Animating UBC's Outdoor Art with videos and tours at the Belkin

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Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery

The Belkin Art Gallery is pleased to launch a new series of investigations considering the public realm of the UBC campus. The UBC Outdoor Art Collection is growing, with new works added, a restoration and re-siting of a major piece, as well as shifts in meaning and context for works whose surroundings are undergoing development. To help understand and enrich the changing collection, we begin this series with videos by artists Vanessa Kwan and Holly Ward and writer Jordan Abel who respond to several works in the collection under the direction of filmmaker Ian Barbour. At the same time we have reissued an updated self-guided UBC Outdoor Art Collection tour booklet.

Holly Ward draws on her independent research into cameras obscura to explore the revised landscape and therefore the new meanings associated with Rodney Graham's Millennial Time Machine (2003), a nineteenth-century, horse-drawn landau, whose carriage has been converted into a camera obscura.

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Myfanwy MacLeod, "Wood for the People," 2002

Photo by Howard Ursuliak

Vanessa Kwan addresses two works that upend the formality of the campus environment with playful humour: Myfanwy MacLeod's Wood for the People (2002) and Glenn Lewis's Classical Toy Boat (1987). A woodpile cast in concrete, Wood for the People was designed to precisely insert a cipher of rural culture into the site of the contemporary art museum. Classical Toy Boat, teetering vertically on its bow and poised to plunge into the water, was installed in 2016 in the pond behind the Leon and Thea Koerner University Centre.

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Edgar Heap of Birds, "Native Hosts," 1991-2007

Photo by Michael R. Barrick

Nisga'a writer and scholar Jordan Abel responds to Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds's Native Hosts (1991–2007), a series of text-based works situated in multiple locations on campus. Resembling way-finding signage, Native Hosts reverses the words British Columbia and cites the names of twelve BC First Nations as hosts of provincial occupation.

With the help of Steedman Design, the Belkin's iconic yellow Outdoor Art Guide has been revised and reprinted in sky blue, with new entries on James Hart's Reconciliation Pole: Honouring a Time Before, During and After Canada's Indian Residential Schools (2015-17) and Glenn Lewis's Classical Toy Boat (1987). The pocket-sized guides are available at the Belkin Art Gallery, or by downloading from the website http://www.belkin.ubc.ca/outdoor-art

Scheduled tours begin at 2 pm and 3 pm every Saturday and Sunday until August 13, or book a free private tour for groups of four or more by contacting belkin.gallery@ubc.ca.

Source: Belkin Art Gallery