Lise Soskolne’s three text-based monochrome paintings in this exhibition were generated by the idea that the birth of cinema displaced painting’s original role as pictorial storyteller – both formally in terms of colour saturation, scale and quality of light – but also as a visual document that recounts a story – fictional, historical or mythological. Using titles and credits from films which utilize formal devices such as colour, scale or editing to abstract the conventional cinematic narrative, these ‘film still’ paintings collapse the static, non-narrative language of painting together with the textual and inherently narrative implications of film, forcing a variation of pictorial storytelling.

L.A. based artist Yunhee Min will be developing a sight specific installation in both the Or’s rear gallery and on the glass of its storefront vitrines. Like Soskolne, Min is working with hard edged abstraction. She incorporates abandoned household mistints in paintings on specific architectural venues. Titled Home Improvement Paintings Min is conducting an on-going investigation of the relationship between colour, the object and the specific space it engages, questioning how spaces are defined and for whom. Her installation in the Or’s vitrines for instance, will be developed from photographs of the abandoned store-fronts flanking the gallery on each side and will insert itself temporarily into the rapidly mutating street scape of West Hastings.