The Fraud that Goes Under the Name of Love

^{The Fraud that Goes Under the Name of Love. Installation view, Audain Gallery, 2016. Photo: Blaine Campbell.}

The Fraud that Goes Under the Name of Love

June 2 - August 1, 2016
Audain Gallery

Billy-Ray Belcourt, Hannah Black, Rebecca Brewer, Anne Boyer, Maggie Groat, Johanna Hedva, Hanna Hur, Dylan Mira, Skeena Reece, Mika Rottenberg and Rachelle Sawatsky.

This group exhibition, co-curated by Amy Kazymerchyk and cheyanne turions, explores how singular and social bodies are affected by the entwinement of love and work. It focuses on under-acknowledged forms of physical, intellectual and emotional work, such as domestic care, cultural production and social activism, which are often referred to as "labours of love." In querying the complexity of this commonly used phrase, the exhibition exposes how this love is valued on global, communal and personal scales.

Artists use material and conceptual strategies to express the physical, emotional and psychological effects of enduring or refusing the conditions of these social roles. Using figurative language, abstraction and poetics, their works express how the conditions and affects of labouring are absorbed in the body and enfolded into life.

The title evokes a line from Italian scholar Silvia Federici's 1975 "Wages Against Housework," distributed by the International Wages for Housework Campaign, that demanded that social and economic contribution of domestic work, motherhood and familial care be acknowledged as labour. American poet Anne Boyer quoted the same line in the title of her 2014 prose poem about how breast cancer puts a woman's body on strike from being able to fulfill her work. The tension between the temporal distance and the material proximity of these two texts frame the exhibition.

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar-elect and completed a BA (Hons.) in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. He is one of the founding members of the Indigenous Feminist Collective and his poetic and academic writing has been published by Assaracus, Decolonization, ActiveHistory.ca, rabble.ca and Red Rising Magazine.

Hannah Black is an artist and writer currently living in Berlin. Her work is assembled from pop music and auto/biographical fragments, and draws on feminist, communist and black radical thought. Her videos have recently been shown at W139, Amsterdam; Embassy, Edinburgh; and MoMAW, Warsaw; and her writing has been published in magazines including Dazed Digital, The New Inquiry and Art in America.

Anne Boyer is a poet based in Kansas City. She works as an Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her publications of poetry include Garments Against Women, 2014; My Common Heart, 2011; The Romance of Happy Workers, 2008; Art is War, 2008; and Good Apocalypse, 2006.

Rebecca Brewer completed her BFA in sculpture and painting at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and her MFA in the Department of Painting at Bard College. She has exhibited at Catriona Jeffries Gallery and Exercise Project Space, Vancouver; Marcelle Alix, Paris; and Walter Philips Gallery, Banff, among other venues. She lives and works in Vancouver.

Maggie Groat works in a variety of media including collage, sculpture, textiles, site-specific interventions and publications. Her current research surrounds site-responsiveness with regards to shifting territories, alternative and decolonial ways of being. Groat’s work has been shown nationally, including at SBC galerie d’art contemporain, Montréal and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. She currently lives on the southern shore of Lake Ontario.

Johanna Hedva is an anticapitalist psychonaut sorceress who strives to practice an intersectional-feminist, queer, anti-white-supremacist, decolonial politics. She makes novels, plays, performances, poetry, myth, autohagiography, theory, books and magic. She is a fourth-generation Los Angelena on her mother’s side, and, on her father’s side, the granddaughter of a woman who escaped from North Korea.

Hanna Hur’s work considers emotional, psychic and spiritual experience. She has recently exhibited at Tomorrow Gallery, New York; Daniel Faria and Roberta Pelan, Toronto; and Shanaynay, Paris. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Dylan Mira works with moving image and text to record how language makes bodies. Her recent projects have been presented at ICA Miami; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York; and Human Resources, Los Angeles. She grew up between the American Midwest and East Asia, and now resides in Los Angeles.

Skeena Reece is a multi-disciplinary Tsimshian/Gitksan and Métis/Cree artist whose work encompasses performance art, spoken word, sacred clowning, writing, singing and video art. She has performed extensively across Canada and internationally including in Sydney, Australia; Belfast, Ireland; and Washington D.C., USA.

Mika Rottenberg was born in Buenos Aires and lives and works in New York. She has shown extensively across the world, including at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; De Appel, Amsterdam; and the 56th Venice Biennale.

Rachelle Sawatsky is an artist and a writer who lives and works in Los Angeles and Vancouver. Her work employs painting, drawing, ceramics, poetry and prose to explore densely internal narratives. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Night Gallery and Harmony Murphy Gallery, Los Angeles; Presentation House Gallery and Artspeak, Vancouver; Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna; and Tate St. Ives.

Events

Opening Reception and Performance by Skeena Reece with Jeneen Frei Njootli
Wednesday, June 1, 7 - 9PM, performance 8pm
Audain Gallery

Curatorial Tour
Saturday, June 4, 1 - 2pm
Audain Gallery

Co-curators Amy Kazymerchyk and cheyanne turions will lead a tour of the exhibition.

Closing Reception
Friday, July 29, 7 - 9pm
Audain Gallery

Closing reception in conjunction with the Lacan Salon and Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroup's 14th APW Conference "On Love," July 30 to August 1, 2016 at SFU. For more information on the conference, click here.