Vancouver Art Gallery's "Ambivalent Pleasures" Surveys Latest Innovations

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Charlene Vickers, “Accumulations of Moments Spent Underwater with the Sun and Moon,” 2015-2016

watercolour, gouache and pencil crayon on paper. Courtesy of the artist, Photo by Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery.

That Vancouver is knee-deep in good art is no surprise. After all, it's one of four cities, along with Chicago, Los Angeles and Mexico City, recognized this year by the PBS series Art21, a showcase of 21st-century art that prides itself on giving “unparalleled access to the most innovative artists of our time.” Much of Vancouver’s innovation happens in the studios of emerging and mid-career artists, many of whom are interested in materiality – even pieces that blur boundaries with craft or other “makerly” pursuits.

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"Vancouver Special," nd

Courtesy Wikipedia.

At least, that seems to be one take-home message from Vancouver Special, the Vancouver Art Gallery’s new triennial survey of the region’s contemporary art scene. Borrowing its name from a house style popular when the baby-boom generation came of age, this  project gives the wider public a chance to see work by artists sometimes little known outside of small artist-run spaces.

This first iteration, Ambivalent Pleasures, on view until April 17, features 40 artists chosen by Daina Augaitis, the gallery’s chief curator, and guest curator Jesse McKee. They visited more than 90 studios last spring, identifying the latest trends, including new approaches to surrealism, abstraction and conceptual art, as they chose a broad range of painting, animation, ceramics, installation, audio and textiles.

Colleen Heslin, “Waste not /want not,” 2016

Kim Dorland, "Egress," 2016

The artists include Angela Teng, a painter who explores the line between art and craft, even crocheting with acrylic paint, and Colleen Heslin, who creates dyed linen works that evoke abstract expressionism. Kim Dorland, who is now based in Vancouver, makes paintings that echo the Group of Seven’s obsession with the outdoors but are thick with gobs of paint (he was once dubbed ‘Tom Thomson on acid’), while Mark Delong’s recent work stitches together fruit and vegetable boxes salvaged from Chinatown grocers.

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Mark Delong, “Double Nite,” 2016

cotton thread on cardboard. Courtesy of the artist, Photo by Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery.

Charlene Vickers, visited by the curators during her residency at Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver, examines Anishinaabe cultural traditions in abstract paintings that reference porcupine quill designs.

The show includes older artists like Glenn Lewis and Garry Neill Kennedy, who’ve largely worked outside the mainstream. Lewis, a long-time fixture on the Vancouver arts scene, attended the Vancouver School of Art and helped found experimental arts organizations, including Intermedia and the Western Front. “Although he’s over 80 years old, he’s still re-inventing himself,” says Augaitis. Lewis is represented with an installation of recent stoneware ceramics juxtaposed with photo-based images of gardens from 1981.

Meanwhile, Kennedy, one of Canada’s prominent conceptual artists, moved to Vancouver in 2012 and began teaching at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and the University of British Columbia. Kennedy, who served as president of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design from 1967 to 1990, often works with painting, unusual for a conceptual artist. His Ambivalent Pleasures installation includes paintings, framed stencils and archival materials.

Ambivalent Pleasures crosses many boundaries. The breadth of materials and unusual configurations is variously confounding, humorous, playful and exhilarating. It achieves something many post-modern, conceptual shows lack: a sense of exuberant possibilities.

And so, we are introduced to Barry Doupé, who is best known in the film and video world. “His commitment to a way of making things is really astounding,” says McKee, who works at the Vancouver artist-run centre 221A as head of strategy. “It takes a long time to do what he does. But the fact that he is doing things by hand . . . is also very interesting and that makes us recognize him as an artist that fits in with the artists that we have put in this exhibition.”

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Barry Doupé, “Shell Vase,” 2016

digital drawing created using Deluxe Paint V on an AMIGA computer. Courtesy of the artist.

For instance, Doupé’s 2012 work, Whaty, a computer animation that resembles an abstract painting coming to life, was made using Amiga technology from the 1980s. Doupé also produced a series of digital drawings for the show, groundbreaking work he has been doing only for the last year. “The technology that he is using, which was once new and now seems outdated, somehow imbues what is normally associated with coldness – i.e. the screen – with a nostalgic warmth,” says McKee. “That fits into the overall theme that we’re talking about here: that sense of pleasure that is also ambivalent – not as an apathy or a disengagement, it’s more of a more mature word – more about uncertainty, sometimes fence-sitting, sometimes being multiple things at once.”

Tamara Henderson, “The Scarecrow’s Holiday,” 2015

Rachelle Sawatsky, “Untitled,” 2016

Mina Totino, “The Soul Molecule,” 2015

Elizabeth McIntosh, “Mathematics,” 2015

Invoking pleasure is pivotal to McKee. “If you are able to overwhelm situations with pleasure, a really intelligent pleasure, you will be able to transcend things and understand the real stakes of the world and where we are because your pleasure is also not causing pain,” he says. “That’s really what we wanted to do with this exhibition, even though we are in Vancouver, which is often a very critical city.” He refers to an interview in the exhibition catalogue with Richard Hill, the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Studies at Emily Carr University, who notes “art can be political even if the images aren’t overtly political.” Adds McKee: “Just because you are making colourful paintings doesn’t mean you aren’t taking political issues seriously. We take issues very seriously.”