Catching up with Jennifer Vanderpool

Minimalism in an Age of Hoarding: Artist Jennifer Vanderpool

I first experienced Jennifer Vanderpool’s hypersensitive reality close to a decade ago, having walked into one of her elaborate installations at the former Bandini Gallery in Culver City.  It was one of the most obsessive, engaging installations I had come across, and it remains as such in my memory today.

"Hysterical Paradise," 2008 
Bandini Art 
Hysterical Paradise, Culver City, CA 

Jennifer is someone who understands the charm of visual narratives, her works unfolding with an imaginary appreciation, and this room-sized setting was one of her most intricate stagings.  Called, 'Hysterical Paradise', the title summed up well this over-the-top, technicolor landscape of flora, fun, fervor and fanaticism (with the countless hours spanned to spin, tie, mold, paint, and glitter the eruption of pieces, immediately evident).  The work was both appealing and slightly unsettling (like eating too much cotton candy at the fair); hugging that fine line between extremes that Jennifer does so well. 

"Hysterical Paradise," 2008 
Bandini Art 
Culver City, CA

Lincoln Clarkes, “Giving Notice”

Lincoln Clarkes, “Giving Notice”

Recent street works by photographer Lincoln Clarkes, Initial Gallery, Vancouver.

In a time when camera phones have turned ‘everyman’ into a photographer and the ‘selfie’ has surpassed the allure of the portrait, Lincoln Clarkes’ new series of works, “Giving Notice”, returns this expertise to the terrain of the skilled photographer.  In this thoughtfully curated show by Julie Lee, culled from a larger selection of work dating back to 2008, Clarkes turns his lens on the cities and people of Toronto, Vancouver, and a handful of scenes in Miami, Detroit, and London.  The show’s title, “Giving Notice”, suggests the movement of city-life itself as it shifts through its many guises from dressed-up to broken-down.

Bestowing his subjects with a straightforward ease, Clarkes disguises the true complexity of his compositions—two women sitting in a laundromat, a group of friends hanging out on a street corner, shots gazing into and through windows, city-scenes in effect doubling as character–the sensation is that of a fly on the wall, skirting the uneasy rift between discovery and that of not-so-innocent onlooker. 

Lincoln Clarkes, Bathurst Streetcar,Toronto, 2010