Justin Langlois: Conflict Studies - An artists-residency and exhibition

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Justin Langlois, "Conflict Studies," 2018

The Exhibition, Conflict Studies opens with a reception for the artist on Friday, August 24th from 7-9pm, with an artist talk to follow on Saturday, August 25th at 2pm.

Justin Langlois will be in residence at the Oxygen Art Centre from August 20-24th where he will be interviewing select participants around the nature of disagreement for his proposed project, Conflict Studies. In conjunction with this project, Torchlight Brewing Company is bottling a Conflict Brew special beer for the month of August. The beer will have a blank label in which the participants will be invited to embellish with their own text or design during their interview. Langlois takes an interesting view on disagreement, noting.

“The act of disagreement is a core part of everyday life, so learning to disagree is a civic exercise. Disagreement is difference. And difference is the spark of civic life.”

Langlois often draws on conversation, social interaction, and the format of the interview to generate new work. As Vancouver’s inaugural artist in residence, in 2016-17, Langlois focused on key social, environmental and political issues facing the city at the time, culminating in a giant neon sign reading, SHOULD I BE WORRIED? installed near Olympic Village along False Creek. Typical, across much of his art practice, Langlois uses text-based signage installed in public spaces, hopes to inspire diverse possibilities and ways of thinking. His clever signage and text draws from slogans, everyday expressions, and advertising campaigns, inverting or distorting the text to offer new expressions that grow in depth as one ponders them. His works are often installed outside the confines of the gallery space catching the viewer off guard and thus drawing unconscious material and associations to the surface. This sort of tapping into the collective subconscious is akin to spotlighting the elephant in the room and leaves an uncanny presence in the mind the unsuspected passerby. Working outside the white cube allows Langlois’s work to reach an audience that may or may not enter a gallery space and places his art in a broader, more civic context.