Colleen Brown, born in Guelph, Ontario, slowly moved west and is now living in Vancouver. In an earlier rendition of herself Colleen received her B.A. Psyc. and a diploma in Electrophysiology. Later, she received a B.F.A. from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited in British Columbia and Quebec.
Isabelle Hayeur lives and works in Montréal. She received her MFA from l’Université du Québec à Montréal in 2002 and works primarily in photography and video. Her work has been widely exhibited nationally, including exhibitions at the Ottawa Art Gallery; Gallery 44, Toronto; Skol, Montréal; the Rimouski Regional Museum and the Centre for the Photographic and Digital Arts, Winnipeg, as well as at the Hippolyte Gallery, Helsinki, Finland.
Toronto artist Luis Jacob gives character to the shapeless community of isolated individuals consuming waves of spam advertising that arrive at their computer terminals. His Spill contribution, Just Do It!, transposes the litany of failed transformations promised by products on the Internet into ‘worldly’ architecture. Jacob’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions across Canada and internationally including at the Khyber Centre, Halifax; Hippolyte Gallery, Helsinki; YYZ, Toronto; and Saidye Bronfman Centre, Montréal.
Toronto artist Kelly Mark uses her own “will to order” to investigate potential moments of individuation that leak out of the repetitive, obsessive tasks of the everyday. Mark’s work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally in solo exhibitions at the IKON Gallery, Birmingham, UK; Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, Toronto; and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, among others.
Scott Massey is a photo-based artist living in Vancouver. He completed a BFA (photography) at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2003 and has a background in furniture making and design. His work has been exhibited locally at Gallery 83 (2003) and at the Canadian Museum of Craft and Design (2000).
Writer Philip Kevin Paul lives and works on Vancouver Island. He is author of Taking the Names Down from the Hill (Nightwood Editions, 2003) and his work is included in numerous anthologies including An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (Oxford, 1998) and Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets (Harbour, 1995). He was awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry in 2004.
Ana Rewakowicz is an interdisciplinary artist born in Poland of Ukrainian origin; she now lives in Montréal. She works with inflatables and explores relationships between temporal, portable architecture, the body and the environment. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at YYZ, Toronto; Optica, Montréal; Khyber Centre, Halifax; Museé du Québec, Québec City; and Assembly Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland.
Vancouver artist Corin Sworn examines how contemporary popular culture showcases models of the private sphere rendering them symptoms of an ideal interiority. She has a BA in Art and Design from Central Saint Martins College (2001). Sworn’s work, which is largely sculptural, has been included in exhibitions at Bauhaus, Dessau Germany; Gasworks, London, UK; Or Gallery, Vancouver; and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Bogata, Columbia, among others.
Berlin based Canadian visual artist Kara Uzelman (b. 1978) is a graduate of Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver. Since 2002 she has shown work in numerous group and solo exhibitions including Artspeak, Vancouver; Vancouver Art Gallery; Justine M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto; Latitude 53, Edmonton; Sommer & Kohl, Berlin; Pari Nadimi, Toronto and has been highlighted in both national and local publications. Uzelman is also a member of the Vancouver based artist collective Norma. With an educational background based in urban planning, fine arts and archeology, Uzelman has developed process-based, site-specific sculpture and installation works focusing on the rehabilitation of objects and artifacts in her surrounding environment. This process began when she bought entire garage sales and transforming these collections into sculptures, installations, and performance props. In conjunction with a mentorship in Archaeology in 2006, she gathered a team of volunteers to conduct a four-month excavation of her back yard in Vancouver. This informed several exhibitions over the past three years and resulted in a series of performance props, tools, objects and documentary images. Uzelman’s work is based on an interest in the historical and imagined narratives inherent in the objects that surround her.
Lorna Brown is a visual artist, writer, educator and editor, exhibiting her work internationally since 1984. Brown was the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004 and is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, a collective of artists, architects and curators presenting projects that consider the varying conditions of public places and public life. She has taught at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and Simon Fraser University. Brown received an honorary degree from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2015), the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts Award (1996) and the Canada Council Paris Studio Award (2000). Her work is in the collections of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, the BC Arts Council, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank.
Director/Curator of Artspeak 1999–2004.
Spill 01: Collapse
SCOTT MASSEY
September 11–October 16, 2004
Vancouver artist Scott Massey opens Artspeak’s Spill series with Spill 01: Collapse. Questioning order and control, Massey’s work takes on the illusionary boundaries between man and the landscape. His work explores the uneasy relationship between culture and nature, such as photographic images of artificial light illuminating a nocturnal landscape and sculptural investigations into the effects of man-made light on the processes of shedding and growth. His photographs, sculptures and interventions observe this mutual overflow as various forms of control collapse and cultural classification systems are revealed to be unstable.
The works in Collapse engage with aspects of the landscape that display evidence of reciprocity between culture and nature. A series of ten photographs document signs in a northern Canadian dump that indicate how to separate your garbage. This imposed system of order can be seen as a false construct as the items left at the dump are uncontained and ultimately break down into the surrounding wilderness. The work ironically shows the rudimentary classification systems against a background of seemingly uninhabited landscape. In addition to the photographs, Massey’s sculptural work reveals how artificial illumination affects natural processes. In the centre of the gallery, Massey’s circular installation of grass grows toward the lamp at the sculpture’s heart, the blades of grass leaning phototropically toward the light. Here, synthetic illumination becomes a controlled stand-in for the sun. In Collapse, Massey’s social portrait questions the separations we place between the urban environment and the perceived unsettled landscape beyond.
The Spill series has been supported by the Vancouver Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and The City of Vancouver.
Title: Spilled
Category: Exhibition Catalogue
Artists: Isabelle Hayeur, Luis Jacob, Kelly Mark, Scott Massey, Ana Rewakowicz, Corin Sworn, Kara Uzelman
Writers: Colleen Brown, Philip Kevin Paul
Editor: Artspeak
Design: Jen Eby
Publisher: Artspeak
Year published: 2004
Pages: 38pp
Cover: Paperback
Binding: Perfect Bound
Process: Offset
Features: 15 colour images
Dimensions: 16 x 21 x 1 cm
Weight: 103 g
ISBN: 0-921394-50-0
Price: $5 CDN
Spilled was published on the occasion of the exhibition series Spill. The series includes three exhibitions (Collapse: Scott Massey; Meniscus: Luis Jacob, Kelly Mark, Corin Sworn, Kara Uzelman; Paysages incertains: Isabelle Hayeur), an intervention (Travelling with My Inflatable Room: Ana Rewakowicz). The texts in Spilled are framed by two overarching propositions. The first is the understanding of spill as breached physical containment, and the second is the disclosure of information or emotion.
In his essay, “The Sweetly Neglected,” Philip Kevin Paul approaches the split between man and nature from a non-European perspective, revealing boundaries that shift through cultural naming within his Saanich experience on Vancouver Island. Colleen Brown’s essay “Poring In, Pouring Over” considers the portals used by the viewer to find their way into the works in Spilled tackling the abstraction found between the slippery definition of binaries.