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Exhibition

10 Drawings is the first solo exhibition of Kelowna based artist, Brian Boulton. Boulton has been involved in British Columbia’s contemporary art scene since the early 1980s and spent the last 3 years laboriously executing ten meticulous figure studies of young skateboarders. Done in a hyper-realist style, the drawings are a hybrid between the painstaking detail of a classical artist like Albrecht Durer and the punk sensibility of skater culture.

Performance

For a late 19th century urban flaneur like Edgar Degas, a trip to the racetrack must have presented certain social and aesthetic possibilities illuminiating a progresive and excessive side of modernity. More than reeancting this derive as a site for artistic inspiration in the late 20th century, Neil Wedman’s enterprise, Every Bust Stop from My Place to the Racetrack, restages the journey as both a contemporary project for himself and a potential trip for the viewer. Made up of thirty-eight colour photographs mounted in sequence, Every Bus Stop… documents a road well traveled by Wedman whose leisurely habit of going to the racetrack has herebeen visualized in an enclosed site-specific system.

As a photographic narrative, this work brings into picture the repetitive and chance-ridden nature of everyday urban encoutners. The general concept of this project is neither a new nor a novel idea. After all, the title points us directly back to Ed Ruscha’s work was conceptualized agains photojournalism and the hedonistic romaticisim of “art photography”, Wedman re-exmaines the project with both historical hindsight and irony as his photographs become unavoideably linked to the aestheticized social predicaments staged by Vancouver’s own flaneur par excellence – Jeff Wall.

where as Wall’s elaborate tableux attempt to “capture” movements through staging and technical encounters. This is a gamble that comes with being socially mobile on the bus – a bus that drives a spatial narrative through the different social environments of Vancouver. In Wedman’s photographic cartoon, the Or Gallery is not merely posited as a pit stop on this route, but as an “interruption”, allowing the gallery goer to contemplate their own movement.

Placed in dialectical flux, the gallery goer is en route between Wedman’s designated point of origin (his South Granville home) and his journey’s end (the racetrack). Within this indexical system, each individual bus stop has been photogaphed without judgement. Despite this apparent objectivity, Every Bus Stop…maintains a subjective posturing as it is Wedmna who “chooseds” to frame our view between his own place and preferred destination.

As an aim, the racetrack is odd. Like Playland, its PNE neighbour, this is a site gradually transformed into a ruin from an entropic industrial age. by making this his targey, Weman is not only nostalgic, but makes a decisive claim to his own subjective place in the social and economic environment that transforms our landscape. Unlike photographers such as Roy Arden or Thomas Struth, Wedman does not confront his subject straight on. Instead he repeatedly turns his attention to the route that takes him there: a route well traveled. Relying on both structure and chance (he commissioned the photographs), Every Bust Stop from My Place to the Racetrack weaves together an allegorical representation of Vancovuer that allow the reader to playfully construct their own picture of both the racetrack and Wedman’s place.

Patrik Anderson (Septmeber 1997)

Exhibition

Performance

Century Plaza Hotel 1015 Burrard Street

Exhibition

Despite significant historical precendents the corner as ‘site’ has deftly avoided both academic and historical scrutiny. Positioned at the juncture between a painting ‘space’ (the wall) and a sculptural ‘space’ (the floor) the corner as a site has traditionally been regarded as no more than a mere curiosity within the development of 20the century art history, yet it remains a site to which artists continually return.

In Getting the Corners our traditional orientation of the gallery space is inverted, In moving away from the centre to the periphery the works inevitably adopt a less determined role for themselves, regecting the ‘spectacular’ nature of a traditional presentation, preferring instead to operate as if by ‘stealth’. The works in Getting the Corners – for the most part discrete, unassuming and sleight – consciously accept their diminished status. Getting the Corners makes no claims on history, rather it operates as a partial survey of the varying responses by a group of young British artists (all of whom are working within the twin legacies of minimal and conceptual practice) to this problematic scenario.

Exhibition

Group show of Helen Pitt Award winners for 1999, 1998, and 1997. Participants were graduates from the visual art programs of Emily Carr Institute, Simon Fraser University, Okanagan University College, University of British Columbia, and the University of Victoria. The show contained a wide range of works, and provided the young artists involved with exposure and experience in a prominent public gallery.

Exhibition

Born in Hong Kong, Priscilla Yeung has been based in Vancouver since 1985, and this was her second solo exhibition. In Yeung’s word: “Each object that I make is a release and a personal documentation on thoughts, events, landscapes, and imaginations from the everyday reality. I bargain and play with the materials that I am working with… which are gathered from found objects, toy items, and household products. Yeung’s installation consisted of a variety of small, transitory sculptures on the themes of travel, cultural migration and the idea of home. Made of play-doh and surrounding a large fridge, visitors were encouraged to place the sculptures into the fridge to turn colour.

No Matter What – catologue

Once I managed to get inside the #375 minibus, I felt relieved. I had been standing and wandering all day. Inside the bus, the celing had been reworked. It was covered with a silver fabric with small shiny floral details. Soon the bus was full and we warted to moved. It was not just dark outside, but thick with cars, motorbikes, bicycles, venders, and cooking steam. Because of the lack of streetlights, the lights from side-walk venders and running street cars were reflecting inside the vehicle. whatever was shiny glowed, and the ceiling was flasing constantly. Shadows of dismembered pieces of the things were showing up on the ceiling fabric; and shattered light was reflecting on the skin of our faces to reveal parts of our features. In this heavy traffic, our cramped, privately subsidized bus was still rushing to get ahead of the public bus to arrive a car length earlier at each bus stop to pick up passengers. Looking around the interior, and out the windows, I though of how much I was part of the design here.

7th November, 1998
translated on 24th May, 1999

Exhibition

An Outreach project of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at UBC, Heart of Darkness was the first two-person exhibition of B.C.’s most celebrated artists, Emily Carr (1875-1945) and Jack Shadbolt (1909-1998). The theme “Heart of Darkness,” is borrowed from Joseph Conrad to suggest that the work of both artists confront colonial anxiety. The title refers to and spotlights the dark heart of Vancouver’s most difficult street and site of civic neglect, and was intended to highlight the social deterioration of the downtown eastside by showcasing some of BC’s most prized cultural works in its most debilitated area.

National Post, January 18, 1999. pD8 by Murray Whyte. The Province, January 24, 1999, pA17. by Steve Barry. Georgia Straight, Jan28-Feb 4, 199,9 p65. by Trevor Boddy. Georgia Straight, feb 11-18, 1999, p84. by Robin Laurence. Influx Magazine, Feb 1999, p.3, vol 14, n2 by Mia Thomsett. Front, mar/apr 1999, p18. by Clint Burnham.