Collecting Plum Blossoms. Courtesy the SFU BFA Graduating Class of 2022
BFA Graduating Exhibition 2022: Collecting Plum Blossoms
April 14 – 23, 2022
Audain Gallery
Jesse Blanchard, Debbie C., Sena Cleave, Sofia Grace, Shinaaz K. Johal, Ritz Li, Daniel Lin, Sahar Rahmanian, Ravneet K. Sidhu, Paige Smith, Shiny Xiaotong Sun, Lil Waldegger, and David Yunze Xie
This exhibition presents the work of visual art students graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
The title, Collecting Plum Blossoms, is borrowed from a 2021 artwork by Sahar Rahmanian in which plum blossoms symbolise hope for the future. In this exhibition plum blossoms become a metaphor for the way disparate pieces can come together; for the way the artwork sits in relation to one another, always shifting to make room for neighbours, and for our collective sense of futurity that comes, in part, from the activity of graduation.
Collecting Plum Blossoms is a proposal, an offer, and a starting point that resists a tidy conclusion. Using the mediums of photography, textile, installation, film, and text, the artists address issues around domesticity, positionality or identity, community, and future potential. Central to the work of many of the artists is the active engagement of the audience. For example, some works prompt audience members to perform or respond, while others invite the audience to initiate a film or a projection. Through their works, the artists in Collecting Plum Blossoms consider ways to orient themselves among each other and within the wider world.
The artists in the exhibition recognize that they are uninvited guests on the unceded territories of the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. The spaces in which their practices have been developed, and the tensions they are investigating, are indisputably situated within settler-colonial conditions.
Presented by the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU in partnership with SFU Galleries.
Events
Opening Reception
Wednesday, April 13, 7 – 9pm
Audain Gallery
Open Critique with Artist and Curator Lorna Brown
Tuesday, April 19th, 2:30 pm
Student-led Exhibition Tours
Saturday, April 16th, 2pm
Saturday, April 23, 2pm
