Bricks & Mortar

Brian Jungen lives and works between Vancouver and Fort St. John and has shown nationally and internationally in major solo and group exhibitions. Using reclaimed materials and creating a hybridity of meaning in these objects, Jungen's work evokes cultural traditions and points to the link between the social and environmental effects of our globalized trade in mass-produced objects and the power that such commodities transmit. Solo exhibitions include National Museum of the American Indian (2010); Le Frac des Pays de la Loire (Fonds régional d'art contemporain des Pays de la Loire), Carquefou (2009); Casey Kaplan, New York (2008); Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2007); Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2007); Tate Modern, London (2006). Jungen recently presented his large outdoor work Dog Run (2012) in Kassel, Germany for dOCUMENTA (13).

Annika Rixen lives and works in Berlin and Cambridge, UK.

Knox graduated from ECUAD (BFA) and Goldsmiths College, University of London (MFA 2010). Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include: Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London UK; Or Gallery, Vancouver; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; Cell Project Space, London, UK; Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; Bloomberg New Contemporaries and Whitstable Biennial 2014. This work is written about by Martin Herbert in the September 2012 edition of Art Monthly.

Kyla Mallett completed her MFA at UBC in 2004, and her BFA at Emily Carr in 2000. Working primarily in photography, text and print media, her practice engages with the intersection of culture and language, using archival and statistical research to examine transgressive activities in such cultural arenas such as adolescence, feminism, academia and art. Past works have examined schoolgirls' notes, girl bullying, gossip, marginalia in library books, hauntings and aura reading. Current projects involving parapsychology and self-help materials focus on marginal and devalued forms of language and communication. Mallett’s work has been exhibited widely, including the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), Modern Fuel (Kingston), Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris), and The Power Plant (Toronto), with solo exhibitions at Artspeak (Vancouver), Catriona Jeffries (Vancouver), Access (Vancouver), ThreeWalls (Chicago), Mount St. Vincent University Gallery (Halifax), The Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge), and Mercer Union (Toronto).

Kathleen Ritter is an artist and a curator. Ritter is currently an artist in residence at La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, as a recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts International Residencies Program in Visual Arts. Ritter was the Associate Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery from 2007 to 2012, where she organized the exhibitions How Soon Is Now, WE: Vancouver (with Bruce Grenville), Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (with Tania Willard), Rebecca Belmore: Rising to the Occasion (with Daina Augaitis) and commissioned public artworks for Offsite by Kota Ezawa, Damian Moppett, Heather and Ivan Morison, and Elspeth Pratt. Her writing on contemporary art has appeared in ESSE, Prefix Photo, and Fillip as well as in numerous catalogues.

Shannon Oksanen works in a variety of media from video to drawing. She has a growing international reputation and has participated in group exhibitions at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2004), VTO Gallery, London, England (2004), 303 Gallery, New York (2005) and The Charles. H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver (2006). Oksanen had participated in There are Those: Drawing by Six Artists at the CAG. For her solo exhibition, she presented a new 16mm film and a painting series. The film continues her interest in showmanship sports following in the line of works such as Break Away and Vanishing Point that focus on figure skating and surfboarding. Here waterskiing becomes the subject matter, which Oksanen sets back in time through the filter of the medium and layers of melancholy music. Her painting series continues her interest in portraiture.

Duane Linklater is Omaskêko Cree, from Moose Cree First Nation in Northern Ontario and is currently based in North Bay, Ontario. He received his MFA from Bard College in New York State. Linklater has exhibited both nationally and internationally including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Or Gallery, dOCUMENTA (13) Banff Alberta, Art Gallery of Ontario, Family Business in New York City, and Logan Center at the University of Chicago. He is currently shortlisted for the 2013 Sobey Art Award.

She is an active member in the arts community and has participated in panel discussions, juries, curatorial projects, advisory committees, mentoring youth and young artists. She is of Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux ancestry and her family reserve is Wood Mountain.

Phillip McCrum lives and works in Vancouver, and currently teaches at the University of British Columbia. His affiliation with the Or Gallery stems from exhibitions at the Or in 1984, 1986 and 1998. McCrum was director of the Or Gallery from 1985-1987.

Vancouver artist Kathy Slade works across various media including film, video, embroidery, sculpture, vinyl records, and books. Her recent exhibitions include It was a strange apartment; full of books…, with Lisa Robertson, (Galerie Au 8 rue saint bon, Paris, and Malaspina, Vancouver) IS EVERYTHING GOING TO BE ALRIGHT? (Audain Gallery, Vancouver), Die Perfekt Austellung (Heidelberger Kunstverein), No Soul for Sale (Tate Modern) and Cue: Artists’ Video (Vancouver Art Gallery). In 2009 she received the VIVA Award.

Steven Brekelmans was born in Vancouver, attended the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and recently graduated from the University of Victoria’s MFA program. Working across a variety of mediums, he has exhibited his work both locally and internationally at the Western Front, Or Gallery (Berlin), The Western Bridge (Seattle) and The Butcher Shop (Toronto).

Geoffrey Farmer (b. 1967, Vancouver) lives and works in Vancouver. He has a forthcoming retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2015. His major work, Let’s Make the Water Turn Black, opened at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich in June of 2013 and is currently on display at Nottingham Contemporary. The work will also travel to Kunstverein Hamburg and the Miami Art Museum. In September 2013, at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton Geoffrey organized a project in the form of a haunted house entitled The Intellection of Lady Spider House. In 2013 he was awarded the Gershon Iskowitz Award by the Art Gallery of Ontario, which will mount a solo exhibition of his work in 2014.

Photograph by Guy L'heureux.

In this work, the images are used somewhat hieroglyphically, to stand in for language.

Laura Piasta (b. 1981, Canada) currently lives and works in Vancouver BC. Piasta received her MFA in 2012 from the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in Sweden and holds a BFA from Emily Carr Univerist of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and institutions including BildMuseet (Sweden), The Contemporary Art Gallery, Blanket Gallery, Autocentre (Berlin), Grimmuseum (Berlin) and the Or Gallery. In November 2012 Piasta was an Artist in Residence at the Fabrikken for Kunst og Design in Copenhagen. 

"America is Waiting" is a digital collage printed in archival pigments on archival paper. One of a group of collages from this period of Arden's work, it is derived from internet sourced images that have been collaged in photoshop. The work borrows its title from a song by Brian Eno and David Byrne from their 1981album "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" which pioneered a technique of collaging or sampling from vernacular sound sources. Arden's collage incorporates images from American popular culture, vernacular images of technology, landscapes, and various other images overlaid in a quilt-like pattern. The ghostly overlays recall Robert Rauschenberg's work with solvent transfers.