The Peak

Shaping the Audain gallery

By Adam Cristobal

I will admit that I find this new Woodward’s contemporary arts campus a little unsettling. Aside from being well beyond the university’s budget, it’s a little overdone, so I have carefully manoeuvred The Peak’s Arts section around addressing the big W2.

Every mainstream media outlet in the city has probably had press releases flood their inboxes with regards to Robert LePage and his “critically acclaimed” play, Le Dragon Bleu, coming to the university’s Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre this month, so odds are that readers will be able to find reviews galore of this production elsewhere and outside of The Peak’s pages. Let us remember that LePage’s production, among others, is a diadem of SFU Inc.’s big-money parade into the Downtown Eastside, ultimately serving as a simple one-upsy to UBC’s Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. Pardon my pseudo-hippie rhetoric, but I find this unsavoury. So, maybe I’ve snubbed Woodward’s, just a little.

But Woodwards is not all that bad, really. Say what you will about “gentrification” and half of the campus not actually functioning as a space for learning, its new gallery — the Audain Gallery — is a beacon of hope in what might otherwise be termed a yuppie playground. I took a peek last week, and while the gallery is not quite finished, the money has clearly been spent well: Audain is a glorious white space with countless track-lights which radiate with halogen, massive moving dividing walls, and freshly-poured concrete floors that would make any hipster designer squeal.

Unlike much of the rest of Woodward’s, this gallery is genuinely intended for students. Viennese and Vancouver-based artist, Sabine Bitter, has been teaching in the university’s visual arts program for the past three years and recently took up the position as the new curator of the Audain Gallery. She was kind enough to speak to The Peak about her professional background and the gallery’s focus.

Though not trained as a curator, Bitter’s approach is conducive to her new position as well as the intermediary and pedagogical philosophy of the Audain Gallery. “It’s my first post as a curator,” she said, “but my colleagues and I understand artistic practice as not only a very studio-based practice — that’s part of it — but very much involved in the discursive part of making art, research-based, and organizing, communicating, collaborating with different groups.”

While the “really incredible, great facility” of the SFU Gallery on the Burnaby Campus is tied to SFU’s art collection, Bitter told The Peak that her and her colleagues see the Audain Gallery as “project-based” with an emphasis on “engaged pedagogy.” Academic jargon can get a little messy, but in broad strokes, this means that contemporary arts students will have an opportune chance to hone their skills through the gallery’s connections to international artists.

“There is one thing that is really important: we have . . . in the making, an artist-in-residence program, the Audain Visual Arts Residency Program,” explained Bitter. “A minimum of two international artists will come to Vancouver and work with students, faculty, with the community. It’s not just, you know, coming in, setting up a show, and leaving, but very much an engaged work which is project-orientated, and that, now, is tied to the [Audain] Gallery. This resident will, somehow, have a project in the gallery. It could be that the artist is working with a particular part of the practice, or it could be a project-orientated workshop. But, it could also be an exhibition where the artist engages in different ways with the students and faculty.”

“We have a very small-scale but really nice visiting artist talk series at Alexander Centre, in the visual arts,” she added. “We left the program quite open for now, because we really want to shape it to what the artists would like to do.”

“There will be four main exhibitions,” continued Bitter. “Two projects with the Audain Residence program — international artists coming here and collaboratively working with people who are setting up their own shows, and then we want to have one collaboration with an international partner and one collaboration with a local partner . . . we’d be applying together for budget and setting up the structure.” Considering the ominous budget cuts, it is crucial for the artistic community to work together. Bitter and her colleagues realize this and have already begun working with Centre A, so the Audain Gallery is certainly headed in the right direction.

This space is not limited to the big kids, and Bitter made this clear. “A very important part of the gallery’s program is not only the visiting artists who will work directly with students, but also the students’ exhibitions,” she told The Peak. “The third-year exhibition which used to be up at the [SFU] Gallery . . . that will probably be here. There is, of course, also the grad exhibition, which is always a really great thing at Alexander Centre. The Alexander Center is often too small, so the [Audain] Gallery will absolutely provide the space for student shows and MFA shows, if they happen.”

In the past, Bitter has worked with Viennese artist Helmut Weber on urban geographies, an experience which will certainly come into play when working in Vancouver’s rapidly changing Downtown Eastside. “Of course we’re always asked that question,” Bitter said. “How are you going to deal with the community? We actually thought to do this artistically and discursively.”

This has been embodied by the Coming Soon exhibition (AudainGallery.ca/Coming-Soon), which consists of Ken Lum’s “provocative” window project, “I Said No,” on the gallery’s Hastings entrance as well as the web-based projects of SFU alumni Lorna Brown (“AdmIndex”) and Jamie Hilder (“DTA”). “We commissioned artists to do work, site-specific,” Bitter said. “Either they could work around SFU or the Downtown Eastside.”

Coming Soon functions almost as an open address to the community, and now that the deal is done and the protests have happened, maybe it’s time for dialogue. “It’s not so much a preview so much as it is a move to be aware.”

“We thought, ‘Before we say how we deal with it, let’s see what the different expectations are,” Bitter continued. “‘What are you expecting from us? What are you expecting from art? What is the role of art? What role should art play in this neighbourhood, or in the community, or in public? Which public does it address?’ We thought we’d ask the question before hand, ‘What are you expecting?’ whoever the ‘you’ is. But also, the question is what I expect, what I as an artist expect, or I as a faculty member expect from this neighbourhood.”

“We will come here, but let’s ask questions before we come here, and see how those different expectations can be negotiated.”

I expect we shall see some interesting work at Audain, and perhaps this white space — so small in comparison to the looming bricks and concrete of the rest of SFU’s new bastion — will be the most interesting, unique, and open-minded place at Woodward’s. This is something to which we can look forward.