Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! features new works by thirteen UBC Master of Fine Arts students in a variety of mediums. What unites the works is their exploration of the concepts of perception and translation.
The title of the exhibition is inspired by the famous windmill scene in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and the book by Edmund Carpenter of the same name. The prevailing theme of Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! is translation (or mistranslation), underlined by its working process. In the case of this exhibition, the curators made phantom “interventions” into the artists’ practices, resulting in a dialectical dialogue between the curators and the artists. The thirteen audio, textual and visual “interventions” were playfully based on the referential title and the themes of the exhibition. Forming a collective yet fragmented and macabre narrative, the “interventions” are suggestive of the intangibility of individual perception and its concomitant effect on interpersonal relationships. The artists interpreted their analytical and visceral reactions to the “interventions” into their respective artworks.
Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! is curated by the University of British Columbia’s first year MA Critical and Curatorial Studies students, Jacqueline Mabey, Kim Nguyen and Alison Rajah.
This exhibition is supported by the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory and the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the University of British Columbia.