Grace Gordon-Collins: Pulp
January 27 - February 12, 2005
Opening Thursday February 3, 6-8 pm

British Columbia artist Grace Gordon-Collins examines the “inherent truth” of object and place, and the fact that the real truth is often not as it appears. The vivid C-prints in Pulp explore personal memories, cultural history and pulp iconography. Reminiscence and experience as well as truth and fantasy are reinterpreted.

Images in the 45 x 30 inch prints were taken with a medium-format Hasselblad and digitally combined with brightly-coloured text. The prints reconstruct the covers of literature known as pulp fiction. Featuring hard-boiled heroes and glamorous heroines, dastardly villains and spicy encounters, these detective mysteries, western adventures and spy episodes were the main source of mass entertainment in the first half of the 20th century. Gordon-Collins’ vivid photomontages recall books by Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer, two masters of pulp fiction who influenced every medium including comics, movies, and television.

The exhibit includes two supporting groups of work: The Dress, a full-scale triptych of photograms of wedding dresses, and The Port, abstracted glimpses of shipping containers.

Grace Gordon-Collins has been a practising architect in British Columbia for over twenty-five years. Her award-winning skills encompass architecture, interior design and photography. She is a recent graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design, and has a Masters of Architecture (Photography Major) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she studied under Minor White. White (1908-76) was one of the best-known names in American photography, as well as one of the greatest teachers of the medium.