YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES: THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS IN ART
September 13 - November 5, 2011

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS IN ART, 2011
Digital Video, 9:32 minutes

The Audain Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming fall Audain Artist-in-Residence and exhibitions with the widely recognized, Seoul-based art collective YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. The co-organized exhibitions with Centre A (Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art), THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS IN ART, will be presented from September 13 – November 5, 2011 at the Audain Gallery and September 16- October 21 at Centre A.  A total of three new, commissioned works by YHCHI will be presented for the upcoming exhibitions.

A fast-moving, text-based video artwork synchronized to a jazz score, THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS IN ART, contrasts the conflict and struggle of daily existence within the seemingly unproblematic and easy life of an artist. In the artists’ characteristically irreverent manner these issues are examined from the artists’ perspective through the use of a narrator whose musings provoke an empathetic critique from within that assumes simultaneously the roles of corroboration and critical inquiry.

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES are the second artists to be hosted by the Audain Gallery Visual Artist-in-Residence Program, following the noted Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrć. A series of workshops and artist talks will be scheduled in September 2011 in conjunction with Centre A during the artists’ stay in Vancouver.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is <a data-cke-saved-href="http://yhchang.com" href="http://yhchang.com" style="color:#f365b1" text-decoration:none"=""> yhchang.com</a>. Its principals, Young-hae Chang (Korea) and Marc Voge (U.S.A.), are based in Seoul. YHCHI has made work in 17 languages and presented much of it at some of the major art institutions in the world. It has done commissioned works for the Tate, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the New Museum, New York.</p> <p></p>

Kontakt: Conceptual Art from Ex-Yugoslavia
May 12- August 13, 2011

Sanja Iveković, still, Meeting Points (1979)
B&W video with sound, 6:06 min.

This exhibition gathers works from some of the most important representatives of Yugoslavian conceptual art, which developed in the late 1950s through performance, printed matter, and photography, and in the 1970s, expanded to include video. This exhibition features works by internationally recognized artists and collectives including Sanja Iveković, Katalin Ladik, Neša Paripović, Raša Todosijević, and The Gorgona Group, marking the first time many of these important works will be shown in Canada.

This exhibition showcases conceptual art from the former Yugoslavia that takes up performative and conceptual strategies that developed alongside geo-political restraints. Locating the art of the former socialist countries within an international art context draws attention to not only their wide set of practices, but also the dynamic reciprocal connections and dialogues from which these practices sprung. For instance, Croatian artist Sanja Iveković's performance Meeting Points, realized at Vancouver's Western Front in 1979, marks the international connections of conceptualism at a time when political borders hindered mutual artistic exchange.

Beyond the phenomena in Eastern Europe, the exhibition reflects the transformed political geographies and the international emergence of conceptual and actionist tendencies that have been developing simultaneously since the late 1960s.

Grad Show 2008: SFU Visual Art Graduation Exhibition
April 14 - April 30, 2011

Exhibition Opening April 13, 7 - 10pm

Nikita Alagappa, Elena Boulankova, Ryan Chow, Michelle Lui, Laura McKillop, Monica Rudd, David Stein, Vikram Uchida-Khanna, Alexis Vanderveen, Lőrinc Vass, Jason Wang, and Nathaniel Wong

The School for the Contemporary Arts and the Audain Gallery is pleased to announce Grad Show 2008, the 2011 graduation exhibition of undergraduate visual arts students. The title of this year's show contextualizes a contemplation of the near past and the very recent, as the artists in this exhibition face the future. The apparent homage to 2008 suggests an inadequate distance from 2011, yet at the same time demands a criticality above topicality. The graduating class of 2011 confronts not just the false promise of newness in contemporary art, but the increased pace with which the past has been historicized and rendered obsolete. In the near future, three years ago revisited may be ahead of its time.

This is the first year the BFA undergraduate exhibition will be held at the Audain Gallery, located in SFUs Woodward's campus.

I Could Be Wrong:  SFU visual art student exhibition
March 10 - 26, 2011

Public Opening: Wednesday, March 9, 2011 at 7 pm
Roundtable Discussion: Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 10 am
Gallery Tours: Saturday, March 12, 19, 26 at 1 pm

Organized and curated by SFU 3rd year Visual Art students, the exhibition I Could be Wrong considers the notion of failure laterally. Viewing failure as contingent and continuously in flux generates a departure point for discussing the contemporary paradox that in fact, true failure is questionable in an age where progress is suspect and failure to conform is often validated as a subversive act.

The artists included in the exhibition have approached the concept of failure critically through the examination of failed cultural models, utopias and utopian thinking, a testing of the limits of formal representation, and an exploration of the potentiality of human attempt, error and inadequacy. Strategies for engaging range from attempts at emulation and re-enactment, demonstrations of the instability of replication, deconstruction of the expert and the amateur, and navigation through systems of authority and bureaucracy. Throughout I Could be Wrong there is an understanding of difference and ‘otherness’ that aids in the assertion of new perspectives towards dominant ideology.

Taking the experience of the student in a long process of learning, full of successes and failed attempts, this exhibition launches a question to consider what it means to fail -- and thus, paradoxically to succeed -- by challenging the limits of binary models for assessing levels of progress and achievement.

THE LONG TAKE: VIDEOS ON ARCHITECTURE AND SOCIAL SPACE
January 13 - February 26, 2011

Clemens von Wedemeyer
Silberhöhe (2003)
35mm transferred to DVD, 10 min, color
Film still
courtesy Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris
(c) Clemens von Wedemeyer

Public Opening: January 12, 2011 at 8pm The exhibition opening will be preceded by a talk by participating artist, Terence Gower at 6:30pm.

This group exhibition gathers national and international artists whose work seek to represent the scales, angles and details of architecture and the urban territory as well as the more hidden relations of the city, such as gender and space and the effects of socio economic processes. The large-scale projections of these works will transform the space of the Audain Gallery and the show opens up a discussion of urban imagibility and artistic strategies of representation.

Mark Lewis is one of Canada’s most renowned and internationally acclaimed artists; this exhibition will feature his work, Children’s Games, Heygate Estate (2002) which explores the modernist estate, located in London England, that currently awaits demolition. In this video, the camera steadily tracks along an oppressive, raised concrete passage between working-class apartment buildings while children play in the yards and the alleys below.

Terence Gower’s Ciudad Moderna (2004) explores the city as a built environment by using clips from the source film Despedida de Casada (Dir. Juan de Orduna): through a process of re-editing, Gower isolates the architecture by transforming scenes into perspective renderings that highlight the modernist architecture of Mexico, such as the Museum of Anthropology and the Hotel Presidente in Acapulco.

Dorit Magreiter’s Pavilion (2009) explores the relationship between interior and exterior by examining the concept of the Pavilion as an exhibition space and speaks to the contingent relationship between the status of the image and the space inside as well as outside of the projection. Here, the pavilion becomes the site of multiple interactions exploring the way in which architectural spaces determine social behavior.

The exhibition also features Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Judith Hopf’s Villa Watch (2005) and Clemens von Wedemeyer’s Silberhoehe (Silver Heights) (2003).

Marjetica Potrč, Audain Artist-in-Residence The Making of New Territories and Communities
October 7 - December 18, 2010

Marjetica Potrč
The Struggle for Spatial Justice
installation 2010

The Audain Artist-in-Residence Program will commence in the fall with an exhibition of works by Slovenian artist and architect, Marjetica Potrč.

Marjetica Potrč will be the first artist to be hosted by the Audain Artist in Residence Program and will begin her residency in October 2010. The Audain Artist-in-Residence will work closely with visual-art students within the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU Woodward’s and the community in Vancouver. A schedule for a series of workshops hosted by the artist, as well as a public artist's talk, will be released in September 2010.

Marjetica Potrč is best known for her on-site projects using participatory design, her drawing series, and her architectural case studies. Her work focuses on new forms of social practices within urban changes, citizenship as well as community-based environmental projects. Potrč's work has been featured in exhibitions throughout Europe and the Americas, including the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (1996 and 2006) and the Venice Biennial (1993, 2003, and 2009); and she has had solo shows at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2001); the Max Protetch Gallery in New York (2002 and 2005); the Nordenhake Gallery in Berlin (2003 and 2007). Potrč has taught at numerous institutions in Europe and North America, including MIT (2005). In 2000 she received the prestigious Hugo Boss prize, and was awarded a fellowship at the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics at The New School in New York (2007).

Work With Visual Art Faculty Exhibition 2010
September 7 – September 25, 2010

Sabine Bitter, Allyson Clay, Elspeth Pratt, Judy Radul, Jin-me Yoon

PUBLIC OPENING, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 5pm - 8pm

This exhibition serves as an introduction to the work of the five faculty of the Visual Art Program at the School for the Contemporary Arts. While their practices cover a range of media and interests they share the conviction that their work as artists is fundamental to their teaching.

The works featured in the exhibit chronicle paths of inquiry through materials, research, theory and practical experience. Artwork is a conduit between teacher and student, not least because the struggles the student experiences in creating an artwork, is never, in fact overcome. Rather, art is itself the preservation of this struggle. As a result, the Audain Gallery becomes another component of the learning environment, for the students, teachers and the community near and far.

Audain Gallery SFU Woodward's
149 West Hastings Street, Vancouver
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 12pm - 6pm

Coming Soon, Kathy Slade Is Everything Going to be Alright?
June 9– September 6, 2010

Kathy Slade
Is Everything Going to be Alright?
2010

In the Hastings Street window of the Audain Gallery, Vancouver artist and SFU alumna Kathy Slade asks the question, Is Everything Going to Be Alright? Slade's window project concludes the initial public art project entitled Coming Soon for the new Audain Gallery, located in the Woodward's development in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Four visual artists who are SFU Alumni have been commissioned to create new site-specific public art works. The works in this provocative series address the qualities of Vancouver's Downtown East Side, the neighbourhood and context of the new location of Simon Fraser University's School for the Contemporary Arts. In January, the first work by Ken Lum, I said No, was shown in the Hastings Street windows of the Audain Gallery before the official opening of SFU Woodward's. As an extension of the window project into another medium, and as a public interface for the Audain Gallery, Lorna Brown and Jamie Hilder have created projects specifically designed for the internet on the Audain Gallery’s website. Coming Soon highlights the Audain Gallery's commitment to art in the public sphere that addresses the present and history of Vancouver.

First Nations / Second Nature
February 6–March 20, 2010

left: Sam Durant, You Are on Indian Land Show Some Respect, 2008
right: Rebecca Belmore, Sister, 2010

First Nations / Second Nature was the inaugural exhibition in the new Audain Project Gallery at SFU Woodward's. With its roots in the local history of Vancouver, First Nations / Second Nature is an exhibition built of works that mediate the politics of site and the shifting conceptions of territory. The works, from local, national as well as international artists, together offer divergent engagements with the politics of site from the national to the local as it is defined by First Nations' conceptions of place and territory. Artists included Rebecca Belmore, Matthew Buckingham, Greg Curnoe, Sam Durant, Jimmie Durham, Andrea Geyer, Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Andrew Lee, Brian Jungen and Patricia Reed.

Coming Soon, Jamie Hilder, Downtown Ambassador
Jan 23, 2010

Jamie Hilder, video still Downtown Ambassador, 2010

The Audain Gallery SFU Woodward’s has commissioned new web-based projects from Vancouver artist and SFU alumnus Jamie Hilder. This work is part of the Gallery’s initial project, entitled Coming Soon, which reflects the Gallery’s commitment to art in the public sphere that addresses the present and history of Vancouver.

“Downtown Ambassador” is a web-specific project based on the performance, text, and video work of urban art that Hilder initiated in Vancouver. For four days last summer, Hilder patrolled tourist areas of Vancouver dressed in a uniform that resembled the distinctive garb of the Downtown Ambassadors, a “hospitality force” established by the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association. But rather than providing helpful tourist hints to visitors, or moving homeless people along, Hilder provided the alternative histories of these sites as well as their relationship to the present political and economic climate of Vancouver. This intervention into the imagining of Vancouver vividly brings forward its radical history.

see www.audaingallery.ca/coming-soon

Coming Soon: The Expectations of Art in the Public Sphere

Symposium Audain Gallery

As part of the Coming Soon project, a public symposium was held at the Audain Gallery on Saturday, January 23, 2010. The symposium's aim was to address questions regarding the different, and often competing, public and artistic expectations of art in the public sphere and art as a public discourse. Two panel discussions with artists, curators, and cultural critics opened these issues: Lorna Brown (CA), Jamie Hilder (CA), Am Johal (CA, moderator), Makiko Hara (CA), Ken Lum (CA), Bik Van Der Pol (NL), Jeff Derksen (CA, moderator) and others.

Coming Soon, Ken Lum, I Said No
Jan. 1 - Febr.5, 2010

Ken Lum, I Said No, 2010

As the initial public art project for the new Audain Gallery, located in the Woodward’s development in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, four visual artists who are Simon Fraser University alumni have been commissioned to create new site-specific public art works for a series entitled Coming Soon.

The works in this provocative series address the qualities of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, the neighbourhood and context of the new location of Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. As well, Coming Soon highlights the Audain Gallery’s commitment to art in the public sphere that addresses the present and history of Vancouver.

Internationally acclaimed Vancouver artist Ken Lum, whose adroit and precise public art works are known to spark public interest and commentary, opens the series with a text work entitled I Said No in the Hastings Street window of the Gallery. This text is characteristic of his signage work and is pointed, humorous, and compelling in its address to the public.

I Said No exclaims variations on the ability and potential to say “no” as a civic and social right: in this sense, I Said No is a work about intellectual freedom the public sphere.