In Place of Sight: MFA Graduating Exhibition 2020

This exhibition presents the work of graduating Master of Fine Arts candidates in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.

In Place of Sight offers a multi-modal meditation on in/visibility. As portals to an altered time and space, the artists’ poetic interventions take the form of installation, painting, drawing, photography, sound, and video. Combining distinct practices and process-based research, the exhibition examines notions of silence, concealment, erasure, embodiment, and the felt. Cumulatively, these works set in motion contradictory assumptions about place: the physical, the historical and the emotional.

As each artist explores within their work an unfolding of hidden narratives contained within place(s), it is imperative to acknowledge how these projects have been created on the the unceded territories of the  Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. There are no treaties on these lands, and the implication of settler-colonial violence, both visible and hidden, continues today in many different forms of ongoing dispossession. To live and make work within these lands, one must confront and take action against both the historical and continued forms of colonial violence, and their present repercussions.

The exhibition of a graduating project represents the culmination of a candidate’s studies, and is presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts. 

All images courtesy Rachel Topham Photography, except where noted.

Presented with SFU Galleries.