An important Canadian conceptual artist and a leader in the avant-garde community, Vincent Trasov (b. 1947, Edmonton, AB) is a painter, video and performance artist. His work is often media-based and collaborative in spirit, involved with developing networks. In 1969 he founded Image Bank with Michael Morris, a method for personal exchange of information amongst artists. Trasov has made videotapes since 1971. In 1973, Trasov co-founded and co-directed the Western Front Society, an artist-run centre for the production and presentation of new art activity. Trasov gained international prominence with his performance as Mr. Peanut (in a Planter’s Peanut costume), an official candidate for Mayor of Vancouver in 1974. The Mr. Peanut role was intended as, amongst other things, a commentary about the perceived merging of art and politics. In 1981, he was invited to Berlin with Michael Morris as guest of Berliner Kunstlerprogramm, DAAD. He and Morris founded the Morris/Trasov Archive in 1990, housed at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, to research contemporary art and communication. Trasov has had numerous international exhibitions and is represented in public and private collections in both Europe and North America. He presently lives in Berlin and Vancouver.
Vincent Trasov’s work has used the element of fire in different processes over six decades, and at this juncture in the climate crisis the Belkin is presenting Flammable on the Outdoor Screen.
Flammable is a film document of Trasov’s first event as an artist, filmed by Gary Lee-Nova in 1969 outside the former Student Union Building at UBC. Inspired in part by the work of French artist Yves Klein’s process work in which he burned his canvases using an acetylene torch, Trasov set fire to a selection of objects placed on the paved plaza. Arranged in plastic cutlery trays, the thirteen flammable substances identified by Trasov in this event included gasoline, matches, naphthalene, benzene, potassium nitrate, sodium nitrate, phosphorus, magnesium, gunpowder, methelhydrate, flares, toluene and amyl acetate. Trasov produced an invitation card to watch the performance, with “Flammable” stamped in red on one side, a precursor to his use of rubber stamps in the Image Bank collective.
In a 2012 interview with Here and Elsewhere, Trasov says of the work: “My work is process-oriented. The dozen flammable objects I ignited in the Flammable event were my palette. It is the play with fire, the play between construction and deconstruction, controlling the basic element into a creative force which is in the end my painting. There is also a performative and ritualistic aspect to my use of fire and heat. It is also contemplative.”
Trasov’s work often used fire and water, and in his 1969 series of drawings he used copper sulphate – a substance that becomes visible only with the application of heat – to draw on paper. Trasov likened this process to drawing with invisible ink; the transparent copper sulphate would turn a brownish-copper colour when heat was applied. In his Burnt Studies series from the early 1980s, Trasov cut squares of paper from magazines and stacked them in tinfoil, slowly heating them overnight so they would burn slowly, smouldering, but not to the point of destruction. He then adhered the blackened squares to boards.
Vincent Trasov’s film Flammable (1969) plays daily on the Belkin’s Outdoor Screen between 9 am and 9 pm from 2-20 June 2024 and from 12 August-2 September 2024.
An important Canadian conceptual artist and a leader in the avant-garde community, Vincent Trasov (b. 1947, Edmonton, AB) is a painter, video and performance artist. His work is often media-based and collaborative in spirit, involved with developing networks. In 1969 he founded Image Bank with Michael Morris, a method for personal exchange of information amongst artists. Trasov has made videotapes since 1971. In 1973, Trasov co-founded and co-directed the Western Front Society, an artist-run centre for the production and presentation of new art activity. Trasov gained international prominence with his performance as Mr. Peanut (in a Planter’s Peanut costume), an official candidate for Mayor of Vancouver in 1974. The Mr. Peanut role was intended as, amongst other things, a commentary about the perceived merging of art and politics. In 1981, he was invited to Berlin with Michael Morris as guest of Berliner Kunstlerprogramm, DAAD. He and Morris founded the Morris/Trasov Archive in 1990, housed at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, to research contemporary art and communication. Trasov has had numerous international exhibitions and is represented in public and private collections in both Europe and North America. He presently lives in Berlin and Vancouver.
With the opening of the Image Bank exhibition on June 18, 2021, the gallery is pleased to launch the Outdoor Screen, a 4x2 metre outdoor screen curated with media works from the Belkin’s permanent collection and archive alongside work commissioned specifically for this platform.
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