KALENDARIUM AT EUGENE CHOO
JUNE 2024 - MAY 2025

3683 Main Street - Vancouver, B.C.

JUNE: LOTTA ANTONSSON
JULY: SAMUEL ROY-BOIS
AUGUST: JEAN MACRAE
SEPTEMBER: BERNADETTE PHAN
OCTOBER: JACK JEFFREY
NOVEMBER: ERIN SKIFFINGTON
DECEMBER: KIM KENNEDY AUSTIN
JANUARY: LES RAMSAY
FEBRUARY: CHARLENE VICKERS
MARCH: RYAN QUAST

Kalendarium is a curatorial project which consists of selecting and installing an art work once a month for a year behind the sales counter of Eugene Choo. Previously, this space has been occupied by a large calendar designed by Massimo Vignelli for Charles Stendig in 1966. The title of this curatorial project, Kalendarium is a Swedish word that not only references this calendar, but also refers to the Latin word calendarium (meaning book of debts, to be paid on certain dates), used in Swedish since 1549. Each month the curator Patrik Andersson has agreed to deliver and exchange an art work that by the end of the tenure conceptually reads like a group exhibition.

Alliance Francaise Vancouver September 12 - November 9, 2024

Paris based artist Raphaël Zarka and Vancouver’s Cameron Kerr both make art that mines the histories of modern art and design. Addressing our contemporary urban and rural environments, they draw attention to an allegorical conflict between nature and culture. They also highlight the interstice between public and private space through individual aesthetic means. If, as art historian and sociologist Walter Grasskamp has noted, “public space is to be more than a mere planning cliché, then, it must be fed constantly with 'a supply of collective energy in all its manifestions — political, economic, social, theatrical as well as artistic.” As he points out, “the fourth dimension of public space is its utilization.” Kerr and Zarka both make art that make visible this engagement. It was this impulse that brought the two artists together in the exhibition Out of Control: The Concrete Art of Skateboarding for Whistler’s Audain Art Museum in 2022/23 — a major exhibition addressing the intersection between art, architecture and skateboarding.

Raphaël Zarka’s Regular Score, W9M1 was specifically commissioned for Out of Control and received financial support from Canada Council and Vancouver’s Consulat Général a France. The work is composed of a set of nine modular sculptures produced by Van Urban Timber, a Squamish-based sawmill and manufacturer of wood products founded and run by a group of skateboarders. Prior to being exhibited in the museum, Zarka invited skateboarders to skate the sculptures — leaving scratch marks and dents that became an essential part of the artwork. At Alliance Francaise, skaters were once again invited to activate and add their individual gestures to the “score.” Shown alongside these sculptures are a selection of photographs from Riding Modern Art (2007-), an ongoing series of black-and-white photographs of images drawn from skateboarding magazines showing skaters performing tricks on modern sculptures installed in public spaces. Over the years, the project has become more global and participatory in that skaters and photographers contribute images to his archive. They reveal what most documentation of architecture and public art leaves out, the creative energy of its clandestine users.

Like Zarka, Kerr expands Minimalist and Conceptual practices through material exploration to address both historical and contemporary conditions. Working in material ranging from marble, wood and photography, Kerr merges modernist tendencies associated with Minimalism and Surrealism to produce uncanny reminders of the conflicts that make up our natural and built environments. Kerr is particularly interested in the way memory and vision operate within aesthetic structures to address the inside and outside, self and the world. Included in this exhibition are a number of hinged assemblages whose open and closed forms respond to the space of the gallery and its viewers. Here, sculpture and photography are put into dialogue to set up a tension between abstraction and representation. This tension is also found in the two photographs included that document Kerr’s ongoing series of clandestine chainsaw carvings using the leftover stumps from logging activities in British Columbia — these can be understood as a kind of rural graffiti or formalist intervention in the tradition of Earthworks.

Paris based artist Raphaël Zarka and Vancouver’s Cameron Kerr both make art that mines the histories of modern art and design. Addressing our contemporary urban and rural environments, they draw attention to an allegorical conflict between nature and culture as well as architecture and bodies. In this exhibition, both artists have employed materials natural to British Columbia ranging from marble and cedar from Vancouver Island to salvaged Douglas Fir from the mainland of B.C.. In their work we also find a shared interest in “pedestrian speech acts” such as skateboarding. It was this impulse that initially brought the two artists together in the exhibition Out of Control: The Concrete Art of Skateboarding for Whistler’s Audain Art Museum in 2022/23 — a major exhibition addressing the intersection between art and skateboarding.

Dave Allen / Hank Bull / Thomas Elovsson /Carole Itter / Al Neil / Pippa Lattey / Laura Piasta / Samuel Roy-Bois / Ron Tran

Exhibition dates: March 2 – March 31, 2024

The exhibition Contra-Band takes as its starting point a piano once owned by the late artist and musician Al Neil. Piano (2021) is a kinetic sculpture constructed by Vancouver artist Pippa Lattey that functions both as a frame and an activator of Neil’s piano. Initially shown during her residency at the Blue Cabin, Piano literally turns the piano into a playing piano and artwork — producing a concrete and abstract melody in the spirit evoking not only Al Neil, but the likes of John Cage and Alfred Jarry. Just as artists and musicians were no doubt invited to the Blue Cabin to make music with Neil, Trapp Project has invited a group of artists to a pataphysical jam session of sorts. The exhibition reverberates with references and relations near and far but are ultimately united by an acute awareness and response to socio-economic conditions and the sound of music.

The exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and support of Ian Penn and Sandy Whitehouse. Special thanks to Thomas Evdokimoff, Luke Blackstone and Brad Chernoff for their assistance during the installation of the exhibition. Also an enormous thank you to Judith Steedman for her design.

ANDY ANDERSON / BENNY ZENGA / CHRISTIAN ZENGA

January 7 - February 18, 2024

SKATE BREAK: PROTOTYPES FOR PLAY, AN EXHIBITION BRINGS TOGETHER FURNITURE, DRAWINGS, FILM AND PRINT BY THREE ARTISTS WHOSE INDIVIDUAL STRENGTHS AND SHARED INTEREST IN SKATEBOARDING AND DESIGN HAS LED TO EXPERIMENTS THAT SHUTTLE BETWEEN ART, DESIGN AND ATHLETICS. HERE, THEIR DESIGNS OF FURNITURE, SKATEBOARDS AND OTHER MULTI-FUNCTIONAL OBJECTS COME TOGETHER TO ENCOURAGE LUDIC BEHAVIOUR AND PRY OPEN NEW HYBRID CULTURAL MODELS.

LIMITED EDITION CATALOGUE AVAILABLE ON REQUEST: DM @TRAPPPROJECTS

BIOS:

Andy Anderson is from Whiterock, B.C. but lives and works as a professional skateboarder in Venice Beach, California. He is known for his unique style that blends classic tricks of the early decades of skateboarding with contemporary techniques. In this sense he responds to history as much as the present. Not only does he design his own tricks in response to our built environment, but he designs his own boards, wheels and signature helmets. While this is his first exhibition showcasing his drawings and graphics in an art gallery, his art and design is known around the world. Anderson’s board that he skated in the 2020 Olympics is included in the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Benny Zenga is an artist, filmmaker and designer whose projects often involve building unique contraptions — whether it’s a double decker bicycle or rogue hut dwelling — Benny thrives in immersing himself in all parts of the process. He sees the camera as a tool: to experience life more deeply, to build community, to transform his life. Benny has led video campaigns for Swatch, Red Bull, Vans, Converse, VICE and MTV. His filmwork has been included in such venues as Anthology Film Archives, New York, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, Barbican, London and L'Entrepôt, Paris.

Christian Zenga holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and a MArch from the University of Toronto. He is an interdisciplinary artist, architect and filmmaker who works primarily in sculpture and large-scale public installations, producing projects which necessitate both a sensitivity to material and skilled craftsmanship. His practice engages with ideas of citizen-initiated architecture and craft, and the merger of the built environment with nature. Zenga’s work activates public spaces through the creation of interactive works that thoughtfully reflect the history of a site and invite cross-cultural contact and collaboration.

October 21 - November 19, 2023

Figures and Folds: New Work by Parvin Peivandi highlights Peivandi’s innovative approach to a broad range of material practices ranging from papermaking, textiles, and drawings to ceramics and metal work. The exhibition charts the artist’s enduring interest in the traditional arts of her native Iran (art, architecture, design, craft and poetry) while indicating an astute awareness of Western art traditions such as Surrealism and Minimalism from which she gleans a phenomenological impulse.

Included in this exhibition are new works produced during her recent residency at Banff Centre for the Arts, as well as work made at her studio in Chicago. Many of these art works are grounded in a close study of, and at times integration of, motifs, colour and material found in Iranian tribal rugs she has collected for over a decade. For the artist, these hand-made and well-worn objects carry with them histories of displacement, nomadic life and in particular the struggles of women. Both literally and metaphorically Peivandi folds these objects and formal conventions into her own hybrid configurations —unravelling and exposing these established paradigms.

Parvin Peivandi holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago along with an undergraduate degree from Emily Carr University of Art & Design. She has shown her art in solo and group exhibitions locally and internationally, including at Expo Chicago, NCECA, the Polygon Gallery, Griffin Art Projects, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Burrard Arts Foundation.

CASTING SHADOWS

May 13 – June 4, 2023

Maru Aponte / Danielle Bobier / Lyndl Hall / Scott Massey / Ian Penn


Unlike forecaster’s who try to predict the weather, the artists in this exhibition observe and record natural phenomena through a variety of rear-view mirrors provided by artistic traditions. Maru Aponte makes large scale watercolour paintings on canvas that privilege colour and chance over line and control to foreground liquid memories of time and place. Her beach scenes insert personal observations and identity into the well-trodden paradigm of post-painterly abstraction to widen our eyes to the emotive dimension of colour, light and shadows.

If Maru’s vantage point looks through the landscape, Danielle Bobier’s Remote/Robot observes it from above. Routed onto plywood, the 15 foot square composition is based on satellite-captured images of weather patterns. Here the inorganic grid-lines create an uncanny tension between the past, the future, nature and technology. The work shows an interest in physiography and remote sensing, using technology to manipulate what is essentially "god's eye view”.

Countering this downward gaze, Lyndl Hall’s drawing Ascension (after Dürer) pulls us up toward the clouds where Christ’s feet can be seen sticking out — caught in the act of transformation. Lyndl approaches magic and divination as a way to think about perception and language. In much of her work she translates systems of navigation, geometry and cartography into a poetic system of her own. Another good example of this is No Moment Without Its Line, a sundial that merges two distinctly different descriptive systems to redefine space and time in sculptural terms.

Scott Massey has spent much of his artistic career bridging his interest in science and art with inventions that frame and accentuate the aesthetic dimension of natural phenomena. Cloudmaking (Viewed under the principle of least time, or constructive interference) is a performative sculptural work that manipulates and refracts light through multiple lenses. These stacked lenses focus on a magnified droplet of water which in turn becomes a lens as it expands. Eventually the droplet falls onto a heated bronze dish where it transforms playfully into a cloud-like bit of steam. Arguably a bit more ominous is his photograph Omen made from a large format 4x5 negative. Here, the shadow cast by the province-wide wide forest fires of 2018 filters an image of the setting sun to form a discrete black hole above Ragged Island across from Bowen Island where the artist resides.

A certified inventor and cardiologist, the artist Ian Penn has spent the last three years observing and painting clouds that he has given three categories: Covid Clouds, Trump Clouds and Putin Clouds. Weather comes and goes. The question is how to deal with bad weather. For Penn, there is nothing more pertinent than addressing the present conditions through tropes that will remain as relevant in the future as they have been in the past. In these paintings, the beautiful and sublime compete in clouds casting shadows on our mental and physical state of being.

Artist Bios:

Maru Aponte is an artist from the Caribbean Island of Puerto Rico. Her work investigates color and the unknown results of painting. Before completing her MFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver this year, she studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for two years and was the first Puerto Rican to graduate from the painting department of The Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.

Danielle Bobier holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2016), and a diploma in Fine Art from Langara College (2014). She has shown in local solo and group exhibitions, and is the recipient of two BC Arts Council grants, the Langara College Painting Studio Award, and residencies at Malaspina Printmakers and Makerlabs. She works professionally as a fine art framer and makes her studio at 1000 Parker Street in Vancouver.

Lyndl Hall is a visual artist based in Calgary who has had solo exhibitions at the Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver; the Burnaby Art Gallery; the Reach Gallery Museum, Abbotsford; CSA Space, Vancouver; as well as participating in group exhibitions at the Sanatorium Project Space, Istanbul; the Western Front, Vancouver; and Access Artist Run Centre, Vancouver. Hall has a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal and a MAA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver.

Scott Massey holds a BFA in photography from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design (Vancouver) and has participated in residencies at: Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity 2010/2015, Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, Lumen Collective Atina Italy and Dazibao/PRIM Montreal. He has been awarded numerous production/creation grants from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council. Massey currently lives and works on Bowen Island (Nex̱wlélex̱m), British Columbia.

Ian Penn is a doctor, inventor and artist based in Vancouver, originally from Sydney, Australia. Penn graduated from Emily Carr University of Art + Design where he began his exploration of personal and collective histories through the tradition and practice ofplein airlandscape painting. Careful observation and reflection is at the heart of his practice. His work can be found in various public and private collections, including the VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation.

April 8th - May 7th, 2023

WEST COAST / WEST COAST is an exhibition of new work by Lotta Antonsson. Treating the gallery as an intertidal zone, Antonsson links her roots in Sweden’s West Coast with her long standing fascination with, and ties to, British Columbia’s landscape and its photo-conceptual history. For this exhibition, Antonsson has sourced image of women and nature from vintage magazines and records that she combines with seashells and driftwood from both coasts. In her work, the ebb and flows of nature are fossilized and echoed in the repeated images and tropes that have defined the female figure. Waves of water, waves of emotion, waves of music and waves of fashion flow in and out of focus to destabilize familiar clichés. The subjects of manufactured desire are given their own abject subjectivity that stares back at us.

Antonsson belongs to a generation of Swedish artists who emerged in the 1990s, inspired by post-structuralist theory and art exploring new media as it pertains to identity formation. For nearly three decades, her work has questioned the objectification of women with irony and self-distance. At the heart of this project has been her exploration and exploitation of lens-based images disseminated via printed matter. In particular, Antonsson’s work reflects her fascination with the late 1960s and 1970s, in a style where documentary and fiction blur in a merging of social and sexual revolutions.

Antonsson lives and works in Falkenberg, Sweden and has for the past two decades also had a studio in Berlin, Germany. Since her first visit to North America in 1993, Antonsson has been fascinated with both the natural and cultural landscape of North America’s West Coast. In 1998, she had her first solo exhibition in Vancouver at Trylowsky Gallery. For the past two decades, Antonsson has maintained a deep relationship with both the West Coast of British Columbia and her native West Coast of Sweden.

For this exhibition, Antonsson will assemble a collection of images and objects from her studio that will function as pretext for her research into local archives and the shoreline of Vancouver. The exhibition title, West Coast / West Coast, is a literal reference to the artist’s research sites, but also evokes East Coast / West Coast, the title of a work by Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt produced in 1969, just prior to their arrival in Vancouver.

This exhibition is part of the 2023 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibitions Program. It has been made possible with the generous support of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and sponsorship by The Lab, Vancouver. Special thanks to Chernoff Fine Arts and Andrew Kent for framing, Barbara Bernath, Christos and Sophie Dikeakos, Jean Macrae and Joe Filippone for sharing objects from their collections. Ian Penn and Sandy Whitehouse Penn for making this possible.

Exhibition dates: April 8th to May 7th

Gallery hours: Sat & Sun 1-5pm or by appointment (DM or email)

Nov 19 – Dec 4th, 2022

Angus Ferguson’s paintings, drawings and sculptures have an immediate appeal that derives as much from the many layers of references to the history of art, animation, and film history as from their subtle use of gestures, colours and installation tactics. Despite all this appeal, the work remains ambigious. While illustrative, it does not very readily illustrate. You could say that it has a pictorial quality in line with rebuses. With this in mind, Ferguson’s practice hinges on the tension between two speeds of reading his work: fast and slow.

Perhaps it was this temporal aspect of his work that led me to think of his work in relation to music. In particular it reminds me of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations (1899). A program note for a performance in 1911 explained that:

“This work, commenced in a spirit of humour & continued in deep seriousness, contains sketches of the composer's friends. It may be understood that these personages comment or reflect on the original theme & each one attempts a solution of the Enigma, for so the theme is called. The sketches are not 'portraits' but each variation contains a distinct idea founded on some particular personality or perhaps on some incident known only to two people. This is the basis of the composition, but the work may be listened to as a 'piece of music' apart from any extraneous consideration.”

In other words, these musical compositions function like portraits based on musical notes and characterizations. They derive not so much out of professional duty or expectations as much as for the shared pleasure and understanding of a few. In my imagination, this is not unlike the way Angus Ferguson composes a painting or assembles a body of work. They appear driven by an amusement of juxtaposing one enigma with another to produce his own modus operandi.

Elgar’s portraits would go beyond a personal folly and become famously popular. Despite this, Elgar did claim that the scores still retained a musical mystery within their composition: “The Enigma I will not explain – its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed…”. In a similar “spirit of humour” and “deep seriousness,” Angus Ferguson has turned familiar tropes into uncanny variations on artistic enigmas.

THE CONCRETE ART OF SKATEBOARDING

SEPTEMBER 17 - JANUARY 8TH

ARTISTS: RAYMOND BOISJOLY, KARIN BUBAŠ, ANDREW DADSON, HANNAH DUBOIS, NOAH FRIEBEL, TIM GARDNER, DAN GRAHAM, BRACKEN HANUSE CORLETT, CHRISTIAN HUIZENGA, MIKAELA KAUTZKY, ANDREW KENT, CAMERON KERR, ALEX MORRISON, MICHELLE PEZEL, SAMUEL ROY-BOIS, RON TERADA, IAN WALLACE, AMIR ZAKI, AND RAPHAËL ZARKA.

Out of Control is organized by the Audain Art Museum, Whistler, British Columbia. The exhibition is guest curated by Patrik Andersson (TRAPP PROJECTS) and organized by the Museum’s Gail & Stephen Curator Kiriko Watanabe,

The exhibition is sponsored by the TD Bank Group, Major Sponsors RAB Foundation and Herschel Supply Co., and Susan I. Roop for their exceptional support; government partners Canada Council for the Arts, the Resort Municipality of Whistler, and the Consulate General of France in Vancouver, hotel partner Fairmont Chateau Whistler and printing partner Tricera Printing. The accompanying book designed by Judith Steedman is proudly supported by a sponsorship by Hemlock Printers and produced 100 percent carbon neutral. Special thanks to Maryon Adelaar for her donation in support of the catalogue!

Images: Courtesy Audain Art Museum

The exhibition catalogue is available for purchase in the Museum Shop (https://shop.audainartmuseum.com) and picked up at the museum or at Trapp Projects in Vancouver.

For more information, go to: https://audainartmuseum.com

PENN IDEA ART AWARD AND EXHIBITION OF ARTWORK FROM THE VGH & UBC HOSPITAL FOUNDATION ART COLLECTION

ART WORK BY: SONNY ASSU, UTA BARTH, KARIN BUBAŠ, GENEVIÈVE CADIEUX, LIZ CARTER, ROXANNE CHARLES, NAN LAWSON CHENEY, ENN ERISALU, LUCIAN FREUD, TORRIE GROENING, MONA HATOUM, CAROLE ITTER, KRISTA JAHNKE, RUSSNA KAUR, ARNO KORTSCHOT, GLENN LIGON, ROBERT LINSLEY, CYRUS MCEACHERN, LEVI NELSON, CHRISTIAN NICOLAY, IAN PENN, MARY PRATT, WATER POON, JULIANA REMPEL, DAVID ROBINSON, CHRISTOPHER RODRIGUES, YINKA SHONIBARE, LORNA SIMPSON, JACOB STROHAN, GORDON SMITH, SVAVA TERGESEN, ANDY WARHOL, PAUL WINDSOR, ALAN WOOD, JIN-ME YOON

2022 SHORT LISTED ARTISTS:

ROXANNE CHARLES, JACOB STROHAN AND SVAVA TERGESEN

WINNING PROPOSAL FOR A COMMISSION TO BE INSTALLED IN THE WAITROOM OF VGH EMERGENCY: JACOB STROHAN

2022 Nominators: Raymond Boisjoly and Kathy Slade (S.F.U.); Scott McBride and Liz Toohey-Wiese (K.P.U.); Marina Roy and Althea Thauberger (U.B.C.); Elizabeth McIntosh and Birthe Piontek (E.C.U.A.D.).

2022 Jury: Patrik Andersson, Grant Arnold, Roberta Beiser, Russna Kaur, Katharine Knowles, Scott Maher (VCH, VGH Emergency Department Patient Services Manager), Mira Malatestinic, Coleen Nemtin, Lori Quinn (VCH, Director - Indigenous Patient Experience and Professional Practice)

Founded in 2009 by Dr. Ian Penn (BFA 2010) and Dr. Sandy Penn Whitehouse, the PENN IDEA Art Award was established to link the world of visual art with that of health care via a response by the recipients to site-specific needs at Vancouver General Hospital, UBC Hospital and other health care facilities like GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre. Initially awarded through Emily Carr University of Art and Design to an ECUAD student or alumnus, we are excited to announce that the award has now evolved to include students and postgraduates from other Fine Art degree granting institutions in the Lower Mainland. Over the past eleven years, the winning work has been placed in different areas of our hospitals as part of the VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation Art Collection.

MARIAN PENNER BANCROFT, CHRISTOS DIKEAKOS, HANNAH DUBOIS, MARISA KRIANGWIWAT HOLMES, JACK JEFFREY, KEN LUM, ISAAC THOMAS, NEIL WEDMAN  

April 16th through May 8, 2022

In his car rides & street scans of 1969/71, Christos Dikeakos has commented that he “was a vehicular flaneur of Vancouver’s False Creek basin, an industrial and desolate urban expanse. This was a wasteland not just of buildings, but of human values and street interaction.” This “scanning” and open-ended observation of the shifting landscape, economy and population that is called Vancouver, is an artistic strategy he shares with numerous other artists. For this exhibition, a few of these artists have been brought together to provide a fragmented, yet focused, mapping of place and space which also reveals shifts in the photographic medium itself. Whether by car, public transport, walking, or simply standing still, the works in this exhibition contribute to a type of unitary urbanism of Vancouver that continues to question the status quo production of space.

TEXTILE, WEARABLES and ARCHIVE
Featuring: Tsumori Chisato, Comme des Garçons, Ozone Community, Hysteric Glamour, FRAPBOIS, LIMI Feu, Issey Miyake, mercibeaucoup, Mikiosakabe, Né-Net, Anna Sui, Sunaokuwahara, Yohji Yamamoto and others

October 16 -24th, 2021

“After all, those fine clothes were once worn by a sheep, and they never turned it into anything better than a sheep.”

Isaac Penn is a fiber artist, textile designer and clothier based in Vancouver. He holds a BFA in fibers at the Savannah College of Art & Design with a focus in raw material development as well as various product lines ranging from garments to installation art. Most recently he completed a Master of Science in Textile and Clothing Management at Hochschule Niedderhein in Monchengladbach, Germany where his research focused on the ecosystem of fashion and how ideas and trends develop into what we see today.

In 1969, Vancouver’s Conceptual art-duo N.E. Thing Co. declared that “Art is all over.” As if an extension or misreading of this statement, this exhibition looks at Isaac Penn’s daily practice of playing, making, buying and selling to proposes that “Fashion is all over.” While this exhibition presents a focused and material “collection,” it runs parallel to Penn’s Instagram account @ittookyears which, like Charles Baudelaire’s flaneur in the 19th century, tries to capture the “particular beauty, the beauty of circumstances and the sketch of manners” that he stumbles upon in the street as much as in the virtual world. The exhibition focuses on four distinct bodies of work that nonetheless inform each other. A limited production of pyjamas inspired and made from Liberty of London fabrics are shown alongside stretched quilts made from the same source. These rich colour and pattern fields function as reminders of their origin in the Arts and Craft and Aesthetic Movements of the mid to late 19th century but are also connected to Isaac Penn’s interest in DIY aesthetics as they intersect with specific elements of Japanese fashion design. Responding to the architecture of the gallery are woven textiles suspended from the ceiling, hanging on the walls and placed on the floor. These weavings strike a dialogue with Penn’s private archive of 1990’s Japanese clothing that are for sale along with his own designs. This includes items by Tsumori Chisato, Comme des Garçons, Ozone Community, Hysteric Glamour, FRAPBOIS, LIMI Feu, Issey Miyake, mercibeaucoup, Mikiosakabe, Né-Net, Anna Sui, Sunaokuwahara, Yohji Yamamoto.

“My interest as a maker lies in the manipulation and transformation of materials and the collaborative nature of the finite object. As a designer, I’m interested in the foundational and basic design elements; finding practical solutions through process and practice. Attention to details, assessing one’s real needs and requirements, leads to decision making through simple gestures. Common sense drives the discovery and exposure of universal constants. Curiosity, experimentation and a constant urge to produce leads to understanding, innovation and development.” (Isaac Penn)

Photography: Rachel Topham

Teeth, Loan and Trust Company, Consolidated: The Trylowsky Collection

September 24 – December 11, 2021
Curated by Patrik Andersson

A TRAPP PROJECT FOR GRIFFIN ART PROJECTS, North Vancouver

Documentation: Rachel Topham Photography

There are many ways and reasons to collect art. On December 3, 1919, unable to pay his American dentist Daniel Tzanck in cash, the artist Marcel Duchamp made and signed a fake cheque written in the amount of the 115 dollars that he had been billed. The significance of this false Teeth, Loan and Trust Company, Consolidated cheque may be measured both by the fact that the dentist accepted this original copy as payment and that Duchamp valued it so highly that he bought it back from him years later at an inflated price. The title of this artwork has a number of puns embedded in it. Not only does Duchamp ‘Thank” Dr. Tzanck with this work, but the spelling of “check” refers as much to a cheque as it alludes to Duchamp’s obsession with the game of chess.

Continuing in this tradition, Dr. Zenon Trylowsky opened his dental practice on the twelfth floor of the Vancouver Block Building at Granville and Georgia Street in 1996. Like Tzanck Check, the majority of work in Trylowsky’s collection was acquired through exchange — particularly beneficial for artists working independently without a dental plan. In 1997, Trylowsky began collaborating with curator Patrik Andersson who that same year founded Trapp Projects, a curatorial platform initiated to introduce local and international artists which regularly transformed his private office across the hall from his dental practice into Trylowsky Gallery. For this project, this tradition continues with the Griffin exhibiton and an offsite show at the dental clinic, Office Work, which presents work by Kim Kennedy Austin, Ryan Quast and Neil Wedman. These dual exhibitions at the Griffin and the dental office highlight a selection of works from this collection’s 20 year history.

Artists: Vikky Alexander, Jerry Allen, John Anderson, Lotta Antonsson, Roy Arden, Kim Kennedy Austin, Tim Barber, Karin Bubaš, Tom Burrows, Neil Campbell, Lincoln Clarkes, Christos Dikeakos, Jamie Dolinko, Hannah Dubois, Marcel Dzama, Mark Gilbert, Graham Gilmore, Rodney Graham, Claire Greenshaw, Adad Hannah, Arni Haraldsson, Cameron Kerr, Robert Kleyn, David Korty, Evan Lee, Tim Lee, Robert Linsley, Attila Richard Lucacs, Kelly Lycan, Jean MacRae, Jason McLean, Al McWilliams, Mathew McWilliams, Myfanwy MacLeod, Eric Metcalfe, Julie Morstad, Shannon Oksanen, Oraf, Heather Passmore, Isabelle Pauwels, Parvin Peivandi, Ryan Quast, Tony Romano, Derek Root, Peter Schuyff, Alex Tedlie-Stursberg, Ron Terada, Mia Thomsett, T&T (Tony Romano & Tyler Brett), Holly Ward, Neil Wedman, Brian White and Kelly Wood.

OFFICE WORK:

KIM KENNEDY AUSTIN / RYAN QUAST / NEIL WEDMAN

September 24 – December 11, 2021

Viewed by dental appointment

Public Viewing: Saturday October 2nd and 9th.

Where: TRYLOWSKY GALLERY

1216 - 736 GRANVILLE STREET

Buzz Dr. Trylowsky 1216 to enter building

This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver and functions as an extension of the exhibition Teeth, Loan and Trust Company, Consolidated: The Trylowsky Collection. For more detailed information: https://www.griffinartprojects.ca/exhibitions/teeth-loan-and-trust-company-consolidated-the-trylowsky-collection

MATTHIS GRUNSKY / M.E. SPARKS: A FINE LINE

JUNE 12TH - JUNE 26TH, 2021

On a visual level there are few similarities between the work of M.E. Sparks and Matthis Grunsky, two artists who have been working side by side for some years now — sharing a studio after both receiving their BFAs from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and their MFAs from Emily Carr University. If there is something that links them it is their heuristic approach to dealing with rhetorical problems arising from modernist forms and techniques translated through screen-based experiences.

For M.E. Sparks, a fine line is drawn between abstraction and figuration that opens up a self-reflexive space within the clichéd and prickly territory of avant-garde and modernist painting. Confronting well worn tropes from artists such as Balthus, Derain, Picasso and others with references to her own daily life, Sparks strips bare both of these representational spaces to point at the uncertainties that lie between them. What results are paintings that are not only haunting and seductive, but also self-aware.

In his work, Matthis Grunsky makes use of material and digital systems to produce images that explore the aesthetics of computation. Working with computer code and experimental electronics alongside painting, drawing and plaster casting, he is interested in how we find meaning in chaotic information. Just as Sparks draws on the legacies of male painters only to question their dominant role in the paradigm of painting, Grunsky appropriates technology in ways that produce a short-circuit across the increasingly fine line between human and technological control.

Installation shots: Rachel Topham

April-May, 2021

Charles Baudelaire, the 19th Century poet and art critic, saw the ‘ragpicker’ as an allegorical figure able to convey the essence of consumer capitalism:

Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry. 

While Alex Tedlie-Stursberg may not be a ragpicker, he does share with this allegorical figure the impulse to collect objects of low material value, often acquired though thrift, salvage, or trade. In bricolage fashion, he has cobbled together an art practice that elevates and gives new thought to base material we often take for granted or ignore such as fragments of Styrofoam, bottlecaps, cigarette lighters and copper pennies— in other words, objects designed to be used and thrown away. This he combines with material such as stone, shells, mortar and safety glass to stage for us a series of uncanny encounters that triggers our imagination and lead us to the edge where city meets the sea.

This strategy of re-evaluating and re-purposing found objects is equally pronounced in Tedlie-Stursberg’s borrowing of a number of aesthetic traditions such as Art Informel, CoBrA, Nouveau Realismé and Arte Povera. It is worth pointing out that these are all European traditions that stem from a materialist Existentialism, rather than a North American Liberal Pragmatism. It is in that spirit that the curator of the exhibition has playfully misappropriated the famous Situationist slogan Sous les pavés, la plage graffitied on the streets of Paris in 1968 to ask what it means to make art in this avant-garde tradition after the failed revolution of ‘68. 

Included in the exhibition is a silk-screen poster by the Dutch CoBrA artist Karel Appel made at a print workshop set up in support of the student uprisings in 1968.  In his work, Appel insisted on mixing serious politics with child-like gestures that he saw as reminders of our creative and ludic potential. This is something that seems to resonate with Tedlie-Stursberg’s practice whose work is as heavy handed as it is whimsical and at times plain goofy. Like a spiral, the work in this exhibition does not bring us closer or farther away from a clear intention but offers us a pataphysical logic that keeps its agonistic potential alive. What appears as smoke rising from a number of the works in this exhibition turns out to be aromatic steam that rises like thought bubbles from the abject looking bronze and aluminium sculptures cast from Styrofoam castoffs found on beaches and mounted on plywood bases that have humidifiers installed inside them. Three different scents drift through the gallery to be married in a Duchampian inframince to lure us into a closer reading of the work.

 About the artist:

Alex Tedlie-Stursberg (b.1980 UK) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator who lives and works in Vancouver, BC.. He works across various mediums with a key focus on sculpture and installation. His work has been exhibited in galleries across North America and Europe; recent exhibitions include, Mass Residue, with Field Contemporary, Vancouver, BC, (2019) and Utopos, with Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria, BC (2020). This year he was awarded a Digital Originals grant by the Canada Council for the Arts and presented Atmospheric Supply; an online exhibition of activated sculptures (2020). 

Tedlie-Stursberg did his undergrad studies in Political Science and Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University before completing an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art. He has worked as a Sessional Instructor with SFU Contemporary Arts and the Langara College Visual Arts Program. In 2021, he will be unveiling public artworks for Ballard Fine Art and will be presenting work at Keep in Touch Gallery, Seoul, Korea, and Plum Gallery, Toronto, ON. 

Tedlie-Stursberg continues to facilitate a variety of socially motivated projects: The most recent of these was a fundraiser for Camp KT, a tent city in Vancouver, BC, whereby donations were raised to provide various needed supports at the camp such as heaters, towels, storage tubs, military tents, sea can rental, and peer employment. 

January 24 – March 14, 2020

Beyond Thought Forms is Cameron Kerr’s first solo exhibition after graduating with an MFA from the University of British Columbia (2019). The exhibition provides insight into Cameron Kerr’s continued interest in locating a dialectical space between physical and metaphysical experiences. What is revealed is an aesthetic position that locates itself within the allegorical conflict between our natural and designed environment.

Cameron Kerr is interested in how images strike us and the effects of technology on aesthetic perception. Whether in photographs, paintings, prints or sculptures, what appears more than anything in Kerr’s practice are repetitive structures and patterns. According to Kerr, this attention to form derives from his attempt to reconcile images that recur in his dreams with images he finds repeated in the built and natural environment around him (nature, art, architecture, design). What fascinates Kerr about abstraction (organic or geometric) is that it can function as a node for the disparate experiences around him. This, he has realized, is because his thought forms are connected to the very architecture of the visual cortex. Here is where science and imagination find an anchor of sorts.

About the artist:

Cameron Kerr grew up in Campbell River, British Columbia and starting his career on fishing boats. There Kerr not only learned how to tie nets and catch fish but also how to navigate the complex cultural and environmental context of the West Coast of British Columbia. For Kerr, this required a certain degree of pattern recognition which in the early 2000s he began to translate into a variety of artistic forms including landscape design and sculpture. In the late 1990s, Kerr moved to Carrara Italy where he spent three years in the Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara studying marble with Manuel Neri, an early participant in San Francisco’s Bay Area Figurative Movement. Here he learned to read material densities and patterns such as the veins of marble in order to liberate imagined or actual internal forms, a skill which he has since expanded to other material explorations such as metal, which he learned about under the guidance of Antony Gormley in London, England. With these skills, Kerr set out to explore the historical and contemporary implications of his material practice by pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (2006) and most recently an MFA surpervised by Gareth James at the University of British Columbia (2019).

SEPT 13 - OCT 12, 2019

VEIL OF TEARS is Russna Kaur’s first solo exhibition since graduating with an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design in the spring of 2019. In her paintings, drawings, collages and assemblages, Kaur evokes spatial and figurative illusions with a visual intensity that parallels her interest in secular and religious spectacles of celebration, mourning and consumption. The exhibition title derives partly from a creative misspelling of Jules Feiffer’s children’s book A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears that Kaur read as a child. But as much as this subject matter remains at the core of Kaur’s practice, the shift from the word vale to veil serves to acknowledge a long tradition of modernist abstraction of veiling the personal in favour of metonymic invocations. In Kaur’s hands, this tradition is torn apart, re-assessed, and reassembled into gestures of her own.

Aug-Sept 2019

WALK THE WALK / PAINT THE PAINT is an exhibition of recent work by Ian Penn which points to his fascination with the tradition of landscape painting as it connects with his interest in phenomenology. As a curator working next to his studio for the past year, I have found myself fascinated by his daily practice of mapping and mark making. While this exhibition may appear to differ from much of Penn’s earlier art that more directly grapples with social and emotional trauma (such as seen in his recent exhibitions Projections (2015) and POLES (2017) at the ZACK Gallery, Vancouver, it shares his concern with memory. Selected for this exhibition are works produced in Australia, Canada and Croatia. The experience of observing and depicting the changing landscape of vastly different geographies is often matched by a selfreflective observation of the changing nature of the representations themselves. It is at this point that Penn’s work begins to stake out its own artistic identity situated between observable facts and intuitive expression: realism and abstraction.

Patrik Andersson
August, 2019

About Ian Penn: A medical degree and practice of interventional cardiology were bookmarked by the study of philosophy and political science in the ’70s and more recently by a BFA at Emily Carr University, Vancouver 2010.

3 SCULPTORS

MAY 31 - JUNE 29, 2019

While Samuel Roy-Bois, Elspeth Pratt and Jack Jeffrey have never been brought together in an exhibition before, there are a number of serendipitous affinities within their sculptural practices that made this a compelling affair. All three artists make work that evoke the principles of factura, a term used by Russian constructivists to forefront the laboratory and experimental side of art making — demonstrating the objects’ “madeness” and distinct material properties. They also share a fascination with our designed, built and administered contemporary environment. Their quotidian observations and use of modest, readily available material, are filtered through a number of formal tropes that weave together strands of minimalism, arte povera and conceptual art into three distinct practices that situates the viewer in a state of precariousness and wonder. 

Samuel Roy-Boisis widely recognized for his large-scale installations that explore the socio-political dynamics of our built environment. His work, which includes sculpture, performance, photography, drawing and writing, is motivated as much by a theoretical critique of the production of space as it is driven by a ludic drive towards a pure pleasure of making. Roy-Bois is Assistant Professor in Creative Studies and Director of the Research Studio for Spaces and Things at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. His travelling solo exhibition Presences can currently be seen at Kamloops Art Gallery until June 29^th.  

Elspeth Pratt’s sculptural practice is an aesthetic investigation into the abstract nature of our constructed social environments. Utilizing humble and familiar material and introducing her own handmade gestures into the geometric language of industry, Pratt introduces a poetic dimension to her critique of social space. Pratt has shown nationally and internationally for three decades and her works can be seen in collections across Canada. Alongside her extensive exhibition record she has produced numerous public artworks, including a major commission for the Richmond Olympic Oval and Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite on Georgia Street, Vancouver. She is an Associate Professor and Director of Simon Fraser University’s School for Contemporary Art.

Jack Jeffrey is known for an interdisciplinary practice that includes sculpture, installation, video, writing and music. His work often shows a playful, subtle, yet critical treatment of everyday objects and spaces and makes references to the “poetry” of arte povera, the “chance” of surrealism, the “phenomenology” of minimalism, and the “activity” of process art. Jeffrey has exhibited extensively, including in Canada, Europe, Australia and China. Recently, his work was included in the Trapp Projects exhibition Serpentine Path at Terminal Creek Contemporary, Bowen Island. Jeffrey is Professor Emeritus at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver. 

Noah Friebel, Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes, Theo Terry and Graeme Wahn

Curated by Patrik Andersson

April 25 – May 18th, 2019

“What goes through the Green Glass Door? A feeling, not a certainty”

Like the riddle that gives this show its title, this exhibition encourages the viewer to enter a game of visual art to make links and discover differences between the distinct practices of Noah Friebel, Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes, Theo Terry and Graeme Wahn. All four share an interest in exploring the limits and possibilities of photography and have made work that moves beyond its documentary nature to address their conceptual and physical framing devices. All graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design within the last four years and share the distinction of having shown in the prestigious Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize exhibition at North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery — Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes winning the prize in 2017.

GREEN GLASS DOOR has been made possible by the generous support of Ian Penn and Sandy Penn Whitehouse as well as Judith Steedman and Chernoff Fine Arts.

LEFTOVERS: TOPOGRAPHIES OF CHANCE

FEB 28 - APRIL 6 2019

KIM KENNEDY AUSTIN / STEVEN BREKELMANS / ANDREW DADSON / CHRISTOS DIKEAKOS / HANNAH DUBOIS / CAMERON KERR / EVAN LEE / JEAN MACRAE / N.E. THING CO. / ISABELLE PAUWELS / PARVIN PEIVANDI / RYAN QUAST

Housed in a leftover space, this exhibition gives a nod to the shifting, gentrifying elements of its building and neighbourhood, and fits nicely into the serendipity inherent in the mandate of TRAPP Projects.

Since its inception in 1997, TRAPP Projects has been inspired by the SnarePicturesof the Romanian/Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri who, in 1959, began trapping the leftovers from breakfasts, lunches and dinners to make his own psycho-geographic reading of everyday life. Similarly, this exhibition maps out a series of relations between social, economic, political and aesthetic interests. Leftoversis also a term meant to evoke material and intellectual concerns of the artists shown. From Ryan Quast’s meticulous documentation of the leftovers of his artistic production, to Parvin Peivandi’s mobilization of tattered Kurdish rugs that occupy the leftover spaces of the gallery, the exhibition traces art production that has been glanced over, left behind, or explores the very idea of leftovers. 

Not unlike Daniel Spoerri’s book An Anecdoted Topography of Chance(1962), this exhibition is organized to be experienced like a stroll taken in every direction at once. Or, like Robert Smithson once said about the space between his Sites and Nonsites, it may open up a space where “one may lapse into places of little organization and no direction.”