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VISUAL ART
Exponential Future
"Exponential Future," the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery's new survey of emerging Vancouver art, appears to me a failure of artistic and institutional nerve. "Curators Juan Gaitan and Scott Watson chose artists working in different media whose work involved a wide range of issues to give an overview of the new artistic thinking of our time and place," claimed a gallery press release. It went on: "The curators were interested in works that engaged the complex reality of urban life at the beginning of the 21st century."
What's remarkable about "Exponential Future" is how reluctant its participants are to engage directly "the complex reality of urban life," without the props of theory or subjects and themes around which critical consensus has already formed. Realism-the ostensibly transparent representation of the now-has a long history on the west coast. A mid-career retrospective of Roy Arden, on display this past fall at the Vancouver Art Gallery, cogently summarized realism's ongoing relevance to a region being razed and rebuilt just in time for the spectacle of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.
Realism has also been important to a younger generation of Vancouver artists, including Evan Lee, Mike Grill, Adam Harrison, Alison Yip, Scott McFarland, Jamie Tolagson, Sara Mameni, Chris Gergley, Owen Kydd, Brad Phillips, Sylvia Borda and others. "Exponential Future" muscles realism offstage. In its place it deploys works that are canny, learned, self-reflexive and deeply ironized. Most of these pieces pair quotation from avant-gardist practices (Modernism in all its guises: Pop, minimal, conceptual art and "photoconceptualism") with subject matter either lifted from popular culture, or rehearsing the by-now well-trodden tropes of "the failed utopia" or "alternative culture." The 'anything goes' spirit of the works on display recalls the free-ranging across forms of another local artist, Rodney Graham. But "Exponential Future's" works largely lack Graham's idiosyncratic wit and playfulness. The art is learned, in the worst sense of the word. This isn't to say that the artists in "Exponential Future" haven't previously made good work. Most of them have. But these pieces aren't in the show. Take Tim Lee, whose videos and photographs are exemplary in their hybridization of art historical and Pop cultural sources. Lee's output was recently surveyed in a Presentation House Gallery...