Scott Watson (Canadian, b. 1950) is Director Emeritus and Research Fellow at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia. A curator whose career has spanned more than thirty-five years, Watson is internationally recognized for his research and work in curatorial and exhibition studies, contemporary art and issues, and art theory and criticism. His distinctions include the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2010); the Alvin Balkind Award for Creative Curatorship in BC Arts (2008) and the UBC Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance Development in the Visual and Performing Arts (2005). Watson has published extensively in the areas of contemporary Canadian and international art. His 1990 monograph on Jack Shadbolt earned the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1991. Recent publications include Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry (2015); Thrown: British Columbia’s Apprentices of Bernard Leach and their Contemporaries (2011), a finalist for the 2012 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize; “Race, Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape” and “Disfigured Nature” (in Beyond Wilderness, McGill University Press, 2007); and “Transmission Difficulties: Vancouver Painting in the 1960s” (in Paint, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006).
Born in Lithuania and raised in Israel, Esther Shalev-Gerz is an artist who lives and works in Paris, France, Gothenburg, Sweden, and since 1984 part-time on Hornby and Cortes Islands, British Columbia. She is interested in uncovering histories and in how knowledge is interpreted and made accessible from generation to generation. The life-size photographs in this exhibition are of rare books that can be seen in UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections, among them a Victorian pictorial history of Palestine and the Holy Land, and the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. The publications depict the imaginations and desires of European writers and travelers. Each page was photographed with a large-format camera and reveals the pages as well as the hands of the librarians who are holding the book of their choice and drawing attention to the minute details.
The photographs were originally commissioned in 2008 by the Vancouver Public Library. Shalev-Gerz asked librarians to select pages from their favourite books in the VPL’s Special Collections. The photographs that have been selected for Koerner Library are of books that are available at the University of British Columbia. More works of art by Esther Shalev-Gerz can be seen at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery from January 11 to April 14, 2013.
The Open Page is a collaboration of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Walter C. Koerner Library at The University of British Columbia, and is made possible by the generous support of the Audain Foundation. Art in the Library offers new perspectives on contemporary art by presenting art that questions our current perceptions about the world around us.
Esther Shalev-Gerz. The Open Page: The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia. From drawings made on the spot, by David Roberts, RA. With historical descriptions by the Revd. George Croly, LLD; lithographed by Louis Haghe. By David Roberts, London: F.G. Moon, 1842-44. (The Holy Sepulchre), 2008, inkjet on paper, 82 x 113 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Scott Watson (Canadian, b. 1950) is Director Emeritus and Research Fellow at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia. A curator whose career has spanned more than thirty-five years, Watson is internationally recognized for his research and work in curatorial and exhibition studies, contemporary art and issues, and art theory and criticism. His distinctions include the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2010); the Alvin Balkind Award for Creative Curatorship in BC Arts (2008) and the UBC Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance Development in the Visual and Performing Arts (2005). Watson has published extensively in the areas of contemporary Canadian and international art. His 1990 monograph on Jack Shadbolt earned the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1991. Recent publications include Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry (2015); Thrown: British Columbia’s Apprentices of Bernard Leach and their Contemporaries (2011), a finalist for the 2012 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize; “Race, Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape” and “Disfigured Nature” (in Beyond Wilderness, McGill University Press, 2007); and “Transmission Difficulties: Vancouver Painting in the 1960s” (in Paint, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006).
Audain Foundation
Esther Shalev-Gerz brings together key works by the Paris-based artist in the first solo exhibition of her work to be organized in Canada. First shown at the Kamloops Art Gallery in the spring of 2012, the exhibition will be presented with additional work by Shalev-Gerz at the Belkin Art Gallery.
[more]In conjunction with the exhibition Esther Shalev-Gerz, WHITE-OUT: Between Telling and Listening presented at the Kamloops Art Gallery, this hardcover, bilingual catalogue includes documentation of the KAG exhibition and three commissioned texts that explore Shalev-Gerz’s work from diverse perspectives. Curator Elizabeth Matheson addresses the work in the exhibition through a broader discussion of the artist’s practice and Ian Wallace offers a formal analysis of the work in the context of art historical approaches to photography and video. In addition, the catalogue includes an insightful contribution from Swedish academic Fanny Söderbäck, who worked closely with Shalev-Gerz on the production of WHITE-OUT: Between Telling and Listening.
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