Everyone is Happening Always

BFA Project 2022
March 24 – April 2, 2022
Audain Gallery

Featuring: Tanha Binte Azam, Ayesha Beg, Kaila Bhullar, Karry Hon, Marwah Jaffar, YanJun Li, Huong Anh Pham, iver smith, and Hana R. Steinwand.

Visual Arts Faculty: Raymond Boisjoly

Culture can be understood as anything which may produce meaning or appear meaningful to an observer. By necessity, the distribution and access to what is accessible as culture varies from person to person and community to community. During these past few years we have seen cultural forms both wither and proliferate.  

The process for this exhibition was initiated through discussions with Jackson Polys, the Audain Visual Artist in Residence for Spring 2022. The focus on our discussions concerned the various permutations of art and culture, with an understanding of the variability of the roles of both production and reception. Art never exceeds culture. Art suggests both what is possible and what is already existing from within a field surrounded by the wider domain of culture.  

The artists in Everyone is Happening, Always, all 3rd year visual arts students of the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU, draw on a diverse range of cultural phenomena to frame a varied collective impulse around issues of belonging, mental health, personal relationships and the absurdity of everything. The content which enters their work comes from beyond art.

A central task for art students is to develop an attentiveness to the ways in which their experiences constitute an important facet of their research process. These artists come to function as cultural conduits, recirculating their experiences through their work. Experience leads to creation leads to further experiences and the process continues. What we see in this exhibition is the work of young artists feeling their way towards a negotiation of their role as cultural agents. The things they make produce alternative trajectories for those things they have experienced.

Events

Opening Reception
Wednesday, March 23 | 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Audain Gallery

Student-led Exhibition Tour
Tuesday, March 29 | 11:00 AM
Audain Gallery

Presented by the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts and SFU Galleries.