Sol Hashemi\, Cedar Cart Offcuts in Kaizen Foam< /em>\, 2020\, cedar\, plastic and Kaizen foam\, 15.0 x 60.0 x 120.0 cm. Cou rtesy of the artist.
The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of work by the 2021 graduates of the Unive rsity of British Columbia’s two-year Master of Fine Arts program: S ol Hashemi\, Martin Katzoff\, Natalie Purschwitz\, Xan Shian\, and Dion Smi th-Dokkie. This program in the Department of Art History\, Visual Art and Theory is limited each year to a small group of four to six artists \, who over the two years foster different sensibilities developed within a n intimate and discursive working environment.
Sol Hashemi views his artworks as mushrooms popping up occasionally from a vast mycorrhizal web. His prac tice spans many niches\, including foraging\, woodworking\, experimental pr oduct photography\, stoneworking\, cooking\, organizing\, conceptual floral design\, writing\, conversation\, curating\, brewing and the internet. Muc h as a network composed of fungi allows apparently isolated trees to commun icate and share resources\, Hashemi is interested in exploring how this rel ationship can exist through art. Solo exhibitions include Afterwards\, What Comes Before is Different at James Harris Gallery (Seattle)\, Technical Support at Annarumma Gallery (Naples) and Software Upda te / System Build at The Henry Art Gallery (Seattle). He has also exhi bited his work at Sculpture Center\, the Portland Art Museum\, Ditch Projec ts and Kunstverein Munchen. Hashemi was a founder of the art space Veronica and is a recipient of the Kayla Skinner Award from the Seattle Art Museum.
Martin Katzoff is a printmaker and painter from Providence\, Rhode Island. Katzoff’s etchings address myt hology across ancient and modern cultural and religious contexts. His print making practice draws upon materials that shift into large abstract and sur realistic paintings reflecting catastrophic environmental events and human oddities. Katzoff’s lyrical and immersive large-scale murals have been feat ured at the Freehand Hotel and Broken Shaker (New York\, NY) and Stair Gall eries (Hudson\, NY). He is a graduate of Bard College and is currently an M FA candidate at the University of British Columbia.
Natalie Purschwitz is an artist living and working on the traditional\, ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̍əm (Musqueam)\, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and Se l̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) people. Thinking about earth – as a complexity of materials\, a location\, a temporal range\, a perspective\, an intellig ence\, a system within systems\, a geometric configuration\, an embodiment of motion and a life-supporting loam – has become the primary substance of her research. She draws from personal experience\, daily practice/observati on and theoretical discourse to coax out relational clusters of meaning\, c orrespondences and visual strands to form a matrix of interconnected nodes. Purschwitz has shown her work nationally and internationally at the Vancou ver Art Gallery\, Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver)\, Plug In ICA (Winnipeg )\, the Japanese Canadian National Museum (Burnaby)\, the McMichael Canadia n Art Collection (Kleingburg\, ON)\, the Prince Takamato Gallery (Tokyo\, J apan)\, Canada House (London\, UK) and AGX Galerie (Tehran\, Iran).
Xan Shian is an interdisciplinary artist and writer\, and MFA candidate in the AHVA Department at UBC\, whose practice examines the corporeal tensions that manifest within her body\, including those between the white settler and the Scottish Gaelic. Shian’s work considers how the S cottish and Gaelic folklores she grew up hearing help navigate the in-betwe en spaces of personal\, cultural and material encounter by seeking what is absent or unaccounted for. She has written for and shown works at spaces in cluding Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver)\, Project Pangée (Montreal)\, the AHVA Gallery (UBC\, Vancouver)\, and the Ou Gallery (Duncan). Shian makes art and lives as an uninvited guest on the traditional\, ancestral and unce ded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̍əm (Musqueam)\, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) an d Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Dion Smith-Dokkie is a visual artist and painter cur rently based in Vancouver\, BC. Grounded in painting\, he thinks about colo ur and light\, interfaces\, skins\, screens\, skies\, and so forth. Smith-D okkie has a BA in Humanities (Women’s Studies) from the University of Victo ria and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University. He is a me mber of West Moberly First Nations\, a Treaty 8 First Nation located in nor theast British Columbia.
This exhibition is presented wit h support from the Department of Art History\, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia.
LOCATION:Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery GEO:49.268088;-123.256007 URL;VALUE=URI:https://ahva.ubc.ca/events/event/fata-morgana-mfa-graduate-ex hibition/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ahva.cms.arts.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/37/2021/05/BelkinMar2021ParkadePoster_website_belkin-01-scaled.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 DTSTART:20210314T100000 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR