Search results for ""Author Daina Augaitis""

Shortly after graduating from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Vikky Alexander made her 1983 entry into the international art world while living in New York by participating in photo historian Abigail Solomon Godeau’s exhibition The Stolen Image and its Uses. For over a decade she was active in a circle of New York artists that merged the critical ideas of Minimalism and Conceptual Art with photography, and came to be known as the Pictures Generation. Since then she has continued to explore the appropriated image through her own photography, especially in relation to iconic representations of nature as well as the spaces of consumerism—two subjects that remain significant in today’s cultural discourses. This book, which accompanies an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, is a beautifully illustrated retrospective of nearly four decades of Alexander’s work. Since the 1980s, Alexander has made numerous series of photographs, montages, sculptures, collages and installations, all working to hone a vision that captures the spectacle and inherent falseness of certain public and private spaces. From the exaggerated architecture of Versailles, Disneyland and the West Edmonton Mall, to the use of idyllic “natural” settings and the skin-deep beauty of fashion models, she unravels the mechanisms of display that shape meaning and desire in our culture.

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MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture traces the inexorable rise of collage, montage, sampling and the cut-up. Tracing its roots from the multiple-perspectives, montages and readymades of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Hoch, to the present - with its postmodern network culture, where remixing and co-production are the norm and the New Aesthetic seeks to harmonise the now-everyday crossover of the digital and the actual. The book addresses the development of detournement and deconstruction in art, architecture, music and society. Each chapter is a detailed, inclusive look at a cross-section of the main artists and thinkers that have embraced and developed all forms of 'mashup' culture, since its inception in the late nineteenth century with Braque and Picasso's experiments into perspective. MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture finds parallels between the works of luminaries such as Jean-Luc Godard, Joseph Cornell, Elizabeth Price, Joyce Wieland and Jeff Wall, tracing the lasting impact of such seemingly disparate cultural phenomena as voguing, hacking and the use of audio and film as a kind of a globally available, open source language in vidding, hip hop and dub, and in art that deals with the mass proliferation and dissemination of images and knowledge brought on by digital technologies. MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture situates the work of Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton and Guy Debord alongside the likes of Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, Superstudio, Brian Eno and Cory Arcangel, and more generally within a culture where the new is necessarily re-made and re-modelled, and quotation and re-appropriation are an integral part of the way we talk about it. Published in collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery.

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From the aesthetics of postwar reconstruction to the functional objects that complemented 1950s West Coast Modern architecture and the expressive material forms of the 1960s and 70s, Modern in the Making will acknowledge the many dimensions that defined British Columbia’s cultural identity in the postwar era. It is the first volume to trace the evolution of Modern ceramics, weaving and fiber art, furniture, fashion and jewelry design produced between 1945 and 1975 in the Vancouver Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island and the Okanagan.

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Gathie Falk: Revelations, published on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition curated by Sarah Milroy, investigates the career of a legendary Canadian artist.Now in her nineties, Gathie Falk was born in 1928 in Brandon, Manitoba, settling finally in Vancouver, where she established herself as one of Canada’s most visionary and experimental artists. Flying horses, rows of potted conifers festooned with blossoms and ribbons, floating cabbages, piles of glossy apples, gentlemen’s brogues presented in reliquary style, expanses of water, or burgeoning flower beds exploding with color—these have been the manifestations of Falk’s rampant imagination as she has explored the disciplines of painting, ceramic, performance art and installation over the span of a half century. In all her works, effulgence and order are held in a dynamic tension as she works through her generative themes and variations.A trailblazer on all fronts, she has brought a rich sensibility to bear on her observations of the everyday, perceptions often tinged with the surreal and the uncanny. From her fruit piles to the landmark performances of her early career, to her extended pursuit of themes with variations in her painting practice —expanses of water dazzling with light, riotous flower borders set against cement sidewalks, night skies pierced by starlight or obscured by clouds—she finds the wondrous in the routine world around her, pursuing her work with a modesty and diligence that reflects her Russian Mennonite heritage.The publication includes an introduction by McMichael Chief Curator Sarah Milroy, lead essay by Vancouver curator and writer Daina Augaitis (who examines her performance and installation works in a national and international context), and a host of other artists and writers, rising to the occasion of this career-spanning survey. This catalogue summarizes an extraordinary career, with full page images of her artworks and rarely seen archival photos of the artist’s studio, performance works, and Falk herself.For more than sixty years, Falk has generated work of extraordinary thematic integrity and material invention. This publication will illuminate those connections across disciplines, while also tracing the artist’s journey from youth to old age—from the lushness of the fruit piles, with their sensuous surfaces and dazzling colors, to the sepulchral hush of the night skies.

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