Susan Schuppli

For the past few years, Vancouver artist Susan Schuppli has developed projects that have addressed our relationship with public space. She has been at the forefront of artists, many of whom work in Vancouver who are interested in examining and reclaiming the public sphere as a space for women to occupy and traverse. She has carried out her ideas both as gallery projects and street interventions in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, and San Diego.

Slow Pressure marks a shift in Schuppli's work that was first evident in her exhibition of photographs, *Domocile*, presented at Artspeak Gallery in 1996. In *Domocile* she examined relationships between an idyllic public face through images of domestic exteriors and the more subjective activity that takes place in the interior of the home. With *Slow Pressure* it is the confines of the interior domestic space that is the focus. Schuppli's objective is to create an experience suggesting the familiarity of a dwelling, while questioning it as safe territory for women to inhabit. Rather than opting to “reproduce” a room, the various images, objects and sounds function as signs of domesticity that are distorted through scale, placement and architecture. Although the installation projects a sense of pleasure through her use of materials, it conveys tension through a transformation of the familiar and the benign into a psychological environment.

This exhibition has been funded by the Pro Helvetia Arts Council of Switzerland, with generous support from the Consulate General of Switzerland.


Essay: "Under Pressure," Susan Best

This is a close-up view of a photograph placed on the gallery floor. This circular-shaped photograph shows a brown eye with a red blue circle beneath it.  

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04-SusanSchuppli-1997.jpeg

A view of a gallery corner shows a small photograph mounted on the wall. The piece shows a part of a light blue door with a metal lock and a chain lock.

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01-SusanSchuppli-1997.jpeg

The large oval shape is projected on the white gallery wall. It is a cut-out image of an electric coil stove for cooking. The stove’s orange colour suggests that it is generating heat.

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02-SusanSchuppli-1997.jpeg

Three artworks are installed in the gallery. A projection of a coil stove is on the wall, foregrounded by a black rug chair on the floor. A circular-shaped photograph of an eye sits beside the rug. 

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03-SusanSchuppli-1997.jpeg

A rectangular-shaped photograph is mounted on the white gallery wall. This is a partial image of a blue door with a brown lock and a silver door chain.   

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05-SusanSchuppli-1997.jpeg

Slow Pressure

This booklet was published by the Contemporary Art Gallery in 1997 on the occasion of the exhibition *Susan Schuppli: Slow Pressure* at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, September 6 – October 18, 1997. The publication contains a foreword by director and curator Keith Wallace and an essay by Susan Best.

Susan Schuppli

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