Three Wrongs Don’t Make a Right

Opening Reception - Friday, November 15, 2013, 8pm

In Conversation: Kevin Schmidt with The Everything Company – Saturday, November 23, 2013, 11am

Access Gallery presents The Everything Company’s first solo exhibition, Three Wrongs Don’t Make a Right, a self-conscious inquiry into the constructs of landscape within the tradition of western aesthetics and the history of picture making. Combining elements of the members’ own photographic practices as well as a number of interests from the collaboration’s earliest moments – particularly their investigations into masculinity in a Canadian context – Three Wrongs Don’t Make a Right queries the nature of aesthetic experience itself and the historically laden roles of painting and photography in the fabrication of that experience. Each of the three works that together comprise the exhibition is “wrong” in some way: purposefully scaled too large for the space of the gallery that contains them, they present viewers with hopelessly elaborate framing devices and viewing apparatuses, and make unavoidable the gap between artist, object and audience. With uneasy nods to the legacies of Friedrich, Bierstadt, Harris, Adams, Smithson and Wall, Three Wrongs Don’t Make a Right offers both a challenge to and admission of complicity with these powerful and problematic traditions.

The Everything Company (TEC) is a collaborative founded in Montreal and now based in Vancouver. Membership is fluid; currently active are Jason Gowans and Michael Love, other past and current members include Simon Benedict, Chris Dahl, Max Yuristy. Both Gowans and Love have individual photographic practices and see TEC as an outlet for ideas that are distinctly different from their solo work. Gowans and Love are also founders and co-directors/curators of Gallery 295 in Vancouver, a space dedicated to the presentation of emergent photographic practices. They see 295 as an ongoing TEC project. The collaborative practice of TEC has to date focused mainly on creating events and facilitating relationships; recent projects have included a year-long series of distillations and speakeasies engaging with various local Vancouver sites and histories of prohibition and alcohol consumption (and presented at the Western Front and 221A among others), and the construction of a giant, bicycle-powered cedar salmon smoking hut in downtown Toronto for Nuit Blanche 2013, wherein participants were encouraged to pedal for several minutes in exchange for smoked salmon. This will be The Everything Company’s first gallery exhibition since the members’ relocation from Montreal in 2010.

Download a PDF copy of the Exhibition Tearsheet for Three Wrongs Don't Make a Right here