Kim Kennedy Austin: You, Only Better
The result of a recent artist residency at BAF, Kim Kennedy Austins new body of work
You, Only Better touches on the seemingly universal desire for self-improvement. In her
past work, the Vancouver-based Austin has drawn from the prose of pop culture,
distilling nuggets of questionable wisdom from such unlikely sources as old editions of
Seventeen, trade magazines, love songs, and YA novels. You, Only Better borrows its
title from a recent New York Times article on Dave Apsey, the prominent founder of
Bulletproof coffee known for his driven, if not fanatical approach to achieving the 3.0
version of himself”and selling the recipe behind it. In North America, methods for self-
improvement”espoused by personal trainers and plastic surgeons, life coaches and
lifestyle bloggers, stylists and self-help authors, make-up moguls and Goop gurus”
proliferate within the marketplace.

Andrew Kent: Epiphoria
Epiphora, a clinical term, describes an uncontrolled flow of tears across the face. The
suffix -phoria can refer to the visual axes of the eye, but also to an emotional state;
euphoria, dysphoria. Like the portmanteau he has created to describe it, Andrew Kents
new show at BAF Gallery evokes the fragility of both our inner worlds and the material
one we inhabit.  Rendered in pencil on black paper, Kents painstakingly detailed seascapes
flicker in and out of visibility as light catches on the reflective graphite surface. The
viewers bobbing, back-and-forth motion that causes the image to appear and disappear is
reminiscent of the ebb and flow of tidal waters, and the shifting mutability of perception
itself.