Saturday, April 5, 2014

Young and Repless / BFA Grad Show














April 17 – April 26

Opening Reception 
April 16, 7-10pm



This April at Audain Gallery, the seventeen students of SFU’s School for Contemporary Arts’ 4th year class present their Graduating Exhibition, The Young and the Repless. The title humorously refers to our status as emerging artists who have completed four years of study, but who are without representation or reputations. As we organize our exhibition and make our art works, we contemplate the future with a hopeful belief in artistic freedom and experimentation, yet also a deep sense of anxiety. We are at a crossroads: the exhibition represents a moment of differentiation framed by the awareness that every year legions of art school graduates enter the world. There is no explicit common denominator across the works in the exhibition; however, a certain emphasis on materiality is evident: the gallery will be full of fabric, bricks, sticks, string, concrete, glitter and photography.

Participating artists are: Lindsey Adams, Dasha Boichenko, Taylor Boisjoli, Katy Churcher, Susan Lizeth Bernal Clavijo, Adrienne Evans, Gabrielle Hill, Dana Howell, Coco Huang, Amanda Jang, Angela Lin, Sherry Ma, Kun Peng, Emily Starkey, Linnea Strom, Alex Stursberg and Krystal Wong.


The Young and the Repless is presented by the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU.
http://www.sfu.ca/galleries/audain-gallery/upcoming.html


Facebook page:Young and Repless



Tuesday, March 18, 2014

The Hand of Hah Opening

Index Gallery / The Hand of Hah / March 20th

The Hand of Hah
Group Sculpture Show/ Emerging Artists 


Maggie Boyd, Brennan Kelly, Sydney Koke & Alex Stursberg

Index Gallery1305 Powell St


Opening Reception 7pm-11 March 20th






For viewings please contact thehandofhah@gmail.com



More information please visit The Hand of Hah / Group Sculpture Show


Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Other Worlds Exhibition at Audain Gallery




















Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Art and the Audain Gallery are excited to announce OTHER WORLDS. 

OTHER WORLDS is a show curated by SFU’s third year visual arts students showing collaboratively created works surrounding the ideas of otherness, self-reflectivity, politics, globalization and colonization. OTHER WORLDS aims to explore the infinitely expanding frontier of space-travel, science fiction and science fact, futurism and global-self-awareness from a variety of critical views arising out of an interest in collectivity.

The only way to truly recognize the self is by comparing it to the mirror-self, the reflection of an entity that is whole and separate. It points at the original source whilst being removed from it… reflection.

“We have no need of other worlds; we need mirrors.”
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris


Opening March 26 at 7:00pm
Audain Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia

For more information Other Worlds Facebook

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Interview #1 David Stein

 Butterfly, 2014






























































Tell me a little bit about yourself

I graduated from SFU with a BFA in Visual Art in 2011 since then I have been traveling a lot, participating in some group shows and exploring my creative interests. I designed and helped build the Vancouver Effigy for Burning Man 2012, which was burned along with 32 other structures at the event. My medium of choice is sculpture but I have been experimenting with printmaking and mixed media more since finishing my undergraduate degree.


Tell me a little bit more about your art

My art consists of breaking down, rearranging, manipulating, or repeating existing objects and images to create a new perspective on the familiar. This treatment of the material is often informed by a psychological or physiological process such as the ability of our memory to fracture or amplify images from our past. Mythological and esoteric symbolism also inspires my work as it has the ability to enrich and extend the cultural power and significance of a given object or image.


1. How would you define your work in five words?

Multiplied, deconstructed, calculated, eclectic, abstract 


2. What drives you to create art?

As cheesy as it sounds, life. The people around me especially other artists whose work I admire, events, experiences, nature, and my environment. I like to borrow from different media as well film, television, and music mainly. Lately I have been influenced quite a bit by my emotional reactions to experiences. I feel like the drive to create art is so closely linked to our need to express our inner dialog. Finding a way to channel the energy that we absorb from our experiences into the work makes creating art feel like a relief, I guess it’s a form of therapy.  


3. What food, drink, song inspires you?

I’ve never really thought about how food and drink influence my art before. I would have to say fruit and wine. They have such a rich connection to art history and I also really enjoy the visual diversity of fruit I guess they are both passionate things. As for music it really depends on my mood I think music amplifies how we feel so sad, happy, aggressive, contemplative, romantic ya there is a song for all of that.


4. What does your creative process look like when you are looking to begin a new work?

I think way too much before I even begin so my process is a lot of working on an idea and reworking. It’s key to just start working because most of the time it will take a few attempts to mold the idea into something close to what I imagined. I feel like every good idea is perfect in my head and the real challenge is to reproduce it in physical form as close to that original intention.


5. Do you ever collaborate with other artists?

Not as much as I would like to. Collaboration is one of the best ways to learn more about yourself and the work. It is incredibly beneficial to have someone else challenging you and pushing you to dive deeper into the work or explore an idea further. Collaboration can cause conflict but as long as it’s manageable the outcome is usually powerful.


6. What are some of the important lessons you learned from school?

Process is very important, there is no replacement for hard work. The more you explore and invest in an idea the more it will give back to you. Art School teaches a lot about context as well which is important because work exists in relation to what has come before it and the world that surrounds it.


7. What have you been up to after graduating from SFU?

I’ve been traveling and going on adventures mostly. New ideas and creative drive come from challenging ourselves and being passionate about the world we live in. The more I expose myself to new experiences the more I want to express myself through art.


8. Any favorite artists or websites we should check out?

Yes! I am really inspired by graphic work and street art at the moment so Juxtapoz.com and unurth.com are great. In terms of artists, I really like Connor Harrington’s work his ability to combine figurative and abstract elements into his paintings is incredible. I was also blown away by the Marc Quinn show I saw in New York at Mary Boone Gallery. He made these immaculate gigantic bronze seashells from 3D prints that had a real presence to them. Matthew Day Jackson and Paul McCarthy had some very beautiful and interesting sculptural work that I saw at Hauser and Wirth Gallery and Frieze Art Fair on that trip as well.


Thank you David!  For more of David's work please visit david stein studio



Thursday, February 6, 2014

HxBIA Announces Student Art and Culture Submissions




















Are you a student or team of students at SFU, VCC or VFS? Do you have an awesome idea you want to bring to life in public space in the Hastings Crossing Area? (See map below) If so you are eligible to compete in one of three prize categories of $750, $1250 or $2000 to assist in bringing your idea to life.

HxBIA embraces edginess, innovation, diversity, urban culture and community. We are looking for visual art (including but not limited to murals, graffiti, sidewalk or street painting, chalkstencil or image projectioncultural exchange or interpretationurban design features, live performancegaming or otherwise creatively utilizing a public space. It may have content that is unconventional, perhaps even controversial.

More details at Hastings Crossing

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Things from 2009 - 2013

Please visit Old 611 forum for any past exhibitons and student works.


Radical Spirits: A One-Night-Only Multidisciplinary Arts Extravaganza.

















Leah Tottenham and Adriana Lademann, co-creators of the Radical Spirits project, are pleased to announce that the Radical Spirits multidisciplinary art exhibition will be taking place Sunday, February 23, 2014 from 7:00 pm until midnight at Astorino’s Ballroom (1739 Venables St., Vancouver, BC). 
The Radical Spirits show is an all-ages community event with no admission fee. The venue is supplied by The Safe Amplification Site Society.

Radical Spirits is dedicated to displaying and celebrating works that address the relationship between the supernatural, the spiritual, and any multitude of feminist
expressions. The themes underlying the project are intentionally broad and are interpreted differently by everyone, and we believe that this subjectivity is a crucial
part of the project. Each artist’s individual take on the themes of the Radical Spirits project helps us in our goal, which is to examine and critique the cultural silencing and erasure of radical feminism. We want to challenge and reject this erasure by exhibiting art that reworks themes of the ghostly, the supernatural, and the spiritual to serve a female-positive and egalitarian agenda. We also invite audience participation in that we invite people to attend costumed as their “magical selves”.

We noticed the lack of radical, socially conscious art in Vancouver and created Radical Spirits to work toward changing that. We are an independent, volunteer-
run collective, and the show on February 23 will be the public debut of the Radical Spirits project, wherein we begin our endeavour toward creating a new dialogue surrounding feminist issues in Vancouver.

More information can be found on our Facebook page and on our website, which is coming soon (late January 2014):

www.facebook.com/radicalspiritsvancouver

www.radicalspirits.ca

All Ages No BYOB

ACCESSIBILITY INFO:
There is one gradient step up to the door of the venue. It is 2.5” at the lowest point and 6” at the highest. There are two washrooms stalls with grab bars, one in each washroom; the doors to these stalls are 30” and they are 42” wide. The venue space itself is fully accessible to mobility devices.