Thursday, November 24
3:00 pm
AHVA Gallery
rm. 1001
Audain Art Centre
6398 University Boulevard
gallery.ahva.ubc.ca
Peter von Tiesenhausen has exhibited and lectured widely across Canada as well as in Europe, the United States, and Mexico. He has had more than fifty solo and many group exhibitions, which have been widely reviewed and the subject of three national television documentaries including a one-hour award-winning film, Elemental, produced in 2000 for Adrienne Clarkson Presents.
His multidisciplinary practice includes painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, installation, event, video, and performance. His work often involves the community in which he is working and uses the materials to be found there. He has created several permanent and ephemeral public artworks throughout North America and in Europe and has works in many public and private collections.
The land where he lives constitutes his primary and ongoing artwork. In the mid-1990s, he won a challenge against an oil pipeline that was proposed across his property outside Demmitt, Alberta, about an hour northwest of Grande Prairie, by copyrighting the top 6″ of the surface of his land as a work of art (he had done some land art on his property), effectively forcing the pipeline to take on expensive reroutes because it would destroy the work of art. This is a cunning and important moment in Canadian art and land art, and ephemera from this copyright claim will be presented in the exhibition at the UBC AHVA Gallery. von Tiesenhausen will use this moment of his career to enter into a discussion about his broader perspectives and diverse modes of artmaking.
Image: Witness, human and bear marks on aspen, courtesy Peter von Tiesenhausen
Peter von Tiesenhausen’s talk is held in conjunction with the exhibition This is it with it as it is (November 24, 2016 – January 17, 2017)
