Julia Feyrer
New Pedestrians

From November 8 to December 21, 2019
Opening on November 14 at 7 pm

In colourful or even wacky worlds, in which both objects and beings apply themselves to personifying abstract ideas or moral concepts which are difficult to depict, the works brought together here by Bambitchell, Julia Feyrer and Mikhail Karikis offer another way of telling the world and make allegory a form of activism.

Julia Feyrer’s work emphasises the body’s connection with various media and materials, taking the form of films and sculptures or assemblages made out of everyday objects. Although many of their materials refer to or are even commonly used objects, their presence is asserted more through their potentially idiomatic value than through their use value. In this fashion, their work conveys a kind of chimerical vertigo in a dream language reminiscent of the Lacanian unconscious. Feyrer often joins their films and sculptures by using gallery installations as sets in their films. This manner of working, in which one artwork infiltrates another, contributes to the variety of ways their projects are interconnected and overlap.

In New Pedestrians, extras silently play the roles of pedestrians or passers-by. As they stroll by, they plot a banal yet unstable path. Little gestures let us suppose an emotion and sometimes a kind of agitation or contemplative activity. At the same time, our highly anthropocentric vision of the world is disturbed by the interaction between a body and numerous objects put to an unusual function, becoming protagonists of a purely speculative fiction. Each step anticipates the next and retroactively illuminates or cancels out the previous one.

New Pedestrians (2019) — 16mm film transferred to digital, sound, 4 min.

Julia Feyrer (1982) is a filmmaker and artist living on the unceded lands of the Tsleil-Waututh, Skwxwú7mesh and Musqueam First Nations in Vancouver. They are a graduate of the Städelschule in Frankfurt. POTTS in Los Angeles and the Western Front, the Catriona Jeffries Gallery and Artspeak in Vancouver have presented solo exhibitions of their work. The Vancouver Art Gallery, the Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm), the Art Gallery of Alberta and Presentation House Gallery (Vancouver) have shown their work in group exhibitions. Pieces created in collaboration with Tamara Henderson include The Last Waves, presented at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery of the University of British Columbia, Consider the Belvedere, shown at ICA Philadelphia, and Bottles Under the Influence, presented at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff. Julia Feyrer is co-editor of the audiozine Spoox and the author of several artist books published by Perro Verlag.