May 14–17, 2015
VIP preview: May 13, 6pm
Or Gallery at SELECT NYC
Booth #208
Center 548
548 West 22nd Street (former Dia Building)
Chelsea
www.orgallery.org
www.select-fair.com
The Or Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in the 2015 SELECT Fair NYC (May 13–17). The gallery will exhibit a small selection of editions and single works by Vancouver-based artists pertaining to the city’s strong history of conceptual photographic and textual practices. These include Guilty, 1950 (2010), a previously unreleased photographic edition by Stan Douglas from his acclaimed “Midcentury Studio” series; Cockatoo Island (2009) by Ron Terada; America is Waiting (2007) by Roy Arden; and Sentences on Conceptual Art 1st Draft (2008) and Bungled Open Cube (2008) by Hadley+Maxwell.
Stan Douglas produced his “Midcentury Studio” series in 2010, meticulously staging a collection of photographs under the conceptual premise that they were the work of an anonymous Vancouver photographer practicing between 1945 and 1951. Work in the series includes studio shots of fashion and hair models, promotional shots for entertainers, candid street scenes and film noir-like snapshots of possible crime figures caught in the glare of a blinding flash bulb, destined for the newspaper pages. Guilty, 1950 is of this latter category. Reminiscent of the crime photography of Weegee (Arthur Fellig), the work depicts a well-coiffed man walking up a narrow stairwell, covering his face with his open palm against the ambushing photographer. The work stems from the same body of research used to produce Douglas’s critically acclaimed stage play Helen Lawrence, currently on international tour.
Hadley+Maxwell’s Bungled Open Cube (2008) and Sentences on Conceptual Art 1st Draft (2008) both started with a passage from Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote: “The reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty.” Envisioning this sentence as part an early draft of Sol LeWitt’s 1969 Sentences on Conceptual Art, Hadley+Maxwell further extrapolate “prototypes” for LeWitt’s sentences and artworks, rendering them as crumpled notes rescued from the dustbin. Ron Terada’s Cockatoo Island (2009) documents his walkabout of Cockatoo Island, site of the 2008 Sydney Biennale. Presented in a serial layout, Terada’s Cockatoo Island “blacks-out” any visual evidence regarding the works in the exhibit, the trajectory of his walk, or any clues to the island itself, instead making visible some of the contextual undertones of the event. Roy Arden’s America is Waiting is a digital collage derived from internet-sourced images of American popular culture, technology, landscapes, and various others. The work borrows its title from a song by Brian Eno and David Byrne from their 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which pioneered a technique of collaging or sampling from vernacular sound sources.
About the Or Gallery
The Or Gallery (est. 1983) is a non-profit artist-run centre committed to exhibiting work by local, national, and international artists whose art practice is of a critical, conceptual and/or interdisciplinary nature. Since its inception, the gallery has acted as a space for research, proposition making, conceptual experimentation and documentation. The works presented in this sale were contributed by the artists to assist the Or Gallery in establishing an international residency apartment and studio in Vancouver. We extend our deep thanks to the contributing artists and their gallery representatives, including David Zwirner Gallery (New York), Catriona Jeffries Gallery (Vancouver), Jessica Bradley Gallery (Toronto), and Monte Clark Gallery (Vancouver).