Geoffrey Farmer

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Vancouver based artist Geoffrey Farmer titled The Blacking Factory. Farmer's cross-disciplinary practice utilizes a wide variety of materials to investigate the place of art within a social context. Like artists Gabriel Orozco and Thomas Hirschhorn, Farmer's work often intersects and develops in dialogue with a specific location. Most recently, Farmer's work has been the subject of a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and he is included in upcoming group exhibitions at Gasworks Gallery, London, UK and at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, UK. He is represented in Vancouver by the Catriona Jeffries Gallery.

The Blacking Factory is comprised of three interrelated works: a sculptural installation in the form of a large truck trailer, a film work depicting the windows of the Contemporary Art Gallery shattering from an explosive concussion and a set prop of a generic newspaper box installed at the exterior of the Gallery entrance. All three works utilize the technological expertise of the film industry to provoke analogies between mechanisms of display and the artifice behind the creation of meaning and value. The truck trailer is fabricated in mimicry of those used by movie production companies — an increasingly common sight on the streets of Vancouver — and alludes to the transportation of such illusionist necessities as props, lighting systems and costumes. Farmer's film work rehearses a set piece found in a wide spectrum of Hollywood movies — from action-adventure to thriller — and uses the unexpectedness of this violent genre staple within and about the gallery to prompt questions about the context of perception.