Inside and Out: An Interview with Diane Espiritu

by Debbie Cheung

Diane Espiritu is Satellite Gallery’s resident artist at Inside and Out, an interactive drawing event on June 9^th as part of this year’s Vancouver Draw Down. We visited her newly renovated studio in Chinatown and got a behind the scenes look at her work.

Mumbai Diaries, Part 3: An Artist Profile of M.A. Jafar

by Erin Campbell

Kala Ghoda  is the centre for art in Mumbai. At the centre of Kala Ghoda is Jehangir Art Gallery, where artist M.A. Jafar sells his paintings on the sidewalk outside of this monumental building. He creates his paintings alongside palm-readers, rice-writers and a host of sketch artists who promise to draw your portrait in five minutes or less.

Beat Nation, Mastering Tradition with Urban Youth

by Janine C. Grant

The exhibition of Beat Nation begins even before you enter the Vancouver Art Gallery. Carved into the cement by the Hornby Street entrance, the stylized logo ‘Indians’ of the Cleveland Major League Baseball team physically imprints the sidewalk with new meaning.  Interweaving the history of Vancouver with contemporary re-appropriation, Nicholas Galanin’s piece sets the tone for the work found inside. In the past, the gallery building held the Land Title office of still un-ceded Coast Salish territory. The enlightening play between space, medium and meaning throughout the gallery presents re-interpretations of tradition and the lived experience of Aboriginal people today.

The Business of Art in the Digital Age

by Liza Montgomery

In his influential 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, German cultural critic Walter Benjamin examined the effects of a changing technological environment on the status and function of art. While Benjamin’s predictions—that new reproductive technologies would diminish the symbolic and ritual authority of the “original” art object—have since been contested by art theorists, his work continues to highlight the need to attend to the relationship between changing technologies of representation and the value and function of art in a society.

Seventy years later, the development of the internet along with a rapid succession of new digital technologies has ushered in a new technological era: a digital age in which the “original” has become conceptually indistinguishable from its copies. Characterizing this new culture, and reflective of the internet itself, is the increased accessibility and free flow of information and images that threaten capitalist notions of space, private property, and ownership.

Camera Absentia: B/I

by Sean Michael Nelson

How does one express the grief over the loss of a loved one? Roland Barthes wrote several works in the wake of his mother’s death, among them Camera Lucida, a personal reflection on the essence of photography. In it, Barthes notes that the “photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.” Ishiuchi Miyako’s (石内 都) photographic series Mother’s (2000 – 2005) is one instance where photographs say what-is-no-longer through what-has-been.

2 on 1: An Interview with Adriana Estrada-Centelles

by Stella Hsu and Rhys Edwards

The Body of the Crime by Marcos Ramírez Erre

Satellite’s bloggers Stella Hsu and Rhys Edwards interview the curator of our current exhibition Broken Borders

Stella Hsu (SH): Describe the narrative of how Broken Borders came to be.

Adriana Estrada-Cantelles (AEC): During the first year of my masters in Critical and Curatorial Studies at the University of British Columbia, many of the readings and discussions were focused on the war on terrorism and the relationship between war, violence and contemporary art. Art history and contemporary art theory have developed ways of thinking about the resulting violence as well as the various forms of its representation in contemporary art. This war on terrorism, between the United States and Middle East, has left aside other urgent conversations on war and violence, such as the drug war in Mexico. I was interested in foregrounding, in terms of curatorial practice, a contemporary war on a much more complex, global scale that has changed the artistic production of many Mexico-based artists.

Mumbai Diaries: Part 2—Interview with Abhishek Bhonsle

By Erin Campbell

I first heard about Photographer Abhishek Bhonsle through a mutual friend who suggested the two of us meet for coffee to discuss Abhishek’s artistic career and his thoughts on the Indian art world. Abhishek began his art career in the Bangalore theatre scene. He was a part of organised theatre jams and performed regularly. He later became an amateur theatre photographer, which gradually led to him to use the camera to explore the stories he discovered on the streets.

I met Abhishek at a beachside café in the steamy heat of Mumbai to learn more about his perspective and his creative practice.