Theodore Wan

Opening: Thursday 15 January at 8:00 pm 
Curator Christine Conley will be present to give a guided tour at the opening.

The guest Curator of this exhibition, Ottawa-based art historian Dr. Christine Conley, comments “Theodore Wan’s reputation as an intriguing photo-conceptual artist was secured in the late 1970s by a remarkable series of medical photographs that played on the ambivalent status of the photograph as art object and illustration. These technically precise and accurate stagings of medical procedures, carried out at the Dalhousie Medical School and Dental School, doubled as a kind of self-portraiture, with Wan in the position of the patient... In the 1970s Wan opened a gallery in Vancouver called Main Exit, and developed a commercial practice that fed his fascination with performance, narcissistic spectacle, and exotic dancing—riding a fine line between art and everyday life. None of this latter activity was shown in the art world before Wan’s untimely death from cancer in 1987. This nationally touring exhibition is an opportunity to revisit a practice that resounds with contemporary artists’ interest in the visual regimes of science and medicine, and to see photographs, documents and videos from the archives of the Vancouver Art Gallery that have never been shown before.” The exhibition has been organized by the Dalhousie Art Gallery with artworks loaned from the Vancouver Art Gallery and major funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts. A parallel exhibition focusing on Wan memorabilia and offering a second computer station for exploring the archive will be at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, NSCAD, from 6-17 January.