Yvette Poorter: Knock on Woods Roving International Residency June 21, 2008

The Helen Pitt Gallery presents:

KNOCK ON WOODS: A Roving International Artist Residency
Yvette Poorter

Closing reception and video presentation: Saturday, June 21 at 7:00 pm
Artist talk: 7:30 pm

Please join us for the reception concluding the KNOCK ON WOODS residencies at the Helen Pitt Gallery. For the past week, the gallery has hosted 12 short-term residencies of local artists, writers, yogis, musicians and people who do other things too.

With Knock on Woods, Rotterdam-based artist Yvette Poorter has created a nomadic version of her previous residency projects “This Neck of the Woods" (2005-07) and "A Week in the Woods (2001-03)." After a number of European stops, Poorter is now in the process of touring the project to a number of Canadian cities. Poorter will also be presenting this project at Open Space (Victoria), Mercer Union (Toronto), Modern Fuel (Kingston) and Quartier Ephemère (Montreal) over the next months.

Knock on Woods International Residency is a constructed space that dedicates itself to offering local and international artists of all sorts a sense of rootedness and respite from a hectic and bewildering globalism. The residency is a para-site that consists of a rustic tent-cabin and a forest of tree-flags. Functioning as a sculpture, an architectural intervention, an archive, a series of collaborations and a traveling circus, KOW suitably takes on more nebulous forms: a cross-roads, a zone, a state of mind.

Artists were invited to do a residency with Knock on Woods for a minimum of four and a maximum of 24 hours. Any kind of work/non-work was advocated: out-come-based projects, pointless exploration, rest or respite.

For more information on the background for this project, the artist, and a link to Knock on Woods, please visit http://thisneckofthewoods.net/

YVETTE POORTER is a Canadian/Dutch artist currently based in Rotterdam. Her sculpture, video, photography, text-works, actions and installation have been shown extensively in North America and Europe, as well as in Japan. Recent solo exhibitions include The Vegetarians at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (Victoria BC), ICI3 at Buro Dijkstra (Amsterdam), and Forty-Hour-Work-Week at Sox36 (Berlin). Previous versions of Knock on Woods were staged at TENT (Rotterdam) and Ouve, O Seculo (Lisbon). In 2005 Poorter was part of the photography exhibition Duplicitous, at the Helen Pitt Gallery.

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

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