In Conjunction with The Unseen: AHVA Graduate Symposium
“The Unseen” features w orks by seven graduate students that explore the limits of the unseen. A co mmon dialogue around the body as invisible or absent emerges through an exa mination of the qualities of specific media such as film as well as in cont emporary technologies. Narratives of history and mythology that have been b oth lost and repressed are recuperated in order to bring new specificity to their subjects or at least to make tangible the processes of erasure and e ntropy that effect them.
Exhibiting artists: Kevin D ay & Nathan McNinch\, Colin Lyons\, Aydin Matlabi\, Faye Mullen\, Tristan S ober-Blodgett and Étienne Tremblay-Tardif
Curated By: Louis-Alexandre Douesnard\, Tarah Hogue\, Toby Lawrence and Klara Manhal< /p>
THE UNSEEN
Organised in conjunction with the 3 5th Annual University of British Columbia Art History\, Visual Art and Theo ry Graduate Symposium\, this exhibition features works by seven graduate st udents exploring the limits of the unseen. The artworks record\, inscribe\ , narrate\, choreograph and flirt with various absences across the vast ter rain of visual experience. They consider\, each in their own way\, the wei ght of the invisible subject\, yet together a common dialogue emerges aroun d the body. By recuperating the historical body in order to re-imagine or re-inscribe it with new specificity\, as well as examining the absence of t he body through a particular medium\, the artworks call attention to their art historical and psychical underpinnings\, and reflect on the degree to w hich the body is a central concern when addressing notions of the unseen an d its effects.
An exploration of their chosen media is used to unders core notions of absence and erasure in artworks by Faye Mullen\, Tristan So ber-Blogett and Colin Lyons. Attending to these unseen elements\, the mate riality of these works sustains a set of continuities that perforate the su rface and tie them to the body. In Mullen’s video installation\, To be Vei led\, a struggle for the continuance of being is maintained in the looped v eiling and unveiling of the represented body. The body exists temporally o nly through the medium itself. The interrelational character of materialit y takes precedent in All I Need is a Tin Can Modem by Sober-Blodgett\, wher ein the body is implicated in the knit Ethernet cable which further plays o n the advancements of technology. For Lyons\, the materials chosen for his artworks are reminiscent of the industrial era\, and the processes of ruin ation re-enacted become exemplary of continual systems of growth and obscur ity.
Bookworm by Étienne Tremblay-Tardif and Sufi Vision by Aydin Mat labi both challenge established historical narratives and present us with p reviously unseen propositions. In Bookworm\, the artist drills through an official Québec history book\, finding within its pages pierced portraits o f iconic figures. Variously positioned\, these piercings evoke assassinati ons\, violations and defacement\; the nuanced ideological struggles and ten sions of which history is made. In never giving us one explicit narrative\ , Tremblay-Tardif recuperates the infinity of untold historical alternative s. Sufi Vision explores the mystical realm of Persian mythology by departi ng from imagery traditionally void of the figurative and restaging it in th e field of the sensual body. Depicted are the concept of brotherhood from the Koran\, the lustful chronicle of the Sady\, and the significance of fem ale power in Iranian history.
In Kevin Day and Nathan McNinch's colla borative artwork\, attributes of gallery visitors are captured on camera – a surveillance device that records data such as skin\, eye and hair colour as well as bodily comportment. The division of this data from the body its elf is disrupted\, however\, by its abstraction into randomised and illegib le code that is further overwritten and even erased by the (mal)function of the machines that inscribe the data on rolls of paper. The trace of the c ompartmentalised and possibly commodified body eventually overflow the exhi bition space as the paper continuously piles on the floor\, paradoxically s uggesting the arbitrariness of such processes that would erase bodily prese nce while simultaneously resisting the action in its abundance of physical material.
The 35th Annual UBC Art History Graduate Symposium: The Uns
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entsDetails.cfm?EventID=1077&EventTypeNumID=5