The Vancouver Art Gallery presentsThe Distance Between You and Me 3 Artists from Vancouver, Los Angeles and Guadalajara an exhibition on views eptember 24, 2011 to January 22, 2012.
Gonzalo Lebrija, The Distance Between You and Me 15 (detail), 2009. Lamda print. Courtesy the Artist and Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris.
The Distance Between You and Me presents the work of three notable contemporary artists from Vancouver, Los Angeles and Guadalajara. Thematically, the exhibition revolves around the ideas of location and dislocation, not only in the geographical sense, but also in terms of psychological location. Vancouver-based artist Isabelle Pauwels uses video and found photographs that combine images from her home in suburban Vancouver with home movies made by her grandfather during his family’s time in the Belgian Congo. The temporal and geographic disjunction produces a remarkable uneasiness, binding social and political history, location to medium and memory and family relations.
Here and Elsewhere a two-channel video installation by Kerry Tribe, presents a charming conversation between a father and young daughter. Asked to speak about time, space, memory and being, the daughter evokes a sense of melancholy and dislocation that cannot be mended with critical thinking. In the arid Los Angeles landscape that appears and disappears throughout their conversation, their resolutely British accents seem oddly out of place.
The Distance Between You and Me by Guadalajara artist Gonzalo Lebrija includes four 16-mm films, each depicting the artist running away from the viewer as fast as he can. Light and landscape discernment of the receding figure, creating a visually mesmerizing and disturbing image in the same time. The viewer is left to wonder if they are the cause of this retreat, or if they should join the artist and abandon their own location.
Exhibition microsite: http://projects.vanartgallery.bc.ca/the_distance/