Opening reception: May 2 from 8 to 10 pm

In the late 1960s, buoyed by his phenomenal success as an avant-garde filmmaker in Italy, Michelangelo Antonioni was invited to shoot a feature length film in Hollywood. The result was released in 1970. Zabriskie Point began as a commercial failure and a target of harsh criticism in the United States. At issue was the film’s lack of narrative focus and its verité accounts of the mounting civil unrest on American campuses, all in marked defiance of California boosters who were eager to placate the increasing political tensions that threatened speculative profits. Zabriskie Point concludes with a famous scene that dwells on the destruction of a designer oasis in the California desert. A series of enigmatic, slow motion explosions endure for the entire length of Pink Floyd’s background track “Careful with that Axe, Eugene.” In 1999, Vancouver-based artist Mina Totino completed a series of painting studies based on these final scenes of fire, smoke, floating appliances and up-scale commodities bound for cathartic destruction. The Belkin Satellite is pleased to present the first full exhibition of this body of work in Vancouver.

Mina Totino has been exhibiting in Europe and North America since the late 1980s. Study after Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point was previously shown in Contemporary Utopia, a multi-venue exhibition in Riga, Latvia curated by Frank Wagner. Totino’s paintings operate on the borders of the modern visual field, where notions of the sublime and desires for annihilation find form. Yet the process of her work – copying, serial production, study – belies its image of romantic reverie. In the Zabriskie Point studies, a dialogue with Antonioni’s enigmatic final scene points to the broader question of what Diedrich Diederichsen has termed “psychedelic critique.” Totino’s paintings unleash a complex array of associations and oppositions between cinema and painting, looking and hallucination, beauty and destruction, the end of utopia and the Hollywood ending.

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.