In A Wave Of New Shows, Creative Types Prove That Putting Together An Exhibit Can Be An Art Form In Itself

Artist Kathy Slade is making some last-minute adjustments to the exhibition she is guest-curating at Artspeak. A large waterbed occupies the centre of the gallery, covered with what looks, at first, like a patchwork quilt. On closer inspection, it reveals itself to be a grid of photographic images silkscreened on white-coated cotton. Each image is of an air-sickness bag bearing an airline logo. Slade herself looks a little queasy and admits to being both exhausted and nervous. "I'm way more stressed about this show than I would be if it was a show of my own work," she says.

Whether it's to challenge the limitations of cultural institutions, to explore new ways of seeing, or to find a more collaborative means of making exhibitions, the trend of artist-as-curator is in full bloom here. At the Contemporary Art Gallery, photo-artist Roy Arden has organized Supernatural, an exhibition that juxtaposes the paintings of Neil Campbell and the ceremonial masks of Beau Dick (to April 25). At the State Gallery, emerging artist Mark Soo has been curating projects, including Appendage, by Miguel Da Conceicao, which is mounted on the gallery's second floor faí§ade (until the end of April). Art dealer Catriona Jeffries recently launched her Artists Curating Artists series of exhibitions, to be played out at her gallery intermittently over the next 18 months. And at the Western Front--as at some dozen artist-run centres and galleries throughout the city--an artist oversees the exhibition program.

At Artspeak, No Fixed Address is the first solo show in Canada by the acclaimed American artist Rita McBride. Both her installation and her bookworks (on view till April 17) satirize romance novels and pulp fiction, amusing their audience while skewering conventional notions of gender and sexuality. "Rita is an artist that I admire a lot," says Slade. "And while my work doesn't look like hers at all, I think that we share certain approaches or ideas."

Artists may curate for a number of reasons, but for Slade, bringing McBride's work to Artspeak is about more than empathy and admiration. It's about introducing ideas and strategies to a Vancouver audience--and perhaps inspiring local women artists. McBride's success, Slade says, is a great example for those who may feel muscled out of the male-dominated local art scene.

Slade, whose own fabric and text work explores conditions of gender and creative production, began thinking about exhibition-making as an adjunct to her art-making while still a student at Simon Fraser University. "I consider writing about art and curating as part of my practice as an artist," she says. "It's about participating in a discourse."

The artist as curator--or at least as exhibition organizer--is not a new idea, exactly. Late-19th- and early-20th-century European and North American artists protested the conservative salons and institutions of their day and formed themselves into avant-garde groups to show their work outside the bounds of the establishment. Thirty years ago, the artist-run-centre movement took off around the world, again inspired by artists' desire to bypass existing museums and galleries and present innovative and experimental art directly to the public.

"MY VIEW IS that artists are always rebellious," says Laiwan, about the impulse to make both art and exhibitions. The Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator founded the Or Gallery as an experimental space in 1983. Her curatorial projects may arise from the needs of whatever community she is working with, she says in a telephone interview. "But usually it has to do with me just wanting to see something that I'm not seeing."

Often, she explains, artists curate in order to fill a gap, to bring forward work not being shown in conventional venues. "Institutionalized curation has a very particular perspective of what should be presented and how it should be presented," she adds. "The task of the artist is to be curious and investigate the limits of perception...to challenge established ways of seeing."

In one of the liveliest forums at InFest, the international symposium on artist-run culture recently held in this city, speakers from Canada, the United States, and South Africa exchanged ideas about the characteristics and responsibilities of the artist as curator. Laiwan, who moderated the symposium, suggested at the time that artists bring a number of skills to curation, including perceptual insight and sensitivity, intuition, vulnerability, and the inclination to take risks. The artist's "renegade" status, however, is not the same as being elitist or exclusionary. It's important, she says now, for art to be presented in a way that empowers the audience.

Another idea raised at InFest was that of curation as an artistic practice itself. It's something Jonathan Middleton, an interdisciplinary artist who has been curator of exhibitions at the Western Front since 1999, explores within the context of that centre's anti-institutional history. "There's a spectrum of where curators see themselves in relation to artists and also in relation to the public," he says, sipping green tea in a Main Street coffee shop . He lists interpreter, facilitator, catalyst, and provocateur, then adds that his own practice, in curation as in art, embraces the role of collaborator. "My favourite shows have been ones where there has been real...exchange of ideas."

Now showing at the Front is a group exhibition (to April 3) which originated in an e-mail correspondence between Middleton, cocurator Brett Jones, and the 10 young artists represented. Titled Organization for Cultural Exchange and Disagreement, the show revisits the artist-run centre's long-standing critique of museum practice and curatorial conventions. Among the works on view is Mark Soo's cluster of linked, helium-filled balloons, each bearing a curator's name. It's a kind of three-dimensional flow chart, a spoof on the cliquey, networking nature of the art world.

Back at Artspeak, Slade reveals that she's been so busy curating, she hasn't directed much energy toward a small show of her own work, to be installed in a few days in an improvised exhibition space at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. She tries to describe her black monochromes and their literary sources, then lets the subject drop. Later, she seems to say through a cloud of cigarette smoke and fatigue. Later.