THE LIMINALITY PROJECT: Joshua Bartholomew and Cedric Meister March 8, 2008

THE LIMINALITY PROJECT
Joshua Bartholomew and Cedric Meister

A Helen Pitt Back Gallery project curated by Tegan Moore, Robyn Croft and Tiziana La Melia

Saturday, March 8 through Saturday, April 5, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, March 7 at 8:00 pm

For this project Bartholomew and Meister will be undertaking a spatial intervention involving a direct physical repositioning of the Helen Pitt Gallery space, and a pointed theoretical reconsideration of notions of gallery structure in general. Involving formal and conceptual elements from the fields of architecture, film, semiotics, history and institutional critique, THE LIMINALITY PROJECT is concerned with the various sociological and aesthetic language systems that are implicated through alternative motives in design processes of labour and product.

CEDRIC MEISTER is a Vancouver-based artist from Basel, Switzerland. He is currently finishing a visual arts degree at Emily Carr Institute, majoring in Photography. He has had work published in West Coast Line and has previously shown at LES Gallery in Vancouver.

JOSHUA BARTHOLOMEW is originally from Toronto, Ontario and attended Parsons School of Design for Architecture before moving to Vancouver. He is currently in his third year of a Visual Arts program at the Emily Carr Institute.

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INTRODUCTION
by Tegan Moore

We have all been confronted with the challenge of stepping over a threshold, whether it’s as trivial as passing over the sill of a doorway or as momentous as graduating from highschool or college and entering the “real world”. In any event, however great the challenge, the act of passing over the threshold involves expectations of transformation and assimilation. The term liminality is derivative of the Latin word limen meaning “threshold” and applies to a state of being in which one is prompted into an indeterminate transitional period or space. The term was conceived in part by Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner who rested its meaning as that which is “neither here nor there, betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony”. This amorphous “space” whether physical or metaphorical, operates between polarities, most notably between the ephemeral and the finite, and between modes of possibility and restriction.

In a balancing act of intervention on the threshold, Cedric Meister and Joshua Bartholomew’s recent project with the Helen Pitt Gallery involves architectural alteration on the flipside of practical design. Using various elements of the gallery and its objects, the project seeks to put the gallery and its attendees in a temporary state of liminality. This project requires a specifically rendered exchange between the gallery’s office space and back gallery, bringing to light the limits and opportunities set in place by common physical thresholds, like windows and doorways. By reconditioning social spaces and objects, this undertaking levels structural hierarchies in search for, in the artists’ words “an unstructured state of ‘communitas’” an ergonomically challenging and unexpected equalization of people and place.

Bartholomew and Meister's project appreciates the unique sensibilities in the architecture of the space, namely the integrated office space, the narrow back corridor, the back gallery's low ceilings and its doubly interior window. The reframing of the gallery's place for art, visitors, and administration is an institutional inquiry that, while nodding heads at other work like Michael Asher's wall removals and replacements, taps into the personality of the Helen Pitt itself and what it feels like to move through it.

Helen Pitt Gallery
#102-148 Alexander Street
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6A 1B5
www.helenpittgallery.org
Contact: Lance Blomgren, Gallery Director/Curator

Official Website: http://www.helenpittgallery.org