25 February to 2 April, 2005
Opening Thursday, 3 March, 7–9pm

Catriona Jeffries Gallery is pleased to present the complete photo project, Color Pictures, by Los Angeles-based artist Sam Durant. In this body of photographs, Durant collides moments from recent histories of art, politics and popular culture so that their contemporary refractions start to add up. Well-known for layering installation, sculpture, drawing, photography and music, Durant's practice frequently points toward ambitions of the late 1960s/early 1970s counter-culture in connection with the rise of conceptual principles in contemporary art. Recent works have referred to the four deaths at the 1969 Rolling Stones' Altamont concert; Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) at Kent State University, created just before the National Guard killed four student anti-war protesters; and Kurt Cobain's death in 1994.

The Color Pictures series figures such historical turning points as Huey Newton's 1966 founding of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, the student protest movements of May 1968, and Robert Smithson's ground-note “Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan” (1969). In Durant's photographs, a racially harmonious, passively posed group of models assume placards and paraphernalia that bear deliberately controversial statements and symbols devised by the incipient Black Power movement. While superficially suggesting campus sit-ins, Durant's tableaux occupy a far more complicated ideological terrain. With their advancing Smithsonesque inverted tree/mirror sculptures, perhaps Color Pictures may be seen to annex our adjacent histories' own “riddling zones.”

Sam Durant is an influential member of a generation of West Coast artists that has come into international prominence over the last ten years. He has held recent solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium; as well as a year-long artist residency at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Durant participated in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and the 2003 Venice Biennale. His work was seen recently in Vancouver in the 2003 exhibition, “Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art.”
Jessie Caryl
For further information about this exhibition please contact the Catriona Jeffries Gallery, 604.736.1554

Artist Lecture Wednesday, 2 March, 7pm, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Lecture Hall 328