About May Globus
Vancouver City Editor May Globus is obsessed with the sartorial and all that surrounds it: art, design, culture, music and film. Oh, and she really likes writing about it, too. A left coast girl at heart, her Sweetspot finds just might show why the westside really is the best side.
Immanent by Paul Wong
the view from vancity: immanent canada, Vancouver
(Nov.02.11)
The creative and artistic talent pool in Vancouver is nothing short of amazing.
While some of them have flown the west coast coop for big cities and the American dream (Aurel Schmidt, Jason Wu, Michael J. Fox and Michael Buble), some of them have stayed, like author-artist Douglas Coupland, musician Sarah McLachlan and artist Paul Wong.
The latter's newest exhibit Immanent is now on display at the Windsor Gallery, an exhibit whose opening party mixed the who's who of the local art scene with a young, hip set intent on improving their artistic eye by taking in Wong's neon creations, photography, static TV images and single-channel video recordings peppering the main level of this South Granville gallery.
Paul Wong, in neon.
Light and movement is the focus of this new set of works. For 'Storm', Wong captured car lights coming in and out of focus with a video camera through a rain-soaked windshield. In 'Habana Riviera', he recorded a downpour through a hotel room window in Havana, Cuba—the result is a seven-channel video from different vantage points on both the inside and outside the window.
Habana Riviera.
For me, the most compelling piece — well, pieces — are the twenty-one photographic still sets (four of them). Originally shot on video, Wong divides each recording into 21 separate pictures, capturing fleeting moments in snapshots and freezing them in time.
It's always heartening to hear when internationally-known artists decide to stay close to home instead of flying toward brighter lights, instead finding beauty in their own backyard.
Immanent runs at the Windsor Gallery until November 6, so be sure to pop by to see the neon lights and glowing videos.
You may not run into Wong in person, but there are little pieces of him everywhere, on all the gallery walls that surround you.
"A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects: an immanent life carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects. This indefinite life does not itself have moments, close as they may be to one another, but only between-times, between moments; it doesn't just come about or come after but offers the immensity of an empty time where one see the event yet to come and already happened, in the absolute of an immediate consciousnes."
- Gilles Deleuze, Immanence: A Life
(Photo credit: May Globus, via Instagram)