Blue Like an Orange | Curated by Emily Falvey
April 11 to May 31, 2009
Contemporary Galleries
|
|
Blue like an Orange features the work of six BC artists working in sculpture, ceramics, and installation art. Inspired by a well-known line of poetry by surrealist poet Paul Éluard (The world is blue like an orange), the exhibition explores humorous and poetic transformations of the everyday world through cumulative processes, assisted ready-mades, and the creation of hybrid forms. The work of multidisciplinary artist Samuel Roy-Bois questions concepts of inhabitable space by inviting viewers into new relationships with ordinary architectural details. Using common materials and found objects, Roy-Bois' work fosters a poetic sense of displacement, loss, and, at times, even emotional exhaustion. Working in painting and sculpture, Sonny Assu combines pop-culture branding with traditional Pacific Northwest Coast formline and totemic art. By exploring totemic representation in a contemporary context, Assu examines "how we use everyday consumer items and icons of pop culture to define our personal lineage."1 Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky's series Clutter Sculptures consists of fabricated objects covered in globs of polymerized gypsum and brightly coloured enamel. Both attractive and vaguely repellant, these sculptures recall Lautréamont's famous surrealist description: "as beautiful … as the chance encounter on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!"2 Ceramic artist Brendan Tang mixes contemporary pop culture with historical and cross-cultural references, creating hybrid forms that are at once playful and critical of aesthetic hierarchies. Manga Ormolu combines references to Chinese Ming dynasty vessels with techno-pop forms borrowed from contemporary Japanese anime and manga. Working with everyday materials, such as plywood, paint, and found objects, Lucy Pullen explores and visualizes concepts of paradox and contradiction. Known for sculptures and serial works that combine the idea-driven strategies of conceptual art with a post-minimalist concern for haptic experience, she seeks to physically realize theoretical shapes, as well as ideas of randomness and simultaneity. – Emily Falvey, Exhibition Curator 1 Sonny Assu, Artist Statement, 2008
EventsFAMILY WORKSHOP OPENING
TALK TALK
|
