GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

The Studio

Exhibition with works by artist Monique Fouquet

Exhibition
October 3 - October 29, 2024

Opening Reception
Thursday, October 3, 2024 from 6 - 9pm

Artist Talk
Monique Fouquet in conversation with Randy Lee Cutler and Ingrid Koenig
Saturday, October 12, 2024 from 2 - 3pm

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Many years ago, Monique Fouquet recalls looking through a glass wall at Brancusi’s reconstructed studio located at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Brancusi considered the relationship between sculptures and the space they occupied to be of crucial importance. When he bequeathed his entire studio to the French state, he stipulated that its reconstruction at a new site had to display his sculptures in their exact location at the time of his death. The studio, in effect, became a work of art.

In Fouquet’s studio, objects such as notebooks, art materials, books, family heirlooms, and other items, either purposefully collected, or haphazardly accumulated meld into the background. In a home studio, boundaries can be ambiguous. It is in fact, the visibility of works-in-progress that here cover the walls and which transforms domestic space into conquered territory. As transitional space and space of uncertainty, the studio is also a place of unpredictable connections.

On the studio walls, a series of drawings suggesting space, movement and time coalesce in abstractions where imaginary boundaries could potentially extend beyond the edges of the paper. The objects which, moments ago, sat imperceptibly on shelves thus become part of a new register. This shift of context, from background to foreground, calls attention to materiality and to social relations.

As an experiment, Fouquet isolates and photographs objects, a process that gradually leads to building an inventory from which images are selected to construct still life compositions in dynamic relation to each digitized drawing. Historically, still life paintings or drawings occupy commonplace settings like a table top. But here, it is the objects’ placement over the drawing that determines the illusory surface onto which the objects sit. The series renders visible, not only the accumulation of things, but also the incongruous relationships that are suggested in the process of juxtaposition.

In this project, Fouquet aims for a fluid relationship between the photographic representation of the objects and the abstraction of the drawings. Objects make connections. Books, an old camera, porcelain vases, a bottle of black acrylic paint and other effects, though personal to the artist, are assembled and underscore the dialectical interplay between the artist’s intent, the viewer’s perception and the social sphere.

The Studio invites viewers to engage on a personal level and to consider the interconnectedness of disparate components in both, art and life, while contemplating the possibility of multiple meanings and the reinterpretation of historical traditions to allow for more poetic associations.

ARTIST BIO

Monique Fouquet was born in Quebec City and now lives in Vancouver - Unceeded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Territory.

She holds an MFA (Simon Fraser University) and a PhD in Curriculum Studies (The University of British Columbia). She taught at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and served as Vice President Academic and Provost 2002-2011.

She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Asia including the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Surrey Art Gallery, the Contemporary Art Gallery, the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and the Yokohama Citizen Gallery among others. She has served on the Vancouver Public Art Committee 2018-2021, 2020-2021 (Chair).

Her work is included in the collections of Canada Council Art Bank, the City of Vancouver, Simon Fraser University, the Surrey Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Vancouver General Hospital and in numerous private collections in Canada and the United States.

moniquefouquet.com

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

THE EYES OF THE CITY EXHIBITION

Exhibition with photographer and filmmaker Richard Sandler

Exhibition
September 7 - September 28, 2024

Opening Reception
September 7, 2024 from 2 - 5 pm

SlideNight (Tickets)
September 19, 2024, 7pm

Artist Talk
September 28, 2024, 2pm

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

The photographs in this show were made in New York City (and to a lesser extent) in Boston, from February 1977 to the Summer of 2001. They depict the “recent past,” an uncomfortable time, that lives in historical limbo. They are too young to be a record of the distant past, and too old to resemble contemporary culture. These street pictures reveal the time just before the proliferation of computers, cell phones, digital cameras and the Internet. For better and for worse one was simply “on the street,” in public space, bathing in the comforts, or terrors, of the human sea. There was no way to filter the reality of the broken city and there was no refuge in virtual space. In the underground, graffiti tags and spray painting exploded onto every surface, and whole subway cars were “bombed,” windows and all. Crime and crack cocaine were epidemic, rents were inexpensive and tourists were too scared to come to NYC. The Times Square and East Village streets were drug addled and dangerous, while in mid-town the insulated rich wore furs in unprecedented numbers. Ronald Reagan was the U.S. president for eight of those years, “greed was good” and Y2K hysteria was approaching. To some the New York City of the recent past was a hell on Earth. To others it was one of New York’s most fertile artistic periods. I offer these photographs as marbled evidence of beauty, humor and decay mixed with a healthy dose of cultural critique, and as questions about colonial life itself. All of the photographs in the show were shot on film and printed on silver gelatin paper by master printers, Sid Kaplan, Bob Klass and myself. After the disaster of 9/11/01 I put the still camera on the back burner and recorded only video with sound. It seemed to me, that "silent" still photography was too poetic of a medium to convey the heartbreak, fear and chaos of that time.

ARTIST BIO

Richard Sandler, (b.1946) is a street photographer and documentary filmmaker. His still photographs are in the permanent collections of the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Historical Society, the Houston Museum of Fine Art, the Museum of the City of New York and the Center for Creative Photography. Sandler was awarded two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships for photography, (1992, 1998), a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship for Filmmaking, (2006), and a New York State Council on the Arts fellowship for Filmmaking (2009). Sandler worked as a freelance photojournalist for 35 years; his clients included the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Village Voice, The Boston Phoenix, Boston Magazine and The Real Paper (Boston). 

Richard has directed and shot eight non-fiction films, including “The Gods of Times Square,”(1999), “Brave New York” (2004) and “Radioactive City,” (2011). Presently, Sandler's documentary film, “AKA Martha’s Vineyard” is in post production; it recounts the lovely island’s history, told from Wampanoag first nations' perspectives. His first monograph,"The Eyes of the City," (powerHouse Books, 2016) is in it’s third printing, and two other (street and subway) books are in the works. From 1985-1993 Richard taught street and documentary photography classes at the International Center of Photography in New York City.

In Canada, Richard Sander is represented by Gallery 881.

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

The Heart is Not a Well, It Is a Fountain Exhibition

Exhibition with works by artist Monika Wiatrowska. Curated by Alejandro A. Barbosa.

Exhibition
August 8 - August 30, 2024

Opening Reception
Friday, August 9, 2024 from 6 - 9pm

Artist Talk
Monika Wiatrowska in conversation with Alex Waber
Saturday, August 17, 2024, 2 - 3pm

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

The Heart Is Not a Well, It Is a Fountain presents a selection of Monika Wiatrowska's still life works, including pieces produced in collaboration with artist Alex Waber.

The exhibition focuses on the artist's photographic practice and includes staged and unstaged works on fabric and paper. These works express the artist's interest in the representation of the absent body, beauty, banality, the relationship of objects with intimacy and memory, the passage of time, decay, the domestication of organic and synthetic materials, and the codification of natural and artificial light in contemporary photographic imagery.

Wiatrowska's tableaux formalize her desire to translate multisensorial and cognitive experiences into images, and much of her work originates in her writing practice. Her observations of sensory experiences are repurposed toward her visual work by transferring her impressions to the construction of her still lifes.

The central work in the show, F*ck Everlasting, originated in Wiatrowska and Waber's intention of challenging the still life's typical stasis, embracing the artifice of expressing temporality via photographic imagery. In contrast to the full control provided by a studio setting, the work is arranged and photographed outdoors where accidents, decay, shifts in lighting, and the progression of time are all equal participants in a setting where non-human bodies and forms coalesce with what is domesticated and human-made.

ARTIST BIO

Monika Wiatrowska is a Vancouver-based artist, originally from New Hampshire, US. She holds a B.A in Cultural Anthropology from the University of British Columbia; and a M.S in Design Strategy and Management from Parsons School of Design, The New School . Monika started out professionally as a print graphic designer, later moving on to art/creative direction and production. She has art directed for Sad Magazine and Montreal-based Maisonneuve Magazine. Monika began working full-time as a freelance stylist, art director and photographer in 2020.

Monika’s photographic work examines sensing/sensuality, and their necessity as expressed through appreciation of the natural world and the design and histories of objects—from the personal realm, to the social, and anthropological. Her still lifes extend this exploration to personal possessions and human-made objects re-contextualised with natural materials and flora. Music and design are her other energetic outlets, as well as experimental spaces to further translate the world of her visual art. 

CURATOR BIO

Alejandro A. Barbosa (they/he) is an HIV-negative queer latinx visual artist born in Argentina who lives and works on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples—the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations—in what is known as Canada. Alejandro’s curatorial practice focuses on lens-based media and revolves around questions on the political potential of the photo-based exhibition as a cultural form, the intersection of photography and family histories, and the ever-shifting relationship of the photographic image with violence. They hold an MFA in visual art from the University of British Columbia, and a BFA in photography from Concordia University. Alejandro’s curatorial projects have been exhibited in Argentina and Canada.

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

OFFERING EXHIBITION

Exhibition with artist Lam Wong

Exhibition
June 22 - July 31, 2024

Opening Reception
June 22, 2024 from 12 - 5 pm

Artist Talk
Lam Wong in conversation with Hank Bull
Wednesday June 26, 2024, 7pm

Tea Ceremony with Lam Wong (Free RSVP)
Sunday, July 28, 2024, 1 - 5pm

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Alone I hike with deer.
Cheerfully I sing with village children.
The stream under the cliff cleanses my ears.
The pine on the mountain top fits my heart.

...

On the broad river, so vast, the spring day is about to
dwindle.
Willow blossoms, fluttering about, dot my patched
robe.
One verse of a fisherman’s song inside the dense mist;
This boundless grieving, for whom is it carried on?

Ryokan

Amidst the chaos and madness of current world affairs, Lam Wong reinforces the important notion of human connection to nature as a form of survival and a way of being to fight urban isolation, social disintegration, and moral decay in humanity. A self-care mechanism during times of turmoil.

Offering conveys Wong’s deep meditation on his ongoing investigation into the human condition and fragility of life. His concern for our state of mental wellbeing under the present political climate of intense polarization and an increasingly divided and violent world. The works also express his profound respect for trees as sentient beings. One of the photo works, Offering (Clinging Pine), taken in Banff (2023), is a testament to its resilient spirit. The biography of this clinging pine tree on the Bow River includes sitting on an important geographical marker of the Earth’s Permian extinction some 252 million years ago, a severe mass extinction event also known as the Great Dying. The pine tree reminds Wong of his own visit to Yellow Mountain, a high mountain full of famous pine trees, in China prior to the global pandemic. Coincidentally, the artist was told that Banff and Yellow Mountain are sister cities.

The works in this exhibit are all new works showing for the first time, including many of Wong’s creative outputs from his 2023 visual art residency in Banff.

ARTIST BIO

Lam Wong (b. 1968, Xiamen, Fujian, China) is a visual artist and curator who immigrated from Hong Kong to Canada during the 1980s and studied design, art history and painting in Alberta and British Columbia. Wong works with painting, installation and performance to engage with themes such as the perception of reality, the role of art and the relationship between time, memory and space. He sees artmaking as an ongoing spiritual practice and his work draws upon his knowledge of Western art history and his interest in Taoism and Buddhism. Wong’s creative approach is often concerned with blending Eastern philosophies and challenging the notion of painting.

Lam Wong has been based in Vancouver BC since 1998. He has recently exhibited his work and performed at Campbell River Art Gallery, Canton-sardine, Centre A, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, Gallery 881, Griffin Art Projects, Unit 17, Walter Phillips Gallery, Western Front, and Vancouver Art Gallery.

lamwong.com

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

Tangential Matter Exhibition

Group Exhibition with artists Chris Jordan, Danielle Bobier, Gerri York, Jennifer Lim, Paula Nishikawara. Curated by John Goldsmith.

Gallery 881 Centre Room

Exhibition
May 21, 2024 - June 18, 2024

Opening Reception
May 25, 2024 from 12 - 5 pm

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

"Tangential Matter” is an exploration of the interconnectedness between the tangible and intangible, the material and the ethereal. The group exhibition unites five artists from distinct disciplines—photography, printmaking, painting, ceramics, and sculpture. The exhibition draws inspiration from the five ancient elements including air (ἀήρ aḗr), fire (πῦρ pŷr), water (ὕδωρ hýdōr), earth (γῆ gê), and the aether (αἰθήρ).

Tangential Matter echoes from a space of protoscience with the philosophical gesturing predating modern science. With photography as a basis, tangential mediums are presented as an experiment in resonance and interference. Through the spectrum of depictions of geothermal forces and atmospheric currents, we see and experience our world as it is governed by the “shape” of the localized forces that act on the energy and matter of our material plane.

Tangential Matter takes place in the Gallery 881 Centre Room located at 881 East Hastings Street, Vancouver. The entropic works on display explore this human-nature dualism in the context of beauty and destruction, organic and inorganic, life and death. The exhibition also incorporates design elements through our collaboration with Retro Modern Designs. The Noguchi table, with its organic and physics-defying shape, unites the exhibition like the universe's interstitial glue aka dark matter.

ARTIST BIOs

Chris Jordan

For two decades Chris Jordan’s internationally known photographs and conceptual artworks have probed into the dark underbelly of our culture of mass consumption. Exploring the complexities of our many forms of waste, these series have been exhibited and published worldwide, most recently with a retrospective solo exhibit at the Sungkok Art Museum in Seoul. Chris has published four books and is past winner of the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Prize for Conservation Photography (2010), the Prix Pictet Commission Prize in Paris (2011), and the GreenLeaf Award given by the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo (2007). His paradigm-breaking film Albatross reached a global audience with its compelling love story about birds on a remote island in the Pacific whose bodies are filled with plastic. Albatross was recipient of the 2018 Planetary Health Film Prize in London.

Chris currently lives in a small town in Patagonia, Chile on the Strait of Magellan at the tip of South America. In this space of relative isolation, his work turned in a new direction: toward the contemplation of beauty as a response to the mental chaos of our times. He has recently released several new photographic projects, all under the title “Beauty Emerging.”

chrisjordan.com

Danielle Bobier

Danielle Bobier is a Vancouver-based visual artist whose practice finds interest in elements of material, abstraction, geometry, and the natural world. Working primarily as a painter, her compositions consider the act of horizon-gazing, observing the inner landscape through a symbolic lens. She has shown in numerous exhibitions, most recently at spaces such as Trapp Projects, the lobby space at the Contemporary Art Gallery, and Art Rental & Sales, Operated by the Vancouver Art Gallery. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2016), and a diploma in Fine Art from Langara College (2014). She is the recipient of two BC Arts Council grants, the Langara College Painting Studio Award, and residencies at Malaspina Printmakers and Makerlabs. Her work can be found in collections across Canada and in the US.

daniellebobier.com

Gerri York

Gerri York is a visual art graduate of the BFA programme at Emily Carr University. She was born in London, England and completed a B.Ed.(Hons) degree at St Gabriel’s College, London University, England. Her visual art practice encompasses sculpture, printmaking, photography and drawing and has been exhibited in a wide variety of exhibitions and juried shows. The work is included in both public and private collections, in Canada and internationally, and an artist’s residency was completed at Grafisch Atelier Utrecht (CBKU) in the Netherlands.

York has sat on the education committee of the Vancouver Art Gallery and completed an internship. During 2003–2006 she worked at the VAG as a staff animateur and workshop leader in public programmes. At the Contemporary Art Gallery she has volunteered on the Education Committee and facilitated workshops for art teachers. Gerri is a member and past Board member of Malaspina Printmakers,’ has worked on their fundraising, education and studio committees and written articles for the print media journal, CHOP.

Currently York is working at the Howe Street studios in Vancouver situated on the unceded, indigenous homeland of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-waututh Nations.

gerriyork.com

Jennifer Lim

Form is prioritized over function in Jennifer Lim’s slow, hand-built ceramics. With a focus on surface noise and disruption, her work conveys a sense of porousness and malleability. A deep love for nature leads her to highlight the inherent qualities and materiality of clay, while working towards a practice that is minimally extractive, and honors the multiform ways in which this earth nourishes us. As an immigrant settler, Jen is keenly aware that extractive processes in procuring ceramic and glaze materials sometimes cause great harm to local and Indigenous communities and lands worldwide. Her practice is an ongoing engagement with this tension—exploring her positionality and responsibility, through art, in supporting repair and resilience.

Of Chinese descent and born in Manila, Jen immigrated to Toronto in her early teens. She obtained a dual BA in Visual Arts and Anthropology from the University of Toronto, with a concentration on printmaking and site-specific installation. She focused on street and travel photography, then food and beverage photography while living in New York City for 15 years. She also worked as a photo researcher and photo librarian while obtaining her masters in Library and Information Science (with a concentration on archival studies). Jen pivoted to ceramics in 2018, and established a practice after moving to Vancouver in 2020. Her work has been included in curated group shows in the U.S. and Vancouver.

jlimceramics.com

Paula Nishikawara

Nishikawara’s artistic DNA is authentically rooted in the landscapes and experiences of the Canadian Pacific Northwest. Her colour and composition finds its source in the beauty of rainforests, mountain glaciers, seascapes, vast skies, and fast flowing rivers. Paula is an international artist creating humanistic and environmentally focused works using painting, printmaking, installation, photography, sculpture and performance.

Her ancestral connection with Japan plays an important role in Nishikawara’s creative universe. It is expressed in her extensive use of reinvented traditional Japanese printing techniques, use of Japanese papers, and above all a fluent and articulated way of merging traditional and modern discourses of art making. Although her works stand alone, the immersive installations where multiple and broad elements intertwine to create alternate dimensions - are her most favourite constructs that invite reconsideration, and often self-inquiry.

paulanishikawara.com

SPONSORS of GALLERY 881

PrintMaker Studio is a Canson Infinity Certified Print Lab and custom finisher and framer. We are located at 881 East Hastings, Vancouver. printmaker-studio.com

Retro Modern Designs furnishes Gallery 881. Please contact the gallerist for acquisitions of art and design. Retro Modern Designs is located at 727 E Hastings, Vancouver. retromodernhome.com

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

Below the Sea of Fog

Exhibition with artist Roger Larry

Exhibition
May 18, 2024 - June 15, 2024

Opening Reception
May 18, 2024 from 1 -5 pm

Artist Talk (UPDATED!):
September 21 from 3 - 4pm
Moderated by Julie Lee

Download: Below the Sea of Fog Catalog (pdf)

ARTIST STATEMENT

My exhibition of photographs, Below the Sea of Fog, was shot over the three-plus years of the pandemic. The pandemic haunts us still. For myself, the pandemic was marked by my family’s health challenges, and my own work reversals as a feature film maker. We all have suffered. The act of creation was my refuge. I took over 15,000 images in this period. Before the pandemic most of my art production was film installation and photography. Most of the photography was tableau of people at work and play. But as the pandemic wore on, I found myself focused instead on dark eerie landscapes. These photos were so different for me that I spent much time puzzling over them. Then I began to remember… When I was twelve the Art Gallery of Ontario had a show devoted to German Romantics curated by Alan Wilkinson, that included work by Caspar David Friedrich. Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter of the late the eighteenth century, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his allegorical landscapes, which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies or a sea of mist. Friedrich is powerfully associated with the idea of the romantic sublime.

Eighteenth century philosophers described the sublime as the limit of human understanding, where the human mind meets something vast and impossible to digest: experiences of the sublime could include confrontations with great precipices and mountain vistas, with the infinity of the sky, or with the darkest depths of the sea. We could say that the pandemic itself was a kind of sublime formation with the virus overwhelming our little lives. In much Romantic philosophy and art the Romantic subject emerges from a confrontation with the sublime ennobled; the sublime becomes a secular spiritual experience through which the romantic subject/person experiences transcendence and totality. But my photographs, I felt, dealt with another aspect of confronting the sublime, one that was more destabilizing.

In fact, in the late eighteenth century there was a flipside to the ennobling romantic sublime, a gothic sublime, often associated with the work of Giovanni Piranesi, Henry Fuseli and Francisco Goya. Instead of stepping back from the sublime precipice, the subject of the gothic sublime descended into an incompressible nightmare from which there was no reassuring emergence. To quote Vijay Misra “this other sublime, the gothic sublime, is in many ways the voice from the crypt that questions the power of reason … as the mind embraces the terror, located at the near abyss where the subject says, I am my own abyss, and is faced with a horrifying image of its own lack of totality.” And this gothic sublime, I believe spoke to the experience of COVID. And it spoke to my photos. In the year or so after COVID, I thought more about my photos and also about their location and I realized that the abyss I felt in Stanley Park during covid was not, of course, solely my own. It was also entwined with the history of the Coast Salish people, the original indigenous inhabitants of the lands now called Stanley Park. Before mounting this work, I went on tours with Coast Salish guides. I will not be sharing the stories the Coast Salish shared with me on those tours, that is their prerogative. However, I was advised by my Coast Salish guides that using the original Indigenous place names in the titles of the work would be a respectful way to allude to what has haunted the park long before me or COVID.

The exhibition tells an elliptical story; it begins with a Romantic portrait and ends with an evocation of Armageddon. It’s the culmination of the journey from the naïve and romantic to a gothic space where doubt and devastation reign supreme – personal, political, and environmental.

ARTIST BIO

Roger Larry is a filmmaker, artist and emerging curator. Three film installations he co-authored with Mark Lewis screened in 2013 at MOMA/PS1. He has a large body of photographs and film installations made over the last thirty years but is only now attempting to exhibit them. His fifth and latest feature film, COOL DADDY, a documentary about toxic masculinity is currently screening on CBC GEM. Other films include the feature documentary CITIZEN MARC and the thriller CROSSING. Roger was also creative producer on contemporary artist Mark Lewis’ first feature film INVENTION(2015), which premiered to great acclaim at TIFF and the Berlinale. “Below the Sea of Fog,” Roger’s first solo photographic exhibition is at Gallery 881. rogerlarry.art

ESSAY by MARK LEWIS

“On Roger Larry’s Below The Sea of Fog”
By Mark Lewis

“My painting, I know what it is beneath its appearances, its violence, its perpetual play of force; it is a fragile thing in the sense of the good, the sublime, it is fragile like love.”

—Nicolas de Stael, in a letter to his dealer Jacques Dubourg in December 1954

Amy Hempel’s short eponymous story (barely eight lines long) from her recent collection Sing to It: New Stories (2019), opens with the following: ‘At the end, he said, No metaphors! Nothing is like anything else.’01 Or, everything is only everything if you forget about all the rest. Some years ago, a friend shared an experience she had on a plane, flying from Toronto to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She was sitting next to a young man from Pakistan, aged around 22 or 23, en route from Karachi to take up a graduate scholarship at the University of Saskatchewan. He had the window seat; my friend had the aisle. As they were getting close to their destination, the young man tapped my friend on the shoulder and asked: ‘What is all that whiteness down there?’ My friend leaned over and looked out the window and of course everywhere down below was carpeted with snow. When I have retold this story, people have usually thought it cannot be true as they assume everyone, especially those travelling to Canada for postgraduate studies, would know what snow was, how it looked, that it was white. And sometimes I have thought that I have got the story wrong, that I have forgotten some detail or indeed made the whole thing up.

Recently I was flying to Saskatoon, probably on the same scheduled flight as my friend and the young man from Pakistan. I was going to Saskatchewan to make a film, and as I needed lots of snow, I was travelling there mid-winter. As the plane approached Saskatoon, I too looked out the window and for the first time I understood the young Pakistani man’s puzzlement. There was indeed snow, lots of it, everywhere. But there was a strangeness to what I saw, and this was not simply due to the fact of snow. Looking out the plane window, the whiteness seemed to go on forever but with little articulation. In fact, it did not really look like ‘snow’ at all. It appeared as a strange and unworldly whiteness, with its own peculiar perspectival and spatial laws. It was strange too because it was not completely unfamiliar: there were still a few roads, buildings, occasional trees, etc., but nothing looked exactly right. I might well have asked the person next to me to explain what I was looking at.

In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, its disaster mise-en-scène dramatic in arrival and effect, with huge death counts, immediate lockdowns, and restrictions on travel both near and away. To me it felt a little like going to bed one night, everything articulated, sharp and recognisable, and then waking to realise that while you had been sleeping the world had been both covered and confused by snow. Quotidian, second nature things became experiences thick with puzzlement and surprise. Think here of the then new ‘correct distance’ between people, even those close to you; or the missing repertoire of facial expressions of strangers and colleagues; or the geography of public space where the absence of much human life felt like a sign; or the silence in the high sky and the return of birdsong lower down. These barely noticed signs of etiquette and humanity (at its best and worst) became things to discover, think about, and reckon with. This was a magical defamiliarisation of our lives with formal, social, and political consequence. The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky describes this effect or device – ostranenie – as the quintessential art effect, the work of the work of art – the work of making the world strange, again. Here art reveals a world that can look back at us, destabilise us, a world that challenges the viewer to see difference, to see something new, as if the world’s very form has been overdetermined by something homologous to an aesthetic effect.

For quite a long time, many artists could not go to their studios. Some could not even go outside because of health compromises. Many lost their income, some of which will never return. Art institutions that had supported and presented artist’s works shrank; others permanently disappeared. It was an unsettling and made-strange landscape. Thankfully, as far as I can tell, there seems to have been little appetite for an art of Covid paraphernalia.

One important effect of the Covid era is that it enabled, in comprehensive and readable form, political and cultural action, particularly Black Lives Matter and related decolonial interventions. Here the Covid paraphernalia was essential: from the masks that gave people confidence to join others outdoors; to the copious home-delivery cardboard boxes that were the material for inventive and beautiful home-made signs. ‘Covid time’ itself produced possibility, particularly for the young: it allowed time for spontaneous gatherings and protests where people could express their collective horror and anger at racism and discrimination, and articulate the need for a different, better future. Most of all, the making strange effect of the virus revealed that it, like most other disasters of Capital, was not even handed in its punitive terror, and that race and class were significantly determinant. If there is any gift from Covid, even today after the many disappointments and ugly backlashes, I think it is a rare moment of political transparency, a significant and rupturous condition that though in retreat, still rumbles on. Some kind of sublime.

For Roger Larry, despite the uncertainties and gloom, the necessary life-style changes, the health threats, as well as imagined catastrophes, Covid 19, with its restrictive consequences, enabled a radical rethink of his artistic practice. The film he was working on with the CBC, about Vancouver as a centre for international stolen and untaxed money, was cancelled. Other projects in development were paused. Long recognised for his clever and thoughtful documentaries, his work as a show runner on network reality shows, and as an early Canadian pioneer rock video director, Larry began to take stock, to think about what he could do, how he might continue his artistic work otherwise. He had always loved photography and with the aid of a new high-resolution camera he began to photograph each day. Because of the pandemic he was unable to venture far, so he homed in on trying to understand and depict neighbouring Stanley Park.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Stanley Park is, literally and metaphorically, Larry’s backyard. My son Oak, when he first met Larry in Vancouver some years ago, thought Larry lived in the park, so often did we bump into him there. Larry knows the park inside out, knows its history and its different iterations, and when I lived in Vancouver in 2011, he would always take me to special spots, framing up compositions with his hands (we only had Blackberries back then), and excitedly describe how this shot or that shot (and there were more than a few) would one day feature in a film he was working on. Well, these compositions, as far as I know, never featured in any of Larry’s films. However, I am pleased to note that we can see some of them here in this exhibition of his recent work. These pictures are beautifully composed, carefully rehearsed (see above), and shorn of showboat pictorialism. Of course they depict the beauty of the park, but Larry’s photos draw their critical strength from the staging of the park as a place of transformation, of historical and contemporary inhabitations, many of which have been neither righteous nor disinterested.

Each year trillions of digital photographs are taken across the world, many millions of which no doubt feature Stanley Park. Do we need to, and if so, how do we register the difference between these and the images that artists like Larry are making? Larry’s pictures acknowledge this very vital and contemporary question, by drawing upon and provoking the complicated and referential histories of this kind of depiction. Landscape pictures did not always belong to iPhones and social media, but the fact that they might ‘belong’ there now is of no less interest to Larry than everything else. Julian Barnes recently wrote of the shock – and for some the disappointment – registered when standing in front of the actual subject or object of circulating reproductions. Barnes speaks particularly about the effect this circulation had on his experience of Velazquez’s painting Los Meninas. He described how muted the colour and contrast of everything is when compared to their instagramification. Landscapes are transformed in this way and no photograph of ‘nature’ in general and of Stanley Park in particular, is readable without this long historical cabinet of pictorial execution. Larry’s choice of black and white must be significant here; and more on this below.

The fantasy of a virgin (North and South) American landscape was an invention of white colonialists, made after the one hundred years separating the arrival of the first white settlers and the eventual death of 90% of the indigenous populations through genocide and disease – a death toll greater than the entire European population of 1500. Fire farming, practiced for thousands of years across the Americas including the Amazon, disappeared, almost overnight, leaving behind a growing fantasy of untouched primordial nature. Today’s beautiful ‘intact’ landscapes are brought into existence through and alongside this history of death and destruction. See for instance Larry’s pictures of Beaver Lake, a place used for thousands of years by the Musqueam and Squamish. His pictures depict a zone once logged for profit and then some years later became an important summer spot for white Vancouver residents with its cafes, concerts, and cabins. The romantic sublime of the location today, where few people go and there are no longer concerts, is felt in Larry’s photographs as an invention of all the images ever made of constructed and conflicted places like this. Larry’s images ingest this and then detail nuance.

Many of the photographs Larry shows here have a mysterious dusk and darkness about them. Things merge, edges disintegrate and photography itself appears as material. Shooting in black and white is important for Larry, as it accentuates here the work’s materiality, making it difficult, even impossible, to know if the images are appearing out of their darkness or disappearing into it. It is an important, definitional question for photography, where light can easily overexpose and wage war with itself. Think if you are looking for new planets in distant galaxies. You would know that all the wonderful magical light from hundreds of billion stars, both dead and alive, is simply pollution that stops you from seeing what you want to see. So, if you want to see something then, really see it, sometimes you need to see past the light, and catch the dark precarity. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in a much-quoted passage, writes: “to perceive this darkness is not a form of inertia or of passivity, but rather implies an activity and a singular ability. In our case, this ability amounts to a neutralization of the lights that come from the epoch in order to discover its obscurity, its special darkness, which is not, however, separable from those lights." The darkness in Larry’s photographs, like silence, is an important location; its full of meaning and therefore full of possibility. Darkness is also doubt, an unsettling uncertainty, a lack of self-confidence – what Maurice Merleau-Ponty found in Paul Cézanne, for instance: a doubt without end.

It is in the inscrutability of Larry’s photographs, in their darkness, so to speak, that Stanley Park begins to come alive with bits of everything. Indigenous populations have lived in The Americas for at least 17,000 and possibly as long as 130,000 years, and the ‘nature’ of The Americas has been tended, rearranged, protected, battled for, destroyed and at times surrendered to, by hundreds of diverse cultures across thousands of years. There is not even a single blade of grass in the park today that has not in some way been determined and formed through this historical nature-culture portmanteau. The ‘old growth’ trees of Stanley Park, featured in some of Larry’s photographs, were probably born on the grounds of ancient custodial ambitions. The land’s most recent fate sealed in part because local Indigenous invention did not include firearms, and indigenous bodies were unable to fend off ‘foreign’ diseases often introduced deliberately. For the long curated and cared-for ‘natural’ landscape of the Americas, the white settler was a bad throw anomaly, uprooting and changing everything in less than a century.

It's by looking and thinking about Larry’s images that the above thoughts came to me, more properly, to this text. And as I was writing about his work, I remembered a line from a letter Henry James once sent to the educationalist Graham Balfour: “the rarest works pop out of the dusk of the inscrutable, the untracked.”

MARK LEWIS BIO

Mark Lewis is a Canadian artist, best known for his film installations. His work focuses on the technology of film and the different genres which have developed in over 100 years of film history. In 2009, he represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. He has had solo museum exhibitions at the Musée du Louvre, Paris (2014), The Power Plant, Toronto (2015), the Art Gallery of Ontario (2017), the Museo de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) (2020), and at numerous other international museums.

His work is in many collections including the National Gallery of Canada; Museum of Modern Art New York; Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris; the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Museo de Arte de São Paulo and the Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal, among others. In 2007, he received the Gershon Iskowitz Prize and the Brit Art Doc Foundation Award. In 2016, he received a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. He is Professor in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

SPONSORS

“Below the Sea of Fog” and Gallery 881 are proudly sponsored by PrintMaker Studio, a Canson Infinity Certified Print Lab. Our full service, open concept, fine art print studio offers the finest papers and archival mounting and custom framing services. Visit PrintMaker Studio online or at Gallery 881.

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

Undercurrents
Exhibition by Kristin Man

Opening Reception
March 16, 2024 from 12 -5 pm

Exhibition
March 16 - April 13, 2024

Artist Talk
April 6, 2024 from 2 - 3pm
Moderated by Josema Zamorano

Artist Tour
April 13, 2024 from 2 - 3pm

Artist Statement

“The sea is the symbol of the collective unconscious, because unfathomed depths lie concealed beneath its reflecting surface.” (1) Dr. Carl Jung

Centred on locating her own “Self (2)” amidst a passage through six countries and ongoing global upheavals, Kristin Man began this series with a couple of questions: “What would the impact be on my consciousness if I were able to see my mind as a radiologist can examine an x-ray?”, and “What form would my art take if I were able to combine my inner and outer Seascapes?”

In February 2023, while pursuing her advanced yoga teacher training certification program, Man contacted a local university-based neuroscience laboratory to make simultaneous investigations in the studies of philosophy-bodywork and science. The goal was to explore the potential paradoxes and parallels and perhaps, to find her sense of reality somewhere in between. The lab’s neuroscientists assisted her in making EEG recordings of her own brain activity over meditations. These recordings are embedded in the majority of artworks here. While Undercurrents is predicated on the mother series A-MARE (to love-to sea), based on the overriding concept of connections signified by woven waves, conveying interconnected themes such as ecology (human-others), memories (between times and places), history (between past and present), here she focuses mainly on the waves between those of her brain and the ocean. These efforts by Man to place a scientifically measurable reality of the human brain in dialogue with a transcendent experience derived from metaphysical investigations, suggest that her project is an ongoing experiment. This exhibition represents her recent artistic rumination and embodiment of her micro-macro cosmos.

1. Which drives 95% of our behaviour/actions according to Dr. Carl Jung

2. In yoga philosophy, “Self” is interchangeably used to refer to consciousness and conscience

Artist Bio

Kristin Man (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and author of two publications. Born in Hong Kong, after having lived around the world, she is now based in Vancouver. She writes in English, Chinese and Italian. In projects A-MARE (to love-to sea), 9_9 and Fragments of Grey Matter, she marries her written and visual poetry.

Man holds an IB from UWC of the Atlantic in Wales, a BA in International Relations from Brown University and an MBA from Columbia University in the US. She is also a certified yoga teacher and believes that life and her art traverse inside-out and outside-in.

Since 2018, she has been focusing on project A-MARE which initiated with weaving her photographic images printed on various materials into 3-D artworks and has evolved to include found plastic objects and industrial scraps. Undercurrents is an offspring. In addition to galleries in Vancouver such as Canton-sardine, Burnaby Art Council and Pendulum Gallery, Man has exhibited internationally and her work is in the collection of foundations and private individuals. She has presented her work at institutions such as the Museum of Anthropology and Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Garden in Vancouver, Les Rencontres d’Arles in France, the Italian National Archives in Rome, Rizzoli in Milan, the Museum of Contemporary & Modern Art in Naples, and PAN Palazzo delle Arti Napoli as well as radio and TV interviews in Italy. Her works of art invite viewers to question what being human means by exploring disconnects between shared human issues like social justice, migration, anthropocene and consumerism.

kristinman.com
@kristin.man

The Artist would like to thank the following people for their friendship and participation:

VR Creator - Mana Saei @manasaeiart
Music for VR - Andy Hepburn @hepandy
Video Participant & Support - Laura Cisneros @unfoldingsenderos
Video Assistant - Alice Bi @bismuthbta
Artist Talk Moderator - Josema Zamorano @josema_zamorano

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

“Where I’m From” Exhibition by
Jeremy Jude Lee & Megan Kwan

Opening Reception:
February 10, 2024 from 12 -5 pm

Exhibition:
February 10 - March 9, 2024

Artist Talk:
Saturday, February 23, 2024 from 1 - 3pm

With generous support from the Strathcona BIA and the Vancouver Art Walk.

Artist Statement

Where I’m From contemplates (be)longing, lineage, and the nature of evolving dreams passed down through generations as (grand)children of immigrants. The collective exhibition, led by Vancouver artists Jeremy Jude Lee and Megan Kwan, includes a site-specific installation, focusing on cinematic imagery in conversation with physical objects and familiar locations specific to their Asian-Canadian experience.

Lee and Kwan’s practice examines self-portraiture—embracing aspects of their cross-cultural identities that they struggled to accept in the past. The photographic work depicts narratives of leisure, tenderness of friendship and the fleeting nature of memory. The installation works are everyday artifacts that represent the resourcefulness, dreams, and sacrifices of generations before. Together, these works create an immersive installation that expresses the mutual influence of Asian culture in a Western world.

The title of the exhibition, Where I’m From, speaks to the concept of home for those who live on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations also known as “Vancouver.” Having both been born and raised in the Lower Mainland but still perceived as foreign, Where I’m From, is a homage to the past revisiting familiar places but documented with a renewed perspective while redefining past beliefs of belonging.

The process of creating this series of artworks was deeply collaborative and made possible by the contributions of Jacky Huang, Esther Joh, Rachel Kwan, Ciara Kosai, Sabrina Wong, James Jin, Jason Chu, Long Xi Vlessing, and Xin.

Artist Bios

Jeremy Jude Lee (He/Him) is an artist and photographer based in Vancouver, Canada. He is known for his storytelling narratives of nostalgia — inspired by cinema, skate culture, and music.

Jeremy’s photography work has been featured in publications such as Montecristo Magazine, HYPEBEAST Magazine, Editorial Magazine, Highsnobiety, Magazine-B and more.

A graduate from Emily Carr University of Art + Design with a BFA in Photography, he has been working as a photographer in the city for over 10 years working with brands such as Canon, Lululemon, and Arc’teryx while continuing to pursue his personal artistic practice.

Jeremy aims to share narratives surrounding the local Asian-Canadian experience, using forms of selfless self-portraiture. His projects in this vein — “Myth & Reality” and “Chinatown Forever” were featured by BOOOOOOOM.com, Meta’s 2021 “AAPI Heritage Month” Campaign, and exhibited at “The Break Room” by OCIN. Jeremy’s most recent work, “Parker Place”, was featured on i-D Magazine’s “Your Month in Photos” in April.

In 2022, Jeremy self published his first book, “Montage,” a compilation of film photographs organized by tone and color. The book launch included an exhibition hosted at SORT and Alterior / A Living Taste. His book is currently available at the OR Gallery and Gallery 881.

IG: @jeremyjudelee
website : jeremyjudelee.com
CV: https://read.cv/jeremyjudelee

Megan Kwan (She/Her) is a Queer Chinese-Canadian art director, designer, artist and founder of the creative studio and collective, Super Sensitive Studios (SSS). Her professional and personal practice focuses on collaboration and visual storytelling to explore ever-evolving questions of identity, grief and belonging.

An alumni of Emily Carr University of Art + Design with a BDes in Communication Design, Megan has 7+ years in the creative industry. Her interdisciplinary work has been featured in HYPEBEAST, Dazed, Booooooom, exhibited in Ranger Station Art Gallery, Vancouver’s Science World, “The Breakroom” by OCIN, and was one of two Canadian participants for Design School Kolding’s International DesignCamp15. She has a wide range of experience working with growing start-ups, design agencies, and global brands, and collaborating with independent filmmakers, artists and non-profit organizations. Megan has led creative teams locally, such as TEDxECUAD’s inaugural event, and internationally taking her to the UK, Denmark, and South Korea.

Megan’s empathy-lead work strives to express the shared feelings of individual experience that ultimately connect us all through a design lens. Notably, after the passing of her mother in 2015, her award winning project “Of Loss and Grief” continues to explore the journey of grief through the objects that still remain. More recently, her collaborative projects “Chinatown Forever” and “Pretty Boys,” revisit the inter-generational Asian-Canadian experience of a cross-cultural identity. In addition, she is preparing her solo exhibition “Begin Again” at Slice of Life Gallery in September 2024, which aims to showcase the emotional and physical experience of starting over.

IG: @supersensitivestudios
CV: https://read.cv/megankwan 

Thank you!

Participating businesses include: Printmaker Studio, Sunrise Soya Foods, Sunrise Market, Coolite Bamboo Products, CINCO Drink Co, Allegra – Vancouver, and Alterior/A Living Taste. The process of creating the series of artworks was deeply collaborative and made possible by the contributions of Jacky Huang, Hwahyoo Joh, Rachel Kwan, Ciara Kosai, Sabrina Wong, James Jin, Jason Chu, Long Xi Vlessing, and Xin.

Rituals Exhibition with Broad Magazine

Group exhibition

Opening Reception:
Dec 9 from 2 - 5p

Exhibition:
Dec 9, 2023 - Jan 12, 2024

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

Rituals Exhibition

PROJECT STATEMENT
Explore the power of daily habits and rituals, beyond the confines of religion. Rituals have the ability to ground us and give us a sense of stability and routine in our daily lives. Gallery 881 invites you to the opening of “Rituals”. Artwork that captures the beauty and significance of these daily practices, and how they can provide comfort and strength even in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. This exhibit celebrates the power of daily rituals and showcases the sense of community and connection that they can bring to our lives. This exhibition aims to inspire viewers to reflect on their own daily habits and find meaning in the simple moments of their lives.

ARTISTS
Alfred Hermida, Alice Pinelli, Anton Bou, Atsushi Momoi, Benjamin Page, Chih Yi Chou, Cole Schmidt, D'Arcy Newberry-Dupe, Daniel Campbell, Deborah Bakos, Elena Vanoni, Frank Crosby, Gerri York, Gizem Aleyna, Yıldırım, Gregor Bauernfeind, Gretchen Grace, Hiroya Takeuchi, Jackson Case, Jayne Lloyd, Jim Eyre, John Culbert, Justin Boudreau, Laura Noel, Lingxue Hao, Louise Francis-Smith, Lucas Baade, Marco Bordignon, Marie Dreezen, Mark Edwards, Nicole Melnicky, Nicolo Masini, Paula Nishikawara, Rachel Nixon, Rebecca Wang 王晨釔, Richelle Greabeiel, Roger Larry, Roman Agee, Sam Shariati, Silvia Szucs, Stefanie Zito, Tal Ben Avi, Teodora Petrovic, Thanachai Tangwaralak, Toby Zeng, Tommy Lei, Trevor Schmidt, Utu-Tuuli Jussila, Vadim, Marmer, and Valerie A Durant.

CURATORS
Gergo Farkas — BROAD Magazine Founder and Editor
John Goldsmith — Gallery 881 Owner and Gallerist. Owner and Fine Art Printer at PrintMaker Studio

Gallery 881 is grateful to our sponsors including PrintMaker Studio – a Canson Certified Print Lab and art finisher, BROAD Magazine, and Canson Infinity – maker of Digital Fine Art & Photo range media. We're also very excited to share a new curation of meticulously placed furniture in collaboration with Retro Modern Design.

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

“metsänpeitto” Exhibition” by Richelle Greabeiel

Curated by Alejandro A. Barbosa

Opening Reception
November 4 from 2 - 5pm

Exhibition Dates
November 4 - December 2, 2023

Gallery Conversation: Richelle Greabeiel with Alejandro A. Barbosa
November 11, 2023 from 1 - 2:30 pm

metsänpeitto Sound Presentation & Social Event: Richelle Greabeiel and de_vinchee (sounds designer) 
November 17, 2023 from 6 - 9 pm

 metsänpeitto Exhibition

Join us Saturday, November 4, 2023 for Richelle Greabeiel’s metsänpeitto exhibition and opening reception. metsänpeitto is a word from Finnish folklore that can be translated as “to be covered in forest” and as “a state of being where a familiar forest becomes unrecognizable.” Greabeiel’s metsänpeitto explores photography as a site to inhabit and undo family myths through performance.

The work presented in the show was produced in 2023 during Greabeiel’s stay at the Art Shed residency in Sointula, British Columbia. Originally founded in 1901 by socialist Finnish settlers, Sointula is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded Kwakwaka’wakw territory of the ‘Namgis, Mamalilikala, and Kwakiutl Nations, also known by the colonial name, Malcolm Island.

ARTIST BIO

Richelle Greabeiel is an emerging, multidisciplinary artist born in so called Canada and is of Finnish descent. She lives and works on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Wautuh peoples. Since 2019, Richelle keeps an art practice focused on investigating the intersections of history, personal narratives and placemaking through site-specific performance, lens-based and sculptural explorations. Her work utilizes conceptual and multi sensory frames of reference.

CURATOR

Alejandro A. Barbosa (they/he) is an HIV-negative queer latinx visual artist born in Argentina who lives and works on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples—the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations—in what is known as Canada. Alejandro’s curatorial practice focuses on lens-based media and revolves around questions on the political potential of the photo-based exhibition as a cultural form, the intersection of photography and family histories, and the ever-shifting relationship of the photographic image with violence. They hold an MFA in visual art from the University of British Columbia, and a BFA in photography from Concordia University. Alejandro’s curatorial projects have been exhibited in Argentina and Canada.

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

The Nostalgic Statement of a Cibachrome Retrospective by Launie Wong Fairbairn

Opening Reception:
Saturday, June 24, 2023 from 4 - 9p

Exhibition:
June 17 - July 24, 2023

Artist Statement

Circa mid-70s images capture an idealistic, wistful, tribal and free-spirited flower power contemplation and enchantment. Shot on discontinued chrome film manipulated for random, spontaneous and abstract grain then analog printed on obsolete archival forerunner Cibachrome by the artist. Both processes fell victim to modern technology for a proclaimed practical digitization.

These 25 Cibachrome portraits (editions 1 of 1) are arranged characteristically for this exhibition. Subjects were requested to perform a discreet act accompanied with a stationary stance yet go unblinking for up to 2 minutes. Vulnerability, luminosity, and the expression of time and motion were performed through this reciprocity between subject and artist. Technical parameters exceeding the recommended limitations resulted in an excruciating effect of painterly grain. As part of the artistic process, the polyester triacetate images were clipped resulting in a flawed azo layer with black edges to indicate true inherent Cibachrome characteristics.

Artist Bio

Launie Wong Fairbairn holds an Advanced Photography Diploma from Emily Carr University of Art & Design with a postgraduate 5th year specialization in analogue colour printing. Launie was the first female graduate of Chinese descent with a degree from Emily Carr’s photography discipline. She has exhibited her work at the Helen Pitt Gallery (solo exhibition), Burnaby Art Gallery, Richmond Art Gallery, and was interviewed on Mike Winlaw’s “The Vancouver Show.”

Launie is currently co-owner of ABC photo. In her 5 decades in the photographic arts, her practice was a visual exploration and technical experimentation culminating in a photographic livelihood. She is recognized for her technical expertise as a print technician, imaging consultant, and project coordinator for esteemed photo artists on their local and international lens-based projects.

Launie’s artwork is held in private collections and can be acquired directly from Gallery 881. Please contact the gallery for additional information.