Nathan Coley

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition with British artist Nathan Coley, his first in North America. Comprising an exhibition across all gallery spaces and an offsite presentation, existing pieces are presented alongside *Unnamed* (2012), a major new commission.

Coley’s practice revolves around investigations into the social aspects of our built environment, working across a diverse range of media. Interested in public space, the artist explores how architecture comes to be invested — and reinvested — with meaning, and how through the competing practices of place these claims and significations come into conflict.

For Coley, buildings are empty vessels given significance by their social history: by the communities that populate them. He is interested in these politics, insofar as they put a political demand on place in the current pluralist climate of enforced equality. Fiona Bradley comments, “The gap between the city as built and as experienced, as it exists in the world and in the mind and memory, resonates throughout Nathan Coley’s practice … [he] conjures cities, metaphorically dismantling them.”

*Unnamed* forms the centerpiece to the exhibition, developing on from In *Memory* (2010) a simple enclosure formed by poured concrete surrounding a tended graveyard with headstones and planting commissioned for Jupiter Artland in Scotland. Just as previous works have looked at how buildings embody systems of belief — specifically places of worship — at the Contemporary Art Gallery *Unnamed* develops this thematic questioning by using headstones, which collectively reveal the differing stories relating to the patterns of history, immigration and Indigenous peoples. Gathered throughout the gallery supported on stout wooden batons, the seemingly informal, provisional nature of their installation creates a sense of the sculptures being in transit, of yet to find a home, suggestive of a dislocation from their actual site, temporarily in limbo. The silence of these “ready-made” objects produces a powerful presence leaving us to ask where they have come from and how they got here. With names erased the forms touch on notions concerning how we mark lives that are passed and raise the issue of morality in using these loaded objects in such a way.

Coley’s practice reveals that claims to public space in postmodern society (one marked not by national cohesion, but fragmentation, trans-nationalism, pluralism) are made by groups of people who have different ideas on how it should be used; the structures they erect manifest these desires, values and beliefs. Works such as *28.10.11.* or *18.10.11.* (both 2012) from an ongoing group of works titled *The Honour Series* picturing protests taken at various public marches and demonstrations throughout the world clearly engage such issues.

Presented off-site *We Must Cultivate Our Garden* (2006) a large scale illuminated text work held aloft on a scaffolding structure, evokes just such concerns. Taken from the last line of Candide by Voltaire, the statement is powerful and complex. The use of the plural “we” is inclusive, conveying the sense that a joint effort is necessary for an endeavour to have any effect. The imperative “must” lends an active, almost dictatorial tone. The words “cultivate” and “garden” are loaded with metaphorical weight: we can cultivate our minds, our souls, our relationships as well as the soil. Our “garden” might constitute a house, a spirit, a child, or a patch of land. In some ways it can be considered a call to arms, suggestive that a hunger for knowledge and understanding can be satiated through investigation and hard work rather than reliance on fate, tenuous beliefs or social standing. Coley is interested in the idea that the sentence is open to multiple forms of translation and interpretation, this element of ambiguity crucial whereby the onus is placed on the viewer to locate a meaning which interests them. Indeed, through his work, the artist reveals the unconscious of the architecture and cityscapes he interrogates, investigating social as much as physical constructions. Or as Coley says, “It’s in your imagination.”

### Biography

Nathan Coley lives and works in Glasgow. He was shortlisted for the 2007 Turner Prize and recent solo exhibitions include: *A Place Beyond Belief*, Haunch of Venison, London and Kosova Art Gallery, Kosovo (2012); *APPEARANCES*, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, *The Ballast Project*, Scheevaartmuseum, Amsterdam (2011); *There Will Be No Miracles Here*, The National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2010); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2009); De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, East Sussex, UK, *46 Brooklands Gardens*, Jaywick, Essex, UK, Haunch of Venison, Berlin (2008). His work was included in the group exhibition *Days Like These*, at Tate Britain (2003) and in the *British Art Show 6* at BALTIC (2005). More recent group exhibitions include: *Mythologies*, Haunch of Venison London, UK; *Jerusalem Show (Version 2.1*), Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem (2009); *Tales of Time and Space*, Folkestone Triennial, Folkestone, UK; *The Greenroom*, The Hessel Museum of Art, New York; *Persona*, Parc Saint Léger, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Paris (2008). Coley’s work is held in many European museum collections and he is currently represented by Haunch of Venison in London and New York.


ProgramGuideColey2012.pdf

A black and white photograph of a person standing by a traffic light pole on a city street corner. They have a megaphone and are carrying a sign covered by a gold leaf intervention over the image.

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Variously sized tombstones installed in a gallery. Some of them are a pink stone, while the rest are black, grey, or white. Each stone sits on a pair of wooden slats.

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Variously sized tombstones installed in a gallery. A pair of tall, narrow grey stones stand in the middle of the group of tombstones. No names are carved onto these stones.

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A grey tombstone placed on a pair of wood slats facing upward. It reads, IN LOVING MEMORY OF MY DEAR HUSBAND, OCT 27 1883, OCT 19 1935. The name has been removed with a rectangular cut to the surface.

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A series of five framed photographs are mounted on a gallery wall. Each of them shows different scenes from a street protest. Flags and signs are covered by an intervention of gold leaf over the image.

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Nathan Coley’s work installed on the top loof of the Pennsylvania Hotel on East Hastings St. The Illuminated text reads “WE MUST CULTIVATE OUR GARDEN” in yellow-green light in the late evening sky.

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Knowledge, Kindliness and Courage | We Must Cultivate Our Garden 

Nairy Baghramian

For the first exhibition of work by Nairy Baghramian in North America the Contemporary Art Gallery presents *Class Reunion*, an ambitious eighteen piece sculpture comprising a variety of abstract forms. Consistent throughout the artist’s practice, it references literature, theory and modernist design to comment on current issues of materiality, manufacture and display while examining aspects of social and political relationships.

As a collection of posed characters, *Class Reunion* forms an uncanny tableau, the stage shifting between the immediacy of the inherent material qualities — surface, shape and colour — to a more speculative consideration of meaning and content. The viewer’s experience moves from a consideration of physicality to an examination of social mores, the specific objects evoking a multiplicity of personalities and social identities, encompassing questions of context, institutional framing and the production and reception of contemporary art.

Each individual piece is unique, but combines with others to conjure a cast of characters creating an oddly theatrical scene. Taking on human characteristics accentuated by their proximity and placement, such qualities are suggested as much by their titles, for example *The Slacker*, *The Dandy and Please*, *After You*, as in their poise and structure. A sleek and slender black pole, supporting a bulbous white form seems to be the centre of a small grouping, holding the attention of the others. The simple curve of a line gives an air of confidence while a fold of metal might insinuate shyness.

Working primarily in sculpture, Baghramian brings together a myriad of references — the formal language of Minimalism, Surrealist juxtaposition, stylistic features from interior design and suggestions of absurdist narratives. This mix gives her work an enigmatic quality whereby it is not easily characterized; yet subtle political readings are inferred through the nuanced relationships between singular elements, the very nature of these as objects and their relationship to architectural settings.

For *La Colonne Cassée (1871)* [the Broken Column (1871)], Baghramian placed almost identical elements back to back, sandwiching the plate glass of the museum windows, visually uniting the interior and exterior of the exhibition space. Two curved metal panels, each anchored by a square white base, create a mirroring effect, their vertical surfaces perforated in differing patterns, breaking the illusion of symmetry and establishing a sense of uneasiness. What appears whole and solid is fragmented; this fracturing also seen in *Spanner (Stretcher/Loiterer)*, a long chrome-plated brass pipe jammed horizontally between two walls, generating tension at the limits of the room. The question of inside and outside is not one of either/or.

This hovering between the part and the whole is continued in *Class Reunion*, here the notion of the collective presented but from an assembly of pieces, united in shared materiality but separated as individual entities. The word “class” can signify formal categorizations as well as social and economic structures. While the coming together of forms is familiar, resembling social encounters and playing with our desire to classify things, Baghramian seems to suggest the specification of types, division into groupings and ideas of personality or identity are as fabricated as the individual sculptures we see.

### Biography

Nairy Baghramian was born in Isfahan, Iran, and now lives and works in Berlin. Major solo exhibitions include *Butcher, Barber, Angler & others*, Studio Voltaire, London (2009-2010); *The Walker’s Day Off*, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2008); *Ein semiotisches Haus, das nie gebaut wurde*, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (2008); *Es ist ausser Haus*, Kunsthalle Basel (2006). She has been included in a number of international biennials, most recently the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), as well as the 5th Berlin Biennial (2008) and Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007). She has also exhibited *Die Geister mögen das Flanieren* (2005) and *Voluptuous Panic* (2004) at Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin. In 2010 she had a two person show with Phyllida Barlow at The Serpentine Gallery, London. Earlier this year she took part in the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and received the Hector Art Award (2012) from Kunsthalle Mannheim. Nairy Baghramian is represented by the Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Berlin and Cologne.


ProgramGuideFall2012.pdf

Detail image of Nairy Baghramian's sculptures. A black sculpture with two legs resembles a stool, while another in white, standing to the back, resembles the form of a resting heron.

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A series of tall, abstract sculptures by Nairy Baghramian installed in a gallery. Many of them, free-standing on the floor, appear to have long necks with thin heads. Their shapes resemble music notes. 

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Detail image of Nairy Baghramian's sculptures. The tops of two sculptures are captured in this image. A black one resembles a bicycle saddle, and a white one resembles a shower nozzle.

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A series of tall, abstract sculptures by Nairy Baghramian installed in a gallery. Many of them, free-standing on the floor, appear to have long necks with thin heads. Their shapes resemble music notes.

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Nairy Baghramian's sculptures installed in a gallery  Some of the black and white sculptures are larger than human-scale. Their rounded heads are supported by thin straight necks.

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Class Reunion

Xu Zhen

This will be the first solo exhibition in Canada for Shanghai based artist Xu Zhen who has emerged as one of the most inventive and provocative artists working in China today.

 A co-founder in 1998 of the influential artist-run space BizArt Art Center, he has also organized seminal exhibitions including *Art for Sale* (1999) staged at a Shanghai shopping mall. His work is characterized by tackling authoritarian gestures and clichés of human ambition often with a wry sense of humour that counters any notion of value.

Encompassing a wide range of media, his broad practice, operating also as a curator and writer, is dramatic and knowing, aesthetically and conceptually ambitious. In fact it is exactly in order to accommodate this range of activities that Xu Zhen set up MadeIn Company in 2009 after deciding he had taken his individual identity as far as it would go. Embodying the core propositions present in his solo work, the company likes to upset the assumptions of the art establishment in ways both theatrical and humorous. The pieces they make frequently offer a satirical take on the art market while being aware of the potential to ultimately become commercial products that circulate within this system.

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents an installation, a cluster of small sculptural pieces, slightly-larger-than-life-size replicas of a mosquito. At first glance the gallery room appears empty and yet closer inspection reveals the space occupied by these insects which appear to be sucking blood from the building, glowing red as they drink in the nutrition needed. This creature is an effective symbol and with context vital to meaning, here, in this white cube gallery, Xu Zhen offers a subtle and witty take on cultural politics. Does this mosquito represent patrons or consumers of what the institutional art world has to offer? Or should we read the walls as skin and re-conceive the space as a kind of living organism, a surrogate body as vulnerable and susceptible as we are to parasitic opportunism?

The title also suggests the result of some government directive, the kind that characterizes a totalitarian state, whereby the elimination of these ubiquitous, annoying insects was decreed, and we now have an opportunity to see a remnant of an endangered species. Or we could be more positive. Perhaps Xu Zhen is asking us to imagine a better world, one without mosquitoes, after these last ones have sucked their last drops.

### Biography

Xu Zhen was born in 1977. Solo exhibitions include *Xu Zhen: Forbidden Castle*, Montanelli Museum, Prague (2012); James Cohan Gallery, New York (2009, 2008, & 2007) and ShanghART, Shanghai (2009 & 2006); *8848 – 1.86*, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2006). Xu Zhen now works as MadeIn Company with solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern (2011), *MadeIn: Seeing One’s Own Eyes*, S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2010); *Don’t Hang Your Faith On the Wall: MadeIn*, Long March Space, Beijing (2010). Major international group exhibitions include *Nether Land: Act VIII of Morality*, organized by Witte de With, Rotterdam, Dutch Culture Center, Shanghai (2010); *Retro-Tech*, San Jose Museum of Art (2010); *21st Century: Art in the First Decade*, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2010); *Useful Life*, MuHKA, Antwerp (2009); *Life-Biomorphic Forms in Sculpture*, Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2008); *Avant-Garde China: Twenty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art*, The National Art Center, Tokyo (2008); *Performa07*, New York (2007); the 10th International Istanbul Biennial (2007); *China Power Station: Parts I and II*, Serpentine Gallery, London (2007); *The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China*, Tate Liverpool (2007); *China Now*, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004). He was also included in the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) and represented China at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005).



Detail image of a mosquito sculpture by Xu Zhen. It is mounted to a white gallery wall and has six long legs. It has a dark grey body, and three quarters of its abdomen is red.

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Two mosquito sculptures by Xu Zhen are barely visible in this image. Installed on a white gallery wall, one is on the upper right and the other on the lower left, each dwarfed by the size of the wall.

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Two small-scale mosquito sculptures by Xu Zhen installed on a white gallery wall. They are only visible as black dots in this image; one on the upper right and another on the lower left.

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Detail image of a small-scale mosquito sculpture by Xu Zhen. It is mounted to a gallery wall and has six long legs. It has a dark grey body, and one-fifth of its abdomen is red.

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Detail image of a small-scale mosquito sculpture by Xu Zhen. This sculpture, facing the gallery wall and nailed at its thorax, looks like it's sucking the blood out of the white gallery wall.

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The Last Few Mosquitoes

Gareth Moore

Geoffrey Farmer

Ulla Von Brandenburg

Mike Marshall

Sylvain Sailly

Keren Cytter

Harrell Fletcher

Julia Feyrer

The Contemporary Art Gallery has worked with Vancouver artist Gareth Moore to co-commission a project comprising seven new films and a series of related posters.

For *Children’s Films*, Moore approached a number of international artists to produce short films for children, each person free to focus on any particular topic, shaping the content and form of their respective piece. Artists invited consist of some from Europe as well as other Vancouver based practitioners familiar to our local audiences. Moore then collated the two to five minute pieces into one longer work, providing it with open and closing credits, each section acting as a discrete but interconnected episode. One point of reference for this project alongside the artist’s own fascination with the formats of popular children’s television is *Children’s Tapes* (1974) by American artist Terry Fox.

By focusing on children, Moore seeks to engage visitors in a very different way to the conventional gallery goer, purposely taking work out into the city and challenging perceived conventions of whom the audience might be and where art may be apprehended. Distinctions are blurred between exhibition display and more usual educational activities. Furthermore his resort to a collaborative method of production questions the role of the artist as singular author, a more generous and outgoing approach that chimes with the underlying ethos of the gallery.

The exhibition format developed for *Children’s Films* deliberately moved between children’s cinema, pedagogical film and wandering circus. Akin to the early days of cinema with travelling magic lantern shows, weekly screenings of the 16mm films will take place in different locations throughout the city of Vancouver such as community centres, schools and a tent in open parkland, places including the Roundhouse, Trout Lake, Emery Barnes Park and the Moberly Arts and Cultural Centre amongst others. The place and time will be announced via posters in our windows as well those fly-posted throughout Vancouver, in addition to the internet via the project’s own website and that of the gallery.

With an audience comprising exclusively children — adults are only allowed if essential to accompany a child — Moore subverts, with charm and characteristic humour, not just the usual form of communication and presentation of exhibitions in an institution but also the notional audience itself. He debunks the idea that museums and galleries are merely places for adults, bypassing the conventional mediation with which children engage in contemporary art and involving them on their own terms while investing the work with a clear and significant social dynamic.

Moore’s work has long conflated performance, documentation, installation, and sculpture, as well as everyday activities normally considered peripheral to contemporary visual art, projects often involving communities external to the typical sphere of interest. As such this newly commissioned body of work is consistent with his broader practice: notional spaces and groups outside of the usual art audience become the key ingredient and participant.

*Children’s Films* highlights Moore’s enduring interests in ideas around museology, display, social engagement, and economic exchange. By using materials collected from his previous travels to create new objects that he will take with him on future journeys — or in this case the network of shared ideas within his broader artistic community and friendships — Moore’s inventions create a continuously evolving story of his pilgrimage where past narratives can be manipulated and transformed into new tales of exploration and ingenuity.

This expanded version of Children’s Films is presented by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. The project is commissioned with Bielefelder Kunstverein, Germany; IPS, Birmingham and the Whitstable Biennale. Venues in collaboration with Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre.

The exhibition was generously supported by The Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts.

### Biography

Gareth Moore was born in Matsqui, British Columbia. He currently lives and works in Kassel, Germany. Solo exhibitions include *Children’s Films*, Bielefelder Kunstverein (2011); *Passengers 1.9: Gareth Moore*, CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2008); *As a Wild Boar Passes Water*, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2008). He has also participated in the group exhibitions: *Elements of Chance*, La Biennale de Montréal (2011); *It Is What It Is*, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2010); *Right Right Now Now*, Arthur BoskampStiung M.1, Hohenlockstedt, Germany (2010); *The Chained Lady, the Microscope and the Southern Fish*, SOFA Gallery, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand (2010); *Nothing to Declare*, The Power Plant, Toronto (2009); *Every Version Belongs to the Myth*, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2009). Currently he is exhibiting in dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany and has been nominated for the Sobey Art Award 2012. Moore is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.


A child, wearing a mask and dipping a brush into an ink bottle, sits in front of an open book with photos of statues. A print hangs on the wall in the background. The entire image has a magenta hue.

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A group of young children sit in a darkened room in front of a screen watching a projected video. The video depicts a shadow puppet-like, human figure tip-toeing across the screen carrying a large sack.

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Primary school age children sit on the floor in a gym and watch a video screening. On the screen, a boy wearing a black mask is dipping a brush into ink with a thick photo book in front of him.

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Image still from a video. A black cat sits in the middle of a window frame, its back facing the camera. Black text across the image reads, “Meow,” just to the right of the cat.

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Image still from a video of shadow puppets. A figure of a man stands before a wild boar in a forest, their arm raised as if in conversation with the boar.

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Presented by Gareth Moore with Ulla Von Brandenburg, Keren Cytter, Geoffrey Farmer, Julia Feyrer, Harrell Fletcher, Mike Marshall, and Sylvain Sailly

Children's Films

Sarah Browne

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first North American exhibition by Dublin-based artist Sarah Browne, a survey including the artist’s entry for the 2009 Venice Biennale. Using “the economy” as the basis for her artistic practice, Browne works with small communities of people, documenting resourceful forms of exchange to reveal the hidden social relations that exist in small scale economic structures, summations of collective intention or desire typically influenced by emotional affects. Within the current context of austerity measures and failing markets, such an undertaking could not be more relevant. By processes such as filmmaking, sculpture and publishing the potential for a more radical resourcefulness is sought as a manifestation of creative opposition to prevailing systems. Vancouver with its immediate history of Vietnam draft dodgers and alternative island lifestyles provided an interesting backdrop for Browne’s work.

On February 17, 2012, in the midst of an unfolding European currency crisis, the Central Bank of France ceased to exchange French francs for euros, ending a system that has continued since the introduction of the euro and thus marking the demise of the franc altogether. Commissioned by the Contemporary Art Gallery and its partners, Browne’s film *Second Burial at Le Blanc* (2011–2012) follows a procession through Le Blanc, a small French town where local merchants continued to accept francs for goods and services. At the centre of this procession is Browne’s bespoke “ticker-tape countdown clock,” counting down the hours, minutes and seconds of the franc’s existence, the film completed in the days immediately following the end to the original currency.

As the film unfolds, the commemorative nature of the event seems ever more poignant, a sort of anti-monument in progress to what Le Blanc represented as a working alternative to the current state of affairs across Europe and the world. Accompanying this are two newspapers, distributed free in the town and previous presentations, visual essays that weave together historical and anthropological information related to the work.

Several of Browne’s works explore redundant technologies and leftover industries. Her *Carpet for the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale* (2009) is made from surplus wool stocks from the Donegal Carpets factory. Once renowned for its hand-knotted carpets adorning Irish embassies around the globe, Donegal now produces carpets by machine or outsourced labour. The artist’s carpet was hand-knotted by two of the factory’s previous female employees and the design, reminiscent of Irish modernist Eileen Gray, was dictated by the proportions of surplus wool remaining at the old factory, now converted into a “heritage centre.” Works such as this positions Browne’s approach as rooted in documentary, operating from a principle of “critical proximity” and using certain methods from the social sciences, particularly ethnography.

*A Model Society* (2007) stems from research in which Iceland was declared the happiest nation on earth. Browne advertised for knitwear models in Reykjavik newspapers and then surveyed respondents about the quality of life in Iceland. The models are presented within iconic Icelandic landscapes, wearing traditional Lopi sweaters in which selected phrases from their comments, such as “no war'' and “rotten politics,” have been knitted. In works like these, the artist taps into the personal, emotional underpinnings of both national identity and macroeconomic forces, the traditions of such knitting practice shared globally with other Indigenous coastal communities, seen here on the West Coast in Cowichan sweaters.

The film commission Second Burial at Le Blanc and the exhibition catalogue are co-produced by the Contemporary Art Gallery with Project Arts Centre, Dublin and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

The exhibition is generously supported by Culture Ireland and The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

### Biography

Sarah Browne was born in 1981. Her practice includes exhibitions, public projects, publishing, and critical writing, and she also works collaboratively with Gareth Kennedy as Kennedy Browne. Browne has participated in residencies and artist exchanges in Finland, Thailand, Japa, and the UK and is currently resident at Firestation Artist Studios, Dublin. Recent exhibitions include *Second Burial at Le Blanc*, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2011); *To Have/To Own*, Kunsti Art Museum, Vaasa, Finland (2011); *Lebensreform in Leitrim*, Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Ireland (2011); *Minimalism and Applied II*, Daimler Contemporary, Berlin (2010); Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2010); and *Unto This Last*, Raven Row, London (2010). In 2009 she co-represented Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Forthcoming exhibitions include Higher Lanes Gallery, Drogheda and Galway Arts Centre, Ireland (2012).



ProgramGuideSummer2012.pdf

An image of a child wearing a brown sweater facing towards the camera, but looking away, with their hands in their pockets. The blurred background is a stark landscape with buildings in the distance.

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Several artworks installed in a gallery. A film projector projects a moving image of clocks on a large screen mounted on a wall. A map of France is framed and mounted on the other wall.

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A film projector is installed in the middle of a gallery on a tall wooden support. A text-based artwork is mounted on the wall behind the projector.

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A large wooden sculpture installed in a gallery. It is a free-standing cross with four black rods attached at each end. White threads are taut across the rods, creating a large diamond shape.

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Detail image of a wooden, cross-shaped sculpture. On a small black plate attached at the end of the wooden frame, a coiled white thread, a block of metal, and a small machine are placed.

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Sarah Browne's artworks installed in a gallery. A film is projected on a large screen next to a large, hand-knotted carpet hanging from the ceiling. A slide projector projects an image on another wall. 

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A sculpture resembling a metal milk can sits atop a wooden plinth. A long metal rod, bent at one end, emerges from the top of the jug. A glass bottle is placed on a shelf mounted to the wall.

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Sarah Browne's artworks installed in a gallery. A large, hand-knotted carpet hangs from the ceiling next to a film projected on a screen. A sculpture resembling a milk can sits atop a wooden plinth.

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A large, hand-knotted carpet is installed in a gallery space. Hanging from the ceiling, it is square-shaped and mostly black in colour except for 3 rectangles in brown, pink, and white in the middle.

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How To Use Fool's Gold

Nicolas Sassoon

Nicolas Sassoon’s new commission *WAVES* is part of his ongoing body of work using Moiré patterns — a visual blur inadvertently discovered by Swiss photographer Ernst Moiré — whereby two images are overlaid to create a third “plane.” The resulting optical effect causes the eye to see movement where there is none.

The artist’s concern with visually vibrating patterns stems from his interest in the various factors relating to a computer screen, a matrix display with inherent limitations of depth, detail and colour. Sassoon uses such considerations — restrained palette and individual pixels — as the parameters to make a series of hypnotic animations specifically designed to be seen on such displays. Avoidance of smooth gradients instead leans toward the hard-edged, grids and lines creating complex configurations that test the screen itself in its technological ability to process and render such information accurately.

Sassoon is drawn to early computer graphics because of their strong physicality articulated via limited means. For example, the colour grey was originally made by placing white and black pixels next to each other, varying their density to create the desired shade. Even though the process effectively produced a variety of tones the isolated white or black pixels remained visible, revealing themselves as a vibrating image of squares and lines, and thus creating an accidental field of movement. For Sassoon such unintentional effects provide the basis for his own abstract arrangements using similar base elements as a means to represent complex forms.

The Moiré pattern designed for Yaletown-Roundhouse Station is formed by the physical layering of a symmetrical configuration of vertical, curved black lines on top of a coloured pixelated background. With no focal point the mural is activated by the movement of the viewer. As commuters pass by the two overlapping planes, horizontal waves appear to undulate rhythmically across the image surface. Initially disorientating, sustained viewing creates an immersive effect, altering our usual encounter with the entrance of the station, notionally erasing its glass side as if to reveal another dimension.

Sassoon’s abstractions are rooted in the “real,” always based in some representational form, their movement reminiscent of nature and tied to the landscape. As one image plane interferes with the other, waves, clouds scudding across the sky, a field of grass blowing in the wind, or other meteorological and atmospheric occurrences are suggested. Virtual graphics are transformed into physical manifestations, pixel-generated movements translated into architectural interventions. We are momentarily transported.


### Biography 

Nicolas Sassoon was born in 1981. He regularly works online and is a member of the artist and design collective Computers Club. His work has been exhibited at Axiom Centre for New and Experimental Media, Boston (2010); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2011); Portland Art Museum (2011); and SOMA, Mexico City (2011). Locally he has shown in the New Forms Festival (2010) and Every Letter in the Alphabet (2010). Online exhibitions include *SPAMM* at Spamm.fr and a solo exhibition entitled *TIDES* at bubblebyte.org. Upcoming exhibitions will be held at Preteen Gallery, Mexico; The Sunday Painter, London and Western Front, Vancouver.


Vertical, curved black lines of pixels atop a pixelated, coloured background form a rainbow coloured Moiré pattern of undulating waves.

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Nicolas Sassoon’s Moiré-patterned mural installed on the windows of Yaletown-Roundhouse station. Black lines of pixels atop a pixelated, coloured background form a rainbow pattern of undulating waves.

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Detail image of Nicolas Sassoon’s artwork installed on Yaletown-Roundhouse station’s facade. Black and rainbow-coloured pixels overlap with each other to create a Moiré pattern of undulating waves.

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Nicolas Sassoon’s Moiré-patterned mural installed on the windows of Yaletown-Roundhouse station. Black and rainbow-coloured pixels overlap with each other to create a Moiré pattern of undulating waves.

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WAVES

Josephine Meckseper

For her first exhibition in Canada, Josephine Meckseper creates eight new works in the street front window vitrines of the Contemporary Art Gallery. Originally intended for retail, these spaces could not be a more sympathetic location for Meckseper’s ongoing artistic proposition. 

For over twenty years Meckseper has developed a complex body of work that unites modernism with the formal language of commercial display to combine mass-produced objects with images and artefacts of recent and historical political events. Consumerism as an unrelenting presence in our daily lives is reflected in the artist’s highly polished and glossy sculptural installations which offer a critique of capitalist economy and ultimately lay bare some of its absurdities while acknowledging its seductive surface. Meckseper’s re-interpretation of forms not only challenges the way consumer culture is transmitted, but also the foundation of its production through her bringing together of symbolic objects and images, often contained in glass and mirrored vitrines. Here disparate collections, for example an unopened package of vintage women’s nylons, perfume bottles or a crisp, white folded men’s shirt, may sit next to a book on the British militant group, the Angry Brigade, a symbol of the Soviet-built Treptow Monument in Berlin, or an image of an anti-Bush demonstration in Washington.

In this new installation Meckseper both uses and undermines the language of consumer display with her characteristic deadpan humour. Juxtaposition creates new meanings. The vignettes created across each window may appear superficially simple or austere, but individual displays are connected and it is the relationship between objects, their materiality, placement and order that unfolds as more than a sum of its parts. 

Two windows house solitary chrome car wheel rims, displayed on mirrored pedestals, the image of the luxury car distilled into two distinct shimmering objects. In another a pair of black dowdy sandals sit atop a reflective pedestal; others showcase stainless steel scouring pads on a plastic consumer display stand or single mannequin legs clad in hosiery, one preciously sealed under a glass dome. As if to further isolate each object, they are shown against a black background defining their form as silhouettes, in stark contrast to a white vertical text along the door frame of each window.

The design of the typeface for these texts refers to Jugendstil — an artistic style in Germany from the mid 1890s into the early twentieth century as part of Art Nouveau — adding a further critical dimension as well as particular personal resonance for Meckseper. Her great grand uncle, Heinrich Vogeler worked within this tradition and is well-known for his participation in the German avant-garde through his involvement with the artist colony in Worpswede. Here, in addition to illustrations and paintings he began making and designing household wares. A pacifist and vocal advocate for the working class, Vogeler joined the German Communist Party shortly after World War 1, immigrating to Russia in 1931. Meckseper’s interest in connecting contemporary consumer culture and Art Nouveau is one imbued with optimism for art as potential for change; in how the historic avant-garde emerged from a consideration of the everyday and developed as a form of aesthetic and political resistance to the mainstream. 

This overarching theme plays out in each window, but also speaks to a broader, more locally inflected past. References to Vancouver’s pioneer beginnings and its colonial origins, today often linked to tourist attractions, are reflected in a number of sculptures that loosely reference the vertical forms of the Northwest Coast totem-pole, neatly stacked collections of objects, assembled to form new associations. With this Meckseper posits a suggestion of alternatives to the individualism of market-led economies — that of bartering and gift trade within large communities, exchange systems now lost. Pepsi cans and scrubbers are stuck on metal poles like sinister totems of a mad consumer society. The value of appropriated and recycled imagery and objects is central to Meckseper’s search for cultural and sociological end points. In turn she uses this as a platform to subvert notions of authenticity and value. 

The exhibition was generously supported by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V.

### Biography

Josephine Meckseper was born in 1964. Her works have been included in international biennials such as the Whitney Biennial (2010 and 2006); the Second Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art (2007) and the Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (2005). She has had solo exhibitions at the Migros Museum für gegenwartskunst, Zürich (2009); Ausstellungshalle zeitgenössische Kunst, Münster (2009); the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2009); and a retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2007). Her work was featured as part of *New Photograph* at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008) and as part of *Contemplating the Void* at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010). A large installation by the artist was included in *Plot for a Biennial*, the Sharjah Biennial 10, United Arab Emirates (2011).



ProgramGuideSpring2012.pdf

A sculpture made of a mannequin foot in brown stockings covered by a glass bell jar sitting on a mirrored plinth.

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Josephine Meckseper’s sculpture installed in one of CAG’s facade windows. A fox tail ornament hangs from a silver, free-standing coat rack. A mirror is attached to the rack.

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Josephine Meckseper’s sculpture installed in one of CAG’s facade windows. A mannequin arm on a pedestal loosely holds a pair of sunglasses. The arm has a silver reflective surface.

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Josephine Meckseper’s sculpture is installed in one of CAG’s facade windows. A silver metallic car wheel without a tire sits atop a black plinth. The wheel reflects green colors from the tree-lined street.

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Josephine Meckseper’s sculptures installed in CAG’s facade windows. A narrow stained-glass piece, which has a design that reads KAFFEE on, is installed on the right side of some of the sculptures.

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Josephine Meckseper’s sculptures installed in CAG’s facade windows, a mannequin hand, a car wheel, and others. Many of these sculptures have metallic, reflective surfaces and are displayed on plinths.

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American Leg

Matthew Monahan

This will be the first solo exhibition in Canada of work by Los Angeles based artist Matthew Monahan. The survey brings together for the first time three distinct phases of his practice: early works using drywall, more recent pieces utilizing large sheets of glass and industrial ratchet straps and new works in cast bronze often standing atop structures made from materials found in the foundry — bricks from smelting ovens, large sheets of metal. Running throughout is Monahan’s interest in the interplay between two and three dimensions, between drawing and materiality, infused with personal mythology and a self-reflective look at the conventions of museum display.

Selected from work made during the past eight years, Monahan’s figurative sculptures and drawings evoke artefacts from another time or era. With their manipulated surfaces and contorted, fragmented bodies, they could be ancient totemic figurines, tribal masks or chunks of Greco-Roman statuary. But instead of marble, wood or stone, Monahan imbues less weighty materials like foam, wax and paper with a sense of substance, meaning and artificial patina. Some figures perch on rectangular pedestals of unfinished drywall, raw edges and exposed fixings interrupting any impulse toward preciousness; others are contained within glass cases simultaneously acting as container, plinth and discrete element within the overall sculptural composition.

In *Seeing brightly (attended by the dim)* (2006) figures made of carved foam blocks are placed on a drywall stand and are partly contained within glass boxes. *Squint Spirits* (2009) or *Rubble Friends* (2005-08) have folded, collaged and photocopied drawings or fragments of figurative elements sitting on chunks of polystyrene foam, attached to large sheets of glass held upright with bright orange industrial straps. Here drawings or prints are often used as the former for a mould — twisted constructions create volumes containing expanding foam that gives physical three-dimensionality to the drawn image. Other components are bound together as if for transportation, ratchet straps more usually seen securing heavy loads. Juxtaposed with pristine industrially produced material, apparent decay or objects notionally in a state of becoming suggests that works are still in progress, and in some cases they may be. Monahan constantly recycles the detritus of his own studio. This practice accounts for the wide time frame attributed to some of the pieces reflecting the temporal uncertainty that makes Monahan’s work appear both resolutely contemporary and yet timeless. Within the studio debris, chaos and visible disorder reign. However these impressions are not wholly true. Individual pieces are in a constant state of being reconfigured once process is set in motion. A fragment might sit for a while on a block of foam and then move to perch on a pile of other fragments or be collected together as a series of off-cuts, discarded objects. Elements switch from one place to another, gradually finding a discrete area where they rest a while before arriving at a state of completion after undergoing several phases of development.

There is a sense that Monahan’s practice reaches across time, cultures and geographies, and evokes the classicism within European traditions, on occasions recalling more modern figures including Rosso, Rodin and Brancusi in both methodology and form. Within the studio a diverse range of processes is in evidence — casting, carving, assembling, fabricating, drawing, and folding. Works emerge from what has been described as the “rubble of [Monahan’s] own creation.” Drawings are photocopied, redrawn, cut, and creased to become form; objects appear fractured, partial or ruined like sculptures on a tour of Rome and all the while they are seemingly unfinished, signs of their making visible.

Within this ambiguity, Monahan plays with the conventions of museum display, most powerfully in his use of glass or the conflation of object and support. As much attention is given to the intrinsic qualities of the plinth or container as to the thing itself. *Datong* (2005–2007) is a large rough-hewn figure lying on its side, topped by a clear, rectangular glass sheet. Similar to works in which enclosed vitrines become part of the overall sculpture, *Datong* blurs the boundary between artefact and protective case by placing the object of study literally “under glass” as a structural support. The glass sheets and “vitrines” are at once a sculptural component, a display mechanism and a device for viewing and contemplating other elements within the overall work. This intermingling of the object and its container calls the neutrality of display into question, suggesting that the romance of antiquity and the primitive is nothing but an historical fabrication. In creating his own relics, Monahan reminds us how the past is constructed and revises it according to his particular vision.

### Biography

Matthew Monahan was born in 1972. Recent solo exhibitions include Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2011); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2010); Massimo de Carlo, Milan (2010); Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2007); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2007). Recent group exhibitions are Public Art Fund, New York (2011); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); Huize Frankendael, Amsterdam (2010); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009); Barbican Centre, London (2008); Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh (2008); 7th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2008); New Museum, New York (2007); 4th Berlin Biennale (2006); and Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2006).


Detail image of a sculpture. A folded, collaged and photocopied drawing resembling a human figure sits on a plinth. In front of it is a sheet of glass and behind an abstract, metallic form.

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Multiple sculptures on plinths of different heights and materials and design are installed in a gallery space. One has an abstract form with a metallic surface while the rest resemble human forms. 

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Variously sized sculptures installed on plinths inside a gallery. In total, twelve human form sculptures of different materials are visible. Some are copper coloured, and some are light grey.

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Five human form sculptures installed in a gallery on plinths made of boxes or a large stone slab with glass. Some of these sculptures have metallic surfaces while others appear to be made of stone.

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Two human form sculptures and two framed works installed in a gallery. The sculptures appear rusted with copper-coloured surfaces and stand on a plinth.

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Guo Fengyi

The Contemporary Art Gallery presented the first solo exhibition in North America of the work of Chinese artist Guo Fengyi (1942-2010). Self trained; she belongs to an older generation whose embracing of Chinese folk culture combines with traditions of wisdom and myth. Her large-scale drawings comprise intricate details and obsessive mark-making to articulate ideas of spiritual and metaphysical significance.

While never considering herself an artist, it was Guo’s involvement with the Long March project in 2002 that brought her into contact with the contemporary art world. Originally Long March wanted to engage her as a means of demonstrating art’s loss of vocabulary in dealing with things of tradition as contemporary China moved on apace.

Guo Fengyi began drawing after illness brought her to the healing practice of Qi-qong (a traditional Chinese health practice as a means to cultivate qi energy within the body). Combined with her study of theories of mysticism, she began having visions when in these meditative states which she felt compelled to translate into drawing. Guo’s subject matter encompasses these traditional concepts of thought with Chinese philosophy, myths, cosmology, acupuncture energy maps, divination and dynastic sites — all systems which are fast disappearing in a modernizing China. Her works are charged in every sense, bringing together notions of creativity as acts of everyday life. Redolent of fields of energy and magnetic auras, drawings manifest as suggestions of the human form, otherworldly beings and internal body parts, mapped against diagrammatic evocations of invisible worlds surrounding and influencing our existence.

Cosmic diagrams, diving apparatus for oracles: within Western traditions her work is seen to locate within the idea of “Outsider Art” or Art Brut, collections of which were put together by French artist Jean Dubuffet, as a means to tap into some notion of authenticity. Many of these artists were perceived as naïve, some were confined to institutions, others seen to produce work that somehow revealed a private, coded message from deep within our human psyche, alternative images of unfathomable worlds. From the perspective of Guo her work has much more value than can be conventionally attributed to art. They go far beyond that.

In a formal analysis it can be seen that her drawings provide a meeting point between two worlds — physically, conceptually and philosophically, intriguing in their mysterious complexity. There is a consistency in her formal style and expressive mark-making and pictorial sense. Yet for Guo they are an alternative means of communication, a truth in the sense that they picture messages from elsewhere and a message of both cultural and symbolic relevance to our contemporary position, a premonition from the past. In her own words she saw drawing as a “viewing from afar” and as such should be considered not as some form of representation but as a process of release, a visiting of events which burst forth into our everyday lives yet sit outside of our daily experiences. In that sense they remain true to the notion of drawing as a means to grasp something, a thing that resides outside of our immediate comprehension. Some works such as the series of SARS are ghostly demons, uncanny in their terrifying depiction of this epidemic which threatened world wide infection. Others such as the impressively large-scale scroll drawings of Shaodian (father of the Yellow Emperor), various Goddesses and deities of religious Taoism, are intriguingly unfamiliar. Through her work we get a glimpse of a pre-modern society, one in touch with the greater secrets of our world and laying claim to ongoing links with ancient histories. Hidden cultural memories are revealed as ones to be revisited and not dismissed as mere superstition, establishing an attractive subversive nature to a more systematized world.

### Biography

Guo Fengyi (1942-2010) lived and worked in Xi’an, China. Her first foray into the contemporary art world was her participation in the 2002 Long March Project—A Walking Visual Display, in which she produced site specific works at Lugu Lake, Yunnan Province, China, and collaborated with American artist Judy Chicago. Since then, solo exhibitions include Guo Fengyi, Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne (2011); China in Four Seasons, Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand (2009); *I am Guo Fengyi*, Long March Space, Beijing (2009). Group exhibitions include *The Kaleidoscopic Eye: Thysse-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection*, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2009); *China Welcomes You…Desires, Struggles, New Identities*, Kunsthaus, Graz (2007); Taipei Biennale, Taiwan (2006); Biennale of Contemporary Art, Prague (2005); Yokohama Trienniale, Japan ( 2005); and *The Long March Project—le moine et le demon*, Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon (2004).



ProgramGuideWinter2012.pdf

A coloured drawing by Guo Fengyi. On a white sheet of paper is a drawn figure resembling a green microbe with a soft, round form. A thick, red line outlines the figure.

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Ten drawings by Guo Fengyi on long, narrow sheets of paper larger than human scale installed in a gallery. The images resemble imaginary human, animal or mythical figures.

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Multiple drawings by Guo Fengyi installed on white gallery walls. Four, white-framed drawings in colour are mounted on the back wall while large-scale drawings on paper hang on the left and right walls.

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Six, black and white drawings resembling dragon-like faces on long, narrow paper installed on gallery walls. A blue and pink, large-scale drawing with three smaller drawings interrupts the row of drawings.

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Detail image of a drawing by Guo Fengyi. A collection of repeating, hand-drawn lines of warm colours creates a dense, feather-like pattern on paper. A small face is visible in the middle.

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Four, framed coloured drawings mounted on a gallery wall. The drawn figures resemble microbes with soft round forms in green, blue, and orange. Their bodies look semi transparent.

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Four black and white drawings on long sheets of paper installed on a gallery wall. Each has faces resembling animals depicted at the top and bottom of column-like, organic forms of repeating lines.