AHA Media

A Flickering light in the heart of darkness

Multimedia art show opens in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside

Vancouver, BC—In the heart of Vancouver’s infamous Downtown Eastside, the InterUrban Gallery opens Far, Up Close on February 12 for the duration of the Winter Games. The show is made up of a number of multi-media works, providing a flickering counterpoint to the darkness, real and over-hyped, surrounding it.

• Where: 1 East Hastings St. (Google map)
• When: February 12 to March 21, Gallery Hours: Wed to Sun, 12 to 5pm; Window Projections: dusk to dawn

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“The media makes the Downtown Eastside out to be such a dark place,” says artist Christoph Runne. “In some ways, that is true. But this is also a place of community and people with stories to tell. We wanted to show that.”

Below is a photo of one of Christoph Runne’s portraits

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Far, Up Close includes works by Chris Welsby, Christoph Runne, Faith Moosang and Monique Mees
Chris Welsby’s Time After, a five-monitor new media landscape, is neither a movie, nor a photograph. It takes high-speed communications technology and slows it down to planetary speed. Revealing hitherto unnoticed atmospheric shifts and subtle changes in light and color, it turns the city into a landscape and places human activity within the larger time scale of the natural world.

Christoph Runne’s Portraits combines classical portraiture with overt allusions to Dutch masters, turn-of –the-century anthropological photography and police mug shots. Projected on the gallery’s windows, Portraits creates a spectral permanence for the residents of Vancouver’s most disputed neighbourhood.

Faith Moosang and Christoph Runne’s film installation, The Blair Bush Project, looks at the glamourization of warfare and suggests that there is a correlation between beauty and horror.

Monique Mees’ photographic series Specimen Plates exposes the visual culture of medicine by addressing the historical use of cinema in medical science to analyze, regulate and reconfigure the transient and uncontrollable human body.

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ARTIST BIOS

Chris Welsby

Chris Welsby is a graduate of the Experimental Media Department at the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London UK. He is currently Professor of Film and Digital Media at Simon Fraser University Vancouver and a member of ICICS (Institute for Computing, Information, and Cognitive Systems) at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Showing internationally since the early 1970s, his work has ranged across several media, but always concentrating on this central theme: how do we see ourselves in relation to the natural world and how should we position ourselves and our technologies within it?

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Christoph Runné is a Vancouver-based experimental film, video, and installation artist. Through his work, he explores the unhidden yet seemingly invisible world around us. He creates visual tone poems with a humanitarian heartbeat whose minimalist and impressionistic methodology contradicts the complex human conditions with which Runné engages.

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Faith Moosang graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and has received her MFA from Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. Her work, while largely based in photography, has also included installations using video and film. She has shown in group and solo exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Europe. She is fixated on the constructed visuality of warfare and its mediation to and by the public at large.

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Monique Mees graduated with honors from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1987. She pursued a scholarship in Germany at the Staatliche Der Bildenden Kunste, Karlsruhe, where she studied painting and has since developed a multi-interdisciplinary practice.  Mees has  received numerous cultural grants from both the Canada Council and the BC Art Council for her work, which has been shown both nationally and internationally.