[Bcma-l] Going Nowhere: Second And Third Year Visual Arts Student Exhibition

[bcma-l@museumsassn.bc.ca]

*Going Nowhere
**Second And Third Year SFU Visual Arts Student Exhibition
At the SFU Gallery, Burnaby
February 27 – March 20, 2009

Opening Reception: Friday February 27, 2009. 7-9pm

*Each year students from the Visual Art program in the SFU School for 
Contemporary Arts are given the opportunity to exhibit their work in the 
SFU Gallery. Organized and curated by students in third year, the 
exhibition reveals the aesthetic tendencies and conceptual trajectories 
developed by students of the program. This year we wanted to explore the 
relationship between rational conceptualism and visceral intuition in 
the creative process. We called this exhibit /Going Nowhere/ because the 
rational and the intuitive qualities of art can often be seen to circle 
one another in an infinite regress, each somewhat dependent on the other 
for its existence.

Intuition itself is both a rational concept and a visceral experience, 
and it is therefore a fallacy, although a common one, to legitimize or 
covet the rational over the intuitive. Our school teaches us that theory 
is the backbone of art, but we are proposing that the opposite is 
equally true. In submitting work for consideration, students were not 
required to justify their creativity, to speak or write about what their 
work ‘means,’ or about the intention or from which it emerged. The 
artists presented in /Going Nowhere/ have been released from the 
cul-de-sac of self-conscious intentionality, and instead offer work with 
a non-specific origin and an undetermined destination.


As the viewer you may be stimulated intellectually, viscerally, or both 
at once. But the point is that like the artists in the creation of these 
works, you are not required to justify your response. We curated this 
show as a selection of works that simply struck a chord with us, 
independent of any written, or verbal explanation. That work has now 
been surrendered to you as the viewer – the co-creator of meaning – 
leaving the interpretation open and fluid.


Signed, the curatorial team:

Erik Brinkman, Kyle Halliday, Olivia Dunbar, Simon Murtagh