Marja-Leena Rathje

The Belkin Satellite has an interesting sounding exhibition coming up called Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!.

The opening reception is on Friday, January 19th, 8-10 p.m. at 555 Hamilton Street, Vancouver, BC. The exhibition continues to February 18, 2007.

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.

The artists are Raymond Boisjoly, Melanie Bond, Natalie Doonan, Jesse Gray, Joshua Hite, Paul Kajander, Marilou Lemmens & Richard Ibghy, Elizabeth Milton, Colin Miner, Ryan Peter, Kristina Lee Podesva, Sarah Turner.

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

My thanks to Chris of Zeke’s Gallery in Montreal for the heads up on this exhibition. He knows Jacqueline Mabey, who worked as an intern at Zeke’s Gallery.

We saw an amazing, very educational and awe-inspiring exhibition yesterday – not really an art show**, but a science and health one based on the human body, Body Worlds.

I thought I’d feel a bit squeamish seeing real human bodies with skin, fat and liquids removed and then preserved by plastination. But no, it was amazing to see muscles, ligaments, tendons, organs, and the beautiful filigrees of blood vessels and nerves in bodies posed in various sport activities. There were displays of individual organs, some ravaged by disease. Smokers would be appalled by the black lungs!

We were left with a new found appreciation and awe for the complex and usually well-run machine that is our body. I enjoyed the historical references to early anatomical studies and drawings by artists like Leondardo da Vinci, making me recall an excellent exhibition of anatomy drawings at the Vancouver Art Gallery a few years ago.

Body Worlds has been and is still traveling around the world, so maybe it will be somewhere near you. I’d first read about it when it opened in Tokyo about two? years ago and was thrilled to see it here in Vancouver at Science World. Only a few days left here, so if you haven’t seen it yet, go!

Both the Science World page and the Body Worlds official site are very informative about the plastination process, the donor program and additional educational resources like this student guide, a four minute video, and the amazing biography of the inventor of plastination Gunther von Hagens.

(**I’m going to place this in the art exhibition category anyway, as our bodies are the ultimate work of art as presented here!)