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Randy Lee Cutler

Whether through performance art, experimental video, photographs, recipes, interventions in gallery windows, or creative/critical writing, Randy Lee Cutler’s practice explores the aesthetics of appetite and embodiment. She has authored numerous essays published in C magazine, Pyramid Power, The Fillip Review, FUSE magazine, Vancouver Art & Economies, Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture, West Coast LINE, n.paradoxa, Blackflash Magazine, Canadian Art and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art on topics as diverse as digestion, truth-telling, orientalism, feminism, photography and social change. Originally from Montreal, she lives in Vancouver where she maintains an experimental relationship with pedagogy, gardening and reading.

Exhibitions

  • The Party is Over

    DIVYA MEHRA
    November 26–January 28, 2012

    Divya Mehra, The Party is Over, Street View

    Divya Mehra, I will split up my Father's empire (after N.W.A.),, 2011. Neon sculpture, 45 x 57 x 4 in

    Divya Mehra, The Party is Over, Installation View

    Divya Mehra, Here's to Us (Who wore it best?), 2011. Fake silver watch set to Pakistan Standard Time, 2.25 x 12 cm

    Divya Mehra, Here's to Us (Who wore it best?), 2011. Fake gold watch set to Indian Time, 2.25 x 12 cm

    Divya Mehra, For Bapu (posthumous overture), 2011. Live performance by cellist, mahogany British parlour circa 1890, speakers, dimensions variable

    Divya Mehra, The Pleasure of Hating, 2011. Digital C-Print, 22.5 x 31 cm

    Divya Mehra, They've burst your pretty balloon, 2011. Digital C-Print on cardstock, infinite edition, 5.5 x 5.5 cm

    Divya Mehra, There's just not enough to go around, 2011. White cake with fruit, custard filling and whipped topping, mahogany British parlour table circa 1890, dimensions variable

    Divya Mehra, There's just not enough to go around, 2011. White cake with fruit, custard filling and whipped topping, mahogany British parlour table circa 1890, dimensions variable

    Divya Mehra, Your Turn Next (You've Got the Juice Now), 2011. Off-site aerial advertising, red nylon sailcloth, 60 x 1080 cm

    Divya Mehra, Your Turn Next (You've Got the Juice Now), 2011. Off-site aerial advertising, red nylon sailcloth, 60 x 1080 cm

    Divya Mehra’s practice draws from experiences of displacement, cultural conventions, and hybridization, infusing a biting wit in the execution of her projects. Connecting political and religious icons with popular hip-hop culture, Mehra examines cross-cultural appropriations and the parallels between family tension and nationalistic conflict. Her work investigates the construction and misrepresentation of cultural identity while making reference to layered divisions and the disparity and exploitation of power. Engaging with decay, excess, and failed celebration, Mehra will present an exhibition comprised of new sculptural and photographic work and a performance by a local gospel choir.

    Postscript 44: Joni Low on The Party is Over (PDF)

  • Speaking Truth to Reconciliation (a project in two parts)

    ABBAS AKHAVAN, KRISTINA LEE PODESVA, MOHAMMAD SALEMY
    September 12–October 31, 2009

    Race: Proposals in Truth and Reconciliation

    What are the possibilities of talking about race today? It is critical that we continue to challenge the conditions of racism, marginality, exclusion, and xenophobia. But how does one approach talking about a subject whose archaeologies of knowledge have been laden with histories of conflict and contestation? And how does one do this with a commitment to generosity, truthfulness, and reconciliation?

    Over the last year, there has been an escalating presence of race in every aspect of social, political, and economic life. Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech in Philadelphia became the most popular video in the world, drawing 1.2 million views in the first 24 hours after it aired. Described by some writers as the most important speech on race given by any American politician, it pointed to the fact that racial discord in the US, although entrenched, distracting, and emotional, was not necessarily intractable. It is this disavowal of intractability that forms the core of Speaking Truth to Reconciliation. Is it possible to engage with a fraught subject, but with a commitment to moving beyond questions of accountability or accusation, towards a conversation that both acknowledges the conditions of exclusion, while seeking shared ground?

    Through an exhibition and forum Speaking Truth to Reconciliation brings together artists, writers, and curators to consider the possibilities of discussing this contested subject and “speaking out.”

    The artists will engage with Artspeak as a site of dialogue and discussion that takes the principle of “truth telling” as a framing device, while considering these concepts poetically, pedagogically, and declaratively.

    Curated by Sadira Rodrigues

  • 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.

  • Suspects (Performance for the Police)

    WARREN ARCAN, SHELLEY GUHLE, JOSH SCHAFER, TERI SNELGROVE, SUSAN STEWART
    October 21–November 25, 2000

    Suspects (Performance for the Police) is the second in the series A Set of Suspicions.

    The starting point for Suspects (Performance for the Police) stems from a long-standing proposal by the Vancouver Police Department to improve policing of the Downtown Eastside by installing surveillance cameras in key locations. This controversial initiative has the support of some businesses and neighbours and is opposed by others on the basis of privacy issues, as a breach of civil liberties that would be unacceptable in less impoverished neighbourhoods. These police cameras would join the already established use of video surveillance on private property such as office towers, shopping malls and business enterprises.

    The four artists were invited to consider what might constitute ‘suspicious behaviour’ in the context of this neighbourhood and to develop work in response to the presence of video surveillance in the neighbourhood and beyond.

    Susan Stewart’s work, “scene unseen”, is a three channel video installation which uses still images and text, interview footage, and surveillance images to investigate the lived effects of the heightened surveillance in this neighbourhood upon the people who live here. Completed throughout the summer of 2000, “scene unseen” seeks the views of residents about who exactly is protected by surveillance technologies, and who is expected to pay the price of that protection.

    Artist Shelley Guhle has collaborated with immunologist Josh Schafer on “A Survey of Bio-design Carcinomal Interfaces” which animates time-lapse footage of cells mutating in a laboratory on the UBC campus. The installation uses projected Flash animation, drawings and a closed-circuit monitor to investigate the observational methods of science that are applied on a broad social level in surveillance technology. In the context of Suspects, the work also draws attention to the cultural fantasy of the inner city as a breeding place of disease and other social ills.

    Warren Arcan’s interactive installation “Oopsy-Daisy” allows the viewer to observe on video the theft of children’s toys that Arcan has placed on a street corner close to the gallery. Shot from an upstairs window across the street, the videos reveal the complex task of interpreting the documents of crime. Is the artist causing the theft to be committed? For whom is the toy stolen? How might this document be used? And do we as viewers have the information we need to interpret these acts? “Oopsy-Daisy” confronts key issues surrounding video surveillance and its promise of security.

    Teri Snelgrove has worked in close collaboration with Arcan, Guhle, Schafer and Stewart on the production of their work over the summer and early fall. Her video document of the three projects that make up Suspects (Performance for the Police) will include production footage and images of the final installation in the gallery, and will be released, along with A Set of Suspicions publication, early next year.

    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

    Bank Job
    JANICE KERBEL
    December 9–January 27, 2001

    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.

  • La Salle des Noeuds (pedestrian movements)

    DANIEL JOLLIFFE, JOCELYN ROBERT
    September 9–October 14, 2000

    As the first in this series of exhibitions, Artspeak is pleased to present La Salle des Noeuds (pedestrian movements). Drawing on research completed in the summer of 1999 at the STEIM centre for electroacoustic research in Amsterdam, Vancouver artist Daniel Jolliffe and Quebec composer and artist Jocelyn Robert have developed a collaborative sound installation work which takes as its central theme and process the surveillance network of global positioning satellites in constant orbit around the earth. The installation makes use of the ‘cyber sky’ composition of US military/aerospace GPS technology, established to aid in military applications and designed for precision, control and certitude. This technology has found mass market applications from automobile design to recreation and is used in this new work as both method and subject of artistic inquiry.

    La Salle des Noeuds (pedestrian movements) takes the information on the position and identifier data of the orbiting overhead satellite network, and converts it to music played by a stationary grand piano. By inverting the technologies and their intended use, the work playfully subverts notions of military and computer-based accuracy. La Salle des Noeuds (pedestrian movements) streams, sifts, chops up and spits out the continuous data flow meant for the single purpose of navigating human movement and fixing civilian and military locations. The resultant stream is processed and parsed by a sound composing system which tries to make musical sense of the network’s activities. The compositionally unpredictable outcome is a unique aural narrative for each of the earth’s rotations, informed by the satellites’ position and the reconfiguration of the data provided, placing the viewer at the centre of an enormous network, watching and hearing the movements of the satellites themselves.

    Artist Statement: La Salle des Noeuds (pedestrian movements) explores the disparate rulesets of science, programming and military structures on one hand and the musical and visual aesthetics of art on the other.

    Loosely translated, the phrase La Salle des Noeuds refers to two ideas: the old technology and symbolism of a rope knots and the new concept of an electronic network node. Both speak of the interconnectedness of two physical bodies, be they the fibres of a rope or the organized movement of electrons through a digital network. The connected parties in LSdN begin in principle with the GPS satellite network and the musical conventions of a 300 year old device, the piano.

    La Salle des Noeuds is a convergence of two rulesets: the rules of coding and the rules of composition. LSdN is a performance of the collision of these two rulesets. Going further we can say that LSdN explores the knotted nature of the digital network on our everyday lives- and how this network translates poetically and aesthetically as we perceive it.

    LSdN takes as a starting supposition that music is about the way in which it is produced, rather than the quality of composition, playing or notation. A piano played under the rocket fire of wartime Beirut, or LSdN’s piano-manipulated satellite data are both music produced under the current conditions of our society, mirroring the social state of our world rather than an historical one. In this sense LSdN’s performance is not one of music but an aural translation of the technologized world which we inhabit.

    Positions and Reversals

    Artspeak, Latitude N 49 degrees 16.971′ Longitude W 123 degrees 06.242′ EPE : 20 M, a stationary, position expressed in conventional geographic notation. LSdN inhabits this position in relation to the network which it sets out to examine.

    From this position, the sky is obscured by the light of the city, rendering invisible the 27 GPS satellites passing overhead in semi-synchronous, 12 hour orbits. Only the radio waves emitted by these floating bodies pass through the various strata of atmosphere between us and their orbit at an altitude of around 11,000 miles.

    The collaborative process for LSdN began with the instantaneous data being streamed from the orbiting constellation of Global Positioning Satellites. From this feed of precise timing information, the position of the gallery is triangulated. In turn, from this symbolic, numbered representation of our place on earth we set out to track the reverse of the intended ‘pinpoint process’.

    Visitors to art galleries often come away with a catch phrase describing the work they have just seen. The transferable explanation from viewer to viewer of LSdN will likely be something like ‘a piano played by satellites’. At first glance this is the structure but is not the methodology of LSdN.

    Inverting the intended use of the GPS network, we found that each satellite sent instantaneous updates of its azimuth, elevation, and unique identifier code. We took this live data as a source of influence, and allowed it to dictate the outcome of our process, and to expose itself in doing so. La Salle des Noeuds is not music but rather the creation of sound under the direct influence of the scientific data which we have more or less plucked out of the air. As collaborators we have little interest in the aesthetics of the ‘music’ produced by the piano. LSdN sets out instead to make visible the collision of these two cultures and to physicalize the invisible data.

    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

    Bank Job
    JANICE KERBEL
    December 9–January 27, 2001

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

Talks & Events

  • Summer Reading

    CLINT BURNHAM, RANDY LEE CUTLER, OMER FAST, AARON FLINT JAMISON, TRICIA MIDDLETON, PHILIP MONK, PAMELA ROSENKRANZ, KLAUS SCHERUÜBEL
    August 1–August 31, 2012

    Please enjoy these summer reading “picks” from a selection of local and international artists and writers, including Clint Burnham, Randy Lee Cutler, Omer Fast, Aaron Flint Jamison, Tricia Middleton, Philip Monk, Pamela Rosenkranz and Klaus Scherübel.

    The PDF is available here.

  • Conversation

    DIVYA MEHRA, RANDY LEE CUTLER
    November 26, 2011

    Artspeak is pleased to present a conversation between Divya Mehra (Winnipeg) and Randy Lee Cutler (Vancouver) in conjunction with Mehra’s exhibition, The Party is Over.

  • Speaking Truth to Reconciliation (a project in two parts)

    ABBAS AKHAVAN, RANDY LEE CUTLER, KRISTINA LEE PODESVA, KEN LUM, SVEN LÜTTICKEN, ASHOK MATHUR, TED PURVES, MOHAMMAD SALEMY
    October 23–October 24, 2009

    Speaking Out: A Lamentation for Parrhesian Strategies

    Emily Carr University Theatre, Room 301, South Building

    “My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity… Who is able to tell the truth? What are the moral, the ethical, and the spiritual conditions which entitle someone to present himself as, and to be considered as, a truth-teller? About what topics is it important to tell the truth?… What are the consequences of telling the truth?… And finally: what is the relation between the activity of truth-telling and the exercise of power, or should these activities be completely independent and kept separate? Are they separable, or do they require one another?”
    —Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia (1983)

    In a two-day forum, local and international speakers will consider the possibilities of “speaking out” in the context of cultural production. Speaking out describes adopting a position which is perceived to be oppositional to mainstream cultural production and which chooses to reveal the limitations or structures in the operation of power. Speaking out also implies a consequence to the act of intervening or critiquing these institutions. The act of speaking out is not only intellectual, but extends to the value of the speaker as a social individual, his or her place in society, the consequences on their cultural capital, and the ramifications of talking about things most people do not want to.

    The project will include a publication co-published by Artspeak and West Coast Line.

    FRIDAY OCTOBER 23

    6:30pm / Sadira Rodrigues
    7pm / Ken Lum

    SATURDAY OCTOBER 24

    10am / Sven Lütticken (virtual)
    11am / Ted Purves
    12:30–1:30pm / Break
    1:30pm / Ashok Mathur
    2pm / Mohammad Salemy
    2:30pm / Kristina Lee Podesva
    3pm / Abbas Akhavan
    3:30–5pm / Panel: Randy Lee Cutler, Ken Lum, Kristina Lee Podesva, Ted Purves, Sadira Rodrigues

    Curated by Sadira Rodrigues

  • Vancouver Art & Economies Book Launch

    CLINT BURNHAM, RANDY LEE CUTLER, TIM LEE, MELANIE O'BRIAN, SADIRA RODRIGUES, MARINA ROY, SHARLA SAVA, REID SHIER, SHEPHERD STEINER, MICHAEL TURNER
    March 28, 2007

    Wednesday, March 28, 7-9pm

    At the Brickhouse, 730 Main Street

    Please join Artspeak and Arsenal Pulp Press in celebrating the release of Vancouver Art & Economies, edited by Melanie O’Brian, with essays by Clint Burnham, Randy Lee Cutler, Tim Lee, Sadira Rodrigues, Marina Roy, Sharla Sava, Reid Shier, Shepherd Steiner and Michael Turner.

    Vancouver Art & Economies was financially supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council, the City of Vancouver, Arts Now: Legacies Now 2010, the Spirit of BC Arts Fund and the Hamber Foundation.

  • Vancouver Art & Economies: A Forum

    SHARLA SAVA, CLINT BURNHAM, MARINA ROY, TIM LEE, SADIRA RODRIGUES, RANDY LEE CUTLER, REID SHIER, SHEPHERD STEINER, MICHAEL TURNER
    October 6–November 3, 2005

    Vancouver Art and Economies is a forum for critical dialogue on Vancouver’s contemporary art practices in the face of globalization and a remarkable recent history. Academics, artists, curators and writers will speak at Emily Carr Institute over the course of five evenings in the fall of 2005. The speakers will consider Vancouver art and its institutions over the last two decades in particular, remarking on the economies at work. whether global, institutional or market. Addressing a perceived professionalization of the institution of art, the talks will collectively consider Vancouver’s position within local, national and international art economies. The forum talks will be published in an anthology in 2006.

    Thursday, October 6

    Sharla Sava: The Political Culture of the Counter-Tradition in Vancouver Art

    Clint Burnham: Imperial Art: the Vancouver School in the age of Empire

    Thursday, October 13

    Marina Roy: The Art Star, the Academic, the Author, and the Activist: Art-writing in Vancouver 1990-2005

    Tim Lee: Specific Objects and Social Subjects: Industrial Facture and the Production of Polemics in Vancouver

    Thursday, October 20

    Sadira Rodrigues: Dealing (with) Cultural Diversity: Art and the Economies of Race

    Randy Lee Cutler: Vancouver Singular Plural: Art in an Age of Post-Medium Production

    Thursday, October 27

    Reid Shier: Do Artists Need Artist Run Centres?

    Shepherd Steiner: Beyond the “Ifs” of an “Ifing” Hermeneutic Economy: Examples from an Unsystematizable System 

    Thursday, November 3

    Michael Turner: Who’s Business Is It? Vancouver’s Commercial Galleries and the Production of Art 

  • Publication Launch/Video Screening

    TERI SNELGROVE, JOCELYN ROBERT, DANIEL JOLLIFFE, WARREN ARCAN, SHELLEY GUHLE, JOSH SCHAFER, SUSAN STEWART, JANICE KERBEL, LORNA BROWN, RANDY LEE CUTLER, DENIS GAUTIER, KATHLEEN RITTER, ALLYSON CLAY
    April 6, 2001

    Artspeak Gallery will host the launching event for the publication accompanying the exhibition titled A Set of Suspicions, as well as a video screening of one of the show’s artists, Teri Snelgrove, part of Suspects (Performance for the Police).

Publications

  • Vancouver Art & Economies

    VAN A and E front
    VAN A and E spine
    VAN A and E back

    Title: Vancouver Art & Economies
    Category: Criticism
    Writers: Clint Burnham, Randy Lee Cutler, Tim Lee, Melanie O’Brian, Sadira Rodrigues, Shepherd Steiner, Michael Turner, Sharla Sava, Reid Shier, Marina Roy
    Editor: Melanie O’Brian
    Design: Robin Mitchell
    Publisher: Artspeak, Arsenal Pulp Press
    Year published: 2007
    Pages: 236pp
    Cover: Paperback
    Binding: Perfect Bound
    Process: Offset
    Features: 13 b&w images, 44 colour images
    Dimensions: (Height x Width x Depth) 23 x 15.5 x 2 cm
    Weight: 496 g
    ISBN: 978-1-55152-214-2
    Price: $30 CDN

    Since the mid-1980’s, the once marginal city of Vancouver has developed within a globalized economy and become an internationally recognized centre for contemporary visual art. Vancouver’s status is due not only to a thriving worldwide cultural community that has turned to examine the so-called periphery, but to the city’s growth, its artists, expanding institutions, and a strong history of introspection and critical assessment. As a result, Vancouver art is visible and often understood as distinct and definable.This anthology intends to complicate the notion of definability. It offers nine essays to address the organized systems that have affected contemporary art in Vancouver over the last two decades.

    The essays in Vancouver Art & Economies collectively remark, both compatibly and contradictorily, on the economies at work in Vancouver art – its historical, critical, and political engagement; its sites of cultural production; and its theoretical and practical intersection with technology or policy. Considering a selection of conditions, focuses, and resources within the community, Vancouver Art & Economies marks shifting ideologies and perspectives on art, politics, society, and capital in Vancouver.


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  • A Set of Suspicions

    Title: A Set of Suspicions
    Category: Exhibition Catalogue
    Artist: Warren Arcan, Shelley Guhle, Daniel Jolliffe, Janice Kerbel, Jocelyn Robert, Josh Schafer, Teri Snelgrove, Susan Stewart
    Writers: Lorna Brown, Randy Lee Cutler, Denis Gautier, Kathleen Ritter
    Design: Steedman Design
    Publisher: Artspeak
    Printer: Rainbow Press Ltd., Vancouver
    Year published: 2001
    Pages: 64pp
    Cover: Paperback
    Binding: Perfect Bound
    Process: Offset
    Features: 3 b&w images, 46 colour images, plastic jacket cover
    Dimensions: 11.5 x 20 x 1.2 cm
    Weight: 153 g
    ISBN: 0-921394-33-0
    Price: $10 CDN

    A Set of Suspicions documents a series of three exhibitions over the Fall 2000 season by artists investigating ideas of threat, security and surveillance. The works used 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 as well as cultural habits of interpretation.

    Designed by Judith Steedman, A Set of Suspicions includes photographic documentation of the three exhibitions, writing by Lorna Brown, Randy Lee Cutler, Denis Gautier and Kathleen Ritter. An artist’s project, Improper Perspectives, by Allyson Clay was produced for A Set of Suspicions.


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