BARTLEBY REVIEW

HYGIENE TRICKS & THE PEOPLE AT SCHICK ______________________________________________ by JACQUELYN ROSS In the shaving aisle I’m assaulted by a stupefying assortment of coloured razors, foams and waxes. The women’s shaving products are all pink and lime green; the men’s are dark blue and silver and black. I’m listening to that song, “Make Up”, from Lou Reed’s album Transformer, as I cruise through the fluorescent aisles of Shoppers Drug Mart, security guard at my back. Eyeliner, whitener, then color the eyes. Yellow and green, ooh, what a surprise... It’s kind of a childish, circusy song, with a tuba that follows the melody line. I can’t tell from Lou’s voice whether he’s being earnest or sardonic, especially when he belts out, you’re a slick little girl, oh, you’re such a slick little girl...so many times in the refrain. I’m sure that the people at Schick are betting on the way my brain might mistake it for “slick” as I intuitively reach for a gold- coloured razor in their aptly-titled IntuitionTM line. Do I intuitively reach for the IntuitionTM line because of the brand’s association to slickness? Or do I intuitively reach for it because the name IntuitionTM cajoles me into thinking that such a thing as instinct still exists? Though it’s plasticy and over-designed, in the end I’m sold on its promise of “moisturizing ribbons” that eliminate the need for shaving gel. I purchase the item at the till with a playful tap of my Enviro Visa, much to the chagrin of the skulking security guard. Kara Hansen’s exhibition Hypnic Jerk is dreamy like the handle of the IntuitionTM razor and awkwardly surreal like being shaken from a nap by a coworker in the break room with the lights down low. In two large works on paper, gouache is smeared with hair oils and marbled shaving creams by leading market brands Gillette, Mr. Shaver and Max Supreme; an oversized glove hangs from the ceiling sprinkler pipe like a still-damp bath towel. There’s something friendly and familiar—but also spooky, and sinister—about a lonely glove making paintings with shaving cream. Although, isn’t that what personal hygiene is really like, after all? Tweezers are creepy; my hairbrush, a matted, alien utensil. Moreoever, in the “History” section of schick.ca I learn that their innovative safety razor was invented in 1921 by a Colonel Schick (no word play, after all) who was inspired by army repeating rifles. Already I don’t like the link between rifles and bare legs, but then I read on, and learn that the same brand historically made swords. At the opening, Kara serves me a plastic cup filled with something she calls her “potion”: a homemade concoction of champagne yeast, mugwort, lemon and ginger. I eagerly accept, but hand it off discretely to a willing friend after I’ve had a few sips. I get the sense that there’s magic at work here, some kind of gradual enchantment, and I wonder what might have happened had I finished my glass. Maybe if I’d drunk more of that potion, I think to myself, I could have cured myself of those hypnic jerks that make me jump from my sleep each time I’m about to enter a dream. I wander into a dark booth, where a projected image is refracted through a series of mirrors and plexiglas panes. Two figures are moving inside a giant white fabric glove, and I marvel at the way their limbs are used so efficiently to activate the costume’s five enormous digits: someone’s right arm operating the thumb, two legs collaborating clumsily on a middle finger. The glove puts on a sorry show, in a way— the kind of show that might make an audience member get up and leave in the middle. It’s a terrifying thing to watch the human body squeeze itself into another form, though it’s something we do frequently. I ought to consider this morbid shape-shifting the next time I put on that stubborn pair of skin-tight jeggings, or apply concealer to hide the bags under my eyes. Then again, maybe we’re just transformers, Lou and I—though transforming can be a harrowing process. I think I’ll go home and exfoliate. ______________________________________________ JACQUELYN ROSS is a writer, critic and occasional curator based in Vancouver. Her artwriting has appeared in artforum.com, The Capilano Review and Decoy. She is currently working on her first collection of short stories. YOUNG ADULT is her latest publishing project, initiated during a year-long residency at Publication Studio Vancouver.

THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN ______________________________________________ by SUNG PIL YOON Peter Handke’s The Left Handed Woman centres around Marianne, a woman has recently separated from her husband. It would seem that she has not only divorced herself from an overbearing husband, Bruno, but also her ability to relate to the world in the aftermath of her marriage. When Marianne realized she wanted to divorce Bruno she proclaimed to him that it was an “epiphany”, but what informed this profound decision to be is not elaborated beyond that exchange, nor are her goals beyond that outcome. Throughout the film, she wields a dignified loneliness by her refusal to be a victim. She does not submit to Bruno’s belittlements, nor to Franziska’s projection of her own doubts while in a similar situation. Depictions of Marianne’s struggles are presented exclusively for the audience and no other characters ever participate in this private spectacle. While many stand-alone scenes highlight her state of isolation—spending the occasional day sitting at home staring into space for prolonged periods of time, or even walking in endless circles in the backyard while her son and his friend play in the background. Handke makes pronounced references to the work and personage of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu: first with his portrait making appearance in the set, and then a scene from Tokyo Chorus (1931) playing at the cinema. Striving for certain characteristics of Ozu’s film style is evident, most explicitly still-life background cinematography, with carefully arranged furniture with deliberate compositions in each nook and cranny. Even so, Handke does not succeed in emulating the concept of Mu—emptiness that gives heightened meaning to form. Handke attempts to appropriate Ozu’s “emptiness” for Marianne, but this “emptiness” is too literal, and no longer shares the same definition as Ozu’s. Marianne is actually not lonely; she maintains self-imposed solitude, therefore her character is never emotionally prompted to engage with any other characters, to reach out. Ozu’s humane approach to character development evokes vulnerability as a common ground throughout his films. There is no focus in any particular character but a self-sustained model where plots seem to unfold naturally with no person elevated on a pedestal. Handke’s admiration contradicts the very philosophy of Ozu in filmmaking, because of the fact that Marianne’s presence is always elevated, rendering all other characters as static and two-dimensional. They simply exist to trigger Marianne’s actions behind a backdrop of neatly placed furniture. The heavily considered set design surpasses a cast of characters who seem to function much like props themselves. Her living space repeatedly creeps back to the forefront of the audience’s attention. By this observation, it seems that Handke’s contradicting reliance on Ozu’s cinematic signatures evokes not a subtle homage, but rather an aesthetic exercise that attempts to pass as homage. Marianne seems to indulge in these moments that she has built around herself. Her quiet yet dignified solitude does not convince us that she is truly uncomfortable with her situation. She basks in the struggles of modern life to the point where it translates into a form of leisure amongst a cryptically chic setting. This portrait is arranged for Marianne’s freedom from her overbearing husband, however, is not possible to escape the grasp of the overbearing direction of the film. Note: Wim Wenders is credited as the producer of The Left-Handed Woman which screened as part of Wim Wenders: A Retrospective throughout October and December 2015. Wenders was a frequent collaborator of Handke’s who also shared a profound admiration for the work of Yasujiro Ozu. ______________________________________________ SUNG PIL YOON

WE SHOULD TAKE BELOW: THE GAMBLING SPLINTER ______________________________________________ by D'ARCY BLAKE Rachel and Sarah Seburn amalgamate an architectural aesthetic with cultural commentary to critique urban development. Reacting against encroaching development and the gentrification of Vancouver’s Chinatown, the twins have transformed UNIT/PITT Projects into a sardonic presentation center for their prospective subterranean oasis.The hypothetical bunker is a proposition to “take below” as surrounding historic buildings continue to be demolished. In what is perhaps a jab at Chinatown’s impending beautification, the Seburns’ alternative space plays it remarkably safe when it comes to building code regulations. Insulated foam, shiny Plexiglas and crisply formed concrete mark the perimeter, while sea-foam green commercial grade rebar pokes out from the angular blocks. Although their straight-laced construction practices appear to be up to code, one cannot dismiss the bunker’s air of ephemerality. Propped up walls constantly remind that its duration will not outlast the exhibition. Interrupting the floor plan, an elbow joint painted bright red and set in concrete contradicts its material immobility as it sits upon a weathered dolly. Two compressed gas cylinders, one painted blue and the other grey, also in a cart, suggest that relics of an industrial past can be simply rolled away and replaced by sleek, streamlined modernity—or at the very least, painted over. The Gambling Splinter does more than offer a romantic solution. It also dredges up past rumours that have long circulated about an alleged system of tunnels underneath Chinatown. The myth has since been debunked—as it turns out, the tunnels were more like unconnected cellars. Nevertheless, they likely provided refuge from racism and also acted as hideouts for more nefarious enterprises like opium dens, brothels and gambling rings. The Seburns hint at this suppressed culture with a poker table queued up for fictional real estate buyers, while the bunker itself echoes the form of the century-old gambling parlours. Furthermore, the rolled-metal door atop a precariously mounted staircase and a dusty transistor radio perched above a wooden ammunition box seem to allude to Cold War era bomb shelters and the concomitant anxiety that permeated the latter half of the twentieth-century. Michel Foucault stressed that heterotopias must necessarily stem from a relationship to real sites and experiences, and the Seburns make clear that their bunker draws from the historical and current context of its surroundings. What they present us with, however, conveys not so much an association with reality, but an ominous anticipation of disastrous effects. By tying together recent urban development with historical narratives in a complex entanglement, the Seburns show us that we are not progressing along a linear path, but rather, are participating in a consistent push-pull dynamic. Could it be that bygone fears of mutually assured destruction are returning, only with developers replacing flagrant social intolerance? The Seburns point out that fear of destruction is apropos of all generations. ______________________________________________ D'ARCY BLAKE

SURFING THE MARGINS ______________________________________________ by JULIAN HOU Site specific works of this kind, showing a commitment to the material sensitivity of sculpture and photography and a relationship to Institutional Critique, have a sporadic history in Vancouver and currently seem somewhat off the radar. We are in a moment when the convergence of voice, collectivity, and persona/performativity seem to be most resonant. However, a slackening from the referential might signify an overestimation of freedom. Which is to say that the expression of freedom is distinct from agency, in that the former risks speaking while having nothing to say, while the latter does not privilege utterance as being the primary mode of delivering meaning. The work in RENT exposes the ease and play that a scaffolding of both heavy ideas and light material approaches can afford, which seems to be a continuous propagation of material investigations that are both contingent and engaged. A friend recently remarked that artists in galleries are similar to Snakes on a Plane. Artists must wriggle their way around the institutional politics and obstructions of a vessel which is foreign and ultimately uninhabitable—resulting in artwork that is forced to slither around and beneath. Having witnessed the production process of Lorna Bauer and Jon Knowles for their recent exhibition at Model first hand, much of which occurred in the gallery a week leading up to the opening itself, I realised that project spaces can allow other models of thinking about the artist in relationship to spaces. Bruce Lee talked about the power of formlessness: Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow and it can crash. Be water my friend. While the gallery itself is a project space and ultimately very free from curatorial expectations and institutional funding limitations, Bauer and Knowles nevertheless take on this relationship of artists to spaces as a subject to consider in their exhibition RENT. They reflect thoughtfully on context and site as a way of generating textures of meaning that reflect larger concerns about patterns of urban development and its relationship to the conditions of showing and making art. What I read as a metaphor for this approach was their video HABITAT (2015), which showed a surfer balancing precariously on a standing wave that had been produced adjacent to large-scale urban construction. To ride momentarily on an incidental wave is the sad illusion of achievement that the artist has come to face in cities that relegate art to balancing on the margins. The title of the exhibition contains an authoritativeness that belies a more subtle dimension to the works on display, where sourcing materials from local neighborhoods gives the work a textural familiarity. A few thin sticks of bamboo are brushed with copper leaf and mounted to the walls of the gallery, forming a vertical rhythm playing off the architecture of the space. The bamboo, sourced in neighboring Chinatown, nods to the use of copper gilding in decorative applications but also to the heightened value of copper in the Downtown Eastside—a metal that can be stripped from buildings and sold to recycling depots. Inversely, decorating the walls of the Cedar Tavern (the room at at the back of the gallery) are actual copper tubes sleeved in a reprint of a found sunbleached travel poster depicting a giant panda. iPhone protective films and iPad privacy screens are adhered directly to the walls of the gallery, with their inner surfaces gilded in abstract copper patina shapes and arranged compositionally with the electrical outlets and light switches in the room. A tattered threadbare awning, echoing the awning presently installed on the facade of the gallery, is stretched on a painting stretcher and hung over the gallery window, its back to the street and filtering the light that enters into the space. ______________________________________________ JULIAN HOU is an artist based in Vancouver.

UPKEEP ______________________________________________ by MAIA NICHOLS Three blocks of confetti greet you. Lara Favretto’s Village of the Damned (2014) references the 1960 sci-fi film set in an English village inhabited by blonde, glowing-eyed children with powers that compel people to suicide. To block the children’s telepathy, their professor visualizes a brick wall, effectively hiding his plan to drop a bomb on the building the children live in. Village of the Damned succeeds in formalizing mental compression, serving as a slight yet weighty gesture. The confetti blocks shed lamentably slowly, a silently oppressive reminder of our impermanence. Favaretto will recycle the confetti to create new pieces. Throughout her career, she revisits the same materials, repurposes found objects, and creates links informed by location. Air migrates and influences the structures, notably the one in front of the door separating the entrance from the first gallery, which has bald patches, lumps missing. Twistle (2003) also deals with air. Here, Favretto has prepared an ominous human-sized air tank, regimented and timed, to blow a silent party streamer. Inflating and deflating rhythmically, the dialogue between a heaving machine and a flimsy, replaceable streamer ultimately mocks the seriousness of the former. Fisting (2012) is a sculpture that shows the impact of the artist’s fist punching the top of a concrete plinth-like rectangular form. Visually reminiscent of digging into sand, she is crude, unapologetic, and violent. Inertia, the heaviness of the object (an evident hassle to ship), echoes the slow nature of progress, the stasis of political structures, amidst the fleeting gestures of the body. Upstairs, you enter a room of car washers installed vertically in pairs; their cloth strips elevate and twirl almost touching each other and grazing pieces of metal mounted against the wall behind them. Coppie Semplici/Simple Couples (2009) seems democratic, even fun; a light-hearted study of characters reflecting us. The metal is harsh against the tenderness of the twirling bodies that are sometimes complacent, and stopped, sometimes furiously spinning their wheels, forever chained to their liaisons. Soon, it becomes an aesthetic poesis of wear, as the metal grates behind the washers show marks from their movement. This parallels the wearing down of the self through affiliations to others, and to the environmental substrate within which we are contained. The overwhelming darkness here is one of recognition, of familiarity with being trapped, caught within the mechanism. On the floor, a glossy plaque that reads Defense d’Entrer (2012) is mounted over a small piece of African zebrawood of the same size. The small sculpture continues to function as it did when it was first exhibited, amidst European elections. Raising awareness of Europe’s challenging interdependence with Africa, it is a marker for the cultural diplomacy of trade, immigration, and demographic changes in Europe which instilled conflicts around African migration and employment. Visitors are not likely to step over the plaque to enter the corridor. This is likely another derisive jab at codes of public display, echoed further in Favaretto’s Lost & Found (1998), which emerged from an interest in the state-run auctions of lost and found items from the Italian railway system. Here, Favaretto locks a suitcase and gets rid of the key. We don’t know where it is from, or what’s inside. Rennie’s custodian moves the suitcase on a regular basis. This instruction taunts the monumental in systems of care, consequently stained by the artist’s privilege. ______________________________________________ MAIA NICHOLS is an artist and writer currently based in Los Angeles.

SÈANCE FICTION ______________________________________________ by BOPHA CHHAY Think Bruce Nauman’s 1967 neon work The True Artist Helps the World By Revealing Mystic Truths. While Nauman’s neon-signage work questioned the role and function of the artist in society, “Séance Fiction” examines more closely the role of the artist as an agent and interpreter of the past and the future. In Shana Moulton’s video The Undiscovered Drawer, the protagonist Cynthia (Moulton’s alter ego) is trapped in a room. She locates a key that unlocks a drawer where she finds objects that consequently determine her fate. Cynthia frees herself from the room by playing an ergonomic keyboard as a xylophone and belting out a Coldplay tune with a cosmetic tool that encourages you to hold your head and face in a particular manner. Perhaps a kind of mystic intuition? The conflation of science fiction titles and floriography in Heather and Ivan Morison’s ongoing Science Fiction/Wildflower series becomes not only a temporal and spatial conflation but one that encourages a belief in parallel universes. What is the relevance of a Bulgarian daisy in a copy of JG Ballard’s The Crystal World? Between the pages are pressed flowers and botanical specimens. Carrying their own language, their placement between the pages of a science fiction title forces a schism or interjection within the narrative. Hannah Doerksen questions the symbolic value of nostalgia as imbued in objects with I Come to Believe We All Gunna Drown—a near reconstruction of the Overlook Hotel bar in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Along the bar, familiar objects such as African masks and an Easter Island statue amongst others are all placed atop various vessels. We recognise these mass produced objects from a time when it was acceptable to perpetuate cultural stereotypes without critical reflection. The bar’s estrangement is further induced through the absence of bartender and alcohol, and though it beckons the viewer with wunderkammer-like allure, it remains devoid of hospitality. Focusing on the form of moving image as a way to invoke the incorporeal, Soda_Jerk’s The Time That Remains makes use of glitches to rupture not only of the fragility of the medium but also the audacity of the film industry. The two channel work stages the past and future selves of actresses Bette Davis and Joan Crawford from movies they star in. One is asleep on one screen while the other is seen attempting to escape devastation. The recurring glitches create a disturbance, with sleep signifying the descending starlet and the societal pressures on women in the film industry to maintain eternal youth. A Família do Capitão Gervásio, a 16mm film and installation by Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj, looks at the town of Palmelo, Brazil where a small Spiritist community lives. People are seen to be undergoing both individual and collective heal- ing transformations and rituals. Spliced between these moments are cut shots of modernist archi- tectural forms from within the town. While the forms cast from concrete and wood acting as plinths and furniture within the installation might seem a superfluous trope of contemporary art, the abstraction and materialisation of modern- ist architectural forms as support structures can speak to our desire to discern the unknown. As if to obliquely respond to Nauman, “Séance Fiction” positioned the role of the artist as “medium”.Wherelanguagemightfallshortas we seek clarity and order, the exhibition reveals a tension between belief and skepticism. One of the most compelling and incidental aspects of “Séance Fiction” was the convergence of drifting audio from the various works that induced an ever present immaterial hauntology soundtrack, creating a synergy as if channeled by the works. ______________________________________________ BOPHA CHHAY is a writer based in Vancouver

THE FUTURE LIVES HERE ______________________________________________ by GABI DAO LISTEN TO A FANTASY IN SURREY En route to the Surrey Public Library, the Sky- train’s balanced robotic voice announces, “Your next station is Surrey City Central.” An adjacent billboard gleams, “The Future Lives Here”. A Fantasy in Surrey is an aggregate of abstract electronic verses organized in six sections. Against the backdrop of architecture appropriating Frank Gehry’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, an MPC 1000 is positioned for a photo-op. Brought to the Surrey Public Library for the sake of a photo shoot, it composes the foreground of Fantasy’s album cover. Same Same’s SoundCloud features accompanying text that points to the optimism of the modernist architecture. He admits, “For a moment while in the Surrey Public Library I wasn’t afraid to make music.” The sampler is like a euphemism for a human being, a funny cyborg reposed and illuminated on the curve of the frigid utopia where Same Same might have escaped from the hubbub of the city in order to focus on his work. Each moment within “Sections 1-6” is a distinct progression without a chorus and resists conforming to the structures of a danceable beat. It’s meant to be listened to attentively—academic ambient—more like the geeky cousin of the beat driven tracks that one could shimmy to at a handful of coy spots in town. Indulgent in deep metronomic sequences, its pops and clicks skim over abrupt textures that hinge onto intermittent droid like vocals that nod to the social etiquette of the library. The tableau of a library patron clicking on a laptop in a shiny public library-cum-recording studio is a picture of post-studio practice. Work is no longer necessarily relegated to the traditional space of a studio; in this case it can be made anywhere with a Wi-Fi connection, a laptop, editing software and some headphones. The city of Surrey champions the alleviation of business centres, the dispersal of civic resources and hype. The 77,000 square foot library is designed as an extension of the home—to exist, as architect Bing Thom states, as “a community room”. Without a studio at the time, Same Same felt comfortable enough to compose Fantasy quietly on headphones in a library that he heard looked like the Guggenheim. As an independently released EP circulated on free online audio distribution platform Soundcloud, it participates in the virtual real es- tates that make it possible to host the boom of electronic music demand, production and reception. Like these distribution platforms, condos and civic community centres model a uni- form experience of space. The sonic pleasure of Fantasy, like much of the electronic music in town, requires idiosyncratic spaces that don’t fit into the agenda of city planning. These idiosyncratic spaces allow a kind of participation free from regulations that define specific types of public venues such as bars clubs. Arguably, they can establish a kind of programming that isn’t completely ruled by an equation for maximum revenue. The energy of immediacy, unhindered by regulation, elicits a freer itinerary in providing visibility for local talent within a particular aesthetic of electronic music. These covert venues become intoxicating, but consecutive late-night jives are accompanied by the fact of city by-laws and politics that give next weekend’s plans a precarious status. A public and private binary becomes exaggerated by the need to remain covert, setting a model for when and where these cultural activities can occur. Under these parameters, a tense standard is formed. What makes Fantasy so singular is that this EP/artwork circumvents and cryptically subverts the standardized spaces of cultural production and reception, both in visual art and electronic music, on the Internet and within civic reality. It offers a poetic critique of metropolitan ambition while maintaining the sincerity of its medium that quietly speaks to a modest 41 virtual followers. ______________________________________________ GABI DAO is really into sculpture and sound. She is a member of the collective practice Avenue.

CORPORATE CURATION SUMMATION ______________________________________________ by BRETT BARMBY Corporate lobbies are monumental open spaces with high ceilings, abundant light, and high volume foot traffic. What would make an ideal gallery is, unfortunately, usually treated as a living room, home to designer furniture and decorative art, conservative palette knife paintings, humble landscapes, or most commonly no art at all. As a courier, delivering packages from office to office, I’ve located the best bike racks, the backdoor entrances, the unlocked bathrooms, the quickest elevators, the receptionists with the best candy, and of course, the best lobby art. A. World Trade Centre, 999 Canada Place – Unknown title and artist, only the initials “MT” in the corner. Let your neck tense up as you gaze twenty feet above the security desk at this cool blue and grey painting. The intention behind the obnoxiously high placement of this piece is not very strategic, as I’ve breezed past it several times and have only noticed it recently. B. Private Residencies at Hotel Georgia, 669 Howe – Warholism by Patrick Hughes. One of the many signature accordion-style three- dimensional collages of textbook art history images put in space. This lobby is a little tricky since it acts as both a lobby for private apart- ments as well as a few offices. If you tell the concierge you just want to look at the art, may- be they will buzz you in. C. HSBC Building, 885 W Georgia – Broken Column by Alan Storey, colloquially known as “The Pendulum”. A massive kinetic sculpture featuring a large metal column that swings from the ceiling to meet with its stationary partner, hovering over it by just centimetres. Impossible to miss in the giant and otherwise empty atrium, however it’s frequently immobile for unknown reasons. D. The Burrard Building, 1030 W Georgia – Stellar by Eric Metcalfe, made in partnership with the Burrard Arts Foundation. This massive, vibrant blue and yellow painting conspicuously hangs in a beige and black marble room. Its location on the west wall before the elevator lobby however doesn’t allow much throw be- tween the viewer and the piece. In a bottleneck of rushed office workers on their way in and out, its curation is ambient at best. This piece also appears to be the only one placed indoors in correspondence with a local art institution. E. Bentall Three, Bank of Montreal Tower, 595 Burrard – Light Up (Red/Blue) by Renée Van Halm. Walk past the nine-panelled Water Lilies homage on the main wall between elevator lobbies and towards the east entrance. Pushed back into the ground level offices of the bank hangs the Dutch painter’s work. Just let the receptionist know you’re only trying to ap- preciate the art as this location skirts an unspo- ken boundary between lobby and office. F. The Evergreen Building, 1285 W Pender – Unknown title and artist, a series of five small square pieces framed behind glass, with an additional sixth hidden back towards the elevators. The combination of size, frame and op-art illusion of movement give the impression that these are video pieces, and the evidence of fingerprint smears on the glass shows they’ve been mistaken to be interactive, or just confused for a touch-screen directory for the building. No didactic information is available either on location or online. ______________________________________________ Brett Barmby is an artist originally based in Vancouver. He is currently pursuing an MFA at Concordia in Montreal, QC.

QUAIL EGGS & FERRERO ROCHER ON REPEAT ______________________________________________ by STEFFANIE LING When a slide projector whirs, its images are always accompanied by a voice, wheth- er it is a recently returned vacationer, the art history professor’s routine, or at the very least, the mechanistic sighs of slides changing. In the convention of oral accompaniment for this modest form of image sharing, the voice in Tris Vonna-Michell’s installations is his own. His reading, wearing a Beat rhythm, is repetitive with hard-hitting syllables, seemingly delivered in a single breath (they are usually recorded in one take without much postproduction). In Postscript V (Berlin), you watch two slide projectors cycle through pairings of various benign photographs. These documents of consumption, rest, and landscapes of gen- eral transience carry the spirit of Stephen Shore. Whereas Shore’s pictures give the feeling of a slow, blanched America, TVM’s documented objects and spaces are difficult to profile. In what begins to form as the fragments of an itinerant traveller, the reoccurring image and mention of quail eggs and Ferrero Rocher chocolates are signs of some material stability. The commercials I’ve seen tend to project major opulence onto this fairly garden-variety chocolate, but the images of an extended handful of its brown and gold pleated wrappers and a tray of chocolates replaced with quail eggs perpetuate some splendor in the consumption of such ubiquitous things. Finding Chopin: Dans l’Essex, a film project- ed into the corner, is partially distorted on the right where the wall turns. The camera often pans slowly to the left giving the film’s landscape shots a quality of disintegrating into oblivion, and it is nearly impossible not to think about Angelus Novus. TVM’s voice- over is frantic, but focused on remembering. As with quail eggs and Ferrero Rocher, his memory treats the miniscule as monumental, and the monumental as suspect. Capital Complex is an assemblage of photographs and audio abutted with a script set in the Modernist outpost of Chandigarh, again creating a nebula of references within the installation. It prompts the question, why is failed Modernist architecture such a common stoic stomping ground? Such smooth monolithic surfaces were not meant to harbor flourish nor dust, never mind histories or memories. Do such works now compen- sate for this period of style so hapless in its disregard for sentiment? TVM’s work is often described as “layered” and the press release warns that “[the] exhibition calls for our active engagement”, but it doesn’t mean participatory, just that the work is not for the faint of attention span. Certainly, maximal information demands our attention, and a decent effort to consider a heaping pile of disassembled narrative is not so gratuitous to ask, but achieving that concession as the main pur- pose or desired affect of TVM’s work here seems highly unlikely. When an artist lays their subjectivity out bare, they are relying on a combination of mediation and the viewer’s own determina- tion to parse the material. While it is dense, it does not demand or stress its own importance and retains its modesty as a personally driven project. You may be endeared, or compelled by this exhibition the way travel literature can inspire wanderlust, but no romantic escapism is to be found here, only an existential digression which will either momentarily distract with your own crisis or exacerbate it. ______________________________________________ Steffanie Ling is editor of BARTLEBY REVIEW

A MIRAGE ON A HILL ______________________________________________ by MICHAEL COOK I was tempted to begin this review with, “Like Kalli Niedoba’s Big Beige Eyes exhibition at 221A, which interrogated the function of industrial design in financial institutions, or I.O.U. at Unit/Pitt which soaked a crate of her friends’ artworks in the ocean for a month before the exhibition—A Mirage On A Hill is an exhibition that engages the practice of iconoclasm.” It is that. But to reduce the works to their destructive capacity is to miss the complexities of their affect. In the hallway approaching the gallery space, the visitor begins to hear the slowed down notes of Kim Mitchell’s vaguely threatening “Go For A Soda”. The pitch-adjusted loop entitled “Well, The Bomb In My Head Is Love (Kim Mitchell)” (2015), is accompanied by a warm, softly-modulating light that emanates through a hole in the high corner of the west wall. This hole, cut through the drywall in the shape of a soda cup and straw is covered by a 638 gel filter affixed with a single piece of tape, allowing it to flap gently in the warm air that moves up through the space between the window and the wall. The title of the hole, “Varying Degrees Of Optimism (Or I’m At My Best At 7:35 PM)” (2015), hints that it works most effectively as the sunset shines through. On the floor beneath the soda-hole, a pile of dust and scraps from the cutout are mixed with some kind of reflective additive. Along with the gel filter, the scraps are an important element of the work, but the central material is the absence of material: the space where the drywall used to be and the natural light that shines through that space. The absence of a thing is the thing: the intangible, ephemeral, and experiential. Finally, the central work, “I Love It Here! (Monument To The Floor)” (2015), is a minimalist sculpture of a person in prostrate prayer with arms outstretched towards the setting sun. Like “Thanks!” (2014), the central table sculpture in the Big Beige Eyes exhibition, “I Love It Here!...” is made from framing lumber and drywall, and dominates the gallery space. It is built in eight segments: arms, legs, head, torso, feet—each piece a whitewashed, irregular, geometric extrusion, which, standing alone, would read as an abstract form or a misshapen plinth. In fact, the size of the work in the small gallery space forces a close perspective on the viewer, obscuring the wider view that together these shapes represent a figure. There are several jokes to be read from this exhibition: the idea that a person in prayer is truly worshipping the floor, the celebration of history’s most embarrassing example of CanCon rock, the inclusion of “hole” in the listed media, and the musical references throughout the didactic material that exhort against snobbery. If the works are considered in their warmth and subtlety, they no longer appear to be tearing down our relationships with icons: on our stereos, in our prayers, or on our gallery walls. Instead, they invite us to consider the ways of devotion implicit in these structures, the several functions of a wall or the layered meanings of a terrible pop song. ______________________________________________ Full Disclosure: Bartleby Review acknowledges that the editor of this publication is also the curator of the exhibition covered in this review.

PICTURES DON’T FEEL THE SAME ANYMORE ______________________________________________ by ZEB ZANG A tree grows on a barren hill, weighted down beneath a cyan sky. The rain on the glass saturates its colours and the glow from behind the image deepens the contrast between each tone. The bus is running late. This image was shot with an iPhone 6 and uploaded by Hyeong Jun K. before becoming an ad for Apple’s new product, along with dozens of other iPhone photos, all enlarged to their impressive bus stop size as proof of the product’s technical ability. The phone is nowhere to be seen. To show it would be irrelevant, so a despondent set of images showing where it can be taken acts as its replacement. As with every other image in this advertising suite, the one glowing in front of me demonstrates an adept understanding of compositional rules—a quality more common than uncharacteristic in any gallery of cell phone snapshots—yet an exclusively formal analysis would miss the point. This tree is advertising a phone. Aside from its commercial purpose, it points towards a basic fact: producing a beautiful photograph is no longer a challenge, and this has made beauty feel redundant. Susan Sontag discussed how images of violence and war might eventually render those subjects completely without affect, and it seems now the same may be true of beautiful, composi- tionally perfected pictures. Continual expansion thins the care a viewer can give to an image. Photographic technology of any kind cannot compare in affective capacity by those that created the earliest still and moving images, such as the Lumière Brothers’ film of a train which was potent enough to chase viewers from their seats. The more pictures in the world the less power each one has. Yet from the stereoscope to the oculus rift, innovators have always tried to push against this loss of pictorial potency with technical devices to force the image closer to reality. From their inevitable inferiority to real world, these developments towards optical immersion all pass into the realm of kitsch and satire, as viewers learn to spot their obvious manufacture. It is more likely to find immersion not within a single image but in the depiction of everything by everyone at all times—the infinite crowd sourced pool of pictures. A phone may be the new populist form of communication or just a new source of visual noise, but it isn’t quite killing art. I once heard a comedian say that art is harder to make as time goes on because everything has already been done. With artists there is often an overanalysis of things that have no relevance outside of Art, however the cell phone photograph retains consequence in the world at large as communication both personal and political. My concern is how pictures have changed in power and in feeling. Though the growth of photography is no more inherently negative than a new television channel, it may force a reaction and a new set of parameters by which art can retain relevance. As the iPhone makes optical perfection and innovative composition accessible to all, more demanding goals must be insisted upon. The challenge is for an insightful honesty that avoids the growing trend of solipsism common with the new ease of depiction. Emotion and affect are more hard-won than impressive visuals and good ideas. The rain hasn’t stopped as the bus arrives. I get on and the next day the ad is replaced. Yet it stays ingrained in my thoughts, as a picture important for some reason beyond what it depicts. A tree placed against a sky made by an apple. ______________________________________________

WITHDRAWN ______________________________________________ by SARAH DAVIDSON Shary Boyle’s Spell to Bring Lost Creatures Home suggested linear narrative, but never solidified. I was therefore made to float, unmoored, amongst dream-like fragments of ex- perience. The work was commissioned to be toured around schools in the Canadian North, and the artists had just returned from a tour by small plane. When I heard this context, along with the words “overhead projector”, I imagined something crude, but the event unfolded like a well-directed stage play. Projection lent a transcendent, theatrical power to the imagery, which morphed and danced on cue to music performed live by Christine Fellows. Spell to Bring Lost Creatures Home adds to the growing mythology of the artist and analogously echoes the history of the lighted spectacle. Boyle’s own growing mythology consists of an ongoing investigation into the figure, strong feminist leanings, and recur- ring animist tendencies. In revisiting the mo- ment when light show became animation and animation other forms of film, Boyle suggests counter-narrative footnotes for outdated spectacle-based storytelling. We forget, in the age of the lighted screen, that this form of display was once seen as a remarkable thing. Sky Goodden panned Boyle’s 2013 Venice Biennale presentation in Blouin Artinfo, and though I didn’t see the exhibition myself, and can’t speak to how the scale of her work functioned in the space, a certain anathema is attached to work that embraces the “cute” aesthetic. Another criticism of this nature could also be made based on the fact that Boyle gained fame for work that seemed to embrace “cuteness” only winkingly, wearing obvious grotesquery on its surface as well. Porcelain propelled Boyle into the limelight, but she’s been neglected as an artist in draw- ing, projection, and other media for well over a decade. Boyle wields the art of projector choreography like a beautifully crafted knife, for one thing. A seasoned performer, her theatricality shines when she reveals the ability to paint a child’s face and make it age before our eyes, by swirling india ink and water together on glass. None of this feels winking. The sincerely handmade is made transcendent, a familiar form strange. Boyle making her work so inclusive makes it all the more powerful; but surely, starting a dialogue about loneliness with youth, and at- tending the Venice Biennale, can’t be part of one and the same practice. Would you believe me if I said hard-hearted art insiders wiped their tears as the lights went up? As an artist who draws, I felt particularly in- vested in Shary Boyle’s performance. I say this because I think it’s important to note that I’m not a disinterested party and, even more so, because I think the wider reception of Boyle’s oeuvre illustrates the problems presented by a certain aesthetic, namely that of the line- based and implicitly feminine. I can note, hopefully, that Reading The Line (currently on view at Western Front), brings another related set of concerns to the fore by examining tex- tile art and other overlooked, often gendered genres of line-based image making. I leave you with my lingering sentiment: if new and complicated forms of knowledge can be woven out of illustrative art in a high school auditorium, then perhaps they might also be fashioned within an art scene where they would be all the more unsettling for being so unexpected. ______________________________________________

Print Erratum: page 2, graph 2, line 3 insert “to” so that sentence reads “You try to smooth the edges of his language, looking for something familiar, but the man speaks in gibberish.” 

SUPER, UNNATURAL BC ______________________________________________ by CURTIS GRAHAUER Stand-up paddleboard yoga is a curious pastime that perfectly encapsulates the Vancouver “experience”. For those who are unfamiliar with this activity, you must be new to Vancouver... welcome! SUP yoga, as it’s affectionately known, involves paddling a surfboard on a body of water and then striking yogic poses against the majestic backdrop of the Coast Mountains reflected in the glass towers of downtown. Does it take place outdoors? Check. Can it be cross-promoted with one of the local, recog- nizable outfitters (Lululemon, MEC, etc.)? You bet! Is it a fusion of two appropriated cultures? Of course. In this case, Hawaiian paddle boarding is combined with a bastardization of yoga by a consumer demographic more familiar with the Gandharvas, 90’s alt-rockers, than with the gandharvas of Indian classical music. Namaste. Inspired by Japanese rock garden aesthetics, the main part of the installation consists of a slatted wooden pathway elevated over pebbles and a few considerately placed stones, and highlights how unnatural Vancouver’s “natural” environment really is. The calm feeling that permeates this enclosed and windowless space engenders quiet contemplation of the environment outside of Spare Room. The aggressive vehicular energy of Main Street and grimy Chinatown alleyways surround this indoor island of Zen. The studio and exhibition space, as agents of production and dissemination respectively, are in a perpetual motion of depending on and supporting one another. This symbiotic relationship becomes hardened in a city like Vancouver, where the thirst for arts and culture is supplanted by leisure and livelihood. As outlined by curator Sung Pil Yoon on the space’s website, “the exhibition room strives to construct (and deconstruct) the concept of space as an environment, situation, or place in order to analyze the experimental stages of spatial design”. It is fitting then that 86, with its references to the prototypical Vancouver lifestyle, is the pilot exhibition for Spare Room. Thankfully, 86 avoids entering into any tired conversations that revolve around whether or not Vancouver is a city that supports the arts as much as it should. Instead it brings up fundamental points on the local environment to consider what is nature versus naturalized in the context of a city obsessed with nature. Recessed into the opposite wall are three vignettes of Vancouver life in miniatures. In one, a man in a forest is balling up a Gore-Tex jacket with the intention of stuffing it in a MEC backpack. In another, a couple of seals play at a pebbled shore while a man fixes an oblivious stare towards the unseen horizon. The third is a scene of a man drinking a glass of tap water within a kitchen sharing the inefficiently spacious aesthetic inherent to the Vancouver Special. There are very few who would argue that we are entitled to access nature and its resources, whether that is hiking the local mountains, doing SUP yoga in False Creek, or getting our hydrate on straight from the tap. Along with this entitlement, however, is also the naturalization of having our natural resources sold back to us. What else could explain the ease with which people pay $2.25 for a bottle of Nestlé water, freshly bottled in Hope, BC?

SARA’S BAT MITZVAH ______________________________________________ by EMILE RUBINO Awkwardly located high on the narrow wall facing the front entrance of Gallery 295, the 4 x 6 ft lightbox project space exhibits a rotation of transparencies presented independently of the gallery’s program- ming. For the most part, the works presented here have avoided dealing with the local and influential legacy of that particular mode of presentation through a variety of subterfuges. From the wide array of abstract looking images to the numerous colorful arrangements of squiggles, without forgetting the occasional anecdotal play on the devices’ nature, featured artists have forgone, or abstained from, the inevitable implications of the backlit frame. In this context of willful amnesia, Isaac Thomas’s Sara’s Bat Mitzvah (2015) could mark a turning point in the short history of 295’s lightbox project space. Resulting from Thomas’s meticulous arrangement, the large format colour photograph is purposefully deployed to overtly recall the compositional methods associated with the “Vancouver School”. Using a large format camera incongruously placed inside a car, the picture shows a man in formal costume standing on high stilts by the side of the road. The man is festively waving his white-gloved hand at the driver in a greeting manner, meanwhile holding a large flashy arrow indicating the direction to “Sara’s Bat Mitzvah”. The unexpected nature of the scene is enhanced by the banal suburban landscape pictured on a bright sunny day. Here, the grass is green, the sky is blue, and the man waving his hand harbors a large smiling face in what appears to be a picture perfect scene. One could linger on deciphering the religious connotations of the event announced by the displayed sign, but what is most striking in Thomas’s photograph remains its composition, which renders the reading of this announcement more complex than merely giving directions to Sara’s coming of age. The sum of all peripheral and central elements of the composition makes for a photograph in which past, present, and future times are collapsed within the contained space of the picture.The rearview reflection situated at the top right of the picture seems to evoke an idea of the past, whereas the man waving his hand in front of us stands as a marker to announce the event currently unfolding. In the meantime, the two lignes de fuites of the picture, present in the form of a yellow painted line on the road guiding the eye to the right edge of the plane, and a passing airplane on the top left corner, guiding the eye to the other side of the frame, seem to suggest an unknown future; an indefinite elsewhere. This dynamic composition, while making more believable and ambiguous the carefullyarranged photograph, simultaneously operates a discrete yet significant synthesis. By combining large format photography along with the simulation of a snapshot taken from a moving car, Thomas visually encapsulates the conceptual origins of the artists infamously linked to the “return” of pictorial forms in picture making. Wall’s 1969 Landscape Manual comes as a self-evident reference that is further reaffirmed through the presence of a comparable early photograph by Ian Wallace, Untitled, 1970/1995, recently on display at Catriona Jeffries, located across the street from 295. Lucky coincidence! When contextualized within the rest of Thomas’s work, Sara’s Bat Mitzvah seems to constitute a punctual and rigorously contemporary response to the intricate context of 295’s project space. One could almost use the convoluted word homage to describe this piece which indeed asserts Thomas as one of the few young artists experimenting with photography in Vancouver today, who does not succumb to the prevalent angst towards traditions. ______________________________________________ Print Erratum: date should read March 2015

SQUIGGLE CULTURE ______________________________________________ by INGRID OLAUSON Some of my peers attribute a certain look in recent exhibition making to the hyperactivity of our behavior online. In this content-driven climate, a dual-standard of provisionality and visual opulence has gained currency among our tiny tribe of emerging artists. Based on the recycling of cultural tropes, mainly from the 80’s and 90’s, I have looked skeptically on at this “look” that pressumes a lack of criticality. In ‘Beginning the Shape’, the usual suspects are all there. Maya Beaudry’s tableaus are blanketed with the energetic patterns of Italian Postmodern design, while Scott Kemp’s rubber casts give off the kind of parodic obsolescence that can only belong belonging to consumer products produced within the last decade. Curator Madison Killo organized the four artists, all recent BFA undergraduates, around a game of telephone where a single shape—a squiggle—would suffice as the primary motif transplanted into each subsequent work. The result was a self-reproducing system that is at once optimistic and paranoid; it would not be a stretch to compare this curatorial prompt to current feedback loops of trends in music, fashion and revisited as contemporary art. This leads me to believe that an impressionable generation of artists are either folding to the Contemporary Art Daily paradigm or are delib- erately transgressing the politics of an already tired Postinternet argument. A 3D animation by Mel Paget of an object reminiscent of 90s Net Art is projected on the far wall of the gallery. Despite my above statement about fashion and the Internet, the work manages to nullify any feelings of being overwhelmed by “cool” images through a simple hypnotically revolving object. Although Kristen Abdai’s sound piece, which consists of static discharging from dangling speakers installed between the other works, seems to be the least intrusive to my attention, it is the rejection of youthful enthusiasm in Kemp’s sculptures that is surprisingly shy. The monochrome objects resemble bath or car mats. The way they are draped over elegantly bent metal stresses the flaccidity of the material. It feels like a joke, a really pathetic (but droll) admission about a lack of virility against accelerated capitalism. Where the contemporary eye is conditioned to target relevant information amidst the noise of surplus content, represented in the show as vibrancy and pattern, Kemp responds to the squiggle, this kind of pattern-seeking with a gesture of playful complicity with the show’s collaborative premise. The dilemma I presented earlier between the passive aesthetics of web aggregators like Contemporary Art Daily and an anti-hegemonic form of criticality we seem to have misplaced when we accepted that raving is cool again, is a dialectic we’ve long since broached. We crossed that threshold when it became necessary to conflate photographic technology and social media in the production of contemporary art (with the advent of micro-blogging artist collectives such as K-Hole and The Jogging). Rather than applauding the moment where excitement over a cultural object gone viral can only last a few seconds, the objects in ‘Beginning the Shape’ submit to the forces that underscore their consistency with Jamie Ward’s analogy of the visual phoneme. Why situate the ascetic heroism of the critical position outside of the digitally-driven “me- world” when artists are more than capable of challenging the free and unmediated acceptance of trending culture? ______________________________________________ Ingrid Olauson’s review was written in response to an essay by Jamie Ward “On Banality and Convergences” (2014) which was published in Issue Magazine, Autumn 2014. With permission from the editors of Issue, Ward’s essay has been republished in full for the reference of Bartleby readers.

STORY OF THE EYE ______________________________________________ by AMY KAZYMERCHYK In the introduction to her lecture Unstoppable Development, Kaja Silverman declared, “I am arguing that photography is as old as we are; that it is the world’s primary way of disclosing itself to us. Photography has been developing unstoppably from the first pinhole camera...to digital photography, and there is nothing static or fixed about it.”To substantiate her argument, she read the second chapter from her forth- coming book, The Miracle of Analogy. Silverman focused on the experimental photography of Joseph Nicépthore Niépce (1765- 1833), Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) and Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877). She traced the lineage of their mutual concern for taking a view of the world, rather then receiving an image. Each photographer used a derivative of Robert Hooke’s 1694 camera obscura, which allowed the “artist’s view” to direct the aperture, and they each used the window to “obtain a print- able view of nature” by “gathering viewpoints”. In 1826 Niépce pointed a camera out of his window and framed the rooftops of the neigh- bouring buildings. Over an eight-hour exposure he produced View from the Window at Le Gras. In 1835, Talbot took The Oriel Window. Rather than offering a view through his window, however, he exposed a view of his window (though he would go on to take numerous images “drawn with the pencil of nature”). In 1838 Daguerre further developed Niépce’s vision with the series View from the Boulevard du Temple, with an exposure time dramatically shortened from eight hours to thirty seconds. The analogy of Silverman’s thesis is photography itself. Photography is an optical analogy for the development of human vision and cognition. “Early photographs that disappeared quickly were called retinas because they resembled after-images and the opacity of human retinal vision, as described by [Johannes] Kepler.” It is a technical analogy for developing the ca- pacity to arrest fugitive life. “Daguerre was driven to rationalize time and solidify form in his images–” to “command more imperiously” over the sun and achieve the Cartesian dream of fixity and stability. It is a chemical analogy for the development of apprehension. “The image evolved in tandem with the world.” It is an ontological analogy for the development of being. Talbot observed early chemical images to be “self-developing”. Some imprints captured in an exposure would appear much later as other imprints were undeveloping from view. The miracle of this analogy is that it is interminable. Photography did not emerge with the invention of the camera, but has been developing in our consciousness since we began. As our imperious command of perception unfolds, the analogy develops–unstoppably. Walking away from the lecture, I gazed up at the full moon. Along with the sun, it is perhaps the oldest ocular aperture we’ve been exposed to. I thought about early human experiences of doubling. I thought about the advent of the mirror (and Silverman’s own contemplation of it in her early writing). I thought about reflections in water and Narcissus. I thought about shad- ows on rock walls and Plato’s Cave. I thought about the first time a human gazed into the eyes of another in their likeness. I thought about our inclination to figure star alignments, anthropomorphize weather patterns, and even model the progenitor of being, in our own image. And in the moments before the clouds shrouded the moon from view, I recalled Silverman echoing Heidegger–“nothing ever stands fully exposed before us”. ______________________________________________ Print erratum: Dates for Henry Fox Talbot should read (1800—1877)