Lesartefact

Ferry Series  Photographs and words by Joshua Gabert-Doyon Lesartefact

The Grominator,  photographed February 2014

Photograph by Jadynn Wolff , Lesartefact 

 This house has been torn down  shortly after this photograph   and a frame for new home stands in  its place.

All photographs by Jadynn Wolff,  Lesartefact Written content provided by CapturePhotofest.com 

Peter Morin

“Remembering the cost of human genocide” by Peter Morin 2014

“36 x48 “

digital print on paper

“time travelling device “ by Peter Morin 2014

“28 x 26″

digital print on paper

Peter Morin is a Tahltan Nation artist, curator, and writer, who recently relocated from British Columbia to Brandon, Manitoba, where he joined the Visual and Aboriginal Arts Faculty at Brandon University. Morin studied art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and completed his MFA at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in 2011. In both his artistic practice as well as his curatorial work, Morin’s practice-based research investigates the impact between Indigenous cultural-based practices and Western settler colonialism. This work, defined by Tahltan Nation epistemological production, often takes on the form of performance interventions and also includes object and picture making.

Morin has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions including Team Diversity Bannock and the World’s Largest Bannock Attempt, 2005; A return to the place where God outstretched his hand, 2007; performative works at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; 12 Making Objects AKA First Nations DADA (12 Indigenous Interventions), Open Space, Victoria, 2009; Peter Morin’s Museum, Satellite Gallery, Vancouver, 2011; and Circle, Urban Shaman, Winnipeg, 2011. In 2014, Morin was nominated for the Sobey Art Award.

Katie Huisman

Katie Huisman is a photographer and educator based in Vancouver. Her work is informed by human behaviour, body language, and our relationship to voyeurism within contemporary society. She is influenced by the scientific approach to the creation of identity in nineteenth-century photography and is intent on studying the present state of photography with regard for history.

The snapshot aesthetic first appeared in the 1960s and ’70s as a powerful yet naive stylistic approach to photography. Robert Frank was the originator of this movement publishing his book The Americans in 1958, featuring a series of black-and-white beat-era photographs of gas stations, citizens, parking lots, small town politicians, etc. This work showed an unromantic, detached perspective of subject matter that had been frequently idealized in pictorialist and modernist photographic movements.

Aligning itself with pop art due to an ironic detachment from its subject matter, the snapshot aesthetic in the ’90s was popularized by young contemporary photographers such as Hiromix and Ryan McGinley who gained international recognition. In its ubiquitous nature, the snapshot allowed these young photographers a freedom to express their ideas with an unfiltered vernacularity.

In twenty-first-century photography, the snapshot aesthetic is everywhere, favouring our need for immediacy and consumption. It has become our way of seeing. This visual language is now inherent to today’s young photographers, glamourizing banality through raw realism, serving a vitally communicative role in our lives.

Traditional concerns for the medium of photography no longer seem to matter.

Jason Wright

Jason Wright is an artist living and working in Vancouver. He received a BFA in Visual Arts from Simon Fraser University in 1997 and an MFA in Sculpture in 2009. His recent practice peers into the pleasures and excesses of contemporary food culture in relation to one’s body. The work examines the communal performances of form, the smacking poesy of lips, the creamy comedy of slick tongues, the playful pulls and squishes of mouths dripping and salivating words, and the joyful spillovers of conversations and connections.

Food(ie) culture in all its sexy vigour may unite us in pleasure to be sure, but it is the slippery mush of our bodies that truly connects us. Not the long table, not the artisanal sausage, not the handmade ice cream, nor the designer juicer. (The language surrounding the trend of artisanal food culture often eerily parallels that of earnest contemporary art speak: rhetoric of community and of community based values, of organic process, of cultural service, of broad yet local cultural inclusions and brandings, of green interventions, and ultimately of transcendent social purposefulness.) On the surface, Wright’s work may appear as a sneering play against excessive consumption, against “consumer culture.” But how does one elude this consumer culture? It is not something one merely avoids or navigates around. Culture-as-traffic-accident. Rather, one takes it all in as one may food: consumer data cascading in and out of one’s body. This lyrical model of consumption is a tract, a body. One takes it all in and yet it all must leave. Food to body to waste. This work looks to examine not only what we consume but how this consumption moves through our bodies and, ultimately, how this movement may connect us as individuals and as larger communities—however grotesque, however beautiful.

Jason Wright, Tragedy of Open-Faced St. Sebastians or The Sacrifice of Artisanal Sandwiches for the Redemption of the Ethical Glutton, 2013 C-prints on paper

Fan-Ling Suen

Fan-Ling Suen, Honeymoon Sweet, 2007 7" x 5"

Couple and Honeymoon Sweet are drawn from a series of photogrpahic collaborations between Fan-Ling Suen and Katie Clark. From 2006 to 2008, Fan-Ling and Katie used staged photography and cinematic tropes to investigate narrative structures and explore the visual languages of  interpersonal relationships filled with quiet tension, and cultivate an exchange between the models’ actual relationships and their preformed roles.

 Fang- Ling Suen Couple, 2007

5″x 7″

Fan-Ling Suen is a graduate of the University of British Columbia’s Masters of Fine Arts program. She has worked at Arts Umbrella since 2012 as a teaching assistant, visual arts instructor, and administrative staff. Suen’s current practice investigates the complex nature of human relations and how we understand ourselves within the framework of institutions—particularly those that structure childhood experiences. A combination of social history, popular fiction, children’s literature, and psychoanalytic theory informs her work as she navigates concerns around memory, longing, and attachment.

The works Couple and Honeymoon Sweet are drawn from a series of photographic collaborations between Fan-Ling Suen and Katie Clark. From 2006 to 2008, Suen and Clark used staged photography and cinematic tropes to investigate narrative structures and explore the visual languages of interpersonal relationships. Always involving the artists’ close friends and family, the photographs present scenarios filled with quiet tension and cultivate an exchange between the models’ actual relationships and their performed roles.

Kate Henderson, Untitled, from the Illumination Study, 2015 Analog black-and-white photogram

Kate Henderson

Kate Henderson is a Vancouver-based artist who received her MFA in Visual Art from the University of British Columbia in 2013 and her BFA with a major in Photography from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2007. Henderson’s practice navigates the transitional space between the analog and the digital and the body and the machine in technologies of seeing, surveillance, and self-surveillance. She gleans low-res Internet images and videos of the material remains of analog media and repositions them through digital projection, slide projection, and installation—a process that locates and materializes the digital substrate, thereby giving physical form to a seemingly intangible medium. Henderson is interested in appropriated images of analog ruin and the industrial sublime and how the economy and poetics of photography has transformed with the onset of virtual, circulating images.

Henderson is sessional faculty at Emily Carr University and an art educator for children and youth at Arts Umbrella. She has exhibited in Vancouver at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Satellite Gallery, VIVO, Access Gallery, Burrard Arts Foundation, Gallery 295, and the AHVA Gallery at the Audain Art Centre at the University of British Columbia.

Lisa Burke

Lisa Birke is a multidisciplinary artist who situates herself between the tradition of painting, digital video, and performance art. She is a recent MFA graduate from the University of Waterloo (with distinction, 2013). She has had solo exhibitions and screenings across Canada, and her short films have been shown at film and video festivals internationally including the sixth edition of InShadow—International Festival of Video, Performance and Technologies, Lisbon; CologneOFF X; Cyprus International Performance Art Festival; Cold Cuts Video Festival, Dawson City; the 20th International Short Film Week, Regensburg; Other Venice Film Festival; and Videoholica, Varna, Bulgaria. Recently she was a keynote artist at the Sounds Like Audio Art Festival, Saskatoon, and performed at CAFKA 2014, Kitchener.

Birke examines notions of “self” through the lens of gender, bringing the cultural tropes of woman into focus and into question. Filmed unaccompanied in the Canadian landscape, absurd yet insightful performative acts become entangled in nuanced and complex narratives in single and multichannel video works that make reference to art history, mythology, and popular culture. Revealing what lies beneath the surface of femininity, her work toys with a conclusion that is problematic, comi-tragic, and, most essentially, human.

Red Carpet,  20 Minute Film

Words by Jadynn Wolff, Lesartefact Edited by Adam Hendrik

All images and and content copyright by Exhausted Monologues 2015

Pissing, is the latest addition to a body of art zines both written and distributed by artist Andrea Lukic. It is not the first of its kind, by any means, but only one of several of Lukic’s written and illustrated works. Each hand-designed product Lukic makes goes under herself-titled publication: Exhausted Monologues. Th name itself references a series of audio installments Lukic created while she studied at Emily Carr. These tapescontain almost what seemed to be white noise - din and alarming sounds at unnerving frequencies. The tapes themselves were similar yet completely opposite to meditative listening. It was through this auditory chaos you were intended to derive and arouse a sense of excitable energy, thus the title: Exhausted Monologues. It was only natural for Lukic, in the aftermath of these tapes and university, that she would reinstate it for her own publication out of which her zines could find themselves in print.

Pissing appears to be a small booklet, seemingly untitled, its front cover is a collage of newspaper clippings and headlines. The headlines featured read: “Be a DETECTIVE,” “See More Clearly,” and “Read Fine Print.” These newspaper headlines evoke a sense of curiosity and cause question to what one will discover upon reading its content. It is with extreme subtly that the collage of newspaper clippings begins its silent gesture - laying play with the concept of perception, our realities, what we deem to be truth. Is it fact because it was printed? Is it fiction because the content seems so otherworldly and unfathomable?

My curiosity begs a deeper understanding. My questions begin on the first page with the title: Pissing. The term is no stranger, still I ask why and what does it mean? I investigate further. I have to. It’s written before me. It is expressed in conversation with Lukic that the term pissing brings applicable description to some of her personal experiences over the last year. It was during this period that she felt as though she was being pissed on. She mentions that it was sort of a running joke among her friends and peers. The title appears to be self-deprecating but maintains a blatant yet undeniable sense of darkened humour, a trait that is prominent in Lukic’s character. So it comes as no surprise that this characteristic should translate to both her written and illustrated work. She prints Pissing, this compilation of undesirable situations generated from experience and feelings as she encounters them, and processes them with her hypercritical ability of social observation.

She tells me: “I feel like in life when something bad happens to you, or you go through something, some kind of change you kind of go through and replay it over again in your head and try to find meaning in things. You also try and find foreshadowing [and motives]… like I should of known it was going to work out like this, or I knew it was going to happen like that.”

Lukic refers to these occurrences as: Life-Crime. It is not crime one would initially assess, but crime by way of thought or existential means within an emotional and mental timeline. The life-crime itself consists of two equal parts. It is composed one half active victim and the other half investigator - never having one without the other. Her ideology of the Life-Crime and its application begins to communicate itself throughout Pissing as the drawings make out this conceptual storyboard and fortify each incident as it happens and in the aftermath of each crime scenario. Constantly Lukic will find herself caught between the two functions - the victim and investigator as the crime is played out.

Through the zine Lukic offers her audience a vantage point from which we observe her many self-states and emotions pertaining to the crime. This portrayal of her private mindscape becomes public secret. The crime is called to undergo this process of a kind of emotional forensics. The cerebral felony and the suspect are questioned, analyzed and brought to reason. We bear witness to the misdemeanor through this type of voyeurism dealing with all these emotional extremes.

Throughout Pissing and its Life-Crime theory finds itself prominent and full of meaning within our own lives. Pissing calls attention to a string of personal unsolved mysteries we have yet to forget and revisit. We find ourselves gathering found footage in memory, ever alert for those signifiers despite how obvious or obscure they were. We dust for prints, and possible suspects, we beg in desperate attempt to find the one clue that would bring it all to a rational end and those held responsible to psychic justice. 

Pissing achieves this humbled transcendence beyond mere zine. The weight of it’s content is much more than photocopied paper and stapled binding. Its subversive subject matter suggests a sense of honesty unto its medium exceeding its script and visceral sketches. One curious enough will head the words before them and examine each page as evidence and they too will uncover an archive of existential felony. 

Purchase a copy of Pissing at

Exhausted Monologues.com

More of Andrea Lukic’s artist practice can be found at

Lukicandrea.tumblr.com

Witchcraft is a group exhibition with four American artists – Laura Brothers, Sara Ludy, Brenna Murphy and Krist Wood – examining notions of craftsmanship, personal mythologies and spiritual queries within the online realm.Computer systems and networks in the 21st century are creating a seismic shift in the human experience, affecting how we create, organize and extend identities both individually and as a society. Within this shift, artists engage with pervasive technologies to convey digital impressions on primeval questions of identity, spirituality and virtuosity.Within the exhibition, Sara Ludy creates beaded vessels for otherworldly entities, Laura Brothers portrays digital expressions of arcane figures, Krist Wood elaborates composite images of transfixing dreams, and Brenna Murphy unfolds the vernacular structures of a meditative practice.Curated by Nicolas Sassoon, this exhibition brings a unique contemporary outlook on one of the most compelling areas of Internet Art. Witchcraft offers a conversation between four major artists on the applications of the digital in the construct of allegorical and spiritual identities. Written summary provided by Initial Gallery

Witchcraft lay quiet in the window of  Initial Gallery for almost a month now, haunting me.  It pulled me in from first I laid eyes on it, this delicate presentation of leaves and a stones strewn about in perfect symmetry. These images presented are not perfect, in any way, but my attempt at capturing its power.

in advance of

words  and photographs by Jadynn Wolff, Lesartefact

Edited by Samantha Newton, The Robert Lynds Gallery

‘in advance of’ three words by themselves remain but a fragment of an uninhibited thought and idea. The words themselves are but a compilation of factors and values within this artistic equation; full of emotional variables left to be fathomed and understood.

Each element of the title, ‘in  advance of ‘, begins to birth a question or thought regarding the undefined equation. We  must look beyond the evident outline and it’s parameters of natural law concerning the english language. Something in advance of what? The distance between these two unknowns becomes infinite. Unknown punctuated by unknown. Infinity beget infinity.  We navigate through this metaphorical absence of space, time, and material inside these three words.  The title conjures a place of balance in which we find ourselves resting between two points of its existence. These two points are the artistic ambiguity and the physical relationship to the tangible form of an idea presented here in this exhibition. Inside his practice, Leimert continuously experiments with the subtlety of the idea and the form that gestates inside the mind, becoming the tangible representation that lays before us. He lends minimal information to the viewer as means to entice and engage with them in the unveiling of his artistic intent. The time and space allowed forms a capacity in which our own interpretations bloom. Leimert’s creative application of ‘in advance of’ becomes much like the words that form the sentence calling to be understood. Each component holding space all their own, suspended in an emotional yet physical environment larger than themselves. Their shapes, forms, and idea converge at this point, ‘in advance of’. It is here that the artifacts themselves begin to obtain the ability to speak, in their own quiet unseen language-it is as though they begin to communicate. They whisper amongst themselves - one unto the other going back and forth and then finally to the audience. We in response observe them as they too observe us. They stare silent, unmoved by our wordless judgements as we contemplate their value.

It is as though the  audience become a reflection of  these inanimate artifacts, as they seem to slowly inherit our human characteristics within this space. This exchange of attention between subject and viewer, though unheard,nevertheless congruent. Through this silent process, ‘in advance of’, and all of its constructs,an ever-expanding narrative is formulated that exceeds the subject and it’s audience. This narrative openly speaks to the continuous loss of our in ability to give expression to our appreciation  for inventiveness ,while remaining conscious of all it’s glory after the moment.  As the viewer, we gravitate toward ingenuity instantaneously, which deprives  us ample time for reflection. The present is such a distorted place within the living timeline. You cannot captivate the present, as it remains held in continuous evolution. ‘in advance of’ and it’s subjects, present themselves as a counter to this undeniable truth in relation to time, space, and object.

Leimert continuously flirts with time and its traces, encapsulating the inevitable loss of the fleeting idea between his fingers. It is in his hands, Leimert balances past and present by means of an amalgamation of film, photograph, and sculpture - bringing it forth into an altered stasis, where time bears no weight, reflection is forward thinking, and the present is captured as it happens.

Detritus of Romance, Mixed Media, 2015

Post LA Hourglass  (white & black), mixed media, 2015 

Punctum Black Chain  & Punctum Chain White, mixed media, 2015

(only 3 of 11 pieces photographed)

 JaedanChayceLeimert.com

January 10th to 23rd and February 10th to 28th, 2015

Poster designed by Linton Murphy

by Adam Hendrik

Photographs by Jadynn Wolff

Address Graffiti - Buff the Issue with rolled on paint, haggard geometric shape covert by quantity. The Buff, the blotch on the wall that business owners are forced to paint to get around the high cost of removing graffiti, which is mandatory in Vancouver according to Bylaw 7343 (which also happens to be the title of Brett Barmby’s new solo exhibition that opened last month at Avenue Gallery). The ugly shapes stack, as street art is covered with a clean backdrop, which encourages artists to paint over the Buffs with new graffiti, which is again covered with mismatched paint; layers, unintentional shapes form, they are modular and evolve as the old is rolled over and the cycle continues. This disaster is Vancouver's idea of a solution.

The many of layers of paint that form behind the Buff extends into Barmby’s camera where he crops the image, includes a window or door frame - perspective allows him to use the geometry of buildings together with the abstract mess to create a type of collage which will be painted with oil color onto recycled canvas found in the alleys and garbage bins of Vancouver; the texture and stories of the old paintings push through the new paint with lumps and bumps - the artists covered before him. They all have their part in this orchestration, but it took Brett’s eye to find it. 

Buff Marks (Incidental Composition #3)

29x45”

 Right: Buff Marks (Incidental Composition #8)

48x66”

Bench structure designed by Rowena Ren

From left to right: Buff Marks (Incidental Composition #3)

29x45” Buff Marks (Incidental Composition #5) 

54x72”

Buff Marks (Incidental Composition #6)

61x83”

Buff Marks (Incidental Composition #4)

48x66”

These photographs are few, but only small fragments of time before I was born.  I walked the room immediately overcome with the plethora of information that surrounded me.  My eyes  were racing from wall to wall.  They danced about like a schizophrenic. Images of an era so far from me , but yet so close. It was a feeling as if I could have been there, or that I  could have found my face somewhere inside these moments. My impossible yet extremely wishful thinking, had gotten the better of me. It struck me long and hard, seeing their instant film cameras now replaced with an app on your phone.   Their film video presented in old tube televisions screen, so honestly. Their documentation from old transcribed notes, to friends and loved ones turned artifact. Paintings of daily objects, such as coffee filters. Photography of murder scenes, in fallen snow.

These jars used to catch octopus  in Japan 

He carried an octopus in water from one side of Japan to the other. It ended up boiled by the heat in the summertime and the salt content of the water. It arrived dead.

The jar in which he caught  octopus , he would find them at times with precious stones, broken glass, shells  they the octopus  had gathered into the jar. This sculpture is for the octopus.

He shaved one eyebrow off , and made a lot of friends. I was beaming when I saw this, as  I myself have shaved my eyebrows recently. I have made a lot of friends as well. Somehow I feel as his experience can be related to my own.

He was at the Monkey Mountain and he build an art exhibit for the monkeys there so they do could improve their quality of life. Japanese culture has fascinated me for years, they are so connected with  animals and an infinite respect that is so much deeper than most.

MAJOR APPLIANCE

Words by Jadynn Wolff Edited by Adam Hendrik & Jennifer Dickieson

When an object is formed, its purpose is left to accident and is open to an array of possibility. It holds no value as it is inanimate and without feeling. Purpose is something we build into the form; we give it a title, space and functionality. Until this happens, an object is left open for interpretation.

Major Appliance is an articulate dialogue of physical reality versed through the construction and minimalistic demonstration of displaced applicable objects. It is brought to us by means of a solo exhibition presented by Scott Kemp and hosted at INDEX Gallery this past November.

Kemp’s body of work gains its title from a reference to a refrigerator. When looking closely at Kemp’s practice, and the structures involved, one will notice that there are no restrictions, even when considering the title, and so it is, as such, Major Appliance remains the same - uninhibited. Kemp states: “There is so much more possibility to an object when you are not aware of it.” He then explains an instance of his theory and relates it to a handle: “It is only a handle because that is what you are told it is.” The word “handle” defined as a noun within the English language is “The part by which a thing is held, carried, or controlled”. Kemp challenges this fact that is known to us, he then suggests that if the handle itself is stripped of it’s familiarities, put in a weird place, it then transforms and becomes something different completely. Kemp’s application of the language and the words of “Major Appliance,” when they are applied to something other than the actual meaning, the words become somewhat of metaphorical conduit for unexpressed variables within his extensive practice. This idea being somewhat introspective and elaborate is not distributed without a shade of self-expressed humor. His objects remain truthful within artistic context.

It is with my personal experience that Major Appliance becomes an analytical display of devices removing them of their physicality, giving them new motive and language. Scott Kemp’s objective in his practice is currently based on creating displaced applicable objects that echo actual devices carefully as to not to reference them directly.

I admit to Kemp, that his work provoked a string of thought that resonated within me when viewing these plastic “handles” and other like objects. When presented these things as they are mounted upon a wall, outside of it’s usual parameters Major Appliance began to stir up this motion of extreme curiousness that I just couldn’t shake. What is that constitutes any object to become art and art to become the object? It is in this instance the idea of Major Appliance then is a personal reminder that an object exists before it is defined. For instance, common objects such as tables, chairs, and handles began simply just as raw material, form, and idea. The construction of these objects require the same design, forethought and creativity as any type of artwork, even if it is just a handle, table, or chair. Functionality is required of these devices while maintaining a creative aesthetic, no matter how ordinary or extraordinary we think they are.

Kemp’s presentation is an inversion of this idea; his materials used are stripped of all familiarity and their usual purpose. Kemp achieves this concept by withholding specifics concerning his work and he utilizes this lack of detailed information in order to obstruct interference to their individual interpretation. The only shared details were the length of construction it took to complete Major Appliance, which entailed a period of two months. It is a small fact expressed by Kemp that even some pieces took nine instances of careful execution before they became the art.

During this time he gestated his idea and worked with his material it until it became finite, polished, and ready for public view. This exquisite attention to detail strikes me as a strong display of fine art with a mature distinction that cannot be overlooked. Kemp and the strength of his knowledge of materials enhances his skill that show in his use of paint and careful line work detailed on a sheet of industrial plastic, and is his repetition of an object over multiple constructs. Although Major Appliance is Kemp’s first solo show, his work has been showcased previously in-group shows. I first experienced Kemp at Dynamo Arts Association this past summer in an exhibition titled: It’s a Long Story, and again in Frontlines 2, which took place at the Robert Lynds Gallery. Kemp’s technique and methodical ingenuity remain true, and effectively consistent to what is known to me of his personal aesthetic and concepts therein.

Major Appliance is an effectively brilliant yet deeply understated extension of all things known about Scott Kemp and his practice. Kemp’s muted palettes, and contrary use of industrial materials, which upon initial observation hold an almost inconceivable artistic aesthetic - Kemp’s work remains an individualistic contrast to some of the more emotive and expressive art that lies inside Vancouver’s current art culture, commercial and independent. It is within Kemp’s active knowledge of self and his isolative relation to his materials and their devoted marriage to specificity in they then begin to inherit this less obvious yet unique sense of wonder. It is not because this movement toward more obvious emotive art is implied less credible or of lesser value, it is because of such artworks that Kemp obtains a welcomed alternate perspective to art.

The only frills are on the dresses in the hybrid fashion/music video piece directed and edited by ANTI