Exhibitions

• The Chatter of Culture

  LORNA BROWN, DAVID ZINK YI
  April 7–May 12, 2007

  It has been noted that the Age of Information is, in fact, an age of forgetting: we are inundated with a culture so overwhelming that it hurtles past us without remark, unabsorbed. This flood might be called cultural chatter. One of the results of the waves of information is boredom, a lack of curiosity in the face of the sheer magnitude of things and ideas in the world. A nod to Theodor Adorno’s discussions of the culture industry, leisure, and the “chatter of culture,” this exhibition brings together the work of two artists that approach the thematics and anatomy of world-weariness.

  Lorna Brown’s ongoing research into boredom has informed her recent visual and critical practice. The Structure of Boredom (After Oden) is a work that endlessly repeats an analytic diagram, mapping boredom’s characteristics of repetition, predictability, and temporal suspension. Installed in Artspeak’s windows, it functions not only as analysis, but as decorative hoarding or perhaps lolling dance step instructions. Brown’s video Threshold (cont.) projects an archive of rolling quotes on boredom that spills over the floor and up the wall like cinematic credits. The quotes complicate and contradict one another as they struggle to communicate. The use of text elicits a layering of histories. From the inception of the printed word through modern literature, theory, and into the age of Hollywood and digital communication technologies such as texting and Powerpoint, the work incites a consideration of the conditions of obsolescence in tandem with the conditions of boredom.

  David Zink Yi’s practice offers reflections on the hybrid character of cultural and personal histories, often depicting the body as an instrument or medium of both the individual and the collective. His video Ahumm is a short verbal, visual, and physical meditation in which a figure is shown writing variations of the expression “ahumm” on a piece of paper while intoning the expressions. It is unclear if the actions are synchronous and the actions reflect an emotionality that is at once personal and distant. The performative activity of the figure takes place in real time (but in its looping this “real time” is suspended), unlike the Hollywood structure of the film credits in Brown’s work. The work contains a tension between passivity and action, conceptualism and body politics. The works in The Chatter of Culture are potentially on the threshold between pessimism and hopefulness, at once frustrating and contradictory, meaningful and on the brink of illumination.

  Postscript 27: Rebecca Marks on The Chatter of Culture (PDF)

• Doubt

  ELSPETH PRATT
  February 16–March 23, 2002

  Doubt features new and recent sculptural work by Elspeth Pratt, known for her exploration of architecture and furnishings, and for her inventive use of ubiquitous building supplies such as foam insulation, metal corner bead and veneers. Pratt’s new projects further her recent interest in concepts of leisure and consumerism in domestic and public spaces.

  One work, “Escape to Paradise”, uses countertop laminate (named Spa by its manufacturer) which mimics the effect of light on the surface of a swimming pool. This wall construction evokes a kidney shaped pool or a sheltered tropical cove, yet also suggests an abstracted logo or sign in a play of heft and surface.

  In “Adrift”, candy-pink foam insulation and metal mesh arouse the numbed buoyancy intrinsic to the fragile fantasy of the poolside lounge or the beachfront property. The works hinge on the familiarity of the lumberyard materials, and the surprising and contingent methods used to combine them; woodgrain ‘columns’ are stitched together with chain, model-sized balconies are propped on sponge in shapes that suggest a racetrack viewing platform or a cliff-top dwelling.

  The wry humour in Doubt leans upon a critique of the seamless aims of our built environment and the fetish of the custom finish. The work in Doubt suggests the skepticism with which the artist approaches the weight and permanence of sculptural tradition as well as the viewers’ hesitant response to her contingent and ephemeral negotiation of gravity.

  Artspeak and the artist would like to thank the Vancouver Art Gallery for the loan of Adrift.

• Soft Architecture: A Manifesto

  JOSÉE BERNARD, SHARYN YUEN, LISA ROBERTSON
  March 27–May 8, 1999

  Memory’s architecture is neither palatial nor theatrical but soft. — Lisa Robertson

  The project Soft Architecture: A Manifesto was realized through the collaborative efforts of Artspeak Gallery and Dazibao Gallery in Montréal, bringing together the work of artists Josée Bernard and Sharyn Yuen with writer/poet Lisa Robertson. Despite cultural difference and geographical distance, all three artists have used childhood and the notion of memory to discuss the discomforts of displacement. The intention of this project was to provoke ideas and forge links between different practices that would extend the parameters of both photography and writing. Inspired by a child’s quilt found in the house in which she grew up, Josée Bernard uses images and themes from Après les étoiles filantes that explore perceptions of comfort and the passing of time. The installation is meant as a symbol of fecundity and equilibrium in which memory and labour are juxtaposed. In Once Here, Sharyn Yuen addresses issues of displacement and dislocation. The departure point for this installation was inspired by stories of young Chinese girls sold overseas in the early 1900’s. Handmade shoes and images of childhood games become visual metaphors for vulnerability and innocence.

  A bilingual publication with prose by Lisa Robertson accompanies the exhibition.

• Conviction

  SARA LEYDON
  September 14–October 13, 1990