Giving Face
Deborah Edmeades
and Michael Lachman

Exhibition dates:
June 25, 2016
and by appointment

Opening reception:
June 25, 7-11pm

Haunt presents Giving Face, featuring the two-channel video work, Poems, by Deborah Edmeades, and new sculptural works by Michael Lachman. Locating productive sites of embarrassment through performative gestures—the persuasive enactment of adolescent poetry, the lavish investment in half-hearted achievement—both artists work to side-step identities prescribed by dominant culture. Additional to the exhibited works, Haunt’s garage becomes a one-night listening lounge presented by “Debi”.

Deborah Edmeades is currently based in Vancouver. Her work has been focused through a practice of performance that has continued at times outside of an artistic or academic context and into therapeutic and esoteric experiments. Recent interests include: the histories of western mystical and esoteric practice and thought; their intertwinement with the history of religion, philosophical discourse and the sciences; and their somewhat embarrassing contemporary
manifestation in the ‘New Age’. Thankfully, embarrassment for Edmeades has been a long­time indicator of productive content and is often an ingredient of the work, which ranges between performance, the lens, object­making and drawing. Recent group exhibitions include: The Accursed Share, curated by Marina Roy at Artspeak, Vancouver, 2016; Performing Franklin Furnace, Participant Inc. and Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, 2015; Martha Wilson “Staging the Self”: University of Utah Fine Arts Museum, Salt Lake City; Nichols Art Gallery, Pitzer College of Art, Los Angeles and Inova (Institute of Visual Arts), University of Wisconson, Milwaukee, 2013; and History of Disappearance: From the Archives of Franklin Furnace: PHOTO IRELAND FESTIVAL, Dublin, Ireland and Laznia Center, Gdansk, Poland, 2011. Edmeades is a Franklin Furnace grant recipient, was visiting artist and guest lecturer of performance art at the University of Texas at Austin in 2000 and completed an MFA at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver in 2014.

Michael Lachman is an emerging artist living in Vancouver. He spent his childhood in suburban America, waiting for the school bus to pick him up from parking lots in front of strip malls. He is drawn to amateur graphics, logos, signs, and typography, often borrowing from the idiosyncratic language of found, or thrifted items. Appropriating the forms of everyday, household objects, his work emphasizes tensions between high and low culture. He works across media, conjuring fictional narratives, exploring notions of nostalgia, commodity and excess. His work was recently included in I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone, an exhibition for the aceartinc. Flux Gallery, Winnipeg, 2015, and in RELIEF, the first publication in Colouring Book Series, compiled and designed by Emma Metcalfe Hurst & Scott Kemp. He holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University.

Viewable at:
HAUNT basement
(entrance in yard)