Opening reception: Friday, September 8, 8-10 pm

The Belkin Satellite is pleased to present The King and I, an exhibition of recent work by Vancouver-based artists Phillip McCrum and Marina Roy. Both artists work across a variety of media, experimenting with and manipulating materials in new ways, and engaging with art historical precedence. Their work investigates the relationship between “traditional practices,” including avant-garde strategies, and the development of new palettes and forms of expression, oftentimes using “marginal materials.” Their work shares a number of aesthetic sensibilities and social concerns: the grotesque, emphasis on materiality and representations of power and class.

This ongoing investigation of class issues surfaces in McCrum’s work, specifically regarding representations of the working class, and what is perceived as “trash” culture. This manifests itself connotatively as discontent about how the establishment, at the academic and capitalist level, consumes the “anti-aesthetic.”

Roy’s cross-media practice explores how each medium engages with (and is shaped by) not only current ideological power structures but also art historical canons, especially with respect to representations of power. Her work reflects an interest in the intersection between language and the visual arts as well as art history and psychoanalysis.

The Belkin Satellite gratefully acknowledges the support of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, the Faculty of Arts, and the Museum of Anthropology at The University of British Columbia and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Between 2001 and 2008, the Belkin Satellite operated as an auxiliary space in downtown Vancouver that presented a mix of exhibitions by local artists, new projects by mid-career artists, experimental projects by UBC curatorial studies students, and served as an additional venue for the Belkin’s permanent collection. Its location at 555 Hamilton Street is Vancouver’s most enduring single gallery space as the prior site of the Bau-Xi Gallery from 1964 to 1972 and the Contemporary Art Gallery from 1973 to 2001; in August 2008, the Or Gallery took over the site.