Lorna Brown is a Vancouver-based visual artist, curator, writer and editor. Brown is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, and is an ongoing member of the Other Sights Producer team. She was the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004, an artist-run centre focusing on the relationship between visual art and writing. Between 2015 and 2022, she was Acting Director/Curator at the Belkin, curating exhibition series such as Beginning With the Seventies that explored the relationship between art, archives and activism. Brown has exhibited her work internationally since 1984, and has taught at Simon Fraser University and Emily Carr University of Art and Design where she received an honorary doctorate of letters in 2015. Awards include the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts Award (1996) and the Canada Council Paris Studio Award (2000). Her work is in the collections of the Belkin, SFU Galleries, the National Gallery of Canada, the BC Arts Council, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank.
The twenty-four anonymous, undated and very personal letters that make up Dear, seem to be suspended in a first-draft state. Reading closely, it becomes clear that this is not a correspondence but rather a one-sided exchange between the author and himself. The typed texts have been anxiously marked up and corrected by hand, and in exasperation – a second-guessing that harangues the writer for breaks in logic, improper syntax and evasive or vague passages. At other times, the editor’s fidgety revisions pause to comment that a passage exemplifies “the postmodern condition” or to helpfully smooth and polish an acceptable phrase. At one point, even the sentiment “I hope one day we can just let ourselves be ourselves around each other” has been worried with a complicated re-working.
Dear, discloses the most private reflections of the writer while simultaneously challenging the authenticity of these feelings with analytic detachment. The failure to communicate perfectly, displayed publicly and self-deprecatingly in this exhibition, is a paradox we can recognize. Erdem Taşdelen’s work focuses on the complexity of self-expression in projects using a range of media. Worrier, a series of videos, are sessions with a psychoanalyst in which he reveals his recurrent fears and anxieties about being an artist, while Erdem Taşdelen is a business card project in which his “title” is given as “Sullen hermit,” “delusional lover” or “dissatisfied libertine” amongst others. In presenting these multiple and conflicting subjectivities, the artist’s identity becomes more credible yet more suspect at the same time.
This exhibition is a collaboration between the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Walter C. Koerner Library at The University of British Columbia, and is made possible with the generous support of the Audain Foundation. Art in the Library offers new perspectives on contemporary art by presenting art that questions our current perceptions about the world around us.
Erdem Tasdelen, dear, (detail), 2010
inkjet and ink on copy paper
Lorna Brown is a Vancouver-based visual artist, curator, writer and editor. Brown is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, and is an ongoing member of the Other Sights Producer team. She was the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004, an artist-run centre focusing on the relationship between visual art and writing. Between 2015 and 2022, she was Acting Director/Curator at the Belkin, curating exhibition series such as Beginning With the Seventies that explored the relationship between art, archives and activism. Brown has exhibited her work internationally since 1984, and has taught at Simon Fraser University and Emily Carr University of Art and Design where she received an honorary doctorate of letters in 2015. Awards include the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts Award (1996) and the Canada Council Paris Studio Award (2000). Her work is in the collections of the Belkin, SFU Galleries, the National Gallery of Canada, the BC Arts Council, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank.
Audain Foundation