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Linda Bouchard - New Works

The Commons is thrilled to present an intimate evening with French Canadian composer Linda Bouchard. Immersed in collaboration with visual artists, Bouchard’s recent work utilizes digital samples, extended and manipulated, which are drawn from and respond to projected images. Her atmospheric project “seek(s) to express emotional experiences in their most raw form, without a literal or narrative setting. Like a collage of different perceptions that eventually forms a whole picture, I attempt to create a world from "real time" experience: reconstructing an imagined emotional event that unfolds in a compressed time frame.” This is the second in series of solo performances organized by François Houle. 

Linda Bouchard will present four recent works, all Canadian Premiers. InUnspoken, 2013, a collaboration with video artists David and Hi-Jin Hodge, Bouchard used manipulated samples of a previous composition called"L'échapppée d'ailes" (a flock of wings escaping) for gamelan orchestra to create a meditative, ever changing sonic environment that is shaped around the breathing of Hodge's diverse subjects pictured in 15 second video portraits. Sonic Forecast, 2009, is a Film by Luis Maurette (Buenos Aires) with live score inspired by the Myanmar (Burmese) anti-government protests led by students and Buddhist Monks in September 2007. Also present will be a World Premiere ofBlack Ice with projected image by Eliane Duval and Low Wind, an improvisation with François Houle joining Bouchard’s live electronics on clarinet.

Linda Bouchard is active as a composer, conductor and producer. Her works are heard regularly on both sides of the Atlantic and have been recorded by CBC, Analekta, Marquis Classics and CMC in Canada; ECM in Germany and CRI in the US. Bouchard has won four SOCAN awards in Canada and a Prix Opus for best composer in 1997.  Her honors in the US include first prizes in the Princeton Composition Contest, the Indiana State Competition, the National Association of Composers USA Contest and a Fromm Foundation Award from Harvard University. Linda was a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio and at the Civitella Ranieri in Italy. In June 2001, she was invited to participate at IRCAM’s “Stage d’Informatique Musicale” in Paris and became very interested in pursuing exploration with new technologies. In the fall 2005, she founded NEXMAP: New Experimental Music and Performance, a non-profit arts organization of which she is Artistic Director.

Linda Bouchard Sat Jan 19, 8pm organized by François Houle  119B E Pender St $20 at the door, seating is very limited for this intimate, one night only event

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Anatomize Obfuscation

image: Jasmine Reimer, Bath Mat, 2011, found object, styrofoam, 24x30x2"

The Commons is proud to present Anatomize Obfuscation, an exhibition of three female artists who work in assemblage sculpture, collage, and painting. These artists’ abstract use of ostensibly mundane materials speak of these common objects as charged with aesthetic potential. The formal refinement fostered by these artists displays a loving-connection for their ubiquitous materials. The exhibition includes new work by Guadalupe Martinez, Jasmine Reimer and Anna Wood.

Martinez and Reimer articulate a kind of deconstruction of the everyday through their interplay with use value, form and colour. Their objects respond to common systems of organization, standardized within our material landscape. InReimer's work bundled pieces of insulation, wood and found objects act as base material for the surreal and uncanny to manifest. Through the changing nature ofMartinez's installation, realized in concrete cinderblocks and fabric, she activates the potenial of her materials in a formal process. Paintings byWood move this kind of colloquial experimentation with materials to the surface, realizing similiar reductive gestures through paint and collage. 

The liminal space created through abstraction activates an aesthetic realm of relative non-clarity. The works in Anatomize Obfuscation seem to breathe and expire simultaneously within their set aesthetic systems and utilize these systems to navigate spatial and material textures of the quotidian experience.

This exhibition has been organized by Lee Plested with the assitance of Tobin Gibson. The exhibition will open Wednesday January 16, 7-9pm, artists will be in attendance.

In conjunction to this exhibition we are very pleased to present the second concert in our music series organized by Francois Houle featuring French Canadian Composer and Electronic Musician Linda Bouchard. This on going series of intimate evenings present virtousic artists in solo performance. Sat, Jan 19, 8pm $20 at the door.

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The Magus/ Corner Pieces

The Commons is proud to present the exhibition The Magus. Curated by Noam Gonick, this project brings together  C. Graham Asmundson's paintings, drawings and works in yarn with The Magus, 2011, a film work by his son Jaimz Asmundson which documents his father's artistic process.  Seen here together for the first time, it is a focused glimpse into their unique creative and intergenerational collaboration. The exhibition will open Friday, November 23, 2012 and run through Sunday, January 6, 2013.

C. Graham Asmundson received a MFA from the Concordia University and has been prominent artist and cultural worker in Winnipeg for many years, though rarely exhibiting outside his home community. His son Jaimz Asmundson is an experimental filmmaker, video artist, and electronic musician. They recently collaborated on The Magus, 2011, Jaimz’ groundbreaking documentary about his father's transcendent art practice. Graham works create allegorical fields of figures at times mystical, often playfully queer and insurrectionary. Jaimz uses film, video and animation techniques to penetrate deeply into his father’s unusual process whereby random impulses, channeled from the supernatural world, guide the artist while in a trance state. His bold art making has often been the centre of controversy, including the Plug In Gallery, Winnipeg, billboard projectHomophobia is Killing Us, 1991, which was defaced by the Ku Klux Klan, leading to death threats. Jamiz Admundson has exhibited in numerous festivals and gallery contexts. Selected screenings for The Magus include FIFA - Festival International du Films sur l’Art (Montreal), Hong Kong International Film Festival, MIX NY and Lume International Film Festival (Brazil) – Artistic Contribution Award. This exhibition has been made possible with the assistance of the Winnipeg Arts Council.

The opening reception will be preceded by a conversation with curator Noam Gonick and Jaimz and C. Graham Asmundson at 7pm in the exhibition.

  Also at this time Lance Blomgren’s will present Corner Pieces: Texts for Loitering. As part of his ongoing series of public posters he has produced short texts written for and to be posted in the immediate environs of The Commons. Undermining the impersonal, public tone of the urban poster with an openly subjective, mundane and seemingly meaningless series of observations and histories, Texts for Loitering offers a contemplative or dumbfounding moment for local passersby and wanderers, hustlers and flâneurs. These posters function as an associative intervention, addressing both the reader and site itself, and work to implicate the reader in his or her own role within the larger relational—and often celebratory—flow of events in the neighbourhood.

Lance Blomgren’s text projects have been exhibited in Banff, Chicago, Berlin, and most recently as part of Magnetic Norths (Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montreal).  He is the author of the novella Walkups, and Corner Pieces, both published by Conundrum Press. Blomgren is a MA candidate in Curatorial Studies program at UBC.

Opening reception Friday November 23, 8-11pm               

Artists will be in attendance

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François Houle

François Houle   

Fri Nov 16

The Commons is thrilled to present the incomparable François Houle performing aerial, an intimate evening of solo performance. This one night only event will incorporate video projection by Bay Area visual artists David and Hi-Jin Hodge, frequent collaborators and fellow members of NEXMAP.

Clarinetist François Houle has established himself as one of today’s most inventive musicians in the diverse musical spheres he embraces: classical, jazz, new music, improvised music, and world music.  Inspired by collaborations with the world’s top musical innovators, François has developed a unique improvisational language, virtuosic and rich with sonic embellishment and technical extensions.  A sought after soloist and chamber musician, he has actively expanded the clarinet’s repertoire by commissioning some of today’s leading Canadian and international composers and premiering over one hundred new works.

François studied at McGill University, winning the National Debut competition and completing his studies at Yale.  He has been artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy.  In 2008 he was appointed as “Associate Composer” of the Canadian Music Centre.

This special evening launches a series of musical performance at The Commons that will occur on an on going basis and be organized by Houle. By actively bringing music into the gallery the project strives to foster exchange between artistic disciplines. Second in this exciting series will be Linda Bouchard coming January, 2013.

  The Commons is a venue for the presentation of art in all of its forms. In this way The Commons means to be a place where disciplines meet and mix, a place for cross fertilization and dialogue. The Commons facilitates the presentation of international art in Vancouver through collaboration with galleries from around the world and seeks to foster new economies for local artists through our exhibition program.

  François Houle

aerial

Friday November 16, 8pm. $20 at the door.

Seating will be limited, door opens at 7pm.

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Absent-Minded Window-Gazing

Curated by Charlie Satterlee

  Ian Edmonds - September 6 - 16

Israel Lund - September 21 - 30

Vanessa Disler - October 5 - 21

  Absent-Minded Window-Gazing presents three emerging artists in a series over the span of 6 weeks. The three-part exhibition will take place in our front window. As you pass the window during this time there will be an installation and painting by Ian Edmonds, new painting by Israel Lund, and a series of prints by Vanessa Disler. Hardly absent-minded, the work of the artists results in a contemplative dialogue. Working by way of material abstraction the artists share a poetic quality that arrives through repositioning of common material, repetition and overall painterly tendencies.

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Hank Bull and Glenn Lewis

BOWLS AND HORIZONS

Opening Friday September 7, 7-10pm

Exhibition runs September 8 - October 21, Fri-Sun, 1-5pm

The Commons is thrilled to open our fall season with an exhibition by Hank Bull and Glenn Lewis, Bowls and Horizons.

The exhibition will present recent work, a series of horizon paintings by Bull and porcelain bowls by Lewis. Known for their central participation in the conceptual-garde of Vancouver, specifically at the Western Front, Bull and Lewis' new work continues to draw on idea based methods, a life long interest in the philosophy of the east and west, and a creative consciousness of the everyday.

Glenn Lewis’ Song Bowls for East Hastings Street, 2012, is a work that presents new porcelain bowls on a mirrored shelf. Incorporating Chinese Sung forms and glazes as well as Japanese and Korean influence, Glenn Lewis captures his poetic vision on these fine porcelain surfaces through combing, calligraphy and glaze combinations. Derived from his experiences as a flaneur, specifically in and around East Hastings St, the individual bowls are inspired by the sights and sounds of his contemporary urban landscape. “Named’ in the manner of Japanese tea bowls, the title of each pot is a poetic descriptions of these sites. Taken from daily life, the bowls acknowledge the contemporary along with the ancient in the quotidian tradition of Hokusai. Reflected on a mirrored horizon the bowls also resonate with past projects including Room Freshener Series, 1967, Japanese Pickle, 1968, and Taped Landscape, 1972. Glenn Lewis is shown courtesy of Trench Gallery, Vancouver.

Open Sea, 2011-2012, is a series of horizon paintings, which Hank Bull has made in contemplation of the sea. Developed from photographs and sketches he completed at the coast of the Altantic and Pacific oceans these reductive compositions are stripped of figuration as means for a contemplative visual experience. Inspired by the final chapter of Ulysses, in which, after an epic of trials he encourages his men to gain strength for one more journey, these reductive canvases draw their duo-colour schema from nature, memory, and subjective experience. In foregrounding the horizon line Bull explores an infinite point beyond field/ground relationships, a space past what is merely seeing or knowing. Having travelled the world through out his 45 years as a cultural producer, these new works are the accumulation of experiences breaking through new media boundaries, building cultural contexts for the mixing of the east and the west and facilitating the production and dissemination of Vancouver’s avant-garde practices since arriving on the west coast in 1973.

Hank Bull recently showed this series of paintings at the Wakayama Museum in Tokyo. Glenn Lewis will show some of the first bowls he has thrown since the 1960s. We are thrilled to be able to debut this work in Vancouver.

A small catalogue with writing by Hank Bull, Masashi Ogura and Naomi Sawada has been published in conjunction with this exhibition.

The artists and gallery dedicate this exhibition to the life and memory of Patrick Ready. We toast his Tesla coils, alcoholic stills, hysterical radio moments and dedicated friendship.

In collaboration with: Glenn Lewis The Artist as a Fraud Trench Gallery Opening Sept  Friday 7, runs Sept 8 – Oct 13

Hank Bull Autumn Colors, after Zhao Mengfu Dr. Sun Yet Sen Gardens Sept 15, 7pm

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image: Michael Rudnick, Firebird, 2002

Are you happy?

Trolley Bus, Andrew Dadson, Noam Gonick and Luis Jacob, Janice Guy, Matthew Higgs, Euan MacDonald, Gailan Ngan, Michael Rudnick, Althea Thauberger, B Wurtz

Aug 2 - Sept 2

Taking its title from a book page work by Matthew Higgs, this exhibition brings together a range of recent works that explore the conflict of contemporary life. Playful and colorful yet filled with internal tension, these works are part self-reflection through the process of art making that acknowledge utopian aspiration in the face of alienation with the purpose of knowing ones self. In embracing these inner conflicts these artists are able to create aesthetic works of art that formally resonate this dialectic. 

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A Videotour of Darwin Meyers's Crash and Burn exhibition.

For Crash and Burn: Demolition Derbies of the Northern Prairies,Darwin Meyers spent the spring through fall of 2003 compiling documentary photos from various locations and demolition events. Essentially a rural activity, these rallies of destruction are a cultural phenomena that collides automotive fetish with friendly local competition. Meyers infiltrated these home grown communities through research in small town papers and on the Internet for information on these backwood events.

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Noam Gonick/ Stryker

Stryker A Film by Noam Gonick Friday July 27, 9pm Dunlevy Snack Bar 433 Dunlevy Ave

The Commons in collaboration with Dunlevy Snack Bar are thrilled to present a screening of Noam Gonick’s groundbreaking feature Stryker. Recently screened at the MMK (Frankfurt), Stryker was premiered at the 2004 Venice Film Festival and is in the collection of MoMA, New York.

The arrival of a fourteen-year-old Native arsonist (Kyle Henry) sparks a turf war between two gangs vying for control of Winnipeg's North End in Gonick's vivid depiction of the defiant attitudes of gangsters. Backed by a crew of Filipino enforcers Asian Bomb Squad leader, and former male stripper, Omar (Ryan Black) pimps trannie sex trade workers utilizing a potent combination of fire and fear. But Omar isn't the only troublemaker looking to cement his status as top thug on the block. Embittered bull dagger Mama Ceece (Deena Fontaine) has just been released from jail, and with help from the Indian Posse, Ceece is determined to wrestle back control from the opportunistic Omar who thrived in her absence. When young Stryker (street slang for potential gang member) arrives from his northern reserve, the confrontation between gangs escalates as each prepares to find out once and for all who truly rules the hood.

Noam Gonick explores a variety of iconoclastic issues and positions surrounding radical politics and queer sexuality, exploring Utopian hippie cults, Aboriginal street gangs, labour uprisings, stockbroker meltdowns, and prison architecture --using film, television, photography, and installations. Gonick has premiered work at the Venice and Sundance film festivals, is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Director's Guild of Canada and is in the collections of the the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, UBC and the National Gallery of Canada.

Please join us and director Noam Gonick at Dunlevy Snack Bar, 433 Dunlevy Ave, Friday July 27, 9pm. $5

This special screening is presented in conjunction with our current exhibitionsDarwin Meyers, Crash and Burn: Demolition Derbies of the Northern Prairies and In Protest, protest posters curated by Joseph del Pesco andConstance Lewellan. 

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Seed Engine: Vancouver Pit Stop

The Commons is happy to host a Vancouver pit stop for Randall Anderson as he and his VW Westphalia make their way on the great adventure, Seed Engine: Two Highways, Sunday July 22 from 7-10pm

“I grew up in trailer parks, or nomadic communities. My father was a long haul trucker. The first art object I made was a custom race car. My current work is informed by this inherent movement, of both things, people, and meaning.. As I consider this movement I'm becoming acutely aware of how we also shift back and forth in time in both our memories and in the associations of fragments and images.

I make works that visualize certain ideas about things moving, coming together, or falling apart, and how this process is integral to our understanding of our world. I'm drawn to the transitional place that is neither/nor, in between; where the absence of specificity destabilizes the viewers need to fix meaning. We make things, then we move those things around. It's like each time something comes to rest it's actually waiting to be moved somewhere else. Earlier I made performances and toured around the world. I moved myself, and the stuff I used.

I'm currently on the road following the two defining highways of North America. In the last few weeks I've traveled the old Route 66 from Chicago to LA. Join me at The Commons along my journey on Seed Engine: Two Highways as I begin the journey from Victoria to Saint John, Newfoundland, along the Trans Canada."

-Randall Anderson

Please join us to support Randall and his optical proposition as it heads back east along the might Trans Canada. This event was organized on the fly but we are very excited about it's resonance with our current exhibitions Darwin Meyers Crash and Burn: Demolition Derbies of the Northern Prairies and In Protest, protest posters curated by Joseph del Pesco and Constance Lewellan.

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Crash and Burn/ In Protest

The Commons is thrilled to present two new exhibitions, Darwin Meyers Crash and Burn:Demolition Derbies of the Northern Prairies and  In Protest organized by curators Joseph del Pesco and Constance Lewellan originally for Kadist Foundation, San Francisco and the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. These two exhibitions will open July 15 and run through August 5. 

Please join us for an opening reception on Bastille Day, Saturday July 14th from 7-10pm.

image: Darwin Meyers, Untitled (Wreck), 2003

For Crash and Burn: Demolition Derbies of the Northern Prairies,Darwin Meyers spent the spring through fall of 2003 compiling documentary photos from various locations and demolition events. Essentially a rural activity, these rallies of destruction are a cultural phenomena that collides automotive fetish with friendly local competition. Meyers infiltrated these home grown communities through research in small town papers and on the Internet for information on these backwood events.

The Demolition Derbies documented in Meyers' project are all full size class events, referring to the car type, which follow a list of rules for structural and engine enhancements. Along with these ‘enhancements’ the competitors paint up their demolition machines for battle heats, crashing into their competition with each heat having fewer and fewer cars until the last car running is the winner. In between each heat the driver and his team repair what they can to keep the car competitive. In documenting these amateur events Meyers is interested in the collegial competition and expressive potential of this Prairie subculture.

image: In Protest installation at BAM/PFA

At this time we are also honored to host the Vancouver presentation of In Protest, which was commissioned by the Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. 

For this project curators Joseph del Pesco and Constance Lewellan asked “How can the arts participate in a creative and collective production of our shared future? How can we make visible our shared concerns about the political landscape of this country?” Protest signs, posters and banners are some of the clearest manifestations of the visual language of political action. They then invited politically inclined artists and writers to make a protest poster that addresses specific events or generalized demands. Artists included in the project are John Baldessari, Amy Balkin, Dodie Bellamy, Charlie Dubbe, Amy Franceschini, Doug Hall, Kevin Killian, Paul Kos, Tony Labat, Shaun O'Dell, Rigo 23, Piero Golia, Jordan Kantor, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Mungo Thomson, and Natasha Wheat. The exhibition will be presented in our store front window to be read from the street.

Joseph Del Pesco is the Program Director of the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, and was previously curator for Artists Space in New York. He has curated exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Nelson Gallery and Fine Arts Collection at the University of California, Davis, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Constance Lewallen lives and works in San Francisco, California, where she is adjunct curator at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. As senior curator there from 1998 to 2007, she curated many national and international traveling exhibitions, including Joe Brainard (2001); Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (2001); Everything Matters: Paul Kos, a Retrospective (2003); Ant Farm 1968–1978 (2004, co-curated with Steve Seid); and A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s (2007). Lewellan co-curated State of Mind: New California Art ca. 1970, with Karen Moss of the Orange County Museum, which will open at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, UBC, this coming fall.

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The Commons is proud to host a 4 day sale of new work by Gailan Ngan.

Vancouver-based ceramist Gailan Ngan is a visual artist who has been presenting her work professionally for over ten years. Originally from Hornby Island, British Columbia, Gailan began her ongoing fascination with the possibilities of ceramics at an early age, first as a studio assistant - and eventual apprentice - to her father, Wayne Ngan.

Gailan Ngan founded her own studio, Cornershop, in the Strathcona neighbourhood of Vancouver in 1997, and graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2002. Ngan' has exhibited extensively including the Canadian Craft Museum, the Museum of Anthropology,Centre A International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, the Western Front, the Ranger Station Art Gallery and at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where she was a participant of the Informal Architecture Residency Program in 2004.

Gailan Ngan works in both stoneware and earthenware. Her pieces are created by a wheel-thrown and hand-altered process, and are fired in both electric and gas kilns. Recently, Gailan has been utilizing a rare Yukon clay and glazes made from volcanic ash from the Okanagan, which give her pots their distinctive tones and textures. She continues to experiment with glazes created from local materials the artist herself has collected, including local rocks, clays and ashes.

Please join us Thurs June 21 from 6-9pm for a reception and launch. The sale will continue Fri 22 - Sun 24 12-6pm.

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Serial Abstracts brings together 8 Vancouver artists whose individual explorations of material are commonly realized in abstract works of art. Derya Akay, Susanna Browne, Arabella Campbell, Jeremy Hof, Nicole Ondre, Igor Santizo, Sylvain Sailly, and Jen Weih each negotiate formalism by individual aesthetic paths that are commonly rooted in conceptually based processes. These 'abstracts' are in fact methods or systems which they have applied in serial production.

As the first exhibition in a new venue this project celebrates the strength of practice in Vancouver. It presents abstract art, an avant-garde notion now being taken up within the materialist discourse of this rigorously intellectual community. Through this gathering of individual practices the exhibition seeks to ask why abstraction, why now? The exhibition has been organized by Lee Plested

view one (from left to right): Arabella Campbell, Susanna Browne, Jen Weih Sylvain Sailly, Nicole Ondre

view two (from right to left): Jeremy Hof, Igor Santizo, Derya Akay, Nicole Ondre

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Rebecca Belmore

En plein air, 2012

Shopping carts. bottles, lights

We are deeply honoured to host a new sculptural work by Rebecca Belmore, En plein air. 

Sparked from our idea to recreate Arman’s Le Plein, 1960, Rebecca Belmore was invited to take up the challenge. The french artist Arman (1928-2005), responded to his friend Yves Klein’s exhibition Le Vid (The Void) of 1958 (for which Klein painted the Iris Clert Gallery white and left it vacant except for an empty glass vitrine), with his own exhibition, Le Plein or ‘Full Up’ at Clert’s gallery where he heaped bourgeois trash in the space to the point where it was only visible through the galleries street level windows.

Conscious of the material and economic realities of our new neighbourhood the choice of working with Rebecca Belmore, who has consistently worked to respond to the Downtown Eastside through powerful and poetic works of art, was a dream collaboration. The invitation has developed into a residency of sorts with Belmore making the sculpture on site. 

Rebecca Belmore has shown in major exhibitions and museums around the world including the Sydney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, Bienal del la Habana, Insite/Santa Fe, The Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the Brooklyn Museum.