Artspeak

Off-Site Storage Provider

Candie Tanaka

- 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.

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.