Exhibitions

The Poster Project

SARA MAMENI
July 23–September 4, 2004

The Poster Project is a window installation to be viewed from the street. Gallery closed.

Sara Mameni uses drawing to labouriously replicate information documents generated in everyday life. Redrawing receipts, newspaper broad sheets and street concert posters, Mameni’s meticulous works mediate authorship while creating portraits of individuals, a day in the media, or of a street location.

Finding interest in documents that are mechanically produced and intended for public dissemination, Mameni’s drawings are performative gestures that question labour, identity and place. The original receipts, newspapers and posters are residual documents that negotiate personal and cultural communication. The drawings are highly detailed observations of these documents, and like Andy Warhol’s drawings of newspaper front pages from the early 1960s or Los Angeles artist Dave Muller’s recent hand-drawn replicas of art posters and invitations, they speak to the mass consumption of culture.

The Poster Project is a concealment of Artspeak’s windows with drawings of street posters. Mameni collected posters from a single pole at Smithe and Granville streets over the period of one year and redrew the graphics to create a portrait of the location. When installed in the windows of Artspeak the drawings at once obscure the gallery space from street view, like postered hoardings conceal a site, and provide a window into another space in the city (Smithe and Granville). The street experience of this installation is in competition with the printed posters and announcements that occupy the neighbouring cafe windows, poles and walls in Gastown. In this competition Mameni’s work questions the gallery space and narrates a portrait in reverse.

Sara Mameni lives and works in Vancouver. She is a graduate of Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and studied design in Cyprus prior to moving to Canada. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Atelier Gallery, Vancouver (Drawing on Architecture, curated by Patrik Anderssen, 2003) and the Vancouver Art Gallery (For the Record: Drawing Contemporary Life, curated by Daina Augaitis, 2003), among others.