Art
Wednesday, 08 April 2009 02:04
Written by Berwin Song and Caroline Welles

---

m97 and Eastlink offer exhibitions of paired photography

It's always hard to ignore m97 Gallery's group exhibitions – even when they're not trying. Their latest exhibit, a collection of works from 14 of the gallery's artists under the heading Parallax, came together "by accident," according to gallery director Steve Harris. The original idea, he explains, was to have a simple showcase for a number of m97 artists – providing a bit of breathing space after their painstakingly selected Exquisite Corpse exhibition. Instead, as the gallery went about looking through their catalog, their basic showcase turned into a fully-fledged thematic concept, offering pairs of similar works from different periods in each artist's career.

Of the 14 artists represented in this exhibit, Harris takes pleasure in explaining the circumstances of each pairing. He points to Greg Girard's 'House on Huangpi Lu #1,' a striking image of a solo free-standing house in the midst of a recently demolished street, then gestures to 'Sailor's Home, Vancouver' from 1973, one of Girard's earliest works, commenting: "There's over 30 years between those photos – but the themes are still the same. That's amazing."

Certainly, while not every artist included has such dramatic, career-spanning connections, there's still much to marvel over. Nadav Kandor manages to find similar compositions along the Yangtze River and a Los Angeles highway, while Michael Wolf's dedication to urban density is expressed in three different works. And Han Lei's portrait shots remain provocative, whether candidly in 1989 or staged in 2007.

The exhibition has been extended to the 15th of the month, after which the gallery will begin to prepare for a different type of pairing: contrasting solo exhibitions of Lu Jun and Sun Ji, opening on the 18th. Likewise, Eastlink Gallery's Transposing the Common exhibition combines the work of two photographers, one from Europe (Dutch photographer Hans Wilschut) and one from China (Shao Wenhuan of Hangzhou), and displays their pictures from opposite ends of the planet. Wilschut, having plenty of experience traveling far and wide, offers portraits depicting the often-ugly effects of urban development and globalization – notably, however, his portrayal of Shanghai's Lupu Bridge is both beautiful and a bold statement of urbanization.

In contrast (and in black and white), Shao Wenhuan travels to various historical sites around the world and photographs tourists. Believing that "the conception of history is more important than history itself," Shao prefers to focus on the beauty found in tourism. Pairing such disparate visions may not provide much common ground, but gallery director Charlotte Vurpas offers: "They are both taking pictures of common scenes… [as well as] both traveling outside homelands to catch a view from the outside." Hence: Transposing the Common.

< Prev		Next >