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V 1s Photomontage and Other Composite Images at Presentation House Gallery byJacquclyn Menard Presentation House Gallery will be exhibiting German artist Hannah Hoch's collages and photomontages to January 23rd. Hoch was an important member of the 1920s Dada movement in Berlin who was rediscovered in the 1960s when art historians began reassessing the contribution of women artists. In collaboration with Raoul Hausmann, she developed the technique of photomontage in 1918, at a time when new intellectual forces were aggressively directed against those deemed responsible for the failure of European civilization: the military and the bourgeois establishment. Subversive, iconoclastic and revolutionary, her art attacked the Weimar society that she detested "like an angry dog" and aimed at revealing its grotesqueness. Thirty-two of her works will be on view, dating from 1918 to 1967. and spanning 50 years or so of her long and productive career. Consisting of montaged combinations of images, decisively cut from journals, magazines and other photographic and printed materials, the work "takes issue not only with stereotypical images of women, gender, family and romance but also with larger cultural concerns such as a fascination for and violence of the techno-scientific developments of the early 20th century." Hoch's humorous and haunting collages seem especially suited to express the artist's self-questioning spirit and the psychological paradox of pleasure versus anger. With their startling rhythms, they combine intellectual analysis with perceptual feelings, celebrating materials with Raoul Hausmann and a long and close relationship with Til Brugman, as her life--like her art--attempted to deconstruct the a priori of rigid masculine and feminine identities. She also developed a particular "elective affinity" with Kurt Schw itters. the Merz artist from Hanover, while Max Ernst, the Dada from Cologne, kept a close eye on her work. Ostracized by 1932 because of her biting and irreverent social criticism, she was one of the only artists surviving the Nazi regime. As her friends scrambled away from Germany she withdrew in her hidden house north of Berlin, and for a while her world grew more lonely. But she went on working after the end of the war right into old age. creating her refined and playful sheets, always ready to embark on new and unknown paths. She never clung to a particular canon of forms: her work finds reference to Surrealism. Constructionism and Abstract Expressionism. We can even think of some 90s feminist an practices-- Cindy Shermans and Barbara Kriiger's in particular--as Hoch's most direct descendants. Following the Hannah Hoch exhibition, Presentation House Gallery will present recent works by Jerry Pethick. a senior Canadian West Coast artist who attended the Royal Art College in London and also studied holography in the United States. Since 1975, he has lived and worked on Homby Island. His work has been exhibited in Europe and North America and was included in the Canadian Biennal of Contemporary Art in Ottawa in 1989. It has been a number of years since a body of work by Pethick has been seen in Vancouver. Jerry Pethick loves experimenting: the strange combination of high and low technologies, rudimentary modes of visualizations and an eclectic use of materials give his exhibits a "science fair" aura. He has explored various low-grade visual resolution techniques and materials including diffracting grating, spectrafoil. stenographic photography and notably Fresnel lenses. He often chooses materials which interact with light, and his assemblages arc concocted from recycled industrial materials often gleaned from Hornby Island, sort of "rural objets trouves." Their seemingly ad-hoc construction and whimsy remove the edge of sterility that might otherwise delineate his scientific approach. For the past 25 years. Jerry Pethick has been interested in both an archaeology and a metaphysics of space: his work is concerned with a religuration of that space, a new way of looking at the physical world and a demateriali/ation of objeclhood, this within the continuous organic field of electronic information networks. For example, one of his best know works. The Remembered Room, uses a pixel-like arrangement of lenses mounted in front of a grid of photographs of a waterfall (Qualicum Falls. B.C.). The Fresnel lenses recall other visual apparatus like photo. that . liln ol Ihc hurniui eye in relation to the world. As for the accompanying sculpture. Pethick used a large industrial pile of steel tubes, creating a paradox of solid, impenetrable and massive construction which, when seen from the side, turns into a disembodied, immaterial hollow. u a1 It has been said that Pethick*s approach to technology seems devoid of suspicion, of sociological and ecological foreboding. Rather, he appears to be involved in recapturing the true modernist spirit of the early 20th century, from the work of Seurat, Gabriel Lippmann and the Italian futurist Boccioni. He invites the viewer to the threshold of an imaginary space in which everything seems possible, in which all dimensions are dislodged from the laws of gravity and perspectival space, where according to the artist, "even men are free to play." The Jerry Pethick exhibition. The Composite Image, will be at Presentation House Gallery from February 2nd to March 13th, 1994. Jacquelyn Menard has degrees in French Literature and in An History. She has a background as a cultural journalist, teacher, lecturer and curatorial a She is presently the A rt Educator c Presentation House Gallery. Homage ä Riza Abäst Fnendships with painters, sculptors, writers and architects played an important part in Hannah Hoch's unconventional life. She what she called a "sad apprenticeship" \i· .1... Feb 1994 13