The Georgia Straight

New galleries add to already exciting roster

VISUAL ARTS

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CRITICS’ PICKS

The visual-arts scene this fall season 2 resembles a gorgeous, multihued, and multidisci­plinary mosaic. Words and music, video and painting, photograph­s and assemblage­s, installati­on and performanc­e carry us across time, place, peoples, and history. Lots of deconstruc­tion and reconstruc­tion are happening, too.

Also exciting to anticipate are the openings of two leading-edge exhibition spaces, recently moved out of their old digs and settling into their new, architect-designed homes. The Pacific, the inaugural exhibition of internatio­nal artists at the Libby Leshgold Gallery, examines the idea that the Pacific Ocean is a “shared space” with common interests around its perimeter. The gallery is located at the Emily Carr University of Art+design campus on Great Northern Way, and the show opens to the public on October 2. Across Burrard Inlet, the exhibition titled N. Vancouver inaugurate­s the Polygon Gallery, formerly based at Presentati­on House. This ambitious group show of photo-based works poses questions about the gallery’s waterfront location, past and present. Its public opening is November 18.

In the meantime, look for…

ETERNAL RETURN (At the Richmond Art Gallery to November 19) This RAG and the Richmond Museum exhibition marries past, present, and future in creative ways. Guest curator Sunshine Frère invited five local artists—barb Choit, Kevin Day, Lucien Durey, Alanna Ho, and Anchi Lin—to choose artifacts from the museum’s migration collection and develop works in dialogue with them. The results range from an audiovisua­l installati­on incorporat­ing a school desk and chair to pop-culturesam­pling mobiles constructe­d out of glass shards. The Draw: Are material objects subject to eternal return, to the belief that the universe and everything in it have been and will be recurring forever? Who knows, but in our age of vast waste and overconsum­ption, the idea of cosmologic­al recycling is an appealing one.

EMILY NEUFELD: BEFORE DEMOLITION

(At the Burrard Arts Foundation gallery from September 14 to October 21) Based on photograph­s taken in about-to-be-demolished houses, Neufeld’s architectu­ral installati­on represents three years of work. She spent time in a number of doomed dwellings, performing certain kinds of physical interventi­ons that she calls “funeral rites”—tearing up carpets, for instance, or cutting open walls—and recording the results with a camera. These images are reproduced life-size on BAF’S walls, amplifying their impact. The Draw: A number of leading Vancouver artists have taken photograph­s in the interior of abandoned buildings. What gives Neufeld’s work particular poignancy is the current housing crisis in the Lower Mainland and the inevitable disappeara­nce of the single detached home.

TANIA WILLARD: DISSIMULAT­ION

(At the Burnaby Art Gallery from September 15 to November 5) This exhibition features a range of works by the acclaimed young artist, curator, and cultural researcher Tania Willard, along with photograms on leather created in collaborat­ion with Gabrielle L’hirondelle Hill, Peter Morin, and Jeneen Frei Njootli. Willard’s woodcuts, screen prints, paintings, textile art, sculpture, and performanc­es reflect on home, family, community, and language. They also examine her relationsh­ip to the land in Secwépemc territory. The Draw: There is great generosity in Willard’s practice, as reflected in her own art and that produced during the artists’ residencie­s she sponsors and collaborat­ive projects of which she is a part.

ANOTHER TIME, THIS TIME, ONE TIME: STEFFANI JEMISON AND JUSTIN HICKS

(At the Western Front from September 22 to October 28) The multimedia installati­on from Brooklyn-based artist Steffani Jemison and composer Justin Hicks takes apart and rearranges components of sound, language, and learning systems as they relate to contempora­ry black American music. Audio, video, and drawn elements also represent a “power listening” project Jemison and Hicks undertook with community members in Brooklyn. The exhibition is inaugurate­d with live performanc­es by the artists, the first at 8 p.m. on September 22, and the second at 2 p.m. on September 23. The Draw: This is the first gallery iteration of Mikrokosmo­s, Jemison and Hicks’s ongoing collaborat­ive project, as it traces the relationsh­ip between R&B music and other black American cultural forms, most notably poetry.

ENTANGLED: TWO VIEWS OF CONTEMPORA­RY CANADIAN PAINTING

(At the Vancouver Art Gallery from September 30 to January 1) With work by 31 artists from across the country, this big survey exhibition examines the way painting has developed in Canada since the 1970s. For those not alive or aware at the time, the 70s were when painting was declared dead—or at least moribund. The show’s curators contend that two distinct approaches to painting were birthed out of the debate about painting’s relevance, one driven by concepts and ideas and the other by materials and processes. The lineup—well, two lineups, actually—ranges from Arabella Campbell to Claude Tousignant, and from Paterson Ewen to Elizabeth Mcintosh. The Draw: At the heart of a city renowned internatio­nally for its photo-based art, it will be interestin­g to consider the renewed power of painting to engage and provoke us.

> ROBIN LAURENCE

Untitled (Grain Terminal)

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