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.

Come EAT!  Holiday Feast!

DRINK!   mulled wine, hot apple cider with rum, and other libations!

DANCE!   to Weekend Leisure Club’s karaoke performance!

BE MERRY!  hang out at Artist-in-Residence Kate Sansom’s post-apocalyptic cocktail lounge!

There will be music, Bad Santa, SURPRISE AUCTION, raffles for cool prizes!

This holiday event honours and celebrates hard working artists, curators, writers, and other cultural producers who have given so much to ACCESS, yet ask little in return. This event is made possible by the work of 100 volunteers.

Admission is free for ACCESS volunteers and members.

Or you can become a member at the door!

Door Opens at 7pm until 12 midnight Saturday, December 12th.

Bring your friends, and party with us!

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.

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.

Maya de Forest, I love here now, June 30-August 4, 2007, Opening Friday June 29, 2007 at 8 pm at Access

The exhibition “I love here now” uses the genres of still life, portraiture and landscape to present a photographic portrait of Yoshiko de Forest. Born in Kyoto Japan in 1931, Yoshiko Hasegawa, immigrated to Winnipeg, Manitoba after meeting and marrying a Canadian. Leaving behind her home and a teaching career, she began a new life as a homemaker and mother, raising three children. “I love here now” is a portrait of Yoshiko by her daughter, Vancouver based photographer Maya de Forest.

Pop Philosophy, Works by Julie Beugin, Jessica Eaton, Jillian Pritchard & Dan Starling, Curated by Rachelle Sawatsky, May 26 -June 23, 2007, Opening Friday, May 25, 2007 at 8 pm at Access.

Ever thought that contemporary art exhibition theorized? Guest curator, Rachelle Sawatsky will be addressing this question directly in her first stint as a curator of her practice as a visual artist.

Sawatsky has asseembled an exhibition opening on May 25, 2007 that broaches the relationship between philosophy and contemporary art by presenting the work of four emerging artists influenced by philosophical ideas. The selected artists, Julie Beugin, Jessica Eaton, Jillian Pritchard and Dan Starling use video, painting, and poet, Clint Burnham and Sawatsky will feature new poems and mock interpretations of the exhibition’s work by relating each work to w popular philosopher’s theories. Contributors to the publication also include Patrik Andersson, Eli Bornowsky, Dana Claxton, Randy Lee Cutler, Michele Faguet, Maria Fusco, Jonah Gray, David MacWilliam, Mark Soo and Jordan Storm.

Both Beugin and Starling begin by creating new compositions from medicated sources. Beugin’s oil paintings on paper are derived from descriptions in literature. She traces moments of recognition as she paints sections of her paintings from her imagination and others from photographs that relate to the text. Starling’s photographs adhere to the social conventions of widely disseminated amateur photography such as the impromptu sports team photo, or the flag-burning photo while examining the relationship between certain “types” of images from the news media, from advertising, and amateur photographers.

Eaton is interested in creating highly technical compositions using traditional photographic techniques in order to examine conceptual and visual relationships to digital photography. Pritchard similarly questions the notion of medium-specify. Pritchard’s digital video, White on Black Polka-dot #1 (With Boil), depicts a white dot on black fabric that replicates the “boil” – the process in classical animation where the figure seems to shake due to the process of the changinf frames.