11 Stations

The world around us is constantly changing and transforming, and the SFU Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology situated at the Burnaby campus sets out to educate us on these developments. Situated at the northeast corner of the

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The SFU Choir has a lot to celebrate not the least of which is their strong membership of around 75 extremely dedicated choirists who, this past weekend, came together beautifully to offer an exquisite hour-long recital of songs and arrangements from films, TV shows and video games. Continue reading →

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The SFU Choir has come a long way since its inception 20 years ago. In fact, in a recent conversation with Choir Conductor Melissa Ratcliff, who’s been heading up the choir for the past 5 years, she says the choir has remarkably become a community-driven initiative, rather than a strictly SFU bound group. This year, the SFU Choir celebrates its 20th anniversary season, a milestone and testament to the enduring passion of its participants over the years. Continue reading →

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The current exhibit at the SFU Art Gallery, the collaboration between Vancouver artists Michelle Allard and Khan Lee, occupies much of the space within gallery, and engages visitors to draw both connections and disconnections between the two installations. Allard and Lee had not met prior to these collaborative installations for Circulation Patterns, but had been invited by guest curator Rachel Rosenfield Lafo to join forces due to the minimalism and points of intersections in their respective works. Continue reading →

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Renée Van Halm’s work has permeated the art world for nearly 40 years, her style ever evolving, her gaze ever shifting. From February 10 – April 8, 2012 Burnaby residents and visitors alike can see a retrospective of Van Halm’s works on paper, in the exhibit “Cross-Cutting/Inside Out”, which will be exhibited at the Burnaby Art Gallery.

Despite a career filled with a great diversity of subjects and mediums – from installation, to collage, to painting – this particular exhibit will focus in on Van Halm’s decades-long interest in the role of architecture in society.

“What we’ve done with this exhibit is we’ve compiled a historical survey of moments in my career”, said Van Halm in a recent phone interview. “As an artist, I reflected on different scenes presented over the course of my career and ultimately myself and the curator, Sophie Brodovitch, decided to focus on my ongoing interest in architecture, which started very early and was part of my practice at different stages in my career”.

Indeed, since her early body of work, Van Halm’s art has been perpetually inspired by the works of other artists, particularly those in the renaissance era. However, while others admired these works on the whole, Van Halm’s gaze and curiosity would continually focus on the background space, the space beyond the central figure. Inevitably, it was this fascination with the negative space that formulated Van Halm’s artistic strategy: to resurrect these backgrounds and bring them to the forefront of her work.

“By adopting that process, I was able to kind of create snapshots of a period in time, but not in a literal way”, Van Halm explained, “They look familiar, but they’re not. They’re parts of photographs or paintings that not one ever really looks at: the background. But, background has a huge impact on how one reads these images. If you put a model in front of a white wall, instead of something more evocative, your reading of it is very different. I’m interested in that context.”

Since the Burnaby Art Gallery has been committed to exclusively showing works that are only presented on paper, the retrospective of Van Halm’s art will focus solely on items presented in this medium, yet this focus hardly limits the viewer from experiencing Van Halm’s talents at their fullest.

Among more polished and finished works of art, the exhibit will include preparatory drawings and sketches that conceptualize ideas for Van Halm’s paintings and installations, an aspect of the artists’ work that is rarely exhibited or shown to the general public. The exhibit will also feature Van Halm’s more recent forays into collage, which often serve as her source material for paintings.

With such a large body of work, Van Halm and curator Sophie Brodovitch had to find a meaningful way to focus the viewer’s gaze and ultimately shape their experience of Van Halm’s art and of the artist herself, which is why “the exhibit has been hung not chronologically but thematically, forming a juxtaposition of past and present to see how an idea or compositional strategy was developed.”

The “Cross-Cutting/Inside Out” exhibit is sure to be a transformative experience for art lovers, as both the pieces presented and the manner in which they will be presented will allow the viewer a more intimate experience of the artist at work.

Watch for a preview of the art exhibit on Friday! For more events and art exhibits around Burnaby, visit the Tourism Burnaby events calendar.

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In true form, the National Nikkei Museum and Heritage Centre brings another exhibit illuminating a beautiful aspect of Japanese culture. The latest exhibit displays an eye- catching array of Tenugui Towels, Tenugui meaning a piece of dyed cotton cloth. At once pragmatic and beautiful, it’s amazing to learn how much these seemingly simple towels say about Japanese culture, and as the brochure attests this exhibit seeks to showcase “design excellence in Japanese daily life”. Continue reading →

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We are surrounded in our everyday lives by words and images. These two things are often put together, but how often do we actually stop and consider the relationship between the two?

The current exhibit at the SFU Art Gallery explores this concept through a selection of Lawrence Weiner posters collected from various shows and installations throughout the span of his almost five-decade career that began in the late 1960’s, and is still going. Upon entering the exhibit, there was a sense of minimalism as the posters sparsely covered two of the walls, while the third wall was covered by what initially appeared to be fragmented lines of Weiner’s words, which included the definitive statement: “Posters are in fact the writings on the wall”. Continue reading →

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In about a week’s time, the highly anticipated Hotel Bethlehem will open at the Shadbolt Centre.  Produced by Ruby Slippers Theatre, this entertaining Christmas farce is set 2,000 years ago – and offers its share of unexpected twists and turns of some unusual events that transpired on a certain fateful night at The Inn thousands of years ago.

Multi-award winning actor and director Diane Brown directs Hotel Bethlehem – which opens on Dec. 14^th at the Shadbolt Centre.  Diane is also a co-founder and artistic director at Ruby Slippers Theatre, which – over the past six years alone – has garnered some 31 Jessie Richardson Theatre Award nominations, including two for “Outstanding Direction” and “Outstanding Production,” along with 12 awards. Continue reading →

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For more than six decades, renowned BC artist Takao Tanabe has offered his own unique artistic expressions of the Canadian landscape, from drawings and watercolours to intricate sketches.

Now, in a rare opportunity, the Burnaby Art Gallery (BAG) features a sweeping retrospective of Tanabe’s works in Chronicles of Form and Place: Works on Paper, showcasing the evolution of Tanabe’s creativity and signature style.  Featuring numerous selections from the artist’s personal collection, the exhibition is a rare glimpse into the creative practice of one of Canada’s most esteemed artists.

Dating from the late 1940s to present day, many of the more than 60 works in this exhibit have never before been displayed publicly. Continue reading →

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Source: sfu.ca/artgallery

If the medium is the message, Jerry Pethick expressed the meeting point of nature and material goods through a very dimensional means in his artwork. Pethick was well known for his larger sculptural works, but throughout his career, he created smaller works directly inspired by his home on Hornby Island. Some of these smaller installations, dating from 1968-2003, are making their first public display off of Hornby Island as the focus of the current exhibit at the SFU Gallery on Burnaby Mountain. Continue reading →

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