Janice Wu is that cute girl next door that likes to draw. This Vancouverite is not only one of my good friends, but is also one of the many talented students from Emily Carr University.

Janice Wu’s work explores how meaning, value, and associations are placed upon things in the material realm. She is interested in how seemingly worthless objects have the potential for whimsy and how the ‘inanimate’ mundane can reveal poetic and narrative possibilities. Through re-imagining the mediocre, the ordinary can become playful and even precious. Working meticulously in pencil and watercolor, her drawings reveal the intricate, tender nature of this medium and reflect the notion of devoting time and contemplation in to the easily overlooked. Through this process of investigating the quotidian, she trains her looking practice towards observing the subtleties in her own lived experiences.

Janice Wu was currently featured in Beautiful/Decay, Juxatpoz and The Huffington Post. Congrats J!

Hedi Slimane’s “California Song” exhibit at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art was the perfect way to end my own California adventure. If you don’t know who Slimane is, he’s a fashion designer/photographer, but no one knows when his fashion design hiatus will end, for now he is soaking up the west coast Americana with his lense.

Hedi Slimane California Song from Commonwealth Projects on Vimeo.

The exhibit was separated into two parts. The first section were large black and white prints; iconic figures in music and fashion, back alleys, tattooed bodies, and the sonic youth. The second part of the show leads up to a set of stairs lit by incandescent lights, dimming into a black void with somber yet soothing sounds from No Age. It was their ambient music that gave vocabulary to each photograph. The room was filled with speakers that resonated the ambient “California Song”, which paired nicely with each image that was projected onto the architectural cube display.

The silent still photos of youth imagery and rock and roll gave light to the popularized new genre of a photo diary. The repetitive display of images created a visual language, a whole new way to experience the mundane, the everyday.

The Color of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art, an exhibition beautifully curated by the Vancouver Art Gallery is a show you do not want to miss. I'm serious, no, actually I'm surreal.

The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art features 350 works by leading Surrealist artists, including André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Leonora Carrington, Brassaï, André Masson, Man Ray, Edith Rimmington, Wifredo Lam, and many others.

For those of you who can't afford to visit the Louvre in Paris or the MOMA in NY, this would be the closest thing to having that kind of epic gallery experience. Standing in front of work that paved and inspired a new genre of painting, a milestone in the historic art world is something worth witnessing. There is much to say about each painting, but here is what the VAG is luring us in with:

The installation of the exhibition is designed to create a variety of environments and moods in which to contemplate the themes that the Surrealists explored over a period of three decades such as desire, androgyny, violence and transmutation. The exhibition also highlights the many techniques developed by Surrealist artists including automatism, frottage, fumage, Rayographs and ‘the surrealist object,’ an approach to sculpture in which several unrelated components—most often found objects—were joined together.

The exhibition runs from May 28 – September 25, 2011

Gallery Hours
Daily 10 am to 5 pm / Tuesdays until 9 pm

Adult $22.50/ Student (with valid ID) $16/ Tuesdays after 5pm admission by donation.

For those of you who missed the Roy Arden show at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, here is a Recap!

Roy Arden is a Vancouver based artist known for his cityscapes, and his exploration on local history and modernity. Although his shows are usually pretty serious, UNDERTHESUN was quite whimsical and playful. Using old LIFE magazine clippings, and collaging them to make new work, Arden was able to transport us from now and then, while giving us plenty of imagination.

The show was separated into two galleries, one gallery had a more institutional feel, and the other was more juxtaposed. The ‘fun’ gallery as I like to call it, was filled with images ranging from different sizes, colors and shapes. It was filled with a lot of random works in different mediums: from photography, design, type, prints, and sketches; it was all there, a live Google image search right in front of you!