Surrey Art Gallery ushers in the New Year with the group exhibition Facing Time opening Saturday, January 23 and launching the following Saturday, January 30 with a live Instagram event from 6:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.

The human face reveals a lot about someone. From smiling or frowning to more complex expressions of hope, fear, or approval, the face is how people read others. During this pandemic, faces have taken on heightened significance. Most interactions with others happen virtually. Masks cover much of people’s faces, leaving communication up to the eyes.

In Facing Time, Surrey Art Gallery invites the public to get up close to collages of archival portraits, psychological portraiture, altered faces from art history as art stamps, photographs of amateur baseball players, drawings of aged faces suffering from illness, needlepoint representations of French philosophers, terracotta heads, and artworks that use social media as a medium, to name a few examples in this show drawn from the Gallery’s permanent collection and from loans.

The artworks in this exhibition, while mostly created before the pandemic, speak to the current moment of facial interfaces and increased digital activity. Time shrinks as people scroll through faces on social media, join another video conference meeting, and catch up with family and friends in the same or different time zones via video calls. More and more personal devices use digital facial recognition software for identification and surveillance. Selfies still abound. Surrey Art Gallery invites you to look at the human face—in all its beauty, pain, and complexity—and to consider these questions with them this winter.

Participating artists: Durrah Alsaif, Simranpreet Anand, Rebecca Bair, Lorna Brown, Diana Burgoyne, Chila Kumari Burman, Audrey Capel-Doray, Lisa Chen, Qian Cheng, Lincoln Clarkes, Share Corsault, Patrick Cruz, Francis Cruz, Eryne Donahue, Tom Douglas, Wayne Eastcott, Soheila Esfahani, Gabor Gasztonyi, Barry Goodman, Jaswant Guzder, Brian Howell, Jim Jardine, Bill Jeffries, Doreen Jensen, Ali Kazimi, Ann Kipling, Laura Wee Láy Láq, George Littlechild, Ken Lum, Al McWilliams, Elizabeth MacKenzie, María Angélica Madero, Chito Maravilla, Sally Michener, my name is scot, David Neel, Al Neil, Mark Neufeld, George Omorean, Leslie Pool, Deborah Putman, Marianna Schmidt, Jack Shadbolt, Drew Shaffer, Hari Sharma, Stephen Shore, Jarnail Singh, Jeannette Sirois, Manuel Axel Strain, Ed Varney, Carrie Walker, Jin-me Yoon.

Celebrate the online launch on Saturday, January 30 at 6:30 pm on Instagram Live @surreyartgal. Gallery staff will introduce Facing Time and exhibiting artists Patrick Cruz, Qian Cheng, and Francis Cruz will do a performance that addresses profiling and racialization.

Exhibition visits can be pre-booked Tuesdays and Thursdays 4-7 pm and Saturdays 10 am-3 pm: artgallery@surrey.ca or call 604-501-5566, press 1.