Corin Sworn

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents *Endless Renovation*, an evolving installation by Corin Sworn, which combines found objects and texts, light and shadows, storytelling and speculation. With this recent work, Sworn transforms the Balkind Gallery into a set animated by audio and images.

*Endless Renovation* was first performed in front of a live audience, where the artist read from a transcript corresponding to a selection of found images. Sourced from a discarded collection discovered in an alleyway several blocks from her home in Glasgow, these comprise nearly 600 35mm slides. Employing a typical art school lecture format, Sworn used two projectors as if comparing one image against another, an approach that emphasises the visual — precisely where Sworn starts. She begins, “All I have to interpret the images is what is held within them …” as if there were no other choice, but breaks from this notion of a singular known by merging poetic quotes with her own thoughts. In describing the first slide she moves to include the words of American poet John Ashbery: “you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles.” In citing this phrase, it is as if she is suggesting we cannot fully comprehend that which we see, acknowledging the difficulty in attempting to characterize the intent of the image’s maker. The act of conveying her impressions consequently shapes the narrative and thus our understanding.

The performative element of this initial presentation remains central to the exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery. Here the narration is now recorded and synced to two automated slide projectors, with glass and mirror shelving, a flower arrangement, various vases, and tailored curtains assembled into a minimal installation. However, each object, the room’s composition, the scent of flowers and diffuse yet changing light form a precise setting for the images and the artist’s meanderings, while also becoming emblematic of Sworn’s task in deciphering the images.

A selection of vases from different decades is placed on mirrored wall shelves. Twice weekly one is chosen to hold a floral arrangement made in accordance to the historic tastes of the era of the vase. They sit on the floor illuminated by a light from an antiquated slide projector, casting a sharp silhouette on the wall. This element makes reference to Malcolm LeGrice and his experiments in Expanded Cinema. Here the shadow cast by the flowers to obscure the slide is a dematerialized image produced continually in the present rather than the inevitable “past” implicit in images in film and photography. Hence the form of the arrangement remains speculative: a contemporary interpretation that ultimately determines its appearance. Another component, that of layered curtains, their simple design representative of the two interlocking beams of light emitted from the lens of the slide projectors, notionally gives the immaterial substance, while echoing the physicality of the installation itself. These components are symbolic of the artist’s process, linked to the viewer’s experience and a more general understanding of how time — past and present — is represented and perceived.

The exhibition is a space of projection, starting with Sworn’s simultaneous interpretation of the slides and her contemplation on the actual process of interpreting present in the audio. The narration begins by lingering on the first image which she singles out from its counterparts. It is a “mistake,” a crop of the ceiling and a paper lampshade. For her it differs in that the others “are composed in a style that might be considered objective.” This error, easily thrown away by the photographer yet deliberately retained by Sworn, shapes the reading of the rest of the images as nondescript: flowers, empty apartments, landscape and dust. As the sequence progresses, they become more consistent, repeatedly using the same composition, displaying a solitary object centered against a blank background. It seems the photographer was perhaps an ingenious clock-maker whose unique, futuristic designs allow hours, minutes and seconds to be interchangeable.

But then again in this moment of discovery, of knowing, the associations that emerge when heard in tandem with the images slip as the work unfolds and loops, revealing Sworn’s preoccupation with multiple, simultaneous readings, with the impossibility of singular, definitive meaning and with time, perception and memory. Hence the structure moves between organizing the images into a narrative chronology whilst alternately suggesting they function as sites for separate yet related thought process.

To further question assumptions, Sworn imposes subtle interferences; projectors are positioned on perpendicular walls making it difficult to view both images at once and obscure references are incorporated in the voiceover. While specific musings appear to relate directly to the content of the images seen, they are later revealed as lies. At one point in the narration, Sworn reveals that she also found a diary marked “Temporary diary: June to November 1985” from which she learnt what car the photographer owned and the dates of his meetings. So the images were not all she had to work with?

Weaving between concrete discussions of the images represented to a meandering collection of thoughts, as well as a shifting assortment of objects and forms, this subtle yet affecting work poignantly touches on the passing of time and the notion of the past forever out of reach. Speculation no matter how tentative still offers meaning. In the artist’s words, “these moments of projection produce territories of imagined possibility.”


### Biography

Corin Sworn, born in London, UK, now lives and works in both Vancouver and Glasgow. She studied at Emily Carr University of Art & Design and Glasgow School of Art. Her solo exhibitions include *Endless Renovation*, Tate Britain, London (2011), *Prologue: Endless Renovation*, Washington Garcia, Glasgow (2010); *Corin Sworn*, ZieherSmith Gallery, New York (2008); and *Adventure Playground*, Or Gallery, Vancouver (2006); among others. Sworn has participated in group exhibitions including *Cosey Complex*, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2010); *Morality Exhibition, Act 5: Power Alone*, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2010); *Report on Probability*, Kunsthalle Basel (2009); and *Exponential Futures*, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2008). She has written catalogue essays and reviews for publications such as *Canadian Art*, *C Magazine* and *Hunter and Cook*, Toronto and is represented by Blanket Gallery Inc., Vancouver and Kendall Koppe Gallery, Glasgow.


ProgramGuide_OrchardsonSworn_2011.pdf

A bouquet of fresh flowers in a white ceramic vase on the floor of a gallery. A spotlight on the ground illuminates the bouquet, casting a stark shadow on the wall behind.

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Two glass shelves installed in the middle of a gallery hold five slide projectors. Two images are projected onto the gallery walls. A rectangular fabric piece hangs in the corner between the images.

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Behind glass shelves in the middle of a gallery are nine variously-shaped ceramic vases on floating shelves mounted to the wall. A bouquet of flowers in a vase sits on the floor next to another wall.

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In a darkened gallery space, two glass shelves sit in the middle of a gallery, holding slide projectors at various heights. An image of a white, round-shaped light is projected on the wall.

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Detail image of glass shelves installed in the middle of a gallery space. Two projectors are placed at various heights. A pile of glass slides for a microscope is placed on one shelf.

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In a darkened gallery space, flowers are arranged in a white vase, illuminated by a spotlight in front of a white wall. Glass shelves holding projectors are placed in the middle of the gallery.

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In a darkened gallery space, flowers are arranged in a white vase illuminated by a spotlight in front of a white wall. Nine, variously-shaped ceramic vases sit on floating shelves mounted to another wall.

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Endless Renovation

Robert Orchardson

This will be the first exhibition in Canada of work by British artist Robert Orchardson. Inspired by science fiction films and the work of architects and designers who engage with ways of thinking about the future, Orchardson is all too aware of the inherent paradox in visualizing the unknown, any attempt immediately foiled as it becomes instantly familiar. In setting out to imagine "things to come," such endeavours unavoidably speak to us of the here and now. For Orchardson, his artistic proposition compels us to reassess utopias of the past, this revisiting however more than a mere act of longing. Instead it implies a restaging of unfulfilled possibilities as he grapples with fresh meaning and opportunity.

Using humble materials such as wood and resin as well as found objects, Orchardson is unashamedly nostalgic for modernist idealism, appropriating its forms and reconfiguring these, when utility has been postponed, as objects devoid of apparent function. He considers prototypes and models to be carriers for ideas, able to convey utopian potential as they develop into something beyond themselves. Orchardson also sees this sense of possibility inherent in stage sets, a tension evident where a narrative exists between the material character of the set itself and the “other” identity it adopts within the context of a play.

At the Contemporary Art Gallery we present *Endless Façade* (2011), an ambitious new installation which partially revisits stage sets designed by Isamu Noguchi in 1955 for a Royal Shakespeare Company production of *King Lear*. Noguchi aspired to an other-worldly state or feeling — a kind of mythical elsewhere, “free of historical or decorative associations” — where abstract, mobile forms created a shifting landscape against which the play unfolded. However, his designs were met with damning criticism, regarded as outlandish and unsympathetic to the theatrical production.

Fascinated by aspiration offset by failure, Orchardson revisits Noguchi’s designs, grasping their optimism and eventual redundancy. A sumptuous floor piece made of red felt, sensual in its materiality, is redolent of the cloak designed for Lear, the cut holes proposed to multiply as the play progressed, symbolic of the protagonist’s deteriorating mental state.

While Noguchi spoke of a unifying grey against which brightly coloured geometric designs and costumes sat, so Orchardson constructs a huge monochrome wall drawing, a jigsaw of interlocking triangular shapes creating a repeat pattern. In part also formally referring to Aelita, a Soviet science fiction film from 1924, this acts as a cohesive backdrop, a recurring motif for a series of highly coloured, prop-like forms, transforming the gallery spaces into an immersive environment tense with possibility. This major work within the overall piece recalls further reference points typical of Orchardson’s practice whereby he reframes the work of other designers, sometimes even fictional characters. For example, working in the 1970s, architectural practices like Superstudio proposed modular structures which could stretch to infinity; Bruno Taut in the early twentieth century proposed a kind of utopian architecture of crystalline forms extending beyond the horizon. Made of endlessly repeating elements, such forms would inevitably have to stop somewhere, their own physicality limiting the potential implied. Therefore, if positioned as “endless,” they convey a utopian possibility, a provisional idea for architecture.

A broader context cited by Orchardson for this work is Paul Scheerbart’s 1914 novel *The Grey Cloth* that tells the story of an ambitious and headstrong architect who pioneers the use of brightly coloured glass. He comes to the conclusion that the visual experience of his buildings is undermined by occupants who wear coloured clothing, clashing with his careful, chromatic schemes. In response he insists that his new wife should only wear grey, with ten percent white, in order to be the perfect visual accompaniment to his architecture. In spite of such attention to detail, in a practice that extends to all corners of the world, he often finds his work to be the subject of derision.

Approached through a triangular opening at the CAG, the wall construction will pervade the whole gallery, reinforcing the deliberate sense of entering another world. Against this, the series of coloured objects resemble the amorphous motifs that feature in paintings by surrealist artist Yves Tanguy. The result is an environment that speaks of competing implications of potential and redundancy; abstraction versus figuration; the immediate present as opposed to somewhere else.

Such an ambitious installation corresponds to sensibilities evident in earlier works by Orchardson, including *Mimoid* (2005) based on Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris in which strange forms emerge and dissolve back into the living, thinking ocean of another planet. *World Without Worlds* (2005) consists of a circular wall piece behind a screen that incorporates imagery from the “stargate” sequence of Kubrick’s *2001: A Space Odyssey*; within *Endless Façade* stands a shallow curving screen made of complex rhomboid forms, its geometric patterns mediating our view of other visitors, creating a new “stage” space in which viewers assume the position of actors. Seen within the context of the exhibition as a whole, such machinations are key to Orchardson’s artistic proposition.

This exhibition is organized in collaboration with Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. 

### Biography

Robert Orchardson was born in Glasgow and now lives and works in London, UK. He studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee and Goldsmiths College, University of London. Solo exhibitions include *Robert Orchardson*, Economist Plaza, London (2005); *Perfect Vacuum*, Wilkinson Gallery, London (2005); *Beyond*, Monitor Gallery, Rome (2005) and *New Model Army*, Galerie Ben Kaufmann, Berlin (2009). Recent group exhibitions include *A Stranger’s Window*, Nottingham Castle Museum, (2010); *A Cage Around the Sun*, von Doering Contemporary, Schwabisch Hall, Germany (2010); *The Associates*, Dundee Contemporary Arts (2009); *Let Me Show You Some Things*, CCA, Glasgow (2008); *Artfutures 07*, Bloomberg Space, London (2007); *Arte all’ Arte*, Castilo Linare, San Gimignano, Italy (2005); *Bloomberg New Contemporaries*, Cornerhouse, Manchester; *LOT*, Bristol and Barbican, London (2005). Commissions include *Paths Beyond* for British Airways at Heathrow Terminal 5 (2008) and *Nexus*, British Land Plc, London (2006). He is represented by Wilkinson Gallery, London and Galerie Ben Kaufmann, Berlin.


A textured, painted wall in gray on which two objects hang. One a sky-blue circle, the other a thin yellow stick hung vertically and casting a thin shadow to its right. 

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Robert Orchardson’s installation transforms an entryway to a gallery. A bold, red geometric facade with a triangular opening in the middle leads visitors through a white, angled tunnel to the gallery.

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Two sculptures and one drawing are visible in this image. An hourglass-shaped green sculpture and a thin, black propeller-shaped sculpture sit on the floor below a golden cube drawn on the wall.

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A flat, abstract-shaped sculpture in bright orange is installed in a grey-painted gallery on the floor. Beside it, a thin, white sculpture of trapezoid shapes in a fence-like pattern stands to the left.

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In a dark, grey painted gallery are several sculptures by Robert Orchardson. Four variously-sized, geometric sculptures are installed on the concrete floor.

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A white, oval stone-like sculpture is next to the entrance of a gallery. A wooden, bow-like sculpture leans against the white wall next to a pink oval sculpture, slightly bent and mounted on the wall.

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Robert Orchardson’s sculptures are installed in a gallery space. A large, fence-like sculpture of white trapezoid shapes stands in front of a dark grey wall facing a wooden sculpture across the gallery.

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Endless Façade

Federico Herrero

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major new commission by Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero. *Vibrantes* will evolve over a period of time at the beginning of September revealing the performative aspect of Herrero’s practice while working in the public realm, such unconventional locations and surfaces typically providing a context for his large-scale abstract murals. While Herrero at times also produces more usual gallery exhibitions, his works are primarily site-specific and more commonly made outside as part of a cityscape. For example, in 2007 in Medellin, Colombia, Herrero painted the cement pillars raising the subway tracks over the city’s central park, covering the uniformly drab surface in bright flat planes of blue, which acted as the background for his characteristic layering of colourful geometric shapes.

Herrero often seeks out difficult sites — the horizontal expanse of an exposed rooftop, the cracks in concrete pathways, the exposed bottom of a swimming pool, or the brutalist structure of the Central Library in Portsmouth, UK. Most recently he painted the exteriors of four fishing huts on the Rhine, solid monochromatic planes juxtaposed with dense clusters of multi-coloured organic forms. While his colour palette makes the huts stand out in contrast to the landscape, it is his distinctive compositions that are transformative. The murals seem to physically alter the positions of the huts — the formal compositions seeming to dislodge the structures creating the illusion that they are somehow flowing with the river. The static forms are vibrant with the energy of Herrero’s configurations of vivid colours. The architecture vibrates, moving like the landscape, endlessly changing. 

The new piece for the Contemporary Art Gallery shares its title with this intervention, for Herrero the word being transferable from one project to another signalling an ongoing commonality, functioning to both describe and name, but it also modifies into a verb, evoking his process. Herrero builds his paintings slowly, a basic plan in place but the final form undetermined, choice of colour, the space it occupies and the geometry left to improvisatory decisions. He relies on the mutability of the medium as well as the unfamiliarity of the surface to keep his actions in the present.

For *Vibrantes* at the CAG, Herrero shifts mediums. Akin to Matisse and his late paper cutouts, he will use sheets of coloured adhesive vinyl instead of paint, progressively developing the work across our building’s façade of windows and doors. Glass will become the field for an array of layered forms, accumulating in density and amalgamating into a cohesive composition. However even after he has finished the piece, it will constantly shift in intensity, opacity and saturation as clouds roll in or sun moves across the panes. And once the seasons change and the days darken, the interior lights will affect the colours and complexity of forms. At times their brightness will mute the vinyl palette and hide the multiplicity of shapes. The vibrancy at times may be dimmed, but the work will still pulse with the energy of its environment.

Paradoxically, this flux is key to Herrero’s work. Through form, colour and context, the artist directly addresses the division between art and life, attempting to challenge the notion that art is a specialized commodity. Here CAG’s façade acts as both a metaphor and connector — a vibrant conduit bridging inside and out, a membrane extending exhibitions into the street, directly addressing the gallery’s location and physical presence in Vancouver — at the base of a generic condo high-rise on the corner of an intersection with three other similar buildings. The uniformity of the environment functions like a well patterned camouflage — a concern for a public institution that wants to be seen — a broader civic problem as Vancouver’s skyline and downtown streetscape become indistinct, the city already commonly used by the film and television industries as a stand-in for others. *Vibrantes* offers a temporary reprieve, inserting a unique signature into Vancouver, the work’s changeability suggestive of a variety of extraordinary futures for a city that is still growing.

This program is generously supported by TELUS, 2010 Legacies Now and the Canadian Art Foundation.

### Biography

Federico Herrero (b. 1978) is based in San José, Costa Rica. Recent solo exhibitions include *Federico Herrero—Aurora*, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen (2010); *Amalgama*, Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid (2009); *Amansalba*, Teoretica, San José (2009); and *Colorigami*, Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo (2008). Selected group exhibitions include *Panamericana*, Kurimanzutto Gallery, Mexico City (2010); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain ( 2010); Latin American Pavillion, 53rd Venice Biennale (2009); and the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2007). Herrero was the recipient of a prestigious best young artist award at the Venice Biennale in 2001. In 2008, Kunstverein Frieburg published a monograph on Herrero, including texts by Paulo Herkenhoff and Felicity Lunn. He is represented by Sies + Höke Galerie in Düsseldorf, Germany.



ProgramGuideFall2011.pdf

 CAG’s facade windows are installed with colorful circular and organic shapes in vinyl. The first floor windows are covered in two hues of pale blue, on which the various-sized shapes scatter.

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CAG’s facade windows installed with by various coloured, circular shapes in vinyl. Some windows have uncovered parts, through which the lights from inside the building shine through to the street.

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Image of CAG’s facade taken from across the street. The building’s windows are installed with yellow and blue vinyl, foregrounded by many, overlapping colourful circular vinyl shapes. 

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Detail image of the corner of CAG’s exterior building facade. The first floor windows are installed with colourful, circular vinyl shapes overlapping with each other on a light blue background.

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This is a close-up shot of the corner of CAG’s building taken from outside. The first floor windows are covered with colourful circular shapes overlapping with each other in a light blue background.  

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Vibrantes

Corita Kent

*To create is to relate* is the first solo exhibition in Canada of the work of Corita Kent (1918–1986). Corita was one of the most innovative and unusual pop artists of the 1960s, who, living as a Catholic nun in California, battled political and religious establishments while revolutionizing graphic design and encouraging the creativity of thousands of people.

Corita taught at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, since the 1950s both celebrated and criticized for its progressive educational programmes. Here Corita along with other sisters initiated a lecture series that today reads as a cultural who’s who of the time, contributors including Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage and Saul Bass amongst many others, who quickly came to be admirers of Corita, and keen supporters of the College and its activities. In her silkscreen prints she mixed contemporary advertising with slogans, poetry and song lyrics, commandeering nuns and students to help make ambitious installations, processions and banners. For Corita her choice of printmaking was deliberate, its very form explicitly democratic enabling a wide distribution which she enhanced further by rejecting limited editions, instead making large series of individual pieces and keeping prices inexpensive. For such an output her printmaking was limited to the two or three weeks between the end of summer school and the beginning of the new school year. This annual outpouring was the culmination of all she had absorbed the previous year — images, phrases, sounds, and ideas — works born of relationships she forged between the disparate elements of society she encountered. Corita too has a direct connection to British Columbia having taught in the province during the early 1940s thereby making the exhibition even more appropriate given the time spent here during formative years. It was this period which in many ways shaped her thinking, focusing on the potential for creativity within us all linked to progressive social beliefs.

Her work and its community/participatory engagement marked a decade of utopian thinking but one rooted in the conviction that direct action can cause real change. As such she asserts the continuum between daily life and art through her work, and challenges our expectations of what and how we encounter art. This lack of division between form and activity makes for a compelling argument against the notion of detached art experience both for artists and the audience. As such it chimes with the Contemporary Art Gallery in our belief that art and its conventions should not be divorced from our everyday experience and have meaning to everyone. 

This exhibition focuses exclusively on Corita’s prints produced during the 1960s. Here we see a rapid visual move from a muted palette at the beginning of the decade to one where figurative style is replaced by an increasing use of large areas of intense abstract color. Words too find their way into her compositions often fragmented whereby they become image and the dominant compositional element. The size of the serigraphs also increases and for Corita the absorption of the burgeoning media signage, packaging, commercial systems and slogans she saw daily in Los Angeles play an important role in the development of her work. She embraced the urban environment, the commonplace becoming far from empty wasteland, rather a vehicle for hope and rejoicing. By her appropriation of the colors, design and advertising of the day, she situated her prints within a contemporary popular idiom, generating poetic work in which such visual communication is filled with social and human meaning. In *someday is now* (1964) for example, the partial block letters clearly derive from SAFEWAY supermarkets; *enriched bread* (1965) includes fragments from the red, blue and yellow of the packaging still used today by bread manufacturer Wonder, and *somebody had to break the rules* (1967) has the phrase jumbled but taken from a laundry detergent of the day. Her use of a viewfinder to de-contextualize source material coupled with a technique of layering and “cut and paste” collage — critical juxtaposition — create the conceptual methodology to generate new content.

Toward the end of the decade her work evolved to juxtapose song lyrics, poetry, advertising, and theological criticism. The culture of protest entered too whereby she turned her attention to racism, poverty, feminism, military escalation in Vietnam — the burning political landscape of the time. These smaller scale prints incorporate documentary material taken from magazine publications such as *Life* and *Time*. Seen in pieces such as *news of the week* or *the cry that will be heard* (both 1969) her use of posters, formal innovations and the democratic social process that resulted in their mass production reached its critical peak. Corita titled this series *Heroes and Sheroes*, a crucial work being *phil and dan* (1969) consisting of a news photograph of Philip and Daniel Berrigan burning dra records in protest of US crimes in Vietnam. These two were part of the Catonsville Nine, a group of clergy and laypeople peace activists, Father Philip Berrigan achieving notoriety as the first Catholic priest in the history of the US to serve a sentence as a political prisoner. The fluorescent colors of these prints recall the political graphics and psychedelic pop of that late 1960s period.

As with many other cultural figures Corita appeared to reach a point of activism exhaustion by the onset of the 1970s; at the end of the decade and at the height of her fame and prodigious work rate, she led the convent where she had spent her adult life. Her work shifted again returning to a more conversational and sentimental nature with simpler, cleaner form rather than the bold statement of the 1960s. In part due to her departure from the vibrancy and creativity which had surrounded her at Immaculate Heart College her move to Boston, New England also signaled a retreat from public participation to privacy.

The exhibition was developed in association with the Corita Art Center, Los Angeles and Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco. Special thanks to curator Natasha Boas.

### Biography

Corita Kent became internationally recognized for her brightly coloured silkscreen prints during the 1960s and 1970s. Admired by Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage and Saul Bass, she was one of the most innovative and unusual pop artists of the 1960s, her work an outlet for her spiritual and political beliefs, reflecting her desire for social justice and peace during the period of the Vietnam War. As a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles, she ran the Art Department at Immaculate Heart College until 1968 when she left the Order and moved to Boston to pursue her practice. Over the next eighteen years Corita produced more than 400 prints and made many commissioned works such as book covers and textbook illustrations. She also remained socially engaged, designing posters and billboards for Share, The International Walk for Hunger, Physicians for Social Responsibility and Amnesty International.



Detail image of a Corita Kent silkscreen print. Red, pink and black block letters and shapes overlap in a collage-like composition.

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Installation view of Corita Kent’s colourful sign artworks mounted on white gallery walls. Some of those signs read “POWER UP” and “STOP Take it easy. Let yourself Go.”

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Installation view of Corita Kent’s colourful sign artworks mounted on white gallery walls. Some signs have their words mirrored, disproportionated, or overlapped with each other.

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Installation view of Corita Kent’s colourful sign artworks mounted on white gallery walls. A poster of a large realistically drawn eye is installed next to the yellow and purple sign.

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On a white gallery wall, a silver-framed colourful sign which reads “POWER UP” is mounted on the top. Below it, three other signs are mounted. One of them reads “GET WITH THE ACTION.”

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To create is to relate

Thomas Bewick

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first exhibition in North America devoted entirely to the vignettes of British wood engraver, artist and naturalist Thomas Bewick. The exhibition is a contemporary look into history, building a bridge between image making techniques and endeavors of different eras.

Born in Cherryburn, near Mickley, Northumberland in 1753, Bewick worked in Newcastle until his death in 1828. Clearly influenced by his childhood on a small farm on the banks of the river Tyne, the son of a tenant farmer and a collier, Bewick’s love of the countryside is reflected in his detailed woodcuts of animals, birds and rural scenes. The vignettes presented here were not originally made to be hung on gallery walls, but published in books about natural history. With his workshop partner, Ralph Beilby, Bewick produced three volumes, his most ambitious projects being illustrations for *General History of Quadrupeds* (1790) and *History of British Birds* (two volumes, *Land Birds*, 1797 and *Water Birds* 1804). They presented each specimen by describing it in words and illustrating it with a printed image. In the time before photography such hand-made pictures served as scientific evidence. The grand idea of publishing the Quadrupeds and Birds was to give common people access to information, which until then was confined to the “libraries of the wealthy.”

Where there was empty space at the end of a paragraph or the bottom of a page, it was customary to fill it with some ornamental figure, a tailpiece. The ornament, or vignette, could also be placed in the beginning of the paragraph, as a headpiece. These would often depict leaves and foliage, from which the word “vignette” (French “vigne,” vine) is derived, or small decorative objects like oil lamps.

Cut into the end-grain of blocks of box-wood, an exceptionally close-grained hardwood, Bewick’s tale-pieces are necessarily small in size, making us even more aware of the extraordinary skill involved in their production. Bewick recast the art of the tailpiece through his depictions of everyday life in his native Tyne valley. Each represents a part of the world on paper in miniature: it can be a whole landscape with the horizon in the distance, a group of people or a lonely figure in a story. The image is not bound by a frame but integrates with the space of the page.

Bewick referred to these as “tale-pieces.” Intended as illustrations of “some truth or point of some moral” they provide an invaluable insight into social history while also demonstrating the artist’s imagination and wit. However the tailpieces were marginal in a number of ways: they were executed as an alternative to the day job, and in his books they were fitted around the main content. In contrast to the more systematic, encyclopedic natural histories, with vignettes Bewick was free to develop his own tales the way he wanted them.

As such these narrative works provide an interesting counterpoint to the work of many internationally established artists in Vancouver, engaged in image making that critically examines and reflects on the city and socio-economic conditions which surround them. The presentation of historical work, a first at the CAG, is intended to challenge our understanding of what a contemporary art space should show and as such reinforces the notion that everything was once contemporary, retaining meaning for future generations, just as much as what is contemporary now will inevitably become historical.

Subject to Bewick’s more psychological and sociological scrutiny his images frequently reveal human frailties; one depicts a drunkard seeing two moons in the night sky; another shows a horse stopping on the bank of a river to avoid falling into the water, while his rider is oblivious. A dog is also present and aware of the imminent danger. An interpretation, written later by his daughter Jane, sums up the artist’s general attitude: “Instinct teaches these two dumb animals to walk wisely — churches and sign-boards do not avail in teaching men to keep in the right path.” Bewick’s sympathy was on the side of the underprivileged. Many vignettes depict people coping with different situations, often travelling, working, crossing rivers and other obstacles on their way. Bewick’s resentment of human cruelty towards animals and people is clear, signified by the many hanged figures in his works.

Mortality is a subject to which Bewick often returns both as an individual destiny but, through motifs such as military uniforms and memorials, also making wider connections with the restless times of the Napoleonic wars. In one poignant vignette he shows us children dressed in tall hats, holding swords aloft, riding gravestones like hobby-horses. One of his last wood engravings, this time on a larger scale, was entitled *Waiting for Death*. Bewick depicts an old emaciated horse, weary and exhausted from past labor, standing motionless against the familiar landscape, exposed to the cruel elements and resigned to its fate in the natural order of things.

One tale-piece in particular attracts interest amongst artists today. It features a small scene with a house and figure on horseback almost totally obscured by the artist’s engraved thumb-print. With this unprecedented gesture Bewick asserts his authorship at the expense of a carefully wrought image.

### Biography

Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) was a celebrated wood engraver, artist, and naturalist. At the age of fourteen he began a seven-year apprenticeship with an engraving business owned by Ralph Beilby in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. His talent was soon apparent and he began working on book illustrations for publications such as *Tommy Trip’s History of Beasts and Birds*, *Fables by the Late Mr. Gay* and *Select Fables* for Thomas Saint, a Newcastle printer. In 1790 Bewick published *General History of Quadrupeds*, and as a result of its success went on to publish two volumes of *History of British Birds*.





A black and white wood-block print depicting a person on wooden stilts walking across the water. In the background another person climbs on a tree. 

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An installation view of a gallery with multiple framed works mounted on three walls. Each small-sized print has one larger and one smaller image, vertically composed with the larger above the smaller.

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Tale-pieces

Shary Boyle

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents *Flesh and Blood*, a major touring exhibition of recent work by Canadian artist Shary Boyle. Through drawing, sculpture, painting, writing, and performance Boyle creates installations that examine a range of psychological and emotional situations rooted in a fictional world. Her position is at once feminist, yet poetic, located within dreamlike states. Tense with troubled emotions, possessing an expressive immediacy and poised between grace and strangeness, her portraits and ”genre scenes” read as allegories of the human condition. Their resolutely symbolic language raises bold perspectives on the present, revealing a conscience haunted by a consideration of the morals of our world today. Centring on heredity, sexuality and death, and the nature of our place within the greater animal kingdom, these conditions form a visual investigation into the complex links between the individual and society as a whole.

A number of characteristics are key to an understanding of Boyle’s work: stylistic contrast and ornamental excess, figurative exuberance and phantasmagorical presence, the mechanisms of seduction, an evocation of a weird, theatricality of subject and manifestations of social politics. Her examination of scenes and subject matter associated with childhood and adolescence, in turn reference surrealistic landscapes, fairy tales, cartoons, and illustrated novels that recall past fantastic worlds or prophetic futures. She updates the variety, excess and hybridity of the Baroque by insertion of a feminist dimension, exploiting the potential for shifting motifs and imaginary space whereby tensions are set up between individual isolation and the notion of community.

The baroque nuance in Boyle’s work becomes evident in her play between form and material, light and dark, image and narrative, individual and collective, human and animal, and body and soul. Sited between straightforwardness and splendour, while retaining a compelling ambivalence, Boyle plays with the notion of beauty as a means to draw us in. Her figurines simultaneously attract and repel, through both the familiarity of the object and of what is represented, and the technical command of material and process.

Boyle’s practice encompasses a series of interwoven genres, a network of relationships, embodied in both her paintings and sculpture. Explicit in the narrative of images created, these are amplified further by the fantastical qualities generated in her light installations and performances. Contrary to the constant spectacle of images that bombard us daily, where initial potency soon becomes commonplace, Boyle counters the risk of over familiarity by using visual codes from a range of diverse sources. She adopts freely from historical, aesthetic references including Hieronymus Bosch, Félicien Rops, Ferdinand Knopff, and Otto Dix, to the more popular imagery of radical contemporary comic art.

Her figures and characters form a family of sorts. Also displaying an original and unique genetics, one encrypted in the artist’s choice of materials, the specificity of her techniques and their inherent meaning. And like most families, functional and dysfunctional members live side by side, harmony and chaos coexisting in an environment that shifts between the magical and the disturbed, from the real to the unreal. This dualism is no doubt what holds Boyle’s fictive world together: its main characters bound by conflicts, idylls, fears, passions, and destinies. They are a community even if meaning rests in their singular forms.

By crafting the work herself Boyle sees this as crucial to her feminist standpoint, critically addressing the devaluation of the decorative arts — such as porcelain and embroidery — customarily associated with women’s leisure activities. Instead of working with technicians to fabricate the pieces, the artist’s handmade means of production is designed to simulate the exacting standards of expert industrial manufacture by artisans, demanding a mastery of technical challenges. Yet she embraces convention by studying the porcelain techniques of the great European tradition — for example, Sevres, Meissen, Nymphenburg — and familiarizes herself with oil painting in the manner of the Old Masters. By employing these forms we are seduced by the lustre of glossy paint, the brilliance of the porcelain, the alluring texture of tiny polymer miniatures, and in other works by the fluidity of lace and ribbons, the gleam of polychrome flesh and delicate gilding, and the magic of graceful projections and shadow plays. While the objects themselves remain redolent of the domestic, their formal attributes are used to engage and hold our attention, subverting expectations through that which is depicted.

Regardless of media and genre the works of Shary Boyle confront our gaze head on. No matter how appealing or oppressive, we remain somehow transfixed. The feeling that the gaze is aimed at the viewer is not specific to Boyle’s work, but here, if eyes are considered the site of expression, in common parlance “the mirror of the soul,” then they present themselves in many guises. Bulging, popping out of their sockets, staring wide-eyed, blinded, obstructed, masked, shut, or deeply sunken, they have a hypnotic, hallucinogenic effect and suggest a troubling intensity. The variety, expressiveness and functionality of the multiple gazes pull us back to question what it is we see. Boyle reinvents a form of historicity in which we attempt to seek our own figure.

This is an abridged and re-edited extract from the text by curator Louise Déry first published in the catalogue *Flesh and Blood* accompanying the exhibition.

The exhibition is organized by Galerie de l’UQAM in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario and the collaboration of the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, with the support of Heritage Canada, The Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

### Biography

Shary Boyle is based in Toronto and has exhibited throughout Canada, Europe and the US. She has had solo exhibitions at the Power Plant, Toronto (2006) and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge (2008). In 2009 her work was featured at the Fumetto Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland, in The Likely Fate of the Man that Swallowed the Ghost at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and included in exhibitions throughout 2010-11 at The Gardiner Museum, Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Maison Rouge in Paris and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. *Shary Boyle: Flesh and Blood*, curated by Louise Déry and produced by the Galerie de l’UQAM, launched at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Fall 2010 and travelled to Galerie de l’UQAM in Montréal. Boyle’s work is held in museum collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Paisley Museum in Scotland. Boyle received the Gershon-Iskowitz Prize at the AGO in 2009 and the following year, a Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Awards for outstanding achievement by a Canadian artist. She is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.




ProgramGuideSummer2011.pdf

A human head-like plaster sculpture lit by a colourful, patterned projection. Owl eyes in the projection line up with those of the sculpture’s and lace strings emerge from its mouth.

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An overhead projector points towards a wall, casting a colourful projection onto a human-like sculpture posing on a platform. The projection is a circular array of stripes, butterflies, and tree shadows.

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Three artworks are displayed in a gallery; a framed artwork on one wall, a small sculpture in a display case, and a colourful projection and sculpture on another wall. 

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Two large-scale artworks are mounted on a gallery wall. On the floor are two white sculptures, one a large, human-like form of white plaster and another, a smaller sculpture under glass atop a plinth.

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A large pile of straw sits on a gallery floor on which two, embracing mannequin-like forms are laid. A small sculpture under glass on a plinth and a portrait-style framed artwork are visible behind.

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A large pile of straw sits on a gallery floor on which two, embracing mannequin-like forms are laid. Two small sculptures, each under glass atop a plinth, are visible in back of the exhibition space.

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Flesh and Blood

Sharon Hayes

For American artist Sharon Hayes’ first solo exhibition in Canada, the CAG presents *In the Near Future*, her multifaceted and dynamic installation, incorporating thirteen slide projectors and 354 different images. The numerous photographs were gathered from audience members over four years as part of a series of performances Hayes staged in six cities.

Hayes is best known for her performance-based work, which uses public modes of address, from street demonstrations to letter writing, to analyse how political views are conveyed and represented. She is interested in examining recent historical events at a point when the language and structures that codify them are still in use. Her choice in subjects relates to the different ways in which political opinion in its most direct form is expressed. For example, in *Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds # 13, 16, 20 & 29* (2003) Hayes re-spoke, as performances and later as video works, the four audio tapes the SLA had Patty Hearst record describing the conditions and reasons behind her kidnapping in 1974; for *Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time for Love?* (2007) she read aloud over five days an anonymous love letter for an hour each day outside the headquarters of the Swiss financial corporation UBS in New York City. In much of her work, she breaks down different forms of public protest by personalizing and dividing them into their essential components, thus analyzing the how and why of their currency and examining the ways they have been represented and distributed as text and images.

Most of Hayes’ work is dependent on audience interaction. While reciting Hearst’s audio tapes, from memory, she had the audience, who were given transcriptions of the original tapes, correct her when she made mistakes. For *In the Near Future*, Hayes invited onlookers to document her enactment of thirteen lone protests. In select public sites she picketed with placards bearing anachronistic and ambiguous slogans. Some she made up, altered or directly appropriated from bygone protests, such as “Who approved the war in Vietnam?” a phrase originally used in 1962 at the Charter Day Protest at the University of California and “I am a Man,” a slogan taken from the civil rights movement during the Memphis Sanitation strike in 1968. The origin of such sayings is not made evident in the final installation and the particularities of this information are not essential to understanding Hayes’ public performances, but the reference to recent events is clear. Her actions are not designed to make clear declarations, she has no direct aim and this is not activism. Each performance is a paring down of the basic strategies of street protest — the way text, body, place, and time go together to define subject and create a common language. Hayes’ discursive and aesthetic investigation in the history of protest chimes directly with the recent success of mass protests in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, and the worldwide support for the Libyan revolt. The slogan “the people want to bring down the regime,” first used in Tunisia was adopted by each of the countries. There is a shared purpose not only in the reasons and aims of each uprising, but also in the way it is collectively expressed.

### Biography

Sharon Hayes lives and works in New York. She holds a MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio from the University of California, Los Angeles (2003) and also participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (1999–2000). Her work has been exhibited extensively across North America and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions include *Andrea Geyer / Sharon Hayes*, Göteborgs Konsthall, Göteborg (2010); *Sharon Hayes: The Future is Unthinkable*, Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp (2009); *We The People*, Context Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland (2009); *In the Near Future*, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art (2008); and *I march in the parade of liberty, but as long as I love you I’m not free*, New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York (2007). Hayes has also participated in numerous group exhibitions including Haunted: Contemporary Photography / Video / Performance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); and the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.



ProgramGuideSpring2011.pdf

Essay: “Votes for Women,” Jenifer Papararo

A photograph depicting a protester on a city street holding a sign that reads "WHEN IS THIS GOING TO END."  

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A dozen slide projectors are installed in the middle of a gallery floor. They each project images of Sharon Hayes’s In the Near Future performance on the surrounding walls.

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Eight slide projectors are visible in this image, each of which are on tables at various heights. They project photographs onto the three surrounding walls.

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Nine projectors face three surrounding white walls. They each project images of Sharon Hayes’s In the Near Future performance on the surrounding walls.

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A dozen projectors are installed in the middle of a gallery space. They project photographs onto the walls, which are the documentations of Sharon Hayes’ public performances in various locations.

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 In the Near Future

Maayan Amir

Ruti Sela

For their first solo exhibition in Canada, the CAG presents *Beyond Guilt — The Trilogy* (2003–2005) a collaborative video series by Israeli artists Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir. Its currency rests in its daring and mischievous blend of sex and politics and its jumbling of subject and author.

The trilogy begins with *Beyond Guilt #1* shot in the bathrooms of night clubs in Tel Aviv where the artists record themselves negotiating sexual encounters. They are the instigators off camera, but we also see them pictured, at times agreeing to hand over the filming completely. Sela and Amir seem open to, and comfortable with, performing any of the sexual propositions presented to them, frequently upping the ante. They are provocateurs as well as ready and willing participants.

The work while potentially titillating, turns at a point, where sexual evocations give way to other social and political topics. In *Beyond Guilt #2*, through an online chat room, the artists invited men to a hotel room where discussions of sexual preferences lead to talk of experiences in the army and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The men appear relaxed in speech and pose; some are naked or partially clothed and while the conversation always starts with sex, it repeatedly turns to military concerns. One visitor, while holding metal handcuffs relates his position as sergeant as being perfectly suited to his sexually dominant role play. But even under these charged circumstances what is remarkable is the overall tone of ordinariness.

This mundane quality runs through the series, but is most evident in the final video for which they invited a sex worker to a hotel room, gave her their camera and asked her to document their meeting. The piece is intimate as the three women develop an understanding of each other outside of the expected financial transaction. It ends with all three lying on a bed looking listlessly into the camera or at each other.

*Beyond Guilt — The Trilogy* is at times difficult to watch. The artists create risky scenarios by negotiating sex in public places and inviting strangers into their hotel room. Yet, Sela and Amir have managed to anaesthetize situations that are out of the ordinary, filled with unknowns and potential risk. They capture a banality within the sensation of these sexual encounters, neutering much of the provocation. The conflation of sex and war isn’t what one would expect — a depiction of spectacle and drama. It is of the everyday and seems to represent a possible tactic for coping with life in Tel Aviv. In a nation continually at war, surrounded by violence, this seems most viable.



Essay: "Okay, Big Time," Jenifer Papararo

A low-fi video still of a person doing a handstand in a simple room with a beige bed and curtains, a desk, mirror, and mini fridge. A bottle is in the foreground of the image in front of the person.

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In a gallery space, two video works are projected on the walls. The video on the left shows the torso of a naked person lying on a bed, and another video shows a person smiling in a red-lit room.

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In a gallery, two video works are projected on the walls. The video on the left shows two people in black outfits jumping on a white bed. Another one shows two naked people standing in a washroom.

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In a gallery space, two video works are projected on the walls. The video on the left shows two people kissing with their eyes closed, and another video shows a person looking up at the camera. 

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Two video works are projected on gallery walls. The video on the left shows a person saying, “Because the sex started to control my life.” Another video shows a person smiling under a black cat mask.

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Beyond Guilt — The Trilogy

Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir

Roy Arden

The colloquialism of Roy Arden’s exhibition title *UNDERTHESUN* suggests open-ended generosity. It may imply the act of finding one’s place, it can also, quite simply and implausibly conjure “everything.” Arden’s dense installation of nearly one hundred works, comprising broken antique toys, rusted objects, spinning sculptures, loud horns, colourful palettes, and graphic imagery, gives the exhibition a carnivalesque atmosphere, and the dynamism collectively draws a history that is at once playful and welcoming yet foiled by a cool elusiveness and criticality.

From intimate handmade collage to large-scale kinetic sculptures, Arden chronicles the progression and effects of modernity. Beginning with images and materials from his extensive digital and print library, Arden extracts a seemingly unsystematic selection: a short newspaper article of a domestic break-in is rescaled into a pencil drawing, the covers of out-of-date and small print-run books are painted, found and aged materials become assemblages on wheels. Yet the ostensibly diverse works are linked by lines and repetitions that provide crucial clues to our understanding of social and economic history, beginning with the industrial revolution. Depictions of technological advancements in textile and transport industries may simultaneously signify progress as well as the deteriorating conditions of workers; a reiteration of a mid-twentieth century illustration comically signals the machines domination over man as well as female liberation. *UNDERTHESUN* is a multifaceted compilation of works that combine to speak of a focused search to discover manifold causes of our present condition through relentless digging, quotation and reinterpretation.

Arden is well-known for his austere photographs depicting transformative effects on Vancouver's cityscape and its surroundings. As such this comprehensive exhibition at the CAG may seem a departure, but he has always performed a parallel combing of the larger image world. In the 1980s Arden produced a body of work that employed historical photographs to explore the social history of BC. Recently he has returned to working with found images in video, online works, drawings, sculpture, paintings, paper and digital collage, which continues his broader artistic interests.

This exhibition was sponsored by The Hamber Foundation.

### Biography

Roy Arden studied at the Vancouver School of Art and received an MFA from the University of British Columbia in 1990. Although best known for his photographic work, Arden’s artistic practice is multi-disciplinary, including collage, painting, sculpture, and video. Over the past three decades, Arden has exhibited extensively across Canada, as well as internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include *I Can Only Give You Everything*, Richard Telles, Los Angeles (2010); *People of British Columbia*, Monte Clark, Vancouver (2009);  *Roy Arden (Selected Works 1981-2007)*, Vancouver Art Gallery (2007); *Always the Sun*, Galerie Tanit, Munich (2006); and *Roy Arden (Selected Works 1985-2000)*, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2006). Arden lives and works in Vancouver. Arden is represented by Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Clark & Faria, Toronto and Richard Telles, Los Angeles.



A collage of cut and pasted photographs on a red background; a sunset, black and white images of a couple, people lying on a beach, and a person in a suit all overtop of an image of a gallery space.

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Various artworks are installed in the corner of a gallery. Multiple two-dimensional works of different sizes cover the walls behind a large-scale sculpture installation resembling a cart.

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Multiple two-dimensional works of different sizes are mounted on gallery walls behind a large-scale sculpture resembling a wind wheel. The wheel is attached to a bicycle and moves as a person pedals.

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Artworks installed in a gallery. A sculpture of rusted wheels hangs from the ceiling. Behind it are large sculptures resembling a cart and a wind wheel along with many two-dimensional works on the walls.

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Multiple artworks by Roy Arden are installed in a gallery. Three, large multimedia sculptures occupy the gallery floor while various two-dimensional works cover the walls surrounding the sculptures.

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Detail image of an installation by Roy Arden. In this image, the top part of a white bike is visible below two graphic design works mounted on the wall; one is blue and the other is red.

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Various artworks are installed in the corner of a gallery. Framed drawings and photo-collage pieces are mounted on the walls behind a small-scale multimedia sculpture on a pedestal.