[BCMA] Sandow Birk at SFU Galleries

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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Sandow Birk at SFU Galleries
Date: 	Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:57:49 -0700
From: 	Bill Jeffries <bill_jeffries at sfu.ca>



*Sandow Birk
/The Depravities of War
/**/SFU Gallery, Burnaby Campus: September 12 - October 24
Teck Gallery, Vancouver Campus: September 7 - November 12


/*/Destruction/, 2007, woodcut on Sekishu paper, 48 x 96 inches. 
Courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; Koplin Del Rio 
Gallery, Los Angeles; and HuiPress, Makawao, HI.
*/
/**Sandow Birk* is a prolific Southern California artist working in a 
wide range of media: painting, printmaking and cinema. The SFU Gallery 
will show his series of fifteen outsized woodcuts about the US incursion 
into Iraq titled /The Depravities of War/. The series was inspired by 
recent events as well as by the war etchings of Jacques Callot 
(1592--1635), titled /The Miseries of War/, which in the early 1800s 
were a source for Goya's /The Disasters of War/. Birk worked from TV and 
Web news reports at the time of the US-led invasion, making small 
drawings of news images, blowing them up to 4 X 8 feet at Kinko's and 
then grinding and gouging the plywood sheets -- the resulting prints 
resemble images from a graphic novel. Birk is a witness to our times, 
reflecting & refracting events back to us; he protests injustice through 
his woodcuts and, as with Jeff Wall's photographs, shows us history writ 
pictorially large, transforming news events into something strange and 
horrible, yet weirdly familiar.

The prints depict recruiting scenes ("enlist Army, free college"), 
training, the invasion, the destruction of Baghdad, the occupation, the 
local insurrection, incarceration, and Senate investigation hearings, 
that have, so far, only occurred once, amongst other stages in the 
"Bush/Cheney War."

*The exhibition is in two parts:* half at the Teck Gallery, SFU 
Vancouver Campus, 515 W. Hastings St.(September 7 - November 12); the 
other half at the SFU Gallery at the Burnaby Campus ( September 12 - 
October 24)

Sandow Birk graduated from the Otis Art Institute and has subsequently 
received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim 
Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Getty Fellowship as well as a 
COLA grant from the city of Los Angeles. /The Depravities of War/ is in 
the collection of LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

*Artist talk & film screening:* 2PM, Saturday September 12, at the 
Burnaby Gallery, followed by an opening reception from 3 to 5pm.  Birk's 
talk will discuss the prints in the exhibition as well as a screening of 
his legendary film "In Smog and Thunder: The Great War of the Californias".

*Lunchtime talks at Burnaby: *Tuesday September 15, 12:05, Wednesday 
September 16, 12:35, Wednesday September 30th, 12:05, & Thursday October 
1, 12:35.

Talks for classes or groups may be scheduled by appointment at 
778.782.4266 or gallery at sfu.ca
*
Publication: *The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by 
HuiPress, Makawao, HI.
*
Hours:* The Teck Gallery is open all day, 7 days a week, closed 
holidays;  SFU Burnaby Gallery is open Tuesday to Friday 10 -- 5 & 
Saturdays noon to 5.


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