Facing Time

×

Expand

Deborah Putman, "Vefele Looks in the Mirror," 2009

acrylic on canvas

“Close Up: In Conversation with Jaswant Guzder, Missla Libsekal, and María Angélica Madero,” a live online panel discussion on Saturday, February 27 from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. hosted on their Facebook and Youtube pages in connection with their exhibit Facing Time. 

Guzder and Madero are exhibiting artists in Facing Time, and Libeskal is a curator and writer. The conversation will be introduced and facilitated by Surrey Art Gallery Curator Jordan Strom.

The human face reveals a lot about someone. From smiling or frowning to more complex expressions of hope, fear, or approval, the face is how people read others. During this pandemic, faces have taken on heightened significance. Most interactions with others happen virtually. Masks cover much of people’s faces, leaving communication up to the eyes.

In Facing Time, Surrey Art Gallery invites the public to get up close to collages of archival portraits, psychological portraiture, altered faces from art history as art stamps, photographs of amateur baseball players, drawings of aged faces suffering from illness, needlepoint representations of French philosophers, terracotta heads, and artworks that use social media as a medium, to name a few examples in this show drawn from the Gallery’s permanent collection and from loans.

The artworks in this exhibition, while mostly created before the pandemic, speak to the current moment of facial interfaces and increased digital activity. Time shrinks as people scroll through faces on social media, join another video conference meeting, and catch up with family and friends in the same or different time zones via video calls. More and more personal devices use digital facial recognition software for identification and surveillance. Selfies still abound.

Surrey Art Gallery Curator of Exhibitions and Collections Jordan Strom says, “Contemporary art can reimagine how we represent ourselves and think about facial communication both now and in the future. This exhibition examines the many creative and critical ways in which artists have sought to capture the human face over the past 50 years.”

Other exhibitions at the Gallery include Art by Surrey Secondary Students, a display of collages, drawings, and paintings from local youth (opens February 6) and Carol Sawyer: Proscenium, a video installation about illusion, trickery, and performance (closes February 14). At UrbanScreen, Surrey Art Gallery’s outdoor art site, the Flavourcel collective will launch a new experimental animation project on February 6.

On Saturday, January 30 from 6:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., join Surrey Art Gallery staff on Instagram Live @surreyartgal for a casual introduction to the exhibit and a performance by Patrick Cruz, Qian Cheng, and Francis Cruz. On Saturday, February 27 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., exhibiting artist Jaswant Guzder will discuss portraiture and faces with curator Jordan Strom. This live event will take place on the Gallery’s Facebook and Youtube pages. The Gallery is open for pre-booked tours of Facing Time on select days: Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Phone the Gallery at 604-501-5566 (press 1) or email artgallery@surrey.ca to book.

Participating artists: Durrah Alsaif, Simranpreet Anand, Rebecca Bair, Lorna Brown, Diana Burgoyne, Chila Kumari Burman, Audrey Capel-Doray, Qian Cheng, Lincoln Clarkes, Share Corsault, Patrick Cruz, Francis Cruz, Eryne Donahue, Tom Douglas, R.W. Eastcott, Soheila Esfahani, Gabor Gasztonyi, Barry Goodman, Jaswant Guzder, Brian Howell, Jim Jardine, Bill Jeffries, Doreen Jensen, Ali Kazimi, Ann Kipling, Laura Wee Láy Láq, George Littlechild, Ken Lum, Al McWilliams, Elizabeth MacKenzie, María Angélica Madero, Chito Maravilla, Sally Michener, my name is scot, David Neel, Al Neil, Mark Neufeld, George Omorean, Leslie Pool, Deborah Putman, Marianna Schmidt, Jack Shadbolt, Drew Shaffer, Hari Sharma, Stephen Shore, Jarnail Singh, Jeannette Sirois, Manuel Axel Strain, Ed Varney, Carrie Walker, Jin-me Yoon