True to its mandate to display work that examines the relationship between contemporary art theory and practice, Artspeak, a non-profit artist run centre in Vancouver, is currently featuring Seurat and Friends, an exhibit which comments on the complex dynamic between art and labour.

Artspeak’s latest exhibition, Seurat and Friends, explores the connection between art and labour. | Photo by Blaine Campbell, courtesy of Artspeak

Georges-Pierre Seurat was a seminal French post-impressionist painter whose signature pointilist method involved the application of dots of colour in structured patterns to form an image.

Kim Nguyen, director and curator of Artspeak, says that Seurat’s painting method can be viewed as a mechanized form of labour, which is why his name was used for the title of a show that features labour as a primary conceptual point of reference.

She says that this exhibit emerged from conversations with three participating artists, Gyun Hur, Jordy Hamilton and Matt Browning, which helped formalize Nguyen’s own intellectual and intuitive reflections on the topic.

Deconstructing labour

Korean-born and currently Hong Kong-based installation artist Gyun Hur was inspired by the physical labour her immigrant parents engaged in upon moving the family to

Jordy Hamilton’s Old Hat (2012–2014, ink, oil, acrylic on canvas, linen)
explores concepts of structure and pattern in art and life. | Photo by Blaine Campbell, courtesy of Artspeak

the United States when she was a teenager. Hur’s piece, Untitled, is composed of hand-shredded silk flowers that are arranged on the floor with thoughtful geometrical sensibility.

Hur wanted to demonstrate that an accumulation of repetitive manual work can have a concrete aesthetic manifestation that comments on the beauty and fragility of labour.

“My hand-shredded flowers are very vulnerable, and they are carefully arranged on the floor [within] a structure [which features] the potential for rupture, tension and vulnerability,” she says.

Contemporary artist Jordy Hamilton’s take on the concept of labour in this exhibit was its relationship to pattern and structure. His Old Hat series was inspired by a pattern from a woodworking magazine, and depicts a wine carafe and a glass with variations of colour and texture in each painting.

“[Old Hat] seems to aspire to the language of modernist painting and at the same time celebrates a craft/do-it-yourself decor history,” he says.

Hamilton hopes that Old Hat motivates viewers to think about their own conflicting relationships with pattern and structure.

“For me, contemporary art is about producing and picturing the contradictions of our moment… those without structure crave it, and those with too much of it want out,” says Hamilton.

Verbally visual

Seurat and Friends is accompanied by Nguyen’s essay Rich Teeth, which references the exhibition in creative prose instead of the more conventional descriptive curatorial writing. The essay is a reflection of Artspeak’s unique commitment to inspiring dialogue between visual art and writing and encouraging new ways of speaking about art.

“We frequently work with artists who integrate publishing, or address concerns related to language and text in their practices,” says Nguyen.

Hur is enthusiastic about integrating written language within her own work, and has already collaborated with writers in her last American show, called System of Interiority.

“Once the idea is put into words, it’s a moment of acknowledgment. Written language opens up dimensions of ideas in ways that visual art can’t,” she says.

Hamilton also explains that the bridge between language and the visual is extremely important to him.

“Art is valuable because it produces and critiques both simultaneously, and [doesn’t create] just ideas [or] just intuitive bodily experience,” he says.

The notion of dialogue in Seurat and Friends extends to the way in which the works by the three artists cross-reference one other and coexist as a dynamic whole.

“I was open to responding to the space and to other people’s work. I wanted [my piece] to exist without any sort of agenda,” says Hur.

In the process of sculpting and transforming Artspeak’s floor with her shredded silk flowers, Hur says that she sought to respond to hard and soft edges in Hamilton’s paintings and Browning’s carved wood pieces, and to break up the diagonals within the gallery space.

Jordy Hamilton and Matt Browning will hold a public talk at Artspeak, giving Vancouverites the opportunity to connect with the artists and to reflect on how their own personal and cultural identity is affected by the connection between labour and art.

“As a culturally diverse curator I feel a responsibility to not only present the work of minority artists, but to challenge and complicate the dialogue surrounding cultural identity in visual art,” says Nguyen.

Matt Browning and Jordy Hamilton in Conversation takes place at 2 p.m. on Dec.13 at Artspeak. For more info on the talk and Seurat and Friends visit www.artspeak.ca