Collected Data
"Marlene Yuen, Winner of the Post-Residency Award"
Marlene Yuen is a Vancouver-based artist who took part in a Visual and Digital Arts extended residency earlier this year. She is currently working on her forthcoming 2018 off-site exhibition, Coal, Gold & War, at Campbell River Art Gallery. Through a series of large-scale comics and handmade artist books, Yuen’s exhibition will address the labour of Chinese workers on the transcontinental railroad.
Congratulations to Marlene Yuen, Winner of the Post-Residency Award!
"As much as this is an exhibition of Marlene Yuen’s creative output, it is also a lovely demonstration of how an artistic practice can facilitate a larger function"
There is a matter-of-fact quality to these histories. The tragedies and injustices are never amplified for dramatic affect as much as they are calmly, soberly pointed out. Victorious moments are also quietly delivered: such as that of women like Jean Lumb, whose activism helped reform Canada’s severe immigration laws and who became the first Chinese Canadian woman to earn the Order of Canada or Mary Ko Bong, a jazz performer and fine instrument mechanic trained in Hamilton.
The stories range from a salmon canning factory in B.C., to a lunch counter in Alberta, to a Chinese laundry on John Street in Hamilton, to the systemic exploitation of Chinese workers who mined tunnels through 13 mountains during the construction of the Trans-Canada railway. Taken together, there emerges a troubling pattern wherein Chinese immigrants are dehumanized by arduous, impoverished work, only to endure a second dehumanization when those jobs are mechanized, modernized, or unrecognized. Finding a way to thrive or even survive within these conditions is correctly constituted as heroism by Yuen.
Marlene Yuen | After Gold Mountain: Selected Stories of Chinese Labourers in Canada
Marlene Yuen: After Gold Mountain
Join us for our Spring/Summer exhibition After Gold Mountain: Selected Stories of Chinese Labourers in Canada by Vancouver-based printmaker and book artist, Marlene Yuen.
Please join us for the public opening reception of After Gold Mountain on Friday, May 12th from 7-10 pm. Marlene Yuen will be in attendance.
Marlene Yuen: After Gold Mountain
"Its proper name is Floor Burger because … well, because that’s where you’ll find it"
Floor Burger is an intriguing, even revolutionary work, at once sculptural and painterly, accessible and complicated. It’s not so much a reproduction of a burger as a quasi-trompe de l’oeil semblance “pushed to the limit,” in the words of the AGO’s assistant curator of modern art Kenneth Brummel. And for all the monumentality of scale, it’s more anti-monument than monument to the United States’s most enduring fast food. Nobody’s appetite is going to be whetted here; the burger’s finally too dead(-in-the-)pan than sizzler-on-the-grill for that – the Big Boy as anti-hero, floored by its bulk and the weight of its ennui. (Those who see Floor Burger as a sort of anticipation of, say, the General Idea installation One Year of AZT, Ron Mueck’s A Girl, or Jeff Koons’s Puppy, or other contemporary works of gigantism are not wrong.)
It’s a whopper all right: Floor Burger returns to the AGO
"Folks are looking at work in boxes of some of Andy’s film that probably hasn’t been seen since he shot it.”
Read: "The Great Swindle" by Roger Scruton
The fake intellectual invites you to conspire in his own self-deception, to join in creating a fantasy world. He is the teacher of genius, you the brilliant pupil. Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers. The arrival of fake thought and fake scholarship in our universities should not therefore be attributed to any explicit desire to deceive. It has come about through the complicit opening of territory to the propagation of nonsense.
The Great Swindle by Roger Scruton from Aeon Magazine.
I went to art school. I don’t agree with everything in this essay but the section quoted above made me smile.
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