GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

Below the Sea of Fog

Exhibition with artist Roger Larry

Exhibition
May 18, 2024 - June 15, 2024

Opening Reception
May 18, 2024 from 1 -5 pm

Artist Talk
June 15, 2024 from 2 - 3pm

ARTIST STATEMENT

My exhibition of photographs, Below the Sea of Fog, was shot over the three-plus years of the pandemic. The pandemic haunts us still. For myself, the pandemic was marked by my family’s health challenges, and my own work reversals as a feature film maker. We all have suffered. The act of creation was my refuge. I took over 15,000 images in this period. Before the pandemic most of my art production was film installation and photography. Most of the photography was tableau of people at work and play. But as the pandemic wore on, I found myself focused instead on dark eerie landscapes. These photos were so different for me that I spent much time puzzling over them. Then I began to remember… When I was twelve the Art Gallery of Ontario had a show devoted to German Romantics curated by Alan Wilkinson, that included work by Caspar David Friedrich. Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter of the late the eighteenth century, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his allegorical landscapes, which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies or a sea of mist. Friedrich is powerfully associated with the idea of the romantic sublime.

Eighteenth century philosophers described the sublime as the limit of human understanding, where the human mind meets something vast and impossible to digest: experiences of the sublime could include confrontations with great precipices and mountain vistas, with the infinity of the sky, or with the darkest depths of the sea. We could say that the pandemic itself was a kind of sublime formation with the virus overwhelming our little lives. In much Romantic philosophy and art the Romantic subject emerges from a confrontation with the sublime ennobled; the sublime becomes a secular spiritual experience through which the romantic subject/person experiences transcendence and totality. But my photographs, I felt, dealt with another aspect of confronting the sublime, one that was more destabilizing.

In fact, in the late eighteenth century there was a flipside to the ennobling romantic sublime, a gothic sublime, often associated with the work of Giovanni Piranesi, Henry Fuseli and Francisco Goya. Instead of stepping back from the sublime precipice, the subject of the gothic sublime descended into an incompressible nightmare from which there was no reassuring emergence. To quote Vijay Misra “this other sublime, the gothic sublime, is in many ways the voice from the crypt that questions the power of reason … as the mind embraces the terror, located at the near abyss where the subject says, I am my own abyss, and is faced with a horrifying image of its own lack of totality.” And this gothic sublime, I believe spoke to the experience of COVID. And it spoke to my photos. In the year or so after COVID, I thought more about my photos and also about their location and I realized that the abyss I felt in Stanley Park during covid was not, of course, solely my own. It was also entwined with the history of the Coast Salish people, the original indigenous inhabitants of the lands now called Stanley Park. Before mounting this work, I went on tours with Coast Salish guides. I will not be sharing the stories the Coast Salish shared with me on those tours, that is their prerogative. However, I was advised by my Coast Salish guides that using the original Indigenous place names in the titles of the work would be a respectful way to allude to what has haunted the park long before me or COVID.

The exhibition tells an elliptical story; it begins with a Romantic portrait and ends with an evocation of Armageddon. It’s the culmination of the journey from the naïve and romantic to a gothic space where doubt and devastation reign supreme – personal, political, and environmental.

ARTIST BIO

Roger Larry is a filmmaker, artist and emerging curator. Three film installations he co-authored with Mark Lewis screened in 2013 at MOMA/PS1. He has a large body of photographs and film installations made over the last thirty years but is only now attempting to exhibit them. His fifth and latest feature film, COOL DADDY, a documentary about toxic masculinity is currently screening on CBC GEM. Other films include the feature documentary CITIZEN MARC and the thriller CROSSING. Roger was also creative producer on contemporary artist Mark Lewis’ first feature film INVENTION(2015), which premiered to great acclaim at TIFF and the Berlinale. He has a large body of work made over the last thirty years but is only now attempting to exhibit them. “Below the Sea of Fog,” Roger’s first solo photographic exhibition is at Gallery 881. rogerlarry.art

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

Tangential Matter

Group Exhibition with Chris Jordan, Danielle Bobier, Gerri York, Jennifer Lim, Paula Nishikawara

Gallery 881 Centre Room

Exhibition
May 21, 2024 - June 18, 2024

Opening Reception
May 25, 2024 from 12 - 5 pm

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

"Tangential Matter” is an exploration of the interconnectedness between the tangible and intangible, the material and the ethereal. The group exhibition unites five artists from distinct disciplines—photography, printmaking, painting, ceramics, and sculpture. The exhibition draws inspiration from the five ancient elements including air (ἀήρ aḗr), fire (πῦρ pŷr), water (ὕδωρ hýdōr), earth (γῆ gê), and the aether (αἰθήρ).

Tangential Matter echoes from a space of protoscience with the philosophical gesturing predating modern science. With photography as a basis, tangential mediums are presented as an experiment in resonance and interference. Through the spectrum of depictions of geothermal forces and atmospheric currents, we see and experience our world as it is governed by the “shape” of the localized forces that act on the energy and matter of our material plane.

Tangential Matter takes place in the Gallery 881 Centre Room located at 881 East Hastings Street, Vancouver. The entropic works on display explore this human-nature dualism in the context of beauty and destruction, organic and inorganic, life and death. The exhibition also incorporates design elements through our collaboration with Retro Modern Designs. The Noguchi table, with its organic and physics-defying shape, unites the exhibition like the universe's interstitial glue aka dark matter.

ARTIST BIOs

Chris Jordan

For two decades Chris Jordan’s internationally known photographs and conceptual artworks have probed into the dark underbelly of our culture of mass consumption. Exploring the complexities of our many forms of waste, these series have been exhibited and published worldwide, most recently with a retrospective solo exhibit at the Sungkok Art Museum in Seoul. Chris has published four books and is past winner of the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Prize for Conservation Photography (2010), the Prix Pictet Commission Prize in Paris (2011), and the GreenLeaf Award given by the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo (2007). His paradigm-breaking film Albatross reached a global audience with its compelling love story about birds on a remote island in the Pacific whose bodies are filled with plastic. Albatross was recipient of the 2018 Planetary Health Film Prize in London.

Chris currently lives in a small town in Patagonia, Chile on the Strait of Magellan at the tip of South America. In this space of relative isolation, his work turned in a new direction: toward the contemplation of beauty as a response to the mental chaos of our times. He has recently released several new photographic projects, all under the title “Beauty Emerging.”

chrisjordan.com

Danielle Bobier

Danielle Bobier is a Vancouver-based visual artist whose practice finds interest in elements of material, abstraction, geometry, and the natural world. Working primarily as a painter, her compositions consider the act of horizon-gazing, observing the inner landscape through a symbolic lens. She has shown in numerous exhibitions, most recently at spaces such as Trapp Projects, the lobby space at the Contemporary Art Gallery, and Art Rental & Sales, Operated by the Vancouver Art Gallery. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2016), and a diploma in Fine Art from Langara College (2014). She is the recipient of two BC Arts Council grants, the Langara College Painting Studio Award, and residencies at Malaspina Printmakers and Makerlabs. Her work can be found in collections across Canada and in the US.

daniellebobier.com

Gerry York

Gerri York is a visual art graduate of the BFA programme at Emily Carr University. She was born in London, England and completed a B.Ed.(Hons) degree at St Gabriel’s College, London University, England. Her visual art practice encompasses sculpture, printmaking, photography and drawing and has been exhibited in a wide variety of exhibitions and juried shows. The work is included in both public and private collections, in Canada and internationally, and an artist’s residency was completed at Grafisch Atelier Utrecht (CBKU) in the Netherlands.

York has sat on the education committee of the Vancouver Art Gallery and completed an internship. During 2003–2006 she worked at the VAG as a staff animateur and workshop leader in public programmes. At the Contemporary Art Gallery she has volunteered on the Education Committee and facilitated workshops for art teachers. Gerri is a member and past Board member of Malaspina Printmakers,’ has worked on their fundraising, education and studio committees and written articles for the print media journal, CHOP.

Currently York is working at the Howe Street studios in Vancouver situated on the unceded, indigenous homeland of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-waututh Nations.

gerriyork.com

Jennifer Lim

Form is prioritized over function in Jennifer Lim’s slow, hand-built ceramics. With a focus on surface noise and disruption, her work conveys a sense of porousness and malleability. A deep love for nature leads her to highlight the inherent qualities and materiality of clay, while working towards a practice that is as minimally extractive as possible. She works primarily with high fire stoneware and atmospheric firings.

Of Chinese descent and born in Manila, Jen immigrated to Toronto in her early teens. She obtained a dual BA in Visual Arts and Anthropology from the University of Toronto, with a concentration on printmaking and site-specific installation. She focused on street and travel photography, then food and beverage photography while living in New York City for 15 years. She also worked as a photo researcher and photo librarian while obtaining her MLIS in Library and Information Science (with a concentration on archival studies). Jen pivoted to ceramics in 2018, and established a practice after moving to Vancouver in 2020. Her work has been included in curated group shows in the U.S. and Vancouver.

jlimceramics.com

Paula Nishikawara

Nishikawara’s artistic DNA is authentically rooted in the landscapes and experiences of the Canadian Pacific Northwest. Her colour and composition finds its source in the beauty of rainforests, mountain glaciers, seascapes, vast skies, and fast flowing rivers. Paula is an international artist creating humanistic and environmentally focused works using painting, printmaking, installation, photography, sculpture and performance.

Her ancestral connection with Japan plays an important role in Nishikawara’s creative universe. It is expressed in her extensive use of reinvented traditional Japanese printing techniques, use of Japanese papers, and above all a fluent and articulated way of merging traditional and modern discourses of art making. Although her works stand alone, the immersive installations where multiple and broad elements intertwine to create alternate dimensions - are her most favourite constructs that invite reconsideration, and often self-inquiry.

paulanishikawara.com

SPONSORS of GALLERY 881

PrintMaker Studio is a Canson Infinity Certified Print Lab and custom finisher and framer. We are located at 881 East Hastings, Vancouver. printmaker-studio.com

Retro Modern Designs furnishes Gallery 881. Please contact the gallerist for acquisitions of art and design. Retro Modern Designs is located at 727 E Hastings, Vancouver. retromodernhome.com

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

OFFERING EXHIBITION

Exhibition with artist Lam Wong

Opening Reception
June 22, 2024 from 12 -5 pm

Exhibition
June 22 - July 31, 2024

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Alone I hike with deer.
Cheerfully I sing with village children.
The stream under the cliff cleanses my ears.
The pine on the mountain top fits my heart.

...

On the broad river, so vast, the spring day is about to
dwindle.
Willow blossoms, fluttering about, dot my patched
robe.
One verse of a fisherman’s song inside the dense mist;
This boundless grieving, for whom is it carried on?

Ryokan

Amidst the chaos and madness of current world affairs, Lam Wong reinforces the important notion of human connection to nature as a form of survival and a way of being to fight urban isolation, social disintegration, and moral decay in humanity. A self-care mechanism during times of turmoil.

Offering conveys Wong’s deep meditation on his ongoing investigation into the human condition and fragility of life. His concern for our state of mental wellbeing under the present political climate of intense polarization and an increasingly divided and violent world. The works also express his profound respect for trees as sentient beings. One of the photo works, Offering (Clinging Pine), taken in Banff (2023), is a testament to its resilient spirit. The biography of this clinging pine tree on the Bow River includes sitting on an important geographical marker of the Earth’s Permian extinction some 252 million years ago, a severe mass extinction event also known as the Great Dying. The pine tree reminds Wong of his own visit to Yellow Mountain, a high mountain full of famous pine trees, in China prior to the global pandemic. Coincidentally, the artist was told that Banff and Yellow Mountain are sister cities.

The works in this exhibit are all new works showing for the first time, including many of Wong’s creative outputs from his 2023 visual art residency in Banff.

ARTIST BIO

Lam Wong
(b. 1968, Xiamen, Fujian, China) is a visual artist and curator who immigrated from Hong Kong to Canada during the 1980s and studied design, art history and painting in Alberta and British Columbia. Wong works with painting, installation and performance to engage with themes such as the perception of reality, the role of art and the relationship between time, memory and space. He sees artmaking as an ongoing spiritual practice and his work draws upon his knowledge of Western art history and his interest in Taoism and Buddhism. Wong’s creative approach is often concerned with blending Eastern philosophies and challenging the notion of painting.

Lam Wong has been based in Vancouver BC since 1998. He has recently exhibited his work and performed at Campbell River Art Gallery, Canton-sardine, Centre A, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, Gallery 881, Griffin Art Projects, Unit 17, Walter Phillips Gallery, Western Front, and Vancouver Art Gallery.

lamwong.com