too much light is blinding
10 april – 8 may, 2022
SFU Woodward’s, 149 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC
Opening Reception
Sunday, 10 April | 5:00 pm
SFU Woodward’s lobby
It’s become something of a cliché to say that we live in a primarily visual world—a world in which we are constantly bombarded by images while our own likenesses are endlessly on display. But every appearance casts its own shadow. Every picture has its backside, and every frame has its beyond-the-frame—that which is left out, that which fails, refuses, or is refused the right to be seen. Across a broad range of media and contexts, the eighteen artists in this exhibition ask us to take a closer look at the overlooked, underheard, occluded, occulted, opaque, peripheral, blurred, reclusive, and clandestine images that hide, or are hidden, often in plain sight, behind the picture and beyond the frame. The premise for the exhibition is a simple one: To fully attend to the visual world in which we live, we must also be attuned to the many and varied blindspots that shape both what we can see and what remains invisible to us. For as art historian Georges Didi-Huberman suggests, darkness produces a kind of erasure, and too much light is blinding.
too much light is blinding is curated by Claudette Lauzon and features the work of Rebecca Bair, Dave Biddle, Sabine Bitter + Helmut Weber, Raymond Boisjoly, Brady Cranfield, Rehab Nazzal, Marianne Nicolson, Elspeth Pratt, Eldritch Priest, Judy Radul, Carol Sawyer, Nadia Shihab, Kathy Slade, Alex Tedlie-Stursberg, Jin-me Yoon, Katayoon Yousefbigloo, and Lianne Zannier.
Special thanks to Josephine Lee, Alex Tedlie-Stursberg, Miles Lavkulich and the SFU Woodward’s production team, Brady Cranfield, Gillian Hanemayer, Eldritch Priest, Elspeth Pratt, Christopher Lacroix, Denise Oleksijczuk, Sanem Guvenc-Salgirli, SFU’s Faculty of Communication, Art & Technology, the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
too much light is blinding is presented in conjunction with the Invisible Cultures: Seeing the Unseen symposium, organized by students from the SCA Graduate Student Seminar, with Claudette Lauzon, running April 8 & 9, 2022, featuring a kynote presentation by Dr. Alberto Toscano.
