Ron Terada: Who I Think I Am
May 15 – July 25, 2010
Image courtesy of the artist
Ron Terada’s work typically functions as something of a game, a game based on authenticity and the appropriation of such everyday objects as street signs, advertising copy, and popular music. The reinvention of these readymade forms into paintings, photographs, or playlists allows Terada to accumulate a list of multiple readings and reference points while taking no firm position himself. By playing with signs, sounds, and images borrowed from the commercial world, Terada has created a body of work that allows him to make statements — like the title of the exhibition, Who I Think I Am — that contain nothing but more questions that are curious enough to keep us wondering who, or more importantly, where Ron Terada is within all the layers.
Terada has been interested in art world narratives, and his new language-based paintings, Jack (2010), are a way for him to reflect upon this world and his position in it by re-examining painting through the memoirs of troubled American painter and conceptual artist, Jack Goldstein. After years of not receiving the recognition he believed he deserved — and afflicted with a drug addiction, a personality disorder., and deeply disruptive bouts of depression — Goldstein chose to end his own life in 2003. His story is one that Terada found interesting not simply because of the artist’s failure, but because of his choice to suddenly switch his film and performance-based practice to painting, a move Terada has duplicated to produce the canvases in this exhibition. The eleven paintings here reproduce verbatim an entire chapter from Goldstein’s memoirs, and ironically, like the history they retell, also mark a return to painting for Terada after a ten-year hiatus.
Terada’s method of appropriation continues in Soundtrack for an Exhibition (2010), the latest in an ongoing series of playlists. This list, which can be experienced both visually and aurally, is a dense, richly symbolic collection of lyrics and titles that provide yet another layer to Terada’s constructed story: a musical self-portrait or another carefully curated selection to act as a catalyst for multiple meanings.
Despite all that the exhibition title suggests, Ron Terada the artist is not easily found. He will not leave you with a clear picture of himself, but instead offers a peek at the complex relationship between contemporary artistic practice and the identity of the one producing it.
Organized in collaboration with Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK; and the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Hart House, University of Toronto, Canada.
Supported by the British Columbia Arts Council.
- Ron Terada interview with Bad at Sports (Duncan MacKenzie and Christian Kuras)
- Bad at Sports
- Christian Kuras and Duncan MacKenzie
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