Toronto artist Christine Davis premieres a slide dissolve piece in this exhibition. In keeping with the title’s allusion to Alice in Wonderland, “Drink Me” is a fantastical scene of disorienting scale. Here figurative images are projected onto a field of oversized plastic flowers in lurid colours, creating a kaleidoscopic effect. As in her previous projections onto screens of feathers and butterfly wings, this fusion of moving images and surface creates a tactile cinematic experience. As described by the artist, the piece “explores haptic space where a thickening of the image occurs through the convolution of support and surface, interior and exterior, matrix and optics.” Christine Davis brings to this piece an enduring interest in questions of identity and representation. Here she uses fiction as a way to prefigure autobiography. Her early photo-based art from the 1980s and mixed-media installations from the 1990s often incorporated text. In 2000 she began to produce time-based projection works that reveal her strong sculptural sensibility. In addition to these moving picture installations, she also continues to make still photographs.
Christine Davis was born in Vancouver in 1962 and lives in Toronto. She studied at York University in Toronto. She has exhibited across Canada and abroad since the mid 1980s and is a founding editor of the journal, Public. Her time-based projection works have been exhibited at The Power Plant, Toronto; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She is represented by Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto. PHG will produce a catalogue in conjunction with the exhibition featuring an essays: by critics Barry Schwabsky and Janine Marchessault.

Curated by Helga Pakasaar.

Saturday, April 30 3-6 pm Artist Introductory Talk at 3 pm followed by Opening Reception

This new media installation by Vancouver artist Althea Thauberger is a collaboration with the performers Jessica Griffiths, Gemma Isaac, Kaoru Matsushita and Natalie Needham. Each girl has developed her own characters, costumes, script and songs in response to a story about confronting death through improvisation and singing. Shot in a North Vancouver backyard around a pool with lush landscaping, the film is cinematically lit and shot as a stage production played out in real time. The contrived footage resembles soap opera, music video, slasher movies and musical theatre. A Memory Lasts Forever is a portrait of a social landscape that highlights the energies of teenage girls prone to euphoric fantasies and abjection. As with her earlier work, Songstress, a series of original songs written and performed by young women, the film poses questions about the limits of self-expression and authentic emotion, and the very idea of social documentary. The interpretations of amateur performers are becoming increasingly important to the content of Thauberger’s work, creating an effect that troubles distinctions between fiction and reality. Her interest in the social and spectacular aspects of performance have extended into the public domain in her two new projects that involve working with community choirs.
Althea Thauberger was born in Saskatoon in 1970 and graduated with an MFA from the University of Victoria in 2002. She has exhibited extensively and was short-listed for last year’s Sobey Art Award. She was in the touring exhibition Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art, recently had a solo exhibition in New York and is part of InSite: Art Practices in the Public Domain in San Diego/Tijuana. She is represented by Tracey Lawrence Gallery, Vancouver. This project is a co-commission with the MATRIX Program of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum. Funding assistance for the project is from The Leon and Thea Koerner Foundation, Vancouver.

Curated by Helga Pakasaar.

Saturday, April 30 3-6 pm Artist Introductory Talk at 3:30 pm followed by Opening Reception

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