Josh Thorpe & Jeff Tutt: FOR REAL TOADS

5 May 2016 through 5 June 2016
Opening reception Thursday 5 May 2016, 6-9pm
Curated by Steven Tong

A selection of Josh Thorpe's artist books & publications is available downstairs in Pulpfiction Books for the duration of the exhibition.

Cornelia Wyngaarden: HEROINES

17 November 2015 through 13 December 2015
Opening reception Tuesday 17 November 2015, 6-9pm
Screening Thursday 19 November 2015, 7pm at the Western Front, 303 E. 8th Avenue

Guest curated by Liz Park

This multi-nodal project celebrates the decades-long contribution of video art pioneer Cornelia Wyngaarden. Her unrelenting commitment to feminism and queer politics often translates to poetic video portraits of female protagonists who defy the male-centric order of their respective milieu. Wyngaarden’s unique voice provides incisive commentary and has been fostering various communities of allies in Vancouver and beyond.

Presented for the first time in over two decades, elements of her past media installation projects The Fragility of Origins (1994) and Apollo’s Kiss/Matricide: An Allegorical Landscape (1991) will be installed at CSA. Initially presented at the UBC Fine Arts Gallery (now the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery), Apollo’s Kiss takes inspiration from Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and in particular, spotlights the fate of the tragic heroine Cassandra, doomed to the gift of prophesy believed by none. The Fragility of Origins was first presented at the Western Front, and featured a five-channel composite of unidentified female bodies in motion, ambiguously torquing as they lay on a sheet of white. Accompanying the installation at CSA is a screening at the Western Front of As a Wife Has a Cow (1985) as a single-channel video that captures the stories told by a female rancher named Keely Moll.

This exhibition is by no means a survey of Wyngaarden’s work, but is a spark that lights up a portion of her activities as an artist. It is also the force that propels a new work in progress by Wyngaarden, a video portrait of a female stevedore. This project will be accompanied by a publication co-edited by Kim Nguyen and Liz Park, to be published in spring 2016 by Artspeak.

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

Tristan Unrau: IT RAINS, IT SNOWS, IT PAINTS

23 July 2015 through 23 August 2015
Opening reception Thursday 23 July 2015, 6-9pm

Curated by Steffanie Ling

"I watched sailboats go by all afternoon. Aiming my telescope out from the deck to the sea I could make out the names given to the boats: Teorema, Best Case Scenario, Giverny, Summer Wind, X ta Sea...

I thought: The distance from the chin to the shoulder when you are looking down to your left, or your right, is a classical distance. The years between Rembrandt's lion and Thurber's dog—a few lifetimes of drawing cats and dogs—lazy lifetimes. The distance between the telescope's primary mirror and the sailboats: perfect kilometers. My day dreams were pink and then green. The sun was shining, the waves were breaking, and I was painting."

Tristan Unrau received a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at UCLA in Los Angeles.

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.

Kalli Niedoba: A MIRAGE ON A HILL

7 May 2015 through 31 May 2015
Opening reception 7 May 2015, 6-9pm

Curated by Steffanie Ling

A demonstration of figure-ground worship will be a new sculpture by Kalli Niedoba. 

Kalli Niedoba is an artist based in Vancouver with an interest in large-scale sculpture. Her works are constructed in adherence to the architectural parameters for display. Propelled by misinformation, jargon and airy personas, her practice attempts to make memorable the slippages in daily life. She has recently exhibited her work at 221A and Sunset Terrace.

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.  

Tiziana La Melia: INNOCENCE AT HOME

5 March 2015 through 5 April 2015
Opening reception Thursday 5 March 2015, 6-9pm

Curated by Steffanie Ling

Tiziana La Melia is a Vancouver based artist and writer. Her first book of writing will be published by Publication Studio Vancouver and appear in late March. In 2014, she was the Writer in Residence at TPW R&D in Toronto. Recent solo-exhibitions include The Eyelash and The Monochrome at Mercer Union (Toronto). In 2014, she was the recipient of the RBC Painting Prize. She is represented by The Apartment (Vancouver).

Steven Brekelmans: TEMPORARY STRUCTURES (YAKITY SAX)

22 January 2015 through 22 February 2015
Opening reception Thursday 22 January 2015, 6-9pm

Curated by Steven Tong and Christopher Brayshaw

Donato Mancini: BYTHELIGHTOFTHE

18 December 2014 through 18 January 2015

Opening reception Thursday 18 December 2014, 6-9pm 

Curated by Steven Tong

Deirdre McAdams: OPEN BOOK

13 November 2014 through 14 December 2014
Opening reception Thursday 13 November 2014, 6-9pm

Guest curated by Elizabeth Zvonar

It’s not everyday I get really excited about painting. Exciting painting pops and pulsates and confuses me a little. Deirdre McAdams' canvases are painted and sprayed symbols of abstracted and approximate forms and ideas. Sometimes there’s a disagreement between forms existing on different planes or heavy lines delineating shadow beyond the scope of logic that collide with her astute nod to the ‘graffic’ aesthetic. This dissent on the surface of the picture makes for weird, mesmerizing and exciting works that are big enough to hold a wall and yet they demand your attention to come closer to view.

Her technique is sharp and speckled, formulaic and free form. The works trigger a moment of familiarity that dupes you into thinking you understand what you’re seeing, only to shift gears into that terrain of life territory that is simultaneously mutable and arbitrary. Not unlike a story of days, the works form, take a direction and roll out. Something happens along the way and it's best to pay attention as the journey holds the heart. With titles that point out that direction; Illustration, Stone Tablet (with detail), Puzzle Painting and Monologue, McAdams deftly tells a compellingly rich and strange story through histories of geometric abstraction and minimal painting.

-EZ, 2014

Deirdre McAdams is a visual artist living and working in Vancouver, BC. She is a graduate of Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2008), and the Victoria College of Art (2003), where she studied painting.

Deirdre McAdams' website

Georgia Straight exhibition review by Robin Laurence