The Most Violent Thing: Idleness as Weapon
Hamed Teymouri #5 (from Recent Sunshine) 2008
The premise for Republic Gallery’s latest show comes from a Slavoj Zizek quotation: “Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.”
Though this quotation can be interpreted in many ways, curator Vanessa Sorenson—who has a particular interest in politics and didacticism in contemporary art—takes it to mean that it is politically important sometimes to do nothing, to slow down and resist the tendency to urgency.
The artistic result of Sorenson’s musings is a group show of seven artists, a few established and several emerging, who she feels encourage this exploration of politicized idleness. Well-known photographer Marian Penner Bancroft turns her precise lens to mesmerizing fields of grass. (These images become less peaceable when one realizes they are sites of former residential schools.) Newcomer Hamed Teymouri brings a similarly detailed approach to immersive pencil drawings of found wood.
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Blaine Campbell An Abstraction 2007 |
Despite the conceptual gravitas, there’s also some surprisingly playful works here. Recent Emily Carr grad Rose Bouthillier juxtaposes two items that are part of our cultural lexicon: Canadian “wilderness” and George Orwell’s 1984. Similarly, Blaine Campbell’s photographs of altered BC landscapes play with the Group of Seven’s style. Finally, Mohamed Somani’s Propositions for a Public Monument: 27 Sketches for Mixing All the Materials in the World absurdly attempts to create a “truly universal object.”
Maybe there’s a little something to all this nothing after all. (732 Richards St, Vancouver BC)
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Hamed Teymouri #7 (from Recent Sunshine) 2008 |
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