Another Green World: Works from the Collection
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC - June 20 – Aug 10
Brian Eno fans will recognize the title of the Belkin’s current group exhibition as that of the UK musician’s groundbreaking 1975 album, which chronicles his transition from rock songs to more ambient textures. Readers in the humanities, too, might recall Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957), where he defines the “green world” using Shakespeare’s comedies. Frye writes of “the archetypal function of literature in visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from ‘reality,’ but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate.”
In putting together this exhibition, curator Melanie O’Brian drew on works from the collection that feature “ambiguous sites, redrawn maps, critiques of control, pastoral edens or portals where puppets, dislocated appendages, doubles and loops proliferate,” with particular attention given to formal imperatives “in the building of other worlds, whether speculative models, abstractions or narratives.”
A notable example of the formal-social nexus can be found in two works using sodium lights—the first as a deterrent, the second as an enabler. In Mark Soo’s Monochrome Sunset (English Bay—Oppenheimer Park) (2006), sodium vapour lamps, like those used to obscure the veins of IV drug users in public spaces, are shone onto a large-scale photograph of Vancouver’s touristic English Bay. In Stephanie Stein’s penetrating Oase (2022), an abstracted band of vertically positioned lights, like those used by motor vehicles to cut through fog, shine on and off, accompanied by Carlo Heller’s sound score.
Also included are works by Joan Balzar, Tom Burrows, Kate Craig, Gabi Dao, Sarah Dobai, Jesse Gray, Antonia Hirsch, Tiziana La Melia, Damian Moppett, Nadia Myre, Gailan Ngan, Jerry Pethick, Dana Qaddah and Gordon Smith.
