From now through the spring, Burnaby's Art Galleries feature an array of exhibits by multiple artists.
Burnaby Art Gallery:
Printed Pictures
Laurence Hyde, The Southern Cross
FAX
Special Event
Simon Fraser University Art Gallery:
To Show, To Give, To Make It Be There
Printed Pictures at the BAG
Visit the Burnaby Art Gallery (BAG) to experience three diverse, enlightening and thought provoking exhibits from now until May 23rd.
The Printed Pictures by artist Gordon Smith will be showcased at the BAG until March 7th. As a practicing visual artist for nearly seven decades, Smith has consistently explored the mediums of drawing, painting and printmaking in inventive and expressive ways. For more than 50 years, his paintings have focused on the vast Canadian landscape.
The captivating Printed Pictures exhibit will feature some 50 prints of the nearly 300 prints created by Smith over the past 70 years. Smith’s extensive and critically-acclaimed work can be found in major art centres throughout North America – including Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, as well as the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Burnaby Art Gallery.
As an award-winning artist, Smith has received numerous recognitions and honours throughout his career, including First Prize at the Biennial of Canadian Art in 1955, a Senior Fellowship from the Canada Council in 1960, an Honourary Doctorate from Simon Fraser University in 1973, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada's Allied Arts Medal in 1980, Professor Emeritus from the University of British Columbia in 1983 and an Honourary Doctorate from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1995. He was also awarded the Order of Canada for his significant contribution to Canadian culture in 1996, as well as the Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts in 2009.
Laurence Hyde: The Southern Cross
From March 16th to April 18th, the BAG features Laurence Hyde: The Southern Cross. In 1948, artist Laurence Hyde began working on The Southern Cross, a wood-engraving project that took him almost four years to complete.
Described as a “book without words,” The Southern Cross comprises 118 blocks that tells the story of a fictional Micronesian family that fell victim to the American military, a story based on actual events that took place on the Bikini Islands. In the 1940s, the American government displaced a community of close to 200 people in order to use the area as a hydrogen bomb test site. The Castle Bravo detonation of 1954 and other tests have ensured that the area remains uninhabitable to this day. This series of prints reveals Hyde’s deep feelings of distress and the sense of concern and anger that he felt when hearing of these events.
The Southern Cross series reveals the artist’s ability to use line and form to create an expressive and important body of work. The full set of proof prints can only be found in two galleries, the National Gallery of Canada and the Burnaby Art Gallery.
Laurence Hyde was born in England in 1914 and emigrated to Canada in 1926. While taking art classes at the well-recognized Central Technical School in Toronto, he became interested in printmaking – specifically wood engravings. His style is known for its precision, power and elegance. Hyde died in Ottawa in 1987.
FAX at the Burnaby Art Gallery
From March 16th to May 23rd, the BAG presents FAX – an exhibit that invites a group of multi-generational artists, architects, designers, filmmakers and thinkers to conceive of the fax machine as a drawing tool.
Participants will transmit fax-based work via the museum’s working fax line throughout the duration of the exhibition. The accumulation of information, errors of transmission, junk faxes, “fax lore,” as well as drawings and text – some seminal examples of early fax art – will create an exhibition concerned with reproduction, obsolescence, distribution and mediation. Curated by João Ribas, this exhibition is co-organized by The Drawing Center, New York, and iCI (Independent Curators International), New York, and circulated by iCI.
Faxes by nearly 100 participants sent to the initial showing of FAX at The Drawing Center will form the core of this generative and accumulative exhibition; and subsequent institutions will each invite up to 20 additional artists to submit works to be presented at successive venues as a touring exhibition in collaboration with iCI. Participating artists include: John Armleder, Tauba Auerbach, Pierre Bismuth, Barbara Bloom, Mel Bochner, Jan De Cock, Peter Coffin, Cerith Wyn Evans, Morgan Fisher, Aurélien Froment, Ryan Gander, Matt Sheridan Smith, Liam Gillick, Joseph Grigely, Wade Guyton, Charline von Heyl, Matthew Higgs, Germaine Kruip, Glenn Ligon, Dr. Ronald L. Mallett, Josephine Meckseper, Olivier Mosset, Steven Pinker, William Pope.L, Seth Price, Pamela Rosenkranz, Dexter Sinister, Wolfgang Tillmans, Edward Tufte, and Christopher Williams, among others.
Special Event, March 21st
Join the Burnaby Art Gallery on March 21st as writers Claudia Cornwall and Eve Lazarus read from The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman and LeRoy Jensen, the second book published by Mother Tongue Publishing in The Unheralded Artists of BC series. This event/reading will be held from 3:00pm to 4:30pm on March 21st.
For more information on the Burnaby Art Gallery’s events, exhibits and programs, call 604-297-4422 or visit www.burnabyartgallery.ca. Admission is free.
SFU Gallery Features to show, to give, to make it be there
From now until March 13th, the SFU Gallery presents to show, to give, to make it be there – expanded literary practices in Vancouver, 1954-1969.
Featuring works by Bill Bissett, Tom Burrows, Judith Copithorne, Stan Douglas, Maxine Gadd, Gerry Gilbert, Ray Johnson, Roy Kiyooka, Gary Lee-Nova, Glenn Lewis, Malcolm Lowry, Michael Morris, Al Neil and Ian Wallace, this exhibit takes its title from the opening editorial poem of Bill Bissett’s debut issue of blewointment magazine.
This intriguing exhibition seeks to recognize an interdisciplinary literary activity that emerged in Vancouver in the 1950s, beginning with the collagist fiction of Malcolm Lowry, and proceeding through the 1960s in magazines, exhibitions, performances and through the mail.
The work in the exhibition – including bookworks, photography, music, paintings, sculptural assemblage, drawings and epistles – is contrasted with the “straight” literary modernism of the TISH newsletter and the “Georgia Straight Writing Supplement.” It is further contextualized by video screenings of Léonard Forest’s film In Search of Innocence (1963), which Bissett addresses in his opening editorial, as well as Maurice Embra’s 1964 film portrait of Bissett, Strange Grey Day This (1966).
This exhibition is curated by SFU’s 2009-2010 Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence, Michael Turner.
For more information on the gallery’s events, exhibits, discussions and programs, call 778-782-4266, email gallery@sfu.ca or visit www.sfu.ca/gallery.
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