Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Essays
Authors: Karen Henry
[Fall 2022] By Karen Henry [Excerpt] We humans project a great deal onto clouds, as they oat loftily above or gather and settle in around us. They represent the grandeur and mutability of nature but are also intimate to our everyday experience and the subject of idle contemplation – to have one’s “head in the […]
Ciel variable 118 - EXHIBITING PHOTOGRAPHY | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Karen Henry
[Fall 2021] Capture Photography Festival 2021 Vancouver April 1–30, 2021 By Karen Henry [Excerpt] It’s impossible to review the Capture festival, a rambling aggregation of events in Vancouver that celebrate photography, as a whole. Here, I focus on public art billboards and the major festival commission. Billboards are of a scale to command attention in […]
Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Interviews
Authors: Helga Pakasaar, Karen Henry
March 30, 2021 [originally published in CV108 in Winter 2018] — Curator Helga Pakasaar contemplates changes in Vancouver institutions and art practices at a significant moment of change for Presentation House Gallery, where she has been curator since 2003, as it is transformed into the new Polygon Gallery…
Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Karen Henry | Artists: Kelly Lycan
February 27, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — The title of Kelly Lycan’s show, Underglow, incorporates her interest in consumer culture, photography, high art, and cultures of display. Lycan uses the connotations of luminous detailing in car culture, cosmetic techniques that add shimmering radiance, and, in general, the use of light to emphasize form to animate the role of light in photography…
Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Karen Henry | Artists: Antoni Muntadas
October 10, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — Warning: Perception Requires Involvement, in bold white text on a red background, covers the wall of the Canada Line transit station in downtown Vancouver. It is both a statement about the commitment needed to understand something and a public warning about the tendency these days to limit the onslaught of information to what can be gleaned in a ten-second media clip or an advertising image…
Ciel variable 93 – FORENSICS | Essays
Authors: Karen Henry | Artists: Henri Robideau
November 6, 2017 [originally published in CV93 in Winter 2013] — Who would have thought that the 1980s were such a stimulating time. There is so much emphasis in cultural memory on the 1960s and 1970s that it seemed like it was all over by the 1980s – but not so, as revealed in the two-part exhibition on photography in Vancouver c. 1983…
Ciel variable 85 - CONFLICT | Essays, Portfolios
Authors: Karen Henry | Artists: Stan Douglas
May 16, 2016 [originally published in Summer 2010] — The impressive piece of public art addresses the very nature of public space. It is named after the two streets that cross at the north corner of the Woodward’s building, on which the artwork is installed. The image inhabits space like a sculpture, grandly overlooking the public and private courtyards of the new complex in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.