Exhibitions

• Persistence: An Archive of Feminist Practices in Vancouver

  JESSIE CARYL, CRISTA DAHL, JENNIFER FISHER, ELIZABETH MACKENZIE, MARINA ROY
  November 8–January 31, 2009

  

  

  

  

  Organized by Artspeak with Jessie Caryl, Crista Dahl, Jennifer Fisher, Elizabeth MacKenzie and Marina Roy

  Persistence: An Archive of Feminist Practices in Vancouver is part of a citywide dialogue with the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. WACK!, at the Vancouver Art Gallery, explores the formation, development and impact of feminism in post-war international contemporary art from 1965 to 1980. Artspeak is presenting a collection of printed material that offers a local perspective on feminist art production from the 1970s to the early 90s.

  Artspeak will exhibit ephemera and texts that span the creative experimentation, political action and critical inquiry of a wide array of feminist artists and arts collectives working in Vancouver. Including production catalogues, screening guides, event posters, announcements, as well as other documents, this collection of material allows for an examination of the dynamic contribution local practices have made to both the feminist project and creative culture at large.

  Persistence: An Archive of Feminist Practices in Vancouver has been organized to compliment VIVO Media Arts Centre’s parallel screening project November 7-8 Persistent Resistence: Early Feminist Video in Vancouver and takes its materials largely from VIVO’s archives. See www.vivomediaarts.com for more information.

• The Underside of Shadows

  ELIZABETH MACKENZIE, JEANNE RANDOLPH
  September 8–October 13, 2001

  The Underside of Shadows interprets the invasion of everyday life by microscopic creatures, whose effect on humans are often presented through the medical dualities of normal and abnormal, purity and contamination, danger and safety. Within this collaborative installation, images and pattern poetry are drawn directly on the walls of the gallery; an ephemeral method that does not rely upon the idea of the work of art as an autonomous object, or presume the gallery space as neutral, or deny text any visually aesthetic commonalties with image.

  The Underside of Shadows includes representations of the germ Giardia Lamblia, one of the intestinal parasites most commonly identified in waterborne disease outbreaks. Here imagery and text intertwine in such a way that viewers may ponder the visual metaphor of human-to-microbe and microbe-to-human influences. These unseen entities provoke reconsideration of ordinary perception, everyday dependence upon technology and closer scrutiny of our anxiety to find narratives to account for realities we imagine, yet cannot see.

  This two person exhibition is the result of a long-distance, often technologically mediated collaboration between Elizabeth MacKenzie, a visual artist known for her video, photography and drawn installation works and Jeanne Randolph, a Toronto psychoanalyst and writer of highly inventive ficto-criticism. This new work draws from a twenty year association as well as a recent shared residency at The Banff Centre for the Arts’ Leighton Studios.