Artspeak
Robert Arndt
Arndt’s work suggests a manner of reading the object/subject under a diversiform of presentations, styles, subjectivity, and institutional structures through art and cinematic history. His work shifts between performance, photography, film, video, text, and publications. Since graduating from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design (now Emily Carr University) in 1998, Arndt has exhibited and screened his work in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the U.S., and abroad, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Tracey Lawrence Gallery (Vancouver), and Artists Space (New York).
Exhibitions
-
ROBERT ARNDT
January 22–March 26, 2011
Robert Arndt’s most recent video work, Placeholder, uses a commercial documentation shoot for a series of homogenous blocks as the setting for an absurdist theatre of critical dialogue. Through this familiar backdrop of well-considered object presentation, the scene becomes a site of dubious discourse, akin to an aesthetic sample group. Actors adopt the roles of off-camera producers and directors, engaging in disagreeable narration and directing the objects’ placement while negotiating aesthetic judgments, language, and the structures of authority through the practicalities of collaborative documentation. Moving beyond the presentation of video as theatre model, Arndt’s video installation implicates the screen, gallery, and viewer in this discourse through it’s unconventional presentation.
This exhibition is curated by Peter Gazendam, Artspeak Programme Coordinator.
-
…a legend, it, it sounds like a legend…
HANNAH RICKARDS
September 11–October 30, 2010
THE SOUND I THINK IT MAKES IS, IS THAT WHISPERING SOUND, TO ME IT SOUNDS, IT ALMOST SOUNDS, UM, UH, WHAT’S THE WORD I’M THINKING? UM, LIKE HISTORIC, NOT HISTORIC, BUT, UM, OH: A LEGEND, IT, IT SOUNDS LIKE A LEGEND, YOU KNOW, WHEN YOU THINK OF A LEGEND OR SOMETHING WAY BACK IN THE PAST YOU GET THAT, THAT, IT SOUNDS LIKE THAT TO ME, LIKE THIS LEGEND OR SOMEBODY’S, THIS WHISPERING SOUND: IT’S A LEGEND.
Hannah Rickards’ practice centres on the translation of natural phenomena into sound, text, and installation. …a legend, it, it sounds like a legend… is a three monitor installation that contends with the description of the sound of the northern lights from observers in northern British Columbia and central Alaska. Rickards’ work shifts between modes of perception and representation including the linguistic, the visual, the natural, and the artificial.
Postscript 39: Robert Arndt on …a legend, it, it sounds like a legend… (PDF)
Talks & Events
-
ROBERT ARNDT
February 12, 2011Artist Robert Arndt will discuss his exhibition, Placeholder at Artspeak.