Capture Catalogue 2021 by Capture Photography Festival

2021

Grant Arnold Susan Bright Kate Henderson Dr. Omar Kholeif Gabrielle Moser Cheryl Mukherji Emmy Lee Wall Jordan Wilson Chelsea Yuill

Capture Photography Festival

April 2–30, 2021

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 #CapturePhotoFest2021

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Executive Director Emmy Lee Wall Festival and Publication Coordinator Chelsea Yuill Programming Manager Madalen Claire Benson Youth Program Coordinator Jeri Engen Festival Assistant Jocelyne Junker Graphic Design Victoria Lum Videographer Sahand Mohajer Printing and Assembly Mitchell Press, Burnaby Insert Printing Moniker Press, Vancouver

Board of Directors Kim Spencer-Nairn, Founder & Chair Mike Harris Ian McGuffie Alison Meredith Sheenah Rogers-Pfeiffer Tobi Reyes Mahdi Shams Evann Siebens David Thorpe Adrienne Wood Advisory Board Grant Arnold Claudia Beck Helga Pakasaar cheyanne turions

Front Cover: Jordan Bennett al’taqiaq: it spirals, 2021 Courtesy of the Artist All content © 2021 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 / editor, Emmy Lee Wall; authors, Grant Arnold, Susan Bright, Kate Henderson, Dr. Omar Kholeif, Gabrielle Moser, Cheryl Mukherji, Emmy Lee Wall, Jordan Wilson, Chelsea Yuill. Names: Capture Photography Festival (2021), author. | Wall, Emmy Lee, editor. Description: Catalogue of the exhibition Capture Photography Festival held in Metro Vancouver from April 2-30, 2021. Identifiers: Canadiana 20210135492 | ISBN 9781777354701 (softcover) Subjects: LCSH: Photography—British Columbia—Vancouver— Exhibitions. | LCSH: Public art—British Columbia—Vancouver— Exhibitions. | LCSH: Photography, Artistic—Exhibitions. | LCGFT: Exhibition catalogs. Classification: LCC TR655 .C357 2021 | DDC 770.74711/33—dc23

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Donors Anonymous Claudia Beck & Andrew Gruft Brigitte & Henning Freybe 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 Wright Thank You Grant Arnold Claudia Beck & Andrew Gruft Stephanie Bokenfohr Susan Bright Lynn Chen Shaun Dacey Diane Evans Diana Freundl Brigitte & Henning Freybe Jeff Hamada Tarah Hogue Candice Hopkins Stuart Keeler Jeff Khonsary Lindsay Kilpatrick Geraldine Layante Allison Mander-Wionzek Klara Manhal Jenny-Anne McCowan Gregg McNally Brian Messina Sarah Milroy Helga Pakasaar Birthe Piontek Justin Ramsey Stephanie Rebick Chantal Shah Ann Thomas Thomas Tran cheyanne turions Michael Wesik

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Welcome to Capture 2021

In a year of unprecedented upheaval, Capture has seized the opportunity to re-examine our purpose. We have launched a new vision statement, “Connecting Vancouver to the world through lens-based art,” that speaks to the urgent need for greater understanding, respect, and empathy between us all. With its uncanny ability to convey human experience, lens-based art is powerfully positioned to act as the medium through which this is accomplished. This year, we have reimagined our catalogue to focus on editorial content, including texts by Omar Kholeif, Gabrielle Moser, and our inaugural Writing Prize recipient, Cheryl Mukherji, whose poignant essay about the power of her family albums is a stirring reminder of the singular ability photography has to connect us to and define our memories. We have also commissioned new work by artist Aaron Jones, debuting in our catalogue. His collages, cut and torn from magazines like O and Ebony, combine images in an act of self-affirmation, declaring possibilities for a new reality. For 2021, we are thrilled to be presenting a site-specific commission by Mi’kmaq artist Jordan Bennett on the façade of the Dal Grauer Substation. He discusses his work in an interview with Kate Henderson, and Jordan Wilson has written a text on how Bennett employs the ancestral language of his predecessors while photography makes the public amplification of his work possible. It has been truly heart-warming to see the ways in which the art community, our donors, and our sponsors have remained committed to the work we do. Thank you for your continued partnership and support. This year marks our first co-curated Featured Exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, an institution close to my heart. I would like to extend a sincere thank you to the team there, especially my co-curator Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art, who has made realizing Pictures and Promises such a joy. I would also like to take this opportunity to particularly acknowledge TD Bank, Capture’s Presenting Sponsor, whose commitment to amplifying diverse voices resonates so strongly with Capture’s own mandate. With your support, we are able to accomplish so much. Capture is truly a collaborative effort, and the Festival is the result of a dedicated staff as well as the exceptional support of the Board, which has been a fantastic source of guidance. I feel so grateful to have the opportunity to work with this team. While 2020 presented challenges worldwide, it was also an incredible opportunity to call into question established systems, reimagine institutions and relationships, and suggest possibilities for a different future. This is the work that art and artists do and why the need for art is more acute now than ever. A profound thank you to the artists who are participating in Capture 2021 – we are grateful to you for the inquisitive, hopeful, and challenging work you create.

Emmy Lee Wall Executive Director

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TEXTS

13–16

27–29

Collage as Affirmation: An Interview with Aaron Jones How Not to Be Seen Mourning (in) a Photograph The Shape of the Future

BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project 3,599 Miles Apart: An Interview with Jordan Bennett Amplifying Presence Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project TransLink Public Art Project Canada Line Public Art Project Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen Holy Terrain: Films by Yumna Al-Arashi Instagram Artwork Catalogue Insert

19–21 23–25

35–37 38–41 42–45 46

48–57 58 59–61 62 63

Emmy Lee Wall Gabrielle Moser Cheryl Mukherji Dr. Omar Kholeif

PUBLIC ART Kate Henderson Jordan Wilson

Chelsea Yuill

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS

67–73 75–79

Pictures and Promises: Vancouver Art Gallery Feast for the Eyes: The Polygon Gallery

82–104

Selected Exhibitions

107

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

ARTIST INDEX

Grant Arnold Susan Bright

Cheryl Mukherji My Grandmother’s Funeral (Spread from my family album), 2020 digital photograph 18.4 × 24.4 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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TEXTS

Collage as Affirmation: An Interview with Aaron Jones

Emmy Lee Wall

19–21

How Not to Be Seen

Gabrielle Moser

23–25

Mourning (in) a Photograph

27–29

The Shape of the Future

13–16

Cheryl Mukherji

Dr. Omar Kholeif

Aaron Jones Miner, 2020 magazine clippings 27.94 × 33.02 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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Collage as Affirmation: An Interview with Aaron Jones Emmy Lee Wall

Emerging Toronto-based artist Aaron Jones mines magazines like Essence and O as well as educational texts such as encyclopaedias and books on space, nature, and wildlife for found images, which he recombines to create surreal, amorphous forms that defy categorization. Surrounded by these publications on fashion, pop culture, and education growing up, Jones would go through them searching for bodies; by extracting pictures and using them to build entirely new images, Jones’s work points to the complex and multilayered nature of reality as well as undefined possibilities for the future. By cutting and tearing existing images and recombining them into something entirely new, Jones’s practice is, for him, an act of self-affirmation and a proclamation of a new reality.

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Emmy Lee Wall You started off as a photographer, but in an interview from the fall of 2019, you mentioned that you’ve stopped taking photographs because there was no point in taking more pictures. Can you explain a little more about what you mean by that? Aaron Jones As I reflect on that interview, I think it’s important to say that the statement I made was very personal. What I meant was, there was no reason for me to take photos as an artistic practice. Photography through my own hands no longer served me. Maybe it never served me, or never made me feel artistically satisfied. At least not to the degree that comes with finishing a collage. ELW Can you tell us a little bit about the source material for your collages – where do you find the images you use, and what makes a compelling image for you such that you want to include it in a collage? AJ Around 2014/2015, I started working through collage. A large majority of my source material was just in my mother’s home. Often using beauty, health, and fashion magazines such as Essence and O, which had been archived in that home over the majority of my childhood years. Other source material comes from a handful of titles that are geared toward educating youth, covering topics such as the oceans, trees, space, and many others that are intended to help a young person understand the world they live in. ELW I recently read a text about your work from Zalucky Contemporary in relation to your solo exhibition there that states that your “practice surrounds ideas of self-reflection and character-building, as a way of finding peace.” Can you unpack this a little for us? AJ Without going too deep, my work explores finding peace as a philosophy. I think people engage in self-reflection and character-building in many ways. For example, through putting ourselves in the shoes of a main character in a story, regardless of it being a book, or show, or movie. Or even being aware of what we post on the internet because of the

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way it will affect how people see our character. Even in the simple act of getting dressed, or choosing the people who we surround ourselves with, or what we want to eat. In some capacity we go through self-reflection and character-building when making those choices. Regardless of our belief systems, the choices we make help confirm our reality. And, in turn, they have an impact on the objects, people, and food we choose (those of us that have the ability to choose) as self-affirmations which bring peace. For myself – and I could imagine other artists feel the same – what I create makes some form of affirmations. Visually, I feel it is somewhat difficult for myself to relate to many photographic and cinematic depictions of people. With existing images, I dismantle them, cut, rip, and tear them – I deny them. As if I’m denying how I’m supposed to see myself in them. Then, I build new characters through the medium of collage, like I’m building myself and building my memories. Creating these characters and images is like creating my own affirmations for life. Affirmations that bring peace for the self, like finding one’s true home. ELW I really like this idea that in collaging an image – cutting and tearing it – you are denying it. But the act is simultaneously positive – you use the original found image to create something new and affirming. Do you think it’s fair of me to say that there is something incredibly powerful in this act? AJ I won’t say it isn’t fair, but I honestly never considered saying to myself that this act is “something incredibly powerful.” For me, this act is something I felt I needed to do. As the years go by, I am evolving my practice and working through video, sculpture, and digital formats. But something about collage and the act of creating affirmations seems like a no-brainer in the context of this world. Powerful or not, I think denying what we have been given from the status quo is an important act. And to go deeper than denying images. I believe it is an important act to deny established structures of government, policing, schooling, banking, and healthcare to move toward a more tangible prosperity for all people. It is important to imagine more than what is established. ELW How do you know when a work is complete?

Aaron Jones Wardrobe, 2020 magazine clippings 13.97 × 24.13 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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painters. But I can’t get over using only colours that an artist mixed themselves to create a world seemingly all from scratch. Currently, I’m not actively using any images of or from paintings in my work. What I’ve been shifting toward is using only specific clippings of just a colour from other artworks, if any. I think it's important for my collage practice to primarily use photographic images. And, yes, I look at paintings more than any other artwork. Maybe it’s the most plentiful or readily available work to see in the world. Regardless, I really do enjoy ELW Can you talk a little about the influence of painting on your the medium, and I definitely enjoy a wide array of paintpractice? In your earlier work, you were taking imagery ings more than collage. Currently, I’m in awe of Oreka from painting and incorporating it into your collages readi- James (@orekaj), Curtia Wright (@curtia), Kezia Harrell ly. I’m wondering if you are still looking a lot at painting? (@sugarygarbage), Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Kerry James Marshall, and still to this day, Francis Bacon. AJ I think paintings are, simply, the epitome of “art.” Maybe it’s because I’ve been somewhat indoctrinated to believe that, or even because I shared studio space with ten-plus AJ Simply, it’s a feeling. I try to balance my own aesthetic values with my philosophical ones. As I work continuously to build and deconstruct my work for aesthetics, slowly a story, character, or place starts to come together in my mind; something that I can speak to. Even if I have the story I want to convey in my mind before the images are in front of me, it is really important for me to have a balance between aesthetic values and the richness in the story.

Aaron Jones Cabinet, 2020 magazine clippings 11.43 × 12.70 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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Aaron Jones Sitting on the Sky, 2020 magazine clippings 20.32 × 22.86 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin Shirley, 2013 archival photograph printed on polyvinyl chloride Courtesy of the Artists and Goodman Gallery

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How Not to Be Seen Gabrielle Moser

For the past two decades, the Bangladeshi-born American artist Hasan Elahi has been generating a massive database of images that document his whereabouts in real time. Available to the public through a website and presented as a multimedia art installation, Tracking Transience (2003–) accumulates Global Positioning System tracking of the artist’s daily movements alongside more than 70,000 photographs of airports, hotel rooms, meals, receipts, and other banal moments from his everyday life. Conceived as a solution to a harrowing encounter with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in which Elahi was suspected of terrorism and questioned about his activities for months, this self-surveillance archive uses quotidian images – the kind many of us take and post to social media daily – to both respond to and anticipate the government’s use of lens‑based technologies to monitor its citizens. At the same time that Elahi has been documenting his every movement with the camera, the Berlin-based artist Hito Steyerl has been working to make herself invisible. Experimenting with graphic, razzle-dazzle camouflage, green-screen technologies, and more rudimentary barriers to sight, Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) is a fourteen-minute video that instructs viewers on “how to disappear in an age of total over-visibility.” Meditating on various ways to interrupt surveillance technologies – including moving to a gated community, being disappeared as an enemy of the state, or simply becoming a middle-aged woman – Steyerl questions both the advantages and dangers of becoming unseeable.

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This tension between Elahi’s hypervigilant self-surveillance and Steyerl’s desire to evade photographic capture illustrates the contradictory role lens-based technologies play in contemporary life – as forms of discipline and state control, and also as tools for critiquing and evading these same systems of power. Though the use of the camera by government bodies is not a new phenomenon, the rise of imaging technologies such as closed-circuit television surveillance, Google Street View, biometric screening in airports, and facial recognition software in smartphones means that photography is increasingly being used to map and measure embodiment – technologies that are all the more prevalent in our daily lives under the conditions of a global pandemic. Meanwhile, platforms for self-surveillance have expanded rapidly with the development of social media, where the content being produced and consumed is overwhelmingly photographic: 3.2 billion images are shared online each day, and the majority of them are portraits or selfies. Elahi’s and Steyerl’s projects respond, in different ways, to this glut of digital images, asking how we can understand photography’s relationship to identity, visibility, and embodiment as a seemingly immaterial technology with very real material consequences on human bodies. Though the saturation of images in our daily lives, and the state’s use of them for population management, might feel like a strange new dystopian scene, photography’s relationship to the control of bodies has been a long one. Shortly after the announcement of photography’s invention in 1839, thousands of people flocked to studios to have their portraits taken, while many of those same portrait photographers – including the American daguerreotypist Mathew Brady – brought their cameras to penitentiaries to photograph adult and child inmates in the 1840s. By the 1890s, photography was employed to create the first mugshots in France and England, followed shortly thereafter by the compulsory use of portraits on Chinese head tax certificates in Canada, and the first passports requiring photographs in 1916. These, and countless other examples, are instances of how photography, and later film and video, has been deployed for the goals of biopolitics: a system of state power in which life itself is managed, measured, and controlled. As critical theorists like Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben have argued, apparatuses like the prison, the school, and the asylum, but also the camera, are used to police the bounds of normal citizens and to normalize the quality of life of humans. What is perhaps new about twenty-first-century image culture is that the distinction between catastrophe and the everyday has begun to break down, where seemingly ordinary images can have disastrous effects on subjects’ lives and rights – something both Elahi’s and Steyerl’s works demonstrate. The effects of lens-based technologies on embodiment are all around us through the forms of gendered and racial violence that are captured on digital media platforms, and yet they are difficult for us to see, name, and analyze. Contemporary artists have worked to address this rift in visibility in a variety of ways, attempting to intervene in photography’s power to

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capture and organize the social body, cataloguing which bodies matter. One approach is to wield the weapons of state apparatuses to critique governmental power: to ask how photographs are used to exercise power over individuals and to watch the mechanisms of surveillance from below, in a practice of what surveillance studies scholar Simone Browne has described as “sousveillance.” Another not only draws attention to how images are used to manage and normalize the quality of life of humans, but also asks about how imaging technologies are calibrated to see some subjects as people and to unsee and dehumanize others. The South African artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, for instance, have been reworking Kodak’s Ektachrome colour-balance test cards, also known as “Shirleys” (after the name of the model who posed for the first test strip), into billboards and public artworks in their series To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light (2013). Used since 1959, these balance cards were meant to help commercial photo developers correct the colours, particularly skin colours, of final prints, and each features a white woman posing in front of a black-and-white background, often holding clunky props in the primary colours of red, blue, and yellow. Emblazoned with the brand name of the film and the designation “normal,” Broomberg and Chanarin’s redeployment of these darkroom test cards in public spaces demonstrate that whiteness was the unspoken norm in the very chemical composition of one of the most widely used forms of everyday photography. Though digital cameras use different mechanisms for seeing colour, their sensors are calibrated in many of the same ways, making darker skin tones literally and physically harder to see. More recently, the Ghanian American computer scientist and digital activist Joy Buolamwini discovered that the facial-recognition software used at the MIT Media Lab – and by hundreds of corporations – was unable to identify her face due to the racial bias embedded in the technology’s data sets: only by using a white paper mask over her face was the computer able to “see” her as a human. These projects investigate what communications scholar Lorna Roth has called the “technological unconscious” of lens-based practices and help attune us to what we might intuitively know but cannot immediately see about contemporary image culture. In this way, contemporary artists ask us to think about how our bodies are seen, moved, and sometimes disappeared by cameras, and what this might have to tell us about how we recognize one another across great digital and physical distances.

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Photographer unknown My Mother's Matrimonial Photograph, date unknown digital photograph 17.24 × 25.4 cm Courtesy of Cheryl Mukherji

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Mourning (in) a Photograph Cheryl Mukherji Capture Writing Prize Recipient

“Afternoon with Michel, sorting maman’s belongings. Began the day by looking at her photographs. A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended). To begin again without resting. Sisyphus.” — Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary1 In the winter that I spent revisiting my family albums over and over again, I pulled several photographs out of what had been their designated slot for years – pockets of clear, cheap plastic measuring exactly four-by-five inches that is standard across all the albums that I have inherited. The plastic has turned brown and brittle with age, and the photographs encased within have burned and bled onto it, morphing plastic into the memory of a photograph – a prosthesis. The family album is a body built from several prostheses, rickety at the spine but functioning as it does – as memorabilia for the lives it represents and in memoriam of the lives of people who passed away. My mother lost her mother to breast cancer. I know my grandmother from a memorial photograph of her in the family album, hand-painted over by an artist in white paint to brighten her eyes and her eternally still string of pearls. I also know my grandmother from a photograph of her funeral – her body covered gently in an off-white sheet resting on the

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1. Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), 139. 2. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 8. 3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), 4. 4. Ibid, 6–7.

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floor, under the weight of garlands of fresh marigolds, roses, and jasmine. Her forehead and hair are smeared in sindoor (vermilion) – a symbol of matrimony. Even in death, she is a wife, a mother. My mother, whose eyes and nose have sunken into a deep red on her brown skin from crying, sits beside her, staring into a distance. My grandfather sits next to her, looking straight into the camera as other people surround them with their faces cropped by the photographer. Family albums traditionally celebrate success, so it is not surprising that the only major family gathering excluded from the album is the funeral, as it marks the reduction and impoverishment of the group. The absence of death from the albums does not deny its presence from our lives but hides the intermittent mourning from future generations: from their inheritors. If we understand the construction of the family album as a form of myth-making around relationships, values, and beauty, we would choose to not depict moments of familial unrest and trauma for posterity. Cultural scholar Marianne Hirsch writes, “This myth or image – whatever its content may be for a specific group – dominates lived reality, even though it can exist in conflict with it and can be ruled by different interests. It survives by means of its narrative and imaginary power, a power that photographs have a particular capacity to tap.”2 The family album becomes a stationary relic that repeats and reinforces these myths, as philosopher Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida: “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”3 In having the photograph from my grandmother’s funeral in the family album, the completed process of mourning is repeated every time the photograph is revisited. There are photographs in the album of people I do not recognize, and then there are photographs I have come to love, which, now liberated, lie on my desk under a pile of magazines, between books as bookmarks, taped to the wall, forgotten on scanner beds – as objects in their own right – no longer points of reference to our lives as curated by my father. My father, an orthopaedic surgeon and an amateur photographer, set out on a mission to fill a plastic slot in the albums for every print of the photographs he took. Before this, they lay scattered in uneven heaps – stale, half-eaten by termites, their colours bleeding into one another – clumped together just enough to make a sense of their subjects: my father’s patients. These photographs were a young surgeon’s visual testimony of successfully operating on broken and bleeding limbs. One photograph before the surgery and one post-op, and another when the stitches came off as the skin healed. These photographs – interspersed with family portraits – found an uncontested spot in the albums my father made. Hirsch sees photography as “the family’s primary instrument of self-knowledge and representation” and, as such, a carrier of “family memory.”4 Typically the photographs that comprise the family album are taken by a family member or a member of the family’s social circle, all existing within the context of the family’s life. There is even an opportunity to visit

a nearby photography studio and have a quick portrait taken by a professional photographer for pleasure and aspiration. This aspiration often merges with performativity and playfulness. The subjects dress in special garments and accessories, posing against painted backdrops that depict monuments, such as the Taj Mahal, and exotic travel destinations with snow-peaked mountains. The staging creates a mythical realm that draws from one’s desire for heightened self-knowledge, representation, and the means to visit places one might not be able to due to financial constraints.5 Family albums consist of photographs that are curated to portray romantic ideals of family life, as opposed to the messy realities. I discover a photograph of my mother in the album taken in a photo studio where she’s my age, wearing a silk saree – “It was too expensive to wear anywhere else without ruining it, but I wanted a photograph of me in it,” she recalls – against an exquisite backdrop of jasmine flowers in bloom as she smiles, cheerfully looking at the photographer. This photograph is pushed into a slot next to a photograph of a bloodied thigh, ripped and held apart by forceps to make a skin graft for one of my father’s patients. Masoom Raza, as I have always known him – first by his name, and then by the fact that it was his thigh in this photograph – accidentally blew his hand off with a firecracker, leaving it completely mangled before he was rushed into the emergency room. As I flip through a few pages of the album looking for more evidence of the surgery between portraits of my mother, I find a photograph of a hand, thumbless, held together by stitches post-surgery. There is a relief in knowing that Raza, who I, as an eight-year-old, often heard of at the dinner table as my father discussed his day with my mother, has found a place in my family album. There is a missed opportunity for complete myth-making in my family album, a lost potential. The reality of my family album is that it was curated by my father who, arguably, is not a curator. He photographed my mother for love and his patients for work on the same roll of film and remained true to himself in portraying his life in the albums – torn between his family and the laborious hours spent in the operating room. When I look at the album today, I see what my father was doing. He was building an album for mourning. Over the years, I have seen my father lose some patients to death and many more to letting go and forgetting after their recovery. I have seen him mourn the loss of my mother’s youth and, with it, her warmth. In these albums, I see my mother mourn the loss of her mother, and her fall from my father’s loving gaze after he stopped photographing her. The bloodied medical photographs, like perfect punctuations throughout my mother’s life in portraits, depict the life they lived together; the life that they will probably never diverge from. The bright-red velvet cover of the family album reads “Home Sweet Home” in gold lettering and, without hesitation, I take it for that. It is Home, and sometimes Sweet.

5. Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 173–95.

TEXTS

Mahmoud El Safadi Work from the Becomings series, 2016 digital print 60 × 40 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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The Shape of the Future Dr. Omar Kholeif

“Eternity is non evident. There’s this endless rotation of the sun in the skull, the stillness outside, and a storm within. At least a river is always flowing in some part of the country. Winds, always gathering speed, shatter the order of things. We return home, in tears.” — Etel Adnan, Night “Late night blues Taints my heart’s hue Late night fuels . . . Breathing each other As we lay Searching Way to end Ways to numb Ways to bend Ways to blow Ways to float Ways to strain Ways to score Ways to fall and so, we woke To another being Rogue The riots begin” — Otobong Nkanga, The Haze

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“I look for signs, but for what?” — Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse I am sitting staring at a printout of an image that I found on the so-called internet. One might ask: In an age where cross-embedded screens are entrenched within our consciousness, why print a picture? ***

1. “Lebanon Asks Interpol to Arrest Owner, Captain of Beirut Blast Ship,” Deutsche Welle, October 2, 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/ lebanon-asks-interpol-to-arrestowner-captain-of-beirut-blastship/a-55127953.

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I remember receiving my first computer when I was around twelve years of age. The first thing that I did was “search” for all the places that I wanted to visit when I grew up, and I would print out various scenes and locales, which were kept in what, over time, became a thick black photo binder. To make manifest an accessible (re: searchable) image in the early 1990s was somehow to exalt a subject: to cherish it, but also to contain it within the annals of memory and history. The picture before me now is of a very different tenor. It is an image that holds within it so many contradictions; it is weighted. To see it on a screen as a fleeting glimmer would undermine the intensity of the subject. Gleaned from an article with the title “Lebanon Asks Interpol to Arrest Owner, Captain of Beirut Blast Ship,” the picture itself is more peculiar than any of the self-evident politics that surround it.1 This depiction is what one refers to as a stock image. Produced and made available by Getty Images and the AFP, the witness, the author, is anonymized. Still, its aesthetics have unsettled me. Here, one can see the Port of Beirut, which in the summer of 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, was obliterated due to the improper storage of ammonium nitrate. The initial images, sounds, and stories of the blast suggested an attack, a war. In the end, it was a psychological war created by the corrupt and wayward abuses of power. More than 200 people killed, 6,000 injured, and more than 300,000 left homeless. Could a place be cursed?, many pundits asked. Yet, in this stockpile image, a world of chaos lies before me. This is not a document but an aestheticized view of turmoil. Here, the ashen port buildings sit before serene blue water, which to the expert eye are clearly polished with lively brilliance through the use of computer editing software. The burnished port buildings seem indiscernible. Instead, the emphasis is on a wide-angle view of the city of Beirut behind the port, all seemingly intact. Look at the picture without frame or context and one might think this an archaeological ruin in the romanticized Lebanese capital. A city that has been adoringly subjected to colonial terminology such as “the Paris of the Middle East” and the land of “exceptions.” Highly visible within the global social and political arena, Lebanon is a country all of 4.5 million people by most estimates, which has been mired in conflict since the end of French colonial rule and the now infamous civil wars that occurred between 1975 and 1990.

Still, for many diasporic Arabs, Lebanon and Beirut hold a particular form of resonance, enabled by the nation’s progressive attitude toward cultural forms. I began my professional career in the Middle East in Beirut, working on a magazine funded by Solidere, an organization that has been responsible for gentrifying, by some measures, considered “destroying,” downtown Beirut. Designer stores encased in a makeshift urbanism that is neither real nor imaginary. Waltz past a Chanel flagship store and you are confronted by a crumbling ruin; handsome examples of both Ottoman and French architectural structures surround you, glistening despite the holes left by bullets: Were they stray shots? When the blast occurred in August 2020, it dominated television screens, Instagram stories, Facebook updates, Twitter feeds, and every other form of social media. The neighbourhood most closely anchoring the port was a middle-class area filled with bars and restaurants where many individuals from the city’s artistic community lived, where I indeed once lived. To attempt to decode the scene of the crime through fragments of WhatsApp correspondence and haphazardly filmed short videos was an impossible feat. I felt hollowed, burdened, nauseous. The euphoric confusion that had spurred the people’s protests across the country in October 2019 was now gone. The imagery in and of itself was bereft of meaning. These were active documents; individual people’s forms of catharsis as they watched their homes and economy collapse into a single shroud. The Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari informed me in an interview that during this time the coronavirus pandemic became a secondary nuisance. He recollected running down the stairs of his building, doors unmoored, glass shattered, without a mask, to investigate the damage and the safety of his neighbours.2 The removal of the mask is an apt metaphor to consider here insomuch as the citizens of Lebanon have arguably always been seen on the international stage as embodying the “white mask” that political philosopher Frantz Fanon laid bare for us in his landmark thesis in 1952.3 This is a country where power cuts are commonplace, where posters of martyrs who died during the civil wars still sit etched in street walls, and where more than 1.5 million Palestinian and Syrian refugees line the streets. But the nation’s citizens have carried on. To the world, Lebanon is the heart of the Arab art world, as well as an archaeological tourist site, a place of medical tourism, and a major shopping destination. Taking off a mask in a pandemic is to release yourself to humanity and its sickness – an illness that has consumed the entire world. Yet, within the interstices, one may find hope in art’s potential to unmask truths and revolve the compass; visuality in its purest form can present an axis of being and experiencing the world through specific subjectivities that help us redefine context. This is perhaps the greatest gift of the “post-digital” world – that we can “see” the world from wherever we are.

2. Akram Zaatari, “Hitting the Wall,” interview by Omar Kholeif, Art Monthly, October 2020. 3. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952; London: Pluto, 2008).

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Jordan Bennett al’taqiaq: it spirals, 2021 Courtesy of the Artist

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Anique Jordan Work from the Darkie series, 2018 Courtesy of the Artist

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PUBLIC ART 34

BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project

3,599 Miles Apart: An Interview with Jordan Bennett

39–41

Amplifying Presence

35–37

Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project

TransLink Public Art Project

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48–57

59–61

Holy Terrain: Films by Yumna Al-Arashi

Instagram Artwork

Jordan Wilson

Canada Line Public Art Project Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen

Kate Henderson

Catalogue Insert

Chelsea Yuill

BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project

Jordan Bennett

al’taqiaq: it spirals, 2021

April 2021 – March 2022 944 Burrard St, Vancouver

Jordan Bennett al’taqiaq: it spirals, 2021 Courtesy of the Artist Installation mock-up: Jocelyne Junker, Capture Sponsored by the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association

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Curated by Kate Henderson

3,599 Miles Apart: An Interview with Jordan Bennett Kate Henderson

al’taqiaq: it spirals, Mi’kmaq artist Jordan Bennett’s first lens-based public artwork, is a multilayered photographic work that features a moose skull gifted to the artist by a family friend who harvested the moose in Bennett’s home community over a decade ago. The inspiration for the work was a porcupine quill basket created by ancestral artists from Bennett’s nation around 1860–90. Bennett took the skull’s patterns directly from the ancestral designs found on the porcupine basket and then photographed the painted skull on Mi’kma’ki land. Through photography, Bennett reconnects the spirit of the displaced basket back to its origin and home territory. For decades, this Mi’kmaq cultural belonging – the porcupine quill basket – has existed many miles from its home of Mi’kma’ki (Mi’kmaq territory), kept in the collection of the Museum of Vancouver (MOV). The MOV is built on the village of (Vanier Park), which is part of the unceded territory of the (Squamish) Nation, and al’taqiaq: it spirals is installed on the façade of another settlercolonial institution: the BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation. The Dal Grauer, which powers almost half of downtown Vancouver, sits on the unceded territories of the (Musqueam), , and (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. al’taqiaq: it spirals is a reclamation of cultural belongings, stories, and histories. The image weaves together generations of Bennett’s ancestors and their deep connection to land and animals. By placing this photograph of Mi’kmaq culture in Vancouver, a link is created between both places – the Lower Mainland and Mi’kma’ki – and between the

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cultural belonging of Bennett’s ancestors and the artist’s own work. The work’s positioning on a public building and on a huge scale provides space for these ancestral designs to exist outside the museum and on the street, to be visited daily. In the following conversation, the artist discusses this powerful and timely work and his return to photography as part of his artistic practice.

photographs or by translating the design onto a physical form and photographing that form in situ. The latter was the most powerful option. It’s what felt the most right. KH I love that sense of time travel. That the porcupine lived hundreds of years ago, and you’re using the basket to inform your work now. I really think this is a beautiful gesture. Does the moose skull have a particular significance?

Kate Henderson Tell me about your process and the influences that inJB formed this site-specific work for Capture Photography The moose, just like the porcupine, is a huge part of our Festival. community. This animal has provided sustenance to my family and my ancestors for hundreds of years. This parJordan Bennett ticular moose skull and how it travelled into my life has I have always been inspired by designs rooted in Mi’kmaq its own story. That skull belonged to a family friend of territory, particularly porcupine quillwork. These objects ours, who hunted it well over a decade ago. My dad had come from animals that live on the land, and a lot of the seen it on the side of this gentlemen’s shed for years, and quillwork I reference is created from porcupines that lived he’s always asked him about it. One day, our friend finally 200 or 300 years ago. So, my works connect back to these gave it to my dad, and my dad in turn surprised me with it. beings. It’s a beautiful set of antlers, and it’s very rare to find them For al’taqiaq: it spirals, I wanted to tell a story about attached to the skull like that, in this pristine form. Mi’kma’ki that was also rooted in the city of Vancouver. I let the skull live on the land – exactly where it was Sourcing porcupine quillwork from the Museum of photographed for the work, actually – for about two Vancouver’s collection gave me an opportunity to think months. One day I grabbed a can of spray paint because I about how the designs rooted in Mi’kma’ki have travelled thought the skull needed to be hot pink. I had seen a porso far. I both wanted to find a way to share that idea with cupine quillwork piece that was created in the mid-1800s, Vancouver and at the same time give this quillwork a and hot pink was one of the colours used. Hot pink came chance to visit with people again, to be utilized, and to to Mi’kmaq via settlers who were trading colours and dyes, become a shared story. so you can date porcupine quillwork by the introduction The way I wanted to do that was to bring the basket of these bright colours. back here, to Mi’kma’ki, in a sense. The only way I could I left the hot-pink skull in my yard for a while, and do that was either through recreating the design with then it hit me that I needed to paint it with porcupine quill design as a way to connect it back to its home. This moose’s ancestors originated in Nova Scotia, and it was hunted in Newfoundland (where moose were introduced in the early 1900s), and then brought back to Nova Scotia, where I live. So, adding this quillwork design brought it all full circle. KH Historically, photography has been theorized as being an “index” – a trace of something real, whether an object, a place, or a time. You were unable to visit the MOV and study the porcupine quill basket due to travel restrictions related to the Covid-19 pandemic, and so you had to work from a photograph – an index – of the real object. Could Quillbox and cover, Mi’kmaq Museum of Vancouver Collection, AG 103a-b

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you speak about your use of this “trace” in the work, and perhaps how this photograph is further indexical of your ancestral lands and community belongings?

photographs, I feel like photography has been inching its way back into my life and art practice. KH One of the most interesting aspects of your work is how it seeks to create a conversation between and across territories and times. It provides a connection between land, cultural belongings, and histories. You often mention the act of visiting when discussing your work. In which ways does al’taqiaq: it spirals facilitate a visit between the territories of Mi’kmaq, , , and .

JB If it wasn’t for the folks at the MOV taking the time to photograph this basket, al’taqiaq: it spirals may not have been able to happen. They engaged with me and they spent time with the basket on my behalf. Visiting is a big part of my practice, and when I visit these belongings, I’m not just spending time with objects – I’m spending time with an ancestor. Photographs are as important as the objects themselves, because they share the spirit of that being, that belonging. One of the main reasons I’ve been reincorporating photography into my practice is because of an experience I had many years ago when I encountered plate photography of Mi’kmaq people from the mid-1800s at Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris. That was physically the closest I could ever get to my ancestors, because the light that bounced off their skin in that moment – making those images – was literally captured on those plates, which in turn became artworks that I was able to visit over a hundred years later. Ever since that encounter with these

JB Most likely the quillwork basket is stored in a part of the MOV’s collection that is specifically Indigenous, so it has been visiting with the community belongings of those territories within the confines of the museum for a long time. al’taqiaq: it spirals gives me the chance to facilitate a visit between the quillwork basket and the territory outside the walls of the museum. I would love to visit with , , and people in the community, but because of the weird times we’re in, this photograph is now acting as a physical stand-in for me. I have friends from these nations in Vancouver, and they often wear their design on their bodies through tattoos, medallions, or clothing. My hope is that they will walk by the installed work, and there will be an interaction between the cultural signifiers of our communities. At the same time, this piece of my people’s history – the quillwork basket that was stuck inside the museum – is now out in the world and can visit with people again, in its own way. Kate Henderson and Jordan Bennett wish to express their gratitude to Sharon Fortney, Curator of Indigenous Art and Collections, and Jillian Povarchook, Acting Curator, at Museum of Vancouver.

Paul Emile Miot Group of three women of the Mi'kmaq nation, 1859 photograph from a collodian glass-plate negative 53.34 × 68.58 cm © musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

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Amplifying Presence Jordan Wilson

Over the past ten years, I have encountered Jordan Bennett’s work in different contexts. The first time was at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Beat Nation, where I experienced Turning Tables (2010), an installation comprising two turntables crafted from walnut, oak, and spruce that produces the sounds of Bennett learning his ancestral language. I have observed the form, mediums, and materials of Bennett’s work vary wildly; the connective tissue, however, is an ongoing engagement with the work, histories, and culture of his Mi’kmaq ancestors. Bennett’s research-based practice interrogates who he is and where he comes from, imparting a sense of Mi’kmaq worldview in the contemporary moment; al’taqiaq: it spirals is no different. Bennett continues his in-depth engagement with Mi’kmaq quillwork, relocating the motifs of a box currently held by the Museum of Vancouver (MOV) onto the skull of a moose that once moved across Mi’kmaq territory, and then photographically documenting its presence back on the land.

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While Bennett’s ancestors have always used porcupine quills as a decorative material, the bark insertion of dyed quills blossomed as a distinctive visual tradition in the mid-eighteenth century, a practice expanded by the consumerist desires of European settlers and travellers.1 Mi’kmaq women – like many other Indigenous women – responded to their changing circumstances and the imposed economic system by adapting traditional techniques with introduced styles and materials. Made to be sold to non-Indigenous outsiders, items made of birchbark and covered with mosaics of appliquéd quills became strongly associated with the Mi’kmaq through their extensive circulations as “tourist” or “souvenir” art. Historian Ruth Whitehead notes that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “the Victorian mania for decoration on even the most prosaic of household furnishing created a big market for quillwork novelties.”2 Whitehead calls attention to the continuity of imagery from ancient Mi’kmaq petroglyphs to these quill-adorned objects; Bennett’s oeuvre likewise continues a broader tradition of reimagining ancestral visual compositions. While they once embellished the domestic interiors of middle- and upper-class Europeans and Canadian settlers, a substantial amount of Mi’kmaq quillwork now resides in museum storerooms. Many of these objects emanate joy, playfulness, and experimentation, and a sense of intimacy; every quill was inserted into the bark by hand. They are beautiful, captivating objects. Focusing on their beauty, however, may obscure the social and political conditions of their making. The development of this “transcultural aesthetic expression,” as art historian Ruth Phillips observes, was “articulated through the asymmetrical power relations of colonial regimes.”3 Indeed, that which has often been understood as a “curio” or “souvenir” was born of a complex process involving agency and marginalization – of selfrepresentation, but also consumption of the Other.4 Phillips observes that, despite their status as commodities, such souvenir objects were invested by their Indigenous makers with meaning, conveying knowledge and creative expression. The production of decorative objects was a matter of both economic and cultural survival in a time of strengthened assimilationist policies.5 The gendered dynamic of this history, moreover, must also be recognized. Mi’kmaq women (and all Indigenous women) have historically borne – and continue to bear – the brunt of colonial violence, and yet their work became a significant source of income for supporting their families. And so their creations are with us today. The box Bennett has chosen as his source was likely made in the late nieteenth or early twentieth century. It was purchased by Mary Lipsett, the wife of a successful American businessman who frequently travelled, amassing collections of Indigenous and Asian art. In 1941, the couple established the Edward and Mary Lipsett Indian Museum, opened on the Pacific National Exhibition grounds in Vancouver. At this time, it was the only museum in Canada dedicated to Indigenous material culture. In a series of archival photographs documenting this museum and earlier displays of the collection, this particular box is visible in one image of

Jordan Bennett Artist Once Known Chair Seat Panel c. 19th century, 2018 birchbark, porcupine quill, root 40.5 × 24.9 cm Collection of the Canadian Museum of History, III-F-268, 2018, Courtesy of the Artist, the Canadian Museum of History, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia Photo: RAW Photography

1. Ruth Holmes Whitehead, Micmac Quillwork: Micmac Indian Techniques of Porcupine Quill Decoration, 1600–1950 (Halifax: Nova Scotia Museum, 1982), 24. 2. Whitehead, Micmac Quillwork, 49. 3. Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 3. As Whitehead comments, “The status of women during this period was not at all conducive to the retention of quilling techniques, much less a flowering of the art. … The traumas of the contact period were particularly severe for women.” Whitehead, Micmac Quillwork, 22. 4. As Phillips notes, “The absorption of souvenir wares into the clothing and domestic spaces of non-Aboriginal people offered a means of capturing Indianness and rendering it consumable.” Phillips, Trading Identities, 10. 5. Ibid., 14.

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City of Vancouver Archives Lipsett collection of First Nations basketry, c. 1930 gelatin silver print AM281-S8-: CVA 281-5185 Photo: Dominion Photo Co.

6. Ibid., 8. 7. Daina Augaitis, “Edenshaw’s Legacy in Contemporary Art,” in Charles Edenshaw, ed. Robin K. Wright and Daina Augaitis (London: Black Dog; Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2013), 217. 8. As Bennett remarks in an artist statement referring to this body of work: “I attempt to give some of these designs their voice again.” Jordan Bennett, in Insurgence/ Resurgence, ed. Jaimie Isaac and Julie Nagam (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2017), 48.

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an imposing wall of basketry – predominantly from Northwest Coast communities, also likely made for sale and trade. A placard reads, “Indian Private Collection of Mrs. Mary Lipsett, Vancouver B.C.,” but does not offer a means of differentiating or providing context for these objects. We do not know when or where Lipsett acquired this box, or the identity of its creator – typical of historical Indigenous material culture in institutional collections. This was often of little concern to collectors like the Lipsetts, for whom objects stood in as representations of a generic Indian Other, a means of establishing racial difference but also a distinct Canadian identity. As Phillips observes, Indigenous-made souvenirs were understood as documents not only of places travelled to but also of peoples presumed to be vanishing.6 In the late 1960s, the Lipsett collection was transferred to the Museum of Vancouver, where this piece has likely sat in storage ever since, far away from Mi’kmaq territory. In recent years, Bennett has created a series of works in conversation with the quillwork creations of his ancestors. Like many other Indigenous artists, scholars, and community members, he is recuperating the colonial archives that were assembled for the benefit of a non-Indigenous public. Today, Indigenous people are navigating these institutions that were not built for them, engaging with materials for their own needs and concerns. They are demonstrating what Haida artist Raymond Boisjoly has referred to as an “unforeseen potential” of historical objects – just as the objects’ creators, while making work to sell and circulate in different contexts, were also “smuggling” into the outside world a sense of who their people are and their experiences.7 I have experienced and been privileged to witness community members reconnecting with ancestral objects, and it is often an emotionally powerful moment, one complicated by virtue of it being mediated by Western institutions. Through his practice, Bennett draws from experiences visiting collections to reposition and transform historical Mi’kmaq quillwork, expanding the motifs beyond the limits of the object itself, its display case, and even its holding institution; he manifests the connections these works have to contemporary communities and territories that are often invisible.8 In doing so, he honours the generations of Mi’kmaq women who made birchbark quillwork. He prompts us as viewers to see these mosaics and their makers differently, recovering them from the silence and anonymity of the storeroom. While still employing paint as a medium, with al’taqiaq: it spirals, Bennett takes his engagement with quillwork in a new direction. Rather than physically visiting the source object, Bennett relied on its photographic documentation and digital presence, registering the evolving complexities of circulation and access to Indigenous cultures and knowledge. As with previous quillwork-based pieces, he dramatically transforms what was once an intimate, domestic object into something expansive and public-facing. Photography makes this amplification possible, adding yet another layer of remediation: the quillwork pattern – the creative impulse of its original maker – is transmitted from the box to its museum documentation, by Bennett’s paintbrush to the skull’s surface, and to its

current manifestation as a large-scale photographic installation. These interconnected layers are reflective of the persistence and transmission of Indigenous knowledge and values through both space and time; perhaps this is what the work’s title is referencing as spiralling – perpetually moving, increasing in scale and reach. The intensely bright colours Bennett uses in adopting the motifs from the box’s lid reflect his ancestors’ ready adoption of synthetic dyes to facilitate their visions. The skull can also be understood as souvenir-like: a memory of the creature that was taken and the food it provided; skulls have also been painted and adorned by Indigenous artists as part of tourist art economies. With its strong presence, it is tempting to view the painted skull as the work itself. Indeed, the photograph feels like a form of documentation, as Bennett captures the return of both the moose skull and the quillwork motif to their homelands. Yet this documentation is distinct from the museum's, which like all photographic documentation produced for the collections database, further severs the connections objects have with their original contexts. With this image, Bennett places the animal, the box, and Mi’kmaq territory in relation. If there is an ambiguity in the term “souvenir,” what, then, is being remembered? As I write this, in October 2020, a long-simmering dispute has boiled over in Mi’kmaq territory in regard to the Mi’kmaq enacting and affirming their right to a moderate livelihood via lobster harvesting in their waters, as their ancestors have always done. They have been subject to race-based violence at the hands of non-Indigenous commercial fishermen, indifference from the police, and ignorance from Canadian politicians. As a descendent of Musqueam fishers and a member of a community that has faced similar struggles in asserting our right to fish in our ancestral territory, I would be remiss to not think about the connections that Bennett’s work implicitly makes between our respective contexts. I think about the women – my ancestors, Bennett’s ancestors – who continued to create beauty, challenging themselves to make increasingly intricate baskets and boxes during some of the darkest times of settler-colonial violence and assimilation efforts. The savagery of the settler state, however, as manifest in the harms currently being inflicted upon the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia, is yet further evidence that we are not yet out of the dark. “I wanted to make it beautiful,” Bennett states. He conveys the joy, hope, and respect that exists in every quill stitch. This work, too, will help us remember the dignity of our peoples in the face of injustice.

Jordan Bennett Na'ku'set, 2018 porcupine quill, birchbark, spruce root, latex paint 40.5 × 24.9 cm Courtesy of the Artist and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia Photo: RAW Photography

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Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project

April 3 – May 21 Sited on seven billboards along the Arbutus Greenway, between Fir St and Burrard St, Vancouver

Arbutus Greenway: Steven Shearer

Untitled, 2020 Steven Shearer works primarily in painting, as well as in drawing, print, sculpture, and collaged found photography. He regularly conducts internet image searches and has created an archive of more than 63,000 images, creating a visual lexicon around portraiture and the human form. The works presented here are appropriated from Shearer’s personal archive and include both photographs purchased through eBay as well as those found in print and online. Through the sustained act of looking and searching over several years, the artist connects the iconography in these found images with depictions of different canonical styles and representation throughout art history. The reclining and sleeping figures presented on Shearer’s billboards recall the poses found in religious paintings and sculpture, wherein bodies appear to be in states of ecstasy or seem to defy gravity, as if they are floating, having been released of their earthly bonds. By virtue of giving way to their physical desire for sleep, the figures have unintentionally invited passersby to observe them at a heightened level of vulnerability and intimacy. In mining the internet and eBay – the most public of forums – for photographs of private moments and again making them public, Shearer offers a subversive and poignant commentary on the ways in which so many banal moments of our lives in contemporary society are made accessible for public consumption.

Steven Shearer Untitled, 2020 Installation mock-up: Steven Shearer Studio The Arbutus Greenway Billboards are generously supported by the Audain Foundation

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Curated by Capture Photography Festival

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Expo Boulevard: Anique Jordan

Works from the Darkie series, 2018 Anique Jordan’s practice employs the theory of hauntology, which suggests that elements from the past – ideas, trauma, memories – will persist in the present and into the future, as in the manner of a ghost. Her work spans performance and photography, mining historical archives while negotiating the possibilities of reimagined futures. Jordan focuses on examining the ways in which histories affect our bodies, particularly in relation to Black women. In these works from the Darkie series, Jordan turns her camera on her own body, acting as both photographer and subject while simultaneously obscuring and celebrating her corporeal form. Both images feature part of her legs presented against a stark white background, and in one photograph, a single braid drops into the picture plane. In presenting her nude body as a work of art, the artist raises questions around invisibility, generational trauma, and the grief suffered by and violence perpetrated against Black bodies in a contemporary context. Jordan’s work points to the complicated lived experience she negotiates. About this series, Jordan states: “I am reminded that so much artwork is haunted – not by searching to represent an idealized form or idea, but patronized by what cannot be represented. . . . It feels like I have to sit and try to understand this series again within the context of the current uprising . . . within the context of trying to find the balance between armour, protection, vulnerability and love. . . . I am actively striving to find a place where that same body can still be vulnerable, fragile, soft, happy . . . all of the things a body can’t be when it feels like it’s always at war.” Through displaying these images at a large scale in a space traditionally used for advertising, Jordan offers her presence in the world. The work is at once a celebration of her form, a reminder of its power, and a provocation to consider the reality she experiences daily.

Curated by Capture Photography Festival

April 3 – May 2 Sited on two billboards along Expo Blvd in Northeast False Creek, Vancouver

Anique Jordan Work from the Darkie series, 2018 Courtesy of the Artist Installation mock-up: Jocelyne Junker, Capture

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Pattison Outdoor Billboards Public Art Project

Rotating installation March 2021 – March 2022 Between Dreaming and Living #1, 1985 Mar. 18 – Jul. 14, 2021 Between Dreaming and Living #3, 1985 Jul. 15 – Nov. 17, 2021 Between Dreaming and Living #9, 1985 Nov. 18, 2021 – Mar. 15, 2022 Sited on a billboard at Kingsway and Fraser St, Vancouver

GreyChurch: Vikky Alexander

Works from the Between Dreaming and Living series, 1985 Since the 1980s, Vikky Alexander’s practice, which includes photography, sculpture, installation, and collage, has examined cultures of desire and utopian ideals. Early in her career, Alexander initiated what turned out to be a long-term interest in the use of appropriated imagery from magazines and other popular media sources, which she uses to critique consumer culture. On view successively from April 2021 to March 2022 are three works from her series Between Dreaming and Living, which was created in 1985 and first exhibited at the Coburg Gallery in Vancouver. The original images are 35mm colour slides that have been sandwiched together, printed in black and white, and framed with a Plexiglas overlay, the tint of which produces the colours seen in the final images. In these works, Alexander fuses found fashion photography with sublime landscapes to create a contrast between the urban and the rural as well as the natural and the unnatural. The vibrancy of the colours, the intensity of the figures’ expressions, and the eerie transparency created by layering disparate images creates a haunting quality that complicates the aura of romance and glamour inherent in the source material. Exhibiting the works on a billboard – traditionally a space dedicated to advertising – adds additional significance to the way in which the images sell ideals of different kinds: romantic love and utopian nature.

Vikky Alexander Between Dreaming and Living #1, 1985 Courtesy of the Artist and Downs & Ross, NY Installation mock-up: Jocelyne Junker, Capture The GreyChurch Billboard is generously supported by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill

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Curated by Capture Photography Festival

River District: Sarah Anne Johnson

Explosion, 2011 Explosion is from Sarah Anne Johnson’s Arctic Wonderland series, which she developed in 2009 while on the Arctic Circle residency, an annual expeditionary residency program for artists, scientists, architects, and educators. Speaking of her time there, Johnson describes the Arctic as “totally alien. I felt like I had landed on Mars. It was unlike anything I had even seen or done before.” Work from this series captures the vast, expansive landscape, both beautiful and barren, sublime and formidable. The two human figures in Explosion are dwarfed by their majestic surroundings – a potent reminder of the fragility of human life in the face of the natural world. Snow blankets the mountains and ground with no end in sight. Johnson’s work taps deep into the Canadian psyche and its long-held fascination with the majestic North, which has served as a defining element of Canadian identity and a symbol of the untamed wilderness that still forms much of the nation’s landscape Johnson’s practice continually explores alternatives to traditional “straight” photography, seeking to express the lived reality of particular experiences and the psychology of place. She states: “My general interest in photography is showing what something looks like, but also what it feels like. . . . [By] altering the surface or image in any way, I can describe what a space feels like psychologically, what it feels like to be there.” After printing Explosion, Johnson painted bold bursts of colour in the sky – fireworks that act as a stark contrast to the blue-grey surrounds. This painterly addition suggests a joyous, overwhelming feeling in experiencing this place, despite the desolate, frozen environment. This celebratory mark-making renders the images simultaneously real and imagined, challenging the notion of a photograph as a document or fact and expanding the possibilities of the medium to capture a different kind of truth: one that is subjective but nonetheless real.

March 22 – May 15 Sited on a billboard at SE Marine Dr and Kerr St, Vancouver

Sarah Anne Johnson Explosion, 2011 Courtesy of the Artist Installation mock-up: Jocelyne Junker, Capture

Curated by Capture Photography Festival

The River District Billboard is generously supported by Wesgroup

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TransLink Public Art Project

Stadium–Chinatown SkyTrain Station: Émilie Régnier

Works from the How do you love me? series, 2017 April 2021 – March 2022

Presented in partnership with TransLink

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In How do you love me?, Émilie Régnier presents black-and-white self-portraits with an Afro hairstyle as well as straightened hair, signifying versions of herself that are deemed more “Black” and more “white” by society at large. In some images, Régnier has cut and taped together film, which she has then scanned into one photograph, splicing together two different images of herself. In these pictures, the artist is literally bifurcated and the two versions of herself are juxtaposed, a visual that is suggestive to the viewer of the nature of the reality she must negotiate. Régnier pairs the photographs in this series with text that explores her relationship with her physical being and identity and the ways in which the world tries to categorize and label her based on comments she has received in the past about her physical appearance that often were influenced by how her hair was styled. The artist questions the notion of “mixed ancestry” and explores her experience as a child who grew up in Gabon in Central Africa and later on as a teenager and young adult who lived in Montreal: “We are embraced and rejected. Never pale or dark enough. . . . Black in the Western World and white on the African continent.” Born in Canada to Canadian and Haitian parents, Régnier spent most of her childhood in Central Africa before moving to Dakar in Senegal and to Paris. She is currently based in Montreal. Working in series, she explores through her artistic practice the cultural signifiers that portray the intersection of beauty, power, and identity. Régnier acknowledges that “as a person of mixed race, you portray the collision of two worlds. But you can also consolidate two distinct universes. I am white and Black, I am Canadian and Haitian.” How do you love me? confronts these two worlds.

Curated by Capture Photography Festival

Émilie Régnier Work from the How do you love me? series, 2017 Courtesy of the Artist

PUBLIC ART

Canada Line Public Art Project April–September

Aaron Leon Meryl McMaster Christine Howard Sandoval Hiro Tanaka Zinnia Naqvi Krystle Coughlin Silverfox Chun Hua Catherine Dong Brendan Fernandes

Canada Line Public Art Stations Map Waterfront Vancouver City Centre Yaletown–Roundhouse Olympic Village Broadway–City Hall

Vancouver

King Edward

Fraser River

Richmond

Aberdeen Lansdowne

For the 2021 multisited Canada Line Public Art Project, Capture has installed lens-based artworks at Canada Line stations throughout Greater Vancouver. This year’s project stretches across eight locations, from Waterfront to Lansdowne Station, and includes contributions from Capture and other local art organizations including Booooooom, Contemporary Art Gallery, The Polygon Gallery, and Richmond Art Gallery. Presented in partnership with Canada Line Public Art Program—InTransit BC

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Hiro Tanaka Work from the Chicharrón series, 2018 Courtesy of the Artist Installation mock-up: Jocelyne Junker, Capture

PUBLIC ART

Canada Line Public Art Project

Waterfront Station: Aaron Leon

Works from the Altered Landscape series, 2013–16 Altered Landscapes, by Secwépemc artist from Splatsín Aaron Leon, is a series of photographs in which the tricolour process conveys an experience of wonder in nature. Each photograph is captured through a long shutter exposure over the course of several hours, during which time Leon alternates red, blue, and green filters in front of the camera. Together, the filters neutralize each other to create a white, or “balanced,” negative. However, anything that moves in the landscape during this process – such as light, water, foliage, shadows, or clouds – is exposed differently to the various colour filters, appearing pearlescent in the finished image. Altered Landscapes honours the independent agency of the natural landscape, as interconnected places and processes that constantly travel and change. This agency registers in the photograph through the final polychromatic shimmering. Inherent in these vibrant colours is a sense of psychedelia, suggesting altered states of consciousness. This series invites participants to think of the land as a teacher and Knowledge Keeper, recognizing how slowing down and engaging thoughtfully with our environments leads to new, deeper understanding.

Aaron Leon Work from the Altered Landscapes series, 2013–16 Courtesy of the Artist

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Curated by Justin Ramsey, The Polygon Gallery

Vancouver City Centre Station: Meryl McMaster

From a Still Unquiet Place, 2019 Meryl McMaster’s photography incorporates highly stylized, symbolically rich imagery that asks viewers to consider the relationships between heritage, history, land, and identity. This work comes from a series titled As Immense as the Sky, in which McMaster re-enacts patrimonial stories and often photographs herself performing as historical and mythological figures who are prominent in narratives related to each chosen location. Disentangling narrative is a central concern of this series, which sees McMaster highlighting tensions between what is visible and audible and what is otherwise present, for example, her ancestors. In From a Still Unquiet Place, McMaster presents herself in the location of her father’s childhood home at Red Pheasant First Nation, Saskatchewan. Her head is obscured by a handcrafted headdress in a local military style. She is also wearing the tartan of her Scottish ancestors. In doing so, she evokes her complex ancestral identity while directing our attention to the history of tension and conflict on the land she traverses. Hanging off her back are lockets that hold collected images of her Indigenous and European ancestors. She rings vintage school bells that provoke her audience to consider Canada’s history of colonization and forced assimilation through the Canadian government’s administration of residential schools. The landscape depicted was once home to vast forests, the current lack of which points to complex histories of ownership, occupation, and use.

Curated by Capture Photography Festival

Meryl McMaster From a Still Unquiet Place, 2019 Courtesy of the Artist and Stephen Bulger Gallery and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain

PUBLIC ART

Canada Line Public Art Project

Yaletown–Roundhouse Station: Christine Howard Sandoval

Archival – for Rosario Cooper and my 10 year old self, 2020 January 22 – August 29 Presented in partnership with the Contemporary Art Gallery

Christine Howard Sandoval Archival – for Rosario Cooper and my 10 year old self (detail), 2020 Courtesy of the Artist

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Photography is inseparable from colonialism. While the violent extraction of land, labour, and resources from Indigenous Peoples was in practice long before the invention of the camera, it is both embodied by and perpetuated through the act of “taking” pictures and of organizing them into photographic archives by European settlers. In a meditation on land, language, and architecture – and without the use of a camera as a tool – Vancouverbased Obispeño Chumash and Hispanic artist Christine Howard Sandoval reconsiders the insidious meaning-making power of the colonial archive in Archival – for Rosario Cooper and my 10 year old self. This public installation is presented by the Contemporary Art Gallery as a component of the artist’s solo exhibition A wall is a shadow on the land. Howard Sandoval wraps the surface of the Canada Line station with a series of overlapping, scanned archival documents and images, forming a multifaceted collage. To build her composition, she draws from the notebooks of J. P. Harrington, a linguist who extensively documented Indigenous cultures and languages in California. She focuses on passages describing mission architecture and excerpts on his work with Rosario Cooper, who was the last language holder of Obispeño. Layered with these archival documents are schematic maps comparing Spanish mission and ancient Indigenous architectures as well as a drawing of Father Junípero Serra from Howard Sandoval’s fourth-grade school report on the California missions. With Archival – for Rosario Cooper and my 10 year old self, Howard Sandoval creates a presence for Indigenous ways of thinking about space and time and unsettles the archive through the act of enlargement, annotation, and collage. The stratum of material encourages multiple entry points for interpretation, calls into question the use value of the image, and resists the archive’s power to cement colonial histories. Embedded into the institutional systems of education, imperial archives inform generations; Howard Sandoval’s act of archival dislodging is a crucial step in unlearning history and excavating deep-rooted colonial foundations of knowledge.

Curated by Julia Lamare, Contemporary Art Gallery, and Kimberly Phillips, SFU Galleries

Olympic Village Station: Hiro Tanaka

Works from the Chicharrón series, 2018 Hiro Tanaka’s images capture encounters from his daily life, objects, still lifes, animals, and people, both banal and unusual, which he combines to surreal effect. Frequently travelling for his work, Tanaka acknowledges the sense of displacement he experiences and the way in which this prompts his image-making. He explains: “When you travel and you’re in a completely different environment, you experience so many more random events than you could ever have imagined. . . . Every day is different, removed from the usual flow of time and speed. I’m attracted to those unusual experiences.” Tanaka carefully crops and shoots his photographs in a way that seems to heighten and exaggerate the act of looking. His images are close-up, blurred, and angled, so that the artist’s hand is felt in every frame. His highly saturated scenes are shot with flash to intensify the visual experience for the viewer. In pairing these photographs – a lime-coloured bird with a green ping pong table, a close-up of a goldfish with a still life composition centred on an orange, drifting snow in the night with a white merry-go-round horse head – Tanaka suggests relationships between images that are not immediately apparent. They are, however, connected by “the air, the atmosphere, the colours, the things you can’t see with the eye, and the things that remind you of something else.” In creating these evocative connections, he acknowledges and seeks to employ the subjective nature of interpreting imagery.

Curated by Booooooom and Capture Photography Festival

Hiro Tanaka Work from the Chicharrón series, 2018 Courtesy of the Artist

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Canada Line Public Art Project

Broadway–City Hall Station: Zinnia Naqvi

Works from the Yours to Discover series, 2019 Zinnia Naqvi is an emerging interdisciplinary artist whose practice investigates the notion of authenticity and identity in the context of colonialism, especially in relation to cultural translation, language, and gender. These works are part of an ongoing series begun in 2019 that repurposes found photographs of the artist’s family visiting Canadian tourist sites prior to immigrating to Ontario. When reading images from Yours to Discover, viewers are invited to consider the many layers of narrative at play and to strengthen our awareness of the political context of their making. Naqvi subtly inserts critical commentary on Canadian ideals and immigrant experiences by juxtaposing these images with texts on national identity and race theory. She simultaneously invites playful engagement through a nostalgic association with board games. Importantly, these games themselves centre colonialist and capitalist agendas. Through the inclusion of her own arm and perfectly manicured fingernails, she works through what she calls “the precarity of brown bodies being included in these sites.” While these works examine the specific experience of Naqvi’s family confronting Canadian ideals and values, they also speak to broader patterns of cultural adaptation and belonging.

Zinnia Naqvi A Continuous Journey, 2019 Courtesy of the Artist

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Curated by Capture Photography Festival

2021

King Edward Station: Krystle Coughlin Silverfox

Works from the tth’í’ yáw nan (thread beads land) series, 2018 In tth’í’ yáw nan (thread beads land), Krystle Coughlin Silverfox overlays photography of the streets of Vancouver with scanned images of beads. Through this subject matter, Coughlin Silverfox conjures the long history of landscape painting and photography, but in the act of purposefully blurring and abstracting the scenes to create painterly and unspecific images of these sites, the artist simultaneously refuses this art historical tradition. As an artist of the Selkirk First Nation, Coughlin Silverfox identifies beading as an important cultural practice for herself, as well as for many other Indigenous people. Indigenous cultures have used beads as ornament, as a means by which to record knowledge of the landscape, and also as trade items, imbuing them with both cultural and economic significance. In tth’í’ yáw nan, the artist uses beads as stand-ins for Indigenous people in landscapes that are otherwise devoid of figures. In literally placing beads over the landscape, Coughlin Silverfox points to the complicated history of the terrain in this region and the possibilities for a different, as yet to be imagined future. By pointing to both the Western tradition of landscapes and the history of beading, this series simultaneously dismantles and extends cultural traditions.

Curated by Capture Photography Festival

Krystle Coughlin Silverfox Work from the tth’í’ yáw nan (thread beads land) series, 2018 Courtesy of the Artist

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Canada Line Public Art Project

Aberdeen Station: Chun Hua Catherine Dong

The Misfits, 2020 Utilizing digital techniques and photography, Chun Hua Catherine Dong’s work illustrates the rich symbolic value of Chinese textiles to explore issues of gender and culture. The phoenix and dragon are interconnected symbols in Chinese culture and are often used together to symbolize auspicious and blissful relations between husband and wife. In ancient Chinese history, the phoenix could be male or female. However, as the dragon became associated with Chinese emperors as an imperial symbol, the phoenix became exclusively associated with female identities. Within this diptych installed at Aberdeen Station, Dong envisions the phoenix and the dragon not as opposites but as mirrors of each other. Adding her own twist to a traditional medium, the artist uses blue to return masculinity to the phoenix and plum blossoms to offer femininity to the dragon. By placing these symbols within the rainbowed sea and mountain patterns, the artist suggests a contemporary perspective on Chinese tradition. Each image is animated with augmented reality through a free app that can be downloaded on a mobile phone or tablet. Once the image and sound are activated, graphic elements begin to dance, paired with an ethereal score of traditional Chinese music.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong The Misfits, 2020 Courtesy of the Artist

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Curated by Shaun Dacey, Richmond Art Gallery, in partnership with Richmond Public Art

2021

Lansdowne Station: Brendan Fernandes

The Left Space, 2020 Brendan Fernandes uses historically significant patterns to tell stories of power, camouflage, and resistance. Evoking a sense of urgency and emergency, “dazzle” patterns, which were painted on warships to confuse the enemy, are coupled with purple and magenta plaid, which at once symbolizes British colonial rule in Kenya, a warning to predators in the wild, and the flashing of police lights. Fernandes playfully wraps this symbolic print across Lansdowne Station. The gesture offers a moment to contemplate solidarity, resiliency, protection, and care during these trying times. The print seen in this installation is one used as a backdrop in The Left Space, an online performance by the artist. Faced with a global pandemic, we have had to reimagine the ways that we gather, protest, and achieve critical mass. In the fall of 2020, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto presented The Left Space, developed by Fernandes specifically for the online platform Zoom. In the performance, custom backdrops, such as the one seen here, and on-and-off camera sequences intervened in and aesthetically connected a team of dancers performing from their homes around the world. This installation is presented in conjunction with the artist’s exhibition Inaction, which was on view at the Richmond Art Gallery from February 12 to April 3, 2021.

Curated by Shaun Dacey, Richmond Art Gallery, in partnership with Richmond Public Art

Brendan Fernandes The Left Space, 2020 Courtesy of the Artist

PUBLIC ART

Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen

Yumna Al-Arashi

The 99 Names of God, 2018 Montañas, 2019

April 2–30 Sited on the east side of the Independent Building at the intersection of Broadway and Kingsway, Vancouver

Yumna Al-Arashi Still from The 99 Names of God, 2018 16mm film, 4:19 min. Courtesy of the Artist Yumna Al-Arashi Still from Montañas, 2019 16mm film, 4:20 min. Courtesy of the Artist Presented in partnership with grunt gallery, organizers of the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen

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Curated by Chelsea Yuill, Capture Photography Festival

Holy Terrain: Films by Yumna Al-Arashi Chelsea Yuill

Yumna Al-Arashi’s short films are parallel views, elsewhere. In The 99 Names of God (2018), Al-Arashi brings us to the Islamic practices in the Middle East, and in Montañas (2019), we see the climbing Cholitas of Bolivia scaling the Andes mountains, some of the highest peaks in the world.1 These films build awareness and offer resonance as Al-Arashi weaves together and celebrates specific types of Islamic and Indigenous womanhood, ritual, and landscape. With a background in social inquiry, which she studied at the New School in New York City, Al-Arashi’s Arab American perspective effortlessly blends intimacy, beauty, and mysticism within the documentary tradition. Her portraits of self and others become a form of poetry and resistance that nurtures a stream of under-recognized images that disarm the Western canon of film and photography.

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Chelsea Yuill Whether you’re in Yemen, North Africa, or Bolivia, your practice seems to be propelled by a curiosity around women that are on the edges of the colonial gaze. What inspires you to approach a subject and community, and what is your process in creating a film? Yumna Al-Arashi From an early age, my motivation was to combat a gaze that felt unfair, whether it be a colonial gaze, a male gaze, a post-9/11 American gaze. I often look to my own female lineage – the women in my life, my maternal ancestors. Although my gaze is inherently Western, since I’m an American, I still have a connection to Yemen and North Africa, so it’s a push and pull between both sides. I think that combination of diaspora offers an interesting perspective, a necessary one to speak and to see from, because I’ve always had to submit to the American ideology or be completely non-, the anti-. My work always tries to find where I fit between all these things. When I went to Bolivia to create Montañas with the Indigenous Aymara and Quechua women commonly known as the Cholitas, there was a question of ethics that came up in my mind, because it wasn’t my idea – it was an idea from Vogue Mexico & Latin America. I continued with the Vogue story because I knew I was reusing the privilege of that space in a way that was empowering and life-affirming for the Cholitas while offering visibility to many people within and outside Latin America. Bolivia didn’t

receive Vogue until recently, so the fact that the Cholitas were on the front cover of the twentieth anniversary issue, and weren’t selling fashion but were telling their story – for me that was epic. We spent days with the Cholitas before we pulled out our cameras. That process of sitting with them and witnessing their life and thinking about, “How can I tell their story without speaking on their behalf.” I was writing everything down from our interviews and piecing it together like a puzzle. It turned into this beautiful poem, and they were part of the process completely. The voices that are speaking in that film, that is all them. I think ethics is a constant everyday question of oneself and one’s motives. I’m always considering the ways the camera has been used over time, how it continues to be used as a form of violence. Rather than taking someone’s photograph, I want to make things with people. I want them to use my camera just as much as I am. CY Landscape plays an equally significant role for you and the communities you engage with. When watching your work, I sense both landscape and people are living monuments to be seen in reverence. Can you expand on how landscape is an important element to your artistic vision? YA I don’t think there’s any work of mine that doesn’t incorporate landscape or femininity. When I say femininity, I’m not speaking of the heteronormative female body, I’m speaking of nature and the earth – things that in my opinion are feminine. Face is a project I did where I travelled to Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria to photograph North African Indigenous women with tattoos. The tattoos inked all over their bodies were images of moon faces, complete knowledge of their crops, stories about their lovers, and their children. As gateswomen who move between realms, these spiritual markings offer protection on their journey. When I looked at the architecture, particularly the houses – this is something I never found in the literature – I saw the same exact symbols on their faces as were on the houses. I started to see how the tattoos honour the power of these structures, whether it’s a woman’s body, a home, the earth – her ability to protect and be protected. As a dying matriarchal tradition, I saw the landscapes dying too. The places around the equator are the ones that

Yumna Al-Arashi Work from the Face series, 2017 digital photograph 43.18 × 50.8 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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era was one of the most psychedelic eras, since they were seeking something bigger, something beyond representation. The way they began using astronomy and geometry during this time is incredible to me. I love how Islam is so anti-image: there is no iconography of god, prophets, or people in the stories. As for the Cholitas, the story of why they wear the bowler hats is rooted in British colonialists coming to CY I admire your unapologetic use of “beauty,” which is a term South America to build railroads. The Western version of that many contemporary Western artists have focused on appropriation is often the only one we focus on, since it’s dismantling. During my research, I recall you mentioning so problematic, but I also think that humans do that – we feminist theorist Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: see things we like, and we fashion it the way we feel. The The Erotic as Power,” so perhaps that word – “erotic” – is British completely changed the lives of Indigenous Peoples more precise. Could you speak to the ways you approach in the Andes mountains, so why not take a part of them and their style as a marker of that history? beauty and eroticism in your work? CY YA Audre Lorde writes how the erotic has been weaponized What were some surprises you had during the process of against us to make us feel uncomfortable in our bodies, ul- making The 99 Names of God and Montañas? timately to diminish our inner power. There is something YA that happens in the body when experiencing something beautiful. I could not for the life of me make something that When I was making The 99 Names of God, I fell in love with didn’t feel like it speaks to the feminine in me. I experience Islam in a way that I never thought I would. Growing up beauty in terms of colour and composition, structures be- as a Muslim in America was a negative experience. Once I ing beautiful, the way that shapes form together, the way stepped away, I reconnected with how much Islam speaks that nature is blooming. It takes my breath away. Anything about letting go of the ego, and I realized how much we’re I’ve cared about has never really been given the space of dying for this in the West. There was a moment when I was “beauty,” so I think I use it as a way to say, “Fuck you, this at a mosque with my producer; we were filming around the does have value.” Why not reclaim the image to occupy outside area, and there was a call to prayer. She said, “Hey, I’m going to go pray. Do you want to come with me?” It was and create spaces of beauty, whatever it is? something I hadn’t done since I was a child, but I knew all of the prayers by heart; my body remembered. There was CY There’s a lot of symbolism in your work that at times is root- one point where I had my forehead to the floor and I just ed in spirituality, knowledge, and fashion history. Could started sobbing. I thought, “This is so beautiful. I love it. I you tell me more about the dates, the metal star-shaped don’t understand how I’ve avoided this for so long.” In Montañas, I was moved by the Cholitas’ story. For device, and the bowler hats? decades they served international climbers as cooks, maids, and porters in the Andes, until recently they said, “Actually, YA In the Middle East and North Africa, dates are the fruit this is ours. We’re the rightful caretakers.” I was like, “Wow, of the land. Prophet Muhammad said one can get all the I’m surrounded by these badass women who have taken nutrients one needs in life by eating seven dates a day. It’s a back full control of their territory.” bit of a stretch, but he was alluding to respecting and taking care of the land: if you take care of it, it will take care of you. 1. Historically, the Spanish The second object you mention is a nautical star map term “cholita” has been used to discriminate against women of invented by Muslim scientists during the Golden Age of Amerindian ancestry. Recently, the Islam. This era birthed the foundations of the math, geIndigenous Aymara and Quechua ometry, and astronomy that we know today. I think that women of Bolivia have reclaimed are first being affected by climate change. So, my theory for the ending of this tradition, including climate change, is the result of the monoculture within monotheism. It steals so much of our beautiful diversity and culture and knowledge and care and understanding of the earth and of ourselves.

its meaning as one of dignity and respect. Paula Dear, “The Rise of the ‘Cholitas,’” BBC News, February 20, 2014, www.bbc.com/ news/magazine-26172313.

PUBLIC ART

Instagram Artwork

Simon Bermeo-Ehmann

Works from the CLIPS series, 2020 April 19 and 20 On view on Instagram at @capturephotofest

Simon Bermeo-Ehmann left to right: Juan Ponce de Leon, Multidimensional, and Copacetic from the CLIPS series, 2020 iPhone video, each 14 sec. looped Courtesy of the Artist

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The videos in Simon Bermeo-Ehmann’s CLIPS series layer stored footage of quotidian life from the artist’s personal archive that was shot casually on his phone. These short,nonnarrative moving images include hypnotic reflections on the surface of a body of water, the play of light on fabric, cars whizzing down the freeway, and the rushing water of fountains. Focusing on “moments of calm, peaceful banality,” as the artist refers to them, these works extend the act of looking, draw the viewer in to watch more closely and more carefully, and evoke a “trance-like state” through their simple, repetitive compositions. The meditative short clips find tranquility and poetic imagery hidden within the hustle and bustle of the everyday. Employing a feature within Instagram that allows videos to be layered over one another, Bermeo-Ehmann creates scenes-within-scenes and windows-within-windows. Sometimes this act of layering combines two very similar videos; at other times, the artist offers a purposefully jarring juxtaposition, actively evoking the remix culture that pervades contemporary media. This viewing experience mimics the way in which many people experience electronics today, through multiple devices or toggling between various websites and applications. Some of the videos are strangely surreal, featuring what feels like a portal to another world through a door or amid a field. Exhibited on Instagram, these videos were specifically created on the social networking and sharing service, which is just a decade old and one not traditionally used to present artwork. Using this platform as his medium, Bermeo-Ehmann confirms the continued conflation of the personal and the public, the mundane and the unusual, and the blurry lines around what qualifies as “art,” as well as suggesting new possibilities for the widespread distribution of work through this accessible and popular platform.

Curated by Emmy Lee Wall and Chelsea Yuill, Capture Photography Festival

Simranpreet Anand

Catalogue Insert

(blueprints for tying a dastaar), 2020 In (blueprints for tying a dastaar), produced especially for Capture Photography Festival as a limited-edition catalogue insert, Simranpreet Anand considers material memory and embodied knowledge by tracing the everyday ritual of dastaar (turban) tying through a cyanotype process. The work was created through a cameraless process: the textile was soaked in photosensitive chemicals, tied, and then worn; the dark blue hue demarcates areas touched by the sun, while the lighter areas are those that remained hidden in the folds. Unravelled and displayed as a blueprint of the process of tying, the dastaar fabric retains an imprint of how it was worn. Dastaar styles within the Sikh faith are numerous and are associated with different diasporic and spiritual communities around the world. Each individual dastaar retains effects of particular washing, folding, wrapping, and pleating processes, as well as the associations of faith and style that have been imprinted into the fabric, to document a personal relationship to the Sikhi of the wearer. This printed edition is part of a series of works in which Anand has worked with close friends and family, learning a multiplicity of styles and stories related to dastaars. Conventional terminology around photography suggests a troubling power dynamic lodged in the history of photographic practice. Terms such as “shoot,” “capture,” and “take” suggest both a violent and an extractive relationship between the camera and its subjects. Anand’s decision to use a cameraless process, which results in abstract images, is a deliberate departure from the many photographs depicting men in turbans as synonymous with terrorism following 9/11. She considers ways in which the turban has become the dominant signifier for diasporic Sikhs, who, in the face of oppressive governmental and societal suspicion, have sought to uphold with pride the dastaar as that which distinguishes them from others. As such, her work speaks to the limitations of photography as a form that claims to capture reality, and it celebrates the embodied knowledge of the dastaar wearer that is deposited in the fabric. The artist acknowledges the generous support of the BC Arts Council and would like to thank Conner Singh VanderBeek and Christopher Lacroix for their assistance in realizing this project.

Insert: Simranpreet Anand

Curated by Kimberly Phillips and cheyanne turions, SFU Galleries

(blueprints for tying a dastaar) (detail), 2020 double-sided risograph print on archival paper 12.7 × 40.64 cm Courtesy of the Artist

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Yasumasa Morimura Self-portrait (Actress) After Marlene Dietrich, 1996 chromogenic print 118.5 × 93.3 cm Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of Vivian and Morris Saffer

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FEATURED EXHIBITIONS 67–73

75–79

Pictures and Promises Vancouver Art Gallery Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography The Polygon Gallery

Grant Arnold

Susan Bright

Ken Lum Steve, 1986 chromogenic print on acrylic sheet 203.5 × 138.5 × 5.5 cm Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery Acquisition Fund

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Group Show

Pictures and Promises

Pictures and Promises is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery in collaboration with Capture Photography Festival and is co‑curated by Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director, Capture Photography Festival.

Vancouver Art Gallery

Generously supported by the Audain Foundation

February 20 – September 6

www.vanartgallery.bc.ca

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS

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

Barbara Kruger Poster for Pictures and Promises: A Display of Advertisings, Slogans, and Interventions Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

1. Carrie Rickey, “Pictures and Promises: The Kitchen,” Artforum, March 1981, 86. 2. Barbara Kruger, press release for Pictures and Promises, the Kitchen, 1981, http://archive.thekitchen. org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/ PressRelease_Kruger_1981.pdf. Warhol was represented in the exhibition, perhaps to provide a point of reference for the work of the other artists.

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Drawn from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s collection, Pictures and Promises brings together artworks that depict, employ, or critique the conventions and formal vocabularies that have come to pervade mass media, advertising, and the culture of commerce. The exhibition, which focuses primarily on lens-based works produced over the past century, reflects on some of the ways artists have engaged the iconography of consumerism, the forms through which it propagates meaning, and its role in shaping collective understandings of the world around us. The exhibition’s title refers to the ground-breaking 1981 exhibition Pictures and Promises: A Display of Advertisings, Slogans and Interventions, curated by the now widely known American artist Barbara Kruger. On view at the Kitchen, a centre for video, music, and dance in New York, from January 8 to February 5, 1981, Kruger’s exhibition combined print advertising for jewellery, electronics, and men’s and women’s fashions and excerpts from television commercials for cigarettes, perfume, and the US Navy with works by artists including Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer, Dara Birnbaum, Victor Burgin, and Kruger herself. Art and advertising intermingled: a text-based work by Holzer and photographs by Prince and Burgin were placed adjacent to ads for jewellery and products from General Electric and Sony. A television ad by Birnbaum – commissioned by the cognac purveyor Rémy Martin – was presented with excerpts from TV ads for Marlboro cigarettes and a Waterpik shower massage. Many of the two-dimensional artworks were mounted directly onto the gallery walls without a frame, implying a level of equivalence with the other components of the exhibition that undercut the conventional hierarchy between art and mass culture. The implication being, as the art critic Carrie Rickey noted at the time, that “‘art information’ and ‘commercial information’ [could be] subsets of an inclusive repository of images. . . . Do they share a collective semiology, and, if so, how can we decode them?”1 This destabilization of boundaries was not, in itself, particularly radical. Artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and many others had already been crossing this terrain and using appropriated imagery for two decades. The emergence of conceptual art in the 1960s had drawn attention to the mechanisms and institutional frameworks that – in Euro–North American culture at least – determined what is and what isn’t “art.” What marked a break between this new generation and pop art in particular, but also neo-Dada and conceptual art, was the overtly critical stance most of the artists represented in Pictures and Promises took in relation to the emblems, protocols, and graphic techniques that had come to pervade everyday life through their deployment in mass media. Here, the cool neutrality of Warhol and Lichtenstein was displaced by approaches that attempted to open up the codes of advertising, interrupting the pleasure evoked by conventional responses to publicity. The aim was, as Kruger put it, to couple “the ingratiation of wishful thinking with the criticality of knowing better.”2 The presentation of Pictures and Promises at the Kitchen corresponded with a historical moment in North America and Europe marked by

Vikky Alexander Obsession #3, 1983 gelatin silver print, vinyl type, coloured Plexiglas 92.0 × 61.0 cm Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of the Artist

the proliferation of new forms of advertising conceived specifically for an increasingly media-saturated culture – developments that Kruger would have been familiar with from her time as a magazine designer for Condé Nast Publications and picture editor for Mademoiselle magazine. Advertising strategies that focused on branding – which deploy combinations of text and imagery that operate on both symbolic and descriptive levels to construct an image that holds a significance beyond the functional properties of the commodity – began in earnest in the mid-1950s. By the mid-1970s, marketing campaigns began to combine branding with newly developed “positioning” techniques that were not exactly about the product itself. As marketing consultants Al Ries and Jack Trout put it in their book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, published the same year Pictures and Promises was presented at the Kitchen: “The basic approach of positioning is not about creating something new and different. But manipulating what’s already up there in the mind [of the prospect]. . . . To retie the connections that already exist.” 3 Set against this background of new marketing strategies and ever more spectacularized forms of consumption, Kruger’s exhibition occupies an emblematic position within the development of a mode of postmodernism in which analysis of the

imagery that permeates consumer culture – including its role in defining gender, race, and social status – seemed more urgent than adding new pictures to a world already saturated with images. Of the artworks on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery, those by Richard Prince (who participated in Kruger’s exhibition), Vikky Alexander, and Ken Lum are paradigmatic of the new ways in which artists approached photographic images during the 1980s. Prince’s Live Free or Die 3 (1987) and Alexander’s Obsession (1983) use rephotographed images from magazines, a method of working adopted by a number of artists during the 1980s that finds parallels in the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s assertion that the real has become subsumed in a “simulacrum” of endless images. Live Free or Die 3 is from a larger body of Prince’s work that engages with cowboys and bikers as embodiments of a mythologized masculinity in American culture. The work comprises nine details copied from a photograph Prince found in a biker magazine – one submitted by a reader rather than a professional photographer – depicting a woman astride a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. In what seems like a deliberate pun, Prince arranged, or “ganged,” the details into a grid laid out on a single sheet of paper. The division of the original image into segments, with 3. Al Ries and Jack Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 18.

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differing degrees of enlargement, that focus on the wom- postures convey a sense of familiarity that is unhinged by an’s torso and the motorcycle’s fuel tank, along with the the large scale of the works and the custom-designed logos amateurish technique of the photographer, exaggerates the that brashly identify the depicted subjects. The size of the fetishization of the female body and the overblown phallic works and the manufactured smoothness of their surfaces character of the machine she straddles. The parodic tone formally fuse image and logo – but the combination is of the work – reinforced through the title’s reference to unsettling. Portraits of this size are generally associated the cliché of the motorcycle as an emblem of individual with prominent personas and corporate spaces, while freedom and rebellion – is immediately apparent, but it is the visual presence of the logos – with their evocation of also countered by a sense that the work wants something branding – seems to overpower the domesticity of the from the viewer, as they attempt to mentally reconfigure pictures’ settings. While the tropes deployed in Lum’s Portrait-Logo series the details back into a completed image. The implication being that it’s difficult to engage with a fiction without call up the standardization of daily life in the consumer cultures of the Western world, the implication is that being at least partly pulled into it. Alexander’s Obsession also uses pictures copied from difference is not entirely subsumed. In Ollner Family, for magazines, although the sources for her material have example, the ethnic makeup of the family in Lum’s staged higher production values and broader circulation than portrait – a Euro-Canadian father, an Asian Canadian the subculture periodical that provided the image for mother, and a mixed-race daughter – speaks to both the Prince’s work. Obsession is composed of eleven black-and- conditions of displacement that have been fundamental white copies of professionally made colour photographs to modernity and the capacity of emotional bonds to of the American supermodel Christie Brinkley – the first transgress the processes of racialization. The smiles and model to be featured on three successive covers of Sports apparent self-confidence of the family imply optimism Illustrated’s “Swimsuit” issue, from 1979 to 1981 – in pre- and a sense that individuality is not entirely effaced by dictably glamorous poses and locations. Alexander has en- convention. Nonetheless, the image of the nuclear family larged the photographs well beyond the magazine format is dominated by the intensity of the logo, which positions of the appropriated images, and some are conspicuously them within the patriarchal lineage of the father. While photographs now have a prominent place in larger-than-life size. Each print is overlaid with a sheet of yellow-tinted Plexiglas, one with Brinkley’s name and the the collections and exhibition programs of art museums others with numbers rendered in vinyl tape to indicate across North America and Europe, it was only in the 1980s the image’s position in the overall sequence. This mode of that most of these institutions – including the Vancouver presentation, which visually flattens the picture, and the Art Gallery – began to collect and exhibit photography use of familiar images cropped just enough to highlight seriously. It’s something of a paradox that the elevation in the overdetermined character of the bone structure, toned the art world of what is commonly referred to as “straight” body, and pale skin of the model, diverts a conventional photography – discrete, small-scale prints with little or male-identified reading, instead turning attention to the no manipulation – coincided with the critical challenges fairly restricted repertoire of codes used to elicit desire in to both the “truth value” of photography and claims that the medium is a purely visual language that were taken glamour images. Lum’s Portrait-Logos of the mid-1980s differ from the up by artists such as Kruger, Prince, Alexander, and Lum. works by Prince and Alexander in that Lum appropriates a In relation to this exhibition and Capture Photography distinct photographic idiom rather than a particular image. Festival as a whole, it’s worth noting that, right from the The inexpensive family portraits that populate end tables origins of photography, questions of authorship figured in middle- and lower-class North American homes share prominently in discussions about the medium’s status as art a set of conventions that is clearly recognizable in works and its relationship to mass culture, although the terms of such as Steve (1986) and Ollner Family (1986), which these original debates differed substantially from those of evoke the familiar ritual of applying makeup, arranging the 1980s. From the mid-nineteenth century on, the discushair, and selecting clothing in order to present the camera sion focused largely on the question of whether the camera, with an image equivalent to the sitter’s sense of self. The as a machine, overwrote the individual subjectivity of its uniform lighting, ubiquitous smiles, and standardized operator, and later – as photographs became commonplace

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in everyday life in North America and Europe – interest turned toward identifying what might distinguish an “art photograph” from a commercial, vernacular, or newspaper image (questions that were turned on their head in Kruger’s exhibition). The terms of these debates were put forward clearly in “Photographs of America: Walker Evans,” an essay that the writer and philanthropist Lincoln Kirstein contributed to Walker Evans’s now canonical art book American Photographs, published in 1938 in conjunction with a solo exhibition of Evans’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.4 As Kirstein sees it, from its inception in 1839 through to the 1880s, photography was a nascent technology in which the articulation of “the human personality, the incidental individual comment of the photographer” through the photographic image had not yet entered the realm of possibility. While admiring the work of photography’s earliest practitioners, he argues – in the gendered terms of the time – that they held “a simple but overwhelming interest in the object which was set before his machine.”5 He disparages the developments that followed this early period, condemning both the pretensions through which soft-focus pictorialism claimed its status as art and the development of “candid-camera” photojournalism, which Kirstein argues – prefiguring later discussions on the social operations of photography – promised truth but delivered only an “accidental revelation which does far more to hide the real fact of what is going on than to explode it.”6 For Kirstein, the real possibilities for photography lay in an approach exemplified in works such as Evans’s Torn Movie Poster (1931), Bowery Lunchroom (1933), and Gas Station Reedsville, West Virginia (1936), all included in this exhibition. Evans’s approach emphasizes the descriptive power of the image while – in comparison to the work of his contemporaries like Edward Steichen – downplaying overt indications of the photographer’s sensibilities, as if the maker of the image is almost anonymous. As Kirstein puts it: “The facts of our homes and times, shown surgically without the poet’s or painter’s comment or necessary distortion, are the unique contemporary field of the photographer. . . . It is for him to fix and show the whole aspect of our society, the sober portrait of its stratifications, their backgrounds and embattled contrasts.” 7 Evans’s images of signs, posters, and billboards can be seen as precursors to the use of appropriated imagery four decades later by Kruger, Prince, and Alexander, although his frame of reference was substantially different. For

Walker Evans Torn Movie Poster, 1931 gelatin silver print 25.3 × 20.2 cm Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery Acquisition Fund

4. At the time, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was one of the few art museums that collected and exhibited photographs, and it played a dominant role in framing the debates on photography as art until the late twentieth century. For a critical analysis of photography at MoMA, see Christopher Phillips, “The Judgement Seat of Photography,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 15–46. 5. Lincoln Kirstein, “Photographs of America: Walker Evans,” in Walker Evans: American Photographs: Books on Books 2 (New York: Errata Editions, 2011), unpaginated. Kirstein is generally believed to have funded the publication of American Photographs. Born into a wealthy family in Buffalo, NY, Kirstein’s patronage was wide ranging. He is best known as a co-founder of the New York City Ballet company and as a writer, editor, and impresario. He was an important figure in the development of MoMA and was closely involved in a New York community of queer artists. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid.

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Zhang O We are all the Future of the Earth, 2008 inkjet print 80.5 × 99.5 cm Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of the Artist

Evans, an analysis of the subject positions embedded in advertising was not on the horizon of possibility, and he admired the work of sign makers, postcard photographers, and illustrators as manifestations of vernacular culture. Nonetheless, his images of signs – whether billboards in front of dilapidated row housing or cardboard advertisements pasted over holes in the walls of a tenant farmer’s shack – amplify the depredations of the Great Depression, the prevalent racism of American culture, and the desire for escape in the spectacle of entertainment as the primary themes of American Photographs. Although Kirstein describes Evans’s images as “social documents,” documentary was a category that Evans explicitly rejected, at least later in his life. In a 1971 interview, he famously noted that documentary is “a very sophisticated and misleading word. . . . The term should be documentary style. An example of a literal document would be a police photograph of a murder scene. . . . A document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore, art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style.”8 Even if what Evans might have meant by “documentary style” is a bit slippery, its influence can be seen in the work of artists ranging from Robert Frank and Diane Arbus to Bernd and Hilla Becher and Jeff Wall. Of the artists included in this exhibition, threads of influence can be found in the use of signage in the urban landscapes of Roy Arden’s Condominium Advertisement, Vancouver, BC (1992) and Fred Herzog’s New Life Joke Shop (1957); the window display of vernacular objects depicted in Diane Evans’s Untitled (2005–07); a roadside recruiting billboard for the US Navy featured in Charles Gagnon’s Untitled (1971); and the celebrations of vernacular culture pictured in Henri Robideau’s Giant Ravel Piano Concerto, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1976 (1978) and Lorraine Gilbert’s Untitled (1982–86), a photograph of the enticingly lurid lighting of an amusement park at dusk. Parallels to the work of Kruger and Lum, as well as Evans, can be found in the work of Zhang O, whose photographs are often described as having a straightforward documentary character. The title of Zhang’s The World Is Yours (But Also Ours) (2008) project was taken from a 1957 speech given by Mao Zedong to a congress of Chinese youth, and the format of these works follows the combination of image and text found in posters from the Cultural Revolution. Each work in the series features a fairly conventional photograph of a cheerful-looking Chinese teenager casually standing in front of a Chinese monument. Each

8. Walker Evans, interview by Leslie George Katz, 1971, ASX, https:// americansuburbx.com/2011/10/ interview-an-interview-withwalker-evans-pt-1-1971.html.

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wears a T-shirt with an English text that has obvious errors in translation or doesn’t make sense, as in “Thow Your Hand Up CHINA. Looking inti my eyes touch my heart” and “WALKIN «ONTHE« OVKRLOVS «NATUR«.” The Chinese versions of the English titles, which are based on well-known slogans from Mao Zedong, slang, and advertising taglines, appear below each image. Zhang made the photographs for The World Is Yours (But Also Ours) in Beijing during the months leading up to the 2008 Summer Olympics – a moment when Chinese citizens were acutely aware that, since the nation was assuming a heightened role on the world stage, a successful staging of the Olympics was imperative. The apparent errors in translation, the evident fascination with Western pop culture, and the hollow tone of the slogans – which sometimes echo the aspirational rhetoric of both the Olympics and state propaganda – evoke the disjunctions that mark the merging of cultures and the discrepancies between the promise of harmonious prosperity and the realities of everyday life. Of the works featured in this exhibition, Ron Terada’s Signage (2002) most closely mimics a “document,” in Evans’s definition of the word. Terada’s practice takes existing cultural idioms as subject matter and deploys them in a variety of mediums, including painting, illuminated signs, printed brochures, photography, and soundtracks for exhibitions. Signage is from a body of work that addresses the significance of place and its often troublesome position in the art world. The artist produced the work for an exhibition titled Signage at Vancouver’s Catriona Jeffries gallery by combining a photograph of a standard highway sign marking the geographical boundary of the city with text indicating the artists represented in the Signage exhibition as well as venues in Toronto and London where other Vancouver-based artists represented by Catriona Jeffries were showing. The work appeared as an advertisement in the June 2002 issue of Artforum, and a framed print of this advertisement was then hung in the gallery as Terada’s contribution to the exhibition, thereby situating the publicity for the exhibition as the work itself. Produced at a time when Vancouver had become internationally recognized for the photographic work of artists such as Rodney Graham and Jeff Wall, Terada’s Signage work drew attention to the way in which the city had become a brand that could be used to attract attention in a highly competitive art market, with exponential growth in pricing. However, the work’s implications are broader

that the specific context it refers to, and it opens up much larger questions surrounding branding and identity in the art world – a topic many of its inhabitants prefer to avoid. As Terada’s work suggests, branding is a pervasive strategy used to stake out territory or to establish an identity by commercial galleries, art museums, photography festivals, and art journals. And, as the extensive and ongoing discussions on how the “photographer’s eye” of Walker Evans might be discerned in his “nearly anonymous” images indicate, the notion of branding also extends to the necessity for an artist to articulate a visible identity or cohesive logic as part of their practice, if they want to be recognized in the art world. Terada’s collapsing of publicity into an artwork takes us back to the destabilization of the boundaries between art and advertising enacted in Kruger’s original Pictures and Promises exhibition in 1981. While Kruger continues to engage in an extended critique of cultural formations in which identity and human value are closely linked to consumption, she has never claimed her work sits outside the marketplace, noting specifically that “there is nothing outside the market.”9 While her work takes on diverse forms and has been presented in unconventional contexts, it carries a recognizable identity through her use of a specific red tone for her frames and a particular font for her text in combination with high-contrast monochrome photomontages. Further to that, the extraordinary ability of marketing agencies to co-opt any tactic intended to subvert the mechanisms of advertising in their search for ever hipper publics is exemplified by the logo of the Supreme clothing company – which is clearly based on the formal vocabulary of Kruger’s work. Pointing this out is not meant to suggest that the critical capacity of art is entirely subsumed by the market; rather, it’s intended to draw attention to the way in which the interests of artists and institutions are continually renegotiating discursive fields as they form – and are formed by – branded identities and market structures that permeate life in cultures and economies driven by relentless consumption.

9. Barbara Kruger, quoted in Mayer Rus, “A Bold Social Commentary since the 1970s, Barbara Kruger’s Art Is as Incisive as Ever,” Wallpaper, January 26, 2019, https://www.wallpaper.com/art/ barbara-kruger-profile.

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Daniel Gordon Clementines, 2011 archival pigment print 76.2 × 101.6 cm Courtesy of the Artist and James Fuentes Gallery, NY

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Group Show

Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography

Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography is organized by Aperture Foundation, New York, and is curated by Susan Bright and Denise Wolff.

The Polygon Gallery

The exhibition at The Polygon is generously supported by the Babalos Family and Paula Palyga and David Demers through their membership in The Polygon’s Exhibition Circle.

March 4 – May 30

www.thepolygon.ca

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Photographs of food are rarely just about food. They hold our lives and time up to the light. As a subject that is commonly at hand, food has been and continues to be widely depicted. Many of the photographers in this exhibition demonstrate that the most obvious of subjects is often the most demanding, and photographs of food – much like food itself – can invoke deep-seated questions and anxieties about issues such as consumption, aspiration, tradition, gender, race, desire, wealth, poverty, pleasure, revulsion, and domesticity. It can be a carrier for all kinds of fantasies and realities, and photographs of food can be complicated and deceptive, touching on many aspects of our lives, both public and private. In addition, these pictures can be found in all sorts of places – not only in cookbooks, but also in art, fashion, and advertising, or as vernacular, industrial, and editorial photography. But despite the ubiquity of photographs of food – or perhaps because of it – these images are rarely written about in their entirety. Early photographs of food feature in two parallel histories: that of art and that of cookbooks. But both environments show that photography is the magpie medium, borrowing, copying, and appropriating from other practices with bravura to create something unique. Early nineteenthcentury art photographers faithfully followed the traditions of painting, reproducing established genres and calling upon the same strategies and symbolism. Early photographic still lifes, in emulation of paintings, gestured allegorically toward the different states of human existence by depicting certain foods: peaches for fertility, apples as the forbidden fruit, or grapes to reference the Greek god Dionysus, insinuating excess and good living. Early photographers concentrated on the richness of objects, the things that make up our world – turning what was visible into artifacts and transforming them to resonate beyond mere subject matter. But alongside allegorical meanings and similarities to painting, the photographing of food has also shown photography’s great differences to painting and the insecurities about its own status that have plagued its history. This can be seen in the richly toned black-and-white still lifes by Roger Fenton: the food he photographed may resonate with the history of painting that went before it, but it also works to show the abilities of photography to the fullest. Filling his scenes with rich textures and shapes to heighten the senses and show off his skill, he showed great dexterity in illustrating depth on a flat surface – something that painting could do more easily, using colour and the three-dimensional texture of paint. Without an established history within art, photography had yet to prove itself – so the frames of Fenton’s photographs were trimmed to a curve at the top, as if to signal his work as art, rather than mere document. This device of trimming prints to this shape was common among other early photographers, such as Julia Margaret Cameron, in order to mimic the actual shape of the paintings they were directly referencing. As such, the picture isn’t about what is visible, and what is seen in the world, but more about what is photographed, and what is art. But it is perhaps meals as they appear in vernacular photography that tell us the most about our relationship to food. Snapshots of food have

Susan Bright

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increased and asserted themselves over the history of the medium, to the point where they are now part of the contemporary eating experience, captured with smartphones and distributed through image-sharing apps. But holidays and celebrations were being photographed almost as soon as cameras became readily available. Due to the expense of very early photography, it was mostly the pursuit of the wealthy. Food did appear in nineteenth-century family photographs, but it was more into the twentieth century, as the camera became more accessible, that food often took centre stage. Since then, snapshots have been taken when extended families gather together around the table. Birthdays, parties, and weddings are often photographed around the cake, and summer vacation pictures would seem lacking without the requisite ice cream cone or picnic shot. The photographs that we now associate with the commercial practice of “food photography” (as opposed to food in still life, art, or vernacular images) undoubtedly have their roots in the rise of magazines and packaged foods. The interwar period saw an explosion of inventive printing and publishing techniques in photography. No one mastered these methods more than Nickolas Muray, who, while working in Germany, had perfected experimental colour processes while studying photoengraving and working for a publishing company. On moving to America, he transformed that skill into a commercial practice, creating vibrant tableaux for magazines in both advertising and

editorial. His photographs of food and homemaking are among his best, bringing a new and daring aesthetic to magazines like McCall’s. These heavily styled scenes of food offered a fantastical escape and a vision of America far removed from the food shortages and anxieties of the war. Due in part to the success of Muray’s photographs, the almost Technicolor results of the three-colour carbro process became a staple of American lifestyle and fashion magazines from the late 1940s into the 1950s – despite the fact that the process itself was fiddly and time consuming. Such books and the magazines of the time also gave rise to the art and business of food styling. Often shot under hot lights in the studio, food had to be meticulously arranged to last while the photographer worked. Heavily propped and fastidiously set up, food photography from this period relied on techniques that have become somewhat mythic and, of course, made the food completely inedible – such as spraying it with hairspray so it would appear shiny and fresh. Ice cream might be made from powdered sugar, ice cubes from plastic, foam from soapsuds, and condensation with glycerin. But it is not just the food that made a food photograph important; the tableware, tablecloths, garnishing, and props showed mastery in making a scene complete, and were illustrative of the collaborative teamwork needed in commercial photography. The 1960s and 1970s saw the increased publication of cookbooks and a shift from postwar ideas about national Peter Fischli and David Weiss Fashion Show, from Wurstserie (Sausage Series), 1979 chromogenic print 43.18 × 53.34 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Sprüth Magers

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identity to a desire for armchair travel, a precursor to the multiculturalism of the 1980s. Popular cookbooks with skillful photographs illustrated the advances in colour printing and food styling in North America, Europe, and beyond, reflecting changes and attitudes particular to each nation. There was also an increase in books featuring foods from a single country, as recipes and accompanying photographs from Mexico, Morocco, India, and Thailand became popular. This was the golden age of jet travel, and Western television began to feature more “ethnic” chefs. This fascination with the exotic also inspired the American Time-Life Foods of the World cookbook series (1968–78). Coinciding with this explosion of cookbooks, the 1960s and 1970s also saw the rise of conceptual art and, with it, artists who used banal subject matter, mixed high and low culture, and favoured repetition and seriality, both in topographical and typological explorations. They used food for comic effect, as can be seen in John Baldessari’s Choosing Green Beans (1972), Fischli and Weiss’s Wurstserie (Sausage Series, 1979), and Marion Faller and Hollis Frampton’s series Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion (1975). Marcel Broodthaer’s La Soupe de Daguerre (1975) is more mysterious, however: Are these ingredients for soup? Unlikely, as this combination of “real” fish and tissue cutouts could hardly be cooked. At the bottom is a label that suggests museums and classification. Here, Broodthaers presents food as a puzzle – very much at odds with the bombastic messaging of pop art, in which food also often featured, and the advertising and lifestyle aims of cookbooks. Perhaps he is parodying oversimplified representations of food and the polarized positions across hierarchies and genres in the artificial divisions between high and low culture. While much art of this time favoured systems, artists also turned to performance and visual playfulness.

Semiotics of the Kitchen by Martha Rosler (1975) does not use food, only the kitchen equipment. In this performancevideo piece, Rosler works through the kitchen in alphabetical order – apron, bowl, chopper, dish, eggbeater, and so on – demonstrating each appliance with increasing aggression, in a parody of the growing popularity of cooking shows on TV and the idea that a woman’s place is in the kitchen. Rosler has said of her work, “I was concerned with something like the notion of ‘language speaking the subject,’ and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.” The theoretical language of semiotics gave artists much-needed linguistic and visual tools to reclaim their work from critics and their value judgments, often to comic effect. The philosopher Roland Barthes famously illustrated how the tools of semiotics could be applied to the messages and meanings of images in his 1964 essay “Rhetoric of the Image,” using an ad for the pasta brand Panzani. By deconstructing the scene, he showed (among other things) how “Italianicity” could be read in it. These systems for the construction of meaning are key to how food is photographed in cookbooks and popular culture, both of which rely on easy readings across a wide audience. Clichés and stereotypes suggest authenticity – especially when illustrating food from other cultures. This device would later be used by artists such as Martin Parr and William Yang, who play on such clichés for instant recognition and a visual shortcut to understanding. During the 1990s and into the 2000s, the rise of the celebrity chef, foodie culture, and eating out contributed to a rise in the popularity of cookbooks once again. Photography became increasingly dominant in these books, and a much more relaxed style prevailed. The pictures featured food that you wanted to eat – food as it was cooked, rather than overly styled and presented on the table. The styling was made to look somewhat nonexistent, and, most important, photographers were more likely to be credited. Taking photographs for cookbooks became a more credible, legitimate space in which artists could work. Well-known photographers have shot for cookbooks – including Joel Meyerowitz, Adam Bartos, Richard Learoyd, Ron Haviv, and Jason Fulford, to name a few – illustrating the fact that photographs have become more important than the recipes in many instances. With the rise of digital platforms, printed books needed to rethink their shelf appeal in order to reach consumers,

Martha Rosler Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975 video with sound, 6:00 min. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), NY

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and publishers have reached into the bag of tricks from art and design books. This has elevated cookbooks to become like photo books; their pictures have become more aligned with still life and art practices. Though the pictures, in some cases, could operate in a proper art book, in a cookbook they remain connected to lifestyle and taste, continuing to provide an aspirational experience that situates the reader in a very particular time and sensibility. They are for show, for seductive visual pleasure, and for longing – all very far away from the labours of shopping, cooking, and washing up, but not so far away from the very first cookbooks, such as Le Livre de Cuisine. The distinctions between art and commerce that previously defined photographs of food are becoming much finer with the increasing cultural acceptance of commercial food and product photography, as well as a renewed interest in its history and pioneers such as Nickolas Muray. At the same time, fine-art photography has returned to the still life genre with new vigour. No longer at polar ends of acceptability, a crop of up-and-coming commercial photographers – such as Keirnan Monaghan and Theo Vamvounakis, Grant Cornett, William Mebane, Trey Wright, Lauren Hillebrandt, Paloma Rincón, and Stephanie Godot – produce exciting work that is often indistinguishable from art and its recent fascination with still life. Artists such as Maurizio Cattelan and Roe Ethridge also reference the commercial food photography of the 1950s through the 1970s, while Daniel Gordon and Laura Letinsky incorporate lifestyle pictures found in magazines and online into their collaged still lifes. In short, many artists are turning to deconstruction, collage, montage, and appropriation to comment on the ubiquity of certain subjects on the internet – food being one of them. Right now, commercial food photography is incorporating the tropes of fine art, while fine art simultaneously comments on commercial and digital practices. This creates a seesaw of taste-making, and the connotations of aspiration, class, and style are up for examination. All the while, irony, deadpan humour, retro styling, and bold statements dominate. Much of it may seem superficial – but at a time of renewed nationalism around the globe, when we are once again grappling with the intricacies of nationhood in the culture at large, photography is an important marker of how food can define who we are. And yet, despite how food has been photographed in art and commerce, it is how it has been photographed in vernacular imaging that has perhaps had the biggest impact

on food as subject matter – and how those photographs are consumed. Photo sharing on social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter have made photography part of the dining experience itself. So many people are taking pictures of their meals that restaurants expect each party to take more time at their table. And for those restaurants, as well as for specialty stores and brands, this sharing, tagging, and geotagging of food photos has become a kind of grassroots advertising scheme, in which both the authenticity of the author (and their established connection to the viewer) and FOMO (fear of missing out) might drive others to want the same experience – and it’s all delivered directly into the hands, homes, and pockets of an attentive audience. Photographing your food has never been more popular or encouraged. This may explain why traditional commercial photography has simultaneously become more like fine art – as well as more diaristic, mimicking the “realness” of social media. Platforms such as Instagram can be outlets for more than just aspirational “food porn,” a term coined to poke fun at the glamorization and proliferation of photographs of food on social media. Like the book The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady – in which Edith Blackwell Holden provides personal observations from her daily life in 1906 and intricate details of the woodland creatures near her home, along with exquisite paintings – Instagram can also act like a diary or journal, and of course food plays a part in this. Photographs of food in this context can be touching, a way of communicating with families and friends. There are mothers documenting care packages made for children who are away at university, families eating at holidays, and lovely tables set for celebrations. Food is photographed as it brings people together, as ritual and tradition. The photographs in this exhibition hand the viewer a key for coding and decoding society, if one is prepared to take the time to really look. They can celebrate, pervert, inform, and inspire. From the banality of the diner breakfast special captured by Stephen Shore to the allegorically dense still lifes of Letinsky, from Fenton’s elaborate nineteenth-century setups to the cookbooks of the 1960s, food – and how it’s photographed – defines how we live and how we value ourselves, and, at its very best, connects us to our dreams and desires.

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS

Dave Heath Miles Smith, Troy Ohio, 1962 gelatin silver print 8.26 × 12.07 cm Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery

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SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 82

Art Gallery at Evergreen Canton-sardine

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 merit, and overall impact.

Centre A

Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Equinox Gallery

Franc Gallery

2021 Jury

Gallery Gachet

Gordon Smith Gallery

Claudia Beck Writer, Curator, Collector

Griffin Art Projects

Ground Floor Art Centre

Howard495 Project Space

Kurbatoff Gallery

Macaulay & Co. Fine Art

Marion Scott Gallery

MONOVA: Archives of North Vancouver

Monte Clark Gallery

Next Door – Slice of Life

On Main Gallery

100

Parker Street Studios

101

Poïesis Contemporary

102

SUM Gallery

103, 104

Wil Aballe Art Projects

Tarah Hogue Writer, Curator (Indigenous Art), Remai Modern Ann Thomas Senior Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Canada Emmy Lee Wall Executive Director, Capture

Erika DeFreitas

Close Magic

Erika DeFreitas left to right: On Larkspurs and Sorrow (les pâles se sont ouverts) and On Pincushions and Lace (les pâles se sont ouverts), 2017 inkjet prints 101.6 × 101.6 cm Courtesy of the Artist

An image, less than a memory but more than a feeling, lingers. A woman runs rosary beads between her fingers. A mother and daughter laugh hysterically to the point of tears. Two hands intertwine. These simple yet vivid vignettes reveal something akin to muscle memory, where intellect and biology falter, and intuition and magic take over. “It is impossible for language to fully articulate the experience of magic” (Charlotte Cotton, Photography Is Magic), and so the body and art represent what cannot otherwise be expressed. This solo exhibition focuses on lens-based artworks Erika DeFreitas has made over the last five years, many of which feature her mother, whom she has been working with as a subject for more than a decade. The collection of photographs, video, and works on paper illuminates recurring themes in her practice, through which DeFreitas interweaves the personal and the historical. She touches upon her own cultural histories, connected to her matrilineal Guyanese heritage and Catholic background, while turning to cultural figures like writer Gertrude Stein and artist Carrie Mae Weems, as well as the many unnamed female subjects of art history. Hands and the body – symbols of care and of labour – reoccur throughout the exhibition, as DeFreitas asserts the agency of a racialized and gendered body in art, revealing both strength and vulnerability, trauma and joy. These threads are all connected by the artist’s continual search for “all that is left out of the frame,” using the body as a vessel to hold what might otherwise be out of reach.

Curated by Katherine Dennis www.evergreenculturalcentre.ca/ exhibit

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Art Gallery at Evergreen February 13 – April 25

Wang Qingsong

Fotofest

While positioned as cultural celebrations, photography festivals have steadily become more commercial in nature. In China, this phenomenon of conflating culture and commerce is referred to as “culture performed on the stage built by economy.” Increasingly influenced by contemporary Western culture, life has become more uncanny and ironic in China. Wang Qingsong’s work is deeply engaged with these shifts in cultural life in contemporary China. Using images as weapons and photography as his medium, Wang’s work attempts to subvert a kind of criticism of reality in order to let people find humour when facing his works, so as to experience the absurd essence in this confrontation. In his exhibition Fotofest, a title taken from Wang’s work of the same name, he asks viewers to consider the rapidly changing tenor of contemporary Chinese society through photography, employing grand scales, civilian perspectives, and gaudy popular aesthetics, combined with painting and staging, among other visual languages. Wang Qingsong is Capture’s inaugural Printing Prize recipient. The Capture Printing Prize is generously supported by Wesgroup.

Wang Qingsong MOMA Studio, 2005 inkjet print 170 × 300 cm Courtesy of the Artist This exhibition contains work that may not be suitable for some viewers.

Canton-sardine

April 3 – May 30

Curated by Xiaoyan Yang and Steven Dragonn www.canton-sardine.com

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Will Kwan

Exclusion Acts

This solo exhibition by Will Kwan brings together a number of new photo-, text-, and media-based works that take an unflinching look at the systemic and absurd ways that economic ideology shapes social relations and beliefs. The works examine a range of conditions, from the racialization of low wages and precarious labour and the dominance of the private sector in the housing market resulting in unequal access and the accumulation of capital, to the fanatical neoliberal rhetoric used to support the supremacy of the economy. Seen in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, the works in the exhibition portray systems and minds trapped in a recursive state – inertia, entrenchment, and business as usual. Kwan is a Hong Kong–born, Toronto-based Canadian artist. His research-based work investigates the socioeconomic conditions that form everyday realities and critically examines the intricate relationship between economy and culture. Often employing proactive and forceful ideological positions, Kwan’s practice dissects the notions and manifestations of power by way of destabilizing institutionalized narratives.

Will Kwan There are more important things than living, 2020 digital study for sculpture dimensions variable Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Henry Heng Lu

Centre A

March 10 – May 29

centrea.org

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Group Show

Revisions

“In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.” — Ernst Fischer In 2020, the world has seen dramatic changes. Some of them appeared abruptly; others resulted from a slow, ongoing shift. And yet there are changes we are still waiting for – the ones that have an urgency, that need our participation and our voices. The exhibition Revisions showcases critical views and propositions of change by students – including Hailey Van Elslander, Jaiden George, Khim Hipol, Thea Kehler, Xanthe Kittson, Delaney Soumang, and Rebecca Wang, among others – who are currently enrolled in the Visual Arts / Photography program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Through the photographic medium, internal and external transitions and transformations are made visible. By reflecting on photographic practices as forms of perseverance as well as acts of responsibility and resistance, the works offer perspectives to understand and rethink a changed and changing world. Revisions pictures the world as full of possibility and brings together young and relevant voices working in the photographic medium in Vancouver today.

Emily Carr University of Art + Design Michael O’Brien Exhibition Commons April 1–30

Khim Hipol Noon, Ngayon at Bukas (Past, Present and Future), 2020 digital scan from vintage photographs, archival inkjet print 45.72 × 60.96 cm Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Birthe Piontek www.ecuad.ca/calendar/type/ exhibitions

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Adad Hannah

New Work

Adad Hannah’s practice brings together performance, portraiture, optical illusion, and still life, finding inventive ways to highlight both stillness and movement simultaneously through photography. For this exhibition, Hannah presents a new series of photographic and video works that connect early art-making theories and practices with contemporary and collaborative techniques. This series builds upon Hannah’s interest in art history (particularly the tradition of the tableau vivant) as well as early photographic practices, taking one or more notable historical Canadian artworks as his point of departure. Over the past two decades, Hannah has explored several ideas in conversation with many historical artworks, including projects such as Age of Bronze (2004), shot at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and Unwrapping Rodin (2010), made in collaboration with the Musée Rodin in Paris. His photographic works are often a collaborative effort – most notably in his recent series The Decameron Retold (2019) and The Raft of the Medusa (Saint-Louis) (2016) – where Hannah draws on the contributions of community members to craft various elements of the project, including building and painting sets, sewing costumes, and acting as models where required. This new project for Capture came together over several months in early 2021, to be presented in April for the Festival. Through the application of modern cinematic approaches to historical work, Hannah’s exhibition continues to expand the artist’s improvisational approach to production and community engagement, while presenting familiar moments in art history within new contexts, melding the historical and the contemporary.

Adad Hannah Untitled (Empty Set), 2021 archival pigment print 60.96 × 91.44 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Equinox Gallery

Equinox Gallery April 17 – May 15

www.equinoxgallery.com

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2021

Laura Dutton and Anna Kasko

We were here

We were here is an exhibition of works by Laura Dutton and Anna Kasko that, together, describe how photographs reveal our collective desire to get near to something or someone. Dutton’s photographs are abstracted, candid portraits of tourists visiting the Grand Canyon. The people, standing in the distant landscape, were unaware that scant details of their likenesses were being captured by the artist’s camera. Later, Dutton enlarged the iconic landscape to pluck out the tiny portions of portrait information. Through a process of printing, scanning, and reprinting, the results reveal ink-dot patterns that are reminiscent of pointillism, as though these people could have been stolen from the background of a Georges Seurat painting, where they had been forgotten. While Dutton finds her subjects buried deep within her images, Kasko’s work involves a discarded personal archive from a time when vernacular family photography became widely accessible. The artist’s process of superimposing multiple slides results in a blurring of the subject’s identity and permits the audience to make the photographs their own. A familiarity is born of commonplace visual cues – a picnic, a barbecue, an outboard motorboat ride. The images become both familiar and anonymous, linking then to now by way of our lasting tendency to record the mundane. Together, these series reveal the voyeurism of both image-taker and audience – a dialectical give-and-take that has become a regular part of contemporary life. This process explores our individuality and binds us as a community of seers.

Franc Gallery April 8 – May 15

Laura Dutton Untitled, 2018 inkjet print mounted on Dibond 96.52 × 76.2 cm Courtesy of the Artist Please note that this exhibition is not wheelchair accessible. www.francgallery.com

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Jackie Dives

Things My Dad Taught Me

Things My Dad Taught Me is a series of twelve images created to address the complexity of grieving a parent who has died from a stigmatizing death. In 2017, my dad died from an accidental drug overdose. Since his death I have been visiting places that remind me of him. I go to the housing co-op where I grew up, to the swimming pool we used to go to, to his old apartments, and to the last place I saw him alive. Along the way I stop to take photographs of things that resonate with me as I reflect on our relationship, my childhood, and the things he taught me. Walking through the neighbourhoods I grew up in, I find myself compelled to capture things that look overgrown, neglected, and forgotten. But I see freedom in these things, reminding me of the lack of inhibition that my dad embodied throughout his life. Since my dad’s death is entrenched in stigma that perpetuates the idea that someone who uses drugs is less worthy of life, and therefore less worthy of remembering, I have to stand up for him and explain that he was more than his drug use. I have to justify his goodness and continually go out on a controversial limb for a drug user, instead of simply mourning the loss of my father. Taking these photographs has been a way for me to reconnect with him and to remember him in his complexity instead of just for his faults. My dad was unique. A cat lover, a mechanic, a carpenter, a goof, a friend, a caretaker, an alcoholic, and also a drug user. This work is even more urgent during this time of spiking overdoses. People who live in British Columbia are currently five times more likely to die from a drug overdose than of Covid-19.

Jackie Dives Broken Tree, 2019 chromogenic print 45.72 × 60.96 cm Courtesy of the Artist

Gallery Gachet

gachet.org www.gachetfromaway.org

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April 1 – May 15

2021

Laurie Kang and Chris Curreri

Unfixed

Unfixed explores how the fluidity and tension between the concepts of “fixed” and “unfixed” operate as metaphorical and artistic strategies in the work of two Canadian artists: Chris Curreri and Laurie Kang. Through photography, installation, and sculpture, these artists suggest a network of connectivity between traditional understandings around photography, art history, and intimate personal narratives. The subject matter and materiality of their work indicate that photography itself creates a rhizomatic, interrelated relationship between seemingly disparate ways of thinking about our bodies, the political, and the social. Historically, photography has been thought to fix an image in time and space, thus capturing an authentic record of an event or moment. Yet the physical reality of the process and an artist’s bias rarely fulfill those promises; what is left outside the frame is as important as what is included. To fix and to unfix can be used as lenses through which to view the ebbs and flows of social tides. Both artists’ work implies an interchangeability between all things: orifices are swapped out for one another, guts reveal themselves outside the body, lotus root and seaweed stand in for flesh and bone. Curreri and Kang suggest that there is an “unfixedness” at play in hegemonic systems, as well as within characteristics we think of as innately human, beautiful, healthy, and enriching.

Chris Curreri Seem, 2016 gelatin silver fibre-based print 30.5 × 30.5 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Daniel Faria Gallery, Shlesinger-Walbohm Family Collection, Toronto Curated by Meredith Preuss

Gordon Smith Gallery April 8 – June 5

www.sd44.ca/school/ artistsforkids/Visit/Exhibitions/

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Group Show

Whose Chinatown? Examining Chinatown Gazes in Art, Archives, and Collections

Whose Chinatown? Examining Chinatown Gazes in Art, Archives, and Collections brings together an art history of Chinatowns and their communities by historical and contemporary Canadian artists such as Emily Carr, Unity Bainbridge, Yucho Chow, Fred Herzog, Paul Wong, Mary Sui Yee Wong, Morris Lum, and aiya哎呀, among others. In current archives and collections across the country, there is scant historical material depicting the various Chinatowns or their communities. What exists aside from documents, for the most part, are photographs. These historical images, shown alongside more contemporary photographs and video works, allow viewers to see the changes to Chinatowns over the decades. This exhibition aims to question how narratives are constructed around the idea of Chinatown and the colonial notions that underwrite some of these ideas. This exhibition is drawn from private collections in Vancouver and across Canada, such as the Beatrice and Raymond Jai Cantonese Opera Collection and the Chung Collection, which holds more than 25,000 rare items related to Chinese Canadian history assembled over sixty years, now housed at the University of British Columbia. The show is also supplemented by public archives and collections.

Morris Lum Xam Yu Seafood Restaurant, Toronto, 2016 inkjet print 50.8 × 60.96 cm Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Karen Tam

Griffin Art Projects January 29 – May 1

www.griffinartprojects.ca

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Rina Lyshaug

Chiasmus

In Chiasmus, Rina Lyshaug employs a method of image doubling to create a self-referential space through the superimposed projection of a room within a room. By integrating the image with the architecture of the exhibition room, the image and the physical space become inseparable. This trompe l’œil facilitates the opening of portals within the walls of the gallery, shedding light into a non-linear reality. This body of work documents Lyshaug’s experimentation with paradoxical perspectives through projected images, installation, and sculpture. She uses found photographs of corners and corridors, similar to the ones in the exhibition room, to achieve a sense of spatial similarity where the image and the room reference each other. Lyshaug presents a visual paradox to the viewer. In realizing an impossible space, she relies on the authority of the camera – an apparatus believed to accurately deliver an objective perspective. Simultaneously, her construction of this impossible space asks the viewer to question the camera’s authority and truth. By disrupting Euclidean optics, Chiasmus invites the viewer to acknowledge that the possibility for depth in an image relies on our imaginative engagement, regardless of the image’s level of realism. Recognizing that we apply our imaginations on a daily basis through the reading of images may create avenues for ways of knowing that empirical science would otherwise deem impossible. Lyshaug believes that this speculation of the image can challenge ways of thinking that reify the status quo.

Rina Lyshaug Chiasmus (landscape), 2020 installation of projected image dimensions variable Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Asia Jong

Ground Floor Art Centre – Mobile Curatorial Project April 3–6 and 10–13

www.instagram.com/ groundfloorac

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Aaron Jones

Brobdingnagian

Brobdingnagian is a solo exhibition of new photocollages by Toronto-based artist Aaron Jones. Made from magazine clippings, advertisements, newspapers, and personal photos, this body of work is inspired by a series of expeditions through forests and rural landscapes that have expanded Jones’s botanical knowledge and understanding of self in relation to the Southern Ontario landscape. Jones’s exhibition references Jonathan Swift’s satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels of 1726, in which the protagonist, Lemuel Gulliver, visits the land of Brobdingnag after his ship is blown off course. Brobdingnag is a fictional land occupied by giants, and the adjective “Brobdingnagian” has come to describe anything of colossal size. For Jones, the act of collage-making is part of a journey of self-discovery: to see one’s self separate from the stereotypical constructions of people and places in media. In previous work, Jones focused on the body’s nuanced performative potential. By using collage, Jones denies and shifts the images from their original meaning to explore ideas of the self and make visible how conflicting realities are constructed and imagined. This exhibition intends to situate collaged characters and figures that represent the self in environments in which Jones grew up around and yearns to know more of.

Aaron Jones Untitled, 2017 magazine clippings 27.94 × 43.18 cm Courtesy of the Artist Please note this exhibition is wheelchair accessible during gallery hours via a freight elevator that can be accessed from the back of the building.

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Howard495 Project Space April 17 – May 15

www.howard495.com

2021

Gregory Geipel

Still Vancouver

For over a decade, Gregory Geipel has walked the streets of Vancouver, carefully documenting the unique, yet often overlooked, fixtures that have remained amid the city’s rapid urbanization. His photographs are shot with meticulous, if not deadpan, composition and attention to moments of symmetry that are often difficult to find. A follow up to Geipel’s On the Corner series, Still Vancouver captures the quiet resilience of a city that refuses to disappear in an increasingly planned cityscape. As the face of the city evolves, few structures have managed to withstand the change. The ones that do occupy a unique presence in the public subconscious: they are mainstays of the Vancouver experience, yet at the same time taken for granted – forgotten in their quiet, unassuming resilience. Their longevity has obscured their staying power. They’ve become the invisible, in-between places surrounded by more desirable, pristine destinations. But hidden in the cracked stucco, faded awnings, and dandelion-filled parking lots lies a vivid memory of Vancouver’s past. Still Vancouver captures the seemingly relentless inertia of a structural past that has remained timeless and refuses to be forgotten. As these buildings seem to defy the gravitational pull of modernity, one can’t help but wonder, for how long? Still Vancouver is a collection of photographs that evoke hope and resilience in their fragility and strength.

Kurbatoff Gallery April 15–30

Gregory Geipel 2400 Kingsway, 2020 archival inkjet print 101.6 × 101.6 cm Courtesy of the Artist www.kurbatoffgallery.com

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Tom Hsu

a spot behind the ear

Tom Hsu’s first solo exhibition at Macaulay & Co. Fine Art includes photographs shot on 35mm film of intimate moments captured between friends and acquaintances over the past three summers in Vancouver. Hsu is known for his investigation of bodies and the way they intersect and interact both with each other and with the space in which they exist. His poetic images in this exhibition seek to capture the whimsy, mutual care, and curious play between him and those around him. Hsu’s work often focuses on everyday moments and interactions, drawing attention to the overlooked and banal in a soft and lyrical manner. His work is inspired by his readings of philosopher Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida: “A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but only his Ariadne.” Hsu states, “This fragment stuck with me and made me think about truth and photography; by building a labyrinth, maybe the truth becomes less important, but the intention and the root of it all is what matters. Perhaps that is the light we all seek.”

Tom Hsu egg head, 2019 archival inkjet print 43.18 × 30.38 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Macaulay & Co. Fine Art Please note that this exhibition is not wheelchair accessible.

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Macaulay & Co. Fine Art April 3 – May 3

www.mfineart.ca

2021

Lindsay McIntyre

Lindsay McIntyre Is Inviting You to a Scheduled Zoom Meeting

While our Zoom heads sit crudely in our low-resolution frames with fake backgrounds and we jerk and start in time with our unforgiving internet connections, Lindsay McIntyre invites us to look at our engagement with this connective tool in a body of new work. In recent years, artists of Inuit heritage have been telling important stories of personal and cultural change in the age of colonialism, and while many Inuit artists speak of life on the land in the North, others speak specifically of the diasporic experience. Much of McIntyre’s extensive catalogue represents a parallel investigation into her personal identity and family history, as well as media-making itself, including its processes and associated mechanisms. McIntyre recounts her matrilineal history: When Knud Rasmussen came to her community on the Danish Ethnographical Expedition to Arctic North America, known as the 5th Thule Expedition, in 1921, Kumaa’naaq wasn’t anyone he wanted to speak to. She had the singular skill of speaking English fluently. She didn’t fit the narrative they wanted. She wasn’t ethnographic enough. Her kind could only live in the footnotes of the Northern narrative. They were not Inuk enough for the history books. Not valid, collectable knowledge. She wasn’t the one they wanted pictures of. So, there are just a handful of prized photos of her.

McIntyre blends technologies to enter into these photographic traces of her grandmother, Kumaa’naaq, to ask questions, expose tensions of identity, depict desires, and create new pathways of communication. In this exhibition, still and moving images, along with analogue and digital methodologies, come together to explore identity along with some Zoom quirks and its potential to connect us, across vast cultural and metaphorical divides.

Marion Scott Gallery April 1–28

Lindsay McIntyre As One, 2020 inkjet print 80 × 45 cm Courtesy of the Artist www.marionscottgallery.com

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Neal Marshall Carter

Between Science and the Sublime: Neal Carter’s 1920s Mountaineering Photography Albums

Neal Carter Lynn Peaks, January 29, 1922 gelatin silver prints mounted on black construction paper with coloured-pen drawings 35.56 × 25.4 cm Courtesy of MONOVA: Archives of North Vancouver MONOVA is accessible to wheelchairs via the front entrance and elevator to the second floor. Curated by Jessica Bushey, Archivist, MONOVA

MONOVA: Archives of North Vancouver February 19 – August 20

www.monova.ca

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This exhibition explores the mountaineering tradition of creating personal photography albums. These albums adhere to the principles of the Alpine Club of Canada, specifically the promotion of scientific study and the exploration of Canadian alpine and glacial regions, as well as the cultivation of art in relation to mountain scenery. MONOVA: Archives of North Vancouver is the custodian of three meticulously documented and decorated photography albums created circa 1920 by mountaineer and marine biologist Neal Carter, PhD. The albums demonstrate the ways in which mountaineers integrated photography into their expeditions, and how they combined technology, aesthetics, and sport to express a unique alpine culture. The albums include views of North Shore mountains taken during ascents with British Columbia Mountaineering Club (BCMC) members. Unlike traditional archival practices of separating photographic prints from albums for preservation purposes, these albums are intact, and each page has been digitized to secure the contextual relationships between the annotations and the images. From hand-pasted panoramic views of mountain ranges to the abstraction of scale between climber and glacier, these albums demonstrate the role of the camera in twentieth-century exploration for the spiritual in the physical landscape. With new interest in the impact of our industrialized culture on nature, including climate change, the photographic albums of mountaineers are gaining greater importance for their historical evidence of the evolving environment. Carter’s photographic albums allow the viewer to re-evaluate early mountaineering photography and investigate new ways of experiencing and visualizing landscapes in an interdisciplinary context.

2021

Vilhelm Sundin

Soon

Vilhelm Sundin’s exhibition explores the intersection between photography and cinema, and their places in the contemporary visual domain. His new body of work examines contradictions of looking outward (observing public space) and inward (memories and imagination), both of which are relevant in a time of confined experiences. In this show, street photography is met with purely simulated lens-based works, setting an ambiguous tone toward documentation and imagination. Sundin’s work is concerned with the experience of the present and offers reflections on being alive in a time of constant technological acceleration. Utilizing some of the most current visual tools available to portray universal stories of solitude, imagination, and distant human connections, he aims to create works in both a timeless and contemporary domain. Using sound, computer-generated graphics, and traditional lens-based media, the show exists somewhere between reality and simulation, stillness and motion – while displaying narratives of the everyday.

Vilhelm Sundin Woman in the Fog, 2018 hybrid analogue and digital photography dimensions variable Courtesy of the Artist and Monte Clark Gallery

Monte Clark Gallery April 1 – May 1

Please note that this exhibition is not wheelchair accessible. www.monteclarkgallery.com

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Group Show

To Stay Related

Gloria Wong Cupboard, from the sik teng mm sik gong (pardon my Chinese) series, 2020 archival pigment print 50.8 × 60.9 cm Courtesy of the Artist

In our current moment, the question of home has never felt so important. Contemporary photographers, now more than ever, seem to be drawn to looking inward, toward the ordinary and the everyday as a site for photographic investigation. Although the “home” is often considered to be a physical manifestation of belonging, it can also bring up feelings of displacement. To Stay Related brings together lens-based works from a number of emerging artists – including Michèle Bygodt, Rishara Ferguson, Bruce Fraser, Mikhela Greiner, Marija Rebekka Kanavin Gutans, Jackson Heseltine, Kristy Hui, Andres Imperial, Stefan Johnson, Silas Ng, Neena Robertson, Svava Tergesen, Luis Villarreal, and Gloria Wong – who navigate the different nuances of their relationships to the home. With photographs that explore ideas ranging from queerness to diasporic identity, the works in this show attempt to provide new ways of understanding what, where, or how “home” is created. To Stay Related probes into this instability of the notion of home and proposes that the home is not one thing, but is always in a state of becoming. Drawing from writer Sara Ahmed’s idea that “bodies do not dwell in spaces that are exterior but rather are shaped by their dwellings and take shape by dwelling,” the works in this group show investigate the home as a critical site for the formation of identity. Extending beyond only the physical space, the artists in this exhibition also explore the notion that “home” can be embodied within ourselves and the everyday objects that surround us. Through still lifes, portraiture, and documentary photographs, this exhibition brings together a number of emerging voices that demonstrate how the idea of home is brought to life through relationships, culture, and surreal fabrications.

Please note this exhibition is wheelchair accessible during gallery hours via the back door. www.sliceoflifevancouver.com/ nextdoor

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Nextdoor – Slice of Life April 9–12

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SD Holman

Momento Mori

“I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. . . . Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.” — Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida Momento Mori, like the “properly” spelled memento mori, is a reminder of our mortality, just as every photograph is a tragedy, in that the instant the shutter snaps, the moment ceases to exist. Momento Mori carries a double entendre from the Spanish “momento”: the moment of death, that is, the moment a photograph is taken. SD Holman has of late been turning their lens to portraits of absence. This exhibition is curated from a series documenting the home of trailblazing artist Geoff McMurchy’s home. At the estate’s request, Holman spent four days in McMurchy’s apartment after his untimely death, sleeping in his bed, photographing his meticulously curated assemblages of everyday objects. Portraits of what is left after life. Tiny particles of DNA left on objects that become imbued with the divine, at once present and absent. Lonely and glorifying. Empty and full. All that remains, except for fallible memory. The work in this series takes on new meaning when viewed through the lens of now. As our mobility is curtailed to contain contagion, and most of us are spending more time at home, these portraits invite us to contemplate our interior architecture.

On Main Gallery April 2–30

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SD Holman Kitchen Sink, 2020 transparency backlit lightbox 60.96 × 91.44 cm Courtesy of the Artist Curated by Paul Wong www.onmaingallery.ca

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Louise Francis-Smith

Reflection

For the past forty years I have had my heart open to and lens focused on the street in a vibrant neighbourhood I call home. Reflection is an intimate portrait of this neighbourhood, capturing the spontaneous spirit of daily life, the content dynamic in colour, street scenes with and without people. It is about a rich, distinctive, built, and living heritage filled with familiarity and belonging changed little over generations. Moved not only by the human condition but also by beauty of the surface of things. The architectural features, ordinary people walking by, shopping stalls where food spills haphazardly onto the street; I am drawn especially to the juxtaposition of perceived beauty alongside the harsh reality of the often undervalued and neglected. The derelict and patinaed, old and new, ruin and renovation, and the way they collide and merge in the heart and soul of this neighbourhood have all informed my work. When I first moved to Strathcona, I saw such richness in backyard plots where vegetables and washing were hung out to dry. I had a strong sense of the families growing their gardens, eating from them, and using every little bit. Chinatown, once vibrant, is now a neighbourhood in transition and struggling with its identity. Reflection represents an irreplaceable cultural heritage in images where barbers, fish markets, shoppers, and seniors are a part of the glue that was a unique feature of this historic Vancouver neighbourhood. By including everything and pushing away nothing, what is often not seen, or seen as ugly, can be transformed into an arresting image of truth and beauty. The ultimate meaning lies in the photographs themselves, not in my words about their meaning. Louise Francis-Smith Ginger, 2010 archival inkjet print 45.72 × 60.96 cm Courtesy of the Artist

Parker Street Studios

www.louisefrancissmith.com

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2021

April 3 – May 1

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Angela Grossmann

WORK

WORK presents new works by Angela Grossmann that explore the subject of labour, its history, its changing nature, our essential need for it, and – possibly most pressing in our current time – its precarity. Throughout her career, Grossmann has sought to redress injustices in the social fabric by transforming historical photography, intended as a means of social control, into images of empowerment. Grossmann works with images of the marginalized, the misunderstood, and the dispossessed from a deeply feminist point of view. WORK brings to the fore our relationship to our jobs and our struggle to move within its social confines when expressing our identity, desires, and individuality – “the who we are through what we do.” The remake is at the heart of Grossmann’s undertaking. She has snipped, torn, and pasted together her archive of anonymous snapshots, creating what appears to be a collapse in time. In doing so, she has brought the past to bear on the present in an effort to make a better future. Clothing and uniforms have traditionally acted to categorize us, to allow recognition – from maids to generals, we instantly recognize these social codes and act accordingly. Some of Grossmann’s workers present a sense of pride, confidence, and assertiveness in their chosen jobs. For others, the artist has captured the resentment that is felt working a daily routine that furnishes few rewards. However, Grossmann’s workers defeat any simple understanding of the assumption of predetermined social roles that occasion the adoption of dress codes or even the feigning of employment duties. She accomplishes this feat through her uncanny ability to create believable characters that point out the unselfconscious ways that the work we do determines our being.

Poïesis Contemporary April 17 and 24

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Angela Grossmann The Academic, 2020 photographic collage on paper 122 × 59 cm Courtesy of Poïesis Contemporary Curated by Lynn Ruscheinsky www.poiesiscontemporary.com

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Vivek Shraya

Trauma Clown

Trauma Clown is a photographic series by author, musician, visual artist, and performer Vivek Shraya documenting the journey marginalized artists often experience when addressing their own oppression within their artwork. Motivated by a perceived contemporary cultural fascination with suffering, Shraya uses herself as the subject by adopting the persona of a “trauma clown” – an entertainer whose growing success and commodification comes at the expense of externalizing her pain. Over the course of nine photographs, the entertainer repeatedly revisits traumatic experiences for marketable entertainment and is rewarded with increasing accolades, to her own detriment. The images that comprise Trauma Clown are informed by Shraya’s experience as a trans artist of colour on the rise. Surprised by audiences’ jovial reactions to sombre anecdotes while touring for her 2018 book I’m Afraid of Men, Shraya discovered that “marginalized art, in order to break through into the mainstream, needs to be tied to humor. . . . It’s this idea that, ‘We’re going to make you comfortable by allowing you to laugh at us’” (Bustle, 2018). However, the trauma clown’s laughs dissipate quickly, leaving the viewer with less comfortable questions on the mediums of modern spectacle and the depths of their own appetite.

Vivek Shraya Coming Out Clown, 2019 matte inkjet print 106.5 × 122 cm Courtesy of the Artist Curated by SD Holman

SUM Gallery April 1 – July 1

www.sumgallery.ca

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Dave Heath

On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth

Wil Aballe Art Projects in collaboration with Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto, present a selection of works by under-recognized master of 1960s black-and-white photography, Dave Heath. Integral to understanding Heath’s work is appreciating the technical crafting of his photographs. Dodging and burning his images, both through hand manipulations during darkroom exposure as well as through chemical reduction and intensification of tones after development, Heath’s deliberate yet artful manipulation of the lights and darks grants access to deeper interpretations of his subject’s psyche and emotions. Often the resulting image is a powerful contrast of stark whites and heavy blacks, and his subjects ebb and flow through every gradient in between. The works selected for this exhibition share a common theme of youth culture, isolation, and abandonment. With subjects consisting primarily of children and adolescents, Heath captures moments of the intense, and often confusing, emotions experienced by youth. This exploration of immortalized youth is rooted in Heath’s lived experiences. At the age of four, he was abandoned by both of his parents. By the age of fifteen, he had lived in a series of foster homes and, finally, in an orphanage. It was at this early age that Heath knew he wanted to be an artist, seeing this as the best way to experience the world and come to define himself within it.

Wil Aballe Art Projects April 24 – May 29

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Dave Heath New York City, 1962 gelatin silver print 8.26 × 12.07 cm Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery www.waapart.com

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Randy Lee Cutler

On the Other Hand

On the Other Hand is a collage series that began in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. As thoughts of handwashing, fear of touching surfaces, and a general lack of physical intimacy informed daily life, Randy Lee Cutler found herself constructing a visual syntax that embraced ciphers, sign language, and writing across diverse cultures. Working with gifted and thrifted National Geographic magazines, Cutler embraced the virus by channelling its RNA code to cast spells through hieroglyphic forms. By bringing disparate elements together into new configurations, an emergent lexicon is cast of human gestures and cultural artifacts. These sparse, abstract images operate as a kind of writing, open to interpretation while resonating our shared desire for pattern, recognition, and meaning. The series is comprised of more than seventy images that represent a form of personal intuition that is likely a collaboration with the unconscious. Each collage evades understanding while simultaneously inviting a personal connection to its message.

Randy Lee Cutler Hand Mandala, 2020 hand-cut collage 22.86 × 27.94 cm Courtesy of the Artist

Wil Aballe Art Projects April 24 – May 29

www.waapart.com

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Adad Hannah still from Untitled (Making a Collage), 2021 4K video, 4:28 min. Courtesy of the Artist and Equinox Gallery

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SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Louise Francis-Smith Walkway, 2012 archival inkjet print 29.21 × 21.59 Courtesy of the Artist

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Artist Index

Rotimi Fani-Kayode

pp.75–79

Thea Kehler

Yumna Al-Arashi

aiya哎呀

pp.58/59–61

p.90

Roger Fenton

pp.75–79

Victor Keppler

Vikky Alexander

pp.44/67–73

Rishara Ferguson

p.98

Xanthe Kittson

Brendan Fernandes

p.57

Carl Kleiner

pp.75–79

Barbara Kruger

pp.67–73

Simranpreet Anand

p.63

Nobuyoshi Araki

pp.75–79

Fischli and Weiss

Roy Arden

pp.67–73

Louise Francis-Smith pp.100/106

Eugène Atget

pp.67–73

Unity Bainbridge

p.90

Carl Beam Jordan Bennett

pp.67–73 pp. 30–31/34/

Bruce Fraser

pp.75–79

p.85

Will Kwan

p.84

Ed Ruscha

pp.75–79

Carolee Schneemann

pp.75–79

Steven Shearer

p.42

Cindy Sherman pp.67–73/75–79 Stephen Shore

pp.75–79

Vivek Shraya

p.102

p.98

Russell Lee

pp.75–79

Sandy Skoglund

pp.67–73

Ouka Leele

pp.75–79

Delaney Soumang

Gregory Geipel

p.93

Luis Lemus

pp.75–79

Vilhelm Sundin

Jaiden George

p.85

Aaron Leon

p.50

Charles Gagnon

35–37/38–41

Lorraine Gilbert

pp.67–73

Laura Letinsky

Sian Bonnell

pp.75–79

Nan Goldin

pp.75–79

Ken Lum

Guy Bourdin

pp.75–79

Daniel Gordon

Manuel Álvarez Bravo pp.67–73

p.85 pp.75–79

Douglas Gordon Mikhela Greiner

pp.74/75–79

pp.75–79 pp.66/67–73

pp.75–79 p.85 p.97

Tony Stellato

pp.75–79

Paul Strand

pp.75–79

Hiro Tanaka

pp.49/53 pp.67–73

Morris Lum

p.90

Ron Terada

pp.67–73

Rina Lyshaug

p.91

Svava Tergesen

p.98

Chris Maggio

pp.75–79

Anne Testut

pp.75–79

p.101

Joseph Maida

pp.75–79

Mickalene Thomas

pp.75–79

p.98

Michèle Bygodt

p.98

Harry Callahan

pp.67–73

Angela Grossmann

Jo Ann Callis

pp.75–79

Gu Xiong

pp.67–73

Man Ray

pp.75–79

Hank Willis Thomas

pp.75–79

pp.67–73

William H. Martin

pp.75–79

Wolfgang Tillmans

pp.75–79

Lindsay McIntyre

Philip Timms

pp.67–73

John Vachon

pp.67–73

Emily Carr

p.90

Richard Hamilton

Neal Marshall Carter

p.96

Adad Hannah

pp.86/105

Henri Cartier-Bresson pp.75–79

Salmon Harris

pp.67–73

Yucho Chow

p.90

Dave Heath

pp.80/103

pp.75–79

Fred Herzog

pp.67–73/90

Peter Menzel

pp.75–79

Renée Van Halm

pp.67–73

Luis Villarreal

Lans Christensen

p.95

Patricia McLaughlin Meryl McMaster

p.51

Hannah Collins pp.67–73/75–79

Jackson Heseltine

p.98

Eric Metcalfe

Sharon Core

pp.75–79

Khim Hipol

p.85

Keirnan Monaghan and

Grant Cornett

pp.75–79

SD Holman

p.99

Krystle Coughlin Silverfox Robert Cumming

p.55

pp.75–79

Christine Howard Sandoval p.52

pp.67–73

Theo Vamvounakis

Hailey Van Elslander

p.98

Lorenzo Vitturi pp.75–79

Yasumasa Morimura pp.64/67–73

pp.75–79

Rebecca Wang

p.85

Wang Qingsong

p.83

Tom Hsu

p.94

Cheryl Mukherji

Robert Walker

pp.67–73

Imogen Cunningham pp.75–79

Kristy Hui

p.98

Vik Muniz

pp.75–79

Tim Walker

pp.75–79

Chris Curreri

Andres Imperial

Nickolas Muray

pp.75–79

Andy Warhol

p.89

Randy Lee Cutler

p.104

Ronny Jaques

p.98 pp.75–79

Zinnia Naqvi

Hendrick Dahl

pp.67–73

Sarah Anne Johnson

p.45

Helmut Newton

Erika DeFreitas

p.82

Stefan Johnson

p.98

Silas Ng

Jackie Dives

p.88

Aaron Jones

Robert Doisneau

pp.75–79

Chun Hua Catherine Dong Audrey Capel Doray Laura Dutton

p.56

pp.67–73 p.87

Harold (Doc) Edgerton pp.75–79 Roe Ethridge

pp.75–79

Diane Evans

pp.67–73

Walker Evans

pp.67–73

Marion Faller and Hollis Frampton

109

pp.75–79

pp.12–17/92

pp. 10/23–25

p.85 pp.67–73

p.54 pp.75–79 p.98

pp.67–73/75–79

Donald Weber

pp.75–79

Weegee

pp.75–79

Edward Weston

pp.75–79 pp.75–79

Holger Niehaus

pp.75–79

T. R. Williams

pp.67–73

Gloria Wong

p.98 p.90

Allen Jones

pp.67–73

Oraf

Charles Jones

pp.75–79

Dick Oulton

pp.67–73

Mary Sui Yee Wong

Anique Jordan

pp.32/43

Paul Outerbridge

pp.75–79

Paul Wong

pp.75–79

Martin Parr

pp.75–79

Kelly Wood

pp.67–73

Irving Penn

pp.75–79

Romulo Yanes

pp.75–79

Zhang O

pp.67–73

Marija Rebekka Kanavin Gutans Hiroyo Kaneko

p.98

Richard Prince

pp.67–73

pp.75–79

Émilie Régnier

pp.46–47

Laurie Kang

p.89

Neena Robertson

Anna Kasko

p.87

Henri Robideau

pp.67–73

Martha Rosler

pp.75–79

Rinko Kawauchi

pp.75–79

p.98

p.90

Capture Catalogue 2021

Articles inside

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS

ARTIST INDEX