6 September–12 October, 2002

The cultural readymade, that perfect Duchampian construct, has been the textual anchor of Ron Terada's practice since his early ad paintings of 1996. From the art and classified ads, to the grad students' text of a high school annual, to the slippery questions/answers of the American game show Jeopardy, Terada has utilized the cultural readymade word/s as pictorial content defacing the modernist purity of the monochrome. This gesture of “claiming” that which exists as cultural phenomena, which can be referenced to the likes of the ACT's and ¼ Mile Landscape works of the N.E. Thing Company from 1968, has become, in this forthcoming exhibition, an ultimate utilization of the artist's working source material, namely the replication of a City of Vancouver highway sign. Built by the very same municipal workers who make city signage which confines the perimeters of civic landscape, this large sign tightly installed within the gallery's exhibition space proposes a new sculptural object which when installed within the white cube "claims" Vancouver, creating new borders around the artists of that city and the construct of the very gallery in which this work is shown.