Germaine Koh: Processes


DATE
Wednesday November 24, 2021 - Friday January 14, 2022
TIME
12:00 PM - 4:00 PM

The AMS Hatch Art Gallery presents Germaine Koh’s new public exhibition Processes, opening Wednesday, November 24, 2021 and running through January 14, 2022. The gallery is located on the second floor of the AMS Student Nest, 6133 University Boulevard, Vancouver. Gallery hours: 12:00 to 4:00pm, Monday to Friday (closed December 18 to January 3).

Germaine Koh is the 2021 Koerner Artist in Residence at the University of British Columbia. As one of the most influential conceptual artists in Canada, Koh is renowned for her ephemeral and concept-driven artistic production. Koh’s Processes actively explores two of her continuing works, Accord of Wood, begun in 2013, and Fête, ongoing since 1997. Both works specifically look at processes of transformation, accumulation, archiving, and administration of commonplace materials, and how they change through the process of time. Accord of Wood began as one cord of beetle-kill pine, which will be transformed over time as it adapts to different administrative systems and records a growing understanding around both the material and Indigenous land rights. Fête displays a growing collection of the artist’s own hair, cut and sewn into swags over the past twenty-five years. The work evokes celebratory décor and rites of passage, while recording the aging of a female body and other changes over time.

This exhibition is curated by Violetta Lapinski in collaboration with fellow class members in VISA 475: Exhibition Theory and Practice and Professor Althea Thauberger, with the support of the AMS, the Art History Students’ Association and Mia Chen, the Visual Art Students’ Association, and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory.

Read Violetta Lapinski’s curatorial essay.

Germaine Koh is an internationally active artist and curator based in Vancouver, in the ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Her work adapts familiar objects to create situations that look at the significance of everyday actions and common spaces, and which encourage connections between people, technology, and natural systems. She is currently working on a public art commission for the Topaz Skatepark in Victoria. Her ongoing projects include Home Made Home, an initiative to build and advocate for alternative forms of housing, and League, a participatory project using play as a form of creative practice. From 2018 to 2020, she was the City of Vancouver’s first Engineering Artist in Residence.

The Hatch Art Gallery is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xwmə0–kwəy’əm (Musqueam).

Contact:
Violetta Lapinski, Project Curator
hatch@ams.ubc.ca