Hung

Author: 
Rachel Johndrow

Thanks to SFU visual arts students and faculty, the paper has been torn off the doors on the, of late, neglected SFU art gallery, and the 2005 Visual Arts student show, Hung, opened March 4th.

Did you know SFU has an art gallery in the AQ? Maybe not because the gallery itself has been closed for a few months now. It may be on the verge of closing entirely. However, about 150 people attended the opening to peruse the work of this year's 1st, 2nd, and 3rd year Visual Art majors and, thanks to them, our gallery is open again (at least for the moment). The show is aptly named Hung.

Paintings, installations, video, sculpture and curatorial inventiveness characterize this show, with work that addresses themes of immigration, poverty, memory, childhood, friendship, family, creation, and more.

The first thing we noticed was Negin Farsian's 77 Bottles of Dirty Dish Water, which at first looked like bottles of water strategically placed on the floor, next to a television screen documenting a person's hands washing dishes. What is the connection? We started to look closer at the water bottles and noticed that the liquid was brown and dirty. 77 Bottles draws attention to the results of daily consumption rituals.

Inexplicable, by Adriana Contreras, consists of black and white pictures posted on long-distance phone cards, highlighted with other bits of colour pictures. This incredibly intricate and detail-oriented paper collage of places, and people from different countries and time periods, captivates. Adriana's choice of small phone cards in a gallery that consists of works that were 8X10 or larger, is refreshing. This body of work reveals the anxiety experienced for many new immigrants, such as loss and exile. If you appreciate tedious hard work amidst intricacy, Contreras' work will keep you intrigued.

In contrast, Cecilia Greyson's work, Imperfect Memories of One Hometown, is much larger, but might still go unnoticed. Marked by tape strips on the floor, this "tape installation," we noticed, had some kind of cohesion, some connection. This is eventually revealed when you locate the low-lying placard. The partial grid is a map of her hometown in Ontario, which she hasn't lived in for fifteen years. Cecelia told us that she is "interested in how architecture, or the reconstruction of architecture in our minds, can hold memories and rekindle, or infuse memories for us. It's a confusion of layers, this traveling through memory."

On the whole, we agreed that Hung was infused with colourful, interesting and thought-provoking pieces. Stop by during your break, or after class to the SFU gallery in the AQ, and see what your fellow Fine and Performing Arts students are creating these days.

To learn more about the gallery hanging, you can read the e-peak article about it, online, at www.peak.sfu.ca/the-peak/2005-1/issue9/ar-hung.html - 20 Mar 2005

  • Posted on: 11 March 2016
  • By: Administrator