HO TAM "A Portrait of the Photographer"

March 27 - April 25, 2015

Closing Reception Saturday April 25, 2-5pm. Artist present.

Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to present "A Portrait of the Photographer", a concise survey of Vancouver-based multi-disciplinary artist Ho Tam's work, from his seminal video "The Yellow Pages" 1994 to his current publishing projects, photography, painting and printmaking. Please join us for a closing reception. Ho will be coming from Vancouver for the occasion.

Here is a review of "A Portrait of the Photographer" by Terence Dick for akimblog.ca

In the reading list to her recent self-help guide for artists, Carol Bove included fifteen-year-old art magazines because they are the best place to see artworks in their least flattering light. A decade and a half represents the midway point before things come back in fashion, so this is the point of the greatest estrangement but also the most honest test of a works worth. Looking at old art magazines is always dispiriting because they are catalogues of failed careers, flashes in the pan, and the savage Darwinism of art history. So little survives between now and then, and the major institutions can only validate a miniscule selection of an eras artists. The economy of time and space, as well as money, for the big public galleries is a horribly limited arbiter of whats remembered, so its worth recognizing the efforts of others to keep up with the past. University galleries like the AGYU with their recent Toronto in the late seventies exhibition and the University of Guelphs Toronto-based G Gallery and their just closed Janice Gurney survey not to mention mid-career surveys from U of Ts Barnicke Gallery all do their part to halt our collective amnesia. A couple of commercial galleries have also stepped up to the plate and Paul Petros current look at the varied output of Ho Tam is a fine example of how to do it right.

From an old school magazine rack how much longer are they going to be around? housing the full range of Tams book and magazine work to a viewing station made up of a vacuum tube TV set, VHS deck, and a selection of VHS tapes with the artists videos dating back the 1994 now over twenty years ago, FYI ready to be rewound and watched again, the exhibition captures not only the evolution of the work but the drastic technological shifts of recent history. The overriding interest in issues of identity and self-representation carry through to the more recent photo series that benefit from a lens turned on others, be they naval officers facing a sublime sea or weathered seniors in Montreal or young men who would otherwise be depicted as angry urban youth joyously displaying the stuffed animals they just won at an amusement park.

Tam also revisits his own past in a photo/video series from 2000 just over fifteen years ago taken at his former grammar school in Hong Kong and a more recent series of the artist's partner dressed in ambiguously aged clothes posing amongst miniature cities in a historical theme park. These works stress not only what we remember, but how we remember it. As Faulkner wrote, The past is never dead. Its not even past. As such, a retrospective is perhaps as much about the present as the newest flavour of the week.

http://www.paulpetro.com/exhibitions/436-A-Portrait-Of-The-Photographer