Artist Books/Books by Artists in the Cultural Olympiad

Books, Records
Curated by Dave Dyment

photo left: Michael Snow.

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Perhaps because of influential publishers and distributors in the 70s (Nova Scotia College of Art & Design and Art Metropole, respectively) Canada has a rich history of producing art designed to infiltrate book and record stores.

Michael Snow’s The Last LP is a classic artist’s audio work, and his Cover to Cover is possibly the most renowned artist book ever printed - a rare case where a Canadian work defines the genre.

Snow’s works bookend this exhibition, which otherwise draws on artists who explore the structure, content and possibilities of books via published works, photographs, handcrafted facsimile and trompe l’oeil. The works examine our relationship to these objects and to each other, while questioning the authority of the codex.

The records selected here share a relationship to books. Davis’s charred vinyl refers to book burning and The Last LP is about the form of the vinyl record, as a printed package. It features extensive liner notes that both set up and eventually give away the trompe l'oeil.

Dave Dyment is a Toronto-based curator, artist and writer. From 2004 to 2008, he was director of programming at Mercer Union. Prior to that he was at Art Metropole for five years, where he curated numerous exhibitions. Other projects include Nuit Blanche 2008 and a forthcoming volume on Artists’ Multiples for YYZ Books. He is co-founder of Nothing Else Press, which has published projects by Jonathan Monk, David Shrigley, Paul Butler and others.

A Sports Swarm in Contains Animal Byproducts!

Artwork at left: "Red Football Helmet" by Aganetha Dyck. Photo: Peter Dyck.

Contains Animal Byproducts! Pet Food for the Brain, Curated by Daina Warren

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Contains Animal Byproducts! is a multi-media, group exhibition that investigates the animated side of art - literally and figuratively. All the visual artworks incorporate various references that include animal as shaman, animal for consumption or the natural environment as well as projects and images that are connected to politically charged notions such as the link between the protection of wildlife and Canadian identities. These diverse projects hold various interpretations due to the incongruity of aesthetic materials and objects paired with animal depictions.

Daina Warren is of the Montana Cree Nation in Alberta. She received her BFA in 2003 at Emily Carr University, and is currently enrolled in her MA in critical and curatorial studies at UBC, graduating in 2010. Warren has curated for the New Forms Media Arts Festivals (2004,2005), the Earth Village for the World Urban Forum (2006) and as an associate curator with grunt gallery and the LIVE Biennale of Performance Art from 1999-2009.

Contains Animal Byproducts! Pet Food for the Brain is lead by Governor General's Award for Visual and Media Arts winner Aganetha Dyck with Mary Anne Barkhouse, BGL, Marianne Corless, Susan Detwiler, David Diviney and Bill Burns.

Enjoy! (Did we mention that Aganetha Dyck will be in our upcoming LATERAL LEARNING exhibition-in-print curated by Paul Butler????)

Vantage Art Projects Uses PITCH ENGINE for SOCIAL MEDIA PRESS RELEASES

Vantage Art Projects launches Social Media Releases with PITCH ENGINE as the primary method of news wire and press release distribution

Vantage director Jennifer Mawby says that " the real-time and multi-media capabilities of Social Media Releases surpasses the ability to engage people in arts and culture activities over traditional text and image only press releases. With a S.M.R. sound bites for tweets and links to other social media portals like Facebook are included in the release for one-click re-posting. The ability to embed You-Tube video and multiple images into the release add to it's dynamic features we feel are right for Vantage's unique art projects. We are excited about the potential with Pitch Engine."

See the GATEKEEPERS S.M.R here!

Curator Dave Dyment Watches Iain Baxter on Television - CODE Screen 2010 Exhibition 6

Old Televisions and Super 8 Film Stock inspires Dave Dyment, CODE Screen 2010 Curator.

(Artwork at left by Iain Baxter). As a countdown to the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, CODE Screen 2010 will animate your screen and captivate your imagination. By the end of the Games, CODE Screen 2010 will have showcased the work of more than 100 of Canada's finest creators, including recipients of the Governor General's Award for Visual and Media Arts.

Enjoy the works of artists including Alex Janvier, Michael Snow, Aganetha Dyck and Kenneth Lochhead in 14 exhibitions curated by Kate Armstrong, Dave Dyment, Donna Wawzonek, Nathalie deBlois, Milena Placentile and Daina Warren.

The best way to experience CODE Screen 2010 is to install the application putting you one click away from all the content. You'll receive an automatic prompt whenever a new exhibit is launched. Or come back to vancouver2010.com/code whenever you need an art break.

http://www.vancouver2010.com/more-2010-information/cultural-festivals-and-events/code-connect-create-collaborate/code-screen-2010/

Catch Exhibition 6 to the end of November. Test Pattern curated by Dave Dyment featuring Governor General Award Winner Iain Baxter, with Collin Zipp, Kelly Mark, Janet Morton, Aaron Carpenter, Germaine Koh and Sara Angelucci.

"Canary" by James Whitman - FRESH PICK Volume 1 Edition 24

The wild bird, endemic to Macaronesia, is gregarious and builds cup-shaped nests while often fiercely defending it's territory. It feasts in flocks while foraging on the ground, and cannot survive without gravity. James Whitman's "Canary" is a wild bird of a different feather.

"Canary" comes from the figures and creatures in the artists "Some Kings" series. Whitman tells us the 'kings' are caricatured alien or ‘other’ subjects generated from a formal play with the construction of face, countenance, and the kinds of social space these can generate. They are purposely deadpan and low affect. They acknowledge us and present themselves, but they don’t elicit our attention or social engagement, and beyond holding our eye, they make no social display. As with wild animals, we don’t share their society and they are indifferent to us.

The kings’ social world, social relations, the state of the land they inhabit and its economics have been bracketed off, left open. We are not presented with the depiction of an imaginary or allegorical society and its functions and relations, but with difference, with our world become different. The point isn’t so much the specifics of that difference, but to depict the absence of our society, the world without our administration. These drawings both depict a certain semi-developed state of the not-wilderness of British Columbia, and shift this familiar mundane land of overgrown logging roads, abandoned fridges, and ten year old spruce over into a fantasy of an unpeopled world. They imagine a world that exists quite sufficiently without any of the very particular forms of meaning peculiar to our species. A world without our presence as witnesses.

James Whitman has an honours BFA from UVic 1998 and is currently represented by the LES Gallery in Vancouver. He is artist, curator, collaborator and has sat on board of the Vancouver Access Artist Run Centre and the ‘536’ curatorial society “with a focus on exhibitions in unusual situations”. He has completed residencies in Leipzig Germany and Dawson City, Yukon. He is a member of the Vancouver-based drawing collective Lions Pile. You can find more work by the artist at LES Gallery, Outbuildings and Livestock and Lions Pile.

Buy "Canary" now from $45+!

"Sweet Smell of Success" by Matthew Sweig - FRESH PICK Volume 1 Edition 23

Welcome to "The Sweet Smell of Success". This series is a fragmented self-portrait made up of the little physical evidence of the artist’s ancestral past. Further to past works dealing with urban debris and the memory of objects, this work strives to illustrate the many ways in which one views themselves. The people are distant maternal relatives captured from old photographs. The screen printed pattern is extracted from monetary notes from Czar ruled Poland from the early twentieth century where Sweig’s paternal family was at the time the photographs were taken in Canada.

Matthew Sweig is educated in the field of Landscape Architecture and practices in Toronto, Canada. Gary Michael Dault of the Globe and Mail’s review of Sweig’s “Reconstruction of a Demolition” exhibit from 2005 could equally describe this piece. “A glance at the picture reproduced here - or even a prolonged study of it - will probably not serve to identify it as a painting rather than a photograph. But a painting it assuredly is, a vastly labour-intensive, black-and-white acrylic on canvas...” More information on the artist’s original works can be found at www.matthewsweig.com. He is represented by the XEXE Gallery in Toronto, www.xexegallery.com.

Buy "The Sweet Smell of Success I" now from $45+!

PAUL BUTLER EXHIBITION-IN-PRINT - Artists to be published

The artists who responded to our open call for submission, and who have been selected for publication in our Paul Butler exhibition-in-print project are now announced. The full press release and list of artists can be found on our website. Thank you for "Submitting to Paul Butler"!

Full press release can be found here: http://www.vantageartprojects.com/Current_Submissions.html

Please find below the list of artists whose work was selected for publication in the upcoming Exhibition-in-print book curated by Paul Butler. The full list to be published in at the end of this message and includes 40+ individuals. We would like to stress that in keeping with the process outlined, Paul blind-juried the work of all submitting artists. Further to the open submissions, Paul was invited to ask a small number of artists to contribute along with his own work. These artists also paid a submission fee. 

The quality of the submissions were high and came in from all corners of the globe making the final decision of what works to publish difficult. The selections were made very carefully based on the best fit with our curatorial theme and guided by the critical essays to be published with the artwork.

ARTISTS TO BE PUBLISHED - VP1_PB1

Artists in “Lateral Learning” featuring Paul Butler, Mark Clintberg and Dr. Jeanne Randolph with: Amarie Bergman, Lisa Birke, Melissa Brown, Lydia Burggraaf, John Campbell, Robert Caspary, Lucia Cipriano, Jennifer Delos Reyes, Rebecca Donald, Christopher Donnelly, Aganetha Dyck, Richard Dyck, Sarah Fuller, Julie Gendron, Lori Gordon, Sheila Heti, Robin Lambert, Marissa Largo, Henry Mah, Ashley Neese, Christian Nicolay, Jennifer O'Leary, Richard Palanuk, Mitzi Pederson, Perry Rath, Kerri Reid, Scott Rogers, Jesse Sherburne, Julia Sherman, Jonny Silver, Eric Steen, Derek Sullivan, Aislinn Thomas, Julie Thomson, Margaux Williamson, Sascha Yamashita, Weakhand , The Make It Collective (Gabe Baribeau, Ian Fitzgerald, Rachel Fleming, Aimee Burnett, Sean Walsh, Todd Guthrie, Pat Bodnar, Meghan Hunter, Nick Edwards, Emily Vesigny, Emily Rayner and Bailey Holmes), The 26 Collective (Melanie Rocan, Cyrus Smith, David Wityk, Fred Thomas, Shaun Morin, Ian August, Michael Topf), The Reverse Pedagogy Team (Venice 2009). All artist submissions were blind-juried based on an international open call.

V.A.P. is committed to offering inclusive opportunities for artists. As a part of our programming, V.A.P. provides open call, blind juried opportunities for artists via exhibitions and art publications.