Cullinan + Richards: Total Synergy
Cullinan + Richards “Strippers” 2008 Installation view
Meaning comes in many forms in the collaborative practice of artists Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards. As a matter of fact, meaning is downright ambiguous, and intentionally so, in the British duo’s omnibus presentations of paintings, photos, sculptures and spatial interventions designed to challenge accepted notions of form and function. “Their work,” writes critic Barry Schwabsky in the May 2008 issue of Artforum, “construes subject matter not as a topic to be addressed directly but rather as a device that absents itself except to organize the relations among otherwise disparate objects and gestures.”
With that in mind, Cullinan + Richards bring their latest multifaceted assemblage to Vancouver’s Charles H. Scott Gallery in the provocatively (though abstractly) titled exhibition, “Strippers.” In it, a suite of paintings based on filmmaker Russ Meyer’s 1965 cult classic Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, text works and three water-fountains are among the objects displayed helter-skelter on walls, across tables and sandwiched between floor-to-ceiling panels, all of which act as sculptural interventions on the gallery itself. The result establishes a kind of cumulative synergy between otherwise oblique objects and reference points that leads to an age-old question: Is the whole greater than the sum of the parts? For Cullinan + Richards, at least, the answer remains intriguingly open-ended. (1399 Johnston St, Vancouver BC)
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Cullinan + Richards “Strippers” 2008 Installation view |
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