"Full Frontal"

Join us for a conversation on opening night with David Hatfield, program director for the on-going, experiential course for men, Manology: Exploring 21st Century Masculinity, and the Canadian Coordinator of International Men's Day. The conversation will engage with viewers' responses to the works in the exhibition and the questions on masculinity and male identity that arise.

Drawn from the collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Full Frontal explores the relationship between masculinity and male sexuality, and why the image of a naked man, baring all, remains one of society’s taboos. With works spanning over 50 years, Full Frontal investigates the stake our society has placed in representations of the male body, questioning why “manhood” refers to both male identity and the physical penis. Through photographs, paintings, drawings, sculpture, video and archival material, Full Frontal explores how artists, both publically and privately, have represented the penis-phallus.

The exhibition couples images of the phallus—the socially approved symbol of male power—with images of the flesh—the often-censored penis that society carefully regulates.

In bringing many perspectives and subjectivities to the sexualized male body, this exhibition questions a masculinity that upholds and is controlled by the idea of the phallus. Gritty and real, the works in this group exhibition present alternative modes of engaging with male sexuality, in which masculinity becomes masculinities. Full Frontal liberates the literal organ from the concept of the phallus through play, vulnerability, violence, love, desire, humour, fantasy and sex. Unlike Women’s Studies, which has a 40-year history, Men’s Studies is an emerging discipline. In investigating male identity, this exhibition joins the growing conversation on masculinity.

The exhibition includes works by artists Iain Baxter, Tom Dean, Maria Eichhorn, Russell FitzGerald, Noam Gonick, jess, Brian Jungen, Bruce LaBruce, Attila Richard Lukacs, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eric Metcalfe, Michael Morris, Jack Shadbolt, Wolfgang Tillmans, Vincent Trasov, Joyce Wieland and others.

Full Frontal is curated by Katie Schroeder, a Master’s Candidate in the Critical and Curatorial Studies program at the University of British Columbia.

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For more information contact:

Karen Benbassat

tel: 604-681-8425, karen@satellitegallery.ca

www.satellitegallery.ca

Satellite Gallery is a Michael O'Brian Family Foundation project with partners the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, and Presentation House Gallery.