Christian Kliegel

Christian Kliegel is a recent graduate from Emily Carr who, in his young career, has deftly managed to mesh the grand gestures of Minimalism with the more subtle and personalized actions of the Situationists. Kliegel's expansive use of scale in defining spatial relations between viewer, architecture and object is humbly grounded in the everyday. Kliegel's choice of materials is both literal and figurative. They represent his personal pursuits and daily routines, but also reflect large systemic social and institutional interests. The layered function of his material use is particularly evident in *Production Postings*, an on-going project that Kliegel will rework for the Contemporary Art Gallery's windows. He will fill the windows with location signs used by film and television production companies to direct crew and extras to film shoots. Each production uses a cryptic code to identify itself, but the general design and style of these brightly coloured signs are formulaic and ubiquitous: they are made of coroplast and vinyl, similar in dimension, and use fluorescent or intensely coloured arrows for direction. By saving and amalgamating hundreds of these temporary signs, which he has been collecting since 2003, Kliegel creates a frenetic spectacle that marks his personal movements through Vancouver and references one of the city's largest industries.

### Biography

Since graduating from the Emily Carr Institute in 2004, Christian Kliegel has held several solo exhibitions in Vancouver, including *Gloom, Boom & Doom*, Access Artist Run Centre; *Office Prop*, Space Gallery; and *Dave Johnston, aware of the danger of Eruption…* in collaboration with Gareth Moore, Charles H. Scott Gallery. His work has also been included in many local group exhibitions, such as *What Do We Do When We Can’t Be 2gether*, 69 Pender; *The Benefits of Lax Devilry*, The Butchershop and *One Hundred and Ten Percent*, organized by Emily Carr Institute. His work has been reviewed by Robin Laurence in *The Georgia Straight*, Vancouver and by David Lehman for *Only Magazine*, Vancouver.


Neon-coloured signs cover the entire windows on the CAG’s facade. All the signs mimic the enlarged allow-shaped sticky notes with some words printed on them. Arrows point either to the left or right.

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Neon-coloured arrow-shaped signs cover the window on the CAG’s facade.  Different characters and words are printed on each of the signs. Those printed words include “infinity” and “sv1” in uppercase letters.

Christian Kliegel

Exhibitions