Art and architecture

ROY ARDEN

"Basement is a suite of colour and b&w photos which were made in the basement of my apartment building. The room depicted was used for the last ninety years as a caretaker's workroom and as a storage for tenant's belongings and castoffs. I saw it as a 'museum of the rejected' and wanted to construct an allegorical and Realist image of the basement through both Marxist and Freudian filters. I was interested in both the psychological, libidinal charge of this place and its material function as a base which supports the life above. I wasn't trying to make singular, artful compositions but instead tried to create the effect of a scanning vision—like someone looking for something with a flashlight. By using both colour and b&w, I aimed to frustrate a reception of the images as transparent documents and assert the fictive aspect of all photography."

GREG CURNOE

"You either go to the source of the main influence or to the roots of your own experience."

Curnoe chose to go to his personal experiences when he portrayed his preferred means of locomotion, the bicycle, so clearly and precisely without metaphor or myth.

GATHIE FALK

"The Night Skies (1979-80) series... are paintings that might be described as personal realism, because they represent my personal and emotional response to my environment... The colors of the night sky over the city continually fascinate me, especially when the lights of the city light up low clouds."

ARNI HARALDSSON

ARNI HARALDSSON

"These two works (Canterbury Place, West Vancouver and Ramet Rahel, Jerusalem) form an interpretation of a particular aspect of the contemporary urban landscape: the periphery.

Originally, the environs of Vancouver—its changing suburban landscape and vernacular architecture—served as my model for the modern megalopolis. After having documented and conceptualized Vancouver's periphery as emblematic of larger social forces (the movement of capital, of people, the role of history, etc.) it became necessary to extend the mode of exploration to include other cities where—as with Vancouver—the notion of landscape is central to the definition of place. Today one of the most heightened landscapes of recent history is arguably located in and around the city of Jerusalem. The two cities represented in these works are very different.

Yet, viewed as they are here, from the periphery, both show elements of a human sign system reflecting something of man's recent and past activities. As such, the questions generated are the same: What does 'landscape' mean? How has it been 'shaped'? What can one 'read' from it?"

JOHN KOERNER

"Every work I do is in accord with everything I feel, believe, know and remember. In this way it changes from an act of skill to an act of mind.

This Garden of Eden is one of an ongoing series of over forty paintings dealing, metaphorically, with the spiritual homeland of all human beings, of which our physical world is only a pale reflection.

The West Coast landscape is used as, for me, it symbolizes something edenic."

KEN LUM

"This work is part of a series that deals with the idea of duration in art. The boy's counting of ceiling tiles or what have you that has caught his attention is announced on the text half of the dyptich. With each count, the viewer returns to the image half of the work only to be directed back to the text half. With respect to the reception of the work, a mutual reinforcement of one half to the other takes place in a circular movement thereby entrenching a sense of duration that is at odds with the normally static character of photography.

On the level of iconography, the image is of a boy absorbed in an activity, a game of counting which he has devised perhaps to absorb time or simply to have fun on his own. It is his absorption that forms the subject of this work, an absorption that is replicated by the device of enhancing a sense of duration on the part of the viewer."

LANDON MACKENZIE

"This unique map of Vancouver layers multiple truths, languages and geographical histories of the region. Originally applied to the painting in individual legible strands, the various maps words and fragments blend together to weave a complex fiction and invite dialogue between the imaginary and the real."

The artist gratefully thanks Edwina and Paul Heller, Andrea Thorburn (artistic assistant), Margaret Prevost, Bud Osborne, Doris Whitehead, Alex Lu, Chen-Yu Hsieh, Shigeko Nagashima, Sonia Sanga and Carol Geddes for their stories, maps and talents, and the archives of the City of Vancouver.

BILL REID

In this piece of northwest coast art by one of Canada's most distinguished artists, the juxtaposition of shapes creates a symbolic reference to theHaida and Bill Reid's magic world of myth and legend.

JACK SHADBOLT

In a mood of despondency and disillusion following the second world war, Shadbolt had turned for a time to works of implicit socio-political comment... industrial workers, crowded street scenes illuminated by garish neon light, bomb ruins, prisoners of war, etc.

Frequently, dogs figured in these images, as snarling symbols of violence and rapacity, terror, or sometimes simply as tokens of the tawdry side of life. Some forty years later, in a related mood of critical observation, though now using entirely different subject matter, he watched the "monster house" phenomenon as those huge constructions—symbols of ostentation and consumerism gone wild—invaded and destroyed the spirit and character of many a quiet and modest community in urban areas of the city. Once again the dog appeared as a ravaging and destructive symbol of protest. During summers spent on hornby island Jack had the habit of roaming the beaches, his eye open for pieces of driftwood that he could drag back to his studio for study, not as pieces of simple decoration, but as images that could feed and nourish the beaches of fantasy and darkness in his imagination. Such was the source of the dog in this painting.

JACK SHADBOLT

JACK SHADBOLT

JACK SHADBOLT

"I have found the problem of the individual's adjustment to a disheartening complex society to be in a broad sense my basic concern as an artist. To find the equation to express this situation in not just literal terms but in a way which could imply the force of its meaning, I have leaned more and more to the use of symbolic abstraction."

GORDON SMITH

"I find it hard to put my feelings about my paintings into words. I do not think of my paintings as devoid of subject matter. My feelings and themes are largely derived from nature, the sea, rocks, trees; the things I live with. I feel a painting should be a recreation of an experience rather than an illustration of an experience."

—from Gordon Smith, the Act of Painting by Ian Thom and Andrew Hunter.

JEFF WALL

JEFF WALL

IAN WALLACE

IAN WALLACE

"The photographs for these pieces were taken in early September 1996 and are of an unspoiled valley near the Chopaka border-crossing in southern British Columbia. The images are then mounted onto the canvas, one being photolaminate and the other silkscreen. The high-resolution detail of the large-format photograph enhances the panoramic scope of the horizontal image. The silkscreen image is a detail taken from a low-resolution reproduction of an archival photograph of a dirt road and sagebrush in the same area. The grain of the process-dot printing pattern taken from the original reproduction acts as a textural ground that refers both to the grain of the canvas and to the terrain of the landscape itself."

ALAN WOOD

ALAN WOOD

"My work is the synthesis of my life's daily experiences. I respond to my environment and to events. I draw, photograph and put into words the ideas that come from looking and thinking. These notes and memories remind me of moods, colours and shapes, often in landscape, for which I invent equivalents in paint and painterly action.

I often seem to have words in my head as I begin to paint—about a predominant colour, a weather or light condition, a time of day, tangible or fugitive structures and shapes. Painting takes place in a kind of trance, intuitively establishing a balance between paint and its varied qualities, forms and structure and a 'rightness' of colour.

The painting is complete when it 'works' in accordance with all of the above."