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Informal Architectures
Curated by Anthony Kiendl
for Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre

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Informal Architectures is an exhibition gathering the work of a number of artists exploring the intersections of architecture, social thought and failure. The exhibition presents predominantly new works (some commissioned and produced by artists at The Banff Centre) with select historical works. When viewed together, these works form a narrative about the often unspoken role of architecture in controlling people.

This exhibition describes a contemporary landscape of social, political and cultural assumptions. These ideas are incorporated into the structures of the built environment —economic, physical, and institutional—affecting the recent past, uncertain present and near future. In this landscape, technology and consumerism are the primary vehicles of a utopian modernity. But waste, materialism, entropy and abjection form incessant counter-narratives haunting modernity’s ideological projections. In and around these scenes of our post-9/11 environment, artists re-configure our surroundings.

While monumentality continues to weigh on contemporary art and architectural practices in western societies, alternative strategies in spatial culture have proliferated since the 1960s. By considering work by artists from diverse and unconventional perspectives, the assumptions and dream-narratives of modern art and architecture may be re-imagined. The artists in Informal Architectures visualize economies of both excess and lack —chocolate and dirt, shopping malls and ruins, humour and destruction—proposing alternative strategies and criteria for the creation, representation and inhabitation of space—or of how to be in the world.

Anthony Kiendl, exhibition curator

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Artist Bios

Lida Abdul

Born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1973, Lida Abdul resides there now. She lived in Germany and India as a refugee when she was forced to leave Afghanistan after the former-Soviet invasion. Her work fuses the tropes of Western formalism with the numerous aesthetic traditions –Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, pagan and nomadic– that collectively influenced Afghan art and culture. She has produced work in many media including video, film, photography, installation and live performance.

Eleanor Bond

Eleanor Bond is known for her large-scale paintings, an art practice based on research of urban and architectonic space, utopian or visionary possibilities, and transition in collective social experience. Since 1995, she has researched and produced work on individual cities, such as Rotterdam, Salzburg, and Windsor/Detroit, as well as continuing to image a range of speculative or local conditions. Bond has exhibited internationally since 1987, participating in numerous biennials and group exhibitions and with major solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sao Paulo, Witte de With centre for contemporary art in Rotterdam, the Clocktower in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, amongst others. She divides her time between Winnipeg and Montreal, where she teaches at Concordia University.

Jimmie Durham

Jimmie Durham is a sculptor, essayist and poet. He was born in the USA in 1940 and became involved in the arts through the civil rights movement in the 1960s. From 1973 to 1980 Durham was a political organizer with the American Indian movement, serving as director of the International Indian Treaty Council and representative to the United Nations. In the early 1980s Durham returned his attention to art, using detritus and other found objects to create sculptures that radically challenged conventional representations of North American Indians. He has exhibited in venues around the world, including the Whitney Biennial, Documenta IX, ICA London, Exit Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp and the Venice Biennale, among many others. In 1983 West End Press published Columbus Day, a book of his poems. Durham is the author of numerous essays and in 1993 Kala Press published an anthology, A Certain Lack of Coherence. In 1987 Durham moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico and in 1994 to Europe. In Europe, Durham’s work has focused primarily on the relationship between architecture, monumentality and nationalist narratives. In 1995 Phaidon published Jimmie Durham, a comprehensive survey of his art.

Her most recent work has been featured at the Venice Biennale 2005, São Paulo Biennial 2006, Gwanju Biennial 2006, Moscow Biennial 2007, Sharjah Biennial 2007, Gotenborg Biennial 2007, Istanbul Modern, Kunsthalle Vienna, Museum of Modern Art Arnhem, Netherlands and Miami Central, ICA London, Tate Modern, Moma,  ZKM, Capc Bordeaux, CAC Centre d’Art Contemporain de Bretigny, and Frac Lorraine Metz, France. She has also exhibited in festivals in Mexico, Spain, Germany, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan. For the past few years, Abdul has been working in different parts of Afghanistan on projects exploring the relationship between architecture, identity and memory. In the upcoming year she will take part in the Biennial of Cuvee in Austria and solo show at (MANN) National Archeological Museum of Naples. Also in 2008  Ms. Abdul has been shortlisted for Artes Mundi award and residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

Dan Graham

Since the mid-1960s, Dan Graham has produced an important body of art and theory that engages in a highly analytical discourse on the historical, social and ideological functions of contemporary cultural systems. Architecture, popular music, video and television are among the focuses of his provocative investigations, which are articulated in essays, performances, installations, videotapes and architectural/sculptural designs.

Graham began using film and video in the 1970s, creating installation and performance works that actively engage the viewer in a perceptual and psychological inquiry into public and private, audience and performer, objectivity and subjectivity. Restructuring space, time and spectatorship in a deconstruction of the phenomenology of viewing, his early installations often incorporate closed-circuit video systems within architectural spaces. The viewer's perception is manipulated and displaced through such devices as time delay, projections, surveillance and mirrors.

In installations focusing on the social implications of television, as articulated in private and public viewing spaces, Graham refers to video's semiotic function in architecture in relation to both window and mirror. Graham has also published numerous critical and theoretical essays that investigate the cultural ideology of such contemporary social phenomena as punk music, suburbia and public architecture.

David Hoffos

Since 1992 David Hoffos has maintained an active exhibition schedule - with over 30 solo exhibitions, including Catastrophe, 1998 (Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Or Gallery, Vancouver; and Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga) and Another City, 1999-2002 (Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; Trépanier Baer, Calgary; Joao Graça, Lisbon; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and Museé des Beaux-Arts, Montréal). In 2003 Hoffos (with Trépanier Baer) launched the first phase of Scenes from the House Dream, a five-year series of linked installations set to begin its national tour in October 2008. His single-channel work has been shown in festivals in over twenty countries, and he recently represented Canada at the 48th Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany. A survey of his installation work debuted at the Edmonton Art Gallery in December, 2003. His first work for the stage – Hoffos/Clarke Conspiracy (with Denise Clarke/One Yellow Rabbit) – debuted at Calgary’s High Performance Rodeo in 2006. Hoffos has been invited to several residencies, including three at the Banff Centre. The artist has received awards including 2nd prize in the inaugural Sobey Art Award, December 2002; and the 2004 York Wilson Endowment Award.

David Hoffos lives and works in Lethbridge, Alberta. He is represented by Trépanier Baer, Calgary.

Luanne Martineau

Luanne Martineau currently lives and works in Victoria, British Columbia, where she is a Professor of Drawing and Theory at the University of Victoria. Born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1970, Martineau studied art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Alberta College of Art & Design, completing her MFA at the University of British Columbia in 1995.

Martineau’s wool sculptures and drawings explore the places in between art genres, engaging a long tradition of social satire within contemporary art. Combining various forms of labour-intensive traditional female hand work, Martineau blurs the boundaries between style and ideology as well as high modernist art and the baseness of the body.

In 2007 Martineau was the recipient of the Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA Award for the Visual Arts, and exhibited work at the Biennale de Montréal. In February Martineau was a guest lecturer at the Tate Modern for the Banff Centre for the Arts and Middlesex University symposium Informal Architecture. Martineau’s work can be found in the public collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Musee d’art Contemporain de Montreal, and The National Gallery of Canada.

Martineau's recent limited edition artist book FREAKOUT (Temporal Bodies) brings together images of her work with eight texts ranging from Hannah Hoch to Woody Allen.

Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark was born in New York in 1943 and died in 1978. He studied French literature at the Sorbonne and Architecture at Cornell University. From the early 1970s, as a founding member of the artist-run Food Restaurant in New York's Soho neighborhood, Matta-Clark participated in numerous group exhibitions and projects. His work was presented in Documenta V, Kassel, Germany; and at exhibitions in Sao Paolo, Berlin, Zurich, and in the 9th Biennale de Paris. Major projects by Matta-Clark were staged in Aachen, Paris and Antwerp. Following his death, retrospective exhibitions have been organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany; and IVAM Centro Julio Gonzalez, Valencia, Spain.

Rita McKeough

Rita McKeough was born in Nova Scotia and received a BFA from the University of Calgary and an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She works in installation, audio and performance and has been exhibiting installations and site works throughout Canada since 1977. She is currently living in Calgary where she teaches at Alberta College of Art + Design. In her installation and performance work she has consistently interacted with architectural spaces and implicated architectural systems. Often destroying and consuming the walls themselves. She works from a feminist perspective, sometimes more directly than others. She has always been drawn to social issues, idealism and social change. In her recent work she is experimenting with mechanical and electronic devices to create performing objects that will perform in the new works.

Ryan Norulund

Ryan Nordlund was born in Kenora, Ontario in 1978. He graduated from the Alberta College of Art & Design in 2000, with a BFA in Sculpture. Ryan served on the board of directors for TRUCK Gallery in Calgary from 1996 -1999. His interest in public sculpture as social commentary influences his work. In the Art Gallery of Calgary’s 2001 show, Out & Out in the Big City, curated by Gregory Elgstrand, Ryan presented the Flowerbed Project.In 2002, Ryan’s project Park was included in the Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art shown at the Edmonton Art Gallery and the Nickel Arts Museum in Calgary. Shortly after, Ryan left for Ghana, West Africa to volunteer as an art instructor with Osu Children’s Library Fund. This culminated in an exhibition of Ghanaian children’s art co-curated with Anu Guha-Thakurta at Winnipeg’s Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery in March 2003. In 2004, Ryan participated in the Informal Architecture Thematic Residency at the Banff Centre. Ryan lives and works in Calgary.

Edgar Arceneaux with Vincent Johnson, Olga Koumoundorous, Rodney McMillan, and Matthew Sloly

Edgar Arceneaux was born in 1972 in Los Angeles, California, where he continues to live and work. He received his BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and his MFA from the California Institute of Arts in Valencia, California. In addition he has studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and at the Fachhochschule Aachen in Germany. He has had solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Ulm, Germany; Galerie Kamm, Berlin; Frehrkring Wiesehoefer, Cologne; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York and the Project, New York. Recent group shows include True Stories at the Witte de With, Rotterdam; Social Strategies: Redefining Social Realism at the University Art Museum, Santa Barbara, Urban Aesthetics at the African American Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and One Planet Under a Groove at the Bronx Museum, New York.

Matthew Sloly is a Canadian artist of Jamaican descent who lives and works in Toronto, Canada. He graduated from the Experimental Art, Drawing and Painting Program, at the Ontario College of Art and Design (1993) and received his MFA at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (2002). Through his drawings, paintings, sculpture/installation, video, virtual reality installations and large format digital prints, his art explores the metaphorical and poetic interstices between metacognitive concepts and the technological construction of human subjectivity. The artist’s work has been exhibited at Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, The Beall Center for Art and Technology (University of California, Irvine), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), The Saidye Bronfman Centre for The Arts (Montreal), Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax) and is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada. Sloly currently the Director of the “SIL Project Consortium”, which he founded to develop a semantic infrastructure for creating, manipulating and managing content for 3D virtual worlds. In connection with the SIL Project, since 2005, Sloly has been a frequent Artist in Residence at the Computer Graphics and Multimedia Lab at RWTH University in Aachen, German. The SIL project has been awarded two prestigious grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. In January of this year, Sloly was also Artist in Residence at the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena), where he collaborated with his colleagues, artists Edgar Arceneaux, Vincent Johnson, Olga Koumoundouros and Rodney Mcmillian on “Philosophy of Time Travel” (PoTT), a site specific installation and multimedia project that involves the physical simulation of Constantine Brancusi’s monumental “Endless Column” as if it had crashed through the roof and into the main galleries of the Studio Museum in Harlem. The show opened at the Studio Museum last April and this ambitious installation will be on view through July 1, 2007. PoTT was created with the support with a major grant from Creative Capital Foundation and additional support from the Canada Council for the Arts. Other parts of the project will be exhibited in “Informal Architecture”, curate by Anthony Kiendl at The Banff Centre (Banff, Alberta) and Plug-In ICA (Winnipeg). Sloly was Artist in Residence in the Visualization Lab at the Banff New Media Institute in 2005 and the VR Lab in 1997. He is represented by Adamski Gallery for Contemporary Art, in Aachen and Berlin, Germany and Mehr Gallery, New York.

Vincent Johnson lives and works in Los Angeles. His photographic work has been exhibited at the P.S. 1. Museum, the SK Stiftung, Cologne, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Adamski Gallery of Contemporary Art, Aachen, Germany, Locust Projects Miami and Another Year in LA. His photographic work delves in architecture as fantasy, from the vernacular and domestic architecture of Los Angeles to that found in the Western and Eastern United States. His sculptural practice engages perceived notions of the historical dimension of American culture.

Johnson's work has been exhibited in a number of art fairs, including Aqua Art Miami, the Armory Show, NOVA Art Fair Chicago, Scope New York, Scope Hamptons, and the Affair at the Jupiter Hotel, Portland. 

Johnson received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in 1997. He studied with Mike Kelley, Jack Goldstein, Stephen Prina and Christopher Williams. He received his BFA in Painting with studies in Film History 1986 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a 2005 Creative Capital Grantee, and was nominated for the Baum: An Emerging American Photographer's Award in 2004.  In 2007 he has been nominated for the Aldrich Award.  Johnson has also published essays on architecture, photography and history, and a number of short stories.

Olga Koumoundouros lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She has an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, California State University, Long Beach and University of Vermont. Selected solo exhibitions include Thieves Vinegar and Designated Hitters at the Spider Hole Adamski Gallery, Aachen, Germany and More Yellow Wallpaper Mullin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Collaborations include; Capitol Punishment, with Pia Ronicke at Glassell School of Art, Houston, TX, On A Front Porch a collaborative performance with Rodney McMillian at The Suburban, Chicago, IL and LAX-Art, Los Angeles and #9, 5301 Sunset Boulevard with Rodney McMillian, Los Angeles, CA. Selected group exhibitions include Sculpture, Rental Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Thing-New Sculpture from Los Angeles, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, A New Balance Frontier, curated by Aimee Chang, Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN, Rent-a-Bench, Kunstmuseet Trapholt, Kolding, Denmark.

William Pope L.

William Pope.L is a visual and performance-theater artist and educator who makes culture out of contraries. A graduate of the Mason Gross School at Rutgers, he has been making multi-disciplinary performance and installation works since the 1970s, and has been invited to exhibit and or perform across the world, from Universities to major metropolitan museums. His street performances have been featured in several publications, including Art in America. His inclusion in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and his nationally touring retrospective on his work of the past 25 years, entitled "eRacism," and its companion monograph, "William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America," published by MIT Press in 2002, have inaugurated an increasing surge of interest in his provocative and exceptionally diverse works. His most recent project, "The Black Factory," is at once a digital project, a traveling caravan, a social service, and a community-based public art intervention.

Kyohei Sakaguchi

Kyohei Sakaguchi studied in the Department of Architecture at Waseda University, and the book Tokyo House was his graduate thesis. This handmade, 200-page book consisted of photographs, sketches and technical drawings of houses built by people in Tokyo who are generally referred to as “homeless.” Sakaguchi became fascinated with this type of architecture when he stumbled on a carefully constructed dwelling built by a “homeless” man on the side of the Tama River. With this encounter, Sakaguchi became aware of the great human potential for self-built dwellings. This discovery, along with Sakaguchi’s other field research, is the point of departure for Zero Yen House. In 2002, Sakaguchi produced another handmade book entitled ROAD IN, a collection of photographs of street dwellings in Nagoya and Osaka, and in 2004, his Zero Yen Houses was published by Little More Co. Ltd. Sakaguchi’s work has been shown in Canada, Asia, Europe and Africa. He lives in Tokyo.