51 PUBLIC ART Presented in partnership with Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival 460 King St, Toronto: Jake Kimble Grow Up #1, 2022 Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival May–June Part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival 460 King St W at Spadina Ave, Toronto Jake Kimble’s practice combines both humour and pathos in vulnerable, self-reflective images that often feature the artist himself engaged in acts of self-repair. Grow Up #1 is an image of the artist, aged six or seven, taken by his mother and overlaid with text that reads “I was told peace was mine to keep” – the statement of a promise unfulfilled or a burden to bear. The phrase implies both that peace was his, and its opposite – that he was to be the peacekeeper. The work reflects the artist’s personal experience of growing up in a chaotic household in which, from a young age, he felt the burden of adult responsibility. The photo features Kimble wearing a cowboy hat, on his way to the Calgary stampede, complicating his identity as a Chipewyan (Dëne Sųłıné) child from Treaty 8 Territory in the Northwest Territories. In this work, Kimble subverts traditional dichotomies between “cowboys and Indians” and “parent and child” by playing both roles simultaneously.
Capture 2023 52 Canada Line Public Art Project Meganelizabeth Diamond Thirza Schaap Alison Boulier Soloman Chiniquay and jaz whitford Kvet Nguyen Faune Ybarra Jaspal Birdi The Canada Line Public Art Project – InTransit BC is presented by Wesgroup Properties Presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Project – InTransit BC Canada Line Public Art Stations Map For the 2023 multi-sited Canada Line Public Art Project, Capture has installed lensbased artworks at Canada Line stations throughout Greater Vancouver. This year’s project stretches across seven locations, from Waterfront to Lansdowne Station, and includes contributions from Capture and other art organizations including Artspeak, Booooooom, Centre A, Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, and Richmond Art Gallery. N Vancouver Waterfront Vancouver City Centre Olympic Village Broadway–City Hall King Edward Aberdeen Lansdowne Fraser River Richmond
53 PUBLIC ART Waterfront Station: Meganelizabeth Diamond The Surface of an Image, 2017–22 Meganelizabeth Diamond Composition test 03, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Chelsea Yuill, Capture Photography Festival Collectively, we understand that taking a photograph can be as simple as “point and April–August shoot.” Some artists take photos, but Meganelizabeth Diamond builds them. Her experimental approach plays with alternative ways of image-building by blending analogue and digital photographic processes. Diamond’s studio practice integrates physical and online worlds. The images in her growing photo collection of plant life and landscapes are captured during walks or mined from the web. She may begin with a film photograph that is scanned, but her transformative process might see this initial image photoshopped, printed, collaged, rephotographed in nature, rescanned, and combined with more images. At times she may include a three-dimensional scan of an object, pointing to the material interplay between the digital image and the printed one; or she may explore floral forms with lumen prints, a nineteenth-century technique that harnesses the sun instead of a camera to produce an image on light-sensitive photo paper. Within each image, time is compressed as the artist fuses together historical and contemporary photographic methods. Diamond produces painterly and experiential work that teeters between figuration and abstraction, the organic and artificial. All of these elements aim to expand our definition of landscape photography and our ideas surrounding how images can be made.
Capture 2023 54 Vancouver City Centre Station: Thirza Schaap Works from the Plastic Ocean series, 2016– Thirza Schaap Stuck, from the Plastic Ocean series, 2019 Courtesy of the Artist Presented in partnership with the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival Curated by Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival April–August Drawing on the aesthetics of commercial product advertisements, dividing her time between Cape Town and Amsterdam, Dutch photographer Thirza Schaap creates elaborate tabletop sculptures made of debris collected from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. A beachcomber at heart, Schaap has long been drawn to collecting natural materials, including seashells, rocks, and twigs, on frequent waterfront walks near her studio. Yet, due to the massive proliferation of plastic waste on shorelines everywhere, recently she has often found herself gathering bits and pieces of plastic. As an artistactivist committed to living plastic-free as much as possible, Schaap began collecting these fragments not only as a clean-up effort, but also as an act of creative recycling. With an astute eye, she arranges her compositions into increasingly abstract and whimsical shapes, often incorporating dried plants, seaweed, and found textiles. At once seductive and disquieting, Schaap’s images serve as reminders of the endless stream of this obstinate material that saturates contemporary life and floods the earth’s waterways. Once considered an invention fueling progress, convenience, and efficiency, plastic has turned out to be the enemy of people and the planet. Schaap writes, “Our beaches are covered in plastic confetti and there really is nothing to celebrate.” The ever-growing “garbage patches” floating on the planet’s oceans are testament to the detrimental effects of prioritizing convenience and consumption. With their bold, alluring colour schemes and playful, inventive qualities, the images in Plastic Ocean straddle a fine line, pulling the viewer in while quietly raising the alarm, warning of our current predicament. Canada Line Public Art Project
55 PUBLIC ART Olympic Village Station: Alison Boulier Works from the Invasive series, 2022 Alison Boulier Work from the Invasive series, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist Presented in partnership with Curated by Booooooom and Capture Photography Festival Booooooom Alison Boulier’s series Invasive features close-up images of plants shot against a white April–August backdrop, gently held in place by a hand. Himalayan blackberry, white sweetclover, and lesser burdock – the species featured – are considered “invasive species”: those that are not native to a region but adapt and reproduce effectively, spreading undesirably and harmfully. These non-native organisms can be devastating to natural ecosystems and have an enormous economic impact. In highlighting invasive plants, Boulier’s work draws a poetic comparison to the ways in which settlers occupy and take land from those who were and are Indigenous to it. By focusing on that which is not native to a landscape but is instead unknowingly destructive, Boulier draws attention to the challenges of reconciling settler occupancy with how humans’ integration into place may be detrimental to those who existed before. With this series, Boulier asks, “What does it take to remain, or become native to place?”
Capture 2023 56 Broadway–City Hall Station: Soloman Chiniquay and jaz whitford Works from the Ake Huchimagachach Ena (I’ll see you again mother) Ake Huchimagachach Ade (I’ll see you again father) series, 2017–21 Soloman Chiniquay and jaz whitford Mînî Thnî, December, from the Ake Huchimagachach Ena (I’ll see you again mother) Ake Huchimagachach Ade (I’ll see you again father) series, 2021 Courtesy of the Artists Presented in partnership with Artspeak Curated by Nya Lewis, Director/Curator, Artspeak April–August In Stoney there is no word for goodbye, only “Ake Huchimagachach,” which means “I’ll see you again in this life or the next.” A gesture toward boundless preservation, Soloman Chiniquay and jaz whitford create cultural memoirs, enlivening the mundane of the colonial condition with colourful markings that re-root Indigenous accounts of place and land. Consisting of digital images manipulated with superimposed acrylic, oil, and ink, the collaboration repositions common conceptions of land as static or commodity to something alive, vocal, and with agency. With a dynamic range of point-and-shoot images, Chiniquay’s and whitford’s quiet observations frame sites of familiarity, intimacy, grief, longing, and possibility. A mirror to dispossession, Ake Huchimagachach Ena (I’ll see you again mother) Ake Huchimagachach Ade (I’ll see you again father) posits Indigenous life, labour, and connection as vital to the embodiment of sovereignty and the self-determination of land. Central to the series is a method of exchange. Their approach fuses photography, painting, and conceptualism that culminates in an offering – placing the value of art in the act of collaboratively envisioning practices of stewardship and care. Canada Line Public Art Project
57 PUBLIC ART King Edward Station: Kvet Nguyen Works from the You are allowed to mix apples and pears here series, 2020 Kvet Nguyen Work from the You are allowed to mix apples and pears here series, 2020 Courtesy of the Artist Presented in partnership with Centre A Curated by Henry Heng Lu, Previous Executive Director/Curator, Centre A Kvet Nguyen’s work demonstrates an embodied sense of searching within the self. For April–August her photo series You are allowed to mix apples and pears here, Nguyen assembles a range of objects – primarily organic – of various sculptural forms and photographs them against backdrops of domestic settings. The objects, many of which are often found in diasporic cooking, are posed with others with apparently different cultural roots; the constructed compositions display dexterity, elegance, and discomfort. These compositions symbolize the act of “blending in” performed by Nguyen’s family following their immigration to Slovakia from Vietnam several decades ago and simultaneously evoke a sense of uncertainty through the strange-yet-familiar quality of the collages. The subtle approach to familiarity is aided by elegant lighting, surroundings, and colour choices, seemingly creating a metaphor for becoming, unbecoming, and rebecoming. Ultimately, You are allowed to mix apples and pears here is a family portrait of Nguyen and her parents that speaks to the prolonged process of navigating cultures and settling in.
Capture 2023 58 Faune Ybarra Iceberg Stranded in My Bed (detail), 2020–22 Courtesy of the Artist Presented in partnership with Richmond Art Gallery and Richmond Public Art Curated by Maria Filipina Palad, Curatorial Assistant, Richmond Art Gallery April 1, 2023– February 29, 2024 Faced with feelings of displacement and the constant need to adapt to different landscapes, diasporic artist Faune Ybarra aspires to ground herself in the places she chooses to live. Born in Mexico City and raised between Oaxaca and Mexico City, Ybarra later moved to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where she lived for four years. She now lives and works in Vancouver. Hoping to acknowledge her presence in a new – albeit potentially temporary – place, Ybarra created an ongoing multimedia archive of her journeys to weave her story within the broader tapestry of immigrant narratives. This work is a part of Ybarra’s archive. While in St. John’s, Ybarra developed an artistic response to Robert E. Holloway’s book Through Newfoundland with the Camera (1905). Now part of the Digital Archives Initiative, the seminal book influenced the Canadian public’s perception of the province in the 1900s. Ybarra contemplates whether her perspective as an immigrant to Canada and as an artist of colour could provide nuance to the evolving story of the province. In 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ybarra, unable to get to the physical archives in St. John’s, used their digital archive instead. Behind and on her is a projected image of the Holloway photograph captioned “Iceberg Stranded Outside St. John’s Harbour for Three Weeks.” She enshrouds herself with a white blanket and stands on a mattress situated in her apartment in Vancouver. Ybarra’s movement and the shape of her covered body change the original image’s identity, creating a new one in the process – one of intimate connection, impermanence, and confinement. Canada Line Public Art Project Aberdeen Station: Faune Ybarra Iceberg Stranded in My Bed, 2020–22
59 PUBLIC ART Lansdowne Station: Jaspal Birdi 11h02m, 2020 Jaspal Birdi 11h02m, 2020 Courtesy of the Artist Presented in partnership with Richmond Art Gallery and Richmond Public Art Curated by Maria Filipina Palad, Curatorial Assistant, Richmond Art Gallery April 1, 2023– February 29, 2024 In 2020, Jaspal Birdi was on an art residency in Milan, Italy, when news of lockdowns began circulating, so she returned to Toronto to pursue her work. Often working in both countries, Birdi is used to living between places. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, put a twist on her otherwise mobile life. 11h02m was first shown in Birdi’s 2020 exhibition Can I Play Outside at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery. In this work, Birdi draws us back to this time of isolation, when she simultaneously felt a sense of helplessness and an elevated state of creativity and struggled with feelings of confinement, longing, and hope. The sameness of looking at the sky every day gave Birdi a sense of separation from those she longed to be with. However, seeing the clouds move collectively also gave her a sense of being among a community and hope that the world would move on from the crisis. This painterly image of a blue sky lined with low-lying clouds was a photograph taken using an iPhone from Birdi’s window at her Toronto home. More interested in the imperfect image than the faithful duplication of her shots, Birdi overrides the settings of her printer, which would typically cease printing when the toner runs out. For this work, she scanned and enlarged the print and re-printed it in pieces. She transferred the image onto a gold rescue blanket – a lightweight, portable material that is both delicate and stable. The result is this ethereal, abstracted image offering a window into how the artist navigated a time of unprecedented collective uncertainty.
Capture 2023 60 Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. Devin in Red Socks, 2016 chromogenic print 91.44 x 60.96 cm from As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021) Courtesy of the Artist Part of the Featured Exhibition Program
61 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Here and Now Pendulum Gallery Svava Tergesen: Ornamental Cookery Audain Art Museum As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic The Polygon Gallery The Children Have to Hear Another Story: Alanis Obomsawin Vancouver Art Gallery Emmy Lee Wall and Chelsea Yuill Emmy Lee Wall Elliott Ramsey Richard Hill and Hila Peleg 60–71 72–75 76–81 82–85
Capture 2023 62 Jaiden George Hinkiicims, Digitization Studio, 2023 inkjet print 117.22 x 156.21 cm Courtesy of the Artist
63 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Here and Now is organized by Capture Photography Festival Presented by the Audain Foundation and generously supported by the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, and PricewaterhouseCoopers capturephotofest.com Pendulum Gallery March 27 – April 29 Curated by Emmy Lee Wall and Chelsea Yuill, Capture Photography Festival Here and Now Jaiden George Khim Hipol Tom Hsu Alexine McLeod Dana Qaddah Isaac Thomas Ian Wallace Gloria Wong Jin-me Yoon Karen Zalamea Here and Now celebrates Capture’s tenth anniversary by commissioning ten local artists to create new lens-based artworks. These artists, selected for their varied approaches to the medium, have each been asked to respond in some way to this place – by considering the landscape, history, people, or culture – with an aim to producing a dynamic exhibition that revels in the diversity of the city itself. The inaugural Capture Photography Festival took place in 2013 and was founded as an annual celebration of lens-based art, in part to acknowledge the important local history of conceptual photographic practices that have been significant in contemporary art dialogues internationally for decades and which remain influential to this day. Capture’s current mission is to connect Vancouver to the world through lens-based art; this exhibition, therefore, is of special significance for its exploration of place and in considering the artists that are shaped by and who shape the city. Including emerging, mid-career, and senior artists who live and work in Vancouver, Here and Now includes expansive investigations into the histories of this place, the material culture here, the changing streetscapes, cultural inheritance, and sites of leisure: intangible but formative elements of the city. This Featured Exhibition, Here and Now, presents the myriad ways in which contemporary artists are deploying the medium today.
Capture 2023 64 Khim Hipol korona from the Anak ng Lupang Hinirang series, 2021 archival inkjet print 152.4 x 114.3 cm Courtesy of the Artist
65 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Tom Hsu Hand in flower, from the Between a rock and a soft place series, 2022 archival inkjet print 35.56 x 24.13 cm Courtesy of the Artist
Capture 2023 66 Alexine McLeod Oscillation (408), 2022 inkjet print 91.44 x 60.96 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Monte Clark, Vancouver
67 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Dana Qaddah We’re not the only ones but………, the special ones, 2023 transparency on lightbox 63.93 x 73.32 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Unit 17
Capture 2023 68 Isaac Thomas Basketball Court, 2023 chromogenic print 121.92 x 147.32 cm Courtesy of the Artist
69 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Ian Wallace Intersection 1970: Then and Now, 2022 gelatin silver print, inkjet print 41.91 x 60.96 cm, 60.96 x 78.74 cm Courtesy of the Artist
Capture 2023 70 Gloria Wong Self-portrait as my grandmother (after Yucho Chow), from the fictive genealogies series, 2023 archival inkjet print 152.40 x 121.92 cm Courtesy of the Artist
71 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Jin-me Yoon Longer View, from the Listening In Place series, 2022 chromogenic print 83.82 x 128.27 cm Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Rachel Topham Photography The Artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
Capture 2023 72 Karen Zalamea The Joyce-Collingwood Food Hub, 2022–23 archival inkjet print 55.88 x 228.6 cm Courtesy of the Artist
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Capture 2023 74 Svava Tergesen Fancies, 2023 vinyl adhesive 2.68 x 3 m Courtesy of the Artist
75 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Svava Tergesen: Ornamental Cookery is co-organized by the Audain Art Museum and Capture Photography Festival audainartmuseum.com Audain Art Museum April 1 – June 11 Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival Svava Tergesen: Ornamental Cookery Ornamental Cookery is a solo exhibition including a site-specific installation by Vancouver-based emerging artist Svava Tergesen. Exploring the symbolic potential of everyday objects, Tergesen’s work often starts as a sculpture or collage in which she employs foods and other household items to create intricate, surreal arrangements. Combining handicraft techniques such as cooking and textile art with photography, Tergesen’s practice explores the domestic sphere and the gender roles therein. By repositioning and glamourizing photographic images – those she has taken herself as well as repurposed found imagery – Tergesen considers the ways in which photography can create a novel encounter with the familiar. The title of the exhibition, Ornamental Cookery, refers to Roland Barthes’s eponymous 1957 text in which he examines the way women’s magazines present glossy images of food as representative of a fantastical lifestyle – a façade of gentility – while obscuring, or perhaps serving to entrench, economic issues and gender divides. Tergesen’s work brings these issues to the fore by combining imagery drawn from a myriad of sources, including vintage cookbooks, etiquette manuals, and online open-access museum archives, to create still life collages that imagine new lives for domestic objects. Exploring the tension between the functionality and decorative qualities of everyday objects, her work presents a vision of domestic space, both physical and symbolic, as one rife with possibilities. Emmy Lee Wall I have seen your work presented both as photographs in frames, and as installations in which you have installed photographs on top of vinyl works. Can you talk a little bit about working site-specifically and how this project extends the ways in which you have previously expanded your work beyond traditional modes of presentation?
Capture 2023 76 Svava Tergesen I like to create interplay between the foreground and background in my photos, so I see my use of different installation techniques – like vinyl wallpaper – as an extension of this impulse. I’ve hung unframed works on vinyl, where the photograph almost blends into the backdrop. I like that the perimeters of the photo become ambiguous and that the backdrop extends this sort of fictional life that the objects live outside the frame. The vinyl also recalls advertising, like signage installed in window fronts, so there is a commercial aspect to using different installation techniques, like vinyl, that resonates strongly with the history of food photography. Many of the works I’ve made for this exhibition exist only temporarily, since the vinyl can really only be installed once – it’s adhered directly to the wall and then destroyed. I think this resonates a lot with how ephemeral my subject matter is; most of the objects I photograph change from day to day, decay, and are subject to time. ELW Food imagery and food photography figures very prominently in your practice. What is compelling for you about this imagery, and why does it hold such a central place in your work? ST I could talk about this for ages! I think food is a really interesting material: at its core it’s functional, but its aesthetics play a huge role in forming our experience of it. I’m really interested in that point at which an object crosses over from functional to completely decorative – I find food hovers so nicely between these two poles. I think this makes it particularly well-suited to photography, which can render the haptic qualities of food in such great detail while also privileging the act of looking as a means of knowing. So multiple senses are activated to make sense of what is going on. Food is also something everyone can relate to on some level. It’s charged but also mundane. In my work, I see food as a jumping-off point to larger questions about how we understand the familiar objects that surround us. I enjoy taking these objects that we encounter so frequently they almost become invisible and turning them into something new, in order to see what possibilities this can generate. An important aspect is accessibility – food is not arcane or difficult to source. My practice is very neatly integrated into my daily routine: I buy my art supplies at the same time as my groceries for dinner. It feels very powerful to turn gestures like doing chores into a form of art-making. This methodology is something I think about continuously as I’m making work and continues to inspire how I want to make work. ELW Your works have a certain “look,” achieved, I think, in part because you use imagery found from sources that are not contemporary. Where do you derive the images that you use for your collages? ST I source a lot of imagery from vintage cookbooks, magazines, and etiquette manuals that I find online or in thrift stores. I also visit the library and scan images from books, and use open-access museum archives. People have started to gift me their vintage cookbooks – recently I was given an old Crisco baking manual – I think mostly because the imagery showing these outdated foods is no longer appealing to actually consume. They’re more or less recognized as novelty items now. I spend a lot of time examining how antiques are presented in books – especially jewelry, clothing, and glassware – so my images are informed by this material and the presentation strategies used in these books. ELW The title of your exhibition at the Audain Art Museum, Ornamental Cookery, refers to Roland Barthes’s 1957 text of the same name. Barthes considers the way women’s magazines present food as a stand-in for an aspirational
77 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Svava Tergesen Roses with Stretch Lace, 2023 archival pigment print 139.7 x 91.4 cm Courtesy of the Artist Opposite Page: Svava Tergesen Zanfirico Glassware, 2021 archival pigment print 101.6 x 72.4 cm Courtesy of the Artist lifestyle while avoiding the economic and gender issues it raises. With inflationary pressure being a scary reality for many as you prepare this work, can you speak to some of the social issues your work addresses that may not be immediately obvious at first glance? ST It has been a really different time to be buying my supplies recently; a lot of the items I buy are carefully considered based on budget. I set a lot of limitations on myself, partly out of financial and physical necessity, but also because I fundamentally feel that art shouldn’t be this out-of-reach, hermetic practice. This fuels me to keep using ordinary objects that most people encounter in their daily lives. I often think about how chores can become art, because so many of these domestic tasks are truly creative, like organizing, repurposing, cooking, and repairing. I think of my photographs as a sort of re-enactment of this type of household labour on a two-dimensional surface. Doing this turns these mundane, everyday gestures on its head by separating it from its original function, which is an interesting space to operate within. Barthes critiques this creation of an essentially “magical” cuisine because it attempts to separate itself from the conditions of its reality. I think there is a strong desire for escapism currently, and photography is a great medium for crafting various kinds of alternate realities. That’s partly why I’m so fascinated by the creation of these look-alike foods – you know, where a cake is made in the shape of a log or a flower is put on a latte. This impulse to decorate hinges on the desire to be something else; there exists this possibility for transformation or becoming. Maybe there’s a link between this and Charlotte Cotton’s proposal that photography is a “close-up magic,” where photography both deceives and reveals these aspects of our current condition.1 1. Charlotte Cotton, Photography Is Magic (New York: Aperture, 2015).
Capture 2023 78 Samuel Fosso ‘70s Lifestyle, 1975–78 gelatin silver print 46.5 x 46.5 cm © Samuel Fosso, Courtesy of JM.PATRAS/PARIS
79 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Exhibition organized by Aperture, New York This essay was first published by the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, September 2022 All images are from As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021) thepolygon.ca The Polygon Gallery February 24 – May 14 Curated by Elliott Ramsey, Curator, The Polygon Gallery As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic Familial, Familiar In his preface to the book on which this exhibition is based, the writer and photographer Teju Cole describes As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic as an album. He likens it to a family photo album, with the sitters in every portrait exuding comfort and confidence. Family – and the kinds of images at home in a family album – proliferate through As We Rise, Seydou Keïta’s photograph of twin babies in costume, or Malick Sidibé’s endearing shot of a brother and sister dancing on Christmas Eve; Deana Lawson’s festive picture of the Coulson family in their living room, or Dawit L. Petros’s image of the Hadenbes family standing, somehow relaxed yet regal, in their yard; or Zun Lee’s intimate, close-up photo of a father staring straight into the camera as he holds his son. In these photographs, the subjects are present with the photographer. They are in community. This ethos of community is at the heart of the collection from which this exhibition is drawn. Established by Dr. Kenneth Montague in 1997, the Wedge Collection is Canada’s largest privately owned collection committed to representing African diasporic culture and contemporary Black life. Many of the acquisitions have come about through, or helped to foster, personal friendships between collector and artist; Dr. Montague is intentional in championing Black artists, and – particularly with emerging artists – bringing their work to higher acclaim. The title As We Rise is borrowed from a phrase that Dr. Montague’s father would often invoke: “Lifting as we rise.” By this, he emphasised the importance of parlaying one’s personal success into communal good. He believed in investing back in the Black community to which he and his family belonged. As an ethic, “lifting as we rise” suggests an expanded sense of family, one that reaches beyond close relatives. As an exhibition, As We Rise embraces this expansive sensibility, centring the familial alongside the familiar.
Capture 2023 80 Familiarity infuses As We Rise, joining together vantages from around the Black Atlantic in a space of mutual recognition. Socially and geographically, the notion of the “Black Atlantic” considers how, between 1492 and 1820, some two-thirds of people crossing the Atlantic were from the African continent; and that these forced migrations have spun connective threads between Africa, the Americas, and Europe, weaving a foundation for what scholars such as Paul Gilroy argue constitutes a Black consciousness. Jamel Shabazz emphasises joy in his stylish street photographs of youth in New York, as hip hop gained prominence in the 1980s; Oumar Ly foregrounds the everyday, the vernacular, in his portraits taken on streets in 1960s Podor, Senegal. Kennedi Carter preserves, in her self-portrait, a tender moment of care as her father trims her hair at home during the Covid-19 pandemic. These photographs span space and time, yet remain sympathetic to one another; a suggestion, perhaps, of this “Black consciousness” that Gilroy alludes to. Wherever these photographs engage legacies of violence or injustice against Blacks, they do so from a position of power. Reflecting on the life of Sarah Bonetta Forbes, a Yoruba woman given as a gift to Queen Victoria, Ayana V. Jackson does not portray Forbes as property but instead explores her autonomy, and the possibilities for self-invention that – according to the historical record – she plausibly enjoyed. When racism is addressed, it is done so as a celebration of individuals active in the Toronto chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement, conveyed forcefully in the tintypes by Bidemi Oloyede, or in the dramatic documentation of protest by Jalani Morgan. Each of these works is rooted in its own specific context and locale, but together they speak to a broad and transnational affirmation of Black dignity, echoing the urgent calls for anti-racism that have grown ever louder in recent years. Their message is recognisable. Regardless of where viewers situate themselves, these photographs engender familiarity. Indeed, familiarity resides not just in the exhibition collectively, but in the photographs unto themselves. Black subjects are depicted by Black photographers, presented as they wish to be seen. Largely, these subjects are aware of the camera, and yet they never seem rigid or unnatural. The gaze is mutual and consensual. But the imagery produced is far from uniform. It is as varied, surprising, and heterogeneous as the Black Atlantic itself. Like a family album, it is idiosyncratic. How is a family album organised? Often by chronology, or sometimes by the people shown, or else by other typologies: birthdays, holidays, special events. However they are sorted, albums bring together distinct and even unrelated moments into rhythms and cadences. In his preface, Cole parallels the family album with the music album, and this exhibition takes cues from both these formats, imagining the photographs at once as disparate snapshots united by an intuitive visual logic and as tracks on a record, organised around repeating motifs and themes. A prelude comes in the form of James Van Der Zee’s Couple in Raccoon Coats, one of the oldest photographs in the exhibition and one of the first that Dr. Montague acquired. An overture occurs with Deanna Bowen’s sum of the parts: what can be named, in which the artist traces her lineage as far back as Jones County, Georgia, 1815, naming her ancestors and recounting the political events that shaped the world around them. Refrains of Bowen’s history are familiar to me; I’ve heard them before. She and I are both descended from free Blacks who left the American South from Oklahoma, settling in homesteads on the Albertan prairie in 1910. The Canadian government, alarmed at this influx of Black immigrants, passed anti-Black immigration laws shortly thereafter. Opposite Page: Kennedi Carter Untitlted (Self-Portrait), 2020 digital print on Hanhemüle Photo Rag 99.06 x 73.66 cm Courtesy of the Artist
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Capture 2023 82 Such connections as my identification with Bowen arise organically. Many of the photographs in As We Rise interconnect, visually or thematically, in ways sometimes clearly seen and in other instances softly sensed. Unlike the book, which sorts the photographs into three themes of “Community,” “Identity,” and “Power,” the exhibition’s categories are subtle and incidental, perhaps difficult to define. Indeed, how can community, identity, and power be parsed apart in the context of contemporary Blackness? Here, these concepts intersect and merge, discernable in many of the photographs not as features to be singled out – a scene of community here, versus an assertion of power there – but rather as a recognisable essence; a recognition of the complex strength, beauty, vulnerability, and irreducibility of Black life. Community, identity, and power underscore the show in its entirety, articulated throughout the space in the eloquent words of Liz Ikiriko. Ikiriko is one of several esteemed writers to respond to the photographs in As We Rise. Dr. Mark Sealy also contributes, reflecting on how these photographs, and their assembly in the Wedge Collection, constitute acts of great care. The book and exhibition are further enriched with texts by such luminaries as Isolde Brielmaier, Julie Crooks, O’Neil Lawrence, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzemi, Zoé Whitley, and Deborah Willis, among others. These writers describe the phoDawit L. Petros Hadenbes, 2005 chromogenic print 76.2 x 101.6 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Bradley Ertaskiran Opposite Page: Xaviera Simmons Denver, 2008 chromogenic print 101.6 x 76.2 cm Courtesy of the Artist and David Castillo
83 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS tographs from their vantages as scholars and historians but also just as Black viewers, perceiving in these evocative images something resonant – something familiar – and profoundly true. This truth is crucial. Ikiriko notes the “profound deficiency” in positive, and accurate representations of Black community in popular culture and the arts. As We Rise marks an important amendment to the visual record. As Ikiriko writes: “The pictures here forefront the experience of Black life, in all its myriad forms: a marker of the histories and spaces (real and ephemeral) that transcend geographic boundaries – from photo studios in Mali, to the nightclubs of southeastern Brazil, to the streets and subways of Manhattan. The collection extends out to a global diaspora and proclaims, ‘We are home.’”
Capture 2023 84 Alanis Obomsawin filming Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child, 1986 Courtesy National Film Board of Canada and the Artist
85 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS The Children Have to Hear Another Story: Alanis Obomsawin is made possible by a partnership between Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin; Art Museum at the University of Toronto; and Vancouver Art Gallery, in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada, and through the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts; and CBC/Radio-Canada. vanartgallery.bc.ca Vancouver Art Gallery April 7 – August 9 Co-curated by Richard Hill and Hila Peleg The Children Have to Hear Another Story: Alanis Obomsawin Alanis Obomsawin was born into a dark period of Indigenous history, when options for social and political agency were radically and systemically foreclosed. Despite this, she managed to consistently access public platforms to advance Indigenous concerns and tell Indigenous stories. She has done this so effectively and with such integrity as a documentary filmmaker working at the National Film Board of Canada that she has become a revered and beloved figure within Indigenous communities and is celebrated both in Canada and internationally. She has created a model of Indigenous cinema that privileges the voices of her subjects and challenges core assumptions (economic, environmental, political, epistemic, ontological) of the world system created by colonialism that we all now inhabit and contend with. Having moved from her home community of Odanak to TroisRivières at about the age of five to start grade school, Obomsawin was taught a curriculum that slandered and disparaged her Abenaki heritage. As the only Indigenous child in her class, she was subject to vicious racist bullying at school and in town. Her circumstances would have broken many strong people, or at least prevented them from achieving their full potential. Yet when her father died when she was twelve – another terrible blow – Obomsawin resolved: “Nobody’s going to beat me up anymore.”1 This act of will was followed by a surprisingly adult insight: “I thought, if the children could hear the stories I hear, maybe they would be behaving differently. . . By the time I got to be fourteen, I knew exactly why and how all this had happened.” She then put this knowledge into action. Her commitment to children and the transformative potential of education has remained a driving force of her life’s work. Looking through
Capture 2023 86 her personal photograph collection, she can be seen again and again surrounded by children – playing, performing, telling stories. Obomsawin put into action almost immediately her insight that children needed to hear a different story about Indigenous Peoples. She began locally, visiting Scout troops, “telling them stories and going to the bush to talk about the things I learned as a young person. Eventually I started going to the classroom.” Around the same time, she worked as a model in Florida, and later made Montréal her home. She became immersed in the city’s cultural foment of the late 1950s and 1960s, meeting influential artists, photographers, and musicians and gaining a reputation as a singer and storyteller. By the early 1960s, the media had discovered Obomsawin, and she discovered the media – quickly grasping the opportunity to direct the attention she was getting to the issues she cared about. By 1964, she began appearing occasionally on CBC/Radio-Canada television programs, talking about Indigenous issues, and performing songs. The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) began to release Obomsawin’s film work in the 1970s, although her relationship with the NFB began earlier, when she was brought in as a consultant. Her criticism of how NFB documentaries portrayed Indigenous Peoples was on point: in the films, “we never get to hear the people speak.”2 Her frank assessment impressed the NFB and she was offered a contract in 1967, which would turn into a permanent position about a decade later. She has worked at the NFB ever since and is now the only remaining filmmaker on staff. The films that Obomsawin released in the 1970s, such as Christmas at Moose Factory (1971) and Mother of Many Children (1977), aim directly at giving their Indigenous subjects opportunities to tell their own stories. This agenda fundamentally and permanently shaped Obomsawin’s approach to cinema, which, whenever possible, involves visiting communities and taking the time to build trust. This includes listening to and recording stories solely on audiotape until she thoroughly understands her subjects’ perspectives, and everyone involved is comfortable enough for camera and sound crews to come in to do their work. Through the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the attempts of earlier activistartists to articulate a positive vision of Indigenous cultures began to de velop into a broader and more explicitly political program. This followed the Alanis Obomsawin Trick or Treaty? (still), 2014 video with sound 85 min. Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada
87 FEATURED EXHIBITIONS 1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from Alanis Obomsawin in an unpublished interview with Richard Hill and Hila Peleg, October 23, 2021. 2. Alanis Obomsawin, quoted in Randolph Lewis, Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 29. growing connections being made across Indigenous communities to create coalitions to defend Treaty Rights and work toward sovereignty over government organizations, social services, and territory. This shift was mirrored in Obomsawin’s films. Amisk (1977) and Incident at Restigouche (1984) address persistent land, resource, and Treaty Rights issues that erupted at times into open conflict between Indigenous communities and the state. At the same time, communities were also addressing the multigenerational damage to families and cultural institutions inflicted by colonial dehumanization and assimilation. This included attempting to gain control of, and provide culturally specific social services to, their own communities, which can be witnessed in Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child (1986) and Poundmaker’s Lodge: A Healing Place (1987). Most of Obomsawin’s energies as a filmmaker in the 1990s were spent living through, and then analyzing in one film after another (four in all), the causes and effects of what is often referred to as the Oka Crisis, or, by many Indigenous people, the Kanehsatà:ke Resistance. For much of the Canadian public, the crisis – an armed standoff between the Mohawk (Kanyen’kehà:- ka) and the Quebec provincial police (and later the Canadian military) – appeared to erupt from nowhere. However, as Obomsawin shows in her most famous film, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), it was a long time in the making: an outcome of the legacy and ongoing reality of colonial dispossession as the town of Oka continued to expand onto territory that the Mohawk community of Kanehsatà:ke claimed as their own. At the same time that direct Indigenous political activism was continuing across Canada in the first decade of the new millennium, many significant changes were occurring without fanfare inside institutions, as attitudes evolved and long-closed doors began to open. With increasing access to mainstream cultural institutions, Indigenous people began to use these platforms to explore a wide range of questions, including how Indigenous thought and values might be sustained and put into action in these spaces. These are issues that Obomsawin had been addressing throughout her body of work, but in the 2000s and 2010s, some of her films brought them close to home in some of her most personal works. These include Waban-Aki: People from Where the Sun Rises (2006), Sigwan (2005), and When All the Leaves Are Gone (2010). Over the past twelve years, Indigenous issues have been at the forefront of public conversations across Canada, and “decolonization” (variously imagined) has become a priority in many academic, cultural, and political institutions. The structural depth of these changes remains an open question, and many worry that symbolic gestures are too often offered in place of real action on long-standing substantive issues, such as Treaty Rights, land claims, and unequal social spending. Nevertheless, more Canadians have begun to reckon with histories of colonialism that have, for decades, been wilfully ignored. With growing connections being made between Indigenous communities around the world and increasing awareness of Indigenous issues, the importance of Obomsawin’s work to the global conversation on decolonization has never been clearer. She has remained continuously active, using the recent Covid-19 lockdown to explore her personal archives and produce a series of new films, including Bill Reid Remembers (2022). She recently said, “I think of all those young [Indigenous] people making films now. They’re so curious, and they’re so responsible, and they’re so beautiful. The doors are open. If ever there’s a time when anything is possible, it’s right now.”
Capture 2023 88 Wang Guofeng North Korea 2014–High school students at physics class, 2015 inkjet print 281 x 180 cm Courtesy of the Artist Part of the Selected Exhibition Program
89 SELECTED EXHIBITIONS Art Gallery at Evergreen, Evergreen Cultural Centre Art Gallery at Evergreen, Lafarge Lake–Douglas Skytrain Station Burrard Arts Foundation 沙甸鹹水埠 Canton-sardine Centre A District Library Gallery, Lynn Valley Library Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden Equinox Gallery Gallery Gachet Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art Gordon Smith Gallery, The Lobby Howard495 Mónica Reyes Gallery Monte Clark Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Or Gallery Pacific Gallery, Fairmont Pacific Rim Peanuts Gallery The Reach Gallery Museum Trapp Projects The WALL, CBC Plaza Wil Aballe Art Projects West Vancouver Art Museum The Selected Exhibition 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. 2023 Jury Arpad Kovacs Assistant Curator, Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum Dr. Kenneth Montague Director, Wedge Curatorial Projects Elliott Ramsey Curator, The Polygon Gallery Emmy Lee Wall Executive Director, Capture Photography Festival 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95–96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111
Capture 2023 90 Jin-me Yoon Long Time So Long Jin-me Yoon Long Time So Long (still), 2023 single-channel video with sound 19:02 min. Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Katherine Dennis The Artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council supported by the Province of British Columbia evergreenculturalcentre.ca/ exhibit Art Gallery at Evergreen February 18 – April 30 Responding to the forced isolation and slow, interior sense of time created by the pandemic, Jin-me Yoon presents Long Time So Long, a new multimedia body of work. The artist explains how the Covid-19 virus has “weakened not just our physical but our social immune system. Secondary infections have raged in our collective body for years, and with weakened immunity, they suddenly boil on the surface, demanding our attention now.” Countering these forces using her embodied approach to artmaking, the artist’s new works focus on rest, repair, and coming together in difference. Centring the voices of local youth of Korean ancestry, a twenty-four-channel soundscape fills the gallery with their collective humming. Captured with stethoscope microphones that recorded the interior of the youths’ bodies, the piece was made onsite at the gallery during a somatic healing workshop. This emphasis on interiority and healing addresses the global pandemic and the rise in East Asian racism. Yoon’s investigation into how the weight of geopolitics is carried in the body continues in this exhibition, informing the artworks. The photographs and video that surround the audio installation take a different register. Starting from a dream – seen while both awake and asleep – Yoon uses iconography derived from emojis as well as Talchum masks, which are used in Korean folk dance, to find a place for traditions of resistance. The resulting works – at once haunting and humorous, exposed and veiled – grapple with the potentials and challenges of expressing the strangeness of our current moment.
91 SELECTED EXHIBITIONS Alyson Davies Blue Earth Tarot Alyson Davies Hierophant from the Blue Earth Tarot series, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Katherine Dennis Blue Earth Tarot public art installation is a partnership project by the Art Gallery at Evergreen and TransLink evergreenculturalcentre.ca/ exhibit/outdoor-exhibitions Art Gallery at Evergreen Lafarge Lake–Douglas SkyTrain Station March 29, 2023–March 29, 2024 In Alyson Davies’s Blue Earth Tarot, a grid of seventy-eight cyanotype tarot cards envelops a series of eight windows at the Lafarge Lake–Douglas Station. Created as playing cards and thought to originate from Italy in the fourteenth century, tarot cards were imbued with occult meaning by the eighteenth century. Today, they provide a tool for self-reflection. Davies’s Blue Earth Tarot series (2022) embraces seasonality and astrology. The whimsy and tenderness of this deck and the invitation for play offers a delightful contrast to the viewer’s routine experience of the street and transit station. The artist used a slow photographic process that brought together light and handmade collage to create this meditative tarot deck. The deck’s imagery began with sketches, a collection of landscape photos taken by the artist’s grandmother, and Davies’s photographs of plants and animals in the wintertime. The resulting vignettes are rich with symbolism. The deck’s Minor Arcana suits – representing the daily ups and downs of life – are named in a traditional manner, but their symbols have been adapted: water droplets (cups), clouds (swords), sticks (wands), and hands (pentacles). The Major Arcana – which represents principles, concepts, and ideals that inform big life events – mixes nature-based imagery with inclusive human forms. Each card suggests a story untold or path yet to be taken. The immersive, intricately detailed installation invites viewers to choose their own reading of the artwork as they move forward on their journey.
Capture 2023 92 Jake Kimble My Guardian Angel Is Tired Jake Kimble Cavity, 2022 archival inkjet print 63.5 x 63.5 cm Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Kate Bellringer burrardarts.org Burrard Arts Foundation March 31 – June 3 Jake Kimble is a multidisciplinary Chipewyan (Dëne Sųłıné) artist from Treaty 8 territory in the Northwest Territories whose practice focuses on acts of self-care, selfrepair, and gender-based ideological refusal. Using a funny bone as a tool, Kimble excavates themes of existentialism, narcissism, and the strange. He offers an invitation to the audience to examine the absurdities that exist within the everyday so that both the artist and viewer might exhale, unclench, and even chuckle in the spaces where laughter is often lost. Kimble currently works on the stolen territory of xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl ilw̓ ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations and holds a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. His exhibition features work created during his residency at Burrard Arts Foundation, beginning in January 2023. Since 2013, the BAF Residency Program has supported forty-eight emerging artists to develop their practices, overcome barriers, and realize new ideas. Exhibitions are organized to share a new body of work produced by the artist during the ten weeks preceding the date of their public exhibition.
93 SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 王國鋒 Wang Guofeng The Spiral of Spectacle: The Image Bank of Wang Guofeng Wang Guofeng North Korea 2014–English class at Pyongyang International Football School, 2014 inkjet print 270 x 180 cm Courtesy of the Artist Co-curated by Steven Dragonn and 楊小彥 Xiaoyan Yang canton-sardine.com 沙甸鹹水埠 Canton-sardine April 8 – May 27 A significant study in communication, the “spiral of silence,” coined by German communication scholar Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in 1974, is a brilliant analysis of the “silent masses” phenomenon under Nazi Germany. The theory posits that minorityopinion holders refrain from expressing their views from fear of isolation or reprisal. In Wang Guofeng’s North Korea series, subjects are undifferentiated and individuality is obliterated. The images are staged, with all of the artist’s subjects performing for the camera (with the exception of “the special one”). The Spiral of Spectacle is a manifestation of the silent, ant-like masses, which become an undifferentiated sign of presence. Wang states, “I have always avoided being confined by the notion of photography within my practice but emphasize the ‘image as a medium.’” Many of Wang’s serial works are computer generated and are the result of numerous images being combined. The camera is used only to capture content for his image bank, and subsequent computer editing is needed to finalize the body of work. Although Wang’s images appear to be documentary, what lies behind them is a manipulation of the spectacle, which implicitly points to the nature of the subject in view.
Capture 2023 94 Group Show The Living Room 2.0: Intimate Entanglements Wayne Yung Field Guide to Western Wildflowers (still), 2000 single-channel video with sound 5:30 min. Courtesy of the Artist and Vtape Curated by Henry Heng Lu centrea.org Centre A April 8 – June 3 In 2022, Centre A initiated the experiential project The Living Room, for which the gallery space was transformed into a furnished living room. Visitors had the opportunity to sit down in the makeshift living area to watch a selection of films and videos. By converting the gallery rooms into a (semi-)domestic space, we hoped to demystify and challenge the often-inaccessible nature of a contemporary art gallery. Throughout the exhibitioninstallation, we organized a series of public programs and events, such as dance parties, film screenings, and food sharing, to activate the living room and welcome guests of all backgrounds. In 2023, we have brought back The Living Room with a new set of film programs. From April to June 2023, we are presenting a program titled Intimate Entanglements. Presented in partnership with Vtape, the films selected orient toward storytelling and the agency of the self or of the community, by way of musicality, rhythm, and tempo. Films by Roya Akbari, Hiba Ali, Kevin Lee Burton, Dana Claxton, Midi Onodera, and Wayne Yung play on a loop.
95 SELECTED EXHIBITIONS Alessandra Abballe All but absent from history Alessandra Abballe All but absent from history, 2018 archival inkjet print 61 x 76 cm Courtesy of the Artist nvdpl.ca All but absent from history is a project that explores the structure of adventure narratives, how women who are often excluded from these stories claim space and agency, and the importance of representation in writing. As a point of departure, Abballe investigates Joseph Campbell’s 1949 text The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a comparative work in which the author discusses his theories on the archetypal hero and the characteristics of “the journey.” The cyclical structure that Campbell outlines in his book is imbued with notions of patriarchy and leaves little room for interpretation. At its core, Abballe’s project attempts to intervene in and renegotiate the terms of “the hero’s journey,” as outlined by Campbell, through the exploration of marginalized and omitted female narratives, both fictional and biographical. Turning their attention to the writing and narratives of women, the work included in this project attempts to visually map out Abballe’s research through the compilation of various texts and imagery in their studio, referencing their engagement with these histories while also encouraging further investigation. District Library Gallery, Lynn Valley Library March 9 – June 21
Capture 2023 96 Tom Hsu Isthmuses Tom Hsu Hose on Green Wall, 2014 inkjet print 60.96 x 40.64 cm Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Sam Shen vancouverchinesegarden.com/ exhibitions Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden April 7 – August 7 A narrow strip of land that connects two larger landmasses, the isthmus, is a place and a non-place that is ever changing (much like the location of this garden, connecting different parts of the city). Tom Hsu presents images made during visits to his homeland of Taiwan. Photography also acts as a type of isthmus, weaving together events and memory, exploring geographical, ideological, sociological, political, and philosophical spaces. Hsu visits Taiwan seeking the familiar and unfamiliar; what was once home becomes memory that reactivates in the body as time passes.
97 SELECTED EXHIBITIONS Fred Herzog Selected Works Fred Herzog San Francisco, 1962 archival pigment print 30.48 x 45.72 cm Courtesy of Equinox Gallery and the Estate of Fred Herzog equinoxgallery.com Equinox Gallery March 18 – April 29 After immigrating to Canada in 1952, Fred Herzog gravitated toward the medium of colour photography for observing everyday life, long before it was recognized as a documentary or artistic style. Herzog was especially interested in pictures that included a human presence, and while his photographs are impeccably composed, he avoided an escape into formalist occupations. Through his committed documentation of Vancouver, he has become one of the city’s most compelling visual narrators, telling the story of the place, the culture, and the people who live there. The selection of works on view will highlight the exceptional colour and intensity of Herzog’s street photography and his keen observational eye.
Capture 2023 98 Marten Elder New Colour Photographs Marten Elder Sun. Rendered in 6 color spaces, 2022 archival pigment print on fibre-based paper 101.6 x 76.2 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Equinox Gallery equinoxgallery.com Marten Elder’s exhibition expands the scope of his continued research and experiments in capturing and rendering colour photographs. Elder’s images of Los Angeles landscapes present hyper-flattened spatial compositions that accentuate the flattening that exists inherently in the photographic transformation of space. Paired with a colour-rendering process that breaks the norms of traditional image processing in favor of maximizing the amount of information extracted from the camera, subtle colour relationships are seen more vividly and new ones are created as the same image is reprocessed multiple times. The resulting photographs appear hallucinogenic and synthetic but are rendered with technical accuracy and firmly rooted in documentary-style description of the world. These photographs are presented alongside pictures that push the photographic limits of image capture. Deceptively simple photographs of light sources stretch the bounds of tonal separation to the maximum, while studio photographs resembling textbook optic illustrations appear to defy laws of light and colour. This new type of picture opens avenues for investigation into Elder’s ongoing interest in the challenges of translating a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional image. Equinox Gallery April 1–29
99 SELECTED EXHIBITIONS Kevin Lee Burton and Raeann Kit-Yee Cheung Intervening Light Raeann Kit-Yee Cheung Widow, 2022 archival inkjet print 25.4 x 20.32 cm Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Olumoroti Soji-George gachet.org Intervening Light combines the practices of Cree photographer and filmmaker Kevin Lee Burton and Chinese Canadian photographer and archivist Raeann Kit-Yee Cheung. The works presented here are rooted in the ever-expanding tactics utilized by minority bodies that aim to disrupt and reinvent the archive. Burton attempts to create a new archive that considers the existence and deterritorializing nature of the queer Indigenous imagination. Cheung utilizes interventions on found archival images of Chinese Canadians to explore the muted suffering and successes of economic migrants to Canada. Brought together, Burton’s and Cheung’s practices act as a testament to the agency and life of minority populations in Canada. These works recognize history but also create and rewrite it, informed by the experiences of the “other.” Burton’s and Cheung’s practices also directly respond to, and intervene in, the ways that the bodies of the “other” are perceived and remembered in the history of the West. The union between the artists and the curator of Intervening Light reflects the growing movement of solidarity and intersectionality amongst members of the BIPOC community. Their work testifies that, although they have different relations with the states of Canada, they share a history of being oppressed and othered by the state, and once brought together, they can reimagine history and futurity rooted in anti-oppression and equity. Gallery Gachet April 8 – May 5
Capture 2023 100 Katie Kozak and Lucien Durey Endless Summer Katie Kozak and Lucien Durey Candelabra (still), 2020 single-channel video with sound 4:15 min., looped Courtesy of the Artists Curated by Jenn Jackson sd44.ca/school/artistsforkids/ Visit/Exhibitions Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art April 15 – June 17 Endless Summer is an exhibition and series of public programs that features the collaborative works of artists Katie Kozak and Lucien Durey. Since 2012, Kozak and Durey have worked together on durational projects that enact care for one another and gratitude toward the places and spaces in which the artworks are realized and exhibited. The resulting artworks and programs contemplate lineage, ancestry, queerness, sustainability, and healing within a context of reimagining place-based relations that serve the social and cultural landscape of their shared communities. Endless Summer conveys a dedicated period of trust and exchange between artists. The program engages with a longstanding collaborative practice of collecting discarded materials to be reassembled in unexpected ways. This drawing together of collaborative social networks and reciprocal exchange is a continuation of Kozak and Durey’s ongoing practice of collectivity and care. The project includes new and recent sculptural, photographic, and video works that consider lineages of reciprocity that grow from friendship and familiarity. The public programs extend to include additional artists, musicians, and creative collaborators through workshops, events, and presentations.