Ron Terada | BBQ BEER FREEDOM

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Ron Terada, "WE DID THIS TO OURSELVES," 2023

corrugated metal, 38 x 461 x 2 in. Courtesy of the Gallery.

Ron Terada (b. 1969, Vancouver; lives/works: Vancouver) has developed a wide-ranging conceptual art practice over more than two decades, which includes painting, photography, video, and music, as well as publications, posters, billboards, and signage. The majority of Terada’s work is text-based, appropriating material from a variety of sources, from pop culture to conceptual art. Since 1993, Terada has produced various series of found text paintings, reproducing the texts of commercial gallery ads, high school year book quotes, Jeopardy clues, and even the full text of artist Jack Goldstein’s memoir. For these works, he selects fonts for their canny or critical relationships to the chosen content, then utilizes the techniques of the sign industry to painstakingly execute his paintings. 

Terada selects texts that, together, trace the ways in which communication technology shapes speech and access to information. For instance, in his ongoing series titled TL; DR—internet shorthand for “too long; didn’t read”—Terada addresses the fragmentation of attention caused by the deluge of online content and its effects on everyday life. By reproducing headlines from the website The Verge in the signature font for The New York Times on a plain white background, the individual missives on individual canvases hung salon-style on one wall, point to the formal aspects of information consumption and how visual identities and treatments contribute to ideas of authority and truth-telling. Together, the work is monumental in scale, and creates a humorous, but unsettling conceptual art take on the history painting.

Terada is a graduate of the Emily Carr College of Art and Design. In 2006, he was awarded the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award, Visual Art, from the Canada Council for the Arts, and in 2004, he won the VIVA Award, Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts, Vancouver.