Richmond BC, Canada #richmondartgallerybc
This exhibition features the work of Colleen Brown, Paul Kajander and Kara Uzelman. These artists produce sculpture in a variety of media: video, photography, sculpture, found materials, and text. Their treatment of objects and thematics are loosely oriented around the trajectory that the title implies: a treatment of objects and cultural product that is both vacuum-like and explosive. The shakiness with which objects hold meaning in our world—art and otherwise—speaks to a kind of bankruptcy of signification (one thing refers to all things, everything’s been done before, it’s all relative, and so on), and this “black hole” will intersect with another kind of approach: that meaning, in this vacuum, might explode into generative new constellations, narratives and associations.
The work in the exhibition are treated as experiments in form, concept and embodiment.
ARTISTS BIOGRAPHIES
Kara Uzelman is a Berlin-based artist whose work creates fictional narratives and histories from found objects, made work as part of a 40-day solitary retreat into the wilderness.
Colleen Brown‘s new sculpture was part of her studies at Bard College this summer; her work has in the past taken common objects (signage, propane tanks, chairs, doors and more) and created formally complex new sculptures that are both familiar and strange in their use of assemblage, colour and texture.
Paul Kajander‘s work brings together a wealth of associations and found objects, and his work often highlights a certain cultural obsurdity—the weirdness of expressing oneself in a world of signs, the collective ridiculousness of our cultural products, and an underlying sense of a world in flux, the anxious individual, and the importance of human connection amidst it all.
Vanessa Kwan is a Vancouver-based artist and writer. Her work has been exhibited at a number of galleries, including solo exhibitions at the Or Gallery, Access, and the Art Gallery of the South Okanagan. A public art commission for the City of Vancouver is forthcoming in 2010.
