Vancouver Art Gallery’s 2017 program celebrates Canada 150

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Image credits: (left to right) Susan Point, "Halibut (State I of II)," 2007; Howie Tsui, "Retainers of Anarchy (poison purge)," 2015; Jeremy Hof, "Fluorescent Ring on Purple," 2014

(left to right) Susan Point, screenprint on paper, Courtesy of the Artist; Howie Tsui, animation key frame drawings, Courtesy of the Artist; Jeremy Hof, acrylic on panel, Courtesy of the Artist, Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid, Courtesy of the Artist

In 2017, the Vancouver Art Gallery is proud to present a dynamic year-long program of exhibitions and public events that will tell unique stories through visual art on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation. This ambitious program will include outstanding presentations on distinctive artistic practices within Canada’s extraordinary visual art communities and will explore diverse aspects of this country’s cultural identity with a special focus on the West Coast. Visitors will have the opportunity to witness the long-overdue career retrospective of Musqueam artist Susan Point, reflect on perspectives of political reality through Pacific Crossings: Hong Kong Artists in Vancouver, Howie Tsui: Retainers of Anarchy and Tsang Kin-Wah, contemplate internationally acclaimed conceptually-based photography from this region in Pictures from Here, experience the breathtaking beauty of Claude Monet’s Secret Garden, and consider the evolution of painting in Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting. An exciting lineup of public programs, including symposia, lectures, artists’ talks, tours and family activities will further enrich visitors’ experience at the Gallery.

Highlights from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s 2017 exhibitions:

Susan Point: Spindle Whorl

February 18 to May 28, 2017

Featuring more than a hundred artworks that take the spindle whorl as their starting point, Susan Point: Spindle Whorl is a career survey of works by this celebrated Musqueam artist. Over the past 35 years, Point has received wide acclaim for her remarkably accomplished and wide-ranging oeuvres that affirm the vitality of Coast Salish culture, both past and present.

The Coast Salish spindle whorl has been a persistent motif in Point’s work since the beginning of her career. Comprised of a small (usually) wooden disk with a pole inserted through the centre, this tool was traditionally used by Coast Salish women to prepare wool that would be woven into garments and ceremonial blankets. Point has drawn upon the spindle whorl to provide a formal structure for her art while combining this motif with a uniquely Salish vocabulary of circles, crescents and curved triangles, elements that distinguish the art of her people from the formline-based art of northern First Nations peoples.

While Point’s practice is informed by a profound respect for Coast Salish traditions, she has pushed the boundaries of tradition by articulating Coast Salish culture in contemporary terms. When she embarked on her journey, there were few precedents for a First Nations woman to carve or work with sculpture, as these were activities traditionally done by men. Nonetheless Point embraced both carving and sculptural work and has continually pushed the traditional form of the spindle whorl in extraordinary new directions.

Susan Point: Spindle Whorl is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Ian Thom, Senior Curator-Historical and Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art. This exhibition will be accompanied by an extensively illustrated 160-page hardcover book, co-published by Black Dog Publishing and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Pacific Crossings: Hong Kong Artists in Vancouver

March 4 to May 28, 2017

Hong Kong and Vancouver share a long-standing history of cultural symbiosis. June 2017 marks the 20-year anniversary of the transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty from the United Kingdom to mainland China. In the lead up to the handover in 1997, tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents immigrated to Canada, many choosing to settle in Vancouver, and among them were a significant number of artists. Pacific Crossings presents works from well-known Hong Kong artists created after their relocation to Vancouver throughout the 1960-90s. It explores various visual languages from Hong Kong’s modern and contemporary art beginnings including ink painting, abstract and landscape painting, and examines the influence that a new environment had on their practices. Participating artists include David Lam, Koo Mei, Paul Chui and Josh Hon.

This exhibition is presented as part of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Institute of Asian Art initiative.

Howie Tsui: Retainers of Anarchy

March 4 to May 28, 2017

Retainers of Anarchy is a solo exhibition featuring new work from Vancouver-based artist Howie Tsui. The title work, Retainers of Anarchy, is a 28-metre scroll-like video installation that references life during the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), but undermines its idealized portraiture of social cohesion by setting the story in Kowloon’s notorious Walled City—an ungoverned tenement of disenfranchised refugees in Hong Kong which was demolished in 1994. This work considers wuxia as a narrative tool for dissidence and resistance. Wuxia, a traditional form of martial arts literature that expanded into 20th century popular film and television, was created out of narratives and characters often from lower social classes that uphold chivalric ideals against oppressive forces during unstable times. The People’s Republic of China placed wuxia under heavy censorship for fear of arousing anti-government sentiment. However practitioners advanced the form in Hong Kong making it one of the most popular genres of Chinese fiction.

This exhibition is collaboratively organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Ottawa Art Gallery.

Tsang Kin-Wah

May to August, 2017

Hong Kong-based artist Tsang Kin-Wah will create a site-specific text work for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s exterior wall. Based on editorials taken from Vancouver newspapers in the 1980-90s, Tsang’s text critically addresses generalizations and issues surrounding the cultural climate of immigration in Vancouver from Hong Kong. The composition of the pattern is made from text in both Chinese and English. Tsang Kin-Wah explores the immigrant experience and marginalized voices in an attempt to unpack history and account for suppressed narratives.

Pacific Crossings, Howie Tsui and Tsang Kin-Wah are organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Diana Freundl, Associate Curator, Asian Art.

Pictures from Here

May 19 to September 4, 2017

The association of conceptually-based photography and the rise of Vancouver as an internationally known centre for the production of contemporary art has been widely recognized. Beginning in the late 1970s artists such as Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall, Christos Dikeakos and Rodney Graham developed intellectually rigorous approaches to photography. Breaking with the romantic landscape tradition that dominated art making and collecting in Vancouver well into the 1970s, they developed practices that both articulated an affinity with the avant-garde projects of early modernism and acknowledged the specific place and historical moment in which they were working.

The exhibition will showcase photographs and video work made over the past twenty-five years that builds upon this conceptual framework, both from the Gallery’s Collection and private collections. Artists will include Roy Arden, Marian Penner Bancroft, Karin Bubas, Stan Douglas, Christos Dikeakos, Rodney Graham, Fred Herzog, Sandra Semchuk and James Nicholas, Althea Thauberger, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace and Paul Wong, among others.

Claude Monet’s Secret Garden

June 24 to October 1, 2017

The largest exhibition of Monet’s work in Western Canada, Claude Monet’s Secret Garden will draw from the extensive collection at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris and showcase the artist’s extraordinary works from Giverny, France, as well as important selections that illuminate his overall career. His late Water Lilies series will be juxtaposed with other significant works from the 1870s. Also featured will be landscapes that Monet executed in France and England.

Together, nearly forty canvases will highlight Monet’s striking aesthetic. Audiences will witness Monet’s commitment to naturalistic representation—which prompted him to reject European conventions governing composition, colour and perspective, his mastery of colour, and his fascination with Japanese woodblock prints, especially those by Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige, which he avidly collected. These prints encouraged Monet to pursue asymmetrical arrangements of forms, eliminating linear perspective and drawing attention to the two-dimensional surface.

This presentation is co-produced by the Musée Marmottan Monet and the Vancouver Art Gallery, and is curated by Marianne Mathieu, Deputy Director of the Musée Marmottan Monet and Ian Thom, Senior Curator-Historical at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting

September 30, 2017 to January 2, 2018

Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting offers an insight into two distinctly different modes of painting that have come to dominate contemporary painting in this country. The origins of both can be effectively traced back to the 1970s, to a moment when the continued existence of painting was hotly debated. Within that debate two strategies were devised, one that proposed the possibility of conceptual painting—painting that emerged from and returned to the idea, and a second proposition that valued actions over ideas—where doing and making were pitted against ideas and concepts.

This exhibition traces the legacy of that debate and documents the work of more than thirty artists who have been largely responsible for the strong revival that painting now enjoys in this country. It offers a convincing survey of the lively debate that makes painting relevant and meaningful today.

This exhibition is curated by Vancouver Art Gallery Senior Curator, Bruce Grenville, and artist and Emily Carr University of Art + Design professor David MacWilliam. It will be accompanied by a 112-page publication.

Source: Vancouver Art Gallery