Uploads from Belkin Art Gallery, tagged british, with geodata

Because... there was and there wasn't a city of Baghdad

nobody@flickr.com (Belkin Art Gallery) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:47:19 -0700

Jamelie Hassan (b. 1948)
Because... there was and there wasn't a city of Baghdad, 1991
digital print on mesh flex

This work, located on the exterior wall of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, features a photograph Hassan took on her first visit to Baghdad, Iraq, in the late 1970s when she studied Arabic at the University of Mustansyria. The photo shows the colourfully tiled dome and minaret of the Haidar Khan mosque, and the text evokes Arabis literary traditions as exemplified in One Thousand and One Nights.

Hassan's billboard project was conceived in 1991 in response to the Gulf War, a conflict between Iraq and a United Nations sanctioned coalition of forces led by the United States. Within six months of the war's outbreak, hand-painted versiojs of Hassan's billboard were exhibited in the city centres of Windsor and London, Ontario. In 1992, it was displayed in downtown Vancouver at the intersection of Richards and Pender Streets. Although more than fifteen years have passed since the Gulf War, Hassan's evocative combination of text and image continues to resonate with contemporary politics.

Jamelie Hassan was born in 1948 in London, Ontario, where she continues to live and work. She has extensively throughout North America, Mexico, Cuba, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and works as an artist, writer, curator, and lecturer. Her work frequently engages with contemporary political issues and themes of cultural identity. In 2001, Hassan received the Governor General's Award in Visual Arts.

Three Forms

nobody@flickr.com (Belkin Art Gallery) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:47:25 -0700

Belkin Art Gallery posted a photo:

Robert Clothier
Three Forms, 1956
concrete
218.5 x 86 x 115.5 cm

Located near the north side of the Frederic Lasserre Building, Three Forms won the UBC Purchase Prize in the first Outdoor Sculpture Show held at UBC in 1956.
The work consists of three components of equal proportions. Each concrete form resembles a slightly squared “C” shape. These are stacked and turned to present a configuration that seems to change depending on the angle from which it is approached. Though Three Forms is an abstract work, the combination of these
simple forms is evocative of the human body.

Clothier was born in Prince Rupert, British Columbia. He was a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force and served in the Second World War. He flew several
successful missions in Europe. In 1944, while serving as an instructor with the RCAF’s Operational Training Unit in Boundary Bay, British Columbia, Clothier was involved in a plane crash that killed three, and left him with a broken back. After making a remarkable recovery, Clothier came to UBC in the late 1940s to study in the Department of Architecture. Clothier soon realized that architecture was not his calling, and shifted his focus to theatre. He traveled to London, England, where he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Clothier is well known for his role as “Relic” in the popular CBC television series about rural West Coast life, The Beachcombers, which ran from 1972 to 1990.

As a sculptor, Clothier had his first exhibition at UBC in 1956 when he won first place for Three Forms in a contest judged by Herbert Read, the English author and
art critic. He also exhibited in Art Encounter ‘82 in Vancouver and was a member of the Pacific Northwest Society of Sculptors. Clothier often spoke about the parallels he found between working as an actor and working as a sculptor. He noted that a requirement of sculpture is that it works 360 degrees around, and likened this to “an actor who can play upstage and let you read what he’s thinking about from his back.” Clothier, who was known to cover his scripts with drawings, found that his art making practice provided a certain kind of balance to his life. Clothier believed that he needed sculpture because “in the theatre, acting is a reproductive process.
Most of it is a matter of being true to someone else’s script. And you’re responsible to many people. Sculpture, on the other hand is completely your own. And you’re responsible only to yourself.” (Robert Clothier as quoted by Lloyd Dykk, “Gassing with a former Relic,” The Vancouver Sun.)

Cumbria

nobody@flickr.com (Belkin Art Gallery) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:47:57 -0700

Belkin Art Gallery posted a photo:

Robert Murray
Cumbria, 1966-67
corten steel
425 x 900 x 450 cm

Cumbria was first exhibited on the plaza of Toronto’s City Hall in Sculpture ‘67, and then shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Shortly thereafter, the large-scale work was selected by the Office of Cultural Affairs of New York’s Parks Department to open its Sculpture of the Month program. It was shown at Battery Park in Manhattan, in the city Murray had made his home.

The sculpture returned to Canada in 1969, when the Ministry of Transport purchased it for the newly-opened Vancouver International Airport Terminal. The Ministry of Transport’s Fine Arts Committee chaired by Jean Sutherland Boggs, then Director of the National Gallery of Canada, hoped the sculpture would reflect the international aspirations of both the Airport and the city of Vancouver.

Cumbria generated much public controversy upon its arrival in Vancouver, mainly because it departed from traditional sculptural forms. At first Cumbria was granted a prominent place on a height of land that gave it a soaring effect. However, it was later moved to a median on Grant MacConachie Way. Because of its proximity to a gas station, and the busy traffic, the sculpture could not be properly viewed. By 1993, the airport no longer wanted the sculpture and had it removed with bulldozers, which caused irreparable damage, and once again, public controversy.

In 1995, with the intervention of artist Toni Onley, Transport Canada agreed to donate the work to the University and fund its re-fabrication. Cumbria was the first large-scale public sculpture installed at UBC since 1975.

Robert Murray is well known in Canada and the United States for his large, nonrepresentational, painted steel and aluminum sculptures. His early training as a painter is evident in the attention to the surface of the sculptures, and his use of colour. The viewer must physically walk around Murray’s sculptures to see the different aspects of them, which change dramatically from each angle of view.

Wood for the People

nobody@flickr.com (Belkin Art Gallery) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:47:20 -0700

Belkin Art Gallery posted a photo:

Myfanwy Macleod
Wood for the People, 2002
cast concrete
91 x 30 x 460 cm

Installed along the entry staircase to the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Wood for the People features 230 identical, cast concrete logs stacked in the form of a woodpile. The work, evoking a romantic pastoral landscape, appears misplaced on the manicured grounds of UBC, creating a sense of irony. Because of their texture and arrangement, the logs convincingly resemble firewood stacked and ready for use, though the material betrays their status as an architectural folly and lends them the appearance of a ruin, or even a fossil. Seen in this light, the work
makes a statement about environmental and economic issues particular to British Columbia. MacLeod also intended that the work reference a barricade, a reading that transforms it from a benign woodpile to a politically charged piece that raises issues around control and access at the University.

Myfanwy MacLeod was born in 1961 in London, Ontario, and currently resides in Vancouver. She completed her B.F.A. at Concordia University in Montreal, and
received a M.F.A. from UBC in 1994. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and abroad.