Capture Catalogue 2022 by Capture Photography Festival

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Grant Arnold Isolde Brielmaier Durga Chew-Bose Luce Lebart Nya Lewis Sarah Milroy Erin Silver Emmy Lee Wall Jeff Wall Ramona Jingru Wang Chelsea Yuill

Capture Photography Festival

April 1–29, 2022

305 Cambie St Vancouver, BC V6B 2N4

Capture Photography Festival is produced by the Capture Photography Festival Society, a registered not-for-profit.

info@capturephotofest.com www.capturephotofest.com #CapturePhotoFest2022

Please share your Festival experience with us on Instagram, Facebook, and Vimeo at @capturephotofest

Executive Director Emmy Lee Wall Assistant Curator Chelsea Yuill TD Assistant Curator of Engagement Jas Lally Festival Coordinator Jocelyne Junker Communications and Events Assistant Sidney Gordon Grant Writer Qian Cheng Graphic Design Victoria Lum Videographer Sahand Mohajer Printing and Assembly Mitchell Press

Board of Directors Kim Spencer-Nairn, Founder & Chair Kate Galicz Mike Harris Gosia Kamela Tanner Kidd Ian McGuffie Alison Meredith Sheenah Rogers-Pfeiffer Tobi Reyes Mahdi Shams Evann Siebens Adrienne Wood

Front Cover: Sara Cwynar Umi, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto All content © 2022 the artists, authors, and Capture Photography Festival Society. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. All images are reproduced courtesy of the artist unless otherwise specified. Capture is not responsible for the specific content or subject matter of any work displayed or advertised. Some exhibitions or installations may be offensive, upsetting, or disturbing to some members of the public. For the most up-to-date programming information, please visit capturephotofest.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Capture Photography Festival / Grant Arnold, Durga Chew-Bose, Isolde Brielmaier, PhD, Luce Lebart, Nya Lewis, Sarah Milroy, Erin Silver, Ramona Jingru Wang, Emmy Lee Wall, Jeff Wall, Chelsea Yuill. Names: Capture Photography Festival, author, publisher. Description: Includes index. Identifiers: Canadiana 20220174393 | ISBN 9781777354718 (softcover) Subjects: LCSH: Capture Photography Festival. | LCSH: Photography— British Columbia—Vancouver— Catalogs. | LCSH: Public art—British Columbia—Vancouver— Catalogs. | LCSH: Photography, Artistic— Catalogs. | LCGFT: Catalogs. Classification: LCC TR655 .C3574 2022 | DDC 770.74711/33—dc23

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Advisory Board Grant Arnold Claudia Beck Helga Pakasaar Donors Anonymous Claudia Beck Jane Irwin & Ross Hill Wesgroup Founding Donors Anonymous Anonymous John & Nina Cassils Stephen Carruthers Chan Family Foundation Mike & Sandra Harris Brian & Andrea Hill Hy’s of Canada Ltd. Jane Irwin & Ross Hill Jason & AJ McLean Michael O’Brian Family Foundation Radcliffe Foundation Ron Regan

Eric Savics & Kim Spencer-Nairn Leonard Schein Ian & Nancy Telfer Samantha J. Walker (in memory of) Bruce Munro Wright Thank You Kate Armstrong Grant Arnold Claudia Beck Stephanie Bokenfohr Lynn Chen Monte Clark Dana Claxton Danielle Currie Shaun Dacey Daniel Faria Gabe Gonda Sophie Hackett Jeff Hamada Jane Irwin Alysha Jacobs Chris Keatley Stuart Keeler Darcy Killeen Lindsay Kilpatrick Geraldine Layante Kyla Mallett Klara Manhal Greg McNally Brian Messina Sarah Milroy Helga Pakasaar Birthe Piontek Stephanie Rebick Heather Rigg Reid Shier Thomas Tran Biliana Velkova Gaëtane Verna Stephen Waddell Jeff Wall Michael Wesik Jayne Wilkinson Bruce Munro Wright

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Welcome to Capture 2022

Photography is the common language of modern history. It’s everywhere; and everyone, in some way, understands it. — Holland Cotter

Emmy Lee Wall Executive Director

So begins Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic Holland Cotter’s review of Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life at the International Center of Photography for the New York Times in 2012. A decade later, this statement is no less true. It is this ability to connect, unite and bring recognition – this transcendence – that makes the medium so potent. Welcome to Capture 2022! We are so proud to share our catalogue this year, which includes commissioned editorial content by Nya Lewis, Erin Silver, and our Writing Prize recipient, Ramona Jingru Wang. Durga Chew-Bose offers an evocative text on our Dal Grauer artist, Sara Cwynar. We have used our catalogue this year to give voice directly to many artists, in the form of interviews with Cwynar and the artists in our Featured Exhibition, titled Family Album. We have also commissioned new work to debut in our catalogue by Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes, who considers the way in which images circulate and percolate in society at large. With the passing of Andrew Gruft, a pillar of Vancouver’s art community, the Vancouver Art Gallery celebrates his life with a show drawn from its permanent collection of works formerly in the collection he formed with his wife, Claudia Beck. Capture has paid tribute by asking those familiar with their holdings to speak to the significance of a specially selected work. I am inspired daily by the growing community of artists, curators, organizations, donors, and sponsors who are eager to contribute to the Festival. A sincere thank you to everyone for their partnership and support. I especially want to acknowledge TD Bank, Capture’s Presenting Sponsor, whose dedication to Capture cannot be overstated. It is a pleasure and privilege to work with you to use our platform to amplify traditionally underrepresented voices – something that photography is uniquely poised to do. Capture is the culmination of the tremendous efforts of a small, committed staff and the leadership of our intrepid Board, led by Kim SpencerNairn. We all learn so much from each other and I’m so thankful to work with you all. We put together this year’s Festival during incredibly disquieting times; still, the work we do is exceedingly hopeful. Many artists in the Festival question the ways in which lens-based work can be used as a tool through which to engage with the issues of our times. In a text titled “A Gathering of Souls” in As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic on the Wedge Collection in Toronto, Mark Sealy writes, “Though photographs never provide the complete answers, they might, at times, adjust or reset our sense of reality. Most important, they can help us frame new questions, uncouple and delink us from harmful dominant narratives, and allow us to feel the presence of a past moment in the now of our time.” I am reminded time after time through the work that we do that the greatest possibility of art is that it allows us to imagine an alternative, speculative future; an incredibly inspiring notion at this moment. I sincerely thank every artist, writer, cultural worker, and curator who is participating in Capture this year – your commitment to sharing your work and vision during these most challenging of times is an act of bravery, and we are grateful to you.

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TEXTS

9–13

23–25

Lo-fi: An Interview with Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes Photography as an Act of Care Photo-consciousness: Thoughts on the Responsibility of Lens-based Media Arrivals, Departures, Returns: Images that Stay

30–35

62–63

BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project TransLink Public Art Project Contemporary Art Gallery Façade Public Art Project Canada Line Public Art Project Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen

67–77

87–89

Family Album – Pendulum Gallery Everything Under the Sun: In Memory of Andrew Gruft – Vancouver Art Gallery Cloud Album – The Polygon Gallery

92–115

Selected Exhibitions

117

119

Untitled (Garden) – Virtual Exhibition Stranger than Fiction – Capture × Emily Carr The Collective Agency Project – Community Exhibition

15–17 19–21

36–45 46–47 48–51 52–61

79–85

121–127 129–131

Emmy Lee Wall Ramona Jingru Wang

Nya Lewis Erin Silver

PUBLIC ART

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS Emmy Lee Wall

Grant Arnold Luce Lebart

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

SPECIAL PROJECTS

Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes Shoes, 2021 digital collage 10.16 × 12.7 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Unit 17

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TEXTS

Lo-fi: An Interview with Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes

15–17

Photography as an Act of Care

9–13

19–21

23–25

Emmy Lee Wall

Ramona Jingru Wang

Photo-consciousness: Thoughts on the Responsibility of Lens-based Media

Nya Lewis

Arrivals, Departures, Returns: Images that Stay

Erin Silver

Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes Dress, 2021 digital collage 10.16 × 12.7 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Unit 17

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Lo-fi: An Interview with Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes Emmy Lee Wall Strange forms and objects collide in Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes’ digital collages, forming an alliance between both her own photography as well as images sourced from a myriad of sources, including encyclopedias, old photographs of friends and bands, amateur stock photographs, and shopping platforms for used items. Acutely aware of the way we are all inundated with highly curated, perfectly posed images daily, the works she creates are purposefully nostalgic, relying on some of the compositional tropes grown on the internet but offering a respite from dominant social media trends. By purposefully creating work that is in dialogue with but visually distinct from that which circulates around us all, Kriangwiwat Holmes asks us to question the way vernacular images pervade our daily lives. Emmy Lee Wall Can you describe your process for us? What sources are you mining for your imagery? Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes It depends on what I’m making. Sometimes, if I’m making a two-dimensional collage, it can start with a photograph I took as a jumping-off point that sparks a desire to see a different image or collage that doesn’t exist yet . . . then I have to make it and add elements. This first photo is almost always one I took on my phone. I like to thrift a lot of books and pictures. I keep a lot of screenshots and scanned stuff all over my computer. Furniture encyclopedias, receipts, and doodles in my sketchbook are some of the most recent sources of images for my collages. I also like to use fabric cutouts and scanned painted shapes. A lot of digital images from my iPhone or Ricoh. Some are old 35mm scans from

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the past ten years, which are of people and friends, or bands who needed promotional photographs. I also like to look at amateur stock photos – I’ll buy them and use the image that has the watermark. I like looking at used shopping platforms and museum archives. At this moment, I don’t super enjoy the actual action of taking photographs or organizing photo shoots. I do it because I know I have to in order to make this ingredient for a picture. I keep a pretty ridiculous amount of files on my desktop, all labelled something like “image dump [month]” And then I just dig through them all and pull parts of them together to see what matches or clicks. In terms of the process of making pictures, I’d say a lot of it is honestly spent on Photoshop moving things around. It’s a lot of erasing, a lot of dumping it all together, and then taking parts away. Sometimes I’ll make a picture and feel that its missing a component.

ELW It seems like your work engages in a dialogue around ownership of images and the way in which they are used and reused?

MKH Yeah, I guess I’m interested in, and I try to pay attention to, how people view and share images today. I don’t so much think of it as ownership similar to, say, the Pictures Generation. I just sort of believe our current generation is speaking a visual language through mass picture sharing. We’re communicating with them on literal levels where we have images with text overlaid, and we’re also communicating with them in languages we’re not aware we’re fluent in, like style arrangement and formal composition. Tight crops of objects like used clothing are an example of today’s photo composition trends that distort scale and have now become pleasant to us. We can hold the object and subject in our hand. Using a camera isn’t always necessary for me ELW What are your thoughts around authorship during this to express these aspects about photo composition that I’m digital age, where we are inundated daily with so many interested in. If I make collages with found images with drawings or stickers overlaid, I can point toward compoimages and they circulate so freely? sitional rules and messages behind actual subject matter instead of photographic authorship. MKH Recently I think I saw about fifteen images of the same I don’t think about authorship as much as I think about how normal it is for us to be screenshotting and sharing rainbow in Vancouver on Instagram, likely all taken with quickly. Whether it’s a message for an event, action or a an iPhone. A lot of people are using literally the same tool meme – we’ll take a photo and plop a bunch of written and are taking photos of the same subject. A lot of people information over it. We do it to learn but also to com- are sharing the same screenshot. These are the conversamunicate with peers our desire to stay in touch. I find tions of photography I’m in relationship with. myself screenshotting and pulling pictures heedlessly. I ELW think being buried in a mass amount of images daily via social media makes it hard for us to feel precious about What draws you to the images you save and select as the pictures and their authors. We’re kind of rough with them, material from which to make your digital collages? Is there something particular about these images that unites them you know? I was talking to a co-worker about how a band recorded or makes them interesting for you? an album digitally, and then ran it through cassette to give MKH it a lo-fi effect. It’s like a filter – it happens all the time. We have the technology now for musicians to record music It’s not always this calculated, but sometimes it is. Again, digitally for cheaper, but we opt for this recording effect you find inspiration in something you stumbled across and to bury the digital crispness. There are nostalgia factors that can be a starting-off point to look for more, out in the still at play, but my co-worker raised a good point: our physical world or online. I like things that remind me of ears are muscles that eventually tire after working for design and advertising. I took an advertising course a long some time. Sometimes ears can find rest in something time ago, and we did an activity where you had to self-anrecorded “poorly.” I think people today want this same alyze what kind of demographic you were part of based on rest for their eyes. We seek pictures with low contrast, the advertisements you were drawn to. We were flipping grain, or just something more grey. Of course, then this through big magazines like Vogue. Some of the composidevelops into a style . . . something had to come after all tional guidelines given by the teacher seemed arbitrary at the brightness from the first tier of post-internet art. first – for example, depending if the picture had a full bleed or a white border, it would attract a certain type of audience that identifies as either more alternative or classic.

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Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes Handles, 2021 digital collage 20.32 × 25.4 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Unit 17

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When it is calculated, there are some deeper reasons for my choice of subject matter. What I have taken photographs of is a little eclectic, but there are a lot of dogs, horses, friends, and cars (all either real or figurines). I was once more interested in subject matter that supposedly held ideas about the person who took the image as being approachable, cool, or sincere. Most recently, I have been trying to photograph objects as if they were going to be sold on used shopping platforms. I’m interested in the composition of these photographs that aim to advertise and be made by just your everyday person. This kind of photography reads like a deal.

Opposite page: Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes Tables, 2021 digital collage 20.32 × 25.4 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Unit 17

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Ramona Jingru Wang Bea and Grandma, 2020 archival pigment print 152.4 × 101.6 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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Photography as an Act of Care Ramona Jingru Wang, Capture Writing Prize Recipient On the Lunar New Year’s Eve of 2021, I wrote a letter to my grandpa. (The original is in Chinese; the translated letter appears at the end of this text.) While I was writing the letter, a photograph kept appearing in my head. It is a photograph I took of my grandma’s sink on her balcony. A photograph works as a portal in its ability to capture things that we failed to remember, or we’re not even able to register into our consciousness. Usually, they are trivial things that are not the reason why the photographs were made, but because of these “punctums” (as Roland Barthes might call them), a photograph acts as a fragment from the past that is yet to become our memory; when we look at a picture, we can recreate and experience the past again and again in different ways in the present. I found this balcony photograph and looked at its every detail, trying to find traces of the past. Photographs hold a special place in our interactions with memories. Even though we are almost certain about the truth and reality in a photograph, we invent new narratives every time we look at them, just as we revisit memories and discover something new about ourselves. When Walter Benjamin talks about Marcel Proust, he says that “in his work Proust did not describe a life as it actually was, but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it.”1 If a photograph is a description of a life as it actually is, then the reimagining of a photograph is a life as it was remembered. Benjamin also discusses the remaining cult value in photography writing: In photography, exhibition value begins to drive back cult value on all fronts. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It falls back to a last entrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait is central to early photography. In the cult of remembrance of dead or absent loved ones, the cult value of the images finds its last refuge.2

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Ramona Jingru Wang Angelica and Cici, 2021 archival pigment print 101.6 × 152.4 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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However, it is not only within portrait photography that we find this cult value. When I am looking at the photograph of my grandma’s sink, or when Barthes grieves over his mother’s winter garden picture, we both are performing a ritual to worship, to mourn, and to remember with photographs. This ritualistic aspect of photographs comes with the unique value that photographs hold for us; they allow us to project our personal meaning and longing onto them, sometimes independent of the referent. As Barthes confesses about the winter garden photograph: “I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary.’”3 What happens when we look at photographs that are not directly from and about our personal past? Putting down my personal, sentimental photograph of my grandma’s sink, I start to think about the public, social, and exhibition value of photography, and, perhaps most importantly: How do we care for each other through photographs? As viewers, one way to reimagine photography in a public sphere is to see it as an action rather than an object. Photography is an action that creates social relations between people, and it happens between the person who is being photographed, the person who takes the photo, and the viewers who look at it. In The Civil Contract of Photography, after pointing out that the invention of photography is “the invention of a new encounter between people,” Ariella Azoulay proposes an idea of “the citizenry of photography,” which she contextualizes by envisaging an alternative politics that can be driven by photography.4 Instead of being an object of art, photography becomes a social practice that connects people, and we are able to care for others that are in the citizenry of photography. Azoulay describes photography as an action that does not end with the final outcome of a photograph. Emphasizing a new type of gaze generated from the invention of photography, especially from the power of the spectators in a public sphere, she presents photography as analogous to action as defined by Hannah Arendt, which “approximates at least the central distinguishing feature of action: it includes the aspect of a new beginning, and its ends are unpredictable.”5 When we reimagine a photograph that is not from our memory, we read it in ways that relate to our own background and previous experiences. Photography is an action that leads to unpredictable ends because of the plurality involved in the making and reading of a photograph. When it comes to what we are able to see when we try to reimagine and reconstruct meanings of a photograph as spectators, simply identifying what has been there in a photograph is not enough. Photography is an encounter between the photographer and the subject; therefore, a photograph provokes us to imagine specific situations where the photography takes place. When looking at what was there when a photograph was made, we are facing other questions such as: What happened when the photograph was taken? Why was the subject worthy of being photographed? What is the person being photographed trying to convey? What is the photographer trying to convey? What is the photographer trying to convey through the person being photographed? What kind of relationship do the photographer and the subject have? It is with this mindful reimagination of photographs that we as spectators are able to care for others through photographs.

When people are involved in a process of making photographs, photography becomes an opportunity for them to give care and look for care from others. To photograph the beauty of the insignificant is as powerful as to expose the shock of a disaster. As much as photography can be exploitative toward the subject being photographed, it can also be a gesture of love. The act of taking a photograph of someone means to carefully carry their trust and vulnerability on one’s shoulders to form a safe space through the making of the images with them. To be able to care in the act of photography, we need to draw attention to the intent behind photographs. In the essay “Why Intent Matters,” Jay Simple points out that the common photographic practice, in which the photographer is led by instinct and simply captures and explores the world – such as street and landscape photography – is deeply rooted in a colonial mindset.6 The instinct that these photographers follow is never neutral, and it is fostered by their cultural ideologies. Agreeing to be photographed means making oneself vulnerable, and to give in to the power of the photographer and viewers. We need to care as much about the connections that are formed during the process of photographing as the final images. To read the message in a photograph is to imagine the making of it when the photographic encounter happened, which is not so much only about the final photograph itself. Because photography is deeply intertwined with our memories, and how we understand ourselves, it is important to examine the process, the intent, and the purposes behind a photograph. It is through this process that we are able to truly care for others. Letter to my grandfather: “Grandpa Happy New Year! I have never written you a letter, and I’ll probably not send out this one. It was Lunar New Year’s eve last Thursday, and mom video-called me so that you can see me. She was telling me that you tried to touch me on the screen because you didn’t know it was a video call. I always joke that I have no home because I live on the internet, and I keep forgetting that you and grandma don’t live online. Three weeks ago I had a dream on my birthday. In my dream, we are in a weird temple, where there are many dragon sculptures. There’s water running through them, and fire coming out of their mouths. I couldn’t tell if it was a traditional Buddhist ritual or a contemporary art installation. It was a year ago when I last saw you in person. It was Lunar New Year too, and it was one day before the Covid-19 outbreak in China. I was there with you. You could not recognize me anymore, but you still kept telling me about this granddaughter (which is me) that you have to walk to school everyday. Time doesn’t exist for you anymore. Memory is not always linear. How does it feel to be surrounded by fragments of memory everyday? I miss you, grandpa. I wish we could float around in each other’s existence, like pieces of memories. I wish I could live in your reality.”

1. Walter Benjamin, “The Images of Proust,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (Boston: Mariner Books, 2019), 150. 2. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), 27. 3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993), 73. 4. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2014), 97. 5. Azoulay, The Civil Contract, 96. 6. Jay Simple, “Why Intent Matters,” Photographer’s Green Book, March 31, 2021, www.photogreenbook.com/special-collections/ why-intent-matters.

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Jorian Charlton Out of Many, Nyabel & Nevine (In standing embrace), 2021 digital scan from a negative 39.37 × 32.91 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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Photo-consciousness: Thoughts on the Responsibility of Lens-based Media Nya Lewis We are still grappling with the gaze. Within the dominant national conversation of excluded voices in art, perhaps we as practitioners are beginning to pay special attention to amplifying the work of artists who create from an experiential lens – artists who graciously contribute to the visual canon by documenting their communities and influences of cultural production from an invaluable intercommunal vantage point. Perhaps we are better prepared to analyze the role of photography as an apparatus of strategic social convention. One that, when yielded unethically, promotes voyeurism. As we wave our decolonial flags, we can now also acknowledge the role of lens-based work in framing history and culture, and question who is doing the framing and how these factors affect the practice and the artists it serves. Perhaps it is time, again, and always, to critically engage with the responsibility of lens-based work and its obstinate impact on the way we see ourselves and others. In the aftermath of the dichotomous movement for Black lives and the impending white awakening, we are called to challenge image production and consumption (particularly portraiture) and its role in perpetuating intersectional oppression. As a Queer first-generation African Trinidadian Canadian Curator and Artist, much of my research and practice is making visible the absences in documentation of Black art and Black existence. I hope to contribute to my community’s collective self-regard by instrumentalizing art's ability to inform culture and identity awareness. I am in constant pursuit of references or narratives that daylight my experiences and sense of belonging, and wholeheartedly believe in arts potential to reshape anti-racism dialogue, shift perception, and understand deficiencies in public thinking, teaching, education, and democratic thought. I share this in acknowledgement that this position informs the possible oversimplification of my expectations of photography. The visual articulation of Blackness, however insufficient, has

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changed over the years, ranging, but not limited to: mammies, power to the people, fly-swatting babies in Africa, thug type #1, gay and dying, gay and fabulous, creole fair-skinned women, island paradise calendar girls in wet T-shirts, Essence magazine new negroes, fashion mavens, bodytype trendsetters, queer and angry, dancing, singing, flashy, pop culture gods, the new new negro. This visual vernacular is constantly in flux and intermittently coding. At the intersection of gazes – imposed and self-imposed, lens-based media ultimately becomes an accomplice of fractured storytelling and a vehicle in pursuit of visual subjectivity. I am fascinated by the ability of photography to create and enforce seemingly concrete ideas, normative conventions, expectations, and signifying practices of cultural bodies of knowledge. What photography insinuates is an evidentiary, visceral, immediate historical reference and, in relation to public art, access where the observer is inextricably linked to the subject, and an assumption of power or expertise over what is presented pursues. Within the arts and social sciences, researchers have critically analyzed the correlation between the public’s perception of images of marginalized communities and the normalization of treatment of these marginalized groups. I assert that the criminalization, dehumanization, and at times misinformed “reading” of people of colour employs a cycle of fostered racial bias that is grossly impacted by the public imagination and highly informed by the imagery we consume. In understanding this, how might we quarrel with the implications of lens-based work as a potential false truth-making in the social construction of “marginalized” beings? Beyond the observed static frame, how might we hold lens-based media accountable for how we understand and contextualize images in our daily lives? This discourse is not new. The implications of capturing “marginalized” communities have roots in criticisms of ethnographic and colonial anthropological documentation. I consider myself a student of the speculative work of Black artists, curators, writers, activists, and thinkers whose rigorous literature created and continues to create a foundation for a critical analysis of a postcolonial gaze. Practitioners like bell hooks, Deborah Willis, Betye Saar, Carrie Mae Weems, Mark Sealy, and Tina M. Campt have supported my articulation of the responsibility of the camera. Their work challenges us to consider the consciousness of a photo, what survives the image, and how these ideas shape cultural projections, concretely qualifying the connection between observer and subject, camera, and cultural agency. Our labour as cultural workers is to question strategic representations in media, material culture, and art history. The task is to continue highlighting inequities by responding with opportunities for a multitude of depictions of underrepresented communities. Lens-based practitioners can and should support establishing a new presence, visualizing a new sense of being, seen through new expressions of pride and identity. Here we may challenge with intention what the camera reveals and implement alternative mechanisms to support the interpretation of visual images. When photographers yielding the camera results in a type of lens appropriation or reclamation, a shift in the methodology of capturing “marginalized communities” occurs. To construct a “counterhegemonic” world that stands as visual resistance requires the participation of self-identified

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communities. This active involvement on both sides of the lens is vital to the function of ethical engagement. In an increasingly visual culture, with new technologies, social media, and endless modes of image production and presentation changing our consumption of imagery, we should continue to interrogate the relationship between visual technologies and the way we see. Wherein new exposure to visual sources creates additional pathways to learning, simultaneously creating a more even playing field for representation, perhaps the responsibility of photography is not so complex. Ethical lens-based work is an effortful practice of looking alongside or with. It demands adjacency and is regenerative labour that does not allow the viewer to engage passively. If we are the stories we see, then it will always matter who tells them. While we continue to document the times, our engagement of images should never stop quarrelling with insidious racial and gender stereotypes, the unravelling of colonial histories, and the objectness of photography. It remains that the emergence of photography and the invention of the camera as a tool to record social reality objectively and truthfully is interrupted by the false assumption of a collective value system or shared understandings of humanity. It is not my position to prove the existence of bias within spectatorship. It is alive, and proof of its existence can be seen within the last century of photography. Instead, I am proposing an expansion of what we deem to be ethical engagement with lens-based work. How do we create objective reflections of the communities we document? To contend with the tension of the critical gaze, the responsibility of photography is to value lived experience as the primary rule of expertise, to ground our ways of seeing in methodologies that centre interdependence, employing a non-negotiable positioning that confronts the context through which photographers approach their practice, to tell the fragmented truth, to exist as a site of resistance for colonized people understanding the history of the apparatus, to cultivate and reclaim the realities, nuances, and aspirations of our lives, and to never neglect the politicization of looking.

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Dana Claxton in collaboration with Sean Griffin Muckamuck Strike Then and Now, 2018 composite photograph 42.57 × 25.4 cm Courtesy of the Artists

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Arrivals, Departures, Returns: Images that Stay Erin Silver A group of over a dozen individuals, wearing flared jeans and walking forward in unison, carry protest signs, which piece together details of unfair working conditions and demands for contract negotiation. The image was once an archival black-and-white photograph documenting the 1978 strike by Indigenous members of SORWUC (Service, Office, and Retail Workers Union of Canada) who were employed at Muckamuck Restaurant, a nonIndigenous-owned establishment serving Northwest Coast Indigenous cuisine. The photograph has been transformed by Vancouver-based Hunkpapa Lakota artist Dana Claxton, in collaboration with Sean Griffin, its title offering a clue as to its manipulation. Not immediately apparent in Muckamuck Strike Then and Now (2018) is that, amid the group, are two time travellers. The colour tinting on the beaded necklace worn by one, and on a ribbon skirt worn by the other, links them to a protestor leading the group, whose beaded belt is similarly illuminated. The time travellers are members of the ReMatriate Collective (formed in 2015), an Indigenous women’s collective that uses social media to counter misrepresentations and appropriations of Indigenous identities, offering a platform for Indigenous women to determine their own representation. Borrowing the slogan “Yours for Indigenous Sovereignty,” which appears in one of the Muckamuck strike archival photographs, the ReMatriate Collective transformed it into a banner, which hung prominently outside the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia at the same time as Claxton’s composite photograph hung within it. Where does movement reside in photography, and how does photography activate recent histories? In her book Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography, Shawn Michelle Smith explores the ways that artists “follow photographs to variously trace, bend, pierce, truncate, extend, and fold time,”1 the photograph being “an emblem of temporal disturbance that shows,

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quite literally, how a past inhabits a present.”2 In her photographic series In the Near Future (2009), American artist Sharon Hayes restages a series of historically significant protests, carrying the iconic signs associated with these movements and re-enacting them as a one-person demonstration. In one, she holds the “I AM A MAN” placard first introduced during the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike, in which some 1,300 Black sanitation workers walked off the job in protest of discrimination and dangerous working conditions, and which was famously photographed by Ernest C. Withers. In an interview with art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, who asked how Hayes’ evocation of this historical slogan might differ from other approaches, Hayes responded: I can’t just cut out the protest sign and put it on a wall in this present moment – it just becomes style. That excision is not actually an investigation; nor does it tease out how history is rupturing in the present moment. Instead, it becomes anesthetizing of the conflict. My interest was to actually work with protest and protest signs by putting myself in the space of enactment.3 Hayes considers herself a demonstrator in the Brechtian sense, whereby demonstrators, in German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, reenact an event that has taken place. Movement, here, is central, explicitly affirming embodiment as inextricably tied to the realm of the political – the body, a material conduit for tracing the sociohistorical. Chronophotography, a term coined in the late nineteenth century by French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey to refer to how sequences of photographs of movement could be used to study motion, evidences the longstanding fascination with the seemingly contradictory elements of stillness, temporality, and movement as contended with in photography. Despite technological advances allowing for the most minute of movements to be documented and studied, it is the decisive moment – photography’s ability to halt movement – that continues to captivate. Images that stay with us are often those that arrest movement, transforming the living figure into a statuesque icon. American photojournalist Jonathan Bachman’s 2016 image Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge has been studied by humanities scholar Raymond Drainville as exemplary of iconography’s value to social media research; the photograph of Ieshia Evans, taken in Baton Rouge on July 9, 2016, during the protests following the shootings by police of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, shows Evans appearing to topple three riot gear–clad police officers by sheer force of presence. Although several before-and-after photographs show the cops approaching and apprehending Evans, it is the image of Evans in seemingly still confrontation with the excessive force deployed in the face of peaceful protest – Evans’ economy of movement – that seems to anticipate its almost instantaneous reading as a “secular icon” at the same time as its meaning shifted for the thousands of social media users who shared, manipulated, and meme-ified it across social media platforms.4 In the present day, photographs move through virtual spaces like a stadium wave: an image repeated by thousands of users as a form of political solidarity where words fail in the face of the weight of injustice. Photography, when mobilized in such a way, can bring struggle to greater public consciousness and spur calls to action. Images of protest inspire

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and threaten; when mainstream media attempts to downplay the numbers in attendance at any given protest as a means to delegitimize support, photographs fight back against such misrepresentation. In an era defined by political uprising in tandem with technological advances in facial recognition, photography has been redeployed as a surveillance technique, introducing new concerns over the ethics of photography in political protest. But photography becomes counter-deployed as a tool of accountability against those who use force to arrest and immobilize moving bodies in the streets. Like bodies, images, too, form a critical mass and a palpable rhythm through which its own powerful resistance culture emerges, offering a view to political movements and embodied movements as moving in time with contemporary movement culture.

1. Shawn Michelle Smith, Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 1. 2. Smith, Photographic Returns, 5. 3. Sharon Hayes, “We Have a Future,” interview by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Grey Room, no. 37 (Fall 2009): 87. 4. Raymond Drainville, “Iconography for the Age of Social Media,” Humanities 7, no. 1 (2018): 12.

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Sara Cwynar Umi, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto

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Shellie Zhang Still Life with Dragon Fruit, 2018 Courtesy of the Artist and Patel Brown Gallery Part of the Offerings to Both Past and Future Canada Line Public Art Program at Waterfront Station

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BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project

Ambiguous Form: An Interview with Sara Cwynar

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Imitation of Life

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Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project

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A Conversation with Miranda Barnes

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TransLink Public Art Project

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Canada Line Public Art Project

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Durga Chew-Bose

Isolde Brielmaier

Contemporary Art Gallery Façade Public Art Project Mutable Materialism: An Interview with Michelle Bui

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Emmy Lee Wall

Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen

Chelsea Yuill

BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project

Sara Cwynar Umi, 2022

April 2022 – March 2023 944 Burrard St, Vancouver

Sara Cwynar Umi, 2022 Courtesy of the Artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto Installation mock-up: Jocelyne Junker, Capture Sponsored by the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association

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Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival

Ambiguous Form: An Interview with Sara Cwynar Emmy Lee Wall Sara Cwynar’s monumental image, Umi (2022), boldly commanding a large portion of the Dal Grauer building’s façade, features a woman participating in a photo shoot holding a pose that seems simultaneously relaxed and contrived. In a subtly subversive move, the subject looks away from the camera and hence the viewer; her gesture, in which she holds her hand to her head, waffles somewhere between private contemplation and exasperation. There is something undeniably unsettling in Cwynar’s presentation of this immense and seemingly simple image of a reclining woman in the public sphere. Perhaps it is that the subject seems mired in her own thoughts and feelings, disregarding the viewer and ignoring our gaze, while so many images of women are presented for approval or consumption. The image evokes advertising tropes while simultaneously denying them. By playing upon the visual power of vernacular images, Cwynar’s concise, powerful photograph investigates the ways in which the images that surround us shape our collective consciousness. Emmy Lee Wall Let’s start from the beginning. When you were presented with the opportunity to create a public work, can you tell us a bit about your thought process in creating such a monumental image depicting the female form? Sara Cwynar Yes! I wanted to use the grid on the building and to think of something that would have a trompe l’oeil feel, like one thing is contained within something else. I thought of a giant, monumental image of a woman who is sort of having her own private moment, as if she is actually in a very small space, looking up at the sky and disregarding the gaze of the viewer. It’s also a play, obviously, on all the traditional advertising we see where women are posed forward-facing,

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looking at us, as if they are there for our gaze. I wanted to use the opportunity of having such scale in a public place to work against those expectations. I also like that she seems maybe a bit tired, maybe a bit over it, like she just doesn’t care too much. I think it’s an apt billboard for 2022! ELW Are the considerations different for you when making work for the public realm versus a traditional gallery or museum setting? SC Definitely. I think, for one thing, you immediately think about the lack of context, whether it be a wall text, explicatory material, or other artworks. I wanted to make something that stands on its own, that does one thing that can be read quickly, and that can mean something to someone who has no relationship with my work, which will be most people who see it. In my experience, it is often harder to make an image that does only one thing, as opposed to layering different references and images and seeing how they make meaning against each other. I went through a lot of different and more complicated ideas to get to this relatively simple one! I also wanted to do something that used the public space, the relationships of scale inherent in that, which couldn’t necessarily exist in the museum, because of this unique opportunity. ELW You had a couple different versions of this image that you were happy with as a result of your shoot, and we had a bit of back and forth in selecting the final work. What made this specific photograph the most compelling for you? Her gesture and specific posture sit somewhere between relaxed and posed for me – the work strikes a very interesting balance between evoking a fashion shoot and someone who is exasperated or in the throes of despair. I love the ambiguity. SC Yes! I touched on this a bit; I’m glad it reads that way. I think because it is one simple image, the nuances and possible conflicting meanings in her pose become a lot of the content of the work. I definitely wanted it to feel like she doesn’t care too much about the viewer, but she also might know that they’re there, and she clearly got dressed up and posed for something. I think it speaks to having an ambivalent relationship to self-presentation, to making images of ourselves according to images of ourselves that we have already made (for example, on Instagram), and the way we are all participating in so much self-imaging that it has come to often feel more like a chore than a freedom or a

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leisure activity. I also think that it goes way past the internet into the early history of art, where women were so rarely pictured doing anything they might do in real life, and so few of them were pictured at all. I did waffle between having this pose be more natural and realistic and having it be an obviously constructed fashion pose but reversed. In the end, the more casual tone feels in step with the current moment. ELW In every version of this image we considered, the model looked away from the camera, so that her gaze does not meet the viewers’. Can you share your thought process behind this decision? SC I did not want her to seem there for the viewer, or like she needed anything from them. I think it’s a powerful image for that reason. I also think the building is so beautiful in its relationship to the sky, and the idea that she could be more oriented toward the sky than to the street or the material world is a really nice feeling for this site. ELW I can’t help but think of really well-known paintings of reclined women when I look at this work – Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647) and Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1534), for example. Are you looking at painting a lot? Are you actively trying to evoke these works with your image? SC I love these kinds of paintings, but I wouldn’t say that I actively look at them all the time so much as I have many of them kicking around my studio from various encyclopedias and sourcebooks. I like that they are so absorbed into our shared idea of art. I love John Berger’s writing in Ways of Seeing on these kinds of paintings, about them not being about women’s actual subjectivity (except in a couple rare examples) but about them being there for other people, as objects. This is like the first idea of any contemporary reading of art history, but I think it’s actually hard to make an image of a woman looking into the camera that doesn’t do that to some degree. So I am always looking out for examples of where the person seems to come through, versus where she gets obfuscated under our expectations that women’s images are there for us, that everyone owns them but the women themselves. I think also of fashion model Emily Ratajkowski’s amazing piece “Buying Myself Back” from New York Magazine last year, where she explains how this happens in a current-day, internet context.

Imitation of Life Durga Chew-Bose For the majority of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), the actress Monica Vitti, who plays an emotionally exiled woman named Giuliana, spends her days holding on. She holds on to her grey sweater, clutching its sleeves and asking the question “Who am I?” She holds on to her black scarf, which she uses to conceal half of her face as she walks alongside her future lover. She holds on to a sandwich, which she eats strangely, standing outside an industrial plant in the film’s first minutes. Vitti wolfs down the sandwich with both hands like a woman starved – greedy for a feeling, any feeling. Later, she holds on to a paper map of the world. “I wonder if there’s some place in the world where people go to get better,” she says. Giuliana quickly waives away the thought: “Probably not.” And on and on she goes, holding on: to her son Valerio, and soon after, a quail egg. She holds on to rare moments of stillness that telegraph like a form of sinking, lapsing toward a specific “elsewhere” (the dream of a pink beach in Sardinia, it’s later revealed). She holds on to her hair – that auburn, tousled sweep of Vitti volume – further framing the sharp-puff of her glare. She holds on to it so intensely that Vitti forces two modes of being with a single gesture: safeguarding what remains (of herself) by way of seduction. In one scene, it appears as though Vitti’s Giuliana is holding on to the walls of her bedroom with gripping ennui, like her insides are experiencing an earthquake that nobody else can feel. Betterment is never near, nor is it suitable material according to Antonioni. Giuliana is barely riding it out, holding on even when her attention is stolen by the arrival of ships – a preoccupation so obviously attendant to her need to escape that the ships function as a version of her subconscious; as a presentiment of the growing gulf between Giuliana and everyone else.

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Excerpt of Red Desert (Deserto Rosso) directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (1964) authors of the subject and screen players Tonino Guerra and Michelangelo Antonioni licensed by RTI S.p.A

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Vitti’s Giuliana is not a woman on the verge, no. She’s already been there. She is looking up, estranged from the site of her fall. She is wearied, desperate to be spun around. She is spinning, too, desperate to lie down. These ambiguities are enough to send her back to bed, yet, even there, she appears troubled. “Sometimes I want to attack someone,” says Guiliana, resting her head on her pillow. I mention Vitti’s beautifully elegiac, larger-than-life performance in relation to artist Sara Cwynar’s work because Cwynar’s project – with photography, film, self-portraiture, book-making, and, to some extent, performance – often recasts the notion of the muse, capturing instead varieties of reluctance that train the viewer’s gaze on something more simulated, congested, and visually footnoted. Cwynar’s approach to the model is presented like an interrogative clause instead of a sure thing. Her models are amalgamations. A confederacy of characters and coincidence, power and personhood; of allusions to place, the colours pink and pale blue; of historical figures often reworked with commercial innuendo, as if to attitudinize a sculpture or make statuary the girl in a catalogue. The cornucopia of references (e-commerce imagery colliding with Nefertiti busts; interpretations of poise, like hands resting on hips or holding an apple Eve-like; surveys of kitsch held together with neon Post-its; various degrees of desire like luxury goods superimposed by more practical, even retrograde, totems of “women’s things,” like pantyhose) are abundant yet achieve something more cryptic and intangible. Cwynar’s models possess a logic of anonymity. Who is she? is the common refrain folded into each of her photomontages – a refrain shared by Vitti’s Giuliana, who, too, offers up plenty only to disclose very little. Regardless, the visual bounty (Vitti’s unforgettable green coat for instance, or Red Desert’s engineered shades of pastel, in bloom and sickly, both), Antonioni’s heroine, and the Cwynar subject (sometimes herself, other times a model or a friend named Tracy) are unsolvable. That we will never really know Her is wondrous, melodramatic, and fun. Both artists author intrigue with plenitude, not as a measure of payoff but as the potential – romantic, even eerie – for what we get wrong. The woman in front of the camera holds the same curious power of a woman who is just out of frame. Cwynar’s study of beauty – like Vitti – is both easy and hard to look at. Pleasing, coordinated, splendid! But also disguised and withholding. A woman who is covering her face with one hand does not merely signify disengagement. There can be enormous vitality in looking away. There can be enormous vitality in how a woman might hold a sandwich (Vitti) or cross her legs at her knees (Cwynar’s model). Cwynar’s models, whom she captures both in studio and with collage (bringing to mind the chaotic glory of

cascading cards at the end of Microsoft’s 1990s Solitaire), reject traditional notions of the muse in exchange for multiplicity, or, in the case of Umi (2022), with an unorthodox, seemingly offhand, super-sized pose. This non-pose is surprising, especially given the scale. While the image of a woman lying down belongs to a long figurative lineage in art, Cwynar’s model appears uninterested in being “arranged.” Her torpor tips into another territory: extreme relaxation, which is so enjoyable to encounter, particularly now. The studio setting furthers the image’s intimacy, as if we are encountering a moment between takes, before the model has made herself accessible. Much of Red Desert unfolds in kind, as though Giuliana has stumbled into the frame accidentally: in heels as she walks through the mud or wearing green in an otherwise grey world. These beta moments come into view confidentially, providing maximal intimacy for the viewer. Giuliana occupies the screen like a secret. Cwynar’s colossal lady in red occupies a wash of teal, also like a secret. Two women, out of time and in step with it. They are so real. Real like a hallucination. We ask ourselves, as the credits roll or as we turn a street corner, Did I imagine her?

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Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project

Miranda Barnes A Journey Reframed, 2017–21

March 25 – May 1, 2022 Sited on seven billboards along the Arbutus Greenway, between Fir St and Burrard St, Vancouver

Miranda Barnes Tiffany and Gio, 2018 Courtesy of the Artist Installation mock-up: Jocelyne Junker, Capture The Arbutus Greenway Billboards are generously supported by the Audain Foundation

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Curated by Isolde Brielmaier, PhD Deputy Director, New Museum, New York Curator-at-Large, International Center of Photography, New York

A Conversation with Miranda Barnes Isolde Brielmaier At a time when we are inundated with bold images, visual calls for action, and coverage of big events, photographer Miranda Barnes, who works across both the commercial and contemporary art realms, explores a different kind of moment in her work. This collection of images was taken in a few states around the US, including Texas, Louisiana, New York, Ohio, and California, over the course of four years, and they are a strong representation of her artistic practice. She explains that “some of my earliest works are still my favourite images; a couple locked in embrace in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, after an August swim, Tory and Tyra on their way to a dance recital.” Barnes is drawn to quiet instances in her daily passings and to highlighting people in her community. These images have served as a gateway to ideas for future projects, and they remind her of the power that photography has to capture the beauty of the everyday and mundane as well as to ignite a dialogue about important societal issues. About this particular project, she explains: “The works selected for Capture Photography Festival are an array of images made across several states including New York and, most recently, my transition to making work in Texas and the surrounding areas. I like to believe that my work leaves space for imagination and highlights themes that interest me, such as nostalgia for the past and dreaming about the future.” Isolde Brielmaier Let’s start off pretty easy or fairly general, Miranda. Why photography? How did you get here? Miranda Barnes I began photographing heavily during my junior and senior years of high school, mostly because I knew in some way that I wanted to have memories to

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look back on. I think it blossomed into a full passion from there. IB I find it fascinating that you got your Bachelor of Arts in Humanities and Justice from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. It feels so far from photography, though I am sure it informs your work. Do you find that what you studied influences your images and how you think about images and visual culture? MB I would like to believe that graduating from John Jay has helped my interactions with the people I photograph. It was a great place to learn in depth about the particular parts of history and sociology that intrigued me. The subject matter of this process definitely overlaps with my photographic practice. IB You work between Brooklyn, New York, and Austin, Texas. In so many ways, these locations are very different environments, not only in terms of place but also with regard to culture and history. Do you find that your inspiration and thus your work changes depending on where you are? MB I’m challenged to think differently now that I go between two places. Texas has taught me to think about space and time differently. Returning to New York shows me things

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I may have not noticed before I started living outside the state. I think they both complement each other well in ways that I am actually still figuring out. IB Your work has such a beautiful rawness to it. I assume this is in part due to your subjects’ comfort during the shoot. Can you talk about how you put them at ease and how you manage to capture such “realness”? MB Thank you, Isolde. During my shoots, I try to explain to my subjects what I would like out of our interaction and to make sure I know if there are any limits. I like to always think of my photo shoots as collaborative. IB You work both in the studio and in the streets. How do these spaces differ – physically and technically – but also emotionally for you as an image-maker? MB I am self-taught, so the streets are where I first learned to practice. Studio work has come later in my career, but I have grown to love the ability to control the situation or lighting in my future work more. Emotionally, I feel I connect more when the sun starts to set; things look different. IB I really love your series of Black twins titled Doubles (2016–). Where did the idea stem from? How did you

find all of your subjects? And, finally, what did you learn from that experience? MB The inspiration came from my nana and my aunt Jean being twins themselves. In particular, a class at John Jay had a pair of twins, and I began my research on representation, and the idea of photographing Black femme twins. Some pairings came through word of mouth, but I was also looking out for twins, and I met some of them organically. The experience taught me a lot of the importance of research for a photo project, but I also made lifelong friends. Still hoping to finally complete the series one day.

MB I definitely have my goals – but the pandemic has forced me to know that you can’t plan everything. I have learned to embrace the idea that things do happen organically and that it takes time. I feel super fortunate to have had the experiences and opportunities that have already come my way. I know my future is bright!

IB The pandemic has really affected all of us, some more than others, of course. How did you and your work change through all of this? Were some of those changes permanent, do you think? MB Things slowed down, and I believe my process did as well. In the fast-paced world that we live in, I think young artists are subjected to putting out work prematurely. I worked on trying to let go of that pressure, and I still am! IB It feels strange to say that you are only at the beginning of your career because you have already done so much, but you are young, so it’s true! As you look forward, do you have any goals or dreams that you would like to fulfill?

Opposite page: Miranda Barnes Tory and Tyra, 2018 Courtesy of the Artist Miranda Barnes Lindsay at Pioneer Farm / Tonkawa Land, 2021 Courtesy of the Artist

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Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project

June 7 – July 12, 2021 Sited on five billboards along the Arbutus Greenway, between Fir St and Burrard St, Vancouver

Celia Perrin Sidarous Isis (detail), 2020 Courtesy of the Artist and Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal Photo: Jocelyne Junker, Capture

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Arbutus Greenway: Celia Perrin Sidarous Works from the Flotsam series, 2021 Celia Perrin Sidarous’ arrangements of inanimate objects and archival materials in her Flotsam series are fluid and associative. Whether a page from a book, a photograph, a piece of coral, a mirror, or a glass sphere, these still life assemblages play with the viewer’s sense of perception. Perrin Sidarous uses medium and large format cameras to create photographs that contemplate ways of looking and remembering. Each photograph becomes a montage that links to antiquity, art history, still life, and methods of display. Over the past decade, Perrin Sidarous has built an archive of images created outside the studio without artistic intent. Her work combines this archive with images she takes in the world and those she shoots in the studio. Regardless of the source, what she collects outside of and arranges within the studio becomes the building blocks of each image. This process of gathering, positioning, and combining to create something new alludes to the ways cultures have influenced each other across time and distance. Unlike the fast readability of advertising, these ambiguous images, mounted at a monumental scale, ask the viewer to look slower, to look again, to look more intently. Consider the life cycle of these particular objects: How do they exist outside their commonplace use? What are the connections they hold with time and the psychological space they occupy? Within the frame, time is compressed, space is condensed, a fragment of a narrative reconstructed. Is there more to the image? How much of it do we – the viewer – imagine?

Curated by Chelsea Yuill, Capture Photography Festival

Arbutus Greenway: Juliana Sohn Works from the Boys with Long Hair series, 2018– Juliana Sohn’s Boys with Long Hair series captures adolescents who, at the time the images were shot, identified as boys. Each sitter has chosen to defy societal conventions and grow their hair long and is pictured alone, some shot in their homes surrounded by their belongings, some photographed outside. There is a quiet intimacy achieved in each work, which is the result of a collaborative process in which Sohn asked the boys about their experiences living with long hair and the kinds of reactions they have received. Sohn seeks to empower her sitters by giving them a say in determining how they are portrayed. The boys often suggest solutions to creative problems that Sohn narrates as they work on the shoot together. Sohn began this series after raising two boys that chose to have long hair and who were regularly mistaken for girls. While her sons were not offended by these presumptions, she states that as the mother of boys with long hair, “I understand the time, patience, and determination the child endured achieving that length. Since many boys with long hair are often mistaken for girls, I see their decision to grow their hair as an indication of the individual’s strong character and their solid grasp of self-identity.” Sohn’s series documents these children with the commitment and inner strength to present themselves as they would like to the world, despite continually being misassigned a gender identity by it. The images are a celebration of this small, personal act of protest from children that have the power to challenge cultural assumptions.

Curated by Capture Photography Festival

July 23 – August 30, 2021 Sited on five billboards along the Arbutus Greenway, between Fir St and Burrard St, Vancouver

Juliana Sohn J. Griffin, 2018 Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Jocelyne Junker, Capture

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Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project

September 3 – October 11, 2021 Sited on five billboards along the Arbutus Greenway, between Fir St and Burrard St, Vancouver

Mahmoud El Safadi Work from the Becoming series, 2016 Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Jocelyne Junker, Capture

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Arbutus Greenway: Mahmoud El Safadi Works from the Becoming series, 2016 Along the edges of Beirut is the last pocket of nature open to the public, known as the Dalieh of Raouche, or the Pigeon Rocks. The Dalieh is an iconic landmark and longstanding haven for working-class Beirut families to dive and swim in its Mediterranean waters. Those who visit once or continue to return offer a presence for preservation, expressing a collective ownership over this unique coastline. It is a site of freedom, of home, and a place of great cultural memory with its archaeological significance. In one image, an adolescent stands surrounded by limestone, contemplating his first jump, as sleek condos in the near distance loom, hinting at this cliff ’s future as a soon-to-be site of privatized development. Artist Mahmoud El Safadi spent time with these divers, observing the bonds and rituals between teenagers coming of age who gather in Dalieh, travelling in from various neighbourhoods in Beirut. In this selection from the series Becoming, El Safadi documents the solitary moments of young divers as they brace themselves for an exhilarating plunge. The sequence of images story a sacred coalescence of oneself with the sea and with friendship. The act of diving becomes a right of passage from individual to community, symbolizing rebirth. Questions emerge as to how we preserve the material and metaphysical relationships we share in familiar spaces, how we retreat to these spaces for relief, joy, and connection, and how we continually navigate changing social, urban, and natural worlds.

Curated by Capture Photography Festival

Arbutus Greenway: Evan Benally Atwood Works from the Black Hills series, 2020 ˇ artist Evan Benally Atwood’s journey Black Hills is a series that documents Diné (Navajo) to an isolated mountain range in western South Dakota and Wyoming that are the ancestral ˇ Šakówin. Benally Atwood’s practice is one lands of the Cheyenne, Mnicoujou, and Oceti of personal introspection documenting interactions in places of Indigenous importance. In Black Hills, the images highlight and celebrate the remaining untouched landscapes of this territory, where the trail traffic, catered to tourism, disregards its original inhabitants. The Black Hills are a sacred site with a tempestuous history of control passing between various Indigenous nations before being taken by the United States in 1876. In 1980, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled the land was illegally taken. Financial remuneration was offered but was refused, as the land would not be given back to the Indigenous people from whom it was taken. To this day, a vast majority of the land comprising the Black Hills region has not been returned to its ancestral Indigenous caretakers. For this series, Benally Atwood used a 35mm rangefinder camera to offer a panoramic view, as in the self-portrait Cowgirl at Heart, establishing a filmic quality and subverting the canonical history of Indigenous representation in American western films. Benally Atwood takes this visual trope and reframes it through the optic of being a queer Indigenous person on those trails in present day. Through this act, Black Hills serves as documentation of Benally Atwood walking in harmony with the land and honouring these spaces that have been stolen.

Curated by Jocelyne Junker, Capture Photography Festival

October 28 – November 29, 2021 Sited on five billboards along the Arbutus Greenway, between Fir St and Burrard St, Vancouver

Evan Benally Atwood Cowgirl at Heart, 2020 Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Jocelyne Junker, Capture

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Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project

Horse of Oblivion 2, 2019 On view March 18 – July 18, 2022 Horse of Oblivion 5, 2019 On view July 22 – November 21, 2022 Horse of Oblivion 8, 2019 On view November 25, 2022 – March 10, 2023 Sited on a billboard at Kingsway and Fraser St, Vancouver

GreyChurch: Shannon Bool Works from the Horse of Oblivion series, 2019 Shannon Bool’s practice, which spans painting, sculpture, installation, photograms, and carpets and tapestries, marries fine art with methods traditionally relegated to craft or the decorative arts, often associated with female labour. Her work considers the system of art history while simultaneously engaging and referencing related disciplines such as architecture, literature, and psychology to question our habitual ways of seeing. In the Horse of Oblivion series, the artist combines images of modernist and brutalist architecture with elegant, energetic horses in stride. Bool was inspired by an image by Carlo Mollino, an Italian modernist architect, designer, and photographer who designed the Equestrian Club of Turin. Mollino’s work is a photomontage of a horse running past the façade of the Equestrian Club. In reference to that image, as well as Mollino’s surrealist treatment of the body in his designs, Bool developed this series by collaging buildings – including those by Jean Renaudie and Aldo Rossi – onto the bodies of horses to signify the power and progress modernism was intended to proclaim and evoke. Here, horses symbolize beauty, speed, and power but also act as harbingers of things to come. These works were originally created as photograms, a technique where photographic prints are created without the use of a camera through directly exposing light-sensitive paper. For this series, Bool made collages with transparent foils that were then placed atop photographic paper and exposed to light. Blown up on a grand scale as billboards, the images expose the method of their creation, making visible the gaps and tape that hold the layers together.

Shannon Bool Horse of Oblivion 2, 2019 Courtesy of the Artist and Daniel Faria Gallery The GreyChurch Billboard is generously supported by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill

Capture

2021–2022

Curated by Capture Photography Festival

River District: Yoshinori Mizutani Tokyo Parrots 005, 2013

Yoshinori Mizutani’s subjects include landscapes, skyscapes, animals, and flora and fauna, sometimes depicted in heightened, surreal colours. He plays with focal points and movement, using the camera to blur and obscure that which it captures, focusing on the expressive possibilities of the natural world. Tokyo Parrots 005 is part of a series shot over a year that documents parakeets that fly in swarms to the elm tree near the artist’s home in Tokyo’s Setagaya area. They flocked daily until eventually hundreds of the tropical birds appeared – a surreal sight, given that they are not native to the urban environment. Upon researching their presence in the area, Mizutani discovered that parakeets were imported to Japan from countries such as India and Sri Lanka in the 1960s and ’70s and sold as pets. Eventually, they made their escape and now roam the streets freely, undomesticated. Using strobe lights, the artist shot the birds in the evening, highlighting the hallucinogenic colours of the birds against the sky. He states: “These parakeets aren’t supposed to exist in Tokyo, but they do. And it’s the intensely uncanny feeling I felt when I first saw the swarm that I’ve captured in these photographs.”

March 11 – May 22, 2022 Sited on a billboard at SE Marine Dr and Kerr St, Vancouver

Yoshinori Mizutani Tokyo Parrots 005, 2013 Courtesy of the Artist and Christophe Guye Galerie, IBASHO, and IMA gallery

Curated by Capture Photography Festival

The River District Billboard is generously supported by Wesgroup

PUBLIC ART

TransLink Public Art Project

Stadium–Chinatown SkyTrain Station: Gloria Wong Works from the Rituals series, 2019

April 2022 – March 2023

In Rituals, artist Gloria Wong documents herself and her grandmother performing everyday domestic tasks common in Hong Kong/Macanese culture, including playing mahjong, peeling oranges, making dumplings, and sewing. These quiet activities demonstrate some of the ways in which the artist connects to her grandmother and her cultural heritage. Wong’s work often considers the multifaceted nature of Hong Kong/Macanese immigrant identities related to her family heritage. The artist states: “As language often serves as a barrier between my grandmother and I, my relationship with her and to my own cultural history has largely been enacted through actions and gestures rather than words.” In pairing images of herself and her grandmother performing the same acts, Wong demonstrates some of the ways in which cultural traditions are passed down, adopted, and practiced in immigrant families where members of the family serve as the primary conduit through which to learn about one’s heritage and traditions. The muted, neutral background of each photograph and the way the artist and her grandmother look down, focused on the task at hand, creates a feeling of peace evocative of their inner states in relationship to these familiar activities, which have been taught and learned from grandmother to granddaughter and which, through their enactment, demonstrate lineage and cultural inheritance. However, while Wong and her grandmother perform identical tasks that connect them, they are photographed separately, each in their own frames, perhaps to suggest the distance between them.

Gloria Wong Dumplings, from the Rituals series, 2019 Courtesy of the Artist Presented in partnership with TransLink

Capture

2021–2022

Curated by Capture Photography Festival

Lafarge Lake–Douglas College SkyTrain Station: Angeline Simon All that we carry, 2017–21 Photography satisfies the human desire to record and remember, but photographs can be lost, forgotten, or fade with time, leaving us with questions about our not-so-distant past. Lethbridge-based artist Angeline Simon mines her family photographic archives for source material to create collages that span multiple time periods and geographies, fulfilling a human desire for connection and belonging. Grappling with the disconnection the artist feels to her Malaysian Chinese and German roots, All that we carry urges us to consider how culture and family history are altered or lost in the process of immigration. Informed by early twentieth-century photomontage artists Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, Simon’s method involves cutting, pasting, and erasure, reinforcing the idea that memory is fluid and evolves over time. In addition to traditional collage methods, Simon uses a tool in Photoshop that replaces portions of the image with the surrounding content. In this process, an algorithm decides what is removed from or included in the image, infusing the works with an element of chance. For example, the figures of distant relatives become replaced with landscapes, leaving only the eerie and melancholy outline of ancestors lost through the passing of time. Simon, in this way, revisits and revises her family history, honouring her ancestors’ distant cultures while creating a new, subversive archive that tells a story of transcontinental immigration and resists the fading of intergenerational memory.

February 2022 – February 2023

Angeline Simon Kuching II, 2020 Courtesy of the Artist

Curated by Kate Henderson, Interim Visual Arts Manager, Art Gallery at Evergreen

Presented in partnership with Evergreen Cultural Centre and TransLink

PUBLIC ART

Contemporary Art Gallery Façade Public Art Project

Michelle Bui Works from the Mutable Materialism series, 2021–22

April–August 2022

Michelle Bui Envelop #1, from the Mutable Materialism series, 2021–22 Courtesy of the Artist

Capture

2021–2022

Organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery and Capture Photography Festival, co-curated by Julia Lamare, Acting Associate Curator, Contemporary Art Gallery, and Chelsea Yuill, Assistant Curator, Capture Photography Festival Envelop #1–8 continues with Bui’s Mutable Materialism, presented at Yaletown–Roundhouse Station

Mutable Materialism: An Interview with Michelle Bui Chelsea Yuill Enveloping the Contemporary Art Gallery’s façade and Yaletown–Roundhouse Station are Michelle Bui’s newly commissioned large-scale installations, titled Envelop #1–8 and Mutable Materialism (2021–22). As a whole, this still life series investigates the changing symbolism of objects and materials present in supermarkets and convenience stores, particularly ones encountered in dense cities like Montreal, where Bui lives and works. Bui uses the photographic process like an abstract painter and sculptor, making organic and synthetic materials that are marked by commerce and consumption ambiguous, fluid, and poetic. Luminous and seductive, the physicality of each image compels the viewer to reflect upon the intersection of still life, advertising, desire, and material culture. Chelsea Yuill With a background in painting and drawing, what pulled you into photography, and how does your initial training in the visual arts influence your current practice? Michelle Bui The first fine arts class that I took as a child was at a very rigorous and classical school in Montreal called Mission Renaissance, where we spent our time reproducing works of old masters and arranging our own still life sets with various fake fruits, crystal glasses, feathers, bouquets, and silverware. On a large shelving unit, we could find a mix of fake antique objects and thrifted goods that we treated and manipulated with the utmost care, already sensing the aura and potential those objects carried. I would carefully select a few objects and a dark velvet background, and would light the scene from an angle, inventing a narrative that would help in creating a dramatic composition.

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I would then spend weeks along with the other students reproducing the arrangement on paper with dry pastels – drawing and erasing, perfecting the image to emulate with utmost accuracy the composition that lay in front of me. In recent years, I’ve moved through various mediums, but thinking back on those memories, it is striking to see how that period has been fundamental to my practice today and how the thought process involved in building an image, either through drawing or photography, has stayed quasiidentical up to this day. CY The organic and inorganic materials you encounter in supermarkets and convenience stores are brought into your studio to build an image. How do you select materials, and what is your process in creating a photograph? MB In contrast to those antiques from my drawing classes that I needed to search out, I’m interested in the sheer amount of stuff that is ready to be bought, consumed, thrown out, and that fills our cityscape to the point of banality such that it almost becomes invisible. No matter what our consuming philosophy or approach is, there is a broad tendency toward overfilling and overabundance – an excess that is glazed over with a pending sense of doom, surely heightened by the knowledge of our inevitable decline. You don’t need to go very far to witness the sheer amount of stuff so readily available to us and in such vast quantities, which is why those convenience stores, supermarkets, dollar stores, florists, hardware and craft stores – all at a walkable distance from my home or studio – have become a way to source materials through daily errands. That constant feeling of overload and overstimulation, with things and images coming at us and assaulting our senses to a point of disorientation, is a starting point for my practice. Concretely, I rarely look for things to photograph; rather, objects come to me and pique my attention through their colour, texture, shape. The most promising ones are banal, familiar to most, but also hold the potential to be strange or to create a friction through their association with other items or materials. And it’s precisely in those common stores where all kinds of objects rub shoulders without any particular hierarchy – isolated from the friction of their production – that I find objects that are so ordinary they can be part of a universal language. So it makes sense that a dish glove can be associated with pork tripe – they can both be found in the same aisle, and share the same pictorial language in my practice that allows me to shift the symbolism of commerce and turn it inward into something intimate and sensorial.

Capture

2021–2022

CY How do the photographs on view at the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) mark a new approach to still life compared to the photographs installed at Yaletown–Roundhouse Station? How do you see these two site-specific works being in conversation with one another? MB The installation at the CAG derives from a series that I had started in 2020 that moved away from the tabletop still life into imagery that is more liquid and abstract. Both projects, while visually distinct, are connected through the gathering of objects and materials, which remains the same. On the other hand, composing the image is quite different, as one project relies more on the efficiency of visual language in a very controlled studio setting and the other is more about mark-making and opening up a space for stains and traces to appear, sometimes over a period of time as the composition takes on a life of its own. Concepts of haptic visuality and the idea of formlessness has always been part of my practice, but the sense of touch, the desire for poetry and softness, felt increasingly essential during that year and ended up seeping into my practice as well. I’m constantly thinking about the photographic surface, where the medium is also the message. In this still life series, a lot of it’s achieved through the use of bright colours. As for the more recent series, I’m interested in ways emotion can be conveyed and shared through the curve of a line, the creases and folds on a surface. At the CAG, those various visible layers of plastic film that were stretched, folded, wrinkled, overlapped – they activate the surface-like marks on skin, first through the sense of vision with a desire to reach the sense of touch. I’m hoping the installation becomes a connective space where the viewer is moved by it and where the architecture merges into a sensory cloth. Read Julia Lamare’s didactic on this project at capturephotofest.com and contemporaryartgallery.ca

Michelle Bui Envelop #2, from the Mutable Materialism series, 2021–22 Courtesy of the Artist

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Canada Line Public Art Project

Shellie Zhang Shahla Bahrami Michelle Bui Joseph Maida Ali Cherri Philotheus Nisch Svava Tergesen Chad Wong Kyla Bourgh

Canada Line Public Art Stations Map

Presented in partnership with Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC

Capture

2021–2022

For the 2022 multisited Canada Line Public Art Project, Capture has installed lens-based artworks at Canada Line stations throughout Metro Vancouver. This year’s project considers contemporary and expansive examples of the still life genre and stretches across nine locations, from Waterfront to Lansdowne Station, and includes contributions from Capture and other local art organizations including Booooooom, Burrard Arts Foundation, Centre A, Contemporary Art Gallery, Richmond Art Gallery, and Vancouver Art Gallery.

Waterfront Station: Shellie Zhang Works from the Offerings to Both Past and Future series, 2018–19 Shellie Zhang examines how societies learn, sustain, and transform culture through objects and iconographies. In Offerings to Both Past and Future, vibrant arrangements of artificial and edible fruits and vegetables are displayed in bowls from the artist’s collection of family heirlooms. This series uses visual cues from still life painting, advertising, produce displays in restaurants and grocery stores, and the Chinese tradition of gifting fruits at celebrations, temples, and shrines. The textures and types of foods, paired with symbolic textile backdrops, reference the comforts of home, instilling a sense of belonging for those living within China and members of the Chinese diaspora who live outside its borders. The everyday produce and wares are majestically elevated, becoming like precious jewels. Zhang’s pedestals of produce call attention to the routine of giving, an intimate gesture that nourishes the mind, spirit, and health of the receiver. It is an act of care, affection, gratitude, and labour. From farm to table, this labour is often directly tied to migrant work that includes the harvesting, transport, and selling of local and international foods. For those unfamiliar with these specific traditions and labour, stigmas may be projected onto the cultures that share these values. In this way, this series is a powerful representation of the ongoing experiences of diasporic communities, their struggles with oppression, and their rich, evolving traditions of generosity and remembrance. Zhang elevates and makes visible these intersecting experiences. Each image becomes an offering and a tribute to honour, and in the artist’s words, the series “sustain[s] the collective memory of those in the afterlife and those in the present.”

April–August 2022

Shellie Zhang Still Life with Citrus, 2018 Courtesy of the Artist and Patel Brown Gallery Presented in partnership with Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC

Curated by Capture Photography Festival

The Waterfront Station public art project is generously supported by MLT Aikins LLP

PUBLIC ART

Canada Line Public Art Project

Vancouver City Centre Station: Shahla Bahrami Works from the Censorship and Autocensorship – I bite my tongue series, 2021

April–August 2022

In the hands of Shahla Bahrami, food and language are intimately fused. To create the striking photographs that make up her series Censorship and Autocensorship – I bite my tongue, Bahrami first writes fragments taken from her journal or Persian poems onto ingredients or dishes typical to Iranian cuisine. She then photographs these foods and their inked Farsi inscriptions against a black background. Bahrami views this series as an exploration of power, symbolically linking eating – typically considered a benign activity – with the fraught dynamics of control, violence, and suppression. She writes: “If speech takes the form of an opening, a gift, an extraction of oneself, eating is on the contrary the movement of a return to oneself, of a compression, of a disappearance into the flesh.” Through the juxtaposition of food and the written word, Bahrami deliberates on the roles of the individual and of the collective in consuming the culture of others, limiting self-expression, and, as her title starkly indicates, the censorship of language and artistic creativity. Despite their deeply disquieting underpinnings, these seductive images are equally imbued with Bahrami’s evident delight in Iranian gastronomical and intellectual traditions. They function thus as an elegant homage to these time-honoured practices. The series also offers brief windows into Bahrami’s own identity – crystallizing her deep appreciation for Iranian cuisine and culture while hinting, in a more opaque way, at her specific experiences as a diasporic woman and artist. Marked by her handwritten notations, these images oscillate subtly, artfully, between the genres of still life and self-portraiture.

Shahla Bahrami Shaer, Nevissandeh, Rooznamehnegar/ Poet, writer, journalist, 2021 Courtesy of the Artist The Artist thanks the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Ottawa, and Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain gallery for their support. Presented in partnership with the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC

Capture

2021–2022

Curated by Zoë Chan, Assistant Curator, Vancouver Art Gallery

Yaletown–Roundhouse Station: Michelle Bui Works from the Mutable Materialism series, 2021–22 Bringing both a painterly and a sculptural approach to her photographic practice, Montreal- April–August 2022 based artist Michelle Bui operates within the visual language of still life. Working with an array of everyday, seemingly unremarkable materials, Bui creates delicate, often precarious compositions in her studio, employing her camera at the moment they threaten to perish or collapse. Disrupting the idleness so often associated with still life, the resulting images come to assume a kind of artifice – idealized instants captured in tension with the reality of their inevitable decline. Building on this strategy, Bui wraps the surface of the Yaletown–Roundhouse Station with a series of new images as part of her exhibition Mutable Materialism. Continuing to work with a lexicon of familiar objects – such as those commonly and overabundantly found on the shelves of supermarkets and convenience stores – Bui obliges often incongruous forms into conversation with one another, such as imitation pearls and upholstery foam or fresh cut flowers and wooden blocks. Enlarged to an outsized scale reminiscent of billboards and situated in public space, these compositions both engage and confuse the seductive language of advertising, rendering the familiar strange and the banal surreal. Their absurdity invites reflection on our relationship to the everyday and the consumptive, to broader systems of value, commerce, and desire. Mutable Materialism continues with Bui’s Envelop #1–8, presented on the Contemporary Art Gallery’s façade.

Michelle Bui Oyster, from the Mutable Materialism series, 2021–22 Courtesy of the Artist

Presented in partnership with the Contemporary Art Gallery and the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC

PUBLIC ART

Canada Line Public Art Project

Olympic Village Station: Joseph Maida Works from the Things “R” Queer series, 2014–

April–August 2022

Joseph Maida’s Things “R” Queer series uses still life photography to express queer identity and reflect upon contemporary material culture. With saturated colours that pop, the images make palpable the references in Maida’s work to pop art, camp culture, food porn, advertising campaigns, and kawaii culture (a Japanese term for “cuteness”). Maida queries the aesthetic approach of documentary, or “straight,” photography by playing with scale, perception, stasis, and movement. By reorienting the functions of the pictured objects, these subversive tableaux offer visual cues to suggest playfulness, leisure, indulgence, and gender fluidity. Installed at Olympic Village Station, each image is printed at larger-thanlife scale, radiating eye-catching colours and humorous juxtapositions. This ongoing series began in the artist’s studio as an exercise to “make a photo a day” and share it on the social media platform Instagram. By mixing his artworks into the feed of everyday, autobiographical moments, Maida uses Instagram to consider and re-evaluate the distribution and consumption of their work. Since 2014, Things “R” Queer has had many lives, circulating on social media, in publications and exhibitions, on postcards, as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and now as a public art installation. In contrast to a painting or sculpture, the varied presentation of this body of work highlights that the life of a photograph does not exist as one but as multiples. Maida takes this idea of plurality further by adding new images to and creating novel experiential contexts for the series, ensuring its meaning remains fluid.

Joseph Maida #now #serving #cake #フルーツ #ムース #テニス #ケーキ #thingsarequeer, July 30, 2016 Courtesy of the Artist and CONVOKE Presented in partnership with Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC

Capture

2021–2022

Curated by Chelsea Yuill, Capture Photography Festival

Broadway–City Hall Station: Ali Cherri Works from the GRAFTINGS series, 2018–21 In agricultural botany, a graft is a sprout inserted into a slit on a trunk or stem of a living plant; the joined parts grow together to become one. In medicine, a graft is a piece of living tissue that is transplanted surgically to replace diseased or injured tissue. Grafting is often used to create new varieties, and the act can sometimes occur between different species, through which a new lifeform is birthed. In his series GRAFTINGS, Ali Cherri imagines an alternative to the binaries often proposed by nature and culture by using both botanical and medical techniques of grafting. Combining objects uprooted from various sites or collected at auctions and markets, this body of work employs an intriguing hybridity while embodying a visceral, anthropomorphic presence. It proposes a dehierarchization of materials and objects, expressed through compromised authenticity, and evokes the possibilities of speculative and different ways of existing in this world. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Cherri’s formative years were largely characterized by wars and ruins to which he bore witness; as a result, his practice continually represents such traumatic memories. The artist has a particular interest in monstrous bodies, as well as broken objects that have been written out of the histories constructed by museums. The objects produced as part of GRAFTINGS are described by Cherri as intruders, as they serve to disrupt the preset value system and contest what is deemed desirable. They also hint at traces of violence while symbolizing a sense of survival.

April–August 2022

Ali Cherri Grafting (H), 2018 Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Imane Farès

Curated by Henry Heng Lu, Executive Director/Curator, Centre A

Presented in partnership with Centre A and the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC

PUBLIC ART

Canada Line Public Art Project

King Edward Station: Philotheus Nisch Skewer, Straw, Breadcrust, 2020

April–August 2022

Berlin-based artist Philotheus Nisch creates strangely surreal still lifes using a wide variety of props and artifacts juxtaposed in surprising compositions. Foods stacked into a colourful kebab, a straw from which a glistening red liquid flows, and the crusts of bread are the main components in these beguiling arrangements – but juxtaposed against an impossibly beautiful sky or a golden sunset, these mundane objects are elevated as if supernatural or magical. “Everything you can think of can be translated into photography,” he states, finding inspiration in flea markets, dollar stores, construction sites, and hardware stores. His work features ordinary things made extraordinary through the hyper-saturated, high-contrast, high-gloss images and close cropping that defines his work and makes these objects the subject of intense scrutiny. Despite the exceedingly produced nature of his images, postproduction and manipulation after shooting in Nisch’s work is minimal. The images are, however, decidedly constructed, and Nisch acknowledges that each work is the result of a series of decisions, whether intuitive or calculated. The images selected for this installation were initially commissioned for publication in magazines and newspapers and all evidence the artist’s fantastical treatment. In choosing to integrate his commercial and artistic practice in this way, Nisch questions the boundaries between these two realms and the way in which value is accorded to images.

Philotheus Nisch Skewer, 2020 Courtesy of the Artist Presented in partnership with Booooooom and the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC

Capture

2021–2022

Curated by Booooooom and Capture Photography Festival

Marine Drive Station: Svava Tergesen Works from the Crudités series, 2019 In the fall of 2019, illness caused artist Svava Tergesen to lose her appetite. Though the thought of consuming the foods in her fridge repulsed the artist, she wanted to engage with the materiality of fruits through touch and sight, rather than taste. For her series Crudités, Tergesen began composing surreal ornamental arrangements using the citrus fruits, melons, pears, and squash she sourced locally, including at Marine Drive’s T&T Supermarket. No longer needing to account for appropriate ripeness, texture, bruising, and other considerations associated with food consumption, Tergesen selected fruits as if they were the coloured glass or pigments used in the creation of a stained-glass window. The artist’s saturated colour palette, domestic textiles, and unusually flat lighting are reminiscent of some of the uncanny food photography of the 1950s and ’60s found in magazines and on recipe cards. In Tergesen’s work, manipulating food becomes a playful and aesthetic gesture, rather than a task focused on nurturing the family, offering resistance to or a reimagining of domestic tasks within the household. For Tergesen, her large format camera and analogue film act as plastic wrap, preserving the precarious arrangements and halting the inevitable process of decomposition that food faces. Her camera is also utilized as a bridge between photography and sculpture and between photography and disciplines that are typically referred to as “craft,” such as quilting, crocheting, and even cooking.

April–August 2022

Svava Tergesen Surprise, 2019 Courtesy of the Artist

Curated by Andrea Valentine-Lewis, Gallery Manager, Burrard Arts Foundation

Presented in partnership with Burrard Arts Foundation and the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC

PUBLIC ART

Canada Line Public Art Project

Aberdeen Station: Chad Wong Empty Spaces that Fill My Heart, 2021

pril 1, 2022 – A February 28, 2023

Empty Spaces that Fill My Heart is a photographic diptych connecting Richmond and Vancouver’s Chinatowns. In this work, Chad Wong presents abstracted fragments of the awnings and hallways of the Hong Kong–style cafes and Chinese Canadian malls he grew up visiting. The images contemplate how various modes of representation in architecture and shared cultural spaces shape the narrative and identity of a community. Wong is a first-generation Canadian whose family immigrated to Richmond from Hong Kong. Since the 1990s, a steady stream of Chinese newcomers has arrived to the Lower Mainland, initially from Hong Kong and now more predominantly from Mainland China. This body of work explores the fading signs and symbols of the Hong Kongese/ Cantonese Chinese Canadian cultural urbanscapes of both Richmond and Vancouver. The uniqueness of these malls and restaurants – which have become visible icons in the Lower Mainland – exists in their blend of Eastern and Western influences. These spaces are now slowly disappearing, and the artist views them as a last vestige of his connection to Hong Kong. He felt an urgency to document and preserve these Chinese Canadian sites that are on the precipice of gentrification as demographics shift. Sited at Aberdeen Station, the works occupy a location that is a significant space for Chinese Canadian businesses and cultural manifestation.

Chad Wong Empty Spaces that Fill My Heart, 2021 Courtesy of the Artist Presented in partnership with City of Richmond Public Art and the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC

Capture

2021–2022

Curated by Shaun Dacey, Director, Richmond Art Gallery

Lansdowne Station: Kyla Bourgh Objects given to my mom because she is Asian, 2018

Kyla Bourgh’s installation at Lansdowne Station presents objects that have been given to the artist’s mother over the past fifty years. Each object was gifted to her because of her physical and cultural identity. These gifts are thematically “Asian” in style, and although they were offered in kindness, they unconsciously express to her that she is and always will be a “visible minority” in the farming community in rural British Columbia where she lives. Through this work, the artist considers the unconscious biases placed on her mother and how they differ from the artist’s own lived experience as someone of mixed ethnicity who is white “passing.” The photographed objects exist in an unclear cultural locale that challenges the viewer to unpack their own prejudices and perspectives. From within the diverse mix of cultures present in Richmond and in Canada at large, Bourgh’s work raises questions about the dichotomy many people face between having a sense of belonging and of being stereotyped within a country where many of their families have resided for several generations.

pril 1, 2022 – A February 28, 2023

Kyla Bourgh Objects given to my mom because she is Asian, 2018 Courtesy of the Artist

Curated by Shaun Dacey, Director, Richmond Art Gallery

Presented in partnership with City of Richmond Public Art and the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BC

PUBLIC ART

Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen

Jessie Ray Short Wake Up! (still), 2015 video with sound 5:58 min. Courtesy of the Artist

Capture

2021–2022

Jessie Ray Short Wake Up!, 2015

Jessie Ray Short’s Wake Up! raises questions around identity as a femme-presenting Métis person confronted with self-reflection in the face of the ongoing reality of colonialism. The work captures the artist’s transformation through clothing, make-up, and a moustache, taking on the persona of eighteenth-century Métis political leader Louis Riel. In his short life, Riel was a former member of the House of Commons of Canada who had concerns about his safety in entering parliament; he also led two rebellions against the Government of Canada and John A. Macdonald. He is primarily referred to as a captivating leader who defended the Métis people from unfair treatment resulting from the progressing colonization of the newly established Canadian government. Riel was captured and imprisoned in Regina after the North-West Rebellion of 1885, convicted of high treason, and subsequently executed. Due to this history, Riel remains a central figure in Métis history, culture, and identity. Short’s practice considers the symbols of Métis culture, and how we might integrate them into the present while leaving room for a culture to flourish and grow. Wake Up! asks how the legacy of a celebrated leader from over a century ago can remain the primary touchstone for a culture that remains alive and active. The work asks, “Do you know who Métis people are? How do you explain a culture in small talk?” Re-examining the cultural significance of Louis Riel allows us to consider the ways in which we can question representation while still respecting the importance this history holds.

Curated by Jocelyne Junker, Capture Photography Festival

April 1–30, 2022 Sited on the east side of the Independent Building at the intersection of Broadway and Kingsway, Vancouver

Presented in partnership with grunt gallery, organizers of the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen

PUBLIC ART

Dainesha Nugent-Palache Porcelain Ponies, 2021 inkjet print 80.23 × 76.2 cm Courtesy of the Artist

Capture

2021–2022

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS 67–77

79–85

87–89

Family Album Pendulum Gallery Everything Under the Sun: In Memory of Andrew Gruft Vancouver Art Gallery Cloud Album The Polygon Gallery

Emmy Lee Wall

Grant Arnold Sarah Milroy Jeff Wall

Luce Lebart

Silvia Rosi Self Portrait as My Mother, from the Encounter series, 2019 chromogenic print 88.9 × 30 cm Courtesy of the Artist

Capture

2021–2022

Pendulum Gallery

March 21 – April 14

Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival

Family Album Rydel Cerezo Anique Jordan Anna Kasko Meryl McMaster Cheryl Mukherji Dainesha Nugent-Palache Birthe Piontek Silvia Rosi

Family Album explores the power of image-making in relation to a fundamental social unit: the family. Many people’s first experience of being photographed is by and with their parent or guardian. Traditional family photographs, in which the sitters are captured within their home, surrounded by objects of pride, and dressed in their finest, not only have come to define the way subjects wish to present themselves but also are complicit in generating an idea of how a family should appear. The local, national, and international artists in this exhibition reveal the family as a social construct and use the camera as a mechanism by which to better understand their own personal histories and familial relationships. They mine the visual language of family photographs and use these tropes and conventions to explore the emotional weight of ancestral affiliations. By turning their lens on their families, themselves, and objects of personal significance, as well as through using found photographs, the artists in this exhibition make visible the intimate, imperfect, and sometimes difficult relationships that characterize our connection to those deemed to be closest to us. The works ask viewers to reflect upon the limits of the knowledge of others obtained through images, including those with whom we are deeply familiar. In using photography to explore the family unit, the works in Family Album together present a study of what is possible for a photograph to convey.

Family Album is organized by Capture Photography Festival, presented by TD Bank Group, and generously supported by the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association capturephotofest.com

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS

Rydel Cerezo

the ways in which photography has been used to construct an idea of family in creating your work?

Can you describe your process and working method in creating the body of work shown in Family Album?

Sure. The examples of being photographed by one’s parents and the idea of family presented through photography Back of My Hand (2020) was made intuitively during the made me think of how family photographs have shifted first lockdown of the pandemic. It began for me as a means more toward presenting “success” in the age of Facebook. to process the rapidly changing reality and document the During that time, it became apparent to me that family unique situation of being held in close proximity with my albums live online and were typically presented in lieu of family over that period of time. At that moment, with some sort of “accomplishment.” I couldn’t help but think what felt like all the time in the world, turning toward within the context of being quarantined what it would photography felt like a hobby again. Picture-making felt mean for me to create photographs of my own family where easier with subjects I knew intimately and the stakes felt there essentially was no “goal” being accomplished. We lower. What I did feel tension with during this sudden could argue that the only goal at the time was to quietly halt of time was the amount of unseen change that has survive. I wanted to reflect on how much each of my family transpired over the years since immigrating to Canada. members changed physically, how our relationships with Working with my siblings, parents, aunts, grandmother, each other have been redefined over the years, and how and partner made me realize that I was not simply a voy- simple exchanges of care became significant for survival. eur – instead, the act of photography can be a physical The photographs I made may lack social glamour, yet the gesture. Through this process, picture-making became a idea of family in all of its banality felt intimately more silent conversation or even a familial touch in which each full. exchange was a means of holding each other at a distance, and the photograph became a visual means through which It’s interesting to me that while the artists in this exhibition explore family history and lineage, none of the works in the we moulded one another. exhibition are traditional family portraits. Can you speak Photography and the idea of family are so intimately inter- to the relationship between photography and truth for you, twined – most people’s first experience of being before the lens personally? is being photographed by a parent. Were you thinking about

Rydel Cerezo Lola Curling Hair, from the Back of My Hand series, 2020 digital scan from negative 50.8 × 40.64 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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I’m more fascinated by the idea of fiction than truth in photography, which is inspired by literary fiction or autofiction. Writing has more licence in playing into fiction as a means to convey a more intimate and emotional truth. Most if not all of the photographs made in this series are staged; however, they are heavily inspired by a moment or activity that I witnessed before. Each of these moments or exchanges between my family members were restaged in order for me to convey the quiet labour and poignant feeling of being together.

Anique Jordan

on the materials of the archives and the photograph. We lose things like rhythms, gestures, secrets, all those pieces that are held within families that disappear as generations are born and as generations die. At the same time, these images have become a type of family heirloom because they document all these sites that in my family history are very quickly disappearing. It’s interesting to me that while the artists in this exhibition explore family history and lineage, none of the works in the exhibition are traditional family portraits. Can you speak to the relationship between photography and truth for you, personally?

Generally, photography is not a marker of truth for me. Just because we say something is true doesn’t mean that the reality it plays out in the world relates to it as truth. The body of work that I’m showing is called Salt (2015). This idea is really interesting because it’s more popularized My background is in community economic development, now more than ever through Trumpism and all the things and I was doing a lot of work in African diasporic com- that came with him. When we show an image, even when munities across the Americas and in Canada. I had been it’s holding something that factually happened, we don’t struggling with this idea of how is it that Black people have necessarily get the result from that truth-showing that we been able to make it through all these levels of historical should get. The number of images and documentations of interruptions, I’d say, throughout much of the diaspora’s people being killed at the hand of the state or all these ideas history. I started thinking about questions of survival, of violence – those images don’t necessarily result in what particularly survival strategies, and I asked women in my you think that type of truth would result in. I think the family in Trinidad if they could talk to me about what truth-telling ability of the photograph is being lost more survival looked like for them. They started answering, and and more, and I don’t know if that matters. For me, these in the locations where their answers were situated, I started photographs hold a type of truth about my family and my family history, but at the same time, they distort it. I’m photographing myself at those sites. inserted inside of these images that look like they are old. Photography and the idea of family are so intimately inter- They look like they could be an ancestor in my family. So twined – most people’s first experience of being before the lens you’re forced to deal with multiple registers of how you is being photographed by a parent. Were you thinking about believe in and understand an image. the ways in which photography has been used to construct an idea of family in creating your work?

Can you describe your process and working method in creating the body of work shown in Family Album?

Anna Kasko

Was I thinking about the way the family is photographed? I think so, but not in the material sense of the photograph. Can you describe your process and working method in creating I was thinking about how photographs hold memories and the body of work shown in Family Album? then get inserted into archives. There are so many things that a photograph excludes This project is essentially an editing process involving and so many things that archives exclude. That is why I found slides. My intent is to investigate possible narratives work across performance and photography – because I’m by asking questions: Why was this picture taken? What trying to find ways to create archives in my own body, are the relationships between the subjects? What makes memories in my own body, new pathways, and memo- this image compelling? ries in the bodies of my family that experience me doing By superimposing one found image over another, I this and who have had to share so much of themselves interfere with the original intent in order to blur subject through stories I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise specificity and create a more universal experience. I invite while I did this work. I think this activates a type of mem- the audience to look at and through the image – literally ory that is regularly hushed by putting so much emphasis and allegorically.

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Photography and the idea of family are so intimately intertwined – most people’s first experience of being before the lens is being photographed by a parent. Were you thinking about the ways in which photography has been used to construct an idea of family in creating your work? One of the most striking realizations I had while editing these images is what remains the same while everything around us changes; technology, familial roles, fashion all change, but the need to belong does not. The photograph is a concrete representation of belonging. Anna Kasko Garden Cruise Stanley Park, from the Found Slides series, 2021 superimposed archival transparencies on lightbox 27.94 × 41.91 × 5.08 cm Courtesy of the Artist

It’s interesting to me that while the artists in this exhibition explore family history and lineage, none of the works in the exhibition are traditional family portraits. Can you speak to the relationship between photography and truth for you, personally?

Opposite page: Meryl McMaster Ancestral 3, from the Ancestral series, 2008 digital chromogenic print 50.8 × 76.2 cm Courtesy of the Artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain

Yes, this is exactly what I find interesting and what my project is questioning: photography and truth. I begin this dialogue through obscuring traditional family photographs. My process abstracts the truth in the images through superimposing and creating a new scene, one that is not real. For me it is interesting exploring these superimposed slides to see if abstraction opens up viewer connection: the work can represent anyone’s familiar family scene. I think about

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I wasn’t thinking so much of how photography has been used to construct the idea of family, although it is an interesting thought. The process I went through while thinking about the people in the historical portraits was similar to what I experienced when I was looking at my own family photographs. They were ultimately strangers to me, just like these relatives of mine who I had never met. I also tried to imagine who these women or men were and what their lives were Meryl McMaster like during that time, as well as what was going through Can you describe your process and working method in creating their heads when their photograph was being taken for this image. I felt there was a loneliness to the images as the body of work shown in Family Album? they were on their own, as opposed to the more common The Ancestral project (2008) began with a search for fam- family photographs when you are with other people. The ily photographs in the hope of learning more about my people in the photographs were not smiling and most often Indigenous family heritage and the ancestors who walked looking off to the side. There was a feeling of passiveness. the land before me. I am part nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) from Red Pheasant First Nation in Saskatchewan and a member It’s interesting to me that while the artists in this exhibition explore family history and lineage, none of the works in the of the Siksika Nation in Alberta. Unfortunately, the photographic record of that side of exhibition are traditional family portraits. Can you speak my family didn’t have the detail I was seeking, so I began to the relationship between photography and truth for you, collecting a variety of historical photographic portraits and personally? paintings from the late nineteenth century of Indigenous men and women across America. The portraits I found were photographs taken by the American photographers Edward S. Curtis and William Soule as well as the works of the painter George Catlin. These three men had an objective with their work – to document as much of Native American traditional life as possible from across America, believing that Indigenous people were disappearing and that their ways of life must be collected at once or the opportunity would be lost. They directed their subjects and manipulated images to show lifestyles and cultures of the past. Their ideas and misrepresentations were spread throughout the public. In fact, my ancestors were still very much alive, just not in the way that they were depicted in these images. I scanned the images and then used a digital projector to shine the portraits onto the bodies of myself and my father. I painted both of our faces and torsos with white paint, like a screen, allowing the projections to appear more clearly on our bodies. This process of playing with light and projection on the body creates a surreal and ghost-like quality to the images, with aspects of the past and present subject visible. these intersections of photography and truth often with my photographic practice. A photograph allows you to see more of a scene than what you can process at the time of its capture. The experience of the scene is completely different than experiencing it in real time. I am still exploring the potential of truth in photography.

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It’s complicated in terms of whose truth is being told through photography. Whoever is taking the photograph is seeing the subject through their own lens. Photographers are always framing the image in a certain way, making judgments about composition and cropping that supports the way that they view the subject(s). The viewer brings their own lens in terms of the aspects of the photograph that they focus on. These complexities are what make photography so beautiful and interesting, but I think the photographer has a responsibility to the truth that I felt was violated when it comes to the works that I appropriated for the Ancestral series. These images were staged – a romanticization and misrepresentation of the people being used as subjects, all in an effort to capture the “truth” as the photographer wished to have people see it.

Cheryl Mukherji Can you describe your process and working method in creating the body of work shown in Family Album? In the collage series A Mirror is Where I See You (2020), I use reflective mylar to mimic mirrors over photographs of my mother from our family albums. I collage parts of the photographs in abstract and playful shapes while reflecting on origin, likeness, becoming, and inheritance. I was inspired by mylar’s materiality, its photographic, filmlike quality, and its use as an intervention in family photography. I feel that the collages get activated when I stand in front of them and my reflection on the mylar merges with my mother’s photograph. In the family photographs, I find a resemblance between my looks and my mother’s. This physical resemblance feels synonymous with fate: if I already looked like her, then I must become her. In the work, I explore the idea of becoming my mother by reinserting myself into the family album and staging self-portraits in my domestic space alongside prints of my mother’s photographs – exposing the anxiety of seeing her body as a home lost and my need to return to it. In Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl (2021), I reimagine and subversively recreate my mother’s matrimonial photographs, which were taken for the purpose of arranging my mother’s marriage in India, using self-portraiture against hand-painted backdrops in my domestic space that also alternates as my studio.

the ways in which photography has been used to construct an idea of family in creating your work? Yes, I think about the social function of photographs within collections like a family album where each person, each pose, serves the purpose of creating an idea of what a family and kinship should look like. These ideas are constructed to serve the myth that a family is a harmonious unit in a society where each member performs their duties of being a daughter, a mother, a sister, a father. That way, these albums are a space for play and performance that is built to cater to the myth of a happy family. It’s interesting to me that while the artists in this exhibition explore family history and lineage, none of the works in the exhibition are traditional family portraits. Can you speak to the relationship between photography and truth for yourself, personally? Growing up, the tradition of family portraiture was sustained by my father’s interest in photography, where he would direct us to pose for the camera as he set it on a self-timer, and we scrambled for space and quickly scanned the group for height differences and posture until the photograph was taken. Even in these photographs that were informally taken, we followed the conventions of

Photography and the idea of the family are so intimately intertwined – most people’s first experience of being before the lens is being photographed by a parent. Were you thinking about

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traditional family portraiture, like sitting with legs crossed, hands resting on our knees, a soft smile, and a demure gaze. Family albums – a primary instrument of self-knowledge, identity-making, and representation – traditionally celebrate success and joy, leaving out depictions of tragedy, trauma, and mourning from family life to maintain the myth of a perfect happy family. In my work, I think about this erasure of nuanced stories from family albums. If we see family albums as relics of truth and memory that are passed from one generation to another, it is important to ask whose truth and memories are being preserved and passed along. In my family albums, I don’t have enough photographs of my grandmother or my great-grandmother. Their stories have been kept alive through oral retellings and anecdotes by my mother, much like various other feminine histories in my family. In my work, I use photography and archives, alongside personal writing, to bring forth the complex stories and feminine histories that are missing from family albums to create a counter-archive that does not flatten the experience of family life and relationships.

Dainesha Nugent-Palache Can you describe your process and working method in creating the body of work shown in Family Album? The process for creating many of my photographs begins after becoming conscious of a long-held subconscious affinity, aversion, or attraction, then tracing the experience to expose a deeper meaning for the phenomenon. In the case of the still life works being presented, this starting point is rooted in both affinity and aversion toward particular objects that have existed within my family’s home my entire life. I often begin by removing these items from their usual domestic location and into my studio to study their forms and consider their histories, drawing connections between objects and assembling and arranging them to build narratives. It isn’t unusual for people to collect or covet objects, but I have always found it peculiar that my mother maintained a collection of porcelain figurines. The function of these figurines has never made much sense to me, and I was never able to perceive their value in the way my mother did. Some of these fragile objects fascinated me, and tempted me to include them in my games of imagination, but of these figurines, the ones that made the least sense, and caused the most psychic disturbance, were also among the smallest: white-and-blue or sepia-toned human figures dressed in colonial-era attire. According to my mother, I never liked these figurines, and have gone as far as to roll

Opposite page: Cheryl Mukherji Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl, 2021 inkjet print 52.07 × 36.83 cm Courtesy of the Artist Dainesha Nugent-Palache Red Earth of St. Elizabeth (What Brought Us Here), 2019 inkjet print 152.4 × 103.35 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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them down the stairs yelling, “Look, Mom, they’re going, The images in the series Abendlied (2014–) are a collaborathey’re going” – calling her to watch as they tumbled to- tion between my family and myself. All the photographs ward an irreparable state. I can only assume the figurines are staged and see my family members engage with each creeped me out as a child, but as an adult I started to ques- other or with objects that were part of my childhood home. tion why my mother and so many other women of the I worked on this series for six years, every time I flew home Afro-Caribbean diaspora of a certain age kept these idols to Germany for a visit. I planned many images ahead of my in their home. The other objects included in these photo- visits, but others happened more spontaneously – triggered graphs I view with an equal amount of intrigue, though by an encounter with a certain object, by observing an interaction between my family members, or by the surfacing with greater fondness. of an emotion that needed expression. Overall, I tried to Photography and the idea of family are so intimately inter- look at the elements that create a family: not just the genes, twined – most people’s first experience of being before the lens but also the stories and secrets, as well as the objects that we is being photographed by a parent. Were you thinking about surround ourselves with. The things that have always been the ways in which photography has been used to construct an there, are handed down, and make up the tangible and visible material that turns houses into homes. In this series, idea of family in creating your work? they become poetic stand-ins for underlying emotions, and When creating this work I was thinking less about how the “unspeakable” that is unique to each family. photography constructs the idea of a family, and more about the objects found throughout the domestic setting Photography and the idea of family are so intimately interof a family home – in particular, the memories and histo- twined – most people’s first experience of being before the lens ries associated with these items, and how they inform our is being photographed by a parent. Were you thinking about perception of our family. While the objects I choose to the ways in which photography has been used to construct an include in my still lifes do not exist as focal points in the idea of family in creating your work? images found within my family’s albums, they are often present in the background by chance as a result of simply While I didn’t actively think about the role that photograexisting within our home or due to their role in events phy plays in constructing an idea of family, I certainly was informed by my family’s photographs and the memories being documented. and narratives that are embedded in them. I also thought It’s interesting to me that while the artists in this exhibition about the role of photography in creating specific narratives explore family history and lineage, none of the works in the or identities – how photographs can become a stand-in for exhibition are traditional family portraits. Can you speak a person. Some of the objects in my images are portraits of to the relationship between photography and truth for you, my father and his twin brother, made by my grandfather. I grew up with these portraits, and from a young age, they personally? served as a starting point for specific narratives and conA photograph can be used purely for the purpose of structions of their identities. documentation, but information that cannot be recorded through capturing an image contributes to the skewing It’s interesting to me that while the artists in this exhibition of truth. Space is created for interpretation by the viewer explore family history and lineage, none of the works in the to apply unintended subjective meaning, even potentially exhibition are traditional family portraits. Can you speak missing the perspective the image-maker intended to em- to the relationship between photography and truth for you, bed into the photograph. Photography rarely supports the personally? idea of an inherent truth, which is an interesting realization to come to, considering that a large part of why I began To me, the relationship between photography and truth is taking photos in the first place is for them to stand in for very complicated. Even if an image tries to deliver a fact as opposed to a fiction, it can only show one specific angle: my terrible memory. that of the photographer. Many other angles are left out, including everything that existed outside the frame when the image was taken. At best, a photograph can depict Birthe Piontek one version of truth. What is true is that the people and Can you describe your process and working method in creating objects in my images were staged to tell a story and express emotions that my family members and I felt while losing the body of work shown in Family Album?

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Birthe Piontek Embrace, from the Abendlied series, 2016 archival pigment print 30.48 × 30.48 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Jones

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my mother to dementia. However, the act of staging also implies performing, and one could argue that one has to take on a role for this. Maybe my family members played themselves; maybe they took on roles for the camera – this is always the complicated “dance” when people pose for the camera. Their actions and gestures aim to convey true feelings of transition, loss, but also connection and belonging. These feelings are linked to the above-mentioned “unspeakable” of a family, which is made up of emotions, memories, stories that have been told many times or that we tell ourselves – this “unspeakable” is always a web of truth and fiction.

Silvia Rosi Can you describe your process and working method in creating the body of work shown in Family Album? To create Encounter (2019), I looked directly at my family album, taking inspiration from the history of West African photography. The set is very homey, built with recycled materials to recreate the environments of a photographic studio in Lomé, in which my grandmother appears in multiple photos from the family album. The idea for the series stems from observing my family archive of images and recreating scenes in the studio that tell the life of two Togolese migrants in Italy. Photography and the idea of family are so intimately intertwined – most people’s first experience of being before the lens is being photographed by a parent. Were you thinking about the ways in which photography has been used to construct an idea of family in creating your work? I think vernacular images have an important role in creating a vision of ourselves as we would like to be seen. Especially for Black communities, they represent an alternative from the usual mainstream representations. Yet they are also constructed and meant to show the best parts of family life. In my work, there is the idea of showing my parents’ past, but of doing it in a way that differs from images that might be found in a family album. I wanted to activate a reverse process. My images are constructed and do not represent reality, or at least not exactly, but they are a record of stories and conversations with my family, and they attempt to capture moments that are not always happy but that express the complexity of the individual. I’m not looking for absolute truth, but something similar.

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Anique Jordan Family Album, from the Salt series, 2015 chromogenic print 55.88 × 76.2 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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Julia Margaret Cameron The Seven Stars, 1870 albumen print 58.3 × 45.5 cm Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft

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Vancouver Art Gallery

April 15 – September 11

Curated by Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art, Vancouver Art Gallery

Everything Under the Sun: In Memory of Andrew Gruft Group Show

Described as “erudite, serious, and passionate collectors,” Andrew Gruft (1937–2021) and his partner, Claudia Beck, played a crucial role as collectors, critics, patrons, boosters, and curators in Vancouver’s art community for almost fifty years. From 1976 to 1982, they ran NOVA Gallery, an influential commercial gallery that specialized in photography and was a nexus for artists, collectors, and curators. During its run, NOVA staged a number of important exhibitions of contemporary, modern, and historical photographs and was widely known as the first gallery to exhibit the groundbreaking lightboxes of celebrated Vancouver photographer Jeff Wall. After NOVA closed in 1982, Gruft and Beck continued to actively collect art and donate work to the Vancouver Art Gallery, up until Gruft’s passing in September 2021. The Gallery’s 2004 acquisition of almost 400 photographs from the Beck/Gruft Collection – most of them as gifts – marked a radical shift in its collection. Prior to that time, the Vancouver Art Gallery’s holdings included little in the way of historical and modern photography; with the addition of these works, it became a photography collection of international significance overnight. This significance grew over the following years through regular donations by Gruft and Beck. Their extraordinary generosity, intelligence, and passion will play an important role in the Gallery’s programs for decades to come. This exhibition features a selection of photographs gifted by Gruft and Beck, including images by Eugène Atget, Anne Brigman, Robert Frank, and William Henry Fox Talbot, and a group of photographs by artists such as Gabriel Orozco and Helen Levitt bequested by Gruft.

Everything Under the Sun: In Memory of Andrew Gruft is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art vanartgallery.bc.ca

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Yevgeny Khaldei Berlin, Fall of the Reichstag, May 2, 1945, 1945 Contributed by Grant Arnold Yevgeny Khaldei’s 1945 photograph of the Soviet flag flying over the Reichstag in Berlin was an iconic image in postwar USSR, but Westerners became familiar with it only after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989–90. The print acquired by Andrew Gruft and Claudia Beck dates from the mid-1990s. Born into a poor Jewish family in Ukraine in 1917, Khaldei was a self-taught photographer who became a wartime photojournalist when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and he was with the Red Army as it advanced toward Berlin in the spring of 1945. By most accounts, Khaldei was aware of Joe Rosenthal’s staged photograph of US Marines raising an American flag on Iwo Jima and hoped to make an equivalent image in Berlin. Unable to find a usable Soviet flag, he flew to Moscow, obtained three red tablecloths, and had a tailor sew a yellow hammer, sickle, and star on each. He returned to the front as the Red Army entered Berlin. Two days after the Reichstag’s capture, he ascended the roof and made thirty-six exposures as three soldiers – following his directions – hoisted the improvised flag over the city. Published in the newsmagazine Ogonëk on May 13, 1945, the chosen image presents a view from slightly above the flag as it unfurls over the wreckage in the street below. The flag-holder’s stance is heroically confident, and his alignment with the building’s statuary evokes the historical import Khaldei was after. In subsequent versions of the picture, including the one seen here, columns of smoke were added to heighten the drama. Although this picture seamlessly aligned with Stalinist propaganda, its instrumentalization doesn’t completely efface its affect; the histories to which it’s attached are too expansive and intense for that. I never discussed this image with Andrew, but I imagine it had a special resonance for him, given that in 1939 he and his family fled Poland on foot to escape Nazi persecution. The photograph’s dramatic character led to its use on the poster for the 2005 exhibition of Andrew and Claudia’s collection at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a copy of which still hangs in their home.

Opposite page: Yevgeny Khaldei Berlin, Fall of the Reichstag, May 2, 1945, 1945 gelatin silver print 41.2 × 56.8 cm Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft

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Judy Dater Imogen Cunningham and Twinka, Yosemite, 1974 Contributed by Sarah Milroy

For months after Andrew Gruft’s sudden death, I often seemed to hear his voice booming in my ears – nowhere more frequently than when I was in a gallery, looking at art. Andrew was always the best of company in such moments: merciless, impassioned, expletive. Now, with him gone, I wish I could ask him what he made of this work: an early purchase and one of the comic gems in the collection. The picture reminds me of him because it is both wise and funny. Of course, it captures the contrast of youth and age with tenderness (another Gruft attribute), with youth manifested in the person of the impossibly beautiful Twinka Thiebaud in the nude, and the elfin photographer Imogen Cunningham approaching. Cunningham’s twinlens reflex Leica is hung about her neck, the weighty instrument of her profession, and she holds up a halting, appraising finger to the young model, as if to fix her in space. Both photographer and muse seem overcome with shyness. The other woman present in this moment cannot be seen: the photographer Judy Dater, who took the shot. She was an admirer of Cunningham’s, and remained her friend for life. Known best for her capable and often probing portrait work in and around her San Francisco community, Dater will nonetheless always be remembered for this picture: a masterpiece of timing. The photograph is about flirtation, play, but it’s also about the gravitas that comes of long experience. It seems to express the twin poles of a life well lived: purpose and commitment on the one hand, and merriment and pleasure on the other. What more could we want here on earth? In its relationship to time, photography is forever haunted by the Angel of Death, who seems to hover in the treetops here. (Cunningham would die two years later.) But the elements of this scenario – a beautiful young woman somewhat incongruously unclad; the transcendent natural landscape of California, with its ancient redwoods; and the well-seasoned artistic spirit in the wings, emergent – these were the elements of the life Andrew Gruft perfected. I think this picture says it all.

Opposite page: Judy Dater Imogen Cunningham and Twinka, Yosemite, 1974 gelatin silver print 45.7 × 35.5 cm Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft

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Ian Wallace Still from Film in Progress, 1973 Interview between Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace Jeff Wall The picture you call Still from a Film in Progress was taken in the summer of 1973 in the back garden of my parents’ house on Cartier Street, the house I grew up in. So, it brings back personal memories for me. But, first, how did it come about that Andrew and Claudia acquired this particular panel of the three images that made up the original work? Ian Wallace I did a show for NOVA Gallery in 1978 of flash photo works; that was when Andrew and Claudia showed The Summer Script, the finished work that came out of that 1973 process, to Pierre Théberge when he was at the Canada Council Art Bank, and he bought half of it for $3,000. I was so happy to sell something that I think I gave them that panel as a thank you; it was an outtake from The Summer Script. A first set of photos were done at Rodney Graham’s mother’s house at the foot of Trafalgar Street. As I remember, these photos were printed and then I made a new script constructed from a combination of these first shots and some video. The image here was made during the second iteration, when, later that summer, we videoed the reconstructed script at Cartier Street – hence my title of The Summer Script. The image is a real mise en abyme, with images within images, showing the pictures of the script book from the first iteration. JW And we can see your then wife, Colleen, sitting languidly at the table, and Rodney’s sister Lindsay reflected in the mirror, as well as at least a third figure at the right, who I can’t identify. IW Remember how we were working on the theme of “marriage”? So we included our own partners and family, even though we weren’t necessarily trying to say anything specific about them. You and I were collaborating in those days, and I remember you being the driver of the concept of the scenes, and then I had a more theoretical and formalist approach and wanted to stress the function of the text we were trying to write into the ambience of the mise en scène. This structure of pictures within pictures still continues in my work.

Opposite page: Ian Wallace Still from Film in Progress, 1973 oil on gelatin silver print 106 × 167 cm Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft

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Anonymous WW1 German Aviation Album Featuring JG 29 Unit, 1914–18 gelatin silver print on album page page: 21 × 27 cm Courtesy of the Archive of Modern Conflict

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The Polygon Gallery

March 11 – May 1

Photographs from the Archive of Modern Conflict Curated by Luce Lebart and Timothy Prus

Cloud Album Group Show

Luce Lebart At the dawn of photography, when photographs required long exposures, images of clouds were almost impossible. It wasn’t until the second half of the nineteenth century, with improvements in photographic acumen and technology, that photographers could begin capturing the infinite variability of clouds. Photomontage techniques led to the creation of landscapes composed in two stages, with skies added after, resulting in a burgeoning market for plates of clouds. So began an avid fixation with the subject, an affinity that has since generated innumerable images: often for scientific uses, such as developing an international naming system or visualizing cloud movement on a planetary scale, but also for impassioned artistic purposes. Some cloud studies were considered works of art in and of themselves, while others served as a reference for artists, modelling the interactions between cloud masses and light. Noted are the abundance of serial, repetitive approaches, with some notable photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz dedicating years of their lives to framing the sky. The ghost of abstraction looms over these images, and a sense of focus proves elusive: In a photograph of a cloud, how is blurriness gauged, or droplets distinguished from grain or pixelation?

Media Partner: CityNews 1130 Generously supported by the Andrew Gruft Fund for Photography Exhibitions thepolygon.ca

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS

The title Cloud Album refers to a stunning scientific album initiated by the Belgian meteorologist Jean Vincent (1851–1932). Vincent studied cloud classification for more than twenty years, becoming the first director of the Institut Royal Météorologique when it was established in Brussels in 1913. The album would come to take on a life of its own, involving hobbyist and professional photographers alike in its composition. The resulting compendium – resembling both a scientific document, such as a herbarium, as well as a family album – reflects the efforts of successive generations, each as fascinated as the next by this ephemeral phenomenon. This interest in clouds grew, peaking in the mid-1920s after World War I, but well before satellite imagery. With the advent of air transportation, weather forecasting became critical, leading the Comité National Météorologique in France to organize an International Cloud Week to record photos of the sky. Hundreds of volunteers from North America and Europe collaborated, pointing their cameras skyward at specific times each day. Thousands of images were collected, though most have not been preserved. The knowledge produced by such initiatives endures, as does photographers’ fascination with clouds’ varying forms and conspicuously fleeting nature. Cloud Album features 250 works including 200 photographs and 50 albums and books, spanning the first cloud nomenclature proposed by British chemist and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard in 1803 to a view of a large storm system taken from Apollo 9 in 1969. The works range from the origins of photography to the dawn of satellite imagery, drawn from the collection of the Archive of Modern Conflict (AMC) in London, an organization founded in 1991 and dedicated to the collection and preservation of vernacular photographs, objects, artifacts, curiosities, and ephemera. Representations of clouds and the sky have been a focus of the AMC’s vast and thematically diverse repository from its outset. Cloud Album seeks to celebrate the breadth of beauty of images of clouds and the uniqueness of the passionate practice – of scientists, amateurs, and artists alike – of photographing the sky. Through this, the exhibition draws a picture of the history of the sky, the history of photography, and the ways in which they are intertwined.

Anonymous Personal Album of a French Officer Regarding the War of the Boxers, 1900–05 gelatin silver print on album page photo: 6.5 × 9.4 cm album: 20 × 27 cm Courtesy of the Archive of Modern Conflict

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2021–2022

With thanks to Michelle Wilson, Kalev Erickson, Ed Jones, Lizzie Powell, Giulia Shah, and James Welch (London); Olivia Bishop, David Franklin, and Parker Kay (Toronto); David Medina (Colombia); and Kei Osawa (Tokyo), and with gratitude to David Thomson for his inspiration and vision. Based on the Archive of Modern Conflict Collection, the exhibition has been facilitated by loans from the University Museum, the University of Tokyo (UMUT), and Brad Feuerhelm.

Dr. John Murray Palm Trees Near Taj Mahal, January 21, 1864 45.8 × 36.8 cm waxed paper negative Courtesy of the Archive of Modern Conflict

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS

Sophia Boutsakis Sheers, 2020 archival inkjet print 86.36 × 60.96 cm Courtesy of the Artist Part of the Selected Exhibition Intermediate States on Granville Island

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2021–2022

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 92

Afternoon Projects

Art Gallery at Evergreen

Burrard Arts Foundation

沙甸鹹水埠 Canton-sardine

Centre A

The Selected Exhibition Program features photography and lens-based exhibitions at galleries, museums, and other venues across Metro Vancouver. The program is chosen by a jury who evaluates submissions according to three criteria: curatorial concept, artistic excellence, and overall impact.

Equinox Gallery

2022 Jury

Fazakas Gallery

Gallery Jones

100

Granville Island

Dana Claxton Artist; Professor and Head of Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia

101

Griffin Art Projects

102

Hotam Press Gallery

103

Massy Arts Society

104

Mónica Reyes Gallery

105

MONOVA: Archives of North Vancouver

106

Monte Clark

107

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

108

Richmond Art Gallery

109

Studio f604

110

SUM Gallery

111

Surrey Art Gallery

112

The Reach Gallery

113

Trapp Projects

114

Unit 17

115

West Vancouver Art Museum

Sophie Hackett Curator of Photography, Art Gallery of Ontario Stephanie Rebick Associate Curator, Vancouver Art Gallery Emmy Lee Wall Executive Director, Capture Photography Festival

Nabil Azab Something good that never happened

Nabil Azab Untitled, 2021 archival inkjet print from slide mounted on Dibond 105 × 130 cm Courtesy the Artist Curated by Zhengdong (Benny) Xu afternoonprojects.org

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2021–2022

Something good that never happened brings together new abstract photographic works by Nabil Azab made specifically for the exhibition space at Afternoon Projects. Azab’s photographs are in conversation with his writing, drawing, etching, and research practices. The dialogue between these areas of interest offers a fertile ground for his images and their realities, which will be presented in this exhibition. This exhibition features a grouping of the artist’s abstracted, visually ambiguous, largescale, framed photographic works, as well as wooden photographic sculptures, which will interact directly with the space. The artist’s motivation to make abstracted and aesthetically ambiguous work extends from his own sense of displacement, both physically and psychologically. These hazy, or dreamlike, memories serve to replace the physical space of memory, drawing upon his own experience with displacement and geographic relocation. The refusal to frame photography within its traditional imposed objectivity is equally a refusal to let go of this physical space. The images challenge the commonly held belief in the objectivity of the photographic apparatus through the various manipulations and blur techniques employed in Azab’s practice. The rephotography of the artist’s own archive, as well as the blurring, layering, and distortion of negatives and slides, offers a visuality that altogether challenges the photograph as a moment in time. Instead, the images offer an affective charge that pulls them into the past, as well as the future.

Afternoon Projects March 31 – May 1

Group Show Inherit

The word “inherit” often conjures an object of great value passed down through generations. But what does it mean to inherit the intangible? How do our bodies carry intergenerational memory and story? What do we choose to remember or forget? Inherit weaves together divergent lens-based works by five artists – Joi T. Arcand, Zinnia Naqvi, Birthe Piontek, Carol Sawyer, and Vivek Shraya. Through photography – a pervasive medium with an innate connection to time – as well as video and installation, these artists revisit, revise, and re-enact familial histories and archives to grapple with loss, longing, and identity. Exploring and confronting ineffable emotions related to dementia, the ongoing effects of colonialism, or the complexities of gender and family dynamics, the artists in the exhibition propose alternative narratives, both personal and political, to tell interconnected stories of kinship, resiliency, and the credibility of memory, which can be easily swayed by time. This Selected Exhibition is Capture’s 2022 Printing Prize recipient. The Capture Printing Prize is generously supported by Wesgroup. Carol Sawyer Desk drawer with eyeglasses, 2019, from the series The Scholar’s Study, 2018– chromogenic print 51 × 51 cm Courtesy of the Artist

Art Gallery at Evergreen February 12 – April 24

Curated by Kate Henderson evergreenculturalcentre.ca/exhibit

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Sara Gulamali

Sara Gulamali’s work explores a postcolonial navigation of the hyper-visibility or invisibility of Muslim women using green screen technology. For the artist, green screens and the colour green more broadly reference the notion of otherness and the “othered body” within her practice – a nomadic space that can become anything or transport you anywhere. As we encounter the ubiquitousness of screens and technologies, Gulamali’s interest in digital spaces, and how screens can become proxies for the body, increases. The green screen becomes not only a tool but a material to perform in and create with. Throughout her practice, Gulamali takes inspiration from her family’s diasporic history and its relation to her own identity. As a visibly Muslim, female, British Pakistani based in Vancouver, Gulamali considers her own journey and how these parts of herself influence her being. While working with these themes can produce introspective and personal work, Gulamali also considers how individuals from marginalized communities may embody “otherness” by asking: How does it make us feel, especially when navigating spaces that aren’t always made for us in mind? This exhibition features work created during Gulamali’s 2022 Winter Residency at Burrard Arts Foundation – reflecting on the artist’s recent relocation to Vancouver and how she, in turn, navigates this new beginning.

Sara Gulamali The Green Walk, 2019 inkjet print Courtesy of the Artist

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Burrard Arts Foundation April 1 – June 11

burrardarts.org

2021–2022

Weng Fen The Vanishing Landscape

The Vanishing Landscape features the work of Chinese conceptual photographic artist Weng Fen 翁奮. The exhibition will showcase his latest two series of absurd realism, The Vanishing Landscape and Learning to Live Better in this World. Weng’s hometown, Dongjiao Town in Wenchang County, Hainan, has been developed into a large-scale satellite launch centre. The entire area is planned to be built into a new modern town. Reflecting on the complex psychological dilemma in balancing individual wants and community needs, the artist has turned his attention to the contradictions and conflicts brought about by the modernization of the island rural development to the land of traditional villages since 2007. The series The Vanishing Landscape revolves around the tensions between urban development and land occupation, rural land industrialization and farming, globalization and local economies, and economic planting and environmental destruction that have emerged during the process of Weng’s personal research and observation. Learning to Live Better in this World is a response to the pandemic that began in January 2020. Weng and his family were isolated at home. During this period, the internet was flooded with chaotic and complicated information, which filled him with anxiety and helplessness. In order to maintain movement of his body and occupy his mind, the artist used his old golf putter and created a small golf ball from paper to imitate a golf swing. He recreated this complicated feeling in words, and the paper ball became the carrier for his resistance, as he made paper balls and posters every day. This process of creation made him realize the essence of life: to live daily life to the fullest in this world.

沙甸鹹水埠 Canton-sardine April 9 – June 4

Weng Fen The Vanishing Landscape: Our preserve land has no irrigation water, while the agricultural company rented our fertile land without completing the payment, 2021 inkjet print 150 × 375 cm Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Xiaoyan Yang and Steven Dragonn canton-sardine.com

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Group Show The Living Room Project

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak The Afternoon Knows What the Morning Never Suspected (still), 2017 video with sound 21:00 min. Courtesy of the Artists Curated by Henry Heng Lu

Centre A

April 1 – May 28

centrea.org

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For Centre A’s first experiential project in 2022, we will transform the gallery space into a furnished living room. Gallery visitors will have the opportunity to sit down in our makeshift living room to watch a series of curated films and videos. By converting the gallery rooms into a (semi-)domestic space, we hope to demystify and challenge the often inaccessible, curatorial nature of a contemporary art gallery. Through this project, we intend to host a space in which visitors can reconnect with us and each other after almost two years of isolation. There will be two series of films programmed as part of The Living Room Project: the first one, addressing reconnection, lineage, and exile, will take place from January to March 2022, and the second series will run from April to May 2022. The film program is shaped by compounding tensions within multiculturalism, pointing to intermediacy and extraction. Bringing together an array of approaches, this program contests the making of nationhoods and its discontents from sociopolitical and personal perspectives. The second series will include works by Skawennati (The Peacemaker Returns); Richard Fung, John Greyson, and Ali Kazimi (Rex vs. Singh); Jennifer Chan (Equality); Zacharias Kunuk (Angirattut (Coming Home)); and Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak (The Afternoon Knows What the Morning Never Suspected).

2021–2022

Fred Herzog

Immigrating to Canada in 1952 and settling in Vancouver in 1953, Fred Herzog gravitated toward the medium of colour photography to observe everyday life, long before this type of practice was recognized as a documentary or artistic style. The works in this exhibition span the years 1952–75, bringing together never-before-seen images from the artist’s archive, a selection of his most notable colour street photographs, and early black-and-white vintage prints. No other photographer has chronicled Vancouver’s urban life as comprehensively and with such sustained insight as Herzog, and this exhibition focuses on his photographs of Vancouver’s Chinatown and Strathcona neighbourhoods, where he would continue to take pictures for nearly seventy years. Herzog purchased his first camera in Germany at the age of twenty-one, a Kodak Retina 1. Some of Herzog’s earliest photographs in Vancouver were taken with this model, but it had a slow lens speed and did not contain a rangefinder and, consequently, he favoured using the Leica C for street photography, as it was small and pocketable. Herzog used different lenses while working in low light and crowded locations, all the while producing images that achieve a rare balance of composition and spontaneity. In addition to his photographs, a selection of the artist’s cameras will be on view.

Equinox Gallery April 2 – May 7

Fred Herzog Boys with Marbles, 1958 archival pigment print 29.21 × 45.72 cm Courtesy of Equinox Gallery equinoxgallery.com

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Marcy Friesen Pê-mîciso

Marcy Friesen Smoke Break, 2021 digital chromogenic print 28 × 56 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Fazakas Gallery

Fazakas Gallery April 2 – May 15

fazakasgallery.com

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Pê-mîciso (Cree language: “come eat”) is about the consumption of bodies, love, loss, and sources of life. It is also about decoloniality. This lens-based solo exhibition is comprised of two series of photographs by artist Marcy Friesen: Legacy (2021) and Pê-mîciso (2020). For Friesen, beadwork is about ancestral memories, family, and community. In this exhibition, beadwork is photographed as a cultural belonging. The work both honours and departs from its traditional symbolic representation, responding directly to Indigenous community and personal experience. In Legacy, the beadworks are manifested as Friesen’s emotional response to the unmarked graves unearthed at residential schools around Canada. Rage, empathy, sorrow, hope . . . these emotions all are beaded onto her emotionless face as an act of demonstration, an act of lament. In Pê-mîciso, beadworks are also manifested as Friesen’s “healthy” and “unhealthy” diet – informed by both traditional and colonial traces: fish, crackers, and fried chicken are combined with beaded brooches into a collection of playful assemblages. What is essential to Friesen’s art is an embodiment in which each lived experience and its sentimentality is rendered visible through the performance of beading. The exhibition provides an embodied experience in which visitors will encounter photographic series on two separate spatial dimensions: vertically, with Legacy, and horizontally, with Pê-mîciso. Simulating a supper setting, the viewer is invited to partake in an act of visual consumption, and a question is pointed to the viewer: Who or what is being consumed in this supper – Food? Body? Nature? Cultural symbolism? Ancestral imagery? And, who are the consumers?

2021–2022

Birthe Piontek Janus, Part II

Much of my art practice focuses on creating dialogues between two-dimensional photographic surfaces and three-dimensional spaces. This is achieved either by including objects as sculptural arrangements in my photographs, by treating a photograph as an object, or by bringing the image into conversation with assemblages and sculptures. My interest in broadening the medium’s boundaries aims to question the authoritative and evidential nature of a photograph and draw attention to the fact that an image always only shows a part of an (in the photograph) invisible whole. I intend to make visible what is invisible but what can be experienced or felt, such as identity constructions, influences of memory and the unconscious mind, sociological constructs, and belief systems.

Gallery Jones March 31 – April 30

Birthe Piontek Watermelon, from the Janus series, 2021 archival inkjet print 43.18 × 58.42 cm Courtesy the Artist and Gallery Jones galleryjones.com

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Group Show Intermediate States

In a similar way that a camera has the ability to capture moments through still images, we are innately capable of retaining meaningful experiences and knowledge through memory. When looking inward, we can find comfort in our memories, and comparably while looking outward, we can seek out the familiar based on what we already know. Intermediate States is an exhibition featuring work by emerging artists Sophia Boutsakis, Jeff Henschel, Teigan Kelly, and Natalie Robinson, who consider the power of implied narrative within images. The photographs in the exhibition address themes of time, imagined presence, and spatial transitions. Sitting between documentary and conceptual photography, the work in Intermediate States explores how our memory informs what we do in the face of the untold. The artists featured in this exhibition are recent graduates from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, who work in a range of mediums and subject matter. These artists have found that their lens-based works share a common interest in portraying the quotidian in an elevated manner. Presenting new and ongoing works in vitrines, these artists draw from their own experience of being in transitional states to inform their exhibition.

Sophia Boutsakis Elk, 2020 archival inkjet print 86.36 × 60.96 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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2021–2022

Granville Island April 1–30

100

Lynda Gammon Passing Comments

Passing Comments, a wall collage of over 400 photographs, is a personal and poetic mediation on a particular feminist history by Lynda Gammon. Arriving to teach in a visual arts department in the mid-1980s, this work documents Gammon’s everyday life at work. Over the course of a decade, comments made became embedded in her mind. Examples of the comments include: you need to have a child, you should get pregnant – you cry too easily and when you cry the tears don’t run down your face they pop right out of your eyes – [. . .] you should wear more make-up, you used to, and it looked good As years went on, the artist began creating small figures using chopsticks, Styrofoam balls, and pipe cleaners and photographed these figures in various relationships to each other. She then also pasted the comments she remembered onto the photographs to recreate the poignant, absurd, and at times intense scenarios. Over time, the work grew to approximately 400 photographs with pasted text. All the photographs were then mounted on foamcore, card, and paper and were sometimes layered with digital colour, ink, and paint. These works were then taped directly to the wall in a large patchwork configuration. Gammon titled the work Passing Comments as a reflection of her experience in the academic institution and an ironic look on the seemingly incidental nature of the remarks. Gammon’s artist book, Fisgard, is a selection of many of the images and “comments.” It accompanies the exhibition Passing Comments.

Hotam Press Gallery April 23 – May 28

101

Lynda Gammon Passing Comments, 1989–2021 analogue photographs with pasted text dimensions variable Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Ho Tam bookshopgallery.hotampress.com

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Group Show Per Diem: The Gerd Metzdorff Collection

Including drawing, painting, photography, installation, and sculpture, Gerd Metzdorff ’s collection was drawn together over a period of more than thirty years. Originally derived from Metzdorff ’s modest savings of the per diems provided to him by the airline where he was employed as a steward, he purchased work by some of the most important European and Canadian artists working today, often starting at the beginning of their careers and developing lifelong friendships with them. His collection is presented to the public for the first time at Griffin Art Projects. With the passing of this enigmatic and remarkable Vancouver-based collector, who collected art from the 1980s – and with more than 200 works to choose from – this stunning collection features luminaries such as Lynda Benglis, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Donald Judd, and numerous others.

Stan Douglas Vancouver Flats, 2002 chromogenic print 111.76 × 57.15 cm Collection of Gerd Metzdorff Curated by Lisa Baldissera

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Griffin Art Projects February 4 – May 8

griffinartprojects.ca

2021–2022

102

Dana Qaddah Roof d’état

These photographs were captured on a rooftop studio in Beirut, at sunset, between July and August 2019. The sculptures have since been disassembled, and the sun has since set on Lebanon as we know it. Using the vernacular of urban visual culture in Lebanon, the works reflect on the deteriorating civil conditions in urban centres at a time that foreshadowed the failure of the state. Since the October 17, 2019, revolution, Lebanon has been caught in an economic and political deadlock, with a free-falling economy resulting from decades of state mismanagement, the pandemic, and the tragic loss suffered in the August 4, 2020, explosion. With a currency that has lost 90 percent of its value, many Lebanese people are finding essential goods like gas, water, bread, and electricity to be a luxury. The sculptural compositions documented through photography are speculative of a crisis on the environmental, economic, and political fronts. Found objects – like plastic gallons, commonly used to fill water for households or buy gas on the black market nowadays; construction tape, reminiscent of the privatization and development of most Lebanese public property; and local produce containers, presented against the political backdrop of Lebanon’s 80 percent rate of import of goods – are activated and photographed as a means to translate socioeconomic commentary. Although these works no longer physically exist, their photographs become the index of a time preceding a turning point in Lebanon’s contemporary history. A projected video work focuses on stills of water tanks on neighbouring rooftops, which are a display of corruption, existing out of the necessity to store water purchased from privatized companies due to insufficient state supply.

Massy Arts Society April 4 – May 3

103

Dana Qaddah The sun hits differently, 2019 inkjet on photorag 60.96 × 91.44 cm Courtesy of the Artist massyarts.com

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Jeff Topham Southern Exposure

Jeff Topham Elephant Seal, Jason Harbour, South Georgia, 2017 archival inkjet print 40.6 × 50.8 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Mónica Reyes Gallery monicareyesgallery.com

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2021–2022

It’s been a century since the golden days of polar exploration, where legendary expedition photographers like Frank Hurley and Herbert Ponting famously documented the early Antarctic voyages of Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Henry Shackleton. Yet, the collective idea of the “White Continent” remains mostly unchanged – that of an isolated environment of icebergs, penguins, and jagged mountains, mostly devoid of humans. In this exhibition, Vancouver photographer Jeff Topham exposes a fresh angle on Antarctica. These images from voyages south as photographer-in-residence for a Canadian expedition travel company show that, these days, there is more than just ice and snow. Reaching the seventh continent is now significantly easier than in Shackleton’s day – 75,000 people visited Antarctica in 2019. For those who do undertake the journey, photography still carries much of the same importance and purpose as it always has: to share images of a place few have seen and for scientific and educational purposes. Above all, photography feeds the human need to prove “I was there.” The increased human presence, combined with the ever-increasing effects of climate change, is placing the continent’s once pristine ecosystem under significant new pressure. This exhibition pays homage to the early days of polar exploration while updating it for the current age. Topham challenges the Antarctic myth, asking us to question our responsibility as tourists in one of the planet’s last relatively untouched places, while also reminding us of our deep connection to the natural world – and, ultimately, inspiring the will to protect it. Please note this exhibition is wheelchair accessible through the back door.

Mónica Reyes Gallery April 1–30

104

Group Show An Archival View: The History of Photography on the North Shore (1860–2021)

The exhibition provides audiences with a rare opportunity to view vintage prints selected from the holdings of MONOVA: Archives of North Vancouver. Spanning 150 years, the photographic materials on view include daguerreotypes, tintypes, albumen prints, and more. Visiting curator Emily Sylman has carefully selected images from the archives that represent key photographic processes and focus on the social uses and applications of photography on the North Shore. Many of these images are vernacular, created by amateurs as by-products of their daily lives. Other images are the creative product of professional photographers and artists, such as Leonard Frank and Iain Baxter. Organized chronologically, viewers can expect to learn about the evolution of technological processes and their materiality, as well as the preservation challenges posed by fragile photographic media. Topics explored in this exhibition include photography’s changing role in society as it became more accessible and transformed from valuable keepsakes to disposable snapshots. This exhibition prioritizes images of underrepresented communities to introduce audiences to people, places, and activities that may not be commonly associated with living and working on the North Shore. While working on this exhibition, the curatorial team encountered an absence of provenance and context for many of the images representing women and Coast Salish peoples. As a result, we engaged with members of these communities to “locate” the images.

MONOVA: Archives of North Vancouver November 10, 2021 – April 30, 2022

105

Unknown artist Portrait of a woman wearing a hat, date unknown tintype 4 × 2.7 cm Courtesy of MONOVA: Archives of North Vancouver Curated by Jessica Bushey and Emily Sylman monova.ca/archives

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Greg Girard American Stopover

This exhibition of Greg Girard’s photographs, many of which have never before been exhibited, depict America during the 1970s and early 1980s. Girard has spent much of his career documenting the social and urban transformation in Asia’s largest cities, as well as his travels between Asia and North America. American Stopover comprises transient scenes photographed in airports, hotels, bars, and restaurants, captured in California, Nevada, and Hawaii between flights bound for Asia. In the 1970s and early 1980s every trip to Asia started in California. Whether flying, or travelling by Greyhound down the coast from Vancouver, the journey truly originated in San Francisco or Los Angeles. I’d spend a few days, or as long as a few weeks, making pictures in California, Nevada and Hawaii before finally continuing on to Tokyo or Hong Kong. Multistopover one-way tickets were the norm, on an Asian carrier like China Airlines or Korean Airlines. A typical ticket would be routed YVR-SFO-LAX-HNL-TYO-SEL-TPE-HKG-BKK. I travelled light. A camera bag and another hand-carry-sized bag containing tripod, film and a few clothes. — Greg Girard Please note this exhibition is not wheelchair accessible. Greg Girard Man with Cigarette, San Francisco, 1974 archival pigment print 50.8 × 76.2 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Monte Clark monteclarkgallery.com

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2021–2022

Monte Clark April 2 – May 7

106

Laiwan Laiwan: Traces, Erasures, Resists

Laiwan: Traces, Erasures, Resists highlights the artist’s attention to the material and symbolic vocabularies of print and lens-based media between 1980 and 2000 and features her early interventions into the logic of the book form and the ideology of historical and encyclopedic genres. The exhibition title references processes related to printmaking, while at the same time speaking to the absent narratives, redacted perspectives, and critical refusals that are latent in official publications. This exhibition observes how literary structures are echoed in the apparatus of 35mm slide, 16mm film, and analogue video projection. Laiwan’s moving-image installations explore how this inheritance informs how we write and read images across mediums. For the exhibition, the Belkin has restored now obsolete media works such as African Notes (1982), The Language of Mesmerization/The Mesmerization of Language (1986), Travels in China (1985), and Machinate (1999), which have not been exhibited since their inception. Since the early 1980s, Laiwan has made a meaningful contribution to Vancouver’s cultural ecology through her engagement with artist-run centres – including as founder of the Or Gallery in 1983 – and her participation with numerous queer, feminist, multicultural, and visual art print publications, notably with local activist collectives Angles and Kinesis, and as editor of Front Magazine from 1994 to 1997. In addition to the audiovisual works, this exhibition will present Laiwan’s archive of literary, poetic, and journalistic work. Laiwan: Traces, Erasures, Resists is guest curated by Amy Kazymerchyk and made possible with the generous support of the Audain Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council, and the Belkin Curator’s Forum members.

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery January 7 – April 10

107

Laiwan she who had scanned the flower of the world… (detail), 1987/2017 organic matter placed into 35mm slide mounts, scanned for giclée print 80.7 × 55.7 cm Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Gift of the Artist, 2018 Curated by Amy Kazymerchyk belkin.ubc.ca

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Erdem Tasdelen A Minaret for the General’s Wife

Erdem Tasdelen A Minaret for the General's Wife, 2020 installation view at Mercer Union, Toronto Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid Curated by Julia Paoli and Toleen Touq A Minaret for the General’s Wife was commissioned and organized by Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, and SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre), Toronto. The exhibition is made possible with Leading Support from RBC Insurance and Support from SAHA Association, Istanbul. richmondartgallery.org

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2021–2022

The starting point for Erdem Tasdelen’s exhibition is a little-known architectural oddity located in the Lithuanian city of Kedainiai, approximately 120 km from the capital Vilnius. Built in 1880 and restored in 2007, this structure is a freestanding Ottoman-style minaret that, peculiarly, has no mosque below or attached to it and currently sits in Kedainiai Town Park in a former manor garden. Seized from its original owners after the failed rebellion of 1863 against Russian rule, the manor was eventually handed over to a Russian Army general named Eduard Totleben, who constructed the twenty-eight-metre-tall minaret on the site. In A Minaret for the General’s Wife, the minaret becomes a metaphor for that peculiar and potent feeling of being corporeally out of place, for structures built in locations where they seemingly don’t belong, and for objects brought out of context – in other words; displacement, appropriation, and extractivism. In his search to uncover the origins of the Kedainiai Minaret, Tasdelen takes up these tensions through an array of disparate and tangentially related materials, assembling miscellanea in a web of relational and spatial collage. The resulting installation comprises archival photos, documents, replicas of artifacts, audiovisual materials, a curious selection of objects, and a book of vignettes from undisclosed origins. Together, these elements expose and interrupt connections that enable historical storytelling and, through this tension, forge a place wherein the artist elicits a multiplicity of readings.

Richmond Art Gallery April 9 – May 29

108

Michael Wesik Of Light and Nature

Since 2009, Michael Wesik has investigated the expressive possibility of nature through large format, analogue photographic processes, as well as mixed media compositions. As Wesik believes art-making to be fundamentally performative, his work seeks to expound the expressional potential of the natural world through intricate manipulations of analogue photography techniques and by drawing from the ethos of earth art practice. Of Light and Nature is a solo presentation including both photographs and mixed media panels, focusing on Wesik’s obsessive exploration of the small section of British Columbia forest in which Wesik has worked exclusively for the past decade. His continual return to rephotograph the same landscape from varied vantage points and lighting conditions has resulted in a body of work that oscillates fluidly between academic realism and abstraction. The works in Of Light and Nature demonstrate both a profound level of intimacy with this region as well as the pathological commitment required to revisit, rephotograph, and recompose the same subjects incessantly. This exhibition includes gelatin silver prints, colour photographs, and mixed media compositions addressing the same subject, seeking to weave a common thread between these media in which light and surface function as the vehicle through which expression in nature is perceived and communicated. Wesik’s mixed media compositions push even further into abstraction where natural materials found around photographed subjects are transposed onto canvas to create foundations for paintings that literally pull from the forest in which he works.

Studio f604 April 1–21

109

Michael Wesik Salmonberry Thicket, Composition No. 02, 2021 archival pigment print 152.4 × 189.23 cm Courtesy of the Artist michaelwesik.com

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Duane Isaac Sovereignty

Sovereignty is Mi’gmaq photographer and mask-maker Duane Isaac’s first solo exhibition in Vancouver. The portrait series documents an Indigenous body in nature outfitted with a fantastical mask – one side overgrown with fledgling greenery while the other half conjures a ghost of the human face hidden beneath – who succumbs to increasingly foreboding flames, mask first. Motivated by the health and survival of Indigenous bodies and Indigenous Lands, Isaac casts his model as a vessel of sovereignty under threat; “Sovereignty explores the questions of autonomy and health of both body and Land. The health of the Land will reflect the health of the body and the health of the body will reflect the health of the Land. One cannot survive without the other.” The figure’s mask embodies this dualism, representing Indigenous identity as equal to and inseparable from the Land. Isaac’s photographic practice traces the ephemeral, having handcrafted dozens of surreal and otherworldly masks solely for his portraiture and further heightening their narrative presence through lighting and digital manipulation. Ranging from darkly demure to expressive gaudiness, his masks are opulent, clever, twisted, unsettling, sexy, and unquestionably queer. His lens seeks a balanced relationship between body and mind where masks externalize a rich internal world populated by grotesque and seductive creatures, guided by Indigenous ways of knowing, the queer gaze, environmental angst, and an apocalyptic perspective on the past and future. Balance is less easily found in Sovereignty – the final photograph is not a portrait, but rather a sparse landscape featuring the figure’s red garment among the undergrowth, presumably shed in anticipation of immolation. The Land remains, but the body is gone.

Duane Isaac Untitled, 2020 chromogenic print 60.96 × 76.2 cm Courtesy the Artist Curated by SD Holman

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SUM Gallery

February 17 – May 14

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Rajesh Vora Everyday Monuments

Everyday Monuments is an exhibition of photographs by Mumbai-based photographer Rajesh Vora of sculptural domestic water tanks and “showpieces” mounted on the top of houses. These architectural embellishments are constructed from rebar, wire mesh, cement, and paint and take the form of birds, soccer balls, various animals such as lions, horses, and oxen, airliners, automobiles, army tanks, weightlifters, pressure cookers, and more. While some are mass-produced, the majority are unique objects commissioned by and custom fabricated for each client. The architecture of the houses themselves is a combination of various styles that are highly decorative and intricate. Having emerged in the 1980s, the mix of styles, genres, and historical periods of these houses marks a trend that breaks with conventional design boundaries and serves as an example where art, architecture, and everyday life seamlessly meld together. These photographs are an important document of sculptural and architectural features that are characteristic of Punjabi village culture and all but unknown outside India and built primarily by those who have left the villages and are part of the South Asian diaspora. Metro Vancouver has one of the largest Punjabi populations outside India, and the Surrey Art Gallery is located within the largest concentration of Punjabis in British Columbia. The presentation of these photographs is important in the Surrey Art Gallery’s initiatives to represent the vast diversity that makes up one of the fastest growing cities in Canada. This exhibition is the first time these photographs will have been seen outside India.

Surrey Art Gallery April 9 – June 3

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Rajesh Vora Work from the Everyday Monuments series, 2014–19 inkjet print 60.96 × 91.44 cm Courtesy of the Artist and PHOTOINK, New Delhi Curated by Keith Wallace surrey.ca/arts-culture/ surrey-art-gallery

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Deb Silver Feet Deep in Wet Earth and Watery Pools

This exhibition presents work by Fraser Valley–based artist Deb Silver, in which the artist seeks to combine and harmonize Coast Salish cultural teachings and scientific inquiry as they relate to plant knowledge, ecology, and analogue photography. For her most recent project, Silver specifically sought to link plants, root systems, waterways, and lichen together in a single photo series documenting intimate landscapes in Pelhó’lhxw territory (eastern Chilliwack). Silver draws on traditional Stó:lo practices of using lichen as a base for coloured dyes, and combines this with knowledge gleaned from horticultural research and a scientific method of trial and error to arrive at her finished images. The current exhibition represents the first opportunity for these works to be displayed in the artist’s home territory of S’ólh Téméxw (the Fraser Valley). In addition, this exhibition will also present a reconfigured version of Silver’s photographic installation project Their Words Echo Through My Core (2018). This will be the first time the two projects have been displayed together, with the earlier project providing insight into Silver’s ongoing interest and exploration into the relationship between photography and land and plant knowledge, offering visitors the opportunity to see how Silver’s approach to these concepts has developed in recent years. Deb Silver Mushroom, 2021 gelatin silver print dyed with Usnea lichen 10 × 13 cm Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Adrienne Fast

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The Reach Gallery January 28 – May 27

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Group Show Street Scanners

In his car rides & street scans of 1969/71, Christos Dikeakos has commented that he “was a vehicular flâneur of Vancouver’s False Creek basin, an industrial and desolate urban expanse. This was a wasteland not just of buildings, but of human values and street interaction.” This “scanning” and open-ended observation of the shifting landscape, economy, and population that is called Vancouver is an artistic strategy he shares with numerous other artists. For this exhibition, a few of these artists have been brought together to provide a fragmented, yet focused, mapping of place and space, which also reveals shifts in the photographic medium itself. Whether by car (Christos Dikeakos, Jack Jeffrey), public transport (Marian Penner Bancroft, Neil Wedman), walking (Hannah Dubois, Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes, Isaac Thomas), or simply standing still (Ken Lum), the works in this exhibition contribute to a type of unitary urbanism of Vancouver that continues to question the status-quo production of space. Please note this exhibition is not wheelchair accessible.

Isaac Thomas Floor Mat, 2020 archival pigment print 122 × 152 cm Courtesy of the Artist

Trapp Projects April 16 – May 8

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Curated by Patrik Andersson trappprojects.com

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Scott Treleaven, Cemrenaz Uyguner, and B. Wurtz

Scott Treleaven Untitled (Watercolour in the studio/ cherry blossom at home), 2021 photo collage from 35mm negative prints, archival tape, artist frame 15.8 × 10 cm Courtesy the Artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto

Unit 17

March 18 – May 1

unit17.org

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The works featured by these three artists of different generations speak to everyday objects and the way in which they focus on particular sculptural and material sensibilities through their photography. In Scott Treleaven’s photographs, the “cut-up” is used to invoke the unruly entropic forces that herald possibility, upheaval, and evolution. This strategy is rooted in altered forms of consciousness, sexuality, neurodiversity, extreme experience, and the role of the imaginal social, specifically, the recuperation of subcultural symbologies lost to commodification and the restoration of l’esprit, the intrepid animating force. Focal points, linearity, narrative, and spatial and temporal integrities are disrupted; through the cuts emerge meditations on perception, phenomenology, queer sublimity, utopianism, the aura of handmade objects, and the relocation of modernism and abstraction as sites of a transcendental, rather than purely formal, tradition. Cemrenaz Uyguner’s works range from abstract photographs using Polaroids, intimate colour fields that measure the ambience around her photographic material and their sites of creation, to images that document intricate found objects and personal archives sourced from family members. The experimental works use varied papers and hanging mechanisms that highlight their sculptural nature. The exhibition will also present a range of photographic works by B. Wurtz that document variously coloured bath towels, printed on silk and hung on large wooden dowels throughout the gallery. This larger series, which also includes piles of dirty laundry, was made within the last five years and documents the artist’s interest in capturing poetic moments, gestures, and objects within the everyday. The artworks – all Untitled from 2018 – mimic, disorient, and enhance these slumped, quotidian objects.

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Douglas Coupland Rabbit Lane

In 1998, Douglas Coupland published Girlfriend in a Coma, a work of fiction that traces the lives of a group of friends from their teenage years through to middle age. Set in West Vancouver, the story centres around Karen McNeil, who falls into a coma that lasts seventeen years. When she awakens, the friends come together once again to face an impending apocalypse. The novel, which weaves deftly between literary genres, comes with a moral and a warning. The book is set in the area of West Vancouver’s Rabbit Lane, which Coupland chose because he spent much time there growing up and he always saw it as “a place that time forgot.” Coupland has worked with the West Vancouver Art Museum to create a series of staged photographic scenes that were inspired by his book. These photographs were created in West and North Vancouver, featuring local homes, volunteer models, and cars and clothes borrowed from the community. Girlfriend in a Coma specifically resonates with multiple generations of people who grew up or live on the North Shore. This project not only facilitates an exploration into the work of this West Vancouver artist but also furthers the Art Museum’s commitment to showcasing local residential West Coast modern architecture, which is swiftly disappearing. This project, like much of Coupland’s written work, is both genre bending and chronoclastic, exploring how time can be condensed and contracted to change our perceptions. Sponsored by OmniVita Custom Wealth Management

West Vancouver Art Museum March 30 – May 28

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Douglas Coupland Grad Night 5:30 A.M., 2021 giclée on Dibond 103 × 132 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Daniel Faria Gallery Curated by Dr. Hilary Letwin westvancouverartmuseum.ca

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Abigail Pfortmueller Home (My Bedroom), from the Home series, 2021 archival inkjet print Courtesy of the Artist Part of the Special Project Stranger than Fiction at Emily Carr University of Art + Design

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SPECIAL PROJECTS Untitled (Garden) Virtual Exhibition 119

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Stranger than Fiction Capture × Emily Carr

The Collective Agency Project Community Exhibition 129–131

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Alex Gibson Untitled (Garden 1), 2021 digital composite, single-channel, photogrammetry, sourced animated footage 12:00 sec., looped Courtesy of the Artist

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Virtual Exhibition

April 15–29

Curated by Chelsea Yuill, Capture Photography Festival

capturephotofest.com/ exhibitions

Works from the Untitled (Garden) series, 2021 Alex Gibson Alex Gibson’s Untitled (Garden) series blends animation, glitch, and photogrammetry to create surreal compositions that illuminate queer futures. A technology that is primarily used by architects and geographers, photogrammetry is the art and science of producing digital three-dimensional models from objects, structures, and spaces. Gibson uses a smartphone camera and an app to access this technology to scan flora, fauna, garden structures, and the body. The resulting scans are fragmentary images of organic forms and living beings. This real-world imagery, along with pop culture animations, merge in the three-dimensional open-source software known as Blender, where the image further evolves through manipulation. As a result of this digital process, image quality is lost and what emerges are glitches, or random malfunctions in image data. The disruption and lack of definition becomes a metaphor and affirmation of queer and nonbinary existences. At the same time, these looping compositions ask speculative posthumanist questions that seem more pertinent than ever: What does it mean now and what will it mean in the future to exist beyond the state of being human? Further merging physical and digital worlds, Gibson distributes this series as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) through an online platform where artworks are bought and sold using the Ethereum cryptocurrency. At a nascent stage, NFTs are at once controversial and revolutionary. For many artists and collectors, this decentralized structure makes it easy to bypass artworld gatekeepers, offering an alternative stream of income and community. Gibson’s engagement within the crypto world, like many other queer artists working within it, acts as a reclamation of a space within a realm conventionally dominated by heteronorms. Where there is a world, there is an image, and Gibson reminds us that the radical potential in digital imagery is in its circulation and ambiguity.

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James Vincent The Exhale, 2021 inkjet print Courtesy of the Artist Page 123: Khim Hipol Wa-ta-wat, from the Anak ng Lupang Hinirang (Child of the Chosen Land) series, 2021 archival inkjet print Courtesy of the Artist

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Capture × Emily Carr

April 6–29

Curated by Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director, Capture Photography Festival, and Birthe Piontek, Assistant Professor of Photography, Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Faculty Gallery, 1st Floor

Stranger than Fiction

What can a photograph reveal? This investigation lies at the heart of the work of seventeen emerging, lens-based practitioners that comprises this exhibition. While photography has a long and fraught relationship with the truth, these artists use their works to probe what it is possible to know and delineate through photography, accepting as a given that truth is subjective, malleable, and time specific. Some works are process based, exploring what it is possible for the medium to represent. Here the light-sensitive surface becomes a site of experimentation and the darkroom a playground to test the medium’s boundaries. These works investigate photography’s relationship to truth – the truth that comes in a recording of an artistic process or a representation of a moment in time. Through methods of abstraction, these process-based works evoke the idea of illusion as they move away from the representational. They leave us wondering what we see in these images while simultaneously being faithful depictions of light, colour, and surface. Some artists investigate identity and representation, questioning the ability to offer an honest or accurate representation of one’s self or one’s subject through photography – where does a performance for the camera begin and end? How can one use the camera to capture the reality of a relationship, which by its very nature is in-between, intangible, and ever-changing? In many images, objects become laden with meaning, evoking an emotive or social truth beyond the thing itself. Others in the group consider space – both domestic and interior and that of the street – to explore the ways in which their practices can depict change in familial relationships and urban landscapes. Through these explorations, these artists celebrate the complicated relationship between photography and truth, attempting to convey a veracity far deeper than that which is immediately visible.

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David Aquino BEX Duncan Fitch Sidney Gordon Khim Hipol David Macgillivray Leo Mah Meaghan Murray Abigail Pfortmueller Jordan Robertson Tillie Roy Gibson Switzer Skye Tao Jordan Utting Emil Vargas James Vincent Liao Yi

Capture × Emily Carr is a partnership between Capture Photography Festival and the Audain Faculty of Art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, organized by the Shumka Centre This program is funded in part by the Co-op and Work Integrated Learning Initiative of the Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training, the Government of Canada’s Innovative WorkIntegrated Learning Initiative, and CEWIL Canada’s iHUB, as well as by a generous donation from Wesgroup ecuad.ca/showcase/category/ capture-festival

SPECIAL PROJECTS

David Aquino

Duncan Fitch

Stripped Down series, 2021

Transcendence series, 2021

My practice explores the complex, constructed nature of My work explores the concept of transcendence – the identity and self-representation. In Stripped Down, I turn idea of existence or experience beyond the physical realm. the camera on myself to look inward through a series of Through my practice, I consider how I can capture what self-portraits, presenting myself to the world in a variety it’s like to venture outside the physical shell that is my of iterations. The pressures I face from society at large as body and to push the boundaries of the unseen and the well as my own intuition cause me to put on a mask, so this unknown. My photography reflects the liberation and body of work attempts to capture a version of myself that lightness I experience in the natural world. This series exists behind closed doors, and within the comfort of my involves the construction and photographing of “tiny own home, that is authentic and true. worlds,” which I create out of landscape photography that The bathroom is an incredibly personal space where attempts to capture the majesty of the natural world and one is typically alone. It is a site of transformation. The sculptural elements such as figurines and crystals, to conStripped Down images capture the self-care practices, inti- vey my vision of transcendence. The cat figurines featured mate acts, and rituals through which I strip down, revealing in this work, devoid of any specific physical features, are myself in the flesh. I take off my mask, becoming vulner- overwhelmed by the grand landscape in front of which able and comfortable within my own skin. The process they stand. They act as proxies for myself and the viewer, of doing so allows me to forget about everything else and asking us to consider how photography might incite the prioritize what’s most important: my own well-being. feeling of moving beyond oneself.

BEX

Sidney Gordon

Papillary Dermis, 2021

Xá7elcha (Lynn Creek) Watergrams, 2021

I am intrigued by the way my body moves and is perceived within space. Papillary Dermis is a self-portrait exploring bodily autonomy and the social significance of tattoos. The light-sensitive surface is a canvas for direct material My body is often overtly sexualized, and my tattoos used collaboration. My work Xá7elcha (Lynn Creek) Watergrams as a means to gain access to my body through uninvited uses this method to give authorship to the Xá7elcha river touch and remark. Using photography as a tool, I am able as we work in alliance with each other. By submerging to reclaim my personal space and objectify my body on photographic paper in the water and capturing prints of its my own terms. I do this as an act of both vulnerability refractions, together we render what the human eye and traand defiance. ditional photographic practices are otherwise unable to see. By contorting my body, I re-enact the discomfort proThis type of intervention calls for a holistic approach, voked by the way people interact with my tattoos. While assuring that my own and each material’s interaction with this is a self-portrait, keeping the form ungendered is im- the water is as respectful as possible. For this process, I use portant to create ambiguity as a way to allow the viewer to location-specific materials, including developer made from reach their own conclusions. I see my skin as a temporary surrounding blossoms and river water as a stop bath. The vessel for my being, and the flora and fauna designs of my distinct interplay between these photochemical alternatives tattoos represent both growth and decay. In a way, I use this and the natural forces and matter captured in the prints is imagery to make a home out of my body. With Papillary what produces the final images. I consider this river my Dermis, I aim to disorient the viewer by making my figure kin, and through this practice I acknowledge my position appear somewhat unfamiliar in order to point to the social on this land as both a maker and a marker. Xá7elcha has treatment of tattooed bodies a long history of enduring settler development. This work aims to bring forward a symbiotic relation to create dialogue around this body of water, beyond what’s portrayed at surface level, and to challenge viewers to investigate the footprints they leave through their daily habits.

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Gibson Switzer Gym #1, from the Gym series, 2021 inkjet print Courtesy of the Artist

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Khim Hipol Anak ng Lupang Hinirang (Child of the Chosen Land) series, 2021 Anak ng Lupang Hinirang (Child of the Chosen Land) is a photographic series that uses the body and symbolic objects tied to Filipino national identity to capture a profound and intense feeling of patriotism and nationalism. As a Filipino national who lives and works in Canada, I am aware of the heavy history of colonization here, which mirrors the colonization of my home country. This series explores the complicated history of colonization in the Philippines and the way in which this history has infiltrated our national identity. In my photographs, the Philippine flag, the pañuelo, reflects the legacy of Spanish colonizers. The crown symbolizes beauty pageants, which continue to be popular in the Philippines and come from the influence of American colonizers, reinforcing Western beauty standards. These objects, integrated with the body, investigate Filipino national identity, employing familiar tropes of identity to rearticulate and question each icon and the histories it bears. The body performs together with the symbols to subvert the standard, patriotic reading of the objects. The resulting images encourage viewers to question the origins of the pictured individuals and the true meanings of the objects they display on their bodies.

is an antidote both to anxious times and to the proliferation of images today. The main motivations behind this series are to find new image structures, to emphasize the surface of the photograph, and to examine how or what type of communication can result through abstraction. In denying an obvious visual referent, the images refrain from instructing the viewer on how they should be read. They are pictures of themselves.

Leo Mah Bonsai series, 2021

Bonsai consists of nine living sculptures made of found and scavenged material from my university campus and the adjacent industrial area. Through the rebirth of materials that have lost their original place and meaning, I take a close look at my held perceptions of recycling, rooted in environmental propaganda taught in elementary school. Through this artistic expression, I aim to challenge the economic values of consumerism and recycling. Each sculpture is made of discarded materials that I salvage and reconsider through my curiosity about what we discard. This process of sourcing material is at the centre of this series. I refer to each sculpture as a creature, which I name after the original use of each foundational container, such as Sauerkraut and Turbo Power. Sand from a nearby construction site is a base material in each piece; this everyday substance plays a complex role within both environmentalism and infrastructure development. At David Macgillivray the core of my project is the unknown – regarding both what I might find and the possibility of what I may create. Untitled (Verdigris) series, 2021 Through Bonsai, I ask viewers to rethink their relationships My practice explores the fundamental elements of a pho- with recycling and to re-evaluate their contributions to tograph: the rendering of texture and the temperature of environmentalism. light, and how these can be translated into pigment in the photographic print. The spreading of colour and form in the final works reflects my process of moving the camera Meaghan Murray while exposing an image. When I make these photographs, I take the device away from my eye and improvise gesStories that Lie in the Untold: An tures with the camera, while holding it in one hand, to Album Curation of Foreign Images, emphasize line and depth. No longer looking through 2021 the viewfinder means I become more aware of my body in space. Though my actions can be spontaneous, they are not random; rather, they are composed on the spot. Without context, the possibilities of a photograph’s biThrough motion and the resulting mark-making, I aim to ography are endless, especially when it appears to be a obscure the boundaries between photography and other personal image of the type commonly found in people’s image-making techniques such as drawing and painting. homes. Through the act of assembling albums, my work Much of this process emerges from my interest in abstract explores the enigma I encounter by owning someone else’s art and its physical presence as an object. To me, abstraction pictures and not knowing the details behind their creation.

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The ritual of taking family photos is a performative act Tillie Roy that provides insight into family dynamics and produces a lasting historical document of these relationships. Person in a Petri Dish series, 2021 My works take the form of albums created out of discarded images that I purchase and then develop into photo This series of self-portraits complicates the notion of repreassemblies. The selection process involves making a sto- sentation and identity, presenting myself from a fantastical ryline based on my initial reaction to the photos and then perspective. Working with 35mm film, I take a nontraarranging them as if they are my own memories. I attempt ditional, subversive approach to the darkroom process, to convey a narrative with this fabricated family through which the photographer typically aims to tightly control. grouping photos in themes common to family albums, such Instead, I open up my process to chance, seeking a collaboas a trip to the beach or a birthday party. Through this ar- ration between myself and the materials at play. I introduce ranging of photos, I seek to enact the concept of family as a objects that I have a personal connection to, including bug way to prompt viewers to consider vernacular photography wings, lip balm, cotton, and my own saliva, to complicate in new ways and to honour the memories present within and distort my image, forcing the viewer to look closely at the images, as well as to allow others to speculate further the layers that compose the image. These materials modify on their context. This exploration of family photo albums my face and body in elaborate and surreal ways, asking assesses the performative quality of taking and displaying the viewer to see me as a multifaceted and complex person. photographs, including those not meant to be public, and the sentimental quality of physical images amid the dominance of digital archives. Is it necessary to have an intimate Gibson Switzer attachment to the people, places, or objects in an image to display it with genuine appreciation? What happens Gym series, 2021 when an accessible vessel is used to hold random photos and mimic the family albums we are all so familiar with? This series consists of a pair of staged tableaux photographs that portray me and my two friends working out in a home gym. The gym is in the basement of my friend’s home, where he resides with a group of university athletes. This loAbigail Pfortmueller cation is exemplary of the grimy, so-called manly aesthetic that typifies college frat culture. Using objects found in the Home series, 2021 gym and within the home, I staged the scene to exaggerate My practice focuses on my personal connection to mental the sense of macho culture already present in the space. The health and issues that arose as a result of the interpersonal heightened sense of masculinity is an illusion, as it does not dynamics of my family. My photography rests in a place necessarily exist in the reality I experience. Instead, this between staged and documentary and also incorporates amplified machismo creates a humorous and ironic effect. elements of still life and portraiture. For the images in my These photographs, while partially documentary in nature, latest series, Home, I used a large format camera to amplify represent the ambiguous nature of photographic “truth,” in the objects and spaces themselves, capturing them in star- that they magnify certain aspects of the real-life experience tling clarity and providing the viewer with myriad details of and feeling in this space. Through the process of meticulously staging the set, dramatically lighting the scene, and to compel them to look closer. Home (My Bedroom) focuses on my difficult connec- capturing a moment of tension, I aim to evoke the work of tion to my childhood home. Since my parents’ divorce, I the Vancouver School of conceptual photographers as well have had a strained relationship with the spaces in which as classical history painting. I grew up and spent the majority of my life. The images depict rooms filled to the brim with memories, featuring a cascade of charged objects. The photographed spaces are Skye Tao inhabited daily yet look completely abandoned. I photographed my mother’s home as I found it on the day of the Itch series, 2021 shoot, unflinchingly, and offer the viewer a look into the lives of those who exist therein. The images portray a fam- In Itch, I combine utopic images of cityscapes and skyscapes ily that has gone through many difficult times, evidenced with industrial, urban interiors to create a space of imaginaby a home in a state of disarray. tion and fantasy. Through this series, I attempt to produce

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the world of the unconscious and desire by juxtaposing the beauty of the natural world with the concrete structures through which it is glimpsed. The work evokes a sense of subconscious desire: perhaps of an escape, perhaps of a space of freedom. Marrying various documentary-style images in this way creates an uncanny dissonance – images that, independently, would read as true to life become surreal when presented in this imaginary combination. By creating this tension between the real and the unreal, Itch points to the potential of photography to hold both truth and fiction at once.

Jordan Utting Cusp series, 2021

Using a point-and-shoot camera, I aim to document candid moments that portray a moment of release and reveal an unstaged truth – a moment of quiet and understanding in a loud space. It is important to me that the images communicate a sense of intimacy and closeness with my subjects. The Exhale also investigates the temporary escape and transformation resulting from consuming alcohol and drugs. Drinking and smoking lead to a loss of control and inhibition, and, by partaking in this, we take off a mask and are able to forget about our daily lives and release pressures. In this process, we become someone else, but maybe we also become more of ourselves. I search for moments where my subjects allow themselves to embrace this feeling of unbecoming and becoming – an exhalation of sorts.

These photographs interrogate the concept of a “cusp” – a Liao Yi point of transition between two different states – using the materiality of film. Due to the pandemic, for the last two The Lost Legacy series, 2021 years my mother, older sister, and I have been thrust back into the same household. This series explores the specific “History” needs carriers to document the stories and memrelationship I have with my sister as we coexist in our moth- ories that comprise it. The buildings pictured in this series er’s one-bedroom wood cabin. She and I seem to always be are situated in important industrial areas of Vancouver and on the cusp of each other, unable to distinguish where one Inner Mongolia, China. With the continued development begins and the other ends, resulting in a constant push and of these places, such industrial ruins will soon disappear. pull. Using multiple and long exposures, Cusp considers In Vancouver, areas like the False Creek Flats and the the multilayered, complex nature of relationships and neighbourhood around Parker Street retain factory buildidentities. Following the theme of illusion in photography, ings that carry with them more than eighty years of history. I attempt to push the medium of photography itself while Some have been converted into warehouses and shelters, simultaneously investigating the reality experienced by the giving the buildings new life. I also took photographs of participants of a close relationship. The images, by layering the industrial heritage in my hometown of Hohhot and the exposures, aim to capture not only the nature of interper- surrounding area. As the largest industrial zone in northsonal relationships but also the space of each exposure and ern China, it still features many relics. My artistic practice their composition in relation to one another. Playing on the involves looking for and capturing these aging industrial way in which multiple realities can exist in one image, Cusp sites as they are either abandoned or transitioned to new parallels the way in which my sister and I take up space in uses, in hopes of recording their last image – creating both each other’s mental and physical lives in complicated ways. a tragic and a romantic portrait. I attempt to capture the former power and grandeur of the structures and their current dilapidated state, producing an ironic contrast. My work further attempts to record the intangible relationship James Vincent between these industrial relics and the city at large: Are these spaces forgotten or are they protected? The Exhale, 2021 My project The Exhale focuses on the human desire for community and letting go. With the return of social gatherings, I am interested in depicting the sense of freedom and relief that we were experiencing at what we thought was the end of a series of lockdowns caused by the global pandemic. The images depict my friends at social gatherings and parties, which I attend as a participant and observer at once.

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Mickey McCaffrey Photo Collage #1, 2021 mixed media, archival inkjet print Courtesy of the Artist

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Community Exhibition

Exhibition Dates for Five-Part Project:

Curated by Ann Pollock Part I: April 18 – May 13, 2022 Pendulum Gallery

The Collective Agency Project

Agency – the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. —Wikipedia As a society, we are just now beginning to understand that agency and decision-making have been the privilege of only a few and that many more voices need to be invited to this table of power and independence. Seniors are usually overlooked when thinking about diversification and inclusivity. The Collective Agency, a group of senior Vancouver artists, counters this, giving voice and presence to an age group often relegated to the fringes of society, with their time of usefulness deemed over. The Collective Agency Project was formed in January 2020 through an open call of the City of Vancouver's Public Art Program at the Hillcrest Centre. The proposal was both straightforward and yet deeply complex: seniors were invited to join a two-year project that would introduce them to photography as a multifaceted art practice in order to produce an extensive body of work that would result in an exhibition and public art project. Led by Vancouver curator Ann Pollock and artists Christos Dikeakos and Birthe Piontek, with additional expertise and support from artists Barrie Jones, Henri Robideau, and Harry Killas, the aim was to turn art into an agent of change. Through the idea of collectively joined artistic voices, this project takes agency through art, plus a counterposition on the boundaries and stereotypes of aging and fading senior artists at large. The work engages with complex ecologies of the cultural, political, and environmental while examining the inspirational origins of place, both real and imaginary, with its sources of inspiration. It recognizes and showcases the powerful and layered visions that emerge from many years of varied experiences that are both deeply personal as well as political.

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Part II: March 14 – May 15, 2022 Digital Still Image Billboards Part III: April 23 – May 15, 2022; April 2022 – April 2023 Hillcrest Centre Part IV: Summer 2022 The Collective Agency Project, film by Harry Killas, thecollectiveagencyproject. com Part V: Summer 2022 The Collective Agency Project thecollectiveagencyproject. com

The Collective Agency Project is made possible through the public art requirement for OPAL by element and produced by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program in partnership with Arts & Health: Healthy Aging Through the Arts, Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation thecollectiveagencyproject.com

SPECIAL PROJECTS

Oonagh Berry Early Morning, 2021 archival inkjet print Courtesy of the Artist

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Greg Helem Image #18, 2020 archival inkjet print Courtesy of the Artist

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SPECIAL PROJECTS

Artist Index

David Aquino pp. 121–127 Joi T. Arcand p. 93 Eugène Atget pp. 79–85 Evan Benally Atwood p. 43 Nabil Azab p. 92 Shahla Bahrami pp. 52/54 Marian Penner Bancroft p. 113 Miranda Barnes pp. 36–39 Iain Baxter p. 105 Lynda Benglis p. 102 Oonagh Berry pp. 129–131 BEX pp. 121–127 Shannon Bool p. 44 Kyla Bourgh pp. 52/61 Sophia Boutsakis pp. 90/100 Anne Brigman pp. 79–85 Michelle Bui pp. 48–51/52/55 Rydel Cerezo pp. 67–77 Jennifer Chan p. 96 Ali Cherri pp. 52/57 Dana Claxton pp. 22–25 Douglas Coupland p. 115 Sara Cwynar pp. 26–27/30–35 Judy Dater pp. 79–85 Christos Dikeakos pp. 113/129–131 Stan Douglas p. 102 Hannah Dubois p. 113 Mahmoud El Safadi p. 42 Weng Fen p. 95 Duncan Fitch pp. 121–127 Leonard Frank p. 105 Robert Frank p. 79 Marcy Friesen p. 98 Richard Fung, John Greyson, and Ali Kazimi p. 96 Lynda Gammon p. 101 Alex Gibson pp. 118–119 Greg Girard p. 106 Sidney Gordon pp. 121–127 Sara Gulamali p. 94 Greg Helem pp. 129–131 Jeff Henschel p. 100 Fred Herzog p. 97 Khim Hipol pp. 121–127 Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes pp. 6/8–13/113 Duane Isaac p. 110 Jack Jeffrey pp. 113 Barrie Jones pp. 129–131 Anique Jordan pp. 67–77 Donald Judd p. 102 Anna Kasko pp. 67–77 Teigan Kelly p. 100 Yevgeny Khaldei pp. 79–85 Harry Killas pp. 129–131 Zacharias Kunuk p. 96 Laiwan p. 107 Gustave Le Gray pp. 87–89 Helen Levitt pp. 79–85 Ken Lum p. 113 David Macgillivray pp. 121–127 Leo Mah pp. 121–127 Joseph Maida pp. 52/56

Capture

2021–2022

Mickey McCaffrey pp. 128–131 Meryl McMaster pp. 67–77 Yoshinori Mizutani p. 45 Cheryl Mukherji pp. 67–77 Meaghan Murray pp. 121–127 Dr. John Murray pp. 87–89 Zinnia Naqvi p. 93 Philotheus Nisch pp. 52/58 Dainesha Nugent-Palache pp. 64/67–77 Gabriel Orozco pp. 79–85 Abigail Pfortmueller pp. 116/121–127 Birthe Piontek pp. 67–77/93/99/129–131 Dana Qaddah p. 103 Jordan Robertson pp. 121–127 Henri Robideau pp. 129–131 Natalie Robinson p. 100 Silvia Rosi pp. 66–77 Tillie Roy pp. 121–127 Carol Sawyer p. 93 Cindy Sherman p. 102 Jessie Ray Short pp. 62–63 Vivek Shraya p. 93 Celia Perrin Sidarous p. 40 Deb Silver p. 112 Angeline Simon p. 47 Skawennati p. 96 Juliana Sohn p. 41 Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak p. 96 Gibson Switzer pp. 121–127 William Henry Fox Talbot pp. 79–85 Skye Tao pp. 121–127 Erdem Tasdelen p. 108 Svava Tergesen pp. 52/59 Isaac Thomas p. 113 Jeff Topham p. 104 Scott Treleaven p. 114 Jordan Utting pp. 121–127 Cemrenaz Uyguner p. 114 Emil Vargas pp. 121–127 James Vincent pp. 121–127 Jean Vincent pp. 87–89 Rajesh Vora p. 111 Ian Wallace pp. 79–85 Ramona Jingru Wang pp. 14–17 Andy Warhol p. 102 Neil Wedman p. 113 Michael Wesik p. 109 Chad Wong pp. 52/60 Gloria Wong p. 46 B. Wurtz p. 114 Liao Yi pp. 121–127 Shellie Zhang pp. 28/52–53

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Cloud Album March 11 May 1, 2022

The Polygon Gallery 101 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver Territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Nations @polygongallery thepolygon.ca

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Image: Anonymous, WWII bomb raid on Moosbierbaum oil refinery, courtesy of the Archive of Modern Conflict

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PROUDLY SUPPORTING WESTERN CANADA’S VISUAL ARTS COMMUNITY MLT Aikins is dedicated to the West. This is our home, and from the Prairies to the Pacific, we provide strategic solutions backed by a keen understanding of the legal and business landscapes. For legal proficiency where you need it, look to us.

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WOLVES: The Art of Dempsey Bob April 2 - August 14, 2022 | Visit audainartmuseum.com for exhibition details Dempsey Bob, Wolf Chief’s Hat, c. 1983, red cedar, acrylic paint, operculum, horse hair, leather, ermine, Collection of Eric Savics, Rachel Topham Photography