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			June 11 to July 10, 2010 Contact Games Megan Dickie Opening Friday, June 11, 7pm Contact Games focuses on novelty as a means to promote amusement. Large interactive sculptures combine with absurd serigraph prints to reference the artificial obsession with the new. For Dickie the novelty object is the quintessential example of a form that rejoices in excess and is truthful about its moral shortcomings. It is an object of play but is created from a place of science, physics and reason. This conflict that occurs between pleasure and logic is the basis for the competition in Contact Games. Megan Dickie completed a BFA in printmaking from the University of Calgary in 1997 and received a MFA in sculpture from the University of Saskatchewan in 2002. She has exhibited her work across Canada and has had recent exhibitions at Grunt Gallery (Vancouver), Nanaimo Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Ministry of Casual Living and Kenderdine Art Gallery (Saskatoon). She was the recipient of a Canada Council creation grant in 2004 and BC Arts Council grants in 2007 and 2009. Dickie teaches sculpture and printmaking as a sessional instructor at the University of Victoria. The artist thanks the BC Arts Council for their generous support in funding this project.
	Megan Dickie, The Tangler (detail), leather, vinyl, steel rivets, 2009-10
			May 21 to June 5, 2010 RPM: The Lost Art of LP Covers A fundraising show and sale Opening Friday, May 21, 7pm The art of the record sleeve, remixed and remastered by more than 50 artists. Remember the LP cover? Two square feet of eye-popping, groin-stirring, world-rocking graphics, titles, and liner notes rolled into one precisely measured object of desire? Well, the infamous RPM fundraising exhibition is back by popular demand. RPM features the work of 50+ local, national and international emerging and established artists employing a variety of concepts to interpret this endangered species in a wide range of media. These creations will go on sale to the public for $45 each at the gala opening on Friday, May 21st. The exhibition and sale continues through Saturday, June 5th. Sponsored by Victoria Gin and Ditch Records & CDs
	Shawn Shepherd, Transfer, recycled metal and vinyl, 15x15", 2010
			April 2 to May 1, 2010 Dios Nunca Muere the visual politics of transmutation in contemporary Oaxacan art José Arnaud Bello | Alfonso Barranco Sánchez Ana Belén Paizanni | Arian Dylan | Moisés García Nava Joel Gómez | Mariana Gullco | Daniel Guzmán Luis Hampshire | Saúl Hernández | Dr. Lakra Morelos León Celis | Roberto López Flores Saúl López Velarde | Rolando Martínez Rosa Vallejo | Jessica Wozny Deluge Contemporary Art, 636 Yates Street, Victoria Open Space, 510 Fort Street, Victoria Opening: Friday, April 2: 7 to 10pm at Deluge, 9pm to 12am at Open Space Artists/Curators Talk: Saturday, April 3, 3pm at Open Space Deluge Contemporary Art and Open Space are proud to present Dios Nunca Muere: the visual politics of transmutation in contemporary Oaxacan art. Featuring the work of 17 artists from the region, the exhibition is notable for the presentation of established artists with celebrated international reputations (Daniel Guzman, Dr. Lakra) with a younger generation of emerging and mid-career artists, the majority of whom have not exhibited in Canada. Dios Nunca Muere explores the seismic shift in contemporary art practice in Oaxaca, Mexico over the last two decades. The work of these artists -- both individually and collectively -- parallels and reflects widespread social, political and economic changes in the region. Informed by such social and material conditions, this new wave of artist/provocateurs is dismantling the prevailing hegemony of the Romantic artist/auteur in favour of collaborative approaches, social practice and self-examination. As they embrace the area’s unique geographical isolation and historical reputation as a ground zero for resistance, transformation and revelation, the artists in this exhibition do so through an international perspective and critical dialogue with the art world at large. Curated by Deborah de Boer (Victoria) and Luis Hampshire (Oaxaca), Dios Nunca Muere is the first exhibition of its kind to engage with a sporadically recognised, but generally unheralded group of artists in order to provide a unique and immersive experience of a vitally important but virtually occult chapter in the contemporary art history of Mexico. Dios Nunca Muere is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue with essays from both Mexican and Canadian contributors. The exhibition will tour Mexico in 2010/11. Monday Magazine article artopenings.ca article Martlet article
	Daniel Guzmán, Tlazoltéotl, carrizo, leather, mixed media, 80 x 200 x 110 cm, 2008
			February 19 to March 20, 2010 Relics of Prester John Brian Grison Opening Friday, February 19, 7pm Grison's drawings are exhibited in an apparent condition of incompletion to emphasize two conditions of art that are always present: its conceptual transience and its ephemeral existence. While recalling memories of the artist's life, the drawings imagine relics of the mythic ruler of a medieval kingdom. Brian Grison is a graduate of the Art Department of Central Technical High School. He has undergraduate degrees in Art History and Visual Art from the University of Victoria and a Masters in Art History from Carleton University. After living in Mexico from 1967 to 1969, Grison taught at Central Technical High School for seven years, as well as at York University in 1975. Since then he has taught at universities, art colleges and community colleges in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta. Since his first exhibition in 1969, he has participated in solo and group exhibitions at public and artist-run galleries in Ontario, British Columbia, New York, Paris and Belgrade. Grison's drawings are in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Surrey Art Gallery, Art Bank and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Since 2004, he has published articles in various Canadian and American art periodicals. Relics of Prester John; An Introduction Prester John is the threatening anti-hero "other" in the boys' adventure novel, Prester John, written by the English author, John Buchan, in 1910. I read the book when I was about twelve years old. Until the mid 1970s I did not know that Prester John is/was an historic, albeit fictional, twelfth-century person, the ruler of a lost Christian kingdom, and that until the nineteenth century he had been sought by explorers, missionaries, diplomats and mercenaries in Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia. In fact, an Italian traveler in the Middle East invented Prester John in a letter he wrote to friends back home. Perhaps to reverse the joke, the friends published the letter, and the several hundred-year old legend of Prester John and his lost kingdom was born. In the background of these drawings Prester John (or Priest John), as a personae standing in for the artist, is the facilitator of an endless imaginary world of polished, open-ended and apparently meaningless doodles. The drawings are either real or false biographic or cultural relics, depending on how one relates to the meaning of the real in art, memory and the imagination. The frightening charismatic "other" created by John Buchan is a metaphor of the rich and sometimes dangerous interplay between the real and false that both disrupts and liberates the psyche of the young artist. This condition of cultural insecurity is the most appropriate condition of the serious contemporary artist. Because my discovery of history, religion, science and fiction was mostly though books, these drawings resemble illustrations that have been leafed through by generations of doodlers of marginalia. The marginalia represents the constant shift between the mundane and imaginary that distracts the viewer/reader, as well as the artist, from the concentration required for observation, perception, insight and production. In this sense the drawings are not complete, and can never be complete. I am still intrigued by the unique attributes of the many different drawing media. For this reason, in Relics of Prester John each medium functions distinctly from the others, except graphically. Like the different base materials and elements of alchemy, the distinct areas or passages of graphite, ink, gouache etc. represent the impossibility of finding the correct compound or the perfect meaning. There are no personal truths beyond those we briefly compose into temporary existence. Brian Grison
			January 15 to February 13, 2010 Division of Labor Jess Wheaton & Jon Tracy Opening Friday, January 15, 7pm In summer 2006 a disquieting study undertaken by the General Social Survey was published in the American Sociological Review. It had been found that a quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom they can discuss personal troubles, more than double the number who were similarly isolated in 1985. An increasingly fragmented society means that the psychological and civic benefits of intimate social ties are evaporating, and in these current hard times, far more people appear to suffer alone. Wheaton and Tracy, both born near the first study, and both Americans who have lived in other countries, study both meanings of the phrase Division of Labor through their practice. Together they act as both a "contingent" of labor, laboring in the name of partnership, and as artists dividing between themselves the work they believe needs to be done. Tracy's paintings place people from his life in fantastic, combinative settings suggestive of the nature of globalization. Within these environments, his figures tackle real-world challenges through his lens of personal symbolism. Wheaton's paintings and installations explore ways of making both historically "universal," as well as subjective thought and understanding, readable. This method conveys a deep faith in visual logic, while commenting on the impossibility of objective understanding. Jon Tracy holds a BFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and spent this past summer studying art in Paris, France. His work has been shown at the State Capital in California, The Oliver Art Center in Oakland, and Ego Park in Oakland. Jon lives and works in Oakland, California. Jess Wheaton is a painter currently living and working in San Francisco. She received her BFA from the California College of the Arts in December. Her work has been shown at Rare Device in San Francisco, the Fifty Fifty Arts Collective in Canada, and Artists Space in New York.