Enjoy an evening of art, cheese, wine, and mingling with our MFA Graduate students during their opening reception of Lossless on September 10 in the Audain Gallery at the Woodward’s campus!
Lossless is an exhibition featuring final projects by the 2014 MFA graduating candidates at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts; the featured candidates are Deborah Edmeades, Jeffrey Langille, Avery Nabata, Nathaniel Wong, and Luciana D’Anunciacao. Video, sculpture, performance, and installation projects by this year’s graduates share a number of related themes, while formulating distinct frameworks for individual investigation.
This exhibition is truly a culmination of the candidates’ studies. After investing long hours of research and late evenings assembling the projects, the exhibition showcases their individual artistic expressions and their personal perceptions on the concept of Lossless.
The word “lossless” is based on the term “lossless compression.” “It is the idea that nothing is lost from an idea,” says Wong. For example, it is the act of articulating a perception of the world, where nothing is lost in the articulation, and the perception is identical to what was perceived.
With his work, “On the Validity of Illusion,” Edmeades explores the question of illusion through video, within which there are elements of object making, works on paper, performance, and elements of Walter Benjamin’s “theory of experience” and reverse method acting technique.
“How is it that there is always something new?” Lagille’s moving image landscape work, draws witness to a landscape that is not a surface — not topography — but a vital process.
With “Growth, Endlessness, Blocks,” Nabata observes buildings, as “precarious structures left on the edge of regrowth or destruction.” They are “blocks of time and type; structures on the edge of change;” simultaneously ending and beginning.
Within “Thus Spoke Death and Transfiguration,” Wong’s videos are embedded into sculptures, there is music and moving images, and within something quite humourous there is also something quite serious. “Of course, something is lost, but maybe things aren’t just lost, but other things are gained that we didn’t know,” Wong says of the idea of Lossless.
Lastly, D’Anunciacao explores the notion of displacement within the dual nature of installation and performance. “When will my hands become roots?” is in between a gallery piece and a performance piece. The room is left in the same configuration; as it shifts between one state and the other, the space becomes a place that belongs to neither one nor the other.
Lossless runs from September 4 to 27, with works from Edmaedes, Lagilles,Nabata, and Wong presented in the Audain Gallery, and D’Anunciacao’s work presented in Studio T. D’Anunciacao’s installation includes an evening performance from September 11 to 13. For more information visit: sfu.ca/galleries.html.
