Lossless at SFU Woodward's

So I didn't get to my Fringe show yesterday afternoon owing to the usual time suck that always overtakes one at the start of a new term. However, I did make it to the opening of the MFA Graduating Exhibition at SFU Woodward's. Called Lossless, it features works by Luciana D'Anunciação, Deborah Edmeades, Jeffrey Langille, Avery Nabata, and Nathaniel Wong; together they have produced one of the strongest graduating shows in recent memory.

D'Anunciação's piece, When will my hands become roots?, actually takes place in Studio T, on the second floor. A performative installation that combines video projections, music and sound, hung cloth, and natural objects, the work explores questions of place and displacement, home and exile within a total sensory environment that, starting this evening at 8 pm and continuing through Saturday, will be animated by D'Anunciação's own body.

The rest of the works have been installed in the Audain Gallery, and three of them are video-based. Edmeades' complex and hilarious On the Validity of Illusion asks, among other things, how subjects can become objects and objects subjects "through the invisible co-ordinating 'now' of the camera lens."
Jeffrey Langille's How is it that there is always something new? adapts the conventions of landscape painting and photography to the durational space of the screen in order to explore the eventness (geological, meteorological, auditory) within stillness. And Nathaniel Wong's Thus Spoke Death and Transfiguration is a multi-channel installation that sets up a dialectic between the "aestheticization of the banal" and the "trivialization of the everyday," in part by re-performing a lecture on "Being Happy" by the French philosopher Alain Badiou (a clip of which you can find on YouTube here).

The show is rounded out by Nabata's Growth, Endlessness, Blocks. A series of deceptively simple wood sculptures, Nabata's focus on how distinct units fit into each other in order to make a foundation and build a bigger structure evokes questions of architectural scale that one cannot help but read against the crane-dotted skyline of Vancouver.

The show runs until September 27, and it is definitely worth checking out.

P.