Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory MFA graduate exhibition 2018
May 4–June 3, 2018
The Belkin
The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is pleased to present Postscript, an exhibition of work by the 2018 graduates of the University of British Columbia’s two-year Master of Fine Arts program: Aileen Bahmanipour, Christopher Lacroix, Cameron McLellan, Candice Okada and Madiha Sikander. 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.
Aileen Bahmanipour is an artist whose practice is centered on exploring the inter-subjectivities between violence and identity to question their co-constitutive relationship. By interrogating the narrative capacity of the diagram, as a rational practice in abstraction, her work seeks to challenge the problem of perspective in an attempt to reach an anti-perspectival point of view. Bahmanipour has recently held solo exhibitions at Grunt Gallery (Vancouver) and the Hatch Gallery (Vancouver).
Christopher Lacroix’s practice explores the relentless effort of queer existence, to suggest that queerness is not simply being born outside of a normative subject position, but a conscious decision to push against it. His oeuvre includes performance, video, photo and text-based works which embrace the potential of abject self-deprecation as a means of self-preservation and resistance while engaging with notions of failure, aspiration and otherness. Lacroix has exhibited work in a number of exhibitions across Canada, as well as presenting several performance pieces in Toronto.
Cameron McLellan’s work concerns the built environment, architectural space and the consideration of these realms through drawing, painting and materiality. By using Vancouver as a construct—literally and figuratively—McLellan is interested in conceptualizations of space and the social dynamics that underscore it, including the way materiality mediates our relationship with it. Recent exhibitions of his work include the Interurban Gallery (Vancouver) and Robert Lynds Gallery (Vancouver).
Candice Okada, a maker of things, employs an artistic practice that seeks to visualize and emphasize the social symptoms of contemporary neoliberal society, often through the use of textile and fibre work. Taking inspiration from popular culture and the banalities of everyday life, her interests involve an exploration of the many feminisms and their relationships to the question of craft. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Place des Arts (Coquitlam) and the Ranger Station Art Gallery (Harrison Hot Springs).
Madiha Sikander, trained as a miniature painter at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, deploys an artistic practice that takes this foundational experience to question notions of space, spatiality and spatialization. Her work questions the possibilities of space, as both an interrelational process of non-closure and continuous becoming as well as a site where multiplicity resonates, in an effort to discover a way for time and space to coalesce in her practice. Sikander has exhibited work in numerous group exhibitions in Pakistan and internationally.
The exhibition is presented with support from the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory (AHVA) at the University of British Columbia. For more information on Postscript contact Jana Tyner, jana.tyner [at] ubc.ca or visit www.belkin.ubc.ca. For more information on the MFA program at AHVA UBC please contact ahva.grad [at] ubc.ca or visit www.ahva.ubc.ca. Admissions for the September 2019 intake will close January 10, 2019.
*Image above: (1) Candice Okada, Child’s Play–Close Up, 2018. White and gold plastic pony beads, dimensions variable. (2) Cameron McLellan, Flat Folly, 2018. Plywood, plastic fencing, 254 x 508 x 71.1 cm. (3) Christopher Lacroix, Sometimes it’s hard to tell where it’s coming from (still), 2017. Video, stereo sound, left frame 6m 57s, right frame 3m 47s. (4) Aileen Bahmanipour, Image, Disturbance, Pattern, 2018. Dust, permanent marker, vitrail paint, ink and fishing line on acetate sheet, dimensions variable. (5) Madiha Sikander, Majmuā, 2017–18. Monofilament, cloves, glass and metal meads, 378.5 x 914.4 cm.
