Vancouver’s Western Front Society was created back in 1973 when eight artists got together, bought a former Knights of Pythias lodge, and renovated it into an alternative art space. Over the years, the multidisciplinary art center has developed an international reputation similar to the way that Vancouver itself has transformed into a cosmopolitan city.
“If you think back to even the early ’90s, Vancouver wasn’t much of a booming town,” Western Front exhibits curator Jesse McKee says. “But in the past 15 years, it’s kind of come into its own.”
Canada has a long history with interactive art and performance art, and the Western Front has embodied this legacy through its gallery, performance-art program, media-arts program, new-music program, and its publication Front Magazine, which focuses on interdisciplinary work from emerging artists and writers. Western Front’s comprehensive music program focuses on contemporary composition and innovative music-production techniques, and it provides a venue for musicians to perform their works.
The art center also supports emerging new-media artists through its artist-in-residence program that allows them to research and experiment with new practices, collaborate with other artists, and participate in artist presentations to highlight their projects.
Although Western Front’s combined programs host an immense 100 events per year, the gallery curates about six exhibitions annually. The gallery focuses predominantly on showcasing the solo work from numerous emerging international visual artists as opposed to creating theme-centric group shows.
“I think that in smaller centers, there’s this trend to do group exhibitions,” McKee says. “They’re great, but we’re getting away from looking at the artist a little bit, and I’d like to look back at material practice.”
The gallery currently is showcasing Angle Mort (Blind Spot) by artist Sarah Foulquier, a French expat residing in Vancouver. Foulquier’s work centers on sculpture and a variety of installation pieces that explore common objects and materials and reconstructs their meaning from an architectural standpoint.
“She’s playing a lot with ideas of scale and void and moments of tension, distance and waiting, and then after all of that waiting, you are kind of rewarded in some way,” McKee says. “I think that it’s a really elegant show that she has put together.”
Western Front also has begun partnering with other international art centers to produce an annual exhibition and ongoing collaborations. It’s currently working on a video project with the Vector Association, an art center in Romania, and it will be co-exhibiting with the Vector Association during the Frieze Art Fair in London this month. Western Front also plans to host a Vector Association showcase in February of 2011, and it expects to continue joining forces with and providing mentorship to other interdisciplinary art spaces on a global scale.
“Choosing centers and collaborating with people is important, because the centers that have been popping up in the last five years have come from a very similar ethos,” McKee says. “They can learn from us, and we can learn from them.”