LAB 9.3: Kate Wilson, Collages in Motion and Artificial Dreams

In anticipation of Great New Wave: Contemporary Art from Japan, Toronto based artist Kate Wilson creates a wall-drawing project exploring small contained architectures. Wilson says, It’s the idea of constructing ephemeral spaces, which permit a transitory experimentation. My work goes back and forth between computer generation and hand execution. Using as sources architectural plans, images…

LAB 9.2: Mary-Anne McTrowe, Crocheting the Database

Presented in conjunction with the Vision Into Reality exhibition, Mary-Anne McTrowe has produced a crocheted history of the Art Gallery’s entire collection derived from her interest in symbolic representation, taxonomy and systems of organization: My portraits portray the Gallery’s collection as it is described through the filter of the database, and can be seen as…

Vision into Reality: The Birth of the Collection

Today, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria holds the largest public collection of art in the province. Working with a nearly blank slate, Colin Graham, the AGGV’s founding Director, imagined a collection culled from every corner of the world. He wanted to ?give Victoria the whole gamut of ethnic cultures.? Building relationships with Victorians who…

Vision into Reality: Colin Graham and West Coast Modernism

For Canada in the 21st century it is pertinent for us to examine the evolution of Canadian art in the context of modernity. The postwar era 1945-1970 marked the expectancy of the modern as a universality. In 1951 Colin Graham became the first director of the AGGV and over the next thirty years he shaped…

Vision into Reality: The Asian Collection Begins

Colin Graham, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria?s Founding Director, had remarkable insight in starting the Asian art collection, now one of the most important in Canada.  Among the very first works of art accepted into the Gallery?s collection in 1950 were two Japanese woodblock prints by the well-known artist, Utamaro (1753-1806).  These were given…

Sacred Arts of Tibet

The art of Tibet is almost exclusively devoted to the service of Buddhism and is almost never practiced for art’s sake.  Tibetan art is representative of the existential character of Mahayana Buddhism known as Tantrayana or Vajrayana (the diamond path or vehicle), which considers its art to be very sacred.  Although Tibetan art is religious…

LAB 9.1: Mike McLean, Range

Rocky Mountain National Park Photographs

In the summer of 2008 Victoria based artist Mike McLean drove to Banff, Lake Louise, and Waterton Lakes National Park. In the tradition of many before him, he documented these travels with a large format field camera on 4×5 colour negative film. As McLean describes, Historically, the Rocky Mountains have filled many roles in Western…

LAB 9.0: Marcy Adzich, A Magic Particular

A Magic Particular is a series of interpretive sculptures based on selected works from the AGGV Collection which have been accessed online by the artist. These new works, created without viewing the original work, will be displayed together with their original muse to create a dialogue about representation and perception, between the real and imagined,…

World Upside Down

The World Upside Down is one in which the symbolic order is turned on its head. It is a world visualized by artists where killer rabbits hunt humans and Superman is a hero of the Soviet Union. It is the Planet of the Apes and a planet where British aristocrats lose their heads when they…