KRAZY!

Are you wondering about where to place KRAZY!, the Vancouver Art Gallery's big summer show? Curious about how to situate an exhibition of popular culture within the context of a “high art” institution? For starters, chuck out notions of high and low and kill the terms popular culture and mass media. Think, instead, of visual culture, the swirling mass of images that bombards us daily. Bruce Grenville, the VAG senior curator responsible for organizing KRAZY!, explains that a critical examination of visual culture is what unifies this expansive and ambitious show.graphic novels, computer and video games, anime, and manga.

KRAZY! brings contemporary art together with comics, The intent is to make sense of the ways in which each medium or discipline speaks to the others. “We all agree that images are everywhere around us,” Grenville says, adding that what's been lacking is a means of framing and discussing that vast array. “It's part of the VAG's strategic plan to look at visual culture, to identify the shape and the parameters of it, the history, the present day, and to build a language and a visual literacy to deal with it.”