Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery | MFA Graduate Exhibition | til OCT 1
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
UBC Masters of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
Strange Bedfellows: Abbas Akhavan, Derek Dunlop, Eryne Donahue,Rebecca
Donald, Robert Niven, Michael Euyung Oh
Until Sunday October 1, 2006
“Strange Bedfellows” points to the diverse and distinct practices of the
2006 Masters of Fine Arts graduates. This is an excellent opportunity to
view the work of six emerging artists whose practices explore the mediums of
video, sculpture, performance and drawing.
Abbas Akhavan’s four-minute video projection, August 2006, conflates terror
with pleasure, the real with the imagined, and destruction with beauty, as
it draws the viewer through a cycle of heightened anxiety and relief. This
duel signification creates a confusion out of which comes a comment on the
politics of location and perception. Akhavan is a semi-finalist for the 2006
RBC Canadian Painting Competition.
Eryne Donahue problematizes notions of the portrait, where the autonomous
identity of real individuals and bodies is revealed and enlarged. Donahue¹s
use of various photographic and print media has led to a series of
explorations about how humanity is represented, remembered and understood.
Her approach is reminiscent of archival or mnemonic schematics that organize
larger concepts and questions of human life into more manageable parts.
Rebecca Donald combines drawing, painting and sculpture in her visceral
works about the home. Her thin-skinned ³towels² are literally made by the
skin that forms on top of thickly poured oil paint as it dries. The skin of
the towels sags and wrinkles with age much as a person¹s would. Donald¹s
drawings are obsessively rendered, little abstractions of rod-shaped
bacteria that make up objects we take for granted in the hygienic home: a
faucet, a sponge or even a large section of wallpaper.
Under the obscene pressures of advanced capitalism, Derek Dunlop considers
how our culture¹s rage is both intensified and diffused through the
celebration and destruction of the aggressive male. Dunlop considers
drawing a metaphor for the process by which one can learn and internalize
the subtleties of self-constitution. Drawing can be performed in agreement
with the enforced institutionalization and compartmentalization of everyday
life, or as a possible strategy of refutation or revolt. Dunlop works
through the shifting nature of power relations in everyday life, especially
in terms of masculinity, sexuality and desire.
Robert Niven explores various materials and methods, finding ways to make
visible conjunctions between memory, mis-recognition and metamorphosis.
Niven finds materials in a state of functional limbo and gives them an
absurd imitative gist, to confront viewers with recognizable objects in
alternative manners. These odd encounters are meant to create a dialogue
about our perceptions and preconceptions of materials, objects and forms.
Michael Euyung Oh began his “ranking projects” in 1999 by reorganizing
retail catalogue images of diamond rings, handguns, and burial caskets
according to his personal taste. For Oh, the act of making judgments to
construct a value system expresses today¹s utilitarian materialism and
institutional discourse, and is also an exercise in subjective absurdity.
Oh¹s latest ranking project, 100 Popular First Names is concerned with
textual and lingual qualities around naming, the resonance of
personal-cultural memory and fantasy, and the appearance of control and
determination.
For more info. contact Julie Bevan at tel: (604) 822-3640 or fax: (604)
822-6689, bevanj@interchange.ubc.ca
Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, 1825 Main
Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada. www.belkin-gallery.ubc.ca