Althea Thauberger, Ecce Homo, 2011, metallic digital c-print, ed. 2/5 + II AP. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the artist, 2015.
Originally produced as a large-scale public art mural by the City of Vancouver, Althea Thauberger's Ecce Homo is a photograph inspired by classical painting and popular culture engaged with politics. Referencing Jacques-Louis David's 1793 Death of Marat, which depicts the death of a writer deeply involved in the politics of the French Revolution, as well as the locally based television drama Da Vinci's Inquest, the work's engagement of art/politics, real life/representation is indicative of Thauberger's artistic approach. The photograph features actor Nicholas Campbell positioned on an autopsy table. Campbell played the title role of real-life coroner and mayor Larry Campbell in Da Vinci’s Inquest and Da Vinci City Hall. Ecce Homo - which means behold the man - draws on a history of references from the condemnation of Christ to other contexts including the title of Nietzsche's autobiography. Thauberger's project is an allegory of the relationship of art, life and politics that encompasses multiple associations.
Althea Thauberger lives and works in Vancouver. Her internationally produced and exhibited work typically involves interactions with a group or community that result in performances, films, and videos, and offer provocative reflections of social, political, institutional and aesthetic power relations.
Carole Itter, Table of Contents, c. 1977-78, mixed media (wood, metal, ceramic, plastic). SFU Art Collection. Gift of the artist, 2015. Photo: Courtesy the artist.
Carole Itter's Table of Contents is one of the first assemblage works undertaken by the artist using found objects. Using a boxed framework, the wall-hung assemblage of collected and affixed objects includes numbers, hardware, tools, curio and other objects. Referencing the work of American artists Joseph Cornell and Louise Nevelson, particularly Nevelson's large-scale wooden totem-like wall works, Itter connects to a legacy of feminist practice, anti-capitalism and an interest in "natural" materiality
Carole Itter is a Vancouver based artist, writer and filmmaker. Her work has been widely exhibited and collected across Canada.
Lorna Brown, Reading, 1990/2015, photographs on mylar, surveyor's tripod, Plexiglas, speakers. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the artist, 2015. Photo: Blaine Campbell.
Lorna Brown's installation Reading pictures women's negotiation of private and public images and intellect through the perspectives of three readers: a woman obfuscated by the book she is reading (pictured as photographic enlargements), a male subject attempting to read a woman through her concealed book on public transit, and the instructions for a camera disguised as a book, which was used by women in public in the early twentieth century. Spatialized within the gallery, these three encounters - articulated visually, aurally and spatially - complicate the power plays of reading, looking, being read and looked at.
Lorna Brown is a Vancouver based artist, curator and writer. Her regionally and nationally recognized work has critically addressed constructions of femininity and desire in image culture, the politics of literacy, institutional manipulations of language, and civic and cultural publicness.
Stephen Waddell, Man in Car Powell Street, 2012, colour pigment print. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the artist, 2015. Photo: Courtesy the artist.
Man in Car Powell Street was shot on the street in front of Stephen Waddell's Vancouver studio and captured as an unstaged, found street photograph. Waddell's street photography examines the human figure in the contemporary, largely urban environment, which has been a preoccupation of many artists since the mid-nineteenth century. Waddell began his artistic career as a painter and now focuses on photography, sharing an interest in Jeff Wall's preoccupation with the continuity of painting's visual traditions and strategies in contemporary photographic practice. His works are better understood as pictures rather than photographs in that they draw as much from the history of painting as the history of photography.
Stephen Waddell lives and works in Vancouver. His work is internationally recognized and has been a critical voice in the discourse around a third generation of photography in Vancouver.
Roy Arden, The World as Will and Representation, 1991, archival/found photographs digitally printed. SFU Art Collection. Gift of John and Helen O’Brian, 2015.
Roy Arden’s diptych The World as Will and Representation positions found images side by side of differing scales: one of an erupting volcano and the other of a protest in a public square in which the fountain is running red. Arden has contributed significantly to Vancouver’s international reputation as a centre for photography-based contemporary art, particularly through his images of the urban environment that register the transformative effects of modernity on the everyday landscape. His multi-faceted practice includes photography, video and mixed media installation. In the 1980s he worked largely with archival images.
Roy Arden lives and works in Vancouver. His work is internationally exhibited and collected.
Terry Atkinson, Emma Decoy, 1987, mixed media on paper. SFU Art Collection. Gift of John and Helen O'Brian, 2015.
Terry Atkinson's Emma Decoy is a work on paper that refers to the Emma Lake artist workshops run by the University of Saskatchewan. Bringing in Clement Greenberg, Barnett Newman and others to Saskatchewan, it promoted a particular vein of modernist abstraction. Atkinson was a workshop leader in 1987. Using an image of the cabins at Emma Lake, a small blue monochrome, a high horizon line and a figurative male element, Atkinson's work needles the dominance of the Emma Lake modernist vision.
Terry Atkinson was the founder (with John Bowstead, Roger Jeffs and Bernard Jennings) of the group Fine-Artz in 1963, and (with David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell) of the group Art & Language from 1968-74, which were two of the most influential collectives in contemporary art. Art & Language’s activities were self-reflexive on the concept of art and promised a social base in shared conversation. Atkinson has exhibited under his own name since 1973. He teaches at the University of Leeds, UK.
Christos Dikeakos, x wáyxway / x' áy'xi, 1991, c-print, sandblasted glass, metal. SFU Art Collection. Gift of John and Helen O'Brian, 2015.
Christos Dikeakos' photographic series Sites and Place Names, shot in Vancouver, Saskatoon, Athens and Berlin, engages memories, histories and urban typologies within contemporary urban sites. His complex understanding of history, colonialism and representation is reflected in x wáyxway / x' áy'xi which depicts a view from Stanley Park looking north over Burrard Inlet to the mountains and the industry along the shoreline. The panoramic photograph depicts the site from a contemporary perspective and the sheet of glass that is placed over it has words sandblasted in English and Musqueam that convey how these sites were described and understood by the Musqueam First Nation prior to and during European settlement.
Christos Dikeakos lives and works in Vancouver. Since the late 1960s, his photographic practice has played an important role in the development of conceptual photography in Vancouver. His work has been nationally exhibited and collected.
Al Neil, Newton, 1986, mixed media on paper. SFU Art Collection. Gift of John and Helen O'Brian, 2015.
Al Neil's Newton is a mixed media work that reveals the artist's long-standing interest in geometry and laws of motion. Newton combines found images of the mathematician/philosopher Sir Isaac Newton (by Kneller), diagrams and book pages over which Neil has scrawled Newton's name and partially masked the images with splotches of black paint which connote Rorschach's tests and action painting.
Al Neil is a visual and performance artist, musician, writer and composer based in Vancouver. He is considered one of Canada's interdisciplinary artistic pioneers. His work is widely performed, exhibited and collected.
Thomas Ruff, 3-D New York (Bronx), 1998, photolithographs, ed. of 60. SFU Art Collection. Gift of John and Helen O'Brian, 2015.
Thomas Ruff's 3-D New York (Bronx) is a print edition that operates within the artist's interest in photography's grammar and structures. Ruff turned away from straight photography in the mid-1990s (and is very well known for his large-scale, passport-like portraits), and since then has worked largely with manipulated found imagery. The stereoscopic aerial images of an urban landscape - the Bronx - are presented together side-by-side without 3-D glasses. A comparative reading between the two images asks viewers to query the spatial framing and potential optical "pop" of 3-D that does not deliver.
Thomas Ruff lives and works in Düsseldorf. His work has been widely shown and collected internationally.
Allyson Clay, Double Self-Portrait, 2001 c-print on dibond aluminum, ed. 2/2 SFU Art Collection. Gift of the artist, 2015.
Allyson Clay’s large-scale photograph Double Self-Portrait depicts twinned images of the artist tossing books out of the windows of a modernist building, unburdening herself of certain histories of art, theory and psychoanalysis. Clay’s work has been critical in the development of a discourse around feminist visual art practices in Vancouver, and can be characterized as an ongoing attempt to synthesize the complex ideologies of feminism and painting.
Allyson Clay lives in Vancouver and has been a Visual Arts faculty member at SFU since 1988. Her work has been exhibited locally, nationally and internationally and with its focus on the urban female subject, can be considered in part as a response to the Vancouver photoconceptualist discourse.
Jin-me Yoon, Souvenirs of the Self (Postcard Series), 1991-2000, postcards. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the artist, 2015. Photo: Blaine Campbell.
Jin-me Yoon’s Souvenirs of the Self depicts the artist standing in the iconic Canadian settings of the Rocky Mountains. The humour of this project yields to more serious questions about who is and isn’t regarded as a natural citizen. The postcards were a result of being invited to Banff to do a work on the theme of travelling and territories. Attuned to issues around migration and belonging, Yoon is also interested in issues of sexual difference, and she uses her work as an opportunity to challenge stereotypical constructs that continue to permeate our culture.
Jin-me Yoon lives in Vancouver and has been a Visual Arts faculty member at SFU since 1992. Her work is recognized nationally and internationally. The intersections between identity and location have been a central theme in Yoon’s work and she has been an important voice in the development of a discourse around identity in visual art.