20 May–25 June, 2005
Opening Thursday, 19 May, 7–9pm

Terada's practice frequently calls attention to existing cultural forms and their unobtrusive operation as signs. Past works have adapted gallery signage, posters, brochures and exhibition soundtracks to magnify and query the statements of cultural institutions: from Jeopardy!, to the Contemporary Art Gallery, to the municipality of Vancouver. For this exhibition, the artist lifted the phrase “Stay Away from Lonely Places” from the Willie Nelson song and fixed it in block neon to the façade of the Catriona Jeffries Gallery. Transformed into an overhead sign, Terada's ambiguous maxim nudged passersby, gallery visitors, nearby residents, and contending business signage with its ambivalent compulsion to advise—or to admonish.

While the sign signaled Terada's solo exhibition inside the gallery, it also understatedly saluted earlier works he designed to double as illuminated titles for curated group shows. The sign brings to mind neons by conceptual artists Joseph Kosuth and Bruce Nauman, as well as text-based works of public art such as the frieze inscriptions on Vancouver galleries by Kathryn Walter and Lawrence Weiner. Made into a public announcement, “Stay Away from Lonely Places,” calls out to its immediate neighbourhood—not unlike Germaine Koh's recent Shell, which pierced the gallery to allow 24-hour access to the space during January and February. But the two public/private works diverge: whereas Shell presented the street with a threshold, Terada's sign turns on a kind of allusive, intangible cordon.

A series of photographs presented inside the gallery document a number of found announcements and improvised signs encountered by the artist in various places. Observed by chance, many of these notices feature distinctive turns of phrase or visual idiosyncrasies that unexpectedly divert their simple directives. Made quickly by hand for easy expression, the signs somehow get short-circuited by their plain unprompted weirdness. Via found mottos and snapped visual gags, Terada sidetracks the conventions of signage and makes errant its measured determination to mean.

Jessie Caryl