#: locale=en
## Hotspot
### Tooltip
HotspotPanoramaOverlayArea_3D84B38B_333F_4DA6_41AA_9402B9601222.toolTip = Enter upper gallery
HotspotPanoramaOverlayArea_B8B61F03_A674_C3F9_41E1_79AD987B561C.toolTip = Exit Gallery
HotspotPanoramaOverlayArea_4E40CA2F_41A3_197E_41BD_9AA82E8C4E80.toolTip = Exit gallery
HotspotPanoramaOverlayArea_B8BC4F04_A674_C3FF_41CC_90195E16811A.toolTip = Exit gallery
HotspotPanoramaOverlayArea_473CFFA9_7DC2_A4DD_41DB_5A22F5B52528.toolTip = Exit gallery
## Media
### Floorplan
### Image
imlevel_1F711049_052E_02C7_4175_EFEE2326565A.url = media/map_3E19DBCB_3261_8AFF_41A0_3B86CFD8CBB8_en_0.png
imlevel_1F712049_052E_02C7_4130_FEB389103582.url = media/map_3E19DBCB_3261_8AFF_41A0_3B86CFD8CBB8_en_1.png
imlevel_1F713049_052E_02C7_416B_203190DB2B9F.url = media/map_3E19DBCB_3261_8AFF_41A0_3B86CFD8CBB8_en_2.png
imlevel_1F715049_052E_02C7_4156_AEA9D01619B0.url = media/map_3E19DBCB_3261_8AFF_41A0_3B86CFD8CBB8_en_3.png
### Subtitle
panorama_1680BBAE_051A_065D_4193_EDCC513CEFA2.subtitle = BAG | Tending Otherworlds
panorama_DC97B5BB_C75D_89F6_41CD_2293F16E2E02.subtitle = BAG | Tending Otherworlds
panorama_1189F9E4_0516_05CD_418D_F08046079205.subtitle = BAG | Tending Otherworlds
panorama_16D984BD_0516_03BF_4154_B3555440AB18.subtitle = BAG | Tending Otherworlds
panorama_168B9D3C_0516_02BD_4190_643E8D5B6DCD.subtitle = BAG | Tending Otherworlds
panorama_168D9550_0516_02C5_418B_C9A0DDBB3EEF.subtitle = BAG | Tending Otherworlds
panorama_DC877FF2_C75E_9976_41DC_0E4D1744A701.subtitle = BAG | Tending Otherworlds
panorama_168E52EE_051A_07DD_418A_78017E68A682.subtitle = BAG | Tending Otherworlds
panorama_167CC956_053A_02CD_4177_47FBEF093580.subtitle = BAG | Tending Otherworlds
panorama_1697B000_053E_0245_4186_BDF757D41400.subtitle = BAG | Tending Otherworlds
panorama_169CA0AB_053E_025B_416C_2931180F2F94.subtitle = BAG | Tending Otherworlds
panorama_1694320A_053E_0645_417F_B2631EFBCC0D.subtitle = BAG | Tending Otherworlds
### Title
map_3E19DBCB_3261_8AFF_41A0_3B86CFD8CBB8.label = Floor Plan - BAG UPR GALLERY
video_D34AF930_C44C_36F8_41CE_85F1A87EA8DC.label = Low Res_Lilith_by Hana x Zeus copy
panorama_DC877FF2_C75E_9976_41DC_0E4D1744A701.label = TendingOtherworlds_01
panorama_DC97B5BB_C75D_89F6_41CD_2293F16E2E02.label = TendingOtherworlds_02
panorama_1189F9E4_0516_05CD_418D_F08046079205.label = TendingOtherworlds_03
panorama_16D984BD_0516_03BF_4154_B3555440AB18.label = TendingOtherworlds_04
panorama_168B9D3C_0516_02BD_4190_643E8D5B6DCD.label = TendingOtherworlds_05
panorama_168D9550_0516_02C5_418B_C9A0DDBB3EEF.label = TendingOtherworlds_06
panorama_1680BBAE_051A_065D_4193_EDCC513CEFA2.label = TendingOtherworlds_07
panorama_168E52EE_051A_07DD_418A_78017E68A682.label = TendingOtherworlds_08
panorama_1687374F_051A_0EDB_4190_4262A3AC1489.label = TendingOtherworlds_09
panorama_168D8C6F_051A_02DA_417E_C2AA9C2CFCC9.label = TendingOtherworlds_10
panorama_167CC956_053A_02CD_4177_47FBEF093580.label = TendingOtherworlds_11
panorama_16F9ED2D_053E_025F_418D_3548D66974E5.label = TendingOtherworlds_12
panorama_1697B000_053E_0245_4186_BDF757D41400.label = TendingOtherworlds_13
panorama_16EA92D0_053E_07C5_4193_8082733F7723.label = TendingOtherworlds_14
panorama_169CA0AB_053E_025B_416C_2931180F2F94.label = TendingOtherworlds_15
panorama_16E6705A_053E_02C5_4190_9FB34DF1BB9C.label = TendingOtherworlds_16
panorama_DDA31300_C76D_8A92_41D3_D25CDC779B31.label = TendingOtherworlds_17
panorama_1694320A_053E_0645_417F_B2631EFBCC0D.label = TendingOtherworlds_18
### Video
videolevel_1F77006C_052E_02DD_4186_74115F6E8388.url = media/video_D34AF930_C44C_36F8_41CE_85F1A87EA8DC_en.mp4
videolevel_1F77006C_052E_02DD_4186_74115F6E8388.posterURL = media/video_D34AF930_C44C_36F8_41CE_85F1A87EA8DC_poster_en.jpg
### Video Subtitles
## Popup
### Body
htmlText_36968183_7D43_FCCD_41D1_8225C34167DA.html = (left to right)
Daphne Odjig (1919 – 2016)
Harmony in Nature
c.1990
Coloured pencil on paper
32.4 cm x 24.1 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Ours are the Silent Ways
1990
Coloured pencil on paper
22.2 cm x 21.6 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Born on Manitoulin Island’s Wikwemikong reserve of Odawa, Potawatomi and English heritage, Daphne Odjig first learned about art-making from her grandfather, Jonas Odjig, a tombstone carver who taught her to draw and paint. She later moved to British Columbia. Odjig’s style, which underwent several developments and adaptations from decade to decade, manages to always remain identifiable.
Her work has addressed issues of colonization, the displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the status of Indigenous women and children, bringing Indigenous political issues to the forefront of contemporary art practices and theory. Odjig was a founding member of the artists’ alliance Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., also known as the Indian Group of Seven. In 2007, she was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
(left to right)
Freda Diesing (1925 – 2002)
Haida Sitting Eagle Crest Design
1977
Serigraph on paper, 82/100 ed.
58.5 cm x 44.5 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of Linda Morrison and Brian Palmquist
Haida Killer Whale Design
1977
Serigraph on paper, ed. 9/200
55.1 cm x 44.5 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of Linda Morrison and Brian Palmquist
Freda Diesing was a Haida woman of the Sadsugohilanes Clan, one of very few female carvers of Northwest Coast totem poles and a member of the Council of the Haida Nation of British Columbia, Canada. Her Haida name is Skilquewat, which can be translated as “On (or crossing) the Trail of Property Woman.” Diesing studied at the Vancouver School of Art and at the Gitanmaax School of Northwest Coast Indian Art at ‘Ksan Village. In the 1960s, she was a vital contributor to the reawakening of Northwest Coast art after the cultural and governance practices of Coastal First Nations were suppressed through the potlach ban (1884-1952). Diesing was a master carver, painter, and printer who believed firmly in the power of education. She was a mentor to many artists who have since achieved high acclaim. Today, a school named in her honour, the Freda Diesing School of Northwest Coast Art, brings artists of all Nations together and is unique as the only school within Canada focusing on traditional First Nations Pacific Northwest Coast art.
(left to right)
Hiromi Nakatsugawa
Feign Death
2022
Coloured pencil, pastel and ink on paper
94.0 cm x 64.1 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Memory Foam
2022
Coloured pencil on cotton paper
30.0 cm x 21.0 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Nakatsugawa’s work explores the complex modes of being that exist within a single body at any given moment. Their highly rendered drawings visualize multiple states of transformation, appearing as energetic flows travelling across internal communicative networks. Expressing an emergent form of biomechanism that finds precedents in the sculptural work of Lee Bontecou and drawings of HR Giger, Nakatsugawa’s drawings conjure a wide range of science-fictive associations, with references to the figure (internal) and landscape (external) persisting throughout.
Nakatsugawa recounts a moment in the early summer of 2021 when they would regularly lay on the grass to stare up at the sky:
I would see the usual—floaters, a bright spot where the sun would be. I then started seeing small circular lights aimlessly flying around. I’ve never seen them before, so I checked if it was some natural light, or something in my eye … They were not the shadows of small flies, the flight patterns would be more erratic if they were, so I narrowed my hypothesis to something supernatural, something spiritual. I remember that these orbs were profoundly beautiful. They induced the feeling in me that they were like small spirits, communicating with me. Looking back, it's funny to imagine myself with tears streaming softly, attentively staring at the sky.
(upper to lower)
Yaimel López Zaldívar
The Most Loved
2021
Serigraph on paper
38.10 cm x 48.26 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Rainbow
2021
Serigraph on paper
38.10 cm x 48.26 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Yaimel López Zaldívar is a Cuban graphic artist of African descent who specializes in drawing and print media. With more than ten years experience in graphic arts his work has been published in magazines and books. He is based in Vancouver since 2019 where he has worked as an artist and graphic designer. During this time he has collaborated with The Vancouver Foundation, Watari, Burnaby Neighbourhood House, Vancouver Latin-American Cultural Center (VLACC) and Vancouver Latin-American Film Festival (VLAFF). He has participated in several group and solo exhibitions, these include Seymour Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, The Cultch and a solo show titled The Islander at Slice of Life arts space.
As the artist states, “My current work is based on personal memories. I rummage through albums of photos with the intention of revitalizing those memories, giving them a new opportunity to be alive. In this way, I intend to make those past moments more vivid and intense. I believe that our memories make us who we are. Therefore, I look back in order to know how to move forward.”
Tending Otherworlds: New Acquisitions
Collections offer an almost infinite possibility of readings, despite the limitation of the vault space to which they are bound. Tending Otherworlds celebrates new acquisitions to the City of Burnaby Art Collections, exploring conceptions of beauty, history, and desire. A playful challenge to the conceived limitations of “works on paper,” and of divergent histories, the exhibition explores alternative propositions of self and place. Following the 2015 decision to prioritize, by purchase, the acquisition of works by women artists, the Gallery has since expanded to reflect its communities more accurately by prioritizing works by racialized, Indigenous, and gender-variant artists.
For this exhibition we highlight a notion of queerness, calling upon writer bell hooks’ invitation to think of “queer as not being about who you’re having sex with—that can be a dimension of it—but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” Bringing together a selection of recent gifts and purchases, the exhibition demonstrates the Burnaby Art Gallery’s challenge to the boundaries of its mandate as the only public art museum in Canada dedicated to works of art on paper. Further, the works presented offer vantage points which diverge from dominant understandings of place and history.
Curated by Jennifer Cane and Emily Dundas Oke
Tending Otherworlds: New Acquisitions
Collections offer an almost infinite possibility of readings, despite the limitation of the vault space to which they are bound. Tending Otherworlds celebrates new acquisitions to the City of Burnaby Art Collections, exploring conceptions of beauty, history, and desire. A playful challenge to the conceived limitations of “works on paper,” and of divergent histories, the exhibition explores alternative propositions of self and place. Following the 2015 decision to prioritize, by purchase, the acquisition of works by women artists, the Gallery has since expanded to reflect its communities more accurately by prioritizing works by racialized, Indigenous, and gender-variant artists.
For this exhibition we highlight a notion of queerness, calling upon writer bell hooks’ invitation to think of “queer as not being about who you’re having sex with—that can be a dimension of it—but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” Bringing together a selection of recent gifts and purchases, the exhibition demonstrates the Burnaby Art Gallery’s challenge to the boundaries of its mandate as the only public art museum in Canada dedicated to works of art on paper. Further, the works presented offer vantage points which diverge from dominant understandings of place and history.
Curated by Jennifer Cane and Emily Dundas Oke
Al McWilliams
Big Paper #2
2012
Laser cut, sanded 400lb watercolour paper
152.4 cm x 106.68 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of the Artist
This sculptural paper work was created by mechanically cutting and meticulously sanding the edges of each piece to create an arrangement. Working at a large scale and with the heaviest watercolour paper available, McWilliams defies small-scale and fragile conceptions that might be ascribed to works on paper. McWilliams’ sculptural forms are developed through observation and drawing with associations that drift between figuration and abstraction but are anchored in neither.
Al McWilliams has exhibited extensively in both solo and major group exhibitions throughout Canada, the United States and Europe. His work has represented Canada in exhibitions in Germany, France, Japan, Korea and the United States. His work is held in most major public collections in Canada including The National Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Musée d'art contemporain. Along with his studio practice, McWilliams has been commissioned for major public artworks within Burnaby, Vancouver, Toronto, Seattle, and Japan.
Alexa Hatanaka
Tabi (mackerel)
2022
Sewn konnyaku-starched washi (Japanese paper), gyotaku, indigo dye
15.2 cm x 12.7 cm x 22.9 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka is a Japanese Canadian conceptual craft artist based in Toronto. Hatanaka's practice is rooted in honoring the histories of craft technologies. She currently researches and uses washi, Japanese rice paper of over one thousand years of history, and related disappearing processes, to explore the possibilities of contemporary engagements with historical traditions. Her methodology includes papermaking, printmaking, sculpture, multi-faceted collaboration, and social practice. Her work is a testament to the power of art to bridge communities and cultures, underrepresented voices, and their place in society.
Tabi (mackerel) are a pair of small tabi, traditional Japanese socks dating back to the 15th Century. Some types of tabi are created using cotton and washi papers. Hatanaka plays with the material properties of paper, imagining these decorative works as fully-functioning pieces of clothing for a child.
Anna Jane McIntyre
Game Face (Now You Know)
2022
Archival digital print with hand-applied gold leaf and
rhinestones on cotton rag paper
76.2 cm x 101.6 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
This unique print was commissioned by Small Axe Projects, a Caribbean journal of criticism, for a travelling exhibition with 11 artists from across the Caribbean and its diaspora. The exhibition sought to address histories of structural violence and colonialism through poignant, yet also beautiful and hopeful works. A version of this work was shown at the National Gallery of the Bahamas in 2019.
The artist refers to this work as a “relief printed wall puzzle giant emoji installation.” The work portrays a face made up of a dense forest of materials which bud, bloom, and decay. The face is ambiguous, and the viewer might question whether it is made up of the plant and animal life, or camouflaged within it.
As the artist describes:
The original work Game Face (Now You Know) is a mixed relief print wall puzzle consisting of linden woodcut relief prints, Akua printing inks, Arnhem 1618 cotton rag printmaking paper, Winsor & Newton watercolours, copper nails, stories, lies, facts, assorted truths, hearsay, heresy, graphite, pencil crayon, blood, sweat, tears, spit, elbow grease, rhinestones, glue, gold leaf, silver leaf, bronze leaf, glitter, Darjeeling tea, Trinidadian cocoa, Trinidadian cinnamon, and Québécois sage smoke.
Anna Jane McIntyre is a Montreal-based artist with a playful practice that combines storytelling, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, performance and microactivism. Her work investigates how people perceive, create and maintain their notions of self through behaviour and visual cues, and is an ever-shifting visual mashup of British, Trinidadian, and Canadian cultural traditions. Her work has been presented in Canada, the United States, England, Europe, Brazil, South Africa, and the Caribbean.
Atheana Picha
Navigators
2022
Serigraph on paper
76.2 cm x 63.5 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Atheana Picha is a Salish artist from the Kwantlen First Nation, with her grandmother from Tsartlip. Atheana was given the name Nash’mene’ta’naht by Gerry Oleman from the St’at’imc First Nation, which translates to “Go-Getter Woman”. Born in Vancouver, she grew up and works out of Richmond, BC. She is an interdisciplinary artist, working mostly in two dimensional media. Atheana has been doing two apprenticeships learning Salish wool weaving with Musqueam weaver Debra Sparrow since 2019, and learning silver engraving, wood carving, and tool making with Squamish artist and educator Aaron Nelson-Moody since 2018. Atheana’s practice is grounded in learning more about Salish design through studying the old pieces, observing nature, and learning from her elders and teachers.
Atheana studied fine art at Langara College for three years, with a focus on ceramics, intaglio printmaking, and wood carving. Then in 2021, she focused on screen printing and drawing. She is engaged with public art through her mural work throughout the Greater Vancouver area since 2018, and more recently with banner and vinyl mural installations. Atheana is a two-time recipient of the YVR Art Foundation Emerging Artist Scholarship, and has works in the collections at the Museum of Vancouver, Burnaby Art Gallery, and Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art.
Bartley Van Homrigh
Untitled
(The Burning at Torquay of the American Merchant) 1873 Watercolour on paper
15.8 cm x 27.7 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
This work documents the burning of a ship, The Wallace, on January 6th 1873, in Torquay (Torbay, Devon, England). The ship caught fire as it was carrying a cargo of petroleum from Antwerp to New Orleans. The fire was discovered on board and the ship burned close to the pier, noted as a spectacular sight thronged with crowds of onlookers.
Being a tourist destination, in subsequent years the town made souvenir articles from pieces of the wreck. Engravings of the event conveyed the vivid scene throughout the country within the Illustrated London News.
Although little is known about the artist, the work can be fairly attributed to one of the descendants, perhaps the grandson, of Bartholomew Van Homrigh, a Lord Mayor of Dublin who organized forces for William III in England's 1688 invasion of Ireland.
Charles Campbell
Tree Model v 3.2 (Holum)
2019-2021
Cardboard
55.9 cm x 83.87 cm x 58.4 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Jamaican-born, Victoria-based artist Charles Campbell’s Tree Model v 3.2 (Holum) operates as a testament to both Black breath and anti-colonial resistance. The sculpture references a tree in the Maroon village of Accompong, Jamaica. Maroons, descendants of Africans who escaped slavery, established Accompong with Indigenous Taino and successfully defended the village against Spanish and British colonists. Under the Kinpah Tree, Maroons gathered to form allegiances, and successfully established their autonomy, self-government, and rights as Indigenous people in a treaty of independence with the British in 1739.
The piece is also a monument to Black breath, its composition reminiscent of the bronchial tree of the lungs. Created throughout 2019-2021, the piece echoes the continued calls of activists for the Black Lives Matter movement to affirm Black life and flourishing.
Cheyenne Rain LeGrande
Maskekewapoy ᒪᐢᑫᑫᐊᐧᐳᕀ
2019
Photograph
71.1 cm x 104.1 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Maskekewapoy ᒪᐢᑫᑫᐊᐧᐳᕀ documents a performance that took place here at Deer Lake, on the ancestral and unceded homelands of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples. The artist had spent the day with her friend, Squamish and Stó:lō artist Nicole Preissl, who shared teachings about stinging nettle, a medicine important to her ancestors which grows in abundance around the lake. After the pair harvested nettle, LeGrande responded to the generosity of the land in a performance which saw the artist rubbing it across her body as a contemplation on how to exist on land as a guest. Despite Burnaby’s status as one of the fastest growing cities in Canada, Indigenous practices, medicines, and land-based teachings continue to assert their presence within the city.
Cheyenne Rain LeGrande is a Nehiyaw Isko artist from Bigstone Cree Nation. She currently resides in Amiskwaciy Waskahikan, also known as Edmonton, Alberta. Cheyenne graduated from Emily Carr University with a BFA in Visual Arts in 2019. Her work often explores the interconnection between history and the body. She works between installation, photography, video, sound and performance art.
Dana Qaddah
Itinerant Sentiments
(clockwise) Frameworks, Flora, Tiles, X-point stars
2022
Mixed media
25.2 cm x 19.8 cm ea.
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Everything I create, I create for people who are also living in displacement. And these are the people who relate to it, and might find home in it. People who are forced to leave time and time again.
These considerations speak to my body of work - Itinerant Sentiments - which consists of vacuum laminated photographs, shells, plants, packaging. It’s about posterity: how do we preserve and share our experience of home if preservation of the real thing is not guaranteed? If our experience of home is fragmented, or superficial (in the form of consumer objects), how do we better articulate our conditions that are inherently diluted by artificial degrees of separation?
– Dana Qaddah
Dana Qaddah (b. Beirut, Lebanon) is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator based between Turtle Island (Canada) and Lebanon. Qaddah’s practice uses archives of personal and itinerant cultural knowledge, contextualized by themes of building from, and through, colonial legacies, environmental and economic deterioration, and the condition of being abstracted from one’s own sense of self and place.
Don Yeomans
Raven with Sun
1977
Serigraph on paper, 160/200 ed.
33.0 cm x 28.5 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of Linda Morrison and Brian Palmquist
Don Yeomans is one of the most established and respected Northwest Coast artists in Canada. Born of a Haida father from Masset and a Métis mother from Slave Lake, Alberta, Yeomans has studied and worked in the Haida style since his youth.
Yeomans first apprenticed under the expert guidance of his aunt Freda Diesing in the early 1970s. In 1976, shortly after attending art school at Vancouver Community College, Yeomans worked under Robert Davidson on the Charles Edenshaw Memorial Longhouse, a monumental project that unfortunately burned down several years later. In the 1980s, Don completed a two-year apprenticeship with celebrated Gitksan artist Phil Janze. Over decades of work he has mastered formline design, the visual language of Haida art. He often works with non-traditional materials like bronze and Forton (a gypsum resin). As Yeomans states: "Those who understand [formline] and can design, have a limitless potential."
Raven with Sun depicts a well-known Haida story in which the universe existed in total darkness, and light was kept carefully tucked away in the treasure box of an old man. Through Raven’s clever ways, he was able to transform and trick the old man into letting him hold the light, stealing it and bringing light into the universe.
Genevieve Robertson
Crab Larvae
2019
Blue-green algae, calcium carbonate, bitumen and seawater on paper
76.2 cm x 57.1 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of Michel Robert Roy
Genevieve Robertson’s studio practice involves extensive physical and material exploration, engaging with the complexities of our relations to land and water in a time of large-scale industrial exploitation and climate precarity. Robertson’s practice of drawing with found materials—whether harvested, collected or dug up from the ground—is a way of implicating herself directly in the process of landscape representation, and of learning about the entanglement of non-human lifeforms and geologic landforms that coexist in our biosphere.
Many of the materials Robertson employs were generated hundreds of millions, if not billions of years ago, in the seas and ancient swampy forests of earth long before human life began. The abstracted forms within her drawings encourage the viewer to look backward, imagining ‘deep time’: the immense pre-human history of the planet, while traces of plastic objects act as reminders of the long future of human-made materials within the geologic record.
Genevieve Robertson is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in environmental studies and resource labour. She holds an MFA from Emily Carr University (2016) and a BFA from NSCAD University (2009). Her work has been exhibited at the Nanaimo Art Gallery, Touchstones Museum (Nelson), Walter Philips Gallery (Banff), Access Gallery, the Libby Leshgold Gallery, Or Gallery, and the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (Vancouver).
Marcy Friesen
Inner Thoughts
2022
Inkjet print, 3/3 ed.
61.0 cm x 76.2 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Marcy Friesen is of Swampy Cree and Welsh ancestry and currently resides on a farm with her family near Carrot River, Saskatchewan. Marcy comes from a long line of traditional master beaders and accomplished creative family members. Threading through beads, leather, and furs, Friesen draws the viewer into an intimate experience using intuitive sensibilities toward material, colour, and presentation. In Friesen’s practice, the natural and synthetic come together in ways that are inclusive of the contemporary condition, transforming expectations of cultural production. Friesen’s work offers embodied and tangible representations of the sentimentalities of lived experience. Her series Legacy manifested as an emotional response to the unmarked graves at Residential Schools throughout Canada, testament to the violence and genocide that Indigenous peoples have been subject to. A diversity of emotions are represented through the accumulation and careful composition of thousands of beads on the artist’s face.
Sarah Davidson
Burn
2021
Watercolour, ink, and pencil crayon on paper
30.5 cm x 45.7 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Working primarily between drawing and painting, Sarah Davidson creates compositions in which shadowy, biomorphic figures and delicate, foliated fragments mingle. Making reference to a history of discourses constructing the ‘natural’ world, their works investigate bodies, environment, observation, and the tangled strings which often bind them together. While they often draw directly from ‘nature’, their drawings diffract distinctions between embodied self and other through a queer ecological lens: critters and space collapse in upon one another, suggesting a permeable web. Both the eye and the mind work towards the known--animals, plants, brush marks, lines--but are caught in a space of undoing.
Sarah Davidson (b. 1989, Ottawa) lives and works in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. She has exhibited her work at Feuilleton (Los Angeles), Cassandra Cassandra (Toronto), Erin Stump Projects (Toronto), Unit 17 (Vancouver), The Power Plant (Toronto), Little Sister (Toronto), Birch Contemporary (Toronto), The New Gallery (Calgary), and Audain Gallery (Vancouver), among others. She was a finalist in the 2018 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and is the recipient of awards and residencies including the Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grant (2021), The Banff Centre’s Late Winter BAiR (2020), and AiR Sandnes residency in Sandnes, Norway (2016). She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2015) and an MFA from the University of Guelph (2019).
Tanya Lukin Linklater
Hair Print 11
2022
Strawberry, blueberry, raspberry pigments transferred
to paper with artist’s hair
37.5 cm x 46.6 cm
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Lukin Linklater’s ongoing series of Hair Prints (2022) is produced by coating her hair in natural pigments of crushed strawberry, blueberry, and raspberry, and then using the gesture of her hair to transfer them to paper. “I undertook a series of movements in [the] studio allowing for my hair to fall, move across, and be pressed into the paper following my body.” Captured in the works are ephemeral moments and experiences. The mark making connected to the body registers choreography in the print itself, articulating action beyond the object.
Tanya Lukin Linklater's performances, works for camera, installations, and writings cite Indigenous dance and visual art lineages, our structures of sustenance, and weather. She undertakes embodied inquiry and rehearsal in relation to scores and ancestral belongings in museums and elsewhere alongside dance artists, composers, and poets. Her work reckons with histories that affect Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences, (home)lands, and ideas. She continues to write in relation to what she has come to call felt structures.
William Hogarth
Analysis of Beauty, Plates I and II
1753
Etching on paper
43.0 cm x 59.5 cm (ea.)
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of the Estate of Dorothy Beckel
From the British artist and satirist William Hogarth’s book The Analysis of Beauty, these two plates represent the artist’s theory of aesthetics, or beauty. In this book, “written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste,” Hogarth introduced the idea that beauty is primarily achieved through the Line of Beauty, or serpentine line. For Hogarth, S-shaped curved lines signify liveliness and activity and excite the attention of the viewer as contrasted with straight lines, parallel lines, or right-angled intersecting lines, which signify stasis, death, or inanimate objects. Examples of his argument for the Line of Beauty can be found throughout the works.
These strict principles reveal incredible biases of Hogarth’s time, as shown through the introduction to the book:
I now offer to the public a short essay, accompanied with two explanatory prints, in which I shall endeavour to shew what the principles are in nature, by which we are directed to call the forms of some bodies beautiful, others ugly; some graceful, and others the reverse; by considering more minutely than has hitherto been done, the nature of those lines, and their different combinations, which serve to raise in the mind the ideas of all the variety of forms imaginable.
Hogarth presents “six principles” that affect beauty: fitness, variety, regularity, simplicity, intricacy, and quantity. The work characterizes 18th Century European artistic standards of beauty in a manner accessible to the average person of Hogarth’s time in England –a kind of “how-to guide” intended to popularize his prints and literacy in the arts. Through a contemporary lens, however, these principles seem narrow, rigid, and ignorant to the many forms of beauty that exist in the world.