Exhibitions

Bank Job

JANICE KERBEL
December 9–January 27, 2001

Bank Job is the third and final exhibition in A Set of Suspicions.

The threat of terrorist attack has made London, and its business district in particular, among the most surveilled locations in the world. A blueprint for a perfect heist, Bank Job uses surveillance photos of a bank at 15 Lombard Street in the City area of London, specifications for the security systems used by the bank, minute by minute timelines, copious equipment lists, getaway maps and hideout locations all compiled during Kerbel’s exhaustive research. Playing on both the ‘pink collar’ and criminal associations of the term ‘bank job’, Kerbel’s work presents a plan to rob the bank, perhaps feasible, confounding the docility of feminine stereotypes and making use of the condition of invisibility. Bank Job has been exhibited at the ICA, London and at Arnolfini, Bristol along with Kerbel’s on-going projects that use counter-surveillance methods to suggest a complex, contradictory and transgressive subject on the move throughout the city.

In the office, Kerbel presents study for Home Fittings – 233 Carrall Street, part of a series of diagramatic architectural plans with Soundlines (indicating to walk so no creaks are heard) and Sightlines (indicating where to stand so that no shadows are cast).

Kerbel studied at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and completed her graduate work at Goldsmith’s College, University of London. She is currently visiting lecturer at CalArts in Los Angeles.

New release! 15 Lombard St., a bookwork by Janice Kerbel that documents her precisely researched master-plan of how to rob a bank, is now on sale at Artspeak. 15 Lombard St. is part of access/excess, a series of artists’ publications edited by Stefan Kalmár, published by Book Works, London, that attempt to locate the individual within a continually developing tangle of political, cultural, economic and technological systems.

A Set of Suspicions

Artspeak’s Carrall Street location is part of a neighbourhood that faces contradictory pressures and changes: the area is well traveled by tourists; gentrification is taking place through artist’s live/work developments; high density new housing on the north side of False Creek rubs shoulders with the abandoned storefronts and decay of East Hastings Street. The ubiquitous presence of location film crews in the area allow for a sense of overlapping fact and fiction—one may encounter a snowy Edwardian English scene played out on Gastown’s cobble streets only to turn a corner and interrupt a gritty crime narrative (actual or virtual) taking place behind the dumpsters in the alley. If you are familiar with this neighbourhood you will have noticed that the codes of gesture, utterance, dress and deportment are significantly broader and more diverse than other areas of the city. Homelessness and other socio-economic factors make for a confused boundary between private and public space. An acute awareness of threat and security is heightened by the notoriety of this neighbourhood in media representations. Public and private policing merge and cross the very visible yet mobile boundaries between the various terrains of short and long term inhabitants.

A Set of Suspicions presents a fall series of exhibitions and events by artists investigating ideas of threat, security and suveillance. The works use the gallery space to index specific off-locations: the proposed street cameras just beyond our doors; the hyper-watched financial district of London, England; a university biotech lab; and the mobile ‘watching machines’ that orbit the earth. A Set of Suspicions integrates visual art, writing, video, performance, electronics design and music composition to consider the proliferation of technology, privacy and public identities and cultural habits of interpretation.

ALSO SEE

Suspects (Performance for the Police)
WARREN ARCAN, SHELLEY GUHLE, JOSH SCHAFER, TERI SNELGROVE, SUSAN STEWART
October 21–November 25, 2000

La Salle des Noeuds (pedestrian movements)
DANIEL JOLLIFFE, JOCELYN ROBERT
September 9–October 14, 2000

Artspeak is a member of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres (PAARC). Artspeak gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, The Province of BC through the BC Arts Council, the City of Vancouver, the Vancouver Foundation, Canadian Heritage, our Board of Directors, volunteers and our members.

A Set of Suspicions has been generously supported by the Vancouver Foundation and The Canada Council through the Interdisciplinary Arts Program.

Jocelyn Robert thanks the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec for their support.