Jamie Hilder, Downtown Ambassador (video still), 2010; Ken Lum, I Said No, 2010. Installation view, Audain Gallery windows; Lorna Brown, AdmIndex / About, 2010; Symposium: The Expectations of Art in the Public Sphere;
Coming Soon
January 1 - September 6, 2010
Audain Gallery, Vancouver
Coming Soon is Audain Gallery's inaugural public art series. Four visual artists and SFU alumni - Lorna Brown, Jamie Hilder, Ken Lum and Kathy Slade - were commissioned to create site-specific public art works at the Woodward's development in downtown Vancouver.
The works in this provocative series consider and address Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, which is the neighborhood for the new location of SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts and Audain Gallery. Coming Soon highlights Audain Gallery's commitment to art in the public sphere that critically addresses Vancouver's history and present.
Ken Lum: I Said No
January 1 - February 5, 2010
Ken Lum, whose adroit and precise public art works are known to spark public interest and commentary, opened the series with a text work entitled I Said No in the Audain Gallery’s Hastings Street windows. This text is characteristic of his signage work; it is pointed, humorous and compelling in its public address. A work about intellectual freedom in the public sphere, I Said No proposes exclamatory variations on ways to say "no" as a civic and social right.
Symposium: The Expectations of Art in the Public Sphere
January 23, 2010
The symposium addressed questions regarding the different, often competing, public and artistic expectations about art in the public sphere and as a form of public discourse. Two panel discussions with artists, curators and cultural critics, including Lorna Brown (CA), Jamie Hilder (CA), Am Johal (CA, moderator), Makiko Hara (CA), Ken Lum (CA), Bik Van Der Pol (NL), Jeff Derksen (CA, moderator) and others, explored these issues.
Lorna Brown: AdmIndex (web-based project)
January 23, 2010
AdmIndex is based on the textual and visual languages of administration found on the websites of the institutions, non-profit organizations, businesses and civic agencies that operate in proximity to the new Woodward's development. Through indexing the values expressed in their mission statements and elements used in their logos, AdmIndex traces the relationships between the stated goals and public identities of these commercial, social service, educational and cultural organizations, and the web of intention that "administers to, and services the Downtown Eastside in quite distinct ways."
By locating the common language in the mission statements of these organization and the overlapping images of group logos, Brown’s work engages with the representation of these organizations and their role in administering the DTES.
Jamie Hilder: Downtown Ambassador (web-based project)
January 23, 2010
Downtown Ambassador engages Jamie Hilder's interest in performance, research, text based work and video as critical tools for exploring political and economic demarcation of urban spaces. For four days in the summer of 2009, he patrolled tourist areas of Vancouver dressed in a uniform that resembled the uniform of the Downtown Ambassadors, who are a "hospitality force"established by the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association.
Rather than provide helpful "tourism" advice to visitors or ask homeless people to move along, Hilder offered alternative histories of the sites he patrolled, detailing their relationships to the present political and economic climate of Vancouver. His intervention into the imagination and recognition of Vancouver vividly brings forward the city's often-forgotten, sometimes radical history.
Kathy Slade: Is Everything Going to be Alright?
June 9 - September 6, 2010
Kathy Slade closes the series with a text-based window installation that asks the question, Is Everything Going to Be Alright? Slade's question, as earnest and simple as it is profound, is as crucial to be asked in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, as it is in other urban sites undergoing rapid redevelopment.
Curated by Sabine Bitter.
Media
Please click here to view the online archive of the exhibition series: Coming Soon.
