Evan Lee, "S. Fraser Way, Surrey, BC, Landscape #1, 2000, C-Print

"1984 Chevrolet Caprice Classic Wagon, 94000 kms, Good Condition, Engine Needs Minor Work, $1200 OBO 604 888 3243, 2000, C-Print, detail 1 of 5 panels" by Kevin Schmidt	From the series, Permutations of a Failed Image Within An Enclosed Space, 2000, C-Print, by Barb Choit
O-12, 2000, Digital Video, by Matilda Aslizadeh	T-town Legends (Sungod), 2000, C-Print with accompanying text panel by Kyla Mallett & Allison Hardy

Photographs by Matilda Aslizadeh, Barb Choit, Evan Lee, Kyla Mallett & Allison Hardy, and Kevin Schmidt

Curated by Christopher Brayshaw, circulated by the Surrey Art Gallery

As its title indicates, the unifying elements that link the photographs in Out of Sight may not be visible to the viewer’s eye. Framed photographs and photo-sequences join a video projection, all of them depicting and analyzing the landscape, both in its ‘raw’ state and as a ‘cooked’ cultural construct. The relation between pictures of suburbs (Kyla Mallett & Allison Hardy) and those of a station wagon in a ‘natural’ landscape (Kevin Schmidt) may not be obvious until one realizes that both depict stages in the process of the landscape transformation. What is ‘out of sight’ is the machinery of development converting farms into suburbs and the wrecker’s ball converting suburbs into future urban entities.

Curator Chris Brayshaw contextualizes this current photographic work by comparing this practice with that of Robert Smithson, Dan Graham and the Bechers, amongst others. He asks if this exhibition is an extension of their practice, a comment on it, or whether both are simply mining the same material. Publication exists. The exhibition’s historical context is provided in part by its showing at the same time as the following exhibition of work by H.G.Cox.

Thursday June 12 @ 7:30 pm at Presentation House Gallery,
Please join curator Christopher Brayshaw and several of the artists in Out of Sight for a panel discussion on conceptual strategies that informed the making of the works.

 

 

Horace Gordon Cox was a member of the international pictorialist photography scene in the 1920s and 1930s. He lived in New Westminster, held an engineering post with the provincial government, had three solo exhibitions of his work at the Vancouver Art Gallery in the 1930s, and showed his photographs in a hundred photo exhibitions around the world. Cox's photographs were presumed to have been lost but were in fact stored in his son's basement, their whereabouts a mystery to historians and archivists. In 2001 his great granddaughter was given the work. Because the work has been hidden from view, Cox’s reputation has been non-existent, while that of his Vancouver colleague John Vanderpant, has risen over the past thirty years.

Cox worked completely within the confines of the Pictorialist aesthetic, but, as was the case with many of the Pictorialist group, also known as the Clarence White School, he had other interests that would both clarify and deepen one’s understanding of why and how he made the photographs that he did. In Cox’s case part of the context is provided by his book on the ideals and mathematics of ancient Greek culture and their relation to his photographic practice as well as their usefulness in the analysis of all pictures. The original manuscript of the book will form an important part of the exhibition. This will be the first exhibition of his work in over fifty years and will reveal that the BC photography scene had more depth during the first half of the last century than is generally assumed.

Click here to read more about the show

Thursday June 19 @ 7:30pm at Presentation House Gallery,
Please join us for a Panel discussion on H.G.Cox & west coast Pictorialism with
David Martin (Seattle) on west coast Pictorialism,
Sylvia Grace Borda on Cox's techniques and photographic processes
and Bill Jeffries on the life and works of H.G. Cox.