W IN TE R 2015
Examining knowledge production and dissemination within
art practices, the Spring 2015
exhibitions at SFU Galleries
consider how visual art operates
beyond formalized learning
structures. Responsive public
programs will be offered over
the span of the exhibitions that
include performances, intimate
gatherings, discussions and
listening events. All exhibitions
and programs are free and
open to the public.
PRO GRAM GUIDE
Geometry of Knowing
FEB 28 – MAY 15 2015
Part 1, 2, 3, 4
SFU Gallery & Audain Gallery
Derya Akay, Josef Albers, B.C. Binning,
Lee Bontecou, Eli Bornowsky, Neil Campbell,
Abraham Cruzvillegas, Michael Drebert,
Jimmie Durham, Julia Feyrer, Brian Fisher,
Jeneen Frei Njootli, Sandra Hanson,
Lawren Harris, Camille Henrot, Carole Itter,
Dawn Johnston, Brian Jungen, Roy Kiyooka,
Devon Knowles, Evan Lee, David MacWilliam,
Michael Morris, N.E. Thing Co., Bruce Nauman,
Hannah Rickards, Gordon Smith, Frank Stella,
Takao Tanabe, Kika Thorne, Kara Uzelman,
Brent Wadden
Neil Campbell: Interior
Ongoing until APR 11 2015
Teck Gallery
Academic Quadrangle 3004
8888 University Drive
Burnaby, BC
Canada V5A 1S6
778.782.4266
sfugalleries@sfu.ca
sfugalleries.ca
EXHIBITIONS
Knowing through embodiment calls into play the geometry of sense perception, communication and collaboration between artists and physical enactments.
For example, Carole Itter’s 1979 photographic series,
Euclid, documents artist/musician Al Neil tracing
Euclidean geometric theorems in the sand at Cates
Park in North Vancouver. These images were projected
as part of a collaborative live performance with
Al Neil on piano, used on Neil’s Boot and Fog album
cover, as well as existing as photographic works in
their own right.
Geometry of Knowing
Part 1
Part 2
JAN 15 – FEB 28 2015
SFU Gallery
JAN 15 – FEB 28 2015
Audain Gallery
Part 3
Part 4
MAR 21 – MAY 15 2015
SFU Gallery
MAR 19 – MAR 28 2015
Audain Gallery
Manipulating materials, forms and images is a fundamental aspect of artistic production and transfigures how we experience, interpret and know the world.
Camille Henrot’s 2011 video, The Strife of Love in a
Dream, for example, composes a visual atlas of strategies to conquer anxiety and fear through mythology,
medicine, religion, art, ritual and tourism.
Geometry of Knowing is a group exhibition that
investigates approaches to the acquisition of
knowledge in the full mind-body-spirit sense of
intelligence. Organized in four parts and presented
across two galleries located in a post-secondary
pedagogical institution, the objective of the project
is to investigate the way in which artists engage
tactics of fieldwork, embodiment and materiality
in a manner that reveals or instigates a process
of knowing. In this moment of increasing standardization and specialization regarding how people learn,
art is a space for innovative thinking and experimentation outside given frameworks.
At SFU Galleries, we understand the university as
a site of knowledge production, dissemination and
acquisition. Its architecture is spatial and social,
formalizing communal inquiry, contemplation, critique
and invention. Situated in this architecture, the
exhibition imagines the open geometry of the gallery
as a context to re-examine how the visual and material languages of contemporary art generate experiential, emotional, physical, environmental and intuitive intelligence. The exhibition Geometry of Knowing
explores emerging and reclaimed forms of knowledge
as tools to frame how artists consider ways of witnessing, being with, querying and generating.
Many works in the exhibition engage hybrid forms
of fieldwork, borrowing methodologies and tools from
anthropology, hunting, marine navigation, chemistry,
herbology and horticulture. For example, Kika Thorne’s
new sculptural work, The Question of a Hunch, extends
her ongoing interests in geometry, the visible spectrum and magnetism as a field upon which to project
questions regarding chemical composition and its political ramifications.
The exhibition includes work by over thirty Canadian
and international artists across the first three
parts, including works from the SFU Art Collection.
The fourth component is constituted as an SFU School
for Contemporary Arts visual arts course in which
students respond to the exhibition’s theme through
archival research.
(1)
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
RELATED EVENTS
Part 1: Derya Akay, Eli Bornowsky, Neil Campbell,
Julia Feyrer, Lawren Harris, Roy Kiyooka, Michael
Morris, Gordon Smith, Frank Stella, Takao Tanabe
Opening Event with Jeneen Frei Njootli
and Kara Uzelman
Part 2: Abraham Cruzvillegas, Michael Drebert,
Jimmie Durham, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Sandra Hanson,
Camille Henrot, Dawn Johnston, Brian Jungen,
David MacWilliam, N.E. Thing Co., Kara Uzelman,
Brent Wadden
Part 3: Josef Albers, B.C. Binning, Lee Bontecou,
Brian Fisher, Carole Itter, Devon Knowles, Evan Lee,
Bruce Nauman, Hannah Rickards, Kika Thorne,
Brent Wadden
Part 4: Students from the SCA
Curated by Amy Kazymerchyk and Melanie O’Brian.
Supported by a Project Grant from the Canada Council
for the Arts.
WED, JAN 14 / 7PM
Audain Gallery
Jeneen Frei Njootli will perform with handmade
instruments crafted from female vadzaih (caribou)
that embrace and disrupt the hybridity of the
Athabascan fiddle in Vuntut Gwitchin culture. Kara
Uzelman will provide hospitality with brews that
she grew and wildcrafted in Saskatchewan following
research into traditions of medicinal fermentation
and psychotropic experimentation at the University
of Regina.
Event with Derya Akay and Julia Feyrer
SUN, FEB 15 / 12PM
SFU Gallery
A walk, talk, soil to plow, sow, drink and wait…
will explore cycles of harvest and hospitality with
Derya Akay and Julia Feyrer in relationship to their
work in the exhibition.
Event with SCA students
WED, MAR 18 / 7PM
Audain Gallery
Event with Kika Thorne
SAT, MAR 21 / 12PM
SFU Gallery
Extending from her work in the exhibition, Kika Thorne
will facilitate a conversation with a scientist and a
climate activist on the process of creating a carbon
dioxide filter. Whether the process is one of reality
or fantasy, the conversation considers engineering and
activism in a long line of artistic gestures.
(2)
EXHIBITIONS
PUBLICATIO NS
SFU GALLERIES
SFU GALLERY
Neil Campbell: Interior
Damian Moppett: The Bells
Ongoing until APR 11 2015
Teck Gallery
The Bells is the first publication in the SFU
Galleries Critical Reader Series. A discursive forum,
the series encourages critical writing and projects
that run parallel to programming at SFU Galleries.
Simon Fraser University’s
art galleries are dynamic
centres for the presentation and interrogation of
art practices and ideas.
There are three distinct
galleries: SFU Gallery
on the Burnaby campus
(established 1970), Audain
Gallery at the Goldcorp
Centre for the Arts in
Vancouver (established
2010), and Teck Gallery
at Harbour Centre in Vancouver (established 1989).
SFU Galleries stewards
the Simon Fraser University Art Collection that
includes, in its holdings of over 5,500 works,
significant regional and
national art works spanning the last century.
SFU Burnaby Campus
Academic Quadrangle 3004
8888 University Drive
Burnaby BC, V5A 1S6
Vancouver artist Neil Campbell’s work engages with
physical space to affect our senses, producing both
retinal and phenomenological experience. Interior is
a response to the essential structure of the Teck
Gallery and an address to the daily use of the site
for study, conversation and contemplation. Campbell
uses doubled geometric torus forms to establish an
oscillating sensation that pulls viewers’ energy
while projecting a kinetic force outward. Interior’s
illusionistic space offers viewers an experience of
sensual intelligence in which cognition, intuition,
emotion and rhythm all are brought into play.
Focusing on the unfolding ideas raised in Damian
Moppett’s exhibition The Bells (SFU Gallery, January 18 – April 19, 2014), this publication not only
contextualizes Moppett’s layered practice, but also
engages with the historical and ongoing space of the
studio and visual materiality. New texts by poet Lisa
Robertson, writer Sharon Kahanoff and Damian Moppett,
and a reprinted 1974 text by artist Hollis Frampton,
collectively consider Moppett’s widely referential
practice through a myriad of lenses: art historical,
material and theoretical.
Edited and introduced by Melanie O’Brian.
Available through sfugalleries.ca
UPCO MING
SFU’s School for Contemporary Arts
BFA Graduating Exhibition
APR 16 – APR 25 2015
Audain Gallery
(Front) Dawn Johnston, ALL LOST (detail), 2013, black and white
toner print. Image courtesy of the artist.
(1) Carole Itter, Euclid (detail from the slide series Euclid’s
13th Theorem which was used in collaboration with an Al Neil
performance), 1979. SFU Art Collection.
(2) Brent Wadden, Master of None (detail), 2011. Photo: Hans-Georg
Gaul. Image courtesy of the artist and Kinderhook & Caracas.
(3)
(3) Neil Campbell, Interior, Teck Gallery, 2014.
Photo: Blaine Campbell.
sfugalleries@sfu.ca
sfugalleries.ca
TUE - FRI / 12 – 5PM
778.782.4266
AUDAIN GALLERY
SFU Goldcorp
Centre for the Arts
149 West Hastings Street
Vancouver BC, V6B 1H4
TUE – SAT / 12 – 5PM
778.782.9102
TECK GALLERY
SFU Harbour Centre
515 West Hastings Street
Vancouver BC, V6B 5K3
Open during campus hours
778.782.4266