archives 2003
JAN 7 - FEB 7
Alison Norlen (SK) Carnevale Sublime
The work of Saskatoon-based artist, Alison Norlen, is concerned with various forms of cultural artifice, focusing on theme parks and fantasy environments. For her joint exhibition with Victoria-based artist, Kevin Yates, Norlen will present a mural-size diptych (approximately 9' x 20') reflecting her research into the carnival parade. Her meticulous and overwhelming surfaces will be contrasted against Kevin Yates 'underwhelming' installation of a "small dead woman". This minimal installation confronts the viewer with the abject sublime, intending to create a feeling "not unlike the eerie feeling of discovering a small dead animal", (Yates).
FEB 19 - MAR 23
ménage à trois International Women's Day Exhibition
Marisa Portoiese Belle de Jour
Don Simmons Hieronymous 1504-10 / It Keeps Exploding in My Face
Ho Tam The Company of Men
This year's International Women's Day Exhibition marks a turning point at Eastern Edge Artist-Run Gallery. ménage à trois features three artists from across the country exploring issues of gender in audio, video, digital and photographic media.
The exhibition will reinvent the traditional feminist gallery space, pairing Marisa Portolese's series of photographic portraits of women of all ages, masquerading different roles, with the contrasting and complimentary work of two male artists. In the main gallery Portolose is "fascinated and obsessed with flaunting the feminine" while Ho Tam's video-still portraits of purposeful men dressed in business suits and moving through Japan's underground transit tunnels are "boxed" into the smaller Rogue gallery space. Don Simmon's audio piece mediates Tam's and Portolese's charged series with a modern version of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, where viewers can pick up any one or several of the speakers and listen to the sounds of sex.
Portolese plays with the portrayal of women "as various iconic identities such as divas, sluts, goddesses and sexual ingenues," Tam attempts to "represent men with dignity and purpose", while exposing a repressive male experience. All the while, viewers are confronted with Simmon's video piece, "It keep's exploding in my face", two tv's talking to each other. One critic remarks, "Simmons targets the construction of romantic love...employing the high camp movie talk of the thirties and forties, he loops two tvs together playing the same segments - an overwrought speech on the combustibility of love...".
ménage à trois makes a progressive curatorial statement about the changing face of feminist discourse in contermporary visual art, while inviting viewers to confront themselves in the faces and voices negotiating the space.
MAR 22 - APR 12
This City Light Annual Members Exhibition
This City Light, The Annual Eastern Edge Members' Exhibition, is the first group art exhibition to be held in the Great Hall at City Hall as part of a new initiative by the city to present the work of local artists. Some artists featured in this years exhibition include Marlene Creates, Kathleen Knowling, include Marlene Creates, Kathleen Knowling, Louise Sutton, Bonnie Leyton, Greg Bennet and many others.
MAR 22 - APR 18
Mark Clintberg / Shinobu AKimoto / David Poolman Cubed 3
Cubed 3 is an exhibition which forced an awry contemplation of the mundane. Three artists, Mark Clintberg, Shinobu Akimoto, and David Poolman, created physical and introspective spaces that pushed the viewer to probe, and interrogate notions of the liminal territory between art and not-art. They explored the slippery disintegration between everyday objects, and art objects.
Believing 
that "there is content to all of it, all of living," Mark
Clintberg wanted to make people really 'look' at the objects they owned to
see them for all of their novelty. Clintberg's installation 'Maison de Study
Haus' forced the audience to carefully inspect his unusual arrangement of
objects, to think about the intentionality and precision explicit in their
choice and placement.
Similarly, 
Shinobu Akimoto with 'Apartment Painting Project (and other
related activities)' was interested in reflecting her explorations into how
the idea of artmaking exists in relation to our daily living and our various
endeavours of "creation"- or simply, Akimoto's installation "preoccupied
with the symbiotic relationship between 'how to live' and 'how to make
art'." The artist presented a series of "kitchen sized" photographs, a
large photo mural, and a ready-made style wooden bannister.
As
a video artist, David Poolman filmed himself doing everyday things, hence
the title 'A Little Bit of Nothing'. In Iceberg, for example, he merely sat
eating a salad with a spartan backdrop.The eating is in real-time, and as
the viewer waited for something to happen, you felt as though you were in
slow motion, completey absorbed in every facial twitch and every
predicatable fork of lettuce. In his two short video pieces he played with
the role of the viewer by turning them into active participants "who must
come to terms with the . futile scenarios" that he presented.
Cubed 3, created unique, challenging environments within the gallery space that were difficult to reconcile. Thought provoking, humorous, it delivered the ordinary, from an innovative perspective, demanding the viewer to question what they are looking at, and to contemplate the function and relationship of the ordinary in art.
MAY 24 - JUN 14
Kevin Kelly Centrifugally Forced
Centrifugally 
Forced was shot with a spinning video camera in Bryce Canyon National Park. This three monitor installation presents a landscape on the verge of rupture or collapse. It presents whirling image of a popularly photographed landscape. This panorama often falls into abstraction and is unrecognizable as Bryce Canyon. Centrifugally Forced presents questions about random order. In the cosmos, what isn't shifting or spinning?
The second part of the exhibition is a series of digital prints titled Centrifuge. A centrifuge is a machine that separates particles of varying density. This series of digital prints attempts to undermine the stereotypical photographs taken of this well known tourist site. Often, these panoramas become abstract and even unrecognizable as Bryce Canyon National Park. These stills present mages that "happen by chance"; they embrace an irrational or "out of control" aesthetic. These images are stills taken from video images of Centrifually Forced.
JUN 21 - JUL 18
Rhonda Wepple / Michael Flaherty Cerve
Rhonda 
Weppler uses only fragile surfaces to reference the domestic objects she explores through her sculptural works. These traditionally solid forms becme performative as their very material forces them to "twist, sag and mutate" over time. Weppler questions the idea of home where what is imagined to be stable fails and unravels before the viewer. Wepple'r sculptures deconstruct the domestic narrative in their "pathetic imitation" of mundane household objects.
In 
Cerve, local ceramicist, Michael Flaherty uses pottery forms and their inherent utilitarianism as a metaphor for the political and economic activities of humankind. Creating new motorized, static and mobile sculptures made from ceramics and found materials, Flaherty will explore a central theme around the depiction of human body as machine. In approaching this theme through works of pottery and ceramic sculpture, Flaherty reasserts the notion that modern craft is intrinsically deviant, revolutionary and activist. Rhonda Weppler lives and works in Vancouver. Michael Flaherty lives and works in St. John's.
JUL 26 - AUG 20
Tania Sures (Curator) / Glynis Humphrey /
Mikiki / Mike Hickey / Leah Mullins / Ray Peterson I Will Eat Your Heart Out
Karen Spencer Bread Bed
Curator 
Tania Sures brings together new work by artists Glynis Humphrey, Mikiki, Mike Hickey, Leah Mullins and Ray Peterson. I will eat your heart out, addresses issues related to the personal politics of food of the artist, gender politics, ideologies of service and consumption, and the body as a symbol for social and cultural order. The artists presented in the exhibition incorporate a variety of media such as video, installation and mechanics, using food to explore issues around the body, identity and desire. "The use of food/confectionery in the gallery provides a space for dialogue - a discursive space - between the ideas, the artist's work and the greater art community". Sures plans to produce a limited edition catalog in the form of paper place-mats to reflect the dynamics of the exhibition in each different gallery space.
In 
conjunction with this curated exhibition, Karen Spencer's performative installation, Bread Bed will occupy the Rogue Gallery. Everyday of her one week performance Spencer will fill the space with layers of store-bought enriched white bread, creating a bed where she will lay for a period of three hours, then walking away to leave the indent of her sleeping body and the "traces of her daily dwellings". Through her performative work, Spencer explores the concept that bread is symbolic to the body as a social construct. Specifically, white bread embodies meanings related to its social function as an indicator of economic class. In Bread-Bed this meaning is renegotiated as bread is "removed from circulation, transformed and reinserted within a different social framework".
AUG 30 - SEPT 19
Sadko Hadzihasanovic Missing Children
Established 
Bosnian-Canadian artis Sadko Hadzihasanovic's recent work employs portraiture to investigate the reality of children as victims threatened in contemporary society, in particular regions of war. Hadzihasanovic considers child criminals as objects of pity in contemporary culture. "I became aware of the crimes committed by children when I moved to Noth American. Child murderers, a reality in American schools and homes appeared to me as objects of pity rather then monsters. As a product of our aggressive culture, the are victims in their own right."
Missing Children is inspired by these views and by the mass mediated visual invasion of missing children images found on milk cartons, super market panels, public transportation, display boards and television. In response to original photographs of the children he decided to pair those appropriated images with computer-aided aged images of the children. The result is a diptych: two canvases, one black, featuring the image of the child from the missing persons date; the other canvas white with his own digitally altered vision of the aged child that embodies a belief that the child is alive and not necessarily discontent.
SEPT 27 - OCT 24
Carole Hanson She Ought to have Wondered
Stacy Lawrence Raw
Omar Badrin Identity Issues in Transracial Adptee's
Ho Tam The Company of Men
Using 
everyday objects as metaphors for current social situations, Carole Hanson is interested in exploring the dialogue created around the limitations of agricultural diversity and the genetic engineering/modification of our food supply in relation to a sense of nostalgia for tradition instead of progress. Hanson is ultimately concerned with the identity politics involved in "feeding the world" in a global capitalist society.
Stacy 
Lawrence's work also reflects issues of consumption. In his series Raw, Lawrence stages abjection in her photographic images of raw meat. Here, Lawrence uses the sublime to question "the concepts that are arbitrarily assigned to the definitions of desire, repulsion, and attraction, all of which are implicated in the processes of eating". Although the reaction of the viewer is essential is Lawrence's process, he is also exploring the physiological similarities between humans and animals and the philosophical and ethical debates surrounding these similarities.
Omar Badrin's new work is focused on identity, cultural assimilation and the examination of perceptual identity. Badrin's proposed installations consist of a five- wall medicine cabinet that houses a variety of multiple objects with corresponding texts. The medicine cabinets and mirrors are chosen to represent our habitual routine of viewing ourselves in the mirror and our dependence on the cosmetics we store in the medicine cabinets to momentarily relieve anguish. Contained in each cabinet, the viewer will find objects such as Petri dishes, vials, skin molds, cow eyes in formaldehyde, human hair and glass beakers filled with bleach.
NOV 1 - NOV 28
Jerry Ropson / Jo Cook / David Diviney Under Everything Walked Over
This exhibition presents three emerging artists whose work is poignant, and skillfully humorous. Their work playfully wrestles the notion of the conceptual in contemporary art.
Jerry
Ropson (St. John's) Focusing on the strong narrative element throughout his practice, local artist Jerry Ropson is interested in exploring actavism in its relationship to conceptualism in art creation of art itself. After having collected found correspondence for five years, Ropson will create a text based and narrative installation based on this correspondence, whereby he intentionally leads the viewer in frustrating circles of random detail in seemingly mundance meta-narratives. Ropson's whimsical images and found object installations invite the viewer to piece together the overflow of ordinary pieces of narrative to become intrinsically intertwined within the work.
Jo
Cook (Vancouver) Jo Cook's drawings portray a world where the subconscious revelations of play and the oblique truths of humor collide with our conventional expectations about art. The visual language Cook uses draws on the meandering and improvised narratives of children, the banality of comic books, and the simple, though trenchant, subjective innocence of the idiot savant whose knowledge is arrived at by processes totally antithetical to the rational. Cook writes that "I've begun to make installations that are a kind of contemporary Memory Theatre with multiple voices, angles, and points of view. The walls of the gallery become an exchange zone where fragments, details and gaps can links and overlap: the quotidian alongside the mythological; the abstract with the visceral; the comic and the embarrassing beside sacred cows."
David
Diviney (Alberta) The high and the low, the conceptual and the physical, the disturbing and the humorous collide in the sculptural work of David Diviney. "My work sets up an oblique comparison between art making and hunting (the quintessential masculine pursuit?) where practice, precision, aim, and ultimately the rophy (the object) dictate success. Within this I am interested in object relations that suggest narrative structures." Using the technique of the readymade, Diviney's sculptures are simultaneously ridiculous, a little distrurbing and highly compelling.