SFU Galleries reimagine relationships in a changed world

When SFU Galleries’ three spaces closed in March 2020 in response to COVID–19, staff there reiterated a commitment to gathering artists and publics in ways that engage with social and political environments as historical inheritances, contemporary realities and speculative futures. They resolved to use the pandemic time to critically examine “how we form community, who we form it with and how we can do it better."

The pandemic’s social distancing imperatives and travel restrictions immediately impacted artists’ production timelines and project realization capacities, but also created opportunities to work inventively across distance and time zones. Exhibitions were reimagined and public programmes pivoted: while some activities were postponed or cut short, others transformed. Social media became a place of exhibition, as did the SFU Galleries website; experimental publications were produced and distributed via the post, meeting people where they took shelter, in their homes; and public programs experimented with the specific capabilities of Zoom.

Currently presented online is Merritt Johnson’s exhibition Love Song, which includes an extension of the project in print that was distributed to the SFU Galleries mailing list. Love Song, as curator cheyanne turions writes, “confronts the violence of cis-hetero patriarchy, environmental exploitation, and white supremacy through the articulation of practice and the building of armatures that dismantle these logics … Love songs are celebrations of love and loved ones. They also mark trajectories of desire, acknowledging the distance between what is and what could be.”

This acknowledgement of imagining what could be reiterates SFU Galleries questioning of how to connect and better serve communities by seeking ways to reorient the concept of distance.

turions continues, “to live in the space of a love song — a good one — is to honour and celebrate connection and community beyond who and what we know. It is to believe in feeling made flesh, of belief made manifest, of justice come to fruition. It is often a complicated place to be, but Johnson offers ideas about how to fortify ourselves for this labour: by rejecting control masquerading as love, and instead celebrating connection and interdependence.”

The distancing restrictions of the past quarter have also created opportunities to examine SFU Galleries’ accessibility infrastructure for its artists and audiences, and to collaborate with SFU’s Centre for Accessible Learning and IT Services to create live and recorded events, image descriptions and described tours. The pandemic has been a challenge — everyone can agree to that — but it has also enabled opportunities to connect differently and reevaluate what that means.