Stations: Some Recent Acquisitions draws on new works in the permanent collection and is organized into interrelated modules that explore some of the Belkin’s research areas. While the physical gallery remains open to the public, COVID-19 has pushed us to rethink our exhibitions. With the increased turn to our website, we are including here a selection of films that are also being screened in the gallery space.

In 2018, while investigating a large donation of 16 mm films, staff at the City of Vancouver Archives (CVA) identified a number of reels by UBC alum Sam Perry. He had been a key figure in the emergence of multimedia “happenings” in 1960s Vancouver, including at UBC, and made films there were long believed to be lost. Three of these re-discovered films – Record of Rogatnichio (Extravaganza in UBC Armoury) (1965), Abstracts Collage (c. 1965) and Into It (c. 1965) – are on display in Stations (CVA transferred them to the Belkin because of Perry’s ties to UBC). Record of Rogatnichio shows choreographer and dancer Helen Goodwin in rehearsal at the UBC Armouries Building, likely for the 1965 Festival of the Contemporary Arts organized by the Fine Arts Department. Goodwin, with Perry and others, was involved with Vancouver’s Sound Gallery (later Motion Studio) and was a frequent collaborator with Perry on multimedia dance and art pieces. Into It and Abstracts Collage are psychedelic, LSD-informed films that include segments shot with artist Gary Lee-Nova at UBC’s Nitobe Garden and collaging.

Sam Perry, Abstracts Collage
13 minutes, 16 seconds

Sam Perry, Record of Rogatnichio (Extravaganza in UBC Armoury), 1965, with footage of Helen Goodwin
16 minutes, 22 seconds

In this brief video clip from 2016, Kwakwaka’wakw artist, carver and activist Beau Dick (1955-2017) operates his Dzunuḵ̓wa (2016) mask in his studio in the UBC Audain Art Centre, where he was artist-in-residence with the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory from 2013 to his untimely death in 2017. Dzunuḵ̓wa – sometimes written as Tsonoqua and known as the Wild Woman of the Woods – is a supernatural figure in Kwakwaka’wakw cosmology, described by curator Candice Hopkins for Dick’s exhibition at documenta 14 as a cannibal who “lumbers through the woods, plucking out disobedient children and putting them in her cedar basket for later eating. Her giant face is black as though charred from a fire, and her red lips are always pursed as though about to cry out, ‘HUU! HUU!’”

Beau Dick, Dzunukwa, 2016
15 seconds