Hoarding - an installation by Leannej & My Name Is Scot

Hoarding is a vertical midden, an accumulation of ephemera including posters, handbills, tear-away pages, faux signage and plywood mottos that lays bare a visual stratum of textual scheming for forensic investigation. Like the hoardings that surround a boarded up building, or a new construction site, the walls of Project Space Gallery will be covered with a seemingly random aggregation of information signifying both the consequences and implications of remnant efforts and imagined developments.

Representing over 15 years of collaborative and independent, text based works, the installation collages content, chronicles real and imagined moments in time, and documents the ongoing struggle of artist run culture, to (cheaply and meaningfully) insert itself into the public realm.

Individual pieces include selections from Leannej’s acclaimed flowchart narratives which have appeared in a variety of formats and locations, including windows, walls, banners, books and even mugs, while My Name Is Scot provides an assortment of 2-D and 3-D objects which have formed the basis for performance interventions, site specific installations and photo-based texts.

Hoarding reveals both artist's development and commitment to exploring issues of self, place and the constructions of meaning. While many of the pieces have been previously published or displayed, independently of one another, collected together, and presented as part of a larger work, they can be read as a cross section of strategies, a collation of concerns, or an index of intentions.

In Hoarding, objectives overlap and narratives collide, inviting the viewer/reader to decipher the shared storylines and uncover the individual convictions of each artist and perhaps, as a result, consider the infrastructure of their own personal discourse. 

The Installation opened on July 26th, 2013 and will be up for the month of August. Project Space is @ 222 East Georgia Street and will be open from Thursday to Sunday, 1-5 PM. We hope you'll be able to drop by for a look if you are in town and if you have a chance, please let us know what you think!   

Rent Assembly: 2 new projects

I'm very pleased to announce 2 new projects being presented as part of the Rent Assembly event  http://rentassembly.org/ happening in Vancouver, May 24 -26.




Rent Assembly: a gathering of renters in a time of siege, considers the historic roots, economic causes, and cultural implications of Vancouver's growing divide, with readings, performances, panel discussions and art actions that explore various aspects of gentrification, colonialism and class struggle, as set against the backdrop of Vancouver's increasingly unaffordable housing market.

For the first project, Rental Agreement, I've created a poster which I'll be putting up on the streets, adjacent to some of the event locations and along the general migratory routes throughout the city frequented by my fellow renters. The poster stylistically embodies a proclamation and features a short text that makes nods to both Marx and the Canadian TV series Da Vinci’s Inquest (filmed in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), alluding to the ways in which we all are potentially ‘renting’ the spaces (or bodies) that we inhabit. The graphic element of the poster implies a peripatetic movement through zones of temporary shelter, or the erratic ECG readout of a revenant body politic.



The second project, Self Guided Walking Tour 1-5, consists of 5 short digital slideshows looped together, featuring a selection of photographic images I’ve taken over the last 10 years, documenting the seemingly vanquished objects and the increasingly contested interstitial spaces of the DTES. Each ‘tour’ contrives to visually immerse the viewer in a historically and emotionally charged territory littered with the relational signifiers of ownership, authority and agency. The slideshow is being screened at the closing event @ Instant Coffee, 441 Powell, Sunday May 26, 7-10 pm.

If you're in town this weekend, I hope you can make it to an event or two or at least maybe catch a glimpse of one of the posters in your neighbourhood. And if you're out there 'under siege' in another place, good luck and I've got extra posters if you want to bring them to your contested territories ! 

Apologia - a new body of work

Post- Stanley Cup, pre-Occupy, Apologia re-purposes texts taken directly from the raw plywood hoardings that covered Vancouver streets after the June 2011 riots. I've mimicked the gestures and faked the textures and colours of the original scripts and then re-mixed selected portions of the narrative scrawl into a fabricated tableaux of counterfeit relics; creating, in effect - a false 'Apology Wall'.

Lost in the crowd, amidst the spectacle's shameless sermonizing and almost self- congratulatory contrition are fragments of feeling that seem to point to a deeper and potentially meaningful, collective unrest. By re-contextualizing the 'real' wall's chastening catch-phrases, randomly inserting manipulated 'profile picture' images, and assigning imaginary authorship to impersonal confessions, I'm hoping to redeem the more plausible expressions of private regret, remind people of other civic events that bear witnessing, explore genuine acknowledgements of public dissent and perhaps, by reading between the lines, discover the catalysts for inciting a lasting and constructive civic conscience.

Message

Pennant

Shield

Palisade

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