Three Cities: Prayer and Protest / The Garden of Earthly Delights

January 13 – February 18, 2017
Performance Art, Exhibition, Artist Talk

About the Program

Mere Phantoms is the Montreal-based duo Maya Ersan and Jaimie Robson. Three Cities: Prayer and Protest is a shadow-based installation that investigates sites of tension, controversy, and contact within three cosmopolitan environments. Inspired by recent cities the artists have lived and worked in (including Istanbul, Montreal and Vancouver), the exhibition explores notions of prayer and protest as communal expressions of personal hope, desire, demand and outrage. Each ‘city’ becomes a palimpsest in which layers of social, cultural, economic, and political differences come into dialogue. Made from intricately cut paper sculptures, each city is presented as as 'island.' These islands are explored by the viewer with the use of mobile lights created for the installation. As the viewer moves through the space, the miniature paper imagery comes alive. Large scale shadows fill the gallery walls and the viewer, who was initially towering over the fragile paper cities, is now surrounded by layers of giant shadow.

CSA Space, grunt gallery, and PUSH Festival co-present the performance The Garden of Earthly Delights. Inspired by the Hieronymus Bosch painting of the same name, this is an experience of the city as rendered in darkness. It's a ten-minute-long journey in which five viewers at a time are guided by a cued sequence of shadow projections and sound to bring a procession of paper cut-outs to life. The cityscape appears as shadows on the wall, becoming an abstraction even as its physical essence is laid bare. The artists take 16th century notions of heaven and hell and join them to a modern inquiry. This urban maze of concrete and cables: is it fantasy or nightmare? Decide for yourself as you experience the magic of light and paper. This is illusionism at its finest—refined down to a beautiful binary of black and white. An artist talk was given on January 14, 2017.

Artist

Jaimie Robson, Maya Ersan, Mere Phantoms

Composer

Chris Carrière

Identifier

2017.0113 THR

Collection

grunt gallery Programming Archive

Location

grunt gallery (second location)
116-350 E. 2nd Ave, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V5T 4R8
Unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations

CSA Space
2422 Main Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V5T 3E2
Unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations

In copyright. For uses beyond Fair Dealing, research requests, corrections, takedown requests, or other inquiries, please contact grunt gallery: archives@grunt.ca