 Shannon Oksanen: "Spins", 2002 Hammertown Hammertown showcases an emerging generation of West Coast based Canadian artists, and is the first comprehensive and thematically related exhibition of their work realized outside Canada. The artists share a mutual interest in the use of commodities, popular media and everyday imagery. They employ techniques of transformation and rework materials, media and products into objects of personal and political significance. Taking its title from the novel Life, a User's Manual, by French author Georges Perec, the exhibition features works by Geoffrey Farmer, Brian Jungen, Luanne Martineau, Euan Macdonald, Myfanwy MacLeod, Damian Moppett, Shannon Oksanen and Kevin Schmidt. Geoffrey Farmer has created elaborate archives out of such pop cultural ephemera as ET, the extra-terrestrial, memorabilia and in "The Hunchback Kit", objects associated with Victor Hugo's novel "Notre-Dame de Paris". His working process alludes to the object's use value and often takes the form of props. Brian Jungen's reputation began with the production of Prototype for a New Understanding, 1999, a series of masks reminiscent of North West Coast native designs built from Nike running shoes. In his recent work Shapeshifter he constructed a whale skeleton out of cut-up plastic stacking lawn chairs. Euan Macdonald pursues the unconsidered and unexpected event. Through simple editing techniques, the mundane and prosaic gain heroic character. In "The Shadow's Path", Macdonald hired a helicopter to shoot a video image that follows the path of eclipse as the sun falls behind the earth. In "Two Lions", another slow motion video depicts a male and female lion in a California zoo. Myfanwy MacLeod's "Our Mutual Friend" is a sculpture of a man's leg, foot and arm carved from a block of wood. Referencing the traditions of folk artists and rural handicrafts, the carving concentrates on a big toe of the foot poking through a hole in the boot. This iconic hillbilly image is a common stereotype of North American rustic simplicity. Damian Moppett manufactures crude model dwellings out of cheap cardboard that are patterned on signature high modernist architecture. The sculptures are a play between modernist buildings and their child-like reinterpretation. Moppett is also showing a suite of documentary photographs of goats in an urban farm on the outskirts of Vancouver. Luanne Martineau's compulsive and laboriously produced sculptures and drawings combine an interest in early twentieth century cartoons – and their stark portrayals of race and class – with suggestively biomorphic, modernist forms. Martineau's "The German General" is a large, amorphous, and collapsible sculptural "pillow" manufactured from felt and stuffed with styrofoam beads. Shannon Oksanen's Spins is a looped, 16mm film projection. The subject is a figure skater endlessly practicing "spins", rhythmic and formalist exercises. Oksanen films her skater on a rink in front of a back drop of twinkling stars reminiscent of a theatrical stage, and utilizes the drift from theatre to cinema as a method of picturing a subject in a moment of disappearance and re-emergence into something new. Kevin Schmidt's "Long Beach Led Zep", 2002, is a self portrait in video of the artist playing Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven on a guitar while standing on a beach on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Schmidt utilizes the splendour of the outdoor set to counterpoise his rudimentary guitar ability. The work evokes a world of overwrought juvenile sentiment and fatalistic bombast. Ausstellungsdauer: 5.10. - 23.11.2002 Oeffnungszeiten: Mo-So 10 - 19 Uhr The Fruitmarket Gallery 45 Market Street Edinburgh, EH1 1DF Telefon: +44 131 225 2383 Fax +44 131 220 3130 www.fruitmarket.co.uk |
 |