Opening Reception: Friday, Jul 2, 7-9pm

The volume of vehicles is building, the roadways are expanding, and the artists are there, stuck in traffic, performing in this redefined landscape. In the language of traffic radio, “hotspots” are street locations where abnormal occurrences temporarily slow vehicular traffic. These are generally thought of as locations of traffic accidents, construction zones, and traffic light malfunction—in other words, locations to be avoided.
 
The “hotspots” of Surrey Art Gallery’s exhibition Checking in with your hotspots are instead flashpoints where artists Michel de Broin, Jenipher Hur, Ken Lum, and Michael Markowsky perform and engage with the landscapes of the roadway and the vehicles that pass along them. This exhibition opens July 3 and continues to September 12. An opening reception to which everyone is invited takes place July 2, 7–9pm.
 
Evoking earlier days of stagecoach travel between BC’s Interior and the Coast, Michael Markowsky’s mural/video installation Painting on a Truck on the Grand Trunk Road, Surrey BC depicts the landscape-in-motion while the artist paints from a moving flatbed pickup. Ken Lum’s Entertainment for Surrey shows the artist performing for passing traffic on the edge of the Trans-Canada Highway during morning rush hour. In You Are Included Jenipher Hur presents animated traces of her epic walking journeys throughout a city’s dense network of expressways, underpasses and side streets. Michel de Broin’s Shared Propulsion Car depicts an altered pedal-powered 1986 Buick Regal as it weaves its way through metropolitan traffic.
 
The artworks of Checking in with your hotspots reconsider the role of the citizen-commuter and the spaces of transport that are always under construction in the 21st century megalopolis.
 
Checking in with your hotspots is presented concurrently with ARTS 2010, Open Sound 2010: play.back.work, and Surrey Artswest Society: Avenue of Art.
 

A display of recent paintings and other two-dimensional works in a range of media by Society members.

Commuters and residents will see and hear animated images and sounds come and go, as the SkyTrain passes by Surrey Urban Screen every evening after sundown. This interactive public artwork created by Flicker Art Media (Aleksandra Dulic & Kenneth Newby) is activated by the passing trains and the imagery references the diversity of those travelling by transit in the Lower Mainland.

Artists have long portrayed humans at play. Likewise, play and games have long been a part of art. Game Show is a group exhibition that investigates the many relationships between contemporary culture and play, games and visual art. Against the backdrop of the rapid ascent of videogames and portable play consoles in contemporary life, and in the wake of recent large-scale sporting events, Game Show will examine play and games as forms of mediated display and communication. The artworks in the exhibition examine the similarities and differences in play across the diverse cultural practices associated with recreation, sport, electronic and table-top game play. Drawn primarily from the Surrey Art Gallery’s Permanent Collection, Game Show’s combination of photographs, drawings, prints, videos and sculpture will raise questions about how play and games function in today’s globalized world. Artists include Matilda Aslizadeh, Jim Breukelman, Christos Dikeakos, Brian Howell, Keith Langergraber, Evan Lee, Corin Sworn, Colette Urban, and Paul Wong.