Far, Up Close includes works by Chris Welsby, Christoph Runne, Monique Mees and Faith Moosang.
Chris Welsby’s Time After displays a time-lapsed live video projection of the Vancouver urban landscape and seeks to re-position the familiar day-to-day urban experience within the larger realm of the natural world’s subtle changes.
Christoph Runne’s Portraits combines classical portraiture with overt allusions to both the Dutch masters (painters like Rembrandt and Frans Hals) and photographic “head shots” often associated with police mug shots. Projected on InterUrban gallery’s windows, Portraits attempts to put faces to some of the individuals residing in Vancouver’s most controversial neighbourhood.
Monique Mees’ photographic series Specimen Plates addresses the historical use of cinema in medical science to analyze, regulate and reconfigure the human body.
Faith Moosang and Christoph Runne's film installation, The Blair Bush Project, looks at the glamourization of warfare and suggests that there is a correlation between beauty and horror.
Faith Moosang is an artist who lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. She received her BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and her MFA from Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. Her work, while largely based in photography, has also included installations using video and film. Recently she has been interested in what she calls rephotography, using found imagery as the basis for her explorations. Her work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Europe. She is also a curator and researcher of photography and has just completed curating an exhibition from a series of glass plate negative portraits from the early 20th century. She is currently creating a body of work from a found collection of slides snapped by an unknown tourist who visited Hearst Castle in the 1960s. This work, supported by the Canada Council, is about the empire of media, dirty money and the amassing of classical statuary.
Monique Mees graduated with honors from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1987. She pursued a scholarship in Germany at the Staatliche Der Bildenden Kunste, Karlsruhe, where she studied painting under Max Neuman, Friedeman Hahn and Marcus Lupertz, all of whom are internationally acclaimed artists from the German expressionist movement of the 80s when painting was at its prime.
After returning to Vancouver she resided in a loft in the heart of the downtown eastside for ten years while developing her art practice towards a multi/interdisciplinary methodology. Adding the element of photography, she pioneered the use of ‘Liquid Light', a light-sensitive emulsion, in order to make her custom large black and white photos on canvass. The Catriona Jeffries Gallery pursued her early in her career, however she found her niche in the non-commercial artist-run galleries of Vancouver
Mees received numerous cultural grants from both the Canada Council and the BC Art Council for her work, which has been shown both nationally and internationally. Today she works predominantly with multi-media installations, not bound by any specific medium.
Christoph Runné is a Vancouver-based experimental film, video, and installation artist. Through his work, he explores the unhidden yet seemingly invisible world around us. He creates visual tone poems with a humanitarian heartbeat whose minimalist and impressionistic methodology contradicts the complex human conditions with which Runné engages.
Chris Welsby began making landscape films and installations in the early 70s, and although he has worked across a range of media he has always concentrated on one particular theme: how do we see ourselves in relation to the natural world and how should we position ourselves and our technologies within it? His art practice was heavily influenced by Structural Materialist film theory at the London Film Makers Co-operative and by cybernetic and systems theory at the Slade School of Fine Art.
Welsby’s films have screened consistently in Cinematheques and art galleries around the world since 1972. He started making digital media installations in 1993, some of which were featured in his 2005 solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Winnipeg Canada, and his 2007 solo exhibition at the Letherby Gallery, London UK. His recent new media collaborations with Brady Marks have been well received in Toronto, at the 2006 Images Festival, and at the 2006 Gwangju Bienniale South Korea and recently at the Surrey Arts Gallery BC, Canada.
Welsby is currently working on a series of three webcam projects, inspired in part by the "world’s first photograph" taken by Joseph Niépce in 1826 near Chalon-sur-Saône sine. The project uses custom software to relay tiny fragments of imagery over extended periods of time. The resulting image of an 8-hour exposure represents time on a scale that is commensurate with the larger time scale of the passing days and seasons.
Welsby is a graduate of the Experimental Media Department at the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London UK. He is currently Professor of Film and Digital Media at Simon Fraser University Vancouver and a member of ICICS (Institute for Computing, Information, and Cognitive Systems) at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
