Past Exhibitions

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

CAMPsites

CAMPsites investigates transience as a condition of contemporary life. That transience is a circumstance of life in the age of globalization has become something of a cliché. Yet in today’s increasingly global community, the explosive expansion of urban spaces, war, famine, natural disaster, and economic colonialism have ushered in a period of unprecedented deconstruction and re-organization of social fabrics at an ever-increasing rate of speed, while the ease of international travel and porousness of cultural boundaries have desensitized us to the profound cultural shifts that now grip many parts of the globe.

CAMPsites will showcase sculpture, photography, video, and installation by Rebecca Belmore (Vancouver), Robin Collyer (Toronto), Kristina Jaugelis & Reece Terris (Vancouver), Donald Lawrence (Kamloops), Liz Magor (Vancouver), Tsuyoshi Ozawa (Tokyo), Sandra Vida (Calgary) and Paul Wong (Vancouver). Among the works included in the exhibition is EAT: Mainstreet Dinner for the Homeless (2003), by 2005 Governor General Award winning artist Paul Wong. Originally featured in the Banff on-line magazine Horizonzero, this four-minute video draws attention to the plight of the homeless in this record of a December 2002 visit to an adhoc community of homeless people who camped out around a former Woodward’s department store in the downtown eastside of Vancouver.

Also included is Vancouver artist Liz Magor’s Burrow (1999). Reminiscent of the shelter provided by hollow logs and tree trunks, the work evokes ideas of a refuge. Photographs of rudimentary forest shelters from the artist’s Camping Portfolio (2002) are also featured.

Created during a 1996 residency at The Banff Centre, Donald Lawrence’s The Sled, is part sculpture, part photography, and part video work and is accompanied by a journal of fictionalized travels with the sled and its shelter. In tales of extreme weather and depravity, The Sled becomes a locale of relative comfort and luxury. Set in the recreational nexus of Banff National Park – the work spans the disparity between bourgeois leisure and the realities of the world’s poor and displaced peoples and will particularly resonate with communities in the Rocky Mountains faced with the realities of displacement due to recent flood and fire.

Together the works confront notions of class, displacement, and the social and activist functions of contemporary art practice. Issues of survival, shelter, and the portability of home are central in this exploration of the varied notions of campsites.

CAMPsites
Curator: Melanie Townsend
Co-produced with Museum London
July 16 to August 21, 2005
Opening BBQ Reception
July 16, 2-4 p.m.

Featured artists include:

Rebecca Belmore
Robin Collyer
Kristina Jaugelis & Reece Terris 
Donald Lawrence 
Liz Magor 
Tsuyoshi Ozawa 
Sandra Vida 
Paul Wong