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Artspeak

Rob Brownie

Rob Brownie is a teacher and writer with a degree in urban geography and philosophy from the University of Victoria. He has co-written articles for Artspeak, West Coast Line and Vancouver Matters (Vancouver: Blueimprint, 2008) with Annabel Vaughan on themes related to the cultural interface of art and architecture in Vancouver.

Exhibitions

  • DJ Booth / Listening Booth: two works

    IAN SKEDD
    February 18–March 25, 2006

    Opening: Friday, February 17 at 8pm with DJ Dana D

    Additional DJ event with Vinyl Ritchie: Saturday, March 11 from 3 to 5pm

    Engaging with the social effects of design and architecture, Ian Skedd’s practice centres around the interplay of interior and exterior space. In his investigations into psychological and conceptual relationships to space, Skedd considers architecture as transformative, translational and isolationist. His project for Artspeak, DJ Booth / Listening Booth: two works, defines a controlled system of inside and outside, activating an exploration of the social effects of spatialization where the boundaries between public and private, observer and observed are elided.

    DJ Booth / Listening Booth: two works is an architectural and sound installation that uses the form of two separate language translator or interpreter’s booths. The booths, with windows facing one another, will each be able to accommodate only a single individual. One booth will house DJ equipment, and a DJ will perform at intervals during the course of the exhibition. The other booth will house speakers in order to listen to the DJ. When the DJ is not in attendance, a recording of the DJ’s mixing will play in the listening booth. In isolating the DJ and listener, they become equal participants in the work (particularly when viewed by third parties outside the booths). The work approaches the DJ as a translator of cultural material, the listener as a receptor, and the outside viewer as a spectator who will be transformed into an active participant once s/he steps into the listening booth. As spaces of contemplation, Skedd’s work proposes parallels between the listening booth and the gallery as receptacles of culture and places where transformation and reconsideration are possible.

    Postscript 19: Rob Brownie and Annabel Vaughan on DJ Booth / Listening Booth: two works (PDF)

Talks & Events

  • Carrall Street Publication and Edition Launch

    ALTHEA THAUBERGER
    September 30, 2009

    Join us for the launch of Althea Thauberger’s catalogue in conjunction with her Artspeak event Carrall Street.

  • Carrall Street Public Forum

    ALTHEA THAUBERGER
    October 2, 2008

    This public forum will provide an opportunity for further community engagement and critical discussion around the social, political and artistic questions raised by Althea Thauberger’s Carrall Street. An open conversation will be initiated by a diverse body of speakers that include local architect and activist Annabel Vaughan, founding Simon Fraser University faculty member and writer Jerry Zaslove and Miami based writer and curator Ruba Katrib.

    Join us for this compelling discussion at 7pm on Thursday, October 2nd at 33 West Cordova, Vancouver.

  • Carrall Street

    ALTHEA THAUBERGER
    September 30, 2008

    Althea Thauberger, <em>Carrall Street</em>

    Althea Thauberger, <em>Carrall Street</em>

    Althea Thauberger, <em>Carrall Street</em>

    Althea Thauberger, <em>Carrall Street</em>

    Althea Thauberger, <em>Carrall Street</em>

    8-11pm in the 200 block of Carrall Street

    Althea Thauberger’s site-specific performance work will take place on the 200 block of Carrall Street in front of Artspeak. Collaborating with diverse local communities in Artspeak’s neighbourhood of the Downtown Eastside/Gastown, the one-night performance will present the street (brightly lit like a film set at nighttime) as a stage where the roles of participant and spectator blur. The interweaving of organized performers, passersby and audience members will allow for unforeseen interactions to take place, resulting in a destabilized form of community theatre that reveals something of the street’s history, its current successes and stresses, as well as its future.

Publications

  • Carrall Street

    Carrall front
    Carrall spine
    Carrall back

    Title: Carrall Street
    Category: Artist Book
    Artist: Althea Thauberger
    Writers: Jerry Zaslove, Rob Brownie & Annabel Vaughan, Jonathan Young & Kim Collier, Lani Russwurm, Ruba Katrib, Kate Fowle
    Editor: Melanie O’Brian
    Design: Hodgkinson Design
    Publisher: Artspeak
    Printer: Generation Printers, Canada
    Year published: 2009
    Pages: 50pp
    Cover: Paperback
    Binding: Perfect Bound
    Process: Offset
    Features: 87 colour images; 18 b&w images
    Dimensions: 26 x 18 x 1 cm
    Weight: 273 g
    ISBN: 978-0-921394-62-4
    Price: $7 CDN

    The Carrall Street publication documents Althea Thauberger’s site-specific work that took place on the 200-block of Carrall Street in front of Artspeak on September 30, 2008. It considered the specificities of the site as a nexus of social, economic, political, and cultural realities. The block was closed to traffic and illuminated by film lights. Collaborating with local communities, individuals, and organizations, Thauberger invited a diverse group to undertake independent actions or activities within the event’s framework.

    Approximately forty performers worked across and through the delineation provided by the block, extending their activities into alleys and bars. The performances ranged from repeated physical actions, oratories, orchestrated conversations, and scripted performances that often occurred at an intimate scale, to reflected or framed quotidian situations. Because the event encompassed the entire block, the work took on an expanded subject matter that included the attitudes and activities of spectators and passersby, heightened aesthetics and conditions of representation, the street’s physical surroundings and architecture, and transitional moments in the street’s development.

    The publication includes commissioned texts, scripts, a partial transcription of the Carrall Street forum, archival documents, and images.


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  • Scene of Translations

    Translations front
    Translations spine
    Translations back

    Title: Scene of Translations
    Category: Exhibition Catalogue
    Artist: Ian Skedd, Marianne Nicolson
    Writers: Lindsay Brown, Wayde Compton
    Design: Julian Gosper
    Publisher: Artspeak
    Year published: 2006
    Pages: 32pp
    Cover: Paper
    Binding: Perfect Bound
    Process: Offset
    Features: 10 b&w images
    Dimensions: 25 x 17 x 0.5 cm
    Weight: 164 g
    ISBN: 0-921394-54-3
    Price: $5 CDN

    In Scene of Translations, Lindsay Brown, Wayde Compton, Marianne Nicolson, and Ian Skedd interpret visual, textual, aural, and cultural languages to provide a platform on which multiple translations can occur. The texts by Brown and Compton bring together disparate threads of the problems and potentialities of hybridity and translation. Through etymological investigation, transferals of history, and the metaphors of commuter crows and passenger pigeons, Scene of Translations offers an entry point into translatory perambulations. Nicolson and Skedd present architecture and sculpture as translational, resituating the audience not only within the gallery, but in relationship to other viewers. Both artists present new pathways in their consideration of form’s social aspects, indicating that the gallery, like the publication, is a space where transformation and reconsideration are possible.


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