We can only hint at this with words.

We can only hint at this with words.

Russna Kaur M.E. Sparks Andrea Taylor

We can only hint at this with words.

Russna Kaur M.E. Sparks Andrea Taylor

April 23 - June 25, 2022

Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art 2121 Lonsdale Avenue North Vancouver, BC V7M 2K6

There is a slowness that happens in the body when we can’t quite name what we’re looking at. Openness and vulnerability arrive via the experience of looking without speaking, and the phrase “We can only hint at this with words” suggests that a feeling, a moment, or an experience is yearning to be named. But the exhibition’s title also points to the inadequacies of language. Our bodies hold memory, story, and trauma, and words often fail to convey the fleshy, corporeal narrative that defines a life. That is to say, words can only hint at what lies beneath the surface. Through multisurfaced experiential painting, sculpture, installation, and animation, Russna Kaur, M.E. Sparks, and Andrea Taylor aim to fill in the blanks where words cannot describe the myriad personal, historical, and cultural encounters and occurrences that make up the human experience.

All three artists share an approach to surface and material, and through their work each explores the limits and possibilities of their respective mediums. In what ways can an image be extended, pulled apart, unhinged from its borders, set free? How can mediums with predetermined uses become malleable and unfixed? In what ways are these material concerns a metaphor for how we move through the world as humans—particularly as women? We can only hint at this with words. attempts to answer these questions through the wordless language of materials and the traces of unseen gestures. The exhibited works resist the boundaries of wall and plinth—they creep, fold, and drape throughout the gallery, becoming unfixed, modular, and ever evolving. The surface of each artwork becomes a skin that tells a story. In this way, these mixed-media objects become living, breathing bodies in the room—entities that we, as viewers, can engage in wordless conversation with.

These extraverbal conversations reveal both the personal and sociohistorical complexities brewing beneath the skin of each work. The artists cull from childhood narratives, cultural traditions, and art historical legacies to create new meanings, thereby inserting their own presences into the folds of history. Through the artists’ processes of quoting, redacting, and revising histories—both personal and political—they subvert heteronormative, patriarchal legacies, proposing alternative narratives that pull apart and reject problematic and oppressive histories that have become bound to the female body. The exhibition opens up into other wordless worlds that speak to experiential and radical lines of questioning, bodily freedom, care, and rebellion.

As the pages of this publication reveal, Russna Kaur, M.E. Sparks, and Andrea Taylor each have a unique writing practice that informs or is informed by their visual work. On the following pages, you will find artist writings, photography, digital collage, and studio imagery that respond to the works in We can only hint at this with words. The artists were interested in emulating the experimental format of the zine—this DIY approach is reflected in the publication’s design, photocopy paper stock, and simple binding style. The publication concludes with critical writings by Yani Kong and Jayne Wilkinson, who discuss the complex and multifaceted works in the exhibition. I invite you to explore these writings and the exhibition in the nonlinear, experimental way demonstrated by the artworks.

—Kate Henderson, Guest Curator

Russna Kaur

Excerpt from Russna Kaur’s thoughts on line Lines of thought That line your thoughts Stitched, fused together Unable to separate aspirations from expectations Lines spoken Unspoken Lines that ring, vibrating at a frequency that will make you tremble Echoing, again and again Lines of conflict and contradiction, agreeing to disagree - a tangled knot Not straight Not fair The straight line is obedient and continues in the direction it was made to go in - it stays in line, follows in line - single file - heading in the same direction infinite - with no sign of stopping or changing direction That is, until there is a break, a crack, a bump, an edge, the edge, a ledge, a skid, a screech, a crash, a bump, a scar - the breaking point resistance, texture, grit, a tear, a cut, a paste, a drip, a glob, a smear, a disruption a chance for things not to line up perfectly to not be so thick and solid for transparency for imperfection for failure a chance for a transition - from one surface to another -

a chance for chance - for freedom - for something unexpected or different a chance to break off in a new direction - to become unhingedto explore the spaces between point A and point B - and maybe even go on to point C, D, E, F, G And also, is any line truly straight?

If you look closely and examine line you can really see how fragile and delicate it is any slight movement, hesitation, exhale or miscalculation shatters this illusion that the line knows where it’s going making it vulnerable maybe instead of controlling line or trying to control line or pretending like line can be controlled - let line lead the way, let line show the way - let it react and respond to the surface allow it to veer off the path and create new ones - intersecting, straying, growing, splitting, repeating, flowing, sprouting, circling - moving within the surface, off the surface, weaving in and out between these spaces, reconnecting - expanding, shifting, living, breathing, flowing what happens if we don’t erase the lines that don’t go the way we want?

M.E. Sparks

_in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in

your your your your your your your your your your your your your your

house I was sewing and searching chair I thought about my hardened coffee book I read about the liquid bouquet game I pretended drawer I touched your triangular mirror photo I saw Joan Miró closet I searched for the soft arms bed I uncovered my precarious swiss roll dream I watched the moth sleeping night I kicked kitchen I tasted Champrovent cow yard I stepped on the Easter silk studio I found the bed floating painting I saw my daughter

_in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in

your your your your your your your your your your your your your your

house I was reading and watching chair I thought about my transparent cup book I read about the eccentric autumn lesson I cheated drawer I touched your greedy cherry photo I saw Cathy closet I searched for the sleepy feathers bed I uncovered my pink star dream I watched your fruit humming car I finished kitchen I tasted red paisley yard I stepped on the young roses studio I found the houndstooth singing painting I saw my sisters

M.E. Sparks www.mesparks.com/in_your_painting/

_in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in _in

your your your your your your your your your your your your your

house I was looking away and dressing chair I thought about my dotted dream book I read about the nude dance landscape I grew drawer I touched the crooked butterfly photo I saw Thérèse closet I searched for the white oxen bed I uncovered my golden fortune dream I watched my profile looking away kitchen I tasted stiff dandelion yard I stepped on the striped night studio I found the room thinking painting I saw my cat

Andrea Taylor

Sensation In between and underneath, pockets of something unseen – mystery dust, black starless air, vanilla sweet with scattered longing.

Plasticine limbs follow me, emptied and filled, halfway down the spine...

Soon, a pleasantly turbid liquid fills my veins.

Andrea Taylor

Yellow Yellow warms eyes, salts tongue, crunches brain ear, flares nose desire, deep.

Small kernels exploded violent expanded surface absorbing.

Alive and pricking.

Sparking to life my buttered engine.

My nerve tree oiled and singing.

Andrea Taylor

Essays

Something Other than What Is There Yani Kong Andrea Taylor’s artworks are operations of chance. The base materials for her sculptures are rescued from the cardboard recycling dumpster outside her studio. From there, Taylor begins the process of forcing the stiff stuff into the structure it wants to be. Have you ever tried to force a box into any other shape? As a medium, packing cardboard is neither eager nor easy to push or to ply into any form other than what it is. As a result, the artist must break it, press it, rip it, pull it, and aggressively curl it into a resting position. The results range: the sculptures can be conch-like; twisted and cavernous; bulbous and mushroomy; or spindly, straight, and delicate. It is difficult not to treat Taylor’s objects as a sea of creatures, each with individual wants and needs—if not to anthropomorphize them and attempt to gather with them as a squad. However still or static these structures may be, they remain kinetic, vibrant, and teeming with movement.

The casual effects of risk or luck are similarly apparent in Taylor’s video work Three Figures (Liquid Stardust) (2022), where stop-motion plasticene figures move to animated charcoal and pastel mark-making. The work sequences swift transitions between three-dimensional shapes and flatness—between vivid colour and tonal graphite. As with the exhibited sculpture series, I observe an exciting and joyful, almost silly, character to the artist’s movable forms. Again, I’m cautious not to push humanizing qualities or identities onto their surfaces, and yet it’s hard not to call them “guys” or “buddies,” grouping them in some way, because there appears such a friendship between the figures. It is a fun challenge to resist this urge.

Listen closely to the film: the soft sounds of mark-making produce the soundtrack. Invisible hands scribble and erase, sounds swish and scratch, rattle, crack, and rub, wrap and unwrap. The noise is light, matching the sprightly, unplanned motions of the drawn charcoal, juxtaposing the weightiness of the clay mounds as they move and blend, somewhere between speed and slowness.

I am struck by the relationship between Taylor and her structures across the many mediums in which she works. As friendly as her formations appear with each other, so too does a warm fellow feeling seem to exist between the artist and her materials. In as much as each piece contains its own charisma or nature, it arrives to its singularity through her touch. I imagine Taylor in her studio punching and wrestling with the cardboard boxes, producing the sculptural consequence of this difficult dance. The claymation actors, too, show her physical imprint, the intervention of her thumbs and palms, and the depressive force of her hands and arms. Likewise, the immediacy of Taylor’s mark-making is inextricable from the hands that draw them. The works are a fragile container of Taylor’s movements; in turn, they come to share some of her liveliness. She is present in every twist and turn in her work. She is the lining of every fold.

The exhibition that houses these artworks, We can only hint at this with words., addresses

the limits of language in expressing the ongoingness of meaning. Taylor’s co-conspirators in this group show, M.E. Sparks and Russna Kaur, are each motivated to paint beyond the limits of history. For Kaur, this history is deeply personal and familial. Sparks offers a deft feminist response to the canon of art history. Taylor’s work looks to the body’s responsiveness toward art, how the intensities of our affective reactions offer unique extraverbal data. Each artist’s practice produces an expansive art, one beyond the frame.

Like Taylor, my own investigations as an art historian centre on the encounter between the viewer and the work of art. My method is to theorize the act of viewing art as a busy site for the exchange of indirect information—a place of mixing for me and the artwork.

Taylor’s work is an exciting object of study because she inserts so much of herself into her practice. Her artworks make any potential combinations that much richer—triadic, as her objects become a conduit for the viewer to understand the artist’s own movement.

Many levels of combination function in Taylor’s work: the interplay between artist and medium; the interaction between viewer and artwork; and, at a longer reach, the interchange between the viewer and the artist vis-à-vis the art object. From creation to viewing, a process of making and unmaking folds the artist into her objects, to be later unfolded through the viewer’s observation of them. At every point of contact, her artworks gather potentials and capacities and raise the question: How can things become something other than what they are?

Taylor’s process challenges the fatefulness attached to objects, now free of their exhaustive, literal meanings and predetermined uses because she has enabled them to create new relations with her and with the viewers that engage them. The artist’s studio is well populated by her gracious and responsive formations. They gather over every surface and line the walls and floors with their changeable presences.

To come to know these objects, I really had to be with them, to travel them. They require the viewer to circulate their entire structure, to get below them and look through them, to tour every tunnel. The reward for this effort is found in and expressed through Taylor’s use of high-pigment colours—intense oranges, reds, neons, pinks—set with glossy resin and broken up with swaths of hand-painted black and white stripes. Visually, they are a feast.

I hear the ring of feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz’s compelling description of life: “Life is matter extended into the virtual; matter is life compressed into dormancy.”1 Art offers us a unique mode to think such a proposition through, and particularly Taylor’s art, because her works retain the qualities of her movement long after she is done forming them. In dance, bodies are trained to imagine a kind of movement that extends well past their physical parameters. How can you, for example, extend your arm in such a way that the movement keeps going beyond the limits of your fingers? As I mentioned earlier, the sculptures seem to store Taylor’s kinetic practice. So, too, do the figures and the marks in her video work. The liveliness and playful energy of these moving images offer an almost endless opportunity for the artist’s actions to just keep going.

Nonhuman matter becomes something that teems with lively potential, like a pressed flower that remains just as alive when it dries. According to a philosophy of affect, all bodies function in a system of relation. An object’s liveliness is expressed in the encounter with other material bodies. It is found in the impulse of these bodies toward action, in the release of possible becomings. Taylor’s art has the propensity to express something other than what is there. These works are not simply the product of mediums, materials, and techniques; rather, they are what happens when these things and processes come into active contact, and how they come to develop new use-value and new expression through their blending.

In our conversations, Taylor mentioned that her efforts aim to obfuscate her materials.

I read this intention less as an act of elision and more as a physical process designed to crack open her resources and extract what can be renewed. The subtitle of Taylor’s exhibited video work, Liquid Stardust, references some specific thinking that informs her practice. To say that we are all composed of stardust sounds like a cosmic exaggeration, and yet it is a scientific fact that many of the elements of the periodic table, including those that compose the human body, are the product of stars that have gone supernova. As stars die and lose mass, the elements that this process generates are swept out into space.

New stars are formed from these elements in an ongoing cycle of burnout, cleansing, and reformation. This system of breakdown and renewal sets a pace for Taylor. We can see it happening, in particular, in her animated drawings: composition, erasure, new marks; again.

I want to be careful not to convey too grand an optimism in my reading of Taylor’s art.

Rather, what I wish to highlight is the cycle of building and demolishing that is so present in the work—relaying that nugget of potential carried forth in all processes of destruction.

The philosopher Jane Bennett offers us a useful term here: “vibrant matter,” by which she describes the vitality that runs across all materiality.2 Thinking about the mutual exchange between human and nonhuman forces carries such a glowing tinge, but we must remember that even ugly matter is a participant in this potent intersection. Which is to say: even garbage and compost quietly ferment and bubble away as they decompose into togetherness. Yet, as Taylor salvages her discards—cardboard, scrap metal, wool, fibreglass, even her own movement—I think she intervenes like a kind of trash collector or recycler, gathering discarded fragments and reforming them, creating a new shape that remembers its old one.

1. Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 32.

2. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

Surface Tensions: On Works by Russna Kaur and M.E. Sparks Jayne Wilkinson My first questions about art always have to do with process. What is this made from?

How did the artist start? How does a familiar material transform into this unfamiliar thing before me? Part of art’s magic is the moment when paint or glue or canvas or charcoal coheres into an image, when materials disappear into the becoming of something new.

It’s a kind of magic trick. Representational or abstract, the fact of an image and not of its composition is what makes an assemblage of material art. I can’t say whether I’m entirely invested in this idea—it’s impossible to claim that art exists divorced of its maker—but, still, the magic trick of art, the reason we respond to artwork with speculation or imagination rather than only analysis, is this disappearance of everyday material into illusion.

In 2019, artist Amy Sillman organized an exhibition, The Shape of Shape, in which she attempted to understand modern art through a history of shape. Sillman writes: Shapes are how you make distinctions, get the lay of the land, or even tell time.

And doesn’t everyone have two shapes, really? The first is your own body, which you can’t get out of, and the second is your shadow, which you can’t get rid of. … Your shadow is your personal shape, your silent companion, your own flat echo.1 Since reading her essay, I’ve become alert to shadows and the possibility of perceiving the world in two dimensions. My eyesight is generally poor, and without lenses I cannot read signage or distinguish faces, or really navigate the world at all. But this condition does offer me an unusual pleasure: remove the glasses and I exist in a strange sensorium without the crisp dimensionality of 20/20 vision. All is blurred colour, imagery distinguishable only as shapes floating on the surface of my eye. This optical trick immerses me in a world without depth, a world of surfaces. It’s a bit like the experiments in colour and shape we find operative in We can only hint at this with words.

The artists in this exhibition assemble patterns and materials through an attentiveness to shape, line, and cut. Using different methods, and to different ends, their works are invested in a process of collage as they reassemble colours, forms, patterns, and surface textures to produce new works that deviate from their origins. This type of collaging is very different from the cut-and-paste technique that was once revolutionary and is now commonplace. For Russna Kaur, this happens through a process of outlining, in-lining, and experimenting with line as the tool to define a shape; for M.E. Sparks, a shape is defined through its cut. Both offer an investigation into what happens when unexpected juxtapositions join together on a surface. And both explore the flatness of a world of shadows, colour blocks, light patterns, and floating shapes, investing it with new meaning.

Russna Kaur’s colourful paintings offer the uncontained chaos of explosively full sur-

faces, ones that reward close but unfocused looking. She draws influence from aspects of identity, personal biography, and artistic legacy, keeping her references thoroughly embedded such that her surfaces often overtake whatever concept or intention might exist beyond the frame.

Kaur typically works in a modular way, meaning her paintings can be installed in different configurations—a strategy that also allows her to prepare gallery-wall-sized installations from her more modest studio. Her frames are contingent: they come in different sizes, and can grow or shrink or rotate. Her surfaces slide around, from canvases to walls and across other supports; the edges are never bound, and in that (both practically and metaphorically) she is able to map the patterns and images of the world onto a nonrepresentational space of vibrant, flowing texture.

In the two large wall works on display at the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art, Kaur incorporates multiple panels whose surfaces she has built up using acrylic paint and spray paint combined with other mediums, like sawdust, that add volume to distinguish certain outlines and shapes. These panels are riotous and colourful, every hue clashing and combining, though rarely blending. Her colours sit alongside each other, allowing new relationships to emerge through a process that is alive to the permutations and possibilities of colour, shape, and line, evolving across the canvas to continually exceed their containment.

Some of these approaches have come through the influence of Kaur’s family. Her mother owned a local clothing boutique in Brampton, and designed Indian bridal and formal wear, so as a child Kaur was immersed in the colourful, patterned world of commercial textile design. She talks about how this influenced her aesthetic choices, and how trips to India involved sample shopping, where one vibrant pattern was always abutting another.

Kaur’s influences also extend in other, perhaps unexpected, directions. Her undergraduate education was in biology, a pursuit that requires careful study of microscopic details—a way of looking that has surely influenced her approach to mark-making and the relationship between an individual element and a whole. Kaur grew up in Brampton but since 2017 has been living and working in Vancouver, where she completed her Master of Fine Art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, learning from artists whose influences have likewise marked her practice: from Elizabeth McIntosh, a graphic use of colour and modular approach to canvas; from Damian Moppett, a method of abstract, linear painting; and from Ben Reeves, her supervisor during grad school, a keen attention to the relationship between painting and perception.

For Kaur, line is an important conceptual guide. A straight line is constricting, rigid, formulaic; but overlapping lines, broken lines, layered lines, repeating lines—these are where she finds the flow required to achieve her large abstractions. The surfaces of each module, ruptured by uneven assembly, form a distinct yet internally consistent composition. It’s like she’s stitching or quilting with paint—hence, an affinity with collage. It’s a method that brings objects, forms, and materials together unexpectedly, demanding a roving eye that trips across the surface.

This exhibition marks the first time Kaur has combined several mediums in one room: painting, printmaking, and photography. Clearly influenced by the materiality of twentieth-century art processes, Kaur’s project is refreshingly invested in the importance of physicality and tactility. Through all mediums, hers is a practice of wandering lines, of moving shapes, of elements coming in and out of focus across so many scattered and uneven surfaces. Ultimately, these works cohere around a kind of playfulness, or at least an exploration, in experimenting with what it means to look at the world differently.

M.E. Sparks’s approach to shape is defined by flatness—an elision of depth in favour of shifting surfaces—even when working with conventional sculpture and three-dimensional forms. Her rearrangement of surfaces, of mixing and reassembling and recombining elements, borrows heavily from disparate sources to produce new meanings and associations. It’s a practice that understands a different relationship to history and, like many artists of our era, Sparks recognizes much is to be gained from a less direct approach to painterly influence.

Sparks’s grandfather was a painter and illustrator who worked in San Francisco during the 1940s through the ’60s. This period is significant for Sparks, as it marks a transformation in the ways that women, femininity, and the ideals of youth—even the very notion of “being a teenager”—were being culturally constructed and represented. Fashion was also shifting in palpable ways. Sparks refers to these shifts, albeit obliquely, by incorporating fabric patterns from this era.

Each cut-out sculpture includes a front side of oil paint on prepared canvas and a back side of raw, unpainted canvas, which is then draped over a wooden support. In the pieces included in We can only hint at this with words., some of Sparks’s cut shapes—borrowed from her grandmother’s early twentieth-century sewing patterns—resemble the literal cut-outs of paper dolls. Other shapes she directly lifts from paintings by the Polish French modernist painter Balthus, an artist whose problematic legacy has been widely debated because of his penchant for working with underage girls as models (and who shares a timeline, if not a geography, with the working years of her grandfather). Incorporating difficult and historically contestable material is part of what makes Sparks’s ambitious approach all the more unique. What happens when a shape travels through time, when a form returns? These works offer a kind of colour-blocked Rorschach test, abstracted just enough to be barely recognizable, where what we perceive in the strange floating forms is as indeterminate as our individual psyches.

Sparks’s technique comes from experiments with the picture plane and owes much to the aesthetics of collage, a medium traditionally about the production of new ideas through recontextualizing existing images or language. This approach is perhaps most evident in her Dadaist-inspired digital project in_your_painting (2022), where each click of the screen produces a new phrase generated from the titles of Balthus paintings and the names of fabric prints. These are then randomized to generate a new, continuous piece of narrative poetry. The abstract nature of language is captivating, and the website operates as a parallel to how Sparks paints: collecting disparate references that, when recontextu-

alized, form new possibilities. The artist discusses being struck by phrasing in Virginia Woolf’s 1928 essay A Room of One’s Own, where she writes of the woman writer who must find new shape for the male-dominated novel form: “No doubt we shall find her knocking that into shape for herself when she has the free use of her limbs; and providing some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her.”2 Woolf is writing, persuasively, about the politics of finding new narrative possibilities so that women, as readers and writers, might expand the boundaries of their practices. Sparks’s “knocking into shape” likewise takes on new forms by reworking the visual language and conceptual framing of the historically and still male-dominated world of painterly abstraction.

I want to return, briefly, to think about shape as something that performs its work somewhere between a structure, an outline, and a form. Shapes give and take; they produce ideas and pull them apart; they structure and they deconstruct. Crucially, shape is a thing that is representational and abstract at once. In “Shape: A Conversation,” art historian David Joselit distinguishes shape from form by calling it “a kind of intermediate thing somewhere between a body and a geometric figure.” The curator Michelle Kuo replies: “Shape seems to be somewhere between composition and anti-composition, form and formlessness, between good gestalt and raw matter.” But for Amy Sillman, it’s exactly the in-betweenness of shape, the indeterminacy of something that is generally understood as determinate, that defines it: “Shape is the fruit of a certain kind of compositional labor and attention … something between linguistic structures and random outlines.”3 It is in these shifting areas of surface tension that Sparks’s and Kaur’s works perform their transformational magic acts.

1. Amy Sillman, “further notes on shape” in SHAPES: The OG v.14 (New York: MoMA, Spring 2020), 2–15.

2. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), 126.

3. David Joselit, Michelle Kuo, and Amy Sillman, “Shape: A Conversation,” October, no. 172 (Spring 2020): 143–44.

Artist Bios Russna Kaur is an artist living and working in Vancouver. She holds an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2019), and a BA (Honours) with a studio specialization from the University of Waterloo (2013). Solo exhibitions include I Thik The Kracdil wil et Sme and No Bute witse sme a gin., Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver (2021); Veil of Tears, Trapp Projects, Vancouver (2019); and It cannot be heard - the glow is so far away!, A Room With A View Gallery, Toronto (2021). Group exhibitions include High Anxiety, Mónica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver (2021); Holding a line in your hand, Kamloops Art Gallery (2021); and the heart is the origin of your worldview, Art Toronto with Cooper Cole (2019). In 2021, she was commissioned to create an artwork for the second instalment of the Boren Banner Series, a public art initiative at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. Her work is a part of several collections including the Audain Art Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery and the Surrey Art Gallery. Kaur gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

M.E. Sparks is an artist and educator currently living in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 Territory.

She holds an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, and a BFA from NSCAD University, Halifax. Recent exhibitions include A Fine Line, Trapp Projects, Vancouver; To-Do-To-Do, with Number 3 Gallery’s SPAM series; and Hiatus, Ou Gallery, Duncan, BC. Her work has been shown at Access Gallery, Vancouver; Franc Gallery, Vancouver; Dynamo Arts Association, Vancouver; Fifty Fifty Arts Collective, Victoria; Support, London, ON; and SiteFactory, Vancouver. Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, Kelowna, BC. Sparks gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council.

Andrea Taylor is an artist living and working in Vancouver. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier (2014). She has had solo shows at Back Gallery Project and Malaspina Printmakers in Vancouver. Taylor completed a Spring Intensive Residency at Banff Centre, Alberta, in 2017 and has held two collaborative drawing residencies with Margery Theroux. Her sculptures will be a part of a group exhibition curated by Mohammad Salemy at Richmond Art Gallery, BC, in 2022. She has taught for many years for Continuing Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, and is represented by Mónica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver. Taylor gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Contributor Bios Kate Henderson is an artist, curator, public art planner, educator, and cultural worker of white UK settler ancestry, based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaɬ/Selilwitulh Nations. Henderson is invested in socially engaged art, emergent practices, collaboration, and care. She was Interim Curator at the Art Gallery at Evergreen, Coquitlam, BC (2021–22); Public Art Consultant at the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation (2020); and Director/Curator at Capture Photography Festival, Vancouver (2018–20). From 2014 to 2018, Henderson served on the Board of Directors at Access Gallery, where she was president from 2016 to 2018. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2013), and a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, with a Major in Photography (2007).

Yani Kong is SSHRC Doctoral Fellow of Contemporary Art at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. Kong’s research area is in reception aesthetics and contemporary art history, and as a member of the Low-Carbon Research Methods Working Group, she explores sustainable practices in streaming media in online teaching and learning. Kong is a faculty member in the Department of Art History and Religious Studies at Langara College, Vancouver, and an editor and critic for several Canadian publications.

Jayne Wilkinson is a writer, editor, and curator. She is former Editor-in-Chief at Canadian Art and regularly contributes to art publications including art-agenda, Artforum, C Magazine, Momus, esse, and others. She holds an MA in Art History and Critical Theory from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and has organized exhibitions and public programs for galleries and artist-run centres across Canada. She is Sessional Lecturer in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto and in Art History at McMaster University, Hamilton, ON.

Acknowledgements Sincere thanks to the Gordon and Marion Smith Foundation for Young Artists (the Smith Foundation) especially to Daylen Luchsinger, Meredith Preuss and Emily Neufeld for all your support and dedication throughout the exhibition planning process. Thank you to our graphic designers Vicky Lum and Margery Theroux, and to our editor Jaclyn Arndt. Huge thanks to the volunteers and educators at the Smith Foundation, who have helped bring this exhibition to life through workshops and tours.

We gratefully acknowledge the following sponsors: PARC Retirement Living, the North Shore Recreation and Cultural Commission and North Vancouver School District #44.

Russna Kaur’s project generously supported by

M.E. Sparks’ project generously supported by