Shannon Oksanen

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Shannon Oksanen. In *Summerland*, Oksanen remakes the waterskiing scene from the 1965 film *Viva Las Vegas*. Her 35mm film is a combination of visual estimations that represent a moment in America when a shift in consciousness was occurring. The film continues her interest in showmanship sports following in the line of works such as *Spins* (2002) and *Vanishing Point* (2001) that focus on figure skating and surfboarding, using them to capture a time period, and more specifically the ideals of an era as it is being lost or defined. Here Oksanen uses water skiing, saturated colours, costume, choreography, and music to set back time, calling to mind an era and defining it stylistically. She will also present a new painting and drawing series that brings together her interest in portraiture, celebrity and nostalgia. For this new body of work, Oksanen chooses Elvis Presley as her subject, adding unabashedly to the seemingly endless assemblages of images of this pop king. 

### Biography

Shannon Oksanen is originally from Vancouver, where she continues to reside; she acquired a BA from the University of British Columbia in 1993. Since the mid-nineties she has participated in exhibitions across Canada as well as internationally, including solo shows at VTO Gallery, London; Or Gallery, Vancouver; and Tracey Lawrence Gallery, Vancouver. Oksanen participated in *Baja to Vancouver*, a touring exhibition of West Coast artists, coordinated by the Seattle Art Museum, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Wattis Art Institute (2003). Since, she has participated in group exhibitions at Kelowna Art Gallery (2003); Passogen Gallery, Linköping, Sweden (2004); Gallery 303, New York (2005); and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2007). Oksanen is represented by Lawrence Eng Gallery, Vancouver.


Essay: "A General Feel for Summerland," Jenifer Papararo

A painting of Elvis seated playing a guitar, dressed in grey clothing. 

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Three portrait drawings are mounted on the gallery walls. They are coloured drawings, and each depicted man wears different coloured shirts. One of those depicted men is holding a guitar. 

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A drawing of a man and a person-shaped sculpture is installed in a gallery space. A man wearing a grey outfit and holding a black guitar is depicted in a portrait drawing on the wall. 

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A film is projected on the wall in a gallery. The film depicts a man and woman wakeboarding. A film projector placed on the floor close to the gallery entrance projects this film to the wall. 

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A film is projected on the wall in a gallery. The film depicts a man and woman in swimsuits. A silver film projector placed on the floor close to the gallery entrance projects this film to the wall. 

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 Summerland

Jeanne Randolph

Kate Davis

Myfanwy Macleod

Martha Wilson

Hadley+Maxwell

Kelly Mark

Micah Lexier

Elizabeth Zvonar

Cooper Battersby

Emily Vey Duke

Isabelle Pauwels

Randy Lee Cutler

Kristina Podesva

FASTWÜRMS

Dave Dyment

*Keep the IS in FEMINISM* is a collection of new Feminist slogans commissioned for the Contemporary Art Gallery’s street front vitrines. For this project we invited prominent feminist artists along with emerging artists both female and male to “reinvent the ‘f’ word: feminism,” a directive taken from the renowned New York artist and activist collective Guerilla Girls.

Faith Ringold’s “Woman, Freedom, Now” from 1971 still has a resonant tone, but its sense of urgency has waned. We wanted a new round of slogans to capture that original urgency by inflecting the very notion of Feminism back into a contemporary conversation. It’s not only that women are under represented in politics and over represented as objects, it is that women, young and old, no longer identify themselves as feminists. Even with the best of intentions there has been a slow fading of “feminists” as we watch them slide into the history books.

In the last two years there has been an active looking back to feminist art practices of the 1970s. Two prominent references include the traveling block buster *WACK: Art and Feminist Revolution*, which was at the Vancouver Art Gallery. WACK elicited numerous responses from local artists and galleries such as Centre A’s *TentEvent: Generating Exchange* and Artspeak’s *Persistence: An Archive of Feminist Practices*. Also, Frieze magazine’s 2007 feminist issue gave a detailed look at historical feminist work as well as featured new activist practices. Renowned art critic Lucy Lippard declared at  *The Feminist Futures* conference at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2007 that “we’ll be post-feminists when our goals have been met, and not before.” The return of Feminist discourse to the contemporary art table is not a surprise: the time is ripe to pay new attention to this now forty year old practice, to rejuvenate the terms of feminism to better understand what it has effectively achieved and lay out what still needs to be done.

The title of the exhibition was taken from the list of new slogans and is by Winnipeg-based writer, psychoanalyst and performer Jeanne Randolph. Sixteen slogans were displayed over two months. From November 21 to December 21, 2008 we featured slogans by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, Hadley + Maxwell, Randy Lee Cutler, Kelly Mark, Micah Lexier, Myfanwy Macleod, Isabelle Pauwels, Jeanne Randolph, and Martha Wilson, and from December 22, 2008 to January 18, 2009 we featured slogans by Kate Davis, Dave Dyment, Kristina Podesva, FASTWÜRMS, Kelly Mark, Jeanne Randolph, and Elizabeth Zvonar.


A street view of the CAG window spaces, which are painted pink and each contain a large poster with large black block text. 

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Two large fliers are installed in the CAG’s window spaces. The flier on the left mimics CAG’s circular-shaped logo. It says FAG, Feminist Art Gallery. The other one is also a text-based work.  

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Three large fliers are installed in the CAG’s window spaces. They are all text-based works showing slogans such as “Pheminism is Phat.” All the walls behind those windows are pink. 

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This photograph depicts one of the CAG window spaces. Behind a glass window on a pink wall, a large white filter is mounted. The flier says FAG, Feminist Art Gallery in black block fonts. 

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Kate Davis, Dave Dyment, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, Hadley + Maxwell, FASTWÜRMS, Randy Lee Cutler, Kelly Mark, Micah Lexier, Myfanwy Macleod, Isabelle Pauwels, Kristina Podesva, Jeanne Randolph, Martha Wilson, Elizabeth Zvonar

Keep the IS in FEMINISM

Daniel Lopez-Perez

Beatriz Colomina

Olympia Kazi

Alicia Imperiale

Anthony Fontenot

Irene Sunwoo

Lydia Kallipolitti

Craig Buckley

Urtzi Grau

Lisa Hsieh

An explosion of architectural little magazines in the 1960s and 1970s instigated a radical transformation in architectural culture, in which the architecture of the magazines vied with buildings as the site of innovation and debate. *Clip/Stamp/Fold 6: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X* takes stock of over seventy little magazines from this period, which were published in over a dozen cities. Coined in the early twentieth century to designate progressive literary journals, the term "little magazine" is not taken at face value. In addition to short-lived, radical magazines, *Clip/Stamp/Fold 6* includes pamphlets and building instruction manuals as well as professional magazines that experienced "moments of littleness," influenced by the graphics and intellectual concerns of their self-published contemporaries.

*Clip/Stamp/Fold 6* explores the vastness and heterogeneity of this remarkable explosion of independent architectural publishing in the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition's annotated timeline serves as a cross-section tracking the progression and the transformations of little magazines through the design of their covers. A selection of original magazines, sourced locally, surveys the variety of unique formats, re-introducing rare examples from private collections. Forty-four vintage architectural magazines were collected from Vancouver architects and artists for the sixth presentation of *Clip/Stamp/Fold 6* at the Contemporary Art Gallery, and are expanded by complete facsimiles for visitors to browse. Audio interviews with editors and designers of these publications punctuate the room, arid transcriptions of parts of these interviews appear in the newsletter. In addition, many of these editors and designers were invited to respond to the exhibition through a series of Little Magazines/Small Talks events held at the various venues. Selections of these discussions are presented in the gallery in DVD form. An implicit aim of the exhibition is to invite reflection on contemporary uses of media in architecture. Assembling all these remarkable documents for the first time offers a unique view of a key period of architectural innovation and challenges today's architects to provoke a similar intensity.

The exhibition has been a collaborative research and design project by a team of PhD candidates at the School of Architecture at Princeton University led by Professor Beatriz Colomina and is the outcome of two years of seminars, interviews and visits with the editors, architects and theorists who produced the magazines. The project team includes Craig Buckley, Anthony Fontenot, Urtzi Grau, Lisa Hsieh, Alicia lmperiale, Lydia Kallipoliti, Olympia Kazi, Daniel Lopez-Perez, and Irene Sunwoo. The exhibition began in 2006 at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, and has traveled to the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; Documenta 12, (where it was part of the Archplus exhibition The Making of your Magazines),  the Architectural Association, London; and most recently at the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture, Oslo.

For *Clip/Stamp/Fold 6*, the CAG has organized a programme of talks, inviting architects, writers and publishers from the region to respond to the exhibition, including a lecture by the curator Beatriz Colomina. 

Guest curated by Beatriz Colomina


Essay: “Clip/Stamp/Ford 6,” Christina Ritchie

Four CRT TVs are placed on a large pedestal. They play different videos of a person giving a speech in public. The pedestal is covered by the printed images of various magazine covers.

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Many sculptures are installed in a gallery. They are magazines placed inside transparent rounder-shaped plastic cases. Those cases are supported by black metal legs similar to those of music stands. 

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CAG window spaces are covered with the printed images of different magazine covers. They are roughly organized by shapes, and about 50 images appear in rows in each window. 

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Printed images of different magazines entirely cover two walls of the gallery space. Most of those images are coloured. A black bench is placed in front of these two walls. 

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The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X -197X

Clip/Stamp/Fold 6

Max Dean

A chair falls. It doesn’t just fall over, it falls apart. And it falls apart with startling force; its legs fly out from under it, its back topples and rolls away, its seat crashes to the floor with a clatter and thud. But this chair is no Humpty-Dumpty. Once the scattered parts have settled and the noise from the crash quits ringing in your ears, it puts itself back together again. Enabled by a unique mechanical robot embedded in the seat of the chair, and a computer aided vision system suspended from the ceiling above, the chair locates its various parts and methodically re-assembles itself.

*Robotic Chair* was first conceived by Max Dean over twenty years ago in an artist residency at the Canadian National Museum of Science and Technology. Already well-known at that time for his challenging performance-based works, in the intervening years Dean has developed a substantial reputation for his interactive robotic works. Irrespective of form or medium, however, there are themes and relations that he returns to consistently. Characteristically, the spectator is central to the way the works are structured, the nexus around which to explore questions of exposure, trust and responsibility. Computer technology and robotics are, to a great extent, merely tools that the artist has used to construct situations where the spectator is required to act, to exercise a choice and, by doing so, become the performer of the work, becoming complicit in its processes and outcomes.

An early, attention-grabbing performance is exemplary of what Dean is willing to risk. Blindfolded and bound, the artist is dragged feet-first by a winch rigged to suspend the body from a crossbeam. Slowly the audience learns that they can control the action of the winch through the sound they generate. It is then up to the audience to determine their course, and whether the artist will be hung by his feet or not. What is at risk in *Robotic Chair*? In life, we fall apart and put ourselves back together again. If the chair is a representation of life’s process –  of falling down, and picking yourself up; of falling apart, and putting yourself back together, over and over again – then the risk must be that fatal fall, a fall from which the robot can no longer reassemble itself.

Dean routinely makes use of ordinary objects. *Robotic Chair*, for example, is modeled on a basic wooden school chair, sturdy and homely, something that an average viewer might find familiar and unremarkable. Earlier works have used or taken the guise of equally unassuming objects: a stool, a lectern, a table. But these objects are also invested with extraordinary properties. The table, for example, in the work called Table, will try to form a bond with an audience member, attaching itself to the chosen spectator as they move about the exhibition space. The work imposes a certain self-consciousness on the chosen spectator as they choose whether to reciprocate the table’s attention, to play along with the work, or try to escape from unwelcome attention. And what about the spectator that is not chosen? The machine’s behavior is all the more unsettling by virtue of its mundane form.

The chair, on the other hand, is unaware of spectators; it will perform in the absence of an audience, and in this sense it is a departure from the artist’s earlier work.  It is then both “performing” in the *mise-en scène* of the exhibition, and “real” in the autonomy of its functionality and purposiveness.  This duality collapses the difference between the spectacle of the “work” in the “exhibition” and the thing-in-itself. Hence, its potential for failure becomes its most compelling trait.

*Robotic Chair* could easily stand as a metaphor for hope and the virtues of persistence. Hovering just below that uplifting surface, however, is our attraction to failure. Central to either reading is this sense of performativity oscillating between the two poles of spectacle and autonomy. At one extreme is a type of machine pornography, wherein a basic human behavior has been objectified, (hypothetically) infinitely repeatable for our shock and amazement. At the other end is an act of imagination that stages the *Robotic Chair* as possessing both will and desire. From here it calls into question the moral and ethical repertoires that govern our investments in our technological extensions (to use McLuhan’s term), and it is in this dimension that we can look for the meaning of the work.

*Robotic Chair* was realized in collaboration with engineer and systems architect Raffaello D’Andrea and industrial designer Matt Donovan.

*Robotic Chair* has been presented at Yale University and the Yale School of Art (2008); *ARCO* with Nicholas Metivier Gallery (2007), Madrid; *CMA Conference* with PacArt (2007), Ottawa; *Luminato* – Toronto Festival of Arts and Creativity (2007); Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto (2007); Children’s Museum with Kitchener/Waterloo Art Gallery (2007); *a City*, Toronto (2006); *Ars Electronica*, Linz, Austria (2006); and *Private Viewing*, New York City (2006).

### Biography

Max Dean is a performance, video and installation artist originally from Leeds, England. He has widely shown his solo and collaborative projects at such notable institutions as the National Gallery of Canada (2002); ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruh, Germany (2002); and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (2002). Previous group exhibitions also include the *Plateau dell’umanita*, Venice Biennial (2001); *Voici, 100 years of contemporary art*, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2000); and *dAPERTutto* at the Venice Biennial (1999). Dean’s solo exhibitions include *Snap*, Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto (2004); Ottawa Art Gallery(2002); *Mist*, Susan Hobbs Gallery (2002); *Any Moment*, Susan Hobbs Gallery (2000).


A small wooden chair sits on the gallery floor. This chair is mechanicalized and moves automatically. In this photograph, the front two legs of the chair are quickly shifting to its right. 

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A small wooden chair is installed on the gallery floor. This chair is mechanicalized and moves automatically. In this photograph, the chair sits in the posture of a dog lying down.

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A small mechanized wooden chair is installed on the gallery floor. This photograph captures the moment in which the chair is about to rise up from the posture of a dog lying down.

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A small wooden chair sits on the gallery floor. This chair is mechanicalized and moves automatically. In this photograph, the chair is staying still, or it is about to move its legs.

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Robotic Chair

Samuel Roy-Bois

ln all of his sculptural installations, Samuel Roy-Bois sets the viewer in motion or more accurately, makes the viewer aware of their movements. He may ask you to crawl, climb or squeeze in. The guided action may be as simple as walking across a raised floor that, in response, produces amplified sounds, or walking in circles to look into the window of a rotating room. The artist's simple directions ground the body of the viewer in space and in relation to material reality and keep them moving down a path on a scripted journey. 

For his solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Roy-Bois draws a map that should be followed with all the expectations of a traveler on a quest. He will create a new work that will take the viewer through a passageway into a dark place to find a treasure. To set the stage for this journey, the artist will use the gallery's street front windows to transform a common household building material into an overall colour-field. 

### Biography

Originally from Quebec City, Samuel Roy-Bois resides in Vancouver. He acquired his BFA from Université Laval in Quebec (1996) and a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montréal (2001). His installations have been shown across Canada and internationally. His solo exhibitions include *Divertissements*, Point  éphémère, Paris (2007); *Improbable and ridiculous*, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2006); *Faire l’indépendence*, Quartier éphémère, Montréal (2005); *The Monologue (Contempt and seduction)*, Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax (2005); *Fractures mortelles*, Galerie de l’École des arts visuels, Université Laval (2004); *Le monologue*, Galerie Articule, Montréal (2003); *Jai entendu un bruit, je me suis sauvé*, Or Gallery, Vancouver (2003); and *Les printemps obsolete*, Montréal (2001). 

This is an entrance to a gallery space, which is narrowed by white panels attached above the gallery entrance. A large-sized white sculpture is partially visible through the entrance. 

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CAG’s window spaces are filled with pink forms. This is an art installation by Samuel Roy Bois. Behind glass windows, cotton candy-like textured forms are placed with no gaps. 

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CAG’s window spaces facing Nelson Street are filled with pink forms. This is an art installation by Samuel Roy Bois. Behind glass windows, cotton candy-like textured forms are placed with no gaps. 

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This is an installation shot of Samuel Roy Bois’ installation. Black carpet tiles cover the entire floor of a narrow hallway, which was made inside the gallery with white separation walls. 

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A large white and black sculpture is placed on a gallery floor. It is partially hanging from the ceiling via transparent wires. The sculpture resembles a half-completed paper origami. 

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Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait

Samuel Roy Bois

Roy Arden

Stephen Waddell

This solo exhibition of Berlin and Vancouver based artist Stephen Waddell is curated by Roy Arden and will present works from 1997 to 2006 in paint, film and photography. Waddell began his career as a painter but eventually came to concentrate on photography. Studying at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia, he moved to Berlin in 1998 but now maintains a studio in Vancouver and spends time living and working in both cities. Waddell's early paintings focused on anonymous urban spaces. These were usually unpopulated, lonely scenes that seemed like memories of experiences of derealisation. He used the camera to make studies for his paintings and these snapshots and polaroids lead him to take up photography full-time. Waddell also made super 8 film studies of urban pedestrians that paved the way for his tableau-scaled photos of solitary figures for which he has become known. These photos are largely unposed studies of strangers caught at work, in transit or at leisure that reinvent the Impressionist project of "the painting of modern life." Like other painters turned photographers, Waddell's indifference toward criteria established within a strictly photographic tradition permitted him to breathe new life and purpose into the medium. His works are better understood as pictures than photographs in that they draw as much from the history of painting as the history of photography.

Guest curated by Roy Arden


Essay: "Stephen Waddell’s Depictive Art," Roy Arden

Two large scale framed photographs hang on adjacent corner walls in the gallery. One depicts tree roots covered in litter and the other a figure sitting on a tree stump near a body of water.

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Various two-dimensional artworks are installed on the gallery walls. Some of them are small-sized photographs and others are paintings. They all depict urban landscapes. 

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Six photographs are installed on the gallery walls. Two of them are framed photographs depicting a shutter gate. A large photograph on the left depicts a mannequin beside a fire truck. 

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Two video works are projected on the gallery walls. Both videos record a person walking in a city. Two black benches are installed near where those videos are projected. 

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Various large-sized coloured photographs are installed in a gallery space. The photograph on the left depicts a young person sitting on a tree stump beside a body of water. 

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Four large-sized photographs are installed on the gallery walls. One photograph depicts a person standing in a body of water. The other photograph captures two people walking in a park. 

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Allison Hrabluik

*Letter to the Editor*, a poster project by Allison Hrabluik, is in part an exercise in distribution. Only fifty identical posters are produced with the goal of slowly and subtly dispersing them through Vancouver in somewhat unexpected places. What starts in one of the Contemporary Art Gallery’s street front windows will slowly spread out over the course of two months. In this time frame, the artist will personally approach selected common use businesses, asking them to hang a poster from inside their windows. The poster format is a break from Hrabluik’s animation and video work, but retains a narrative format typical to her early work. The poster is a collage of images of small animals, dolls, twigs, and bugs, some of which she reproduced as watercolour paintings while others she left in photographic form. The content at first appears sweet, but turns foreboding as one begins to notice that all the animals are dead and the dolls glare unblinkingly.  

### Biography

Allison Hrabluik was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1974 and is currently based in Vancouver. She holds a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, (1999) and has recently returned from Belgium where she just completed two years of graduate work at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts-Flanders, 2007. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Mercer Union, Toronto (2004); Video Pool. Winnipeg, (2006); Yukon Art Centre, Whitehorse (2006); Western Front, Vancouver (2006); Tatjana Pieters/One Twenty Gallery, Ghent (2006); Diaz Contemporary, Toronto (2007); and KW/AG, Kitchener-Waterloo (2008). Reviews of her work have been published in *Artforum*, *C Magazine* and *Canadian Art*. She has recently finished two new video works, *A Mild Case of Small Pox*, 2007 and *A Question of Law, A Question of Fact and Another Question of Law*, 2008.


Detail of a poster created by artist Allison Hrabluik. Colourful illustration of children, women, and animals are drawn on a pitch black background. 

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An install image of a poster created by Allison Hrabluik on CAG’s window. The poster shows colourful illustration of children, women, and animals on a pitch black background. 

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Letter to the Editor

*DONKY@NINJA@WITCH* is a visual cacophony of cliches and colour coated icons related to Witchcraft and run through popular culture. The legendary Canadian collaborative art Witches, FASTWÜRMS take ancient symbols like the pentagram, and apply a punk do-it-yourself sensibility to them, treating them more as ephemera than ritual objects. In their last video, they pit Witches and Ninjas against each other in the dark and abandoned night streets of Venice. There is a chase and final stand-off between two powerful cultural cliches of midnight evil. In the end, they come together as black collar workers of the night. The mix of styles, genres, subcultures, and identities is common in all of FASTWÜRMS’ installations. They specialize in brewing very particular concoctions, conflating aesthetics and symbols, colourfully mixing metaphors, awkwardly clashin stereotypes, and jumbling iconographies. 

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present FASTWÜRMS’ first solo exhibition in Vancouver *DONKY@NINJA@WITCH*, which is an assortment of several of FASTWÜRMS’ installations, dating back from the late 1990s to 2005. The show includes a new video installation, give-away posters, wall murals, mirror paintings, and over a hundred other new details. This particular mixture includes a collection of elements from *Swag & Shag*, 1995; *Unisex: House of Bangs*, 1999; *Blook & Swash*, 2002; *Denim Pox*, 2002; Pirate Head, 2004; and Blood Clock, 2005. For their re-articulation of *DONKY@NINJA@WITCH* at CAG, FASTWÜRMS will continue refining their aesthetic and conceptual blend by further blurring separate installations, collapsing timelines and overlapping formal elements. 

### Biography

For over thirty years, FASTWÜRMS have moved from film to sculpture to installation, producing large public commissions, and recently participating in the 2006 São Paulo Biennial. They have produced solo projects at the Art Gallery of York University, North York (2007); Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto (2006); the late Zsa Zsa Gallery (2004); and they have exhibited internationally at Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco (1998) and Osaka 90 (1990).  Recent group exhibitions include *Anthem*, Carleton University, Ottawa (2007) and *Flag*, poster intervention, Venice (2007). 

Essay: "FASTWÜRMS: Webs and Icons," Jenifer Papararo

Two coloured photographs are mounted on the walls besides a gallery entrance. A pair of animal horns and a sign that reads NO HUNTING are installed above the entrance. 

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Flags, large posters, and handwritten signs cover the gallery walls. Red, black, and white are prominently used in those images. Two black cooking pots are hanging from the ceiling.

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Many artworks are installed in a gallery space. A series of mirror sculptures on the wall shows the moon cycle. Other drawings and collage pieces share witch motifs including spiders’ webs.

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Various sculptures are installed in a gallery space. Large black web-shaped sculptures cover the gallery walls behind a TV monitor. A red tube-shaped sculpture is hanging from the ceiling.   