Exhibitions 2011
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Frances Stark: My Best Thing
September 24 – December 11, 2011
Exhibition
Frances Stark’s highly compelling animated video My Best Thing premiered at this year’s Venice Biennale to widespread critical acclaim. Using free text-to-speech online animation software, Stark employs Playmobil-like avatars to chronicle the dialogic episodes of random video chat that are at once philosophical and absurdly funny. The story of these virtual encounters examines the shared space of sexual attraction, the creative process, and technological mediation.
Dexter Sinister: The Serving Library
July 10 – September 4, 2011
Exhibition
In 2006, Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey) established a workshop and bookstore of the same name in New York, and have since explored aspects of contemporary publishing in diverse contexts. As well as designing, editing, producing, and distributing both printed and digital media, they have also worked with ambiguous roles and formats, usually in the live contexts of galleries and museums. These projects generally play to some form of site-specificity, where a publication or series of events are worked out in public over a set period of time. Dexter Sinister intend to slowly dissolve all such activities into one single institution, The Serving Library. This overarching project is founded on a consideration of how the role of the library has changed over time — from fixed archive, through circulating collection, to point of distribution. As much about The Library as social furniture as it is a specific model, the project ultimately returns to its point of departure: as a place for learning.
Pierre Huyghe: A Journey That Wasn’t
April 16 – June 19, 2011
Exhibition
In the video installation A Journey That Wasn’t, internationally renowned French artist Pierre Huyghe transports viewers from his Antarctic expedition to an elaborate re-enactment of that voyage in Central Park, New York, as he searches for an elusive albino creature rumoured to live on an uncharted polar island. Part nature documentary, part sci-fi movie, and part musical, the film continues to shift between scenes of breathtaking wilderness and those of the orchestrated spectacle, leaving it up to us to decide what to believe and what not. As the title suggests, we may even suppose that the journey never happened.
Anthony Burnham: Even Space Does Not Repeat
January 15 – March 27, 2011
Exhibition
In Even Space Does Not Repeat, Anthony Burnham’s first solo exhibition in Western Canada, he presents a series of new paintings that develops the artist’s study of replication and authenticity. Burnham’s paintings are documents of experimental sculpture and actions that he transforms, through various forms of representation, into working sketches. These final paintings represent the refined moments and precise details in a measured practice of deconstruction and construction.