Cullinan Richards, Ron Tran, and works from
archives and collections
Mar 01–April 23, 2017
Opening: Tues, Feb 28, 7:30pm, CHS Gallery
Artist Talk: Cullinan Richards, Mon Feb 27, 6pm,
Mocap Studio
The Charles H. Scott Gallery is proud to present Goodbye Charles, an exhibition that celebrates Charles Hepburn Scott, an artist, educator and our gallery’s namesake, in commemoration of the latest chapter in our history. In the fall of 2017 we will relocate to the new Emily Carr University campus on Great Northern Way in East Vancouver where the Charles H. Scott Gallery will be renamed the Libby Leshgold Gallery. This exhibition offers a glimpse into Scott’s creative practice through the inclusion of his paintings, drawings, sketchbooks and writings. Contemporary artists that have exhibited at the Charles H. Scott Gallery have also been invited to respond to the occasion. A diverse list of artists have contributed portraits of Scott to a bookwork, and two additional projects will be situated within the gallery by London-based artist duo Cullinan Richards and Vancouver artist Ron Tran .
As a catalyst, organizer and champion of artistic freedom, Scott helped to shape and define the arts in the city of Vancouver. Along with a core of committed artists and patrons, Scott was instrumental in the founding of the BC Arts League, the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts and the Vancouver Art Gallery, laying the foundation for our internationally recognized contemporary art scene. He had an unshakeable belief in the importance and value of the creative arts.
It was under Scott’s supervision that the students at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts began mounting their annual Beaux Arts Ball and other costumed amateur theatrics. The first ball occurred in 1929 with a medieval-theme. Scott took an active role in these spectacles and his own interest in staging and costumes was evident in his sketchbooks and working notes from his student days at the Glasgow School of Art. Not only did the annual ball raise the profile of the art school within the local public imagination, these kinds of events also helped to strengthen bonds within the art community itself. Further evidence of this can be seen in the summer sketching camps on Savary Island that the school organized and he led, at which students and artists/teachers would sketch and paint en plein air, engage in critiques of each other’s work and perform in concerts and plays, often creating costumes out of the flotsam and jetsam found on the beach. Images and anecdotal recollections of such trips evidence a relaxed camaraderie within the group of participants.
For the Goodbye Charles exhibition Cullinan Richards and Ron Tran respond to the Beaux Arts Balls and the spirit of the Savary Island camps. Cullinan Richards have been shown in both group and solo exhibitions at the Charles H. Scott Gallery. Their installations explore painting, drawing, sculpture, theatricality and exhibition-making. Commonplace materials are employed in the production of their work, including plastic, cardboard, house paint and tape—standard materials used by artists in the making of their work rather than as the finished product.
Like Cullinan Richards, Vancouver artist Ron Tran has had both solo and group exhibitions at the Charles H. Scott Gallery. Tran makes work using a wide range of media and much of his work is performative and temporal in nature, with a sense of community and generosity at play. Tran often works collaboratively with other artists in projects that play with and break down the notions of authorship and the rarefied art object.
London artists Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards have worked together for 20 years, first under the moniker Artlab and more recently as Cullinan Richards. They have exhibited their work widely, including exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, London; South London Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Art, Seville, Spain; Daniel Spoerri Foundation, Seggiano, Italy; Whitstable Biennale, Kent, UK; and Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Switzerland.
Ron Tran has participated in group and solo exhibitions in Canada, Europe and Asia. He was recently awarded a Mayor’s Arts Award (Vancouver, 2015) and the Künstlerhaus Bethanien residency (Berlin, 2014). His work is featured in Avant-Gardes of The 21st Century, published by Phaidon Press.
READ Books | Charles H. Scott Gallery | Emily Carr University
EXHIBITION | Rust Never Sleeps
Arnaud Desjardin, Jason de Haan, Raphael Hefti, Ruben Ochoa, Holly Schmidt
June 1 - July 17, 2016
Lecture by Natasha Myers:
Tuesday, May 31, 2016 at 6:30 PM in the North Building Room 245
Opening Reception: Tuesday, May 31, 2016 at 7:30 PM
Please join us for a lecture by Natasha Myers, a Toronto-based anthropologist of art, science, and ecology. The lecture will be followed by the opening reception of Rust Never Sleeps.
The title of Neil Young’s 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps speaks to the concept behind this exhibition of work by five artists who employ naturally occurring growth—salt, mould, rust, flowers and lichen spores—as their materials. The resulting works address commodity, use value, causality, chance and instability.
Rust is an organic or chemical process of decay. It is also a blight that affects plants. In any form, rust is rarely—if ever—a positive thing. We don’t want rust—it damages and destroys. Yet, despite our best efforts, once rust takes hold and starts to grow there is very little chance of containing it. Conversely, art is a valuable commodity and its value increases over time. We display art with pride and it is to be admired and envied. We ensure it is protected and safeguarded. For these reasons, Ruben Ochoa’s use of rust as a material in his series of rust-on-linen paintings is at once unexpected and even blasphemous, yet also richly hued and striking.
Like Ochoa’s rust works, Arnaud Desjardin’s Mouldy Modern confronts the logic of fine art valuation. Desjardin purchased an edition of Histoire Naturelle, a rare 1926 portfolio of prints by Max Ernst, that was mottled with a purple mould that was eating away at the surface of the paper. Rather than reducing its value, for Desjardin this added a new layer of meaning to the work, referencing both Ernst’s experimental intentions in originally making the prints and also manifesting traces of time and nature. In Mouldy Modern, Desjardin turns the damaged portfolio into a new work that incorporates the decay and embraces the mutability of the object.
In a similar spirit, Jason de Haan’s Salt Beards grow—both literally and figuratively—from the objects of the past. The affects of time and happenstance are played out on their surfaces and generate symbolic meaning through de Haan’s application of mineral growths that develop and extrude from found and borrowed portrait busts. Like Desjardin, de Haan gives new life and reactivates the original objects, imagining “a continued growth and change that is potentially physical (biological/geological) and ideological.”
Holly Schmidt explores the ideologies and economics of floriculture in her work, Pollen Index. For the exhibition Schmidt has created a flower shop in the gallery window that is open during gallery hours and is accessible online. The shop replicates the vendor stalls in the Granville Island Market nearby. Interacting with visitors and passersby, the project will generate discussion about flower cultivation, re-production, the co-evolutionary effects of desire and the complexity of human relations with the natural world.
Lycopodium—or, “Witch Powder”—is a highly combustible moss spore. It was once a homeopathic remedy for a variety of ailments and was also used in explosives (the American government once tested it for potential use in chemical warfare). In the hands of Raphael Hefti, the spores are dusted over photo paper and set alight to make psychedelic, multicoloured photograms. In discussing his approach to making art, Hefti has said: “My direction of the process is intended to create something new away from, or in subversion of, the typical outcome. And of course this new process is prone to its own mistakes, to accidents and not 100% under my control.”
Inviting destabilizing forces into the making of artwork is key to all five of the artists in the exhibition. Though their materials are precarious, they nevertheless embrace the risk and unpredictability that comes with using growing matter, with its own predetermined objectives, as a medium.
Natasha Myers has been working at the cusp of art, science, and anthropology for decades. She is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University. Her book Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke, 2015) is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. Her current projects span investigations of the arts and sciences of vegetal sensing and sentience, the politics and aesthetics of garden enclosures in a time of climate change, and most recently, she has launched a long-term ethnography experimenting with the arts of ecological attention in High Park’s Oak Savannah.
A three-volume set consisting of hundreds of Garry Neill Kennedy’s notes, plans, and doodles produced during one decade at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. DRAWINGS 1, 2, and 3 is published by Emily Carr University Press and Publication Studio Vancouver in partnership with Art Metropole.
The West Coast Modern House chronicles the development of Vancouver residential architecture from the 1940’s through its continued influence on contemporary practice. The post-war era in Vancouver defined what has become popularly known as the “West Coast Style.” Through the work of seminal figures such as BC Binning, Ned Pratt, Ron Thom, Fred Hollingsworth, Douglas Simpson, Barry Downs and Arthur Erickson, Vancouver architects won national awards and international recognition for their innovative house designs. This period is now seen as one of the most important in the city’s architectural history.
Focusing on the years from 1940 to the mid-1960’s, The West Coast Modern House features over fifty examples of modern houses. The book is richly illustrated by photographs taken at the time by noted architectural photographers Graham Warrington, Selwyn Pullan and John Fulker. Essays by Greg Bellerby, Jana Tyner and Chris Macdonald elaborate on the history and innovative design strategies of the early period, through to an examination of the ways modern architectural concerns are being used by contemporary practitioners. The West Coast Modern House enables the reader to come to a greater understanding of the significance of modern residential architecture on the west coast and the persistence and relevance of its innovative design, material and construction strategies.
HOT DEAL at READ Books: buy 5 books get 25% off the 6th!
READ Books is the Charles H. Scott Gallery's bookshop. It is a social space for contemporary art publication that plays an active role in the ecology of artists' publishing in Vancouver. READ stocks an array of artists' books, monographs, exhibition catalogues, critical theory, artists' editions and magazines.
