You’re invited to enliven your evening and meet new friends by joining in an informal tour of the Surrey Art Gallery’s current exhibitions with gallery curator, Jordan Strom on Feb. 10, 7:30-8:30 p.m.
Strom will introduce the exhibitions In Transition: New Art from India and There/Here: Germaine Koh and Gordon Hicks from 7:30-8 p.m.
Participants are invited to stay for conversation over refreshments after the tour. Admission to this event is by donation. Admission for Surrey Art Gallery Association members is free.
Urban, edgy and innovative, India’s contemporary artists transform how we think about India in the exhibit, In Transition: New Art from India, presented in recognition of the Year of India in Canada in 2011. Indian art has undergone dramatic changes over the past quarter century. Since the early 1990s to the present, artwork has increasingly been made that responds to the vivid worlds of global cinema and television, music videos, the Internet, new media advertisements, and new video game technologies. This exhibition features an exciting new wave of Indian artists who combine sculpture, installation, and digital media to interpret the social, political and economic and religious implications of their country becoming a major world economy. Exhibiting artists include Ranbir Kaleka, Reena Saini Kallat, TV Santhosh, Sudarshan Shetty, artist collective Thukral & Tagra, and Hema Upadhyay. In Transition is presented with the Vancouver Biennale, until March 27.
To be tele-present, so contemporary philosophers tell us, is to be in two spaces at the same time through technological communication. Artists Germaine Koh and Gordon Hicks are interested how, in our age of everyday telepresence, manifested by constant mobile phone and portable computer use, relationships between time and space are being altered in significant ways. In Koh and Hicks’ new work There/Here (2011), two doorways link space and time through the sensation of touch. Using an internet data stream, the actions performed by a visitor on one door (e.g. opening or closing) are duplicated on the other. Though located in the Gallery’s TechLab, each door could be anywhere – for example, one in Surrey, BC and one in Surrey, UK, with the same result in sensation. In this spatial diptych of co-relation the act of entering is simultaneously a form of uncanny exiting. Also included in the exhibition are Koh’s Call (2006) and Hicks’ loop_02 (2011). Call (2006) alters redundant telephone technology to provoke random contact and informal discussion with strangers across short distances. Loop_02 (2011) presents two simultaneous images that address the phenomenon of mental projection through space during the act of mediated communication. There/Here is on exhibit until March 20.
The Surrey Art Gallery is located at 13750 88 Ave. Phone 604-501-5566 or check www.surrey.ca/arts
for further details.
