Or Gallery
Vancouver, BC | Canada

For the 2020 Prairie Art Book Fair Or Gallery will be exhibiting a selection of Or Gallery publications including artist books, critical texts, vinyl records, cassette subscriptions, and risograph editions.

The Or Gallery is an artist-run centre in Vancouver BC committed to exhibiting work by local, national, and international artists whose art practice is of a critical, conceptual and/or interdisciplinary nature. Established in 1983 by a group of Vancouver artists, the Or Gallery and has been a continuous presence in the city’s cultural landscape. Since its inception, the gallery has acted as a space for research, proposition making, conceptual experimentation and documentation.

Exercises in Kinesthetic Drawing and Other Drawing
Aaron Carpenter
$25 CAD
Hardcover
Published by Or Gallery, 
Edited by Jonathan Middleton
, Design by Information Office.

A book of drawing experiments by Aaron Carpenter. Carpenter’s humble, humorous drawings often result from peculiar, self-inflicted constraints, as in “Calibrating of Left Arm as a Rule Edge” and “Self Portrait Drawn at Knife-point”.

Cockatoo Island
Ron Terada
$25 CAD
Hardcover, edition of 500
Published by Bywater Bros. Editions and the Or Gallery.

This book documents Ron Terada’s walkabout of Cockatoo Island in September 2008. Expecting an exotic, tropical landscape replete with cockatoos and other rare fauna, Terada instead found himself on an island more in common to an isolated penitentiary like Alcatraz. Located off Sydney Harbour, Cockatoo Island was indeed once the site of a former prison and shipyard, yet on this occasion, also the setting for the 2008 Sydney Biennale.

Presented in a refined yet deadpan serial layout, Terada’s Cockatoo Island “blacks-out” any visual evidence regarding the works in the exhibit, the trajectory of his walk, or any clues to the island itself. What remains is a list of each participating artist as presented by the Biennale organizers: on homely, hand-made signage that evokes at once both protest and resignation.

12 Sun Songs
Cranfield and Slade
$20 CAD
12” vinyl record

Published with JRP Ringier in the Christoph Keller Edition series.

Cranfield and Slade: 12 Sun Songs is a yellow vinyl album made up of covers of pop songs about the sun. Aping a 1970s concept album Cranfield and Slade present twelve songs arranged to represent a day, beginning with songs about sunrise and winding down with songs about sunsets. Tracks range from classics such as George Harrison’s Here Comes the Sun and The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset, to the lesser-known Sun by singer-songwriter Margot Guryan and Where Evil Grows by Vancouver’s The Poppy Family. The album combines field recordings made in various Vancouver locations with electronic sound and acoustic and electric instruments.

Based in rainy Vancouver, Cranfield and Slade are made up of visual artist Kathy Slade and artist/musician Brady Cranfield, working with musicians including Larissa Loyva (Piano, Kellarissa), Johnny Payne (Victoria Victoria, The Shilos), and Chris Harris (Piano, Parks and Rec, The Secret Three, Womankind); and special guests John Collins (The New Pornographers, The Evaporators) and artist Rodney Graham (The Rodney Graham Band, UJ3RK5). The liner notes for 12 Sun Songs are written by celebrated Canadian poet and critic Peter Culley.

Ten Shows
Barb Choit
$14.95 CAD
Co-produced with Black Dog Publishing, London
Softcover

Ten Shows is a catalog for ten exhibitions curated by Barb Choit and presented at the California Institute of the Arts Slide Library in 2002. The “shows” consisted of 35 mm slides that were culled from the CalArts library collection and placed in ten separate slide sheets on the slide library’s light table. After the exhibition, the book was acquisitioned by the library and now serves as a potential checklist for anyone interested in remounting the exhibitions.

Many of the slides are unique to the CalArts collection and show the history of the institution and its place within the greater art world. Included in the book are reproduced images of slides that document early works by well-known CalArts faculty and students, such as Michael Asher’s A Room Situation (CalArts Room A-403, 1973) or Sam Durant’s Untitled Installation, Detail Chairs (N.D.); images of historic changes to the campus architecture; CalArts Library’s Intel Lab (1999); and photographs of exhibitions that took place at CalArts, such as Lucy Lippard’s 26 Conceptual Women Artists (CalArts, 1973).

Also included in the book are generic reference images for general subjects such as astronomy or aeronautics, familiar images from popular culture, and multiple copies of canonized art historical works. The catalog both subjectively categorizes and takes stock of the CalArts slide library as a teaching tool and a living document of the institution’s history.

Vancouver Anthology (2nd ed.)
Edited by Stan Douglas
$35 CAD
Hardcover

Essays by Keith Wallace, Sara Diamond, Nancy Shaw, Maria Insell, William Wood, Carol Williams, Robin Peck, Robert Linsley, Scott Watson, Marcia Crosby.

The essays collected in this book were first presented in the autumn of 1990 as part of a lecture series organized by Stan Douglas entitled Vancouver Anthology: Lectures on Art in British Columbia, a forum in which each contributing writer could test his or her research on the question of art and politics in public. The papers documented a range of Vancouver cultural practices, including the emergence of artist-run centres, experimental performance and video, feminist activity, collaboration, sculpture, painting, art criticism, conceptual art and landscape, as well as critical reflections on perceptions of aboriginal cultures. The book of essays derived from these lectures quickly became regarded as one of the seminal accounts of the city’s recent art production and integral to a broad understanding of Canadian art. This 20th Anniversary hardcover edition features new images and a new afterword by Douglas.

Ginger Goodwin Way
Edited by Jesse Birch
$12
Softcover

Ginger Goodwin Way was a 2010 Or Gallery exhibition of contemporary art that engaged with contested stories and histories: re-interpretations, misinterpretations and unofficial versions. It featured work by Mariana Castillo Deball, Michele Di Menna, and Until We Have A Helicopter, with texts by Adam Sellen, Eric Bell, and Raymond Boisjoly. This book also contains essays by the late Jim Green, Jesse Birch and Michael Turner. 

Northwest Coast

Edited by Dana Claxton
$10 each, $45 set of 5
Softcover, edition of 200

Series titles include:
NCW #1 Skeena Reece, When the Business of Native Art Criticism Becomes Critical
NWC #2 Brenda Crabtree, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted
NWC #3 Morgan Asoyuf
NWC #4 Marika Swan, Pulling Back into Place
NWC #5 Roxanne Charles, Hybridity: Practices Rooted in Indigenous Epistemologies, Born of Resistance, and Engaged in the Occupation of Sociopolitical Space

Northwest Coast is a publication series edited by Dana Claxton. Collectively, the series highlights the Northwest Coast region as a place in common that underlines the development and thrivance of the contemporary creative practices of five Indigenous women. Each book features a single text by a Northwest Coast First Nations artist in which they reflect on the sociopolitical context for their contemporary art practices and engagement with traditional Indigenous Northwest Coast visual culture. As Dana Claxton notes in her foreword to the texts, “It is my hope that the words and art in these precious volumes contribute to critical consciousness and justice for Indigenous People.”

Night Shift
Brady Cranfield & Jamie Hilder
$15
12” vinyl record

Night Shift is a 12” vinyl record by Brady Cranfield and Jamie Hilder, which documents the artists’ 2012 performance and installation at the Or Gallery. In response to the idea that titanium dioxide, the primary ingredient in white paint, is used as an indicator of economic recovery, the artists painted the walls of the gallery white every night for the duration of the exhibition. As the title implies, the artists’ labour took place at night while the gallery was closed and was performed for an amount of time equal to the gallery’s regular business hours. Several microphones recorded the sounds of the painting and were played back during the day while the gallery was open to the public. Over the course of the exhibition, as paint built up on the wall, these sounds also accrued after each night’s work, with each subsequent track layered on top of the previous night’s recordings. Liner notes by Andrew Witt.

Food for Thought
Edited by Sarah Edmonds
$5

Produced for the 20th anniversary of the Or Gallery, Food for Thought is an anecdotal history of the gallery, told through the individuals, institutions and community that has supported it. With contributions from ten of the eleven curators who led the gallery for limited terms from 1983 to 2003, the contributions are as diverse as the curators’ mandates.

Egg Flagg
Aaron Carpenter
$85 ($200 for portfolio set of three)
Risograph print on archival paper

Or Gallery limited edition risograph prints by Vancouver artists Lorna Brown, Aaron Carpenter, and Marina Roy, printed on archival bristol & cold press paper. The Or Gallery 2014 Risograph Edition Portfolio is the first edition printed on our Risograph printer, a machine that prints using a stencil technique, similar to a mimeograph or silkscreen.

Emblem (death drive)
Marina Roy
$85 ($200 for portfolio set of three)
Risograph print on archival paper

Or Gallery limited edition risograph prints by Vancouver artist Lorna Brown, Aaron Carpenter, and Marina Roy, printed on archival bristol & cold press paper. The Or Gallery 2014 Risograph Edition Portfolio is the first edition printed on our Risograph printer, a machine that prints using a stencil technique, similar to a mimeograph or silkscreen.

Study for Swallowtail Catastrophe
Lorna Brown
$85 ($200 for portfolio set of three)
Risograph print on archival paper

Or Gallery limited edition risograph prints by Vancouver artist Lorna Brown, Aaron Carpenter, and Marina Roy, printed on archival bristol & cold press paper. The Or Gallery 2014 Risograph Edition Portfolio is the first edition printed on our Risograph printer, a machine that prints using a stencil technique, similar to a mimeograph or silkscreen.

Select//Or Mixtape Series
$149.99
12 casette tapes

Dig out your Walkmans! With a subscription to the series you will receive twelve mixtape audio cassettes posted directly to your door. Each mix has been selected by a mystery DJ whose identity will only be revealed in an audio outro. Let the dual technologies of the cassette tape and the postal service deliver to you mixes by Alexander Alberro, Sepake Angiama, Diedrich Diederichsen, Simon Denny, Raven Chacon, Deborah Edmeades, Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, Julia Feyrer, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Fred Moten, The Music Appreciation Society, and others!