Greg Girard, Doorway, Wukang Lu, 2003. Image: monteclarkgallery.com

Vancouver photographer Greg Girard has been living in Shanghai for a number of years, documenting the changes to the city’s landscape.

Read my review of his recent exhibition at the Monte Clark Gallery:

Wil Murray: the strange space that will keep us together

At the Belkin Satellite Art Gallery, Vancouver

8 March to 6 April 2008

Wil Murray, Casual Friday Morning Coming Down, 2007. Image: belkin.ubc.ca

We’ve got to say it: VoCA loves Wil Murray’s paintings!

A novel mix between painting, sculpture and collage, with echoes of Jessica Stockholder, James Rosenquist and Rauschenberg, they’re not gimmicky. If vision could equal sound, this might be it.

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1. David Rokeby: Plots Against Time at Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto

March 1 – 26 April, 2008

David Rokeby, Machine for Taking Time (Boul. Saint-Laurent), 2007. Image: courtesy the artist

New media artist (and VoCA favorite) David Rokeby is showing new work at Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto.

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1. RE-ENACTMENTS AT DHC ART FOUNDATION, MONTREAL

February 21 – May 25, 2008

Harun Farocki, still from Deep Play, 2007. Image: mustekala.info

Re-enactments gathers six media artists whose works ‘re-enact’ - in some way critically re-stage media spectacles, performance art or films – cultural events of the past – to pose compelling questions about the present.

Including work by Nancy Davenport, Stan Douglas, Ann Lislegaard, Paul Pfeiffer and Kerry Tribe.

Harun Farocki’s Deep Play (2007) garnered significant attention at last year’s Documenta in Kassel, Germany. Even if you don’t care in the least about football (soccer) – the work is mesmerizing. Twelve synchronised video projections in real time variously show the unprocessed feed from TV networks, motion traces of players, coaches evaluations, schematic depictions of passes, abstract computer-generated representations of the game, kinestesiology, visualisations, as well as soundtracks and commentary of all quantifiable events from the Berlin Olympic Stadium, police radio and TV production teams.

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VANCOUVER

The VAG acquires 2 Jeff Wall photographs:

Jeff Wall, Concrete Ball, 2002. Image: tate.org.uk

To read the article, please click HERE
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1. TRUTHBEAUTY: PICTORIALSM AND THE PHOTOGRAPH AS ART, 1845-1945

At the Vancouver Art Gallery, February 2 to April 27, 2008

Elias Goldensky [Portrait of three women], c. 1915 George Eastman House Collection.

Image: vanartgallery.bc.ca

This exhibition looks at the artistic movement that transformed photography from a tool of documentation to one of the most exciting means of visual expression of the twentieth century.

With nearly 200 photographs from major museum collections around the world, the exhibition includes a large group of works from the George Eastman House as well as important loans from The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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VoCA was forwarded the following email, titled eXponential Future press release and its unexamined assumptions

It refers to the group exhibition of young Vancouver artists currently on view at the Belkin Gallery at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Click HERE to see the exhibition.

Tim Lee, The Jerk, Carl Reiner, 1979. Image: coolhunting.com

VoCA would have thought that it’s a healthy sign how – in contrast to Toronto – Vancouver galleries continually celebrate their own artists. But apparently there are some disgruntled – jealous? – voices around…What amazes VoCA is that these people, whoever they are, don’t have the chutzpa to make themselves known.

Why hide behind anonymity? If you don’t like something, stand it behind it! That’s how you get a dialogue going. Otherwise, you risk appearing petty.

Here’s the email:

POST#1

feedback.vancouver

In an attempt to intervene in the lackluster state of arts criticism in Vancouver, we, a group of artists, educators and curators, have developed a feedback system that is committed to honesty and rigor. Anonymity allows us to say the things that the institutional politics of art makes prohibitive.

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Monika Grzymala, Distortions 2008, installation shot. Image: catrionajeffries.com

KELLY WOOD AND MONIKA GRZYMALA

At Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver, 18 January – 16 February, 2008

This exhibition brings together works by gallery artist Kelly Wood and Hamburg-based artist Monika Grzymala.Kelly Wood will show a new series of ten unique, large, near-monochromatic photographic images that depict the binary code formats of digital recordings of ten songs. Wood has selected recordings of innovative Canadian electronic or avant-garde music, ranging from Hugh Le Caine’s “dripsody”—composed in 1955 from a sound sample of a drip of water falling in a pail—to recordings by Intersystems, the Nihilist Spasm Band, John Oswald and the UJ3RK5.

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Although VoCA won’t be thinking of Christmas shopping for at least another week, here are some ideas for arty presents that support Canadian museums, artists and artist-run centres.

After all, art has been “the new fashion” for quite some time…

1. PRESENTATION HOUSE GALLERY - VANCOUVER

Lynn Valley #2/Kleenex Mathematics. Image: presentationhousegall.com

Lynn Valley is an ongoing series of publications edited exclusively by artists, published by the gallery with Bywater Bros. Editions from Toronto.

Lynn Valley #2/ Kleenex Mathematics expands on super hot Cologne based artist Johannes Wohnseifer’s recent explorations with spam email. Working with a series of diaristic photographs taken in the past two years, Wohnseifer has overlain unedited spam texts, creating collages of word and image that blends autobiographic detail, historical allusion and dense visual puns with the found poetics of strategically designed, nonsensical language.

The book is 64 pages, softcover, edition of 1000.

For more information, please click HERE.

2. VANCOUVER ART GALLERY - VANCOUVER

A Zero-Yen House by Kyohei Sakaguchi. (This image is NOT the edition available from the VAG).
Image: inhabitat.com

The latest artwork in the gallery’s Artist Edition series is the first by Tokyo-based artist Kyohei Sakaguchi.

The work of Kyohei Sakaguchi examines the significance of non-traditional and informal architecture. In the past few years, he has documented an elaborate sub-culture of architecture that includes diverse types of temporary and semi-permanent houses built in public spaces by homeless persons utilizing scavenged materials.

Priced at $175 (unframed), each of the 65 photographs includes a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist. Proceeds from the sale of Artist Editions support the Vancouver Art Gallery ’s exhibitions and programming.

Please click HERE for more information.

3. THE BANFF CENTRE – BANFF, ALBERTA

Lori Blondeau, Belle Sauvage, 2005. Image: banffcentre.ca

These edition projects were commissioned by and entirely produced at The Banff Centre. Prints from these editions are available for purchase at The Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery. All proceeds from the sale of the editions support Visual Arts at the Centre, and provide ongoing opportunities for professional artists.

As a Cree/Saulteaux artist, Lori Blondeau’s artistic practice continues to explore the influence of popular media and culture (contemporary and historical) on Aboriginal self-identity, self-image, and self-definition. The title of the work, Belle Sauvage, references the central subject; a persona Blondeau has assumed in her performance art.

Lori Blondeau, Belle Sauvage, 2005, edition of 16, $500. A six-colour silkscreen print on BFK Rives 100 per cent cotton rag paper.

For more information, please click HERE.

4. PAUL AND WENDY PROJECTS – TORONTO

The Royal Art Lodge, Poster Making, 2007. Image: paulandwendyprojects.com

Paul Van Kooy and Wendy Gomoll have met and worked with a community of contemporary artists over the
years. The ambition of Paul + Wendy Projects is to produce limited edition art works by these artists whose work they love.

Poster Making, By the Royal Art Lodge. Handprinted Serigraph on acid free archival paper. Edition of 75, numbered, signed, embossed and date stamped by the artists. $250 CAD

The current members of The Royal Art Lodge are Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama and Neil Farber. The group was founded in Winnipeg in 1996. Since 2003, they have focused on painting as their main collaborative output.

Please click HERE for more information.

5. MARTHA STREET STUDIO - WINNIPEG

Simon Hughes, Some Icebergs, 2006. Image: printmakers.mb.ca

MPA was formed in the spring of 1984 by a group of Manitoba print artists. Now a non-profit organization, the studio has become one of the largest, best equipped and most diversified open printmaking facilities in Canada. New editions include work by Micah Lexier, Paul Butler, Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline and Michael Dumontier.

Simon Hughes, Some Icebergs. 2006, edition of 15. The portfolio of 3 images is hand-printed on Magnani Pescia paper using a multi-layered silk-screen process.

For more information, please click HERE.

ETIENNE ZACK: AUTHORSHOP

Equinox Gallery, Vancouver

November 24 - 22 December, 2007

Etienne Zack, Cycle, 2007. Image: equinoxgallery.com

Etienne Zack, Cut and Paste, 2007. Image: equinoxgallery.com

Love it or loathe it, there’s no denying that Etienne Zack’s work is fantastically creative. At a time when many young painters are influenced by Neo Rauch and the Leipzig School or the grisaille of Luc Tuymens, Zack - whose work does carry echoes of the new German school - has created his own distinctive style, twisting and folding perspective, often drawing from his immediate surroundings, into something more reminiscent of 1980s-era David Salle.

David Salle, Satori Three Inches within Your Heart, 1988. Image: tate.org.uk

He’s brave, refusing to shy away from looming forms or nonsensical imagery - witness the large (78 x 90 inches) piece Important Things, whose enormous eyeball in one corner put off several prospective buyers at the Toronto International Art Fair - or his signature murky palette of putty beiges and grey.

Etienne Zack, Important Things, 2007. Image: equinoxgallery.com

Zack arrived in Vancouver from Montreal in 1997 at the age of 20, and eight years later won the RBC Painting Competition. Since then, his work has been purchased by the National Gallery of Canada, the Musee D’Art Contemporain and the Musee des beaux-arts de Montreal.

For more information, please click HERE