14 January–19 February, 2005
Opening Thursday, 13 January, 7–9pm

Catriona Jeffries Gallery is pleased to commence the 2005 season with Shell, a new installation by internationally active artist Germaine Koh. For this exhibition, Koh has converted part of the gallery to be street-accessible, 24 hours a day. An enclosure resembling a transit shelter is built onto the inside of the existing glass frontage, a pane of which is removed to enable entry into the new structure. While remaining visibly part of a private interior, Shell presents a recognizable form of public refuge from the outside world. It lengthens the gallery's temporal dimension and spreads out its insulating capacity, though this submission to the street remains partial. Conceded to the public sphere, the area inside the shelter becomes a threshold.

Within the gallery's Granville Street location, Shell offers an intermediary, implicated perspective on the area's cycles of commerce and routes of mass-transit. Decidedly more protective and spacious than current civic bus shelters—and somewhat more antiquated—the work tacitly acknowledges the physical costs of suspended street advertising contracts as well as the real conditions of homelessness in Vancouver. Inside the gallery proper, a second new work by Koh wields the gallery's claim upon the detritus of the street through a glittering accumulation of broken windshield glass. A video monitor plays Side piece (1999), shown recently at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. For the duration of this day-long video track, four men sit, in various combinations, on two public benches: talking, reading, eating, drinking, and watching passing action, while the audio track of the piece conveys simultaneously the parallel activities of a private household. Side piece complements Koh's shelter by quietly aligning discrete forms of refuge, companionship, and exchange.

Materials sponsor: Surrey Fluid Power Ltd.
CJ Press: essay by Monika Szewczyk

Germaine Koh's conceptually generated work is concerned with the significance of everyday actions, familiar objects and common places. Recently she participated in the 2004 Liverpool Biennial International and Quebec's first Biennale nationale de sculpture contemporaine, as well as shows at Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong), the Edmonton Art Gallery, and le Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. Forthcoming is an exhibition in association with Koh's current Canada Council residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin.

Jessie Caryl