Aporia (Notes to a Medium)
Jan 12 - April 14 2024
Group exhibition at Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver


Colleen Brown, Azza El Siddique, Dani Gal, Katie Kozak and Lucien Durey, Mark Lewis, Jenine Marsh, Jalal Toufic, Elizabeth Zvonar

Aporia (Notes to a Medium) considers how history, mythology and wishful thinking entwine across media and through mediums. In this moment where faith in media, government and institutions is further collapsing, where binarization is on the rise, where expressions of doubt are tactical, this exhibition includes artists’ works that contend with systems of belief and perception to trouble truth’s material (and immaterial) forms.

Holding space for doubt – a space of critical reflection that contains multiple truths or exposes the limits of truth – is a self-articulated strength of contemporary art. Doubt is part of nuanced thinking and ambiguity may be fertile ground for possibility and otherwise thinking. But Janus-faced doubt is also a tactic. The exhibition’s title engages the paradoxical or impassable from the Greek word aporos. This impasse functions as an expression of real or pretend uncertainty that the works in the exhibition collectively query and channel.

Indexical proof has always been a double-edged sword and art has tangled with our less-than-seamless belief in the image and the dubiousness of the image’s power to witness. Social media and AI have led to a renewed power and doubt in what we see, hear and read. How images and texts are created and in what context they are seen are determinants in reception, requiring that we ask what is at stake when media and mediums construct realities through images and words that are inconvenient to power.

The works in the exhibition confront perception and examine power structures to variously query art histories, the patriarchy, capitalism, and the acquisition of knowledge. Jenine Marsh’s installation including three sculptures How to Fulfill a Wish (Bronze, Silver, Gold) (2023) considers social practices converging around the form of a public fountain that at once delivers water to a public and is also a site of symbolic wish-making. The works, in the form of wrapped fountains, include coins, preserved flowers, casts of feet and texts from the socialist newspaper People’s Voice to investigate forms of belief and value.

Aporia (Notes to a Medium) is curated by Melanie O’Brian and made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and our Belkin Curator’s Forum members.


(Wall works) How to Fulfill a Wish (gold, silver, bronze), 2023. Cast bronze, coins, newspaper clippings, epoxy clay, powdered pigment, nails, acrylic varnish, polyethylene tarp, polymer-based mortar, rigid foam.
(Floor) Untitled (coins and nails), 2023. Pennies, powdered pigment, acrylic varnish, nails.
(Lights) Optimism, 2024. Lighting, pressed flowers, gels.