SFU Visual Art 2011 Graduating Exhibition

Opening Night April 13, 2011

The Visual Art Student Union at SFU presents:

The Canadian mining corporation Goldcorp recently announced a donation of $10 million to SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts at its new Woodward’s location. According to the university’s press release, $5 million will go towards the capital costs of the facilities, while the other $5 million will be placed in an endowment to support programs aimed at community engagement in the Downtown Eastside. Furthermore, in acknowledgment of the gift, the university’s new arts complex at Woodward’s has been renamed the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts.

Given Goldcorp’s controversial mining operations in several Latin American countries, the donation has triggered significant concern among students and the Downtown Eastside community. Acknowledging our responsibilities as cultural producers and our dialectical relationship with the physical and social contexts in which we work and study, the SFU Visual Art Student Union has organized a panel discussion addressing the corporatization of universities, the ongoing gentrification pressures in the Downtown Eastside, and the ethics of artistic practices involving community engagement.

By organizing this event, we are voicing our demand for a more active role in shaping our position in the university and our relationship with the community.

Wednesday November 24, 2010, 7pm

World Art Studio,  Room 2555, SFU Woodward’s,
149 W Hastings St, Vancouver

Moderator:
Jeff Derksen (Department of English, SFU)
Panel speakers:
Ian Angus (Department of Humanities, SFU)
Alexandra Henao (SFU Against Goldcorp and Gentrification)
Cecily Nicholson (Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre)
Irwin Oostindie (W2 Community Media Arts)
Jayce Salloum (Vancouver-based visual artist)

Ian Angus is a writer and scholar, currently teaching in the Department of Humanities at Simon Fraser University.  His writing on philosophy, politics and activism has looked at issues of instrumental reason and the advance of technology, social movements and solidarity, and cultural identity in the history of Canadian social and political thought.  His recent book Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment (Arbeiter Ring, 2009) looks at the changing role of the university – in the increasingly ‘corporate’ university setting, the heightened importance of interdisciplinary study, and the role of technology – in order to address the implications of these trends on the university’s critical social function.

Jeff Derksen is a poet and cultural critic, whose work takes an interdisciplinary view of the relationship between cultural production and globalization.  His writing addresses issues of cultural geography and gentrification, cultural imperialism, and the poetics of urban space.  He is the author of Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics (Talonbooks, 2009) and After Euphoria (ECU Press and JRP Ringier, forthcoming), and his writing and poetry has appeared in numerous publications including C Magazine and Open Letter.  He is part of the research collective Urban Subjects, and is a founding member of the Kootenay School of Writing. He currently teaches in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University.

Alexandra Henao is a graduate student at SFU in the Department of Education and a member of the SFU Against Goldcorp and Gentrification group. Formed in response to SFU’s acceptance of the $10 million donation from the mining corporation Goldcorp to the new School for the Contemporary Arts in the Woodward’s complex, the group has mobilized through a variety of actions and discussions to raise awareness on this issue.

Cecily Nicholson is a Vancouver and Surrey-based organizer who has worked with women of the downtown eastside community for the past ten years. She is a former consultant with the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women. As Coordinator of funds and administration of the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre in Vancouver, Cecily has participated in various community-based arts initiatives including the Women Engaged in the Arts Vision & Empowerment (WEAVE) program and exhibition, 2008. As a member of the VIVO Media Arts collective she has collaborated most recently on the VIVO Media Arts Safe Assembly Project, 2010. She is the author of the forthcoming book of poetry: Triage (Talonbooks, spring 2011).

Irwin Oostindie is the executive director of the W2 Community Media Arts Society currently located in the W2 Storyeum building. Through the use of their media lab, performance space and gallery for various community projects and events, W2 has become a cultural hub in the Downtown Eastside community, and works to provide a platform for artists, community groups and residents to come together to engage with new art forms and technology. He also has 25 years experience leading social justice art projects, festivals, spaces and publications.

Jayce Salloum is a Vancouver-based visual artist.  His videotapes, photographs, installations, and other cultural projects initiate an engagement between the private and the public, and the political and the social, affecting notions of identity, community, history, boundaries, exile, (trans)nationalism and resistance. His work has been exhibited pervasively at the widest range of local and international venues possible, from the smallest unnamed storefronts & community centres in the downtown eastside to institutions such as the Musée du Louvre, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; 8th Havana Biennial; 7th Sharjah Biennial; 15th Biennale Of Sydney; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Notes from one of the groups during our “Methods and Practices” workshop with Marjetica Potrc.

Our topics were Criticality and Institutional Framework. Please see a full description of these two topics in our previous blog from October 7^th (located below).

Off-site projects:

-When institutions seek out artists to perform off-site projects.

-museum is just one partner. (museum not to be seen as the other- behind the museum is personalities-museums are generally overvalued or undervalued).

-They initiate the project.

-Potrc always works in a collaborative way, not doing everything herself.

-Collaboration between architects, etc.

-Question about statement making:

-Her work literally has statements in it.

-“A man is a tree is a column for a house” an architectural archetype.

-Thinkers of the 1960s thinking about the mobile society and this has actually happened to us.

-Amazonia has same set of problems.

-We are doers, the dreamers of the 1960s were thinking about us.

-The voice in the statements is an indeterminant public statement.

-Potrc is talking from standpoint of community she is working within.

-subjectivity that includes the plural from the beginning.

-Check Marjetica on E-Flux “New Territories in Acre”

-The residency is an example of something the museum can’t understand as part of its normal structure.

-Sustainable architecture is locally focused-local solutions.

-Art is based in some kind of cultural sensitivity that is local.

Question for the group to which everyone responded:
Where do you consider to be your local?

-where are we grounded.

-Where your friends and family is.

-Where you spend most of your time.

-Potrc: -Doesn’t think about Lbjuijia as local

-Grounded in research groups that think about the future of where we live together.

-Make home in places that envision different ways of doing something.

-I.e: Amazonia- to practice small-scale economy.

-Two identities- the one you have and the way someone else might imagine you to be.

-Local can be various places.

-Where someone feels themselves to be adequately represented.

What community would we be addressed as or address?

-Art students in the city.

What is a practical problem here?
-Locks on the doors.

-Reflect relationship to the community.

-Punch code= more access/ key is more limited.

-Marjetica’s practice: access to decision making-ways of living; self-determination.

-Instead, in our discussion, we’re talking about physical access.

Words that we drew from our discussion:

Local, interaction, Concern, team, engagement, institution, access, ground

About Marjetica Potrč

Potrc’s on-site work is about building communities and social environments. She works on community sustainability, primarily through the use of technology and engineering, on-site at communities around the world. Projects have elements of sustainability by including functions such as harvesting water, producing electricity and community gardens. Potrc has helped schools, farms and communities at large, bringing attention to issues regarding the resources and infrastructures, both economic and social, of towns worldwide. The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour (2009, Amsterdam) is an on-site work with a most direct interest in building social environments. Here, a previously unused site is used as a community garden and community kitchen which, as indicated on Potrc’s website, “become a catalyst for transforming not only the public space but also the community itself.” Further adding to the social orientation of this work is the project’s blog.

Given the often-desperate lack of resources in these communities, Potrc has designed self-sustaining housing units that can provide water, sewage and electrical service to the occupants.

Marjetica Potrc injects her designs with glowing colors (pinks and oranges) as a way of celebrating life and beauty she sees in shared needs. (Shared needs – we all need the same things, shelter food, water and beauty).

Her art can be seen as a reaction to the changes imposed and engendered by global economic structuring and its local manifestations.

Some of the themes Potrc works with are temporality – permanence, security, defense. pursuit of happiness, resilience and resistance.

Creative deregulation – term Marjetica Potrc uses to describe improvisational and temporary solutions that have become semi-legitimate in places like New-Belgrade.

Struggle for Spatial Justice, 2006, series of 10 drawings

-- Marjetica related W. Churchill’s famous words: “We will never surrender” (June 4, 1940) with contemporary spatial struggles by creating slogans for every drawing (ex. We shall not flag or fail, we shall go on to the end.)

-emphasis on infrastructure – key to Potrc’s practice

-- by infrastructure she means the informal type of structures that have emerged through individual and community initiatives in order to take place of deteriorating urban and state infrastructure.

-her drawings are infused with bright, uplifting colours to remind viewers of hope and beauty

Artist’s website: http://www.potrc.org/

Related Artists

Lucy Orta is a visual artist with a background in fashion design who creates architectural clothing that respond to the specific needs of the wearer. Her earlier work “Refuge Wear” (1992-1998) is comprised of coats and backpacks that transform into tents and sleeping bags. While some of her work such as “Body Architecture” (2002), “Refuge Wear” lend themselves to practical application, other such as the “Connector” series (2000-2002), Antarctica (2007) and Fallujah (2002-2007) are more prototype then functional objects and are intended primarily to initiate dialogue.

Orta’s work has been exhibited both within the gallery and outside in the form of interventions. For example, her work “Nexus Architecture” consists of large-scale interventions in which each participant is attached to the next via umbilical-like structures. The collective situate themselves within an urban centre creating both a physical and visual intervention. Orta’s work addresses issues of the community, exclusion, sustainability, mobility and the effect of space on urban identity.

Tomas Saraceno is from Argentina and currently lives and works in Frankfurt and Main.
His work rethinks how we live in relation to one another -- reshaping notions about nationality and property, and revising our ideas about the fixity of the built enviornment and organization of cities. He intends to reshape social space and human behaviour as much as physical space through his futuristic speculation. His work transcends quixotic ambition by applying practical priniciples from engineering physics, chemistry, aeronautics and architecture to experiment and model logistical solutions for airborne haitation.

Examples of two works:
Flying Garden (2006-2007): these works imagine parallel agriculture modules, at present housing species of Spanish moss that receive necessary nutrition from the atmosphere—they are “air-sufficient,” an apt metaphor for the human self-sufficiency that his project hopes to engender.This project is an aspect of his Air-port-City (2002) project that are visions for cell-like ariborne cities. They mostly take the form of multiple PVC balloons attached together with elastic rope and fabric webbing.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Her work is characterized by a quiet, intimate interrogation of contemporary urban life. Exploring cinematic conventions, temporality and subjective experience, her short films and installations recreate specific moments in which individuals intersect with places -- highlighting the individual nuances of cultural and social contexts. -- creation of discourse
(a similar approach to cultural and social contexts as Marjetica Potrc).

Mierle Laderman Ukeles is a New York based “maintenance artist” whose practice addresses social, political, economical and environmental concerns within the society. Her methodology consists of long durational performances that often include intense physical labour or the appropriation of service roles, which she performs in public spaces, in the effort to stimulate the public’s empowerment for social change towards equality and ecological sustainability through the act of positive community involvement. She wrote a manifesto dedicated to maintenance art in 1969, and in it she constitutes chores of everyday life as performance art pieces. In her 1974 performance work “Washing”, Ukeles challenged the notions of art and maintenance to their limits when she affirmed that the cleanliness of the entire area outside the A.I.R. Gallery in Soho would be maintained as art for three consecutive hours.

Excerpt from Not Just Garbage (“Washing” 1974):   !

Additional artists

-Mark Dion
-Michael Rakowitz
-Nils Norman
-Peter Fend
-Wochenklausur

Discussion ideas/topics:

Ethics of communal engagement. How does an artist negotiate being socially and politicially engaged without the work being elevated or reduced to simply being social work or political activism, as opposed to “art”? Simultaneously, how can the artist negotiate the potential slip into a downward gaze or exploitation of the subject of their work? [examples: Thomas Hirschhorn, Santiago Sierra, Rikrit Tiravanija, etc.]

Ethics of viewership. What does a body of work developing out of artistic field research require or ask of its viewer(s)? How do practices engaged in this approach to art making consider the viewer and viewership?
[examples: Alfredo Jaar: Rwanda Project (1994-2000), Michael Rakowitz]

Criticality. How can research-based artistic practices move beyond making statements to facilitate critical engagement in a gallery context?
[examples: Judy Radul: World Rehearsal Court (2009), Mark Dion etc.]

Institutional framework. Why do institutions seek out or commission artists who engage in
community-oriented projects? What does this signify?

Displacement, translation, and transformation. What do functional structures and objects become when they are taken, by the artist, from their originally intended environments and placed into the gallery space? What are the implications of artistic interpretation/liberties during this process of translation? (e.g. aestheticization of slum houses with bright colours)

Gestures versus real-world solutions. In an art context that often values cultural production against concrete and utilitarian solutions to social problems, what is the significance of the use-value of an art object, particularly in practices which are overtly invested in making change socially, or politically. What are the implications?
[examples: Lucy Orta, Michael Rakowitz, Bill Burns]

2010′s SFU third year Visual Art show, For the Moment, took place across the street from Woodwards at W2: Community Media Arts http://www.creativetechnology.org/profiles/blogs/original-school-for.

The opening was a great success! On behalf of the organizers I would like to thank the artists, W2, SFU, and everyone who came to support the show. We are now looking forward with great anticipation to the fourth year graduating exhibition Riot.

Images of all art works featured in the exhibition:

W2 Community Media Arts and SFU Visual Art Students Present:

SFU’s Visual Art Student Show “For the Moment”
March 5-14, 2010

Opening – Friday March 5, 7pm-1am with after party at W2′s 4th floor
Public Roundtable – Thursday March 4, 10am

Location: W2 Community Media Arts
112 West Hastings St, Vancouver
Gallery Hours: 12-5pm weekdays and weekends
Contact: forthemomentshow@gmail.com

Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=279460648092

Organized and curated by the third year undergraduate students in the Visual Art program at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts, For the Moment reflects and explores a long-standing art historical tension between deliberately political practices, and play or process-oriented methodologies. Contemporarily, much ‘political art’ has been framed as reductive and ineffective due to its lack of aesthetic considerations and attentiveness to form. Conversely, process and play based artistic practices are frequently regarded as non-critical and socially disengaged. All artistic practices—inclusive of those based in or oriented towards play and process—are inherently socially engaged, as cultural production cannot occur in a vacuous environment. That said, when sensitive to both form and content, more explicitly political artistic gestures can be equally valuable aesthetically and socially. Located at the W2 Community Media Arts and featuring works by students in SFU’s Visual Art program, For the Moment seeks to activate tensions between the seemingly antagonistic means and ends of ‘political art’ and more playful, process-based approaches to explore their commonalities. On March 4th a public roundtable will be held to extend the exploration of the curatorial mandate in relation to discourses surrounding art in the public realm and notions of community.

Participating artists: Nikita Alagappa, Elena Boulankova, Erik Brinkman, Ryan Chow, Olivia Dunbar, Collette Farry, Michelle Lui, Laura McKillop, Jacquelyn Ross, Monica Rudd, David Stein, Yi Xin Tong, Vikram Uchida-Khanna, Alexis Vanderveen, Lőrinc Vass, Jason Wang, Nathaniel Wong.

Curated by: Ryan Chow, Laura McKillop, David Stein, Alexis Vanderveen and Lőrinc Vass.