In a new collaboration with Kafka's Coffee, Art Rental & Sales will be showcasing a rotating selection of artwork at the Kafka's Great Northern Way location on the Emily Carr campus. For the past 10 years Kafka's has positioned itself as a community hub, proudly supporting local artists by providing them with a high-visibility venue in which to exhibit their work. This collaboration will provide a new opportunity to promote AR&S artists and our program, and to reach new audiences outside of the walls of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

On View Now

URBAN FORTRESS 

Inspired by architectural structures and interior decor photography, the Urban Fortress Interiors 8-piece collage series was made while in self-isolation through Spring 2020.  Calling into question established representations of domestic spaces; the collages operate as puzzles and catalysts.  The works consider current events and definitions of heterotopic spaces – “worlds within worlds, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside.” (Foucault)

The printed matter employed for this series was published during the Cold War era, when survival in space held imaginations captive with romantic optimism, if only as an escape from pervasive nuclear panic and civil defense planning.  Contemporary events are once again inspired by visions of future survival. Current projections of home, however, are often bleak, taking into consideration pandemic illness, social and financial inequalities and sheltering-in-place. In recent history, fallout shelters were considered a quaint, even paranoid addendum to the mid-century modern home. Given isolation protocols, pandemic hoarding, and the ever-present/possible ‘second-wave’, the survival bunker as crisis heterotopia is once again a culturally significant symbol.

The goal and challenge of the Urban Fortress Interiors series is to transport viewers from a nostalgic view of past architectural styles and shelters into a critical examination of contemporary politics of panic and imagined refuge. Moving beyond the limits of colonial printed matter, toward an other space, collage as methodology encourages consideration of what we have witnessed and endured, in an effort to confront and imagine possible futures.

All works on view at Kafka's are available for purchase. Please contact us for pricing or for more information at info@artrentalandsales.com. View the work in person at Kafka's, 120-577 Great Northern Way, Vancouver.