Daniel Congdon

Daniel Congdon is a Vancouver artist who has been exhibiting since 1984. Using a minimalist visual vocabulary, he explores a relationship between the formal properties of sculpture and the mechanics of perception. During the past decade Congdon has incorporated a study of the trajectories of projected and refracted light beams into his artwork.

For the Contemporary Art Gallery, Congdon has produced large-scale wall sculptures that in both colour and shape recall minimalist abstraction of the late 1960s. This suggestion of purely formal structures is countered by the fact that they are representations incorporating physics and mathematics. This results in dynamic structures which waver between abstraction and representation, aesthetics and logic. Congdon questions the self-sufficiency of modernist abstraction while simultaneously maintaining its appearance.

Daniel Congdon has been included in exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery; Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver; Surrey Art Gallery; and Wilkey Fine Arts, Seattle.

Essay: "Daniel Congdon: Fold As Figure," Shepherd Steiner

A large-sized geometric sculpture is installed on the gallery wall. Five yellow lines form a shape that resembles an arrow with an extra line that extends downwardly from the arrow point.

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Geometric sculptures by Daniel Congdon mounted on the wall of a gallery space. The visible sculptures are dark-brown with blue, and light-grey with yellow.

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Three large-sized geometric sculptures are mounted on the gallery walls. The one on the left resembles a capital letter A in blue, and the middle one resembles a flipped over character Z in grey. 

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Two geometric sculptures are installed on the gallery walls. The left piece includes figures and straight lines in vivid red, green and blue. The piece on the right is yellow and resembles an arrow.   

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A large-sized geometric sculpture is installed on the gallery wall. A yellow diagonal line runs from the top to the bottom of the wall. This line is foregrounded by an inverted Z shape in light grey.

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A large-sized geometric sculpture is installed on the gallery wall. Two blue incomplete arrow shapes are connected by the brown straight line that runs from the left to the right of the wall. 

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Three large-sized geometric sculptures are mounted on the gallery walls. The one on the right is composed of blue and dark-brown colored shapes. The middle piece is yellow. 

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A large-sized geometric sculpture is installed on the gallery wall. A blue line runs diagonally across the wall, which partially overlaps with a red trapezoid. Both are foregrounded by a green shape. 

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Shape

Ed Pien

Ed Pien lives and works in Toronto and in recent years has been gaining recognition for his large-scale works that extend traditional notions about drawing. He achieves this by developing gallery installations that retain the intimacy of the drawing process. For *Beyond Here*, Pien is presenting a large installation approximately seventy five feet in length and consisting of ink on layers of Chinese paper and Japanese silk tissue. The translucent quality of the paper allows the drawings that lie beneath the surface to read as shadows, which intermingle with the more legible images on the surface. The contrast in scale between the expanse of paper, the large drawings, the small drawings and the vibrantly coloured tunnels creates a dynamic relationship between the viewer and the work. One can perceive the piece as one entity or as a series of individual drawings.

In his work, Pien explores the concepts of fear and vulnerability through referencing both historical and contemporary events as well as combining Eastern and Western mythologies. In *Beyond Here* his drawings depict strange, hybridized creatures that are engaged in an imaginary journey that reads from left to right across the gallery walls. While not a formal narrative, the figures suggest a dream-like transformation from a state of conflict to one of liberation and self empowerment.

Pien's work is both seductive and unsettling. While the paper offers an impression of softness and warmth, it is extremely fragile. The figures project sensuality in the way they are rendered, but are ambiguous in their interpretation.

### Biography

Ed Pien has recently exhibited at the Drawing Centre in New York and the Biennale de Montréal.



Detail of an artwork by Ed Pien. Two mythic figures, half humans and half undefinable animals, are drawin on paper. Red and black inks were used to draw these figures. 

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Inside the gallery, walls are covered by white scroll of paper, on which Ed Pien’s drawings are made. These drawings of human and animal figures are spaced out. Most of the lines are drawn in black. 

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Gallery walls are covered by a wide white scroll of paper, on which Ed Pien’s drawings are made. All of the drawn figures are layered and highly abstracted. All the figures have human legs.

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Gallery walls are covered by a wide white scroll of paper, on which Ed Pien’s drawings are made. One of the drawn figures has an inflamed huge head in red over the naked body outlined in black. 

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Beyond Here

Judy Radul

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present a new installation by Vancouver artist Judy Radul. This exhibition is presented as a component of the *Live at the End of the Century: Performance Art in Vancouver*, a month-long festival, coordinated by the Grunt Gallery, celebrating Vancouver's long history of performance art.

Judy Radul has been exhibiting since 1983. In recent years, Radul's performances, videos and installations have been seen at the Vancouver Art Gallery; Or Gallery, Vancouver; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; YYZ Artists' Outlet, Toronto; and the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, England. She is one of Canada's most respected innovators in the area of performance art. Radul incorporates a cross-over of performance, visual and video art in a way that challenges their autonomy as distinct practices, and extends their boundaries.

With *Rehearsal*, Radul transforms the gallery into a theatrical environment that animates the neutrality of the formal gallery space and blurs the lines between performance and a static exhibition. Using performance/theatre as a model, Radul has created a mock set that includes a stage, curtains and video to create a tension between the idea of a set and its inhabitation or desertion. It functions as a meeting place constructed to explore different conventions of viewing related to the gallery, the theatre and the cinema. Of interest to Radul is the role of the audience and the mechanics of looking and being observed, of exploring illusion and the fantasy of illusion and activating a space through the presence of people. The installation, in essence, exists metaphorically as a rehearsal for an imagined performance.


A small round table and a wooden chair are on a corner of the theatre stage. A red botanical-patterned tablecloth covers the table, on which a vintage wine glass and a book are placed.

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A wooden bench and chairs are placed in the corner of a gallery space. A video piece is projected on a white panel that is placed on a small step stool at the corner of the room.  

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A wooden skinny barrel, stool, chair, two books, and a ceramic coffee mug are placed on the gallery floor. A black dial phone and a dynamite bundle are placed on top of the stool. 

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A theatre stage is set in a gallery space. A dark body of water is depicted in the stage background. Four chairs, a stool, and a table are placed on the stage distanced from each other. 

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Six wooden chairs, three stools. a bench, a bucket, and two ladders are placed on the gallery floor distanced from each other. A large piece of yellow textile is hanging from one of the ladder steps. 

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A tall wooden step ladder is placed in the middle of a gallery space. A yellow and red curtain, with a white layer underneath, are folded and hung from one of the ladder steps. 

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Rehearsal

Nobuyoshi Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki is one of Japan's most celebrated and controversial photographers. Although he has been working for over thirty years and has more than eighty books to his credit, it is only in the 1990s that his work has become widely known internationally. In 1999 he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. This is his first solo exhibition in Canada.

Araki is recognized for work, in which everything from the most mundane to the most intimate is a pretext for photography. The exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, consisting of several bodies of work, emphasizes Araki's interest in the dividing line between the ordinary and extraordinary, fiction and reality, restraint and excess, art and obscenity. It also reveals Araki's obsession with Tokyo as a site of memories, transformation, discovery and chance encounters. Although these themes are presented in the context of Japanese culture, he reveals unsettling incongruities that are familiar elsewhere. The often blunt images of both erotic subject matter and the urban environment—images that have been compared to those of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark—provide a contrast to his lushly coloured images of flowers and the spontaneous smiles of individuals living in his boyhood neighbourhood. The appeal of Araki's work lies both in its sensationalism and its honest approach to human existence.

Curated by Yoshiko Isshiki and Keith Wallace

A large scale photo collage is installed on a white gallery wall. The collage is made up of  a 10 x 10 grid of photographs of various flowers and is almost the full height and width of the wall.

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Many photographs are installed on the gallery walls. There are some small black and white photographs attached to the side walls. A large-scale coloured photo collage is mounted on the middle wall.

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Two gallery walls are filled with black and white photographs. The left wall is covered by small photographs aligned in vertical rows. Six large ones, with some paints on, are on the other wall. 

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A gallery wall is filled with small black and white photographs, many of which are of a naked woman, still life, and landscape. Each vertical row has 16 photographs, and there are more than 27 rows.

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Six black and white photographs are installed in the gallery. The same woman is depicted naked, half-clothed, or fully clothed. Strokes of primary and secondary colour paints run across the pictures. 

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Black and white photographs are installed on a gallery wall. Many of them show human figures in various outside settings. One row contains 2 pictures and 14 rows are visible in this photograph.

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Janet Werner

Janet Werner lives and works in Saskatoon and has exhibited widely across Canada. During the past decade, her work consisted of series of small paintings depicting icons of everyday life rendered in a style that played between abstraction and figuration and installed salon-style.

The paintings in the exhibition *Trust* mark a shift in direction for Werner. By exploring the painted portrait, she works with a genre that receives little acknowledgement in contemporary art, and which is often deemed exhausted in a world dominated by photographic and digital imagery. While clearly referencing the history of this genre, her intentions depart from it. Werner's portraits are not of actual individuals, but are composed of half-remembered, half-imagined faces. Staring outward into space, these subjects suggest inward psychological states of consciousness. And by employing characteristics that are hauntingly familiar, Werner strives to create portraits that are convincing as a representation of persona. Coupled with her interest in making portraits is an interest in the formal issues. The use of strong monochromatic backgrounds, for example, brings into play a relationship between abstraction and representation. As such, these portraits are as much about the process of painting and looking, as they are about the representation of people.

### Biography

Janet Werner was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba and studied in Toronto, Banff and Baltimore before completing her MFA at Yale University in New Haven. Werner is currently Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing in the Department of Art History at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. Janet Werner is represented by the Paul Kuhn Gallery, Calgary and the Robert Birch Gallery, Toronto.



A painted portrait on canvas depicting a person wearing a yellow T-shirt on a light blue background. 

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Three portrait paintings are exhibited on the galley walls. The one in the front has a red-eyed person in a pink background, and the one on the left is a woman in black standing in a brown background. 

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Three portrait paintings are exhibited on the galley walls. The left one is a blue-skinned man, the tiny one in the middle is a woman with grey hair. The one on the right is orange. 

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Three portrait paintings are exhibited on the galley walls. The left one is a woman in the yellow background. The middle one is a close-up of a woman’s face. The one on the right is blue. 

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Three portrait paintings are exhibited on the galley walls. The left one is a woman in a brown background, the middle one is a man in a blue background. The one on the right is a woman in black.

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Five portrait paintings are visible in this photograph. The large-sized painting on the left depicts a man in a yellow T-shirt standing in a blue background. His eyes are looking away. 

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Three portrait paintings are installed on the gallery walls. The one in the front is a short-haired person standing in an orange background, wearing a white shirt and looking straight at the viewer. 

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Trust

Jochen Herz

John Scott

*WAR ZONES* presents photo and media-based artwork concerned with situations of conflict in the late twentieth century. The works, by an international selection of contemporary artists, are divided into three sections: *Siting Conflict*, *Present Tense* and *Bearing Witness*. *Present Tense* explores images of conflict involving spectacle, gender relations, terrorism and apocalyptic visions.

John Scott's gritty most evil vehicle, an actual motorcycle that has been altered into an aggressive war machine with a hologram and video projection, expresses a relentless mechanized warfare which encompasses past, present, future, fiction and reality, both in its technique and in its ominous visionary presence. In contrast, Jochen Gerz's three large photo works attest to the human spirit, utilizing ironic confluences of history and the everyday to express the complexity of the effect of war on our common humanity. John Scott lives and works in Toronto, and Jochen Gerz lives and works in Paris.

*WAR ZONES* is a program of exhibitions and special events organized by Presentation House Gallery in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Gallery, Artspeak Gallery, Access Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Pacific Cinematheque, and Veterans Against Nuclear Arms. 

*Sitting Conflict*
April 17 - May 30, 1999
at Presentation House Gallery

*Present Tense* 
May 15 - June 26, 1999
at the Contemporary Art Gallery and Artspeak Gallery
June 5 - July 3, 1999
at Access Gallery

*Bearing Witness* 
June 5 - July 18, 1999
at Presentation House Gallery

This exhibition is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Foundation, VanCity Savings Credit Union, Marine Printers, and Preferred Service Customs Brokers.

Guest Curated by Karen Henry and Karen Love


A large black and white drawing is installed on the gallery wall. A black airplane is drawn above the word “SR71." This drawing is placed in between a pair of photographs of human eyes.

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Two black and white photo collage pieces are installed on the gallery walls. The left one shows some X-ray images, and the one on the right shows a building. Some texts are written over the images. 

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Two black and white photo collage pieces are installed on the gallery walls. Accompanying those abstracted figures, large-font texts that read “GEISTES, WAFFEN” and “I, NITE & WE” are displayed. 

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A big black motorbike is installed on a gallery floor in front of the wall, on which black and white drawings of eyes are projected. A blurred photograph of a man’s face is attached to the bike's front. 

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A black motorbike is installed in the gallery. An upside-down face shield is attached on top of the bike’s front, on which a man’s portrait photograph is attached. Handles are missing from this bike. 

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A large drawing is installed on the gallery wall next to the motorbike. A black airplane is depicted on the paper, which is placed in between a pair of photographs of human eyes.

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A black motorbike, a drawing of black airplane in between a pair of black and white photographs of human eyes, and a silver gun are installed in a gallery space. 

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A silver revolver gun is framed in black and installed on a gallery wall. The word, WITNESS is carved on a small silver plaque nailed to the frame. A fake human eyeball is inlaid in the grip. 

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Jochen Herz, John Scott

WAR ZONES: Present Tense

Jayce Salloum

Jayce Salloum is recognized for a large body of photography and video production that has been exhibited and screened since 1979. His work has been presented in venues as varied as storefronts in New York and San Diego to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Having lived abroad for numerous years, Salloum now makes Vancouver his home base. 

The title *22oz. THUNDERBOLT* comes from a fragment of advertising represented in one of the photographs in the exhibition. This body of work, presented in an installation format, continues Salloum’s long-held interest in the idea of street photography and documentary traditions, and the ways in which they intersect with the actual experience of the urban environment. He is also a collector of images and considers his artmaking process akin to that of a creative archivist.

Most of the images in *22oz. THUNDERBOLT* are photographed in a seemingly spontaneous manner, evoking the fragmented and peripheral information that one encounters while walking through the city. The syncopated arrangement on the walls accentuates a layered and impressionistic reading of the urban environment. While many of the images capture ephemeral moments — a view from a car window, street scenes and buildings — the exhibition consists primarily of an accumulation of images of storefronts and window displays. These contained yet highly public spaces give emphasis to a relationship between idiosyncratic and subjective modes of display, and the intentions of consumerist appeal, which Salloum points out are “specifically the places in between private and public space.” In this exhibition, the urban environment was filled with signs of diverse identities, desires and needs, and we must find our own space within it.


Four coloured photographs of various sizes are displayed on a gallery wall. All images depict paper. One photograph shows signs covering the wall, and the other shows piles of books to be recycled.

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Nine photographs are installed on a white gallery wall. They, placed three by three, are street photographs. Some of the images include bear trees in front of buildings. 

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Five coloured photographs of various sizes are displayed on a gallery wall. Four of them are placed closely with each other: two of them show shuttered storefronts and the rest shows mannequin heads. 

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Five coloured photographs of various sizes are displayed on white a wall. All photos depict storefronts. Some have handwritten signs that read, “We Got Coffee” and “Match Any Lower Advertised Price!!”

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Four coloured photographs of various sizes are displayed on a gallery wall. All of the images show mannequins and small dolls displayed in shops. Some brown mannequins have bronde and brunette hair. 

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Four coloured photographs of various sizes are displayed on a white gallery wall. The largest photo among them shows small white sculptures with Disney characters and numbers on. 

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Various coloured photographs of various sizes are displayed on white gallery walls. The large-sized photograph at the top includes “22oz. THUNDERBOLT” printed in yellow over the images.

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Various coloured photographs of various sizes are displayed on white gallery walls. These photographs are roughly grouped by the subject matter. Some are installed at the bottom of the walls. 

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Many coloured photographs of various sizes are displayed on gallery walls. The photographs are roughly grouped by the subject matter. Some are vertically aligned, and pairs are placed side by side.

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22 oz. THUNDERBOLT

Vikky Alexander

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present a new installation by Vancouver artist Vikky Alexander. Alexander is a senior Canadian artist who has exhibited widely across Canada, the USA and Europe, and who is represented in many of Canada's most important museum collections. She is currently a professor of visual art at the University of Victoria.

Vikky Alexander is recognized for her use of a minimalist and architectonic aesthetic to explore social constructions of nature and notions of utopian spaces. In the installation presented at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Alexander employs a digital slide dissolve unit to project a series of six wall-sized panoramic images of the gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte in France. Designed in the 17th century by André Le Nôtre, these gardens were devised to create a flamboyant artificial world filled with optical and perceptual tricks. In Alexander's installation, the images of these gardens are reflected onto eight large mirrored columns that are strategically placed in the gallery. The combination of images and mirrors unsettles how space is experienced, and echo the disorienting viewpoints in Le Nôtre's gardens while playing with the photograph's inability to thoroughly describe space and perspective.


Essay: "Vikky Alexander: The Mirage of the Sublime," Ian Wallace

Eight large mirrored columns stand on the gallery floor, reflecting a photographed image of a garden projected on the front wall. Some mirrors reflect an orange light illuminating in the back.

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Eight large mirrored columns stand on the gallery floor. They reflect fragmented images of a garden that is projected on the gallery wall. The back corner of the gallery is illuminated in orange.

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Eight large mirrored columns stand on the gallery floor. A photographed image of a garden is projected on the front wall. Reflections on the mirrors show a red light illuminating the back wall.

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Eight large mirrored columns stand on the gallery floor, reflecting a photographed image of a garden projected on the front wall.  Some mirrors reflect a yellow light illuminating in the back.

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Eight large mirrored columns stand on the gallery floor, reflecting a photographed image of a garden projected on the front wall. The garden seems large and symmetrical. The gallery space is darkened.

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A close-up view of the mirrored columns installed in the gallery. They stand on the floor and reflect a photographed image of a garden that is projected on the wall. 