Capture Photography Festival at RAG Opening Reception

Tickets

Cost: Free

Gallery Exhibitions:
Karilynn Ming Ho
For The Left Hand Alone
April 6 – May 27, 2018

Ho Tam
Cover to Cover
April 6 – May 27, 2018

Richmond Art Gallery (RAG) presents an intriguing combination of lens-based work within its galleries and across the cities of Richmond and Vancouver. At the Gallery, two solo exhibitions by artists Ho Tam and Karilynn Ming Ho engage the aesthetic façade of desire. In dialogue with these exhibitions but outside the physical gallery, RAG presents four public installations along the No. 3 Road Canada Line stations and one at the line’s terminus at Vancouver’s Waterfront Station, in partnership with Richmond Public Art Program, Canada Line and Capture Photography Festival.

In the context of No. 3 Road, a transit and commercial hub, artists Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes, Ho Tam, Karilynn Ming Ho and David Semeniuk are each producing site-specific installations, on display through the spring. This is the first time art has been displayed at Canada Line stations in Richmond.

Opening to the public with a reception at RAG on Saturday April 7, the two exhibitions and five public installations represent a cross-section of photo-based practice, responding to our changing economic and cultural landscape, the ubiquity of advertising, and the influence of digital technology within our daily lives. Together the projects address the lure of the photographic image and its ability to instill desire and longing in its audience.

Free admission, everyone welcome to attend.

ABOUT THE WORKS
Ho Tam’s Cover to Cover exhibition looks at the construction of public persona. The exhibition presents a broad range of Tam’s photo-based practice including his snapshot photo series and collage work. The gallery installation deconstructs the artist’s recent book works presenting individual series installed playful across the gallery walls.

Karilynn Ming Ho’s immersive installation, For The Left Hand Alone, uses the metaphor of phantom limb syndrome to explore themes of fragmented realities in a time when bombardment by digital information leaves many people feeling physically and mentally disconnected and disenchanted with reality.

At Brighouse Station, Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes’ installation Soon is in conflict with the commercial advertising surrounding it. Both in reference to, and disruptive against the global clothing brand adverts displayed across the glass façades of the station, Holmes’ piece initially blends into this environment but on closer inspection disrupts expectations. The work echoes the cacophonous visual experience of the station.

At Lansdowne Station, Ho Tam presents Barbershops; a series of four photographs of barbershops in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Inside this city within a city, hundreds of hair salons serve Chinese residents and visitors. Tam’s photographs capture these shops as key sites for community building, exchange and identity construction. Installed on No. 3 Road in Richmond, the work connects to the thriving Chinese diaspora in the area and the rapidly evolving commercial architecture of the site.

At Aberdeen Station, Karilynn Ming Ho’s alluring installation Mirror Flower, Water Moon utilizes deceptive technologies. The images are derived from Universal Adversarial Perturbations (UAP), visual textures and algorithmic vectors meant to disarm, confuse and deceive artificial intelligence. Ming Ho’s images show us tactics and technologies that deceive, connecting natural and digital actions that are just beyond the reach of human perception. The title, Mirror Flower, Water Moon is from a Chinese proverb, denoting something that can only be seen, but not grasped — like a flower in a mirror or the reflection of the moon in the water.

At Bridgeport Station, located in close proximity to the Fraser River, artist David Semeniuk’s Perimeter series focuses on Vancouver’s shared border with Richmond. “Over the last 200 years, this site has been rapidly transformed, from an Indigenous-managed estuarine environment and settlement to an industrial working river,” project
curator Paula Booker observes. “This history and the shift toward leisure and luxury accommodation here is alluded to, with a log boom in the Fraser River seen alongside the marginal edge of a golf course.”

At the Canada line terminus, Waterfront Station in downtown Vancouver, RAG presents Ho Tam’s, Guys at the Fair. This playful series is a selection of seven portraits shot at the 2003 Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) in Toronto, where the artist approached men who had won stuffed animals from carnival game booths. Guys at the Fair interrogates the mediated construction of masculinity, revealing diverse facets of the self through endearing, humorous and at times awkward intimate portraits of men.

Richmond Art Gallery would like to acknowledge the support of the BC Arts Council, City of Richmond, Richmond Public Art Program, Canada Line and Capture Photography.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes is a Hong Kong born, Richmond-based artist. Recent exhibitions include Bad Flavour, Wonderful Taste at Centre A, and What is Temperature? What is Pressure? at Wil Aballe Art Projects. Holmes was the winner of the 2017 Lind Prize. Upcoming exhibitions include the Polygon Gallery and the Capture Photography Festival (CSA Space).

Karilynn Ming Ho is a Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist working with video, performance, multi-media installation, sculpture and collage. Her work draws on existential themes as a means to examine formal and conceptual ideas around screen culture, technology, performativity and the body. Ming Ho has exhibited in solo shows across Canada including the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Trinity Square Video in Toronto, Optica Centre d’art Contemporain in Montreal, and Khyber ICA in Halifax. Her work has been screened widely in film and performance festivals in Canada, the US, and France.

David Semeniuk is a Victoria-based formally trained environmental scientist and a self-trained artist. His scientific practice focuses on the relationships between the ocean and climate. Semeniuk’s art practice addresses how the histories of capital and the production of scientific knowledge have influenced the production and exhibition of photography. He uses art objects to investigate spatial and temporal scales of environmental changes, the way we experience these changes, and ways of representing them.

Ho Tam was born in Hong Kong, educated in Canada and the U.S. and worked in advertising companies and community psychiatric facilities before turning to art. He practices in multiple disciplines including photography, video, painting and print media. His first video, The Yellow Pages, was commissioned by the public art group PUBLIC ACCESS for an installation/projection at the Union Station of Toronto in 1994/95. Since then Tam has produced over 15 experimental videos. He was included in the traveling exhibition Magnetic North: Canadian Experimental Video by Walker Art Center, Minnesota. His feature documentary film Books of James was awarded Outstanding Artistic Achievement (Outfest, LA) and Best Feature Documentary (Tel Aviv LGBT Film Festival). He also publishes several series of artist’s books and zines. Tam is an alumni of Whitney Museum Independent Studies Program, Bard College (MFA) and recipients of various fellowships and artist’s grants.
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