Stir Cheat Sheet: 5 shows to catch at the Capture Photography Festival
Truth, beauty, body horror, and urban collapse, as lens-based art invades the city well into the summer months
Ho Tam, Meng Cheng Unisex Barber Shop, from the “Haircut 100” series, 2014, inkjet print. Photo courtesy of the Artist and Paul Petro, Contemporary Art, Toronto.
TRUTH AND BEAUTY collide with body horror, urban collapse, and the ambivalent comforts of dream-logic in these exhibitions coming soon (or already underway) at this year’s Capture Photography Festival, now in its 11th year. There’s much more, and be sure to check out Capture’s public art and events programs along with the five exceptional shows listed below.
A Manifesto of Hair
March 23 to April 30 at The News Room
Hair! We all have it. We all care about it, most of us a little too much. It’s not the sole focus of Ho Tam’s exhibition at The News Room, but it’s a quirky portal into this lavish photographic mapping of Manhattan’s bustling Chinatown, where barbershops, salons, and beauty parlours share space with restaurants and other businesses inside a dense thrum of humanity. Inevitably, A Manifesto of Hair turns on questions of appearance in the context of class and New York’s immigrant experience.
Vanessa Denham, First Birthday, from the “Corrupted Memories” series, 2022, archival inkjet print. Photo courtesy of the Artist
Focused Blur
March 31 to June 30 at the Zebraclub
Just as there are invisible orders of reality in the quantum realm, so it is with photography, whose grain and pixels might yield infinite new meanings the further we journey inside. This is the impulse behind this Khim Hipol–curated show—joined by Vanessa Denham, Karl Mata Hipol, and Maria Michopulu—which employs the abstract and the experimental to shatter the ubiquity of visual media in our digital era, in the search for something elusive, novel, and maybe profound.
Preston Buffalo, Raymur Crossing February 21 2023, 2023, stereoscopic image, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.
Go Home Yuppie Scum
April 11 to June 6 at The SUM Gallery
In a brilliant conceptual conceit, Preston Buffalo revises the “Welcome to Vancouver” View-Master series of 3D image wheels, marketed from the ’60s until the ’80s, to encounter a 21st-century city in an advanced state of decay. Using the popular vintage toy plus a View-Master projector, Buffalo’s AR-enhanced and coldly inverted images evoke a kind of melancholy rapture; a world after the fall as perceived by aliens and a new way of seeing for the rest of us.
Marcy Friesen, Sunkissed, from The Daydreamer series, 2023, inkjet print. Photo courtesy of the Artist and Fazakas Gallery, Vancouver.
Daydreamer
April 17 to May 29 at Fazakas Gallery
In a new series by Marcy Friesen, who resides in rural Saskatchewan, audio recordings and poems combine with her witty compositions in a kind of incantation that invites the observer into a warm realm of subconscious symbology. Using the practical tools of her everyday trade—beads and fur—Friesen describes her art as “useless”, knowing full well that it only strengthens the beauty and the appeal.
Theodore Sasketche Wan, Panoramic Dental X-Ray, 1977, silver gelatin print. Photo from the collection of Vancouver Art Gallery, Acquisition Fund.
Unit Bruises: Theodore Wan & Paul Wong 1975-1979
April 20 to June 30 at Richmond Art Gallery
He’s now a venerable fixture in Canada’s art world, but this new exhibition takes us back to Paul Wong’s origins in Vancouver’s avant-punk scene, pointedly recalling his disturbing 1976 landmark work (with Kenneth Fletcher), 60 Unit; Bruise. Also pointed is this posthumous pairing of Wong with his contemporary at the time, Theodore Wan (1953-87), two Chinese Canadians making explicit and challenging work in a less sympathetic era. Along with Wan’s series of medical-inspired images from the late ’70s, Unit Bruises features rarely-shown work by both artists.
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