Comedown

Jon Sasaki

11 September-30 October, 2010

Opening Reception Friday, September 10 8PM In conjunction with Swarm 2010

Access Gallery is pleased to present Toronto-based artist, Jon Sasaki in his first Vancouver solo exhibition. Comedown explores ideas of futility, physical limitations, and letdown. In addition to earlier works, the exhibition includes the premiere of a new video project produced in collaboration with Parkour BC.

In the wake of the 2010 Winter Olympics, Vancouver is a space in transition, coming to terms with an event that has happened and the legacies left by this global spectacle. For Comedown, Sasaki collaborates with local parkour practitioners, or traceurs, to produce a new work. Originating in France, parkour is a way of physically engaging with urban spaces by interacting acrobatically with city spaces and forms of architecture often overlooked by the city’s inhabitants. Sasaki proposes a collective form of parkour, presenting a series of challenges that provide an allegory for the larger society.

Utilizing film, video, objects, performance and installation, Comedown takes cynicism and tragedy as starting points, countering thematic heaviness with dry, comic delivery. Works presented in the exhibition such as, Cycle (2009) and Toronto’s Official Y2K Mascot, Autumn (2008) are structured like the familiar “shaggy dog joke,” a deadpan escalation of expectations, followed by an anticlimactic punch line. Sasaki makes repeated use of an earnest “everyman” character in his short looped video work, suggesting an inescapable cycle of trial and failure. The work is a reflection on the mechanics of making artwork and the frustrations that can accompany its presentation.

Sasaki consistently investigates sports entertainment, athleticism, and the underbelly of unfettered celebration in his practice, finding unabashed optimism and value in what may appear as complete failure, resignation, or pathos.

Working in the vein of “romantic conceptualism,” Jon Sasaki utilizes primarily performance-for-video, objects, installations and interventions in work that mixes humor and pathos, often with gently antagonistic results. His work has been presented in recent solo exhibitions at The Doris McCarthy Gallery, (University of Toronto, Scarborough) 126, (Galway, Ireland), Centre Clark (Montreal), and Latitude 53 (Edmonton). He has participated in group exhibitions at VOX (Montreal), The Vancouver Art Gallery, the Owens Art Gallery (Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB), Simon Fraser University Gallery (Burnaby, BC), as well as the 2006 and 2008 editions of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. Jon was an active member of the Instant Coffee art collective between 2002 and 2007. He lives and works in Toronto and is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects.

Please join us for the opening of Comedown, Friday September 10th at 8pm, in conjunction with Swarm 2010.

An artist talk by Sasaki, entitled, “A Talk That Will Possibly Make You Laugh and Make You Cry, Hopefully Both At the Same Time,” will be presented at Emily Carr University on Wednesday, September 15th at 12pm. For more information visit the Emily Carr Speaker’s Series website.

Comedown is supported by Arts Partners in Creative Development. Access Gallery gratefully acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, City of Vancouver, our members and volunteers. Access is a member of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres.

For more information, please visit www.accessgallery.ca, or contact access@vaarc.ca

On the occasion of Access Gallery’s move to a new space located 437 West Hastings, we developed a project that will redefine the organization’s public identity as well as enhance our commitment to innovative art practices.

The exterior of the new building includes a large backlit signage box and a shop-window display space, both highly visible from the street. We designated these spaces as a venue for public art in order to expand the presence of creative activities in the city.

We are pleased to present Raymond Boisjoly’s All that was, will always have been, somehow never again for the inauguration of an annual public art installation. Raymond Boisjoly is an Aboriginal artist living and working in Vancouver. He is interested in the way cross-cultural contact shifts and transforms conceptual and material understanding. He has participated in recent group exhibitions at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Access Gallery gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Hamber Foundation for ACCESS Public Art project.

Field Work

Diane Borsato, Roy Caussy, Brendan Fernandes, Hannah Jickling, Will Kwan

Guest curated by Shaun Dacey

26 June – 24 July 2010

Opening Reception: Friday 25 June 2010 8pm

Artist Talk by Brendan Fernandes: Saturday 26 June 2010 2pm

MFA in Paper Maché event hosted by Hannah Jickling with Vincent Trasov: Thursday 15 July 2010 6 pm

Field Work presents projects by Canadian artists which foster collaboration and exchange beyond studios or exhibition spaces. In search of skills, expertise, and conversation outside of the artistic field, the artists in this exhibition venture into specific locales developing dialogue with amateur scientists, speech coaches, students, and passersby on the street. Presented though various media within the exhibition, each project offers traces of artists’ experiences in the field.

The exhibition will feature three new projects: Diane Borsato organizes a series of field trips between the Vancouver Chapter of Royal Astronomical Society of Canada and the Vancouver Mycology Society; Roy Caussy works with a horse to perform a meaningful action; and Hannah Jickling offers a Vancouver installment of her MFA in Paper Maché project. For his 2009 video performances Foe and Performing Foe, Brendan Fernandes hired a speech coach to teach him to speak English with Swahili, Indian, and Canadian accents, and practiced these intonations with a group of university students.  Will Kwan’s 2004 Learning From Chinatown is a large-scale map of Chinatown in New York City based on maps he had asked people in the neighborhood to draw.

Join us for the following public events occurring throughout the exhibition. Fernandes will discuss his two video works within the frame of his practice Saturday 26 June 2010 at 2pm. Hannah Jickling will develop an installation throughout the duration of the exhibition as part of her MFA in Paper Maché project. Her project will culminate in an evening of paper maché workshops and conversation with Vincent Trasov Thursday July 15, 2010 at 6pm.

This exhibition is curated by Shaun Dacey, a candidate to the Masters Degree in Critical Curatorial Studies at The University of British Columbia, with support from the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia.

Access Gallery gratefully acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, City of Vancouver, our members and volunteers. Access is a member of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres.

For more information, please visit www.accessgallery.ca, or contact:

Shaun Dacey

Guest Curator

shaun.dacey@gmail.com

Access opens its new space on Friday 16 April at 8 PM with the launch of Raymond Boisjoly’s first solo exhibition The Ever-Changing Light!

Presented in partnership with the Signal and Noise Festival, The Ever-Changing Light runs 17 April – 29 May 2010.

The Ever-Changing Light explores the conceptual and material understanding of communication. As Boisjoly articulates:

“Though there is always the possibility it could be something else, The Ever-Changing Light pairs deliberate constructions with incidental and self-generating forms to grasp the unarticulated middle beyond beginnings and the end. Live feed video projections of television static and video-based recursion stand as the visual surrogates for ill-defined and convoluted ideas concerning the situation we find ourselves in, what will never be and what is still to come–instantaneous and forever deferred.

Working from disparate sources bearing no established relation to one another, The Ever-Changing Light does not exist to redeem any mere concept. Instead, it provides a means to explore inchoate, expansive potential and existing, delimited phenomena.”

Accompanying the exhibition will be the launch of a text-based public art project by Boisjoly installed on the façade of Access Gallery’s new space.

Raymond Boisjoly is an Aboriginal artist living and working in Vancouver. He wishes to thank the First Peoples’ Heritage, Language & Culture Council for their support.

Access Gallery gratefully acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, City of Vancouver, our members and volunteers. Access is a member of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres.

Curated by Charo Neville

Presented as part of Bright Light
www.bright-light.ca

by Access Gallery | www.vaarc.ca

Opening Reception:Friday 12 February 2010, 7 – 10 PM

13 February – 20 March, 2010

Access Gallery is pleased to present a new work by Osvaldo Yero as part of Bright Light: a temporary public art project commissioned by the City of Vancouver that involves fourteen local art organizations. Guest curated by Charo Neville, Passage is one of a series of cultural projects that will be on view through the months of February and March along the Carrall Street Greenway in the Downtown Eastside. Yero’s project will be visible from the street during the day through the window of Access Gallery.

Peering through a revealed slot in the otherwise darkened window the viewer will experience intense flashes of light, created by flickering LED lights which momentarily highlight knife blades set against a black backdrop in a completely darkened room. The brief beams of light on the spikes of metal suggest the reflection of light created from a lighthouse beacon, announcing a vast dark sea. Engaging the individual senses, yet disorientating the viewer and evoking the feeling of being alone in the middle of a dark ocean at night, the work offers a sense of solitude within the public space of the street. Its contrasting beauty and brutality also incites inevitable reflections about violence and self-preservation in the marginalized neighbourhood in which the work is situated.

As an immigrant to Canada from Cuba, Yero has consistently been concerned with themes that relate to his experience as part of the growing Cuban diaspora. Since living in Canada, Yero still frequently visits his homeland, where many of his family and friends continue to live with limited possibilities to leave. Like the paradoxical freedom and panic that swimming in a wide dark ocean may induce, Cubans are legally bound to their country, which is both home and prison. Many who try to escape across the ocean do not survive, or arrive on the other side only to be returned. The metaphor of death prevails in Yero’s practice. The title of the work, Passage, reflects these ideas – water is evoked as the dual possibility of freedom and death.

This new work also addresses myriad issues of integration and dislocation facing immigrants to a new country. Exhibited during a global event promoting nationalistic pride through marketing terms such as “dream,” “discover,” and “celebrate,” the installation in turn speaks to the underlying complexities of these utopic ideals.

This project will also include a forthcoming exhibition catalogue, to be published by Access Gallery, in collaboration with the artist and the curator.

Access Gallery gratefully acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, City of Vancouver, the 2010 Legacies Now’s program, Innovations, our members and volunteers. Access is a member of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres.

Presented by Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad

DEN

KATE SANSOM

Access Gallery Artist Residency

21 November 2009 – 23 January 2010

Closing Reception:

Saturday 23 January 2010 at 7PM

Since November 2009, Artist in Residence Kate Sansom has explored and assessed underground spaces in Vancouver that could serve as shelters in the event of a catastrophe. During her time as a resident, Sansom has hosted weekly screenings under the series Subterranean Movie Nights in visualization of what it might be like to live underground, and seminars on the theme of apocalyptic anxiety and cultural speculation.

On 23 January 2010, Access Gallery proudly hosts the closing reception for Den. The artist will present her findings, share her ideas, and further her appeal to enlist visitors’ underground spaces as communal shelters in the event of a great upheaval.

Kate Sansom is a conceptual artist, and occasional curator.  Her work portrays manifestations of anxiety and neuroses, focusing recently on speculative forms of anxiety; the anticipation of an apocalyptic future for human-kind.  Her work has been exhibited locally and across Canada, and has received mention in international online-publications such as Artforum and Canadian Art. In 2009 Kate received her Masters of Applied Arts in Visual Art from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where her research was endowed by the Joseph M. Lombardier Masters Research Scholarship.

Access Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, the City of Vancouver, our members and volunteers. Access is a member of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres.

Ellipsis

Roy Meuwissen

21 November 2009 – 23 January 2010

Opening Reception: 20 November 2009, 8 PM

Closed for the holidays from 15 December – 5 January 

Continuing with our body of programming that focuses on the lives of objects, ACCESS presents Ellipsis, Toronto-based artist Roy Meuwissen’s first exhibition in Vancouver. Ellipsis, a new, site-specific project created for ACCESS, begins with the familiar, our own tile flooring. The artist takes the motif and displaces it within the installation through photography, print, textile, video and a magic trick. Through this series of translations the artist directly engages the structures of the gallery by continuously reanimating the space.

The exhibition is accompanied by a limited-run print multiple featuring the essay “Carpets,” from Vilém Flusser’s 1999 book The Shape of Things, reprinted with thanks to Reaktion Books, UK.

Born in the Netherlands, Roy Meuwissen immigrated to Canada in the early 1980s. He studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design before receiving his MFA from the University of Windsor. He was recently invited to the Banff Centre for the Arts to participate in a residency led by German art critic Jan Verwoert. The artist would like to thank the Ontario Arts Council for their generous support through their exhibition assistance program. www.roymeuwissen.com

ACCESS gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, City of Vancouver, our members and volunteers for their ongoing assistance. ACCESS is a member of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres (PAARC).

[           ]

Jen Hutton & Daniel Laskarin

12 September to 7 November, 2009

Opening 11 September 8:00 PM as part of SWARM 2009

[        ] is an exhibition that features sculptures by Toronto-based artist Jen Hutton and Victoria-based artist Daniel Laskarin. These two artists from different generations employ varied strategies of material translation within their works. [        ] is both enclosure and separation: a title that reflects these divergent practices.

Laskarin’s sculptures are inspired by diagrams of 19th century farm equipment. However, made from contemporary commercial objects, they operate within their own internal language. Despite their utilitarian referent, these objects only remotely resemble machinery and appear to be on the verge of collapse. For Laskarin, confronting viewers with things in a state of uncertainty makes the act of viewing itself creative.

One of Hutton’s works, a giant plywood structure in the shape of the letter C, operates as both a linguistic symbol and a literalisation of the viewers’ role in interacting with the work. The ends of the C are open, inviting the gallery visitors to peer into a periscope-like mirror system that activates the object.

Hutton and Laskarin translate the immaterial aspects of language—from both linguistic and diagrammatic sources—into sculptural forms. They negotiate the relationships between objects as signifiers of the known world, and their forms as abstracted within the ostensibly autonomous sphere of the sculptural object. The space between the brackets here could be anything; it is as mutable as the affinities between the two artists’ works.

The exhibition will be accompanied by Access Gallery’s fourth Parallel Guidebook.

Also titled [        ], the publication will contain additional artworks by both Laskarin and Hutton.

Jesse Birch and Liz Park
Director/Curators

Access Gallery
206 Carrall St
Vancouver, BC
V6B 2J1

604.689.2907
access@vaarc.ca
www.vaarc.ca

The Cast of Shadows

Ricardo Cuevas (MX), Noa Giniger (IL/NL), Mike Love (CA), Heather Passmore (CA), Kika Thorne (CA)

Curated by Jesse Birch

June 20 – July 25, 2009
Opening June 19, 8:00pm

Honoré De Balzac, the nineteenth century’s master of literary realism, believed that when a photograph was taken, a spectral layer was transferred from the subject through the ether and onto the camera’s sensitized plate. The only photograph taken of the author shows him with his hand across his chest as if to retain as much of his being as possible. From a contemporary perspective Balzac’s superstition may seem anachronistic, but the concerns of this writer, whose life and practice coincided with the development of photography, point to a subject still worthy of investigation: how mimesis influences our interactions with images.

A concept originating with the ancient Greeks, mimesis is classically defined as the visual or literary representation of nature. The word mimetic is often used in this way to describe photographic images. Our engagement with photography, however, should also be considered in relation to what Walter Benjamin calls the mimetic faculty: the capacity to yield to our surroundings, to perceive and produce similarities, and to become Other. This faculty unsettles our everyday interactions with the lives of photographs, from the latent image to the print and beyond.

Photographs are both index and object, and our interactions with them are complex. The Cast of Shadows features five artists who employ varied mediums—including photography, video, sculptural installation, and drawing—to navigate mimetic encounters with images.