Immigration and Domination, Landscape: For the Birds

How Soon is Now is currently showing at The Vancouver Art Gallery, featuring contemporary works of over thirty artists from British Columbia. Each piece is from local artists, but the ideas behind them are not limited to local issues. Many of these artists have displayed the effect of the globalized world within their local artworks.

Abbas Akhavan

Abbas Akhavan was born in Tehran Iran, but has been living in Canada for thirteen years, currently residing in Vancouver. His work entitled “Landscape: For the Birds” is an intriguing piece that explores the issues of immigration. There is nothing installed, instead the viewer is directed to the gallery window where they are instructed to listen to the starlings outside. As Vancouverites we may hear these starlings everyday but probably know very little about their history. Starlings are originally from Asia and Europe but sometime in the 19th century they were introduced to Canada and began to take over. Starting off with only ninety birds, their numbers are currently at 200 million. Starlings can easily adapt to urban life and nest anywhere. They are a particularly aggressive species of bird that are known for pushing other birds out of their nests. This fierce competitive nature usually results in them taking over from the once dominant local bird species.

By pointing to the viewer in the direction of these starlings, Akhavan is conjointly pointing out Canada’s own history of immigration. During the gold rush of 1890 people emigrated from Europe and Asia in vast numbers. These newcomers quickly built homes and drove out the native tribes. Comparable to starlings, these immigrants quickly took over and became the dominant ones.

Click here to hear 

European Starling sound

“Landscape: For the birds” has successfully taken the global issue of immigration (of people and of birds) into a very localized area of the Vancouver Art Gallery. It shows how even a work that involves listening outside a window in Vancouver can point to worldwide issues.

by Kathryn Schmidt

 

 

Related Reviews: Music, Global Art Database, Exhibition, Vancouver Art Gallery

How Soon Is Now

“How Soon Is Now” is an exhibition that is happening now until May 3^rd, 2009 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The exhibition introduces selected artists from the province of British Columbia whose work utilizes range of forms such as sculpture, painting, video, audio installation work and more.

In one part of the gallery, a series of works that are bizarre yet at the same time eye pleasing, is Brendan Lee Saish Tang’s Manga Ormolu. Tang, born in Dublin and raised in Nanaimo BC, links his interest in hybridity to his family background, which includes a number of generations of ethnic intermarriage and intercontinental migration across India, China, Trinidad, Ireland and Canada.

 

Brendan Tang (in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery)

Manga Ormolu version 3.0-b

Manga Ormolu enters the dialogue on contemporary culture, technology, and globalization through the relationship between ceramic tradition (using the form of Chinese Ming dynasty vessels) and techno-Pop Art. The futuristic update of the Ming vessels recalls the 18th century French gilded ormolu, where historic Chinese vessels were transformed into curiosity pieces for aristocrats. But here, robotic prosthetics inspired by anime (Japanese animation) and manga (the beloved comics and picture novels of Japan) subvert elitism with the accessibility of popular culture (Brendan Tang—Artist’s Website).

The title “How Soon Is Now” evokes one characteristic of the work in the exhibition: a sense of immediacy that speaks to the present moment (19^th issue of Glance, news and event of the Vancouver Art Gallery). Through developed technology, it is un-questionable that the world is coming closer. Hence, Tang’s work flawlessly fits with the title of the exhibition and just like his background he has created work that mirrors the hybridization as a cultural effect of globalization.

 

Raymond Boisjoly—Expanding Fields. Christmas lights and wooden construction.

Wood and lights compose Raymond Boisjoly’s Beginnings and Latecomers, a unique hybrid of cultural ideas.  Made of yellow cedar, the sculpture is adorned by Christmas lights of different colours.  The lights form to outline figures similar to those found on totem poles.  This mixture of West Coast Native symbolism with Christian-based tradition evokes a strange juxtaposition, creating an odd, desecrated version of a totem pole.  

Boisjoly offers a unique translation of local Aboriginal tradition and culture. His representation of a totem pole, bright lights and all, is one for the modern, market-oriented world.  Today, artists are expected to go beyond their local art communities and serve and appeal to a more global market.  I see Boisjoly’s work as a critique of this idea, bringing to the viewer’s attention how Native culture has become a cheap commodity.  Aboriginal icons and beliefs have been appropriated time and again in order to make money in the name of celebrating local art tradition.  This is at the expense of true Native culture, however, as traditions are boxed up into packaged products for the mass consumer.

 

Noah Becker in the studio. Photo Big Tiny Smalls

Noah Becker’s piece entitled, Dysfunctional Landscape, is currently being featured at the “How Soon Is Now”.  This artist’s work is labelled as “commenting on contemporary culture.”  Becker’s, Dysfunctional Landscape, consists of a mountain structure broken down with levels of several tiers, containing both objects and human figures.  This frame provides the piece with a downward motion, containing an end when the bottom of the work is reached.  In the depiction, objects appear to be passed and shared.  Some are left on the floor, while others are in use.  These individual abstract fragments include a person with a marionette puppet and the act of building in progress.  While all these individual identities are presented in the piece, so are segregated entities. 

The notion of globalization is here evident.  Individuals choose to partake as consumers in the shared concepts and notions of cultures outside of their own, even if they are not aware of their involvement.  Together people are building a universal point of recognition; however humans are still members of their personal culture.  The scattered objects represent the notion that there is no infinite answer to the implications of globalization.  Cultural overlap exists, however no one is quite sure how to encompass identity into a single definition.  In other words, the lack of certainty of the meaning and repercussions of globalization is represented.

Other Artists in the exhibition:

Jackson 2bears, Abbas Akhavan, Sonny Assu, Cedric, Nathan and Jim Bomford, Aaron Carpenter, Hadley+Maxwell, Antonia Hirsch, Allison Hrabluik, Instant Coffee, Christian Kliegel, Germaine Koh, Laiwan, Kristi Malakoff, Kyla Mallett, Luanne Martineau, Damian Moppett, The Music Appreciation Society, Lucy Pullen, Marina Roy, Samuel Roy-Bois, Carol Sawyer, Kevin Schmidt, Kathy Slade, Ken Singer, Mark Soo, Erica Stocking, Dan Starling, Kara Uzelman, Holly Ward, Paul Wong, Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky.

 

Next Talk: Pleased To Meet You: Socialibility and Art Thursday, March 26, 7pm In the Gallery Panelists: Abbas Akhavan, Instant Coffee, Laiwan and Holly Ward; Moderator: Lorna Brown With: PDA for your PDA (Public Display of Affection for your Personal Digital Assistant) Laiwan will present this participatory event as a complement to the panel. Bring your PDA. 

Jen Lee, Matthew Sy and Melissa Assalone

Related Reviews: Society, Global Art Database,Visual Art, Exhibition, Vancouver Art Gallery

The babel jungle

Walt Disney was a firm believer in utopias.  In all of his animated movies he strived to create lands that were full of harmony, acceptance and love.  One classic example is The Jungle Book (1967), a movie about a boy who is raised by wolves.  Both he and all the animals can talk to one another and more or less get along.  But what’s more significant than the utopian plots of Disney movies is their attempt at reaching global audiences.  Among many other movies, The Jungle Book was translated into twenty-four languages and distributed across the world. 

Thirty-five years after this movie was released, Pierre Bismuth (a French contemporary artist) decided to investigate Disney’s so-called ‘universality’ further.  Bismuth examined every translation of The Jungle Book and decided which character would best fit with each language.  For example, he decided that the patrolling elephants would speak German.  Except for the elephant general’s wife who would speak French, alluding to when France and Germany worked together in WWII.  He also purposely put Latin languages next to Semite languages in reference to issues in Palestine. 

In this video-installation for Manifesta 4 entitled The Jungle Book Project (2002, video on plasma screen), Bismuth transformed this childhood tale into a tower of Babel.  When God made everyone speak a different language, they could no longer understand one another enough to finish building their tower to heaven.  And when Bismuth made each of the nineteen characters speak nineteen different languages, he achieved a similar effect.  Nobody can understand one another within the movie, nor can those watching.  Both the viewer and the characters in the movie become isolated by which languages they speak.  “By mixing the languages in only one film,” says Bismuth in an interview, “you transform something that should be understandable by each of us into something that is incomprehensible to everybody.” 

Bismuth is pointing out that although we live in a globalized world, we are far from being in a utopia.  Movie companies like Disney may try and push their ideals onto other countries, but we are still divided and isolated by our languages and cultures. 

Kathryn Schmidt 

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