Intersecting Orbits: Michael Morris and Joan Balzar
Opening Reception: Friday, January 26, 2024, 6:00-8:00 PM
West Coast artists Joan Balzar and Michael Morris were foundational in the history of conceptual art, abstraction and Op art in the region. To be within their orbit was to be part of a movement which shaped and internationalized visual art in the 1960s and 70s in this part of the country, and went on to become enduringly echoed and quoted. This exhibition will feature work from Morris’s personal art collection and by the artist, himself, as well as selected major Balzar works from a private North Vancouver collection.
Curator’s Tour of Intersecting Orbits and Open Studio
Sunday, February 11: Open Studio 12–5 pm / Curator’s Tour 1–2:30 pm
Join us for a hybrid (in person and online via Zoom) exhibition tour of Intersecting Orbits: Michael Morris and Joan Balzar with curators Lisa Baldissera and David MacWilliam, and in person to see what Established Indigenous Studio Art resident Rolande Souliere has been up to during her time at Griffin.
Spotlight on Five Exhibitions On Now and Through the Holidays: SCOUT
Design and art come together at ADDITION, a distinctive new space in Yaletown, aiming to bring together the design and visual arts communities in a welcoming environment. The project is a collaboration between Andres Aramburu (formerly Inform Interiors, and co-founder of AREA Living in Shanghai), and Wil Aballe (founder of Wil Aballe Art Projects (WAAP)). Expect carefully curated secondary market consignments and exceptional design pieces combining craftsmanship, provenance, ingenuity, and ergonomic design.
“The intention throughout the process of developing the gallery is that we both felt we wanted to create a space where the art is more approachable and where the audience could be broader than what exists within the visual arts silo,” says Aballe. “Vancouver is a really creative city and it made sense to merge the dynamics and energies of the design community and the art community altogether.”
PERSONNAGES
Lyse Lemieux is a Canadian artist who works in a variety of mediums—including drawing, sculpting, painting and installation. She has been contributing to the national art scene since the 1970s and her practice balances abstraction and representation as it relates to the human form.
VANS COMMUNITY SERIES: LES RAMSAY
5 years ago painter/sculptor Les Ramsay relocated his practice from the bustle of city life in Vancouver to a serene home/studio along B.C.’s scenic Sunshine Coast. Alongside his partner, artist Colleen Heslin, the two have created a space wholly their own in Powell River. Focusing on art from scratch, Les has taken on new influences, inspired by the captivating scenery of this updated environment. His metaphorical art practice is rooted in methods of formal abstraction with an intuitive material processes developed from both inside and outside the studio. Exhibiting his work throughout Canada, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany and across the US, Les has come to revere the serenity of an art practice at a slow pace.
Review: ‘Die Monosau’ Revives Chaotic Energy in Berlin
Theatregoers at the opening night of “Die Monosau” at the Volksbühne in Berlin on Friday, were promised a “guaranteed director-free evening,” and that is exactly what they got.
The play was inspired by texts that the German artist and enfant terrible Jonathan Meese penned in the 1990s, but the production is attributed to no one in particular. Or rather, the program cryptically credits the acronym “K.U.N.S.T.” (the German word for “art”) as director. It remained vague, however, whether this was a collective name for the artists who had brought this work to freakish, twitching life, or whether this was an abstract affirmation of the cosmic power of art.
residence: Les Ramsay interview
A conversation conducted between Montréal and London with writer and editor Nathalie Agostini and Canadian painter Les Ramsay on the concept of “weird,” collecting, and language.
Let’s start with a quote of yours from a previous interview: “I’m big on trying to outweird myself… I need that challenge or else it’s easy for things to become just decorative.” Around the advent of photography, Walter Benjamin defined the concept of “aura” as the quality essential to an artwork that cannot be mediated through techniques of mechanical reproduction. How do you see the relationship between the concepts of “weird” and “aura” when it comes to a quality that cannot be mediated technically, and mass-produced?
Rhys Edwards: LA COMMUNE 2021
During the Parisian Commune, Gustave Courbet led the Federation of Artists. They called for a Communal Luxury in art-making. But Courbet himself did not produce any images of the Commune. Herein lies the poetic fissure: the gulf between what it is possible to represent, and what it is not. Like the Commune, painting is an attempt to envision the impossible.
Rhys Edwards is an emerging artist, curator, and writer. He is an Assistant Curator at Surrey Art Gallery, where he most recently curated the permanent collection exhibition, Where We Have Been. He has written for Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, C Magazine, and BC Studies.
Art and architecture merge on Vancouver’s towers—but is the cultural outreach more than illusion?
Lyse Lemieux’s works, Personnages, feature nine figural silhouettes embedded in black mosaic which clad the columns on the ground level of the Grosvenor Pacific tower's southern façade
Odes to Joy: Remembering Cini Boeri (1924-2020)
Ask most architects to describe the objectives behind their designs and the same few words — impact, performance, flexibility — tend to come up. But joy? Not so much. That’s what makes the work and legacy of Cini Boeri, the Italian architect and furniture designer who died in Milan on September 9 aged 96, so unique — and timely.
Lyse Lemieux: No Fixed Abode
SFU Gallery
Lyse Lemieux's artistic practice engages the line through forms that range from figuration to abstraction, and that extend into installation and sculpture. No Fixed Abode is an exhibition of drawings, both three-dimensional textile drawings and large drawings on paper, through which Lemieux uses the line in a nonlinear way, where sources are humorously uncertain, references ambiguous, and yet they assume a physical assuredness.
Lemieux's exhibition title refers to the elusive subject of Franz Kafka's short story Odradek, or The Cares of a Family Man (1919). The story is about a figure or thing called Odradek that is somewhere between subject and object. "He lurks by turn in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall. …Yet when asked, 'And where do you live?' 'No fixed abode,' he says, and laughs, but it is only the kind the mind of laughter that has no lungs behind it." Pursuing forms that inhabit a space of ambiguity, Lemieux’s works resist being easily read, particularly in her blurring of subject and object.
Les Ramsay: BORDERCROSSINGS
“The sea is everything,” wrote Jules Verne in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. “It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe.… It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.” As such, no human vision of the sea can be finite; each connects and merges with those of others elsewhere, sometimes quite distant in space and time.
Visitors to Les Ramsay’s recent exhibition “The Adventures of Atrevida Reef” will have encountered such a dynamic. As the media release states, “Atrevida is Spanish for ‘bold’ and references significant landmarks near the artist’s rural studio/home” on BC’s Sunshine Coast. Atrevida Reef is indeed an underwater feature off that coast a short way north of Tla’amin First Nation. Yet, the exhibition’s visual language traverses a broader circuit, pointing at themes and motifs from oceanic environments and seafaring cultures around the globe, even across millennia. The ocean divides cultures from one another, true—but to a soul with a boat, it is a superhighway around the world and has been since antiquity.
Cini Boeri
Maria Cristina Mariani Dameno—better known as Cini Boeri—is a leading Italian architect and designer, the mother of the internationally renowned architect Stefano Boeri.
She graduated in architecture in 1951 from the Politecnico University in Milan. After a short experience with Gio Ponti—a famous master of Italian design and architecture—she started to collaborate with Marco Zanuso, another acclaimed architect and designer.
Jonathan Meese Releases Bizarre Video on Donald Trump and the End of Democracy
Jonathan Meese has uploaded a bizarre new video to his YouTube channel “Propagandawerk” (propaganda work), in which, for over 15 long minutes, the controversial German artist delivers a scathing take-down of the art world’s reaction to the election of Donald Trump, announcing that democracy, as a system, is faulty and must be replaced with something new.
The monologue, titled Dr. Humprt TRUMPty de Large d’On, begins with Meese announcing that he is speaking as himself, rather than one of the tyrannical personae of his anarchic performances. “I, Jonathan Meese, say ‘I do not participate in the game called democracy.'”
Joan Balzar: Abstract painter stood out in ‘60s West Coast art scene
Even within the dynamic and tumultuous 1960s West Coast art scene, painter Joan Balzar stood out from the crowd. In person, the chain-smoking fashionista exuded the verve and bravado of the most testosterone-fuelled artists of Los Angeles and New York. Her op art canvases matched her persona: intensely bright and highly sophisticated. They grabbed attention 50 years ago, when she began making them, and more recently in belated solo exhibitions. When Ms. Balzar died in North Vancouver on Jan. 16, the 87-year-old artist left a legacy of bold, luminous paintings that suggest power and vitality.
Although many scholars consider Ms. Balzar's work to be in the same league as exalted West Coast artists Roy Kiyooka, Michael Morris and Iain Baxter, she struggled to gain the same attention from the 1960s establishment. "She was at the cutting edge of whatever it was," said curator Scott Watson, head of the University of British Columbia's visual arts department. But, he added, "the art world wouldn't take these women as seriously as they would the men." It wasn't until later in life that her accomplishment was fully recognized, with group and solo exhibitions at significant venues such as the Vancouver Art Gallery, Simon Fraser University Art Gallery, Belkin Satellite, Seattle Art Museum and West Vancouver Museum.