Evan Lee: Fugazi

×

Expand

Evan Lee, "Test Images for Fugazi," 2015

\Courtesy the artist and Monte Clark Gallery.

Dear friends:

Amid growing concerns around COVID-19, SFU Galleries will temporarily close its exhibition spaces, postpone upcoming public programs and rethink how we can continue to present the practices of artists to our publics. We believe in a connection between what has been and what is to come, encouraged and enacted through aesthetic forms, and we believe there are meaningful lessons to take from the practices of artists as we relearn how to be together at this time.

The urgency of this threat, and the collective and necessary withdrawal from social life, offers pause to recognize our shared humanity. We also recognize that crisis of this sort amplifies injustice. Now is a time to reposition ourselves, both physically and ethically, in consideration of those most vulnerable: our elderly, those who suffer chronic illness, the undocumented, homeless and incarcerated, as well as those whose labour is essential in this crisis, be they janitors, cashiers or nurses. There is no denying the links between our physical, moral and cultural health. 

While SFU Galleries' physical spaces are closed, we remain committed to ways of gathering publics that engage with our social and political environments — what is changing about them, what histories they are anchored in and what futures our responses move us toward. Let's use this moment to critically interrogate how we form community, who we form it with, and how we can do better. Let's do this with care.

— SFU Galleries. 

Evan Lee's image-based practice undertakes interdisciplinary considerations of vision and constructions of value through photography, painting and sculpture. In particular, Lee's work examines the aesthetic and social consequences that occur in the evolution of images and imaging technology. His yearlong photo-based installation, Fugazi at the Teck Gallery, considers methods of image capture as they effect ways of seeing and how value is socially constructed. 

Fugazi begins from photographic scans of cubic zirconia, a relatively inexpensive crystalline form of synthesized material that often stands in for diamonds.[1] The images are captured in detail and enlarged to a scale that transforms the gemstones' internal appearance to one that magnifies the distortion and fracture of light. Capturingis integral to photography and Lee's image capture opens up space for the questioning of optic purity, of the cubic zirconia and of the image itself (as the act of enlargement results in a loss detail). The resulting abstract patterns and refracted colours in Fugazi present a destabilizing kaleidoscopic effect, similar to sunlit stained-glass windows. 

Because of low cost, durability, purity, and visual likeness, cubic zirconia is a key competitor for diamonds. Cubic zirconia has been seen as a potential solution to the controversy surrounding the rarity and valuation of diamonds. However, the diamond monopoly persists in perpetuating and fabricating worth through other cultural measures. "Fugazi" is a fictionalized slang term for a counterfeit gemstone.[2]

The captures of the tiny gemstones are scaled up and bisected for the Teck Gallery to fenestral proportions, and in their installation begin to share a language of architecture, landscape and development. In dialogue with the Teck Gallery's view overlooking Burrard Inlet and North Vancouver's coastal mountains, Fugazi is an intervention in the edifice, mimicking and making strange aspects of building and its design, akin to a faceted window illuminated from behind. Conjuring spaces of worship, the installation speaks to economies of belief including religion, education and capitalism. Rising like mineral suns, Fugazi positions the images along a horizon line that connects with our daily planetary rotations while also drawing lines to the extraction industries and the appetite for development that Vancouver is built on.[3]

Fugazi carries an open-ended resonance in relation to value and land. Extraction economies are increasingly being challenged in this moment of late capitalism where climate change is an oppressive force and a turn to renewal and alternate solutions are called for. Our relation to land as a site of colonization is showing its irreversible damage to cultural and environmental ecologies. In its consideration of the complexity of vision, Fugazi asks us to unpack how we understand value in the image and its referents. 

Lee is a Vancouver based artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. He received his MFA from the University of British Columbia. Exhibitions include Libby Leshgold Gallery; Winnipeg Art Gallery; Richmond Art Gallery; Kamloops Art Gallery; Vancouver Art Gallery; Capture Festival; SFU Gallery; Contemporary Art Gallery; Presentation House Gallery; Contact Photography Festival; Le Mois de la Photo à Montreal; Liu Hai Su Museum; and Confederation Centre. Lee’s work has been featured in Border Crossings, Flash Art International, Lapiz International Art Magazine, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Canadian Art, and Art on Paper.He was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Prize in 2014 and has undertaken public art commissions. His work is represented by Monte Clark Gallery.

Curated by Melanie O’Brian

UPCOMING EVENTS

PERFORMANCE: For Zitkála-Šá, directed by Raven Chacon

SUN, NOV 17 / 2PM World Art Centre, 149 West Hastings Street

TALK: Candice Hopkins: Indigenous Methodologies and Exhibition Making

THU, NOV 21 / 7PM Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema 149 West Hastings Street

LISTENING PARTY: with Aram Bajakian, Raven Chacon and Gabi Dao

FRI, NOV 22 / 7PM Western Front 303 East 8th Avenue

TALK: Raven Chacon in Dialogue with Aram Bajakian and Jeneen Frei Njootli

SAT, NOV 23 / 6PM Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema 149 West Hastings Street

TALK: Clint Burnham on Evan Lee's Fugazi

SAT, NOV 23, 2019 / 2PM Teck Gallery, Vancouver 515 West Hastings Street

TALK: Dr. Kirsty Robertson: When the Land Comes First: Oil, Museums and (Missing) Protest

TUE, NOV 26 / 5:30PM Frances & Samuel Belzberg Atrium 149 West Hastings Street