Horizons and Of and About Posters bring together two like-minded mavericks, at the Vancouver Art Gallery
Late conceptualist pioneers Lawrence Weiner and Garry Neill Kennedy, friends in life, are celebrated in twinned posthumous exhibits
Photo courtesy @vanartgallery
Vancouver Art Gallery presents HORIZONS and Of and About Posters until August 25
THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY’s two newest exhibitions stand in spirited dialogue with each other—much as the two late conceptualist pioneers behind them did in life.
On the one hand, you have Of and About Posters, devoted to the work of Lawrence Weiner, who died in 2021 at 79. He’s the artist best known as the creator of the VAG’s longstanding façade text work PLACED UPON THE HORIZON (CASTING SHADOWS).
On the other, you have Horizons—a conceptual project long imagined by Garry Neill Kennedy, in which both modern and historic landscape paintings, here culled from the VAG’s considerable collection, are rehung along the walls so their horizon lines match up. Kennedy died the same year here in Vancouver at 86.
Pains have been taken in both cases to get the exhibits right, in absence of the trailblazing artists themselves. In the case of Of and About Posters, guest curator Grant Arnold had collaborated with Weiner on poster exhibits at venues worldwide, and he had began work on this landmark show in 2018, before Weiner’s death.
In the case of Horizons, the VAG has developed it collaboratively with Cathy Busby, a celebrated visual artist and Kennedy’s spouse.
Both shows are playfully subversive. Weiner made his name using language as the material for a vast body of work that pushed beyond the limits of poetry and aphorism—not to mention notions of what art is. The show here gathers more than 250 posters, created between 1965 and 2021. Kennedy, meanwhile, when he proposed Horizons was toying with ideas of the curator’s power to hang art in galleries.
Tying it all together is a display of correspondence, drawings, and notes from Weiner to Kennedy, offering a glimpse into the camaraderie of these two outliers, who supported and admired each other and shared a similar passion for art-world critique. 
Lawrence Weiner, THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY ARCHIVE OF LAWRENCE WEINER POSTERS (INCLUDING THE NSCAD COLLECTION), 1993, offset lithograph on paper, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Published by the Vancouver Art Gallery, 1993, VAG 93.19, Photo by Vancouver Art Gallery, © 2024 Lawrence Weiner Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/CARCC Ottawa 2024
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