The Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia (UBC) presents Digging, the annual exhibition of new work by the 2nd–year Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art cohort. The exhibition takes place at the AHVA Gallery in the Audain Art Centre from September 18 to October 18, 2024.
Digging
Mahsa Farzi, Sarah Haider, Solange Adum Abdala, Vanessa Mercedes Figueroa and Yuan Wen.
September 18 – October 18, 2024
Opening: Wednesday, September 18, 5 – 7 p.m.
Interdepartmental Crits: September 20 & 27, 1 p.m.
AHVA Gallery
Audain Art Centre, 6398 University Boulevard, Vancouver
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Friday, 12 – 4 p.m.
Interrogating curiosity and wonder, the artists in Digging have gone on self-exploratory journeys of revelation, addressing memory, loss, signs of destruction, and physicality. A space created to discover and be discovered, the familiar and the unfamiliar, ideas, memories, jokes, generational traumas and experiences. The continuous act of exposing vulnerability; what has been lost in translation but has emerged in a new form; loss of the apparent but also the intangible physicality; ever-changing landscapes and experiences. Mahsa Farzi, Sarah Haider, Solange Adum Abdala, Vanessa Mercedes Figueroa and Yuan Wen juxtapose these concerns in their own ways of digging together.
The artists navigate through the decision-making of what to dig out and what to keep, asking to pay attention yet conceal what they decide to tuck away, the art of mark-making, the space of error, forgetfulness, remembering and questioning the reality of it all, changing its course, looking back to the creases that shaped their lives, praxis, calibrating into the present to preserve their discoveries, knowing when is enough and what is enough to see the light of the day. The artists address these concerns with overexposed lines over and over, merging into disorienting sounds, the fleeting scents, inventing new language where it doesn’t exist, the jokes that cannot be translated, the mystery of where the water ends and land begins, where the land ends and human skin begins, revealing the signs of trauma and re-membering what has been lost in erasure.
We acknowledge that the creation and presentation of these works take place on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.
