Image credit: kathy feng.
BFA Graduating Exhibition 2021: Supercharged
April 15 – 24, 2021
Audain Gallery
Book Gallery Visit
zeenah salam alsamarrai, Matthew Bogdanow, Sylvia Burtenshaw, Keting Dong, kathy feng, Jana Ghimire, Olivia Luo, Janice Ma, Vitória Monteiro, Aynaz Parkas, Minnie Yung, and Abbey Zhang.
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 artists in the exhibition respond to a palpable charge in the air that is present in the current state of our world as we emerge from various levels of lockdown. This charge reveals a spatial tension that has become part of the familiar customs of our everyday life and also part of the specialized activities that take place in the university, the gallery, and the studio. Supercharged addresses these particular moments of tension and points to experiences between artists and audiences, as well as bodies and objects, to bring our common vulnerabilities to the fore. This supercharged tension resides in the spaces between people.
The work in the exhibition consists of a variety of media including photography, sculpture, video, painting, publishing, performance, installation, and textiles, which speak to a range of complex negotiations of the intimacy of daily life that is led in both digital and physical worlds. These artworks address diverse subject matter — from the unprecedented situation of attending a loved one in their last hours through a screen, to the expression of self through online roleplay. Dreams, desire, and intimacy are explored through the sphere of the domestic. Our material world is considered through the building of archives, but also in relation to the
earth itself: where we stand and our future survival on it.
Supercharged is the product of a graduating class that is actively engaged in relearning practices of productivity, community, and purpose while expressing a common aim to represent the growth and intimacy that has been provoked by our changes in proximity.
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
Open Critique with Grant Arnold
Tuesday, April 20, 1pm, PDT
Presented on Zoom
Registration required
Please join us for a free open critique of Supercharged lead by Grant Arnold, the Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Student-led Tours
Saturday, April 17, 12pm
Wednesday, April 21, 12pm
Thursday, April 22, 12pm
Friday, April 23, 12pm
Saturday, April 24, 12pm
Registration required
Video Documentation
Video by Samwick Productions
