Works of art in “Faces” are presented at 2 additional locations:
Walter C. Koerner Library, 1958 Main Mall, UBC
January 14 – April 30, 201

Satellite Gallery, 560 Seymour Street, 2nd Floor, Vancouver
Rebecca Belmore: The Named and the Unnamed
February 4 – April 10, 2011

Satellite Reception Saturday, February 5, 6 – 9 pm

Faces is an exhibition featuring work from the collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the University of British Columbia. The exhibition explores the diverse ways “faces” are represented, looking specifically at how ideas of gender, race, class and historical contexts affect our understanding of them—aiming to reveal, in the process, that this uniquely human trait is anything but neutral.

“We used the lens or filter of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of faciality to unsettle ideas about pictures of faces, usually called portraits,” states Scott Watson, Director and Curator at the Belkin Art Gallery. “Deleuze and Guattari propose that the face is inhuman, political… As a foil to this view we allowed other texts to enter our dialogue, notably Emmanuel Levinas for whom the face is epiphanic and utterly human.”

Faces includes over 90 paintings, photographs, sculpture and video from the collections and archives of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. In addition, research and travel photographs that date from the 1890s to the mid 1970s have been loaned by the Museum of Anthropology (UBC), the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Gatineau), and the American Museum of Natural History Library (New York).

This exhibition includes works by: bill bissett, Claude Breeze, Dana Claxton, Stanley Cosgrove, Kate Craig, Lawren Harris, Ray Johnson, Ken Lum, Myfanwy MacLeod, Liz Magor, Al Neil and Andy Warhol, among others; and photographs by Charles Edenshaw, Dan Jorgensen, Fred Rychman, Harlan Ingersoll Smith from museum archival collections.

The exhibition, Faces takes place in three locations in Vancouver: the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (UBC), Walter C. Koerner Library (1958 Main Mall, UBC) and the Satellite Gallery (560 Seymour Street).

At Walter C. Koerner Library (Monday-Friday 8 am-11 pm, Saturday-Sunday 10 am-11 pm), a collection of portraits represents some of the men and women who have been part of the history of the University of British Columbia between 1913 and 1966. Since the early 1980s, these portraits left the departments from which they originated to be stored at the Belkin Art Gallery. Many of the artists who created these images are major figures in the history of Canadian art such as Peter Aspell, Robert Harris, John Koerner, Lilias Torrance Newton and Charles Stegeman.

At the Satellite Gallery (Wednesday-Saturday 12-6 pm and Sunday 12-5pm), Rebecca Belmore’s The Named and the Unnamed (2002) will be presented from February 4 to April 10, 2011. This powerful installation confronts the viewer with images of loss, struggle, and silence. It incorporates a video of Vigil that Belmore performed at the corner of Gore and Cordova Streets on June 23, 2002. The Named and the Unnamed is in polemical commemoration of the women who have gone missing in the downtown east side of Vancouver. It is a reflection on the larger implications of this local event.

We thank Walter C. Koerner Library and the Satellite Gallery for participating in this project.

Faces is a project of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. It is co-curated by Scott Watson and by students in the undergraduate program and the Critical Curatorial Studies and Theory graduate program in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia: Kate Barbaria, Adriana Estrada Centelles, Jonah Gray and Mohammad Salemy. An illustrated catalogue with essays by the co-curators and by Karl Fousek accompanies the exhibition.

We thank Jerry Allen, Rebecca Belmore, Neil Campbell and Dana Claxton for lending works of art and our donors who have generously gifted works to the permanent collection. We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support of the Canada Council for the Arts and our Belkin Curator’s Forum members.