#csa space

Objects of My Affection: Jeff Downer and Marisa K Holmes at CSA

CSA Space presents: Lauren Marsden The Seasonal Bachelor, The Frisky Entrepreneur, The Sociopathic Gentleman, The Affectionate Drug Dealer, The Son of a Dead Rock Star 21 January 2016 — 21 February, 2016 Opening Reception and Book Launch: Thursday 21 January 2016, 6-9pm Curated by Steffanie Ling "Janine Katzman was her name. She got me started. She told me, ‘I don’t care if you’re dating Marianne Ellis, the captain of the cheerleading team. I want you.’ She introduced me to a world where wants and needs can be met; where you can have what you want, if you can just get past that Judeo-Christian stigma of singular, solitary, proprietary, relational contract around boyfriend/girlfriend. It’s a value, whose exploration I’ve carried through life and so…you can call them trysts. You can call them that beautiful, elegant wrist bone of the mid-Western Swedish girl at the hotel. Please don’t forget the big heavy rock glass with gin. She’s there for a reason. It’s not the gin. I have a glass too and that’s not why I’m there." — Duncan Heath in The Audition Tapes, 2014 CSA Space is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Lauren Marsden: The Seasonal Bachelor, The Frisky Entrepreneur, The Sociopathic Gentleman, The Affectionate Drug Dealer, The Son of a Dead Rock Star. In her film The Audition Tapes (2014), these five, vaguely familiar, fictional men come to life through the meandering interpretations of 10 actors’ on-camera and improvised auditions. Accompanying the film is her new book titled The Book of Types, which documents how each elusive character has been repeatedly conjured through collaborations with San Francisco Police Department Officer and Composite Artist Elizabeth Prillinger and Vancouver-based designer Jaz Halloran. Through a series of fragmented descriptions, police sketches, and typography, The Book of Types leaves us with the traces of a cast that never was. Lauren Marsden received her BFA in Visual Arts from the University of Victoria and an MFA in Social Practice from the California College of the Arts. She presents her work internationally in galleries and film festivals and has had recent exhibitions and screenings in Port-of-Spain, Mexico City, San Francisco, Vancouver, Victoria, and Chicago. She teaches at the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and edits for the San Francisco Arts Quarterly. See Pulpfiction Books (2422 Main St.) for admission during regular business hours: Mon-Wed 10am-8pm, Thurs-Sat 10am-9pm, Sundays and holidays 11am-7pm

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.

Takes were taken from the following assortment of identities (in no random order): a new mother, retired jr. high school teacher, art critic, and golf course owner.

H20 runs March 16 - 31 at grunt gallery. Opening reception on the 16 from 7 - 11pm