"Everything Under the Sun: in Memory of Andrew Gruft" Exhibit (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada)

 

"Everything Under The Sun: In Memory of Andrew Gruft" Exhibit

The “Everything Under the Sun: In Memory of Andrew Gruft” Exhibit, opened last April 15, 2022, was drawn from wide-ranging photos in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s (VAG) permanent collection.  It  pays tribute to the late local collector Andrew Gruft  (1937–2021) whose generosity and support, over the past two decades, have been crucial to the development and radical shift of the Gallery’s collection of photographs. Prior to that time, the VAG’s holdings included little in the way of historical and modern photography.  The exhibit runs until September 11, 2022.

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David (Stephen Waddell, 2017, silver gelatin print)

Gruft’s Jewish family had fled the Nazis in Poland in 1939, ending up in South Africa where Gruft grew up and would go on to graduate in architecture from Cape Town University (before working in architecture in Rio de Janeiro and Vancouver).

 

Kodak Three Point Reflection Guide (Christopher Williams, 2003, dye transfer print)

For almost five decades, Andrew Gruft played a vital role as collector, critic, patron and life force in Vancouver’s art community. From 1976 to 1982, he and Claudia Beck, his partner, ran NOVA, a gallery on West Fourth Avenue that was an important nexus for the city’s artists, curators and collectors.

 

Flan Poles (Gabriel Orozco, 2000, azo dye print)

The gallery mounted exhibitions of work by well-known photographers (including William Henry Fox Talbot and Robert Frank) as well as exhibitions by then unknown Vancouver artists such as Jeff Wall and Marian Penner Bancroft. Even after NOVA closed in 1982, Gruft and Beck continued to build an extensive and eclectic collection of photographs and to actively support Vancouver artists.

Berlin, Fall of the Reichstag, May 2, silver gelatin print 1945 (Yevgeny Khaldei, 1945)

 One of Capture Photography Festival’s featured exhibitions for 2022, the exhibit features a selection of almost four hundred historical, modern and contemporary photographs, by Eugène Atget, Anne Brigman, Karin Bubaš, Becky Cohen, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Oriol Maspons, Gabriel Orozco, Issei Suda and William Henry Fox Talbot, among others, donated to the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2004 by Gruft and Beck over the past eighteen years.

 

Trolley - New Orleans (Robert Frank, 1955, silver gelatin print)

Overnight, with the addition of these works in 2004, it radically changed” the face of the VAG permanent collection, giving it international significance for its photo-based art. Over the following years, through regular donations of artwork, the pair’s generosity endured.  Eventually, the permanent collection numbered around 700.

 

Cocks and Flowers (AA Bronson, Felix Partz,
Jorge Zontal, 1976-77, instant dye process prints)

As part of the Capture Speaker Series, Grant Arnold (Vancouver Art Gallery’s Audain Curator of British Columbia Art) and Sophie Hackett (Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery ofOntario) host an online conversation about works in the exhibit on April 26, from 6 to 7 PM.

 

London (Robert Frank, 1951, silver gelatin print)

The wide-ranging collection of the tightly curated exhibit’s historically serious photographs of iconic battlefield and street images includes a silver gelatin print of Benjamin Leeson’s 1894-96 portrait of a high-status Quatsino woman, Lady Warcas, and a large still from Ian Wallace’s hand-tinted video The Summer Script, from 1974. There are also funny, irreverent, and often subversive images such as two self-explanatory 1970s works - Larry Clark’s Couple Shooting Up on a Bed and General Idea’s Union Jack-like polyptic Cocks and Flowers.

 

Toreo de Salon Todas Torrados
(Oriol Maspons, 1958, silver gelatin print)

The famous, iconic World War II image Berlin, Fall of the Reichstag, May 2, 1945, by Yevgeny Khaldei, depicts a Soviet soldier hoisting his country’s hammer-and-sickle flag high atop the Reichstag, the rubble of Berlin beneath him, smoke billowing in the background. The shot only became available to the West after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The photo was staged for propaganda purposes.  For maximum effect, smoke clouds were added after the fact and the man hoisting the flag also had two watches on his arm removed in the printing process. That’s because they were a sign of looting (bad P.R. for the Red Army), punishable by death at the time.

 

Untitled (Jonah Samson, 2015)

Trolley–New Orleans 1955, by famed Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, an image of white passengers seen through the open windows in the front and Black passengers relegated to the back, is a chilling depiction of Southern segregation in the middle of the last century. Shot in the French Quarter, a white child at the midpoint rests her hand on a moveable wooden board (that could be shifted backwards if there were no more seats for white people on the bus) that divided the sections.  The expression, in a Black passenger’s gaze, is a haunting mix wistfulness, puzzlement and alienation. This image emblazons the dust jacket of Frank’s seminal book, The Americans.

 

Manual Labor (Evan Lee, 2008, single channel video)

Toreo de Salon todas torrados en el barrio del Poble Sec endonde nacio, from 1958, a perfectly composed, time-capsule image by the late Spanish photojournalist Oriol Maspons, pictures workers waving around makeshift capes, pretending to be matadors in a narrow street in Barcelona. There are also two women watching, from high above, on a wrought-iron balcony and tiny children stopping to look on the sidewalk.

 

Diego Rivera (Edward Weston, 1924, silver gelatin print)

Untitled, rendered in 2015 by Cape Breton photo artist Jonah Samson ( a rising talent now celebrated for retooling his vast collection of eclectic archival photographs into absurd, ironic, and often disturbing imagery) in rich Van Dyke Brownprint, features a woman grinning and waving at her shadow self in negative.

 

 “Everything Under the Sun: In Memory of Andrew Gruft” Exhibit: 3/F, Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6Z 2H7, Canada.    Open Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 10 AM – 5 PM, Tuesdays and Fridays, 12 noon to 8 PM. Admission: $24.00 (adults), $20.00 (seniors), $18 (students), $6.50 (children, 6 – 12 years old) and free (children 5 years old and under).  Tuesdays, from 5 – 9 PM are “donation nights” (pay whatever you want or can afford). Coordinates: 49.282875°N 123.120464°W.

"Kids Take Over" Exhibit (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada)

 

"Kids Take Over" Exhibit

The “Kids Take Over” Exhibit, opened last  April 15, 2022, combines some of the more playful pieces from a rich selection of works, in a range of media, in Vancouver Art Gallery’s collection. It vividly captures the perspectives and creative expression of local elementary and high school students from Metro Vancouver, ages five to eighteen.

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Foreground: Environment For Reading (Evelyn Roth, 1974, textile, light fixture)

Special participation came from Champlain Heights Elementary School (grade 1/2) and Queen Victoria Annex (grade 4/5) in Vancouver; Carson Graham Secondary School in North Vancouver (grade 11/12); and artists Evan Lee and Brendan Lee Satish Tang who visited the classrooms to discuss their art practices and engage directly with the students.

 

Gathie Falk’s playful ceramic oranges and grapefruit stacks

Highlighting young voices and a future generation of art lovers, the students were asked to respond, in spirited, curious, thoughtful, whimsical, funny and often unexpected ways, to a plethora of artworks (a varied selection of paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures) produced in the 1960s up to the present.  

Scrambler (Robert Rauschenberg, 1980)

They wrote down their thoughts, created their own drawings and collectively moved their bodies, using the artworks by a range of local, national and international artists from the Gallery’s collection as inspiration. Photographs of the students, taken by photographer Anita Bonnarens, show some of the activities leading up to the exhibition.

 

Octopus (Guud San Glans Robert Davidson, 2014, acrylic on canvas)

While cultivating a future generation of artists and art lovers, Kids Take Over also engages with children and youth of all ages, as well as adults, to highlight their creativity. The exhibition was organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Zoë Chan (Assistant Curator); Mandy Ginson (Assistant Curator); and Julie Martin (Curatorial Assistant), in collaboration with Susan Rome (Program Coordinator: Schools and Youth), and Christina Jones (Family Programs Coordinator).

 

Off and On, In and Out, Round and Round
(Audrey Capel Doray, 1966, acrylic on canvas)

The Gallery’s rotunda and alcoves has been transformed into dynamic interactive spaces that feature regular programming for families and kids, including a workshop for teens led by artist Chantal Gibson.  

Family Startled by a Goose (Lucy Qinnuayuak, 1961, stonecut on paper)

Among the highlights of well-known artists’ works are Zhang O’s mesmerizing portrait photos of Chinese children set against endless horizons, Guud San Glans Robert Davidson’s monumental painting Octopus (2014), Gathie Falk’s playful ceramic fruit stacks, Chantal Gibson’s radical modifications of historical books, Annie Pootoogook’s touching family portrait Listening to the Radio (2005-06) and much more.

 

Three Doors (John MacGregor, 1970, wood, paint)

Other well-known featured artists include Pitseolak Ashoona, Eric Cameron, Evan Lee, Ken Lum, Audrey Capel Doray, Evelyn Roth, Thomas Kakinuma, Kimsooja, Devon Knowles, Brendan Lee Satish Tang, John MacGregor, Michael Morris, Laurie Simmons and Allan McCollum, LucyQinnuayuak, Koki Tanaka, Claude Tousignant, Joyce Wieland, RobertRauschenberg, Simon Ripoll-Hurier, and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, among many others.

 

Manga Ormolu 5.0j (Brendan Lee
Satish Tang, 2010, ceramic, glaze)

The Kids Take Over Exhibit also features a range of welcoming, interactive elements for young families.  It includes a play area in one of the alcoves, a touch wall, an activities booklet and a drawing/coloring space in the rotunda. 

Woman Under a Tree (Evan Lee, 2019,
oil pigment, pastel on canvas)

Mobile guides also invite children to explore the exhibition and learn about some of the featured artworks through a series of playful and informative prompts. To begin, scan the QR code on the exhibition’s title wall. This exhibition is affiliated with the international Takeover Day initiative, organized by Kids in Museums, whose mission is to make museums more accessible to children, youth and families.

 

Play Area

 “Kids Take Over” Exhibit: 3/F, Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6Z 2H7, Canada.    Open Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 10 AM – 5 PM, Tuesdays and Fridays, 12 noon to 8 PM. Admission: $24.00 (adults), $20.00 (seniors), $18 (students), $6.50 (children, 6 – 12 years old) and free (children 5 years old and under).  Tuesdays, from 5 – 9 PM are “donation nights” (pay whatever you want or can afford). Coordinates: 49.282875°N 123.120464°W.

“The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” Exhibit (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada)

 

The “Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age
of Artificial Intelligence” Exhibit

The “The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” Exhibit, opened last March 5, 2022 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, surveys the extraordinary uses (and abuses including racial bias) inherent in artificial intelligence (AI) in the production of modern and contemporary visual culture around the world. The exhibit runs until October 23, 2022.

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Golden Bee Cube (Synthetic Apiary II, 2020)

The exhibition, following a chronological narrative that first examines the development of artificial intelligence (from the 1950s to the present), through a precise historical lens, was organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) and curated by Bruce Grenville (Senior Curator at the VAG) and Glenn Entis (Guest Curator), a computer animation pioneer, video games industry veteran, and founding faculty member for the Centre for Digital Media.

 

Model of Vancouver House (Bjarke Ingels Group)

A wide-ranging and in-depth exhibition that took three years of planning, it builds on this foundation, emphasizing the explosive growth, over the past decade, of AI technology that is already all around us, from automated investing to self-driving cars as well as across disciplines, including animation, architecture, art, fashion, graphic design, urban design and video games. Revealing the complex nature of this new tool and demonstrating its importance for cultural production, the Imitation Game revolves around the important roles of machine learning and computer vision in AI research and experimentation.

 

Gigapoint System (Patrick Pennefather and
Michal Suchanek) at the Rotunda

It features several AI experiments that excite and fascinate us. Others are creepy, unsettling and frightening as we could have imagined.  In artist Stephanie Dinkins’s Conversations with Bin48 (one of the world’s most advanced robots, complete with moving lips, lifelike skin, and blinking eyes one screen), we watched, on a screen,  the robot explaining to us why there’s nothing “artificial” about artificial intelligence.

 

Humanity (Fall of the Damned)  by Scott Eaton

On another screen, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) tries to mimic digits, over hundreds of epochs, when its learning algorithms finally start to shape foggy blobs into recognizable numbers.  Clips of dystopian sci-fi flicks like Ex Machina, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and World on a Wire also added to our fears. Two major, room-filling installations reveal artificial intelligence’s beautiful, near-poetic possibilities in visual art.

 

*airegan

One installation, devoted to the work of Hong Kong-born, Canadian-raised, New York City-based artist Sougwen Chung, is full of fluid, blue-ink paintings that are collaborations between herself and her machines. At one end is a video projection where we see Chung, from a camera above, creating calligraphic loops and squiggles of ink across a sheet of paper, a massive, white robot arm reacting to her mark-making and adding its own complimentary flourishes to the painting. A collection of Roomba-sized robots on wheels (called “Dougs” by Chung), in the center of the room, whiz around with their brushes trailing paint.

 

Scott Eaton Gallery

The other installation, a massive space devoted to the work of American-born but London-based artist Scott Eaton (whose unique skill set includes a master's degree from the MIT Media Lab, studies in drawing and sculpture in Florence, animation work with Disney and Pixar, and expertise in human anatomy), features around 100,000 carefully photographed nudes fed by Eaton into AI tools (his “Bodies neural network”) that he then directs to “paint” with those fleshy forms, melding and morphing them into photo-real, and often startlingly surreal, new imagery.

 

Metahuman Creator

Other featured artists, designers and architects include *airegan, Stafford Beer, BIG, Ben Bogart, Gui Bonsiepe, Muriel Cooper, DeepDream, Epic Games, Imagenet,  Amber Frid-Jimenez (Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist) with a background in computational design and the creation of computer programs, platforms and applications), Bjarke Ingels Group, Neri Oxman, Patrick Pennefather, Zaha Hadid and WETA, among others.

 

Bina48

“Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” Exhibit: 2/F, Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6Z 2H7, Canada.    Open Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 10 AM – 5 PM, Tuesdays and Fridays, 12 noon to 8 PM. Admission: $24.00 (adults), $20.00 (seniors), $18 (students), $6.50 (children, 6 – 12 years old) and free (children 5 years old and under).  Tuesdays, from 5 – 9 PM are “donation nights” (pay whatever you want or can afford). Coordinates: 49.282875°N 123.120464°W.

“Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment” Exhibit (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada)

 

The "Uninvited - Canadian Women in the Modern Moment" Exhibit

The “Uninvited:  Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment” Exhibit, a major exhibition opened last June 11, 2022 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, coincides with, and offers commentary on, the centenary celebration of the Group of Seven, a famous set of quintessential Canadian male landscape artists who held their first show in 1920.  Although they shared the friendship, pictorial experiments and, in some cases, the daily life of the Group of Seven members, women artists in the early twentieth century were never formally “invited” to join their ranks despite expressing support for artists such as Emily Carr.

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Kitwancool Totems (Emily Carr, 1928, oil on canvas)

This gathering of nearly three hundred works of art (including 30 works on loan from the National Gallery of Canada) by a generation of extraordinary women painters, photographers, weavers, bead workers, sculptors, architects and filmmakers from a century ago, pioneers who opened new frontiers for women artists in Canada. Focusing on the interwar period (1920s, 1930s and 1940s), it is a cross-country snapshot of female creativity in this dynamic modern moment. 

 

Dress of Rose Runner (Mrs. George Runner, ca. 1927)

The exhibition, running at the Vancouver Art Gallery until January 8, 2023, was first shown, from September 10, 2021 to January 16, 2022, at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (Kleinburg, Ontario), then continued at the Glenbow Museum (Calgary, Alberta) from February 19 to May 8, 2022 and at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (Winnipeg, Manitoba) from June 18, 2022 to January 3, 2023.

 

Northern Island (Elizabeth Wyn Wood, ca. 1927, gold-plated bronze on black marble base)

Organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg (Ontario), the exhibit is curated by McMichael Chief Curator Sarah Milroy and is made possible with the generous support of presenting sponsor BMO and the McMichael Women’s Art Council. It foregrounds the production of women artists from across the country, providing a broad and diverse accounting of female creativity in Canada a century ago.

 

Woolies (Margaret Watkins, 1919, vintage silver print)

In this monumental exhibition, we saw the work of women artists, from all parts of Canada, who responded to a period of dramatic and, sometimes traumatic change. Rather than pursuing the calling of landscape painting prevalent among their male peers, settler female artists in this period tackled such themes as human psychology, urbanization, industrialized resource extraction, Indigenous culture and displacement, environment desecration and the immigrant experience.  They expanded their palette to include urban scenes, portraits of figures marginalized by “modern” society, and natural landscapes encroached upon by fast-developing extractive industries.

 

Elise Kingman (Lilias Torrance Newton, 1930, oil on canvas)

On display are artwork by members of the famed Beaver Hall Group of painters of Montréal, Québec (among them Anne Savage and Lilias Torrance Newton); paintings of legendary artist Emily Carr (from Victoria, British Columbia); sculptures by Toronto-based artists Elizabeth Wyn Wood, Frances Loring and Florence Wyle; works of a number of Indigenous women from this period; contributions of women from immigrant communities such as the painters Regina Seiden Goldberg and the Russian-born leftist Paraskeva Clark (1898-1986) who immigrated to Toronto from St. Petersburg in 1933; and works of Canadian expatriates such as avant-garde photographer Margaret Watkins (who left her home in Hamilton, Ontario for the United States and Scotland).

 

Self-Portrait with Concert Program (Paraskeva Clark, 1942,
oil with paper on canvas)

Indigenous female artists working in traditional media whose works are displayed include Attatsiaq (1910-c. 1955) of Arviat, Nunavut; Sewinchelwet (Sophie Frank, 1872-1939) of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation); Mi'kmaq maker of intricately patterned quillboxes Bridget Ann Sack (whose traditional beadwork and woven baskets were becoming instrumental in their fight for economic survival as the colonial state took over their ancestral territories of Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia); Elizabeth Katt Petrant (1891?-1922) from Bear Island, Lake Temagami; Mrs. Walking Sun from the Carry the Kettle Reserve in Southern Saskatchewan; and Rose Runner of the Tsuut’ina First Nation (near Calgary, Alberta).

 

Sisters of Rural Quebec (Prudence Heward,
1930, oil on canvas)

The watercolors of Winifred Petchey Marsh (1905-1995) documented the customs of Inuit women, Toronto painter Yvonne McKague Housser (1897-1996) depicted a sketch of the mining town of Cobalt (1931), Montreal painter Prudence Heward did enigmatic portraits of Jazz Age women, and the landscapes of Anne Savage (1896-1971), commissioned by the Canadian government, immortalized the totem poles of the Gitxsan First Nation.

 

Sea and Shore (Florence Wyle,
ca. 1950, marble)

In the very last room of the exhibit, Emily Carr (1871-1945) portrayed trees still standing among freshly cut stumps and totem poles.  In front of these works are an undulating series of display cases housing 18 sustainably made Coast Salish baskets from many different communities.  The work of Kathleen Munn tells the story of Christ through a series of ink and graphite sketches that show her mastery of Cubism and dynamic symmetry among other artistic movements.

 

Two of 18 Coast Salish baskets (Panier)

An exquisitely beaded tuilik (women’s parka) panel, by Nunavut artist Attatsiaq, sits beside a watercolor depiction of the same garment by Winifred Petchey Marsh.

 

Tuilik (Woman's Parka, Attatsiaq, 1910-ca. 1955)

“Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment” Exhibit: Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6Z 2H7, Canada.    Open Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 10 AM – 5 PM, Tuesdays and Fridays, 12 noon to 8 PM. Admission: $24.00 (adults), $20.00 (seniors), $18 (students), $6.50 (children, 6 – 12 years old) and free (children 5 years old and under).  Tuesdays, from 5 – 9 PM are “donation nights” (pay whatever you want or can afford). Coordinates: 49.282875°N 123.120464°W.