Our assignment was to visit a local art gallery of our choice and to analyze the exhibitions as contemporary art, based on how it is described in our course text: "Believing Is Seeing" by Mary Anne Staniszewski.
During the time I visited the CAG, three exhibitions were held: Corita Kent's "To Create is to Relate", Thomas Bewick's "Tale-pieces", and Federico Herrero's "Vibrantes".
This was a solo presentation.
(2011)
Using Grammatical Signals Suitable to Patterns of Idea Development
Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver
1. CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY
Federico Herrero
Thomas Bewick
Corita Kent
Gracey Mesina • 301115667 • FPA 160 • Fall 2011
2. CAG
555 Nelson Street, Vancouver
The Contemporary Art Gallery is
devoted to cultivate a setting that
explores and records the transforming
artistic practices as they are shaped
by social forces, while maintaining a
deep connection to the original place
and time of the work, and by fostering
dialogue and new understandings of
collective meanings and values.
3. Federico Herrero
Herrero (b. 1978) is an abstract painter
from Costa Rica. His work is characterized
by his use of interlocking geometric and
organic forms painted in bright colours.
He uses unconventional locations and
surfaces as his canvas for his large-scale
murals (similar to a graffiti artist), which
directly addresses the division between
art and social life, that challenges the
notion that art is a specialized commodity.
4. Vibrantes, commissioned by the CAG, is a window mural with its name derived from the “kinetic”
energy created by the overlapping and mixing colours of the vinyl. The energy is also
a reference to the dynamics of the work, in that its intensity, opacity, and saturation is constantly shifting in conjunction
with the unpredictable Vancouver weather. Essentially, the vibrancy of his work pulses with the energy of its urban context.
5. Thomas Bewick
Tale-pieces
Bewick (1753-1828) is an English wood
engraver, artist, and naturalist. The works
in Tale-pieces are from natural history books
that he illustrated for. These ornamental images
were usually placed in the empty spaces on the
bottom of the page or after a paragraph.
The exhibit requires the viewers to look
at his vignettes through a magnifying glass,
which shows his fine attention to detail, and his
(sometimes dark) sense of humour in use with
his wood engraving skills.
6. Corita Kent
T create is to relate
o
Kent (1918-1986) is a pop artist known for her brightly
coloured serigraph prints. She taught art since the 1950s
at the Immaculate Heart College in California and was
known as Sister Corita Kent until she left the order in
1968 when she moved to Boston to fully pursue her art.
Her teaching techniques were just as innovative as her
creations in that she taught her students different ways
of seeing, and was admired by other designers and artists
such as Charles and Ray Eames, and Saul Bass.
7. Kent mixes advertising slogans, song lyrics,
and poetry. This de-contextualizing of text is
juxtaposed by her layering and “cut and paste”
collaging.
Through her art, she expresses her spiritual,
social, and political beliefs (including topics on
racism, poverty, feminism, and desire for social
justice and peace during the Vietnam war).
Similar to Herrero, her works also assert the
continuum between daily life and art in that
it should not be separated from our
everyday experience