The Golden Bird of Kanjataimu (2018)

An ink drawing from Geoffrey Farmer's exhibition Mudpuddlers, Corn Borers, Polymorphic Platyforms at Casey Kaplan (November 1 - December 22).

Jerry Pethick at the VAG

Dear W,

Just returned from Jerry Pethick's unfortunately titled Shooting the Sun/Splitting the Pie. As much as I would like to say how nice it was to see so much of Jerry’s work at once (some of which I am unfamiliar with), it felt at times like I was walking through a warehouse. The exhibition generates no overtone and comes off as less than the sum of its parts.

This could have been remedied through subtraction, or by mounting the exhibition on the floor below it where the bias arrays would have benefited from that floor’s two large rooms. Instead, Wheelbarrow/Cabin (1989) is compromised by an unnecessarily adjacent wall work. What is more, Geoffrey Farmer's (reprinted) text appears in the catalogue without mention of the 2011 SFU Burnaby exhibition that commissioned it -- yet another instance of the VAG forgetting that the city’s cultural ecology continues outside its admittedly too small walls.

Something I have learned from this exhibition: Jerry's arrays are so grand that they need to be displayed in large(r) spaces and in relation to the work(s) of others, not with more of what Jerry does so well. We saw shades of this with the Jerry/Christina Mackie exhibition; less so with the Jerry/Liz Magor/Ron Tran exhibition that followed it (both at Catriona’s). Will we ever see Jerry's arrays in relation to, say, Brian Jungen’s Void (2002), or Jerry's Intersections (1971) with Ian Wallace's photo-paintings of intersections? Hope so. In the meantime, I remain bummed by this cramped and static show.

Mainstreeters: Taking Advantage, 1972-1982 Website

The website for Mainstreeters: Taking Advantage, 1972-1982 is now up. Thank you Karlene Harvey for your design and Archer Pechawis for your construction.

The website includes still and moving images, texts and a chaptered version of the documentary that Allison Collins and I made with Krista Lomax, who recorded and edited our interviews with Mainstreeters Deborah Fong, Marlene MacGregor, Charles Rea, Jeannette Reinhardt and Paul Wong.

The exhibition opens this Thursday (6pm-9pm) at Satellite Gallery, 560 Seymour Street, 2nd Floor. For those interested in attending the Belkin Gallery's Tom Burrows exhibition (which also opens that night), a shuttle bus will be available.

Gesamtkunstwerk

The German language is big on compound words. An example of a compound word whose form speaks to its content is Gesamtkunstwerk, which translates into English as "a total work of art."

Imagine my surprise, then, as I approached the Granville Street Bridge last week, where I saw the word Gesamtkunstwerk partitioned like those towers that have retail shops on the bottom (WERK), office space in the middle (KUNST) and residential units up top (GESAMT). And then to learn that this sign is in fact an advertisement for an art exhibition that celebrates the "evolution of the city's built form," presumably from the first pre-contact long houses to the integration of tall buildings, view corridors and parks in a porridge of Culture and Nature.

GESAMT/KUNST/WERK is due to open ("to the public") March 22. For more information, click here.