Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Contemporary art gallery on the UBC Vancouver campus. Admission is free.

The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery’s mandate is to research, exhibit, collect, publish, educate and develop programs in the field of contemporary art and in contemporary approaches to the practice of art history and criticism.

FALL AT THE BELKIN This fall at the Belkin, we are thinking about the ways bodies are shaped, regulated and imagined. Th...
08/31/2026

FALL AT THE BELKIN

This fall at the Belkin, we are thinking about the ways bodies are shaped, regulated and imagined. Through exhibitions and programs, we are exploring the tensions between freedom and constraint, the forces of external surveillance and self-discipline and the increasingly complex relationship between our physical and digital lives. The fall programs invite us to reflect on how we inhabit our bodies, navigate structures of power and how we might imagine other ways of being in the world.

Addressing ideas of power dynamics and the control of (our) bodies, Jana Sterbak: Dimensions of Intimacy presents the artist’s innovative work that pushes material and sculptural norms, with wearable structures that merge object with performance alongside her video and film work, photographs and drawings. This exhibition is on tour from the Esker Foundation. Join us on Thursday, September 10 at 5 pm for a conversation with Sterbak and curator Naomi Potter, followed by the opening reception at 6 pm at the Belkin. Dimensions of Intimacy runs through Sunday, December 6.

Conversations around bodies, power and the systems that shape our lives continue inside the gallery throughout the fall. On October 3, artist Pegah Tabassinejad offers a live digital performance and discussion that extends a consideration of external and internal modes of control around the body. On October 7, Nizan Shaked presents a lecture in response to Sterbak's work on the impact of cultural movements and identity politics on conceptualism and its legacies. And throughout the term, UBC scholars and curators are invited to talk about their work and its intersections with the current exhibition. As always, you're welcome to email us at [email protected] to book an exhibition tour for your class or group. Visit belkin.ubc.ca for details about all our programming for the fall!

Image: Jana Sterbak, Manifesto, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Denis Labelle

Jana Sterbak: Dimensions of IntimacySeptember 11 – December 6, 2026Artist Talk with Jana Sterbak and Naomi PotterThursda...
08/18/2026

Jana Sterbak: Dimensions of Intimacy
September 11 – December 6, 2026

Artist Talk with Jana Sterbak and Naomi Potter
Thursday, September 10 from 5 to 6 pm

Opening Reception
Thursday, September 10 from 6 to 8 pm

As one of Canada's most influential artists, Jana Sterbak has had a significant impact on contemporary art, artists and audiences for almost fifty years. This exhibition presents a selective overview of Sterbak's practice, celebrating her pivotal contributions to art history and offering a rare opportunity to experience her work firsthand. Dimensions of Intimacy features innovative early work that pushes material and sculptural norms, wearable structures that merge object with performance, significant video and film work, as well as rarely exhibited artist editions, photographs and drawings from Sterbak's own collection.

Join us throughout the fall for programs related to the exhibition, including a Conversation series with UBC scholars who will consider intersections in their research work and that of Jana Sterbak, a lecture with art and culture historian Nizan Shaked who will look at the impact of cultural movements and identity politics on conceptualism and its legacies, and a performance by Pegah Tabassinejad, whose work tests the boundaries between surveillance and participatory agency.

Jana Sterbak: Dimensions of Intimacy is curated by Naomi Potter, and organized and circulated by Esker Foundation, Calgary.

Image: Jana Sterbak, Cones on Hand, 1979. Courtesy of the artist. From Dimensions of Intimacy, Esker Foundation, 2025. Photo: Blaine Campbell

This is the final weekend of our current exhibition, Fragments and Forms: Attending to the Monumental that brings togeth...
08/15/2026

This is the final weekend of our current exhibition, Fragments and Forms: Attending to the Monumental that brings together work by Deanna Bowen, Hazel Meyer and Jon Sasaki alongside works from the Belkin's permanent collection that consider the ideological investments and representational strategies of the monument. Fragments and Forms is organized as a response to a statue of King George VI in the Belkin’s Outdoor Art Collection, with additional work by Rebecca Belmore, Raymond Boisjoly, Deanna Bowen, Christo, Whess Harman, Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens, Luis Jacob, Gerald Kelly, Laiwan, Glenn Lewis, Glenn Ligon, Ken Lum, Hazel Meyer, Kent Monkman, Will Munro, Marianne Nicolson, N.E. Thing Co., Jerry Pethick, Diamond Point, Marina Roy, Jon Sasaki, Kevin Schmidt, Dan Starling, Ian Wallace, Cornelia Wyngaarden and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. Be sure to visit us before it closes on Sunday!

Photos:

.sasaki

Christo (1935-2000) is one half of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artists behind the creation of monumental environmenta...
08/14/2026

Christo (1935-2000) is one half of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artists behind the creation of monumental environmental artworks. Christo studied fine art in Sofia, Prague and Vienna before moving to Paris, where he met his wife and collaborator, Jeanne-Claude, in 1958. Rejecting the theoretical emphases of then-current abstraction for an art grounded in real objects, Christo began to wrap everyday items such as tin cans and furniture in cloth and string, and later in translucent plastic. The act of wrapping became an undertaking of monumental scale and scope, and for nearly four decades, Christo staged large, site-specific, temporary interventions in both natural and built environments. These bureaucratically and logistically complex projects, often years in the making, were conceived and visualized in preparatory drawings and collages made by Christo. This work, Wrapped Monument of Leonardo (1970) is one such editioned collage and references the wrapped monument of Leonardo da Vinci on the Piazza della Scala in Milan, Italy, which Christo wrapped with polypropylene fabric and rope in the fall of 1970. The wrapped monument remained for one week.

Christo’s work is on view now as part of Fragments and Forms: Attending to the Monumental, curated by Tatiana Mellema, which continues through August 16. Fragments and Forms considers the ideological investments and representational strategies of the monument with work by Deanna Bowen, Hazel Meyer and Sasaki alongside work from the Belkin's collection.

Image: Christo, Wrapped Monument of Leonardo, 1970, edition 31/99

In September of 1969, Iain and Ingrid Baxter, known as the art collective N.E. Thing Company (NETCO), gathered a group o...
08/13/2026

In September of 1969, Iain and Ingrid Baxter, known as the art collective N.E. Thing Company (NETCO), gathered a group of Canadian and American artists, curators, critics and journalists who flew from Edmonton to Inuvik. Over a two-day period, the artists Harry Savage, Lawrence Weiner and the Baxters executed a series of outdoor artworks that were documented by the New York curator and critic Lucy Lippard. Documentation of the Inuvik works were shown shortly after as part of the Place and Process exhibition of “outdoor sculptural projects” at the Edmonton Art Gallery.

NETCO’s Inuvik conceptual art pieces mimic the surveying and mapping procedures and the economic, political and cultural histories of territorial control over “the North” by the Canadian government. Evacuating the social dimensions of space deeply rooted in the lands as the traditional territories of the Inuvialuit and the Gwich’in people, NETCO ironically deploys a reductive representation of a voyage of discovery and exploration. Here, place is defined by the expansive exploratory and seismic work being conducted by American, French and Canadian oil company crews in the Inuvik area at the time, and modernist imaginings of a barren and sublime landscape. Although the artists were critically responding to a Canadian visual mythology and resource extraction, the group did not engage with local Indigenous communities or histories of the land.

Work by N.E. Thing Co. is on view now as part of Fragments and Forms: Attending to the Monumental, curated by Tatiana Mellema, which continues through August 16. Fragments and Forms considers the ideological investments and representational strategies of the monument with work by Deanna Bowen, Hazel Meyer and Sasaki alongside work from the Belkin's collection.

Images: N.E. Thing Co., 16 Compass Points Within the Arctic Circle, 1969

Jerry Pethick spent much of his artistic life on Hornby Island, where he gathered materials from the recycling depot for...
08/12/2026

Jerry Pethick spent much of his artistic life on Hornby Island, where he gathered materials from the recycling depot for his sculptural objects while also exploring complex optic technology – lenticular and holographic lenses, for example – which he often incorporated into these works. Mirrors also played a big role in his work – in “I Wish I Looked Like That” (1989), we can imagine Pethick bringing the framed mirror home from the dump and layering it with a phrase that brings us into his thoughts.

Jerry Pethick (1935-2003) was a visual artist who bridged artistic and scientific fields through an immersive study of optics and perception. Pethick’s lifelong interest in technology and the possibilities of visual perception led to experiments with unconventional materials in his art practice such as plastics and lenticular lenses. A key strategy in his experimentation was obscuring perspective, either through lenses or sculptural assemblages, which was reflective of his critique of modernism and linear progress. Pethick’s work gained popularity during the 1960s and 1970s, as it aligned with many counterculture concepts including alternative experiences of reality, op-art and mysticism.

Jerry Pethick’s work is on view now as part of Fragments and Forms: Attending to the Monumental, curated by Tatiana Mellema, which continues through August 16. Fragments and Forms considers the ideological investments and representational strategies of the monument with work by Deanna Bowen, Hazel Meyer and Sasaki alongside work from the Belkin's collection.

This untitled photograph is from a series that Ian Wallace took in Munich museums in the late 1980s showing not the work...
08/11/2026

This untitled photograph is from a series that Ian Wallace took in Munich museums in the late 1980s showing not the works themselves, but the the spaces between the works, thus setting up new dialogues between the artworks and revealing a different kind of immediacy in the depiction not just of art, but of the museum as an insitution. The strong verticals and composition echo the painted bands that Wallace began integrating into his photo-paintings beginning in 1980.

Since 1965, Ian Wallace has been active as an exhibiting artist, writer and educator. He has been an influential figure in the development of an internationally acknowledged photographic and conceptual approach to artistic practice. Wallace uses photography and painting to investigate the relationship between these and other media, with a focus on the production of narrative, cinematic, literary and otherwise.

Ian Wallace’s work is on view now as part of Fragments and Forms: Attending to the Monumental, curated by Tatiana Mellema, which continues through August 16. Fragments and Forms considers the ideological investments and representational strategies of the monument with work by Deanna Bowen, Hazel Meyer and Sasaki alongside work from the Belkin's collection.

Image: Ian Wallace, Untitled, from the 1900 series, c. late 1980s.

Kevin Schmidt’s works often engage with the history of representations of landscape. At least since the Group of Seven p...
08/08/2026

Kevin Schmidt’s works often engage with the history of representations of landscape. At least since the Group of Seven painters, the Canadian landscape has often been depicted as a sublime, unpopulated wilderness. For these photographs, Schmidt hiked into the forests of central British Columbia in search of a panoramic lake view that was interrupted by a lone tree; that tree was then transformed into a pictorial prop. A plaster-like substance was applied to the bark to produce a smooth surface onto which was rendered in paint an image depicting the scene that is hidden from view behind the tree. The dual view is a playful comment upon reality and representation in the history of artistic rendering of the landscape.

Kevin Schmidt is a Vancouver and Berlin-based artist who works in diverse media with a focus on photography and video, often demonstrating strong interests in landscape, music and popular culture. Since graduating from Emily Carr University in 1997, Schmidt has received national and international attention, including exhibitions at Galerie Barbara Thumm (Berlin), Vancouver Art Gallery and Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal.

Kevin Schmidt’s work is on view now as part of Fragments and Forms: Attending to the Monumental, curated by Tatiana Mellema, which continues through August 16. Fragments and Forms considers the ideological investments and representational strategies of the monument with work by Deanna Bowen, Hazel Meyer and Sasaki alongside work from the Belkin's collection.

Photo:

Calling all UBC students, we're hiring!The Belkin is now accepting applications for Gallery Attendants and an Archive As...
08/06/2026

Calling all UBC students, we're hiring!

The Belkin is now accepting applications for Gallery Attendants and an Archive Assistant for the Fall/Winter term through the UBC Student Work Learn program.

Check out our website or the link in bio for details and join us!

🔗 https://belkin.ubc.ca/careers-student-opportunities-winter/ 🔗


UBC Faculty of Arts

Image: Image Bank, Mr. Peanut, Art Rat and Can.D.Man at Queen Elizabeth Park, Vancouver, 1972. Photo: Michael Morris

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The University Of British Columbia, 1825 Main Mall
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V6T1Z2

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Tuesday 10am - 5pm
Wednesday 10am - 5pm
Thursday 10am - 5pm
Friday 10am - 5pm
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