2024 Capture Catalogue

2024

td.com We are working together with Capture Photography Festival. It’s just one way we are helping to open doors for a more inclusive and sustainable tomorrow. ® The TD logo and other TD trademarks are the property of The Toronto-Dominion Bank or its subsidiaries. Proud to support Capture 2024. M05234

Charlotte Cotton Emilie Croning Asia Jong Sara Knelman Godfre Leung Reid Shier Emmy Lee Wall Kiriko Watanabe Chelsea Yuill

Capture 2024 4 Capture Photography Festival is produced by the Capture Photography Festival Society, a registered not-for-profit. Please share your Festival experience with us on Instagram and subscribe to our Vimeo at @capturephotofest Board of Directors Douglas Coupland, Co-Chair Bruce Munro Wright, Co-Chair Mike Harris R. Stuart Keeler Tanner Kidd Leslie Lee Alison Meredith Donna Molby Jordan Reber Tobi Reyes Mahdi Shams Evann Siebens Adrienne Wood Kim Spencer-Nairn, Founder and Chair Emerita Advisory Board Grant Arnold Claudia Beck Sophie Hackett Helga Pakasaar Donors $10,000+ Rob Bruno Jane Irwin and Ross Hill Leslie Lee and John Murphy Donna Molby Tara and Christopher Poseley Rouzbeh Rabiee Donors $5,000–9,999 Anonymous Claudia Beck Bruce Munro Wright Donors $500–4,999 Karen Bowering Brenda Bradshaw Fine Art Consulting Andrea Davies Brigitte and Henning Freybe Kate and Jesse Galicz Stephanie Glotman Mike, Sandra, and Ruby Harris Mary and Jarrod Levitan Coleen and Howard Nemtin John O’Brian Michael and Inna O’Brian Cathy Radcliffe Ron Regan Sarah Danruo Wang Adrienne Wood and Sam Li April 1–30, 2024 305 Cambie St Vancouver, BC V6B 2N4 capturephotofest.com [email protected] #CapturePhotoFest2024 Capture Team Festival and Communications Coordinator William J. Betancourt Grant and Development Coordinator Katja Lichtenberger Executive Director and Chief Curator Emmy Lee Wall TD Assistant Curator of Engagement Sarah Danruo Wang Assistant Curator Chelsea Yuill Videographer Andrew Booth Bookkeeper Mardie D’Andrea Graphic Designer Nadine Halston Copy Editor and Proofreader Kate Kolberg Printing and Assembly Mitchell Press Catalogue Coordinator Chelsea Yuill We acknowledge the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), səl̓ ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), qʼʷa:n̓ƛə̓ n̓ (Kwantlen), kʷikʷəƛə̓ m (Kwikwetlem), Lilwat7úl (Lil’wat), qiqéyt (Qayqayt), ̓ SEMYOME (Semiahmoo), and sc̓əwaθən (Tsawwassen) First Nations on which Capture Photography Festival takes place. For the most up-to-date programming information, please visit capturephotofest.com Front Cover: Karice Mitchell I, from the Will to adorn series, 2024 Courtesy of the Artist All content © 2024 the artists, authors, and Capture Photography Festival Society. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. All images are reproduced Courtesy of the Artist unless otherwise specified. Capture is not responsible for the specific content or subject matter of any work displayed or advertised. Some images may be offensive, upsetting, or disturbing to some members of the public. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Capture Photography Festival / Charlotte Cotton, Emilie Croning, Asia Jong, Sara Knelman, Godfre Leung, Reid Shier, Emmy Lee Wall, Kiriko Watanabe, Chelsea Yuill. Names: Capture Photography Festival (2024), author, publisher. Description: Includes index. Identifiers: Canadiana 20240321197 | ISBN 978-1-7773547-3-2 (softcover) Subjects: LCSH: Photography—British Columbia—Vancouver—Exhibitions. | LCSH: Public art—British Columbia—Vancouver—Exhibitions. | LCSH: Photography, Artistic—Exhibitions. | LCGFT: Exhibition catalogs. Classification: LCC TR655 .C3576 2024 | DDC 770.74711/33—dc23

5 Founding Donors Anonymous Anonymous Stephen Carruthers John and Nina Cassils Chan Family Foundation Mike and Sandra Harris Brian and Andrea Hill Jane Irwin and Ross Hill Hy’s of Canada Ltd. Jason and AJ McLean Michael O’Brian Family Foundation Radcliffe Foundation Ron Regan Eric Savics and Kim Spencer-Nairn Leonard Schein Ian and Nancy Telfer Samantha J. Walker (in memory of) Bruce Munro Wright Thank you Grant Arnold Claudia Beck Sophie Breault Rydel Cerezo Dana Claxton Dr. Curtis Collins Shaun Dacey Andrew Dadson Catherine Dangerfield Jason Dominic Kate Galicz Tom Gautreau Dennis Ha Jeff Hamada Quyen Hoang Jane Irwin Amin Jamshidifar Bahar Kamali Chris Keatley Sue Kidd Darcy Killeen Sebastian Knittel Arpad Kovacs Nya Lewis Kyla Mallett Robert Marks Ian McGuffie Jason McWhinnie Roy Ng Birthe Piontek Sirish Rao Chantal Shah Reid Shier Evann Siebens Thomas Tran Biliana Velkova Michael Wesik Jenny Wilson Mike Winteringham Faune Ybarra Jin-me Yoon Karen Zalamea Elizabeth Zvonar Capture’s 2024 Catalogue is generously supported by Claudia Beck Supporters We gratefully acknowledge the support of Presenting Sponsor In-Kind Sponsors Media Sponsors Supporting Sponsors Contributing Sponsors Partners

Capture 2024 6 Welcome to Capture During these wildly unpredictable and uncertain times, why photography? This has been at the forefront of my mind this year as we’ve been working on the Festival. Photography has an incomparable ability to represent diverse perspectives and to amplify voices. It has been incredibly rewarding to think about the multiplicity of ideas and the subtle complexities images can evoke. It is this powerful ability to excavate the past, communicate the present, and imagine possibilities for the future that Capture Photography Festival celebrates. Welcome to the 2024 Festival! We are thrilled to share our catalogue this year, which includes commissioned editorial content by Charlotte Cotton, Asia Jong, and Sara Knelman, who explore diverse issues – both deeply personal and publicly impactful – in contemporary image culture. Emilie Croning writes on Karice Mitchell’s public art project, Will to adorn, which brings the Black femme body into the public sphere. We are also particularly keen to use our catalogue to give voice directly to participating artists in interviews with Arielle Bobb-Willis, Gabi Dao, Karice Mitchell, and Karen Zalamea. This year we have collaborated with Booooooom on our Featured Exhibition at the Pendulum Gallery, titled On Time. It examines the way artists have celebrated the elastic nature of how we experience time while uncoupling photography from the idea that it captures a single moment, and therefore a static truth. Kiriko Watanabe, Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Curator at the Audain Art Museum, writes poignantly on the possibilities art presents to facilitate healing in her text on the Featured Exhibition Otherwise Disregarded, connecting the work of four BC-based artists. We also present a text by Godfre Leung on artist Diane Severin Nguyen at the Contemporary Art Gallery, and one by Reid Shier on the feminist art collective Pussy Riot at The Polygon Gallery, both compelling, timely projects that are part of our Featured Exhibitions Program. Community is at the heart of our work. Capture exists because of the artists, curators, audiences, organizations, donors, and sponsors that participate in the Festival annually. I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to everyone whose contributions make our many projects possible. I particularly want to acknowledge TD Bank, Capture’s Presenting Sponsor; their steadfast support has provided a platform for so many diverse voices, and we are truly grateful. I also want to extend sincere appreciation to our committed Board, led by Douglas Coupland and Bruce Munro Wright, for their dedication and wise counsel. I like to think that our team is small but mighty, and I am truly astonished by the ingenuity, support, and positivity our staff exudes every day. Capture’s success is yours, and it is my privilege to learn from and work with you all. Most importantly, I want to thank every artist, cultural worker, curator, gallerist, and writer who has created work, written a text, produced an exhibition, hosted a talk, or facilitated one of the many conversations this year. It is a polarized time and not an easy moment to lean into difficult conversations. I am so grateful to everyone for their willingness to share their work, tell their stories, and have these important dialogues. Emmy Lee Wall Executive Director and Chief Curator

7 120 ARTIST INDEX EDUCATIONAL PARTNERSHIP 118–119 Longing to See: Photography and In-Visibility Birthe Piontek Capture x Emily Carr University of Art + Design SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 92–117 Selected Exhibitions FEATURED EXHIBITIONS On Time Pendulum Gallery Otherwise Disregarded Audain Art Museum Diane Severin Nguyen: If I hadn’t created my own world, I would have died in someone else’s Contemporary Art Gallery Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia The Polygon Gallery 62–75 76–81 82–85 86–89 Kiriko Watanabe and Emmy Lee Wall Maria Alyokhina, Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir, and Ragnar Kjartansson Capture x Booooooom PUBLIC ART Anvil Centre Public Art Project Billboard Public Art Projects Billboard and CONTACT Photography Festival Public Art Project Canada Line Public Art Project Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen 28–31 32–46 46–49 50–57 58–59 TEXTS Small fates big feelings: An Interview with Gabi Dao Fashion Images: From between the Pendulum Swings Framing Desire: Online Dating and the Image of the Asian Woman The World is an Image: Photography in Public Chelsea Yuill Charlotte Cotton Asia Jong Sara Knelman 8–13 14–17 18–21 22–25

Capture 2024 8 Caroline Monnet Renaissance, 2018 Courtesy of the Artist and Blouin Division Part of the GreyChurch Billboard Public Art Project

9 TEXTS Small fates big feelings: An Interview with Gabi Dao Fashion Images: From between the Pendulum Swings Framing Desire: Online Dating and the Image of the Asian Woman The World is an Image: Photography in Public Chelsea Yuill Charlotte Cotton Asia Jong Sara Knelman 8–13 14–17 18–21 22–25

Capture 2024 10 Gabi Dao Liking factors explained, from the Small fates big feelings series, 2023 Xerox colour copy paper, custom parfum formula 43.18 x 27.94 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Unit 17

11 TEXTS Small fates big feelings: An Interview with Gabi Dao Chelsea Yuill Tape, tears, droplets, stains, scans. The collages in Gabi Dao’s catalogue commission, Small fates big feelings, are broken images of snuff bottles and olfactory graphs paired with homemade perfume strips and stains placed on a scanning bed. These fragmentary elements that build the image simultaneously deconstruct it, collapsing our sense of time and value. Focus shifts from the assumed finitude of the image to embodied memory, sensory entanglement, and a desire for alternative ways of being. Challenging photography’s tradition of a singular, decisive moment neatly contained within the immediacy of a photograph, Dao’s process is intentionally slow and nonlinear. Originally from New Westminster, BC, and now based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Dao incorporates “counter-memory, multiple truths, and other ways of knowing” into their multidisciplinary practice toward living beyond the linear capitalist timeline of cause-and-effect. In these collages, Dao gestures to the transient use of snuff and the bottles that survive it, speaking to the circulation and changing values ascribed to scent, commodities, desire, and images.

Capture 2024 12 Gabi Dao Good luck, from the Small fates big feelings series, 2023 Xerox colour copy paper, custom parfum formula 27.94 x 43.18 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Unit 17

13 TEXTS

Capture 2024 14 Chelsea Yuill Your practice encompasses several mediums, including sculpture, installation, collage, moving image, sound, miscellaneous forms of writing, and community events. What was your process in making this body of work? Gabi Dao I work in slow, non-linear, and subconscious ways, gradually collecting and archiving things. These exist as screenshots, sound clips, folders, lists, etc. – all fragments of “information” that I use to relate to things around me in ways that honour their complexities and poetics. I tend to be drawn to things that might be considered “history,” “old,” or “obsolete.” Snuff bottles are one of these interests. Most sources I’ve come across say the snuff bottles in these collages were made when China traded more consistently with European countries like Portugal or the Netherlands. This was between the mid-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, during an economic period called mercantilism, which some consider the precursor to capitalism. I’ve been living in the Netherlands for two years now, and while grasping at meaning and connection to a new place, I noticed these snuff bottles displayed in the collections of many Dutch museums. I became fascinated by their range of designs, materials, motifs, and the contents that used to be but are no longer inside of them: snuff. Snuff is a finely ground mixture of tobacco and aromatic herbs, spices, and oils that is snorted. Originally, snuff was used by Indigenous populations in Brazil and the Caribbean. As a result of colonial trade routes, it became popularized and commodified by Europeans.1 This mixture of olfactory materials was transient. Snuff went through an arc of becoming valuable as a status symbol for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European and Chinese aristocrats, then over time, losing its prestige as its ingredients became increasingly traded. I was fixated on how the contents that the bottles were designed to protect in the first place are now no longer a part of the equation of how these objects are acquired, sold, etc. It is as if these olfactory materials left their bodies and the baggage associated with them. I thought about Legacy Russell’s evocative proposition to “ghost on the binary body” in Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. 2 I imagined the animacy of these olfactory materials escaping their containers – literally and physically – and speculating on who could experience, access, and enjoy them. CY The source material for these scanned images includes olfactory graphs and photo documentation of museum objects. The online archives you’re scrolling through are primarily for academic and educational purposes. Could you speak to how you think through the circulation of images, images of objects, and how cultural value plays a role in your practice? GD I asked myself what it looks like to break the chain of value and who shapes that definition of value, so I literally ended up “breaking” images. The first break is the bootleg, taking the images from the internet or the image breaking from its context (e.g. the Smithsonian Museum collection, Sotheby’s, etc.). The second break is the literal act of tearing the image when it gets printed from the photocopier. Then, I break the image over and over again by repeating the process of photocopying and tearing, photocopying the tear, taping it back together, and so on – a way to make images echo in a dissonant key. I found these olfactory graphs through academic and scientific studies on scent and sensory experiences. The graphs are ways to organize and map information about affective responses to scent categories, which holds such an absurd tension for me because experiences of smell are so tied to memory and subjectivity. I find my practice often flirting with “science” because I’m interested in how knowledge or “truth” is constructed. I find myself confronted with how I, as an artist, participate in this. Working with these charts is a part of those broader questions: how are these empires of knowledge interrupted, and why are aesthetic interruptions critical? CY Your collages combine copies of images, scents, stains, olfactory graphs, and a scanning bed that reveals your hand. What do all of these visual strategies evoke for you? GD Stains are abject. They secrete things that “shouldn’t” be out there in the world, on clothes, on objects. They remind us of the body and its porousness; how it exchanges with the world around it, and how there’s not much we can do about that! When stains appear in images, it’s a way to be uncontained, messy. I think we are conditioned to respond to stains and leaks with anxiety and repulsion because we are taught that our bodies must be clean, tidy, and obedient containers, held to specific standards of race, ability, gender, sexuality, and class. I think the hand and the stains it creates through oils, acid, sweat, and other bodily odours and secretions are powerful. It proves that our bodies can be subversive agents, that the body can secrete out of its vessel. It can trickle out and carry an echo of itself into the future, it can go somewhere else and make something new from what seems like very little.

15 TEXTS Gabi Dao Erogenous/Anti-Erogenous, from the Small fates big feelings series, 2023 Xerox colour copy paper, custom parfum formula 43.18 x 27.94 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Unit 17 CY During a studio visit, you mentioned the desire to “smell an image,” pairing an olfactory experience with the visual – an obvious paradox. Could you expand upon your experimentation with and the interplay between image, text, and smell? GD Scent and its connection to immediacy, pleasure, emotion, and memory became an antidote to the long-term research, pre-production planning, editing, writing, and everything else I was doing/currently do. It feels necessary for me, on a somatic level, to have this creative balance. It keeps images interesting for me. Is scent not a fugitive image anyway? It became an intimate, soothing, and embodied experience: a ritual. It wasn’t always solitary. It became a form of socializing. I bonded with fellow artists and perfumers S F Ho and Megan Hepburn this way, too. They shared their knowledge of scent and perfume with me, and I learned so much! Before I moved to Rotterdam, I started making PPLS Perfume, a first collection of eau de parfum formulas that I think of as olfactory publications because they are something that are disseminated and shared. As a way to make friends in Rotterdam, I started doing Scent Bar, which I would describe as learning around a table with scent family charts, images of different snuff and perfume bottles from my collection, writing worksheets and prompts, and my collection of olfactory materials. Parts of the worksheet prompts and scent family charts are included in this series of collages. Scent Bar(s) are gatherings of small groups of friends or interested folks in the community who come together to write and share freely, thinking about notions of time, place, sensation, association, etc. Based on the writing, I recommend materials to smell and think about, we write some more, we share and reflect, and I share research anecdotes on the colonial trade histories of materials, olfactory practices, and so on. I also share resources as to where I learned and researched these things. Image, text, and smell come together in this social experience. Through the olfactory materials and their histories, we travel across time and space, in a way, or at least find ways to break spells of chrononormativity through the attention we give to the vibrancy of plant and animal-based vapours.3 1. “Snuff (Tobacco),” Wikipedia, accessed October 8, 2023, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Snuff_(tobacco). 2. Legacy Russell, “Glitch Ghosts,” in Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London: Verso Books, 2020), 61. 3. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Chrononormativity, a concept first introduced in this book, refers to the accepted norm that our lived experiences follow the same timeline, that there is the same right thing at the right time for everybody.

Capture 2024 16 Tyler Mitchell Ferragamo New Renaissance campaign, 2023 Concept and creative direction by Ferdinando Verderi By permission of the Ministry of Culture – Gallerie degli Uffizi

17 TEXTS Fashion Images: From between the Pendulum Swings Charlotte Cotton Throughout the course of my curatorial journey, the relationship between fashion and photography has fascinated me. For many, fashion photography’s worth is low on the perceived pyramid of cultural value because of its almost magpie-like gathering of stories and relativity from the world at large, but for me, its porousness is central to the artistry of its most relevant cultural moments. Fashion’s storytelling can be forward-facing and positively disruptive – a predictive cultural force that visualizes the future, catalyzed by economic booms and crashes, cultural politics, and technological shifts.

Capture 2024 18 Working at the Victoria and Albert Museum – the archetypal depository of all manner of human endeavour, including photography and fashion – in the early 1990s gave me the professional calling card to discover a creative industry in full flow. I arrived late to the first flush of London-based photographers, stylists, hair and makeup artists, models, fashion designers, and art directors shifting the cultural parameters and narratives of fashion image culture, but I was in time to chart their ascendance and global impact, recording life-story interviews that are housed in the British Library Sound Archive. By doing the fieldwork of going to studios, darkrooms, and offices, I learnt a history of 1990s and early 2000s fashion photography as it unfolded. In the fast about-turns of fashion image-making, each epoch has its militating factors. New narratives within 1980s fashion photography were being shaped by club culture and independent magazines in London such as The Face, i-D, and BLITZ. These non-binary, gender fluid style magazines had the cultural reach and a gravitational pull for young image-makers who were still at least a decade away from being matched by an ecosystem of galleries that could support photographic practices that were part of the discourses of contemporary art. Editorial fashion photography was still an essentially analogue and “in-camera” process of chasing and capturing an image made first with a test Polaroid. There was time for young image-makers to forge their risk-taking, collaborative relationships with stylists and models, and to fully realize their editorial ideas thanks to far-sighted art and creative directors. A magazine editor who was starting out in the 1980s told me that the greatest patron of the arts in Britain had been the government – the bureaucratic source of housing benefits that covered the low rent payments that made it possible for a generation of young, predominantly working-class artists and performers to stay out of gainful employment and instead to hone their creative talents. The 1990s saw fashion’s commercial centres of New York, Paris, and Milan attempting to translate the visual narratives of a disruptively post-punk, antiestablishment generation of image-makers and fashion designers. Some of the emergent talents successfully negotiated paths into the heart of commercial fashion and brought new frames of reference for beauty and gender into the mainstream. The merging of hip-hop and skateboarding cultures in America and Japan took form in the 1990s and foretold the phenomenal rise of luxury streetwear. It ushered in new communication paradigms of viral campaigns and “drops,” and modelled how the power of the personal “brand” would drive the massive commercial growth areas of menswear – seemingly bypassing the often hasty tokenism, gender binarism, and rampant cultural bias of the fashion system. At the turn of the new millennia, there were the first highly experimental proposals for how digital space would be the next creative terrain and also reconfigure the cultural meaning of fashion’s analogue and real-time constituent parts, which include the printed editorial “well” of magazines through to the glorious performativity of runway shows. The prospect of a creatively led era of fashion image-making in the 2000s was soon dashed in the wake of 9/11 and the concomitant return to conservative values. There was corporate caution about commissioning visual experimentation and a temporary jettisoning of fashion’s old standbys of sex and death as the relatable narrative tropes that could raise American consumer desire. By the mid-2000s, the digital carousel had arrived on fashion shoots – a large screen showing the digital capture of each shot, live on set. Viewable by an expanding congregation of fashion clients and the management of the almost pre-requisite celebrity talent in front of the camera, the selecting and editing of campaign

19 TEXTS 1. Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, “The Challenge: We Must Create At The Same Scale As We Can Destroy,” A Manifesto For The Original, 1984. Electronic Cafe Network Project, Electronic Cafe, accessed October 12, 2023, http://www.ecafe.com/ museum/about_festo/84manifesto. html. imagery was now performed in real time; it was no longer the exclusive preserve of the photographer and art director, and hair, makeup, or creases could all be “fixed in post [production],” as they say. Shoot schedules became shorter, and the list of so-called deliverables became longer, including B-roll video footage, e-commerce banners, and online interactivity as brands began to deal with how to fill the seemingly unquenchable need for media content. We are now in a social landscape of hyper-commercialization, where boundaryless fusions of performance and entertainment drive our vast media ecology, and in a time of thresholded exclusivity and VIP access within an overwhelming spectrum of audience experiences in a streaming-driven world of content. “Live shopping” and “Shop” features are becoming naturalized consumer behaviours where scrolling and buying literally become one and the same via a swipe. It is unclear whether luxury fashion will adopt the technological and e-commercial mechanics currently deployed by its categorically unsustainable close relative of fast fashion, but the 2020s mark an existential moment in the transfiguration of luxury fashion and its visual storytelling. As a dynamic system of rapid pendulum swings, fashion imagemaking is simultaneously resistant and receptive to reflecting upon what it ultimately, actively aims to achieve with its “cultural play.” There have been countless interlocutors in similar situations within the past forty years who have spoken directly – and in chorus – to their moment in time. In addition, since the early twentieth century, artists and talents have actively responded to cultural change and the disorientation of an “image explosion” and its implication of seeing and communicating in new ways. It remains beholden upon image-makers to attune to the complexity of creating at a scale and with such resonance that matches, to paraphrase Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway’s 1984 manifesto, what society’s cynicism, exploitation, and quest for Media Impact Value™ has the potential to destroy.1

Capture 2024 20 Charlotte Zhang The punisher/The ecstasy of Saint Donaldina, 2022 sublimation-dyed chiffon, polysatin, and cotton 55.88 x 119.38 cm Courtesy of the Artist

21 TEXTS Framing Desire: Online Dating and the Image of the Asian Woman Asia Jong I browse my camera roll, sifting through both pre-after hours and post-hair appointment selfies and ask my roommate to AirDrop me that one pic they took when I decided to dye my black hair with an underlayer of blonde. In the search for love, whether for life or the night, it feels inevitable to succumb to the task of getting back on “the apps.” Online dating applications like Tinder ask us to market ourselves as desirable and available potential partners, requiring us to distill our essence as fully formed human beings into a few words and a carousel of five photos. The process of using the applications relies on an unknown audience deciding whether or not you are a viable partner – or if you’re hot enough – within seconds of a selfie popping up on a screen. The first, and often only, impression is dependent on the image.

Capture 2024 22 Relying on an image to find a deep and lasting connection is a doublebinded contradiction: you want to attract someone who is into the real you, not just the image of you, but can this be possible when the mechanism is founded solely on the image itself ? The template of a dating profile necessitates that we craft illusory façades, cropping our facsimilated bodies to condense ourselves into carefully curated pictures to be longed for or lusted after. We serve ourselves up as images of desirability in a marketplace of yearning, to be either discarded (swiped left) or consumed (swiped right). Self-commodification is a prerequisite. Therefore, we must do our utmost to advertise our authenticity, charm, and sexual magnetism, promoting ourselves as the best potential partner in the economy of attraction. In navigating the intricacies of online dating, the politics of representation become further nuanced, particularly when it comes to what type of body is on display. For me, using the tool of the dating app requires an interrogation of what is at stake when the body being presented is that of an Asian woman. If a dating profile necessitates the reduction of the self into its most superficial parts, then I must inherently participate in the process of self-fetishization that comes with the display of my body as romantically or sexually available. What are the consequences when I consent to presenting my image under these terms and conditions? In Leslie Bow’s book Racist Love, she states that “colloquially understood, race fetishism involves sexual objectification and the same process of reduction and exaggeration bound to the stereotype: Asian woman as hair, eyes, or skin.”1 Uploading myself as an image comes at a cost, and the price paid is the consent I must give to be reduced to my most abstracted racialized signifiers. I ask myself: is this person interested in me or do they just have an Asian fetish? I decide to upload the thirst trap I took in six-inch patent leather boots while wearing my mom’s silk, mandarin-collared shirt that she had custom-made while teaching English in Chongqing, China. Addressing the concept of the image, Stuart Hall states that photography is not a “unitary thing,” but a set of multiple “practices, institutions and historical conjunctures in which the photographic text is produced, circulated and deployed.”2 If the location of the photographic text’s production, circulation, and deployment is the dating app, then in order to participate, I must willingly give my image up for an ascription to this conjunction based on the signifiers of my body. Within the context of a dating profile, specific conjunctures become bound to my image as an Asian woman. It becomes impossible to disentangle myself from how the Orientalized female body has been historically exploited and canonized as one which is passive, subservient, and hypersexual. The legacies of imperial and colonial histories have etched enduring marks on the bodies of Asian women. These imprints can be traced back to countless historical junctures: from Canadian immigration policy and the amendment to the Head Tax, which created an exemption for Chinese women contingent upon their marriage to non-Chinese men; to militarized sex enslavement through the trafficking of hundreds of thousands of women predominantly from Korea and China during World War II; to the rise of Asian mail-order brides from Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam in the ’80s and ’90s. The long historical narrative of the Asian woman as both something to fear (temptress) and something to tame (servant) determines the way in which her image becomes culturally coded in our contemporary perception.

23 TEXTS 1. Leslie Bow, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 154. 2. Stuart Hall, “Reconstruction Work: Images of Post-war Black Settlement” in Writings on Media: History of the Present, ed. Charlotte Brunsdon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 152. 3. Charlotte Zhang, Paradise Holds Itself Shut (Los Angeles: Cassandra Press, 2022), 13. The image of the Asian woman as a vessel for racialized anxiety and desire has been explored throughout contemporary art by artists ranging from Yoko Ono to Laurel Nakadate. In the work of artist Charlotte Zhang, she too contends with these constructions of Asian womanhood, addressing the psychosexual pulse that underscores her representation under the weight of wartime, legislative imperial history, and colonial violence. In the exhibition Paradise Holds Itself Shut (2023), images of the Asian woman as devoted nurse, mukbang entertainer, dutiful mother, pornographic actress, and abiding fiancée are collaged together to make a nightmarish polysatin quilt of distorted faces and bodies. The Asian image exists in Zhang’s service, be that of sexual fulfillment, submission, or maternal duty. Zhang’s textile work The punisher/The ecstasy of Saint Donaldina (2022) specifically draws on the legacies of Chinese indentured labour, sex slavery, and missionary saviourism, highlighting the overt contradictions of Asian immigrant women as those “who must be protected from and protected against.”3 In this citation, Zhang refers to how the United States government enforced its protection against the sexual immorality of Chinese women by legislating their exclusion in the Page Act. Meanwhile, Christianity claimed to provide protection to Chinese women who had become sold into sex slavery as a result of illegally immigrating under this very same legislation. In Zhang’s piece, the image of the Asian woman is completely steamrolled and mangled into two dimensions. She is a nameless substitute sitting in as an avatar for the prescription of the Asian female body and its implications. Her amorphous face permits her multiplicities as she becomes both villain and victim simultaneously. The presentation of the Asian image becomes a site where a score of engendered histories is played out. How do these histories inform contemporary manifestations of the Asian woman in the Western racial imaginary and give rise to fetishisms such as hentai porn body pillows or acts of violence such as the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings? Imperial and colonial narratives and their resulting desires and anxieties determine how the Asian female body becomes encoded with meaning, thereby affecting the way that I choose to represent my own identity as a flattened or cropped version of myself. There becomes a sheer irony in making myself available on a dating app considering that the value of the Orientalized female body has historically been attributed to her sexual availability to begin with. I pause before uploading my last image. It’s a mirror selfie in front of my bed. I am wearing a very plain white t-shirt and a denim miniskirt – an ultimately banal photo except for the Hitachi hiding in plain sight on top of my sheets. In front of the screen, I invoke two irreconcilable realities: I am fully aware of the way my body is a receptacle for narratives of racialized sexual desire; at the same time, I participate and take pleasure from presenting myself as someone with a sexual desire of my own. My ability to experience sexual agency becomes inexorably linked to my complicity. All at once, there is a paradoxical struggle in which I know I occupy both subject and object at the same time. And the way for me to find an agency is to exercise my subject position: I desire to be desired.

Capture 2024 24 Lucas Blalock Some Eggs, 2019 Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber (New York/Zurich/Vienna) and Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels) Photo: Dennis Ha

25 TEXTS The World is an Image: Photography in Public Sara Knelman When we speak of the world, we really only speak of an impression of the world. The world is an image, even when we have a scientific conception of it and assert: “This is so and so,” it is still only an image.1 – Carl Jung Photography in the public realm – beaming down from billboards, framing walkways on construction hoarding, lighting large-scale digital screens, looming over civic squares – is usually not considered art. Instead, our experiences of the images we encounter as we cross an urban landscape are often set against widely held expectations of the ways we encounter art. Even if it is publicly accessible, say in a free gallery or library, art is often set behind the façades of institutions that may have other kinds of barriers, often embedded structurally into architecture and, less tangibly, mediated by political and socio-economic systems. Our viewing within such contexts is also generally intentional rather than incidental (we go there to see art), and our gazes are directed (we look at art). And, finally, art has more often been at a domestic scale, compressed into an architecture that comfortably holds our bodies, though, as more cultural institutions co-opt and inhabit industrial settings, this is less and less the case.2

Capture 2024 26 These expectations are synonymous with some of the ways that art is legible as art, and the fraught entrance of photography into museums and galleries requires that it conform to these conventions, at least initially. But photography was always also in the street – not only in the growing spaces created and reserved for advertisements but fluttering in the pages of newsstand magazines, pasted up as propaganda, integrated into storefronts and signage. Our perceptions of photographs in these realms are more often serendipitous, part of the flow of visual information; in efforts to compete with a busy urban landscape for our attention, images are lit up, raised, and made larger-thanlife. One of the boldest early examples, the Kodak Colorama billboard in Grand Central Station, loomed over American commuters from 1950 to 1990. Illuminated, 18-feet high and 60-feet wide, it projected rotating scenes of idealized, everyday domestic life: families at bath time or on the beach, postcard vacations in faraway places, holiday parades and other civic events. Almost every image included someone with a camera in hand, memorializing the moment. It answered the question “What does the world look like?” with scenes of an aspirational middle-class lifestyle and implored viewers to not only embrace the images but perpetually recreate them. In the 1970s, the surge of advertising and consumer culture spurred an artistic counterculture, and many image-makers responded with works that complicated rather than reinforced the kind of idyllic perspectives of postwar America, exposing the power imbalances and contradictions inherent in them. In Possession (1976), artist Victor Burgin pasted up large-scale posters across Newcastle upon Tyne, England, depicting an attractive, amorous white couple in white apparel, with the caption “What does possession mean to you?” and the statistic “7% of our population own 84% of our wealth.” The Guerrilla Girls, founded in 1985, directly implicated the art world as a pillar of patriarchal power, famously overlaying the question “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” above a reclining female nude in a gorilla mask. Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s billboard projects, mainly produced in California between 1973 and 1989, replaced traditional ads with highly conceptual and often surrealist imagery: oranges on fire, billowing suit ties, and a nuclear explosion with the caption “Oh la la!” In the gaps between expectation and reality, viewers are left to consider our evolving relations to, and conceptions of, desire, material culture, self-image, class, and identity. More recently, art and photography festivals occupy a particularly important space within this history, often bringing images created as art into the public realm as a core aspect of their programming. In Canada, both CONTACT Photography Festival and Capture Photography Festival show art in public spaces across Toronto and Vancouver for the duration of their festivals; public murals, billboards along major roads, and entire subway platforms become spaces for art. At last year’s Capture, Lucas Blalock’s installation French Country Kitchen consisted of three images shown in sequence at an Eastside billboard site over the course of a year (March 2023 – March 2024). Both vivid and drab, replete and blank, repetitive and haphazard, they remix the colours, shapes, and textures of aspirational middle-class, everyday objects – indeed some seem lifted almost directly from the aspirational Colorama images. In them, we find domestic elements: yellow kitchen tile, a scuffed wooden tabletop littered with hard-boiled eggs, fruit atop a white plate atop a Formica-patterned ground. Yet they are also clearly not these things – often pasted over or unfinished like an abandoned children’s drawing, refusing to resolve fully. When we encounter Blalock’s images in spaces normally reserved for advertising, they actively play on our inclination to desire – beauty, status,

27 TEXTS 1. Carl Gustav Jung et al., “Alchemy, vol. 1–2,” in Modern Psychology: Notes on lectures given at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, Zurich (Switzerland: K. Schippert & Company, 1959–60). 2. As the boundaries among galleries and the street continue to blur, the aesthetics of outdoor advertising are also more often seen inside exhibitions, in the guise of large-scale lightboxes and pasted enlargements. satisfaction – asking us to reconsider material longing or to replace it with something less assured. Here, they read less as a future we want and more as glitches of memory, of aspiration disintegrating before our eyes – the work of making an image and of asking a question. As a medium that can shapeshift to fit its environment, photography is often defined by its context. It might be understood as reproduction, documentation, advertising, or art; or it may be understood as reproduction, documentation, advertising, and art. It is the peripatetic, sometimes crazy-making, impossibly glorious quality of photographs to be able to move among these forms and functions. Looking and seeing (or failing to see), choosing where to focus and which bits of information to process, accept, or disregard – these are all political acts, even (especially) when we do them unconsciously. Encountering images that tell us something about the world or offer us a way into a new form of empathy or understanding is deeply important. But seeing in a way that makes us think about how we make meaning, how we understand the world – this is critical for keeping us alert and alive to the possibility of change.

Capture 2024 28 Farah Al Qasimi Sisters, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist, The Third Line, and François Ghebaly Gallery Part of the Arbutus Greenway Billboard Public Art Project

29 PUBLIC ART Anvil Centre Public Art Project Ensemble: An Interview with Karen Zalamea Karice Mitchell Finds the Power of Agency in the “Glitch” Canada Line Public Art Project Billboard Public Art Projects Furiously Happy: An Interview with Arielle Bobb-Willis Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen Will to adorn: An Interview with Karice Mitchell Billboard and CONTACT Photography Festival Public Art Project Emmy Lee Wall Emilie Croning Emmy Lee Wall Chelsea Yuill 28–31 29–31 36–39 50–57 32–46 46–49 58–59 32–35 47–49

Capture 2024 30 Anvil Centre Public Art Project Karen Zalamea Ensemble, 2024 Karen Zalamea Ensemble, 2024 Courtesy of the Artist Installation mock-up: Karen Zalamea Commissioned by the City of New Westminster, this temporary public art installation is presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival April 2024 – March 2025 777 Columbia St, New Westminster

31 PUBLIC ART Ensemble: An Interview with Karen Zalamea Emmy Lee Wall Ensemble is derived from an image sourced from a newspaper clipping that depicts a row of female dancers from the Ramon Obusan Folkloric Group of the Philippines. The dancers are performing the ragragsakan, a traditional Kalinga dance in which women carry water pots and baskets on their heads in preparation for a feast. For this project, Karen Zalamea selected a photograph from the June 12, 1986 issue of The Province that features the Filipino dance group performing as part of Expo ’86 in Vancouver. Zalamea was intrigued by the sister-city relationship established in 1991 between the City of New Westminster and Quezon City in the Philippines, the artist’s matrilineal hometown. She approached Ensemble as a means of tracing a potential motivation for the pursuit of this formal agreement.

Capture 2024 32 For this public installation, Zalamea collaged and reproduced the photograph from The Province as a cyanotype – an early form of photography – to create this blue and white image. For the artist, the blue tones of the cyanotype reference both the Anvil Centre’s adjacency to the Fraser River as well as the Pacific Ocean, which connects the two sister cities. There is a significant Filipino presence in New Westminster, which began in the 1990s, with Tagalog becoming a common mother tongue spoken in the city. The city’s museum collection and archives, however, do not yet reflect this thriving community. In presenting this large-scale, culturally significant image on the façade of a civic building, Zalamea asks how we can support and celebrate the presence of diasporic communities and their diversity. Emmy Lee Wall Can you describe your process, which involves found images, collaging, scanning, and even cyanotypes? Karen Zalamea Recently I have been working with found images from scientific sources, including microscope images, as the starting points for creating cyanotypes. For Ensemble, on the glass façade of the Anvil Centre, the process began with a scanned newspaper photograph, which I then digitally manipulated to isolate the dancers from the background and to multiply them in symmetrical V formations. The digital collage was printed as a negative on transparency with its light and dark tones reversed. The transparency was placed directly on paper treated with cyanotype chemistry, exposed to sunlight, and then rinsed in water. Afterwards, the resulting blue-and-white photograph was scanned to create a large-scale vinyl print for the public artwork. This process is a series of analogue and digital methods that activate the photographic surface as a physical material and as a conceptual convergence point where broader ideas of history, cultural knowledge, and community can mingle. ELW Can you talk a bit about why you wanted to use the cyanotype process to enhance the image? I’m curious about what drew you to this analogue tradition and what it adds to the work for you? KZ Cyanotypes are one of the oldest photographic printing processes, a cameraless form of contact printing that can be made on location with available sunlight and water for its exposure, rinsing, and fixing. It was used for scientific study in the 1800s by botanists like Anna Atkins because of its portability and its detailed renderings of plant structures. I started incorporating cyanotypes because I was thinking through different imaging technologies for replicating plant life and how cyanotypes record ecosystems. In using a digitally collaged found photograph as a negative to create the cyanotype for Ensemble, I am thinking more expansively about ecosystems of cultures and communities, and about how this photographic process cumulatively traces its movement between digital and material realms, between histories and the present day. Additionally, with its overall blue tones, and with water being the key ingredient to rinse and fix the cyanotype, my process also references waterways: the trans-Pacific, the sister-city connection between the City of New Westminster, Canada, and Quezon City, the Philippines, as well as the Anvil Centre’s proximity to the Fraser River. ELW Are your considerations different when creating a work for the public sphere rather than a work intended for exhibition in a gallery space? Do you feel a different sort of public or social responsibility? KZ There are many different considerations when creating a public artwork, including the location, how the space is used and accessed, the scale of the artwork, how legible it is to an itinerant audience walking or driving by, the changing lighting conditions based on the time of day and season, and even the weather. There are more variables at play compared to the white cube of the gallery space. While on display 24/7 in the public sphere, the artwork is presented to diverse audiences, and it is imperative to ensure the work is accessible by offering various entry points. Whether its viewers are interested in Filipino cultures, the performing arts, newspaper archives, collage, or photographic techniques, the artwork invites different levels of engagement. ELW I really like that you’re thinking about different levels of engagement with your work. That’s something I consider when programming public art projects. Especially in the public sphere, I think about the important relationship photography has to representation, and I’m curious how traditional cultural images can be presented without being reductive or stereotypical?

33 PUBLIC ART KZ It is important to acknowledge a history of ethnographic photography in the Philippines, employed by both Spanish and American colonial anthropologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These photographic studies of Filipinos fabricated a visual archive of an “inferior” colonial subject, which reduced the represented individuals to racist stereotypes. The photographs were published and circulated as a means of legitimizing the colonial project. In light of this history, and with the understanding that the photographic medium can be weaponized to manipulate information, there is an immense responsibility that comes with handling cultural images. Through this invested process of sourcing the found newspaper photograph (which documents a part of what I imagine would have been a full program of traditional folk dances); extending this captured moment through layers of photographic processes; and then tracing a story of how one of these performances boosted the pursuit of New Westminster’s sister-city relationship with Quezon City, the artwork functions as a proposal for what can be gleaned from a limited archive, and for what can be built from here. ELW Your practice is so multifaceted. I’ve seen images you’ve shot through lenses made of ice, images printed on fabric, as well as photographs that you’ve literally braided into rope. I’m curious what unites these different material explorations for you? KZ I have always gravitated toward finding ways to inject my hand in the making of a photograph, whether it’s a simple gesture of rearranging objects in a still life, or a more palpable action of braiding 50-foot lengths of photographic rope and hanging them in an immersive installation. I deliberately integrate material handling that is in conversation with each project, and it is through hands-on making that I learn more about the work in progress. The methodologies inform the artwork and vice versa, and, correspondingly, the photographs retain traces of the process. Ultimately, I am mostly driven by a curiosity to see if my ideas will work out. ELW I often think about the circulation of images in society; we are so inundated, every day, with images, constantly. In this work, you are using an archival image that you have appropriated and treated to make your own. Is using archival imagery a big part of your practice? KZ I started working with my maternal family’s photographic archive that I gathered from my ancestral house in Quezon City in 2020. In this ongoing project, Sunken Garden (Family Album), I scan and print enlargements of the photographs on canvas, then braid them into 50-footlong ropes. In 2023, I also used a found microscope image for my cyanotype project Taro, and I am continuing to use found scientific imagery in a new cyanotype series in progress. I incorporate found imagery, from both the personal and public spheres, as material, and it has meaningfully made its way into these most recent projects.

Capture 2024 34 Billboard Public Art Projects Capture Billboard Public Art Commission: Karice Mitchell Will to adorn Karice Mitchell II and III, from the Will to adorn series, 2024 Courtesy of the Artist Installation mock-up: Robert Marks Presented in partnership with The Polygon and generously supported by Pattison Outdoor Billboards and Bruce Munro Wright Curated by Chelsea Yuill, Capture Photography Festival March 8 – July 14 Sited on five billboards across Vancouver and North Vancouver becoming and unbecoming (working title), 2023 On view March 13 – July 14 Sited on one billboard facing Cates Deck at The Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver I, 2024 On view March 15 – May 5 Sited on one billboard E Cordova St and Campbell Ave, Vancouver II and III, 2024 On view March 8 – April 28 Sited on two billboards at Davie St and Bute St, Vancouver IV, 2024 On view March 8 – April 28 Sited on one billboard at Yukon St and W 8th Ave, Vancouver

35 PUBLIC ART Will to adorn: An Interview with Karice Mitchell Chelsea Yuill Luxuriously feminine: black skin, white pearls, nails with polish, and satin in red and black. Karice Mitchell is a photo-based installation artist who uses found images from vintage Black erotica to further empower herself alongside Black femmes and lessen the omnipresence of White supremacy. Blending several visual methods such as cropping, reshooting, scanning, and distorting analogue and digital images, Mitchell leans into the possibilities of glitches – or technology’s failure to fulfill its intended function – to highlight alternative ways of being. Mitchell pushes the boundaries of the photographic medium by exploring the interplay between visibility as a celebration and obscurity as a protective “iykyk” politic.

Capture 2024 36 Originally commissioned as Capture’s 2024 signature public art project, Mitchell’s proposed image was denied without the possibility of resubmission. Working with Mitchell, we reconceptualized this project so that one image became a larger body of work, creating an omnipresence of Black femme existence. Across platforms traditionally used for advertising, Will to adorn complicates the language of capitalism. Through the iconography of satin, acrylic nails, and pearls, Mitchell reaffirms that adornment on the Black body is not frivolous nor tasteless, but is power and presence. In this suite of photographs she poses as both author and subject. At this monumental scale, we witness and hold in reverence the self-care, individual expression, culture, and joy inspired by and for Black femmes. Chelsea Yuill It has been a difficult process realizing this public artwork, so I want to express my gratitude for your patience, flexibility, and commitment to see it through as we searched for alternative sites. You ended up producing a new series titled Will to adorn for the billboards while placing the original image, titled becoming and unbecoming (working title) that was submitted for the BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation, at The Polygon Gallery. How has this public art project affected the way you make work? Karice Mitchell For me, it was and it wasn’t surprising that at the first public art site, no dialogue occurred to reach a compromise. This process has made me realize that I’m not interested in compromising my work, and that it’s really important that I set parameters for how my work should be engaged with, especially in the public sphere. A large consideration for this project has been how I can protect my Blackness and my body from potential harm when it’s so public-facing. For me, the Black female body is a subject that needs to be strategically negotiated in response to the ways in which capitalism, patriarchy, and White supremacy have exploited it throughout history up to the present day. I’m excited by the potential of reimagining modes of existence for the Black femme body, unburdened by these colonial histories. I see these histories as a foundation into which Black women, like myself, must intervene. Overall, this process has reinforced a sense of agency and necessity. Moving forward, I’m even more committed to exploring the use of illegibility as a vessel for agency to further develop my thoughts around intervention within public and institutional spaces. CY Your images are presented on multiple billboards across Vancouver and at The Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver. I’m curious how you consider the circulation and the fugitive nature of your images? KM One of my recent reads is Fugitive Feminism (2022) by Akwugo Emejulu.1 It’s a manifesto where she embraces the status of the fugitive and positions it as a process in which Black women can determine their own liberation and freedom outside the constraints of White supremacist capitalist patriarchy. It’s a process that allows you to exercise agency through refusal while still being speculative and hopeful. For me, the whole process of realizing this work really encapsulates the necessity of a fugitive feminism, rather than relying on institutions to negotiate our self-actualization. Though the process of realizing this work was tough, ultimately taking on a fugitive approach enriched the project and was also a way to play and be speculative with my process and concept. Since there are now four public billboard sites, the source image is the same but varies slightly from site to site. I was committed to some of the original ideas that showed up in the first work I proposed around “the glitch” and the idea of “multiple selves,” which Legacy Russell elaborates on in her book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2019).2 This work seeks to visualize “multiple selves” or a “glitch” with the repetition of the image at the different sites. This is an effort to push back against the historical and contemporary reading of marginalized bodies, which is narrow and often problematic. I like the idea that, depending on the site, viewers will encounter a different version of my body and a variation of images to emphasize the idea that my body is responsive to space. CY Your work centres Black femme subjectivity, agency, labour, and bodily autonomy, ultimately reclaiming femininity. I see links to the power of the erotic and Black futurity in your practice. Could you expand on what this reclamation of space means to you? KM Throughout my practice, my work has had an engagement with vintage Black erotic publications, particularly the magazine Players (1973–2005). I became really drawn to Players because it served as a means through which Black women could fully participate in an image-making practice, and it was the only publication of its kind that catered to wide-scale Black readership. My work has always centred around questions of how I can draw upon the historical legacy of these printed images to situate

37 PUBLIC ART them as a significant cultural marker of Black female representation toward reclaiming the body and grappling with infrastructures of power. Scholars such as Jennifer C. Nash and Dr. Mireille Miller-Young have been integral to my work. Their writing really cemented the importance of Black women finding power in the erotic, which is often seen as impossible since pornography functions to perpetuate racial fetishes and harmful power dynamics. Players, however, in my view, was a publication that made the intersection of Black politics and the erotic possible. It realized a potential for the Black femme body to be reclaimed through the erotic to foster a sense of care and sensuality. CY Adornment is a critical aspect of the images you created for this project. Can you speak to the personal and cultural significance of your acrylic nails, the pearls, and the satin? KM I want to begin answering this question with a quote from Saidiya Hartman where she states: ..the beauty of [B]lack ordinary, the beauty that resides in and animates the determination to live free, the beauty that propels the experiments in living otherwise. It encompasses the extraordinary and the mundane, art and everyday use. Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.3 I’ve been really trying to figure out the role and significance of beauty and where my work is situated within it. I think the quote above by Hartman perfectly articulates how I’ve been thinking about the significance of beauty. By restaging images found in Players, I want this work to honour the glorious ways Black women have showed up and embellished themselves throughout the pages of the magazine, visualizing the creation of possibility that is crucial for realizing a sense of self, a sense of humanity. That care and willingness to adorn, which is so clear to me when I’m engaging with the found images, also replicates the way I choose to show up and navigate the world. I actually enjoy getting my nails done at this length despite being questioned. It is something I use to cement my identity and take up space. That proclamation of space I find especially important when occupying institutional space because often, so often, the institution pushes us to be quiet, to self-censor, and to follow the status quo. Pearls have been an ongoing motif in my practice. Along with satin and other textiles like leather and lace, 1. Akwugo Emejulu, Fugitive Feminism (London: Silver Press, 2022). 2. Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London: Verso Books, 2020). 3. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), 33. they are common signifiers of sensuality and adornment worn by the women in the found images I work with. It was important for me when restaging the images that I was being referential to the common motifs and cultural signifiers, while also contextualizing them within my life by using my own objects, textiles, and practices of adornment.

Capture 2024 38 Karice Mitchell IV, from the Will to adorn series, 2024 Courtesy of the Artist

39 PUBLIC ART Karice Mitchell Finds the Power of Agency in the “Glitch” Emilie Croning Karice Mitchell’s photo-based practice uses found imagery and digital manipulation to engage with issues relating to identity, resistance, adornment, and the representation of the Black female body in Western visual culture and erotica. By appropriating imagery from archival issues of the racy magazine Players (1973–2005), she combines visual strategies such as scanning and cropping to recontextualize this imagery detached from the White gaze and patriarchy. Mitchell celebrates the countless ways Black women represent themselves, for themselves, through adornment as a form of personalized self-expression, identity, and self-care – often emphasizing Black cultural signifiers such as long artificial nails, jewelry, and melanated skin. Mitchell reasserts their agency, as well as her own. By carefully concealing and revealing fragments of an image and denying the opportunity for the image to be read whole, she creates tension between image and viewer. For the 2024 Capture Photography Festival, Mitchell drew inspiration from writer and curator Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) to produce a series of larger-than-life billboards. In a rather poetic yet powerful turn of events, what originated as a single proposed site-specific installation for the façade of the BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation, evolved into a series of five activations across the cities of Vancouver and North Vancouver.

Capture 2024 40 There is a certain continuity between Mitchell’s practice and that of other Black women artists, namely Lorna Simpson, whose collage work draws on material sourced from Black-centric publications such as the magazines Ebony (1945–) and Jet (print 1951–2014; digital 2014–), and Mickalene Thomas, whose collage portraits depict Black women unapologetically. Their work seeks to reimagine the possibilities of Black womanhood and sexuality. For her Capture commission, Mitchell took cues from previous projects. Her first public art installation titled take care (2021–22) with Hamilton Artists Inc., which showcased a cropped image sourced from a vintage publication with the words “take care” printed atop, was followed by an artist residency with the Burrard Arts Foundation in 2023. It was during this time that the artist began developing a new visual narrative in her work by restaging these images using her own body. Mitchell sought to combine these concepts, through a different lens, in what has become a self-referential exploration. Guided by one of Russell’s central arguments, which proposes that in order to accept alternative ways of being one must embrace the notion of “glitch” as failure and refusal, Mitchell adopts a process of refusal as it relates to the legibility of an image.1 By setting the parameters within which her body is to be consumed by the public, achieved through cropping and photographic alterations, the sitespecific image would have been further distorted from its original form when mounted to the tile-like façade of the Dal Grauer Substation in downtown Vancouver – a site that has housed installations commissioned by Capture annually since 2015. Unfortunately, this year, the proposed project was denied. It is often the tension created between artwork and viewer that results in questioning its value and palatability in a public context. Rather than embracing a level of discomfort that is crucial to expanding our knowledge and growth, the human instinct rejects it. But how does an artist reclaim that space? As a Black woman, there is an additional layer of negotiation at play when navigating these spaces in a racialized body – a constant mediation of self when it comes to power dynamics within institutionalized contexts and the unspoken labour that this entails. This rejection presented an opportunity for Mitchell to further explore the notion of “glitch” as a conceptual framework that is celebrated as a vehicle or passageway of refusal, and reclaim a moment of censorship through heightened visibility by instead presenting her work on five billboards in a project titled Will to adorn. 2 This exemplifies Mitchell’s consistent interest in granting her work permission and authority to take up space in more ways than one and how she embraces ways to “create through rupture” while situating the Black femme body as a site(s) of resistance.3 Located at the south end of The Polygon Gallery, facing Vancouver and Lonsdale Quay, visitors encounter Mitchell’s Cates Deck installation, becoming and unbecoming (working title), a work separate from the Will to adorn series. By exhibiting this image that was deemed problematic at its original site, Mitchell ensures public access to her work, while also revealing the source image for the accompanying body of work. The second site hosts work from the Will to adorn series at E Cordova St and Campbell Ave in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. An enlargement of a cropped image of fingers adorned with long red acrylic nails, a pearl-like necklace interlaced between them, and glimpses of black satin fabric against brown skin, I is where this series’s “glitch” finds its genesis. By isolating these forms of adornment, the artist calls into question the politics they perform. For instance, hands, often associated with labour, when intersected with artificial nails that are culturally coded within conversations around Black female identity and sexuality, engage new meanings relating to freedom and identity, and gesture as a means to extend invitation or initiate intimacy. This “full” image is only offered at one site.

41 PUBLIC ART 1. Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London: Verso Books, 2020), 17–37. 2. Conversation with the artist, November 15, 2023. 3. Russell, 7. 4. Ben Davis, “‘I Say Tear It All Down’: Curator Legacy Russell on How ‘Glitch Feminism’ Can Be a Tool to Radically Reimagine the World,” Art Net News, September 28, 2020, https:// news.artnet.com/art-world/ legacy-russell-glitch-feminism-amanifesto-1910221. 5. Russell, 145. At a third site, roughly 4 kilometres away at Davie St and Bute St in Vancouver’s West End, Mitchell fragments the images II and III from the Will to adorn series across two intersecting billboards. Zoomed in closer than I, the images begin to lose their legibility. While one billboard still includes references to its whole (pearls, skin, nails), the other isolates skin and pieces of the strand of pearls – abstracting her presence and the image further. A fourth site, in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Vancouver at Yukon St and W 8th Ave, offers another translation of the deconstructed image, wherein a few pearls are carefully woven between two fingers, one of which is cut off by the frame. Only a single red nail can be read in full. While she references the image’s whole at each site, Mitchell’s use of aesthetic tools as a method to reclaim space also highlights the labour that is often required of Black women and the conditions under which femininity, sexuality, and Blackness are dictated within White capitalist and patriarchal societies. Under this current system, her body will always be implicated in these grey areas. This labour is mirrored in what is required of the public in order to engage with the project as a whole – spanning 3 to 15 kilometres distance from one another. Will to adorn presents an amalgamation of a number of works and concerns Mitchell has explored to date and demonstrates the ways in which her practice continues to evolve. Although she is referencing an image that only a handful of people have seen, Mitchell immerses herself in the potential that exists through an act of refusal. Recalling Russell’s hope of her manifesto being adopted as a strategic tool in addressing issues around Black bodies, femme bodies, and queer bodies, Mitchell’s use of her own body in her images as a tool of experimentation to negotiate issues of autonomy gives way for new possibilities of being and becoming.4 There is a raw power in embracing and building new realities no longer predicated on binary systems. In doing so, Mitchell allows her practice to take on a new responsibility in redefining what is deemed “acceptable” for public display and extends that invitation to non-art audiences, in public spaces, thus positioning her work with a greater sense of purpose. As glitch feminists, “we will take up space, and break this world, making new ones.”5 Karice Mitchell becoming and unbecoming (working title), 2023 Courtesy of the Artist

Capture 2024 42 Billboard Public Art Projects Farah Al Qasimi Fordson Island, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist, The Third Line, and François Ghebaly Gallery Installation mock-up: Robert Marks

43 PUBLIC ART Arbutus Greenway Billboards: Farah Al Qasimi Dearborn Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival March 15 –May 5 Sited on seven billboards along the Arbutus Greenway, between Fir St and Burrard St, Vancouver Farah Al Qasimi’s practice makes visible the contemporary, globalized post-internet culture that surrounds us and defines our current condition. She describes her work as “a sort of broken telephone game of cultural interpretation,” highlighting the hybrid cultures that her practice simultaneously documents and questions. Richly detailed images by Al Qasimi, both quotidian and uncanny, depict domestic interiors, people, commercial spaces, and street scenes. The photographs presented for the Arbutus Greenway Billboard Public Art Project this year were shot in Dearborn, Michigan, an important industrial centre where the Ford Motor Company is headquartered. Dearborn is home to a large Arab American community that now makes up more than 50% of the city’s population, according to 2020 census data. Al Qasimi sought out members of the Arab American community in the city and engaged with her sitters, visiting their homes and photographing them both in their personal spaces and in the public sphere. Through quiet observation, her images offer insight into the layered histories and living culture of the people and places she photographs. As we view the world through her lens, unarticulated norms and beliefs reveal themselves as intrinsic to clothing, objects, and places; as these become apparent, unspoken truths about power, gender, and taste are exposed. Presented in partnership with the City of Vancouver and generously supported by Pattison Outdoor Billboards The Arbutus Greenway Billboards are presented by OmniVita Custom Wealth Mgmt. Inc., and are generously supported by Leslie Lee and John Murphy

Capture 2024 44 Caroline Monnet Echoes of a Near Future, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist and Blouin Division Installation mock-up: Robert Marks Billboard Public Art Projects

45 PUBLIC ART GreyChurch Billboard: Caroline Monnet Echoes of a Near Future Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival March 15, 2024 – March 10, 2025 Sited on one billboard at Fraser St and 15th Ave, Vancouver Renaissance, 2018 On view March 15 – July 14 Crise d’Octobre, 2020 On view July 19 – November 18 Echoes of a Near Future, 2022 On view November 22, 2024 – March 10, 2025 This series of photographs by Caroline Monnet features Indigenous women creatives whom Monnet has known for years, including celebrated documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, Québécois actress Dominique Pétin, costume designer and chef Swaneige Bertrand, visual artist Catherine Boivin, as well as the artist herself, and her sister. By presenting them in her work, dressed in elaborate, powerful attire, she celebrates the self-determination and strength of the Indigenous women she portrays. Monnet created the clothes in the photographs herself, considering the garments to be a type of conceptual time vessel carrying her sitters as they travel from the Renaissance in Renaissance, to the October Crisis of 1970 in Crise d’Octobre, to a yet unknown future in Echoes of a Near Future. Both artist and sitter, Monnet presents herself and the other Indigenous women in the photographs looking directly at the camera – and therefore the viewer – with bold, powerful gazes, while set against a stark background as if in a fashion shoot. The works in this series are in glaring contrast to the way colonial archival images of Indigenous women have presented them as “subjects,” engaged in various domestic tasks, disconnected from and subjugated by the camera. By presenting this group of commanding images in the public sphere as a billboard and on a grand scale, Monnet invites passersby to pause and consider why these women demand to be seen and the stories they individually and collectively hold. The GreyChurch Billboard is generously supported by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill

Capture 2024 46 Billboard Public Art Projects Jin-me Yoon Work from A Group for 2067 (Pacific Flyways) series, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Rachel Topham Photography Installation mock-up: Robert Marks

47 PUBLIC ART River District Billboard: Jin-me Yoon Work from A Group for 2067 (Pacific Flyways) series, 2022 Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival March 15 – May 5 Sited on one billboard at SE Marine Dr and Kerr St, Vancouver From the series A Group for 2067 (Pacific Flyways), this image of a young woman by Jin-me Yoon cites an earlier, monumental photographic installation by the artist titled A Group of Sixty-Seven (1996). In this earlier work, sixty-seven members of the Korean Canadian community are photographed in front of iconic paintings by Lawren Harris and Emily Carr. The Harris and Carr paintings are emblematic of a typical Canadian historical painting style, in which the landscape was presented as vast and uninhabited, undermining the long history of Indigenous presence on these lands. The title of Yoon’s work refers to the year 1967, both the Centennial of Canadian Confederation as well as the year in which immigration restrictions were eased to allow for greater migration to this country. In A Group for 2067 (Pacific Flyways), Yoon has replaced the painted backgrounds of her earlier series, instead photographing Korean Canadian youth at the Maplewood Flats Conservation Area on Tsleil-Waututh lands. The young people photographed are draped in saekdong, a brightly hued, patterned fabric used for traditional Korean ceremonial clothing, long associated with both protection and resilience. The sitters in these images face into the foliage as a gesture towards a future that is to be written with the possibilities the next generation presents. Many of the youth featured in this series are of mixed ancestry and by photographing them against a Canadian landscape on traditional Indigenous lands, Yoon presents this grand-scale image as a call for a more inclusive future, sensitive to the complexities of co-existing on this land, free from conventional binaries. The River District Billboard is generously supported by Wesgroup Properties

Capture 2024 48 East Hastings Billboards and Davisville Subway Station: Arielle Bobb-Willis Furiously Happy Curated by Emmy Lee Wall and Chelsea Yuill, Capture Photography Festival Billboard and CONTACT Photography Festival Public Art Project March 22 – June 30 A multi-site project on four billboards along East Hastings between Glen St and Clark Dr, Vancouver, and on twenty-six poster panels at Davisville Subway Station at Davisville Ave and Yonge St, Toronto March 22 – June 9 East Hastings Billboards May 1 – June 30 Davisville Subway Station, CONTACT Photography Festival Public Art Project Arielle Bobb-Willis New Jersey, 2022 Model: Tianna St. Louis Make-up: Mical Klip Hair: Errol Karadag Stylist: Herin Choi Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire Installation mock-up: Robert Marks The East Hastings Billboards are generously supported by Tara and Christopher Poseley The Davisville Subway Station is presented in partnership with CONTACT Photography Festival

49 PUBLIC ART Furiously Happy: An Interview with Arielle Bobb-Willis Emmy Lee Wall Inspired by painters such as Milton Avery, William H. Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Joan Miró, and Mary T. Smith, photographer Arielle Bobb-Willis is known for her colourful, unconventional images that focus on the human figure presented in an atypical fashion. She states: “Within paintings, there’s no end of things you can do with the body, and this has pushed me to see restrictions within reality differently.” The photographs Bobb-Willis creates present unusual shapes and volumes, and use colour to deconstruct the typical means by which an image is organized, such as a figure before a building or inserted in the landscape. Creating work for her own artistic practice, but also shooting editorially, she uses garments to manipulate visual boundaries and create volumetric shapes that occupy much of the picture plane, akin to the way a painter would create unfettered forms on a canvas.

Capture 2024 50 While drawing inspiration from the neighbourhoods and spaces that are familiar to her, Bobb-Willis’s images push beyond the everyday to embrace tension and difference. Her unique visual language celebrates “uncomfortable positions” based on personal experiences of discomfort; leaning into tension, she gently nudges her models to move beyond typical poses so that they bend, stretch, and contort to present new visual possibilities. Her subjects act as sculptures and offer striking, surreal takes on the human form – asking us to all think differently, expansively. Emmy Lee Wall In our first studio visit, you mentioned that your practice is influenced more by painting than photography. What paintings are you looking at and how have they shaped your work? Arielle Bobb-Willis I really love Zeinab Diomande, Kezia Harrell, Simphiwe Ndzube, Skye Volmar, and Marlon Wobst right now. Some staple artworks I always return to include The Fireside Angel (1937) by Max Ernst – it’s such an original thought. I feel like I can hear the creature stomping around. Jitterbugs (IV) (1941) by William H. Johnson – it’s inspiring to see how this painting changed from the first attempt through to the fourth. I like the whole series, but the fourth is so abstract while still allowing me to feel how enmeshed the two subjects are and how much fun they are having together. Play (1999) by Jacob Lawrence is a world I wish I could live in! All of his paintings are how I wish the world looked all the time. The film Free, White and 21 (1980) by Howardena Pindell opened my eyes to what kind of artist I could be. Maria Martins’s The Impossible (1945) reminds me of two lovers who can’t seem to communicate properly. It’s such an honest way to portray the harsh reality of failed love. Gustav Vigeland’s sculpture park The Vigeland (1869–1943) has so much movement to study, and it’s beautiful to see his life’s work in one place. So many more! I love the Fauvist movement of the early 1900s as well. These are a handful of works that completely changed my thought process on creating. ELW Can you describe your process? Your images are so specific in relation to colour and form – when you set out to shoot do you already have a pre-ordained image in mind? Or is the creative process more organic for you? ABW It starts from different inspirations every time. I’ll find a piece of clothing I want to shoot, I’ll see a colour combination I love, or I’ll drive by a really perfect location. I love to improvise, it’s my favourite thing to do. It helps me get out of my own way and not think too hard. It’s pure inthe-moment creating; it keeps me present and is therapeutic. I usually have a huge bag with clothes and props, my camera, and the sun. Very simple. Very very organic. ELW I read in another interview that you like to push the boundaries of what is comfortable in your work and that you may ask your models to hold difficult positions. This, for me, is what really distinguishes your work from pure fashion photography. Can you talk about this a bit? ABW I was first introduced to the art world through painters, so painting is the first place I go to for inspiration. My dad has a big respect for painters, too. He grew up in Brooklyn during the Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring era. He always had books and posters around our apartment. There is no limit to what you can paint; it imposes no limit on how you can stretch the body. I try to gently push my subjects in a direction that questions what a “portrait” traditionally is. I also don’t always use models. I street cast or find people via Instagram. It’s nice to get people out of their comfort zone and have them step into my world for a little bit. When they see the photos they’re like “That’s me???” Besides shooting outside (in the real world), working with people who don’t model grounds the image in reality even more. I love street photography, so I think that’s the photography I envision when I shoot. Alex Webb is one of my favourites. I like to think I stumbled upon my subjects in the street while roaming around whatever city I happen to be in. They can be awkward and bring something new to the photo. Nothing too perfect, just what it is. ELW Most of your images are shot outdoors. What locations are interesting for you? And are sites anonymous for you or does place hold meaning in your work? ABW There is so much that I find beautiful. I would say I love locations that have texture. I love it when people paint over graffiti and there are these weird patches of paint that are different colours. I love poorly painted wooden fences, wide grass hills, and the levees in New Orleans. I love the shadows of trees on the sides of buildings, and I love that all of these things bring layers to an image. It’s so fun to find mini-sets around the cities I travel to. When I was visiting Portland, I freaked out when I saw the long streets FILLED with bright yellow leaves. At this point in