Exhibition | The Activation Map

Exhibition

Josephine Fletcher – Against the Blue

January 8, 1991 to January 26, 1991
Exhibition, Uncategorized
This series of paintings were produced over the last year at Vargas Island off the west coast of Vancouver Island. The striking feature is the quality of light Fletcher captures in these oil paintings. She works from life, each day going back to the same spot when the light is the same and strives to capture that light.

April 5, 1990 to April 20, 1990
Exhibition
A sculptural installation concerned with maintaining a focus between the inner and outer parameters of the gallery space. It involves a concrete ring form equipped with a revolving arm travelling at a speed of one interval per minute. Microphones are embedded in the form itself and reverberate the sound of this motion into the gallery walls. A large photographic reproduction and other elements combine with the form to create associations within work.

March 20, 1990 to March 31, 1990
Exhibition
Merle Addison's exhibition Snapshots and Manipulations combines elements of photography and collage to create abstractions which denote spiritual and emotional concerns. His work does not create a narrative as much as portray a feeling or an emotional state.

February 6, 1990 to February 17, 1990
Exhibition
The work was a video collage of the mountain range in the traditional territory of the Gitksan Wet'suwet'en people. It functions as both a homage and a protest against the threatened clearcut.

November 14, 1989 to November 25, 1989
Discursive Event, Exhibition
Autobiographical drawings can be a powerful tool for self-discovery and resolution. In Margaret Atwood's recent novel, Cat's Eye, painter Elaine Risley returns to Toronto after several years in Vancouver for a retrospective of her work. In the process of installing and previewing the show the artist is confronted with the ghosts of her past and cones to an understanding of its tyrannies.

In a similar way Gail Carney's work on paper uses personal symbolism and allegory to evoke both conscious and unconscious dilemmas. Her personal vocabulary of symbols is not, however, self-absorbed and preoccupied but offers us images that luminously evoke common concerns. (For full curatorial statement see exhibition catalogue attached below)

October 17, 1989 to October 26, 1989
Exhibition
Kathryn Walter's redevelopment intervention was displayed in the streets of Vancouver in November 1988. She appropriated phrases from Harlequin Romance novels and placed them as footnotes on twenty different development permit applications. The phrases carried stereotypical tones of male ownership and dominance of women which when juxtaposed with the permit signs create a parallel in power structures. The intervention was subtle yet effective in drawing attention to the permit signs as symbols of the economic oppression of many inner city neighbourhoods. By bringing the documentation of the project into the gallery we can focus on the piece as a whole and discuss the issues involved in development in Vancouver. Another instalment will be placed in the street during the exhibition.

July 4, 1989 to July 15, 1989
Exhibition
Charcoal drawings and text for Orbis Pictus - both by Jo Cook, inspired by the book by Czech philosopher Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670.)

May 9, 1989 to May 20, 1989
Exhibition
The Synthetic Monolith is Robin Peck's translation of the structural language of architecture and engineering into the plastic, representational or synthetic language of sculpture. Peck refers to this work as Anti- Proun, that is, anti-utopian or anti-constructivist. He uses materials of architecture, of the contemporary built environment and the recycled detritus from the culture of consumerism in a different, synthetic, sculptural way.

January 17, 1989 to January 28, 1989
Exhibition
"Steven Graham's exhibition, "Jesus Christ Abstracts," Consisted of 16 paintings, 15 of them abstracts surrounding one figurative painting of Christ.The schism he wishes to create is both the schism between the figurative and the abstract and the schism of religion in the secular world. These paintings are different from his abstraction conceptually in that they are not non representational but in the Christ figure become a loosely rendered representation of the stations of the cross. The differences in style between the figure he described as "Edwardian Storytelling" and tha abstractions play up the differences and similarities between the styles."