Elizabeth McIntosh

The title *Violet’s Hair* alludes to something concrete. It denotes a subject and specifies an attribute, but who is Violet and what are the qualities of her hair? It also references a colour, but this colour is not characteristic to the work in the exhibition. Yet the seemingly allusive title still offers some keys to Elizabeth McIntosh’s process. While her paintings often formally hint at tangible objects and spaces, they are predominantly located in the realm of abstraction. And despite the apparent simplicity of McIntosh’s formal language, there is often a textural richness that arises from the application of multiple layers of paint, allowing for trial and error, shifts in pattern and colour and leaving a visible reworking.

Although McIntosh is primarily known for her painting, she also works in collage. *Violet’s Hair*, for the first time brings together her work in these two distinct mediums. As well as exhibiting five recent paintings in the B.C. Binning Gallery, she builds two large-format collages: one wrapping the exterior of the gallery, using the window vitrines, and the other filling the Balkind Gallery in a unified form. This is not the first time McIntosh has worked with collage in this scale, but it is the first instance in which she has built a structure as the ground. The collages and paintings carry a similar language, one of solid planes, layered forms and bold colours. They inform each other, running in tandem, offering a visible language that simultaneously exemplifies the flexibility with which McIntosh handles many possible choices and the solidity of her final decisions.

### Biography

Elizabeth McIntosh (b. 1967, Ontario, Canada) is widely regarded as one the most important abstract painters practicing in Canada today. While her paintings are primarily located in the realm of abstraction, the careful organization of forms sometimes alludes to elements of the real world and creates the illusion of three dimensional or even architectural space. Despite the apparent simplicity of McIntosh’s formal language, there is often a textural richness arising from her artistic process, which involves the application of multiple layers of paint and allows for trial and error, visible imperfections, and areas of painterly expression. Although she is primarily known for her painting, McIntosh has also been exploring the art of collage making. Recent solo exhibitions include *A Good Play*, Diaz Contemporary, Toronto (2010); *Cut Out*, Goodwater, Toronto (2009); *Fire at Full Moon*, Blanket, Vancouver (2007); *Young Night Thought*, Diaz Contemporary, Toronto (2006); and Clementine Gallery, New York (2002). In 2010, Emily Carr University Press in collaboration with Diaz Contemporary published a monograph of McIntosh’s work entitled *A Good Play*, which includes essays by Jan Verwoert and Monika Szewczyk. She has also been featured in *Canadian Art Magazine* and *The Globe and Mail*. McIntosh lives and works in Vancouver, where she is also a respected educator at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She is represented by Diaz Contemporary in Toronto.




An image of painting composed of vertical rows of purple, blue, green, yellow and orange triangles. 

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CAG’s facade windows display the work of artist Elizabeth McIntosh. Consistent across the ground floor window are three stacked stripes of blue, purple and gold.

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A large scale painting hangs on a gallery wall. The painting is made up of blue lines on a white background. The lines are laid out in such a way that they form a series of rectangles. 

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A large-scale artwork mounted on a gallery wall. On top of a light yellow background, groups of large, black, circular shapes are stacked on top of each other in three subtle sections.

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A large-scale artwork mounted on a gallery wall. The background is an uneven distribution of yellow. Rectangular shapes made up of bold, patterned stripes of various colours create the foreground.

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Installation image of Elizabeth McIntosh's exhibition. Five large-scale artworks mounted on three gallery walls. Two pairs of artwork hang on parallel walls while a single painting hangs on the back wall.

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Installation image of Elizabeth McIntosh's exhibition. Two large-scale artworks mounted on parallel walls. At the center is a hallway connecting gallery spaces with a distant view of more works.

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Walls of a gallery are completely covered in layers of paper-like material either cut into colorful squares and rectangles or cut out of large sheets and placed on top.

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Violet's Hair

Frances Stark

Paul Sietsema

Pablo Bronstein

Kyla Mallet

Peter Gazendam

Alex Morrison

Susanne Kriemann

The selected works for *Following A Line* dislocate the conventions of how information is gathered and presented by using standard didactic tools and methods, such as lectures, films, PowerPoint presentations, archival images and signage to convey subject matter that in some way challenges the instructive forms. The difficulty of representing knowledge, and the imperative need to demonstrate one’s understanding is common to all the works. Many of the artists in this exhibition work from an archive of images and texts, which they have compiled over years of research, but it isn’t essential to any of the artists to make this explicit or to lay out their research in an accessible form. There is an applied patina on most of the works that implies the passing of time, and the unearthing or preserving of history. The faux finishes are not necessarily used to mislead, but are meant to convey an instability and ambiguity that may be unsettling, leaving the viewer to look for something else, like the relation between images, or how objects and designs connect.



An image of the book “HOW TO See and Read the Aura.” The cover is blue with blocks of rainbow coloured patterns and large yellow text. Many tabs of yellow paper stick out from the sides of the book.

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Installation image of a projected image onto a wall in a dimly lit gallery. A black bench is placed in front. The image depicts a corner view of a bedroom’s dresser and en suite bathroom vanity. 

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A slide projector on a plinth pointed towards a white gallery wall. The projected image is small in scale compared to the wall. It depicts a black and white image of a large group of people standing.

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A large-scale iron sign mounted on a gallery wall. The sign reads A Low Variant From A Split Tongue in turquoise painted iron. The phrase hangs from an L shaped bracket that is mounted to the wall.

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A large geometric sculpture is installed in a gallery. To the right, on the wall, five framed artworks hang. Further right, two tarp-like fabrics are draped over structures to resemble human-like forms.

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Forty-four framed artworks mounted on a wall in eleven columns. Each column is a different colour gradient. Mounted on an adjacent wall is a framed photograph of a blue cover.

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Detail image of a geometric sculpture. Within the sculpture, a lit, hollowed out triangular space houses a relic-like object.

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Pablo Bronstein, Peter Gazendam, Susanne Kriemann, Kyla Mallett, Alex Morrison

Following A Line

Trevor Mahovsky

Kelly Lycan

Lesley Vance

Erica Stocking

Robert Arndt

Jay Isaac

Jeff Wall

Ron Tran

Elad Lassry

Hendrika Sonnenberg

Evan Lee

Chris Hanson

Rodney Graham

David Weiss

Brad Phillips

Eric Cameron

Kelly Mark

Sam Taylor-Wood

Gerald  Ferguson

Damian Moppett

Liz Magor

Peter Fischli

Zin Taylor

Rhonda Weppler

James Carl

Ceal Floyer

Jayce Salloum

Hans-Peter Feldmann

Arvo Leo

Ron Moppett

This exhibition explores the traditional genre of still life and how it is a sustained practice within contemporary visual art making. The number of artists and works is large for the exhibition spaces of the Contemporary Art Gallery, and yet it seems small in relation to the subject. The quantity of works reflects this genre’s continued importance in current art production and discourse, and is conceptually tied to conventional formal aspects of still life, gathering together many objects for contemplation in a constructed setting.

Many of the artworks in this exhibition were chosen because they stick closely to the familiar conventions and typical subject matter of still life. The first part of the title of this exhibition is an appropriation of one of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s photographs from their Equilibres series made in the mid 1980s. The triumph of the carrot is linked to the success of still life, as well as the genre's formal properties, namely its use of humble objects. The second part of the title is linked to a question first posed by art historian Thomas Crow, who questioned how an archaic and hierarchical system such as the genres can still be important for understanding contemporary art. In bringing together this group of works that spans generations and crosses mediums, the CAG traces the persistence of still life, in an attempt to understand how it operates differently now than it has in the past, examining the current circumstances and naming some particularities.


Detail image of fruits on a plate carved out of wood. The entire sculpture is coloured black.

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Installation image of the group show Triumphant Carrot. Various artworks are installed throughout the gallery. There is a mix of photographs, sculptures and a light box mounted on a freestanding wall.

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Installation image of the group show Triumphant Carrot. Various artworks, such as paintings, framed photographs, a lightbox mounted on a wall, and sculptures, are installed throughout the gallery.

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Installation image of the group show Triumphant Carrot. Various artworks, paintings, framed photographs, a lightbox, sculptures, and a tv monitor on a plinth, are installed throughout the gallery.

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Four framed photographs hang on either side of a corner wall in a gallery. A small table with a brown top and black legs sits in the middle. A smaller object sits on top of the table.

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Two framed photographs hang on one side of a corner wall. Three photographs hang on the other side. A small, skull-like object sits on the floor in the corner. A TV sits on a black plinth to the right.

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A monitor mounted on a wall in a dimly lit gallery displays an image. A black bench sits in the center of the room.

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A bright, projected image appears to lean against the wall of a dimly lit gallery. The image displays several objects scattered on a floor. A black bench sits in the center of the room. 

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A small area under the stairs of a gallery is installed to appear as a living room. A burgundy couch with matching ottoman, a lounge chair, a sideboard, a lamp, and three rugs occupy the space.

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Installation image of the group show Triumphant Carrot. Various artworks installed in a gallery space, from framed photographs on the wall, sculptural objects on plinths to colourful objects on a table.

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Robert Arndt, Eric Cameron, James Carl, Gerald Ferguson, Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Rodney Graham, Jay Isaac, Elad Lassry, Evan Lee, Arvo Leo, Kelly Lycan, Liz Magor, Kelly Mark, Damian Moppett, Ron Moppett, Brad Phillips, Jayce Salloum, Erica Stocking, Zin Taylor, Ron Tran, Lesley Vance, Jeff Wall, Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky, Sam Taylor-Wood

Triumphant Carrot: The Persistence of Still Life

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

With over fifty drawings extending over three decades, this exhibition is the first to survey Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s works on paper. Described by Yuxweluptun as preliminary studies, these drawings, etchings and watercolours are the background work and the measuring-stick for developing the forms and ideas that have come to identify his style and pictorial inventiveness. The drawings include the most recent totemic tree studies (2004–2009), the hybrid ovoid portraits (2002–2005), figurative drawings (1985–2009) (some of which are studies for paintings), watercolours (1980–1993), and etchings (1993–2009).

Yuxweluptun refers to his work as a discourse. In his work, art and politics intermix with a Salish cosmology to critique and transform the conditions arising from colonial displacement, returning the notion of an empty newly discovered land to an Indigenous sense of place. In this way a cultural landscape becomes known, if not fully understood, through the myriad forms that are central to Yuxweluptun’s image making. While his work often lays out the terms of a grim pedagogy addressing racism and abuse of the land, Yuxweluptun explores these ideas with a liberating and playful humour.

The traditional and hybrid visual shapes that characterize these complex drawings have provided the forms and ideas for internationally recognized paintings, which have forged far ahead in their ability to challenge the powers of wide networks of environmental, social, political, and legal relationships that, since colonial settlement, have pervaded the lives of Indigenous peoples on the Northwest coast of British Columbia. When characterized as drawing in colonial space, the artist’s discursive position combines compositional elements of Northwest Coast art with the abstractions of modernism. His work is often identified as extracting from the fluid shapes of Surrealism — from Salvador Dali to Roberto Matta, but the surrealists took inspiration from their own interpretation of a Native consciousness by contrasting this to a lack of connection between art and society so characteristic of modernity. The drawings of Yuxweluptun demonstrate a strategic sensibility to underscore how history is embedded in place: these works reinscribe an Indigenous visibility to a homeland, or the difference marking out the Indigenous occupants of invaded colonies, which is in contrast to a neo-colonial gaze. As counterpoint the drawings depict a cultural landscape within which representation and meaning open up hidden epistemologies and indigenous peoples walk on the land. 

Guest Curated by Petra Watson


### Biography

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is best known for his large scale painting, which he has exhibited nationally and internationally since graduating from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 1983. Solo exhibitions include *Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Colour Zone*, Plug In ICA, Winnipeg (2001) and *Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Born to Live and Die on Your Colonialist Reservation*, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (1995). Recent group exhibitions include *Challenging Traditions*, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinberg, Ontario (2009); *Transporters: Contemporary Salish Art*, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2008); and *Beyond Beads and Feathers: Recent Work by Six Contemporary Native American Artists*, Portland Art Museum, Oregon (2002).



A black and white portrait. The portrait depicts a figure from the shoulders up with a human-like torso and a stylized, mask-like head resembling an animal.

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Eight framed works on paper mounted on three gallery walls. A glass vitrine table sits at the center of the room. Within the vitrine, books and more works on paper are displayed.

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Seven framed works on paper, of various scales, hang on a gallery wall. In tall, narrow compositions, five of the artworks depict evergreen trees in black and white.

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Seven framed works on paper mounted on a gallery wall. Three artworks hang on the left side of a corner wall and four on the right. The artworks depict various renderings of trees and human figures.

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Eight framed works on paper mounted on two gallery walls. Five on the left side of a corner wall and three on the right, varying in scale. The artworks depict outdoor settings and trees.

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Neo-Native Drawings and Other Works

Jonathan Middleton

Hadley+Maxwell

Lucy Clout

Jordan Wolfson

Dexter Sinister

Fia Backström

Holly Ward

An ideal context for an examination of the competitive nature of group exhibitions is during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. In order to take stock of the current state of artistic interventions in the physical space or institutional workings of a gallery, guest curator Eric Fredericksen brings together an international roster of artists for *An Invitation to An Infiltration*.

In 1996, artist Andrea Fraser criticized the competitive structure of group exhibitions of artists: “Every public juxtaposition of individual artistic positions on panels and in shows which invites viewers to compare, contrast and judge artists against each other reinscribes artists and works in this competitive structure, reducing them at the same time — regardless of intended effects — to their formal or strategic differences.” *An Invitation to An Infiltration* takes that critique as a model, making explicit the competition inherent to group exhibitions. Instead of attempting to solve the problem, the exhibition is designed to exacerbate and examine it. In part, the exhibition questions Fraser’s critique of competition as inherently reductive, posing competition as a productive state of engagement.

More directly, several artists will explicitly address the Olympics via its symbolism, its expressed ideals and its effects on Vancouver and its citizens. Holly Ward’s works read the Olympics as an act of appropriation of the city, which is facing budget cuts in human services and culture alike. Outside the building, Dexter Sinister will cover the windows in a new wallpaper design of linking rings. The pattern represents bronze, a colour created by mixing the five colors of the Olympic rings. Hadley+Maxwell will replicate the base of a Zane, a figure of Zeus erected by penitent athletes caught cheating in the ancient Olympics. And Fia Backström will organize a public conversation between a game theorist and a hockey strategist during the Olympic Hockey finals.

Jordan Wolfson ignores the exhibition's call for competition by presenting his new video Con Leche in a formal screening environment, separated from the rest of the show. Lucy Clout’s piece, *Untitled (eyebrow)*  is a large plank of MDF, painted black and suspended in front of the reception desk. To be able to speak face to face to the person staffing the desk, one must duck under the plank and squeeze between that plank and the desk, moving from separation to closeness. Local artist and curator Jonathan Middleton will donate part of the artist fee due to him as a permanent budget line-item earmarked for drinks to be bought should the Contemporary Art Gallery cease operations. Holly Ward will build a winners podium out of Pepsi cans. Further interventions are slated with other artists to continue throughout the run of the exhibition. Participating artists will engage the exhibition through publications, discussions, and other public programs, alongside their primary artistic contributions. The specifics of any of these projects may also be altered through group negotiation as the project evolves.

Guest Curated by Eric Fredericksen


A photograph of a city street at night, taken from a low vantage point, is overlaid with 7 illustrated Coca-Cola bottles with white liquid. The bottles have bare feet and appear to cross the street.

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A structure resembling a pole vault leans against a wall with the word CANNIBALISM displayed in black text. On the floor, cases of Pepsi are arranged as a three tier podium near a blue table and stools.

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A pole vaulting stand leans against a gallery wall. On the floor, cases of Pepsi displayed as a three tier podium sit near a blue table and stools. A yellow metal fence stands in the hallway behind.

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A long, yellow metal fence stands in the middle of a hallway connecting gallery spaces. The fence stands to the side of the hallway, allowing people to pass through.

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A single channel video work projected on the wall of a darkened gallery. Speakers sit on either side. The video depicts illustrated Coca Cola bottles with feet in front of a graffitied wall.

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A large, eye level plank of black board is suspended in front of a reception desk. A person stands behind the desk, but their head is blocked by the board. A yellow fence stands in the hallway.