Simon Fraser University
Engaging the World

SFU Galleries

  • Sandow Birk, Humiliation from the Depravities of War, 2007, woodcut prints (black ink, hand rolled and hand inked on handmade Sekishu Kozo paper from Japan, backed twice with two layers of Sekishu and archival wheat paste).

  • Sandow Birk, Preparation from the Depravities of War, 2007, woodcut prints (black ink, hand rolled and hand inked on handmade Sekishu Kozo paper from Japan, backed twice with two layers of Sekishu and archival wheat paste).

  • Sandow Birk, Title Page from Depravities of War, 2007, woodcut prints (black ink, hand rolled and hand inked on handmade Sekishu Kozo paper from Japan, backed twice with two layers of Sekishu and archival wheat paste).

  • Sandow Birk: The Depravities of War, installation view, 2007, SFU Gallery. Photo: SFU LIDC.

Sandow Birk: The Depravities of War

September 12 – October 24, 2009
SFU Gallery

Sandow Birk is a prolific Southern California artist working in a wide range of media: painting, printmaking, and cinema. The SFU Gallery will show his series of fifteen outsized woodcuts about the US incursion into Iraq titled The Depravities of War. The series was inspired by recent events as well as by the war etchings of Jacques Callot (1592–1635), titled The Miseries of War, which in the early 1800s were a source for Goya’s The Disasters of War. Birk worked from TV and Web news reports at the time of the US-led invasion, making small drawings of news images, blowing them up to 4 x 8 feet at Kinko’s and then grinding and gouging the plywood sheets–the resulting prints resemble images from a graphic novel. Birk is a witness to our times, reflecting and refracting events back to us; he protests injustice through his woodcuts and, as with Jeff Wall’s photographs, shows us history writ pictorially large, transforming news events into something strange and horrible, yet weirdly familiar. The prints depict recruiting scenes (“enlist Army, free college”), the training, the invasion, the destruction of Baghdad, the occupation, the local insurrection, the incarceration and the Senate investigation hearings, that have so far only occurred once amongst other stages in the “Bush/Cheney War.”

Sandow Birk is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Culver City.

Curated by Bill Jeffries.

Events

Artist Talk and Film Screening
Saturday, September 12, 2009, 2pm
Screening of Birk’s legendary film In Smog and Thunder: The Great War of the Californias at the Burnaby campus.
Followed by an opening reception from 3 - 5pm

Lunchtime Tours of the Exhibition
Tuesday, September 15, 12:05pm
Wednesday, September 16, 12:35pm
Wednesday, September 30, 12:05pm
Thursday, October 1, 12:35pm

Film Screenings: In Smog and Thunder: The Great War of the Californias
Friday, October 2, 2009, 7pm.
Room 1600, SFU Harbour Centre, 515 West Hastings Street

Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 7pm.
Room 1600, SFU Harbour Centre, 515 West Hastings Street
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue of the exhibition published by HuiPress, Makawao, Maui.

Print