Marina Roy: Gillian Wearing: A Trilogy
In her documentations of contemporary social life, Gillian Wearing brings viewers into direct contact with the poignancy of human relationships: sensitive connections based on love, entanglements fraught with dysfunction and abuse or, more likely, associations that embody the utter complexity of human psychology. This book documents the first solo exhibition of Gillian Wearing’s work in Canada and brings together a trilogy of her video installations: Drunk, I Love You and Prelude.
Gillian Wearing: A Trilogy was published on the occasion of an exhibition organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, curated by Daina Augaitis with assistance from Melanie O’Brian, and presented from July 13 to October 27, 2002.
Edited Daina Augaitis
Essays by Daina Augaitis, Mark Beasley, Russell Ferguson, Marina Roy
Marina Roy: Sign after the x
“X” is one of the most provocative representations in contemporary culture: a symbol of capital, power, waste, and illicit desire. Based on the connection between language and the lack thereof, Sign after the x investigates the letter “X” that is used in our culture as part of a complex sign system that encompasses the evolution of language back to its mythic origins. Copublished by Artspeak gallery, Vancouver.
Including many of her drawings, Marina Roy uses narrative–and the book conventions of the dedication, preface, introduction, postscript, errata, and index–to form a compendium of X words that is part philosophical treatise on the foundations of image and text, part illustration, part math lesson, and part language primer.
For the author, the combination of text and image arises from a desire to make words “flesh” as it were, a desire to treat text as a thing that, in its visual impact, and in its arbitrary association with everyday objects, creates new meaning, leading to revelations about “how myth is constructed in our culture. ”
Beguiling in its ambitions, Sign after the x is a subjective, subversive dictionary of modern culture that forces readers to see the world in a new light.
For more information: https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/S/Sign-After-the-X
Gu Xiong: Drowning
A 17-page catalogue published by the Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, BC, featuring Gu Xiong’s solo exhibition.
In Drowning, an expanded version of the exhibition, The Mirror; A Return to China (Yukon Art Centre, 1999), Gu Xiong poetically links the personal trauma of this boating accident, in particular the near drowning of his daughter Gu Yu, with his sense that his hometown, and by extension the China he grew up in, is being “drowned,” obliterated by the mammoth construction projects and the country’s colonization by Western culture and business. In thirty-six framed photo works and two photo murals that make up the bulk of the installation, he documents and reflects on this transformation, presenting such potent views as workers among piles of rubble, a Marlboro cigarette billboard stretched across a Chongqing pedestrian overpass, hovering above dense traffic, and a classic tourist snapshot of himself before a miniature version of Mount Rushmore (from a theme park in Chongqing which also housed a model of the Titanic). His images also include such charged scenes as Gu Xiong standing before a monument and soldier in Tiananmen Square.
For more information: http://guxiong.ca/en/solo-exhibition/drowning/
Gu Xiong and Andrew Hunter: Ding Ho / Group of 7
A 60-page catalogue published by McMichael Canadian Art Collection, featuring Gu Xiong’s mixed media installation in collaboration with Andrew Hunter.
This collaborative installation by Vancouver artist Gu Xiong and Dundas, Ontario-based artist and curator Andrew Hunter includes artworks, family photos, and artefacts from the Cultural Revolution and Chinese/Canadian restaurants exhibited alongside paintings by the Group of Seven. In Ding Ho/Group of 7, the lines between artworks, artefacts, and common objects are blurred and the traditional authoritative ‘voice of the institution’ and official history are challenged.
In Andrew Hunter’s words, “For Gu Xiong and I, this project is about dialogue and change, about rethinking one’s past and seeing it through the eyes of another, about movement and migration (both physical and philosophical) and the constant struggle to form a sense of identity that is a hybrid of many identities. Ding Ho/ Group of 7 is about being Canadian.”
For more information: http://guxiong.ca/en/solo-exhibition/ding-ho-group-of-seven/
Gu Xiong: The River
Gu Xiong’s installation “The River” is described by John O’Brian as a meditation on migrancy and displacement. The author situates the work within the life of the artist, who left China because of political oppression, and the history of the Canadian West, which has marginalized its Chinese inhabitants. Short poetic texts by Gu Xiong in which he identifies with spawning salmon are included.
For more information: http://guxiong.ca/en/solo-exhibition/the-river/
Nuno Porto: Angola a preto e branco: Fotografia e ciência no Museu do Dundo, 1940-1970
When it comes to distributing scientific knowledge, photography and the museum share a number of characteristics. One like the other operate by selection, fragmenting the real. They proceed by composition, regrouping, in printed albums or in the confined space of a shop window, room or building, the fragments they produce. Both are mediators of something that contains, metaphorically or literally, and which is made present to the spectator even if he is distant, in time or space, or even if it is an entity that is only thought of and takes care of physical realization is established in the process of mediation.
Gu Xiong: The Yellow Pear
Gu Xiong came to Canada from China to find freedom and a new life, but with it came the uneasy feeling of being a stranger in a strange land, with customs, attitudes, and ways of living far different from what he and his family had known in China. The Yellow Pear is a collection of deeply personal narratives (appearing in both English and Chinese) and illustrations about life in his adopted country, a life which resonates with the past he left behind. In these disarmingly simple words and images, which connect community to personal identity, Gu seeks to find his own place in the world.
For more information: http://guxiong.ca/en/publications/the-yellow-pear/