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  • Between You and the Thing Itself
  • Between You and the Thing Itself
  • Between You and the Thing Itself
  • Between You and the Thing Itself

Between You and the Thing Itself

29 June–
4 August 2007

Curated by: Dan Starling

Between You and the Thing Itself, exhibition at Or Gallery, 2006.

Between You and the Thing Itself, exhibition at Or Gallery, 2006.

Between You and the Thing Itself

Curated by: Dan Starling

Between You and the Thing Itself presents the work of six artists from Vancouver working with photography. This exhibition was organized in a spontaneous manner and was largely influenced by the selected artists’ works as well as the curator’s own interest in photography. In this way the show came together organically without a heavy-handed curatorial premise. The artists in the exhibition do not have any easy categorization and work within a variety of contexts.

 

Photography acts as the mediator between you (the viewer) and the thing (the object). While all of the artists in this exhibition investigate the nature of photography’s re-framing and its ability to divulge something about the idea of originality and the subject it is depicting, each explores this distancing mechanism inherent in the medium through different means. For example, Kyla Mallett’s Kids on the Brink, is an image of a scanned book cover that shows how the serious matter of teen suicide is packaged by the medical industry for an anxious public. Formal interventions can also produce comic effects, as in Matthew Booth’s printed stills depicting images of stunned viewers witnessing David Blaine’s street magic.

 

This exhibition includes artists who are not typically grouped together in order to move away from the idea of creating a cohesive group of artists working in a parallel fashion. Rather, the idea is to provide a cross-section of the methods available to photography as a re-framing device. Of interest is the mediation that photography creates because it opens up an imaginative space of speculation—a contemplative space of re-configuring or re-imaging cultural formations.

Artist Bios

Robert Arndt

Robert Arndt examines the means of accessing culture and history through the mediated forms of books, magazines and the internet. His recent work has involved elements of performance, photography and film, and is informed by historical west coast conceptualism and the visual language and authority of cinema. He has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions at Tracey Lawrence Gallery; Artists Space, New York; the Vancouver Art Gallery; Parasite Gallery, Hong Kong; and the Western Front.

Raymond Boisjoly

Raymond Boisjoly is an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia. His research is concerned with the transformative dynamics of cross-cultural contact as a form of artistic production. An upcoming work negotiates the visual intersection of two cultures, First Nations & Heavy Metal.

Matthew Booth

Matthew Booth graduated from Emily Carr Institute in 2006. He is a co-editor of Pyramid Power magazine.

Heidi Johansen

Heidi Johansen completed her degree in photography at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2005 after which she moved to New York and later to her native Norway. Exhibitions include two solo shows at Blanket Gallery, Vancouver; a group exhibition at Irvine Contemporary, Washington, DC; and an upcoming solo show at Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles.

Kyla Mallett

Kyla Mallett is an artist based in Vancouver. Since completing an MFA at the University of British Columbia in 2004, her work has been included in exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery; ThreeWalls, Chicago; the Vancouver Public Library, and Artspeak.

Jeremy Todd

Jeremy Todd is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, musician and educator currently working as an interim Director/Curator for the Richmond Art Gallery. In March of this year he completed the feature length digital film Dear Guy, a reflection on current understandings and acculturations of Guy Debord’s life and works, and is now developing Easter Everywhere, a film project combining dystopic science fiction, pop documentary and epistolary narrative structures.