VANCOUVER.- The Vancouver Art Gallery recently opened Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures, the inaugural edition of its new triennial. On view at the Gallery from December 2, 2016 to April 17, 2017, this exhibition offers a comprehensive survey of the city’s contemporary art scene and its shifts since the 2010 Winter Olympics, featuring artworks ranging from painting, drawing, animation, ceramics, textiles, audio and installation. Ambivalent Pleasures is co-curated by Daina Augaitis, Vancouver Art Gallery’s Chief Curator/Associate Director, and guest curator Jesse McKee, Head of Strategy at 221A, Vancouver.
Over a four-month period in the spring of 2016, the curators conducted over 90 studio visits, mostly with emerging artists, but also with a few established artists whose ideas have been prescient. The range of participants echoes the breadth of Vancouver’s vibrant art community. The result is a multigenerational exhibition that will engage its visitors through a myriad of styles, approaches and practices.
“Since its inception in 1931, the Vancouver Art Gallery has organized many timely survey exhibitions that show us the contemporary art of this region. Building on this robust history, which began with the BC Annuals (1932–68) and continued with significant projects of recent decades, we are now excited to present Vancouver Special, a new triennial exhibition of contemporary art from the city. The triennial model reinforces a more renewable and sustained engagement for the Gallery to connect with contemporary artists who live and relate to Vancouver,” said Kathleen S. Bartels, Director, Vancouver Art Gallery.
“Vancouver Special is drawn from the low-cost housing style that was popular in Vancouver between the 1960s and 80s. This archetype has been embraced again as an iconic symbol of the city. The title of the inaugural exhibition within this new triennial format, Ambivalent Pleasures, points to the ever-present gap between where we are and where we’d like to be. The artworks in the exhibition offer many possibilities for visitors to locate the pleasures in their own experiences of encountering, considering and navigating the complex conditions of today’s city,” said cocurators Daina Augaitis and Jesse McKee.
Works included in Ambivalent Pleasures offer a number of overlapping conversations. Central to these dialogues are three ideas:
• A number of artists engage with Surrealist strategies and ideas. They explore the unconscious and diverse modes of perception, speaking to notions of alienation, escape, romanticism and even the grotesque. In some instances, the works exude a comic tone; in others, a sense of the uncanny points to spirits of unrest that lurk beneath the surface.
• Several artists present a range of approaches to abstraction. This naturally includes a number of painters, as well as sculptors and artists working with textiles who implicate the meaning of gesture or the history of modern painting without necessarily putting brush to canvas.
• Other artists are invested in the possibilities of working conceptually to address today’s social contexts. Questioning dominant systems of knowledge, these artists make sense of the world through material processes, recurrent gestures and other types of interventions.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Derya Akay, Maya Beaudry, Raymond Boisjoly, Eli Bornowsky, Rebecca Brewer, Colleen Brown, Matt Browning, Mark Delong, Kim Dorland, Barry Doupé, Michael Drebert, Julia Feyrer, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Tamara Henderson, Colleen Heslin, Julian Hou, Allison Hrabluik, Gareth James, Garry Neill Kennedy, Tiziana La Melia, Khan Lee, Arvo Leo, Lyse Lemieux, Glenn Lewis, Anne Low, Elizabeth McIntosh, Jordan Milner, Antoni Oko, Ryan Peter, Sylvain Sailly, Rachelle Sawatsky, Walter Scott, Krista Belle Stewart, Angela Teng, Mina Totino, Ron Tran, Tristan Unrau, Charlene Vickers, Brent Wadden and Alison Yip.
