We attended a talk by British artist, Liam Gillick, earlier this week. He is one of the 5 artists featured in this year's Fall Speaker Series at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Gillick is a New York and London-based artist who emerged in the 1990s in the midst of paradigmatic political and cultural change. In the past two decades, he has developed a highly influential artistic practice around a discursive model that complicates object production and raises key social questions.

Solo exhibitions include The Museum of Modern Art, 2003; Palais de Tokyo, 2005; Witte de With, 2008. Group exhibitions include the documenta X 1997; Guggenheim Museum, 2004; 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009.





Gillick engages in writing, design, film and installation. He showed slides of his work based on a chronological time line and talked about a constant revisiting of themes in his art practice. Some of these include the idea of parallel histories, shifting the order of representation and investigating principals of production.

"Art is a convenient term for a mid-space location where you don't need cultural permission to carry out certain corrective tasks in relation to society in general. There are a number of keys to understanding my work; one is distraction. ... What I like about the position of an artist is that you might start out intending to be a DJ but end up cleaning the floor with vodka and glitter instead." - Liam Gillick

To read more about Gillick's work, please click here for an essay written by The Museum of Modern Art.