Oscar Tuazon: What Trees Need
AVAIR Artist Exhibition
January 17 – February 15, 2025
Audain Gallery – SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Opening: January 16, 2025 | 7:00 PM
In thinking about how to protect trees we are also engaged in representing trees, even trying to create trees, an impossible – and necessary – project for sculpture.
— Oscar Tuazon
The School for the Contemporary Arts is pleased to present an exhibition by Oscar Tuazon, the SCA’s January 2025 Audain Visual Artist in Residence.
The installation, What Trees Need, points to the rich history of trees as sculptural material, referent, and even as sculptural objects in their own right. The work in the exhibition issues from a workshop Tuazon held with graduate students that considered the way art production takes place, not just in relation to other works of art, but in a web of relationships that includes place-based communities, ecosystems, water systems, and trees.
Tuazon’s art practice draws on Minimalism and architecture. He works with natural and industrial materials to produce architectural structures and installations that serve as social spaces in which to confront our relationship to natural landscapes and built environments. In 2018, Tuazon founded the Los Angeles Water School (LAWS), an educational centre, based on a design for a "Zome House" (1969-1972) by the architects and engineers Holly and Steve Baer. LAWS provides a space for studying our relation to water and how it functions as a connective tissue between people and their surroundings.
Events
AVAIR Artist Talk
January 16, 2025 | 6:00 PM
Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre
SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
AVAIR Artist Exhibition: Opening
January 16, 2025 | 7:00 PM
Audain Gallery – SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Biography
Oscar Tuazon has exhibited widely with selected solo exhibitions such as fjk3 – Contemporary Art Space in Vienna, Bergen Kunsthall, Kunst Museum Winterthur, Place Vendôme in Paris, Skulptur Projekte Münster, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, ICA London, Kunsthalle Bern, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Seattle Art Museum, and Palais de Tokyo in Paris. In 2011, he designed one of four para-pavilions at the 54th Venice Biennale. In December 2024, Tuazon installed a new public artwork in Seattle’s Waterfront Park.
About AVAIR
The Audain Visual Artist in Residence (AVAIR) program brings artists and practitioners to Vancouver who have contributed significantly to the field of contemporary art and whose work resonates with local and international visual art discourses. The AVAIR program is generously funded by the Audain Foundation Endowment Fund.