Geometry of Knowing
Part 1: SFU Gallery, Burnaby, JAN 15 – FEB 28, 2015
Part 2: Audain Gallery, Vancouver, JAN 15 – FEB 28, 2015
Part 3: SFU Gallery, Burnaby, MAR 21 – MAY 15, 2015
Part 4: Audain Gallery, Vancouver, MAR 19 – MAR 28, 2015
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.
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.
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 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 Fog and Boot album cover, as well as existing as photographic works in their own right.
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.
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.
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.
Part 1: Derya Akay, Eli Bornowsky, Neil Campbell, Julia Feyrer, Lawren Harris, Roy Kiyooka, Michael Morris, Gordon Smith, Frank Stella, Takao Tanabe. 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, BC 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.
Events
Opening Reception and event with Jeneen Frei Njootli and Kara Uzelman
Wednesday, JAN 14, 2015, 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
Sunday, FEB 15, 2015, 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 works in the exhibition.
Opening Reception: SFU Visual Art 3rd Year Student Exhibition
Wednesday, MAR 18, 2015, 7pm
Audain Gallery
Exhibition presented by 3rd Year SFU Visual Arts students. Details to come.
Event with Kika Thorne
Saturday MAR 21, 2015, 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
