Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre

Past Exhibitions

2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 1995 - 2000

ROY KIYOOKA: ACCIDENTAL TOURIST

January 17 - March 21, 2004

This exhibition examines a large but lesser known period of Roy Kiyooka’s art practice from 1969 until his death in 1994. An artist and poet, he established himself in the 1950s and 60s as an important abstract painter. In an effort to reject art critic Clement Greenberg’s theories on Modernism and the institutions of art – with which he and his compatriots of the Regina Five were closely associated – Kiyooka abandoned a successful painting practice in favour of a more diversified approach to his work, embracing a multitude of new forms and media. Dancing between media with great fluidity and agility, Kiyooka’s sustained interest in people and the environment creates coherence and continuity across a range of media. The works included here investigate self, community and nature – they are candid images of his surroundings, reflecting the greater whole of Kiyooka’s life – multiplicitous work for a multifaceted man.

Kiyooka’s work is emotionally limber, revealing great joy, quiet contemplation and profound sadness, capturing the breadth of the human experience. His unconventional and uncatagorical style creates new and exciting challenges to both the curator and critic in the re-examination of his career and role in the development of Canadian art practice. In a broader sense the exhibition creates opportunities for the public to reconsider the traditional parameters of art practice and revive the consideration of Kiyooka’s expansive practice within the canon of Canadian art history. While the Walter Phillips Gallery enjoys a strong history of programming dedicated to contemporary art, it also acknowledges the importance of historical works of art and provides new potential for interpreting and reconstructing pivotal artworks, presenting and reconsidering them within a contemporary context. Accidental Tourist includes soundscapes, film and video works as well as slide installations and sequential photographic works – pivotal pieces in the development of, and experimentation with, a multi-disciplinary practice. Many of the works featured have never been included in a public exhibition.

Evident here is how Kiyooka’s choice of media extends his process. His painterly manner remains steadfast in the way his photographic images are arranged, rearranged and manipulated into a singular work. His sounds and images are reworked and recontextualized to represent something new – a series of interconnected and interdependent moments. For Kiyooka each photo in his sequential series is meant to be viewed as a single moment in time framed by other moments in time, those immediately preceding and following. This filmic quality also runs through Kiyooka’s slide, photo, film, video and audio works – sampling distilled memories into a string of single moments in time. The works also offer a critique of media; their fluid and non-static nature reveal Kiyooka’s sceptical assessment of entertainment television – the cult of personality – though the celebration of the everyday. A hybrid of experimentation with new media, they evade catagorization, and deliberately negate the seeming desire of the art world to commodify and classify his early paintings.

Kiyooka’s works are diaristic in nature – capturing his friends, his community, his environment and as he moves through it we are invited along for the ride – guided by the artist who is both connected and disconnected, inside and yet outside of his surroundings. Accidental Tourist proposes Kiyooka as a tourist and explorer, displaced both in Canada as a child of Japanese immigrants, and a family interned during WWII and yet an outsider in Japan, the homeland of his parents. Made evident in his work he seems reconciled to operating in both worlds simultaneously, floating between east and west; insider and outsider; friend and observer, he becomes a tourist, observer and documenter. A personal view into his private life, the works also speak to the larger human condition, illuminating the streets and alleyways of city life and the overwhelming beauty of the natural landscape that surrounded him. There is a lonely contemplation in many of works despite a seeming band of friends and admirers. A self-proclaimed member of the “artist tribe,” he rejects the conventional art market, at home in a series of seemingly irreconcilable differences.

The Walter Phillips Gallery is proud to present this work and is indebted to Kiyooka’s daughter Fumiko Kiyooka and Vancouver gallerist Catriona Jeffries for their support of this project; and to the MacKenzie Art Gallery and Vancouver Art Gallery for the generous loan of work from their collections.

- Melanie Townsend



	Past Exhibitions 2005 \| 2004 \| 2003 \| 2002 \| 2001 \| 1995 - 2000 ROY KIYOOKA: ACCIDENTAL TOURIST January 17 - March 21, 2004 This exhibition examines a large but lesser known period of Roy Kiyooka’s art practice from 1969 until his death in 1994. An artist and poet, he established himself in the 1950s and 60s as an important abstract painter. In an effort to reject art critic Clement Greenberg’s theories on Modernism and the institutions of art – with which he and his compatriots of the Regina Five were closely associated – Kiyooka abandoned a successful painting practice in favour of a more diversified approach to his work, embracing a multitude of new forms and media. Dancing between media with great fluidity and agility, Kiyooka’s sustained interest in people and the environment creates coherence and continuity across a range of media. The works included here investigate self, community and nature – they are candid images of his surroundings, reflecting the greater whole of Kiyooka’s life – multiplicitous work for a multifaceted man. Kiyooka’s work is emotionally limber, revealing great joy, quiet contemplation and profound sadness, capturing the breadth of the human experience. His unconventional and uncatagorical style creates new and exciting challenges to both the curator and critic in the re-examination of his career and role in the development of Canadian art practice. In a broader sense the exhibition creates opportunities for the public to reconsider the traditional parameters of art practice and revive the consideration of Kiyooka’s expansive practice within the canon of Canadian art history. While the Walter Phillips Gallery enjoys a strong history of programming dedicated to contemporary art, it also acknowledges the importance of historical works of art and provides new potential for interpreting and reconstructing pivotal artworks, presenting and reconsidering them within a contemporary context. Accidental Tourist includes soundscapes, film and video works as well as slide installations and sequential photographic works – pivotal pieces in the development of, and experimentation with, a multi-disciplinary practice. Many of the works featured have never been included in a public exhibition. Evident here is how Kiyooka’s choice of media extends his process. His painterly manner remains steadfast in the way his photographic images are arranged, rearranged and manipulated into a singular work. His sounds and images are reworked and recontextualized to represent something new – a series of interconnected and interdependent moments. For Kiyooka each photo in his sequential series is meant to be viewed as a single moment in time framed by other moments in time, those immediately preceding and following. This filmic quality also runs through Kiyooka’s slide, photo, film, video and audio works – sampling distilled memories into a string of single moments in time. The works also offer a critique of media; their fluid and non-static nature reveal Kiyooka’s sceptical assessment of entertainment television – the cult of personality – though the celebration of the everyday. A hybrid of experimentation with new media, they evade catagorization, and deliberately negate the seeming desire of the art world to commodify and classify his early paintings. Kiyooka’s works are diaristic in nature – capturing his friends, his community, his environment and as he moves through it we are invited along for the ride – guided by the artist who is both connected and disconnected, inside and yet outside of his surroundings. Accidental Tourist proposes Kiyooka as a tourist and explorer, displaced both in Canada as a child of Japanese immigrants, and a family interned during WWII and yet an outsider in Japan, the homeland of his parents. Made evident in his work he seems reconciled to operating in both worlds simultaneously, floating between east and west; insider and outsider; friend and observer, he becomes a tourist, observer and documenter. A personal view into his private life, the works also speak to the larger human condition, illuminating the streets and alleyways of city life and the overwhelming beauty of the natural landscape that surrounded him. There is a lonely contemplation in many of works despite a seeming band of friends and admirers. A self-proclaimed member of the “artist tribe,” he rejects the conventional art market, at home in a series of seemingly irreconcilable differences. The Walter Phillips Gallery is proud to present this work and is indebted to Kiyooka’s daughter Fumiko Kiyooka and Vancouver gallerist Catriona Jeffries for their support of this project; and to the MacKenzie Art Gallery and Vancouver Art Gallery for the generous loan of work from their collections. - Melanie Townsend