Main Gallery
September 12 - October 24, 2009

Sandow Birk:
The Depravities of War

Sandow Birk is a prolific Southern California artist working in a wide range of media: painting, printmaking and cinema. The SFU Gallery will show his series of fifteen outsized woodcuts about the US incursion into Iraq titled The Depravities of War. The series was inspired by recent events as well as by the war etchings of Jacques Callot (1592–1635), titled The Miseries of War, which in the early 1800s were a source for Goya’s The Disasters of War. Birk worked from TV and Web news reports at the time of the US-led invasion, making small drawings of news images, blowing them up to 4 X 8 feet at Kinko’s and then grinding and gouging the plywood sheets – the resulting prints resemble images from a graphic novel. Birk is a witness to our times, reflecting & refracting events back to us; he protests injustice through his woodcuts and, as with Jeff Wall’s photographs, shows us history writ pictorially large, transforming news events into something strange and horrible, yet weirdly familiar.

The prints depict recruiting scenes (“enlist Army, free college”), training, the invasion, the destruction of Baghdad, the occupation, the local insurrection, incarceration, and Senate investigation hearings, that have, so far, only occurred once, amongst other stages in the “Bush/Cheney War.”

Artist talk & film screening:
At the Burnaby Campus, 2pm, Saturday September 12, followed by an opening reception from 3 to 5pm. Screening of Birk’s legendary film In Smog and Thunder: The Great War of the Californias.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue of the exhibition published by HuiPress, Makawao, Maui.

Lunchtime talks at Burnaby: Tuesday September 15, 12:05, Wednesday September 16, 12:35, Wednesday September 30th, 12:05, & Thursday October 1, 12:35.

Film Screenings: In Smog and Thunder: The Great War of the Californias
Friday October 2nd, 7PM. SFU Vancouver Campus, 515 W. Hastings, Room 1600.
Wednesday October 14, 7PM. SFU Vancouver Campus, 515 W. Hastings, Room 1600.

Sandow Birk
Top: Invasion. Bottom: Destruction. 2007. Woodcut on Sekishu paper, 48" x 96"
Courtesy of Hui Press, Makawao, HI and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

Sandow Birk is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco and Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Culver City