Matilda Aslizadeh is an emerging Vancouver artist who completed her undergraduate work at University of British Columbia and has recently completed her MFA at University of California, San Diego. She has exhibited her work in TV or not TV: LA Freewaves Festival of Experimental Media Arts in 2002, the Atelier Gallery, Vancouver and the Surrey Art Gallery. Sunday is her first solo exhibition in Vancouver.
Sharon Kahanoff is a filmmaker, artist, writer and educator. Her works have been exhibited in both cinemas and galleries locally and in the U.S., and she has published in exhibition catalogues, art magazines and other art publications. She is a sessional instructor at Simon Fraser and Emily Carr Universities, a volunteer and board member of Artspeak gallery, and she sits on the program advisory committee at Cineworks. Her interests include the performance and theatricality of social relations in contemporary re-enactment art, and the philosophies and ethics of time expressed through the moving image.
Lorna Brown is a visual artist, writer, educator and editor, exhibiting her work internationally since 1984. Brown was the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004 and is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, a collective of artists, architects and curators presenting projects that consider the varying conditions of public places and public life. She has taught at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and Simon Fraser University. Brown received an honorary degree from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2015), the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts Award (1996) and the Canada Council Paris Studio Award (2000). Her work is in the collections of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, the BC Arts Council, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank.
Director/Curator of Artspeak 1999–2004.
Sunday
MATILDA ASLIZADEH
September 6–October 11, 2003
Sunday is a single channel DVD projection seven minutes in duration. In a highly artificial composite of scenic highway viewpoint and beach, groupings of swimsuit-clad young people gossip, flirt and roughhouse. Each group of characters appears to be oblivious to the goings-on around them, their interactions self-contained elements that occur simultaneously, in a staging reminiscent of the dense and lush allegorical landscapes of Peter Breugel. Boys tussle again and again, and the repetition of this sequence seems more menacing each time. A couple tease each other endlessly with playful aggression; petty judgements are repeated until their meaning shifts. Drawing upon concepts of spatial montage, Sunday presents these staged banalities as discrete concurrent narratives, emphasizing the physical proximity and psychological distance of contemporary culture. As the sequences elapse in independently revolving loops, the gestures and phrases form a vocabulary of filmic performance and an index of specific place and time. In combination, the work disrupts the single point of focus for the viewer’s attention, in much the same way as the television news, advertising or the internet presents us with a pastiche of time and space references in one compressed glance.
Postscript 10: Sharon Kahanoff and Bronwen Payerle on Sunday (PDF)
Title: GUI: Sunday
Category: Exhibition Catalogue
Artist: Matilda Aslizadeh
Writer: Andrew Klobucar
Editor: Artspeak
Publisher: Artspeak
Year published: 2003
Cover: Paperback
Binding: Metal Fastener Clip
Process: Offset
Features: CD-Rom with Flash Animation, .pdf exhibition text
Dimensions: 13 x 14.5 x 0.6 cm
Weight: 42 g
ISBN: 0-921394-46-2
Price: $4 CDN