Stir ’Splainer: 5 artists at The Lind Biennial exhibition at the Polygon Gallery

Mena El Shazly, Karice Mitchell, Dion Smith-Dokkie, Parumveer Walia, and Casey Wei shed light on their work

By gail johnson

Installation view of Casey Wei, The Zhang Clan 张家族, 2024. Photo by Akeem Nermo

The Polygon Gallery presents The Lind Biennial until February 2

THE LIND BIENNIAL is a collective exhibition of works from shortlisted artists for the Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize. The $25,000 award is the country’s largest accolade dedicated to supporting up-and-coming visual artists.

The 2024 exhibiting finalists are Mena El Shazly, Karice Mitchell, Dion Smith-Dokkie, Parumveer Walia, and Casey Wei. They were selected from a longlist of more than 60 nominees by a panel of esteemed international jurors: Grace Deveney, the Art Institute of Chicago’s David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg associate curator, photography and media; Brian Jungen, acclaimed contemporary artist; and Aram Moshayedi, writer, interim chief curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and current curator-in-residence at Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City.

The inaugural biennial exhibition is on view at The Polygon until February 2, 2025. The winner will be announced at a ceremony on January 23, 2025.

Stir connected with the finalists to hear more about their work.

#1

Casey Wei, The Zhang Clan 张家族, 2024 (pictured at top)

“The Zhang Clan is an installation work with an experimental documentary at its core. The premise is my maternal family, the Zhangs, who have all—with the exception of my mom—immigrated to Melbourne, Australia. (She’s here with my dad and I.) Under the conceit of a post-Tiananmen migration story, this project enacts methods of representation to address what cannot be verbally communicated, for a number of reasons: privacy, language gaps, lived trauma.

“Although the documentary had been in post-production for over a year, it wasn’t until a few weeks before the opening that I was able to realize the work as an installation in the space. I had so much fun working with the prep team to get everything just right. The screens, greenhouse, carpeted seating area, plants under the grow light—these elements work with the videos to activate an aesthetic that is provisional, playful, and how I’d imagine my relatives would have done it.

“The Zhang Clan completes the 父母 (fumu/parents) trilogy. Murky Colors, my MFA thesis film from 2012, is a bombastic 47-minute multi-narrative experiment, centred around my adaptation of my dad’s work-in-progress spy novel, Murky Colors—a sexy spy thriller about assassins, separatists, and government corruption in mainland China; Father and Son/Vater und Sohn/父与子 (2013) took me to Germany and China in search for the migration story of the titular comic strip by Erich Ohser from Nazi Germany to Shanghai, China, where I encountered the comic as a young child. While these two films use the father-child relationship as an entry point to investigate visual culture, immigration, and geopolitical history, The Zhang Clan approaches these recurring themes more intimately through the framework of maternal relations, domestic life, and mythic storytelling.”

Installation view of Dion Smith-Dokkie's work in the Lind Biennial at The Polygon Gallery. Photo by Akeem Nermo

#2

Dion Smith-Dokkie

“To make the works, I first collect satellite images of bodies of water in northeast B.C., including those made by humans as well as clouds, and then I use these to create digital collages. Second, I print the collages in multi-part panels. I do this because I use a specific kind of paper that is limited in size and temperamental to work with. Third, I combine the panels and saturate them with acrylic resin: this creates a complete work from the component panels and renders the paper transparent, in the same sort of way that water causes paper to become temporarily more transparent. After this, I fabricate frames and add different mediums and materials to further elaborate on the works.

“Each of the three largest works have inset images, like printed road maps. They show clouds overhead, lilacs, and laundry on the line; an aerial picture of the Williston reservoir; maps of northeast B.C. and greater Vancouver; and then my favourite place in Vancouver: a set of steps at English Bay that have been cut off from the sea wall. Images of the waves lapping at these steps on a summer afternoon have in turn been included in the three largest works: frothing water and systems of bubbles caught between concrete and the tides. Altogether, I hope the inset images open up the entire body of work, providing pools of clarity.

“I hope that viewers connect with the colours, shapes, and textures in the works. I hope the interplay of proximity and distance, of clarity and diffuseness, makes for engaging compositions and images. There is a lot of learning and experimentation, as well as chance, that go into the pieces, and so I hope people find this aspect interesting. Perhaps the works will give viewers occasion to reflect on the place of water and light in their world in a gentle way.”

#3

Karice Mitchell, She May Be Many Things I-IV

“My work seeks to engage with issues relating to the historical representation of the Black female body. All the works in She May Be Many Things are assemblages of scanned images from the vintage Black erotic publication Players. Through the use of collage, cropping, and digital manipulation, the works seek to call attention to speculated moments of interventions from Black women in the archive, highlighting locations on and through the body where self-fashioning and adornment practices can be found. Additionally, this work understands how colonization is deeply embedded within visual culture and considers how the creation of new images through pre-existing archives can serve as a way to reckon with the past. I hope that with this work, the images can offer a curiosity and inquiry into the erotic, allowing for the possibility of reframing relationships Black women can have with pleasure, care, and intimacy.”

Installation view of Mena El Shazly, Hyperopia, 2024. Photo by Akeem Nermo

#4

Mena El Shazly, Hyperopia

“In July 2023, while I was working on Hyperopia, and for the first time in nearly 30 years, the Port of Vancouver stood still as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union demanded pay increases to recognize their labour. Witnessing the port’s stillness was a reminder to rethink today’s fast-paced urban lifestyles and habits of consumption, especially image consumption.

“Hyperopia responds to today’s overindulgence in and overconsumption of images, and overuse of cellular phones to explore and consume the world. The work proposes that digital navigation gestures are ritualistic: e.g., scrolling is recycled from older hand gestures, constituting the same monotonous movement of using prayer beads.

“The project adopts the methodology of the Crystalist artists’ movement in Sudan, which suggests a crystal’s semblance (outer appearance) and its essence (inner reality) oscillate and extend infinitely inward and outward. The work examines the value of not preserving an image in its original state. Hyperopia deals with this idea of seeing in excess, including seeing beyond or between images, seeing in layers, overconsumption of images, exhausting one’s vision, and the vision turning back to the person looking.

“The three moss samples are from Pacific Spirit Park, created in collaboration with Drew Hall at Samuels Lab in the department of botany at UBC. The microscopic scenes show plant cell walls that have unique behaviours around water. Starting with hydrophobic structures, with their cuticular wax crystals that cause water repellency, and concluding with hydrophilic structures, the moss, which have specialized cell walls for managing water, that embrace their moist habitat and grow on decay.

“In the rain scenes, words and punctuation marks resemble falling rain engaging with limitations of language. The highly text-based correspondence scene is juxtaposed with the Port of Vancouver’s busy cargo traffic, a reminder about mass consumption and readymades in relation to language and communication.

“The work is dense with glitch and compression techniques, and the use of the colour blue. While in the analog video circuit, blue means no signal, it ‘has great potential in showing internal dimensions and depths’, according to the Crystalist manifesto, and therefore ‘has the ability to create a Crystalist vision.’

“Read the translated Crystalist manifesto here.”

Installation view of Parumveer Walia, For When They Come Knocking, 2024. Photo by Akeem Nermo

#5

Parumveer Walia, For When They Come Knocking

“For When They Come Knocking looks at how domestic spaces are undone and exposed, especially for queer folks. Queer lives are made into a public spectacle–something for people to stipulate–and the show examines this emotional experience. Inspired by the AIDS crisis and the Lavender Scare, the work takes archival news and audio clippings from these eras and puts them in close proximity to more intimate, tender, quotidian visuals. Family pictures and a film about two brothers are seen next to propagandistic newspapers and media, bringing the viewer into a tense middle-space where the outside and inside worlds seem to be colliding. The re-presentation of historical material becomes an invitation to stipulate its contemporary relevance. How far have we come, if at all?” 

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