PLACED AND FOUND...............organized by The Crying Room, hosted by Access Gallery, December 2006

Andrea Nunes
Curtis Grahauer
Colleen Heslin
Lisa Cinar
Julia Feyrer
Christian Regester

Opening Friday December 2nd 8pm @
Access Artist Run Centre Vancouver, BC

Placed and Found is a two-part group exhibition of found objects presented as art, as well as, projects of publicly placed objects and ideas, taking form in a variety of media including photographs, screen prints and video. 

Referencing the basic concept of graffiti and using methods that are both subtle and re-locatable, the ‘placed’ component of this exhibition looks at the intentional dispersal of art works into public space while avoiding the politics inherent to permanent methods of public expression.  Removing objects from public space and manipulating their context, the ‘found’ works afford the viewer an intimate glimpse of the lives of random objects and anonymous persons, generating questions surrounding issues of public consumption of information and individual privacy.

Andrea Nunes’ Invaders series consist of enlarged found photographs, which depict colourful ‘poofs’—actually mold growing on the original prints—hovering in natural landscapes and domestic interiors.  These invading subjects play a poignant joke on both the viewer and unknown photographer standing as a reminder of how easily memory can be clouded. 

Curtis Grahauer’s on-going project Bookmarks is the dissemination of small paper review cards bearing both his name and opinion of the book in which it is included, functioning as both a review and a proliferation of his persona into public space. 

Colleen Heslin displays Anonymous Submission, a home video that was submitted to the Crying Room in 2003 by a young woman residing in the Downtown Eastside.  Consisting of candid moments from this woman’s life encompassing the month of January 1999, the video acts as documentation of the line between experimentation and addiction, presenting a chilling yet mundane documentation of social decline, from Vancouver's late nineties party/rave scene, hinting at a development into the current methamphetamine crisis. 

Lisa Cinar’s Nestling Project places hand-made silk screens of birds on fabric into public spaces as misplaced or unclaimed treasures, referencing the Situationist’s theories of 'unitary urbanism’ and the idea of shaping the city through play and adventure. 

In The News, a video piece by Julia Feyrer, a pile of newspapers are animated by an unseen device which causes the pile to shift and groan like a lethargic tornado, giving the ephemeral literature of the inanimate newspapers an absurd physical presence. 

Christian Regester's Vancouver to Denver and Queen E. from Sky to Sea are attempts to bring subjectivity to the practice of landscape painting and to record the median dividing public and private space.  In the former he has documented a road trip by recording his car's bug kill on a canvas mounted on the vehicle’s grille, and in the latter he has modified a tree with charcoal to record a breezy Sunday afternoon on paper.

This exhibition has been organized by Colleen Heslin and hosted by Access Artist Run Centre