MFA Graduating Exhibition 2018: WE ALL COME OUT FROM BETWEEN OUR MOTHER'S LEGS, NO ACTUALLY FROM INSIDE OUR MOTHER'S BODIES, OR WAIT HOLD ON, WE ALL COME FROM BODIES...

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Stéphanie Gagné and Maj Britt Jensen, 2018

Courtesy of the artists.

The exhibition features graduating projects by MFA candidates Stéphanie Gagné and Maj Britt Jensen as well as ongoing research projects by Roxanne Charles and Krystle Coughlin. The exhibition of a graduating project represents the culmination of a candidate's studies, and is presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.

As artists leaving the institution, we establish a playful and atypical homage to the women that created us. We joyfully risk using the overdetermined and even hyperbolic image of the space between our mother's legs as an analogy provocative enough to hold our diverse work and to bear relationships between creation, transformation, graduation, and reflection. The title of our exhibition is taken partly from a comment by Pipilotti Rist in a 2011 interview: "We all come out from between our mother's legs. From there that we first see the light of the world." The title also addresses the shared tendency in our work to negotiate connections between personal, social and cultural histories.

Is the gallery unimaginable as a womb?

Here inside, it is dark and warm. We don't have a name yet. No one has started counting breaths. At this moment, in this place, we all know how to swim. We are the centre. Although that's not the way it will be.

Now we are given a name!

Leah's daughter, Roxanne Charles focuses on the body as a primary mode of communication and a vessel of living memory. Her ongoing material and ritual research embraces many aspects of the celebrations that were once banned on the lands we stand upon.

Brenda's daughter, Krystle Coughlin uses photography to consider the ongoing influence of Canadian history on Indigenous presence and erasure. Her photographs contemplate mundane scenes of interior spaces and domestic life.

Brigitte's daughter, Stéphanie Gagné displays a photographic and sculptural installation emerging from her archive of family snapshots. In this work, familiar experiences become strange incidents in which pleasure and displeasure are difficult to distinguish.

Gertrud's daughter, Maj Britt Jensen presents an assemblage of her interdisciplinary research on the physical brutality inflicted on female, transgender and gender-nonconforming bodies. In this architectural intervention, actual geopolitical events collide with images of spectacularization.

We celebrate different ways of accessing and exiting this transitional space. You too will soon be leaving the gallery, so what will you do outside?

Presented with the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU.

* Due to lobby renovations, the gallery is only accessible by the W. Hastings Street doors.