Each year, the Belkin Art Gallery presents the work of the graduates of the Master of Fine Arts program in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory. Concerned with hegemony from the perspective of the Other, Nicole Brabant’s video and photographic works employ golf as a vehicle to enter into a multi-axial critique of contemporary society. In her work Adaptation (Lesson), Brabant documents a staged golf lesson in an attempt to discuss broader issues of racism, classism and neo-colonial aspects of globalization.
Paul Kajander often makes use of humour and provisional materials as means of critique. These devices are employed in works that venture a subjective response to the alienating conditions of contemporary experience. His research-oriented practice makes use of literature, philosophy, popular culture and autobiography as starting points in the development of projects that aim to challenge the means-ends rationalism so pervasive under dominant ideologies.
Marilou Lemmens and Richard Ibghy will present their work There was a bandstand, a two-channel video installation consisting of text, images, monochromes and voice. Using linguistic and visual forms in moving-picture installations, Lemmens and Ibghy explore the intricate forces that shape personal and collective aspects of autobiographical narrative as an expression of embodied experience.
Elizabeth Milton’s performative works integrate video and photography into experiential processes of character play that aim to complicate the act of self-representation. Drawing from acting methods and psychoanalytic theory, her work explores how strategies of self-transformation may be used to challenge and articulate the distorted sense of reality that consumes our culture of simulation.
Stepping outside of a practice rooted primarily in photography and video, Colin Miner’s new sculpture and paint based works allude to themes of stillness and terror as connected to the vampire. The works build upon his interest in the gothic and the film noir genre, while playing with ideas of anxiety in a search for meaning and context in our present time.
As an offshoot of her project, colourschool, Kristina Lee Podesva considers the colour brown in two works for the exhibition Green. Brown, as a vital hue in the colourschool palette (which also includes black, white, red and yellow), proposes questions regarding identity and authorship in these works. Sited in her studio at UBC, colourschool has operated since November 2006 as a free school devoted to a speculative study of five colours and has attempted to develop a colour consciousness through presentations, screenings, reading groups, listening labs and performances, among other activities.
Sarah Turner maps the desire-relations at work within the materiality of everyday life, interpersonal relations and art itself. Unhinging meaning from a fixed origin via sculptural processes, installation and intervention she questions authority, authorship and artistic subjectivity. In so doing, Turner locates agency at the borders between knowledge and desire.
