Lossless
MFA Graduating Exhibition 2014
September 4 – 27, 2014
Audain Gallery, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Lossless is an exhibition featuring graduating projects by the 2014 MFA candidates at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. Video, sculpture, performance and installation projects by this year’s graduates share a number of related concerns, while formulating distinct frameworks for individual investigation.
Deborah Edmeades’ video work and Luciana D’Anunciação’s performances pursue questions of subjective and sensory experience. Edmeades’ two-channel video, On the Validity of Illusion, shows a woman offering sage advice to her double. The trope of the spirit guide figures the events that follow – the staging of various optical tricks and sensory effects – as charmed one-acts and mythical labours. The methodical experiments conjure the work of a scientist but the tone suggests rather, serious and exhaustive play. Performances by D'Anunciação engage the body as a shape, a sound and a malleable force. Poses and gestures, in combination with projected light and video, visually disorder the body and render the human form strange to the eye. Responding to various materials that have been uprooted and imported for the performance, the artist’s graduating project, When will my hands become roots?, considers embodied impressions of locatedness.
Videos by Jeffrey Langille and sculptures by Avery Nabata explore temporal orders and perceptual modes. Langille’s videos are often set in liminal zones and animated by atmospheric effects and happenstance events. Some scenes are so quiet and motionless that the moving images could be mistaken for still photos. Once we’re drawn into the slow tempo of these works however, we begin to pay careful attention to their subjects and subtle “happenings.” Interested in cycles of making and unmaking, Nabata’s wood sculptures are lightly managed, anticipatory objects. The subtle forms resonate as exposed and open armatures that hold together perceptually, gathering in their minimal parts some projection of a cohesive whole.
Nathaniel Wong has examined, often to comic effect, vernacular languages and forms that exist alongside established disciplines. Invoking the conventions of music and cinema, Wong’s installation, Thus Spoke Death and Transfiguration, loosely relates engrained creative habits, ritual acts and blithe theatricality.
The exhibition of a graduating project represents the culmination of a candidate’s studies, and is presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.
Events
Opening Reception
Wednesday, September 10, 7pm
Installation and Performance: When will my hands become roots?
Luciana D’Anunciação
September 10 – 13
Studio T (on the 2nd floor)
Sept. 10: Installation, 7 – 9pm
Sept. 11 – 13: Installation, 12 – 6pm
Sept. 11 – 13: Performance, 8pm
