Supercharged
BFA Graduating Exhibition 2021
April 15 – 24, 2021
Audain Gallery
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.
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.
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 lock-down. 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, 1:00 PM | Zoom | RSVP
Please check back for link.
Please join us for a FREE Open Critique of the exhibition lead by Grant Arnold, the Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Biography
Writer, curator, educator. Grant Arnold is currently Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where he contributes to the Gallery’s exhibition and collecting activities. Over the past twenty years he has organized more than thirty-five exhibitions of historical, modern, and contemporary art. Recent exhibition projects have included Reece Terris: Ought Apartment, Mark Lewis: Modern Time, Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs, 75 Years of Collecting – The Road to Utopia, Classified Materials: Accumulations, Archives, Artists (with Daina Augaitis, Bruce Grenville and Monika Szewczyk), Real Pictures: Photographs from the Collection of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft, Rodney Graham: A Little Thought [with Jessica Bradley (Art Gallery of Ontario) and Connie Butler (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles)], The Shadow of Production, Robert Smithson in Vancouver: A Fragment of A Greater Fragmentation, Liz Magor (with Philip Monk), These Days, The Rhetoric Of Utopia: John Vanderpant and His Contemporaries, and weak thought (with Bruce Grenville). Arnold has contributed more than two-dozen essays and articles to exhibition catalogues and journals. He teaches in the Critical and Curatorial Studies program at the University of British Columbia and has lectured on historical and contemporary art at a variety of conferences and institutions.
Student-led Exhibition Tours
Saturday, April 17 & Wednesday, April 21 – Saturday, April 24 | All tours at 12:00 PM | RSVP
Audain Gallery
Video Documentation
Video by Samwick Productions
