Kasper Feyrer and Tamara Henderson The Last Waves September 6–December 4, 2016
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
Kasper Feyrer and Tamara Henderson: The Last Waves is a collaborative installation in which the viewer is immersed in a sequence of hallucinatory sets that loosely evoke the familiar yet strange locations for escapist films: a bar, a lab, a hotel. At The Night Times Press Bar for Dreamers, visitors might linger over the The Night Times newspaper that records and categorizes the artists’ dreams—or record their own, using an ergonomic keyboard that projects their writing into the Gallery to flicker for a moment, then disappear. The bar is U-shaped, containing glowing vignettes in the form of nighttime windows, in reference to the film Consider the Belvedere (2015), which was shot at the aging Belvedere Court apartment building on Main Street in Vancouver. Research into the collection of the Historical Museum of Wine and Spirits in Stockholm inspired and provoked such elements as a drinking song for women and the film Bottles Under the Influence (2012), in which glass bottles are featured as characters. These “vessels,” with names like The Old Hag, subtly unhinge the pairing of psychosis and female sexuality, instead pulling focus to the potent, transformative states between sleeping and waking explored by Surrealism. This fluid collaboration alters the space of the Gallery to a site of production as well as presentation, and of the accumulated effects of experimentation across a number of years, as these spaces become a set for a third film to be shot during the exhibition.
Kasper Feyrer (b. 1982, Victoria, BC) and Tamara Henderson (b. 1982, Sackville, NB) have worked together since 2009. They have collaborated on Enter the Fog at The Rooms, Saint John’s, NF (2016); Kasper Feyrer and Tamara Henderson: Consider the Belvedere at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2015); Bottles Under the Influence at Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre (2013); and Unfinished Corpse Bar at Jacob Lawrence Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle (2013). They recently participated together in residencies at The Rooms, Newfoundland and IASPIS in Stockholm, Sweden.
Kasper Feyrer and Tamara Henderson: The Last Waves was initiated in 2013 by curator Jesse McKee for the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre in Alberta as Bottles Under the Influence. Its second iteration as Kasper Feyrer and Tamara Henderson: Consider the Belvedere took place in 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, organized by curator Alex Klein. The exhibition at the Belkin Art Gallery is made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and our Belkin Curator’s Forum members: Audain Foundation, Christopher Foundation, Nicola Flossbach, Henning and Brigitte Freybe, Jane Irwin and Ross Hill, Michael O’Brian Family Foundation, Phil Lind Foundation, and Scott Watson and Hassan El Sherbiny. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the UBC Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory and the Department of Chemistry Glassblowing Services with special thanks to Brian Ditchburn.
