In the central courtyard of SFU’s Burnaby campus is a steel framed, cerulean blue pyramid created by sculptor Bridge Beardslee. Energy Alignment Sculpture (1976) was made to reference the proportions of Cheops’ pyramid in Egypt, and positioned to align with the rotation of the Earth’s axis; although some questioned whether it was appropriately positioned to harness “pyramid power.” Brady Cranfield and Kathy Slade read letters and articles written following the sculpture's installation in 1977, to map a heated and often humorous exchange of local controversy surrounding the artwork. The sounds of a synthetic drone and gong are heard throughout, in reference to metaphysical speculations of the frequency 432 Hz, a number which also has connections to mythologies surrounding the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Episode 3 | Brady Cranfield and Kathy Slade on Bridge Beardslee

Carol Sawyer and Laurance Playford-Beaudet, both artists whose practices incorporate sound, focus on the work of May Wilson (1905 - 1986), a prominent figure in the 1960s and 70s North American feminist and correspondence art movements. Following extensive research, Sawyer and Playford-Beaudet explore Wilson’s practice in a textured homage that echoes her approach to collage, splicing audio drawn from archival recordings together with current responsive voice work. Through their experimental process, Sawyer and Playford-Beaudet emphasize the inextricable connections between life and work and how each inform and enrich the other.

Listening To Pictures Episode 4 Broadcast

Ken Lum chronicles the influence and impact of Corita Kent (1918 - 1986), an American artist, educator, and religious sister who, as he argues, was "in many ways the embodiment of pop.” Kent produced a large body of graphically powerful serigraphs that often incorporated song lyrics, biblical verses, literature, advertising imagery and slogans. Lum explains how the focus of Kent’s work became increasingly political throughout the 1960s, particularly concerning urgent issues of poverty and racism. While contextualizing her life and work in relation to her cultural moment, Lum considers her position as a relative outlier within the art world, and a frequently overlooked but important voice in the field of pop art.

Episode 5 | July 14 | Ken Lum on Corita Kent

Marian Penner Bancroft and Patrik Andersson consider fellow Vancouver artist Christos Dikeakos' photographic work x wáyxway / x' áy’xi (1991). Since the late 1960s Dikeakos has played an important role in discourse on conceptual photography in Vancouver, and x wáyxway / x' áy'xi  is part of a larger photographic series engaging with memories, histories, and urban typologies within contemporary urban areas. Penner Bancroft and Andersson discuss the work's depicted view from Stanley Park looking north over Burrard Inlet toward the mountains and the industrial sites along the shoreline, as well as Dikeakos’ efforts to convey how these sites were named and described by the xʷməθkwəy̓əm First Nation prior to and since European settlement.

Marian Penner Bancroft and Patrik Andersson on Christos Dikeakos

Originally produced as a large-scale photographic mural for the City of Vancouver Public Art Program, Althea Thauberger’s Ecce Homo (2011) entangles western art and regional politics, real life and representation. The artwork’s title means “behold the man” in Latin, and offers a contemporary version of Jacques-Louis David's 1793 painting Death of Marat by way of the popular long-running CBC television program Da Vinci's Inquest. Fabiola Carranza and Michelle Helene Mackenzie call attention to the site of the work’s initial presentation in Vancouver, situated amongst the city's economic and social complexities, while considering the dense web of connections Thauberger draws between art and life.

Episode 8 | Fabiola Carranza and Michelle Helene MacKenzie on Althea Thauberger

Comprised of a grid with 16 photographic portraits of youth ranging from infants to young adults from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds, Ken Lum's Youth Portraits (1985) was originally installed as part of a series spray-mounted to the walls of Vancouver's Coburg Gallery (1983-1987), creating a constellation of diverse faces. While in conversation about Youth Portraits, Kara Ditte Hansen and Steffanie Ling reflect on memories of encountering Lum’s conceptual art practice, first as self-described "keener art students," and now a decade later, less burdened by the pressure to perform intellectually cumbersome readings of it. They consider Lum’s exploration — at times humorous, other times painful — of social and political belonging that comes into particular focus when tracing tensions between institutional records and personal experience.

Episode 9 | Kara Ditte Hansen and Steffanie Ling on Ken Lum

Jin-me Yoon has been a critical voice in the development of discussions around identity within visual art for three decades, and has taught as faculty in SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts since 1992. Following Yoon's own description of her artistic strategy as "semiotic collisions” — a means of extracting something from one context and placing it in another to ignite a proliferation of meanings — Laiwan composes their own "semiotic collision" in the form of a three-part score, meditating on Yoon's Souvenirs of the Self (Postcard Series) (1991). Laiwan works to leave the space of representation open, citing American Vietnamese philosopher and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, as a commitment to not speaking on their subject's behalf or in their place.

Episode 10 | Laiwan on Jin-me Yoon

Written in the Earth (2000) is a series of four engraved aluminum and cedar works by Susan Point installed in the Saywell Atrium at SFU’s Burnaby campus. A xʷməθkwəy̓əm Coast Salish artist who was born in Alert Bay and grew up on the xʷməθkwəy̓əm Reserve, Point's artistic practice combines contemporary and traditional techniques to assert Coast Salish culture. At the outset of Point’s career over three decades ago, there were few visible precedents of women carving, though traditionally women did practice carving. Coast Salish artists and sisters C̸OSINIYE Paul and Sage Paul speak on the legacy and techniques of Point’s expansive practice and her influence on new generations of Indigenous artists.

Episode 7 |  C̸OSINIYE Paul and Sage Paul on Susan Point

Carole Itter: On Trying to Be an Artist

What does it mean to bear witness? To be a part of something much larger and more intertwined than the limitations of the individual? How do we shift the paradigm of transactions rooted in impersonal exchanges of the material to intimate sharing between the self and the collective?

In Indigenous philosophy, giving is intertwined with wealth and abundance and status is gained or lost depending on the reciprocal relationship one has with land and community. Exchanges and business in ceremony, and in life, assumes a spiritual form. The act of witnessing is also the act of universal acceptance. It is this ideology that has helped Indigenous Nations maintain sustenance for centuries.

Following Tsēmā Igharas’ performance at SFU Gallery, which culminated her solo exhibition at SFU in Fall 2022, Hughadēsłēł — give it all away, guest participants were invited to recount the event in, as Igharas describes, “a collective remembering, a truth about an experience.”

Guest participants Tanya Lukin Linklater, Alysha Johnny Hawkins, and Mique’l Dangeli experienced the exhibition’s closing performance, and share their witnessed encounters together in a conversation. This audio program is approximately an hour in length and opens with an introduction by the editors Haley McLean and Kristy Trinier, with sound editing by Jean Brazeau.

Episode 3 | Brady Cranfield and Kathy Slade on Bridge Beardslee

SFU Galleries

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