Projects

Underground in the Aether

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Underground in the Aether was a one-day symposium responding to the themes of collectivity, selfhood, and communication circuits in the exhibition Hank Bull: Connexion, co-curated by Joni Low (Vancouver) and Pan Wendt (Confederation Centre Art Gallery). The symposium was held on Saturday, April 8, 2017 at VIVO Media Art Centre, Vancouver, Canada, as the closing event for Spring Fever: Vancouver Independent Archives 2017.

Having assembled speakers from across Canada, the United States and Europe, Underground in the Aether launched itself into the entanglements of technology, fantasy and sociality as engaged by an informal and international community of artists from the 1960s to present day.

Seizing upon the terminology behind our present network economy, keynote speaker Hannah B. Higgins, Professor of Art History, University of Illinois (Chicago), presented “Aether/Or: The Place of Things and Beings in the Eternal Network,” which proposed a rehabilitation of these terms following their use by artists in the 1960s. Presentations by Vincent Bonin (Montreal), Allison Collins (Vancouver), Luis Jacob (Toronto), Jee-Hae Kim (University of Cologne) and Felicity Tayler (University of Toronto), investigated the stakes and sources behind artists’ turn to the imaginary during times of crisis, how forms, identities and communities are transmuted as they circulate through networks, and how artists’ subcultures convened within mainstream and national communications circuits.

With the underground transposed into the aether all is up in the air: upturned and diffuse, yet also aloft, unfixed and in movement. Together these presentations look to artists’ practices as a means to consider possible ways of living in and through mediation today.

Underground in the Aether was organized by current Doryphore member Joni Low and past Doryphore member, Robin Simpson.

Esther Shalev-Gerz

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Esther Shalev-Gerz, WHITE-OUT: Between Telling and Listening is a catalogue published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name, which was co-curated by Charo Neville and past Doryphore member Annette Hurtig for the Kamloops Art Gallery, Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada (March 24 – June 16, 2012). It traveled to the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver (January 11 – April 7, 2013).

The exhibition was made possible in part through the generous support of Doryphore Independent Curators Society.

Memory Palace [3 artists in the library]: Carol Sawyer, Angela Grauerholz, Esther Shalev-Gerz

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Memory Palace [3 artists in the library: Angela Grauerholz, Carol Sawyer and Esther Shalev-Gerz] was an exhibition curated by past Doryphore member, Karen Love. This project was a collaboration between the Vancouver Public Library/Central Library, the City of Vancouver Public Art Program and Doryphore Independent Curators Society, and took place at VPL/Central Branch, May 2008 – February 2010.

In her essay “Memory Palace,” published in the exhibition catalogue, Karen Love observes:

The library is a social environment for intellectual and political needs, a complex support system for collective and individual memory. Its contents are concrete, allusive and elusive, open to re-interpretation. The creative uses of a library illustrate that ideas, however ancient the words that give them substance, are forever fluid, made so by those who borrow from and give back to the memory place.”

Exhibition-related events:
Concert with ion Zoo and vocalist Carol Sawyer, Thursday, May 29, 2008
Artist Talk by Carol Sawyer, Saturday, September 20, 2008

Variations on the Picturesque

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Variations on the Picturesque was an exhibition Guest Curated by founding and current Doryphore member Karen Henry and Karen Love for the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Ontario, Canada. On view December 5, 2005 – March 29, 2006, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue explored the questions: “What are the remnants of the picturesque in the 21st century? What is the combination of landscape, domestication, urban and rural associations and nature that exists today?”

In their catalogue essay, “In Relation to the Picturesque,” Henry and Love note:

The exhibition explores the notion of a contemporary picturesque (and its associations with the dystopic as well as the sublime) through the critical and perceptive eyes and imaginations of artists. The artworks include painting and sculptural works, installation, photography, film and digital media and can be conceptually grouped into several thematic though not mutually exclusive associations.”

Allyson Clay: Imaginary Standard Distance

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Allyson Clay: Imaginary Standard Distance was an exhibition curated by founding and current Doryphore member, Karen Henry for the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta, Canada in 2002. From that year until 2005, the exhibition toured to Mt. St. Vincent University Gallery, Halifax; Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina; Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; and the Kamloops Art Gallery. It was accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Karen Henry and poet Lisa Robertson, and published by the Walter Phillips Gallery.

Writing on the artist’s work in her essay, “Spatial Relations: Architectural Fragments,” Karen Henry notes:

Clay’s sensual colours, range of mediums, elusive stories, and small moving images intend to draw the viewer into a relationship. If the perspectives are ‘improper,’ they invite the viewer to collude in their transgressions. With transgression comes excitement and vulnerability, an agitated edge that threatens stability. These are the material affects of language, of architecture, of intimacy.”