Red River
This is a 15-page catalogue of Gu Xiong’s solo exhibition, Red River, held at Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Red River was a multimedia installation.
The following text is taken from the essay “Toward The New Frontier” by Petra Watson (the curator of this exhibition).
“Gu Xiong’s four-channel video installation and photographs exhibited in Red River depict three rivers coming together as a spatial metaphor for globalization; the concept of flow within this transformative landscape defies any absolute boundaries, either physical or psychological. The river is brought forward to represent place and to give spatial interpretation to global fluidity addressing economic, political, social, and cultural change in a transnational mobile world.
Rivers communicate in ways that are constantly indeterminate. Fluidity defies stability, and the river no longer draws from any immutable continuity with nature; the river is now entangled with culture. This thematic of mobility encountered as a journey and taken up by river views is the central encounter or passage through the exhibition.“
For more information: http://guxiong.ca/en/solo-exhibition/red-river/
Germaine Koh: Overflow
Overflow was a flexible, changing installation of glass bottles that responded to the architecture, socio-geographic location and history of Centre A’s Downtown Eastside space. It developed during the months before the opening, with the gallery participating in one of the more visible unofficial economies of the neighbourhood — the recuperation and redemption of bottles from across the city, through an arrangement with the neighbouring bottle depot, United We Can. The installation itself was a flexible mass of bottles arranged on the concrete floor and around the brick pillars and office furnishings of the vast space, lit primarily by the natural light from the wall of windows overlooking Hastings Street. With their labels removed, the bottles appeared both as abstract tokens for human presence and as a sparkling, seemingly liquid volume. All configurations retained a tension between the now-pristine bottles and the fact that they represented not only a humble yet economically valuable raw material that is a precious local resource and a subject of street-level expertise, but also alcoholism — one of the neighbourhood’s scourges. It is possible that the attractiveness and apparent value of the materials, displayed in all their uselessness in the somewhat refined gallery space, made uneasy position as a possible contributor to the gentrification of the neighbourhood.
For more information: https://germainekoh.com/works/overflow
Ical Krbbr Prodly Prsnts Gart Jas, Jon Klsy, Josf Stra
Michael Krebber, Ical Krbbr Prodly Prsnts Gart Jas, Jon Klsy, Josf Stra [Michael Krebber proudly presents Gareth James, John Kelsey, Josef Strau]. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007
Book information:
A bridge, an ellipsis, a sudden trailing off, the title of this exhibition, etc, the … might also be the blub blub blub of an underwater clam drawn by Jack Smith (“Ploduction Ploblems”), or a sort of mussel-talk taking over. In Réné Daumal’s unfinished novel Mount Analogue, which narrates the search for an invisible mountain (the largest on earth), there is a description of the money used in this place: smooth, pearl-like orbs dug out of the invisible mountain’s soil and very difficult to find. So on Mount Analogue, the … would also be a price, a sum, exact amount of invisible cash. (excerpt from the index of the accompanying book, published by Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne.
For more information: https://www.portikus.de/en/exhibitions/144_ical_krbbr_prdly_prsnts_gart_jas_jon_klsy_josf_stra
Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art
John O’Brian and Peter White, eds. Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007
Book information:
“The great purpose of landscape art is to make us at home in our own country” was the nationalist maxim motivating the Group of Seven’s artistic project. The empty landscape paintings of the Group played a significant role in the nationalization of nature in Canada, particularly in the development of ideas about northernness, wilderness, and identity. In Beyond Wilderness contributors pick up where the Group of Seven left off. They demonstrate that since the 1960s a growing body of both art and critical writing has looked “beyond wilderness” to re-imagine landscape in a world of vastly altered political, technological, and environmental circumstances. By emphasizing social relationships, changing identity politics, and issues of colonial power and dispossession, contemporary artists have produced landscape art that explores what was absent in the work of their predecessors.
Beyond Wilderness expands the public understanding of Canadian landscape representation, tracing debates about the place of landscape in Canadian art and the national imagination through the twentieth century to the present. Critical writings from both contemporary and historically significant curators, historians, feminists, media theorists, and cultural critics and exactingly reproduced artworks by contemporary and historical artists are brought together in productive dialogue. Beyond Wilderness explains why landscape art in Canada had to be reinvented, and what forms the reinvention took.
For more information: https://www.mqup.ca/beyond-wilderness-products-9780773551442.php#!prettyPhoto