Rowan Melling: BOSS BODIES

5 November 2021 through 12 December 2021

Opening reception for the artist Friday 5 November 2021, 6-9pm

Organized by Steven Tong with essays by Dan Adleman and Neal Rockwell

 

Exhibition P(review) by Michael Turner

"For reasons that I hope are quite clear, you will not encounter many exhibitions like Boss Bodies around town. The local press won’t likely have much to say about it either. That’s because the exhibition, in its own modest way, challenges a fantasy system to which so many of us remain indentured. Even at this disastrous stage of the crisis, developer-funded media outlets would have you believe that the Vancouver model provides the only feasible optics for finding our way within a city in freefall. Just try not to look down. "
Dan Adleman Interfacing with the Vancouver Model

"In a certain way, Boss Bodies is a vibe-based reply to [the] image economy. ...The violence inherent in the concrete actions of these companies leaked through in promotional photographs of these organizations' CEOs. They could not quite gloss over their role in dispossessions, demolitions, driving up housing costs, annihilating the meaning of language, and the apparent foreclosing of imagination and possibilities towards a deeply mediocre aspirational vision of corporate citizenship. Their cracked smiles and glinting eyes registered something more sinister than the "good vibes only" image they were attempting to promote."
Neal Rockwell Portraits of the  Vibeconomy 

 

Rowan Melling started oil painting in 2019 to “deal” with his feelings. When he was anxious, he painted plants. When he felt love, he painted his friends and family. When he suffered horror at entrepreneurial superheroes re-making the world in their crappy brand-image, he painted upsetting portraits of CEOs. These latter paintings make up his first solo show, Boss Bodies. This work seeks to reground its branded, transcendental subjects in the abjection of their bodies through the thick materiality of oil paint. As a whole, Rowan’s painting practice tries to resuscitate a bodily intimacy, slowly being strangled by the alienation of digital capitalism. He has previously shown work at CSA Space in Vancouver and the Decadent Squalor in Montreal. Rowan has an M.A. in German Studies from UBC and is currently working on a Ph.D. in Communication Studies at SFU.

Ana Vojnovic: PERFORMATIVE GEOMETRY: GRIDS & GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION

1 April 2021 through 9 May 2021

Organized by Christopher Brayshaw & Steven Tong

Ana Vojnovic works as an educator, artist, design researcher and a lecturer. Her pedagogical and art practices are an interdisciplinary response to urban conditions, and questions of how built/designed environments affect and condition human perception, our responses to designed circumstances and the ways we engage with each other.

Through her hand-drawn compositions and collage analysis, Ana narrates the inter-relations and intimacy between geometric language and space, and indirectly proposes multiple ways one can perceive and experience the work.

While her drawings and collage pieces are guided by the unexpectedness of inspiration and inner vision, they are performed through a deliberate, rhythmic re-working of compositional elements. As such, Ana’s work offers multi-layered engagement, one of a soothing dynamic and the activation of temporal images revealed within the white space.

For additional information on Ana’s practice and additional work(s), please visit her artist website conceptfioka.com