Adad Hannah was born in New York in 1971, spent his childhood in Israel and England, and moved to Vancouver in the early 1980s. He lives and works in Vancouver and exhibits his work nationally and internationally. This exhibition brings together key works made by Hannah in the past decade that focus on his enduring interest in the photographic image in relation to personal and social histories.

Hannah’s work uses intertwined modes of expression (photography, video, installation and performance) to generate the still image. His videos are presented in a fixed manner and from a frontal perspective, with scenes skillfully constructed and orchestrated by the artist in which participants, whose gestures are fixed without being totally immobile, take part in various activities staged by the artist. Often developing his projects over numerous months or years, doing intensive research and working with large groups of participants through community workshops, Hannah’s staged images draw on references ranging from celebrated historical paintings and sculptures to everyday lives.

Temporality and its complex relationship with photography and video occupies a prominent place in Hannah’s work. He consistently diversifies the means of animating a fixed image, beginning with capturing a pose on video that is held momentarily by the vacillating bodies. Hannah's “living pictures” play with the fascinated and attentive eye of the spectator. In recent work, the artist has endeavoured to generate the illusion of movement by taking a multitude of photographs of a body in action in order to successively articulate all the phases, reminiscent of the chronophotography of artist Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904).

This exhibition brings together key themes that define the narrative of Hannah’s artistic practice: Mirroring the Museum, Reflections of Artworks and Lives Captured. In these varied bodies of work Hannah explores seriality, repetition, recovery, duplication, reflection, the copy and visual citation.

Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber are Winnipeg-based artists who work collaboratively to create paintings, drawings and text-based work. In 2008, Dumontier and Farber began working as a duo, meeting regularly, listening to records and making collaborative drawings, following a successful period working collaboratively with the larger artist collective The Royal Art Lodge.

The artists' imagery and texts are generated primarily through a call and response approach wherein paintings and drawings serve as the catalyst for the text. Writing has become increasingly the focus for the two artists; they often generate multiple texts before deciding on the final work. Using humour as a key device, the result of this collaborative process is a fusion of imagery and text layered with absurd narratives and dark humour. Their work is influenced by Surrealist language and methodologies, and often utilizes word play in reference to pop culture, past and present. Through their democratic approach to art making, the artists invite opportunity for open creative possibilities based on extensive dialogue.

The exhibition, I wasn’t paying attention and now it’s over, features Dumontier and Farber’s collaborative paintings and small print editions, as well as their ongoing series of Library paintings and Typing editions. The Library paintings began in 2009 and consist of thousands of book paintings that continue to grow with every exhibition. Book covers and spines reveal fictional titles displayed in a large grid, consisting of a vast collection of questions, absurd phrases and punchlines. The viewing experience is similar to perusing the shelves of a wall-sized library.

The Typing series consists of two different prints, one featuring a woman and the other featuring a man, seated in front of a typewriter with a large blank page encompassing most of the frame. The print is then put through a typewriter where the artists write letters and captions and create typed imagery. Typical of their collaborative practice as a whole, these projects generously open up to the input and output of each artist.