Louise Lawler and Amber Frid-Jimenez:
Other Arrangements
Curated by Emily Butler
January 30, 2027 - May 16, 2027
Opening Reception: Friday, January 29, 2026 | 6-8pm
What does the frame do to a work of art? Louise Lawler and Amber Frid-Jimenez: Other Arrangements brings two artists into a cross-generational dialogue about how meaning and value in art are shaped through collecting, display, and rearrangement. The exhibition brings together Louise Lawler’s behind-the-scenes views in collector’s homes and museum collections, with Amber Frid-Jimenez’s engagement with archives associated with key artistic and cultural figures such as Andy Warhol, Hedy Lamarr and Douglas Crimp.
Rising to prominence in New York in the 1980s, Lawler is often associated with the group of artists known as the Pictures Generation, named after Pictures, the 1977 exhibition curated by theorist Douglas Crimp, which explored how mass-media images construct and affect our understanding of reality. Recognized for her pioneering examination of the world of art collecting, Lawler reveals its hidden details – from museum labels to its wider aesthetic, institutional and economic framework. Her work has greatly influenced subsequent generations of artists, including Vancouver-based Amber Frid-Jimenez, who, 50 years after Pictures, extends these questions to the algorithmic mediation of images in the digital age, by looking at their edges and framing.
Bringing together works from private and public collections, Other Arrangements reveals how art, archives and collections are built and ordered, and how our understanding of them shifts through processes of translation across media, contexts and framing. In the first major exhibition in Vancouver for both artists, Lawler and Frid-Jimenez ask: what do the images we collect and circulate – whether in photographs or in data sets used in machine learning – reveal about us?
-Emily Butler, Curator
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, featuring an essay by T’ai Smith and a series of discussions.
Image: Louise Lawler, Untitled (Dreams), 1993. Paperweight (silver dye bleach print, crystal, and felt) with text on wall. 5.1 cm (height) × 8.9 cm (diameter) | 2 inches (height) × 3 1/2 inches (diameter). Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.
Biographies
Emily Butler is a curator, writer and editor. She teaches on the MA Curating programme at the Courtauld Institute of Art and is a PhD researcher in Curating at the University of Reading. Her doctoral research examines artists and curators as (mis)translators between languages, sign systems, cultures and worldviews. She is Adjunct Curator at Griffin Art Projects. Previous roles include: Head of Programmes at the Contemporary Art Society Vancouver, Platform Talks Curator at Art Toronto, and Conversations Curator at Art Basel and Curator at Whitechapel Gallery, London. She contributes to international publications, including Artforum, Frieze and Art Monthly.
Amber Frid-Jimenez is an artist who situates her work at the intersection of art and cultural archives through installations, photography, printmaking, code and artist’s books. Frid-Jimenez translates radical moments across art and cultural histories through the lens of contemporary technology, exploring the evolving nature of meaning through algorithmic translation. She has exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where her work is in the permanent collection, at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, and internationally at Casco Projects, Utrecht, A Foundation, Liverpool, and the Queens Museum, NY. Frid-Jimenez teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she directs the Studio for Extensive Aesthetics.
T’ai Smith is an associate professor of art history at the University of British Columbia. She has collaborated with Frid-Jimenez since 2017 on several projects, including the publication of V XXXX (2023/2026). Author of Bauhaus Weaving Theory (2014), in addition to numerous articles and museum catalogue essays, Smith’s writing broadly focuses on the overlapping politics of technique, structure, and metaphor in art.
Louise Lawler is an artist and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York, whose work has focused on photographing other artists’ work, giving special attention to the spaces in which they are placed and methods used to make them. Rising to prominence in the 1980s, Lawler is considered to be part of the Pictures Generation, who used photography to examine how mass media shapes our identities. Examples of her work include images of paintings hanging on the walls of a museum or an art collector's opulent home, artwork in the process of being installed or being viewed by spectators.
