Title: The Parallax View
Dates: September 4 - October 8, 2003
Location: Western Front, Vancouver BC
Co-Curated with Jonathan Middleton, Curator of Visual Arts, Western Front
Artists: Nicole + Ryan, Mark O'Connell, Michael Euyung Oh and Claude Zervas. Posited as a sequel to the September 2002 exhibition Binocular Parallax presented at Seattle’s Consolidated Works, The Parallax View takes its name from the title of Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 political thriller, which uses Seattle and the North American West Coast as a location for a series of political assassinations and cover-ups.
This exhibition deals with issues of conspiracy, suspicion, anxiety and paranoia – often citing the road movie genre, and specificity of west coast narratives as a source and location for these themes. Works in the exhibition include Michael Euyung Oh’s Indecent Exposure (2003) series of mug shot photographs of registered sex offenders arrested for the charge of indecent exposure, from the city of Vancouver, Washinton; Nicole + Ryan’s video mirror, mirror on the wall (2002) and photo series every broken down car from Vancouver to National City (2002), tracing early conceptual manoeuvres of Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari through a contemporary (post-9/11) Western landscape; Seattle artist Mark O’Connell’s part road movie/part music video Drive (2000), which depicts a surreal and threatening landscape in a drive through eastern Washington state; Seattle-based artist Claude Zervas’s Tomorrowland, derived from found slides of Disney’s Tomorrowland from the 1960’s. The images have been extracted using a digital microscope to sample very small sections of the transparencies, essentially using macro-photography to produce a kind of retro-surveillance.
Similar to Binocular Parallax, The Parallax View uses the concept of the parallax (the apparent change of distance between two objects based on a change of the viewer’s line of sight) as a curatorial framework from which to explore subjectivity and shifting or slipping perspectives. As both of these exhibitions compare art practices of Vancouver and Seattle-based artists, parallax is used to understand some of the differences between two cities of relatively equal size, and close geographic proximity.
