Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

An Opulence of Squander
That Directionless Light of the Future: Rediscovering Russell FitzGerald

Have you visited the Belkin to see these responses to the gallery's collection?

Guest curators Weiyi Chang and Jon Davies offer two responses to the Belkin’s collections with their respective exhibitions, An Opulence of Squander and That Directionless Light of the Future: Rediscovering Russell FitzGerald that run through December 8, 2024.

Taking its title from an essay by artist Kelly Wood, who is included in the exhibition, An Opulence of Squander brings together works that reflect on concepts of surplus and excess to question the dual ascription of artistic work as a form of both luxury and waste. That Directionless Light of the Future features works by American artist and writer Russell FitzGerald (1932-1978) to explore in depth how secret and subcultural knowledge complicates archiving and transmission, particularly for this rarely seen artist.

Visit the Belkin soon to see these responses to the permanent collection, the exhibitions continue through December 8!

Photos

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Conversation Series: Of Other Earths, with Weiyi Chang and Camille Georgeson-Usher
Tuesday, November 5 at 12:30 pm (online)

This Tuesday, please join us for an online conversation between guest curator Weiyi Chang and Camille Georgeson-Usher, a Coast Salish / Sahtu Dene / Scottish scholar, artist, and writer from Galiano Island, BC. Usher is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art with a focus on Indigenous art history at UBC’s Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory. Her research focuses on the many ways in which peoples move together through space, how public art becomes a site for gathering, and intimacies with the everyday from an Indigenous perspective. She uses her practice as a long-distance runner as a methodology for research and an alternative form of sensing place. Usher is an award-winning writer whose work merges theory with poetry and at times, science Through close attention to Usher’s practice, this program will allow us to reflect on themes and concerns articulated in An Opulence of Squander, currently on view at the Belkin.

Of Other Earths is an online conversation series recuperating forgotten, suppressed and abandoned histories to reconsider capitalist and colonial relationships to the planet and its inhabitants. Multiplying and compounding environmental harms are radically destabilizing earthly habitats, calling into question the viability of existing productivist paradigms that require continuous resource extraction and consumption. These dialogues will offer a generative way to think about how we engage, care for, and conserve past works of art and artists and the ecological lessons that experience might hold.

Past conversations:

Tuesday, September 10 at 12:30 pm with Soft Turns
Tuesday, October 8 at 12:30 pm with Lisa Myers

All conversations take place via Zoom - register for the link at:

🔗 https://belkin.ubc.ca/events/conversation-of-other-earths/ 🔗

Images: Camille Georgeson-Usher, Until it Swells, 2023

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Symposium: Difficult Kinship
Friday, November 22 at 3 pm
Green College Coach House, 6201 Cecil Green Park Road, UBC

We are excited to announce an upcoming afternoon symposium responding to That Directionless Light of the Future: Rediscovering Russell FitzGerald, an exhibition which grapples with a difficult and overlooked figure, exploring how the most idiosyncratic artists can crack open familiar historical narratives.

We invite you to join curator Jon Davies, Nalo Hopkinson and Jamie Parra in an experiment in thinking about this exhibition together, to consider the different contextual forces at play from mysticism and intoxication to poetry and q***r bohemian networks to Harlem jazz and the long history of America’s racial fantasies. We are interested in performing a pedagogical model of speculation and “unknowing,” and to consider the value of anti-heroic “bad kin” and “difficult kinship” (to quote q***r historian Jennifer V. Evans) in our current moment.

For more details, visit https://belkin.ubc.ca/events/symposium-russell-fitzgerald/



Image: Russell FitzGerald, Blueprint for Böhme (detail), c. 1960s. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Gift of Dora FitzGerald, 2008

The Belkin's 4th Annual Costume Contest - big turnout this year!

And [drum roll] .... the runner up prize goes to Moo Deng (Audrey!) with this year's winner - TONYA HADDOX from CHIMP CRAZY! Woooooooo!!! Well done, Teresa, you always bring it home!

With a special shoutout to the art-themed costumes - Kelly Wood's Continuous Garbage Project (x3), Shark Fin Swimmer, Andy Warhol and Anna Banana.

Happy Halloween, all!

Conversation Series: Of Other Earths, with Weiyi Chang and Camille Georgeson-Usher
Tuesday, November 5 at 12:30 pm (online)

Please join us for a conversation between guest curator Weiyi Chang and Camille Georgeson-Usher, a Coast Salish / Sahtu Dene / Scottish scholar, artist, and writer from Galiano Island, BC. Usher is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art with a focus on Indigenous art history at UBC’s Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory. Her research focuses on the many ways in which peoples move together through space, how public art becomes a site for gathering, and intimacies with the everyday from an Indigenous perspective. She uses her practice as a long-distance runner as a methodology for research and an alternative form of sensing place. Usher is an award-winning writer whose work merges theory with poetry and at times, science Through close attention to Usher’s practice, this program will allow us to reflect on themes and concerns articulated in An Opulence of Squander, currently on view at the Belkin.

Of Other Earths is an online conversation series recuperating forgotten, suppressed and abandoned histories to reconsider capitalist and colonial relationships to the planet and its inhabitants. Multiplying and compounding environmental harms are radically destabilizing earthly habitats, calling into question the viability of existing productivist paradigms that require continuous resource extraction and consumption. These dialogues will offer a generative way to think about how we engage, care for, and conserve past works of art and artists and the ecological lessons that experience might hold.

Past conversations:

Tuesday, September 10 at 12:30 pm with Soft Turns
Tuesday, October 8 at 12:30 pm with Lisa Myers

All conversations take place via Zoom - register for the link at:

🔗 https://belkin.ubc.ca/events/conversation-of-other-earths/ 🔗

Photo:

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The Belkin extends our most sincere congratulations to Abbas Akhavan who will represent Canada at the 61st International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia in 2026!⁠

And we’re particularly excited to announce his solo exhibition at the Belkin, Abbas Akhavan: One Hundred Years, opening September 5, 2025. Taking up notions of suspended time, the exhibition includes largely new works that contend with temporal halting and how time is represented in narrativized spaces. One Hundred Years offers shifting relations and narratives between objects, situations and audiences to occupy a fertile uncertainty. Within this constellation, actions and forms blur the distinctions between sleeping, halting, freezing, glitching and incarceration, functioning outside of linearity.
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Born in Tehran and based between Montreal and Berlin, Abbas Akhavan is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice reflects on the relationships between place and history and attends to the geopolitical forces that define spaces through site-specific ephemeral installations, drawing, video, sculpture and performance. The direction of his research has been deeply influenced by the specificity of the sites in which he works, including the architectures that house them, the economies that surround them, and the individuals that frequent them. Through his work, Akhavan engages with formal, material, and social legacies that shape the boundaries between public and private, domesticated and wild, hostile and hospitable.⁠
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Images: Abbas Akhavan. Photo: Alex de Brabant (2024) / Abbas Akhavan, variations on a folly, 2022. Photo: Keith Hunter. Courtesy Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver and The Third Line, Dubai / Abbas Akhavan, curtain call, variations on a folly, 2021/2023. Photo: David Stjernholm. Courtesy Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver and The Third Line, Dubai / Abbas Akhavan, variations on a folly, 2022. Photo: Keith Hunter⁠
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Conversation Series: Of Other Earths, with Weiyi Chang and Camille Georgeson-Usher
Tuesday, November 5 at 12:30 pm (online)

Please join us for a conversation between guest curator Weiyi Chang and Camille Georgeson-Usher, a Coast Salish / Sahtu Dene / Scottish scholar, artist, and writer from Galiano Island, BC. Usher is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art with a focus on Indigenous art history at UBC’s Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory. Her research focuses on the many ways in which peoples move together through space, how public art becomes a site for gathering, and intimacies with the everyday from an Indigenous perspective. She uses her practice as a long-distance runner as a methodology for research and an alternative form of sensing place. Usher is an award-winning writer whose work merges theory with poetry and at times, science Through close attention to Usher’s practice, this program will allow us to reflect on themes and concerns articulated in An Opulence of Squander, currently on view at the Belkin.

Of Other Earths is an online conversation series recuperating forgotten, suppressed and abandoned histories to reconsider capitalist and colonial relationships to the planet and its inhabitants. Multiplying and compounding environmental harms are radically destabilizing earthly habitats, calling into question the viability of existing productivist paradigms that require continuous resource extraction and consumption. These dialogues will offer a generative way to think about how we engage, care for, and conserve past works of art and artists and the ecological lessons that experience might hold.

Past conversations:

Tuesday, September 10 at 12:30 pm with Soft Turns
Tuesday, October 8 at 12:30 pm with Lisa Myers

All conversations take place via Zoom - register for the link at:

🔗 https://belkin.ubc.ca/events/conversation-of-other-earths/ 🔗

Photo:

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Today, Thursday, at 12:30 pm in the Audain Art Centre!

You don’t need a graduate degree to work in the arts!

Emerge presents a careers panel with local arts professionals Fegor Obuwoma, Kiel Torres and Dana Qaddah on Thursday October 17, 12:30–2 pm, in the Audain Art Centre, Room 1002, 6398 University Boulevard, UBC.

Spots are limited. To register, email [email protected] with your name, pronouns, your major (art history, visual arts, psychology, etc.) and the name of the event, Emerge Careers Panel.

Emerge is a series of talks, workshops and behind-the-scenes tours emphasizing professional development that introduce visual art and art history students to the Vancouver art scene.

UBC Art History, Visual Art and Theory .ubc .ubc

Artist talk with Caroline Delétoille
Wednesday, October 16 at 3 pm
Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1825 Main Mall, UBC, Vancouver

This Wednesday, join us at the Belkin for an artist talk by Quantum Studio artist-in-residence Caroline Delétoille, who will discuss her collaborative partnerships with scientists and engineers while embedded at UBC’s Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute. Delétoille will address her studio and research practices and share some initial insights about “Quantum Sensation,” a project initiated in 2023 in close collaboration with a physicist and philosopher and the focus of her residency at UBC.

Caroline Delétoille’s month-long artist residency is a partnership between the Consulate General of France in Vancouver and UBC’s Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute, the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Belkin through Quantum Studio, which is part of a larger program of residencies sponsored by the Embassy of France in Western Canada.

Image: Caroline Delétoille, Henri and Louise (Marrakech, 1934), from the series Les protecteurs ou Le spleen du Maroc (1929 – 1955), 2024. Courtesy of the artist

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You don’t need a graduate degree to work in the arts!

Emerge presents a careers panel with local arts professionals Fegor Obuwoma, Kiel Torres and Dana Qaddah on Thursday October 17, 12:30–2 pm, in the Audain Art Centre, Room 1002, 6398 University Boulevard, UBC.

Spots are limited. To register, email [email protected] with your name, pronouns, your major (art history, visual arts, psychology, etc.) and the name of the event, Emerge Careers Panel.

Emerge is a series of talks, workshops and behind-the-scenes tours emphasizing professional development that introduce visual art and art history students to the Vancouver art scene.

UBC Art History, Visual Art and Theory .ubc .ubc

We invite you to collect seeds from Fireweed Fields
Until October 31

Over the past four years as the Belkin's Artist in Residence, Holly Schmidt developed the Outdoor Art project Fireweed Fields (2021-24) that transformed the gallery's lawn into a fireweed meadow. In response to the climate emergency, the project increased biodiversity on campus while serving as an important site for education and dialogue.

In November, this iteration of Fireweed Fields will come to a close, as the Belkin works with UBC's Municipal Services on transitioning the site into a permanent meadow maintained by the university at large. Although Fireweed Fields has formally ended, Schmidt's critical work and the relationships that she has helped build have fostered our long-term commitment to biodiversity on campus.

Before the Belkin transitions the meadow, we invite members of the public to visit Fireweed Fields over the month of October to collect and gather seeds from growing plants. Those who visit may find seeds from fireweed, yarrow, beggar-ticks, cinquefoils, self-heal and woolly sunflower plants, before they are washed away by the rain. It is by sharing these plants with community that we hope to continue to sow the seeds of ecological regeneration.

We're excited to see Lionel and Patricia Thomas's 1958 mural, Symbols for Education, being reinstalled in its new location next to Brock Commons South on campus - it's been a long road!

To read more about the story of Symbols for Education, its history as part of the university and the conservation process led by Fraser Spafford Ricci, visit:

https://www.arts.ubc.ca/news/how-the-refurbished-symbols-for-education-mural-is-a-mosaic-of-history/

.conservation

You don’t need a graduate degree to work in the arts!

Emerge presents a careers panel with local arts professionals Fegor Obuwoma, Kiel Torres and Dana Qaddah on Thursday October 17, 12:30–2 pm, in the Audain Art Centre, Room 1002, 6398 University Boulevard, UBC.

Spots are limited. To register, email [email protected] with your name, pronouns, your major (art history, visual arts, psychology, etc.) and the name of the event, Emerge Careers Panel.

Emerge is a series of talks, workshops and behind-the-scenes tours emphasizing professional development that introduce visual art and art history students to the Vancouver art scene.

UBC Art History, Visual Art and Theory .ubc .ubc

Conversation Series: Of Other Earths, with Weiyi Chang and Lisa Myers
Tuesday, October 8 at 12:30 pm (online)

Today at 12:30 pm, please join us for an online conversation between guest curator Weiyi Chang and Lisa Myers, an artist and curator based in Toronto and Port Severn and a member of Beausoleil First Nation. Myers has worked with anthocyanin pigment from blueberries in printmaking and in her stop-motion animation. Her participatory performances involve sharing berries and other food items in social gatherings, reflecting on the value found in place and displacement; straining and absorbing. Recently, her artistic practice has expanded into audio and augmented reality projects that draw attention to the histories of the land, dislocation, and gentrification. Through close attention to Myers’s practice, this conversation will allow us to reflect on themes and concerns articulated in An Opulence of Squander, currently on view at the Belkin.

Of Other Earths is an online conversation series recuperating forgotten, suppressed and abandoned histories to reconsider capitalist and colonial relationships to the planet and its inhabitants. Multiplying and compounding environmental harms are radically destabilizing earthly habitats, calling into question the viability of existing productivist paradigms that require continuous resource extraction and consumption. These dialogues will offer a generative way to think about how we engage, care for, and conserve past works of art and artists and the ecological lessons that experience might hold.

Conversations take place:

Tuesday, October 8 at 12:30 pm with Lisa Myers
Tuesday, November 5 at 12:30 pm with Camille Georgeson-Usher

Past conversations:

Tuesday, September 10 at 12:30 pm with Soft Turns

All conversations take place via Zoom - register for the link at:

🔗 https://belkin.ubc.ca/events/conversation-of-other-earths/ 🔗

Photos:

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Conversation Series: Of Other Earths, with Weiyi Chang and Lisa Myers
Tuesday, October 8 at 12:30 pm (online)

This Tuesday at 12:30 pm, please join us for an online conversation between guest curator Weiyi Chang and Lisa Myers, an artist and curator based in Toronto and Port Severn and a member of Beausoleil First Nation. Myers has worked with anthocyanin pigment from blueberries in printmaking and in her stop-motion animation. Her participatory performances involve sharing berries and other food items in social gatherings, reflecting on the value found in place and displacement; straining and absorbing. Recently, her artistic practice has expanded into audio and augmented reality projects that draw attention to the histories of the land, dislocation, and gentrification. Through close attention to Myers’s practice, this conversation will allow us to reflect on themes and concerns articulated in An Opulence of Squander, currently on view at the Belkin.

Of Other Earths is an online conversation series recuperating forgotten, suppressed and abandoned histories to reconsider capitalist and colonial relationships to the planet and its inhabitants. Multiplying and compounding environmental harms are radically destabilizing earthly habitats, calling into question the viability of existing productivist paradigms that require continuous resource extraction and consumption. These dialogues will offer a generative way to think about how we engage, care for, and conserve past works of art and artists and the ecological lessons that experience might hold.

Conversations take place:

Tuesday, October 8 at 12:30 pm with Lisa Myers
Tuesday, November 5 at 12:30 pm with Camille Georgeson-Usher

Past conversations:

Tuesday, September 10 at 12:30 pm with Soft Turns

All conversations take place via Zoom - register for the link at:

🔗 https://belkin.ubc.ca/events/conversation-of-other-earths/ 🔗

Photos:

.cm .turns

We are thrilled to announce two new publications at the gallery!

Laiwan: Traces, Erasures, Resists follows Laiwan's 2022 exhibition curated by Amy Kazymerchyk, and includes interviews and essays that unfold this critical practice. Designed by Victoria Lum and edited by Amy Kazymerchyk, writers include Olivia Michiko Gagnon, Missla Libsekal, Liz Park, Anne Riley, Scott Watson and Rita Wong.

Forecast marks the close of Holly Schmidt’s artist residency at the Belkin and centres on her series of short poetic texts that use the language of weather reporting to speculate on collective responses to environmental changes. Designed by Information Office, writers include Bopha Chhay, Barbara Cole, Melanie O'Brian and Sheryda Warrener.

We will launch both of these officially in the new year with readings and a celebration with the artists, but in the meantime, they are available for purchase at the gallery and on our website.

.lum

Artist talk with Caroline Delétoille
Wednesday, October 16 at 3 pm

Join us at the Belkin for an artist talk by Quantum Studio artist-in-residence Caroline Delétoille, who will discuss her collaborative partnerships with scientists and engineers while embedded at UBC’s Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute. Delétoille will address her studio and research practices and share some initial insights about “Quantum Sensation,” a project initiated in 2023 in close collaboration with a physicist and philosopher and the focus of her residency at UBC.

Caroline Delétoille’s month-long artist residency is a partnership between UBC’s Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute, the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Belkin through Quantum Studio, which is part of a larger program of residencies sponsored by the Embassy of France in Western Canada.

Image: Caroline Delétoille, Henri and Louise (Marrakech, 1934), from the series Les protecteurs ou Le spleen du Maroc (1929 – 1955), 2024. Courtesy of the artist

.scientia.ubc

In observance of Orange Shirt Day and the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, the Belkin and the University of British Columbia will be closed on Monday, September 30. This is a day to honour and uphold Survivors and intergenerational Survivors of residential schools, and to commemorate those who didn't return home. The Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at UBC has some great resources for learning more about Orange Shirt Day and how you can participate, check their website or

🔗 https://irshdc.ubc.ca/orange-shirt-day/ 🔗

📷: Beau Dick at Parliament Hill, Ottawa, 2014. Photo by Sue Heel.

TODAY - Decolonization Tour, Friday, September 27 at 1 pm

As part of the events leading up to the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day at UBC, join the Belkin’s Public Programs staff for a Decolonization Tour to explore artworks by Indigenous artists at UBC, which is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.

The Decolonization Tour highlights site-specific artworks by Indigenous artists and raises questions around issues of place, space and identity. Considering how these works address urgent social and political concerns, we will discuss ideas of settler colonialism, decolonization, reconciliation, protocol and the history of UBC’s Vancouver campus, which is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. We'll take a look at works by Kayám̓ Richard Campbell, Brent Sparrow, Ellen Neel, Edgar Heap of Birds and James Hart, 7idansuu (Edenshaw).

Tours are free but we ask that you preregister at the link below:

https://belkin.ubc.ca/events/decolonization-tours-september-2024/

For more about Orange Shirt Day at UBC, visit:

https://irshdc.ubc.ca/orange-shirt-day/

Image: Edgar Heap of Birds, Native Hosts, 1991/2007

UBC Faculty of Arts

Conversation Series: Of Other Earths, with Weiyi Chang and Lisa Myers
Tuesday, October 8 at 12:30 pm (online)

Please join us for an online conversation between guest curator Weiyi Chang and Lisa Myers, an artist and curator based in Toronto and Port Severn and a member of Beausoleil First Nation. Myers has worked with anthocyanin pigment from blueberries in printmaking and in her stop-motion animation. Her participatory performances involve sharing berries and other food items in social gatherings, reflecting on the value found in place and displacement; straining and absorbing. Recently, her artistic practice has expanded into audio and augmented reality projects that draw attention to the histories of the land, dislocation, and gentrification. Through close attention to Myers’s practice, this conversation will allow us to reflect on themes and concerns articulated in An Opulence of Squander, currently on view at the Belkin.

Of Other Earths is an online conversation series recuperating forgotten, suppressed and abandoned histories to reconsider capitalist and colonial relationships to the planet and its inhabitants. Multiplying and compounding environmental harms are radically destabilizing earthly habitats, calling into question the viability of existing productivist paradigms that require continuous resource extraction and consumption. These dialogues will offer a generative way to think about how we engage, care for, and conserve past works of art and artists and the ecological lessons that experience might hold.

Conversations take place:

Tuesday, October 8 at 12:30 pm with Lisa Myers
Tuesday, November 5 at 12:30 pm with Camille Georgeson-Usher

Past conversations:

Tuesday, September 10 at 12:30 pm with Soft Turns

All conversations take place via Zoom - register for the link at:

🔗 https://belkin.ubc.ca/events/conversation-of-other-earths/ 🔗

Images: Soft Turns, ematerial (stills), 2019. Courtesy of the artists

.cm .turns

Decolonization Tour, Friday, September 27 at 1 pm

As part of the events leading up to the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day at UBC, join the Belkin’s Public Programs staff for a Decolonization Tour to explore artworks by Indigenous artists at UBC, which is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.

The Decolonization Tour highlights site-specific artworks by Indigenous artists and raises questions around issues of place, space and identity. Considering how these works address urgent social and political concerns, we will discuss ideas of settler colonialism, decolonization, reconciliation, protocol and the history of UBC’s Vancouver campus, which is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. We'll take a look at works by Kayám̓ Richard Campbell, Brent Sparrow, Ellen Neel, Edgar Heap of Birds and James Hart, 7idansuu (Edenshaw).

Tours are free but we ask that you preregister at the link below:

https://belkin.ubc.ca/events/decolonization-tours-september-2024/

For more about Orange Shirt Day at UBC, visit:

https://irshdc.ubc.ca/orange-shirt-day/

Image: Edgar Heap of Birds, Native Hosts, 1991/2007

UBC Faculty of Arts