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Shows
It’s all about the light at upcoming shows at Hodnett’s Fine Art
By Kevin Potvin
Internationally renowned Hiro Yamagata and digital photography master Laszlo George open up the possibilities in East Vancouver
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I dropped in on my friend Noel Hodnett in his art gallery Friday afternoon. This was no small feat. Hodnett Fine Art is buried deep within the dreamscape labyrinth of that high-wattage building known only by its address, 1000 Parker. Approaching the outwardly ramshackle building, studio home to surely the highest concentration of working artists in the country, is a death-defying act, especially when attempted by foot or bike: you have to go down from Commercial Drive, pick your way video game-like across the six-lane port truck route Clark Drive, then weave and bob through a few blocks of industrial zone all set about with cock-eyed truck trailers lazily splayed across the roads like huge sleeping dogs.
The gallery space itself is a surprising oasis of quiet and white gallery walls set with typically fascinating paintings, with only occasional distant grinding sounds and floor-shuddering thumps—neighbourhing artists building strange things behind closed doors. Noel was excited to tell me about two upcoming shows, both of which give good reason to be excited.
He showed me a number of digital photography images printed onto mounted canvas, each one approaching the size of a four-foot by eight-foot sheet of plywood. The artist, Laszlo George, originally from Hungary, has been fifty years a cinematographer. His bio says he grew up in a rural Hungarian house with no electricity, not even having experienced the modernity of a light bulb. Thus was his fascination with light born.
The images are fast-moving abstracts, streaks really, of various bright, rich colours on black backgrounds, usually. The unique quality George achieves is a texture to the images: the streaks come half-way to appearing as though they are objects or exotic landscapes so suggestive is the depth of texture, and yet they keep the other foot firmly in abstract territory. Staring into them gives the feeling of that liminal world between dreaming and waking when you’re sure there are recognizable shapes if only they’d let themselves be steadied long enough by a gaze. Noel explained that he and the artist can make them any size on the printer in the back of his studio, and is in fact reproducing one of the images as a triptych for a client.
What’s particularly fascinating about George’s images is the original source of them. One is a scarf over the back of a chair, another is his kitchen table. A particularly striking swirl of orange on black was originally a traffic cone on the always under-construction road to Whistler. The pictures, with their high contrast, imprint on the memory deeply. Laszlo George’s show opens Sunday October 5 at 2:30, at 320 – 1000 Parker Street, and will be on display to October 24.
Opening on the 30th of October in the same space is a special treat for Vancouver. Internationally renowned Japanese installation artist Hiro Yamagata will be at Hodnett’s gallery to host the opening.
Some of Hiro’s recent work includes immense 30-metre by 30-metre translucent cubes installed outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao. The cubes contain within innumerable reflecting cubes suspended in mid air and spinning slowly while being struck with various colours of laser beams. The result on the outside is a bewildering dance of light. But you can also go inside . . . .
He also installed in St Petersburg a permanent gigantic laser projection reaching across two rivers where they meet in the centre of the historically weighty city. The distant helicopter pictures of the effect is a study in contrasts: light, being massless, flitting around fancifully through and on top of a city that couldn’t be heavier with imponderables.
Hiro, a close friend of Noel’s, is sending to the gallery at 1000 Parker a number of paintings, though not his recent work—a nine-foot by 61-foot (yes, sixty-one foot) piece, or an eight-foot by 90-foot (nine-oh) piece. “Send me some smaller pieces,” Noel told Hiro.
It almost makes a kind of sense that Hiro will be climbing the creaking stairs and probing the dark industrial hallways toward Hodnett’s studio. The element most in play in Hiro’s work, it seems, is scale. He moves as easily from nine-inch-by-nineteen-inch pictures to conceptions encompassing a quarter of a large city as I might move from the kitchen to the bedroom. Noel Hodnett ought to be congratulated for bringing Hiro Yamagato to Vancouver. The show promises to be a tasty treat.
See noelhodnett.com/Hodnett_Fine_Art.htm for further info.
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The Republic of East Vancouver masthead
The Republic of East Vancouver supports no party, advocates
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