Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson: The Last Waves is a collaborative installation in which the viewer is immersed in a sequence of hallucinatory sets that loosely evoke the familiar yet strange locations for escapist films: a bar, a lab, a hotel. At The Night Times Press Bar for Dreamers, visitors might linger over the The Night Times newspaper that records and categorizes the artists’ dreams – or record their own, using an ergonomic keyboard that projects their writing into the Gallery to flicker for a moment, then disappear. The bar is U-shaped, containing glowing vignettes in the form of nighttime windows, in reference to the film Consider the Belvedere (2015), which was shot at the aging Belvedere Court apartment building on Main Street in Vancouver. Research into the collection of the Historical Museum of Wine and Spirits in Stockholm inspired and provoked such elements as a drinking song for women and the film Bottles Under the Influence (2012), in which glass bottles are featured as characters. These “vessels,” with names like The Old Hag, subtly unhinge the pairing of psychosis and female sexuality, instead pulling focus to the potent, transformative states between sleeping and waking explored by Surrealism. This fluid collaboration alters the space of the Gallery to a site of production as well as presentation, and of the accumulated effects of experimentation across a number of years, as these spaces become a set for a third film to be shot during the exhibition.

This publication marks the culmination of Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson’s three-part exhibition project. Julia Feyrer and Tamara Henderson documents the project viewed through the artists’ films from the perspective of the exhibition installations at Banff Centre, ICA and the Belkin Art Gallery that served as the sets for their films, as well as from the artists’ process archives, which include the writing, poetry, drawing, and painting that form the backbone of the artists’ respective practices. This fully-illustrated catalogue, designed by Mark Owens, includes essays by curators Jesse McKee (Banff Centre), Alex Klein (ICA) and Scott Watson (Belkin Art Gallery).