Andrew Dadson

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the most comprehensive solo exhibition in a public gallery to date of work by Vancouver-based artist Andrew Dadson.

Dadson has consistently engaged with the notion of boundaries in relation to space and time in his work, primarily through investigations with materiality, process and abstraction. Comprising new, ambitious large-scale paintings, film and installation, the gallery is given over to Dadson, whereby the exhibition presents a major statement by this young artist of propositions core to his practice.

Through different mediums – painting, film, and photography – Dadson explores the possibility to cross the perceptual boundaries of space, both physical and natural, and is thus reflected in his work in an attempt to subvert our perception and usual ways of looking. The works on display reiterate engagement with a core of ideas, suggesting performative actions to form a visual kaleidoscope.

Central to the exhibition is *House Plants* (2017), a new installation using plant forms and objects sprayed a single colour and lit by intense daylight lamps, Dadson’s most ambitious work to date. Sitting on a raised platform staged in the gallery, this large-scale piece echoes with contemporary “green” walls in Vancouver’s architecture, hinting at moments when nature is co-opted into urban space, nominally connecting to the remarkable landscape for which Vancouver is arguably best known. For the first time, using a biodegradable white paint instead of previous versions with black paint, the forms dissolve into the gallery environment. The cast shadows of red and blue light introduce colour where there appears to be none, revealing forms that initially seem white-washed away. As such, the result is a sort of temporary phantom, almost a deletion, and yet an intervention which is destined to fade away when nature once again prevails over the artist’s action. As the organic matter grows over the duration of the exhibition, the unifying painted colour will crack and splinter. New shoots will emerge to reveal fresh, natural colours, reinforcing Dadson’s key proposition in exposing temporal and perceptual shifts. Furthermore, the plants themselves have already undergone conceptual and physical layering, change and dislocation. The tropical palms are already decontextualized, having been brought from the domestic setting in which we usually see them to the gallery, but also from their native place of origin. In many ways we might consider Dadson’s intervention a transitory and frozen moment within a larger cycle of attention, oscillating between care and indifference.

In addition to this ambitious installation is a series of new monochromatic paintings, demonstrating fresh twists on Dadson’s familiar oeuvre. These large-scale paintings, with their surfaces constructed like sculptural elements integrated in their architectural setting, contain colour, which is poured, spread out, layered and scraped towards the edges, while also built into forms creating internal structure to the compositions as a whole. Almost reaching the limits of the painting space, the sheer materiality of the painted surface acquires an almost organic, material thickness. It appears as tangible evidence of the artist’s action and of the process of making that led to the creation of the work. The final layer of white leaves glimpses of other colours in filigree, in a cross-reference to the tradition of American abstract painting, from Rothko to Reinhardt, and Pollock to Rauschenberg.

The modestly scaled *White Restretch with Dirt* (2017) is a characteristic of an ongoing sequence for Dadson. Here however, instead of colour emerging along its edges, we see hints of earth and mud, creating a visual correspondence to House Plants. Alongside pigment, naturally occurring materials have been incorporated to shape and form the piece, to reinforce a connection to landscape and materially speak to the sense of fluidity and flux inherent in such environments. Nothing including the work itself, Dadson seems to suggest, is ever in stasis.

In contrast to the B.C. Binning Gallery where ideas and forms are presented in all-white, the Alvin Balkind Gallery is painted black and in darkness. Such duality, black/white, on/off, inside/outside, light/shadow, is a device that both conceptually and thematically connects Dadson’s work across each medium, providing logic to the exhibition as a whole. Uniting individual works and further elaborating Dadson’s artistic proposition, we present a newly remade twin 16mm film work from the artist’s research into painting techniques in relation to those of photography. Using two projectors that simultaneously show a single film threaded between them, *Sunrise/Sunset* (2017) depicts the sun concurrently rising and setting on opposite walls. In an ongoing loop, the space of a day is compressed into a revolving moment. The result of this technical tour de force is a play on light and dark, presence and absence, a temporary black hole. The film acts almost as a deletion akin to the temporal concerns evidenced in *House Plants*, which are destined to fade away when nature prevails over the artist’s action. As well as locating this within the broader cycles of change and renewal, the film smartly continues Dadson’s preoccupation with evolving shifts and the very materiality and processes of making.

Curated by Nigel Prince

We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of Phil Lind as presenting sponsor; wings+horns as major sponsor and additional support from Jan and Mark Ballard and production support from Cineworks.

### Biography

Andrew Dadson lives and works in Vancouver. Recent solo exhibitions include *Andrew Dadson*, Contemporary Art Gallery off-site at 524 West 26th Street Gallery, New York (2017); RaebervonStenglin, Zürich, Switzerland (2016 and 2013); *Over the Sun*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2015); Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, Italy;  David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2015 and 2013); *The Brink: Andrew Dadson*, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2012); *New Paintings and Visible Heavens*, Lawrimore Project, Seattle (2010); *Evening all afternoon*, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver (2007). Selected group exhibitions include *Summer 2016: Collection Works, Rennie Collection* at Wing Sang, Vancouver (2016); *Les traces matérielles, la temporalité et le geste en art contemporain (Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art)*, Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, Université Concordia, Montreal (2013); *Phantasmagoria*, Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver (2012); *On the Nature of Things*, Kamloops Art Gallery (2011); *WYSIWYG: What You(ngs) See Is What You Get*, Rosenblum & Friends Collection, Paris (2011); *Everything you can imagine is real…*, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2011); *Without you I’m Nothing*, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2011); *Che cosa sono le nuvole?*, Opere dalla Collezione Enea Righi, Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2010); *Summer Projects*, Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle Art Museum (2010); *Nothing to say and I am saying it*, Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany (2009); *Flower Power*, Centro Ricerca Attaule, Villa Giulia, Verbania, Italy (2009); *The Tenth Annual RBC Painting Competition*, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Rooms, St. John’s; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; The Power Plant, Toronto; Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon; Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2008-09); *Street Scene*, Murray Guy Gallery, New York (2007); *dedicated to you, but you weren’t listening*, The Power Plant, Toronto, (2005); *At Play*, Liu Haisu Museum, Shanghai, China (2004); *I am a Curator*, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2003). In 2011 Dadson won The Brink Award 2011, The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. Dadson is represented by Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, Italy and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, USA.


ProgramGuideFall2017.pdf

A close up view of a plant’s leaves under pink light against a white backdrop. The plant is painted white, two bright green leaves have sprouted in the centre. Areas of the white paint are cracking.

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Eight plants of various sizes sit on a white platform. The plants and their pots are painted white. There are bright blue and red lights, pointed towards the plants, casting a pink hue in the space.

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Four paintings hang on the wall of a gallery space. Three of them are black and one of them is white. The minimalist, rectangular paintings take on a sculptural form with thick layers of oil paint. 

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Two large-scale paintings hang on the ether side of a corner wall of a gallery space. The paintings appear sculptural, through the process of repeated layering and manipulating of the paint. 

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A dark gallery space with painted black walls and two projectors installed on white plinths. The projectors thread a single film between them, projecting a video of the sun. 

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Site For Still Life

Lyse Lemieux

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition of work by Canadian artist Lyse Lemieux, incorporating two new inter-related large-scale commissions across the gallery façade and off-site, both challenging and exploiting the opportunities presented at each location.

Lemieux’s artistic practice is often described as one focused on drawing, balanced between figuration and abstraction. But there is something about the artist’s material handling of line and form that is a key characteristic to understanding her process and thinking. Lemieux draws the way a fisherman pulls in the nets — “I need to hold the line in my hands” — stretching, cutting, assembling, turning it over and over, feeling its nap, testing its weight. She absorbs its economy, its tensile possibilities. We might consider this as Lemieux’s way of learning about the potential of line, often speaking of three-dimensional drawing, and why she “draws” as much with black felt and dressmaker’s shears, with button plackets and medical tape, as with ink.

Whether working in small (and until very recently, private) notebooks, on sheets of paper, or across the “page” of  the gallery façade and the glass panelled architecture of the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Lemieux’s working process is inseparable from the forms she creates, which are almost always in reference to the human figure. At CAG, the sequence of large-scale black ellipses on a fleshy-beige background, alternating with areas of pattern, quite literally cover and contain the building, redolent of familiar forms, both revealing and concealing.

But while part of the artist’s composition across the façade might suggest something figural, it equally refers to the body by proxy: through the garments that clothe it, the patterned sections recalling fabric drapes, the design itself wrapping the building. Lemieux is haunted by certain forms — like the black tunic she wore throughout Catholic school as a girl, or the pleated skirt — motifs that reappear again and again throughout her work. Deeply aware of the significance of clothing, the way it declares or masks our subject positions, constrains and liberates us, the artist thinks like a patternmaker: she sees the body through the cut of a skirt, the slope of a shoulder seam. While the works at CAG appear to hem in the building, obstinately suggestive of what and how something is enclosed, by contrast, at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, the intervention unfolds in moments when the artwork appears pulled back, offering glimpses of what lies behind or underneath.

And then there is the artist’s humour: sometimes rueful, sometimes coy. In works presented in a gallery, it can appear through irreverence to the sanctity of the frame (a tongue of cut felted wool or a found skirt will often dangle below it) or to the singularity of the page (a composition is very often held between two sheets of paper seamed together). Lemieux’s wit expresses a resilience, too, to the frustrations of working as a woman artist (much of the time invisibly) for many years, which while refraining from any overt political agenda, might be cast within a context illuminating women’s issues. Certainly this new commission’s title, *FULL FRONTAL*, which joins together the two works, has wryness in its use of language, its evocation of a particular imagery as well as its declaration of a state of being, a description of the works’ enveloping and reclaiming of the space of the architecture which provides its support. Simultaneously subtle or nuanced, yet literally in your face, it is here we sense the smart solution to the presentation of the private in the public realm, Lemieux’s stance asserting the individual and the gendered within the bland, homogenous surroundings of this part of the city.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips

At the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, work is presented by CAG in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC. Lemieux is grateful for the support of Canada Council and BC Arts Council. FULL FRONTAL is also supported by Proper Design.


### Biography

Lyse Lemieux studied at the University of Ottawa (1973–75) and the University of British Columbia (1976–78), receiving a BFA from the University of British Columbia (1978). Recent solo exhibitions include *A Girls Gotta Do What A Girls Gotta Do*, Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, BC (2016); *Black Is The Size Of My New Skirt*, Republic Gallery, Vancouver; *In-Between-In-Between: Lyse Lemieux & Meryl McMaster*, Katzman Contemporary, Toronto (2015); *Soldiers and Vesperers*, Chernoff Fine Arts, Vancouver (2009); *Skinslips / Peau de Jupon*, Musée Marsil, St. Lambert, Québec (2006); *Mignonnette Reine de Nainville*, Sylviane Poirier Art Contemporain, Montréal (2004); *A Fleur De Peau / Second Skin*, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver (1989); *Michèle Delisle / Lyse Lemieux*, La Commune di Perugia, Italy (1987). Alongside her exhibitions, collaborative work by Lemieux has also resulted in two new works by choreographer/dancer Ziyan Kwan, *Dumb Instrument Dance* at Richmond Art Gallery (2016); and *À Fleur De Peau: The Skin Project *with Marguerite Witvoet and Barbara Bourget for Vancouver International Dance Festival (2005). Participation in recent group exhibitions includes V*ancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2016-17); *Aujourd’hui Encore*, Trépanier Baer Gallery, Calgary (2016); *Out of Line*, Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2015); *Cut & Paste*, Equinox Gallery, Vancouver (2012). In 2017 Lemieux was the recipient of the Doris and Jack Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts VIVA award for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts. She lives and works in Vancouver.



A piece of cloth with a black and white pattern made of vertical lines of varying thicknesses. The bottom right corner of the cloth is lifted up revealing the same fabric beneath it. 

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Exterior image of CAG with the work of Lyse Lemieux installed in vinyl across the ground and top floor windows. Large-scale black ellipses alternate with black linear patterns on a beige background.

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Image of the glass facade of the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station. The facade is installed with a vinyl print of a large-scale, black and white pattern resembling moving or folded fabric. 

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FULL FRONTAL

Levine Flexhaug

*A Sublime Vernacular: The Landscape Paintings of Levine Flexhaug* offers the first overview of the extraordinary career of Levine Flexhaug (1918–1974), born in the Treelon area near Climax, Saskatchewan. The exhibition brings together approximately 450 of the artist’s paintings as well as several of his mural-sized works. An itinerant painter, he sold thousands of variations of essentially the same landscape painting in national parks, resorts, department stores and bars across western Canada from the late 1930s through the early 1960s. Whatever its variation, a Flexhaug image represents a Western icon, a silent unspoiled Eden that encapsulates the conventions of sublime landscape painting in a kind of painter’s shorthand. For the Contemporary Art Gallery it continues a strand in our programming where we present work by artists who for a variety of reasons, operated outside of the strict mainstream of the art world.

Long valued by a core of contemporary artists and collectors, Flexhaug turned formula painting into a source of wonder, not only because he churned out paintings so quickly using an assembly line method but because these works are so aesthetically compelling. Indeed, the lushness, variety, intensity, luminosity, touch and authentic feeling of his paintings are arguably non pareil in this genre. Interestingly, he hit upon the exact image that a poll taken by the Russian artists Komar and Melamid in the 1990s, determined is what Canadians most want to see in art.

As engaging as they are aesthetically, Flexhaug’s paintings also offer a point of entry for consideration of significant critical questions ranging from issues of taste, originality versus repetition in art, the appeal of landscape and its iconography – particularly in the Canadian context – to whether art can have integrity as art even if it is unapologetically commercial. Another issue raised by an examination of Flexhaug’s oeuvre is desire. Collecting is by its nature an activity with obsessive tendencies, but the numbers accumulated by those who collect Flexhaugs provide a particular opportunity to analyse aspects of the powerful emotional bonds that exist for many people with art and aesthetic objects. In the case of Flexhaug, more is always more.

Painting for Flexhaug was a way to make a living without having a regular job and he took great satisfaction in both supporting his family and satisfying his customers. Tracing his life from his early years in southern Saskatchewan through the byways of his peripatetic career following the Depression also provides a unique perspective from which to consider early modern Western Canadian social history, from aspects of identity to particular forms of consumption and leisure and recreation.

Alongside the exhibition, in our reading room we also present *Flexie! All the Same and All Different*, a feature-length documentary made in association with *A Sublime Vernacular: The Landscape Paintings of Levine Flexhaug* by Calgary filmmakers Gary Burns and Donna Brunsdale. The film not only tells the story of a little known artist but in its investigation of how people respond to the paintings and what they mean to them, is also a fascinating reflection on both the nature of art and the meaning of place.

Guest curated by Nancy Tousley and Peter White. 

In collaboration with MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina; Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary; Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, Alberta; and Rodman Hall Art Centre, St. Catherines. The exhibition is organized and circulated by the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie with support from the Museums Assistance Program of the Department of Canadian Heritage.



ProgramGuideSummer2017.pdf

A landscape painting depicting a lake and a waterfall framed by pine trees. There is a mountain in the background and a deer standing on colorful rocks to the right.

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Multiple, framed paintings of similar mountain landscapes in different sizes cover the walls of a gallery in a salon-style layout. Four vitrines in the center of the gallery display more. 

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Multiple framed paintings of similar mountain landscapes cover one wall of a gallery. An adjacent wall is painted bright blue and nine more landscape paintings hang. Four vitrines sit in the center.

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Three circular paintings of mountain landscapes hang in a horizontal line on a bright blue wall in a gallery. The landscapes appear to be duplicates but are subtly different.

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A Sublime Vernacular: The Landscape Paintings

Gordon Bennett

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents an exhibition of largely unseen works on paper by one of Australia’s most visionary and critical artists, Gordon Bennett (1955–2014). The exhibition is the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in North America.

Gordon Bennett is internationally acclaimed as one of Australia’s most significant and critically engaged contemporary artists. He is recognized for his powerful perspectives on the post-colonial experience, particularly in the Australian context, with much of his work mapping alternative histories and questioning racial categorizations and stereotypes.

Working closely with the Estate of Gordon Bennett and IMA Brisbane the show comprises a selection of works on paper including drawing, painting and watercolour from the early 1990s through to the early 2000s. Though rarely seen in exhibition contexts, Bennett’s drawing and script form the foundation of his practice. Paper is the site where imagery, words and ideas often found their first expression before being combined into the large-scale conceptual paintings for which Bennett is known. Despite their relatively small scale, works in *Be Polite* embrace rich layers of Western and Australian Indigenous art history and contemporary politics, a direction Bennett played a leading role in developing throughout the 1980s and continued to explore in his successful career. Often confrontational and unsettling, Bennett nevertheless expressed his discomfort with being seen as spokesman for Aboriginal peoples, and in a manifesto (or "manifest toe" as he calls it) published in 1996 he spoke of his wish “to avoid banal containment as a professional Aborigine, which both misrepresents me and denies my upbringing and Scottish/English heritage,” while simultaneously expressing his wish that his young daughter could grow up in a society where her life would not be defined by her race. The confrontation of Australian racism is a regular theme in works by Bennett. As such the shared colonial histories with Canada and in particular those of First Nations concerns are set in dialogue across continents by the exhibition. Issues, events and histories are given compelling voice in these provocative and often disturbing images.

Accompanying the exhibition is a book featuring three newly commissioned essays by art historian Ian McLean and curators and arts writers Helen Hughes and Julie Nagam, published with Sternberg Press. The selection of herein covers a period that produced work of remarkable force and revealed the artist’s working methods, research focuses and ultimately his ambitions for his work.

First presented at IMA, Brisbane and subsequently at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2016, the exhibition will evolve and be reconfigured with a new selection of works at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. This version will then travel to McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton in 2018.

*Gordon Bennett: Be Polite* is produced in partnership with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.

Supported by Arts Queensland and Visions of Australia, Department of Communications and the Arts, Australia Council for the Arts, The Estate of Gordon Bennett, Milani Gallery, and Sutton Gallery.

### Biography 

Selected solo exhibitions include: *Outsider / Insider: The Art of Gordon Bennett*, The Aboriginal Art Museum (AAMU), Utrecht, The Netherlands (2012); *Gordon Bennett: a survey*, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2007), and touring to Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane and Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; *The Expiation of Guilt*, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK (2007); *History and Memory in the Art of Gordon Bennett*, Brisbane City Gallery (1999), and touring to Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK; Arnolfini, Bristol, UK; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway. Selected group exhibitions include: Berlin Biennale (2014); *Documenta 13*, Kassel, Germany (2012); *Cubism and Australian Art*, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, *Avoiding Myth and Message: Australian Artists and the Literary World*, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2009); *16th Biennale of Sydney: Revolutions-forms that turn* (2008); Kwangju Biennale, Korea (2000); Shanghai Biennale, China (2000); *The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art,* Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (1999); *Art-Worlds in Dialogue*, Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany (1999);* In Place (Out of Time): Contemporary Art in Australia*, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK (1997); *TransCulture*, Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, Venice Biennale (1995); *Aratjara: Art of the First Australians*, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Germany and Hayward Gallery, London (1993).



Detail image of Gordon Bennett’s work on paper. A person in a red jacket stands on a seashore, surrounded by other human figures in black and white. A ship is visible in the far left on a body of water.

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Image of a freestanding wall in front of another gallery wall. On the center wall hangs a framed work on paper that reads “BE POLITE.” Two more framed drawings hang on the back wall on either side.

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Installation image of eight framed works on paper hanging on a wall. Two vitrines sit at the center of the room within which various small works on paper are displayed. 

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Six framed works on paper hang in a horizontal line on the wall of a gallery space. Each illustration has abstract figures depicting various violent scenes. 

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Thirty small, framed works on paper hang in two rows of fifteen on the wall of a gallery space. The colour scheme of all the works are dominated by yellow, black and orange.  

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Be Polite

 Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn

 Lisa Tan

Vikky Alexander

 Gerard Byrne

Robert Arndt

 Greg Staats

 Kelly Jazvac

 Niamh O’Malley

 Dawit L. Petros

Kelly Lycan

“You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here,
I believe that much unseen is also here.
…
I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.”
-Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road” (1856)

Taking its title from a poem by Walt Whitman, the Contemporary Art Gallery presents a group exhibition as the central feature of the 2017 Capture Photography Festival. Work is presented both inside and outside and across all of the gallery’s spaces, embracing a diverse set of conditions and approaches centred in a conceptual understanding of an expanded field of photographic practice that examines notions of what you see is most definitely not what you get.

Bringing together artists from Canada, Eritrea, Ireland, Sweden, and the US, the exhibition includes works that combine thematically to interrogate ideas rooted in photographic histories, engaging ideas such as veracity, recollection, remembrance, belonging, staging, and how the image documents and records these or is evidence of differing realities.

Key to the exhibition is *Images or shadows of divine things* (2005–), an ongoing series by Irish artist Gerard Byrne. Visually rich and intellectually complex, the artist’s work in photography, film, theatre, and multiscreen installation examines the slippage between time and the act of image creation. Presented here, a selection of these black and white photographs seems to depict a much earlier period, evoking vernacular photographic idioms of American midcentury photography and thus pointing toward the relationship between time, appearance and the photographic document. Through a collection of over twenty images, a sense emerges that the series has a certain scale of vision. However, it is more about picturing the historical “conditions” of image making than it is about riffing on an aesthetic. That sense of conditions emerges only once the particularity of the given images is surpassed—that is when it becomes obvious that the specifics of the images are not the point, this realization becoming palpable when a sufficient number of them are grouped together.

Robert Arndt’s activities search and reveal the means of accessing culture and history through the mediated forms of books, magazines and the Internet. Made for the exhibition, *Remainders, Repeats and Rejects* (2017) is characteristic in its investigation of production whereby documentation itself becomes the artwork. Alongside a large-scale photograph of the gallery wall on which it sits atop, Arndt’s work collects and conflates personal imagery with found and staged scenarios, highlighting the notion that documentation may be all that is required for an idea to exist and resonate. We imagine wide ranging connections, invent narratives and recognize links between images, all thoughts set in motion to create a diversity of potential meaning.

Recent work by Canadian artist Kelly Lycan includes installations based on 291, the iconic New York photography gallery opened by Alfred Stieglitz in 1905. These recreations are developed through sourcing images, in an attempt to uncover an understanding or experience of the space while drawing on simulations of the photographic illusion of this. Song of the Open Road features a new version of *Nearby Nearby: 291 Burlap Walls* (2015), composed of a series of images of the walls of 291 culled from Internet searches, books, videos and museums. Five images were printed on standard letterhead paper, then photocopied on a variety of machines through different companies in the US, Mexico and Canada, resulting in a series of colour shifts and image quality away from the black and white originals. The resulting installation creates a pixelated arena of varicoloured white grounds, where it is as if each image is forensically being drawn from some depths to emerge on the paper’s surface, evoking an atmospheric quality not dissimilar to Stieglitz’s “Equivalent” series of cloud photographs.

As a contemporary of artists such as Richard Prince, James Welling and Sherrie Levine who were active in New York in the early 1980s, Vikky Alexander is often associated with the Pictures Generation. She is best known for work that foregrounds a strong interest in the histories of architecture, design, and fashion, often focusing on locations such as shopping malls, showrooms and show apartments—sites of desire, aspirations and ideas of home. The images are often complicated through light, reflections and refractions and speak of a set of conditions and values embedded in appearances as seen through furnishings and the notional view from the window (here, a large-scale photo mural). Shown outdoors at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, *Model Suite (Sliding Door)* (2005/17) interplays with its architectural surroundings; the station’s glass pavilion lends a further physical and visual layer as we see the daily activity on the street through the work itself.

*Ambient Advertising* (2016), installed across the CAG’s windows, is a reconfigured work by Toronto-based Kelly Jazvac. Salvaged billboard images that she has reframed, manipulated and cut through, seemingly in reference to a quintessential Canadian landscape, visually envelop the gallery at street level. Taken from contemporary advertising, the imagery appeals to our collective sense of identity through reference to the romantic and awesome natural world that surrounds us while questioning the feeding of desire as driven by contemporary consumer culture.

Alongside photographic work in a variety of processes, the exhibition also includes moving-image works. *Sunsets* (2012), by American artist Lisa Tan, combines literature and various historical and personal references to materially explore the intricate relationship between language, image and experience. The video, filmed on the threshold between night and day, unfolds like a conversation. Seemingly inconsequential things pop up and take hold: a phone call interrupts, the sun starts to set, a stranger asks a question, translations are needed. The work narrates Tan’s engagement with enigmatic writers, with histories, technologies, and geographies that she knows, in order to mediate those that she doesn’t.

Concerned with issues of visibility and the slippage between a moment and an image, Irish artist Niamh O’Malley investigates the construction and arrangement of time and document as revealed through the moving image. Across two large-scale screens, the silent black and white video *Glasshouse* (2014) unfolds as a lengthy tracking shot. As the camera moves seamlessly from left to right along the glass panes, the natural idyll disappears here and there as the glass becomes more or less opaque. Through this O’Malley draws our attention to the process of looking, the camera seemingly attempting to locate and uncover meaning. Yet as images fragment, blocked by stained and broken glass, such efforts are thwarted, challenging our perception of what it is we are actually viewing and of how the images are constructed.

Born in Montreal and currently working in Stockholm, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn investigates issues of historicity, collectivity, utopian politics, and multiculturalism, often revealing the unnoticed political relevance of seemingly trivial historical anecdotes by shedding light on stories overlooked, hidden, or deemed otherwise insignificant. *Seizing Hold of a Memory as It Flashes Up* (2010) is a blind embossing using the speech of twelve-year-old Severn Suzuki, daughter of Japanese Canadian science communicator and environmental activist David Suzuki, delivered at the 1992 Earth Summit. Suzuki and members of ECO, the Environmental Children’s Organization, raised the money to travel from Vancouver to Brazil so they could attend the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. Here, Suzuki delivered her speech before 172 representatives of different countries, 108 heads of state, and some 2,400 NGO representatives; 17,000 of the people who attended the parallel NGO Global Forum had consultative status, resulting in a meeting that ultimately led to the Kyoto Protocol.

Toronto-based artist Greg Staats, Kanien’kehá:ka (b. Ohsweken, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory) whose works combine language, mnemonics and the natural world as an ongoing process of conceptualising a Haudenosaunee restorative aesthetic that defines the multiplicity of relationships with trauma and renewal. Staats addresses the systemic deficit of language—through personal and community archives and an intellectual and aesthetic interpretation of the body and ceremony. The installation *untitled (objects of reciprocal thinking)* (2014) combines both works from the beginning of the artist’s reflection of public and private within a Haudenosaunee linguistic and mnemonic continuum linked to place and recent works based on a reciprocal methodology. When at the edge of one’s condolence and within the liminal metaphysical space prior to renewal, there lies a hesitancy to move forward. While external and internal barriers must be overcome, the process must be completed with the help of others, both as witnesses and holders of the good mind. This ceremonial movement is comparable to moving from the darkness of the forest into the clearing where the light illuminates breath and one’s footing becomes clearer. The Mid-Winter (renewal) ceremony Gaihwayao:ni:, translated as “encouragement,” employs reciprocal gestures and words, repeatable to lifting up the mind after it has dropped down during condolence and/or post-trauma.

Chicago-based Canadian Eritrean artist Dawit L. Petros similarly reflects through personal and cultural histories on ideas surrounding place making that are centred on a critical rereading of the relationship between African histories and European modernism. The book *About the Author’s Journey from Ethiopia to Italy and about the Impressions Made on Him by His Stay in That Country in Tigrinya*, by nineteenth-century writer Fesseha Giyorgis, was the first text published in the Tigrinya language (used in present-day Eritrea and Ethiopia). Using this as a guide, Petros undertook the journey from Ethiopia to Italy, his contemporary journey mirroring the historical passage across the Mediterranean Sea as well as the one undertaken by those currently fleeing to safety. When he arrived in Italy, the artist met a group of Eritrean migrants, with whom he made *Untitled* (2016), a collection of images with these individuals holding mirrors or archive materials in visual dialogue with the surrounding landscape. Viewed together, the photographs offer a metaphor-rich articulation of the fluidity of contemporary transnational experiences and attendant issues of cultural negotiation, speaking to how images and objects enable a sense of belonging or retrieval, both public and private.

Presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival

We acknowledge the generous financial support of the following:
Vikky Alexander: Presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program—IntransitBC
Niamh O’Malley: Culture Ireland
Greg Staats: The Banff Centre, via a thematic residency program, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts
Lisa Tan: Iaspis, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists


Kelly Jazvac’s *Ambient Advertising* is installed on the CAG Facade from April 1 to September 10, 2017 and Vikki Alexander’s *Model Suite (Sliding Door)* is installed offsite at Yaletown-Roundhouse from April 1 to September 24, 2017.



ProgramGuideSpring2017.pdf

A photograph of a person standing on a beach near the ocean. The person is holding a rectangular mirror horizontally with one arm outstretched. The reflection in the mirror is of a light blue sky.

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Installed on the glass facade at Yaletown Roundhouse Skytrain station are three, large-scale colour photographs in vinyl depicting aerial views of Vancouver at different times of the day. 

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Exterior image of CAG’s facade windows installed with the work of Kelly Jazvac. In each window, dark, repurposed vinyl with multiple vertical cut marks cover the interior window box. 

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Twenty framed black and white photographs hang on two sides of a corner wall of a gallery. Four of the photographs hang on the left side of the corner wall and sixteen hang on the right side.

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Five framed photographs hang on the gallery wall. Three are of a person holding a mirror in front of their head, outdoors. Two photographs are of a hand holding another photo in front of the ocean. 

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Eight, unframed photographs are installed dispersed across a gallery wall. In the centre, one large, framed photograph hangs, depicting the same gallery wall with an array of different photographs. 

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Multimedia objects hang on a gallery wall. Each object differs in form, from a text-based print, a black and white photograph, to a very small shelf and a cloth bag.

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One and a half walls of a gallery are covered in sheets of standard letterhead paper in a grid formation. Each piece of paper depicts one of five black and whites images of another wall. 

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A dark room with two chairs facing a large video projection. The projection is a still image of a sunset through the trees, looking over the water. 

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Vikky Alexander, Robert Arndt, Gerard Byrne, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, Kelly Jazvac, Kelly Lycan, Niamh O’Malley, Dawit L. Petros, Greg Staats, Lisa Tan

Song of the Open Road

Kuniko Yamamoto

Anne Morrell Robinson

Diane Borsato

Naomi Sawada

Judie Glick

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a unique one-night installation by Toronto-based artist Diane Borsato. Evolving from a research visit to Vancouver in summer 2016 as part of our Burrard Marina Field House Studio Residency Program, Borsato worked with members of the Japanese flower arranging (Ikebana) community in Vancouver to develop *The Moon Is Often Referred To As a Dead, Barren World, But I Think This Is Not Necessarily The Case*.

Typical of her practice, Borsato often works with amateur organizations—mycologists, astronomers, beekeepers—in projects that examine social and sensorial modes of knowing. She has been practicing and researching Sogetsu Ikebana for several years.

Taking its title from a statement made by the modern sculptor and Sogetsu founder Teshigahara Sofu in *Kadensho: Book of Flowers* the work echoes ideas found in the publication in which he imagines making arrangements in another, very different world. For the project, Borsato invites several Ikebana masters from the modern Sogetsu school to participate in a collaborative workshop and installation. The practitioners will work with seasonal materials, and objects, supplies and the space of the gallery building itself to provide a conceptual framework for materializing a dialogue between the worlds of Ikebana—often a highly technical, rule-based traditional cultural practice and contemporary art—with its own unmistakable tropes and cultural specificities.

The project is generously supported by The Vancouver Foundation.

The artist thanks The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, The Canada Council for the Arts and Toronto Arts Council.

### Biography

Diane Borsato has established an international reputation for her social and interventionist practices, performance, video, photography, and sculpture. She was twice nominated for the Sobey Art Award and was winner of the Victor Martyn-Lynch Staunton Award for her work in the Inter-Arts category from the Canada Council for the Arts. She has exhibited and performed at major Canadian institutions including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Power Plant, Toronto; the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; MOCCA, Toronto; the Vancouver Art Gallery; the National Art Centre, Ottawa; and in galleries and museums in the US, France, Mexico, Taiwan, and Japan.



Detail of a sculpture installation. Some pink flowers and twigs are arranged in a flat rectangular-shaped vase filled with water. A large mirror is placed beneath the vase. 

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Two plinths placed on top of each other in a staggered way. The hollowed out center of the top plinth has a tube light inside of it. There are plant roots in a ceramic container on the bottom plinth.

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Detail of a sculpture installation. Orange gerberas and small twigs are arranged in a small black ikebana flower vase. The vase is situated on wood bars placed on a step ladder.

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Artist name, exhibition title, date, and location are printed on a wall above a white table. On the table, A triangular-shaped pink vase sits, in which some green flowers and twigs are arranged.

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Diane Borsato with the collaboration of Judie Glick, Kuniko Yamamoto, Naomi Sawada and Anne Morrell Robinson

The Moon Is Often Referred To As A Dead, Barren World, But I Think This Is Not Necessarily The Case

Erdem Taşdelen

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents two new works by Toronto-based Turkish artist Erdem Taşdelen. Commissioned by the Contemporary Art Gallery with Cineworks, *Wild Child,* presented in CAG’s North Gallery, is an ambitious two-part video installation which takes as its starting point *An Historical Account of the Discovery and Education of a Savage Man* by Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, a physician who decided to care for a feral boy found in Aveyron, France in 1798. Convinced that he could “civilize” the boy by teaching him language, Itard was left frustrated in his attempts to make the boy transcend his so-called savagery when he proved incapable of learning to speak.

In *Wild Child* Taşdelen adapts this story, this time set in contemporary British Columbia and presented through two distinct elements. One video depicts preparations for an imagined filmed documentary, featuring twelve actors as they audition for the roles of its main characters. This is accompanied by a second piece, a sequence of images of a forest depicting “nature” in a supposedly unmediated manner. Devoid of any human activity, it provides the viewer with a space of contemplation in contrast to the interactions portrayed between performers, crew and writer/director.

Presented in our windows is *The Quantified Self Poems*, a new series of twelve screen prints. Over a period of three months in the summer of 2016, Taşdelen reported his moods approximately three times a day on “Emotion Sense,” a self-improvement smartphone app developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, UK. As he answered a series of questions the artist’s feelings were numerically encoded as data, effectively quantifying the unquantifiable. Working with programmer Ali Bilgin Arslan, Taşdelen developed an algorithm that translated this information into words drawn from a unique dictionary created by Vancouver-based poet Daniel Zomparelli. Unusual sentences emerge from which we attempt to make some kind of sense.

Each work exposes the dynamics at play through differing representations of human nature. Notionally objective realities conflate with fiction in a self-referential manner that deliberately befuddles the viewer; the familiar made compelling strange.

*Wild Child* is commissioned by Contemporary Art Gallery with Cineworks and is supported by BC Arts Council.

*The Quantified Self Poems* is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and produced with thanks to Daniel Zomparelli and Ali Bilgin Arslan.


### Biography

Erdem Taşdelen lives and works in Toronto. His multidisciplinary practice involves a range of media including installation, video, drawing, sculpture, sound and artist books. He has shown extensively internationally and across Canada, including exhibitions at Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver; Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2016); Stacion Center for Contemporary Art, Kosovo; Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul (2015); Galeri NON, Istanbul; Western Front, Vancouver; Kunstverein Hannover; Biennial of the Americas, Denver; ARTER, Istanbul; Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich; MAK, Vienna (2013); 221A, Vancouver and Oakville Galleries (2012).




ProgramGuideWinter2017.pdf

A video still with an image of a lush forest in British Columbia. Sunlight is streaming through the moss covered trees. 

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A monitor hangs on the wall of a dark gallery space. The monitor displays an image of a lush forest in British Columbia.

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A monitor displaying a video work hangs on the wall of a dark gallery space. Onscreen, an actor sits at a table, auditioning for an imagined documentary.

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An exterior image of CAG installed with 12 black and white, text-based prints in the facade windows.

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Two windows outside of CAG installed with a text-based print each. One print has a poem printed in black text on white paper. The other has a poem printed in white text on back paper.

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Wild Child | The Quantified Self Poems

Haroon Mirza

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Canada by British artist Haroon Mirza.

Mirza has received international acclaim for work that tests the interplay and friction between sound and light waves and electric current. Kinetic sculptures, performances and immersive installations purposefully cross wired. An advocate of interference (in the sense of electro-acoustic or radio disruption), he creates situations in which he describes his role as a composer, manipulating electricity, a live, invisible and volatile phenomenon calling on instruments as varied as household electronics, vinyl and turntables, LEDs, furniture, video footage and existing artworks by other artists to behave differently.

The exhibition will centre on a series of new and recent works linked to various plants such as *Lophophora williamsii*, (Peyote), *Psilocybe* (mushrooms) and *Echinopsis pachanoi* (San Pedro cactus) known worldwide as supplements to various transcendence practices through their psychotropic qualities, and used for spiritual purposes including meditation and psychedelic psychotherapy. As such the exhibition invites us to consider perceptual shifts, disorientating environments and displacements of light and sound that create delirious moments as we unwittingly interfere with altering signals and appearances.

First made for PIVO in Brazil in May to July 2016, *ããã* takes over much of our B.C. Binning Gallery. Developed during a two-month residency in São Paulo, captured images and sounds from the city combine as four videos and eight channels of electric signal visualised through strips of LED light and heard via an array of speakers all in synchronization. The videos reflect on a heady mix of the current political climate in Brazil, the local culture of music, entheogens (plants that have psychedelic properties like the ones used in Ayahuasca) and developments in physics and cosmology, while the overall experience of the work collectively creates a mesmerizing visual and aural effect. Alongside this installation are a series of new pieces consisting of framed copper plates printed and acid etched using various methods including passing an electrical current through plant forms such as *Psilocybe cubensis*, Amanita muscaria, resting atop the plates. Amanita for example, is a mushroom genus noted for its hallucinogenic properties, with its main psychoactive constituent being the compound muscimol. The mushroom was used as an intoxicant and entheogen by the peoples of Siberia, and has a religious significance in these cultures. There has been much speculation on the possible traditional use of this mushroom as an intoxicant in other places; in the works, the phantom-like images are indelibly fixed into the metal surface, akin to some kind of vision or half-remembered experience.

The copper in these pieces, normally the raw material in the manufacture of printed circuit boards (PCB), also appears along with commercial solar panels in the relief works presented in our Balkind Gallery. Powered by energy from our gallery lights, both *Five Liberty Caps (Solar Powered LED Circuit Composition 25)* (2015) and *Liberty Cap (Solar Powered LED Circuit Composition 27)* (2015) comprise *Psilocybe semilanceata* imprinted copper plates used to complete the circuit, with the solar panels powering the LEDs. As part of their composition, therefore, these wall works involve the mushroom, commonly known as the liberty cap, a psychedelic (or “magic”) mushroom that contains the psychoactive compounds psilocybin, baeocystin and phenylethylamine. Of the world’s psilocybin mushrooms, it is both one of the most widely distributed in nature, and one of the most potent.

Together with these are other new works combining recycled furniture, solar panels, lights and various plant forms that have also have psychotropic qualities. For example, Lophophora williamsii or peyote is a small, spineless cactus containing psychoactive alkaloids, particularly mescaline and is one of the sacred and sought after cactus known to have been used for shamanic ceremonies for over five thousands of years. *LED Circuit Composition 18 (Self-Transforming Machine)* (2016) references Terence McKenna, an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut and author, and advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. His experiments with hallucinogens are linked to the experience of viewing the work, named after the supernatural entities encountered during his Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) experiences.

*Lamp for Williamsii* (2016) is a sculptural assemblage involving a speaker from The National pavilion of Then and Now, a chair, a plastic cover for a civil aviation authority lamp from Emley Moor radio tower, cable, circuit board, Moroccan antique wooden door arch with Iraqi stained glass, and three  Big Bend Peyotes. It is designed to provide the perfect lighting conditions for the plant to grow requiring certain frequencies of light which are visible to the human eye along with blue and red light. More blue light is required than red so Mirza has created a sequence to calibrate the LED lights to the correct ratio using various electronic processes such as pulse width modulation. Such processes were also used in early electronic instruments and as the electrical signal from the LEDs is also amplified through a triangular speaker incorporated as a plinth, the electricity can be heard. The sound composition is therefore dictated by the lighting requirements of the plant.

Changing light conditions in the LEDs and the movement of visitors to the gallery will cause fluctuations in the light signals received by the solar panels across all of these pieces, a metaphor for the transformative properties that can occur through ingesting the plant forms. Processes are left exposed and sounds will occupy space in an unruly way, testing codes of conduct and charging the atmosphere whereby Mirza asks us to reconsider the perceptual distinctions between noise, sound and music, and draws into question the categorization of cultural forms. The exhibition presents a truly hypnotic and transformatory experience.

The exhibition is generously supported by Brigitte and Henning Freybe.

### Biography

Haroon Mirza lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include *‘ããã’*, Pivô, São Paulo, Brazil (2016); Nam June Paik Center, Seoul, South Korea; Matadero, Madrid, Spain; Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (all 2015); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland; Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Poissy, France; IMMA, Dublin, Ireland; Le Grand Palais, Saint-Nazaire, France (all 2014); The Hepworth, Wakefield, UK; MIMA, Middlesbrough, UK (2013); The New Museum, New York, USA; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St Gallen, Switzerland; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, USA (all 2012); Camden Arts Centre, London and Spike Island, Bristol (2011) and A-Foundation, Liverpool, UK (2009). His work was included in the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China (2012) and the 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011), where he was awarded the Silver Lion. He was awarded the Northern Art Prize in 2011, the DAIWA Foundation Art Prize in 2012, the Zurich Art Prize in 2013, the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize in 2014 and the Calder Art Prize in 2015.



Cacti are planted in a basin filled with dirt lit with blue and pink lights. The image is an overhead view of the cacti through a wooden door arch, which appears silhouetted in front of the lights.

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Various multimedia works are installed throughout a gallery. A sculpture resembling a desk chair on a triangular plinth foregrounds three multimedia artworks hanging on three gallery walls.

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On a gallery floor, a wooden sculpture sits. It is made of various pieces of furniture and looks like a tilted table. Various copper plates are framed and mounted on the wall behind this sculpture. 

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Framed copper plates are mounted on two gallery walls. A large flat sculpture made of a solar panel, a bar of small orange LED lights, electrical wires, and copper plates are also mounted on a wall.

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In a darkened gallery space, four thin TV monitors with stands play video works. In front of them, twelve speaker boxes are placed in a large circle, inside which visitors sit while watching videos.

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Entheogens

Liz Magor

This marks the final venue for the large-scale presentation of works by Liz Magor that begun at Peep-Hole, Milan in the winter of 2015. Conceived in close cooperation with Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and Kunstverein Hamburg and realized in partnership with Contemporary Art Gallery and Musee d’art contemporain de Montréal. 

### Biography 
Liz Magor studied at the University of British Columbia, Parsons School of Design and the Vancouver School of Art. She has participated in major exhibitions worldwide, including the 4th Biennale of Sydney (1982); Venice Biennale (1984) and documenta VII (1987). Recent solo exhibitions include A Thousand Quarrels, Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver (2014); Triangle France, Marseille and California-Pacific Triennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California;  Light my Fire: Some Propositions about Portraits and Photography, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2013); and After Presence, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (2012).  Magor has also participated in numerous group exhibitions including Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2004); National Gallery of Canada (2001); Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University, Florida (1997); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (1996).  Over her career Magor has been recognized through several prestigious art awards such as the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario (2014); The Audain Prize for Lifetime achievement (2009); the Governor General of Canada Award (2001) and York Wilson Endowment Award (2000). Magor is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver, Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto and Marcelle Alix, Paris.


A cream coloured textile with yellow and green stripes hangs from a triangular metal armature mounted on a gallery wall. Pink splotches and small patches of textiles are scattered around the surface. 

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The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present a private exhibition in New York by Vancouver-based artist, Andrew Dadson. Comprising a new commission supported by Vancouver contemporary menswear label wings+horns, the exhibition space will be transformed into a large-scale installation.

Dadson has consistently engaged with the notion of boundaries in relation to space and time in his work, primarily through investigations with materiality, process and abstraction. Through different mediums – painting, film, and photography – Dadson explores the possibility to cross the perceptual boundaries of space, both physical and natural, and is thus reflected in his work in an attempt to subvert our perception and usual ways of looking at things.

The installation uses plant forms and objects sprayed a single colour lit by intense daylight grow lamps. Each light is of a slightly different hue creating multiple shadows on the wall behind and introducing a further dimension to the overall composition. Combined with the large leafy plants, light, shadow and coloured forms produce a painting that evolves and shifts over time. As the organic matter is nurtured over the duration of the exhibition, the unifying painted colour begins to crack and splinter to reveal the fresh natural colours of the leaves beneath.


### Biography 
Since his first solo exhibition at the Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver, in 2003, Andrew Dadson has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and internationally, in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, and the United States. Dadson was the 2011 recipient of The Brink Award held at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. Dadson is represented by Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, Italy and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, USA.


A close view of an installation of palm trees painted in mat black. A light pink and blue light shines on them casting dynamic shadows on the wall behind them. 

An installation of palm trees in pots painted in mat black. A light pink and blue light shines on them casting dynamic shadows on the wall behind them.

A close view of a palm leaf painted in mat black. A light pink and blue light shines on them casting dynamic shadows on the wall behind them.

This exhibition, previously at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst was conceived in close cooperation with Kunstverein in Hamburg and realized in partnership with Contemporary Art Gallery and Musee d’art contemporain de Montréal. 

### Biography
Liz Magor studied at the University of British Columbia, Parsons School of Design and the Vancouver School of Art. She has participated in major exhibitions worldwide, including the 4th Biennale of Sydney (1982); Venice Biennale (1984) and documenta VII (1987). Recent solo exhibitions include A Thousand Quarrels, Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver (2014); Triangle France, Marseille and California-Pacific Triennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California;  Light my Fire: Some Propositions about Portraits and Photography, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2013); and After Presence, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (2012).  Magor has also participated in numerous group exhibitions including Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2004); National Gallery of Canada (2001); Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University, Florida (1997); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (1996).  Over her career Magor has been recognized through several prestigious art awards such as the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario (2014); The Audain Prize for Lifetime achievement (2009); the Governor General of Canada Award (2001) and York Wilson Endowment Award (2000). Magor is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver, Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto and Marcelle Alix, Paris.

Peach and brown coloured textiles are draped on a wire-hanger which hangs on a gallery wall. A green, plastic garment bag covers half of the textile.

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you, you, you

This exhibition at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst was conceived in close cooperation with Kunstverein in Hamburg and realized in partnership with Contemporary Art Gallery and Musee d’art contemporain de Montréal. 

### Biography
Liz Magor studied at the University of British Columbia, Parsons School of Design and the Vancouver School of Art. She has participated in major exhibitions worldwide, including the 4th Biennale of Sydney (1982); Venice Biennale (1984) and documenta VII (1987). Recent solo exhibitions include A Thousand Quarrels, Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver (2014); Triangle France, Marseille and California-Pacific Triennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California;  Light my Fire: Some Propositions about Portraits and Photography, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2013); and After Presence, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (2012).  Magor has also participated in numerous group exhibitions including Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2004); National Gallery of Canada (2001); Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University, Florida (1997); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (1996).  Over her career Magor has been recognized through several prestigious art awards such as the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario (2014); The Audain Prize for Lifetime achievement (2009); the Governor General of Canada Award (2001) and York Wilson Endowment Award (2000). Magor is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver, Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto and Marcelle Alix, Paris.


A grey textile with a vertical stripe down the middle is draped on a wire-hanger which hangs on a gallery wall.

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A New Path to the Waterfall

Harrell Fletcher

Elisa Ferrari

Join Elisa Ferrari, Harrell Fletcher, and the Lord Strathcona Elementary community for *the sound of a cactus being touched by a raindrop*, a communal listening event inspired by the early days of radio broadcasting. In addition to listening to sound collages and field recordings produced by the group, a selection of sound maps and graphic scores will be presented.

A launch of the limited edition publication *The Herbarium Project*, produced by artist Cease Wyss and the students of Strathcona Elementary, will follow the presentation.

This event is part of *A New Path to the Waterfall*, a new satellite gallery space within a Vancouver elementary school, re-shaping the ways in which we consider contemporary art, gallery spaces and public schools.

In *A New Path to the Waterfall*, over the course of six-week periods, each artist collaborates with students to explore different issues and investigate a variety of topics connected to their curriculum. Each artist’s tenure at the school will end with a public presentation that could take many forms.

*A New Path to the Waterfall* will be presented to the public through exhibitions, interventions, performances and public programming at six week intervals throughout the school year. The public are welcome to attend these events and programs during set hours provided on the project website.


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Elisa Ferrari: the sound of a cactus being touched by a raindrop

Join artist Andrew Dadson for a walking tour as he introduces the themes and ideas present in the exhibition, *Site For Still Life*.

###Biography
Andrew Dadson lives and works in Vancouver. Recent solo exhibitions include *Andrew Dadson*, Contemporary Art Gallery offsite, New York (2017); RaebervonStenglin, Zürich (2016 and 2013); *Over the Sun*, Vancouver Art Gallery, (2015);  David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2015); *The Brink: Andrew Dadson*, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2012); *New Paintings and Visible Heavens*, Lawrimore Project, Seattle (2010); *Evening all afternoon*, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver (2007). Selected group exhibitions include *Summer 2016: Collection Works*, Rennie Collection, Vancouver (2016); *Les traces matérielles, la temporalité et le geste en art contemporain (Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art)*, Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, Université Concordia, Montreal (2013); *Phantasmagoria*, Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver (2012); *On the Nature of Things*, Kamloops Art Gallery (2011); *WYSIWYG: What You(ngs) See Is What You Get*, Rosenblum & Friends Collection, Paris (2011); *Everything you can imagine is real…*, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2011); and *Without you I’m Nothing*, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2011). In 2011 Dadson won The Brink Award, The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. Dadson is represented by Galleria Franco Noero, Turin and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.


A detailed image of Andrew Dadson's work. A cactus illuminated by pink-purple light. 

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Talk

Join us for an introduction to the work on display as Lemieux discusses her response to the two difference sites for her exhibition, *FULL FRONTAL*.

###Biography

Lyse Lemieux studied at the University of Ottawa (1973–75) and the University of British Columbia (1976–78), receiving a BFA from the University of British Columbia (1978). Solo exhibitions include *A Girls Gotta Do What A Girls Gotta Do*, Richmond Art Gallery (2016); *Black Is The Size Of My New Skirt*, Republic Gallery, Vancouver (2015);* In-Between-In-Between: Lyse Lemieux & Meryl McMaster*, Katzman Contemporary, Toronto (2015); *Soldiers and Vesperers*, Chernoff Fine Arts, Vancouver (2009). Alongside her exhibitions, collaborative work by Lemieux has also resulted in two new works by choreographer/dancer Ziyan Kwan, *Dumb Instrument Dance*, Richmond Art Gallery (2016) and *À Fleur De Peau: The Skin Project* with Marguerite Witvoet and Barbara Bourget for Vancouver International Dance Festival (2005). Participation in recent group exhibitions includes *Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2016-17); *Aujourd’hui Encore*, Trépanier Baer Gallery, Calgary (2016); *Out of Lin*e, Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2015); *Cut & Paste*, Equinox Gallery, Vancouver (2012). In 2017 Lemieux was the recipient of the Doris and Jack Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts VIVA award for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts. She lives and works in Vancouver.

Cease Wyss

With *A New Path to the Waterfall*, the Contemporary Art Gallery situates a new satellite gallery space within a Vancouver elementary school. Initiated by US artist Harrell Fletcher at CAG Burrard Marina Fieldhouse Studio, the project places artists in Maryann Persoon’s grade 6/7 classroom at Lord Strathcona Elementary School to re-shape the ways in which we consider contemporary art, gallery spaces and public schools.

Coast Salish ethnobotanist, community gardener and interdisciplinary artist T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss is the first artist to collaborate with Maryann Persoon’s class. Through a series of foraging trips to Capilano River, Harmony Garden, Trillium Park and Stanley Park, Cease and the students gathered plants, fungi, moss, lichen and more from different local habitats. They identified species – learning both their Skwxwu7mesh and Latin names – and pressed their plants. The class then composed these into a series of individual, hand-stitched herbarium books, inviting students to open their senses to local natural environments and encounter first-hand the deep interconnectedness of our ecosystems. Together, the pressed plants form not only a beautiful collection but also a historical document of biodiversity and a way to measure change in our natural landscapes.

Please join Cease Wyss, the Lord Strathcona Elementary community, and our primary supporter, Telus Community Board, for the public launch and discussion of these unique herbariums.

A New Path to the Waterfall is generously supported by TELUS Community Board, the Hamber Foundation, Artstarts/Artists in the Classroom, the Vancouver Foundation and the Vancouver Park Board.
