 Kim Beom

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Canada of work by Korean artist Kim Beom. Comprising a survey of work spanning over twenty years and made across a range of material and form, the exhibition presents characteristically humorous and inquisitive takes on the way we come to see and know things.

Kim is a key figure of his generation in South Korea, his ideas based in the shift created when image-making moves from language to physical form. He fundamentally resists any singular definition, partly through the eclecticism of media — drawing, video, sculpture, performance — as well as taking on seemingly disparate subjects encompassing such things as the entire body of work of a modernist Korean poet or the domestication of dogs. Regularly recalling moments in popular culture and often visualizing wordplay or puns that tip language into the absurd or create comic forms, works such as the untitled series of drawings and related video from 1991-96 are as refreshingly intriguing as they are disarming in their charm and curiosity with the world that surrounds us.

Visitors to the exhibition are welcomed by a modest canvas into which has been cut a short text. *Greeting* (2007) may appear almost straightforward in its appeal, captivating in the openness of its invitation, and yet it suggests the impending experience of the exhibition as an open field where the viewer can apply or should determine their own impressions.

Perception and illusion are key to Kim’s practice. While much of his work is figurative in the sense that there are recognizable representational components depicted, this lack of ambiguity is called into question whereby the stability of image or language and its ability to communicate are set in motion. In speaking about his paintings, many of which are raw canvases that have been cut into, Kim talks about this blankness as acting like “a screen for the imagery in the viewer’s mind.” In *Man Standing* (1995), two footprints in metal rings are attached to the surface of the work displayed flat on the floor.  Here we are asked to complete the image, conjuring the subject, imagining ourselves in the space of the piece itself.

This idea of fluid meaning can also be seen in other works that involve a notional transformation in some way — be it functional, a tautology between image to object, or a perceptual shift in the mind of the viewer. Such inventive changes may be considered witty or surreal, and achieved via the most economical of means. *An Iron in the Form of a Radio, a Kettle in the Form of an Iron, and a Radio in the Form of a Kettle* (2002) brings together the three household items which retain their familiarity of form and yet, as described in the title, change their function. As objects they retain their base characteristics but nonetheless are simultaneously something else, becoming other than, or more than, that which they appear to exclusively exemplify.

Such improbable transformation in both the imagination of the artist and by extension the audience can be seen in *Untitled (Plants from the Places)* series (2007- ongoing). Here Kim cuts photographic images of plants from magazines and newspapers sticking them together to form new “plants” that continue to grow by the addition of other pieces of green paper. Through this reusing the artist completes the cycle — trees are cut down, made into pulp which then becomes paper and is returned to being a plant. In other works, this cultivation of change is suggested by Kim with a mix of both humour and unease.

How meaning is made, who constructs it and for whom it is intended is seen more directly in works such as *A Rock that was taught it was a Bird* (2010) in which an absurdist gesture has an actor attempting to teach a rock to fly, unperturbed by its seeming lack of response. Yet by soaking up this instruction is the rock not altered in some way? *Objects Being Taught They are Nothing But Tools* (2010), is a large-scale sculptural work that has common household objects placed on model chairs facing a blackboard in a familiar classroom-like setting. The objects are assembled in front of a pre-recorded, televised lecture in which the teacher’s head is cut off and his voice dubbed so that in a speeded up, squeaky voice, the orator emphatically and gravely iterates the utility of “students” and, therefore, the futility of attempting to become anything more. Tools do not go to the hospital to see doctors, the voice points out, as humans do. They are instead serviced and fixed, or simply replaced. So it goes for the student. Education is a process that involves some notional form of change: knowledge is imparted and one’s identity and views on the world around us are (in)formed. Conventional structures of learning are undermined and replaced by questioning the fabric of our collective and individual perceptions.

### Biography

Kim Beom, born in 1963 lives and works in South Korea. Solo exhibitions include: *Kim Beom: The School of Inversion*, Hayward Gallery, London (2012); *Kim Beom: Animalia*, REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles (2011); *Objects Being Taught They Are Nothing But Tools*, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, (2010); *Kim Beom*, Artsonje Center, Seoul (2010); *Beom Kim*, Sun Gallery, Seoul (2007); *Flower*, Trans Hudson Gallery, New York (2000); *Utility Objects*, Trans Hudson Gallery, New York (1997). Group exhibitions include: *2013 California Pacific Triennial*, Orange  County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2013); *Time Mutations*, UB Art Galleries, University of Buffalo, USA (2013); *Tireless Refrain*, Nam June Paik Art Center, Korea (2013); *Unknown Forces*, MSGSU Tophane-I Amire Culture and Arts Center, Istanbul (2013); *(Im)Possible Landscape*, PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2013); *Media City Seoul*, Seoul Museum of Art (2012); *City Within the City*, Gertrude Contemporary  Art Spaces, Melbourne (2012); *Tell me, Tell me: Australian and Korean Art 1976-2011*, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2011); *A Rock That Was Taught It Was A Bird*, Artspace, Auckland (2010); *The Malady of Writing*, MACBA, Barcelona (2009); *Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea*, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2009); *The Demon of Comparisons*, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2009); *The Cover of a Book is the Beginning of a Journey*, Arnolfini, Bristol (2008); *Always a little further*, 51st Venice Biennale (2005); 8th  International Istanbul Biennale (2003); *Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art*, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (2002); *Beyond Landscape*, Artsonje Center, Seoul (1999). Work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Cleveland Museum of Art; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum für Kommunikation, in Bern, Switzerland; and the Seoul Museum of Art, the Ho-Am Art Museum, Artsonje Center, and the Horim Museum, in Seoul, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, in Gwachun, Korea.




ProgramGuideFall2015.pdf

Miniature chairs placed in rows are placed atop a wooden surface. Various objects such as a kitchen scale, fan, rope, dish soap bottle, clock, bug spray, kettle and watering can sit on the chairs.

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Three objects are displayed in a gallery space. From left to right, a silver iron, black portable radio, and silver kettle are placed on a shelf mounted to a white gallery wall. 

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27 small-scale, framed drawings mounted on the gallery wall. Animals and human figures are rendered on shades of white and sand-colored paper. 

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Various artworks installed in a gallery from framed drawings to two sculptures. A stretched canvas on the right has text cut into the surface.

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Detail view of a gallery wall framed by light gray concrete. In the middle, a monitor displays a black and white video, depicting an older person trying to lift or carry a large rock.

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Kim Beom

Walter K. Scott

Scott is an interdisciplinary artist working across writing, illustration, performance and sculpture. In 2011, he began a comic book series, Wendy, the story of a fictional young woman living in an urban centre, who aspires to global success and art stardom but whose dreams are perpetually derailed. The position of the underdog, outsider and shape shifter is central to this body of work and the influence of feminist icons such as Elle Woods in *Legally Blonde* or artist, punk poet, experimental novelist, and filmmaker Kathy Acker lingers.

Scott’s two panel installation at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, *A Home Underground (Excerpt II)* (2015) evolves from a new Wendy volume in which the eponymous character moves to Vancouver. Evoking the malaise of urban life, we see Wendy pictured moving through the city, a foil or reflection of the daily commuter passing through the station. Considering the two possible viewing positions for the work, inside the station descending the stairs or outside walking by, Scott has developed a recto-verso installation referencing the alter-ego/duality Wendy embodies, and the antagonism between mind and body. In this case, Wendy navigates Yaletown on her smart phone, juxtaposed with her inner self drilling head first into Vancouver’s sub terrain — a representation of existential frustration.

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

### Biography 

Walter K. Scott currently lives and works in Montréal. For the Images Festival 2015, Scott produced *Wendy Live!* where a cast of English, Japanese and Mohawk-speaking performers enacted the newest Wendy book before its 2016 North American English-language release. Alongside his comic work, Scott produces work involving printmaking and sculpture. He is represented by Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, Vancouver and recently completed a residency at the Koganecho Bazaar, Yokohama, Japan.


A graphic illustration of two figures. One is walking and the other is upside down with a drill-like head. Bold text reads “TWO THOUSAND FEET UNDERGROUND'' and “WRITING A ONE THOUSAND PAGE NOVEL.” 

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A graphic illustration of two figures printed in black vinyl on the glass face of a train station. One is walking and the other is upside down with a drill-like head. Bold text is on either side.  

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A graphic illustration of two figures printed in black vinyl on the glass face of a train station. One is walking and the other is upside down with a drill-like head. Bold text is on either side.

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A Home Underground (Excerpt II)

Ryan Gander


Continuing in our window vitrines are a new set of eight sculptures by British artist Ryan Gander, part of the ongoing series *A lamp made by the artist for his wife*. Made from ingenious combinations of everyday objects they evince a smart way with the art of storytelling in an immensely complex yet subtly coherent body of work which in its blend of the personal with the historical, delivers an emotional pull that is not only intellectually arresting, but also affecting in its humour. We take delight in these assemblages of disparate objects, that while provoking a myriad of associations, function as a collection of innovative lighting designs.

### Biography

Ryan Gander, born in Chester in 1976, lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include FRAC Île-de-France / Le Plateau (2013); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2012); Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2010); Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2008); the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2007 & 2003); MUMOK, Vienna (2007) and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2007). He has also shown in group exhibitions such as the Shanghai Biennale (2012); documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2012); *ILLUMInations*, 54th Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2011); 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008) and the Sydney Biennial (2008). Ryan Gander has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes, among others the Zürich Art Prize (2009), the ABN Amro Art Price (2006), the Baloise Art Statements of the Art Basel (2006) and the Dutch Prix de Rome for sculpture (2003). Gander’s works are included in both international public and private collections including Tate Collection, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Le Fonds régional d’art contemporain du Nord Pas-de-Calais; FNAC, Paris, France; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France; MaMBO, Bologna; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Arts Council, London; Welsh Museum, Cardiff; Government Art Collection, London. He is represented by Lisson Gallery, London, Milan and New York; Annet Gelink, Amsterdam, gb agency, Paris, and Taro Nasu, Tokyo.




A sculpture made of various rolls of duct tape are stacked one on top of the other. A dome-shaped incandescent lightbulb shines from the top. 

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Multiple found-object sculptures by Ryan Gander installed in CAG’s facade. The found material assemblages resemble light fixtures and are mounted one per each ground floor window. 

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Detail image of a sculpture by Ryan Gander. A black bike helmet, affixed with colourfully dyed feathers, is illuminated by a yellow light placed inside the helmet. 

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A lamp made by the artist for his wife

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents an ambitious exhibition with UK artist Ryan Gander, his first solo presentation in Canada. Comprising a shifting selection of new and recent works, the show centres on the artist’s ongoing conceptual investigations and playful cultural cross references.

Gander’s complex and unfettered conceptual practice is stimulated by queries, investigations or what-ifs, rather than strict rules or limits. As alluded to in the title, the exhibition itself becomes a site for revealing or elliptical suggestion. We are thrown off balance perhaps or made aware of the underlying structures within the gallery as we view individual pieces. Appearing a seemingly discarded hand-written seating diagram for a special dinner, *Career seeking missile* (2011) lies crumpled on the floor, at once an informal gesture acting as a foil for the often unseen precarious mix of personalities and individuals invited to such events. Similarly the animatronic eyes, eyelids and eyebrows of *Magnus Opus* (2013), are triggered into differing expressions and responses in direct activation by our movements as we visit the show, consciously connecting us to the very act of looking.

Ideas of concealment, accessibility in every sense, and of a deliberate obfuscation to send our minds challenged and reeling, has been a constant ploy for Gander. Work produced is characterized most typically by an intellectual as well as formal rigour, often drawing together a layered range of sources and referents. Gander is a cultural magpie in the widest sense, his far-reaching curiosity in the world around us taking popular notions apart only to rebuild them in new ways. For example, in *Imagineering* (2013), the video and associated off-site poster campaign seen throughout Vancouver, we see what appears to be a short television commercial promoting imagination in the British public, as if commissioned by the British government’s Department for Business, Innovation & Skills. Working to Gander’s brief, it was produced by an existing commercial advertising agency. There is a clear sense of play in the way work is constructed, and play as both an intellectual mode as well as a physical activity.

Language and narrative play an overarching role in his work, not least in his series of Loose Association works first begun in 2002 which stand undefined somewhere between a presentation, a performance and a lecture, to be presented as an artist’s talk, or rather conversation, here in Vancouver. As Gander speaks through a sequence of illustrated subjects, his recognizably digressional approach creates a series of happy encounters between forms rather than simple discoveries. The series of sculptures *I is…* (2013) recall the hiding place dens made by a child from all manner of household items including bed sheets, golf umbrellas, cushions and laundry racks, yet here are remade in memorializing marble. They evince a smart way with the art of storytelling in an immensely complex yet subtly coherent body of work which in its combination of the personal with the historical, delivers an emotional pull that is not only intellectually arresting, but also affecting in its humour. Its delight in suggesting a dialogue between seemingly disparate objects or of provoking a myriad of associations is tinged of sadness.

Organized by CAG and produced in collaboration with Frac Île de France — Le Plateau, Paris; Manchester Art Gallery, UK; Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland; OK Offenes Kulturhaus / Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

### Biography

Ryan Gander, born in Chester in 1976, lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include FRAC Île-de-France / Le Plateau (2013); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2012); Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2010); Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2008); the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2007 & 2003); MUMOK, Vienna (2007) and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2007). He has also shown in group exhibitions such as the Shanghai Biennale (2012); documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2012); *ILLUMInations*, 54th Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2011); 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008) and the Sydney Biennial (2008). Ryan Gander has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes, among others the Zürich Art Prize (2009), the ABN Amro Art Price (2006), the Baloise Art Statements of the Art Basel (2006) and the Dutch Prix de Rome for sculpture (2003). Gander’s works are included in both international public and private collections including Tate Collection, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Le Fonds régional d’art contemporain du Nord Pas-de-Calais; FNAC, Paris, France; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France; MaMBO, Bologna; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Arts Council, London; Welsh Museum, Cardiff; Government Art Collection, London. He is represented by Lisson Gallery, London, Milan and New York; Annet Gelink, Amsterdam, gb agency, Paris, and Taro Nasu, Tokyo.



ProgramGuideGander+Magor2015.pdf

A pair of large, animatronic cartoonish blue eyes with thick black eyebrows and pronounced white eyelids stare out from the image. 

A pair of large, animatronic cartoonish blue eyes with thick black eyebrows and pronounced white eyelids. The blue eyes look to the right with half-closed eyelids.

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A black sculpture resembling a floating balloon touches a gallery ceiling. A silver ribbon attached to the sculpture hangs downwards. 

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Three large-scale, marble sculptures resembling child-made forts of draped sheets, chairs, and other objects. Behind, a large-scale, abstract work of colourful geometric shapes is mounted on a wall.

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A single-channel video is projected onto a gallery wall. The video shows two children in school uniforms walking down a street, along a white picket fence and flowers.

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Make every show like it's your last

Mungo Thomson

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Mungo Thomson. *Time, People, Money, Crickets* brings together a survey of work produced during the past five years, complemented by an extensive monographic publication. Combined, exhibition and publication provide an expansive opportunity to tease out the nuance and complexity of Thomson’s practice across his many media and forms.

Central to Thomson’s artistic proposition is an embrace of context — be it situational, institutional, mass cultural or art historical — and it is through the intelligent breadth of his individual works that we are prompted to examine the perceptual mechanics of everyday life in relation to a wider historical and cosmic scale. The exhibition includes key works in film, sound, sculpture, performance, and publication that approach perception and cultural mediation with economy and wit, often relying on existing forms of recognition and distribution.

The exhibition features several large-scale mirror works from Thomson’s ongoing series *TIME*: person-sized, silkscreened mirrors bearing the iconic logo and red border of the international weekly news magazine. The mirrors are based on individual covers of the magazine that reference a variety of cultural and cosmological notions of time and history, forming a broad cumulative network of objects. Installed together, they form infinity spaces and kinesthetic configurations in which the viewer, the viewing context and other *TIME* mirrors are reflected and reversed endlessly, and the viewer finds themselves pictured within that network.

Such associations are further elaborated by a new iteration of Thomson’s ongoing series *Negative Space*, photographic murals of inverted astronomical imagery sourced from the Hubble Space Telescope, here specially designed for the glass canopy that defines the entrance and exterior of the gallery.

Thomson’s *Crickets* (2012-13) is an ambitious musical score for orchestra based on the chirping of crickets. Transcribed from a French compilation of field recordings from around the world — France, Cameroon, Senegal, Martinique, Borneo, Thailand and Venezuela — and produced in collaboration with Los Angeles composer Michael Webster, the score contains twenty five movements, such as *12. Reunion Island, the Cirque de Cilaos at 1300 m. altitude, February 1998, nightfall in a banana plantation*. Seen in an HD video, and shown alongside the sheet music, a seventeen-player classical ensemble simulates a chorus of crickets in flute, clarinet, violin, and percussion. *Crickets* explores the distinctions between silence, sound, noise and music, using the aural backdrop that crickets represent — so ubiquitous that they have come to stand in for silence, and, in the context of performance, failure. Thomson and Webster have also developed *Crickets* for solo performers — individual musicians scattered around a park, each simulating the sound of a single cricket with a different instrument. Working with Vancouver New Music, CAG will present a live performance of *Cricket Solos for Clarinet, Piccolo, Percussion, and Violin* in Emery Barnes Park.

Other works in the exhibition play with the context of the gallery or museum itself. *Mail* (2013) is the simplest intervention into the CAG’s everyday infrastructure. For the duration of the exhibition, once delivered, the mail remains on the floor, unopened, gradually becoming an obstacle to physical passage as well as to institutional function. *Untitled (Margo Leavin Gallery, 1970– )* (2009) is a Super-16mm stop-motion film animation that flips through all the contacts in the business card rolodexes of Los Angeles’ Margo Leavin Gallery, which was founded in 1970 and closed in 2012, and where Thomson showed for over a decade. Consisting of thousands of contacts, each with their own particular relationship to the operation of the gallery — artists, framers, electricians, collectors, customs agents, florists, critics, exterminators — each card gets a single film frame, the film running at twenty four frames per second. It is a kinetic portrait, pairing analogue technologies, of a group of people randomly and uniquely brought into orbit together around a single cultural enterprise.

*People* (2011) is an ongoing series of photographs of visitors to art exhibitions with the art on view removed in Photoshop, leaving only people staring into the voids of empty white rooms. These images are taken from the web as well as privately commissioned by Thomson from professional events photographers. In 2011 Thomson produced a magazine collecting these uncanny images modeled on the American tabloid “People.” Originally distributed unannounced by mail, it is exhibited here as a free takeaway for visitors.

*Void and Observer* (2013-15) is a series of sculptures modeled on the phenomena of “error coins” — rare and collectible coins that result from a production mistake at the US mint, in which a blank coin planchet is mis-struck by the die that carries the coin image. In Thomson’s reworking of the phenomenon, made with 3D printing and jewelry casting, these coins take on a cosmological dimension, as an off-center John F. Kennedy appears to be contemplating the void of the unstruck side of a half-dollar, and as other error coins in other US denominations resemble planetary bodies in phase or eclipse. Kept in the pockets of the staff of the CAG and displayed upon request, the coins will orbit and revolve around each other throughout the day.

*Time, People, Money, Crickets* is organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver and SITE Santa Fe. 

### Biography

Mungo Thomson lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions, performances and projects have taken place at ArtPace, San Antonio (2014); SITE Santa Fe (2013); The Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2013); The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2012); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2008); The Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2007); and Galeria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAMeC), Bergamo, Italy (2006), among others. Selected group exhibitions include *The 2nd CAFAM Biennale*, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing (2014); *A Guest Without A Host Is A Ghost*, Beirut and Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, Egypt; *Imitatio Christie’s*, Galleria Zero, Milan (2014); *Turn off the Sun: Selections from La Colección Jumex*, Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ (2013); *Public Diary*, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2013); The Pacific Standard Time Public Art and Performance Festival, Los Angeles (2012); *Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial)* (2011); *Exhibition Exhibition*, Castello di Rivoli, Torino, Italy (2010); *Compilation IV*, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2009); The 2008 Whitney Biennial (2008); and *PERFORMA05* (2005). Thomson’s work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and FRAC Ile-de-France, Paris, France, among others. Thomson is represented by Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris, France.



ProgramGuideMungoThomson2015.pdf

A video still depicts musicians in black dress clothes playing instruments in an orchestra, a conductor stands in the centre facing away from the camera. White subtitles line the bottom of the frame.

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In the glass overhang above CAG’s entrance, four rectangular white panels are installed. Small stars and galaxies in blue, orange, and grey dot the panels. 

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Large-scale, silkscreened mirrors are installed on a gallery wall. Visible through one mirror are two others on opposite walls. All bear the logo and red border of TIME, the weekly news magazine.

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Seven white cardboard boxes are grouped on a gallery floor. The boxes are open and filled with the publications for the exhibition. The cover of the books are visible.

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A pair of large-scale mirrors are installed on white gallery walls. They bear the logo and red border of TIME Magazine. Five white cardboard boxes are grouped on the floor. 

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A black projector is installed in a low alcove, projecting an image on the white wall. The image depicts a rolodex of cards. One of the cards reads: THE SAINT LOUIS ART MUSEUM. 

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Overhead view of mailed packages piled on a gallery floor below a mail slot. Approximately two dozen packages and letters of various sizes make up the pile. 

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A single-channel video is projected on a screen in a darkened gallery. The video depicts musicians in black dress clothes playing instruments in an orchestra. 

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A single-channel video is projected on a screen in a darkened gallery. It depicts hands holding a cabasa instrument.

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Time, People, Money, Crickets

Julia Dault

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition by Toronto-born, New York-based artist Julia Dault. Through a selection of new and recent works, the exhibition reveals the importance to Dault of balancing spontaneous gesture with responsiveness to rules, logic and the constraints of materials. Physical negotiations are central to Dault’s textured paintings and improvised sculptures; both are exhibited in *Blame It On the Rain*.

Dault is interested in “embodied knowledge” — how making is thinking — and reinserts the artist’s hand into a minimal aesthetic primarily interpreted as distanced and industrial. The artist’s rule-based painting involves responding to mass-produced elements — patterned silks, pleather, unmixed paint straight from the tube — with unconventional tools, such as squeegees, rubber combs and sea sponges. The limitations of these objects create quasi-standardized gestures that allow Dault to skirt the line between expressive abstraction and cool, machine-like facture. Erasure of her paintings’ topmost layers, which allows viewers to “see into” the painting process, is as important to Dault as paint application.

Exploration of artistic labour recurs in Dault’s sculptures. Always improvising on site and working alone, the artist manipulates and coerces Plexiglas, Formica and other industrially produced materials into imposing curved forms, then affixes them to the gallery wall using straps and cords. Dault’s efforts can be understood as “private performances” in which her physical capabilities are juxtaposed with the properties of the materials she employs. Each sculpture is titled with a time stamp that reflects the duration it took to complete the piece. In this gesture, as with her paintings, she hopes to underline the durational nature of the art-making process.

Dault’s work fuses the emphasis on process found in both Abstract Expressionist painting and post-Minimal sculpture. One unifying element is the artist’s fascination with patterns, and with the slippages and imperfections that reveal the human origins of what appears mechanical. Another is the search for variety within strict limitations. By devising expressive gestures through rules and reasoning indicative of post-Minimal and Conceptual art, Dault is part of a generation of artists acknowledging histories and legacies of art making while revitalizing abstraction today.

The exhibition complements *Color Me Badd*, presented at The Power Plant, Toronto in 2014-2015. 

### Biography

Julia Dault lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has held solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2015); The Power Plant, Toronto and China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles (2014); Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich and Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto (2013); and White Cube Bermondsey, London (2012). She has also participated in group shows which include: *Elevated*, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2014-2015), *Americana: Selections from the Collection*, Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2013–2014); *Outside the Lines*, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2013–2014); *In the Heart of the Country*, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; *Inner Journeys*, Maison Particulière, Brussels (2013); *The Ungovernables*, New Museum, New York; *Roundtable*, the Ninth Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2012); and *Making Is Thinking*, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2011). Her work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Saatchi Gallery, London; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Dault is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto; and China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles.




ProgramGuideSummer2015.pdf

A close up view of an abstracting painting. The painting is made up of a repeating pattern of mainly pink, blue, black, and white crescent moon-like shaped brushstrokes. 

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A large, rectangular sculpture resembling a marble plinth is installed in the middle of a gallery floor. Mounted on the dark blue wall behind are two, two-dimensional abstract artworks. 

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A hallway covered in mirrored panels leads into a bright gallery. A blue, abstract painting hangs on one hallway wall. A large-scale abstract painting is visible on a blue wall inside the gallery. 

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A blue, abstract painting is installed in a gallery hallway. Both walls are covered in mirrored panels, creating infinitely repeating reflections of the painting to recede into the mirrors opposite. 

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A large-scale painting is installed on a blue, free-standing wall. In light tones, abstract shapes and colours repeat across the canvas. Alternating blue and white rectangles frame the edge.

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Two abstract, black and white paintings and one sculpture are installed in a gallery space. The sculpture is made of large, arched and bent sheets of reflective material stacked atop one another. 

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Blame It On the Rain

Shannon Bool

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the second part of a new commission in 2015 with Canadian artist Shannon Bool. Bool typically references a wide variety of art historical objects in her work, commenting on the role of decorative arts within art history, as well as on the change in meaning that occurs through the replication and alteration of significant cultural forms. Central to her practice is the paradoxical examination of the depth and psychological weight that surfaces carry, which she underlines in unorthodox material processes.

Located near to the gallery entrance is *Michelangelo’s Place*, the final version in a series of carrara marble benches Bool has recently produced.  The sculpture references the benches found circling the elevated Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence, built in 1869 to showcase copies of Michelangelo’s most famous works and to provide a panoramic view of the city.

At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Bool’s sculpture references the benches’ scale and appropriates the graffiti that covers them. The graffiti, some of which is over 100 years old and ranges from tourist scribbles, love declarations and Italy’s first Labour Party, is mirrored to emphasize its materialization and the artist’s handwork. These energetic gestures of incision, gouging and defacing subvert the benches’ functionality by drawing attention to the individual experiences of the Piazzale’s visitors who chose to leave their own marks instead of consuming the magnificent views of the renaissance. The carrara marble, signifying wealth and high renaissance material values is subjected instead to the everyday banality of Florentine life and tourism, where the public turns away from its master narrative and carves its own signature.

### Biography

Shannon Bool lives and works in Berlin. Solo exhibitions include: *The Fourth Wall Through the Third Eye*, Galerie Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf; *Walk Like an Etruscan*, Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto (2013); *The Inverted Harem II*, Bonner Kunstverein, Germany (2011);  CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, France; *The Inverted Harem*, GAK-Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen , Germany (2010); RMIT Project Space, Melbourne (2008). Group exhibitions include *MMK2 Boom She Boom*, Works from the MMK Collection, Frankfurt (2015); The Klöntal Triennale, Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland (2014); *Soft Pictures*, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaugengo, Turin, Italy (2013); *Painting Forever!*, KW, Berlin (2013); Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto (2013); the Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2012); *7×14*, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; Rock Opera, CACP Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux (2009); *Drawing on Sculpture: Graphic Interventions on the Photographic Surface*, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2007); *Make Your Move*, Projects Arts Centre, Dublin; *Spiralen der Erinnerung*, Kunstverein in Hamburg; *Carbonic Anhydride*, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2006). Work is held in the collections of The National Gallery of Canada, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Fondazione Sandretto, Turin, MMK Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Lenbachhaus, Munich, and the Saatchi Collection, London. She is represented by Kadel Willborn Gallery in Düsseldorf and Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto.



Detail image of the surface of a white marble bench sculpture. Various carved graffiti marks, Roman alphabet characters, Arabic numbers, a heart, squares, and other marks, cover the surface.

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A white marble bench sculpture installed outside the CAG entrance. It is supported by four, thick quadrangular legs. The surface of the long, rectangular seat is covered with carved graffiti. 

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Michelangelo’s Place

Jeremy Shaw

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents *Medium-Based Time* by Berlin-based Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw, featuring a black and white 16mm film of transgender voguer Leiomy Maldonado, an HD video installation that reworks archival ethnographic film into a dystopian science fiction narrative and a new series of light-activated UV prints in the windows of our street façade.

The exhibition centres on *Variation FQ* (2011-13), in which Shaw worked with legendary voguer Leiomy Maldonado to produce a film that explores aspects of subculture, dance, gender, power, and special effects. “Vogue” is a primarily black and latino, gay subculture that evolved out of the drag balls of New York in the 1980s and includes a fluid, yet raw dance style based around miming the poses of models from high fashion magazines.

The film sets Leiomy starkly lit against a black void performing her signature freestyle dance teetering between elegance and violence. As the film progresses, Shaw introduces step-and-repeat style visual effects, originally created by Canadian animator Norman McLaren in his 1968 ballet film *Pas de deux*. In *Pas de deux*, this optical printing technique embellishes the seduction between a male and female ballerina as typically choreographed for the stage. In *Variation FQ*, the use of special effects creates a ghostly layering and repetition of Leiomy’s image in her most virtuosic gestures and extends the experience of abandon evident in the consequences on her human body. Leiomy’s performance is accompanied by Shaw’s original soundtrack that combines a minimalist piano score with contemporary chopped and pitched audio techniques. This merging of classical composition with manipulated pop a cappella MP3’s is emblematic of Shaw’s fascination of the interdependence between high and low taste cultures.

Shaw’s practice amplifies conceptual strategies within the transcendence-seeking experiences of popular culture, as well as in the speculative nature of scientific mapping of these phenomena. In keeping with this ongoing interest in and around altered states, we premiere *Quickeners* (2014), a pseudo-documentary that puts the role of truth telling into crisis.

Set 500 years in the future, *Quickeners* tells the story of Human Atavism Syndrome (H.A.S.), an obscure disorder afflicting a tiny portion of the Quantum Human population to desire and feel as their Human Being predecessors once did. A species wirelessly interconnected to The Hive, Quantum Humans have evolved to operate solely on pure rational thought and they have achieved immortality. *Quickeners* is set against a cinéma vérité aesthetic, reworking archival documentary footage from a gathering of Pentecostal Christian snake handlers to illustrate the story. As the film unfolds, an authoritative Quantum Human narrator comments on what we witness: indecipherable testimonials, sermons, songs, prayers, convulsive dancing, speaking-in-tongues, serpent handling and ecstatic states that Quantum Humans define as “Quickening.”

Incorporating elements of science fiction, ethnographic survey, neuroscience and belief systems, *Quickeners* collates these disparate themes into a succinct whole to discuss varying notions of evolutionary progress with clinical indifference. This alchemical fusion suspends belief of the fantastic situation by its use of familiar, outmoded technology, meticulous audio editing and subtitles. As the piece builds to a cathartic climax of media techniques and special effects – caught in limbo between ritual documentary and music video – the Quantum Humans surrender to this evolutionary throwback of perceived biological transcendence, while the film attempts to incite a similar phenomenological response in the viewer.

Alongside these film/video works in our window vitrines hangs *Degenerative Imaging (In The Dark)* (2015), a new series of light-activated, glow-in-the-dark vinyl cut-outs that reference star and planet stickers. Though presumably designed with the aspiring child astrologer’s bedroom in mind, these stickers are also commonly found adorning the walls and ceilings of the teenage psychonaut; more likely used to “trip out” than to plan a trip. Rather than the cosmos, Shaw’s source material comes from 3D SPECT scan renderings of the degenerative effects of cumulative mind-altering substance use on the blood flow and metabolism of the human brain. The representational language of neuroscience, or at least the populist aesthetic familiar in health and pharmaceutical advertising, is reformatted here as a mechanism to enhance altered states while viewing their supposed biological effects on the brain. The prints are charged by fluorescent light once per hour, causing them to glow strongly and then fade, glow and fade; static time-based mediums on repeat.

*Variation FQ* is generously loaned by the Rennie Collection, Vancouver. *Quickeners* was co-produced by the Contemporary Art Gallery with the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for the BIM 14 and Johann König, Berlin, with the generous support of a grant from BC Arts Council: Special Project Assistance – Innovations; the Fmac and the FCAC. The exhibition is supported by Inform Interiors and Best Film Service Inc.

This exhibition forms part of Capture Photography Festival, running from April 2 to 29.

### Biography

Jeremy Shaw was born in 1977, Vancouver, B.C. and currently lives and works in Berlin. His solo exhibitions include: *Quickeners*, Johann König, Berlin; *Extinction Marathon*, Serpentine Gallery, London (2014); *Variation FQ, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin* (2013); *Storming Heaven (From Home)*, Fondation Gutzwiller, Zurich, *Best Minds*, MoMA PS1, New York (2011); *Single Channel Higher States*, SAMSA, Berlin, *Lot #422*, Every Letter in the Alphabet (Geoffrey Farmer), Vancouver (2010); *DMT*, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2006); *DMT*, Cherry and Martin Gallery, Los Angeles (2005); *DMT*, Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver (2004). Recent group exhibitions include *Manifest Destiny* (L.A.N.D Public Project), Interstate 10 Freeway, USA (2015); *Shine A Light: Canadian Biennial 2014*, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, *Surface Modelling*, Kerstin Engholm Galerie, Vienna, *Biennale of Moving Image*, Centre d’ Art Contemporain, *Geneva, Altered States*, Macaulay & Co. Fine Arts, Vancouver (2014); *David Cronenberg: Transformation*, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, 12th Biennale de Lyon (with Palais de Tokyo), France, *Contemporary Art Club #2*, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, *The Biennial of The Americas*, Denver, *Love to Love You*, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, USA, *Girls Can Tell*, GAK Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, Germany (2013); *One on One*, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, *The Dark Cube*, Palais De Tokyo, Paris, *The Human Senses and Perception in Contemporary Art*, Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany,  *State of the Art Photography*, NRW Forum, Dusseldorf (2012); *A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance*, Montreal Biennale, *Cities of Gold and Mirrors*, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2011); *Nite Flights*, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2009); *Depiction Perversion Repulsion Obsession Subversion*, Witte de With, Rotterdam, *Mouth Open, Teeth Showing: Major Works from the True Collection*, The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2007); *I really should…*, Lisson Gallery, London (2005). He is currently represented by Johann König, Berlin and Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, Vancouver.





ProgramGuideSpring2015.pdf

A black and white image of a figure wearing a unitard posing with one hand raising their hair above their head. the other on their hip. They are backlit and appear to be glowing on a black backdrop.  

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A single-channel video is projected on the wall. The video depicts a person speaking directly to the camera. The subtitle reads, “I feel the need to believe.” Black chairs are aligned on the floor.

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A single-channel video is projected on the wall. The video depicts a person in a white shirt dancing. Blue and purple lights frame her body. Black chairs are aligned on the floor toward the video. 

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In a gallery enclosed by black curtains, a single-channel video is projected onto a screen. The projector is atop a plinth in front of the screen. In the video, a person in a white leotard dances.

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In a gallery enclosed by black curtains, a single-channel video is projected onto a screen, the projector atop a plinth in front. In the video, a person poses, raising their hair above their head. 

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Medium-Based Time

Grace Schwindt 

 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival

*Only a Free Individual Can Create a Free Society* is a new film installation by German artist Grace Schwindt which revisits discussions she witnessed as a child surrounded by individuals in Frankfurt, Germany. The dialogue running through the film is from an interview that Schwindt conducted with a leftwing activist influenced by the 1960s and 1970s political landscape, shaped by the Frankfurt School, the Outer Parliamentary Opposition and the Baader Meinhof Gang.

Rather than aiming to gain a better understanding of the past, Schwindt attempts to take a system apart—to undo it. Nothing is assumed to be neutral and every movement, word, gesture, or colour is understood to have cultural, social, political, or economic implications. The artist constructs her own processes of translating language into vivid material, choreographing dancers, set, props, costume, lighting, sound, camera movement, and words as elementary forms carrying symbolic power. Each element is equally important and should be read together as a melody where the words or functions of “chair” or “terrorism,” “clothing” or “freedom” have equal status.

At feature film length *Only a Free Individual Can Create a Free Society* is the product of an extensive rehearsal period with eleven dancers and a dramaturge over a period of five weeks using diagrams to map out a detailed choreography. The film features highly coloured and geometric costumes using aluminium, cardboard, silk, and velvet, as well as extensive post-production to create a narrative that questions how freedom was, and is, understood, who has access to it and what political and social structures need to be in place to create a free society. Alongside the installation the exhibition included a newly commissioned sculptural piece, redolent of images pictured in the film. Constructed from salt crystals, bronze and ceramic, it has a bodily suggestion, evoking a sense of place and subject through its shape, materiality and form.

*Only a Free Individual Can Create a Free Society* was commissioned by FLAMIN Productions through Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network, Eastside Projects, Birmingham; The Showroom, London; Badischer Kunstverein; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Site Gallery, Sheffield; Tramway, Glasgow; ICIA, University of Bath; and Zeno X Gallery. Supported by Arts Council England, Hessian Film Fund and The Jerwood Charitable Foundation. Presented with PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.

### Biography

Grace Schwindt (born 1979, Germany) is an artist based in London working with film, live performance and sculpture. Her theatrical sets for film works use minimal architectural elements and props to mark a location, in which she places bodies including her own. Using a tightly scripted choreography in which every move relates to institutionalised systems she investigates how social relations and understandings about oneself are formed, often through acts of exclusion and destruction. The artist’s interviews with individuals often serve as a starting point for fictionalised dialogues delivered by performers. Represented by Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp, her work is distributed by Argos Centre for Media and Art. Recent solo presentations include South London Gallery; ICA, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Spill Festival, Basement, Brighton; Collective Gallery, Edinburgh and White Columns, New York. Schwindt was shortlisted for this year’s Jarman Film Award.



ProgramGuideWinter2015.pdf

A dancer with outstretched arms stands in the centre of the frame with other dancers in the background. They are in front of a backdrop depicting a nighttime cityscape with silhouette foliage.

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A striped multicoloured curtain hangs in a gallery. The curtain divides the space at an angle. A person opens the curtain to enter the other side, revealing a glimpse of a projection on the far wall. 

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A clear, block-like sculpture of encased broken ceramic pieces installed on a plinth. A royal blue cloth hangs from the ceiling and drapes behind the sculpture. 

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A striped multicoloured curtain hangs in a gallery. Installed in front of the curtain is a clear, block-like sculpture of encased ceramic pieces on a plinth. 

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A screen covers a gallery wall beside a closed, black curtain. A video work of a performance is projected onto the screen. Several benches are placed on the floor in front. 

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Only a Free Individual Can Create a Free Society

Grace Schwindt

Krista Belle Stewart

The Contemporary Art Gallery presented the first solo exhibition of Canadian artist Krista Belle Stewart, the culmination of fall 2014 residencies at the Nisga’a Museum and Western Front comprising new works developed in Nisga’a and at her ancestral home in Douglas Lake, BC.

Stewart’s practice reclaims personal and cultural narratives from archival material, situating them in dialogue with contemporary Indigenous discourse and engaging the complexities of intention and interpretation. In relation to this reframing of documents, Stewart’s new installation considers First Nations women’s self-representation and sovereignty. Working with her personal stories and those of the women she met in Nisga’a, Stewart investigates how cultural knowledge is created and exchanged, weaving together new lens-based works with archival photographs and objects from Nisga’a.

Central to the exhibition was an ongoing project, a bucket filled with distinctive dried clay from land owned by Stewart on the Douglas Lake reservation, and passed down to her from her mother’s family. Not only is this a physical connection to her heritage but also a response to the continued dispossession of First Nations women’s land rights. The projections in the exhibition depicted two geographically and culturally diverse landscapes, showing personal stories rooted in an understanding of place evoking a diversity of embedded experiences on Indigenous land.

In 1998 the Nisga’a Nation signed a treaty with the BC and Canadian governments that recognized their land sovereignty and right of self-government, the first to be signed in the province since the 1850s. Such recent challenges to government control of Indigenous lands, also including the current fight against Kinder Morgan and the Northern Gateway pipelines and “Idle No More,” highlight a growing urgency in First Nations communities to detach from Canada’s colonial confines. Although delineated by the Canadian government, both reservation and sovereign lands offer potential in developing new and revived connections with pre-colonial First Nations economic and political traditions.

Opened in 2011 in the town of Laxgalts’ap (also known as Greenville), the Nisga’a Museum holds over 300 repatriated cultural objects that have been absent from the community for over a century. It is a multifarious space operating as a potential economic driver in the community as both a monument to and entry point into Nisga’a culture, while also existing as a site seeking to develop intimate dialogues among contemporary Nisga’a and their ancestors. While hosting a permanent installation that utilizes the tropes of colonial histories through the development of a linear and didactic narrative of Nisga’a culture, it is also an institution evolving through engagement with local community. Lacking detailed archival notes on each object, the museum has focused on connecting Nisga’a oral histories with these artefacts through tours and ongoing conversations with community elders. The Nisga’a is made up of four pdeek (tribes): Laxsgiik (Eagle), Gisk’aast (Killer Whale), Ganada (Raven), and Laxgibuu (Wolf). With ceremonies, customs and histories specific to each tribe there are layers of conflicting interpretations and information for many objects in the collection. Through the repatriation of their material cultural history is emerging a contemporary revival of precolonial traditions, asserting the museum as a platform for active knowledge exchange across generations and offering opportunities for personal and collective decolonization.

Alongside new works Stewart selected pieces from the Nisga’a Museum including an image showing a Nisga’a woman in a full chief’s regalia surrounded by men dressed in traditional and western clothing. Originally shot by Benjamin Haldane, a Tsimshian photographer from Alaska who travelled throughout the Nass Valley area in the early 1900s actively documenting the people of his community until his death in 1941. Recording a time of great cultural and social upheaval on the northwest coast his images of families, social events and traditional ceremonies such as potlatches (illegal at the time) document a contemporary and evolving culture. Haldane’s photographs offer an example of First Nations self-representation, a counter to the more usual colonial-settler’s gaze.

There is a kinship between Haldane’s and Stewart’s practices through the production of complex and diverse documents of First Nations self-representation. Within this Stewart infiltrates male-centered narratives of colonial culture and reasserts connections to pre-colonial matriarchal traditions while considering the tensions present between the institution as colonial support structure and a living entity shaped by the community it represents.

This project was made possible with the generous support provided by the First Peoples’ Cultural Council, British Columbia Arts Council, the Nisga’a Nation through the Nisga’a Lisims Government. Production was supported through a Media Arts Residency at the Western Front. Additional assistance provided by Budget Car and Truck Rental, Terrace.

### Biography

Krista Belle Stewart is a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation, living and working in Vancouver and Brooklyn. Exhibitions include Fiction/Non-fiction at The Esker Foundation, Calgary and Music from the New Wilderness, Western Front, Vancouver. At Western Front, Stewart produced a collaborative multimedia performance working with, circa 1918, wax cylinder recordings by anthropologist James Alexander Teit of her great-grandmother, Terese Kaimetko. A string quartet responded live to Stewart’s loops of these traditional Okanagan songs presented alongside visual projections. Most recently, Stewart was commissioned by the City of Vancouver as part of the *Year of Reconciliation*, public art project at the entrance to the Canada Line City Centre Station at Granville and Georgia where Stewart’s Her Story, a public photo mural and video installation, utilized footage of a CBC documentary entitled *Seraphine: Her Own Story*, a scripted interpretation of her mother’s journey from residential school to becoming BC’s first Aboriginal public health nurse. This work was also exhibited in Where Does it Hurt? at Artspeak. Stewart juxtaposes the 1967 film, in which her mother plays herself, alongside a video of her mother’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission interview, generating a conversation between depiction and lived experience.




A video still depicts two people pointing to a large black and white image hanging on a wooden paneled wall. To the right is a glass display case containing two objects sitting atop a red platform.

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A large grey tapestry is installed on a red-painted gallery wall. The tapestry depicts a small human figure riding on a four-legged animal. 

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A large video projection of a snowy landscape on a red gallery wall. Centred in the image, a red pickup truck on a narrow road cutting across low, rolling hills. 

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A large tapestry and video projection on red gallery walls. The projected video depicts a museum wall with a black and white photograph. The tapestry depicts a human figure on a four-legged animal. 

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A video work by Krista Belle Stewart projected on a red gallery wall. The video shows a person wearing a carved wooden mask. A black and white photograph of children is installed on the other wall. 

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A scarf-like textile hangs from a bar attached to a gallery wall. The textile has a colourful stripe-pattern and blue tassels. The gallery walls are painted in red, and the floor is light grey. 

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Motion and Moment Always

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents an ambitious new commission at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station by Canadian artist Shannon Bool. Originally from Vancouver Island, she attended Emily Carr University before studying in New York, Frankfurt and moving to Berlin.

Bool typically references a wide variety of historical and monumental decorative objects in her work, from Michelangelo’s David to the ornamentation on Etruscan tombs. While the Tuscan themes in recent projects specifically developed during her 2013 residency at the Villa Romana in Florence, her reinterpretation of these objects is characteristic of her practice in commenting on the role of decorative arts within art history, as well as on the change in meaning that occurs through the replication and alteration of significant and well known items.

For Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Bool has worked with a photographer to document the sixteenth-century Egyptian Medici Mamluk carpet, recently rediscovered stored in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Italy.  Mamluk style carpets figured significantly in Mediterranean commerce, appearing in Venetian paintings of this time, and are characterized by a central medallion surrounded by a variety of smaller geometric motifs, forming a kaleidoscopic appearance, the palette limited to red, blue, green and yellow tones. In many such carpets the vast and complex patterns suggest notions of eternity and evoke cosmic associations with Buddhist thought. While undoubtedly they should not be read as some form of direct mapping of philosophical intent, the designs themselves may be influenced by such ideas from central Asia and also reflect patterns in Moorish architecture which connect to similar philosophical readings of mathematical logic and infinity.

By combining patterns from and with historical vernacular objects, Bool’s interventions play with the mechanical reproduction of geometric sources and iconography. In previous work taking impetus from floor surfaces, Bool made *Casino Runner (Aztec Inn)* by blowing up a segment of a cheap wall-to-wall carpet encountered at a Las Vegas casino hotel. The original carpet was laden with random appropriations from ancient Aztec culture and Anatolian ornaments, which the artist underlined in having her version handwoven by Turkish weavers. The casino itself is a throwback to the iconic Art Deco monument, the Aztec Hotel that still operates in Monrovia, California. American Art Deco used the powerful geometry of ancient Mexican civilizations to break from European aesthetic traditions. Bool’s carpet, exquisitely hand-knotted by traditional village weavers in Anatolia, Turkey, heightens – even fetishizes – the production values combining the sublime and hysterical experience of entering a casino with the distinctly Eastern reading of a Western sensibility.

Here, Bool has painstakingly pieced together images of the Mamluk carpet for Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, itself unusual due to its gigantic size and pristine condition, to reproduce the whole carpet at almost exact scale across the glass façade of the building. Amazing in its detail, intricacy and partial signs of use, the image records literally and metaphorically both the patterns and passages of time, in much the same way as the busy station is itself an embodiment of a space of people passing through. Suspended in the everyday space of the station and tilted as if afloat, the work shows some of the mathematical and geometrical sensibilities that are seldom acknowledged but directly influenced renaissance thought.

This will be the first new commission by Bool with the Contemporary Art Gallery during 2015, a second project to evolve for late spring.

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

### Biography

Shannon Bool lives and works in Berlin. Solo exhibitions include: *The Fourth Wall Through the Third Eye*, Galerie Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf; *Walk Like an Etruscan*, Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto (2013); *The Inverted Harem II*, Bonner Kunstverein (2011);  CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, France; *The Inverted Harem*, GAK-Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen (2010); RMIT Project Space, Melbourne, Australia (2008). Group exhibitions include *MMK2 Boom She Boom*, Works from the MMK Collection, Frankfurt; The Klöntal Triennale, Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland (2014); *Soft Pictures*, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaugengo, Turin; *Painting Forever!*, KW, Berlin; Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto (2013); the Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2012); *7×14*, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Tactical Support, Gallery Tracy Williams, New York; *Rock Opera*, CACP Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux (2009); *Drawing on Sculpture: Graphic Interventions on the Photographic Surface*, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2007); *Make Your Move*, Projects Arts Centre, Dublin; Spiralen der Erinnerung, Kunstverein in Hamburg; *Carbonic Anhydride*, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2006). Work is held in the collections of Berlinische Galerie Landesmuseum Für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Berlin; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Lenbachhaus, Munich, and the Saatchi Collection, London. She is represented by Kadel Willborn Gallery in Düsseldorf and Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto.

Detail image of a photograph in vinyl of a rectangular carpet installed on the facade of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. Geometric forms and stylized plant motifs in white, green and red are visible.

Installed on the facade of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station is a photograph in vinyl of a large rectangular carpet. The image is reproduced at a slanted angle, making the carpet look like it is flying.