstream or on the “outside” is any longer possible. Might a more critical and appropriate assessment lie in revealing and acknowledging the subtle and insidious way in which we are all drawn into a sense of fascination with the things that surround us. Through her work we find ourselves in a situation in which we feel the power of images and beliefs being examined. We are all complicit.

The exhibition is supported by Iaspis, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists. At Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, work is presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC.

### Biography

Gunilla Klingberg lives and works in Stockholm and Berlin. Solo exhibitions include Malmö Konsthall; Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin; Rice Gallery, Houston; Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK; Kulturhuset, Stockholm; Skellefteå Konsthall, Sweden; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Zeppelin University, Germany; KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; and Index, Stockholm. She also has participated in several group exhibitions including *A Modern Panarion: Glimpses of Occultism in Dublin*, Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Ireland (2014); *Sense and Sustainability*, the first biennial of art, nature and urbanism, Urdaibai Natural Reserve, Bermeo, Spain; *Abstract Possible*, Museo Tamayo Mexico City; *Currency*, The Visual Arts Gallery, University of Alabama, Birmingham, USA (2011); *Hypocrisy: The Sitespecificity of Morality*, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (2009); *Far West*, Turner Contemporary, Margate and Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2008); 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007); *Altered, Stitched and Gathered*, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, New York; Busan Biennial, Busan (2006); *What Business Are You In*, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, USA (2005); *ReShape!* (with Peter Geschwind), Venice Biennale (2003); *Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture*, Tate Liverpool; Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2002); New Delhi Triennale, India (2001); *All you can eat*, Galerie für Zeitgenössische kunst Leipzig, Germany; *Personal Brandscape*, Migros Museum, Zürich; *What If – Art on the verge of architecture and design*, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2000). She is represented Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm and Berlin.



ProgramGuideFall2014.pdf

Detail image of Gunilla Klingberg’s artwork installed on Yaletown-Roundhouse station’s facade. A grey, mandala-like pattern of cut vinyl covers a window. A mouse-like figure can be seen in the pattern.

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Image of Gunilla Klingberg’s work installed at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. An orange mandala-like pattern in vinyl covers the large glass windows of the station’s facade.

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Exterior image of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, with the station windows installed with Gunilla Klingberg’s work. A dark orange mandala-like pattern of cut vinyl covers the windows.

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Exterior image of CAG’s facade, with all of the windows installed with Gunilla Klingberg’s work. A dark orange pattern in cut vinyl covers the windows on both floors. 

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Detail image of four exterior windows at CAG installed with a pattern by Gunilla Klingberg in orange cut vinyl. Logos of companies such as DOLLARAMA and Canadian Tire are incorporated into the design.

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Exterior view of CAG’s front entrance installed with a pattern in cut-vinyl by Gunilla Klingberg. Covering the entirety of the doors, close inspection reveals that the pattern is made of brand logos.

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Brand New View (Vancouver)

Jürgen Partenheimer

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Canada of work by acclaimed German artist Jürgen Partenheimer. Reflecting the diversity of the artist’s practice, the exhibition comprises works on paper, text, printmaking, ceramics, and sculpture, much of it produced in Vancouver in spring 2014 during his recent residency as the Audain Distinguished Artist-in-Residence, hosted by Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Partenheimer’s work is essentially abstract; his drawings and paintings, caught seemingly on the verge of dissolution, are remarkable for their fragile beauty, whilst sculpture and ceramic work, suggesting some usefulness, remain elusive with respect to any specific function. His artistic proposition is philosophical, encouraging us to challenge the distinction normally made between reality and imagination. Drawing is used as a means to suggest new pictorial space, linking our experience of place through mapping and gesture, through mark-making. His visual language, the particular form of poetic abstraction, creates a system of open, meditative boundaries. As such this conceptual approach, his life-long interest in notions of representation and his thoughtful, meticulous consideration of locality, space and place, suggest a key resonance with artistic practice in the city, asserting continuity between these forms and an experience of daily life.

The conceptual framework for the exhibition is “the archive” as the artist’s physical and mental “storage,” uniting the remembered and the present, as well as individual and cultural memory. Just as the publicly institutionalized archive is a medium of memory, a place to which cultural works are entrusted, human memory is an archive that constantly creates new relational meanings from changing perspectives. The imaginary archive that gives the exhibition and associated book its title has at its disposal the visually experienced basis of a materially tangible and visually representable inventory: it is based on the oeuvre of the artist, on works that were created in different places, are currently part of public or private collections, and form meaningful relationships between people and spaces. At the same time, artworks as “archival materials” are clearly more than mere repositories of information. They are the visible expression of both intellect and emotion; they carry traces of their process of creation and their temporality and correspond with other objects, whether through their motif or the context of their creation. To this end, in Vancouver the exhibition has a subtitle, *The Raven Diaries*, referencing the symbol and characteristics of the Raven to west coast First Nations culture, while simultaneously drawing analogies to similar figures in cultural myths elsewhere in the world, and especially to the role of the artist as trickster, representative of a catalyst for change in life, for wisdom, creativity and humour.

Partenheimer’s unique approach to art-making opens new possibilities of understanding an essential interconnectivity between disciplines and fields of thought, insight into the permeability of abstraction into daily life, as well as offering a consideration into how art can incorporate audiences in its very structure. His work is abstract while suggestive of other tangible forms; historical yet refreshingly contemporary; intimate yet public and oscillating within these seeming dualities Partenheimer produces layered, poetic works that speak to social systems of communication and expression while acknowledging the specificity of place.

Alongside the exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, we have worked in partnership with the Museum of Anthropology. In their Koerner European Ceramics Gallery, housing a unique 600-piece collection of sixteenth to nineteenth-century European ceramics, we present two recent works by Partenheimer. These porcelain vessels are part of an extensive series of forms made in 2013 at the Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg, Munich, Germany, as part of their annual invitation to a contemporary artist to work with the factory and skilled artisans to produce a body of new work. Seen here juxtaposed with objects from the same manufacture but of a different time, they provide a counterpoint to the historical collections, connecting us back to a space of the imagination through the perception of the world of things.

Four institutions joined together in a partnership showing various aspects of Partenheimer’s work: the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich; the Falckenberg Collection, Deichtorhallen Hamburg; the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag; and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. All four exhibitions have independent installation concepts related to their locations and spaces, and open up various subjective and reflexive realms of experience to visitors. The accompanying book provides a “fifth space” where through a series of commissioned essays, philosophers, historians, artists and poets, reflect on the multi-faceted nature of Partenheimer’s work through an examination of ideas and themes present in his practice.

The exhibition is generously supported by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill, and the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Vancouver. With assistance from Niki Design and Glass Studio Inc., North Vancouver.

### Biography

Jürgen Partenheimer (1947, born in Munich, Germany) participated in the XI Paris Biennial, XVI Biennial in São Paulo and XLII Venice Biennial, leading to the inclusion in exhibitions among others at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Singapore Art Museum; Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; Fundació Miró, Barcelona; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Nationalgalerie, Berlin. In 2000, Partenheimer was the first contemporary German artist to whom the China National Gallery of Art in Beijing and the Nanjing Museum in Nanjing dedicated a comprehensive retrospective. Important one person exhibitions include the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; S.M.A.K. Ghent, Belgium; IVAM, Valencia; CGAC-Centro Galego de Arte Contemporànea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany; Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt; Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo; and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

Awards, grants and residencies include the Art Critics’ Prize of Madrid, Spain; the National Endowment of the Arts Award, New York; Arteleku Grant, Basque Ministry of Culture, San Sebastian; the Grand Prize for Visual Art, Germany; the Federal Cross of Merit of Germany for outstanding international achievement; Copan, Artist-in-Residence Award, São Paulo, Brazil; the Nietzsche Grant, Artist-in-Residence, Sils-Maria, Switzerland; Guest of Honour Residency at the German Academy, Villa Massimo in Rome and the Nirox Foundation residency award, Johannesburg, South Africa.

His work has been widely published internationally. Among others, monographs include *Cantos*, Amsterdam (1997); *Fragments*, Karlsruhe, Germany (1998); *Cantos y otras mentiras / songs and other lies*, Valencia (1999); *CrossMapping*, Beijing (2000); *Architecture-Sculpture*, The Hague (2001); *La robe des choses*, Ghent, Belgium, (2002); *Suave Loucura-Gentle Madness*, São Paulo (2005); *Roma-São Paulo Drawings and Copan* Diary, São Paulo (2007); *Metaphysical Landscape*, Basel (2007); *Discontinuity, Paradox and Precision*, Birmingham, UK/Bonn, Germany (2008); *Lemke*, Berlin (2011); *Seeds & Tracks and Folded Spirits*, Cologne (2012); Kalliope, Munich/Cologne (2013).



 A white ceramic vase painted with then orange, black and grey lines. The vase has a bulbous bottom and geometric neck. 

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Multiple two-dimensional artworks are installed in a gallery space, including drawings and watercolour paintings. Several pieces are placed on a large plinth situated in the middle of the gallery.

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Multiple two-dimensional artworks are installed in a gallery space, including drawings and watercolour paintings. Several pieces are placed on a large plinth in front of a wall. 

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Jürgen Partenheimer’s artworks installed in a gallery space. A black, cube-like sculpture is installed on a low white plinth. Two abstract, watercolour paintings are installed on the wall behind.

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Drawings and paintings by Jürgen Partenheimer installed on two gallery walls. One is a black, abstract watercolour painting with several white and orange oval shapes.

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The Archive – The Raven Diaries

Kelly Richardson

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a survey exhibition of work by Canadian artist Kelly Richardson, best known for her immersive projection works which create environments prompting a questioning of our relationship to the natural world.

The universe Richardson constructs can seem somewhat bleak, devoid of all but the strangest forms of life, and notionally touching upon issues within ecological discussion and environmental debate. Yet if we consider nature not as omniscient, but mediated, appropriated, subjugated, and vulnerable, then by examining any simple concept of the “natural,” Richardson actually makes the interrogation even more urgent. Immense and unsettling projections show animated scenes of primordial swamps or forests, desolate moonscapes or eerie holographic trees flickering in and out of view. And yet the videos are open-ended, drawing us in to develop our own narratives for these unsettling scenes, which could be humanity’s last attempt at caring for a ruined planet. Even though she leaves the questions unanswered, it’s clear that she is suggesting we should project farther into the future than we’re comfortable doing, a quality enhanced in understanding how these works are made. A particular quality in Richardson’s videos — in addition to technical facility and her embrace of beauty as a way to prime us about the disturbing undercurrents snaking through her otherwise seductive work — is the way she seems to look back from the future.

The exhibition comprises a selection of recent major projections and photographs. In the large-scale, multi-screen installation of *Leviathan* (2011) we are confronted with an all-encompassing projection. Through the image and its reflections on walls and floors, it occupies or rather infiltrates the space, implicating us as audience as we simultaneously behold and are contained within the image. It asserts itself, with its Biblical title, as suggestive of some kind of apocalyptic flood, the swirling water appearing to almost envelop and swallow up the viewer. The works too are in many other ways absorbing; they elicit a terrible beauty through the seduction of surface.  And yet this slow, churning motion becomes almost hypnotic, a narcotic mesmerizing image, an illusion perhaps not at odds with the evocation of a notional poisonous or toxic liquid; a substance that is at once of our world but at the same time transforming, of becoming somewhere else.

Richardson’s work touches also on the notion of the sublime, that mixture of awe, hope and fear that reveals something uncomfortable about the depth and darkness of human desire. While technically pristine, in part through the process of computer manipulation and invention of form, her work has precedents in sources as seemingly disparate as the romantic landscape paintings of the late eighteenth century or the B-horror and science-fiction films of the 1970s and 80s. She has stated: “I’m interested in that contradiction at this critical time in human history when current predictions for our future are not just unsettling, but terrifying.”

The notion of the artificial is brought to bear in contemplation of what might be considered natural, in part reinforced by the visual polish of the moving images, which reach the point where most viewers are unable to distinguish between what is real and what is computer-generated. In *Orion Tide* (2013), we see rocks and foliage littering the ground, convincing us of some form of scrub land. Then an eerie, distant sound warns us of that which follows, the slow eruption of a lit pod from the surface. Trails of flame and smoke lead the eye up through the dark sky and then out of sight, followed by another and another and another. Are they escape pods — final humans abandoning all hope — or are they a death rattle of a dying planet? Richardson deftly avoids simplistic environmental and sci-fi cliché with a painterly sense of narrative mystery.

The exhibition is developed in collaboration with the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, UK; Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, UK; Towner, Eastbourne, UK and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

### Biography

Kelly Richardson was born in Burlington, Ontario, living and working in the north-east of England since 2003. Selected solo exhibitions include: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo and Towner, Eastbourne, UK (2013); Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge and Artpace, San Antonio, USA (2011); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2009) and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax (2004). Various group exhibitions include Kulturhuset Stockholm (2012); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2011); Museum London, Ontario; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2010); *The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image – Dreams*,(2008) and CaixaForum, Barcelona (2011); the Pompidou Centre, Paris (2002), among others. In addition she has been a part of various film festivals and biennales such as *New Frontier on Main*, Sundance Film Festival,  Utah (2009); *Constellations*, Beijing 798 Biennale, Beijing (2009); Busan Biennale (2008) and *A grain of dust, a drop of water*, Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2004). She is represented by Birch Contemporary, Toronto.




ProgramGuideSummer2014.pdf

An image depicting a forest of dark trees which appear to be standing in a glowing body of water. 

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A pair of Kelly Richardson’s photographs are installed side by side on the gallery wall. The images depict blue trees glowing in the night on a rocky landscape. 

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A two-channel video is projected in the corner of a gallery on large screens installed perpendicular to one another. The video depicts trees in a forest. 

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A single-channel video is projected on a gallery wall. The video depicts objects launching from a desert landscape into a starry night sky, only their path of light and smoke is visible.

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Legion

Stefan Brüggemann

*Headlines & Last Lines in the Movies* transforms the façade of the Contemporary Art Gallery, wooden cladding covering its frontage and south east corner. Resembling a construction site, the structure becomes the ground for the work; the title a precise description of itself.

In this new mural, Brüggemann wrote headlines from current newspapers, from local to global, in combination with excerpts of last lines from popular films. “Forget it Jake, its Chinatown” could be spray-painted next to “Enbridge Pipeline Rejected,” the juxtaposition of appropriated texts creating both a familiarity and an oddly appropriate pairing suggestive of narratives that may exist to connect current news items with scripted dialogue. With one text residing in the real, the other in the fictive, in combination they create a barrage of information that Brüggemann unifies into a totality of black text. The overlay forms a graphic field that is only partly legible, language creating an immersive installation that draws colloquial phrases into dense cacophonic arenas. The work seems declaratory, but what it is trying to communicate is drowned out by volume, intensity and opacity.

It is important that Brüggemann makes installations by hand, the time taken to transcribe them becoming a form of personalization, the act of writing as a means to externalize thought. The frenetic appearance might suggest the scrambled notes of someone trying to work through a complex problem or evoke the direct action of a graffiti political protest, the fragmented scribbling formally read as statements that urgently need to be expressed.

Despite the stylistic uniformity, phrases still register as individual fragments with multiple subjects. There is no cohesive meaning beyond the possible realization that a sentence came from either a film or the reporting of current affairs, but the sources, headlines and last lines, both function as summaries. A good headline gives a concise description of what’s in the subsequent article; it captures the reader’s attention, encouraging them to continue reading or more opportunistically to purchase the newspaper. And the last line of a movie can encapsulate what came before it, distilling the narrative into a single line.

“I get to live the rest of my life as a schnook” is a funny and ironic recap of the film *Goodfellas*, but does it still function when dislocated from its original context? Both headlines and last lines notionally represent a greater whole, yet Brüggemann disorients us, his production rendering text that is almost unreadable, questioning the way we encounter information through language. Individual phrases leap out to command our attention as we attempt to read and decipher words, yet the mural is at once like a protest, the many voices of the body politic, conflicting and cancelling each other, just so many things vying for our attention.

### Biography

Stefan Brüggemann works primarily with text; his often humorous work takes a variety of forms from large graphic fields to imitations of bookworks. Solo exhibitions include Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City (2013); Galeria de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City (2011); Villa du Parc, Centre d´Art Contemporain, France (2010); Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2008); Frac Bourgogne, France (2008); I-20 Gallery, New York (2006) and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (1999). He has contributed to various group exhibitions, including *Confusion in the Vault*, Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2013); *An Exhibition (STEFAN BRÜGGEMANN, LAWRENCE WEINER, CAREY YOUNG)*, The Holden Gallery, Manchester Metropolitan University (2013); *Tectonic*, The Moving Museum, DXB Dubai (2013); the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); *Social Sculpture*, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); Museé d´Art Moderne Contemporain, Genéve (2006); *This Peaceful War*, Tramway, Glasgow (2005); and *Myself and My Surroundings*, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (1999). Key texts written on his work include “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Nicolas de Oliveira, and “Twelve Words, Nine Days” by Chris Kraus. He is represented by Yvon Lambert, Paris; Parra Romero Gallery, Madrid and Jonathan Viner, London.


A close up image of overlapping spray-painted words in red and black on a wooden surface. One phrase reads, “GLOBAL PRIVATE WEALTH RISES,” the other is fragmented and reads “HOW DO Y DEFINE IS.” 

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Detail image of plywood boards installed across CAG’s facade windows. Overlapping spray-painted words in red and black cover the boards. One phrase reads, “PROMISE YOU WON’T FORGET ME.” 

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Multiple plywood boards installed on CAG’s facade blocking all the windows. Overlapping spray-painted words in red and black cover the boards. 

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Detail image of plywood boards with multiple overlapping words in red and black spray paint. One phrase reads, “A DEADLY QUAKE IN A SEISMIC HOT ZONE.”

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Multiple plywood boards installed on CAG’s facade blocking all the windows. Overlapping spray-painted words in red and black cover the boards. One phrase reads, “AWKWARD HANDSHAKES.” 

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 Headlines and Last Lines in the Movies

Rossella  Biscotti 

Ed  Atkins    

Shahryar  Nashat

Fabiola Carranza

 Kim Beom

Toril  Johannessen

Duncan Campbell

Maryam Jafri

Edgardo Aragón

Stan  Brakhage

*The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes* is a group exhibition of recent film and video that seeks to interrogate notions of uncertainty within the documentary format. Work by ten artists engages with the conventions of source footage, narrative voice and re-enactment, questioning perceptions of such devices, while also reclaiming them in order to redefine their intent and potential. Not all works critique these characteristics, but each examines the consumption of knowledge and truth, using the body as form and performance as a site, to address where meaning may reside.

The belief in the documentary as an authoritative tool has long been scrutinized, alluded to by the exhibition’s title, a direct referencing of a 1971 Stan Brakhage film shot in a Pittsburgh morgue, his title itself an attempt to literally translate the “autopsy” as shown. Brakhage’s film has a visceral intensity, a sense of the tangible that rests in his presentation of an inanimate figure, the dead body, being acted upon. Even though categorized within the genre of experimental film, it also functions as a candid record.  While in part the filmmaker’s intent was to disrupt readings of his films as mere documents, this work more pointedly plays with presence and absence, the body as both figure and subject. In blurring the ways factual information is conveyed while simultaneously undermining the more usual documentary conventions, Brakhage’s film provides the underpinning for other works in this exhibition.

*Bernadette* (2008) is a portrait of Irish activist Bernadette Devlin, Duncan Campbell using archival footage from the late 1960s and early 1970s to create an indirect account of her political history. Campbell uses out-takes, the moments between interviews seeming to capture a more off-guard Delvin, the “truth” behind the public persona. However such a strategy only serves to heighten our awareness of the mediation of the camera. *A Rock that Learned the Poetry of Jung Jiyong* (2010) by Kim Beom similarly creates a portrait of a historic figure, but through an absurdist gesture, that of asking a professor to teach a rock everything he knows about the Korean modernist poet, Jung Jiyong. The original video lasts over twelve hours, the instructor giving detailed lectures, a saturation of information that Kim enacts in the work’s sheer length, refusing to distill Jung’s life into a digestible format. Rossella Biscotti’s film *The Prison of Santo Stefano* (2013) also offers a portrait of sorts but here of a place. The super-8 film depicts a trip to the prison, the first to be designed specifically to receive people with life sentences. It wanders through graveyards and shows visitors planting flowers as well as documenting the making of several of the artist’s sculptures, and shows rubbings taken from the prison’s stone courtyard, which is another form of recording.

*Avalon* (2011) by Maryam Jafri initially appears as a straightforward documentary about individuals who unknowingly find themselves making paraphernalia for the fetish industry. Yet among a series of interviews, Jafri inserts a staged performance, a re-enactment of a story told by a dominatrix, thus juxtaposing a fictional world with that of the factory, and performativity with production. Toril Johannessen’s *Non-Conservation of Energy (and of Spirits)* (2012) is based on a transcript of a conversation where she interviewed the late Danish physicist Niels Bohr about energy and consciousness through a psychic medium. The performative element in both these works raises questions about the investigative nature of documentary, the information accessed and the methods of inquiry. Subject and format are set against each other, their topics remaining elusive. In contrast, Edgardo Aragón’s *Efectos de Familia (Family Effects)* (2007–09) uses re-enactment to make tangible his family’s violent past. Drug-related incidents are restaged using young male relatives and their friends as actors, the incongruity between what is portrayed and the age of the actors revealing the ongoing impact of the past on the present.

Fabiola Carranza’s *Corrida, 1929* (2013) also collapses different time frames by asserting a physical presence on top of footage from a bullfight in Spain. A screening of *Corrida*, a home-made film by Man Ray shot in 1929, is re-filmed with Carranza tracing the bull and fighter with a flashlight across the surface of the projection. The artist’s gestures can be read as comment on Man Ray’s process, an illustration of his use of the body, light and shadow to make images, and of how we, as audience, read film. This reference to the viewer is also seen in Shahryar Nashat’s *Factor Green* (2011) where a package containing a green object is delivered to a museum under restoration, it is found by an individual who then proceeds to use the form in various ways. At one point it begins to move of its own volition, becoming witness to the workings of the museum itself. A green screen is used in post-production for cinema or television when layering two images together. Here it acts as a poetic surrogate, embodying the potential to represent all that is not seen: the missed histories, misrepresentations and absent visitors.

*A Primer for Cadavers* (2011) brings us full circle. Ed Atkins’ videos deal with the apparent immateriality of computer generated imagery in relation to its precise representations of the physical world, yet links to Brakhage in poetically addressing corporeal reality. Visually and conceptually the physicality of the body provides a primary focus, whether real or conjured in spirit. The documentary as a form of veracity is called into question, for while the undeniable end for us all is pictured, it remains an attempt to delve into the unknowable, a representation that is at once life-like yet completely dead.

*Bernadette* (2008) by Duncan Campbell is presented in collaboration with Western Front and Dim Cinema and will screen in the Grand Luxe Hall at Western Front, 303 8 Ave E, Vancouver from June 26 to June 29.

This exhibition is generously supported by Inform Interiors.



An image depicting the back of a person’s head, with short blonde hair. The person is cast in warm light with rainbows refracting throughout the image. 

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A large screen on a gallery wall in front of a sofa, rugs and chairs. A single-channel video is projected on the screen, depicting the back of a child’s head, with short blonde hair. 

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A large screen on a gallery wall in front of a sofa, rugs and chairs. A single-channel video is projected on the screen, depicting two people in a physical altercation by a chain link fence.

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A large screen on a gallery wall in front of a sofa, rugs and chairs. A single-channel video is projected on the screen, depicting a person standing on a green block between two large oil paintings.

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A monitor on a gallery wall displays a black and white video piece. The video depicts a person in a suit, reading a book, with a rock on a table in front. 

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A single-channel video piece is projected on a gallery wall. The video depicts a figure lying on a flat surface. A hand touches the figure’s head. Two visitors sit on a bench to watch this video.  

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Ed Atkins, Edgardo Aragón, Kim Beom, Rossella Biscotti, Stan Brakhage, Duncan Campbell, Fabiola Carranza, Maryam Jafri, Toril Johannessen, Shahryar Nashat

The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes

Kevin Schmidt

Kevin Schmidt’s solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery presents a survey of recent works including two major new pieces, *EDM House* and *High Altitude Balloon Harmless Amateur Radio Equipment*, both made in 2013.

Schmidt is an artist who has consistently developed a body of work that addresses notions of a displaced spectacle, often within a consideration of the sublime. This ongoing proposition is tackled not so much through exclusive references to landscape, of being awestruck at the point of apprehending such beauty and wilderness, but by juxtaposing seemingly disparate elements within these environments. Works are often situated in remote locations, where Schmidt stages remarkable events which transfer elements of urban culture into untouched natural contexts. In this way, he simultaneously examines both the seductive elements of contemporary cultural production and the constructions that surround the idea of nature.

Commissioned by Fogo Island Arts, *EDM House* was produced by the artist over five months during the winter of 2013, using a small cabin in the interior of British Columbia. An abandoned house in the middle of an isolated winter landscape has its outside festooned with garlands of colourful lights akin to a suburban celebratory display. The building also glows from within; the illuminations synchronized to the rhythm of an electronic beat, creating the illusion of a night club in the middle of a secluded mountainous setting. This was the first European homestead in the area, built by Norwegian settlers in 1905, and like many such buildings in the new world, it evokes the desire for a new start away from poverty, crowding or persecution elsewhere.

Electronic Dance Music (EDM) typifies contemporary digital production in that it is disseminated on social media, an online community of enthusiasts, suggesting the individual as an alternative brand. Drawing parallels between the original settlers’ intent to escape to pastures new and contemporary “hobbyist” production or DIY culture as a counter to corporate dominance, Schmidt seeks to interrogate such ideas via a surreal combination of the spectacular. In addition to the light display itself, *EDM House* also functioned as a local radio FM channel, broadcasting the artist’s compositions within a small radius to those few passersby. The eerie nature of happening on this by chance is captured in the video projection, conjuring an occasion that is at once magical yet sinister, delightful yet strange. These anxieties are reflected in the horror-movie technique used to document the work, for as the camera rolls forwards or back, the zoom counteracts meaning the house stays the same size within the frame as the background swells or contracts.

Comprising a home-made camera and a large-format slide projection, *High Altitude Balloon Harmless Amateur Radio Equipment* used a weather balloon to capture an image of the Earth by launching the equipment 35,000 meters into space. Both the timing and the right conditions to release the shutter were carefully calculated so that the camera — made of Styrofoam and duct tape and fitted with a 90-mm Linhof lens and a 4-by-5 inch film holder —pointed away from the sun toward the horizon, the resulting photograph of the stratosphere presented as an immersive projection in the darkness of the gallery. Encounters with such images are usually confined to the internet, low-resolution images limited to the size of a screen. In contrast, here the image takes on an all-encompassing quality as well as a tangible physicality, revealing the curvature of the Earth, the vivid blue curve of its atmosphere, the blackness of space beyond and the surface of clouds, earth and water below. Undeniably beautiful, the image is foiled by the means of its presentation and its production.

Like many of Schmidt’s works, *High Altitude Balloon Harmless Amateur Radio Equipment* makes clear the narrative of its construction and process, unexpected parallels drawn by bringing together different “realities.” This will be elaborated in a forthcoming  accompanying publication made by the artist, a manual for other people detailing how to replicate the project. Device, staging and duration are integral to the contemplation of landscape and culture. Standing between the projector and screen, visitors are silhouetted against the image becoming part of the scene akin to the lone figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting *Wanderer above the Sea of Fog* (1818). *High Altitude Balloon Harmless Amateur Radio Equipment* suggests a new form of the sublime — one not indebted to the romantic idea of experiencing nature first-hand, but based on extending human vision by technical means. The image offers us the opportunity of experiencing unseen spaces through the process of looking; the world as contained within the picture.

The combination of settings for the artist’s work, notions of the heroic coupled with seemingly amateur quests, all are recurrent elements in his installations. Schmidt’s interest in the epic expresses the desire to go beyond the limits of knowledge and to chart other territories. Yet in his work manufactured spectacle is tempered by skepticism. Schmidt counters accepted conventions by using visible reminders of handy-man construction and theatrical devices — smoke machines, stage lights and DIY photographic equipment — while seeking to produce experiences that speak to his interest in the tension between doubt and faith. The possibility of art is critically reconsidered by reflecting on the manufactured seductions of spectacle or the romantic search for some truth as embodied within scientific expeditions.

The exhibition in Vancouver is made in collaboration with Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany.

### Biography

Born in 1972 in Ottawa, Kevin Schmidt lives and works in Vancouver and Berlin. He was the recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts’ International Residencies program at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin for 2013 and the Fogo Island Residency Program, Newfoundland in 2011. In 2008, he received the VIVA Award from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts in Vancouver. Recent solo exhibitions include *Don’t Stop Believing*, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto; *A Sign in the Northwest Passage* (billboard project), The Power Plant, Toronto; *Epic Journey*, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; *A Sign in the Northwest Passage* (as part of *Subjective Projections*), Bielefelder Kunstverein, Germany; Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver; Galerie van der Mieden, Antwerp; and *Wild Signals*, Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin. His works have been in a number of significant group exhibitions including *L’Avenir (looking forward)*, Montreal Biennial (2013); *True North*, Anchorage Museum, Alaska (2012); *Up North*, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2011); *How Soon is Now*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2009); *Wild Signals*, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (2008); and *Depiction Part IV*, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2007). Schmidt is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.


ProgramGuideSpring2014.pdf

An image of a snowy landscape with a house made of log timber and forested hills behind. In the foreground of the image is a wooden post with a sign that reads “EDM house 88.1 fm.” 

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A white box with small lenses embedded on its side sits in the middle of a white surface. Other objects surround the white box: a black polaroid camera, cords, a wooden dowel, a piece of fabric.

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A picture of the earth is projected on a large screen on a black wall. The image depicts a view of the earth from space. Glare from the sun is visible at the upper left corner of the image. 

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Video projection on a dark gallery wall of a house in a snowy landscape at night. The house is decorated with strings of colourful lights across the exterior walls and roof. Lights are on inside.

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Video projection on a dark gallery wall of a house made of log timber. The house sits in a snowy landscape with forested hills behind. The outdoor light is faint, it's either dusk or dawn. 

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Marian Penner Bancroft

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major new commission for Yaletown-Roundhouse Station by influential Vancouver-based photographer Marian Penner Bancroft.

Since the late sixties, Penner Bancroft has defined herself as a photographer, dedicating her practice to the medium, meditating on its conventions while also considering the dematerialization of the art object; combining conceptual art strategies as well as pushing the presentation and production of the photographic image into more immersive forms. She is known for drawing attention to the lines between where an image begins and what constitutes an image — at times using the physical framing device as a tangible three-dimensional photographic field.

The subject of Penner Bancroft’s work often resides in the personal, following her family, tracking their daily movements both real and, in the case of her ancestors, imagined. She embeds these inquiries into images of the landscape, using visual traces of a colonial transit to and across Canada as part of an individual yet generalized narrative of immigration and displacement. In recent years she has widened the scope of her research to include the histories of the fur trade, farming, music and religion in relation to the landscape and mapping.

For this new commission, details from a sequence of photographs of winter trees are grouped together in a mirrored formation around two of the station’s glass walls. As high-contrast translucent prints adhered to the windows, they create a lattice effect, casting patterns and shadows in the station when the sun shines through. Penner Bancroft deliberately selected these images from others taken along the Cambie Heritage Boulevard as the Canada Line forms a subterranean echo of the road. This green space, only fifty years old in 1993 when deemed a heritage site by the City of Vancouver, is a highly cultivated strip of land with nearly 450 trees, its significance as an example of Canadian urban design and planning — greatly influenced by the late nineteenth-century English garden city movement — providing a metaphor for notions of origin, belonging, history, and mapping.

Landscape figures prominently in Canadian history. Its scale, diversity, harsh climate, and terrain are inescapable and inextricably linked to the formation of the nation — its cities, economics, culture, and colonial beginnings. In Vancouver this interlocking of landscape and identity is heightened by its geographic location as well as its relative youth.

The Cambie Heritage Boulevard is made of a mix of grass, trees and ornamental plants, but featured prominently between 25th and 29th Avenues are the earliest plantings of two distinct types of trees: Golden Elms and Sequoias. The former originates in Germany, but is a staple of the English picturesque garden while the latter is a redwood indigenous to North America’s west coast. They are an unlikely pairing, but can be considered emblematic of attempts to cultivate space using landscaping strategies developed elsewhere. The contrast between these two trees heightens this sense of another place and time, and through Penner Bancroft’s images, the mural evokes both subtle and beautiful associations and dislocations, a sense of familiarity not simply as representations of trees but as something that is connected to an idea of home. At Yaletown-Roundhouse Station the commuter will be prompted to consider something we know as belonging to here, while, like many of us, also belongs elsewhere.

Presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program — InTransit BC.

### Biography

Marian Penner Bancroft lives and works in Vancouver. She has had various solo exhibitions including the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012); Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge (2001); the University College of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford (1999); and National Film Board Gallery, Ottawa (1979). Bancroft has also participated in group exhibitions including at Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver (2012); Vancouver Art Gallery (2008); Centre D’art Contemporain, Caen (2005); Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris (2002); Art Gallery of Windsor (1997); Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (1997); Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa (1994); University of California, Santa Barbara (1992); the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (1982) and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (1975), among many others. In addition, she has created several public art works including *Root System, Pipeline Road, Stanley Park* (2007) commissioned by InTransit BC and the Canada Line, and a permanent site-specific piece— *Lost Streams, Kitsilano* (1995-96) — for the City of Vancouver Park Board.


A mirrored black and white image of leafless entangled tree branches. 

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Exterior windows of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station installed with photographic prints in vinyl of tree silhouettes. Light from the station shines through the silhouettes, creating a lattice effect.

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A side view of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. Its exterior windows are installed with photographic prints in vinyl of tree silhouettes. Two adjacent windows are installed with mirrored versions of the same tree forms. 

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An interior photograph of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. The windows of the station are installed with photographic prints in vinyl of tree silhouettes. Outdoor light shines through into the station. 

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An interior photograph of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. The windows of the station are installed with photographic prints in vinyl of tree silhouettes. Outdoor light shines through into the station.

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Boulevard

Tim Etchells

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents an ambitious new neon commission across our building façade with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, as part of a larger partnership of presentations, performances and events with British artist Tim Etchells. Arguably best known for his work with Forced Entertainment, Etchells has developed his own practice as an artist outside of their ground-breaking performances, with diverse solo work moving from a base in performance into visual art and fiction. Through writing, producing neon, video and text, collaborations with the photographer Hugo Glendinning on photographic work, and performance projects with an ever-expanding group of artists from around the world, including Franko B and Vlatka Horvat, Etchells opens up new possibilities to approach related ideas via different routes by working across these different media and contexts.

In all aspects of his practice Etchells is often concerned with live-ness and presence, with the unfolding of events in time and place. The site where things happen could be an LCD monitor or a computer screen, a stage, the space of a page, a gallery, a found location, a street, or some private space — a room or a car for instance — in which a person might listen to the radio or read a text. *Who Knows* is typical of Etchells’ approach in that something happens—there is an encounter, a process, the unfolding of an event and its implications, and an exploration of the dynamic relationship between the work and the viewer. *Who Knows* reveals a fascination with rules and systems in language and in culture, in the way these structures are both productive and constraining. Individual phrases of “I know,” “You know,” “We know,” “They know,” produces a playfully paranoid flavour, yet a tone that takes on something of the surveillance, snooping, watching topic, that’s even more on our minds since the information leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden in May of last year. Through the repetition of phrases, the text stages or implies an event or an idea that is at once unravelled and assembled. The mechanisms and economies of this process — of exposure and concealment, construction and deconstruction, appearance and disappearance — are at the heart of what Etchells does.

Presented in partnership with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, Vancouver.

### Biography

Born in 1962, Tim Etchells is based in Sheffield and London, UK and is the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, a theatre company founded in 1984. With Forced Entertainment he has directed, written, and occasionally performed in, dozens of critically acclaimed performance works that have been shown at major festivals and theatres around the world. Recent solo exhibitions include Sketch and Butchers (both London); Netherlands Media Art Institute and de Appel, Amsterdam; *Void Spaces*, Site Gallery, Sheffield; Sparwasser HQ, Berlin; Art Sheffield 08; *ArtFutures*, Bloomberg SPACE, London; Exit Art, New York; Kunsthaus Graz, Vienna; Manifesta 7, Rovereto, Italy; *Acts of Voicing*, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; Aichi Triennale, Aichi Arts Center, Nagoya, Japan; and *Lonely at the Top: Modern Dialect*, MuHKA, Antwerp. Etchells co-curated and commissioned work in the Performing Sculpture section of the DLA Piper series This is Sculpture at Tate Liverpool and took part in the Gothenburg International Biennale *What a Wonderful World*; *After Architecture*, CASM, Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona; and *The Malady of Writing*, MACBA, Barcelona. His books include a critical exploration of contemporary performance and theatre as well as an introduction to his work with Forced Entertainment titled *Certain Fragments* (Routledge, 1999); a book of short stories, *Endland Stories* (Pulp Books, 1998); an ironic dream dictionary, *The Dream Dictionary for the Modern Dreamer* (Duckworth, 2004); and a novel titled *The Broken World* (Windmill, 2009).




ProgramGuideWinter2014.pdf

Phrases in blue and green neon lights read: “I KNOW THEY KNOW.” 

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Image of Tim Etchells’ neon text works installed in CAG’s facade windows. Shot at dusk, the lights appear in various colours. 

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Detail image of Tim Etchells’ neon text works installed in CAG’s facade windows. Phrases in neon lights of various colours read: “I KNOW THEY KNOW,” and “WE KNOW YOU KNOW.”

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Image of Tim Etchells’ neon text works installed in CAG’s facade windows. Phrases in neon lights of various colours read: “I KNOW YOU KNOW,”“WE KNOW THEY KNOW,””THEY KNOW WE KNOW.”

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Image of Tim Etchells’ neon text works installed in CAG’s facade windows. Phrases in neon lights of various colours read: “YOU KNOW I KNOW,” and “THEY KNOW WE KNOW.”

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Detail image of a Tim Etchell neon text work installed in CAG’s facade windows. The text reads “YOU KNOW” in green light and “THEY KNOW” in orange light.

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Who Knows

Aurélien Froment

Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Canada by French artist Aurélien Froment, comprising an ambitious body of newly commissioned work.

Froment produced an exhibition which focused on a series of educational toys (Spielgaben or “play gifts”) designed by Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852), the German founder of the original Kindergarten. Froment’s longstanding interest in Fröbel was aroused by the openness of the system of objects he devised, which has paradoxically resulted in both their survival and disappearance. For Froment, as for Fröbel, each shape begets another, each form foreshadows a second; all images are keys to other images. Replicas have been produced based on historical artifacts and presented for the first time in an exhibition, the “play gifts” in the complete sequence as imagined by their author and displayed on stands created by renowned Italian designer Martino Gamper. The objects are presented alongside an ensemble of photographs, which map Fröbel’s pedagogy while drawing connections with earlier as well as future uses of the geometric grid. *Fröbel Fröbeled* is therefore an exhibition on Fröbel with Fröbel — an exploration of his art, as well as a reflection on what lies beneath his system of objects.

Drawing on the ideas of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the experiences of Swiss pedagogue Johann Pestalozzi, Fröbel advocated for a practice of education where the child and the teacher are co-workers, with play and self-activity at the center of the learning process. To this end, Fröbel introduced activities such as singing, dancing, gardening, map making, and created a series of educational toys, the “play gifts.” He brought together existing children’s toys (wooden blocks, woollen balls, sticks), stripped of any signs suggesting pre-determined educational purposes such as letters, numbers, figures, or colours and sequenced these within an overarching system of relationships in which each toy foreshadows the next while being transformed. A soft woollen ball turns into a hard wooden sphere; a sphere into a cube via a cylinder; a cube is divided into smaller cubes and so on, until volumes become surfaces, surfaces become lines and lines are segmented towards infinity. Continuity and opposition systematically order the world of Fröbel’s gifts. Since the mid-nineteenth century, many educationalists and manufacturers appropriated the influential Kindergarten material and while establishing it as a prominent feature of modernity, the consistency of Fröbel’s ideal was slowly diluted, lost or abandoned.

Throughout his career, Fröbel continually refined his play gifts to achieve the greatest scope through their different forms, relations and applications. They constitute a modest but complex body of works, used for object lessons and often accompanied by analogies and stories, something tangible to enhance the understanding of something conceptual.

Individual sets comprised balls, blocks, sticks, paper folding and weaving, peas and clay. From simple geometrical shapes could appear a chair, a worker’s house, a train, a ruin, or a flower, as well as introducing abstract notions such as unity and interconnectedness. Each gift would be used in short sessions of directed play. Collector and scholar Norman Brosterman states in his seminal book *Inventing Kindergarten*, that “unlike the building blocks, mosaic toys, and traditional crafts that were their forebears, the gifts were never available for entirely ‘free play.’ Their use was always related to *the three realms*: forms of nature (or life), forms of knowledge (or geometry, mathematics and science) and forms of beauty (or art).” The potential of each toy and its associated applications were therefore multiplied according to their ability to represent, demonstrate or to be arranged in a pleasing way.

In the exhibition, each gift was also used and depicted by Froment in a number of different ways. To the three realms proposed by Fröbel — nature, knowledge and beauty — Froment suggests to add two others — cultural forms and material forms — revealing aspects of the gifts’ own history while reflecting on its mediation within a contemporary public art gallery. In some of the accompanying photographs, the gifts were staged based on engravings featured in Fröbel’s own manuals and literature that followed. Representing a throne, a church, a castle, a cross or a sentry box, the photographs draw the imaginary atlas of an archetypal world rooted in the nineteenth century. Whether photographed by Froment like diagrams, models, products or architecture, they perform, alongside their related toy, some of the instructions provided in the early handbooks while potentially becoming again loose instructions themselves. Divorced from their original publication context and captions, freed from their layout, the constellation of images in the exhibition unfolds as another gift.

If the first series of photographs notionally illustrate uses of the play gifts while mapping a model world, other predominantly small-scale images relate more specifically to the biography of the German pedagogue. Fröbel lived and worked close to his birthplace in Thuringia, central Germany. He founded his first institution for early childhood education in 1837 in the small town of Bad Blankenburg where two years later, he coined the term “Kindergarten.” Juxtaposed with the graphic educational material, this series of views of the countryside near Jena (the former East Germany near the Czech Republic border) show a reality without clear narrative, yet situates geographically, socially and culturally the genesis of Fröbel’s project. Through this Froment implies a complex relationship between the objects, images, ideas, places and us as audience. The work becomes the vehicle to draw our attention to changed contexts and so perceptions shift. We contemplate ideas not in a void but think while practising.

The exhibition was made in collaboration with Villa Arson, Nice, France; Spike Island, Bristol, UK; Frac Île de France — Le Plateau, Paris, France; Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany. Research toward the production of this work is funded by a grant from programme Hors les murs 2011 of the Institut Français. The exhibition is supported by the Consulat Général de France à Vancouver and Institut Français.

### Biography

Born in 1976 in Angers, France, Aurélien Froment lives and works in Dublin. Solo exhibitions by Froment have been presented at Le Credac, Ivry-sur-Seine, France; Musée départemental de Rochechouart, France; Centre culturel français, Milan; Marcelle Alix, Paris; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; Bonniers Konsthalle project room, Stockholm; The Physics Room, Christchurch, New Zealand; Motive Gallery, Amsterdam; Frac Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France; Module du Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Project Arts Centre, Dublin and Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, France. Group exhibitions include *The Encyclopedic Palace*, 55th Biennale di Venezia; *Curiosity*, Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK; *Mind is Outer Space*, Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York, (2013); *Descriptive Acts*, SF MoMa, San Francisco; *Tactics for the Here and Now*, Bucharest Biennale 5; *In the Holocene*, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; *Hapax Legomena*, Mercer Union, Toronto (2012); *A Terrible Beauty is Born*, Biennale de Lyon, France; *Our Magic Hour*, Yokohama Triennale, Japan; *Dystopia*, CAPC, Bordeaux (2011); *2 1/2 Dimensional*, deSingel, Antwerp; *10,000 Lives*, Gwangju Biennale, Korea; *Art Parcours*, Basel (2010); *Paper Exhibition*, Artist Space, New York; *From the Gathering*, Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver; *The Space of Words*, Mudam, Luxembourg (2009); *The Way in which it Landed*, Tate Britain, London; *Word Event*, Kunsthalle Basel; *The Great Transformation*, Frankfurter Kunstverein; *Inaugural festival*, Nam June Paik Center, Seoul (2008). Froment is represented by Marcelle Alix, Paris and Motive Gallery, Brussels.



A wood object with differently-shaped blocks hanging from its simple square frame. A wood cube and dowel lay in front. A hand holding a thin wooden down reaches towards the object. 

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A wooden box is installed inside a gallery on a white plinth with black grids on the surface. The plinth is located in the entrance lobby. The box is fully closed. 