Steven Shearer

Vancouver based artist Steven Shearer works in a broad range of disciplines including painting and collage, and continues to investigate the vernacular aesthetics of the 1970s as a site for looking at the emancipatory energies and sometimes revolutionary potential of teens and youth. He has assembled a growing archive of photographs, mostly downloaded from the web, of amateur record and tape collections, guitars and other totems of youthful rebellion and identification. He has also produced a number of works anthologizing images of 70s teen pop idols like Shawn Cassidy, whose androgynous sexuality and rapid climb into and then out of the heights of teen fandom is used for its autobiographical metaphors. 

The exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery will assemble a wide spectrum of Shearer's recent work with the aim of profiling its many convergent strains. The centerpiece for the show will be a recent sculptural installation made from prefabricated parts of steel garden sheds, inside of which a guitar PIA system plays a heavy metal guitar solo specially commissioned by Shearer. The “music” is amplified and distorted by the metal of the shed, creating a keening shrine to angry, cloistered youth. 

### Biography

Steven Shearer has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally and has recently held solo exhibitions at Colin Deland’s American Fine Arts Co., NYC; Mars Gallery, Tokyo; Blum & Poe, LA; and Galleria Franco Noero, Torino. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich and Goodwater Gallery, Toronto.  Shearer will be exhibiting as part of the group exhibition *Pin-Up: Contemporary Collage and Drawing* at the Tate Modern, London. Texts on his work have been featured in *ARTFORUM* and in catalogue essays such as *Rock My World* by Ralph Rugoff. Shearer’s work has also been commissioned and appropriated by pop culture mags Arena Homme, Dazed & Confused, photographer Terry Richardson, bands Chicks on Speed, Angelblood and Belgian black metalers Spasm.


Installation image of works by Steven Shearer. An installation of a children-size house is placed in the corner of the gallery space. Twelve two-dimensional works including prints and drawings are mounted on the walls. 

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Installation image of works by Steven Shearer. Various-sized collage pieces and paintings are mounted on two walls. Among these works, there is a large-size collage work, which shows piles of wrapped gifts on a grey background. 

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Installation image of works by Steven Shearer. Seven text-based works, on which English words appear in all capital letters in white on black background, are mounted on the wall.

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Installation image of works by Steven Shearer. Paintings, collage works, and photographs are mounted on the wall. Many of them are coloured. Some works show figures of a person with long straight hair. 

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Installation image of works by Steven Shearer. Paintings, collage works, and photographs are mounted on the walls. On a far wall, a large photo collage work is installed.

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Installation image of works by Steven Shearer. Paintings, drawings, collage works, and photographs are mounted on the walls. Many of these works show figures of people, including a portrait of a person with a long brown beard.

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Alex Morrison

Alex Morrison's practice spans a variety of media in work that examines the relationships between urban and domestic space, memory and the struggle for subjective identity. In past work he has problematized his subcultural identification, less as biographical source than as conceptual framework, in order to antagonize notions of sentiment, responsibility and social authority.

His new work, *Free Room*, translates these themes into a three channel DVD work based, in part, on Lindsay Anderson's cult classic film, *If* of 1968. Liberally interpolating from the film's depiction of the claustrophobic relationship between alienated youths, *Free Room* is set in a single room where the characters discuss, joke and plot about sex, politics and death — the elements of a projected free life. In this room they are rid of received ideas, giving each other license to act out their projections of agency and independence. Using images clipped from a variety of magazines, the three characters map out a set of identifications and the means to deflate them; they appropriate images in order to domesticate their rhetorical force. The work seeks to illustrate this transitional point of experience, a plane of action that is divorced from both the compliance of childhood and the complex morality of independent choice. 

Accompanying *Free Room* in the exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery will be a selection of silkscreen posters and drawings, together called *Gesucht! (Wanted!)*. Similar in theme to *not the actual apartment* (2001), these works deal with idealized architectural space as lifestyle. Morrison has adopted the visual idiom of Berlin street posters to comment on the way people employ simple aesthetic codes to transmit complex personal and political aspirations. In all of this work, Morrison compares and contrasts motifs of individual freedom and social order, role play and authenticity, idealism and subversion. 

### Biography

Alex Morrison has exhibited both nationally and internationally, and had recently held the Berlin studio as part of the Canada Council’s residency program. He has recently exhibited Free Room at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin-Kreuzberg and the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. A catalog on his work is being co-published by the Contemporary Art Gallery and Lukas & Sternberg Press.


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Installation image of drawings by Alex Morrison. 7 black and white drawings of buildings on various sized paper are mounted on a wall. 

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Installation image of posters by Alex Morrison. Five various-sized posters are mounted on the walls. The posters are coloured red, yellow, green, and light blue. Some of them are black and white.

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Detail of a black and white drawing of a narrow street between one-story houses by Alex Morrison.

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Installation image of posters. Five various-sized posters are mounted on the walls. The posters are coloured red, yellow, green, and light blue. Some of them are black and white. One poster shows the word “gesucht!” in all capital letters. 

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Installation image of video work by Alex Morrison. A video projected on a wall in a completely dark gallery space shows three people at a table working on stacks of magazine-like objects in front of them. 

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Installation image of video work by Alex Morrison. A video projected on a wall in a completely dark gallery space shows a person in a black outfit sitting at the edge of a bed reading a magazine. 

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Installation image of a three-channel video by Alex Morrison. Some phrases appear in a black background in the middle video. Two other videos show people hanging out.

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Installation image of a three-channel video by Alex Morrison. The middle video only shows a black screen. Two other videos show some images taken inside houses, including table chairs and a door. 

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Free Room

Marina Roy

Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist and writer whose recent works combine interests in historical book illustration with psychoanalytic theory and word play. Past works include a series of illustrations the artist crafted on the fore-edges of books, which illustrate the books' titles while making overt sexual puns about their subject matter. 

For her exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Roy will present an ambitious series of new paintings using glass and mirrors. In these works, abstract “blobs” of paint are poured onto sheet glass; Roy then creates representational paintings inspired by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrational styles on the reverse side of the painted glass. Arranging a mirror behind the glass, the illustration can be glimpsed hovering behind the monochromatic blob. Parallels with Rorschach tests bring to mind and literalize the often sexual nature of suggestion. 

Several images from the paintings have been used in the accompanying video animation, *Sleeper*. Using kinetic devices such as bodily emissions or expanding clouds, the relationships between background and foreground are blurred or trade places, operating in much the same way as they do in the mirror painting structures. All of the images are figurative and make reference to landscape traditions, exploiting our abiding interest in nature and human nature. 

Detail of a video installation by Marina Roy. A CRT TV shows a black and white illustration of a character, whose body looks like a tooth fallen off, standing in a dark background filled with stars.

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Installation image of Marina Roy’s paintings. Paintings of abstract shapes are made on the mirrors. Three paintings are mounted on the left wall and a larger painting on the far wall. 

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Installation image of Marina Roy’s paintings. Paintings of abstract shapes are made on the mirrors. Three paintings are mounted on the far wall and a larger painting on the left wall. 

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Installation image of Marina Roy’s paintings. Paintings of abstract shapes in black and yellow are made on the mirrors. Three paintings, varying in size, are mounted on the walls.

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Detail of a video installation by Marina Roy. A CRT TV shows a black and white photographed image of people closely standing with each other and smiling at the camera. 

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Detail of a video installation by Marina Roy. A CRT TV shows a coloured image of two pink circular shapes in motion in a dark blue background filled with stars.

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Assume vivid astro focus

Revolutions on Request

Massimo Guerrera

Lately, I've been interested in the notion of usage — one that addresses the economic term nonrivalrous. In relation to creative property, nonrivalrous defines a type of production or product that does not deplete with multiple users. If someone uses your idea you can still use it. It cannot be taken away from you like a material possession. If I take your car you can't still use it, but if I apply a formula you designed, I don't stop you from also using it. 

For *Together Forever*, usage becomes the means to discuss collaborative and relational art processes. An optimistic dependency lies at the core of collaborative art production where there is value in using each other: borrowing someone else's ideas, co-opting an aesthetic, applying an existing formula, utilizing another's tools. It generates a confident interdependence and creates a complicit generosity that is not so much about giving over one's ego as it is about defining it within a shared social context. 

*Darboral*, one of Massimo Guerrera's on-going projects, is as much a social situation as it is an aesthetic configuration. A filled room with a sprawling patchwork of carpeting; stacked bins both empty and full, containing oil or maybe a ceramic sculpture; plastic containers of edible and beyond edible items; small sculptures molded just right for holding; a Styrofoam labyrinth to hide within; pieced together places for sitting; precious hand­bound books; photographs; drawings; stains. For this incarnation of *Darboral* (and the maintenance of a supple platform) there is something new and, for Guerrera, there is always something new, as he is responsive to each situation/exhibition. *Darboral* formally changes. The objects, areas, constructions continually transform structurally and through individual use.

Usage is a central factor in creating change. For Guerrera it is important to provide the possibility for physical interaction. The more time you spend, the more you touch, the more materials you use, the more you will get out of the work. The books are filled with an accumulation of images, recollecting Darboral at different stages, showing how others manipulated the sculptures, ate the food, performed with and posed for the artist. The books are not only records, but also instruction manuals, simultaneously directing the user and giving them permission. They present possibilities. Depending on flexibility and interest, not everyone will take the time to touch, or to uncover Darboral's histories, or add to its future. Although Guerrera clearly establishes a dependency that relies on others to produce the work through their engagement, he can only set a possible stage, offering a series of potentials, but ultimately people will read the work at different levels. Understanding that some will and some won't, Guerrera openly invites: “you're welcome to join me if you like" and optimistically waits: "I'm hoping you will add something.” 

Whether it is a means to a beginning or an indistinct end, establishing the potential for usage is also central to the work of assume vivid astro focus (avaf). By design, avaf is a name to be used, an erratic collective, an individual, and a point of exchange. It is hard to decide how much I should reveal about the motivations for avaf. It exists for specific reasons: as a means to defer the ego, as an open invitation, as a point of accessibility; through a desire to share; and in order to question notions surrounding ownership. But I believe that in telling, I can point to a history before itself, and more importantly, I won't undermine the potential for sharing that is already set in motion, or halt an acknowledged failure that is implicit in idealist intentions. 

Avaf is the project of Brazilian and New York-based artist Eli Sudbrack. With the intention of finding a pseudonym from which to deflect the self, Sudbrack visited The LP Show at Exit Art, New York in 2001, noting various album titles and band names, finally, mixing a Throbbing Gristle (the mid seventies London-based experimental band) album title, Assume Power Focus, with the name of the New York-based one-man band Ultra Vivid Scene.

“Assume vivid astro focus" from the start and by example became a permissive proposal for usage. In the name of sharing, avaf constantly incorporates the work of others and amasses a mix of references from Memphis design to Los Angeles graffiti; medieval unicorn tapestries to Picabia paintings; George Wolfe Plank's 1920s magazine covers to Vogue balls; and ukiyo-e prints to Michel Gondry videos. Like most of avaf's murals and wallpaper designs, *Garden8*, the graphic design adapted to cover the two stories of windows at the Contemporary Art Gallery, collages together a number of references into an amalgamated colour-field of organic forms so layered that it is easy to lose track of what comes from where, or even know where to find any beginning point. This is reflected in an excerpt from one of avaf's to do lists: "Keep collecting coloring books from eBay. Look for: h.r. Pufnstuf, American Wild Flowers, Space: 1999, New Kids on the Block, Flipper, Jaws, Kimba, Hart to Hart, Moonlighting, The Incredible Hulk, American Architecture, Chips, Prismatic Designs, Bungalows.” It seems anything is up for grabs. Avaf's liberal method of appropriation is informed by the history of the avant-garde Brazilian Anthropophagite movement. In the 1920s in Brazil, the Anthropophagists celebrated cultural "cannibalism,” appropriating, digesting and re-articulating Western art to Brazilian popular culture, forming a distinct signature and as such positing this signature for reciprocal appropriation. The significance is that anyone can be assume vivid astro focus, and anyone can take what they need, as long as avaf can still use it. It is a generous offer and an effect of multiple possibilities. For avaf, giving happens with the same ease as taking, creating a circle of dependency where sharing relies on using. 

This dependency is more overt in the collaborative operations of an artist collective—a group of artists who come together under one name, in this case Revolutions on Request (ROR), which currently defines the joint efforts of Helsinki-based artists Jiri Geller, Klaus Nyqvist, Panu Puolakka, and Karoliina Taipale. But the reasons for forming this interdependence aren't always so transparent. The four members of ROR present an aesthetic collectivity, a discussion and idea of art making that is represented by a gathering of diverse products and concepts that, when presented together, join into an overall design. Even though ROR often produce objects and materials independently, the immaterial ideal of the collective comes together in the exhibition, colliding the material (because objects aren't enough) into a physical accumulation of ideas, in order to create a dynamic where one thing is never only that thing. For example, they juxtapose embroidered portraits of Bob Marley near lampshade explosions; images of superman or superdog next to a painting of someone in a gas mask; a neon meditating Buddha underscored by an ominous baseline, which simultaneously posits and cracks iconic ideals. 
The tongue-in-cheek nature of ROR's play with utopian ideals immediately reveals itself in a name that promises too much. This implausible affirmation is imbued with nihilist undertone—again calling attention to a dimension of failure that separates fleeting idealisms from the tangibility of lived experiences. ROR establishes a smart sincerity that questions its own objectives but again leaves room for hope. *God Says No* (2001), a white escalator that leads nowhere or *Battle of the Worlds* (2000), an adapted foosball game where a team of plastic crucified Jesuses plays against a team of dancing Shivas, are good examples. Whether or not ROR has more faith in one team or the other is not certain, but it is clear that they do have faith in undermining their ideals. 

Each of the projects for *Together Forever* structures a system that is built from an undefined assemblage of adaptations, re­constitutions, incorporations, and re-enactments. Usage becomes a viable means to produce work; giving way to a material accumulation, an aesthetic gathering that idealistically transmits the social in a successive give and take. Using each other is permissible and underlined by a balanced optimism that isn't overwrought with unrealistic expectations or deterred by failure. Like the optimistic sentiment reflected by the exhibition's title, the artists accentuate probability over implausibility, emphasizing the potential. 

-Jenifer Papararo 


Installation image of artworks in a gallery. A variety of found objects, including shellfish and glass bottles are placed on the floor. The floor is partially covered with the patchwork of various carpets.

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Installation image of artworks in a gallery. A variety of found objects, including shellfish and a toy shovel are placed on a partially carpeted floor. Various sized white planks lean against the far wall.

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Installation image of artworks in a gallery. Various seed-shaped objects are attached to a white wall. Red thin strings are hanging from the upper part of the wall. 

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Installation image of works in a gallery. A series of five images of two birds facing each other are mounted on a wall. The corner of the room is partially covered by square pieces of vinyl on which orange-coloured graphic designs are printed.

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Installation image of works in a gallery. A variety of found objects, including shellfish and glass bottles are placed on a partially carpeted floor. A photograph of a person blowing bubble gum is mounted on the far wall.

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Installation image of works in a gallery. Four silver necklaces are placed flat on a piece of black fabric in a display case. A round sculpture that is probably made with orange, yellow and white Lego blocks is hanging from the ceiling.

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Installation image of works in a gallery. A display case sits in the middle of the floor. Three pictures are mounted on the far wall. An orange-brown sculpture is mounted on the other wall. 

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Installation image of artworks in a gallery. A variety of objects, including plastic cups, fruit, and sculptures are placed on the floor. The floor is partially covered with the patchwork of various carpets.

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Installation image of artworks in a gallery. A variety of found objects, including shellfish are placed on the floor. The floor is partially covered with the patchwork of various carpets. Some pictures are mounted on the walls.

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Installation image of graphic design work on the exterior of the CAG. Both ground-level and second-street windows are entirely covered by the vinyl, on which colourful abstract image is printed. 

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A detail of a part of the installation. The image is looking down at four silver necklaces laid on the black textile in a display case.

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assume vivid astro focus, Massimo Guerrera, Revolutions on Request

Together Forever

Jerry Pethick

Jerry Pethick is an uncategorizable artist. His work waits for the descriptive terms that will at once misrepresent it while bringing it into the discursive fold of contemporary art history. One such term might be the 1960s non-starter "photo-sculpture." Although much, if not most, of Pethick's works have no direct photographic element they are almost always informed by thoughts about photography or, to be more specific, by thoughts about a photographic image floating in space (post-photographic sculpture, photo assemblage, concrete conceptual sculpture, neo­ cubo-futurism). As Barbara Fischer astutely observed, Pethick's sculptural program turned to photographic issues at the very time Minimalism erected a barricade against photography.(1) He was on a determined and different path from the beginning. The science and optical engineering in Pethick's practice form a stumbling block for writers like myself who do not have the education or vocabulary to fully engage this critical aspect of his work.

Knowing how unusual his project was, Pethick constructed his own genealogies and his own histories from the history of photography and art. He valued what he imagined were coincidences and speculation. What if, for example, one of the propellers seen by Leger, Brancusi and Duchamp during their visit to the 1909 Paris Air Show had been designed by Ludwig Wittgenstein (who was designing propellers in Manchester in 1908) For Pethick this encounter was emblematic of the meeting of science, art and philosophy. And if Leger reports that Duchamp said (to Brancusi): "Painting is dead. What artist can make anything better than these propellers?" then isn't it possible that they provided the moment of recognition for Duchamp's roto­ reliefs, what Pethick calls "rotational dematerialization," to name an important element in his own sculpture?

The idea of sculpture that approached transparency while also projecting an illusionary or virtual space became Pethick's utopian project. He invested this idea with many holistic notions that implied rethinking how we are as individuals and how society works. The tantalizing proximation to this impossible space he wished to create marked also the distance between our world and a  better one. His sculptures were in the future tense. One genealogy for sculpture went: "the Egyptians, perhaps Bernini, Medardo Rosso, Giacometti and Malcolm Lowry."(2) Pethick liked to eclipse Greco-Roman naturalism and the search for ideal form, naming as aberrant what Western Art History regards as the main story. The inclusion of Lowry and Rosso show his literary bent and his sense of humour. Other genealogies include Umberto Boccioni, surely among the most important artists for Pethick. Boccioni's Cubo-Futurism literralness and his attempts to impale an object on its surrounding space are usually regarded as deviations from the true course of modern sculpture. Pethick regarded them as important signposts.

Pethick's search for a dematerialized form that interpenetrated with its surrounding space began in the 1960s. His earliest sculptures employed the then-new plastics and the technique of vacuum-forming. None of the sixties pieces survive but from pictures one can see that the compositional principles and uses of materials that would be developed in his mature works were already being formulated. He used a variety of incongruous found and fabricated, natural and synthetic materials to build unstable, teetering piles that seem held together by centrifugal force, a representation of their potential "rotational immateriality." While Pethick's mature work such as the *Colossus of Kindergarten* (1990/91) is in step with post Robert Morris installation art, the tipsy figuration still shows how important Boccioni's ideas were to him.

The first excursions into virtual space began in earnest in 1967 when Pethick made his first hologram (a picture of a prawn). For several years he helped pioneer and promote holography as a new medium for the projection of a disembodied image in space. Although he co-founded the School of Holography in San Francisco in 1971, he was already turning from holography proper (his use of spectrafoil is a remnant of holography) to an abiding interest in Gabriel Lippmann's postulated integral or fly's eye photography. The inventor of colour photography had speculated early in the twentieth century that stereoscopic photography could be advanced to produce virtual dimensional images in space. Working with Lippman's and subsequent research Pethick made his first integral photograph in 1972. He shot 256, two inch photographs (with Charles Frizzel) through a large sheet of gridded glass so that each shot took in a slightly different angle. The idea was to multiply the effects of binocular vision to approach a multi-faceted "fly's eye" vision. (The picture is a nondescript landscape on Mt. Tamalpais.) When displayed in a hexagonal grid behind a grid of corresponding lenses, seen from a certain range the two hundred and fifty-six images coalesce into one large dimensional image that hovers in an indeterminate space. This two hundred and fifty-six image array, split into three, is recycled for the triad, *Armchair Traverse* (1970-1987), *Typology of Space* (1972-1989) and *Whale Skirt and Sun* (1970-1994). 

Pethick's utopianism, evidenced in his search for a "magical" virtual low-tech pictorial and sculptural space must be seen also from the perspective of his humour in which there is a kind of expressive autobiographical "self-portraiture." The sense of material and surface, even if the material is often found and recycled, is as unmistakable as a signature. The ballooning shapes of his forms and unsteady pose of his figures seem haunted by the history of twentieth century popular cartoons. The Cubo-Futurist dissonances are often absurdist and funny. The household appliances he recycled to such odd ends reminds us at once of the distance Pathick wants his viewer to travel from the banality of consumerist culture to other dimensions and possible new worlds.

-Scott Watson 

The contemporary Art Gallery thanks Margaret Pethick, Scott Watson and Catriona Jeffries Gallery for their contributions to this exhibition.   


(1) Barbara Fischer, "Jerry Pethick: Bias Arrays," in Saarbrucken: Stadtgalerie Saarbrucken, Jerry Pethick:  Notion of Nothing, 1994. p. 32.

(2) Quoted in Judy Williams, "Jerry Pethick: Le Dot/Transition in Progress," New York: 49th Parallel Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art, Jerry Pethick, 1986. p. 1.


Installation image of Jerry Pethick’s artwork on a wall. The work has a shape of a record with a metallic circle in its centre.

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Installation image of Jerry Pethick’s artworks. On a wall, a set of three works that look like shadow muppets are installed in light box for exhibiting photography. Each of them are illuminated by pale-green light in the light boxes.

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Installation image of Jerry Pethick’s illutrations. Two illustrations are mounted side by side on a wall. One is coloured and the other is black and white. The illustration on the right shows two propeller-like shapes. 

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Installation image of Jerry Pethick’s artworks. A round object and a lope-like object are on the floor. The combination of there objects look like a teddy bear's nose and a mouth. A large square piece of brown fabric is mounted on the wall. 

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Installation image of Jerry Pethick’s artworks. A black round object and a lope-like object are on the floor next to a tall machine-like sculpture. A large square piece of brown fabric and 10 silver circles are mounted on the wall. 

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Typology of Space

Kirsten Pieroth

Kirsten Pieroth is an emerging Berlin based artist interested in ideas of dislocation and authenticity. For example, invited to the 2002 Tirana Biennale in Albania, Pieroth contributed Berlin Puddle, literally a puddle of rain water the artist siphoned from a Berlin street into containers, then transported to Tirana, where she emptied the brackish water onto the gallery floor. “I regret that a previous engagement prevents me from accepting your kind invitation to dinner at your home, on Thursday evening, September seventeenth,” is a sentence taken from a letter written by inventor Thomas Alva Edison. It was also the title of this installation work in its prior incarnation at Klosterfelde Gallery in Berlin. Pieroth's interest in the life of Edison led to the discovery the inventor often made excuses to avoid attending social functions. Pieroth then wrote to the American Patent Office requesting a patent on behalf of Edison for the invention of the "excuse.” This and other of Pieroth's letters to Edison scholars tangentially combine with sculptural elements including a new piece made especially for the Contemporary Art Gallery, to question the subjectivity of historical records. This will be Pieroth's first solo exhibition in North America.

Detail of an installation. In a display case, two sets of a letter and an envelope are exhibited. Both letters were sent to the artist Kirsten Pieroth. The letter on the left is handwritten and the one on the right is typed.

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An installation image of Kirsten Pieroth’s art exhibition. Various pieces of paper with texts printed on them are placed in a display case. Another document is framed and mounted on the wall above the display case. 

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An installation image of Kirsten Pieroth’s art exhibition. At least 7 meters tall white square pillar stands in a gallery. The pillar does not reach the gallery ceiling. Several text-based and photography works are mounted on walls. 

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An installation image of Kirsten Pieroth’s art exhibition.  At least 7 meters tall white square pillar stands in a gallery. The pillar does not reach the gallery ceiling. A wood bench and a table are placed separately on the floor. 

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Detail of an installation work by KirstenPieroth. A wood table placed on a gallery floor has a signature that is read “Thomas G. Edison.” Two bar clamps are attached to the long side of the table.

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I don’t know if Thomas Edison invented the excuse.

Beau Dick

Neil Campbell

Roy Arden

*Supernatural* proposes a look beyond obvious differences to examine commonalities of intention, technique and effect in the distinct work of two artists. Vancouver artist Neil Campbell’s abstract, quasi-geometric paintings are scaled to the human body, and despite their apparent flatness, are performative in nature. They exact a calculated effect on the viewer's bodies and senses. Far from “abstract,” the experience is both physical and spiritual.

Beau Dick is a Kwakwaka’wakw chief, one of the most accomplished and talented traditional carvers and artists on the West Coast. Actively engaged in all aspects of Kwakwaka’wakw culture, he is highly regarded as a teacher and mentor. Dick has concentrated on studying and revivifying the traditions of carving, dance and storytelling, and this exhibition presents several of Dick’s masks in the admittedly compromised and alienated context of the Contemporary Art Gallery, far from their purpose integrated into rituals of dance and Potlatches. Dick mitigates these circumstances by preparing a dance for the exhibition opening.

The work of both Campbell and Dick share a basis in bold graphic design and theatrical effect. *Supernatural* sheds light on these parallels while questioning the aesthetic apartheid which separates the conditions under which similar artworks have been (and continue to be) displayed, with the aim of producing a serious dialogue on the relationship between artistic cultures and traditions.

Guest curated by Roy Arden


Essay: "Supernatural," Roy Arden

Installation image of Beau Dick’s carved wood mask in front of a black background. The mask has a pair of very long black eyebrows. The mask has a pair of wide-open eyes, a sharp nose, and a mouth opened in a shape of making a “u” sound.

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Installation image of four carved wood masks made by Beau Dick hanging in a gallery space. Each mask shows different faces with different facial expressions. The space is dimly lit and the walls are painted dark blue.

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Installation image of paintings by Neil Campbell. The work is a pair of black circles. They are installed on the walls near the corner. The paintings are as tall as the gallery wall, and twice as tall as a person standing in front of them. 

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Installation image of a painting by Neil Campbell. The work consists of many yellow circles outlined by thick bold black lines. The painting is as tall as a person standing near it.

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Neil Campbell and Beau Dick

Supernatural

Nestor Krüger

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of the work of Toronto based artist Nestor Krüger. Krüger's meticulously rendered monochromatic wall paintings have, over the past seven years, explored the perceptual and experiential nature of optics and the specifics of place. In an earlier project he painted a progressively generating series of interiors of a gallery in Halifax onto the walls of a gallery in Montreal, and then in relay, a further series of paintings of the two galleries onto the walls of the Halifax gallery. This dialogue twinned and altered perceptions of both sites. Krüger's work in Vancouver continues in this vein, and elaborates the Contemporary Art Gallery's architecture as a template for an ambitious installation that mirrors and reflects the space to viewers within it. 

### Biography

Nestor Kruger was born in Montreal in 1965, and lives and works in Toronto. Recent solo exhibitions have been at Goodwater Gallery, Toronto (2001, 2003); Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax (2001) and Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco (2001). He was an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2002). Recent group exhibitions included *in through the out door*, The Power Plant, Toronto (2002) and *Ferveurs*, Les Subsistences in Lyon (2001). He is represented by Goodwater Gallery, Toronto. 


Installation image of Nestor Krüger’s artwork. A transparent board, which is cut out in a triangular shape, leans against a corner of a gallery space. The work is approximately the size of a 3-year-old child.

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Installation image of Nestor Krüger’s art exhibition. The word, “(room)” is printed on a white gallery wall. A wall painting mirroring the gallery’s interior is done on the other wall that intersects with the aforementioned wall. 

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Installation image of Nestor Krüger’s wall painting. One entire wall of a gallery is painted. The painting mirrors the interior of the gallery space except for the colours. 

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Untitled (room)

Luanne Martineau

Luanne Martineau joins interests in early twentieth century social realism with mid century modernism to produce works that speak to ongoing biases and entrenched exclusions. She uses turn of the century comic books for their racist depictions of a North American immigrant polyglot as sources for elaborate drawings. Martineau copies select bits from these comic books on tracing paper, building up large palimpsests of marks whose aggregate quality is abstract, but which on close inspection reveals traces of illustrative realism, exaggerated stereotypes and received prejudices. In her exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Martineau plans a suite of drawings accompanied by a large sculptural installation. Working with outdated manufacturing technologies for fabricating textiles—such as flocking and felting and employing an antiquated knitting machine—Martineau has recently been crafting a series of large, soft sculptures that base comic referents off of high modernist ideals. 


Installation image  of Luanne Martineau’s illustrations. They are inspired by the early 20th-century social realism and mid-century modernism works. Most of the illustrations are black and white and depict some objects that resemble machines. 

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Installation image of Luanne Martineau’s art exhibition. A large soft sculptural installation is on the floor. It is made with brown fabric and has four legs. 12 framed illustrations are mounted on the back wall. 

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Installation image of Luanne Martineau’s art exhibition. A large soft sculptural installation is on the floor. It is made with brown fabric and has four legs. 12 framed illustrations are mounted on the back wall.