Surreyalists launch the Psychologically There exhibition in Gastown

By Chris Yee
[contributor]

After months of planning, the Surreyalists presented their first exhibition last month at the 206 Carrall gallery in Gastown.

The exhibition, ‘Psychologically There’, ran from June 4 to June 9.

The Surreyalists (not to be confused with members of the boundary-challenging, urinal-presenting twentieth century art movement Surrealism) are Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s student art collective.

Surreyalists co-chair Andres Salaz said the collective formed in September of last year. Planning for last month’s show started in October, and by March the collective had finally found the venue where they would hold their first exhibition, Gastown’s 206 Carrall gallery.

Meanwhile, the group built up its membership (currently at 13), which solidified around Christmas of 2010, according to Salaz. The group also secured funds, mostly through fundraisers – but also through a grant from the Coca-Cola Foundation.

The Gastown exhibition was their first outside of Kwantlen. Not only was the exhibition about ‘personal spaces’ broadly defined, it was also about the collective’s members learning to establish themselves as professional artists.

As far as the Surreyalists’ goals go, the opening reception on June 3 was something of a success. If anything, the show was organized well enough to ensure a well-stocked table of appetizers. Throughout the evening, passers-by of all sorts filtered in, in addition to the usual assortment of friends, family and associates ñ perhaps a testament to the hard work the Surreyalists did in promoting the show both on and off campus.

Fittingly – considering its theme – the ‘Psychologically There’ exhibition lent itself to a variety of interpretations of the same theme, some more conceptual than others, some of whom took a more personalized approach.

Alan Canning, whose painting ‘Technological Spaces’ was featured in the exhibition, explores themes of alienation and the uncanny through its depiction of an empty nightclub. While the painting seems to be more claustrophobic than Canning’s agoraphobic intentions, it still evokes some sort of unease.

In a more elegiac vein, Robert Kovacic’s ‘Empress Hotel 1912’ also addresses themes of space, or rather location and the subject of Kovacic’s painting is mere blocks from the exhibition’s venue. Here, though, he relates it also to the history of his subject, both civic and personal, addressing its transition from ‘a home to tourists and business travellers’, to ‘beer parlor’, to ‘affordable housing stock’.

As he describes in his artist’s statement how gazing upon the Empress Hotel’s facade evokes in him memories of childhood visits downtown, “accompanied by my parents and the hustle and bustle of traffic”, where “people would greet each other with smiles, conversing on the sidewalks or in buffets where there was all you can eat for $1.99 [sic],” one thinks of the state of the neighbourhood as it was then and how it is now. The promise of new revitalization, and the threat of gentrification, exclusion and displacement that looms behind such hopes.

The oil and wax mixed media work ‘Slippage’ by Elizabeth Anderson is an even more personal take on the passage of time.

“My body has spanned across from a time when technology was mechanical, and digital was mostly imaginary,” the 61-year-old Anderson says in her artist’s statement. Perhaps this is reflected in ‘Slippage’, which blends digital images with highly textural oil and wax strokes.

Cody Lecoy’s painting ‘Psycho Logic’ reflects his ancestral background in Pacific Northwest motifs. Described by Lecoy in his artist’s statement for the painting as a comment on “the nature of… consumer culture, the meaning of the figures depicted are seemingly opaque as such, until one reflects on the ubiquity of the forms it depicts (witness such motifs being used in Olympic mascots, for instance).”

Roxanne Charles tackles similar issues of identity in her mixed media work ‘Dis-con-nect’. According to Charles’s artist statement, the work is about cultural hybridity (among other things), as evidenced by its four triangular frames, symbolic references to “the holy trinity and the sacred number four” of Christianity and traditional First Nations beliefs, respectively.

Yet other artists in last month’s Surreyalists exhibition focused on the creative process behind their work.

Darryl Markiewicz’s ‘Biological Biomorphics’ sculptures were the final product of a process of experimentation which began with the failure of some body cast moulds he was making.

“By noticing the ability of the casting material, alginate, to move and flex, it led me to experiment,” Markiewicz noted in his artist’s statement for the work.

Pleased with the results, Markiewicz subsequently deemed his ‘;Biological Biomorphics’ sculptures as being his “strongest pieces to date.”

Chelsea Lawrick (who is also a co-chair of the Surreyalists collective) took inspiration for her large-format drawing ‘Choke’ from British artist Alison Lambert, namely her technique of layering torn and reapplied parts of drawing to impart extra texture to it; a technique Lawrick admitted took some time getting used to.

So, what’s next for the Surreyalists?

Co-chair Andres Salaz hopes to see the young group coalesce further into one with more unity. Asked about this matter, Surreyalist Debbie Langtry concurred.

“[A] sense of community [is needed] if [the Surreyalists] want to be successful,” Langtry said, adding that it still should be open to new members: “[It’s] not a closed group.”