A collection of images taken at the site of Martin Kippenberger’s Metro-Net Station in Dawson City, Yukon. The book records the condition of the Metro-Net Station over several years, the landscape surrounding the site of the Metro-Net, and a series of drawings using Bunkhouse Hotel stationary that were done by Kippenberger while visiting Dawson City in 1995. A travel guide for reaching Dawson City, Yukon is included in English and German. The book also includes an introduction to the history of Martin Kippenberger’s Metro-Net project.

Designed by Zin Taylor and Roger Bywater. Printer: DL & Associates.

The first edition of our Lynn Valley series of artist-designed publications is by Richard Prince, the influential New York artist who first created controversy in the 1970s by working with appropriated imagery–then a quite radical concept. Weighing in at 48 pages, this volume contains representative samples of all of Prince’s most famous work: biker girls, nurses, sculptures, paintings, tattoo pornography, jokes, and other assorted incendiary images.

Exhibition catalogue showcasing seven Vancouver artists (Karin Bubas, Jeremy Shaw, Jim Breukelman, Dan Siney, Mike Grill, Babak Golkar, Kyla Mallett) who were invited to produce new works in response to the locale of North Vancouver. These established and emerging artists have brought unique sensibilities and personal experiences to their investigations. Moodyville evokes the distinctive atmosphere and spirit of the place, and brings to light its psychogeography of hidden sites and untold stories.

The historically significant title alluding to the city’s past as a distant collective memory implies that the identity of a place is always in negotiation with its history. The earliest industrial settlement on Burrard Inlet established in 1872, Moodyville was a prosperous, albeit short-lived, sawmill community that led to the establishment of North Vancouver. This evocation of the city’s beginnings makes reference to its strong ties to natural resource industries and suggests how ideas about place are determined by the shifting economies of historical change. Moodyville also suggests a psychic space, a state of mind.

Territory was an exhibition concerned with mapping urban experience, civic space, and contested terrains. The project extended beyond the gallery spaces at Artspeak and Presentation House Gallery to public sites around Vancouver, and also includes guided walks, lectures, a film series and publication.

The artworks in Territory navigate real and imagined territories ñ geographic, political, economic, and social. In doing so they reveal how cultural mythologies, both local and global, are scripted into built environments and determine human interactions. The social impact of the often invisible boundaries delineated by civic conflict, gentrification, security, and communication systems is made apparent.

Five artworks have been commissioned for the public domain: photographic billboards by Roy Arden, roaming mobile signboards by Ron Terada, soil transplants by Germaine Koh, photographs by Jayce Salloum dispersed through various distribution systems, and silkscreens postered around the city by Seripop. Encountered by chance, these ephemeral works provoke tensions between public and private space. These artists temporarily occupy and lay claim to transient street life and civic terrain.

In the galleries at Artspeak and Presentation House Gallery five international artists offer poetic interpretations of conditions that impact cities: Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Yael Bartana, Gonzalo Lebrija and Cao Fei. Whether footage of Beirut, Guangzhou, or Guadalajara, we see fragmented spaces of transition and crisis. The instability of places like the Pearl River Delta in China and the Middle East are interpreted in terms of the intersections of global economies, political violence and collective behaviour.

The history of the relationship between canines and humans is more complex than one would think. From Sparta to Stalingrad, the dogs of war, cleanup, guard duty, and companionship have been at our side; their loyalty knows no bounds, whether they are beloved pets or guardians of riot police or unsavoury fight fans. From companion to full-fledged member of the tribe, the dog has irrevocably moved into our homes, hearts and minds to such an extent that the boundaries between “owner” and “pet” have dissolved. The historical and contemporary photographs of To the Dogs explore this human-canine connection in ways that are alternately surprising, endearing, disturbing, and beautiful.

The book has photographs by William Wegman, Larry Towell, Lee Friedlander, Alec Soth, Pieter Hugo, Peter Hujar, Elliott Erwitt and many more. Photographs include depictions of local dog shows, a Moscow circus, a dogfight in Sarajevo, and a dog hotel in Japan. A major essay by the poet Peter Culley explores the international citizenry of dogs, and why they can tell us more about ourselves and our culture than we care to admit.

Exhibition dates: June 30 -August 5, 2007

Designed by Derek Barnett, Information Office. Printed and bound in Canada

From Stills to Motion and Back Again, contains texts by Callie Angell from the Whitney Museum, J.Hoberman from the Village Voice, Geralyn Huxley Curator of Film & Video at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and curator Bill Jeffries. This book also contains the first transcription of the words spoken by Edie Sedgwick in Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space, transcribed by Lisa Dillon Edgett.

Exhibition dates: March 8 – April 6, 2003

Design: Catrina Longmuir. Printing: Generation Printing

Originally an exhibition at Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver during September and October of 2001, Facing History—Portraits from Vancouver is a book about a cityís inhabitants. Contemporary and archival photographs and art, made over the last 50 years by 55 image-makers, address the themes of family and the construction of identity; questions of attribution; the street; work and play; public life; art and life; the body and the life of the mind. Curated by Karen Love.

Artists in the publication:
Alvin Armstrong, Glenn Baglo, Doug Ball, Marian Penner Bancroft, Percy Bentley/Dominion Photo Company, Natalie Brettschneider, David Buchan, Allyson Clay, Corrine Corry, Kate Craig, Bill Cunningham, Max Dean, Fred Douglas, Diane Evans, Jochen Gerz & Esther Shalev-Gerz, John Helcermanas, Lee Holt, Art Jones/Artray, Brian Kent, Robert Keziere, Roy Kiyooka, Una Knox, Mike Love, Elizabeth MacKenzie, Arnaud Maggs, Kyla Mallett, John McGinnis, Al McWilliams, Robert Minden, Al Neil, N.E. Thing Co Ltd., Wendy Oberlander, Ann Park, Jerry Pethick, Colin Price, Foncie Pulice, Judy Radul, Chick Rice, Henri Robideau, Carol Sawyer, Sandra Semchuk & James Nicholas, George Smith, Michele Smith, Henry Tsang, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Colette Whiten, Paul Wong, Jin-me Yoon, Sharyn Yuen.

Written on the  Land presents Mark Ruwedel’s ongoing photographic project that looks at the impact of technologies and culture on the land. His subtle yet rigorous, decade-long investigation has resulted in a fascinating accumulation of images portraying not only those devastations we have wrought during our own recent history, throught military manoeuvres, weapons testing, resource extraction and cultural modification’s but also the violent intrusion that was the ‘conquering’ of the west, in particular the building of the railways and the application of the new site names by European immigrants and explorers. The book covers Ruwedel’s work from 1990 to 2001, divided into three sections: The Ice Age; Pictures of Hell; and Westward The Course of Empire. These three series are interrelated, as archeological history, land use and the act of naming places combine to form a picture of human interaction with the land.
The publication includes a list of works and biographies.
Exhibition dates: September 7- October 20, 2002
The exhibition toured across Canada during 2003 / 2004

Designed by Alex Hass, Radish Design Studio. Printed by Hemlock Printers.

The publication showcases colour photographs taken from 1981 to 85 by Vancouver-based artist Roy Arden, reflecting his interest in photographs “full of flesh and things”, which function “as a lyrical but Realist poetry.” Fragments reflects his experience of the world in a fashion that is personal but not autobiographical, essentially melancholic, and revealing of a time and space overlooked by means-end rationality. Arden produced these portraits and details of urban texture in Vancouver, Paris, Geneva and Berlin.

Exhibition dates: April 15 – June 4, 2000

Touring exhibition.

Designer: Timming & Debay. Printer: Hemlock Printers

Over the past decade Anne Collier has forged a rigorous body of works that engage in a unique dialogue with contemporary photography. Collier produces tight, sparely formalized compositions often using a technique of re-photography. Using an approach that can be compared to artists like John Baldessari, Sherry Levine and Louise Lawler, Collier’s work addresses questions of biography and self-portraiture. Her interest in mass market and pop culture imagery from the 1970s is expressed in carefully staged found photographs, and she has used diverse sources ranging from advertisements and posters, to art magazines and 70s vinyl LP covers. Her biting, dryly humorous compositions—some subtly self-reflexive—frame recurrent tensions of power and gender. In Woman With a Camera (2006), for example, Collier photographs and reframes a pair of promotional posters for the 1978 movie thriller Eyes of Laura Mars starring Faye Dunaway. Dunaway is seen looking through and over a camera, a cipher for the photographer artist, but also posed from within the film narrative inhabiting the viewpoint of the story’s antagonist. Here, Collier proposes questions that are fundamental to contemporary photography while foregrounding a renewed currency to debates about subjectivity and representation.

Catalogue includes a list of works, biography, and bibliography.

Exhibition dates: January 26 – March 2, 2008

Designed by Derek Barnett, Information Office. Printed in the USA

Taking strategies of inversion in art as its subject, this exhibition catalogue showcases both the work from this ambitious exhibition, along with additional ephemera and realted historical and contemporary art. Exhibition artists: Sue de Beer, Miles Coolidge, Sam Durant, Rodney Graham, William Hunt, Jonathan Monk, Kay Rosen, Mungo Thomson, Christopher Williams. The publication includes a list of exhibition works.

Guest curated by Mark Soo.

Designer: Derek Barnett, Information Office. Printed in Canada.

Attila Richard Lukacs is one of Canada’s most talented and controversial contemporary artists. He is best known for his epic paintings that depict masculine, homoerotic imagery, featuring figures such as gay skinheads and military cadets. His work has been exhibited at documenta in Kassel, Germany, as well as in New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Cologne, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, among others; he has also had numerous shows, including the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Alberta.

A co-publication between Arsenal Pulp Press, Presentation House Gallery of North Vancouver, and the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, this will be the first book to document the work of this important artist, from an unusual perspective―a collection of some 1,200 full-colour Polaroid images (twelve per page) taken by Lukacs over the past twenty years as core referents for his paintings, assembled and collaged by Vancouver artist and curator Michael Morris.

Lukacs regularly uses a Polaroid camera as part of his artistic process, using his friends and acquaintances in Berlin, New York, Vancouver and elsewhere as models; taking advantage of the Polaroid’s unique characteristics, his painterly sensibility is evident in the rich hues and romantic sensuality of these photographs, which are strikingly similar to the paintings that resulted from them.

The book will feature essays by award-winning author Michael Turner (Hard Core Logo, The Pornographer’s Poem); Scott Watson, director of the Morris & Helen Belkin Gallery in Vancouver; and Vince Aletti, the American curator, critic, and journalist.

Stunning and bold, Polaroids: Attila Richard Lukacs and Michael Morris is a remarkable visual and written document on Lukacs, one of Canada’s greatest artists working today, and his unique collaboration with Morris, a hugely important artist in his own right.

Designer: Derek Barnett, Information Office. Printed in South Korea.