Weekly Shot of Art - Bit by Bit

Well, I am recovered and back on the arts scene, albeit a little bruised..and I have good stuff for you! I know the Weekly Shot of Art is supposed to be on Tuesday, but the exhibit I wanted to see - "Bit by Bit" - is only open Wed-Sun. So I hope that you will forgive me.

I am such an image junkie, and not only an image junkie, so I have been ripping snippets of photographs, words and images out of magazines and gluing them all together for a long time. I become obsessed with creating new contexts for things and so when I heard about "Bit by Bit" showing at the Contemporary Art Gallery, I was very intrigued. It's not often that you see collage art in a gallery.

The concept of the exhibit comes from the Dadaist idea that "to produce pictures is no big deal". Images are cheap currency in our society and they are everywhere. In that context, does "art" come to have more meaning or less meaning? The Dada movement tried to make ar t out of the common images of flyers, newspapers and the like, and the artists in this group show - Marc Bell, Paul Butler, Miguel da Conceicao, Dearraindop, Amy Lockhart, Jason McLean and Jennifer Murphy - have done something along the same lines. Jason McLean has taken pages of vintage books and altered them over with incongruous words, doodles, scraps of paper and even ads. On one piece he has incorporated an image of the Visa logo with the slogan "the card that cares" cleverly changed to "the card, who cares?". I love it. McLean's work can also be seen on the ceiling of the Vancouver Art Gallery's lobby if you are in that neighbourhood.

Paul Butler's chatotic, fluorescent vision is one of my favorite's of this show, and can be seen from outside the gallery if you don't happen to go by the CAG when it is open, or if you don't want to deal with the cold, cooler-than-thou attitudes. I don't know what it is about that place, I like the art, but they are not very welcoming.

Image courtesy of the Contemporary Art Gallery and Mark Bell