Adrienne Lai: All the Arms Around You
Barrie Jones: New Works
April 8-May 14, 2005
Artist Talks at the Gallery, Saturday, April 23, 2 pm
The Helen Pitt Gallery ARC is pleased to exhibit new works by both Adrienne Lai and Barrie Jones. While Jones has been a part of the regional contemporary art community for over 30 years, he has rarely shown in Vancouver. The Gallery is honoured to provide a public context for his most recent explorations concerning markers of identity, authority, authorship, collaboration and portraiture. Lai’s commitment as an artist and teacher to education and investigations concerning ideas of community runs parallel to the mandate of the Pitt. Her most recent project in Vancouver, “I Am the Remix” (at the Western Front), presented Lai as an artist-curator. This exhibition provides a chance to consider Lai’s practice as an artist-producer. “All the Arms Around You” is particularly interesting in this regard. It questions constructions of the individual practitioner within a contemporary art context — revealing complex collaborative and/or social systems that can direct artistic production and professional assessments of validity, recognition, success and failure.
Jones’s photographs for the show focus on the nature of relationships between clients and employees. Throughout his practice Jones has complicated common assumptions about the identity and role of the artist-photographer by insisting that his portraits are not authored constructions but the results of negotiations with his subjects. The boundaries in his own process of working, between who is a client and who is an employee, between who is an artist and who is a subject, are constantly oscillating. The images in the show are tableaus – what Barrie calls “negotiated documentaries” — of people engaged in various Spa and fitness treatments. The situation is arranged but the treatments are authentic. The people providing the services are real professionals. The “clients” are people Barrie approaches to play people “like themselves”.
Lai’s “All the Arms Around You” involves three separate returns to a previously unfinished series of photographs. After sending out a questionnaire to everyone on her personal email list concerning their relationships to her and to contemporary art and culture, Lai solicited the Pitt’s Board of Directors to select three candidates from those that were returned. Each of the “final three” provided Lai with specific instructions concerning the completion and installation of her unfinished photo-series. For this exhibition Lai has completed three different works based on these instructions. Alongside the finished projects, the Gallery is providing a display of the ephemera documenting this process, as well as explanatory narrative panels.
Barrie Jones lives and works in Vancouver and teaches at the University of British Columbia. He received a BFA from UBC and an MFA at York University. His work is in various collections including the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Windsor, and the British Columbia Government Collection.
Adrienne Lai is a visual artist, writer, freelance curator, and educator. She graduated with a BFA from Emily Carr Institute in 1998 and received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 2001. Her research interests are located at the intersections of contemporary art, technology, popular culture, language and memory. Her studio practice employs photography both as a medium and as a subject for investigation. Lai has exhibited across Canada and the United States and her writing has been published in Fuse, Parachute, and various exhibition catalogues. This past fall, she participated in the “Informal Architecture” residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts.
