News

 

Reverse Joy (fountain) investigates the possibility of joy through mourning via a simple color. A kind of metaphysical acrobatics or splits, the fountain brings together the incommensurate via the naïve, playful festive use of red on one hand with the symbol of blood, commemorating martyrs, and its cynical political manipulation on the other.

An early installment in Slavs and Tatars’s new cycle of work The Faculty of Substitution, replacing one thing for another, telling one tale through another, a look at substitution in the widest sense, from al-badaliya to mystical substitution to the antimodern, the Reverse Joy fountain and presentation ask what it means to adopt the inner-most thoughts, experiences, beliefs, and sensations of others as one’s own in a search for self-discovery?

How does this circumlocution–looking at a something else as a prism on the chosen subject of study, going somewhere else which initially might not seem relevant instead of directly heading towards one’s destination–challenge the very notion of distance, as the shortest length between two points? An investigation of the role of mysticism as an agent for change in the material world, in Vancouver, Reverse Joy explores the revolutionary and critical role of the sacred shared amongst all three Abrahamic faiths: the call ‘for one world or none’.

SFU WOODWARD’S, DJAVAD MOWAFAGHIAN WORLD ART CENTRE
ROOM 2555, 149 WEST HASTINGS STREET, VANCOUVER
April 9, 2013, 7 PM

Co-presented by Presentation House Gallery and SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement

Reverse Joy ( lecture-performance) looks at the perpetual protest movement at the heart of the Shi’a faith for its radical reconsideration of history and justice. Inserting oneself, flesh and faith, into events that transpired 13 centuries ago; the collapse of traditional understandings of time; the reversal of roles of men and women; and joy through mourning all demand an equally elastic and muscular understanding of the sacred and the profane that is the down payment towards any meaningful social change. So we turn to the Shi’a ritual of Muharram not necessarily to better understand Islam or the Middle East per se, but rather to better grasp our own understandings of modernity, history, and time. Reverse Joy looks at the complex constellation of Muharram, as a counterpart to Carnival, which over the course of 13 centuries has taken on a near cosmic significance, beyond regional rivalries, and possibly beyond the faith itself to impact notions of identity, mysticism, protest, and resistance in the world at large.

An early installment in Slavs and Tatars’s new cycle of work The Faculty of Substitution, replacing one thing for another, telling one tale through another, looks at substitution in the widest sense, from al-badaliya to mystical substitution to the antimodern. The Reverse Joy fountain and lecture-performance asks what it means to adopt the inner-most thoughts, experiences, beliefs, and sensations of others as one’s own in a search for self-discovery? How does this circumlocution–looking at a something else as a prism on the chosen subject of study, going somewhere else which initially might not seem relevant instead of directly heading towards one’s destination–challenge the very notion of distance, as the shortest length between two points? An investigation of the role of mysticism as an agent for change in the material world, Reverse Joy explores the revolutionary role of criticism shared amongst all three Abrahamic faiths: the call ‘for one world or none’.

The lecture features original and archival images and video clips of the Shi’a ritual during the month of Muharram, which peaks with the the Day of Ashura, the 10th day of Muharram—a day of mourning for the martyr Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of Muhammad, at the heart of the schism between Sunni and Shi’a. Muharram, the second most sacred month after Ramadan, is commemorated by Shi’as via a constellation of sacred social rituals featuring amongst others, chanting, theatre, public mourning, and self-flagellation.

Director of Development

Presentation House Gallery

The Opportunity

 

Presentation House Gallery is seeking a Director of Development to provide fund development leadership for the upcoming Campaign for its new Gallery at the foot of Lonsdale Avenue in North Vancouver, BC, and to grow and expand the development capacity of the largest independent public photography gallery in Canada. Reporting to the Director and working in partnership with Campaign counsel and the Presentation House Gallery Board and Campaign leadership, the Director of Development will maximize private and public sector support for the new Gallery to achieve an expected Campaign goal of $12M.  Post-campaign the Director of Development will be responsible for planning and implementing of an annual fundraising program to benefit the Gallery.

 

Responsibilities:

• Implement a comprehensive Campaign Plan;
• Support campaign volunteers, Board and senior leadership with Campaign strategy development;
• Manage and support Campaign activities including Campaign volunteer meetings, prospect reviews, and events;
• Facilitate and participate in cultivation and solicitation visits with prospective donors,;
• Develop and implement the Campaign Communications Plan, including website, print and online advertising, newsletter, invitations, etc.;
• Generate Campaign materials, proposals and correspondence;
• Participate in public speaking engagements as necessary;
• Develop direct relationships with a portfolio of prospective campaign donors, solicit campaign gifts
• Support campaign volunteers, Board and senior leadership with their prospective donors;
• Ensure briefing notes are developed for each call;
• Oversee the development and implementation of the donor naming, recognition and stewardship plan;
• Supervise the work of a part time Development Associate; and
• Ensure that donor activity is tracked and gifts processed and acknowledged on a timely basis.
• Develop and implement an annual fundraising and sponsorship program post-campaign.

 

The Candidate

The Director of Development will have six to ten years of development experience with a proven track record in major gifts fundraising, ideally developed in a capital campaign setting. Complementing this experience will be a strong appreciation for, and interest in, art institutions and the visual arts.

 

Additional qualifications: 

• Undergraduate degree in a relevant discipline and education in professional fundraising, or an equivalent combination of education, training and experience.
• CFRE an asset;
• Proven success securing significant major gifts;
• Strong strategic abilities combined with high attention to detail;
• Strong interpersonal and negotiation skills required in liaising with major donors, corporate executives and senior volunteers; tact, diplomacy, discretion and sound judgment required;
• Excellent verbal and written communication and presentation skills;
• Proven ability to write and produce print and electronic communications and marketing materials;
• Proven ability to motivate and inspire staff and volunteers;
• Ability to work simultaneously on a variety of complex projects with imposed deadlines;
• Experience with the use of Microsoft Office, fundraising databases and generally accepted accounting principles;
• Must be able to work evenings and weekends when required;
• Must have a valid BC driver’s license and access to a reliable vehicle.

 

Competitive salary and benefits are offered commensurate with experience.

 

About Presentation House Gallery

Presentation House Gallery is the largest independent public photography gallery in Canada and the nation’s only institution with a focus on media arts. The gallery program currently encompasses all camera-based practices, including photography, film, video and digital art works. Our curatorial mandate, unique among non-collecting Canadian public galleries, emphasizes contemporary practices with an occasional focus on historical work.

 

The Gallery’s campaign for a new building is driven by the goal of a distinctive and vital community-focused space in a publically accessible location in North Vancouver. The new facility will support our mandate to make visual culture of the past and present resonant in the Lower Mainland, BC, nationally and internationally.

Please send a resume and cover letter before April 12, 2013 at 5:00 pm to:

c.hirukawa@presentationhousegallery.org

 

or by hard copy to:

 

Presentation House Gallery

333 Chesterfield Avenue

North Vancouver, BC, V7M 2G9

Canada

We extend our thanks to all applicants for their interest and advise that only those to be interviewed will be contacted.

 

 

Villy Svarre, Pacific Great Eastern (PGE) general manager Einar Gunderson (left, head in noose) and Premier W.A.C. Bennett (right with black hat, head in noose) take part in the inaugural arrival ceremonies of the PGE in Williams Lake, B.C. August 30, 1956, courtesy The Province

Discussion between artists Stan Douglas and Tim Lee, with writer Michael Turner as interlocutor.

Saturday, March 23, 3PM

Satellite Gallery
560 Seymour Street, 2nd floor
Vancouver, BC
604.681.8425

Please join us for a discussion by notable Vancouver visual artists Stan Douglas and Tim Lee about different approaches to working with historical photographs, films and audio-visual materials. Both artists often work with material culture from the past, investing it with new meanings. They will provide insights into their research processes and ideas about media histories. Michael Turner will act as an interlocutor in the discussion; drawing on his extensive knowledge of the cultural life of this city.

This discussion will take place against the backdrop of Presentation House Gallery’s NEWS! exhibition, based on the press photography collection of The Vancouver Sun and The Province newspapers. This unique working archive holds a breadth of material that includes over a million photographs. The exhibition spanning the analogue era of news photography from the late 1900s to the mid 1990s presents a disjunctive collage of the history of the city.

The acclaimed artist, Stan Douglas, creates films, photographs and installations that reexamine locations and past events. His large-scale photographic mural at SFU Woodward’s is a reenactment of the Gastown Riots of 1971. His current project is a cinematic stage production, Helen Lawrence, set in post-war Vancouver that has involved the production of 3D electronic recreations of Hogan’s Alley and the Hotel Vancouver.

Tim Lee’s renowned media artworks often involve reenacting famous moments in the history of popular culture. His most recent multimedia installation, Blowin’ in the Wind, Bob Dylan, 1963, 2013, currently at the Asia Society Museum in New York, is a karaoke pavilion featuring the artist’s cover of the Dylan’s eponymous folk anthem.

Michael Turner is a Vancouver-based writer and art critic whose fictions—the most recent being 8×10, 2009—are composed of multiple genres and mediums. His current curatorial endeavour, A Postcard from Victoria, opening this May at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria is based on a 1983 video by Robert Morin & Lorraine Dufour, with commissions by contemporary artists.

NEWS! is made possible with assistance from the The Vancouver Sun and The Province newspapers, and is curated by Helga Pakasaar, Presentation House Gallery.

PANEL DISCUSSION With News Photographers
Glenn Baglo, Ralph Bower, Rick Ernst and John Denniston

Saturday, March 16, 3PM

Satellite Gallery
560 Seymour Street
Vancouver, BC
604-681-8425

On Saturday, March 16th at 3pm, Satellite Gallery will be hosting a panel discussion with longtime Vancouver press photographers who have decades of experience and will discuss how their roles and activities have changed at the newspapers over the years.

NEWS! takes an in-depth look at the news photography archives of the Vancouver Sun and Province newspapers. This unique collection holds a breadth of material that includes hundreds of thousands of photographs from the 1880s to the 1990s. The exhibition traces the history of Vancouver through a selection of photographs and ephemeral material. It reveals how news photography evolved dramatically over the past hundred years as pictures began to play a more important role in newspapers. Over the twentieth century, occasional illustrations were replaced by photographs, which dominated the pages of newspapers by the 1960s, when staff photographers were in abundance. Television and picture magazines such as LIFE also helped shift public understandings of current affairs from the written word to images.

NEWS! is made possible with assistance from the The Vancouver Sun and The Province newspapers, and is curated by Helga Pakasaar, Presentation House Gallery.

Come early to our NEWS! panel discussion on Saturday and enjoy delicious and refreshing DavidsTea, as they will be providing guests with a free tea tasting service from 1:30 to 3:30pm

 

Presentation House Gallery will host a lecture on the work of Marianne Wex by Avigail Moss, a writer, artist and educator currently living in Los Angeles. Moss has done extensive research on Wex and gave a lecture in conjunction with Wex’s recent exhibition at Yale Union. She has an MA from University College, London and has published on visual culture, modern art history and contemporary art. She is co-editor of “Painting – The Implicit Horizon” published by Jan Van Eyck Academie, Masstricht, Netherlands in 2012.

This lecture is presented concurrently with the exhibition “Marianne Wex: Let’s Take Back Our Space” on display at Presentation House Gallery until March 24. Throughout the 1970s, Wex photographed thousands of women and men in the streets of Hamburg, which she combined with re-photographed images from mass media into an in-depth archive of photo-collages and a book entitled “Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures” (1979). This study provides an expansive historical impression of how we create and present ourselves, and the degree to which gender-specific conditioning and hierarchies are reflected in everyday poses, gestures, and other non-verbal communication.

“Marianne Wex: Let’s Take Back Our Space” is organized by Yale Union, Portland, Oregon, with assistance from Bildwechsel Archive, Hamburg.

 

Group of Vancouver Sun photographers around Charlie Warner. (left to right) Dan Scott, Ralph Bower, George Diack, Ray Allan, Dave Buchan, Ken Orr. December 1960. Ralph Bower/Vancouver Sun (60-4599) [PNG Merlin Archive]

Presentation House Gallery presents News! at Satellite Gallery.

February 15 – March 30, 2013

Opening Reception: Thursday, February 14,  5 – 8 PM

This exhibition takes an in-depth look at the news photography archives of the Vancouver Sun and Province newspapers. This unique archive holds a breadth of material that includes hundreds of thousands of photographs from as early as the 1880s. The exhibition will trace the history of Vancouver through a selection of photographs and ephemeral material. It will reveal how news photography evolved dramatically over the past hundred years as pictures played an increasingly important role in newspapers. Today, the editorial filters of newspaper commentary and television can be bypassed altogether as significant news reaches us directly through eyewitness images posted on the Internet. This timely exhibition focusing  on the pre-digital era of photography offers insights into the consumption of news and developments in mass media.

 

 

In conjunction with HORVAT: FASHION
Saturday, October 20th
Emily Carr University
South Building Lecture Hall, room 301
2:00 pm

Vince Aletti is adjunct curator of photography at the International Center of Photography, New York. He is a renowned New York based curator, critic, and collector with an in depth knowledge of photography. He has recently curated This is Not a Fashion Photograph, Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now and Avedon Fashion 1944-2000. He writes about photography for numerous publications including the New Yorker Magazine and the Village Voice.

 

Frank Horvat’s fashion photography is on view at Presentation House Gallery from Friday, October 19th to Dec. 23rd, 2012. Horvat worked for major publications such as Jardin des Modes, ELLE; Glamour, VOGUE and Harper’s Bazaar and with important designers such as Coco Chanel and Givenchy as well as the Parisian nightclubs, Le Sphinx and Crazy Horse.

The first of 4 parts of this conversation can be seen here.

Thursday, September 27 at 6 to 8pm.

Opening reception of Dorothy at Satelitte Gallery.

Dorothy is a new series of works by Vancouver-based artist Myfanwy MacLeod. The exhibition at Satellite Gallery features origami sculptures and photographs of origami designs, each made from pages of a Playboy magazine in which Vancouver-born playmate, Dorothy Stratten, appears as a centerfold. Through a process of folding and unfolding, the works come to represent what Playboy founder Hugh Hefner has stated constitutes the “ideal” centerfold—one in which “a situation is suggested: the presence of someone not in the picture.”

The show is curated by Reid Shier.

Saturday, September 8 at 7pm.

Opening Reception Annette Kelm Exhibition at Presentation House Gallery.

Annette Kelm is a German artist who within a decade has already made a significant contribution to contemporary photography. Based in conventional studio and landscape genres, her subtle, deadpan images become increasingly mysterious through examination. They initially appear as objective documents, yet the factual and temporal confusions of her uncanny pictures reinforce the uncertainties of perception.

The show is curated by Reid Shier.