Units

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Railay Fawkes
Freya Harding & Gray Parsons
Leo Van Doormaal
Parsa Malihipour
Hana Mitchell
Devin Pigeau
Janice Tsai
Rafael Zen

Opening Reception
Wednesday, April 1, 6 – 8 pm
*Add to Calendar

“What is your unit? There’s an atom, there’s an inch, there’s an hour, there’s a day, there’s a hand, there’s a year. What is your base unit? How do you build a language out of those units?” – Amy Sillman

This exhibition brings together students from the Photography and New Media and Sound Art departments at Emily Carr University who approach the artwork as a structured aggregation of parts. The exhibition takes as its premise that no image, body, or territory is apprehended outside of a system of measure. Units are not simply formal components; they are the operative standards through which value, difference, and relation are organized. A unit establishes equivalence and boundary. It determines what counts, what is divisible, and what remains excess. To ask this question is therefore to ask how perception is structured in advance—by grids, binaries, documents, archives, repetitions, and scales that appear natural but are historically produced.

The works gathered here approach the unit as both a minimal element and a regulatory device. They examine how systems of categorization stabilize gender, nation, authorship, land, and institutional authority, and how repetition and seriality consolidate these structures over time. Measurement is revealed not as neutral calibration but as a technology of normalization: it fixes identities into legible forms, converts lived experience into data, and renders complex relations into comparable parts. Across photography, video, and sound, the artists foreground the procedures—division, sequencing, coding, redaction, enlargement, accumulation—through which meaning is assembled and controlled.

Yet the exhibition does not simply expose these systems; it tests their limits. By isolating, repeating, exhausting, or reconfiguring their chosen units, the artists introduce slippage into the very frameworks that organize recognition. What appears fixed becomes provisional. What seems singular reveals itself as composite. What Is Your Unit? positions artistic practice as a site where the standards that structure perception can be identified, contested, and recalibrated, insisting that every measure carries within it the possibility of being otherwise.