Playing Possum

Opening Reception: Friday, Feb. 1st, 8pm

Exhibition catalogue essay by Nadine Nickull

Milutin Gubash's series Playing Possium consists of photographs of public spaces and text gathered from newspaper clippings. In 1999 Gubash began to collect articles from a calgary daily paper about tragic events in the area and has since regularly revisited the city to document the sites of these tragedies. The artist's on-going series uses Calgary as a model for an urban landscape that is typified by its instantaneous communities ans gentrification. Stories of bizarre and aberrant behaviors are juxtaposed with image of the sites documented well after the fact-any traces point to ruptures between the events and the media accounts, challenging our investment in their coherency and the world we imagine.

Milutin Gubash holds a MFA degree from Concordia University and currently teaches at the University of Victoria. He has exhibited in Montreal, Toronto, and Calgary. Playing Possum is the artist's first solo exhibition in Vancouver. Gubash is at work on a film which uses a beating death in a park to consider the notion of landscape as a site of interesting histories and contested meanings.