Spring Hurlbut

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present a new installation work by Toronto artist Spring Hurlbut. Hurlbut has exhibited extensively in eastern Canada and represented Canada in the 1987 São Paulo Biennale. Her in situ plaster works and tree column installations have been shown in both gallery and outdoor contexts, most recently in at Artcite in Windsor, Ontario and on the campus grounds at York University. 

For this, her first exhibition in Vancouver, Hurlbut will present *Sacrificial Column* which uses a twelve foot tree trunk with a capital incorporating rams horns, and plaster “egg and dart” moulding works installed high on the surrounding gallery walls. In these works Hurlbut investigates the origins of the relationship between natural form and the ordering principle of architecture, and by implication, the often problematic relationship between nature and mankind. The natural form of the tree trunk is disrupted, albeit harmoniously, by the crafted elements of capital and base and by its surrounding context of living trees or gallery walls. 


Essay: "Gestual Colonies," Christopher Dewdney

A close up view of the top of a capital column sculpture. Ram horns protrude from the sides of the column. 

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5 artworks on narrow metal shelves, decreasing in size from left to right. The works are various tree trunks and branches, with pieces added to their tops and bottoms, making them resemble columns.

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A gallery with multiple artworks on the walls. One wall has tree-trunk columns mounted on it, two walls show ornate white mouldings, and on the floor in the corner there is a column with rams horns.

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In a gallery, there are 2 ornate crown mouldings with partway up one wall, with small spaces in them where eggs rest. By another wall, there is a column made of a tree trunk with partial branches. 

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A closeup of an artwork in a gallery. It is an ornate column top, with rams horns attached to the bottom of each corner. The work is on a tall white plinth, making the pieces read as one large column.

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Robert Keziere

The Contemporary Gallery will present an exhibition of forty photographs by Vancouver photographer Robert Keziere. In 1987, Keziere received a Canada Council “B” Grant which enabled him to spend nine months in Italy, making photographs in Rome and Florence. The photographs were made using an 11 by 14 inch Deardorff wooden field camera. The large format made transporting and setting up the camera difficult. Also, acquiring permission from the various government and museum bodies was a challenge in itself. But the 11 by 14 inch contact prints yield an exquisite amount of detail. Keziere is well known for his technical skill and the prints reflect his abilities. Keziere's intention was not to simply document historic sites, but rather, he approached his subject on a personal and experiential level.

"I am interested in architecture and its evolution. But more so in the ineffable, the private corners and eloquent stairways, the windowed rooms which seem to resonate, images of continuance and change. It is a task which is explorative, intuitive and contemplative."

While in Rome, Keziere began to photograph early scientific equipment and related materials.	As this process evolved, relationships between the architectural images and the scientific images became apparent. An image from a building by Brunelleschi and a wax anatomical study of a chicken seemed to embody similar ideas.	The photographs are about knowledge and belief, about discovery and understanding; about reason.

This exhibition toured at the Art Gallery of Windsor in 1990.

Guest curated by Greg Bellerby 


Essay "In Response," Robert G. Sherrin

Seven photos in black frames on a wall. All the photos are black and white, showing different arches and doorways. The two photos on the ends are horizontal, and the rest, in the centre, are vertical. 

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Three separate groups of photos in black frames. The photos are all black and white and show doorways, stairs, and windows. A total of 19 photos are visible in the space.

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Several photos mounted across two walls of a gallery. The photos are black and white, mounted on black matte board in black frames, and show various architectural spaces, like stairways and arches.

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On Reason

Nancy Spero

The Contemporary Art Gallery will present eight scroll works by American artist Nancy Spero. Spero’s work is informed by the feminist movement of the 70s and investigates the prevalence of violence against women in contemporary and historical terms, drawing upon visual sources which include Egyptian hieroglyphics, advertisements, pictographs, classical painting, and pornography. The scroll format and the repeated combination of figuration and text suggest the uneasy relation of women to recorded history and her aim to “...find the speaking subject — woman as protagonist, woman as source.” Spero’s presentation of the figure in variations of scale formally integrates her concerns by intensifying the position of the viewer to the narrative, a parallel of women’s attempts to enter the prevailing social and symbolic order as voiced subjects.

Spero’s analysis of the persecution of women articulated in her printed “acts of rebellion” have been exhibited at galleries and museums throughout North America and Europe. A retrospective exhibition of work since 1950 was presented in 1987 and toured many locations in the US and Canada.

Spero’s work will also be presented in the *Fear of Others: Art Against Racism* group exhibition at various venues throughout the city.


A burgundy coloured exhibition invitation with black text which contains information about the exhibition, the artist;s name, the galley address and hours. 

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Lynda Gammon

The mixture of materials and images from a wide range of styles and periods can be taken for granted as one of the defining characteristics of postmodern artistic practice. As an overall project, this research represents an attempt to develop an epistemology derived from the information that emerges out of these new combinations of materials and forms.

Lynda Gammon’s work from the last five years constitutes a sustained research into the relations between sculpture and the idea of the domestic, between the idea of sculpture and domestic objects. The method here is that of collage, but collage that easily combines elements from pop-art and arte povera practice into a kind of “installation” work that raises questions	about the relations between the gallery and the home. Also, by referring to Tatlin and Gabo, these works invoke the idealism of Constructivist art and apply that ideal to objects traditionally used by women in the home.

The work you see in the gallery results from a gestation process involving preparatory drawings, working models, and “earlier” versions of these pieces. As these works take form they proceed from their status as single isolated elements to the complexes that you see here — but paradoxically, they seem to achieve more stability as objects in the world as they become more complex — like molecules of domesticity, they appear to have arrived at a condition toward which they had been striving, and in which they are more comfortable than they had been when “alone.” This resulting fragmentation serves as a structural analogue for the make-up of our houses analyzed from the point of view of the functional aspect of the objects we live with. The integration, for instance, of a chair and the light falling on that chair, is here represented by a physical integration of	the chair and the lamp (see *Aromaster*). Her *Cool Touch* depicts in
gestural/psychological terms the knot-like feeling of being harassed by your own telephone.	The other side of the “knot,” the unwinding, the picture of relief in a relief, appears in many of these works, not only as relief but as an index of disintegration (the spiral leading to infinity and an entropic zero).

Gammon describes these pieces as being patched or puzzled together. The taxonomy she has created queries, at the philosophical level, the relation of meaning	between (the idea of) appliances and the other objects that inhabit our personal lives. She asks through this repositioning whether a 19th century table leg remembers itself as an appliance, and whether bits of throw-away styrofoam packing can be seen as extensions of the world of objects that “work for us.” It is this position as “potentially useful” domestic objects that gives this work its double-life, its architectonic unity, its meaning, and its humour. As a metaphor for art itself, her idea that she is trying to catch a “momentary kind of	 wholeness” in these works, seems to summarize much of 1980s artistic practice, while maintaining a strong connection with the history of picture making.

-Bill Jeffries


An abstract sculptural assemblage made of various materials mounted on a white gallery wall. The sculpture is emitting light from its base casting a shadow on the wall. 

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A closeup of a sculpture mounted on a white wall. The sculpture is made of many different items, including a double shot jigger, a small wood plank, a metal plant hook, and geometric black foam forms.

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A gallery space with 3 small sculptures on the walls. They all have different metal elements, including a plant hood, a lamp base, and metal sheets that are cut and bent. 

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A closeup of a narrow sculpture against a wall. It is composed of different objects, including a lamp base, a bent cushioned metal chair, an upside down end table, and a long black foam form.

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A gallery with several small artworks on the wall. Three of the works are small sculptures with different objects that include light bulbs, plant hooks, and wood. One wall shows a set of 9 photos. 

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Burrell Swartz

Sibeal Foyle

Belfast and Berlin are the great political islands in the European subcontinent. It is never possible to know whether they are representatives of a kind of situation that we have collectively left behind—a kind of vestigial political wing—or if they are closer to the type of situation that we are in the process of creating for ourselves at the moment—or are they simply what they are—strange and unique? In essence we want to know whether they are part of our past, present or future. These cities are the public manifestation of the tragedy of difference extended into an extreme socio-political complexity. Within the relative calm and refinement of European culture today there is (still) a war in Ulster, and an extraordinary wound running through what was once the capital of Prussia. That there are reasons for this situation does little to mitigate the fact that although there is an exhilaration (to life in Berlin) and a strain (I assume, to life in Belfast, although I've never been there), it is as a psychological analogue for internal strife that these conditions of “learning to live with tension” take on personal meaning.

Artists have always responded impulsively to “the land” — historically basing the response on the beauty, novelty, power, or meaning as a homeland, and more recently as a signifier of current environmental and political forces. These depictions of the land have always been linked to the particular problems, questions and perceptions that the artist brings to the work. The two works in this exhibition are not so much history painting as they are a registration of painting as a method in art to depict an atmosphere. Indeed Burrell Swartz has described his *Berlin Landscape From The Fourteenth Floor* as follows: “Berlin 1986 — I had a chance to stay above the ‘wall;’ the immense no­ man's land; the omni-present guns; the remnants of history; the Futuristic Orwellian East; all gave lies to the fabled city of the West. And yet out of the original ‘sand and swamp' now naked and exposed, arose the great life-giving force that has always given Berlin its special quality — its atmosphere."

The “Irish predicament” which is actually the “Anglo-Irish predicament,” is theoretically irresolvable without a victory of military proportions for one side, or a yielding by one side with the subsequent losses that would entail, Sibeal Foyle describes her paintings as capturing this harsh and seemingly timeless struggle for Ireland between Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants: "The first two panels depict the Catholics in their procession (during 'Our Lady's Month’) of the Blessed Virgin Mary…the third panel depicts the Orangemen — who do not recognize the Virgin Mary on the same light — in a symbolic representation of the 12th of July Parade of the Protestants.”


A close up view of a gestural painting depicting a landscape with a large field, faint buildings in the background and a closer building giving off smoke. 

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A painting, made up of 3 large conjoined canvases (two horizontal, one vertical), on a wall. The painting is mostly yellow and blue and depicts a large field, several dark buildings, and fog at night. 

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A gallery space showing a large blue and yellow painting made up of 3 canvases mounted on a wall. On another wall, there is large black text that reads "Belfast : : Berlin."

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A large painting with greens, purples, reds, and blues, takes up most of a wall in a gallery space. The painting is made of 5 separate canvases, and depicts several skeletons and ghostly people.

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Sibeal Foyle, Burrell Swartz

Belfast :: Berlin

Jack Jeffrey

Jack Jeffrey will exhibit a new installation work at the Contemporary Art Gallery. This installation uses industrial, domestic and fine art materials which are historically charged — such as fishnet, chicken wire, cardboard, plaster, and paint. Objects created from these substances are interwoven with the gallery space to propose “a situation in which to consider the production of meaning.” Throughout the installation various processes are used: some of the objects are purchased, some methodically produced by the artist, with varying degrees of finish and craft. The constructions occupy specific placements to one another within the gallery. This installation simultaneously intensifies the associations that hover between the materials and processes while at the same time eroding the possibility of an emergent narrative.

A closeup of artworks in a gallery. The works include sheer white sheets on the wall, a small textile object on the floor, and a tall and white box, with open flaps.

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3 artworks visible in the corner of a gallery. The nearest work shows sculptures made of lines and circles of rebar wire, arranged and leaning on one another, with a piece of white fabric.

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Several objects in the corner of a gallery. The objects include a large white flag leaning on the wall, two small paintings on the wall, and a white construction that resembles a microphone stand. 

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Several artworks on the floors and walls of a gallery. The works are made of a variety of black, white, and grey items, including a suitcase made from textured metal.

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A gallery with several artworks placed all around. The works include a white, textured tube shape hanging from the ceiling to the floor, and a mound of sheer white fabric on the floor. 

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An Installation

Ross Muirhead

The trios of the title are the industry name for the outdoor billboards that we think of as revolving, or rotating. This particular system was (so they claim) invented by a Vancouver company that now holds a worldwide patent on it. It is possible to see, in Vancouver, trucks from SeaBoard Advertising driving the streets “Trio Maintenance” written across their doors.

In these works of art that summarize Ross Muirhead's production and aesthetic strategy of the past two years (mid-1987 to mid-1989), we see a method of expression and presentation that positions the viewer at a point midway between the poles represented by photography and the cinema. And, as a result of the particular subject matter Muirhead has chosen in these four works, we find ourselves (as viewers) plunged into a formal situation occupying a median point between the worlds of commercial advertising and political activism. These works then are hybrids with regard to art as well as commerce, and it is through this hybridization that they achieve their particular syntheses as an “information delivery system.” Although there is nothing revolutionary in this—many artists have been through various other portions of this route, including Paul Outerbridge, James Rosenquist, Jenny Holzer, and Jeff Wall — Muirhead appears to be the first artist to incorporate the “trio” mechanism into a work of art. The newness of this work has to do with the machinery Muirhead has chosen and the way that this machinery places viewers of the work in a critical position that is predetermined by our memories and expectations, and then confined by the content of a continuous tripartite subject narrative that pulls us into, and then releases us from, the conventional set of responses we have evolved to seeing outdoor “trios.” The psychological connections made by viewers of commercial trios are quite basic — the combination of travel, food, fashion and cars will doubtless catch some of the people some of the time and it is these prior associations that sustain Muirhead's approach to his material. But Muirhead's associations — between suburban development and highway construction, between stock markets and corruption, between fashion trends and the architectural facades of commercial buildings, between “cooperative housing” and the face of the new humanism — develop their meaning through a straightforward and literal presentation of the facts of a situation, while relying on a generalized sympathy for the fate of the earth for the reception of these stories as a kind of “truth in advertising.”

In the ongoing dialogue between art and commerce one is never quite sure who is influencing whom, as the various bits of information that fuel this cycle move about with increasing rapidity. Certainly, 20th-century advertising has not yet caught up with the more advanced graphic work from the 1920s, but it has borrowed quite heavily from the artworld nonetheless. Artists can be seen to constitute an unpaid research team for the advertising industry, and from that point of view there is a certain pleasure in watching the artworld appropriation of technologies developed for “the industry.” It is, of course, the mass production for advertising that brings down the purchase price of the components of these revolving billboards, making the basic materials available to artists (for a price), at a fraction of what it would cost to develop them as prototypes.

Ross Muirhead's version of socio-political analysis in an indoor billboard content avoids psychologizing about the situations he depicts. Instead he seems to engage in a type of deconstruction in which the contradictions implicit in the situations he has chosen to depict rotate around themselves in a relation to the fixed component of the overall image. The sentiments thus revealed are those of a left-leaning dissatisfaction with the “way the world is going.” The aim here is to register a resistance to the ethics of a corrupt world; to continue the project of establishing in art an opposition to a commercial world that is apparently lacking any spirit of idealism.

These works raise interesting questions regarding the contexts in which the various vehicles of advertising are recycled in art. For instance, Jenny Holzer's sign works seem to function best out of the gallery and in the urban environment, while the kinds of imagery Muirhead is working with would probably not read in an outdoor urban setting. The question “‘what does it mean?” would prevent the communication of meaning. Yet, paradoxically, in the gallery context these same works scan so quickly that they could be classified as reductive. The question of intent is, as we would expect, also easily blurred by shifts in the context. Muirhead’s *Awakening Captive*, so clearly critical in the gallery, could be seen as yet another “creative” fashion ad if it were a billboard.

Perhaps one clue to this malleability can be found in Muirhead's idea that his *Trios* are "positioned across a history of the machine in art and the role of mass media in everyday life." While this may be true, it would seem that this relation to the machine, although quite secure regarding the history of art, is tenuous with regard to the longevity of the trio system itself which will doubtless be replaced by something resembling a gigantic television screen some time in the not too distant future. This technology will become extinct in its worldly use, superseded by another, more efficient “delivery system.” And, it is at this point that the problem of being a hybrid is mildly clear — if you can be neither a still photograph nor a moving image, perhaps you are here only temporarily.

As an artworld manifestation, though, these contradictions can be seen to disappear because, as Muirhead has pointed out, “The use of the machine in art as a legitimate model for artistic expression is firmly linked to its intrinsic dynamism as a symbol for a new (emerging) age." Again, he is referring to the linkage with art history here, rather than claiming an industrial avant-garde status for this sign system, thereby leading us to an earlier age when the belief that science and technology would solve all of our problems was commonplace. If the reverse is true today, as scientific research is certainly seen as having created as many problems as it has solved, it is in opposition to the blind faith in the machine that characterized so much of the period that we can now call the Futurist-Constructivist age. Yet, this unswerving faith in the future was not at all blind when it came to inventing applications, derived from Constructivist design principles and destined to serve the masses, such as the prototype news projection system proposed by the Vesnin Brothers in their 1923 plan for a new PRAVDA building in Moscow.

In choosing his subject matter for these works Muirhead has effectively revealed to us a first installment of his list of friends and enemies. And, in much the same way as the confusion resulting from multiple meanings for simple words caused the conversationalists of the 1980s, Muirhead’s project proposes an analysis of “developers” who destroy rather than develop, brokers who are perhaps intending the other meaning of being “broke” and “models” who are not really models for anything other than the consumerism that is the defining characteristic of our society. Nevertheless, taking an adversarial position is not as easy in Canada as it would be in a country in which the adversaries were more clearly defined. Muirhead is not depicting the victims of class struggle. Instead he limits his depictions to those who resist the domination of one group by another, and to those he sees as being in a position of power but who are guilty of the abuse of that power. He specifically singles out two kinds of “deals” that involve Premiers of the Province of British Columbia, one reflecting on the stock manipulation investigation involving the previous Premier, and the other analyzing a bridge construction project in the riding of the current Premier. These pieces therefore operate not only as generalized indicators to a set of complex political and social issues, but also as a representation of specific aspects of the political situation in the Province of British Columbia.

Ultimately the use of artworld vehicles for the representation of artworld ideas opens up a series of fissures into which we can read a variety of meanings, Art as ad, ad as art, subject as ad/art, and object as ad, are possible versions of the successful applications of billboards in art. And, as Martha Rossler has pointed out, works of this type are perhaps more successful as they have “less specificity in relation to their physical locales.” In this case then we can perhaps accept the gallery as the ideal place for these recycled pieces of billboard technology, both from the point of view of neutrality in seeing, and in terms of providing a space where that seeing can be patiently undertaken.

-Bill Jeffries


Essay: “Ross Muirhead: Trios,” Ross Muirhead

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Three artworks in large dark frames, resembling billboards, are mounted on a wall. The works show fragmented colour images and large black and white architectural illustrations.

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Two horizontal artworks in large black frames, in the corner of a gallery. One had two fragmented architectural drawings. The other has a fragmented picture of people in suits and datasheets.

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Two artworks on the walls of a gallery. One shows a drawing of a bridge, and a fragmented image of people in a field. One has an exterior drawing of houses, and two fragmented photos of a city scene.

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2 works on the walls of a gallery, the works are mounted in thick black frames, resembling billboards. The words show fragmented images including architectural drawings, datasheets, and colour photos.

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Trios

Warren Murfitt

Nancy Shaw

Todd Anthony Davis

Amy Jones

Ed Ruscha

Greg Snider

Robin Collyer

Margaret Waylor

Bill Jones

Dan Graham

Robert Linsley

The historical situation regarding the subject is represented in the exhibition by Margaret Waylor's work on Palladian villas (the first modern detached houses). One of her works, in which the villa is drawn directly onto gyprock, is viewed through the other, a three­ dimensional cement abstracted villa resting on a "kitchen" table with folded down "Palladian" wings. The relation between topography and farmland development is represented by Robert Linsley's paintings of exurban development in the Fraser Valley, and by Amy Jones' new work in which a large (two meter high) map of the Fraser Valley is laminated onto plywood and cut to the outline shape of a dining-room set in front of a picture window thereby setting up an oscillatory echo between what "was" and what “is".

Bill Jones and Nancy Shaw explore the problems associated with the conflicting desire to be in (secure) and out (free) through the formal device of reflections registered photographically.	This is effected in Shaw's case through the use of an actual window frame, and in Jones' with glass over the photographed windows, so the gallery reflections act as a palimpsest to the already existing mirror (the photographed window).

The materialistic over-abundance that characterizes suburban growth is clearly presented in the piece Greg Snider will show — a long drawing/collage in which two double garages form mirror images of excess. (There are two of "everything" within ten feet of each other.)

Warren Murfitt's *Four Model Homes* are plinth mounted, highly abstracted representations of the "object of desire" — a critique of the pseudo-variation offered to acquire “difference." Todd Davis and Dan Graham here develop the formal nature of the "row" and its similarity to minimalist sculpture. Davis' photocopy enlargements from single "tourist" slides into a complex of 11 by 17 inch “shingles" depict the European model of a "normal" development, the contradictions of which are revealed through the use of a text overlay. Dan Graham, who along with Ed Ruscha, can be said to have founded this entire area of artistic practice in the late 1960s, will show three photographs from the enormous body of suburban work he has produced.

The notion of detachment, and the privacy that theoretically comes with it, is the operative metaphor in *Some Detached Houses*. The detachment and newly found distance between people that resulted from the flight to the suburbs is reflected in the detachment, distancing and “objectivity" that permeates the work in this exhibition. The show will be an important meeting of work in an important area of artistic practice. To make an exhibition out of such material constitutes, of course, yet another form of “detachment.”

Essay: “Introduction,” Bill Jeffries

A large photo with 2 smaller photos on either side, all in natural wood frames, on a wall. All the photos show black and white landscapes with small buildings in the corner, and phrases in black text.

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A gallery with several artworks. On one wall there are 3 paintings, on the other there is a painting collage. IN the centre, 4 grey plinths show small metal house-like forms on them.

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A closeup of 4 unframed photos on a white wall. One has an apartment complex with a fence, one shows townhouses, one has similar houses in a row, and one shows a playground in front of apartments.

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A small glass window with white panes rests on a white plinth against the wall of a gallery. The window appears to reflect a living room with a large window and furniture. 

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A closeup of 6 unframed black and white photos on a wall. The photos show houses of various sizes in different neighbourhoods. Some have trees in front, and some are in large fields, etc.

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3 paintings mounted on a white wall. One shows a yellow field with houses in the background. One shows a person sitting at a desk with a book. One shows an orange field with houses in the distance. 

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A painting collage on a white wall. The painting shows 3 cushioned chairs and a table, textured with, and layered in front of, a map showing roads and rivers. 

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Two objects mounted on the wall of a gallery. One is a pale-yellow paper in a dark-green rectangle. Below, there is a light box in the shape of a triangle, showing an image of a wide road with trees.

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Robin Collyer, Bill Jones, Todd Anthony Davis, Greg Snider, Robert Linsley, Warren Murfitt, Amy Jones, Dan Graham, Margaret Waylor, Ed Ruscha, Nancy Shaw

Some Detached Houses

Cynthia Short

Cynthia Short is a Canadian artist currently living in New York City. Her drawings and sculptural floor pieces have been widely shown in Eastern Canada with exhibitions at Mercer Union and Wynick Tuck in Toronto, Powerhouse in Montreal, Eye Level in Halifax, and at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. John Bentley Mays, writing in the Globe and Mail, described her show at Mercer Union as "a disturbing minor masterpiece of psychological fiction." Her powerful drawings operate at the intersection of several tendencies in contem­porary art practice: they are at once expressionistic in form, mythological and psychological in content and often unsettling in effect. Her work has been compared to that of Miro and Gorky, and justifiably so, given its “out of a dream” quality. This is Cynthia Short's first Vancouver exhibition.

In the corner of a gallery, there are two large, dark charcoal drawings on the walls. One drawing shows a galaxy with planets and swirls. The other shows a nude angel walking, with their face turned.

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On one wall of a gallery, there is a large charcoal drawing of a nude angel walking. On the other wall, there are three small square drawings showing fabric and bodies. All drawings are very dark.