Vancouver Art Gallery opens three exhibitions running from February 20 to August 22

by Steve Newton on February 16th, 2021 at 1:26 PM

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This Saturday (February 20) the Vancouver Art Gallery will open three new exhibitions: Sun Xun: Mythological Time, Stories that animate us, and Pictures and Promises.

All three exhibitions will be on view until August 22.

Sun Xun: Mythological Time: "In his first solo exhibition in Canada," reads a VAG press release, "Sun Xun employs printmaking and animation to produce ambitious works that contend with notions of time and history, fantasy and reality, and ideology and myth. In his highly imaginative video installation Mythological Time (2016), Sun takes viewers on a journey through his hometown of Fuxin in northern China, a coalmining centre facing the depletion of its economic lifeblood."

Jérôme Havre, Cauleen Smith and Camille Turner, Triangle Trade, 2017, HD video, Courtesy of the Artists.

Stories that animate us (above): "Storytelling—its scope and ongoing significance—lies at the heart of Stories that animate us, a dynamic and compelling exhibition developed formally and thematically in conversation with Sun Xun’s Mythological Time (2021). Highlighting a rich selection of works on paper and animations, Stories that animate us draws from a diverse range of oral histories, narratives, knowledge systems and cosmologies."

Featured artists include Robert Davidson, Francisco de Goya, Jérôme Havre, David Hockney, Cindy Mochizuki, Ed Pien, Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo, Marina Roy, Royal Art Lodge, Cauleen Smith, Amanda Strong, Camille Turner, Howie Tsui and Joyce Wieland.

Eric Metcalfe, Howard Hughes Inc., 1977, screenprint on paper, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of Maryon and Jack Adelaar.

Pictures and Promises (above): "Drawn from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s rich photographic holdings. Pictures and Promises, focuses on lens-based works that employ the structures, conventions and formal qualities used in commercial culture, mass media, fashion and advertising. The works then deploy these strategies to play on collective understandings of the world around us and to investigate the iconography of consumerism."

Featured artists include Vikky Alexander, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Gu Xiong, Richard Hamilton, Barbara Kruger, Ken Lum, Yasumasa Morimura, Andy Warhol and O Zhang.

For more info on the new exhibitions visit the Vancouver Art Gallery website here.