The Apartment

The Apartment is thrilled to present work by Vancouver artist Christos Dikeakos. Selections from two separate bodies of work present strategies Dikeakos employed to form a counter tradition to the hierarchal president of painting and insist on a critical picturing of contemporary life. These early experiments in the pictorial potential of collage and the activity of photography help lay a conceptual ground work which informed subsequent Vancouver art. Where historically collage was seen as a means of producing a ‘new’ reality with alienated elements, “In my case both collage and photography were not to be concerned with building a ‘new’ (aesthetic) unity. Instead these two differing practices were put to task to play a role in the dialectical critique and the cognition and questioning of the real world.”

Made largely in conversation with artist Ian Wallace the Wnston Collage Manuel, 1970, is a sardonic assemblage of images compounded in conflicting compositions that rearrange popular material into a critical review for common life. Exhibited in the Collage Show at UBC Fine Arts in 1971, the project will be here represented with selected pages from the album. In dialogue with these early cut-ups will be a number of black and white pictures taken in 1969 within a few blocks of The Apartment. The “prosaic aspirations of these pictures with their contemplative intent” were produced while driving around in a car as the camera, the windshield as lens.

• The Apartment
• 1450 Chestnut St, Apt. 506
• Vancouver, Canada
• info@theapt.ca