Opening Reception: Thursday, 22 June from 6 to 8 pm
What Is Welcome? includes works from the Belkin’s collection and long-term residency that question the art institution’s language, boundaries and potential for change. From performance to works-in-process that effect institutional practices, the artists included operate with, and at the same time counter, the institution to address the what, how and the why of gallery operations.
When the Belkin looked critically at our collection five years ago, approximately 85% of the works were by white men. In response, the gallery adopted a strategy to broaden artist representation by using 100% of the acquisition budget to purchase only works by women-identified artists, including self-identifying LGBTQ+ artists, with a priority given to Indigenous, Black and People of Colour (IBPOC) artists. This exhibition is an opportunity to explore the ways in which a collection can signal shifts in viewpoints and priorities, and to hold space for this conversation.
As galleries and museums strive to make space for new practices and ways of knowing, artists are critical agents in the institution’s evolution. In interrogating institutional cultural systems, the artists included in this exhibition consider sustaining relevance in the material of living ecologies through exchange, labour and stewardship. Collectively, the works ask the question: What is welcome?
Artists include Allyson Clay, Claudia Cuesta, Andrea Fraser, ReMatriate Collective and Holly Schmidt, as well as recent acquisitions of work by Skeena Reece, Kika Thorne and Tania Willard as part of the Belkin’s ongoing commitment to diversification of the collection.
Approaching the history and language of protest, ReMatriate’s banner YOURS FOR INDIGENOUS SOVEREIGNTY, (2018) borrows a message from a 1978 dispute that allied Indigenous women workers with other labour activists. The feminist Service, Office and Retail Workers Union of Canada (SORWUC) staged a three-year protest against Muckamuck Restaurant in Vancouver and ReMatriate’s use of the language of the strike’s picket signs acknowledges these women’s efforts and asks what sovereignty means over four decades later.
Andrea Fraser’s Official Welcome (2001/2002) approaches the rhetorical language and function of institutional opening events. The work was performed at the opening of Fraser’s exhibition at the Belkin where she delivered a speech that appropriated the physical and linguistic gestures of patrons, curators, critics and artists. Halfway through the performance, Fraser started to undress and stated, “I’m not a person today. I’m an object in an artwork.” In addressing how the gallery functions – akin to Claudia Cuesta’s Culture Cap (2002) that alludes to culture’s limits and expression, and Allyson Clay’s Untitled (He didn’t ask her much…) (1991) that points to the lack of representation of women artists in museum collections – she places audiences and institutions in positions of complicity and discomfort.
Positioning audiences to query their capacity for collective self-reflection, Tania Willard’s Affirmations for Wildflowers: an Ethnobotany of Desire (2020) is an installation work that uses representation of flora, reflection and political affirmations (“the revolution has come,” “the land is strong,” “the future is Indigenous”) to evoke shifting relations in this uncertain but transformative moment.
Questioning the potential for a symbiotic relationship between the site of the gallery and its structure, Holly Schmidt and Kika Thorne consider the physical form of the gallery in connection to its exterior ecology. Schmidt’s installation work, using sculpture, sound and text, connects to her durational residency Vegetal Encounters (2019-23) to test assumptions of where learning takes place and how plant ecologies can be seen as collaborative survival models for living on a damaged planet. Working with fireweed as a metaphor for resistance, Schmidt’s related project Fireweed Fields removes the Belkin’s outdoor green spaces from the dominant manicured campus landscapes to offer an alternate site for practices that increase biodiversity as a means to address the climate emergency. Thorne’s installation The Sun (2019) addresses questions of technology, belief, representation and cultural crises in relation to energy alternatives. Using solar panels to power a projection of the sun in which “the sun draws itself,” viewers watch the sun emit the energy that is enabling its own imagery to reach them in the gallery.
Skeena Reece’s video Hold This (2018) speaks to – and holds space for – a process of care in the face of loss due to colonial violence. The work documents the placing and retrieving of rings, bracelets, watches and glasses on an earthen altar outside a sweat lodge. These personal items are removed so they do not heat up and burn the skin, and are taken care of by the person tending the fire.
What Is Welcome? is curated by Barbara Cole and Melanie O’Brian and made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council, our Belkin Curator’s Forum members, and our individual donors who financially support our acquisitions and donate artworks to the collection.
Image (above): Tania Willard, Affirmations for Wildflowers: an Ethnobotany of Desire, 2020. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, purchased with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Morris and Helen Belkin Foundation, 2023. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography
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This reading room offers resources relating to and exceeding the themes present in the exhibition What Is Welcome?, which includes works from the Belkin’s collection and long-term residency that question the art institution’s language, boundaries and potential for change. From performance to works-in-process that effect institutional practices, the artists included operate with, and at the same time counter, the institution to address the what, how and the why of gallery operations. Artists include Allyson Clay, Claudia Cuesta, Andrea Fraser, ReMatriate Collective, Holly Schmidt, as well as recent acquisitions of work by Skeena Reece, Kika Thorne and Tania Willard.
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Exhibition catalogue from Andrea Fraser: Exhibition at the Belkin (18 January—3 March 2002) with texts by Isabelle Graw, James Meyer, John Miller, Scott Watson, Thryza Nichols and Andrea Fraser. [more information and purchase] -
Join us for a guided tour of the Belkin’s 2023 summer collection exhibition, What Is Welcome? The tour offers insight into the key themes of the show, including Indigenous sovereignties, feminisms and power dynamics, by focusing on select works in the exhibition and contextualizing them within historical frameworks (such as Institutional Critique).
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Fireweed Fields transforms a UBC lawn site into a fireweed meadow, encouraging increased biodiversity through gradual succession as a metaphor for the resurgence of life after a crisis. This installation acknowledges the global climate emergency: by tearing through the fabric of maintained lawns and colonial ideals, it plants the initial seeds for change and catalyzes dialogue, creative experimentation, and new biodiversity research and learning opportunities.
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The Belkin's outdoor screen will exhibit Skeena Reece's video Master Gesture (2018) daily from 9 am until 9 pm through 9 July 2023.
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As part of Holly Schmidt’s three-year residency at UBC, the artist presents Forecast (2019-23), the latest in a series of short poetic texts using the language of weather reporting to speculate on collective responses to environmental changes.
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Becoming Animal/Becoming Landscape explores works from the Belkin’s permanent collection through the lens of recent philosophical ideas, questioning and breaking down old borders between the human and the non-human. Artists in the exhibition include Claude Breeze, Genevieve Cadieux, Kenneth Callahan, Emily Carr, Geoffrey Farmer, Russell FitzGerald, Sam Francis, Lawren Harris, Donald Jarvis, Ann Kipling, Glenn Ligon, Attila Richard Lukacs, Ron Martin, Gordon Payne, Margaret Peterson, Jerry Pethick, Marina Roy, Carolee Schneemann, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Jack Shadbolt, Corin Sworn, Elizabeth Vander Zaag and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. Joan Balzar includes a selection of works by the artist (1928-2016), a key figure in the development of abstract painting on the West Coast in the 1960s. These works from the Belkin’s collection are displayed in the print gallery and Koerner Library.
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Due to the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we are postponing the Image Bank exhibition until June 2021. Our January exhibition will draw on recent acquisitions to the permanent collection. Titled Stations: Some Recent Acquisitions, the exhibition will be in four or five interrelated modules that explore some of the gallery’s research areas.
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Surrounded/Surrounding includes a wood-burning fire bowl, etched leather camp stools and a life-sized rendering of the artist’s wood pile in a graphic score. Written on the split logs and the spaces between them are references to the breathing, beating labour that creates what a fire needs, as well as the trees, sun, sky and ground that surrounds and creates all else.
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Last year, the Belkin Art Gallery was delighted to acquire The Time It Takes (2017), the adult-sized cradleboard artwork by Skeena Reece, for our permanent collection. At that time, Reece said that she had always wanted to work with the cradleboard to create a series of photographs that would document her wrapping specific people in the moss bag. This spring, the Belkin Art Gallery will support Reece’s idea to spend time with the people she invites to be wrapped, and will work with Rachel Topham to document the process. The Time It Takes, along with the photographs and video documentation, will be installed in the Gallery to form the foundation of an exhibition.
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Celebrating the excessive abundance of the archive, Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT is concerned with language, depictions of the woman reader as an artistic genre and the potential of reading as performed resistance.
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In this artist talk, Tania Willard speaks about her work Affirmations for Wildflowers: an Ethnobotany of Desire (2020), a recent acquisition by the Belkin and part of the What is Welcome? exhibition.
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