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For Diane Farris, the qualifications as to whom she'll represent, as an art dealer, are simple: it can't be anybody she wouldn't want to have dinner with and it can't be anybody she wouldn't want to be stuck with in an elevator. That they have to have talent goes without saying. Her current show, Celebrating 25!, which runs to Jan. 24, deserves its exclamation mark. This is a show of 11 artists, represented by a piece or two per, and most of whom she's dealt with for a long time -- the painter Alan Wood being one of the earliest, dating to about 25 years ago when he installed his Ranch project in the foothills of Alberta. A few of the artists are much newer to Farris, being younger. A thread that runs through them is the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and there isn't a dud in the bunch.  Speaking by telephone, Farris remembers what a New York art dealer once told her: "You've done the most fiscally irresponsible thing you can do -- show unknowns."But that's what she's all about, and that's what you can afford to do when you have as good an eye as Farris does. She makes no bones about her lack of formal training in the visual arts (she was a ballerina) and she's positively proud of the fact that she doesn't speak artspeak. Or as she puts it, "I don't have artspeak," as though it were an infection. What she did have for a while was a rough time, when she was on Water Street in Gastown, where she started out. There were 22 months of construction that eliminated all parking and a lot of business. Then there was the leaky condo, which resulted in living with friends for a year and a half. She's been in her new space on West Seventh Avenue for five years. It's a nice space, flanked outside by the imposing Easter Island-ish wooden sculptures of Michael Dennis, who used to be a brain surgeon, and her staff are superb and friendly. "It makes you very grateful," she says, simply.  The works on the walls represent the best of a very good bunch.Another thread that runs through the show is a sense of humour. Many of the works are decidedly witty, such as Angela Grossman's Black Sheep. An oil on canvas (literally -- it's a canvas sack) and composed from several images, it presents a girl in a clown hat with an innocently mischievous smile holding a white lamb, while a black lamb sits meekly at her feet. Graham Gillmore's Take Good Care triptych features spidered glue-on Halloween fingernails. Jesse Garbe's funny Roadrunner (Speedipus Rex) and Coyote (Carnivorous Vulgaris) quotes the obvious source in a chase scene against unlikely mesas and enclosed by the prim sobriety of a small circular frame, which is what makes it funny. Vicki Marshall's large charcoal blackberries and dahlias are shoved -- hardly arranged -- into waterglasses. They avoid every cliche of still life, the fact of being black and white being only one of them. So why are they still so ravishing? Speaking of which, see Alan Wood's Ocean Pools, and think of Matisse's Jazz series. Or take 25-year-old Nick Lepard's Understand Still, a huge facial portrait that is like fauvism taken to the nth degree. The exaggerated brushstrokes make sense, even isolated into small segments. At $5,500, this is not an expensive piece. This boy has talent. As does Gu Xiong, a photographer who lived in China during the Cultural Revolution and is now a teacher at UBC. For a while he worked in the UBC cafeteria where he was appalled by the waste, and documented it. I pity poor Stacey at the gallery who has to work at her desk directly facing his photographs of earthquake devastation in China. But they are beautiful. ldykk@vancouversun.com © Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun |
