VANCOUVER.- Opening on June 24, 2017, the Vancouver Art Gallery will feature Persistence, on view until October 1, 2017. Persistence draws together three recent contemporary installations to explore the surprising and creative ways that technologies, physical objects and natural processes endure and transform.

“We are extremely proud to showcase three major installations by Julia Feyrer, Tamara Henderson, Shelagh Keeley and Germaine Koh from the Gallery’s collection,” says Kathleen S. Bartels, Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. “Looking at natural systems, cycles of economic forces, and the symbolic significance of everyday objects that surround us, these works have viewers directly contemplate the very rhythms of modern life.”

The exhibition’s premise is inspired by Canadian media critic Marshall McLuhan and his ideas concerning obsolescence and perseverance.

“The idea of persistence is a useful one to ponder during a time of dramatic societal change,” says Daina Augaitis, Chief Curator/Associate Director. “It is interesting to observe what ideas and objects persist over time or do not, and why. Each of the three artworks in this exhibition offers diverse and insightful propositions about persistence, whether it is inscribed in nature, or determined by a capitalist economy, or formed through sustained historical knowledge.”

Three Installations on View

Julia Feyrer / Tamara Henderson’s The Last Waves: Laboratory, 2015-2016:
Exploring different forms of perception, Vancouver-based artists Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson’s collaborations often tap into the unconscious. The Last Waves: Laboratory (2015-2016) consists of a group of found tables brimming with an array of salvaged and fabricated objects that summon different characters. Calling to mind theatre, play, myth and ritual, this installation recycles and animates mundane objects in a capricious, sometimes disorienting, response to materials.

Shelagh Keeley’s Notes on Obsolescence, 2014:
Toronto-based artist Shelagh Keeley’s collaged installation Notes on Obsolescence (2014) features photographs of textile looms at an abandoned German factory, prompting references to technological and capitalist cycles. By mixing industrial images with drawings that trace the threads of the everyday, the artist interrupts these cycles to mark other temporalities.

Germaine Koh’s Fair-weather forces (water level), 2008:
Vancouver artist Germaine Koh’s Fair-weather forces (water level) (2008) recasts the familiar in unpredictable ways. The work is a series of velvet ropes, hanging between a row of stanchions, which rise and fall in response to tidal levels recorded at a nearby dock in False Creek. Echoing natural systems in a gallery environment, Koh’s work dramatizes the persistence of nature’s processes and their profound ability to shape and regulate our lives, even in the face of human efforts to control them.

Persistence is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Daina Augaitis, Chief Curator/Associate Director.