Under Super Vision: 40th Annual Graduate Exhibition

Exhibition (March 10 – April 1, 2017)

Opening Reception

Thursday, March 9, 2017
6 – 8 pm

AHVA Gallery
Audain Art Centre
6398 University Blvd.

Gallery Hours

Tuesday – Saturday
12 – 4 pm

Artists

cMAS
Antonia Hirsch
Public Studio
Grayson Richards
Terri Te Tau

Co-curated by Laurie White, Sherena Razek, Whitney Brennan, and Paula Booker

The exhibition Under Super Vision addresses surveillance as an increasingly normalized strategy of institutional power and as an artistic methodology with the potential to subvert, re-appropriate and manipulate the politics of being watched. The exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the banal surveillance rhetoric of hyper-visibility, to focus on what and who have been rendered hyper-visible under invisible structures. Which subjects are most strenuously scrutinized under state-controlled surveillance, and to what degree are such marginalized communities able to respond, resist and reclaim their stolen image? The participating artists in this exhibition draw on methods of imposed surveillance and medicalized control of bodies, while questioning the future of counter-surveillance methods, even suggesting the return to analogue methods of communication and technology avoidance. A tension between the viewer and the surveilling entities emerges, a paranoia even, as we are at once aware that we are observed and yet by whom remains elusive, even illegible. Negotiating these structures of observation and panopticonic watching call for further counter-surveillance, masking and identity protection. How do we fight the new normal of everyday surveillance politics?

We thank our donors for their generous contributions:

Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies
Museum of Anthropology
Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory
Department of Asian Studies
Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies
Department of History
Faculty of Arts HSS Grant
Faculty of Graduate Studies Dean’s Office
Provost and Vice President Academic
Liu Institute for Global Issues