Current
Performance/Exhibition
Sean George Opening: Saturday January 9, 2010, 7-10pm
Bad Boys: Portraits of Mediated Performance
Performance at *8pm sharp!
Exhibition: Jan. 9 - Feb. 6, 2010
Robin Lawrence's Georgia Straight Review
“The end of art is to figure out the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines.” Aristotle - quoted in Malraux’s Metamorphosis of the Gods 1957
The reality of my youth was lived out in a primarily matriarchal environment; book ended by two grandmothers with my mother in between.
My ‘rite of passage’ into manhood was primarily rooted in and routed through popular culture. From Bert and Ernie to The Six Million Dollar Man the fictional outnumbered the real and the real became like fictitious characters. Gandhi and Warhol were as real to me as my own father.
Here as in the past I use the gallery wall to mirror my concerns with identity. In 2004’s group exhibit Cut and Paste at the Helen Pitt Gallery my piece Theatre of Rhetoric was an attempt to process individuality, the body and sexual orientation in a speculative exploration.
In 2008’s learning to walk a mediated journey to Africa at Interurban Gallery, I gave up my shoes and discovered that my journey to Africa was not the complexion of my skin but the complexities of a continent to difficult to define; no matter what the media.
My fervent desire with this exhibit Bad Boys: Portraits of Mediated Performance is to call up the imaginary, the symbolic, the structural and the soul that is the monolithic experience of manhood. Asking is the experience of self, lost in the masquerade of masculinity? If indeed masculinity is a masquerade?
I have attempted to lay out this experience in three aesthetic approaches – the salon, a collaged wall of chaos, an intermingling map of sorts, of images, text and costumes. The second is the personal: inviting friends to reflect on their relationships with fathers, brothers, grandfathers, uncles, sons and husbands. The final addresses the way in which singular famous individuals are canonized from an explosion of tabloid material to the contextual cage that we participate in building for them.
The victims of my iconoclastic gunpowder are Mike Tyson, Michael Jackson, Conrad Black, Robert Mugabe, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Prince William and Prince Harry.
My formal attire has been to lapse into a ceremonial archival mash up, a montage that stabs at the smell, the touch, and the sight of manliness. By stitching together images from different periods I hope to give rise to provocative and subtle conceptual takes on manhood.
In a live performance I will attempt to navigate the fictitious and the real constantly asking, what is the measure of a man?
All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside excepting by striking through the wall?
Upcoming
Exhibition/Event
Altered
Jan Wade and Nhan Nguyen
February 11 – March 20, 2010
Opening Thursday, February 11 at 8:00pm
Screenings and events at Mountain View Cemetery.
Saturday, February 20, 2010, 11:00am-10:00pm
Celebration Hall, Mountain View Cemetery
Access to the site is at 39th and Fraser St.
Altered is a new grunt gallery project by Vancouver based artists Jan Wade and Nhan Nguyen focusing on altar pieces or shrines, which both artists have explored extensively within their work over the past two decades. This project, comprised of shrines installed at the grunt gallery and corresponding video screenings at the Mountain View Cemetery’s new celebration hall, looks at cultural histories around Memorial and how we remember. Video Mapping of Celebration Hall by Krista Lomax and The Media Merchants.
Jan Wade is a Vancouver-based artist originally from Hamilton, Ontario. Wade's work deploys the materials and symbols of the everyday to explore issues of post-colonial identity, ethnicity and spirituality. Drawing creative resources from her own cultural history, Wade's examination of New World black diaspora reflects upon the relations between past and present, self and collectivity, and brings voice to the staunchly political nature of those encounters. Wade’s work focuses on altars as vehicles of worship and memory, as vessels for African spirituality and to reconcile the painful past of the African Diaspora.
Based in Vancouver, Nhan Nguyen works across media finding many of his inspiration in Vietnamese stories and traditions anchored particularly, in personal narratives related to him through his mother and her friends. Nguyen recent process-based installations pursue the themes of community, national history, cultural identity and community. Born in Qui Nhon, Vietnam in 1967 he immigrated to Canada when he was 12.
Acknowledgements
grunt gratefully acknowledges core funding from the Canada Council for the Arts Visual Arts Section, the British Columbia Arts Council, the BC Gaming Policy & Enforcement Branch, the City of Vancouver and our membership and donors.
Specific programs have also been funded by Heritage Canada, The Vancouver Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, The BC Arts Council, The Saskatchewan Arts Board, The Audain Foundation, Province of BC Cultural Services Branch, Arts Now, and Arts Partners in Creative Development.
We thank all funders and supporters of our programs.