14.02.2015 | 12.04.2015
NEGATIVE SPACE | ANTONIA HIRSCH

Opening Reception: February 14 at 8 PM

Reception sponsored by KPMG

Antonia Hirsch's practice testifies to a long-standing engagement with the quantitative, spatial and syntactic systems that structure an understanding of our universe. Hirsch's work often relates these ordering structures to embodied and visual experience. She explores how the ideological nature of these systems expresses itself through particular forms of abstraction.

Negative Space is an exhibition of new work that investigates the interrelation of inner and outer worlds and opens up a space for speculation on desire and human experience. The exhibition's exploration of seeing and believing manifests in evocations of proto-photographic devices—such as the Claude glass (or black mirror) used by 18th and 19th century landscape painters—and a very terrestrial restaging of NASA footage showing the near-earth asteroid 433 Eros that is part of the Amor group of asteroids. Taking up a history of reflection, Negative Space questions how we and our devices - both historical and present day - favour the image over the "real."

Hirsch is a Berlin based artist, writer and editor.  Her work has been exhibited at the Salzburger Kunstverein; the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; The Power Plant, Toronto; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Tramway, Glasgow; and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, among others, and is held in the public collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, and Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry, Miami Beach.  Her writing and projects have appeared in artecontexto, C Magazine, Fillip, and The Happy Hypocrite.  She is the editor of the anthology Intangible Economies (Fillip, 2012).

The exhibition Negative Space is a catalyst for a parallel publication operating between an artist book and a topical anthology that will be released by SFU Gallery in 2015.  Edited and introduced by Hirsch, it contains conversations and texts by artists, writers, and theorists.

Negative Space is organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in collaboration with SFU Galleries. Funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Lethbridge.