Pink

Carie Helm

February 10 to 25, 2007

Opening reception: Saturday, February 10, 2007 at 7 p.m.
Gallery Hours: Saturday and Sunday 1 to 4 p.m.

Pink is a highly politicized colour steeped in strong emotions. This body of work explores the artist’s relationship to the colour pink as well as how these attitudes were informed by a larger Canadian cultural perspective. Helm utilizes various media in her exploration including collage, photography, mapping, and haiku.

The artist produced the series of collage works to reclaim pink for herself by creating new meaning and informing further relationships with the colour. With the “paint swatch” haiku she draws on the name of each colour as a starting point for narrative and personal connection. Through this process she examines the various ways that our culture classifies and categorizes the colour pink. The photographs document everyday occurrences of pink, both natural and man-made. The images form a mapping of her community to discover where the pink can be found in daily life — on the streets, in the artist’s home, in advertising, clothing, nature, garbage, etc. In documenting pink, as she finds it, she brings the project full-circle to connect back to the ideas considered in the collage and haiku.

About the artist:

Carie Helm is a Vancouver-based artist. She studied fine art, with a focus on mixed media, drawing, and painting, at Okanagan University College (now UBC–Okanagan) in Kelowna, BC, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2000. She has exhibited in group- and solo exhibitions in British Columbia since 1998. Her work often takes the form of small-scale collages, artist books, installations, and artist trading cards. She utilizes found/collected materials such as stamps, notes, bills, bits of coloured paper, found and self-generated text, paint swatches and other ephemera to create collages that form a narrative that is often personal and/or fictionally based.