The Belkin Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of work by the 2008 graduates of UBC’s two-year Master of Fine Arts program. Raymond Boisjoly’s focus is the equivocal status of materiality in the active pursuit of meaning made manifest through cultural phenomena. The transposition of a seasonal object onto an Indigenous form provides an opportunity to negotiate their cumulative connotative potential. Melanie Bond explores the relationship between physical geography and personal memory. Her series of photographs portray artists from Vancouver and Chongqing, China at a place with which they feel a connection. Natalie Doonan employs a range of strategies including performance, video, social networking and print media to playfully engage in productions of subjectivity. The work that she has prepared for this exhibition is an homage to the artist Veronika Martz, who recently disappeared in the midst of research into a creation myth for an upcoming film. Jesse Gray engages in the act of collecting—scavenging, foraging, garbage-picking, alley-scrounging—and the practice of recombination, as an investigation into the hidden meanings and secret histories of discarded objects and things.
Josh Hite’s video work looks at how spaces and their arrangement are transformed by those who use them. Influenced by Michel de Certeau, Hite optimistically investigates potential and real confrontation between those who move through spaces, and the physical structures designed to make them move.
Ryan Peter’s paintings borrow from the history of photography—the daguerreotype, aspects of Pictorialism, and more recent phenomena such as x-ray and satellite photography. The techniques Peter employs in the application of paint, such as pouring, pooling, and spraying, create the potential for multiple readings of his work. This slippery representation undermines the apparent aspirations of the work to photographic distance and mimesis, re-situating the work in the sphere of bodily and lived experience.