Title: we will be alright
Artist: Janet Wang
Dates: January 20th – Febuary 17th, 2018
Location: Cartems Donuterie (534 W Pender St)
Reception: January 20th, 2018 from 6:00-8:00pm
Vancouver is a city that favours creatives as an esteemed professional group. Employment for creatives, as well as for a growing segment of the larger workforce, can be tenuous, guarded, competitive, occasional, or elsewhere altogether.
Working in Vancouver means one must always be navigating the virtual and the real, and be portable, willing and able. Working can mean piecing together adjunct, part-time, temporary, floating, seasonal, casual, trial, interim and contract jobs. We blend into the norms of the city, the social patterns created by the structure, the hours and the costs of our built environment; we try to subsist and sustain. We share, we gig, we operate in this floating world, inhabiting the coffee shops, office shares and wi-fi hubs to create.
we will be alright explores downtown Vancouver as an abbreviated map, one that distorts, repeats and loops in a pattern akin to a game level. The imagery is drawn in isometric perspective, inking out landmarks around Cartems ( West Pender location). These drawings were digitized and repeated to produce a toile motif, specific to the non-specificity of Vancouver. The motif is printed into loose sheets, stuck to the wall like giant Post-its, with scrawled text referencing our temporary, cut-and-paste, cobbling together of means in our workaday city.
Wang is a visual artist working within a traditional painting practice, integrated with sculptural installation practices and digital media. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia and a Master of Arts in Studio Practice from the University of Leeds in England. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, and the UK.
This exhibition is in Partnership with the Contemporary Art Gallery.
