The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is pleased to present As Seen Here, an exhibition of work by the 2013 graduates of The University of British Columbia’s two-year Master of Fine Arts program: Carlos Colín, Kate Henderson, Chris Howison, Erin Siddall, Tristan Sober-Blodgett, Stephen Wichuk.
Carlos Colín is a Mexican-born artist whose research focuses on how “art objects” can create links between Latin American-produced art and Latin American societies, in particular in relation to Mexico. His work is an investigation into how artists use local knowledge, realities and histories in social movements, struggles and subversions as new expressions of social and cultural progress using language as knowledge.

Kate Henderson’s practice investigates the degradation of Internet-sourced digital photographs and videos that depict the transition from analogue to digital in lens-based technologies while considering the economy and poetics of the circulating imagery. Additionally, she is concerned with the recent phenomenon of the collectively photographed and shared image of spectacle, and how digitally-mediated viewing has altered forms of subjectivity, perception and experience.

Chris Howison is a Scottish-born artist whose work concentrates on the relationship of the viewer to the work. Working primarily in sculpture, he produces intricate casts from the body and installs them in a way that forces the viewer to attempt to reorient themselves in order to properly inspect the work, thereby challenging the supposition that it is the viewer’s right to unimpeded access to both the physical work and its intended meaning.

The work of Erin Siddall investigates how the artist can find contradictory or complex methods for showing the relationship between the viewer and the viewed, which can be characterized as a tension between inside and out, particularly as it relates to film and other lens-based art practices. Her works deconstruct the biographic materiality of photographic slides while deconstructing the problematics of displaying emotionally charged and sensitive images.

A native of Los Angeles, Tristan Sober-Blodgett’s work is text-based though he employs a range of materials and processes including ink on paper, printmaking, body works and installation. A preoccupation with writing, grammar and code dominate the work, stressing the analogous relationship between linguistic intelligibility and the way the body is “read.”

Stephen Wichuk’s video installations restage sight gags and movement tropes borrowed from the history of cinema. These filmic moments are often utopic representations of labour which are themselves crafted using the laborious techniques of early animation. As studies of the cinematic movement, Wichuk’s work makes use of oft-repeated animated references and the oscillation of the visual movement from a rotating corncob, typewriter movements and roasting spits.

The exhibition is presented with support from the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia.