GALLERY 881
881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_
REDACTED by Pia Yona Massie
Exhibition
May 6 - 24, 2025
Artist Talk & Tea
Saturday, May 10, 2025 from 2 - 5pm
Closing Reception
Saturday, May 24, 2025 from 2 - 5pm
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
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(def.) to censor or obscure (part of a text) for legal or security purposes.
We live in a 24-7-365 world of surveillance where our desires, our secrets, and our crimes can be photographed, bought, sold and traded in the digital market. We can choose to hum along: “Every move you make, I’ll be watching you” OR We can choose to resist. My personal way of dealing with the destructive dogey “Project 2025” is to MAKE MORE ART.
We have learned so much from many brave whistleblowers Daniel Ellsberg to Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and ARTISTS from Jenny Holzer to Dana Claxton that the erasure of our stories by the powerful / the invisibilizing of our histories / and the silencing of our struggles from killing journalists to imprisonment / deportation are the common tools of authoritarian oppression, used equally by the spies and armies of our schools, governments and multi-national corporations.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
~ Milan Kundera
Lawyer Jack Smith, who has served in the US Dept of Justice as an assistant and acting U.S. attorney, and head of the department's Public Integrity Section, created this legal brief. Smith was also the chief prosecutor at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, an international tribunal at The Hague tasked with investigating and prosecuting war crimes in the Kosovo War.
DC District Court judge Tanya Chutkan was the presiding justice over the criminal trial of then-former U.S. president Donald Trump over his attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, including the events leading up to the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. The case never went to trial and was put on ice after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, with the SCOTUS decision of immunity.
Judge Tanya Chutkan released a redacted version of lawyer Jack Smith’s legal brief, here scanned and printed as photographic canvases, laying the foundation for this new body of work. Printed on water color matte rag paper with archival pigments, these submerged and disappearing documents have then been further redacted with color field printing and water color painting and drawing.
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This work is dedicated to all the names in bold and to YOU.
– Pia Yona Massie
ARTIST BIO
Pia Yona Massie is a multi-media artist, environmental activist, and teacher. Massie’s films and art have been exhibited in museums, festivals, and galleries throughout North America and Europe, including The Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts, Lausanne; and Gallery 881, Mónica Reyes and the grunt gallery in Vancouver, BC.
Massie's writing has appeared in: DAMP: Contemporary Vancouver Media Art (Anvil Press), and Forêt-Frontière : Une Action Art/Nature; as well as The Bulletin, Adbusters and Ricepaper magazines. Her work has received Canada Council and BC Arts Council grants, a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, Kickstarter funding, and artists residencies support over the decades.
Pia has taught and mentored for over forty years, in gratitude to her early teachers, many collaborators and friends. This includes work at community centres and universities, outdoor environmental education and film schools, with ages ranging from kindergarten through graduate school, in three countries: Canada, the USA and Japan.
In February, Pia collaborated with Kelly McInnes to create “Ocean Matriarchs Orchestra” This work was supported by a What Lab residency and F-O-R-M. https://whatlab.ca/exquisite-pressure-x-f-o-r-m/
In March, commissioned by the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, Pia helped to create the Tanabata “Wishing” Trees, a yearly ritual and celebration in David Lam Park. The trees held and fluttered with over 900 community wishes in more than a dozen languages.
Currently, 40 years of her work is being brought online for a special collections archive at VIVO Media Arts. She is collaborating with a new generation of artists on the multi-media work — Time Travellers Testimony — which brings the voices of Clayoquot Sound's 'War in the Woods' back full circle to the engaged creatives on the frontlines continuing the ongoing protection of our air, land and water.
Originally raised in Brooklyn, New York she has now lived half her life on the West Coast, near the Pacific Ocean, in the city of her ancestors. She is deeply grateful to work and live in the Pacific Northwest unceded traditional lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.