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El Cadáver Exquisito: Reflejos del Alma Mexicana at IKBLC Gallery

El Cadáver Exquisito: Reflejos del Alma Mexicana
November 22nd – December 20th

Gallery located at Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia
The “Exquisite Corpse” (also known as “Exquisite Cadaver” or “Cadavre exquis”) is a technique consisting on collectively assembling words and images. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, by being allowed to see only a small section of what the previous person contributed.

The first artist paints a space divided in three parts (sky, horizon and surface), with his/her personal style and technique. After having covered this first part, only the last lineal centimeter of the painting is left uncovered on the right side. The next artist then paints his/her section starting from the visible space, following the same rules.

This technique was invented by surrealists Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard, André Bretón and Tristan Tzara in 1925. The first section represents life, the middle section represents love and the last section represents death (three aspects that are constantly present in the Mexican culture).

The collected works of the original canvas will be cut and returned to its creator, and thus to be unveiled by the same author at the opening reception. Each artist will then mount his/her work on wood frames separately. At the exhibition, the audience will appreciate the thematic of the collection; in addition, to the continuity of one painting to the next one.

To complement this exhibition, each artist will bring three to four paintings of their own collection.

For more information, please go to: http://mexicofest.ca/

Stewart Brand's "Rethinking Green" Webcast Available online

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Hosted by UBC Reads Sustainability Lecture Series, and held at the Liu Institute of Global Issues, Steward Brand has been an environmentalist for over 40 years, and shares his wisdom in his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. His book is a compilation of his reflections and lessons which suggest a shift in the environmentalists’ dogmatic approach, and describes a process of reasonable debate and experimentation. His iconoclastic proposals include transitioning to nuclear energy and ecosystem engineering, and are sure to provoke widespread debate. He has helped define the collaborative, data-sharing, forward-thinking world in which we live. Brand is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Global Business Network, the Long Now Foundation and the Well.

UBC Photographic Society – My Everyday

UBC Photographic Society

UBC Photographic Society

The UBC Photosociety featured photo exhibit entitled “My Everyday” at the Irving K.  Barber Learning Center Gallery that displayed work done by members of the UBC Photosociety.  The exhibition’s theme was about daily living in Vancouver, and the ways that those lives intersect with university life.
The  ideas of the photo exhibition is that often the process of capturing the lives of others—be they family members, friends, co-workers, models, or people in the community—but photographers do not often think through the ways in which their praxis mediates their own experience of reality, or the ways in which this capturing provides an illusory sense of their world as objectively theirs.  For the exhibit, my everyday, emerging photographers have captured the things they see, do, are inspired by, and frustrated by in their everyday lives as students and members of the university community, as a means of both encouraging  and denying fellow-feeling with others.  Thus, the exhibit will allow for a theorization of the “everydayness” of university life—a life all too often described as alien to the “real” world—but at the same time will encourage the viewer to see that everyday life is best understood in terms of a plurality of perspectives.
The UBC Photo Society is an interactive organization for anyone interested in photography, be they casual, serious amateurs or professional photographers. The club offers a wide variety of activities: an online weblog, photo and digital competitions, study groups via mail and the internet, how-to programs, an annual photo competition and a raft of other activities and services.
To see more photos of this exhibition, please find here.

Annabel Lyon

Annabel Lyon’s most recent novel, The Golden Mean (Random House Canada, 2009), animates the relationship between the young Alexander the Great and his tutor Aristotle. It won the 2009 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Annabel’s previous work includes the short fiction collection Oxygen (McClelland & Stewart, 2003), a suite of three novellas, The Best Thing for You (2004), and the juvenile novel, All-Season Edie (Orca Books, 2008). She lives in New Westminster, BC.

On the orders of his boyhood friend, now King Philip of Macedon, Aristotle postpones his dreams of succeeding Plato as leader of the Academy in Athens and reluctantly arrives in the Macedonian capital of Pella to tutor the king’s adolescent sons. An early illness has left one son with the intellect of a child; the other is destined for greatness but struggles between a keen mind that craves instruction and the pressures of a society that demands his prowess as a soldier.  Exploring this fabled time and place, Annabel Lyon tells her story in the earthy, frank, and perceptive voice of Aristotle himself. With sensual and muscular prose, she explores how Aristotle’s genius touched the boy who would conquer the known world.  And she reveals how we still live with the ghosts of both men.

Annabel Lyon read at the Parliamentary Room of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre on September 16, 2010.