Vancouver Art Gallery at Robson Square

It’s a lovely day and I’ve got a date! I’m picking up husband from work and we are going to visit several exhibitions late this afternoon and into the evening. We really love walking about in the vibrant downtown on a nice evening.

First we will see the Finnish Design exhibition at the Pendulum Gallery that I’ve already written about. I noticed that the gallery now has the media release with lots of photos on their site, so go have a look at that.

Then we are going to the Vancouver Art Gallery to take advantage of their Tuesday night’s pay-by-donation entry. As usual we are squeaking in near the end of two major shows by two very different BC artists – the Takao Tanabe retrospective, and the survey exhibition of hot artist Brian Jungen.

I will write more about Tanabe and Jungen after seeing the exhibitions.

I’m getting ready to go to a couple of art openings this evening:

1. RETURN, prints by Hannamari Jalovaara and Taiga Chiba at Malaspina Printmakers Gallery, opening 7 – 9 pm.

2. IN CONTRAST – ceramic sculpture by Mary Kim and paintings by Yang Hong at Capilano College Art Gallery in North Vancouver, opening 6 -8 pm. I only learned about this one yesterday – it’s on March 20 – 31st. I knew Yang as a young man in the same high school my daughters attended but haven’t seen him since he graduated from Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver’s art school. He’s done very well – check his website! I look forward to seeing him again.
I will report back on these later!

LATER:
RETURN is an excellent print show, and its amazing how well the two artists works showed well together thematically. I had fun chatting in Finnish with Hannamari, whom I’ve met a couple of times before several years ago. Her work includes some text in English, Finnish and Latin. I had a chuckle with her that we are the only ones in the room who could read Finnish! Sorry I forgot to take photos in the rush but do visit the links in my earlier announcement of RETURN.
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IN CONTRAST features Yang Hong’s very large predominantly black paintings, the Rivet Series, and 24 very small panels called Absence (photo above with Yang) in predominately white, all done in polyurethane and oil. (I was in error thinking the small paintings were Mary Kim’s when I saw the show yesterday – so corrected the earlier statement above.)

Mary’s works are the installation of ceramic rats “Plead” (photo below). Both Mary and Yang are recent MFA grads of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was wonderful to see Yang again and to meet Mary and congratulate both on their achievements and their thoughtful and well done art work.

batik by Annabel Carey, photo by Valeri

Following up on a suggestion in the comments to my post about a batik exhibition in Cornwall, UK, I emailed Valeri of dyeing 2 sew, because she lives in Cornwall. I told her about this show and expressed a hope that she might visit it and perhaps post some pictures on her blog.

Valeri kindly did go see it, even took photos and blogged about her impressions along with several photos here plus more here.

Go have a look! Valeri even sent me the above photo of Carey’s batik. A big thank you, Valeri!!