Christopher Brayshaw: INTO THIN AIR

24 November 2011 through 31 December 2011
Opening reception Thursday 24 November 2011, 6-9pm

Christopher Brayshaw is a Vancouver-based photographer/book-
seller/curator. This exhibition, his first, includes digital photographs made between 2005 and 2011 in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and New York.

Exhibition review by Michael Turner

Exhibition review by Robin Laurence (Georgia Straight)

Ahbyah Baker & Hannah Hughes: SHAPELY

20 October 2011 through 20 November 2011
Opening reception Thursday 20 October 2011, 6-9pm

Curated by Lilac Lang

The show’s title, “Shapely,” refers to seemingly unrelated aspects of both artists’ practices: in Hannah Hughes’ figurative work, the pleasing form of the female subjects, and in Ahbyah Baker’s abstract painting, the type of objects depicted. Each artist’s work exhibits a common theme of tension between abstraction and representation.

“Shapely” acknowledges the urge to move beyond the technical ability of mimicking representational imagery in painting, even as the desire to demonstrate these very things is fulfilled. The work is neither entirely abstract nor objective. Even if one considers Baker’s minimalist paintings without the context of her previous figurative work, the singular shapes employ a central figure/ground relationship typical of most portraiture, including the distorted and masked women of Hannah's work. Shapely suggests that the imaginary border between figurative and non-objective imagery or abstract and representational painting is a blurry or dotted line.

Ahbyah Baker received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute in 2006. Her work has been exhibited at Or Gallery and Shudder Gallery in Vancouver and she was a recent participant in the Summer Residency Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She lives and works in Vancouver.

Hannah Hughes completed her BA in Critical Fine Art Practice at the University of Brighton in 1997 and moved to Vancouver in 2008. She works principally in painting but is also responsible for co-founding The Drawing Salon, a travelling program of contemporary drawing workshops due to start this autumn.

Lilac Lang received her BFA from the University of British Columbia Okanagan in 2007. Earlier this year, she was the resident artist at Spark Box Studio in Ontario. Her work has been exhibited at The Red Head Gallery in Toronto, Diane Farris Gallery in Vancouver, and The Alternator in Kelowna.

Arni Haraldsson: AWAKE IN MOUNT PLEASANT

9 September 2011 through 9 October 2011
Opening reception Friday 9 September 2011, 6-9pm

Guest curated by Alex Pensato

Since the eighties Arni Haraldsson has amassed a vast collection of found imagery gathered from various religious publications such as Awake! and Plain Truth that were made available to him while out strolling in his neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant. Haraldsson clipped the photographic images from these publications and assorted them into various categories. The resulting deconstructed forms and groupings of found images simultaneously espouse the religious and utopic pedagogical intent of their publications and the personal aspirations and hopes of the local Mt. Pleasant followers who distributed them. Taken as such, Awake in Mt. Pleasant can be seen as an unorthodox portrait of the artist's neighbourhood.

Arni Haraldsson has exhibited his photographic work nationally and internationally for the past two decades. Recent exhibitions include Les Lendemains d’hier (Yesterday’s Tomorrows) at Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal; Lugar/Place festival PhotoEspana at the Museu Berardo in Lisbon; and Ze Lino (Copan Project) at Casa Vertigo in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Haraldsson has done numerous residencies, including the Canada Council studios in London and Paris. He has contributed to publications such as EXIT, Fillip, Pyramid Power and Canadian Art. Much of his work has focused on key modernist sites from around the world, often undergoing states of transition. His work generally poses the built environment as emblematic of larger social forces, instrumental in the formation of human relations.

Donato Mancini: I SMELL SOMETHING BURNING (H.K.Y.D.)

7 July 2011 through 21 August 2011
Opening reception Thursday 7 July 2011, 6-9 pm

Curated by Christopher Brayshaw and Steven Tong

The interdisciplinary practice of Donato Mancini focuses mainly on bookworks, poetry, and text-based visual art. He is the author of four books of procedural and visual writings: Ligatures (2005) and Æthel (2007), Buffet World (2011), and Fact ‘N’ Value (2011). His collaborative visual works have been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Scandinavia and Cuba. Notable exhibitions featuring Mancini’s individual works include Surveillance Sketch (Artspeak, Vancouver 2003), Untitled: Conversation Loops (Western Front, Vancouver 2004) and Angels in the Angles (Gallery Atsui, Vancouver 2009). He also co-directed the world’s first genuine in-world avatar documentary, AVATARA (Centre A, Vancouver 2003), now part of the UbuWeb international archive of experimental film and video. Long time member of the Kootenay School of Writing, he was a principal organiser of the interdisciplinary N 49 15.832 - W 123 05.921 Positions Colloquium in August 2008. His booklength critical survey of the language, ideology and aesthetic conscience of poetry reviewing in Canada is forthcoming in 2013. Mancini lives in Vancouver, where he is enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at the University of British Columbia.

Krisdy Shindler: FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN

12 May 2011 through 12 June 2011
Opening reception Thursday 12 May 2011, 6-9pm

Curated by Steven Tong

Please note special hours for this exhibition: Saturdays & Sundays 12-6pm, and by appointment @ 604-771-6765. The gallery will not be available for drop-in viewing.

Utilizing the platform of the moving image, Shindler's animate works address the traditional archetypes and rhetorics of painting. The abstract oily gestures of paint in action bring a new narrative to the genre, suggesting alternative ways of viewing the practice of painting both currently and historically.

Krisdy Shindler received her BFA from Emily Carr University and an MFA from The Glasgow School of Art. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Spain, The Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Canary Islands, Israel, New York, and across the UK, Wales, and Scotland. Current exhibitions include A Functional Dreamworld at Art Cube in Jerusalem, When a Painting Moves, Something Must be Rotten at The Stenersenmuseet in Oslo, Espiritu de Epoca~ Collection of Ofelia Martin and Javier Nunez at MIAC Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, and The Rhetorics of Patriotism at The Cobra Museum in Amsterdam.

Krisdy Shindler's website

Babak Golkar: PARERGON

2 April 2011 through 30 April 2011
Opening reception Saturday, April 2nd 2011, 6 - 9 pm

Curated by Steven Tong

Much of Babak Golkar's practice attempts to examine and negotiate spaces and signifiers between Eastern and Western cultures, with a particular interest in the tension between pre-modern and modern traditions as they relate to architecture. Examining and questioning the ways in which we come to understand space, Golkar has produced a set of frames much like what one might find warped around a classical painting. These interrupted frames are based on the architectural silhouettes of two world-known buildings: the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The two frames presented at CSA Space are part of a recent series which will be exhibited in the Fall at the Third Line Gallery in Dubai.

Thanks to Chernoff Fine Art for their kind assistance with the production of this exhibition and its accompanying catalog.

Scott Massey: TOPOLOGIES AND LIMITS

25 February 2011 through 27 March 2011
Opening reception Friday, February 25 2011, 6 - 9 pm

Curated by Steven Tong

Brad Phillips: SEVEN YEARS IN SWITZERLAND

11 February 2011 through 20 February 2011

Contemporary Art Society of Vancouver artist's talk Friday 11 February 2011, 6-9 pm

Michael Drebert: STAR HOUSE and I CARRY A PILE OF STICKS

7 January 2011 through 6 February 2011
Opening reception Thursday, 6 January 2011, 6 - 9 pm

Curated by Adam Harrison