Marlene Creates: Dwelling and Transience

In this photo-based project, artist Marlene Creates explores Greater Victoria.

During a visit to Victoria in the fall of 2000, Creates explored the city through the eyes of a visitor. Her response to Victoria – harbour city on the western edge of the country – was influenced by her experience of being a resident of St. John?s, Newfoundland – a harbour city on the eastern edge of the country. This national cultural exchange investigates, commemorates and records some of the inscriptions in Victoria?s unique landscape relating to the recreational, commercial, military, touristic, administrative, preventive, and geo-political movement of people and freight at the turn of the millennium.

Creates?s project explores the landscape?s complex history as a place of both dwelling and transience, asking questions about what is and what has been the meaning of the place the artist finds herself in, its relationship to human displacement and to ?home.?

Creates says: ?My works are about our human relationship with the physical world, including the way urban environments have been affected by their geographical location. I am interested in the intersections between experience, memory, language, and the land. My works are the result of what I find out along the way, and they are dependent on the circumstances in the specific place and at the exact time that I am there. They are not acts of the imagination, but more like revelations I am led to by paying attention to what may seem commonplace and everyday.?

Also, Creates will be working as artist-in-residence with students at Central Junior Secondary School and in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Victoria. The works produced by students during this workshop will be featured in the Spencer Gallery. The students? works will be exhibited in the Spencer Gallery from March 8 to April 1, 2001.

Chang Dai-chien Master of the Three Perfections

The great scholar painter, Chang Dai-chien (1899 – 1983) is considered to be one of the most interesting, eccentric, well-traveled, skilled, innovative and prolific artists in the long history of Chinese painting. He was a master of the three scholarly perfections ? painting, calligraphy and poetry. He was also one of the world?s greatest forgers. Many major museums in the world think they have ancient Chinese paintings in their col-lection, which are now turning out to be forgeries made by Chang Dai-chien. Even the top scholars in the world argue over these paintings which is an attestation to the incredible skill of the artist. No one in Chinese painting history has had the skill of Chang Dai-chien.

Approximately 70 paintings by Chang will be on display, on loan from the Taiwan National Museum of History and private collectors in Taiwan, Canada and the US. A retrospective exhibition of his work is a virtual survey of the history of Chinese paintings as it reflects styles from almost every era. Chang Dai-chien lived his entire life in pursuit of art. He is remembered as a towering figure in Chinese painting and as the last of the great literati painters, a true renaissance man.

In Search of the Picturesque

The picturesque, as an aesthetic tradition, became popular in the latter part of the 18th and early 19th centuries. This small exhibition of prints curated by George Wallace illustrates some of the characteristics of this type of imagery.

Using prints from his private collection, Professor Wallace lets us glimpse The Picturesque in landscapes filled with varied foliage and interspersed with waterfalls, rocky promontories or ruined buildings.

Japanese Literati Paintings

This exhibition features approximately 35 scroll paintings by members of the literati or bunjin class. They were greatly influenced by Chinese literati painters and rejected the court-patronized painting schools. Although they all had an idealistic and romantic view of the world, each of these artists had his own style according to his own temperment. Their favourite subjects were landscapes with figures, trees and flowers.

Recent Asian Acquisitions

This exhibition shows Asian art donations to the AGGV for the years 1998,1999 and 2000. These donations include an impressive selection of paintings, ceramics, sculptures, textiles, prints, lacquerware, cloisonn? etc. from Asian countries including China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, Vietnam, Thailand and India.

Slippage: Taras Polataiko, Gerhard Richter, Lucio Fontana

Through the work of three prominent international contemporary artists – Ukrainian-Canadian Taras Polataiko, German Gerhard Richter, and Argentinean Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) – slippage addresses representation, the painted surface, and the device of the mirror in relation to the artists’ paintings, photographs, installations, and prints.

When painter/sculptor Lucio Fontana first pierced his paintings, he called attention to the dimensional quality of his canvas. The painting was not, for Fontana, simply a pictorial vehicle. In these ruptured paintings, called Concetti Spaziali or Spatial Conceptions, Fontana explored the expression of space through gesture. His puncture of the painting surface challenged trompe l’oeil illusion, replacing it with the material presence of the canvas. Through representational painting, abstraction, and photography, Gerhard Richter also experiments with the elusiveness of representation, and with the viewer’s grasp of the fullness of reality through painting. Taras Polataiko’s parallel uses of photography, trompe l’oeil and a disrupted surface in several series further investigate the uses of reflection and illusion in contemporary practice.

Stencil Prints by Sadao Watanabe: 1913 – 1996

Sadao Watanabe’s work reflects a unique combination of Japanese folk artistry and Christian influence. Watanabe studied the traditional stencil techniques of Japanese folk artists and made his stencils on rough and wrinkled handmade paper, giving his work a crude, folk-art simplicity.

While his works were originally inspired by folk art, Watanabe’s work stands apart from other Japanese folk artists and printmakers through its subject matter. A converted Christian, Watanabe took his themes from passages in the Old and New Testaments. His religious stencil prints are beautiful and appropriate works for the Christmas season.

Watanabe’s prints also show an indebtedness to the work of Edvard Munch, the great Norwegian graphic artist working at the turn of the century.

Stencil Prints by Sadao Watanabe

1913 - 1996

Sadao Watanabe’s work reflects a unique combination of Japanese folk artistry and Christian influence. Watanabe studied the traditional stencil techniques of Japanese folk artists and made his stencils on rough and wrinkled handmade paper, giving his work a crude, folk-art simplicity.

While his works were originally inspired by folk art, Watanabe’s work stands apart from other…

Send in the Clowns: The Circus in Prints

Send in the Clowns features a selection of video and graphic works exploring the theme of the circus in historical and contemporary art. The exhibition includes pieces by Picasso, Chagall, Dame Laura Knight, along with Columbian artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s highly entertaining video work, Flea Circus, from the AGGV video collection. The exhibition, presented in collaboration with the National Gallery of Canada, parallels the exhibition Circus Magicus, at the Royal BC Museum.