Curator
Artist
Claudia Goulet-Blais, Geoffrey Lok-Fay Cheung, Andrew Ina, Tannaz Saatchi, Eknoor Thind, Parumveer Walia
Exhibition Dates
–
Tannaz Saatchi, Around The Kitchen Table, 2024, inkjet print, 50 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Tannaz Saatchi, Around The Kitchen Table, 2024, inkjet print, 50 x 35 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Geoffrey Lok-Fay Cheung, Florid Scale, 2023, digital print on watercolour paper, 60 x 50 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Geoffrey Lok-Fay Cheung, Spills II, 2023, wax, photo transparency, 17 x 12 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Parumveer Walia, Letters to Reagan, 2024, gelatin silver print, 17 x 12 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Claudia Goulet-Blais, Care in Action, 2024, analogue multiple exposures, inkjet print, handmade cherry wood holders, 101 x 106 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Claudia Goulet-Blais, Étreintes Maternelles, 2024, photo decal transfers, handmade porcelain pieces, archival images, handmade cherry wood shelf, 274 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Eknoor Thind, Homebodies, 2024, gelatin silver print collage with inkjet prints, 165 x 50 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Andrew Ina, Do You See How Big the Sea Is, from the Between Places and Passages series, 2024, mixed media animation, two-channel video projection with sound, 4:25 min., looped. Courtesy of the Artist.
Andrew Ina, Through your eyes, I see more clearly, from the Between Places and Passages series, 2024, single-channel video, familial archive, found footage, 6:46 min., looped. Courtesy of the Artist.
Tannaz Saatchi, Around The Kitchen Table, 2024, inkjet print, 50 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Tannaz Saatchi, Around The Kitchen Table, 2024, inkjet print, 50 x 35 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Geoffrey Lok-Fay Cheung, Florid Scale, 2023, digital print on watercolour paper, 60 x 50 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Geoffrey Lok-Fay Cheung, Spills II, 2023, wax, photo transparency, 17 x 12 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Parumveer Walia, Letters to Reagan, 2024, gelatin silver print, 17 x 12 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Claudia Goulet-Blais, Care in Action, 2024, analogue multiple exposures, inkjet print, handmade cherry wood holders, 101 x 106 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Claudia Goulet-Blais, Étreintes Maternelles, 2024, photo decal transfers, handmade porcelain pieces, archival images, handmade cherry wood shelf, 274 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Eknoor Thind, Homebodies, 2024, gelatin silver print collage with inkjet prints, 165 x 50 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Andrew Ina, Do You See How Big the Sea Is, from the Between Places and Passages series, 2024, mixed media animation, two-channel video projection with sound, 4:25 min., looped. Courtesy of the Artist.
Andrew Ina, Through your eyes, I see more clearly, from the Between Places and Passages series, 2024, single-channel video, familial archive, found footage, 6:46 min., looped. Courtesy of the Artist.
Selected
Piggybacks through the Living Room
Piggybacks Through the Living Room reaches across memories, objects, and images toward kin and culture, near and far. Emphasizing immigrant memory, artists Geoffrey Lok-Fay Cheung, Claudia Goulet-Blais, Andrew Ina, Tannaz Saatchi, Eknoor Thind, and Parumveer Walia each activate the archival to stipulate its possibilities, while prodding at its slippages and illegibilities. These gestures reveal the complexities of (be)longing and study the most urgent unit of the social: the family.
Located in the historic Edward Hotel, the out-of-use space stands witness to the flux of urban Vancouver and embodies its constant evolutions. In activating the site, the artists seek to situate themselves in Vancouver’s shifting landscape.
For Saatchi and Ina, cultural materials such as Persian rugs, wallpapers, and books are used alongside the family photo to access distant memories and trace the contours of their Middle Eastern heritage. Cheung’s installation, Inadequacies of Care, similarly charts an immigrant experience of family and the labours of accessing ancestries obfuscated by time and space. Such an obfuscation is used to summon the spectre in Walia’s Letters to Reagan, wherein images of those lost to the AIDS epidemic represent a could-have-been family, present in memory but lost in form. Goulet-Blais and Thind employ a mix of staged and archival imagery using the camera and portraiture as a means of developing relationships – Goulet-Blais with her mother, and Thind within her home.
The camera, the impulse to record, and the image all become modes of sense-making, and Piggybacks Through the Living Room maps itself on this premise, anchored to the familial despite the flux of shifting times.
