The Belkin Satellite is pleased to present Risk: Playing the Game, an exhibition curated by Katie Spicer, a Master’s Candidate in Critical and Curatorial Studies at UBC, and organized by a team of graduate students from all branches of UBC’s Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory. The selection of six works by emerging artists from Vancouver, Halifax, Toronto and New York explores the notion of risk as a game to be played. Ideas of artifice and humour emerge as a counterpoint to those interpretations of risk within visual culture and contemporary society that foreground sensational notions of danger and uncertainty.
Andrew Dadson’s video I Get Up to Get Down explores the relation of risk and play in a serial act of trespassing. Stephen Dedalus’ sculpture Untitled uses the readymade as a register for acts of spatial appropriation, détournement and physical malaise encountered in urban skate culture. The position of the gallery as a stage for risk-taking is explored in David Diviney’s Divine Intervention, a series of photographs documenting an institutional intervention performed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Likewise, Derek Sullivan’s Door Chimes and Neutralizing Pennies (portable version) provoke the gallery visitor with the tools necessary to transform the Belkin Satellite into the front for a minor offence. In photographs from her series A More Perfect Union, Triina Linde examines the physical evidence of a relationship gone wrong. Finally, Diana Shpungin and Nicole Engelmann present Five Acts: Bruise, Bleed, Break, Scar, Tooth, a video work that explores the play of simulation, violence, sexuality and movie making magic in constructions of bodily risks.
Risk: Playing the Game has been conceived to coincide with the 21st Annual Graduate Student Symposium organized by students in the UBC Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory. The symposium will be held on April 5, 2002 from 9:30 am to 5:30 p.m. in Room 102 of the Lasserre Building, UBC. Speakers include six graduate students from the University of Calgary, University of Rochester, Stanford University and UBC. Vancouver-based artist, scholar and curator Zheng Sheng Tian will deliver the keynote address.