From August 29 through October 10, Burrard Arts Foundation invites the public to attend the galleries newest free art exhibitions.
The three new art exhibitions will open at Burrard Arts Foundation (BAF), the visual arts nonprofit and gallery located at 258 East 1st Avenue.
BAF’s Residency Program has produced two of the exhibitors; abstract painter Russna Kaur and realist portraitist Cara Guri. During the program, the two artists worked side-by-side in the two studios at BAF’s purpose-designed facility in the False Creek Flats. In addition to Kaur and Guri’s works, a new work from Olivia di Liberto is opening in BAF’s Garage; a street facing exhibition window which allows the public to view the art 24 hours a day and showcases early-career artists.
In ‘Suddenly her lips sharpened – it was splendid’, Russna Kaur uses bold colour and large-scale abstraction to speak to her identity as a Canadian of Punjabi diaspora. But despite this overt confrontation of history and identity, the works have as much in common with the heroic gestures of modernist abstraction as they do South Asian material culture, as Kaur effortlessly situates herself within the contemporary painting landscape.
The meticulously realistic, historically-influenced portraits in Cara Guri’s ‘Interstice’ exist in a strange slippage of in-between spaces, tracing shifting notions of time, identity formation, intimacy, and symbol. We are invited into a pact with history in constant negotiation—an invocation of the deeply intimate embedded beside the complex transactions between the artist, the sitter, and the viewer.
Olivia di Liberto creates an explosion of charmingly naive psychedelia with her new public installation in BAF’s Garage, An Extraterrestrial Picnic. Using cut paper, found objects, lighting and painting, the work constructs a kaleidoscopic scene: a picnic attended by aliens. Di Liberto harnesses her background in illustration, street art, and visual merchandising, reimagining commonplace objects through a hallucinatory lens and mashing them up with familiar signifiers of rave and bohemian culture into an alternate dimension of escapism, hedonism, and excessive visual stimulation.
These exhibitions will be on view from August 29 until October 10, 2020. Free tickets can be reserved on Eventbrite. The gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, from 12-5pm, for full information on these exhibitions and Burrard Arts Foundation visit burrardarts.org