installation views

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Apparitions 

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23 August - 7 October 2018

closing reception: Thursday 27 September 6 - 9pm

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Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill

Motoko Ishibashi

Ursula Mayer

Douglas Watt

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Unit 17 is thrilled to announce Apparitions, a group exhibition of local and international artists who will shape the 2019 gallery program. The exhibition brings together four artists from Canada, Japan and the UK, whose work - spanning the last twelve years - uses history, appropriation and figuration to explore notions of memory, sexuality, social exchange and artificiality. 

 

Engaging in a range of processes - from painting, photography and sculpture - these artists transform common predispositions, taking on thoughts of the ghost - remaining energies, or leftovers - of cultural, historical and psychological space. Apparitions is the second of a series of exhibitions that considers the mechanization and industrialization of the body. SOOT (16 December 2017 - 21 January 2018) - which focused on new sculpture and performance from Vancouver - emerged as the first exhibition within this series. Out of ashes, we have ghosts. 

 

The exhibition considers the versatile potential of the body through its representation in art: as an idealized symbol, a reflection of contemporary attitudes or a suggestion of obliteration or absence. The works reimagine pre-existing objects and images - bodies of many folds and iterations - as they shift scale, material and perspective through continued framing, cropping and disruption. They render intimate perceptions of myth, aggression and docility, popular media culture, and dichotomies of alpha & beta sexualities.

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Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (b. 1979, Comox) is a Metis artist and writer from Vancouver, BC, located on unceded Musqueam, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Tsleil-Waututh territory. Hill’s sculptures and installations perform as both a material exploration of colour and form as well as an enquiry into concepts of land, property and economy. Her work has been exhibited at the Polygon Gallery, the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Sunset Terrace, and Gallery Gachet, Vancouver; SBC galerie d’art contemporain, Montreal; STRIDE gallery, Calgary; SOMArts, San Francisco and Get This! Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia.

 

Motoko Ishibashi (b. 1987, Nagasaki) is an artist currently based in the UK and Japan. She received an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London in 2015; completed her BFA at Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2013 and a BA in Aesthetics and Science of Arts in Philosophy at Keio University, Tokyo in 2010. Recent exhibitions include 2.00 at fig., Tokyo; écrin at La Plage, Paris; Collection n.7, Lyon Biennale at Interior and the collectors, Lyon; HYPOKEIMENON, en dessous du sang at Galerie Nadine Feront, Brussels and Guru Den, Bosse & Baum, London. 

 

Ursula Mayer (b. 1970, Ried im Innkreis) lives and works in London and Vienna. In 1996, she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and completed her MFA at Goldsmiths University, London in 2005. She was the 2014 recipient of the Derek Jarman Award for experimental film and the Otto Mauer Prize in 2007. Her work has been exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, London; SeMA Biennale Mediacity, Seoul; Moderna Museet, Stockholm & Malmö; Audain Gallery, Vancouver; Tramway, Glasgow; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunstverein Hamburg; ICA, London; SculptureCentre, New York; 21er Haus, Museum Belvedere, Vienna; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; 11th Baltic Triennial, CAC, Vilnius; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; TBA21, Vienna and Kunsthalle Basel.

 

Douglas Watt (b. 1990, St. Catharines) is an artist living and working in Vancouver’s Davie Village on the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Tsleil-Waututh. He received a Bachelor of Arts (Art History) from Carleton University, Ottawa and studied Criticism & Curatorial Practice at OCAD University, Toronto. Previously, he has curated exhibitions by Prynce Nesbitt at Niagara Artists Centre, St. Catharines; Michael Snow [Timed Images] at Greenbelt Gallery, Toronto and KAMLINKS at Skylight Gallery, Vancouver.