Landon Mackenzie

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Vancouver-based artist Landon Mackenzie. Mackenzie was educated at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax and at Concordia University in Montreal and has been working as an artist and educator in Vancouver since 1986. Her work has been exhibited nationally since 1977 and this will be her first solo gallery exhibition in Vancouver.

The exhibition will consist of four large scale acrylic on linen paintings that are part of a recent series that Mackenzie refers to as the *Saskatchewan Paintings*. These works explore the idea of geographical and psychological territories, and never having lived in the Prairies, Mackenzie constructs an imaginary relationship to this Canadian locale from the perspective of an outsider and a woman. Beginning with an underpainting of text extracted from written histories and her own fictional writing, Mackenzie constructs a space for a number of voices. Through subsequent layers of paint which include fields of colour, images, diagrams and maps, these voices become obscured and fragmented. The result is what the artist describes as a kind of mumbling where presence intersects with place, and where the struggle to speak and find a position within the confusion of contemporary identity is played out. It is a complex criss­-crossing of emotional and intellectual territory with historical, geographical and physical space.


Essay: "Landon Claims and the Saskatchewan of the Mind," Charlotte Townsend-Gault

This is a detailed view of Landon Mackenzie’s painting. Three black holes are drawn above a rabbit in a brown field with flowers. 

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This is a detailed view of Landon Mackenzie’s painting. Three black holes are drawn below the dark blue night sky.

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Saskatchewan Paintings

Shelley Niro

Faye HeavyShield

Marcia Crosby

Eric Roberson

The exhibit organizers and artists honour the legitimacy of hybrid aboriginal communities in Vancouver and other urban landscapes, and the importance of the histories of aboriginal peoples displaced from traditional lands. At the same time we acknowledge what is now called Vancouver as the territories of the Coast Salish Nation: Tsleil-Waututh (Burrard), Musqueam, Squamish.

The title of this exhibit, *Nations in Urban Landscapes* represents a strategy to metaphorically locate First Nations outside of the demarcated space of Indian reserves, traditional territories and the "Indian" land question — that is, outside the space where aboriginal people are "officially" recognized as having authority and expertise. Within this political terrain of First Nations/ Canadian relations, the conventions of authenticity, origins and tradition have emerged as a measuring stick for "Indianness." In contrast, the work of Faye HeavyShield, Shelly Niro and Eric Robertson reflect stratified and discontinuous histories, historical displacement, breaks in familial lineage, the impossibility of transcendent traditions, and the blurred edges of their legally, socially and politically defined aboriginal identities. All three artists undermine current "romantic" notions of the authentic Indian as a steward of the land or the official keeper of culture and spirituality, revealing instead the hybrid nature of contemporary aboriginal life. This exhibit, then, is not about how artists of aboriginal ancestry straddle the constructed monoliths of Western and aboriginal cultures. Rather, it speaks to the way in which these individual artists constantly negotiate the shifting boundaries of their aboriginal communities.

Faye HeavyShield currently works in Calgary and is a member of the Kainai of the Blackfoot Nation.

Shelley Niro lives and works and lives in Brantford and is a Bay of Quinte Mohawk from the Six Nations Reserve.

Eric Robertson was born and raised in Vancouver and is of Euro-Canadian and Gitxsan heritage. He lives and works in Montreal, and is currently under contract as a Fine Arts instructor at the En'owkin Centre in the Okanagan Territory.

Paul Chaat Smith is a Comanche writer who lives in Washington, D.C. He was born in west Texas and has lived in Oklahoma, Maryland, South Dakota, San Francisco and New York. His book "Like a Hurricane," coauthored with Robert Allen. 

Marcia Crosby is a 3rd generation "urban Indian" of Haida and Tsimshian ancestry. She lives and works in Vancouver and Massett, Haida Gwaii as an art historian and curator, and a researcher and negotiator for aboriginal education in public institutions.

This exhibition and symposium have been made possible with support from the Canadian Native Arts Foundation and VanCity Credit Union.

Guest curated by Marcia Crosby


Essay: “Nations in Urban Landscape," Marcia Crosby

A close-up photo of a shell sculpture mounted on a white gallery wall. On the black surface of the round-shaped shell, the word ANCESTRAL is curved to show the mother-of-pearl inside.

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Two artworks mounted on a gallery wall. The one on the left contains 12 coloured photographs of landscapes and women. The other contains 24 black and white photographs of a woman from various angles.

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An installation view of the gallery shows photograph pieces mounted on a wall. Some of these photographs have a narrow-wide shape, in which blue wavy shapes are depicted in a dark background.

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A close-up photo of the artwork mounted on a gallery wall. Two rows of six colored photographs are closely lined up horizontally. Some photographs capture turtles, women, landscape, and orange leaves. 

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A close-up photo of the artwork mounted on a gallery wall. Two rows of six colored photographs are closely lined up horizontally. Some photographs capture people’s faces, plaques, and road signs.  

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Faye Heavyshield, Shelley Niro, Eric Roberson

Nations in Urban Landscapes

Fernando Arias Gaviria

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present *Cuarto Frio* (Cooling Room), an installation by Fernando Arias, who lives and works in Bogota, Columbia. Arias' art conveys an attempt to bring awareness to HIV/AIDS as an issue, especially in the context of Latin America where it has to be approached in ways that are more metaphorical than literal. His work also considers the context of the art object and gallery.

*Cuarto Frio* is a 2 metre by 7 metre room consisting of metal walls and mesh ceiling. Within this room are twenty­ one suspended columns made from blood samples encased in laboratory glass and lit with black lights.

This work is both seductive in aesthetic and disturbing in content; it is meticulously constructed but reverberates between sensations of the clinic, the morgue and the sanctuary. It functions like a gallery inside the gallery, and upon entering Cuarto Frio, the viewer is placed in uncomfortable proximity to the virus as represented by the blood samples, and in turn art itself.

This will be the first North American exhibition of work by Fernando Arias. He has exhibited extensively in Latin America at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, Venezuela; the Museum of Modern Art, Bogota, Columbia; the Havana Biennial; the Museum of Arts, Guadalajara, Mexico; as well as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany; and Fotofeis, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Essay: “Disease Circuit," Eugnio Valdés Figueroa

Essay: “Ámbito de la Enfermedad,” Eugnio Valdés Figueroa

An exhibition invitation which has a black background with white, yellow and blue text over top of it, which contains information about the exhibition, gallery and the artist’s name in large letters. 

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Cuarto Frio

Fernado Arias

This new exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery continues our exploration of the ways art is collected. In 1992 and 1993, we presented works from the City of Vancouver Art Collection managed by the Gallery. In 1994, we presented artists who collected other artists' work. These three exhibitions proved to be very popular.

This year we are focusing on individuals who have gathered art but who are not directly involved in the art world; that is, they are not artists or curators, nor are they affiliated with a visual arts institution or business. However, in one way or another, these individuals have friends who are artists and they support these friends in a variety of ways. They may buy work from their artist friends or they may buy work at the suggestion of an artist friend. This exhibition is not about individuals consciously creating a collection, but about encouraging a support system for artists.

Three individuals or couples have been invited to select work from their collection and to determine the arrangement on the Gallery walls. It will be an eclectic presentation of work that represents a number of different art communities in Vancouver and the individual sensibilities of the collectors. Those invited are Janice Dillon and David Gibbons, Doug Foster, and Anastasia MacDonald.

A photo of various artworks installed close to each other in the gallery. On the floor, there are two TVs playing video works, one canoe, a wooden abstract statue, and a dog and a cat made with metal.

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A photo of various artworks mounted on a gallery wall. One painting depicts a man reading a book and thinking, “The steadfast contemplation of everyday fact might one day yield impressive results.”  

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A photo of various artworks mounted on the gallery wall. A white small cross is at the top and placed beneath are paintings and photographs depicting human figures and landscapes in different styles.

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A photo of various artworks mounted on the gallery wall. Most of the paintings and photographs are black and white. There is also a large wooden box with multiple labels sitting in front of the wall. 

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A photo of various artworks installed close to each other in the gallery. In the middle wall, the capital letter “ETZKOYV!” is placed on the top, and placed beneath are photographs of diverse people.

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A photo of artworks installed in the gallery. A set of small-scaled two black canoes are placed closer to the camera; one is bigger than the other, and the smaller one has a snake drawn on its side. 

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Collections with Connections

Allyson Clay

Shonagh Adelman

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Shonagh Adelman and Allyson Clay. Adelman is based in Toronto and has produced a number of provocative exhibitions examining women's sexuality. The work she is exhibiting in Vancouver is from the series titled *Skindeep*. Clay lives and works in Vancouver and the work featured in this exhibition is from the series *Some places in the world a woman could walk* in which she addresses gender roles within relationships and the larger social fabric.

Although these two artists have not consciously worked in relation to each other, there are connections that create a curious dialogue between the two. Both incorporate aspects of photography, painting and text in their work. The texts present a voicing of women in contexts where they are not normally empowered participants; Adelman in terms of asserting sexuality and Clay in terms of inhabiting the urban environment. The imagery and text they employ are laden with ambiguity and place the viewer in a subjective position relative to who is speaking and how the text relates to the images.

This will be the first time that Adelman has exhibited in Vancouver. Her work has been exhibited at A Space, Toronto; Neutral Ground, Regina; Latitude 53, Edmonton; Mercer Union, Toronto; and YYZ, Toronto. Allyson Clay has exhibited widely across Canada including the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon; Edmonton Art Gallery; Costin & Klintworth, Toronto; and Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver.


Five artworks mounted on two gallery walls. Two of the pieces have red organic shapes on black background. The second piece from the right captures a figure that resembles a bent naked human torso.

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Five artworks mounted on the gallery wall. Each of them has a black and white photograph of people or a cityscape accompanied by texts, either in black or red, written beside or over the photograph.

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A photo of the installation view in the gallery. All of the five artworks mounted on the right-hand wall have black and white photographs accompanied by texts written beside or over the photographs.

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Five photo pieces mounted on the gallery walls. Three of them are black and white, and the rest are colored; one depicts a naked woman holding her breasts, and the other depicts red organic shapes. 

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A photo of the installation view in the gallery. Seven photograph pieces are visible; five of them have dark backgrounds foregrounded by organic shapes. The rest are black and white photographs.

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Shonagh Adelman, Allyson Clay

Shonagh Adelman / Allyson Clay

Phillip McCrum

During the past decade, Vancouver-based artist Phillip McCrum has been producing objects and installations that explore both aesthetic and ideological systems within art making practices and society. The work in this exhibition focuses on the portrait, specifically the “head shot,” a staple format of portraiture in which the face takes a central position as a factual declaration of the individual represented. Within this format, McCrum has engaged painting, snapshots, the news media, political icons, and popular culture to present a matrix of typologies that upset the systems that determine how portraits are categorized and consumed.

The long line of photocopies in the hallway evolves gradually from snapshots of friends to images taken from history books and the newspaper. A conflation between the two is accommodated by the printing technology employed. But, by the time one enters the gallery proper, the “everyday” person is replaced by the noteworthy.

With the large Lenin and Mao portraits, McCrum situates iconic political representations used for propaganda within the context of the art gallery. While these images maintain their political implications, visible evidence of the painting process is emphasized, and Lenin and Mao are presented within the genre of portraiture. McCrum's distortion of the idealized image of Lenin of Mao creates absurd and exaggerated portraits that contradict the authority embedded in them and skews our understanding of them.

*Portrait Wall* consists of more than 300 individually framed “head shots” extracted directly from the newspaper. The captions have been removed and paint has been applied to each face which transforms them into miniature paintings. Some appear familiar, some not. Without the benefit of captions, McCrum plays upon our desire to name who and what we are looking at, but frustrates the relationship between the portrayed and why they might be newsworthy. His application of fine art pigments to the temporal nature of newsprint brings the art object into an alliance with the banality of the daily newspaper photograph. With these different works, the portrait emerges as a complex system of coding that oscillates between documentation, power, fame,and art while engaging the viewer in sensations of the familiar and the foreign.

### Biography

Phillip McCrum has exhibited at Or Gallery, Artspeak, Western Front, all Vancouver; Cold City Gallery, Toronto and the University of Moncton, New Brunswick. He was also Director/Curator for the Or Gallery, Assistant Director for Saw Video in Ottawa, and is currently co-editor for Boo Magazine published in Vancouver.



Essay: “Phillip McCrum: Portrait Wall & Other Work,” Keith Wallace

A detail of work by Phillip McCrum. 14 times 9 small portrait photographs, each framed in black identical frames, are assembled on the wall. 

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A photo of an installation view in the gallery. A set of three paintings shows the head of Mao Zedong in a yellow background in between two paintings of the head of Vladimir Lenin in a red background. 

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A photo of an installation view in the gallery.  Eight paintings mounted on three walls show the heads of famous historical figures including Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin.

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A photo collage of 320 small photographs of human faces mounted at a corner of the gallery space. Each photograph is black framed; some images are colored and some are black and white. 

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A photo of a photo collage installed in a gallery wall. The photographed faces of different people align horizontally in a long stretched white sheet of paper mounted on a white gallery wall.

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Portrait Wall & Other Work

Yoko Takashima

Yoko Takashima has been working with slide and video installations for the past three years. Using this technology, she manipulates the movement, time and scale of the image to create a dynamic physical and psychological relationship between the viewer, the space of the gallery and the work.

Illuminated images within the darkened confines of the gallery are the stage for her exploration of the particularities of human activity and experience within social and cultural structures, and the ambiguity between the foreign and the familiar. Takashima employs footage of minimal body gestures and repetitive movement to instill a meditative yet unsettling sensation.

*Brushism* focuses on a close-up of the artist's mouth as she brushes her teeth. This image, projected onto a curved surface and then reflected onto hanging Plexiglass discs, intensifies a mundane daily routine that is more often than not taken for granted. In this work it becomes an exaggerated self-conscious ritual of restricted movement within a psychologically private and often reflective space that is inhabited for short periods of time.

*Breathing Hand* incorporates computer processed images that have been manipulated using the "Morph" program. With eight different still images, Takashima creates a pulsating human hand that undergoes a circuitous metamorphosis moving from fetal stage to death and back again. The scale of the image and intensity of the audio component places the viewer in an intimate and focused relationship with a microcosm of bodily transformation.

Yoko Takashima was born in Nagoya, Japan and moved to Canada in 1988 where she attended the University of Lethbridge, Alberta and the University of Victoria. Upcoming exhibitions include the New Gallery, Calgary; Neutral Ground, Saskatoon; A Space, Toronto; and Optical, Montreal.


A front view of a sculpture mounted on the gallery wall. The sculpture has a circular shape and glows blue light. The color of this light changes into red and purple in the space around the sculpture.

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This is a view of a hemisphere-shaped sculpture installed in the darkened gallery. Orange-colored light glows from the sculpture. A shadow of a human’s bottom of the foot is visible from the outside.

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Two large circular-shaped thin red sculptures are visible in this photograph. Hanging from the gallery’s ceiling, these sculptures have a weak white light source placed slightly off-centered. 

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A large circular-shaped sculpture is installed on a gallery wall. A blue light glows from the sculpture in a darkened gallery. Inside, there is a shadow of two spikes aligned horizontally. 

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A large circular-shaped red sculpture is installed in the gallery. The sculpture is thin and completely attached to the wall. There is a circle of white light glowing in the middle of the sculpture.  

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An installation view of three sculptures in the darkened gallery space. All of these sculptures, hanging from the ceiling, are large-scaped, thin, and have a red circular shape.  

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A man is looking at the artwork mounted on the gallery wall. The piece is flat and shaped in a small black oval resembling a hole. A photographed human hand is depicted in the middle of this hole.  

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A man is looking at the artwork attached to the white gallery wall. The piece has a small oval shape and it glows orange light in a darkened gallery space. 