Edge Effects – Inaugural Exhibition

The opening of a purpose-built art museum is a signal event that marks time. Everyone who has attended such an event remembers the museum’s statement exhibition. In 1995, UBC’s Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery opened with Salish artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s Born to Live and Die on Your Colonialist Reservations; in 2017, the Polygon Gallery followed suit with N. Vancouver, a group exhibition featuring work on or about North Vancouver.
For the inaugural exhibition at SFU’s Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum, director-curator Kimberly Phillips has given us Edge Effects.

Taking its title from conditions created when two adjacent ecological communities meet, Edge Effects features the work of 15 regionally based artists displayed throughout Hariri Pontarini Architects’ 12,100-squarefoot, big-windowed, hardwood-floor structure. Of these works, some are newly commissioned, while others, like Liz Magor’s INSITE97-commissioned Blue Students/Alumnos en azul (1997), featuring teens living near the US-Mexico border, are making their Canadian debut. Cindy Mochizuki’s Arboreal Time (2025) acknowledges the meeting of Nature and Culture through a series of porcelain sculptures and yakisugi pine elements that chart a forest of tree spirits (kodama), while Lorna Brown debuts her long-awaited project on Vancouver easements, which includes a large-scale
wall drawing, soft sculptures and a sound work.

“In part inspired by the intelligence of trees and their underground networks of communication and support, the Gibson is a space where art and learning come together to create a vibrant canopy of activity supported by deep connections,” says Phillips. “My desire for natural light and porosity, for bringing the outside in, stems in part from Dr. Edward Gibson’s own belief, as an urban geographer, in art’s connection to its surroundings and the unique experience of Arthur Erickson’s architecture on the Burnaby campus.”

Family-friendly opening program Sep 20, 2–5pm

Artist talk with Patrick Cruz, Sameer Farooq and Jared Stanley Sep 21, 2pm

gibson.sfu.ca