PROFANE ILLUMINATIONS: Contemporary Surrealist Painting

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Takao Tanabe 'Landscape of an Interior Place (Orange Flower)' 1957

Takao Tanabe 'Landscape of an Interior Place (Orange Flower)' 1957 oil on canvas

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PROFANE ILLUMINATIONS: Contemporary Surrealist Painting

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Cody Lecoy, Lenslie Paola Vargas, Robert Bennett with Takao Tanabe

Curated by Rhys Edwards

Walter Benjamin coined the notion of the 'profane illumination' - a form of intoxicated discovery in which the self rebels against the limitations of 'bourgeois values' through ecsatic experience. Though vaguely defined, one characteristic of the profane illumination requires the politicization of history, a mode of criticism where nothing is sacred, and where everything that was previously abject or destitute is now vital. The result is the inculcation of aesthetic experiences that diverge from modes of rational organization.

PROFANE ILLUMINATIONS: Contemporary Surrealist Painting showcases three emerging Vancouver artists who partially reflect the legacy of this dissension from conventional modes of painterly perception. Neither representational nor abstract, each artist in some way utilizes a visual style that presents a fracturing of linear apprehension. Hence the subtitle 'sur-real' - a moving above or beyond the real.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

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Cody Lecoy mixes traditional North West Coast indigenous and archetypal motifs with controlled gestures of poetic visual form, all within the context of ambivalent landscapes. Forms meld into one another, perpetually unwilling to remain static. In their conflation between the indigenous and the global, the organic and the artificial, Lecoy's paintings threaten the possibility of historical contextualization. Rather, they convey a restrained dynamism that speaks to the interconnectivity of all matter, regardless of locality or historical moment.

Lenslie Paola Vargas' work blends intersubjective relationships with the broader fabric of sociocultural development. Patternings and symbols derived from the indigenous cultures and dia de la meurte celebrations of Mexico are displaced by individual figures that connote portaiture, yet abstain from outright characterization. The result is an interaction of worldviews, wherein the personal self struggles to escape from its implication in the machinations of culture; simultaneously, culture cannot be realized without the involvement of subjectivity.

Robert Bennett's paintings constantly oscillate between one temporal moment and another. Underlying the superficial depiction of Vancouver cityscapes is an amalgamation of the different hours of the day, displacing chronological specificity. Likewise, his large scale piece 'Lunch in the Apartment' invokes Manet's 'Dejenuer sur l'herbe' as an uncanny reference to the cyclical evolution of aesthetic, sexual, and perceptual values, and their contingency on the striations of history itself. Embodied in Bennett's work is a historically decentralized vision of daily phenomena.

The exhibition also features a painting from the UBC AMS Art Collection, Takao Tanabe's 'Landscape of an Interior Place (Orange Flower).' Tanabe's decades-long career as a prolific fine artist is reflected by this image, which, much like the historical progression of his work as a whole, is demarcated by lucid insight into the sublime landscapes of both psychological and topological geographies.

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October 23rd - November 2nd

Closing event on November 2nd @ 6pm

AMS Art Gallery

UBC Student Union Building

6138 Student Union Boulevard