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 02: Meniscus
LUIS JACOB, KELLY MARK, CORIN SWORN, KARA UZELMAN
October 23–November 27, 2004
The second exhibition in the Spill series, Meniscus, features four artists working with the residual mass and indivisible remainder of everyday life through strategies of repetition and reenactment. Exploring the permeability of materials, spaces and systems of containment, these artists make tangible the impulse to shore up the arbitrary boundaries between spaces and concepts, and conscious and unconscious behaviours. In addition, Ana Rewakowicz will inhabit an inflatable latex room (cast from her home in Montréal) during the opening of Meniscus. Rewakowicz is travelling across Canada with her room.
Luis Jacob gives character to the shapeless community of isolated individuals consuming waves of spam advertising that arrive at their computer terminals. Just Do It! transposes the litany of failed transformations promised by products marketed through the internet into ‘worldly’ architecture.
Kelly Mark uses her own ‘will to order’ to investigate potential moments of individuation that leak out of the repetitive, obsessive tasks of the day to day. I Really Should is a recorded list of one thousand things the artist really should do. From eating more fibre or taking more chances to cleaning the litter box, this verbal collection of one thousand things permeates the gallery’s architecture.
Corin Sworn examines how contemporary popular culture showcases models of the private sphere rendering them as symptoms of an ideal interiority. Sworn begins with Lissitzky’s 1926 design of a room to display Russian art. Inverting Lissitzky’s model of an interior intentionally designed as a public stage set, Sworn investigates models of interiority prepared to receive the viewers imaginings of a private living space.
Kara Uzelman explores the urge for accumulation in performance and sculpture. In a hotel room all the furniture is in a heap, cast-off clothing in her bedroom is sewn together in a lump, in a park all the dogs are corralled into a camera viewfinder. Interested in piling and purging, Uzelman has worked with an entire garage sale, purchasing and inhabiting the remnants of a stranger’s discarded physical existence.
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.
Traveling with My Inflatable Room
ANA REWAKOWICZ
October 22, 2004
Intervention
6–12pm, Interurban, 9 East Hastings Street
Presented with the Portland Hotel Society and Interurban, in conjunction with the exhibition Spill 02: Meniscus at Artspeak.
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.