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Exhibition

“192 National Flags” consists of one hundred ninety two images of individually framed flags of the United Nations (UN), ranked from 1 to 192, according to the artist’s aesthetic judgment.

Reminiscent of moderist abstract paintings, each flag reflects on a nation’s utopian ideals and artistic sensibilities. Transcensing politics of nationalism and regionalism, the work examines issues of aesthetics, while questioning the nature of taste in artistic discourse.

Are there objective canons of taste? Are aesthetic judgments purely subjective, inter-subjective or even universal? Can such judgments be true or false, and how, if at all, can they be justified? Who has the authority to decide what is good art and what is bad art?

Exhibition

Secondhand brings together recent collaborative works by Vancouver based artists Allison Hardy & Kyla Mallett alongside works of Toronto based artist Zin Taylor. Curated by Vancouver based artist Damian Moppett, the exhibition showcases artists who work at the intersection of reality and fiction, and who create new narratives through a reworking of popularized sources.

Hardy and Mallett have been working collaboratively for the last three years, during which time they’ve developed a quasi-anthropological investigation into aspects of Lower Mainland youth culture. Their photo/text works employ verbatim transcriptions of events remembered by friends and acquaintances, alongside unselfconscious images of the event’s locations. The recounts of these various situations shift in tone between embarrassing, ritualistic and sometimes perverse. Over time, and through insistent retelling, these recollections become distorted and mythic. Storytelling, and the desire to pass on recounts of events, is also documented in a found video work included in the exhibition. The video documents the exploits of a drunken partygoer. The video was subsequently copied and distributed hand to hand by the filmmakers. A portion was even posted on the Internet, and achieved a level of notoriety that transcended its original audience.

Zin Taylor’s work grows out of a desire to formulate a meeting between ‘reality’ and cinema. Taylor creates imagined communities and individuals who construct environments in which to live out cinematic narratives. One video work depicts a friend ‘auditioning’ for the role of himself in a fictional movie. In A Conversation with Marilyn Siligail, another video Taylor will exhibit, the artist acts the role of a fictional costume designer auditioning for work in the same fictional movie

Exhibition

A larger than life-size replica of an outhouse manufactured specifically for the Or Gallery, Macleod’s kingdom is based on the Victorian privy in the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. An outsize architectural folly, it was built from an amalgam of real and imaginary sources, and refers to MacLeod’s interest is defining oneself in relation to history and strong traditions. MacLeod refers in particular to the struggles between the British tradition and an emerging Canadian modernism in the 1930’s, as well as to the incestuous nature of artistic communities, who like the stereotypical Hillbilly, feeds off and propogates it’s own.

Exhibition

Lethbridge artist David Hoffos’ installation is borne of a fascination with outdated genre films, in particular the crude special effects found in 1970s disaster movies such as Earthquake and Airport. A model of a destroyed and rubble strewn city amalgamated from children’s toys is enclosed behind walls in the gallery. Viewed through windows, ghostly groups of moving figures were seen in reflection, including projected images of gallery goers themselves.

Exhibition

David Ostrem was born in Portland, Oregon in 1945. A ‘Baby Boomer’ who saw the Vietnam war as a “crime against an emerging nation”, Ostrem ‘dodged the Draft’ and arrived in Vancouver in April of 1969. Ostrem recalls that he was not exposed to contemporary art until his early twenties. An animated film of a Manhattan street scene by Red Grooms, along with the work of Warhol were among his first inspirations. In 1974 he enrolled at the Vancouver School of Art and specialized in Photography. The still-life photographs in this exhibition represent his first mature works. They reflect both the Pop Art aesthetic which was predominant among artists and students of the time and the Conceptual and Minimalist strategies that Ostrem was introduced to by artists and instructors such as Ian Wallace and N.E. Thing Co. . Ostrem’s photographic still-lifes were followed by the paintings and silk-screen prints for which he has since become well known.

Guest curated by Vancouver artist Roy Arden, this exhibition will present 20 of Ostrem’s austere black and white photos, twelve of the more whimsical colour prints, and six previously unseen, and rather dark, cibachrome prints. These images are largely studio still-lifes depicting table top arrangements of diverse objects. Ostrem managed to give form to his mindscape in compositions which can now be interpreted as time capsules providing a very personal reflection on the realities of an era. References to current events and the recent past are effected through the inclusion of news, popular, and subcultural printed matter. Rock & roll, notions about art, Vietnam, hippie ‘freak’ culture, and the banal everyday coincide or collide in sometimes unsettling, other times humorous allegory. In recent art there has been a resurgence of some of the aesthetic strategies and subjects engaged by these works which makes this reconsideration timely and appropriate.

This exhibition toured to the Norwich Gallery from March 19 – April 27, 2002

Special-Event

An exhibition and fundraiser on the theme of plagiaries, copies and forgeries. This year over 200 artists based in Vancouver, Canada as well as internationally were asked, to ‘copy’ an existing artwork by another artist of their choosing. 75 Works were sold by silent auction at the exhibition close.

Exhibition

Pauwels’ work will intervene in the gallery through the construction of a drop ceiling throughout the complete interior of the Or Gallery space.

Pauwels’ ceiling is standard in every respect; save that it is hung below the lighting track, just above the entrance to the gallery. As a result, the ceiling re-defines our expectations of the gallery’s architecture and how the Or’s space functions. The only illumination in the gallery comes from the light leaking between the cracks of the ceiling tiles, which can be seen in the corners of the room, and along the juncture of the walls and the floors. These light leaks suggest the possibility of another space, or even another room, above the tiles. This space is visible from the street-level windows; and from this perspective one sees what appears to be a fully lit service bay.

Exhibition

North Circular [2000] will be projected in the Or, and consists of a single 4-minute shot lasting precisely the length of one 400ft roll of 35mm film. The shot opens on an abandoned and partially ruined modernist office/warehouse building that sits in a giant empty car park alongside London’s North Circular Road. Through the broken windows of the building we can barely make out figures that run across the second floor, occasionally hurling objects to the ground. After a few minutes the camera begins a slow and steady movement in and up towards the building, and we finally realize the figures are a group of young adolescent boys. The video climaxes on an extreme close up of a child’s spinning top that has been found and discarded by one of the boys. The top begins to lose its momentum and at the moment that it falls over, the film ends.

Shot in real time, “North Circular” uses the minimal narrativity of one single reel of film to explore a sense of duration and place. It also attempts, with these cinematic vocabularies, to examine boredom,stagnation and decay.

Accompanying North Circular will be the another of Lewis’ recent video works, After (Made for TV) [1999]. After is a compilation of scenes which supposedly take place after the action in a movie is completed, and features banal and confusing moments of inactivity, obviously contrived special effects, and histrionic acting.

Exhibition

This exhibition is organized in concert with the Stockholm artist-run-centre Konstakuten, and forms part of a cross-continent artist exchange that includes Nylon Gallery in London, England. It is also Part 3 of an ongoing series entitled Curatorial Mutiny, exploring the ways artists have taken on curatorial projects in their own right, and initiated by Konstakuten as a method of inter-gallery curatorial collaboration. At Konstakuten’s invitation the Or sent two artists to produce an exhibition in Stockholm in the spring of 2000, and in this return leg, Konstakuten has sent Persson and Bogholt to Vancouver, where they are each producing a work at the Or Gallery. Bogholt and Persson’s installations will be accompanied by a video work by March 21.

Bogholt’s Projektion (Projection) is a sculpture constructed entirely out of materials collected from the storage area of the Or. A huge midden of gallery paraphernalia: catalogues, tools, crates, chairs, tables and a variety of other miscellany is piled on the gallery floor, through which a single beam of light from a stripped down slide projector casts the ephemeral silhouette of a window on one of the gallery walls. Persson’s Gömma nyckel (Hiding the Key) is based loosely on a childhood game. A key is attached to a lengthy piece of string, and will circumscribe the edges of the Or Gallery interior, slowly traveling the length of the gallery’s walls, along the floor and across the ceiling as the string is pulled through a system of pulleys. March 21 will present a video showing a close up of him under the influence of the drug Dimethyltryptamine. DMT is powerful hallucinogen that lasts about 30 minutes. The video will incorporate subtitles of what the artist remembers experiencing during this time, written down after the fact. Each artist’s work explores the the psychological architecture of our habitats and the sometimes-illusory division between interior and exterior.