Text from the original 2003 Brochure by Portia Prigert

Quebec Artists Eric Lamontagne and Luce Pelletier consider the fast-evolving terrain between art and science. It is rich territory to explore at a time when scientists are altering conceptions of nature by creating everything from cloned sheep to square melons through genetic engineering and new reproductive technologies. the far-fetched conjectures of science fiction conjectures of science fiction a few decades ago, these new developments create both wonder and anxiety in the public. Lamontagne and Pelletier play with this uneasy fascination, questioning the limits of scientific intervention in the natural world with a whimsical humour that challenges conventional expectations.

Lamontagne uses role reversal in his work - humans become the species and are photographed, catalogued and displayed like insects in the glass cases of natural history museums. He manipulates in detail each miniature portrait according to its physical characteristics to create groupings that reference how humans reference the ways humans categorize animals. once mounted on the wall, these creatures can be viewed with a magnifying glass. Each is carefully labelled. Newborns are classified as Homo Larvae, while older specimens are Homo Chrysalids. Hairy people become Homo pilus while those wearing glasses are Homo parasites. Lamontagne calls these works “degenerate portraits” and presents each specimen with closed eyes to give the impression of artificial hibernation. In another twist, the artist houses crickets in small boxes, ostensibly as a portable interpretive audio guide to the exhibition.

Lamontagne is also interested in how animals see and has translated scientific research on vision via the medium of photography using different lenses, lights, angles and filters. Ants, for instance, cannot. Cats have remarkable vision in near darkness but see colour with less intensity than people. for each specifies, Lamontagne poses in a white lab coat in the guise of a ‘crazy scientist’ and photographs himself as he imagines the animal might see him.

For her part, Pellitier references debates over genetically modified foods and cloning, creating biomorphic fantasies, hand-made consumer products and altered agricultural landscapes. “I question science and the received wisdom upon which we base our knowledge of life,” says Pelletier. “I also question our relationship with particular objects, their familiarity and banality. I choose everyday objects to awaken curiosity and encourage new ways of looking at them.” In this exhibition, she juxtaposes photographs of a pumpkin field at various stages of the growing season with the fruit of a strange harvest - shoes and boots that appear as if sculpted from the epicarp of pumpkins.

There is an unreal quality to these items, which are made from mixed media materials and resemble pumpkins. Yet, just as they are something entirely different. They are magical as if they have materialized from a fairy tale with an unimagined history all their own. Pellitier hopes her work prompts viewers to question modern agricultural practices which have become, in her words, “dubious science” in the age of genetic engineering.

Portia Priegert was a director of the Alternator Gallery of Contemporary Art.

Eric Lamontagne has a Bachelor in Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montreal and a Bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Quebec in Montreal. He has solo exhibitions in Montreal, Tokyo and throughout Quebec and has participated in group exhibitions in Japan, Belgium, Holland and Quebec. He lives in Montreal.

check out his website here.

Lucy Pelletier’s Bio:

Our relationship with nature is dependent on the conjunction of individual perspectives, centuries of experience, contemporary thought. Nowadays, one cannot think about the wilderness without also thinking about its conservation; one cannot consider agriculture without also recalling industrialization and its consequences. One can no longer talk of beauty without suspecting illusion, genetic modification, domestication. 

My work is inspired by these contradictory perceptions. I create hybrid objects which inspire a fresh view of the natural world. In so doing I try to update our perception of nature so that we accept the urgent need for a reconciliation between mankind and the other kingdoms with which we share our universe, as well as for a greater acceptance of our shared accountability.

The equilibrium of our ecosystems depends on this harmonious cohabitation between living things. I propose an intimate look at living that asks us to sixteen our shared future.

Check out Luce’s website here.

Text by Portia Priegert from the original 2003 Brochure

Keithe Langergarber and Atafeh Shojaie both journey into memories of the place, exploring the unstable terrain at the shifting crossroads of culture and geography. Theirs is an evolving landscape refracted by the prism of time and coloured by personal experience.

The impetus for both artists has roots in the personal. for Langergarber, it’s a childhood in the smelter town of Trail B.C, and firsthand experience of the landscape not as a stui of romantic grandeur but as an ongoing process of ruination and reclamation. For Shojaie, it’s a childhood in Iran and her subsequent experience of Western freedoms.

Langergarber focuses his artistic practice on abandoned industrial sites in British Columbia, exploring locations as disparate as a crumbling irrigation system in Fintry, a former cement factory at Bamberton and historic mines in the West Kootenays. He combs through old newspapers and dusty maps in small-town museums and collects artifacts from remote sites for exhibition. His history is not the popularised version of cultural themes parks but raw and often mysterious fragments that evoke less familiar realities. “For me, the inherent imagery of found artifacts suggests the traces of human industry embedded in the permanence of a relentless landscape,” says Langergarber. “the collecting of objects is the basis for a scrutiny of places and history that sifts through the strata of time, looking for evidence of social, cultural, and political change.”

For this exhibition, Langergarber explored an abandoned Chinese migrant farm on the Musqueam reserve beside the Fraser River in Vancouver. during his research, Langergarber discovered that Chow Chee, a market gardener who leased the five-acre parcel in the 1930s, had gone to court for the payment of $34.70 in property taxes levied by the municipality. He lost his court appeal and became the first non-native living on the reserve to be assessed for taxes by the city of Vancouver. This issue, unearthed by Langergarber after he began exploring the site, reverberates with current debates over aboriginal land rights. indeed, modern-day tenants on the Musqueam land went to the Supreme Court of Canada, successfully challenging the band’s attempt to increase their rent.

Shojaie’s interest in cultural history is driven by her experience of moving to Canada with her family at the age of 10. Her work draws from experiences in bot Iran and Canada, exploring identity through fragmented and layered images. She exposes the personal, lifting the veil on memories covered by the swirling sands of time. Her esthetic lines are not in the dense massing of artists presented by Langergarber but in a more spartan juxtaposition of ephemera. Photographic self-portraits on glassine layered with Farsi text and Persian rug motifs transferred onto tea bags become a search to unite present and past lives

Both Langergarber and Shojaie can be compared to archeologists who excavate the past while referencing the present. Poetic and expressive, their creative play with memory and place blends the ‘then and there’ with the ‘here and now’ to offer insight into often-hidden or unofficial cultural histories.

Portia Priegert was the director of the Alternator Centre for the Contemporary Arts.

Keith Langergraber received his BFA from the University of Victoria and his MFA from the University of British Columbia. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group shows in galleries in Canada, the United States, and Asia since 1995. He has received many grants and awards for his work on the leading edge of Canadian Art, including being nominated for the Sobey Award in 2009. Keith has taught at the University of British Columbia, Emily Carr University, and North Island College. In 2005 he was selected to represent Emily Carr at the Canadian Art Colleges Collaborative Banff Residency, Media and Visual Arts. His art work grows from an interest in social, cultural, and political change found through scrutiny of a selected site. His exhibitions consist of the accumulation and reconstitution of information through the peeling back of layers of the vernacular landscape.

Check out his website here: https://keithlangergraber.com/

Atefeh graduated from UBC Okanagan in 2002 with a Bachelors degree in  fine Art. She began her makeup career as a visual artist where her strong eye for color theory, shapes and textures validated her skills and encouraged her to pursue her career in the arts.

Her love for creating beauty launched her Makeup Artist career at Estee Lauder in 2002, and two years later she joined the team of MAC Cosmetics.  Her 11 years with MAC helped develop her creative eye and techniques in the makeup world, while keeping her current with all the latest trends worldwide. After moving  to Vancouver Atefeh began to develop her hair styling skills by working at the Blo Bar.

Atefeh continues to maintain a strong and passionate drive for the industry, not to mention the love of creating beautiful fresh new work. She brings a level of professionalism, attention to detail, and enthusiasm to every job. Over the years Atefeh has gained her expertise at Fashion, editorial, commercials and TV series. Here work has been featured in magazines such as Vogue Italia, Wedluxe, Reach, and Fresh. 

Fashion clients include: Bootlegger, Sympli, Mia Melon, Noelle F, and The Sleep Shirt. As well as companies such as Air Canada, ET Canada, Vancouver Tourism, and the Vancouver 2010 Olympics(CTV). 

To see more of Atefeh’s work, check out here website here: http://www.atefeh.ca/#!/page/492390/home

This passage, written by Deborah Proskow, is directly excerpted from the 2003 exhibition brochure.

By changing the scale of something that is small and familiar, it can be rendered suddenly strange, alien and potentially threatening. Scale, a proportional measurement between things, implies that larger is stronger, more powerful and in control whereas smaller is weaker, more vulnerable and at mercy of the larger. In the photoworks of British artists Clare Charnley, Penny McCarthy and Alexa Wright, and the multi-media installation work of Vancouver artist Fae Logie, natural phenomena such as earthworms, cobwebs, rats and waterscapes are presented as larger than normal and hence ominous. While exaggerated images can seem humorous, these elicit discomfort of folklore, fairy tales, dreams and nightmares.

Addressing a cultural fascination with fear, Charnley, McCarthy and Wright present their subjects out of context. What was considered manageable and properly in place has burgeoned out of control. Wright’s enormous earthworms emerge from hidden realms to confront human space and scale. Of her work Blind Flesh, Wright states,

“These blind, but sensuous creatures suggest an intelligence of the flesh which precedes, or circumvents, the intellect".” That human intellect cannot match unfathomable natural forces forms a premise for stories such as Moby Dick.

McCarthy’s magnified cobwebs allude to darkness, disuse and the decrepitude of deserted places. there are connotations of death, crypts and haunted houses. In movies, cobwebs are signifiers of imminent contact with phantoms, of trespassing upon a resting place and disturbing the dead. McCarthy has collected some 200 images from gardens, under beds and inside cupboards and sheds.

Imaginatively, these growths suggest unknown activity in secretive spaces that have taken on a life of their own. This effect is eerily heightened in McCarthy’s stark black-and-white photo-negative imagery.

In Charnley’s terrifying Ratman photoworks empty rat skins appear to come back to life to devour tiny human figurines scrambling to escape. Her doomsday tableaux trigger deep-seated horrors associated with disease-ridden pestilence reminiscent of medieval Europe and the bubonic plague. Culturally, the aggression of rats and their transgression into human space are so abhorrent it is spoken of rarely. Anyone who has encountered a rat will invariably remark on the rodent’s size (i.e. ‘it was as big as a cat…’). Rats propagate a sinister underworld that, in the world of folklore, streams steadily beneath consciousness.

Logie’s installation Beneath employs audio and visual images of water, sea, wharf and shore to submerge the viewer in subconscious activity. Utilizing scale reversal, Logie upsets the viewer’s sense of body size, where a larger-than-life dining room table and tea set create an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ re-visitation of childhood experience. Once beneath the table, fractured projected imagery and disembodied voices suspend the viewer in a realm of fantasy, dreams and nightmares. Grey Matter is a visual invitation into a subconscious vortex. Layered audio voices accompany a multi-mirrored video image of sunken tree branches. A spherical cone of reflections pulsates in erratic imagery, rendering a landscape that is more synaptic than corporeal.

Fae Logie is a Canadian artist whose practice operates within the registers of the scientific and the poetic, the conceptual and environmental. Embracing elements of sculpture, drawing, photography and video she utilizes the juxtaposition of found and manufactured objects within the context of real and imagined space. Inquiring into how people create a sense of identity though the ecology and history of place, Logie examines alternative means of engagement with our environment – be that wilderness or urban settings, human and non-human. Ensconced in critical observation, her work often employs an element of jest, subverting a purely objective inquiry by questioning the systems and methodologies that dictate our lives.

Interested in making correspondences between local and distant landscapes, she has exhibited across Canada and participated in international artist residencies and shows in Reykjavik, Iceland, King’s Lynn, UK, Whangarai, New Zealand and Trondheim, Norway. Logie is a founding member of the Vancouver-based land art collective, ‘Art Is Land Network’, with a history of collaborative outdoor projects in public spaces including Granville Island, Dr. Sun Yat-sen Park and the Vancouver Maritime Museum.

Logie moved to Bowen Island five years ago to be part of a co-housing community and work in a more rural setting, yet still be accessible to Vancouver. She grew up in Port Moody and lived in her family home on Burrard Inlet for most of her life. She has a MFA degree from the University of British Columbia, though initially she studied science at Simon Fraser University, a discipline that continues to inform her work.

To learn more about Fae, click here to view her website.

Alexa Wright is London-based artist working across photography, video, and interactive installation. In the late 1990s she became known for After Image, an award-winning series of photographs of people with phantom limbs. Since then, much of her practice has involved building reciprocal relationships with people with mental/physical differences, medical conditions and, most recently, with people in prison. As well as being  beneficial for participants this way of working enables Alexa to gather personal accounts that intimately and empathetically address questions of human identity, otherness and vulnerability. 

​Alexa has engaged in several long term inter-disciplinary collaborations, for example with Alf Linney, Professor of Medical Physics and computer scientists at UCL (1999-2010), and an interdisciplinary team based in Toronto looking at the emotional and psychological effects of heart transplantation (2007-20). In 2015 she carried out a participatory project at two NHS Recovery Centres for people experiencing mental health crises. Alexa is currently working on Inside Stories, an Arts Council funded participatory video project in three prisons, and with respondents to HI-COVE: a scientific study into the effects of Long Covid on Black, Asian, and Arabic communities. 

Alexa’s work has been widely shown internationally in festivals such as: FILE, SESI Art Gallery, Sao Paolo, Brazil; DaDaFest International, Liverpool, UK, International Women Artists’ Biennale, Incheon, Korea and Athens Photo Festival, Benaki Museum, Athens. Examples of solo exhibitions include: Toronto Photographers Workshop, Canada; Experimental Arts Foundation, Adelaide, Australia and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. Alexa has works in a number of public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Wellcome Trust and various Universities.

To learn more about Alexa, click here to visit her website.

Penny McCarthy

Clare Charnley