No Windows, on view at Satellite Gallery from November 27, 2010 to January 23, 2011, is the result of a unique collaboration between the departments of Anthropology, Art History and Curatorial Studies at the University of British Columbia, as graduate students in each of these programs have joined forces to curate this new and exciting exhibition.
The task for the curators and the artists of No Windows is to reveal the over-arching themes that are imposed onto art objects through exhibition practices, and to invite the public to decode the conventions of looking and thinking about art in Vancouver and beyond.
No Windows presents artworks by local and national artists Rhonda Weppler + Trevor Mahovsky, Adad Hannah, Jamie Drouin and Zoe Tissandier. Each artist considers the structures that underlie gallery and museum practices—principles and assumptions that may seem invisible or commonsense, yet shape the creation, mediation and reception of art.
Each work seeks to transform our perception of gallery practices. Rhonda Weppler + Trevor Mahovsky present for the first time in Vancouver Sun in an Empty Room. At Satellite, this project will be presented already complete, with a dense assemblage of found and made objects, offered as a record of labour and of adaptations to the spatial constraints of a group exhibition. Adad Hannah’s tableaux vivants, or living pictures, Blind Date and Ouija, meditate on the idea of the performance archive and simultaneously still and moving images.
Jamie Drouin’s new installation, Field, calls attention to the harmful capabilities of noise pollution and how it activates experiences of which we may not be aware. Zoe Tissandier’s video work, When love flourished in M for medical textbooks, extends her recent investigations into the classification and display of archived material and knowledge using video and found text.