51 PUBLIC ART my life, the world is more beautiful to me than it’s ever been. Photography has brought so much to my attention that I maybe wouldn’t have looked for without it. I’m constantly looking for moments every day, constantly curious. I’m very grateful. ELW I’m curious if living in Los Angeles has influenced your work and your palette? ABW I moved to Los Angeles in July 2020, when I was 26. I had a job with Lady Gaga and decided to stay. Los Angeles was never a place I thought to move to before. It was such a last minute choice, but I had a very instinctual gut feeling that it would be for the better. Growing up on the East Coast, I never truly explored the West. Being in Los Angeles, and having new territory to roam has given me a breath of fresh air and a sense of independence I never had before. I’m here in Los Angeles on my own, it’s definitely “Arielle Land.” It’s sunny and colourful and has so much texture, beautiful biodiversity, and odd architecture. All the things I love. I’ve always talked about my depression, how it’s influenced my work, and how photography has been a therapeutic practice for me. While living in Los Angeles, I’ve been creating from a place of abundance and happiness instead of scarcity and fear. I don’t feel the same way I did at 19. I’m creating from a place that’s much more whole. It’s influenced me as a person. I feel a bit lighter and I’ve come to trust myself a lot more. Moving across the country alone will do that to you! I feel I’ve become an adult in Los Angeles, and it’s the healthiest I’ve been in a long time. Arielle Bobb-Willis San Francisco, 2017 Model: Christean Phillip Stylist: Arielle Bobb-Willis Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire
Capture 2024 52 Canada Line Public Art Project Berenice Abbott Nabil Azab Lotus L. Kang Andrea Chartrand Synchrodogs Gabriel Esteban Molina Presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC Canada Line Public Art Stations Map For the 2024 multi-site Canada Line Public Art Project, Capture has installed lens-based artworks at Canada Line stations throughout Greater Vancouver. This year’s project stretches across six locations, from Waterfront to Lansdowne Station, and includes contributions from Capture and other art organizations including Booooooom, the Contemporary Art Gallery, CONTACT Photography Festival, and The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University. N Vancouver Waterfront Vancouver City Centre Yaletown–Roundhouse Olympic Village King Edward Lansdowne Fraser River Richmond
53 PUBLIC ART Waterfront Station: Berenice Abbott The Berenice Abbott Archive at The Image Centre, 1958–61 Berenice Abbott Untitled [Single apparatus with glass elongated dome], MIT, Cambridge, MA, ca. 1958–61 The Berenice Abbott Archive, The Image Centre © Estate of Ronald Kurtz, Commerce Graphics, 2023 Presented in partnership with The Image Centre Curated by The Image Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University April–August Through the postwar expansion of scientific research in the United States, American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) was employed full-time by the Physical Science Study Committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge) to create a body of work on the principles of mechanics and light. These scientific experimentations are presented through abstract and formally compelling photographs, made of visual discoveries and surprises. To capture these pictures, which combine documentary ambitions and the aesthetics of the marvellous and the invisible, Abbott, a highly skilled technician, enhanced the equipment of some of her cameras, extended the exposure time, and used strobe lights flashing on the objects as they moved through space and time. The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University holds a growing collection of nearly 400,000 photographic objects, amongst them the Berenice Abbott Archive. The largest and most comprehensive collection of her work, the Archive comprises more than 6,000 photographs and 7,000 negatives from the mid-1920s through the 1980s, as well as book maquettes, correspondence, personal journals, business records, and ephemera. Highlights include a large selection of her innovative scientific photography made in the 1950s.
Capture 2024 54 Vancouver City Centre Station: Nabil Azab Untitled (Open Channel), 2022 Nabil Azab Untitled (Open Channel), 2022 Courtesy of the Artist and Franz Kaka Curated by Capture Photography Festival April–August How can we uncouple photography from its constrictive relationship to time and truth? Nabil Azab’s large-scale, colourful, and abstract images resist the objectivity and indexicality associated with the medium, making space for individual contemplation and interpretation. The images are of existing photographs – some archival, some personal or of family – that Azab rephotographs and repurposes, obscuring their original objectivity. He creates these images by moving the camera during the shooting process, which purposefully results in blurring, visually embedding the passing of time in the work itself to challenge the notion that photographs accurately reflect a single moment. The result of this process are dreamy and glowing cloud-like images that wash over the viewer and read more like abstract paintings than photographs. The beauty of these images mask their subversive nature: the works demand that the viewer linger, take personal responsibility in making meaning, and finally accept ambiguity, as the works refuse definitive explanation. Currently living and working in Montreal, Azab is of North African descent and was born in Paris and raised in British Columbia. Canada Line Public Art Project
55 PUBLIC ART Yaletown-Roundhouse Station: Lotus L. Kang Synapse, 2023 Lotus L. Kang Synapse, 2023 Courtesy of the Artist and the CAG Photo: Rachel Topham Photography Presented in partnership with Curated by the Contemporary Art Gallery the Contemporary Art Gallery September 29, 2023 – May 5, 2024 Unfolding across sculpture, installation, drawing, and photography, the practice of Lotus L. Kang takes up questions of “becoming” on expansive terms. Known for her use of unstable, continuously sensitive materials and a visual language that melds structural, organic, and entropic forms, Kang creates dexterously layered work that explores self and environment as contingent, continuous, and inseparable. On the façade of the Contemporary Art Gallery and at the nearby YaletownRoundhouse Station, Kang presents a suite of works from her recent series Synapse, which continues her long-term engagement with cameraless photography. These works are created through an analogue luminogram process, wherein Kang places nylon produce bags – the type commonly used to package onions and citrus – in the head of a photo enlarger before projecting them onto photographic paper in the darkroom. The resulting images are both saturated and sensorial, loosely suggestive of bodily forms and functions – sinuous tendons, firing neurons, branching networks of nerves – each a nod to endless processes of regeneration, reproduction, and change.
Capture 2024 56 Olympic Village Station: Andrea Chartrand Works from the Renders series, 2021– Andrea Chartrand Render No. 4, from the Renders series, 2021 Courtesy of the Artist Presented in partnership with CONTACT Photography Festival Curated by Heather Canlas Rigg, Artistic Director, CONTACT Photography Festival April–August Toronto-based artist Andrea Chartrand’s series Renders provides a playful look at photography’s innate deceptiveness. Brightly coloured, strange tableaux showcase the formal gymnastic abilities inherent to photography’s engulfment in the digital. Horses and apples are stretched, pasted, warped, and skewed, while space and depth are compressed and confused. Chartrand’s gestures point to the infinite possibilities offered by editing software such as Photoshop, the medium’s analogue history, and the early motion studies by Eadweard Muybridge. While these images appear to be a complete submission to the digital, they are, in fact, created through an affinity for the physical. The artist creates these deceptively digital-seeming tableaux through laborious physical processes. Shapes are created using various methods, including paper cutouts, clay, paint, mould building, and resin casting; these objects are placed together in a threedimensional tableau and photographed. The resulting images translate Chartrand’s creations as seemingly compressed, digitally created worlds. This ongoing series pushes against the multiplicity that photographic printing invites through the artist’s insistence on creating a single print of each image. In its presentation at Olympic Village Station, Chartrand’s practice extends beyond unique prints and into the public realm. Installed in a display akin to the context of advertisements, the images lean into their titular reference, rendering a material confusion that invites multiple re-viewings. Canada Line Public Art Project
57 PUBLIC ART King Edward Station: Synchrodogs Slightly Altered, 2017–19 Synchrodogs Slightly Altered, 2019 Courtesy of the Artists Presented in partnership with Booooooom Curated by Jeff Hamada, Founder and Editor in Chief, Booooooom April–August Beginning their collaboration in 2008, the Ukrainian artist duo Synchrodogs initially approached photography with a diaristic lens recording everyday moments of their lives. Eventually, they developed the stylized look for which they are now known, playing with ideas of futurism, psychedelia, environmental phenomena, and the body’s intrinsic relationship to landscape. Roman Noven and Tania Shcheglova, the artists behind Synchrodogs, chose this moniker as it aptly encapsulates their mutual taste and creative vision. Part of the artists’ creative process is a nighttime meditation technique, where they harness the exact moment before deep sleep to experience what is described as waking dreams or hypnagogic hallucinations. These dream states are a source of inspiration, propelling them to create scenes of pink dust explosions amidst flora, glass ceramics in rock crevices, and colourful tape adorned to a tree. This imaginative approach to image-making encourages a playful connection to and sense of stewardship with the surrounding environment. Having coined the term “Environmental Surrealism,” the artists visually articulate the irreversible impact corporations continue to have on this planet. Synchrodogs highlight the bizarre crisis we, collectively, are experiencing while reminding us of our shared responsibility to care for the land.
Capture 2024 58 Lansdowne Station: Gabriel Esteban Molina Works from The Great Divide series, 2019–21 Gabriel Esteban Molina The Great Divide II, from The Great Divide series, 2019–21 Courtesy of the Artist and Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix Presented in partnership with Booooooom and the City of Richmond Curated by Booooooom and Capture Photography Festival April–August Growing up in the 1990s during the height of television saturation, Gabriel Esteban Molina’s studies in painting and sculpture coincided with the dawn of the internet and the rise of smartphones. His current practice focuses on lens-based media and the intersections of technology, experience, and memory. He is particularly interested in the potential cameras, screens, and other devices have to reflect our psychological, spiritual, and emotional states. Molina’s work often incorporates new technologies like 360-degree video, photogrammetry, and extended reality. The Great Divide is a series that draws on the connection between photography and nostalgia through the use images of nature captured by Molina over the course of his life. In our current era of constant hardware and software updates – as well as the ever-changing conditions of our environment – the work highlights the precarity of digital media as a tool of preservation while playfully examining traditional landscape photography. The bands and squares are the result of errors in the loading of extremely high-resolution reshot and pixelated images, and reflect the fragmentary, exploitative, and materialistic perspective on nature in Western culture. Canada Line Public Art Project
59 PUBLIC ART Synchrodogs Slightly Altered, 2017 Courtesy of the Artists
Capture 2024 60 Julian Yi-Zhong Hou Bicycle, 2023–24 Model: James Albers (Lady Boi Bangkok) Photography: Ole Vezina Production: Austin Taylor Courtesy of Artist Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen
61 PUBLIC ART Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen: Julian Yi-Zhong Hou Bicycle, 2023–24 Presented in partnership with grunt gallery, on the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen mpcas.ca Curated by 梁家傑 Alger Ji-Liang, Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen, grunt gallery April 1–30 Sited on the east side of the Independent Building at the intersection of Broadway and Kingsway, Vancouver On view every Saturday from 9 am to 10:30 pm and Sunday 9 am to 9:30 pm in April Julian Yi-Zhong Hou’s Bicycle weaves together themes of gender performance, Chinese and Western cultural symbolism, and fashion creating a video tapestry that challenges viewers’ sensibilities through a multiplicity of dissonances. Using the Chinese concept of yin-yang, Lady Boi Bangkok, the drag persona of James Albers, performs an (un)conscious mirroring of selves inviting us to examine our personal relationships with gender and identity. While the video employs a binary framework, Hou nods at the duality of his own Chinese Canadian identity and Albers’s multiracial identity. In doing so, Bicycle offers a portal through which to view, embrace, and embody our multilayered selves, queering and rejecting the notion of a singular identity. Originally commissioned as part of the Public Art Program in the City of Markham, Ontario, Bicycle was cancelled just before its debut, highlighting issues around censorship of queer representation in public spaces. This spurred the question: what is the relationship of queer and marginalized bodies to public space? By imagining new possibilities for Bicycle to persist despite its cancellation, its adaptation for the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen as a moving image work not only realizes its full potential – bringing the work’s themes to life as a physically enacted performance of gender – but also platforms queer visibility in a space often dominated by consumer advertising. The work’s relocalization to the dynamic Mount Pleasant neighbourhood emphasizes the ongoing need to platform underrepresented artists and to fight against artistic censorship.
Capture 2024 62 Michelle Sound Foster Care, 2022 monochrome print on paper, dyed porcupine quills, embroidery thread, seed beads, vintage beads, caribou hair tufting 130.81 x 99.69 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Ceremonial/Art Part of the Featured Exhibitions Program
63 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS On Time Pendulum Gallery Otherwise Disregarded Audain Art Museum Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia The Polygon Gallery Diane Severin Nguyen: If I hadn’t created my own world, I would have died in someone else’s Contemporary Art Gallery Capture x Booooooom Kiriko Watanabe and Emmy Lee Wall Maria Alyokhina, Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir, and Ragnar Kjartansson 62–75 76–81 86–89 82–85
Capture 2024 64 Gabi Dao Sensation, association, from the Small fates big feelings series, 2023 Xerox colour copy paper, custom parfum formula 58.42 x 40.64 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Unit 17 Read Gabi Dao’s interview responses on this series Small fates big feelings on pages 8–13.
65 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Presented by the Audain Foundation, with generous support from the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, MLT Aikins, PwC Canada, and Leslie Lee and John Murphy capturephotofest.com Pendulum Gallery April 1 – May 3 On Time is organized by Capture Photography Festival in partnership with Booooooom and is curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Capture Photography Festival, Jeff Hamada, Founder and Editor in Chief, Booooooom, and Chelsea Yuill, Assistant Curator, Capture Photography Festival. On Time Sungseok Ahn Gabi Dao Pendarvis Harshaw and Brandon Tauszik Aaron Leon Anthony Lepore Diane Meyer Alp Peker Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez On Time considers the ways in which contemporary lens-based artists have challenged the inextricably linked relationship between time and photography and the traditional notion that an image captures a single moment outside the temporal flow. Through their work, the artists in this exhibition ask questions around how photographs can be durational, provide context, and point to what happens before and after. How can practitioners collaborate with time or make time an ally in conveying their message? The artists in this exhibition weave the concept of time into their works: playing with its perception, making it malleable, and considering its relationship to memory. Throughout their work, they examine archives, bring together different points in history, and embed lived experiences, such as the passing of time. Ultimately, this exhibition asks: how can lens-based practices be used to investigate the myriad ways we experience time and deconstruct the meaning it holds?
Capture 2024 66 Sungseok Ahn Historic Present 020, from the Historic Present series, 2010 chromogenic print 71.12 x 88.9 cm Courtesy of the Artist
67 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Pendarvis Harshaw and Brandon Tauszik Myra Burns, from the Facing Life series, 2018 cinemagraph 00:10 secs., looped Courtesy of the Artists
Capture 2024 68 Aaron Leon Untitled 4, from the Altered Landscapes series, 2013–20 chromogenic print 76.2 x 94.61 cm Courtesy of the Artist
69 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Anthony Lepore Growing Pains, 2018 archival pigment prints and wood 149.9 x 104.8 x 17.8 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles
Capture 2024 70 Diane Meyer Brandenburg Gate, from the Berlin series, 2015 embroidered archival inkjet print 35.56 x 40.64 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Klompching Gallery
71 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Alp Peker patience, from the I looked in the mirror and I saw series, 2023 archival inkjet print 144.78 x 96.52 cm Courtesy of the Artist
Capture 2024 72 Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez Untitled (SLP/HGO), 2024 archival inkjet print 27.94 x 35.56 cm Courtesy of the Artist
73 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Sungseok Ahn How do you see the relationship between photography and time? How does your practice relate to the concept of time? I spend more time looking at the monitor in the studio than I do at my mother’s face. I take photographs to explore the era in which I live. I go to the specific site, absorb the surroundings, and take photographs to convey my personal experience to my audience. Can you share a bit about your process – how were the works in the exhibition created? These works are part of a larger series titled Historic Present where I photograph cultural sites throughout South Korea, such as the Dongnimmun arch in Seoul, the Independence Hall of Korea in Cheonan, and Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon. I created Historic Present when projectors became widely available. First, I visit the actual site and when I want to know more about it, I look for archival photographs. Then, I revisit the site and use a projector and screen to project the found black-and-white archival photographs onto the building and rephotograph it in colour, showing how the site and area around it have changed. These cultural assets are traces of wounds left mainly by the Korean War and Japanese colonial rule. I substituted these memories of the past onto Seoul, a monstrously fast-changing city, to invoke our forgotten memories of the past. Rather than understanding the present from the past, the work is carried out in a way that considers why the present was forced to be like this. What are you reading and thinking about or making now? I watch the world’s news. I listen to people who are helplessly sacrificed every day for no reason. This year, I also presented the largest exhibition I’ve ever mounted, which was on view at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea until February 2024. Pendarvis Harshaw and Brandon Tauszik Pendarvis Harshaw How do you see the relationship between photography and time? How does your practice relate to the concept of time? Storytelling is a way to preserve time. Photo and video do it by definition, capturing glimpses of life through the lens. Audio archives sound waves. The written word extends the lifespan of the oral tradition. But nothing beats the live retelling of a lived experience – the energy and emotion, movements and expressions. Someone can almost time travel by simply telling a story. And that fascinates me. When I write, make podcasts, shoot photos, or make videos, this preservation of small pieces of our time is what I think about. Although three hours of tape might only lead to a three-minute published piece, it’s not just about the time that goes into making a story, but how long it will live as well. And I’ve come to find out that stories never really die. Can you share a bit about your process – how were the works in the exhibition created? This project is a combined effort between myself and photographer Brandon Tauszik. His ability to make beautifully engaging cinemagraphs – slowly moving loops of high-quality, video-like portraits – was key in this process. Our aim was to create a project that allowed viewers to slow down and get to know a segment of society that is often overlooked. People who are incarcerated are often treated as second-tier citizens. The ongoing era of mass incarceration has left the United States’s prison system overcrowded, and California was its ground zero. The state’s prisons responded by slowly releasing people who were nonviolent offenders or who had served extended periods. Given my experience of working in prisons, we wanted to look at the people being released who were once serving a life sentence. After years behind bars, what was it like “facing life” of a different sort? What are you reading and thinking about or making now? I’ve just published a four-part long-form audio project called Hyphy Kids Got Trauma; it’s all about the year 2006,
Capture 2024 74 hip-hop, and the Bay Area. In it, I tell my own story of being a baby journalist while simultaneously looking at the hyphy movement, a hip-hop subculture native to the Bay, known for its uptempo and jovial music, goofy dances, and colourful clothing. The subculture gained national exposure in 2006, a year that also brought about 148 homicides in my hometown of Oakland. I lost a friend in January and another in November that same year, so this project looks at the trauma that came from that era. Next, I’m working on something about unions, civil rights, and family history. More to come! Brandon Tauszik How do you see the relationship between photography and time? How does your practice relate to the concept of time? I see photography as the quintessential twentieth-century medium, while video is more so the medium of our current century. Video captures time passing, while photography captures time frozen; the cinemagraph, however, is a hybrid medium between both. I have incorporated cinemagraphs in many of my projects as a way to more deeply engage viewers with portraits. The magic lies in the seamless loop of understated motion and stillness. Can you share a bit about your process – how were the works in the exhibition created? Facing life is a personal documentary project that I created with writer Pendarvis Harshaw over the course of three years. The project lives within a custom-built website experience and includes text, cinemagraphs, video, and 360VR. For this exhibition, we are showing four cinemagraph portraits, which are created by seamlessly looping segments of slow-motion video from a portrait session. The cinemagraph portraits in Facing Life are comprised of both monumental and everyday moments. In Jose’s portrait, for example, he is seen attending one of his first family barbecues. In the project he expresses how interacting in casual social situations such as these initially caused him a lot of anxiety. He didn’t know how to act or how to control his mannerisms around his family. In Myra’s portrait, she is seen working her first job since being released, utilizing handyman skills that she learned during her thirty-seven years of incarceration. What are you reading and thinking about or making now? I’m currently working on a yearlong fellowship with Stanford University’s Starling Lab for Data Integrity, which prototypes tools and principles that can bring journalists into a new era of the internet. I’m researching ways to transfer the Facing Life project onto a robust and decentralized Web3 publishing platform. Aaron Leon How do you see the relationship between photography and time? How does your practice relate to the concept of time? I have learned a lot about photography and how it captures time. Photography does not freeze a single moment instantaneously, instead it collects passages of time. I am fascinated by this and the technical aspects of photography such as light, wavelengths, and time and how these are malleable. It reminds me of the abstract expressionist movement and the way it focused on the gesture of painting; I wanted to think about photography in this way, to see how I could experiment with these tools and concepts to abstract it. I wanted to show the landscape in a new way, to highlight its changes and beauty, and to let it express itself. I used film photography, which added another layer of excitement and uncertainty. When I got the film back, I was amazed by the shifts and variations of the different exposures, wavelengths, and durations that occurred over time. Can you share a bit about your process – how were the works in the exhibition created? These works were mostly shot on medium format film with my Mamiya RZ67 (a few were done with a 4x5 camera) and printed in the darkroom. I wanted to stay in the analogue process as I liked the idea of the fluidity and roundness of colour in film, whereas digital cameras have a layer of interpolation to them. For me, having learned the history and evolution of photography, which I then used to create this series, it felt important to keep the process referential to the medium. The effect overall in this series is known as the tri-colour process, where you have a red, a blue, and a green channel (known together as RGB), which, when layered, creates a balanced image. There are different ways you can introduce this effect, but I used RGB filters on the lens and multiple exposures on a single image with a film camera on a tripod.
75 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS What are you reading and thinking about or making now? I’m exploring the stories of our Secwépemc culture as inspiration for a photo series. I want to imagine what these characters/animals would look like and how they would interact with today’s world. I am also experimenting with sculptural materials from Secwepemcúl’ecw such as birch, and I’m interested in learning more about our dictionary and cultural data. Right now, my research centers on Secwépemc histories and stories, to uncover ways we can share, preserve, and protect knowledge in the digital age while upholding principles of responsibility, respect, and reciprocity. Anthony Lepore How do you see the relationship between photography and time? How does your practice relate to the concept of time? Lucille Ball taught me one of my first lessons about time. Until I was 8, I did not recognize the passage of the years in the faces of the family members and animals that surrounded me. Living in sync with people can hide those changes. I watched the show I Love Lucy nearly every day after school. One evening, my mother was watching the Academy Awards, and they were giving Lucy a Lifetime Achievement Award. Seeing her in the present, decades older than I had come to know her, was my introduction to the aches of aging. My dear Lucy had existed for me, before that moment, in a black-and-white universe, like preserved amber outside of time. Her image on live TV introduced to me a new understanding of change, loss, and the spectre of time’s passage. Moving and still photographic images have a haunting ability to stop time, bridging moments beyond our present. This facet of photography drives much of my work. Can you share a bit about your process – how were the works in the exhibition created? Both of the works in this show feature unique shelf designs, conceived specifically for the paper objects they hold. Downtime creates an impression of movement and timekeeping. Long strips of paper – akin to ticker tape or endless paper receipts – joyfully reenact the steady drip of sand in an hourglass. The other work, Growing Pains, is built around a child’s school portraits that were found at a thrift store. With one year between each image, they act as a record of growth and aging. The shelf is divided into two spaces, which exhibit simultaneous enlargement and diminishment with the onward march of years. What are you reading and thinking about or making now? I’ve been rewatching the early films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong, and thinking about subtropical fruit trees. Diane Meyer How do you see the relationship between photography and time? How does your practice relate to the concept of time? Photography’s relationship to time is one of my favourite things about the medium. At a very basic level, I am fascinated by the fact that a photograph is (usually) taken in a fraction of a second, freezing a moment that is completely cut off from the before and the after to offer a window that can directly connect the viewer to the past. I am also interested in the ways the meaning behind photographs can change with time. My work in the exhibition is from a series of photographs tracing the entire path of the Berlin Wall and considers the ghosts of the past – the psychological presences that remain even if the structures are no longer visible. The embroidery reveals the Wall’s path and references the past and present in the same photograph. This project has yet another layer of time – the amount spent sewing into the photographs, which is a long, meditative process. Can you share a bit about your process – how were the works in the exhibition created? I took the photographs with a medium-format film camera while walking and biking around the circumference of the Berlin Wall. When shooting the images, I used The Berlin Wall, a GPS-based app created by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, which indicated the precise locations of the inner and outer walls. One of the most difficult parts was anticipating in advance where the embroidery would be placed when composing the photographs as this often required me to make changes to how I might normally compose an image. After I returned home, I scanned all of the negatives and made a final edit of the series. I did some additional research by consulting books and websites and by looking at some archival materials at the Wende Museum in Culver City, California, when thinking about where to place the embroidery. I then printed the images onto thick Hahnemühle archival inkjet paper and began hand sewing the prints using cross-stitch embroidery.
Capture 2024 76 What are you reading and thinking about or making now? I have been working on an ongoing series of handembroidered photographs based on found elementary school class pictures from the 1970s. The class photos are from big cities and small towns throughout the United States but, despite their varied locations, the clothing and poses of children and teachers and the classroom decorations are strikingly similar – providing a glimpse into the zeitgeist of this generation and a view into education systems of that time. In the class photographs, the faces of the students, what would normally be the main focal points of the image, are obscured with cross-stitch embroidery made to resemble the digital pixel structure of the image. By obscuring what would typically be the most important parts of the image, otherwise overlooked details, such as body language, social convention, and the relationship between the various figures are brought into focus. I am interested in this time period not only because it is my own generation, but because it is the last generation to have a childhood unclouded by digital technology. Alp Peker How do you see the relationship between photography and time? How does your practice relate to the concept of time? I thought about this a lot during the pandemic. It was such a blank space in everyone’s memory. The first picture in this installation, a birthday at home, reminds me of how time passed without meaning. I had to capture that feeling in photographs. During that period, I began to understand that time is insanely relative. Photography and art are perfect tools for spending time, thinking about it, recreating it, destroying it, and making something meaningful out of it. Can you share a bit about your process – how were the works in the exhibition created? It’s a terribly long process for me. Sometimes, I’ll see an object and relate it to my daily struggles. Other times, I’ll go out shopping, looking for ordinary, boring things that I can reshape and reimagine into a photograph. Then, I draw it on paper to visualize what I imagined. I’ll send these drawings to the models, who are my friends and collaborators, and ask for their ideas and consent. We’ll arrange the time and space. I often shoot at the hours just before sunset – but not quite golden hour. And then, there it is, there’s the photograph. What are you reading and thinking about or making now? I’ve been reading a lot about immigration and racism. Considering how many humanitarian crises are happening in the world right now, I think there needs to be more art on this topic. Art is a platform where we can speak about the most horrific of atrocities and also about how to heal, how to help one another. I’m definitely thinking of making more art about immigration. Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez How do you see the relationship between photography and time? How does your practice relate to the concept of time? In a couple of ways, the passage of time is a contradiction of photography. The act of taking a photograph is dependent on time, of course, but it’s also pertinent to how we read a photograph. A photograph is an immediate document of the present, but the second it is taken it already belongs to the past. I exploit this contradiction in my work. I work with image media from the recent past – found and archival images from a variety of sources such as newspapers, magazines, etc. – and employ them to speak to the present. Currently, I have been working from a set of found personal photographs. I don’t know who they belonged to, but I know what he looked like from his self-portraits. The images are indulgently about him, his friends, and his life. I worked with these photographs to open them up more, to use them as a way to ask personal questions about him which lead to more questions – ones that are broader in scope and have to do with the social and political contexts of when they were taken, from 1987 to 1993, and the subjectivity that can be attributed to the photographs after they were created up until this present moment. There’s an essay by Stuart Hall where he writes something along the lines of how identities are created at the crossroads of historical moments and in the psychic activity between the personal and the political. I am amplifying these personal images from this stranger, alongside my own, to point toward the historical moments they inherently document. Can you share a bit about your process – how were the works in the exhibition created? This was a new and exciting way of working where everything was made by following my intuition. It wasn’t premeditated. The film photograph Portrait: Technoir was the first work I made in the series. I remember just wanting to make a sort of sequel to Nostalgia by Hollis Frampton –
77 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS not in form, but conceptually – to pose similar questions as those in his work, but of the present. The photo works came about in the studio when I brought out my personal archive of snapshots and noticed the many similarities. I wanted to create a dialogue with this other photographer but across time, just by bringing our photographs together. So I turned my images into literal frames for his. What are you reading and thinking about or making now? I’m currently working on assembling photos to build my own bilderatlas. The starting point is the Bideratlas Mnemosyne featuring panels of photographs of artworks from ancient Greece and Rome assembled in the 1920s by Aby Warburg, a German art historian. I am reading Before Pictures (2016) which is a memoir by Douglas Crimp.
Capture 2024 78 Adad Hannah What Fools These Mortals Be (still), 2022 three-channel video installation 15 mins. Courtesy of the Artist, Equinox Gallery, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain Produced in collaboration with The Circle Project
79 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS audainartmuseum.com Audain Art Museum April 20 – September 9 Otherwise Disregarded is co-organized by the Audain Art Museum and Capture Photography Festival and is curated by Kiriko Watanabe, Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Curator, Audain Art Museum, and Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Capture Photography Festival, as a Featured Exhibition for the 2024 Festival. Otherwise Disregarded Adad Hannah Jake Kimble Michelle Sound Jin-me Yoon Text by Kiriko Watanabe Amid a time of unprecedented upheaval, the four artists featured in this exhibition have adeptly harnessed the transformative potential of art. Their works serve not only as a catalyst, nurturing creative expression and challenging notions of justice, but also foster a deep connection between the mind, the body, and society at large. The artists employ visual tools for self-reflection, tackling complex social, political, and environmental issues that should not be dismissed. Simultaneously, they address interwoven emotions, challenging themselves to process, understand, and convey these intricacies to their viewers. Through this process, they reclaim their self-determination and elevate their voices within and beyond mainstream society.
Capture 2024 80 In his captivating three-channel video installation, What Fools These Mortals Be (2022), Adad Hannah collaborates with fourteen formerly incarcerated women to imaginatively recreate Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This collaboration was commissioned by The Circle Project, a platform initiated by filmmaker Brenda Longfellow and restorative justice advocate Dr. Brenda Morrison that is dedicated to addressing issues of incarceration through art. Hannah’s video project engaged the women in an exuberant artistic process, providing hands-on experience and an opportunity to create community in a supportive environment. Through ongoing engagement, Hannah effectively facilitated the women in producing distinctive tableaux vivants, a stagecraft genre in which live actors perform a still image. Working with Hannah’s professional crew, the women constructed sets, props, and costumes over four weeks during the second wave of the pandemic. These women took on diverse roles, including Titania (Queen of the Fairies), Oberon (King of the Fairies and Titania’s husband), Puck (a mischievous fairy), and other characters from the play. This multilayered exploration of art blends the participants’ own sense of creation, imagination, storytelling, performance, movement, and play – encouraging them to freely transform not only their social status and gender roles but also their own personas. The Dreaming (2022) by Longfellow is an interactive audio documentary of highly personal memories, dreams, and aspirations recorded during the production of Hannah’s video. The interactive constellation, hosted on The Circle Project’s website, features the thoughts and desires of women once convicted of serious crimes in their own voices, as meditative music plays in the background.1 In revealing their dreams, the women tell of their unique perspectives and hopes for the future, providing the listener with an intimate glimpse into the emotional worlds of the participants. Jake Kimble, a multidisciplinary artist with Chipewyan (Dëne Sųłıné) roots from Treaty 8 territory in the Northwest Territories, explores lens-based self-portraiture as a medium for engaging in a dialogue with both his artistry and the viewers. Through selfreflection, Kimble examines themes around personal discovery, self-care, and constructed imagery, often delving into persistent issues of ethnic and gender-based prejudices. Kimble’s work navigates the convergence of personal and shared experiences, revealing his vulnerability and thought-provoking perspectives. In his Grow Up (2022) series, he achieves this effect by presenting his own childhood photographs and integrating his own distinctive phrases into the images. Kimble’s art invites us to contemplate the burdens we carry and encourages deeper introspection. Kimble explains that he uses the camera as “an autoethnographic tool” to explore his identity as a Two-Spirit person of Indigenous descent.2 The process of creating photographic art allows him to connect with his deepest emotions, recalling past events, people he’s met, and places he’s visited. Reminiscing about his own life often enables him to let go of anger, shame, and judgment, while at other times it helps him navigate and better understand his circumstances. The artist states that the process of creating his works also helps him embrace who he is as an individual. In I Burnt The Candle So The Candle Burnt Back (2023), Kimble literally and metaphorically expresses the difficult and frustrating situations he has endured. In contrast, When The Lights Come On That Means It’s Time To Go Home (2023) reveals how returning to his ancestral land in the North is incredibly empowering under the intense northern lights. The gentle wind and familiar smell of trees by the lake, the calming surface of water, and the beauty of this remote place depicted in this image forge a deep connection between art and nature; it renders an extraordinary encounter that is welcoming and almost magical. The multidisciplinary artist Michelle Sound, of Cree and Métis lineage, embarks on a compelling artistic journey through a series of works addressing themes associated with the forced displacement of Indigenous communities from their ancestral lands. The loss of language and family, due to legal injustices in the form of colonial and racist policies forced upon Indigenous Peoples, resulted in deeply rooted intergenerational trauma. In her Holding It Together (2022) series, Sound incorporates photographs from her childhood to explore feelings of isolation from her own family and a connection
81 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Jake Kimble Grow Up #5, 2022 archival inkjet print mounted on Dibond 40.64 x 50.8 cm Courtesy of the Artist
Capture 2024 82 with the land that is inseparable from her identity. Intentionally ripped areas in her black-and-white prints represent the wounds and damages that persist in her life and the lives of those close to her. These damaged areas are more vividly brought to life by the additional layers of Indigenous art practices, such as beadwork, stitching, and caribou hair tufting, that are applied on the photographic paper. Through her art, Sound traverses the intimate connections with her ancestors from the Wapsewsipi Swan River First Nation in Northern Alberta within the framework of a contemporary context. As she stands alongside other Indigenous families, she processes her childhood memories, responds to her own feelings, and honours her ancestors. According to the artist, her hand-rendered additions are intentionally treated with warm and bright colours, suggesting protective barriers and survival tools.3 She deliberately creates rips in the photographs to make them visually stand out and covers them to partially conceal what was once destroyed. This conveys the enduring spirit of Indigenous Peoples under injustice and, in part, carries her messages of hope for the future; it celebrates the joy, strong ties, and happiness she shares with her people.4 In her recent photographic series Long Time So Long (2022), Jin-me Yoon delves into the significance of the environment within the broader context of historical land usage as well as the injustices faced by the Indigenous Peoples who engaged in activities along the Northwest Coast, both in the past and today. Yoon uncannily unveils the vital connections between these events to consider the relationships that persist across time. She accomplishes this by capturing her unique performance of characters from talchum – a traditional Korean dance derived from Shamanic rituals, which features caricature masks – at an environmental intervention site on an area of the ancestral land of the xʷməθkʷəy ̓əm (Musqueam) People that is now known as Iona Beach Regional Park in Richmond, BC. The landscape of this location has transformed over generations. The Musqueam People were displaced from the site by European settlers by the mid-1800s, and later, Chinese and Japanese immigrants were forced out to make way for further industrialization in the area. The Iona Island Wastewater Treatment Plant, first opened in 1963, holds the Lower Mainland’s costly infrastructure for treating the sewage of much of Greater Vancouver. In Untitled 9 (Long Time So Long), Yoon sits on the wastewater pipe located on the Iona Jetty that stretches into the Strait of Georgia, where the Fraser River meets the seawater from the Pacific Ocean. Adorned in a costume made of unbleached cotton appliqued with hi-tech fabric, Yoon wears a saja (lion) mask. The mask symbolizes the cleansing of negative energy and Yoon’s iteration playfully combines its typical facial expression with those of the Tears of Joy emoji. This attire ingeniously blends traditional Korean aesthetics with contemporary elements, referencing multiple geopolitical contexts and her Korean ancestry – all set against the stunning backdrop of the West Coast shorelines and mountain ranges. Yoon explains that the conceptualization of Long Time So Long took place during the Covid-19 pandemic when she was following social distancing strategies.5 During this difficult time, her sense of isolation and her desire to connect with the broader world were amplified. She realized that the lessening of human interventions during the pandemic, combined with improvements in the filtering system over the years at the wastewater treatment plant, resulted in the ecological restoration and revitalization of the surrounding ecosystem.6 In the act of pausing to photograph her performance, Yoon considers her own path, as well as the traumatic history of the once heavily damaged site and addresses restorative justice we bring to the land, people, and nature today and in the future. The creation of the works featured in Otherwise Disregarded involved processes of revisiting memories and responding to trauma. The artists and participants intentionally hide their faces, deliberately obscuring their identities as a means of breaking through invisible emotional shields and fostering empowerment. These photographs and audiovisual works draw attention to the painful past associated with colonialist injustice, social discrimination, intergenerational experiences, and environmental devastation and issue a call for justice and a sustainable future.
83 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS 1. “The Dreaming,” The Circle Project, accessed December 7, 2023, https:// thedreaming.thecircleproject.online/. 2. Conversation with Jake Kimble, November 29, 2023. 3. Conversation with Michelle Sound, November 30, 2023. 4. Sound, 2023. 5. Conversations with Jin-me Yoon, August 28 and November 30, 2023. 6. Conversations with Jin-me Yoon, November 30 and December 8, 2023. Jin-me Yoon Untitled 9 (Long Time So Long), 2022 inkjet print 139.7 x 203.2 cm Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Rachel Topham Photography
Capture 2024 84 Diane Severin Nguyen In Her Time (Iris’ Version) (still), 2023–24 single-channel video with sound 67 mins. Courtesy of the Artist
85 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS In Her Time was commissioned and produced by the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, with support from the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. It is presented at CAG with the support of the Province of BC and Clark’s Audio Visual. cagvancouver.org Contemporary Art Gallery February 2 – May 5 Diane Severin Nguyen: If I hadn’t created my own world, I would have died in someone else’s Text by Godfre Leung Working across photography, moving image, and installation, Diane Severin Nguyen is driven by an impulse to create ungraspable images. “I realize that the perfect image cannot be seized by the photograph in front of you,” she has stated. “The most the photograph can do is admit the presence of the perfect image that will never appear.”1 In her moving image work, Nguyen explores the ungraspable by depicting characters driven to express the enigmatic truths of their existence. Often, they also struggle with the inevitability of being lost in translation.
Capture 2024 86 In If I hadn’t created my own world, I would have died in someone else’s, the Contemporary Art Gallery presents the North American debut of Nguyen’s film In Her Time (2023), exhibited in a new edit entitled In Her Time (Iris’ Version). Taking place amid the larger-than-life period sets of Hengdian World Studios, the largest film studio in Asia, the film follows Iris, a young actress searching for her voice as she prepares for a leading role in a Chinese historical epic. Iris’ Version introduces new content shot by Iris on her iPhone camera, inserting the actress’s perspective into the “official” film footage. Building on the success of Nguyen’s video works Tyrant Star (2019), and IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS (2021), In Her Time is the artist’s first feature-length film. Nguyen expands on the scale and ambitions of her previous work to examine the scale and ambitions of Hengdian – and those of China’s film industry more broadly. In its documentation of Iris’s artistic journey, as she negotiates between her individual expression and a role that asks her to speak on behalf of the collective, the film explores what is at stake in performing within this specific cinematic mode of production. While not billed by the artist as such, Nguyen’s three major moving image works could be viewed as a trilogy: Tyrant Star is about singing, IF REVOLUTION is about dancing, and In Her Time is about acting. Each film’s protagonist finds a way to express herself by inhabiting a mode of vernacular culture: karaoke, K-pop, and cinema, respectively. Facing intergenerational and historical traumas such as displacement, war, occupation, and colonialism, Nguyen’s heroines find a sense of agency in performance. This agency, however, sits uneasily alongside the risk entailed in sharing loaded cultural emblems across different points of view, intentions, and patterns of instrumentalization. In his theory of alienation, playwright Bertolt Brecht characterized empathy as the lynchpin of naturalistic acting. In Her Time revolves around the alienating tensions of Iris’s artistic process in coming to empathetically identify with her character. At stake in this enterprise is its effect on the audience, which as Brecht writes, is intended to cause spectators to “lose themselves in the character completely, to the point of giving up their own identities.”2 Towards the end of the film, Iris confides to the viewer, “If I hadn’t created my own world, I would have died in someone else’s” – an insistence that echoes the personal call to action that drove Weronika, the protagonist of IF REVOLUTION: “If I don’t become an artist then I will just remain a victim.” As Iris makes this disclosure, the kaleidoscopic movements of nighttime lights from Hengdian’s amusement park refract into bubblelike coloured dots on her hotel room window. Between the lines, we wonder about the audience of the film Iris is performing in, as they consume the historical memory that it serves as a vehicle for. Much of In Her Time depicts Iris rehearsing lines as she tries to inhabit her character. Throughout, Iris speaks directly to the audience, offering a glimpse into her artistic process, though at many points, it is unclear whether what we are hearing is Iris herself speaking or a dramatic monologue delivered in the guise of her character. Nguyen presents this dialogue through the generic conceit of a behind-the-scenes “making of ” special, but there is a productive ambiguity to Iris’s mode of address. When a performer speaks to an offcamera interviewer, via the interlocutor of a camera, she is really speaking to an audience. This function of “the camera as a sort of relay,” as film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry once wrote, initiates a scenario in which “the spectator identifies less with what is represented, the spectacle itself, than with what stages the spectacle, makes it seen, obliging them to see what it sees.”3 In In Her Time, the invisible mediumship of the camera at times takes a physical form in the figure of MaoMao, a shanzai (or knockoff) Winnie the
87 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Pooh doll with pink flip sequins lining the soles of its feet. Iris performs for MaoMao, takes direction from him, and is abusively coached by him, though she also loves him and totes him around as an emotional support companion. As we come to discover, MaoMao functions as the personification of a nebulous, superegoic voice driving Iris, against which she pursues her own voice within the collective spectacle and nation-building of the film she is performing in. The rise of auteurist cinema in the 1950s celebrated the autonomy of a director’s vision from the commercial demands of the studio system. In Her Time (Iris’ Version) reclaims the actress’s voice from that of the director and the larger superegoic complex for which the director serves as a vessel. Insofar as In Her Time’s conceit is a “making of” special, Iris’ Version contrasts the sanitized, “airable” behind-the-scenes footage of the original cut with the actress’s handshot iPhone footage. In a hall of mirrors where history is filtered through the fiction of filmmaking, housed in Hengdian, an edifice that is at once a factory and an amusement park, Iris asks us to take her interventions as the film’s real behind-the-scenes footage. Seeing as In Her Time debuted at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, the new cut also finds Iris speaking to a different audience – perhaps intervening to tailor the film to a Western audience, outside of China – shooting on her own without a production crew present, and foregrounding historical details not disclosed the first time around. In IF REVOLUTION, the opening voiceover describes spectatorship as a kind of engagement that necessitates one’s withdrawal from participating in spectacle. The possibility of revolution, or even one’s agency and capacity to act at all in a present haunted by the past, as the video suggests, depends on a kind of performance that is by nature participatory. As we watch Iris’ Version, we find ourselves searching for glimpses of Iris’s “own world.” Through the ideological mise-en-scènes of the historical epic and “making of ” special, of trauma porn and the “pink” subject of Chinese market socialism, we bear witness to another spectre of liberation. 1. Alec Recinos, “The Presence of the Perfect Image: Diane Severin Nguyen Interviewed,” in BOMB Magazine (February 8, 2021), accessed January 2024, bombmagazine.org/ articles/2021/02/08/the-presenceof-the-perfect-image-diane-severinnguyen-interviewed. 2. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964), 93. 3. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, in Film Quarterly, vol. 28, issue 2 (Winter 1974–75), 45.
Capture 2024 88 Pussy Riot From the action “Putin peed his pants,” 2012 inkjet print 84.07 x 118.87 cm Courtesy of the Artists Photo: Denis Bochkarev
89 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS The exhibition Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia originated at Kling & Bang (Iceland) and has toured to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark) and the Museum d’art contemporain de Montréal. thepolygon.ca The Polygon Gallery March 22 – June 2 Curated by Maria Alyokhina in collaboration with Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir and Ragnar Kjartansson Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia Text by Reid Shier On February 21, 2012, members of the then newly formed feminist punk collective Pussy Riot staged a guerrilla action inside the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Clad in their signature balaclavas, they stormed the altar to perform “Punk Prayer,” in a blistering response to the upcoming re-election of Vladimir Putin, his collusion with the Church, and the progressive drift of Russia into authoritarianism under his rule: “Congregations genuflect/ Black robes brag gilt epaulettes/ Freedom’s phantom’s gone to heaven/ Gay Pride’s chained and in detention/ KGB’s chief saint descends/ To guide the punks to prison vans.”
Capture 2024 90 Three of the collective’s members – Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova, Maria (Masha) Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich – were subsequently arrested, charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in a penal colony. In the eyes of Putin’s spiritual advisor Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov, the punishment was fitting: “…all of this is more than hooliganism, more than just banal anti-clerical acts, as people are wont to call it. This is a new reality of our life: ‘velvet terrorism.’” “Punk Prayer” was one of the first of a series of over fifty disruptive, but peaceful, guerrilla actions that Pussy Riot embarked on over the next decade. They scaled Moscow trolley and subway cars to scatter feathers that warned “ballots will be used as toilet paper” in the 2012 elections that reinstated Putin. They decried anti-LGBTQ laws, “congratulating” Putin on his 68th birthday by replacing the Russian flag with a rainbow flag on major government buildings, including the Russian Supreme Court, the Ministry of Culture, and the Basmanny police station. They protested the incarceration of prisoners of conscience by running onto the 2018 World Cup Final soccer pitch dressed as police officers and by redecorating a Christmas tree in front of the infamous Lubyanka Building, headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) with ornaments featuring the likenesses of political prisoners incarcerated inside. And when the FSB banned Telegram, the encrypted communication app favoured by the group, they stood in front of the Lubyanka and threw paper airplanes – Telegram’s logo – at it. As humorous and purposely ineffectual as these protests are – or, in the words of Alyokhina, “desperate, sudden, and joyous” – they elicited an increasingly hostile, violent, and often hysterical response from the Russian police and state apparatus. Members of Pussy Riot were put under house arrest, incarcerated, and tortured. The four who ran onto the World Cup pitch were imprisoned, and one of them, Pyotr Verzilov, was subsequently poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok. Alyokhina herself would endure six more prison terms as well as one year of “restricted freedom” under house arrest after participating in a demonstration to protest the harsh punishments of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most formidable political opponent in Russia. On April 26, 2022, Alyokhina appeared on the Russian Interior Ministry’s most wanted list when she removed her electronic bracelet to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Almost immediately, she faced new charges and the near certainty of another indefinite term in a penal colony. Before it could be meted out, Alyokhina and fellow Pussy Riot member Lucy Shtein engineered an ingenious escape from the country disguised as food delivery couriers. Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia sets out to chronicle the history of Pussy Riot’s actions from the group’s formation in 2011 to the present day. Curated by Alyokhina in collaboration with Icelandic artists Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir and Ragnar Kjartansson, the exhibition, which was first staged at the artist-run space Kling & Bang in Reykjavik, is a cacophonous showcase of “...the performances in context – prelude, action, reaction – … shed(ding) light on the oppression and the growing brutality of the dictatorship in Russia for the last ten years.”1 The exhibition invites the audience to explore a labyrinth of the group’s guerrilla actions and the serious consequences of executing them, illustrating an ever-inventive fight for freedom when one’s life is increasingly at stake. This text was written in January 2024 and goes to print with the news of Alexei Navalny’s sudden and unresolved death at the “Polar Wolf” penal colony on February 16, 2024.
91 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Pussy Riot From the action “Death to prison, freedom to protest,” 2011 inkjet print 29.7 x 42 cm Courtesy of the Artists Photo: Denis Sinyakov 1. Exhibition announcement for “Velvet Terrorism- Pussy Riot´s Russia,” Kling & Bang, accessed January 23, 2024, http://kob.this.is/klingogbang/ archive_view. php?lang=en&id=507.
Capture 2024 92 Nicole Beno Forced Production, 2023 archival inkjet print 56 x 38 cm Courtesy of the Artist Part of the Selected Exhibtions Program
93 SELECTED EXHIBITIONS The Selected Exhibitions Program features photography and lens-based exhibitions at galleries, museums, and other venues across Greater Vancouver. The program is chosen by a jury who evaluates submissions according to three criteria: curatorial concept, artistic excellence, and overall impact. 2024 Jury Emilie Croning Curatorial Assistant, Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora, Art Gallery of Ontario Monika Szewczyk Audain Chief Curator, The Polygon Gallery Emmy Lee Wall Executive Director and Chief Curator, Capture Photography Festival Jin-me Yoon Artist; Professor, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University Art Gallery at Evergreen | Evergreen Cultural Centre Art Gallery at Evergreen | Evergreen Cultural Centre, Lafarge Lake–Douglas SkyTrain Station Artspeak The Black Arts Centre 沙甸鹹水埠 Canton-sardine Centre A Crummy Gallery CSA Space Fazakas Gallery Gallery Gachet Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art Griffin Art Projects Kasko Gallery Malaspina Printmakers Monte Clark Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery The News Room Or Gallery The Polygon Gallery Richmond Art Gallery SUM Gallery Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden UNIT/PITT West Vancouver Art Museum Wil Aballe Art Projects Zebraclub 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117
Capture 2024 94 Silas Ng Music in My Eyes Silas Ng Close-Up Bach Suite No. 2, from the Music in My Eyes series, 2020 Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Katherine Dennis and Anna Luth Presented on the public-facing windows of the Evergreen Cultural Centre evergreenculturalcentre.ca Art Gallery at Evergreen | Evergreen Cultural Centre March 7 – September 4 The perception of music is a deeply personal experience, as sound and visual information come together to resonate in the body. Music in My Eyes (2020–) by Vancouver-based artist Silas Ng captures the artist’s connection to music through movement and vibration. Working from his experience as a Deaf person, Ng uses high-contrast black-and-white images to foreground his embodied awareness of sound. The artist has been fascinated with classical music since childhood. He photographs the performance of quick, energetic gestures and the long draw of the bow across the strings. Furthering this personal connection, Ng enlists his brother – an accomplished musician – as the subject. In his photographs, he captures the visual expression of J. S. Bach’s moving Suite No. 2 performed on the cello, trumpet, and violin to reveal how sound is a multisensory experience. For Music in My Eyes, Ng translates a time-based medium into still images by employing long-exposure photography techniques to evoke the feeling of music. The visuals reinforce that sound is not solely experienced through auditory means. In a world that privileges the able-bodied experience, this work celebrates the artist’s unique understanding of music as one perspective among many across the diverse Deaf community. Ng’s mesmerizing photographs become a visual portal into the sensation of music, encouraging viewers to recall their own memories associated with sound and performance.
95 SELECTED EXHIBITIONS Sarah Anne Johnson Woodland Sarah Anne Johnson PIB, from the Woodland series, 2023 Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Katherine Dennis Presented in partnership with Translink and the Art Gallery at Evergreen | Evergreen Cultural Centre evergreenculturalcentre.ca Art Gallery at Evergreen | Evergreen Cultural Centre Lafarge Lake–Douglas SkyTrain Station March 2024 – March 2025 Since 2020, artist Sarah Anne Johnson has been using her camera to document the forests around her home in Manitoba. Using tools like Photoshop, paint, metal leaf, holographic tape, and photo-spotting ink, she then transforms these photographs into images that more honestly reflect her experience with the landscape. Johnson’s distinctive photographic approach reveals the enchanted essence of a living, breathing forest. Johnson takes inspiration from sacred architecture, the intelligence of trees, and her spiritual connection to the forest. Indigenous Peoples on Turtle Island have known since time immemorial the wisdom of nature and the interconnectedness of ecosystems – a mode of knowledge that has only recently been embraced by Western scientific research. Many cultures across the globe have likewise followed eco-centric practices, such as Japan’s shinrin-yoku, also known as “forest bathing.” Johnson’s own meditative practice started during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Photographing forests was her way of finding and sharing calm amid uncertain times. In this series, the artist portrays what she calls the “healing power of the forest” through a kaleidoscope of colours. Her colour prisms bring to light unseen dimensions found within nature. Woodland is a series of eight images – idyllic, whimsical, and psychedelic – that trace the four seasons across Lafarge Lake–Douglas SkyTrain Station. The photographs animate the concrete surroundings of the cityscape and transit station, casting colourful shadows inside and outside by their stained glass-like appearance.
Capture 2024 96 Group Exhibition Fracture/Repair Junior Sealy Transformations, 2021 inkjet print 121.92 x 81.28 cm Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Forgotten Lands artspeak.ca Artspeak April 3 – June 7 Fracture/Repair unfolds as a transcultural examination of diasporic relationships to land across the Caribbean, framing ancestral and contemporary Caribbean landscapes as a backdrop for discourse concerning the politics of location, dislocation, displacement, and dispossession. Where histories and ongoing practices of exploitation, colonization, imperialism, and resource extraction pillar cultural and spiritual memory, a unique perspective of geography and nationhood emerges – planting a visual language of place-making, care, participation, love, and critique. The archival reimaginings, collage, and digital photography on view capture themes of labour, sovereignty, belonging, and reconnection. The exhibition weaves a diverse collection of ecological queries informed by the transient and transformational ruptures and perpetual reassembling of the colonial project that is the Caribbean. Fracture/Repair features artwork by Nadia Huggins, Andrew Jackson, Renluka Maharaj, Junior Sealy, and Ricardo Miguel Hernandez.
97 SELECTED EXHIBITIONS Group Exhibition Family first? Delali Cofie Sunday Afternoon – Sisters in the Courtyard, 2021 inkjet print 60 x 78 cm Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Hafiz Akinlusi theblackartscentre.ca The Black Arts Centre March 28 – June 27 Family first? delves into the intricate dynamics of Black familial relationships and the journey of self-discovery. The exhibition – featuring work by artists Jade Duncanson, Delali Cofie, Iris Huongbo, Deion Squires, and Chukwudubem Ukaigwe – aims to unravel the often-unseen layers beneath the harmonious image of family life, exploring the intersections of personal identity, familial roles, and unspoken emotional undercurrents. Inspired by bell hooks’s insights on love and family, this exhibition critically examines the complexities of Black family structures. It brings to light how individuals often mask aspects of their identity from their family, revealing the struggle between personal authenticity and familial expectations. Central themes include the concealed self, dualities, love, and the multidimensional narratives of Black families, with a particular focus on the weight of generational expectations and trauma and the emergence of non-traditional family models. Set in Surrey, home to Greater Vancouver’s largest Black population, the exhibition holds particular resonance. It reflects the diverse stories and emotional landscapes of the diaspora, shaped by migration and non-heteronormative identities, and challenges traditional familial norms. Family first? is more than an exhibition; it is a provocative journey that invites introspection and the re-evaluation of family narratives. It poses a critical question: what happens when the structures of familial mutual support suppress individual expression? This exhibition is a voyage, traversing the depths of family bonds, identity, and the transformative power of understanding and acceptance.
Capture 2024 98 Wang Ningde The Saboteur Wang Ningde No Name No.1, from the No Name series, 2015 archival inkjet print 199 x 300 cm Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Dr. Zheng Ziyu canton-sardine.com 沙甸鹹水埠 Canton-sardine April 6 – May 31 Wang Ningde describes himself as “The Saboteur.” Though his creations originate in photography, he consistently strives to break the inherent definitions and boundaries of the medium. Ningde’s series titled No Name intricately weaves together photographs he took of graffiti, isolating the painted strokes and layering them with images of conflict he sourced from the internet. Through this collage, he mimics a raw and expressive painting texture, blurring the lines between delicacy and coarseness, clarity and obscurity, narrative and abstraction, destruction and reconstruction, and illusion and reality. In the context of art history, the strokes in painting have often been used to carry the spirit of revolution and rebellion, as in, for example, the impressionist paintings of the nineteenth century. The invention of photography, on the other hand, was predominantly organized around challenging the conventions of realist painting. As such, Ningde’s work represents an experimental exploration of the fundamental essence of both painting and photography. It serves to deconstruct the two mediums, pushing the viewer to reconsider their own assumptions and expectations of painting and photography. The novelty and anxiety stemming from the uncertainty of these works aptly resonates with the contemporary art context today. The Saboteur is the artist’s inaugural solo exhibition in Canada. This exhibition is curated by Dr. Zheng Ziyu, an internationally acclaimed curator of photography and an associated researcher at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China.
99 SELECTED EXHIBITIONS Group Exhibition and when you return, we will talk again Kamesh Bharadwaj Untitled, 2020 archival inkjet print Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Gulmehar Dhillon With support from the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia. centrea.org Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art April 11 – May 24 and when you return, we will talk again is an exploration through the intricate tapestry of migration narratives, set both within and beyond the borders of South Asia. The exhibition delves into the evolving essence of the region, transcending political boundaries to examine complex themes of belonging and estrangement. It grapples with the profound sense of displacement, whether by choice or circumstance, and the evolving concept of “home,” where it represents not just a place but a repository of emotions, connections, and memories woven into our very being. Through the works by Kamesh Bharadwaj, Bharat Choudhary, and Pahul Singh, the exhibition reflects on nostalgia, longing, and the yearning to preserve what has been left behind. Within these works lie the complex politics of belonging, where individuals and communities grapple with the ebb and flow of constantly shifting identities. These multifaceted narratives illustrate the ever-expanding and shifting meanings of South Asia(n), challenging us to confront the enduring legacies of colonialism by shedding light on the intricate intersections of power and displacement. Navigating a wide spectrum of experiences, and when you return, we will talk again resonates with the many voices of those on journeys, carrying echoes of a quest for “home.”
Capture 2024 100 Group Exhibition Signal House Laura Gildner His Presence is Felt: Terry Lynn, Laura, and Patrick, from the Lovechild series, 2023 inkjet print on adhesive vinyl Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Cedric Bomford crummygallery.com Crummy Gallery March 22 – April 28 Crummy Gallery, a mobile art and gathering space, in partnership with FLEET and Other Sights for Artists’ Projects presents Signal House, a series of lens-based exhibitions on Granville Island throughout March and April 2024. This program features a rotating series of site-responsive installations in, on, and around Crummy over the course of six weeks by a collective of artists from Vancouver Island including Laura Dutton, Laura Gildner, Jordan Hill, Kosar Movahedi, and Leanne Olson. Signal House is simultaneously a travelling research station, a performative meeting ground, and a site for unconventional presentation. Signal transmissions from the house may be crossed, scrambled, or in alien languages that need untangling. These beacons reach out from across waters to communicate amidst new surroundings, offering a call and waiting for a response. Works that challenge how we experience signals – whether through optical shifts in perception, kinetic interplay, or portals to the unknown – form the fabric of this exhibition series. A new project will be installed weekly between March 22 and April 28, each considering the metamorphic potential of lens-based imagery in shaping our speculative worlds. A full schedule of events for Signal House can be found at crummygallery.com.