Moozhan Ahmadzadegan

BFA 2019

Artist statement: My artistic practice is primarily based in painting and screen-printing. While both mediums vary in results, they often share a unified underlying objective. I use my platform as an artist as a means of personal inquiry and social commentary.

I am interested in navigating my understanding of socio-political topics through visual arts. Oftentimes, my work involves exploring themes of identity, specifically, surrounding culture, ethnicity, nationality, and queerness. While these themes are not new, they maintain contemporary relevance.

The themes embedded in my work, while very personal, are not only for my own investigations, but also to make visible the experiences of others and to create a space for open dialogue.

But Your Skin Is White, 2019. Cotton sheet, bleach, spray paint, 60.9 x 91.4 cm.

Brit Bachmann

BFA 2013

Artist statement: Across disciplines, I have maintained a preoccupation with ‘the mundane’ as a means of understanding that which connects peoples’ experiences and interests.

From the voyeuristic animations of my earlier practice, to abstract neighbourhood soundscapes, and clay works that blur sculpture and function, each distinct expression is a stroll through my curiosities.

In working with clay and creating tactile pieces for everyday use, I share the most intimate characteristics of my creative process and bring my practice full circle.

Self-portrait as tragic Justice, 2019. Ink on paper, 22 x 15 cm.

Scott Bertram

BFA 2007

Artist statement: I strive to create paintings with a sense of openness and unfamiliarity by searching for form that I can sense, as if on my periphery, and negotiating that with what is presented before me on the canvas.

Through the use of improvisation, intuitive structures, and openness to possibilities, I am able to proceed in painting without fixing my view or knowing what the painting will eventually become.

The kind of painting that I aim for is one that I am not completely able to grasp, yet it doesn’t push me away, and so I want to stay with it and remain within its ambiguity—in not knowing.

1906, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 152.4 x 121.9 cm.

Arden Boehm

BFA 2018

Artist statement: In a culture that is controlled by material accumulation, we are continually encouraged to look for gratification in the form of attainment. My work investigates the relationship that we humans have with everyday objects.

I deal with concepts of production as well as categorization and the notion of the archive. The seeming banality of everyday objects is countered by the emphasis designated by the basis of my exploration.

I am fascinated by the value placed upon specific objects, as well as the act of casting away the seemingly useless when something newer comes along. My investigation is fueled by the social concerns that arise from a continuously growing mess of mass-produced things that are often so quickly considered to be worthless.

Crushed, 2018. Assorted metals, Baltic birch plywood, dimensions variable.

Sarah Burwash

BFA 2009

Artist statement: Situated in non-specific yet decidedly natural landscapes, my work depicts figures experiencing the spectrum of life: creation, destruction, rest, play, curiosity, sorrow, exhilaration, death.

Landscapes appear as outlying settlements in which I research the realm of physical and emotional experience including struggle, hard work, failure and vulnerability. These dreamlike environments celebrate and question a range of gendered interests and identities with undertones of humour, fantasy and performance.

Nature perseveres regardless of its hardships—a disjunctive labyrinth to traverse in search of a meaningful path. In contrast to the virtual languages that saturate us, my intricate cut-and-paste style reflects an inclination toward the tactile and rudimentary.

Top: Blurred at waist high river, 2018. Watercolour and collage, 55.8 x 76.2 cm.

Bottom: Sky Show Blue, 2009. Watercolour and collage, 213 x 27.9 cm. UBC Okanagan Public Art Collection.

Connor Charlesworth

BFA 2015

Artist statement: Recently, I have been making paintings based on digitally-constructed collages.

I do not limit myself in terms of where my reference imagery comes from; many come from personal archives, others are pulled from the internet, and some are pulled from art history. The resulting paintings do not strive to be strictly mimetic, but rather act as caricatures of the reference.

I have been particularly interested in the surfaces of things that mimic the flatness of, and are parallel to, the picture plane. These things end up serving as networks or systems for building up the work. For me, they are both diaristic and a way for me to make quick or fleeting thoughts visible.

Handstand, 2020. Oil & acrylic on canvas, 172.7 x 96.5 cm.

Jon Corbett

MFA 2015

Artist statement: I fused my knowledge of computer programming with my Métis heritage and beadwork practice to develop a generative “digital-beading” application that I currently use to render portraits of my family, mentors and community Elders.

My work “Four Generations” (2015), is a single channel video that shows four generations of my Cree-Métis heritage through animated sequences of spiraled portraits, starting with Nohkom (my Grandmother), Nohtawiy (my Father), myself, and finally Nikosis (my Son). The portraits are computationally generated, with digital beads sewn to the screen.

As each portrait completes, it “undoes” itself from its origin and beads in-place the next portrait in the sequence, representing the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next.

Nohkom (ᓄᐦᑯᒼ), 2019. Computational digital beadwork—digital print, 45.7 x 60.9 cm.

Carin Covin

BFA 2003, MFA 2010

Artist statement: My studio practice is based in the arena of observation and response; when combined with the diary form, it is a place that involves observation of both our public and private spheres.

I suggest that these concepts reflect our social and psychological space, and my work seeks to investigate this fluid location of making. Within this location, I am interested in ideas from second wave feminism, specifically the dialogue surrounding the rights, wages, agency and autonomy of us all, and how this makes up the politics of the everyday.

These ideas underpin the reflections I have when looking at my role in the world, my personal identity, and my responsibilities.

Cyano Length, 2018. Knitted Widmer paper, 60.9 x 30 cm.

Jorden & David Doody

BFA 2008

Artist statement: As sculptors, We wade in the brackish waters between image and materiality, investigating the tactile qualities of sculpture and three-dimensional space in the virtual light of screen culture and the post-internet age of image explosion. With a genuine commitment to experimentation and improvisation, We construct material assemblages that respond to the constant deluge and saturation of visual information.

Our work explores the migration of contemporary culture and imagination into the realm of the virtual network, where We are forced to reconsider presence, absence, and reproducibility as We sculpt our understanding of authenticity. Blurring the boundaries between the rational and the absurd, the measurable and the metaphysical, We strive to dislodge our creative practice from the dogma of prescriptive understanding.

By wrapping the immaterial and the subconscious in a blanket of contemporary psychedelia, We seek to cultivate an unbridled space where contemplation and entertainment mingle freely. We encourage rogue collisions between icons, symbols, and materials that forge new and vibrant networks of associative meanings within the vast nebula of the Post-American Imagination.

Virtually Empty, 2020. Mixed Media Assemblage, printed fabric, printed reflective film aluminum dibond panel and ironing board.

Aj Jaeger

BFA 2013

Artist statement: I believe that art is visual storytelling: communicating a needed message and showcasing beliefs, heritage and vision.

My work has deliberately evolved to depict the complexity and contrast of life through a combination of mediums, symbolism and surface patterns. I am inspired by creating poignant works of art that catch the attention of people distracted by everyday life—as a rally-cry to remind us all to focus on what matters most.

Intuitively acknowledging the uncertainty of life fuels my creative mind and heart to keep expressing candid emotions that positively transform our collective future.

They looked with Envy into her Heart, 2019. Mixed media on canvas, 600 x 480 cm.

Christian Nicolay

BFA 2000

Artist statement:

My art practice is about
paying attention to
systematic confusion

systematic confusion

1, a paradox, or unity of opposites. 2, a process of building or arranging disregarded material into something regarded, regarding the disregarded. 3, noticing the unnoticeable. 4, finding the unusual in the familiar.

My current body of work, “No Where Now Here,” explores current issues of globalization and climate change through the lens of the liminal. Liminal derives from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold. In this series the images reflect concepts of liminality, visually demonstrating transition and transformation—the visible and the invisible.

The notion of space and place occurs in conjunction with ideas of the temporary and permanent, creating a play between the seen and the unseen—the No Where and the Now Here.

No Where Now Here No. 36, 2018. UV digital print on aluminum, 101.6 x 58.4 cm.

Ed Spence

BFA 2005

Artist statement: For this series, I have used video as the raw material and subjected images of the human form to computing errors.

There is beauty and violence associated with the resulting distorted figure. Sometimes it is partially disfigured, partially escapes our sight, or disappears completely. Sometimes it is transformed into a technicolour specter inhabiting a virtual world. It is largely out of my control.

The resulting images are sometimes presented like paintings, but are more accurately a combination of digital photography and generative imagery.

[09:20:59] 18.04.03, 2018. Pigment inkjet print and epoxy, 39 x 31.4 cm.

Pamela Turner

BFA 2017

Artist statement: I am focused on expanding the idea of fibre to include anything that can be linked or woven together, thus re-examining how fibres and materials function. It is important that my materials are only altered through the process of cutting, maintaining subtle but recognizable aspects of what the materials once were.

By choosing to keep my work monochromatic, my aim is to create an emergent image that results in a contemplative response from the viewer, both from a distance and up close.

Blackness has been described as the definitive void, but it also marks the ultimate space of creative possibility. Monochromes both veil and reveal, as the expectations of objects we regularly associate with are given new potential through this method of material transcendence.

Black Weaving, 2017. Mixed media, 213 x 254 cm. UBC Okanagan Public Art Collection.

Tania Willard

MFA 2018

Artist statement:

“Everything within a settler colonial society strains to destroy or assimilate the Native in order to disappear them from the land” (Tuck, Yang, p9)

I am not disappearing.

My MFA thesis project, “Casting Light to Fill Shadow: A Decolonial Aesthesis in Secwepemcúl’ecw,” concerned plaster life-casts of Secwépemc people held in museum collections at the American Museum of Natural History (New York, USA) and the Canadian Museum of History (Gatineau, QC).

These life casts were made in association with the North Pacific Jesup Expedition (1897-1902) and a Chief’s land rights delegation to Ottawa (1916) and were part of a body of physical anthropology of Interior Salish Indigenous peoples.

My MFA thesis project, through the support paper and installation, sculpture and sun-printing, drew parallels between the measuring and surveying of Indigenous lands for settler occupation and the measurement of Indigenous bodies. My project centred on the Indigenous lands and land rights struggle through my own artistic practice.

Anthro(a)pologizing (series): Kukpí7 Clexléxqen Chief Louis: Naming as Decolonial, 2018. From 3D scan, maple burl, tung oil, dimensions variable.