Anchi Lin

In 2015, the Contemporary Art Gallery inaugurated a new annual award for an emerging artist from SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts.

This fall we present *To the Shore* by 2015 award recipient Anchi Lin, her first solo exhibition. In this single channel video, Lin enacts the sound of waves hitting a shoreline through the simple act of sweeping. Rooted in recollection and memory of place, the work playfully explores domestic routines drawing attention to the meditative quality of action while the audience and the performer transcend their physical reality.

### Biography

Anchi Lin obtained her BFA in Visual Arts at Simon Fraser University in 2015. Her work has manifested within the realm of performance and video art. Concepts such as language and gender are the basis of her practice while Lin’s Taiwanese aboriginal background has invariably been the catalyst for her examination of identity and cultural norms. Her work continues to navigate realms that fall between individual and collective consciousness.






ProgramGuideFall2016.pdf

Still image from a video. A person wearing a grey shirt and a pair of black pants stands on a concrete floor between spotlights, sweeping with a long broom. 

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A spotlight and a broom are placed on a gallery floor. A video of a person sweeping with a similar broom is projected onto the white wall. 

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To the Shore

 Guillaume Leblon

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition by French artist Guillaume Leblon in a Canadian museum. Leblon’s practice is characterized both by its diversity and the artist’s shrewd manipulation of space. While he creates powerful, discrete objects, films and paintings, the presentation in Vancouver choreographs his works into a larger spatial narrative within the gallery venue exuding a potent sense of ephemerality and the uncanny.

Creating fictional landscapes or altering an existing space has long been Leblon’s favoured technique for fueling uncertainty and doubt in order to undermine the stark purity and perfect finish of the museum. At CAG, Leblon transforms our gallery rooms with a major intervention. Plywood alterations to the floors and walls modify our perception of the space not only physically but also through the changes in acoustics, and so, by means of such a gesture of immediate and deft simplicity, we engage in a shared make-believe and the experience of a space redefined. Our awareness of the space is further shifted by a shelf that runs around the gallery wall perimeter, its changing height creating an odd disorientation disturbing our sense of sureness.

Interspersed among these new floor surfaces and along the sloping shelf is a selection of new and recent works which characteristically create a poetic universe, a world of its own, extending Leblon’s ongoing propositions with a more tangible figurative presence. We are transported into a different realm, embracing an active, mobile, open relationship with the world. Questions arise concerning established associations – historically, culturally and socially constructed – between the exceptional and the normal, the manufactured and the existent, the personal and impersonal, the ephemeral and the permanent, the old and the new, the dead and the alive. The gallery becomes a landscape, a site somewhere between what is almost known and barely known.

This atmosphere or narrative impulse is created in other ways too. Incorporating familiar objects into his sculptures, from tables and shelves to industrial materials and processes such as plywood and casting, Leblon presents enigmatic constructions and subtly affected combinations which have a powerful, seductive, material presence. While his works refuse a single reading, Leblon having a non-hierarchical approach to his materials, they often conjure images of the ruin and the passage of time, the notion of the vanitas bringing the present and the past into contact. Leblon transforms everyday components into sculptures that attain a relic-like quality or the aura of a classical statue.

For this new exhibition Leblon brings together a group of works that evoke the suggestive potential of the body through the material and image of the resolved pieces themselves. A blank face without features, detached arms without hands, a clothed torso; each of these new evocative sculptures comprises a sort of shell or envelope for an absent body, a hollow core that speaks to questions of memory, dreams, fragmentation and possibility. This body of work also marks a transition in process and materials for Leblon. Over the years, the artist has shifted from working with found materials, remnants and organic matter to foundry work in materials like aluminum, marble and sand. Always invested in temporal concerns, Leblon sees this mutation in process as a transformation of the work’s relationship to time.

While absence of the body is suggested, sometimes an imprint reveals a human form with shapeless contours, where the body is sensed by the viewer, or clothing and other fragments are employed where, ironically, there may remain traces of cigar ashes or of wear. The sculptures perform like characters within some larger narrative. *Likely Political Circumstances* (2016) is a man’s jacket hovering phantom-like above dismembered arms as if held upright by an invisible thread, a scene of some violent action; *Brother* and *Brother II* (both 2016) both present a vessel form, also suggestive of hollowed out partial skulls, evoking a sliced through container whereby we might contemplate its former function or the potential to hold something be it matter or an idea.

This interest in transformations manifests itself in works that hint at a kind of alchemy for the artist. In these new works, Leblon uses forms that are made from hand blown glass or newer technologies, for the first time producing objects using 3D printing, the final sculptures retaining textural and visual evidence of its original humble material. Despite Leblon’s notionally post-apocalyptic world his installations and collections of sculptures teem not only with innumerable, partially perceptible thoughts, but also with movement and life.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of Institut Français and the Consulate général de France in Vancouver. The exhibition is generously supported by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill.

### Biography

Guillaume Leblon was born in Lille, France and currently lives and works in New York. Selected solo exhibitions include carlier | gebauer, Berlin (2016); Panorama, Marseille (2015); MassMoCA, North Adams; Institut d’Art Contemporain (IAC) Villeurbanne; Galerie Projecte SD, Barcelona; Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris (2014); Contemporary Art Museum of Sérignan, France (2012); Fondation Paul Ricard, Paris (2011); Le grand café, Centre d’art contemporain, Saint-Nazaire (2010); MUDAM, Luxembourg (2009); Centre d’art contemporain Culturgest, Porto;  Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporaneo, CGAC, Santiago de Compostela (2008); Kunstverein Düsseldorf; Centre d’art contemporain – Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, France (2006), amongst many others. Leblon has participated in group exhibitions, most recently at Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, Paris and Brussels; Punta della Dogana, Venice; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Biennale de Lyon; Secession, Vienna; Bétonsalon, Paris; Gallery LABOR, Mexico City; Kunsthalle Saint-Gallen; Museum MARTa, Herford; Le Plateau, FRAC Ile de France, Paris; Fridericianum, Kassel; and CAC Vilnius. In 2011 he was nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp, Paris. Leblon is represented by Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris; carlier | gebauer, Berlin and Galerie Projecte SD, Barcelona.




Image of a dark, metallic coloured sculpture on a wooden surface. The sculpture resembles the form of a human ear. 

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Large plywood sheets panel the floor and half the walls of a gallery. A sculpture of a torso in a blue jacket is installed on the right, a projection and a brown, chair-like sculpture on the left. 

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A brown sculpture resembling a human head is installed on a gallery floor. It is faceless, and hollowed out, making the sculpture look like a low chair. 

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In the corner of a gallery, one of the large rectangular plywood floor panels is partially lifted up, revealing a bit of the concrete floor below. A projected image is cast on the wall opposite. 

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A white sculpture of a male nude in a plank position installed in the middle of a gallery. The sculpture is at human scale and installed atop a wooden plinth. 

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UNTANGLED FIGURES

Guillaume Leblon

Mirjam Linschooten

 Sameer Farooq

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents an ambitious new multi-venue commission by collaborators Dutch artist Mirjam Linschooten and Canadian artist Sameer Farooq, interrogating the ways in which cultural diversity is narrated and represented. Working together for over a decade, the duo’s interdisciplinary practice creates community-based models of participation in order to re-imagine a material record of the present. Utilizing installation, photography, design, and writing, they investigate the tactics and methods of anthropology to examine various forms of collecting, interpretation and display. The result is work that reveals how institutions speak about our lives, evoking an archeology of the present often existing beyond the framework of the gallery. Their expansive projects develop intricate, speculative archives re-purposing found objects and language to expose ruptures within cultural representation, questioning the invisibility of the archivist and interrogating the inherent value bias in collecting.

Over the past year, Farooq and Linschooten have undertaken a series of cumulative research trips via the Burrard Marina Field House Studio Residency Program toward the development of installations at CAG, Yaletown-Roundhouse Station and the Museum of Anthropology (MOA). Core to the various commissions are participatory workshops led by the artists with the Native Youth Program (NYP) at MOA, a program for Indigenous youth from Greater Vancouver where students engage in various aspects of working within a museum context, leading public tours, completing research projects and participating in presentations. Farooq and Linschooten invited NYP participants to consider their personal narratives in relation to the anthropological museum’s displays, identifying key elements for examination in the Multiversity Galleries. Throughout the histories of colonialism and capitalism innumerable cultural objects have entered museum collections around the world detached from the communities and physical bodies they belong to. Ripped from context and trapped behind glass, rearranged and discombobulated, the cultural authenticity, specificity and vitality of these objects are dismembered into taxonomies of otherness. Within the window spaces at CAG, Farooq and Linschooten consider such acts of ethnographic curation. Reflecting tensions between local communities and their representation in museums, Farooq and Linschooten focus on ongoing cultural forms that persist in contemporary culture. Replicating, yet also subverting, the supposed objective aesthetic of museum vitrines, Farooq and Linschooten have installed a collection of mass-produced cultural objects purchased from shops across the lower mainland, notionally representative of Vancouver’s largest immigrant communities. Display mechanisms such as shelves, hooks and bars are used to disrupt and unsettle the objects, disturbing the meticulous arrangement and suggestive of the uneasy relations between the conserved and custodian, artifact and everyday object, revealing the unintended violence of display.

At Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Farooq and Linschooten repurpose found language from a local souvenir shop highlighting the active commodification of culture. During their time in Vancouver, the artists discovered Hudson House Trading Company, a typical tourist store in Gastown selling a plethora of Canadian “knick-knacks” that capitalize on perceptions of Vancouver’s identity via a collection of cultural reproductions for sale. Through the simple act of reproducing the language of the store’s inventory list and applying the names of a selection of items directly onto the station windows, the Canada Line façade operates like an advert exaggerating the wholesale co-opting of culture as currency.

The re-appropriation of found images, objects and language developed into public installations both exaggerate and subvert the ethnographic strategies of representation and implicate such practices into a larger system of commodification utilized to propagate cultural hierarchy, difference and discrimination.

Projects are generously supported by the BC Arts Council Innovations Program, the Mondriaan Fund and the Hamber Foundation. Farooq and Linschooten’s collaboration with the Native Youth Program is developed in collaboration with the Museum of Anthropology. At Yaletown- Roundhouse Station, work is presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program — IntransitBC.



A close up view of an installation containing white paper plates edged with a blue floral pattern. The plates are placed upright over a black background and layered creating a scalloped pattern. 

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Image of CAG’s exterior facade windows. Installed in one of the windows are masks on a black background. Each mask is split in half and connected to a white, X-shaped shelf and bracket structure. 

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Image of CAG’s exterior facade windows. Installed in one are white shelves and brackets holding various cultural objects. In the other, maps of the African continent are mounted. 

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Text-based artworks in vinyl are installed on the glass facade of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, resembling hand painted signs. The letters are all capitalized in black, yellow, or white. 

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Text-based artworks in vinyl are installed on the glass facade of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, resembling hand painted signs. One reads: “MEDICINE STONE AWAKENING NECKLACE $29.99 (USD).”

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Sameer Farooq and Mirjam Linschooten 

White, Steel, Slice, Mask | Bear Claws Salad Hands 

 Isabel Nolan

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major new body of work by Irish artist Isabel Nolan, conceived as a single project across successive evolving presentations at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Mercer Union, Toronto and CAG.

Nolan’s work encompasses text, sculpture, drawing and textiles, and often begins with the close scrutiny of individual literary or artistic works, or evolves out of consciously erratic and diverging enquiries into the aesthetics of varied fields. Ranging from cosmology, to theories and systems of medicine detailing the makeup and workings of the human body or to illuminated manuscripts, all provide potential stimuli for investigation. The exhibition takes its title from the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy’s *The Darkling Thrush* (1899), in which the sun, described as “the weakening eye of day,” is a dismal star drained of its force by a gloomy pre-centennial winter afternoon. As the sun’s gaze weakens, so flags the spirit of the poet who, until interrupted by birdsong, sees only the inevitability of death in the cold world around him. The show thereby examines how light manifests as a symbol in our thoughts, obsessions and pursuits, and oscillates around a series of ideas as a material account of the known and unknown strangeness of the world, from the formation of the planet’s crust to the death of the sun and the enduring preoccupation with light as a metaphor for truth, hope and optimism.

Writing is an important tool for Nolan, and at the beginning of the show, a single sculptural form appears perhaps as the protagonist of an improbable story. *Rock founded place* (2014) is a large-scale scrolled text written by Nolan that imagines the viewpoint of the oldest rock in the world, whose exposure to deep time and the precariousness of existence is profoundly different to our own. In this world, time, knowledge and forms of life are recognizable yet play utterly different histories and roles than in our own civilization.

Throughout the exhibition, individual pieces unfold to both seduce and disarm. Nolan uses this as a device to cause us reflection upon our relationship to light as a means by which the world is framed. She provides opportunities to reveal the contingency not only of our own world, but also of our myriad ways of knowing and being in it. Underpinning this is a desire to examine and capture in material form the occasions of intensity that can define our encounters with the objects around us; inexplicable and unsettling moments that leave us with a heightened awareness of what it means to be alive. For the artist this exploration happens through making things; whether these things are sculptures, textiles, photographs or texts. Monumental or intimate in scale, they are presented to us as tentative and precarious markers of the experience of our place beneath the sun.

Across all spaces at CAG, discrete works trace a progression reflective of different human attempts to understand our place in the universe. From *Rock founded place* we might move to consider a small-scale abstract painting such as *Dreams of no thing, no time* (2014), the enigmatically diagrammatic steel construction *Somewhere between Andromeda and Vulpecula: Sky Atlas* (2014) or *Fourfold sorrows (Jesus you look so sad)* (2015), an impressive woven carpet connecting wall to floor. Contemplating these and other pieces such as the collection of brightly coloured ceramic vessels, *Nothing new under the sun* (2014), all combine to reflect Nolan’s interest in the way colour and light are used to express religious or spiritual sensibilities. Elsewhere, the intimate drawings *Based on my recent observations (1–7)* (2014) and the large-scale photograph *The view from nowhen* (2014) are informed by modern cosmology, wherein scientific theories and technologies articulate our contemporary relationship to the universe. And as we meander through the space of the gallery, we are finally confronted by what at first appears a somewhat surreal image, this mural of two donkeys photographed in Bully’s Acre, a former public cemetery located near the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin. Referred to in myth and folklore from around the world as well as embodying different symbolic references in classical and ancient cultures and across different faiths, these donkeys provide a provocation that cannot be met: a stubborn and inscrutable view from a world that can never be fully known.

As with all of Nolan’s oeuvre, the works in *The weakened eye of day* reveal, through their very subjective and intimate nature, the arbitrariness and inherent absurdity of attempting to tackle the enormity of these subjects through the process of object making. Yet the objects are made and for Nolan they also find, with varying degrees of (un)certainty, their place under the sun.

Originated by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, this new selection of work for the exhibition is  presented in collaboration with Mercer Union, Toronto and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. The exhibition is supported by the Culture Ireland programme for 2016 celebrating Ireland’s Centenary. We also acknowledge the generous assistance of Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

### Biography 

Isabel Nolan lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. Recent solo exhibitions include Mercer Union, Toronto (2016); Launch Pad, New York; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2015); Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2014); The Return Gallery, Goethe Institut, Dublin; Musée d’art Moderne de Saint-Etienne (2012); The Model, Sligo (2011); Gallery Side 2, Tokyo (2010); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; ARTSPACE, New Zealand (2008); Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2005). Nolan represented Ireland at the 2005 Venice Biennale in a group exhibition, “Ireland at Venice 2005”. Other recent group shows include Lofoten International Arts Festival (LIAF), Svolvær, Norway; Artspace, Sydney (2015); Wallspace Gallery, New York (2014); Palais de Tokyo, Paris; David Nolan Gallery, New York; Villa Datris, Fondation pour la Sculpture Contemporaine, France; Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2013); EVA International, Limerick (2012); Stephen Friedman Gallery, London;  Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2011); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2010); Accademia d’Ungheria, Rome; The Daejeon Museum of Art, South Korea; Bielefelder Kunstverein, Germany; Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland; AkkuH, Hengelo, The Netherlands; Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, Northern Ireland; SMART Project Space, Amsterdam (2009); Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Stroom Den Haag (2007). Work is held in public collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art; The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Allied Irish Bank; Arts Council of Ireland; Kildare Co. Council and various private collections in Europe and USA. Nolan is represented by Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.



ProgramGuideSummer2016.pdf

An abstract painting of orange, yellow and shades of green reminiscent of a sunrise.

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Nine ceramic sculptures installed on a galley floor. Each sculpture resembles stacked ceramic bowls with a sphere in the middle, painted in either a pale yellow, white, or blue.

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A narrow hallway to a gallery is painted light pink. A large, colourful carpet with abstract forms is mounted on the wall, visible at the end of the hallway. The carpet's end hangs to the floor.  

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A yellow lion sculpture sits on a gallery floor. Behind it, a thin, black steel sculpture leans against a wall. Several framed, small-scale colour drawings are installed on the same gallery wall. 

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A large-scale, black and white photograph of donkeys in a cemetery covers the full height and width of a free-standing wall. The image is foregrounded by a large-scale, coiled sculpture on the floor. 

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The weakened eye of day

Isabel Nolan

 Jochen Lempert

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first major museum exhibition in Canada devoted to the celebrated German photographer Jochen Lempert. Trained as a biologist, Lempert photographs plants, animals and other natural phenomena with both scientific acumen and a poetic appreciation of natural beauty. His approach is scientific as well as humorous. Always working in black and white, his work engages with a diverse range of subjects and genres, ranging from everyday views to abstracted details. Photographic series alternate with single pictures, highly contrasted images with almost blank papers, through which multiple links and subtle associations are woven.

The exhibition focuses on a range of work produced over the last five years that has direct resonance with photographic practice in Vancouver examining the indexical nature of photography itself, notions of time and connections to the history of image making, mutability, classification, and materiality. The subject of interest of Lempert’s work — animal life — is complemented by his exploration of the properties and materiality of the photographic image, as revealed in its developing and printing processes. While seemingly serendipitous, Lempert nevertheless pursues a very clear goal and aesthetic. His is a very careful, subtle world.

Lempert’s large compositions of black-and-white photographs demand close inspection. Ranging from medium-sized to small and tiny prints, the exhibition comprises his now classic repertoire of flora and fauna giving visitors the feeling of being at an amateur’s show, where the standards of high-end presentation have been disregarded. But upon closer examination paradoxical connections manage to unsettle what at first glance seemed unproblematic. The first thing one might notice about his photographs is their physical presence. Unlike on-screen JPEGs and the smooth color gradations of inkjet prints, Lempert always works in black-and-white and prints, his photographs using analogue techniques. He often manipulates them as he processes them in his darkroom and a picture may be printed in four different sizes before the artist settles on which works best.

After a rigorous editing process, Lempert hangs the finished artworks in a gallery un-matted and unframed. They are taped to the gallery wall in such a way that their rippling edges sometimes lift off its surface. The paper he uses has a relatively loose weave, giving each picture a softer effect; even his most sharply focused images seem, upon first glance, like charcoal drawings or finely detailed pencil sketches. In a world of color prints the size of billboards, the material properties of Lempert’s artworks reveal a sensibility rooted in timeless concerns.

Here, it is the photographer’s behavior in front of a myriad of objects — including those from both natural and urban environments — which is the subject of this exhibition. The transformative, scientific qualities of animals and flowers are celebrated ironically — it’s Darwinism at its best. The diptych *Belladonna* (2013) pairs a photograph of the plant, otherwise known as deadly nightshade, and a squirrel. A central dark sphere  —  the plant’s berry, the squirrel’s eye  —  links the two photographs formally, and many artists would be content with the juxtaposition. But for Lempert, this is also visual proof of an evolutionary concept. The plant’s berry gleams to attract the fruit-eating animals that can disperse its seeds; each species sees a face in the fruit according to its particular capabilities. This juxtaposition asks us to imagine what the squirrel sees; the intermingling of scientific and artistic thinking creates a rich set of associations.

While individual images might suggest a certain degree of kinship, in fact they have nothing to do with each other, so the result is totally speculative, like an evolutionary theory gone astray. Lempert’s photographic series depart from similarities based on form; his morphological inventions open up different possibilities. Either he is acting as a street photographer whose silver gelatin prints have been unsuccessfully colonized by the themes of the former biologist, or else he is decidedly dissolving categories like “natural” and “artificial” that have been long set apart.

Our ability to observe what surrounds us is remarkable: we peer deeply into outer space and scrutinize subatomic particles. These powers are enhanced by technologies that grow more potent with each passing year. Lempert, working with nothing more than a 35-mm camera, often tries to photograph phenomena that elude our visual grasp —  great spans of time, the complexity of interacting natural systems, invisible biological processes. Be it the patterns created by raindrops splashing on the surface of a body of water  or pictures of wind and photosynthesis, Lempert engages concepts we understand but can only see through indirect measures, testing the camera’s vision against the natural world, encouraging us to dwell upon how the natural world trumps human perception and understanding. A sense of wonder at the world’s mysteries rushes into the gap between the artist’s grand intentions and the humble means by which he expresses them.

The exhibition at CAG is generously supported by Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V. and and the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Vancouver. Organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery in collaboration with the Cincinnati Art Museum. Special thanks go to Brian Sholis, Curator of Photography. This exhibition is part of Capture Photography Festival.

### Biography

Jochen Lempert lives and works in Hamburg, Germany. Selected solo exhibitions include Cincinnati Art Museum (2015); ProjecteSD, Barcelona, Spain; Overbeck-Gesellschaft Verein von Kunstfreunden e.V., Lübeck, Germany; Städtische Galerie Nordhorn, Germany (2014); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico; Norma Mangione gallery, Torino, Italy (2013); Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; Rochester Art Center, Rochester (2012); Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Front Room. Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2010); Domaine de Kerguéhennec Centre d’Art Contemporain, Bignan, France; Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal (2009). His work has recently been included in group exhibitions at Fotomuseum Antwerp, Belgium; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Germany; Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, Austria; Fondation D’Entreprise Ricard, Paris; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Marian Goodman, Paris; Biennial for Contemporary Art; FRAC Bretagne, Rennes, France; Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany; and the Paris Triennial, amongst many others. His work is held in many public collections including: Fundación “La Caixa”, Barcelona, Spain; Colección Banco de España, Madrid, Spain; CNAP, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, France; FRAC Bretagne, Rennes, France; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Fondation Norac, Rennes, France; Les Abattoirs–Musée d’art modern et contemporain and Frac Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse, France; Museum Ludwig Köln; Museum Folkwang Essen; and Kunstmuseum Bonn, amongst many others. In 2005 Lempert was the winner of the Edwin-Scharff Preis, Hamburg and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2014. He is represented by ProjecteSD, Barcelona.




ProgramGuideSpring2016.pdf

Two black and white photographs hang on a white wall. The image on the left depicts the leaves of a plant with a berry in the middle and the one on the right depicts the profile of a squirrel. 

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Two black and white photographs hang on walls in a gallery separated by an entryway. Two more black and white photographs are visible through the entryway, across a lobby, into another gallery.  

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Three black and white photographs are installed on three gallery walls. A photograph of a pigeon is installed on the front right wall while the two others are mounted on walls farther back. 

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Several black and white photographs are installed on white gallery walls. The photographs look similar with high contrast, low focus compositions.

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Several black and white photographs are installed on white gallery walls. A grid of photographs on one wall depict profiles of bird heads. Six other photographs are mounted on the adjacent wall. 

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Field Guide

Jochen Lempert

 Jérôme Havre

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a new commission by Jérôme Havre, the artist’s first project in Vancouver. Originally from France, Havre’s work considers representation, circulation, transmission and translation of black identities, interrogating racialized stereotypes and ideologies projected onto bodies.

Drawing directly onto a found family portrait, *Untitled* (2010) is a blunt gesture. The image depicts a family posed against a vintage car in a tropical landscape, its warm hues of analog colour giving entry to a past generation. Havre disrupts the scene, scrawling doodles of mask-like forms in white-out directly onto each family member’s face, erasing identity and subjectivity, reforming these physical bodies as alien figures.

Masks are objects held in high esteem in western culture. Through centuries of colonial violence and capitalist extraction these specific objects sit in private and museum collections around the world detached from the action, ritual, communities and physical bodies that they were made for. Disembodied heads without voice, these masked bodies are “stilled,” re-contextualized as stand-ins to represent otherness, here a reflection on western perceptions of blackness.

This offsite exhibition is presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival.


### Biography

Jérôme Havre lives and works in Toronto having completed his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Since 2001 he has exhibited in Europe, Africa and North America. Recent exhibitions include *Talking Back, Otherwise,* Art Museum, University of Toronto (2015); *Paradis: La fabrique de l’image*, 14N 61W, Martinique (2015) and *Land Marks*, Peterborough Art Gallery (2015). Havre is currently artist in residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario.


A faded photograph of a family of six standing in front of a car. White mask-like shapes have been painted over their faces. 

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A large-scale photograph in vinyl installed on the glass exterior of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. In the image, a family stands in front of a car. Mask-like shapes have been painted over their faces.

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Untitled 

Jérôme Havre

 John Wood and Paul Harrison

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Canada by British duo John Wood and Paul Harrison. Their practice unfolds as a way of observing the human condition, an ongoing investigation into the world that surrounds us, the objects we encounter and use daily, and our fundamental engagement with the physical universe in all its sometime or seemingly futile existence.

Comprising various everyday objects, drawings, photographs and videos, the exhibition provides a survey detailing recent propositions for the artists where narrative comes seeping in: taste, politics, aspiration, planning, individual and collective dreaming and ambition appear, literally and metaphorically, opening up on to the world outside. Time, as perceived in an action on video, lengthens from seconds into decades within the sculptural forms, and the focus widens from a momentary encounter in a studio to a project in a landscape or a vision of things to come. As viewers we become implicated in their tragicomic world of absurdist humour leading to both simultaneous delight and sombre reflection on the failures of human endeavour.

The installation contains a selection of new sculptures using tools, drawing equipment and other useful items in various media. For example, two propelling pencils share a single lead; another pencil has been sharpened right down to the rubber end and remains housed in its sharpener; a length of string is measured against a ruler; two balls of string, one un-wound then re-wound, the other original, and a single glue stick, stuck head first onto a wall. The humour is dry and the jokes visual; the familiar made strange by altering perceptions.

Connecting these sculptural works is a selection of videos, typical of their practice while sharing a pared-down set of qualities. *10×10* (2011) and *Semi Automatic Painting Machine* (2014) deconstruct the very nature of the moving image and its means of presentation, investigating narrative structure, representation, transformation and the history of cinematic worlds through various devices that reference both digital and analogue production. Their most recent video *Erdkunde* (2015) playfully connects out from the studio into the “real” world. By encompassing a world of things it causes us to reconsider the sculptures on show and the geography these suggest, an essential optimism within the futility of ongoing attempts, a testament to our ability to overcome obstacles, to forge ahead for a better world.

Long has Wood and Harrison’s work being concerned with the body, characteristically employing a vocabulary that connects into the spatial concerns and material world of choreography and contemporary dance, and is a practice that engages with attributes such as trust, cause and effect, action and reaction, and the physical arena and dimensions in which movement and gesture occurs. To this end, alongside the exhibition we will premiere a major new live performance later this year, a first for Wood and Harrison, who are working with Ballet BC to develop an ambitious joint commission, a new dance work, complete with movement, direction, costumes and staging.

Wood and Harrison’s *Some words, some more words* is installed on the CAG Façade from February 12 to August 31, 2016. 

The art-dance commission is produced in collaboration with Ballet BC with support in part from the Kickstarter community in partnership with Art Basel Crowdfunding Initiative.

### Biography

John Wood and Paul Harrison live and work in Bristol, UK. They have many notable solo exhibitions including Von Bartha, Basel; NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; Carroll/Fletcher, London (2015); Museo de Antioquia, Medellin, Columbia (2014); Frist Centre, Nashville, H&R Block Artspace, Kansas and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2011-12); Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland; University of California, Santa Barbara (2010); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2009); PICA, Perth (2008); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2007); Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK (2005); Tate Britain, London; MoMA, New York; MIT, Boston (2004) and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2002). They have also participated in group exhibitions worldwide: Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2015); OK Centre for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; Tokyo Station Gallery; Itami City Museum of Art; Kochi Museum of Art; Okayama Museum of Art (2014); Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (2013); MOBY, Israel; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2011); Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona (2010); Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2008); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2007); Hayward Gallery, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006); Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh (2005); Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2002); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2003); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1998) among others. Work is held in various public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris; MoMA, New York; Ludwig Collection, Aachen; Tel Aviv Museum; Kadist Foundation, Paris and Tate, London. John Wood and Paul Harrison are represented by Carroll/Fletcher, London; Von Bartha, Basel; Martine Aboucaya, Paris and Vera Cortes, Lisbon.



ProgramGuideWinter2016.pdf

A blue toy car is placed on the floor in the corner of a gallery. Its front is slightly bent and pushed up against the bottom corner of a concrete wall, as if it had crashed moments before.

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Two balls of white string placed on a white flat surface. The left ball is slightly more neatly rolled than the one on the right. 

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A silver pencil sharpener is placed on a white flat surface. The tip of a black pencil, sharpened down to the pink eraser end, is inserted into the sharpener. 

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Fifteen metal rulers align diagonally on a white table in a gallery. Each is bent upwards at a 90 degree angle at different points. In combination, the aligned bent sections create a raised slope.

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Multimedia artworks installed in a gallery: a microphone with a stand sits on the left, three monitors display video works, small sculptural pieces placed on a white table in the middle of the floor. 

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Two black and white drawings are installed on a gallery wall. A sentence, “This is the drawing I was telling you about” is written on one, and “This is that drawing” is written on the other. 

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Exterior image of CAG’s first floor facade installed with text-based work in vinyl by John Wood and Paul Harrison. Text is white on a blue background.

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Exterior image of CAG’s first floor facade installed with text-based work in vinyl by John Wood and Paul Harrison. Text is white on a blue background. 

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Exterior image of CAG’s first floor facade installed with text-based work in vinyl by John Wood and Paul Harrison. In one of the windows, text reads “SIDE AN UNNECESSARY SERIES OF WORDS.”

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I DIDN'T KNOW I DIDN'T KNOW IT

John Wood and Paul Harrison

Patrick Staff

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents The Foundation, a new and expansive body of work by artist Patrick Staff, their first solo exhibition in Canada. The project, which centres around a major film installation but also comprises sculpture, print and text, explores queer intergenerational relationships as they are negotiated through a body of historical materials. The film combines footage shot at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles — home to the archive of the erotic artist and gay icon and a community of people that care for it — with choreographic sequences shot within a specially constructed set.

The legacy of Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991), better known as Tom of Finland, spans multiple generations; his work made a considerable impact on masculine representation and imagery in post-war gay culture. The foundation was established in 1984 by Tom and his friend Durk Dehner to preserve his vast catalogue of homoerotic art, whilst endeavouring to — to quote the organization’s website — "educate the public to the cultural merits of erotic art and in promoting healthier, more tolerant attitudes about sexuality.” Today, Durk runs the organization and lives in the house, along with a handful of other employees and artists.

Rather than focusing on Tom of Finland’s work, Staff’s film evokes the foundation as a set of relations. It explores how a collection is formed and constituted and the communities that produce and are produced by a body of work. Through observational footage of the house, its collections and inhabitants, the foundation is revealed as a domestic environment, a libidinal space, an archive, an office, and a community centre; a private space which is also the home of a public-facing organization and the source of a widely dispersed body of images. In the work, Staff foregrounds their own identity and personal dialogue with the different communities of the foundation to consider how ideas of inheritance and exchange are complicated by gender identity and presentation; in this context, of a younger trans person within a context dominated by the overtly masculine, male identity of an older generation. The documentary style footage of the foundation is intercut with a series of scenes, which are shot in a set incorporating aspects of the building’s architecture and technologies and operate within the register of experimental theatre. These sequences, featuring interactions with an older actor, use choreography and prop to explore the body as a site for the construction and deconstruction of subjectivities.

Through a varied, interdisciplinary and often collaborative body of  work comprising film, dance and performance, Staff considers ideas of discipline, dissent, labour, and the queer body, frequently drawing on the historical narration of counter-culture, radical activity and alternative forms of community building. This new work is the product of several years’ research and dialogue with the Tom of Finland Foundation and is Staff’s most ambitious and large-scale project to date, bringing together languages of film and live performance with sculptural materiality to explore the body as a political, living archive. The Foundation explores the complexities of cultural artifacts and collective identities, via an examination of ownership, appropriation, responsibility and desire.

The Foundation is co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London; Spike Island, Bristol; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Co-produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London and Spike Island, Bristol. With thanks to the Tom of Finland Foundation. The Foundation is supported by Arts Council England Grants for the Arts, The Elephant Trust and the Genesis Prize. The broadsheet publication and screening project is supported by The British Council.


### Biography

Patrick Staff lives and works in London and Los Angeles. Selected recent exhibitions, screenings and performances include *British Art Show 8*, touring; *The Foundation*, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Spike Island, Bristol and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015);  *Europe, Europe*, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; *Scaffold see Scaffold*, The Showroom, London; Art Turning Left, Tate Liverpool; *L’Heure Des Sorcières*, Le Quartier, France (2014); *Mental effort Before Action: 1-5A-5B*, South London Gallery; *A Factory As It Might Be (Bournville)*, International Project Space, Birmingham; *Society is a Workshop*, Banff Centre (2013); and *Chewing Gum for the Social Body*, Tate Modern, London (2012). Staff took part in the LUX Associate Artists Programme in 2010/11, and was recently awarded the 2015 Paul Hamlyn Award for visual artists.




An image of two people sitting in a bedroom facing the camera. Framed images cover the walls of the bedroom. A black leather vest hangs on the door and black leather pants are laid on a blue bed. 

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A  black vinyl strip curtain is installed in a hallway at the entrance to a gallery. Rays of light come into the hallway through the narrow gaps between the strips. 

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A large screen is installed at the end of the gallery space, on which a bearded face is projected. Dim red light illuminates the room. Five long carpets are placed on the floor.

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A video work by Patrick Staff is projected onto a large screen in a darkened gallery. Two figures are dancing the same choreography. 

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A video work by Patrick Staff is projected onto a large screen in a darkened gallery. The camera is closely focused on a bearded person’s face, who stands behind other figures.

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 The Foundation

Partnering with the VSB Windermere Community Schools Team and Frog Hollow Neighbourhood House, CAG worked with artists and filmmakers to deliver a series of year-long media arts projects from 2016 through 2020 with the grade eight and nine students of Get R.E.A.L., an afterschool program at Windermere Secondary School in East Vancouver. Each year’s project was the result of creative art and video production workshops exploring important issues raised by the group. Students were supported in organizing their collective voices and personal experiences through the use of contemporary media, while building technical skills and supportive relationships with each other, older peers and artist mentors.

Get R.E.A.L. was generously made possible by Brian and Andrea Hill. From 2018 to 2020, we acknowledge the generous support of the BC Arts Council Youth Engagement program toward the project. 

 

Three people, with their backs to the camera, look at a row of unframed photographs hanging on a grey gallery wall.