Established but young Asian Canadian artist Germaine Koh has developed sensitivity to different cultures through her extensive exhibition career in different countries. Her work addresses issues of subtle perceptions of different situations and the politics of everyday life. She develops new work in response to the physical site of Para Site Art Space and the social-cultural situation of Hong Kong. Koh has exhibited in international biennales in Montreal and Sydney.
Germaine Koh, an internationally acclaimed visual artist from Canada, exhibit STALL at Para Site Art Space. Koh has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe, Canada, USA, Australia, Asia and Mexico. Her conceptually-driven works are informed by her observations of everyday life, familiar objects, and common places. STALL is a combination of several installation works, including new site-specific pieces, offering an interesting look at the interconnected relationship between various types of commercial transactions.
In the work, Stall, grass sprouting from wooden stepped structures resembling market stands occupy the gallery, whereby the unevenness of grass catches the natural ambience of the space. While making reference to commercial cycles of production and consumption, Stall takes the gallery space out of that cycle of urgency, in favour of a natural process of organic growth.
A new installation, involving hundreds of recycled bottles constructed in a formation uniquely pertinent to the cityscape of Hong Kong occupies the first floor gallery.
Each of these exciting works, which references various types of commercial transactions, distills an action or a movement. By slowing down the processes of transaction, STALL reveals a different time scale; one that is organic, quiet, and relaxing, shown in marked contrast to the demanding pace of the commercial nature of the world we live in. Each work will surprise the viewers in an unexpected twist by slowing down or drawing out each of these processes.
Gu Xiong and Xu Bing. Here is what I mean. London, ON: Museum London, 2004
Book information:
A 15-page catalogue published by the Museum London, London, ON, featuring Gu Xiong and Xu Bing’s collaborative exhibition.
Gu Xiong and Xu Bing are compatriots from the People’s Republic of China who shared experiences through the Cultural Revolution and the development of the Chinese Avant-Garde movement in the 1980s. Each subsequently emigrated to North America: Gu Xiong to Canada (where he now lives in Vancouver) and Xu Bing to New York.
The exhibition includes part of Xu Bing’s acclaimed Book from the Sky – in which the artist has created hundreds of artificial Chinese characters and printed them in books and on scrolls – as well as calligraphy scrolls, a classroom installation and an interactive computer font project. Gu Xiong contributes an installation of sixteen square drawings on canvas, which report on everyday objects and events encountered in his immigrant experience, and several large-scale paintings where text-like images describe the artist’s view of the detritus of Western consumer culture.
Gareth James and Florian Zeyfang, eds. I said I love. That’s the promise the TVideo politics of Jean-Luc Godard. Berlin: b_books, 2003.
Book information:
I said I love. That is the promise. The TVideo politics of Jean-Luc Godard< focuses on the filmmaker’s often neglected work with television and video and his collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville in the 1970s. The starting point is the thesis that Godard’s encounter with television reformulated the aesthetic, political and gender-specific understanding of image and sound. What is called ‘TVideopolitik’ here derives its political power from the fact that it takes images from an economy of reproduction and recognizes their function in an economy of production and distribution. The papers analyze film, television and art as practices of representation and claim that Godard’s turn to television involves “provocation: what it is to see and to think”.
With texts by: Kaja Silverman, Elisabeth Büttner, Dave Beech, Manthia Diawara, Simon Sheikh, Jason Simon, Stephan Geene and Michael Eng as well as pictures from an exhibition.
Charlotte Townsend-Gault and James Luna. Rebecca Belmore: The Named and the Unnamed. Vancouver, BC: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2003
Book information:
Exhibition catalogue from the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (4 October–1 December 2002).
Texts by Scott Watson, Charlotte Townsend-Gault and James Luna.
Marina Roy, “I Love You” in Gillian Wearing: A Trilogy. Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2002
Book information:
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
