Access Gallery proudly presents Vessel, a group exhibition showcasing the works of four Vancouver-based artists; Derya Akay, Fabiola Carranza, Mark DeLong, and Lucien Durey. Questioning our tendency to immediately allegorize objects through their superficial and surface qualities, Vessel interrogates the aura of objects. Each artist playfully disrupts our preconceived notions of objects’ objecthood. Through material play they transform the expected and everyday into something mysterious and magical. Like cherished childhood films where animated sorcerers bring broomsticks to life or fairies turn pumpkins into carriages, the artists of Vessel transform our immediate perceptions of inanimate things.

Derya Akay’s subtle and organic installations are an optical feast for the eyes. Akay meticulously constructs multi-layered 3d assemblages; organizing mirrors, glass, paint, handmade ceramics, and various other materials into complex arrangements. Fabiola Carranza enlivens the inanimate. Her latest sculptural work evokes the past lives of five chairs. The metal body of each one is bent and contorted to complete a transformation from ubiquitous discarded material into the rarefied dances of school time boogie woogies. Mark DeLong’s paintings and ceramic works bring the raw intensity and energy of his earlier zines and drawings; now made even more powerful through the histories that clay, paint, and stretched canvas evoke. Finally, Lucien Durey blurs the line between artifact and artifice. Influenced by his father's life and obsession with the arctic, Durey's assemblages draw from popular and personal narrative in an attempt to convey a transcendent experience of place.