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Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures

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Van Special 3 Way X 895
Vancouver Special
Colleen Heslin, Derya Akay, Eli Bornowsky

The Vancouver Art Gallery debuts its inaugural triennial exhibition putting the focus on the city's contemporary art scene, and the spotlight on many of our alumni + faculty

When

Dec 3, 2016, 12:00am – Apr 17, 2017, 12:00am

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The Vancouver Art Gallery presents Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures, the inaugural edition of its new triennial. The exhibition offers a comprehensive survey of the city’s contemporary art scene and its shifts since the 2010 Winter Olympics, featuring artworks ranging from painting, drawing, animation, ceramics, textiles, audio and installation.

Over a four-month period in the spring of 2016, curators Daina Augaitis ('83) and guest curator Jesse McKee, conducted over 90 studio visits, mostly with emerging artists, but also with a few established artists whose ideas have been prescient. The range of participants echoes the breadth of Vancouver’s vibrant art community. The result is a multi-generational exhibition that will engage its visitors through a myriad of styles, approaches and practices.

Emily Carr University of Art + Design is proud and honoured to see many of our alumni and faculty recognized in this important exhibition.

Featured ECU Alumni + Faculty include:

Derya Akay
Maya Beaudry
Raymond Boisjoly (Alumnus/Associate Professor)
Eli Bornowsky
Rebecca Brewer
Colleen Brown
Kim Dorland
Barry Doupé
Michael Drebert
Julia Feyrer
Jeneen Frei Njootli
Colleen Heslin
Allison Hrabluik (Sessional Faculty)
Gary Neil Kennedy (Sessional Faculty)
Tiziana La Melia
http://khanlee.com/
Glenn Lewis
Elizabeth McIntosh(Associate Professor)
Jordan Milner
Rachelle Sawatsky
Krista Belle Stewart
Angela Teng
Mina Totino
Ron Tran
Tristan Unrau
Charlene Vickers

“Vancouver Special is drawn from the low-cost housing style that was popular in Vancouver between the 1960s and 80s. This archetype has been embraced again as an iconic symbol of the city. The title of the inaugural exhibition within this new triennial format, Ambivalent Pleasures, points to the ever-present gap between where we are and where we’d like to be. The artworks in the exhibition offer many possibilities for visitors to locate the pleasures in their own experiences of encountering, considering and navigating the complex conditions of today’s city.”

Co-curators Daina Augaitis and Jesse McKee

Works included in Ambivalent Pleasures offer a number of overlapping conversations. Central to these dialogues are three ideas:

  • A number of artists engage with Surrealist strategies and ideas. They explore the unconscious and diverse modes of perception, speaking to notions of alienation, escape, romanticism and even the grotesque. In some instances, the works exude a comic tone; in others, a sense of the uncanny points to spirits of unrest that lurk beneath the surface.
  • Several artists present a range of approaches to abstraction. This naturally includes a number of painters, as well as sculptors and artists working with textiles who implicate the meaning of gesture or the history of modern painting without necessarily putting brush to canvas.
  • Other artists are invested in the possibilities of working conceptually to address today’s social contexts. Questioning dominant systems of knowledge, these artists make sense of the world through material processes, recurrent gestures and other types of intervention.
Curator's Tour
About the Curators:

Daina Augaitis has been Chief Curator/Associate Director at the Vancouver Art Gallery since 1996, where she works with a team of curators to conceive and develop the Gallery’s exhibitions, publications, collections and public programs. Among the solo exhibitions she has curated or co-curated are those by Rebecca Belmore, Douglas Coupland, Stan Douglas, Charles Edenshaw, Geoffrey Farmer, Bharti Kher, Kimsooja, Muntadas, Brian Jungen, Ian Wallace and Zhu Jinshi. She was formerly Director of the Visual Arts Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where she organized thematic residencies for artists and curators, as well as spoken word, pirate radio and performance art projects, and has held curatorial positions at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; the Western Front, Vancouver; Convertible Showroom, Vancouver; and Franklin Furnace, New York. Daina is 1983 graduate of Emily Carr College of Art and Design.

Guest curator Jesse McKee is the Head of Strategy at 221A, Vancouver. He is responsible for the organization’s research-based programming model and for aligning all aspects of 221A’s work with a strategic plan that develops self-organized cultural infrastructures. Previously, McKee was Curator at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, and Exhibitions Curator at the Western Front, Vancouver. He has developed new commissions with artists such as Lee Kit, Tamara Henderson and Julia Feyrer, Andrea Büttner and Neïl Beloufa. He recently was a curatorial resident with tranzit.org,Romania, and curated Stopping the Sun in Its Course, a group exhibition on contemporary depictions of the grotesque at Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles (2015).