The Polygon Gallery honours Asian Heritage Month with Maternal Instinct, May 18
Event featuring local Asian-Canadian artists combines short films, live reading, and dance performance
SPONSORED POST BY The Polygon Gallery
Alger Ji-Liang’s motherland 母懷之地, featured in Maternal Instinct.
The Polygon Gallery invites guests to join in an intimate evening of film and live performance in celebration of Asian Heritage Month on May 18 at 6:30 pm.
Titled Maternal Instinct in honour of people’s mothers and grandmothers—their 媽媽s, 奶奶s, nanays, and okaasan-tachi—the event will feature works by local Asian-Canadian artists Clare Yow, Long Xi Vlessing (龙喜), Alger Ji-Liang, Janice Esguerra, Lisa Mariko Gelley, Sophia Mai (舞) Wolfe, and Shana Ai (愛) Wolfe.
Maternal Instinct is a tender exploration of love, grief, matrilineal complexity, invisible labour, and diaspora identity. It delves into a mother’s intuition, people’s instincts in remembering who and where they come from, and the complex and nuanced relationships folks share with their mothers and motherlands.
The lineup includes three short films: Yow’s Daughters of Our Diaspora, Vlessing’s Blanket Song, and Ji-Liang’s motherland 母懷之地. It also features Leftovers, a live reading by Esguerra; and Midori, a dance piece by Gelley.
Daughters of Our Diaspora draws on the significance of invisible domestic labour performed disproportionately by racialized women. Through meticulous and mundane food preparation, Yow’s mother, Yam Sock Yee (任淑儀)—who has spent the past 25 years as an unwaged homemaker—reflects on matriarchs, inheritance, and the nourishment of family.
Clare Yow’s Daughters of Our Diaspora.
Vlessing’s 奶奶 (nainai, grandmother) writes stories by sewing them into blankets and quilts. In Blanket Song, she faintly narrates her creations, and the artist regards them up close with the warped glass lens of his broken camera, a laptop webcam, and a clunky Xerox scanner.
In motherland 母懷之地, a grieving boy moves across the liminal spaces of his memory to connect with someone he’s lost. Through this act, he must confront the tension and trauma within his body to find solace.
Midori, created by Gelley in collaboration with Lily Yuriko Tamoto and performed by the Wolfe sisters, uses dance to make space for the complexities and depth of familial and sibling love, sweet memories, and impossible distances.
Rounding out the evening, Esguerra’s Leftovers unpacks themes of family, intergenerational grief, love, loneliness, and hunger by exploring a nuanced relationship between a mother and her daughter.
Admission is by donation, courtesy of BMO Financial Group. RSVP and find more details for Maternal Instinct here.
Post sponsored by The Polygon Gallery.
Janice Esguerra’s Leftovers.