Solo show of collage portraits - "Reading People" - Oct 16th - 26th

Come see it Come see it. First solo show in Vancouver in 2 weeks. Opening on Oct. 19th.

This October marks a first and a last for Project Space and Jessie McNeil: Reading People, an exhibition of new collage portraiture, will be both McNeil’s first solo exhibition in Vancouver and the final exhibition in Project Space’s brick-and-mortar at 222 East Georgia St, which it has operated out of since 2011.

By re-introducing Project Space texts and images from past publications and other printed ephemera into the portrait forms of people reading, McNeil assembles a new language of text as texture. Hannah Höch’s book Bilderbuch (Picture Book), first published in 1945—and which McNeil first encountered at the NY Art Book Fair in 2012—has guided the process of McNeil’s collage work. Höch, the only female member of the Berlin Dadaists, had an unequalled ability to alter images until they were barely recognizable. In these works, what was once forgotten is reborn into something new yet oddly familiar. Although Höch often avoided the use of text in her photo-montage work, McNeil embraces it in this series, not for its literal meaning or readability but for its textural and graphic potential.

Reading People was inspired by the image of people browsing through publications like Bilderbuch at art book fairs and throughout bookstores and publication spaces like Project Space. With small independent bookshops and publication spaces vanishing from many cities, people browsing or skimming through an actual book has become a less common sight. However, “the media of collage and of printed matter (such as a book) are far from being obsolete or undesirable.” McNeil believes that today’s “artists and creatives successfully embrace both printed matter and the digital or virtual in their work, as if each approach’s survival in this world is dependent on each other’s acknowledgement.”

The collaging of past events, the assembling and perhaps reuniting of histories or artifacts, acts as a metaphor for how we make sense of the present and future, continually recycling information. The future of Project Space may not occupy the physical space of 222 East Georgia, but will continue to thrive throughout local spaces, as well as international, printed and virtual ones.