https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/exhibitions/a-monochrome-journey
Category Archives: Works By Date
Exhibition: Evan Lee Cirage at Monte Clark
Evan Lee
Cirage
January 13th – February 10th, 2024
Opening reception, Saturday, January 13th, noon to 5pm
Monte Clark is pleased to present Cirage, an exhibition of new paintings, pictures, prints and sculptures by Evan Lee.
Cirage is the French translation for shoe polish, a waxy paste or liquid used to polish, shine and waterproof leather shoes.
Central to Evan Lee’s new body of work is an investigation into early photography, in particular Louis Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple, taken in 1838. The photograph is one of the earliest surviving daguerreotype plates. At the time the picture was taken the Boulevard would have been bustling with pedestrians and horse traffic. Due to the long exposure time only static figures could be recorded, in this case a shoe shiner and his customer at the corner of the street, who may possibly be the first humans captured in a photograph. This picture represents a significant step in the development of photography, as well as the inherent class struggles emerging through the industrialization of France and separation between the wealthy and working class. Evan Lee’s After Vue de Boulevard du Temple, 1938 by Louis Daguerre is a reproduction of this detail of Daguerre’s picture rendered in shoe polish in lieu of ink or paint.
Lee’s use of shoe polish examines a common “low value” everyday product as an artistic medium, which he applies using different processes such as screen printing, or with paintbrushes. Shoe polish is chemically similar to paint or an encaustic, and once applied remains fixed. The material adds both colour and shine to any surface, like a faux-finish or veneer which conceals the surface underneath. Often performed by marginalized workers, shoe shining represents a form of labor tied to class and economic status. Lee’s sculptures, Cameos depicting silhouetted figures carved out from tins of shoe polish draw attention to the workers.
Lee’s large-scale shoe polish paintings resemble iconic monochromatic paintings seminal to modern art of the 1950’s and 60s. This work considers tension between high art and low-class materials, pointing to the classism inherent in the economy of artistic production.
Evan Lee lives and works in Vancouver, BC. His first major solo exhibition Captures was held at the Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver in 2006, and included catalogue essays by Jeff Wall and Peter Culley. Since then, Lee has exhibited in numerous museums and institutions including the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Windsor, the Contemporary Art Gallery, the Surrey Art Gallery, the Richmond Art Gallery, the Confederation Centre for the Arts, the Liu Hai Su Art Museum, and at the Winnipeg Art Gallery as a Sobey Award Finalist in 2014. Lee’s work has been published in Artforum, Frieze, Canadian Art Magazine, Art on Paper, Border Crossings, Flash Art, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and other publications.
This work was made with partial support from the BC Arts Council.
Featured works, from top: Evan Lee, After ‘Vue de Boulevard du Temple’, 1938 by Louis Daguerre, 2023, screen print with shoe polish on watercolour paper, 15 x 11 in; Evan Lee, Cameo, 2023, homemade shoe polish, vintage shoe polish tins, 2-1/2 in. diameter.
Exhibition: Open Work (years from today) at CSA Space
Evan Lee
Open Work (years from today)
Exhibition Opening: November 2, 2023 at 7pm
Curated by Christopher Brayshaw
In his first solo exhibition at CSA Space since 2006, Vancouver artist Evan Lee presents Open Work (years from today), an installation of experimental lens-based, printed images.
Over the past 25 years, Lee has been producing works inside and outside of photography. During this time, Lee has always been interested in the people and places of his home in East Vancouver. However, his early works demonstrated a tenuous relationship with the depiction of human subjects and he opted instead to explore them through still life surrogates such ginseng roots and dollar store objects.
In particular, the motif of the elderly recurs in Lee’s conception of the city, as explored in his previous CSA Space installation, Manual Labour, and was also important in his own life, as exemplified by his large-scale photograph, Portrait of the Artist’s Grandmother. Although the city and its people have changed considerably in this time, this familiar figure remains the same.
Lee has explored the subject of elders through drawings, photographs, 3D modelling and 3D prints. In his latest exploration, Lee pairs photographs of old women with paper doilies. Comprising Open Work (years from today), these temporary printed images offer a meditation on the passage of time, reflecting the paradoxical nature of memories and observances: timeless yet fleeting, fragile yet enduring.
Evan Lee lives and works in Vancouver, BC. Recent public exhibitions include Forged at the Art Gallery at Evergreen, FUGAZI at Teck Gallery, SFU, Tyrannyat the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and Everything Under the Sun: In Memory of Andrew Gruft and Kids Take Over at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Lee is represented by Monte Clark Gallery.
CSA Space, 2414 Main St, Vancouver, BC
See Pulpfiction Books (2422 Main St.) for admission during regular business hours:
Mon-Sat 10am-7pm, Sundays and holidays 11am-7pm
Captives / Adamas 2021
In contrast to the “fake” diamonds used to produce Fugazi (2016), the gems pictured in Captives/Adamas (2020) are genuine diamonds of high quality and price. In these photographs, however, the diamonds appear in an unfamiliar form—they are uncut. Through extensive focus and exposure stacking—a macro-photography technique where limited depth-of-field requires areas of exposure and focus to be composited together—Lee captures these otherworldly rough gems as objects of great value that have yet to come into existence. This idea of the “yet-to-emerge” is reflected in the first half of the title, Captives, which refers to Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures, where partially carved figures emerge from rough, untouched marble. The second half points to the Greek origin of the word “diamond”: Adamas, meaning “invincible, indestructible and unyielding.” The duality produced by these two seemingly disparate words suggests the paradoxical values we hold in contemporary culture: captive, yet emergent; indestructible, yet unformed—manifesting in cultural obsessions with eternal youth and power. (Kate Henderson)
Open Work
Public Art/Exhibition: Evan Lee: Fugazi, Teck Gallery, May 11, 2019 – Apr 26, 2020
Photo by Blaine Campbell
Evan Lee: Fugazi Teck Gallery May 11, 2019 - Apr 26, 2020
Evan Lee's image-based practice takes up interdisciplinary considerations of vision and constructions of value through photography, painting and sculpture. In particular, Lees work examines the aesthetic and social consequences that occur in the evolution of images and imaging technology. His yearlong photo-based installation, Fugazi at the Teck Gallery, considers methods of image capture as they effect ways of seeing and how value is socially constructed. Fugazi begins from photographic scans of cubic zirconia, a relatively inexpensive crystalline form of synthesized material that often stands in for diamonds.[1] The images are captured in detail and enlarged to a scale that transforms the gemstones internal appearance to one that magnifies the distortion and fracture of light. Capturing is integral to photography and Lees image capture opens up space for the questioning of optic purity, of the cubic zirconia and of the image itself (as the act of enlargement results in a loss detail). The resulting abstract patterns and refracted colours in Fugazi present a destabilizing kaleidoscopic effect, similar to sunlit stained-glass windows. Because of low cost, durability, purity, and visual likeness, cubic zirconia has been seen as a potential solution to the controversy surrounding the rarity and valuation of diamonds. However, the diamond monopoly persists in perpetuating and fabricating worth through other cultural measures. Fugazi is a fictionalized slang term for a counterfeit gemstone.[2] The captures of the tiny gemstones are scaled up and bisected for the Teck Gallery to fenestral proportions, and in their installation begin to share a language of architecture, landscape and development. In dialogue with the Teck Gallerys view overlooking Burrard Inlet and North Vancouvers coastal mountains, Fugazi is an intervention in the edifice, mimicking and making strange aspects of building and its design, akin to a faceted window illuminated from behind. Conjuring spaces of worship, the installation speaks to economies of belief including religion, education and capitalism. Rising like mineral suns, Fugazi positions the images along a horizon line that connects with our daily planetary rotations while also drawing lines to the extraction industries and the appetite for development that Vancouver is built on.[3] Fugazi carries an open-ended resonance in relation to value and land. Extraction economies are increasingly being challenged in this moment of late capitalism where climate change is an oppressive force and a turn to renewal and alternate solutions are called for. Our relation to land as a site of colonization is showing its irreversible damage to cultural and environmental ecologies. In its consideration of the complexity of vision, Fugazi asks us to unpack how we understand value in the image and its referents. Lee is a Vancouver based artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. He received his MFA from the University of British Columbia. Exhibitions include Libby Leshgold Gallery; Winnipeg Art Gallery; Richmond Art Gallery; Kamloops Art Gallery; Vancouver Art Gallery; Capture Festival; SFU Gallery; Contemporary Art Gallery; Presentation House Gallery; Contact Photography Festival; Le Mois de la Photo Montreal; Liu Hai Su Museum; and Confederation Centre. Lees work has been featured in Border Crossings, Flash Art International, Lapiz International Art Magazine, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Canadian Art, and Art on Paper. He was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Prize in 2014 and has undertaken public art commissions. His work is represented by Monte Clark Gallery.
Curated by Melanie O'Brian http://www.sfu.ca/galleries/teck-gallery/EvanLee-Fugazi.html.html TECK GALLERY SFU Harbour Centre, 515 West Hastings Street Vancouver BC
Public Art/Exhibition: Double Meaningless, No.3 Road Art Columns, Richmond
The City of Richmond invited me to mentor emerging Richmond Artists Crystal Ho and Chad Wong to produce public artworks on the theme of Migration. I wanted to try something a little different and work with text and language. My project, Double Meaningless, 2018 is a response to the ongoing debate in Richmond over signage and English language requirements.
https://www.richmond.ca/culture/publicart/no3rdartcolumns.htm
Cirage / Polish Paintings, 2021-2024
above installation images by Byron Dauncey
Polish Paintings (2021) continues Lee’s trajectory of experimental paintings made using nontraditional materials. Common household shoe polish, a waxy substance that produces an effect similar to oil paint, here creates a series of glossy veneers that reference the high status of the “black square monochrome painting” during the modern art era of the 1950s and ’60s. Such historical paintings continue to fetch millions of dollars at auction, and Lee urges us to consider the value we place on objects and artworks through these substitutes that reference the occupation of shoe shiners and the classism inherent in the economy of artistic production. (Kate Henderson)
Exhibition: The Pacific, Libby Leshgold Gallery
The Pacific
October 21, 2017 to January 14, 2018
Exhibition curated by Cate Rimmer
Opening Reception: Friday October 20, 2017 at 7:00pm
The Pacific, the inaugural exhibition at the Libby Leshgold Gallery, brings together artists from countries in and around the Pacific Ocean.
The exhibition considers the Pacific Ocean as a shared and connected space. It explores the idea that although the Pacific is an immense body of water there is a strong sense that it is a space of connection between peoples that live beside or are surrounded by it — that it brings people together rather than separates them. In contrast, much of the narrative around the Atlantic Ocean has historically perceived it as a space of distancing and division.
In thinking about the Pacific Ocean as a shared space we can consider the histories and contemporary concerns as linked while also being specific to each place. The show will include works that address environmental issues such as rising sea levels, nuclear contamination, the impact of industry and the built environment on the ocean. It will also consider human migration and the experiences of migrants. Finally it will touch upon our deep personal and spiritual bonds to the waters of the Pacific.
Some of the work in the exhibition include excerpts from Charles Lim’s Sea State, which was shown at the 56th Venice Biennale at the Singapore Pavilion, Paula Schaafhausen’s Ebbing Tagaloa, an installation made of sand and coconut oil, and Khvay Samnang’s Air, a video made in the Fukushima Prefecture shortly after the nuclear disaster occurred. Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan will be making a large site-specific installation in the gallery in the weeks leading up to the opening.
Curated by Cate Rimmer, The Pacific extends the research begun in the multi-part exhibition The Voyage, or Three Years at Sea. It will include the work of Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan (Philippines), Taloi Havini (Papua New Guinea), Charles Lim (Singapore), Genevieve Robertson (Canada), Jane Chang Mi (Hawaii), Khvay Samnang (Cambodia), Simryn Gill (Malaysia/Australia), Michael Drebert (Canada), Paula Schaafhausen (Samoa), Kalisolaite ‘Uhila (Tonga/New Zealand), Evan Lee (Canada), Beau Dick (Canada). There will be a series of talks and events scheduled around the opening and during the run of the exhibition that will include artists, migrant communities, social historians and scientists.
http://libby.ecuad.ca/exhibitions/2017/the_pacific.html
