Artspeak
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A recipient of the Bruce Boyd Scholarship and an Australian National University Institute of the Arts Grant, Tanaka’s work has been exhibited at Center A, Vancouver, and at Canberra School of Art Gallery, Canberra, Australia. Off-Site Storage Provider is her first solo exhibition in Vancouver.
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Althea Thauberger is an artist based in Vancouver. Her internationally produced and exhibited work typically involves collaboration with a group or community that result in performances, films, videos, audio recordings, and books. Thauberger gravitates towards social enclaves—groups of people who exist or develop in some form of seclusion and are often perpetuated by social controls—that are both coercive and voluntary. Her work provides constraints for her subjects to work within which may echo the ones they live within. These may be structural imperatives or conventions of particular film or photographic media, allegory, seriality, or other containers. Thauberger’s performances have involved diverse groups including young Canadian female singer/songwriters, U.S. military wives, Canadian tree planters, Vancouver-based reserve soldiers, and male youth in the German civil service. These amateur performers express concepts of self-definition, alienation, and community through their stories.
Thauberger’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work has been presented at Manifesta 7, Trento, Itlay; the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2008; Vancouver Art Gallery, 2008; BAK, Utrecht, 2007; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2006; Kunstverein Wolfsburg, 2006; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, 2006; Singapore History Museum, 2006; Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver, 2005; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp, 2005; Berkeley Art Museum, 2005; Insite, San Diego/Tijuana, 2005; White Columns, New York, 2004; and Seattle Art Museum, 2004. In 2008 she will be traveling to the Canadian Forces Base in Kandahar, Afghanistan to work on a collaborative photograph with military members there. She has upcoming projects with BAK, basis voor aktuele kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands, the Gaungzhou Triennial, China and Artspeak in Vancouver.
Exhibitions
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ALTHEA THAUBERGER
October 19–November 23, 2002Female Victoria filmmaker seeks female singer/songwriters ages approximately 17–25 to be featured in art film. No experience necessary.
From this ad placed in a Victoria entertainment weekly, Althea Thauberger auditioned many young women performing original compositions. A group of eight were then recorded individually in a professional recording studio setting and later filmed on 16mm, lip-synching, at a variety of ‘natural’ settings in and around Victoria. The locations in some way epitomize romanticized west-coast motifs, and the lush glade, the rugged clifftop and the bountiful garden assert themselves as characters in the piece. The series of performances are screened on digital video, in a looped sequence.
Songstress combines references to the screen test and music video and grafts them to the long history of conflating the feminine with nature. The overdetermined form of the folk ballad and the high production values of the work are at odds with one another and with the extremely personal and emotive expression of the young songwriters. The struggle evident in the performances is echoed in the ambiguity of the viewer; both caught between the authenticity of emotional turmoil and the more comfortable and familiar simulations and cliches of pop culture forms.
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CANDIE TANAKA
September 7–October 12, 2002Off-Site Storage Provider
– 9 used white lab coats
– 12 large file cabinets
– 1 recycle bucket
– 1 chair
– 1 microfiche projector
– 1 microfilm reader/printer
– 1 picture of the off-site storage provider
Candie Tanaka’s practice involves the collection of objects, images and sounds from public or institutional spaces, which she then alters and places back into the public realm. The exhibition of the altered objects, images or sounds becomes the mid-point in the circular process of gathering, intervening and the replacing of the materials into other locations. Methodologies such as archiving and indexing the materials gleaned from her travels and explorations inform her installation work that examines the structure of public and personal memory.
In Off-Site Storage Provider, Tanaka has digitized a photo archive of images taken in transit and transferred them to microfilm and microfiche, placing the ‘originals’ in a secure storage facility. Copies of the images taken in public spaces subways, metros and airports, etc. will be available in the gallery to be viewed on a microfiche projector, and copies of images on microfilm can be viewed and printed out on a microfilm reader/printer.
Tanaka’s work makes visible the structures of official memory, the fetish of the document and the anxieties of record-keeping through the absurdity of cataloguing, reproducing and storing personal ephemera. The work exhibited is but a facsimile of the ‘real’ work, which is housed in a secure climate-controlled holding facility, the Off-Site Storage Provider, an abandoned limestone mine in Pennsylvania.
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Bibliography
1. Iron Mountain Website www.ironmountain.com
2. Caves a Cornerstone of U.S. Security Effort (Link)
Talks & Events
<< Rewind
CANDIE TANAKA, ALTHEA THAUBERGER, KATHY SLADE
December 14, 2002
Artspeak Gallery is pleased to present << Rewind: a launching event of two new audio releases. Please join us for mid-afternoon cocktails, some CD listening stations and general holiday cheer.
1. Candie Tanaka – “No sound is dissonant which tells of life” – CD Bookwork
In this audio project, Candie Tanaka has layered, manipulated and digitally edited ‘real world’ sounds from an urban environment into discrete soundtracks. These soundtracks are then inserted as unexplained artworks into the voice messaging systems of individuals and a range of cultural institutions. The CD contains both the out-going recorded message of the recipients and the soundtrack messages left behind. Bookwork graphics: Jen Eby.
2. Althea Thauberger – Songstress / Kathy Slade – Songs for Girls – CD Bookwork
The CD contains the soundtrack from the exhibition Songstress by Althea Thauberger; the bookwork features portraits of the singer/songwriters and their handwritten lyric sheets. Kathy Slade’s text, Songs for Girls, critically investigates the trope of the west-coast chanteuse and the conflation of femininity and ‘nature’.
Publications
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Title: Songstress
Category: Exhibition Catalogue
Artist: Althea Thauberger
Writers: Kathy Slade, Althea Thauberger
Publisher: Artspeak
Year published: 2002
Cover: Paperback
Binding: Staple Bound
Process: Offset
Features: Audio CD, 10 colour images
Dimensions: 14 x 13 x 0.8 cm
Weight: 65 g
Price: $4 CDNFemale Victoria filmmaker seeks female singer/songwriters ages approximately 17 – 25 to be featured in art film. No experience necessary.
From this ad placed in a Victoria entertainment weekly, Thauberger auditioned young women performing original compositions. A group of eight were recorded individually in a professional recording studio setting and later filmed on 16mm, lip-synching, at a variety of ‘natural’ settings in and around Victoria. The locations in some way epitomize romanticized west-coast motifs, and the lush glade, the rugged clifftop and the bountiful garden assert themselves as characters in the piece. The series of performances were screened at Artspeak on digital video in a looped sequence.
The CD contains the soundtrack from the exhibition Songstress by Althea Thauberger. The bookwork features portraits of the singer/songwriters and their handwritten lyric sheets. Kathy Slade’s text, “Songs for Girls,” critically investigates the trope of the west-coast chanteuse and the conflation of femininity and ‘nature’.
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“no sound is dissonant which tells of life”
Title: ‘No sound is dissonant which tells of life’
Category: CD / Artist Book
Artist: Candie Tanaka
Publisher: Artspeak
Year published: 2002
Pages: 12pp
Cover: 4 panel paper sleeve
Binding: Staple Bound
Process: Offset
Features: 10 colour images, Illustrations by Jen Eby
Dimensions: 13 x 14 x 0.8 cm
Weight: 51 g
Price: $4 CDNIn this audio project, Candie Tanaka has layered, manipulated and digitally edited ‘real world’ sounds from an urban environment into discrete soundtracks. These soundtracks are then inserted as unexplained artworks into the voice messaging systems of individuals and a range of cultural institutions. Working with the conventions of film scores, but independent of their linear visual narrative, this audio work challenges the fabrication of time and stimulates the resonance of aural memory through the creation of unsettling imaginative spaces. This work subverts the communications systems of the institutions and domestic spaces, slipping through their points of public access to play with the intimacy of sound, confounding the expectation of the listener and placing them within the vast archive of free floating information. This CD contains both the out-going recorded message of the recipients and the soundtrack messages left behind. The bookwork lists the date, time and location fo the audio interventions and is illustrated with graphics by Jen Eby.