Tue, July 7, 2015 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM MORRIS AND HELEN BELKIN ART GALLERY. Melancholy Bay: Images of English Bay, Burrard Inlet and Howe Sound from the Collection
June 19-August 23, 2015
All are welcome, admission is free.
CURATOR'S TOUR WITH SCOTT WATSON: Saturday, June 20, 1-2pm
HOURS: Tuesday-Friday 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday noon-5pm
Melancholy Bay began as a response to the recent oil spill in English Bay. The University of British Columbia, located on unceded Musqueam territory and only kilometres west of the ancient city of c̓əsnaʔəm, looks out over English Bay, Howe Sound and the Georgia Straight, all bodies of water renamed by George Vancouver in the 1790s. The title Melancholy Bay is a reference to Vancouver’s dispirited response to what he saw as “a sublime, though gloomy spectacle.” The settler culture that followed Vancouver to establish jurisdiction and displace the indigenous villages and place names has been consistent in admixing descriptions of majestic landscape with ideas of frontier and resource extraction. As a result we tend to naturalize the large visual imprint made by the resource extraction industries as the picturesque. That is, until there is an oil spill. Log booms clog the mouth of the Fraser River, freighters wanting to load and unload clog English Bay. In the future, more of them potentially will be loading oil piped in from an expanded Kinder-Morgan pipeline and the risk of future spills will increase as response readiness decreases. Melancholy Bay presents work from the Belkn's collection by B.C. Binning, Christos Dikeakos, Irene Hoffar Reid, Roy Arden, Jack Shadbolt, Anne Ramsden, Mark Lewis, Marian Penner Bancroft, Carole Itter, Michael Morris, Gordon Smith, Mark Soo and Stephen Waddell.
Melancholy Bay also celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, which opened in June 1995 and replaced the former UBC Fine Arts Gallery that was located since 1948 in the basement of the old Main Library. The Gallery is the result of a gift from Dr. Helen Belkin and her family. Dr. Belkin was a veteran of the University’s heroic modernist years when she worked for President Norman MacKenzie. It was under his leadership that the Fine Arts, Music and Theatre buildings were constructed, and the Belkin Art Gallery completes this fine arts quadrant. Designed by Peter Cardew, the award-winning building is a modernist construction—even polemically so—and thus reflects the Gallery’s aspirations and traditions.