{"id":13669,"date":"2024-03-27T15:55:35","date_gmt":"2024-03-27T15:55:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mundusmaris.org\/unkategorisiert\/ubc-morris-and-helen-belkin-art-gallery-offers-topical-new-exhibition\/"},"modified":"2024-11-13T20:08:28","modified_gmt":"2024-11-13T20:08:28","slug":"ubc-morris-and-helen-belkin-art-gallery-offers-topical-new-exhibition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mundusmaris.org\/de\/ausstellungen\/ubc-morris-and-helen-belkin-art-gallery-offers-topical-new-exhibition\/","title":{"rendered":"UBC Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery offers topical new exhibition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Melancholy Bay: Images of English Bay, Burrard Inlet and Howe Sound from the Collection<\/h3><\/div>

June 19 to August 23, 2015
\nOpening reception: Thursday, June 18, 6-8 pm
\nCurator\u2019s Tour with Scott Watson: Saturday, June 20, 1-2 pm<\/p><\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>

This exhibition from the permanent collection began as a response to the recent oil spill in English Bay. The University of British Columbia, located on unceded Musqueam territory and only kilometres west of the ancient city of\u00a0c\u0313\u0259sna\u0294\u0259m, looks out over English Bay, Howe Sound and the Georgia Straight, all bodies of water renamed by Captain George Vancouver in the 1790s. The title\u00a0Melancholy Bay\u00a0is a reference to his dispirited response to what he saw as \u201ca sublime, though gloomy spectacle.\u201d The settler culture that followed Captain Vancouver to establish jurisdiction and displace the indigenous villages and place names has been consistent in admixing descriptions of majestic landscape with ideas of frontier and resource extraction. As a result we tend to naturalize the large visual imprint made by resource extraction industries as picturesque.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

<\/span>
Irene Hoffar Reid, The Rocks Below Our House, Pt. Grey Road, 1933, watercolour and charcoal on paper, 30.1 x 38.0 cm (Photo: Michael R. Barrick)<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

That is, until there is an oil spill. Log booms clog the mouth of the Fraser River, freighters wanting to load and unload clog English Bay. In the future, more of them potentially will be loading oil piped in from an expanded Kinder-Morgan pipeline and the risk of future spills will increase as response readiness decreases. Media reports during the immediate aftermath suggested response time to a spill in Bellingham Bay was planned to be an hour. In English Bay it was twelve hours.<\/p>\n

The University\u2019s Art Collection yields works that can be seen as historic documents as well as art. Irene Hoffar Reid painted and drew the bay in the 1930s as the sublime, even mystical (she was a student of Frederick Varley and Jock Macdonald\u2019s short-lived British Columbia College of Arts) setting for leisure and depiction of heroic smelt fishermen. Jack Shadbolt\u2019s drawings from the 1940s of shacks west of the Burrard Street Bridge on the south shore depict an area of Vancouver\u2019s waterfront that has now been returned to the Squamish people.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

B.C. Binning\u2019s romance with boats, docks and the sun-dappled waters of English Bay and Howe Sound from the 1940s expressed \u201cclassical calm\u201d that was a rebuke to a world at war. Gordon Smith\u2019s Dundarave (1972) explores the same seascape through an orderly, abstract shifting grid.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

<\/span>
B.C. Binning, Four Ships on a Northwesterly Course, 1955 oil on board, 51.5 x 78.7 cm (Photo: Howard Ursuliak)<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

The intertidal zones were the sites for important conceptual works in the early 1970s. The University Art Collection and the Belkin Art Gallery Archives contain documents of such works. Michael Morris and Image Bank sited Dot Depth of Field (ca. 1970), a perspectival essay, on Spanish Banks. Al Neil has had a cabin on Burrard Inlet since 1966 that he has used as a retreat and a studio. \u00a0During that time he collected newspaper articles about the Inlet, these are now a sculpture. Neil\u2019s partner Carole Itter has worked in the studio since the early 1980s. She has been a careful observer of Burrard Inlet since childhood and the Inlet is the subject of several recent works. We are showing sketches and plans for her monumental installation Inlet, as well as a film InLet (2009). Tom Burrow\u2019s Mudflat Sculptures (1970-71) were featured in the Belkin\u2019s last exhibition.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

Roy Arden\u2019s study for his ghostly public mural People of British Columbia (2008) uses archival photos of swimmers at English Bay. Like Binning, Arden represents the bay as an idyllic place for leisure and opening one\u2019s senses to nature. But the central figure (seen three times) is a child covering his face with his hands, a gesture of inwardness in counterpoint to the sweep of early twentieth century mass leisure. Stephen Waddell\u2019s Wader (2006) gives another account of swimming in the bay. Is the figure exuberant or intoxicated? His abandon is ambiguous.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

<\/span>
Roy Arden, People of British Columbia (detail), 2008, screen print on aluminum 119.4 x 149.5 cm each (Photo: Michael R. Barrick)<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

Mark Lewis\u2019s From Third Beach 1 (2010) is a black and white film projection of two freighters. The short film is almost without event except for the lapping of the sea on the shore. Shot from a very low angle under a grey lowering sky, the scene is ominous. Mark Soo\u2019s Monochrome Sunset (English Bay-Oppenheimer Park) (2006) decolourizes a transparency of an English Bay sunset through the use of yellow-orange sodium lights \u2013 the lights used in Oppenheimer Park to discourage drug use by making it hard to see one\u2019s veins under the skin. Marian Penner Bancroft\u2019s book work, Two Places at Once (1983) (and studies for the same), depicts the shores of English Bay and Kitsilano from the water. Her work, which deals with a personal memory, is especially prescient, warning of the dangers of polluting the bay. Anne Ramsden\u2019s Urban Geography (1990) is installed in this exhibition as a seven-monitor piece with text panels. Its episodes depict two women scouting for a film location in Greater Vancouver. Included are segments that research the sulphur piles on Burrard Inlet\u2019s north shore, a docked ship, the view of English Bay from the grounds of the UBC Museum of Anthropology and a scene on Spanish Banks. Finally, Christos Dikeakos\u2019s Sites and Place Names: Vancouver (1991-94) is a project that researched and restored Salish place names in what is now Greater Vancouver.<\/p>\n

The conversations among these works do not exhaust the possible, but they point toward histories that still require redress and the continuing folly of extracting non-renewable resources with no alternate plan for the future.<\/p>\n

This exhibition is made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts. We gratefully acknowledge the Canada Council Acquisitions Assistance program, the Morris and Helen Belkin Foundation, our Belkin Curator’s Forum members and our individual donors who financially support our acquisitions and donate artworks to the collection.<\/p>\n

For more information, please contact:<\/p>\n

Jana Tyner<\/a><\/span>
\nUBC Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
\n1825 Main Mall
\nVancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada
\nt. 604.822.1389
\nwww.belkin.ubc.ca<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3250,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[126],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ausstellungen"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mundusmaris.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mundusmaris.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mundusmaris.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mundusmaris.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mundusmaris.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13669"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mundusmaris.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13673,"href":"https:\/\/www.mundusmaris.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13669\/revisions\/13673"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mundusmaris.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mundusmaris.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mundusmaris.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mundusmaris.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}