Opening Reception & Book Launch - Postscript

Name: Opening Reception & Book Launch - Postscript
Start: 2018-05-03T18:00:00
End: 2018-05-03T21:00:00
Location: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

May 3, 2018 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery 1825 Main Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2

April 23, 2018

10:58 AM

Aileen Bahmanipour, "Image, Disturbance, Pattern," 2017-18

POSTSCRIPT

UBC Master of Fine ArtsGraduate Exhibition 2018

Aileen Bahmanipour, Christopher Lacroix, Cameron McLellan, Candice Okada, Madiha Sikander

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 3, 6:00-9:00 pm

Book Launch with Catherine Soussloff: Thursday, May 3, 6:00-7:00 pm at the Belkin

Guest critique with Kimberly Phillips: Saturday, May 5, 12:30-4:15 pm at the Belkin

The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is pleased to present Postscript, an exhibition of work by the 2018 graduates of the University of British Columbia's two-year Master of Fine Arts program: Aileen Bahmanipour, Christopher Lacroix, Cameron McLellan, Candice Okada and Madiha Sikander. This program in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory is limited each year to a small group of four to six artists, who over the two years foster different sensibilities developed within an intimate and discursive working environment.

On Thursday, May 3 from 6 to 9 pm, join us for the opening reception of Postscript. Between 6 and 7 pm, Professor Catherine Soussloff will read from her new book Foucault on Painting (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), in which she argues that Michel Foucault’s sustained engagement with European art history critically addresses present concerns about the mediated nature of the image in the digital age. Soussloff explores the meaning of painting for Foucault’s philosophy and for contemporary art theory, proposing a new relevance for a Foucauldian view of ethics and the pleasures and predicaments of contemporary existence. Catherine Soussloff is Professor, UBC Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory. Among her many books and articles she is the author of The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept and editor of Foucault on the Arts and Letters.

On Saturday, May 5, join us for a Public Critique with guest critic Kimberly Phillips. Phillips is Curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, where she oversees exhibitions, publications and artist residencies. She holds a PhD in Art History from UBC and was an Izaak Walton Killam Doctoral Fellow. Phillips has authored, edited and contributed to numerous books and exhibition catalogues, and her critical writings have appeared in Artforum, Canadian Art, C Magazine, The Capilano Review and Fillip. She maintains an active teaching practice, instructing graduate courses in modern and contemporary visual art and curatorial practice at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and UBC.

This exhibition is presented with support from the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Aileen Bahmanipour is an artist whose practice is centered on exploring the inter-subjectivities between violence and identity to question their co-constitutive relationship. By interrogating the narrative capacity of the diagram, as a rational practice in abstraction, her work seeks to challenge the problem of perspective in an attempt to reach an anti-perspectival point of view. Bahmanipour has held recently solo exhibitions at Grunt Gallery (Vancouver) and the Hatch Gallery (Vancouver).

Cameron McLellan's work concerns the built environment, architectural space and the consideration of these realms through drawing, painting and materiality. By using Vancouver as a construct – literally and figuratively – McLellan is interested in conceptualizations of space and the social dynamics that underscore it, including the way materiality mediates our relationship with it. Recent exhibitions of his work include the Interurban Gallery (Vancouver) and Robert Lynds Gallery (Vancouver).

Candice Okada, a maker of things, employs an artistic practice that seeks to visualize and emphasize the social symptoms of contemporary neoliberal society, often through the use of textile and fibre work. Taking inspiration from popular culture and the banalities of everyday life, her interests involve an exploration of the many feminisms and their relationships to the question of craft. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Place des Arts (Coquitlam) and the Ranger Station Art Gallery (Harrison Hot Springs).

Christopher Lacroix's practice explores the relentless effort of queer existence, to suggest that queerness is not simply being born outside of a normative subject position, but a conscious decision to push against it. His oeuvre includes performance, video, photo and text-based works which embrace the potential of abject self-deprecation as a means of self-preservation and resistance while engaging with notions of failure, aspiration and otherness. Lacroix has exhibited work in a number of exhibitions across Canada, as well as presenting several performance pieces in Toronto.

Madiha Sikander, trained as a miniature painter at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, deploys an artistic practice that takes this foundational experience to question notions of space, spatiality and spatialization. Her work questions the possibilities of space, as both an interrelational process of non-closure and continuous becoming as well as a site where multiplicity resonates, in an effort to discover a way for time and space to coalesce in her practice. Sikander has exhibited work in numerous group exhibitions in Pakistan and internationally.

Coming this Summer