Evan Lee: OPEN WORK: YEARS FROM TODAY

2 November 2023 through 7 December 2023

Opening reception for the artist Thursday 2 November 2023, 6-9pm

 

Curated by Christopher Brayshaw, with a text by Kevin Chong

In his first solo exhibition at CSA Space since 2006, Vancouver artist Evan Lee presents Open Work: years from today, an installation of experimental lens-based, printed images. 

Over the past 25 years, Lee has been producing works inside and outside of photography. During this time, Lee has always been interested in the people and places of his home in East Vancouver. However, his early works demonstrated a tenuous relationship with the depiction of human subjects and he opted instead to explore them through still life surrogates such ginseng roots and dollar store objects. In particular, the motif of the elderly recurs in Lee’s conception of the city, as explored in his previous CSA Space installation, Manual Labour, and remains important in his own life, as exemplified by his large-scale photograph, Portrait of the Artist’s Grandmother. Although the city and its people have changed considerably in this time, this familiar figure remains the same.

Lee has explored the subject of elders through drawings, photographs, 3D modelling and 3D prints. In his latest exploration, Lee pairs photographs of old women with disposable paper doilies. Comprising Open Work: years from today, these temporary printed images offer a meditation on the passage of time, reflecting the paradoxical nature of memories and observances: timeless yet fleeting, fragile yet enduring. 

 

Evan Lee lives and works in Vancouver, BC. Recent public exhibitions include Forged at the Art Gallery at Evergreen, FUGAZI at Teck Gallery, SFU, Tyranny at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and Everything Under the Sun: In Memory of Andrew Gruft and Kids Take Over at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Lee is represented by Monte Clark Gallery.

Rebecca Donald, Evan Lee and Ben Reeves: WORKS ON PAINTING

14 September 2007 through 14 October 2007
Reception Thursday September 13 2007, 7-9pm
Curated by Adam Harrison

Works on Painting features three artists that deal with the physical and visual aspects of paint through the utilization of three different mediums - painting, sculpture and photography.

Ben Reeves' paintings of people smoking utilize a relatively flat surface to depict the figures, while the smoke they are producing is represented by almost sculpturally thick blobs of paint, protruding from the canvas. Here the fleeting, ethereal nature of smoke is replaced by a dense, physical mass of oil paint.

Rebecca Donald's "towels" are sculptures created by thickly pouring oil paint mixed with oil onto canvas. When dried, the paint creates a tactile surface that strongly resembles terrycloth towels. Folded or strewn on the floor, the sculptures eschew the illusionistic space of painting in favour of the emulative nature of representational sculpture, albeit through the use of processes and materials inextricably linked to the medium of painting.

A Palette from the Artist's Studio by Evan Lee, shows the underside of a transparent palette used by the artist for his own paintings. "Photographed" by a desktop scanner, the picture shows the accidental traces made while mixing paints for actual paintings. Though the picture resembles an abstract painting - the paint marks recall the gestural brushwork of Robert Rauschenberg or Cy Twombly - it is indeed an accurate representation of physical traces of the painting process.

Though working is different mediums, all three artists engage with the act of applying paint to a surface, highlighting this action's relationship to depiction and considering it in relation to the
production of art in general.