Curated by Ines Min
May 6 – June 10\
, 2017
Reception Friday\, May 5\, 8PM
Or Gallery
555 Hamilton Street
Vancouver
Crit ical works by international artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha\, Eleanor King\, Nadia Myre and Erdem Taşdelen will be shown for the first time in Vancouver in “It Is Almost That\,” opening May 6. Curated by Ines Min\, the exhibiti on brings together artists from the east and west coasts of North America t o investigate the political potential of translation.
The show will f eature four bodies of work by the four artists. Cha’s Re Dis Appearing (1977) is a short video that juxtaposes poetic images of a bowl of tea \, a beach and water with stream-of-consciousness translations of English a nd French phrases. King’s Wormholes (2016) are vibrant drawings cr eated by tracing the outline of a CD repeatedly in a spectrum of colored pe ncils. Myre’s Orison (2014) are a series of large-scale black-and- white digital prints that expose the reverse side of an older work titled < em>Indian Act (2002). Taşdelen’s The Elements of Discontent ( 2015) are striking compositions of graphic images sourced from psychology t extbooks.
Each artist demonstrates a subversive use of translation\, incorporating an act of performance in the production of the work. The exhi bition seeks to visualize these hidden processes\, engaging in translation as a practice that shifts\, destabilizes and negotiates agency. A moment of radical possibility is discovered in the works\, which is re-deployed anew with every audience encounter.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in Busan\, South Korea. Her work has been shown at the Berkeley Art Museum\, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Contem porary Art. Eleanor King is a Nova Scotian artist based in New York City. She has held solo exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery (New York)\ , the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and Diaz Contemporary (Toronto). N adia Myre is a visual artist from Quebec and an Algonquin member o f the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation. She recently exhibited in solo shows at OBORO and the National Museum of American Indian (New York)\, and participated in the 2014 Shanghai Biennale. Erdem Taşdelen lives and works in Toronto. He held a solo show at the Contemporary Art G allery this year\, and has exhibited in group shows at the MAK (Vienna)\, t he Sabanci Museum (Istanbul) and the Museum für Neue Kunst (Freiburg).
< p>+ + +Ines Min is an American writer and editor\, and currently a master’s candidate in UBC’s Critical and Curatorial Studies program. She received a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Texa s at Austin\, and was the international public relations manager for the 20 14 Gwangju Biennale. She has written for artnet News\, Art + A uction\, Modern Painters\, Canvas and Ocula magazine.
The exhibition was organized with support from the Kil ly Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the D epartment of Art History\, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia.< /em>