Bernadette Phan: LIFELINES AND PORTALS

3 February 2023 through 5 March 2023
Opening reception for the artist Friday 3 February 2023, 6-9pm

Curated by Steven Tong and Christopher Brayshaw

This series of new works by Bernadette Phan build on her previous “Stipple series” (rectangular canvases with concentric lines or the ripples of an occasional wave, against a ground). These new irregularly shaped works pulse with the soft eddies and currents of stippled paint on raw plywood supports.

"I work in series that evolve over time, some of them decades. The series involve repetition, formal restrictions, dialogues between painting and sculpture, memory and illusion. In each series I undertake particular subjects: language and translation, still life as imaginary springboards, perspectives as set ups. My interest and curiosity are nurtured by making percepts that connect sense perceptions and start with the obvious, visual touch as a means to investigate haptic and proximate spaces generated through the painting medium and weaving as of late. The economy of my decisions as part of the process addresses the potency of the work instead of its potentiality. In this “Stipple series”, the texture captures light and creates its own coloured shadow. The cadence and repetition amplifies the dimensional lines as an expression of warmth and intimacy within the cosmic dance of the everyday unknown."
(Bernadette Phan)

Thanh Marie Bernadette Phan was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and moved to Canada with her family at an early age, via France. She received a BFA from Concordia University, Montréal, and graduated from the MFA program at Tyler University, Philadelphia, in 1997. She moved back to Vancouver that same year and has continued her studio practice in painting, drawing and weaving as of late. She has shown locally, nationally, and in Europe for the past 25 years. When not working, she likes to travel to Cambodia and Alert Bay.

All exhibited works are available for sale

Sean Alward: DARK SALON

27 January 2022 through 6 March 2022
Organized by Christopher Brayshaw and Steven Tong

Get the key,

turn on the light,

and see the

DARK SALON

I began the first painting in this series as a tongue-in-cheek attempt to visualize a distant family member with no known photographs documenting their appearance. I knew where they came from, where they ended up, but little of their life other than their diet: potatoes. So, I painted an arrangement of potatoes on my studio table, avoiding portraiture in favour of still-life as a means of showing one thing via another, conscious that the original subject could never be depicted accurately anyway and thereby allowing metaphor to manifest in unexpected ways. In terms of process, my goal was to be as direct as possible, painting from life without photographic mediation. I wanted a kind of blunt, un-inflected naturalism, similar to that in use around the time photography first appeared (early-mid 19th century), before Impressionism and Modernism. I wanted any sense of inner-life in the subjects to come from an optical experience of their material appearance rather than embellishments of technique such as exaggerated colour or obviously gestural paint application. I also wanted to invoke a consideration of how the physical properties of the subjects were culturally and metaphorically resonant:

potatoes: you are what you eat, subterranean...

butter: solar energy store, fat, oil paint...

copper: distillation, electricity, currency, economy...

wooden sticks: folk art, the woods...

and so on...

Sean Alward is an artist based in Vancouver. His paintings explore the intersection of materials and historical consciousness. He received his MFA from the University of British Columbia and BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He has exhibited across Canada and in the U.S., most recently at the Art Gallery at Evergreen, WAAP Projects Vancouver/Vacation Gallery New York, AHVA Gallery at UBC, Surrey Art Gallery, and the Nanaimo Art Gallery. He has published writing in Canadian Art, C Magazine, and Border Crossings.

https://www.instagram.com/seanalward/  

Image: Sean Alward, Wavelength, oil on linen, 2021

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.

Jordan Milner: TETHERED TO THE BASE BY A TWEAK OF LIGHT

8 October 2015 through 8 November 2015
Opening reception Thursday 8 October 2015, 6-9pm

Curated by Steven Tong

Ron Terada: TODAY IT'S ME, TOMORROW IT'S YOU

3 September 2015 through 4 October 2015
Opening reception Thursday 3 September 2015, 6-9pm

Curated by Steven Tong and Christopher Brayshaw

Ron Terada is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery

Isabella Fürnkäs: 秘密 / A DIACHRONIC HOME

6 June 2015 through 6 July 2015
Opening reception Saturday 6 June 2015, 6-9pm

Curated by Stephen Tong 

秘密 / A Diachronic Home is a solo exhibition by Isabella Fürnkäs, featuring two works “Diachronic Home” and “Vice Versa."

“Diachronic Home” is a four channel video installation. The family’s bookshelves laden with philosophical and literary works, festooned with the accretion of a life spent between cultures. These shelves serve as backdrops in the manner of still life paintings static and motionless. The contemplative silence of the shelves is disrupted by the interjection of attempts to query the world and the objects within it. Along with voices reading excerpts from Elias Canetti, Franz Kafka, Junichiro Tanizaki, Kobo Abe, Marcel Proust, Marshall McLuhan, Michel Foucault, Oscar Wilde, Robert Musil, Roland Barthes, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Samuel Beckett. Read by Juan Antonio Olivares, Kaoli Mashio, Lukas von der Gracht, Daniella Séville and filmed with Moritz Krauth and Magdalena Kita.

 “Vice Versa” is a two channel video installation, with monitors resting on a mattress. As in “Diachronic Home” a stream of images moves across the screens, as if recollection of half remembered dreams. A disjointed conversation between male and female voice, threads its way through the syncopated typology of the videos.

Special thanks to Jordan Milner who kindly agreed to enact the performative aspect of the work on the opening night, as performed by Lukas von der Gracht.

Isabella Fürnkäs (*1988, Tokyo) studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, with Andreas Gursky and Keren Cytter. She has shown and curated internationally.

Michael Jones: SOME DAY SOON

9 April 2015 through 3 May 2015
Opening reception Thursday 9 April 2015, 6-9pm

Curated by Steven Tong

Michael Jones works in Vancouver. He attended the Alberta College of Art and Design, obtaining a B.F.A in Media Arts and Digital Technologies from 1999 to 2003. Between 2004 and 2006 he attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London, U.K. and received a M.F.A in Fine Art Media. He has exhibited across Canada and internationally.  

Donato Mancini: BYTHELIGHTOFTHE

18 December 2014 through 18 January 2015

Opening reception Thursday 18 December 2014, 6-9pm 

Curated by Steven Tong

Malcolm Levy: THE RIZE

9 October 2014 through 9 November 2014
Opening reception Thursday 9 October 2014, 6-9pm

Curated by Steven Tong

The Rize is a mixed media installation recounting the conversation at City Council around the topic of arson at the Kingsway and Main Street location (an investigation which is currently unsolved). The video is an abstract rendering of the burnt out site, intercut with effected audio of the dialogue, evoking realities within the current state of affairs. A map of the area follows with further exploration.

Malcolm Levy is an artist and curator based in Vancouver, Canada. He is the Director of the New Forms Festival 2001 – present. His artistic practice focuses on abstract photography and video. Currently he is finishing an MA in Media Studies at the New School, and teaches digital art and installation at the Centre for Digital Media.

Robert Linsley: ISLAND GENERATION

26 June 2014 through 13 September 2014
Opening reception Thursday 26th June 2014, 6-9pm

Curated by Christopher Brayshaw and Steven Tong

Robert Linsley's website (contains link to RL's excellent blog)

Eden Veaudry: CONFERENCE ON THE WAVE

13 March 2014 through 13 April 2014
Opening reception Thursday 13 March 2014, 6-9pm

Eden Veaudry's website

Organized by Christopher Brayshaw, Steffanie Ling, & Steven Tong

Jayce Salloum: location/dis-location(s): reprise

12 September 2013 through 13 October 2013
Opening reception Thursday 12 September 2013, 6-9pm

Curated by Steven Tong

Part photo-array, sculptures of disused materials, and objects, this installation reprises and coalesces fragments of several projects made between Sept. 12, 1996 up to the opening, Sept. 12, 2013. The works are installed in a panorama of clusters, content spilling off of each other to determine cross-referenced readings and inherent and associated exoteric contexts. The photographs are from an ongoing body of work titled untitled: photographs, that attempts to engage critically in the representation of public and private space, the tableaux of commercial enterprises acting as ideological stage fronts, domestic settings, and the spaces of intimacy found in-between both.

location/dis-location(s) approaches coming to oblique and evolving terms of what it means to be making photographs here (and elsewhere) and the exploration of the possibilities of visualizing the nature of ‘natural’, urban, semi-urban, and sub-urban environment (and the totality of the constructs signified in those terms). It is from an analytical position arrived at through a subjective response to place; the city(ies), the specific locations, and a certain dislocation from these sites, places in flux, permutating, persisting, resisting or collapsing under pressures of consumption/consumerism, regulated & unregulated development, crisis and contestation.

On October 25^th, location/dis-location(s): contingent promises, a corresponding exhibition in this continuum follows at Grunt Gallery, and will run until Nov. 30, 2013.

Exhibition catalog with an essay by Keith Wallace (PDF file, quick download)

Mike Grill: IN VITRO

22 February 2013 through 24 March 2013
Opening reception Friday 22 February 2013, 6-9pm

Curated by Steven Tong and Christopher Brayshaw

Mike Grill's website

Brad Phillips: FOR MARIAH CAREY AND JOHN BERRYMAN

10 January 2013 through 17 February 2013
Opening reception Thursday 10 January 2013, 6-9pm

Curated by Steven Tong and Christopher Brayshaw

Brad Phillips' website

Exhibition review by Emmy Lee (Here is Elsewhere magazine)

Kristoff Steinruck: CRYSTAL CAVE 2

11 October 2012 through 11 November 2012
Opening reception Thursday 11 October 2012, 6-9pm

Curated by Steven Tong

Kristoff Steinruck is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Kelowna, BC. Recent exhibitions include Crystal Cave 1 at the Kelowna Art Gallery, and Free Information in collaboration with Dawn Johnston at G Gallery in Toronto. He earned a BA from the University of British Columbia (1999), and an MFA from the University of Guelph (2009). He is a part-time instructor in sculpture at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus.

Jason W. Fowler Fitzpatrick: TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS

14 June 2012 through 5 August 2012

Selected work from an ongoing series

Curated by Steven Tong

Jason Fitzpatrick present in the gallery on Saturdays between 12-4pm

Please note: no opening, at artist's request

Documentation: http://jasonfitzpatrick.ca/studio/category/twenty-eight-days

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)

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.

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