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Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

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Germaine Koh: Crowd Shyness Face Mask

2020

$5
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Crowd Shyness non-medical face mask by artist Germaine Koh.

In crown shyness, trees grow with distinct space between their crowns to avoid spreading pests, to avoid damaging their own fragile tips and to leave room for their peers. They make small, individual sacrifices for collective health. These natural processes are analogous to societies making adaptations rooted in mutual care: “crowd shyness” as a form of conscious citizenship.

Guided by a vision of collective care, artist Germaine Koh has been working alongside Belkin staff to workshop a comprehensive approach to public interaction. This includes protocols for re-opening the Belkin, but also ongoing workplace procedures that emphasize teamwork and acknowledge both the essential work done by visitor services staff and the fraught character of the gallery threshold. We are continuing as a team to look widely at topics such as exhibition staging, the Belkin’s location on traditional Musqueam territory, and how the Gallery can become more transparent and responsive to diverse publics.

The Belkin invited Vancouver-based artist Germaine Koh to consider new pandemic protocols facing the gallery and to develop creative approaches addressing them. We welcome experimentation within the public realm and learning from and with others in the development of new solutions. This project involves ongoing consultation with Belkin staff and communities (curators, programmers, building operations, health and safety) to address quotidian procedures for visitors, as well as specific interventions for exhibitions. Together we will explore this opportunity for the prototyping and testing of concepts, as well as fine tuning and adaptation in further iterations. As part of this project, Koh created the Crowd Shyness face mask, which was fabricated on Granville Island in Vancouver, BC.

 

Related

  • News

    08 Jul 2020

    Germaine Koh: Crowd Shyness

    In crown shyness, trees grow with distinct space between their crowns to avoid spreading pests, to avoid damaging their own fragile tips and to leave room for their peers. They make small, individual sacrifices for collective health.

    [more]
  • Exhibition

    17 July – 16 August 2020

    one sentence too many, one word too few: UBC Master of Fine Arts Exhibition 2020

    The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of work by the 2020 graduates of the University of British Columbia’s two-year Master of Fine Arts program: Matthew Ballantyne, Alejandro A. Barbosa, Rosamunde Bordo, Sam Kinsley, Nazanin Oghanian and Jay Pahre. This program in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory is limited each year to a small group of four to six artists, who over the two years foster different sensibilities developed within an intimate and discursive working environment.  

    [more]

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

University of British Columbia

1825 Main Mall

Vancouver, British Columbia,

Canada V6T 1Z2 Map

xʷməθkʷəy̍əm | Musqueam Territory

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Telephone: +1 (604) 822-2759

Email: belkin.gallery@ubc.ca

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