Charles Campbell’s 45-minute audio recording of senior Black artists and local community members’ breath is the core ambient backdrop of the curated exhibit Black Breath Spectacle. The participants’ breaths vary from rapid to long, shallow to deep and sombre to sonorous inhalations and exhalations. This immersive sound installation is accompanied with a spectrogram that depicts audio waves of the breath recordings woven together in a digital image. The image encodes the sound and experience of the performance. The digital spectrum appears like an abstract triptych painting made up with bright hues of green, yellow, and blue.  

Campbell invites audiences to experience the sound of breath and breathing and to reflect on this intimate performance that echoed the walls at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2021. Twenty Black artists and curators roamed around the Gallery playing the recorded breath in the Gallery halls. Campbell formed this work as a response to Black Lives Matter by “putting the focus on breath rather than death." Campbell invited each participant to imagine being present with a loved person from their past, be they childhood friends or passed relatives.  

Breath is a personal and functional action, and in this exhibit, Campbell emphasizes the depth and meaning of breath, especially when, as a source of life it can become an object of oppression and power.   

Campbell will be developing an archive of Black breath recordings in the form of audio and sculptural installations called the Black Breath Archive in the coming year. The solo exhibition will be displayed at the Gallery in the spring of 2023.    

Learn more about Black Breath Spectacle in our published conversation Charles Campbell and Assistant Curator Suvi Bains.

About the Artist

Charles Campbell is a Jamaican-born multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose practice expands the future imaginaries possible in the wake of colonization. His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Havana Biennial, the Brooklyn Museum and Alice Yard in Port of Spain. Recent exhibitions include Vancouver Special at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Fragments of Epic Memory at the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Other Side of Now at the Perez Art Museum Miami. He currently lives and works on Lekwungen territory, Victoria BC.

Maya Ersan and Jaimie Robson of Mere Phantoms use shadow play to explore the relationship between memory and architecture, people and place. In 2018, the duo created Shadows Without Borders, a mobile interactive shadow installation that travelled to refugee camps, squats, and settlements in Athens and Istanbul. Building on previously established relationships, Mere Phantoms led paper cutting and shadow workshops and play sessions with children in these communities.

Some of the work created collectively during this journey is included in the exhibition along with the 3.5 x 3.5 metre shadow projection tent and custom-made flashlights. Also central to the exhibit will be a series of photographs from a night of shadow play at an Athens squat, as well as a seven-minute video documenting the workshops and shadow play sessions in Athens and Istanbul. Both the photographs and video were created in collaboration with filmmakers Leila Shifteh and Harun Yasin Tuna. For this latest edition of Shadows Without Borders at Surrey Art Gallery, the artists have made new paper-cut tableaus that will be exhibited for the first time.

During the exhibition, visitors are invited to engage with the artwork. People can add their own cut-outs to this ever-growing interactive installation and pick up a flashlight to animate the intricate paper tableaus imbued with stories from communities both near and far.

This is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program. With this $35M investment, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.

Mere Phantoms will be giving an artists' talk at the Gallery's summer opening on June 19.

About the Artists

Mere Phantoms is a partnership between artists Maya Ersan and Jaimie Robson. Since 2012, the Montreal-based duo has created fantastic worlds through two classic art forms: the theatre of shadows and the art of paper cutting. The artists use as few tools as possible—such as knives, rulers and paper— so that light is the medium that makes their creations come alive. The result fascinates and captivates and makes spectators the moderators of their own experience.

Curator: Jordan Strom
Origin of Exhibition: Surrey Art Gallery

Now in its 38^th year, this annual juried exhibition organized by the Arts Council of Surrey and Surrey Art Gallery presents works by over fifty artists from Surrey and the surrounding region.

From traditional landscape paintings to sculptures and stop-motion animation, there is something for everyone. With a broad range of styles and themes, this exhibition remains popular with locals and visitors alike, who are invited to vote for the People’s Choice Award that will be announced at the end of the exhibition.

Following the shift to a digital version of the exhibition in 2020, this year’s edition of ARTS will be exhibited both on the Arts Council of Surrey website and throughout the Surrey Arts Centre. Both emerging and established artists submitted work in an open competition.

This year’s jury included local textile artist Diane Roy, Surrey School District art teacher Jane Silversides, and Surrey Art Gallery’s Volunteer Coordinator Chris Dawson-Murphy. The jury nominates artworks to receive prizes across several categories: 1) painting; 2) drawing, mixed media and printmaking on paper; 3) sculpture and fibre art; 4) photography; and 5) digital, performative, and new media art. Selected works show technical skill, innovative artistic thinking, and strength in addressing their theme.

Celebrate this exhibit at our summer opening on June 19 where the award recipients will be acknowledged. Registration is required for this event.

Mumbai-based photographer Rajesh Vora documents domestic sculptures mounted on rooftops in the northwestern Indian state of Punjab that tell a story of identity, diaspora, family, and culture. Made from rebar, wire mesh, cement, and paint, many of these intriguing objects serve as functional water tanks.

This phenomenon is distinct to Punjabi villages, gaining popularity in the 1980s. At that time, local artists precast these sculptures from a mould that usually took the form of airplanes, falcons, and footballs. Over the years, artists have custom fabricated the sculptures for each homeowner, resulting in more diverse and elaborate works of art. Visitors will see more than one hundred of these sculptures in Rajesh Vora: Everyday Monuments. Birds, soccer balls, airliners, automobiles, army tanks, weightlifters, pressure cookers, lions, and horses are among the varied objects.

While Greater Vancouver has a Punjabi population established more than a century ago, it was during the latter half of the twentieth century that an increasing number of Punjabi villagers migrated to other parts of the world. Canada was one of their chosen destinations. Many return to India for seasonal visits, keeping close ties with families remaining in the villages and helping to finance the making of these houses. The houses themselves are an intricate mix of various styles, genres, and historical periods. Several stories high, they signal a shift from the traditional one-story courtyard-style house. Together, the unique houses with their rooftop embellishments break with conventional design boundaries. They show how art, architecture, and everyday life meld together. Vora’s photographs are an important record of this cultural expression of the Punjab that is all but unknown beyond India.

The sculptures installed on top of the houses are emblems of pride. They often represent personal and commemorative family symbols. For example: My grandfather had the first tractor in the village; my son is a weightlifter; we took Air Canada to reach our new home; we bought a Maruti car; my father was in the Indian army. These anecdotes reveal that these domestic sculptures are more than an artistic or architectural phenomenon. They tell a diasporic story that has echoes around the world.

Rajesh Vora: Everyday Monuments is guest curated by Keith Wallace and is made possible with financial support from the Hamber Foundation, Hari Sharma Foundation, and Zheng Shengtian Art Foundation. South Asian Studies Institute is a community partner. This exhibition is part of the 2022 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.

About Rajesh Vora

Rajesh Vora (b.1954) is a widely published Mumbai-based photographer who has focused primarily on architectural and cultural subject matter. He graduated in 1979 from the National Institute of Design in Amedabad, India. His architectural photography appears in Domus (India), Architectural Design (India), Inside Outside, Dezeen, and ArchDaily. In 2001, 2007, 2010, and 2016, Vora was commissioned to document architecture projects with social relevance in India and Bangladesh for The Aga Khan Award for Architecture Foundation. His photographs have been exhibited in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Canary Islands), Lille (France), Newark Museum (New Jersey), PHOTOINK (New Delhi), Jaipur Photo Fest, and India International Centre (New Delhi).

Curator: Keith Wallace
Origin of Exhibition: Surrey Art Gallery
Community Partner: South Asian Studies Institute

In this audiovisual art project for UrbanScreen, pr0phecy sun, Freya Zinovieff, Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, and Steve DiPaola—all artists and academic researchers at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Art and Technology—have collaborated on an immersive foray into the world of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven poetry.

Using machine learning algorithms, Body as Border: Traces and Flows of Connection expands the human form into digital space and mingles it with fragments of poetry, painting, and sound. Each artist examines the intersection between the body, technology, and the broader ecological world in which we live. Through a randomized, generative digital process, the work draws from bacterial cultures, documentation of the Fraser River, and fragments of poetry to produce a series of composite audiovisual landscapes. The resulting images and sounds chart humanity’s impact upon the environment, as well as our own porous relationship with both artificial and natural entities. Exploring the possibilities of these artist-developed technologies, Body as Border: Traces and Flows of Connection invites audiences to see, feel, and sense the world beyond the limits of the ordinary senses.

A companion essay about Body as Border by curator, writer, and academic Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan, is available as part of the Surrey Art Gallery Presents publication series.

About the Artists

Steve DiPaola, working as a scientist and artist, uses computational models of creativity, cognition, and artificial intelligence to create generative and interactive art installations. He explores the uneasy interplay between what it means for humans to perceive and emote in a modern computer era. DiPaola’s art has been exhibited internationally at the A.I.R. and Tibor de Nagy galleries in NYC, Tenderpixel and LimeWharf galleries in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the MIT Museum, Cambridge University’s King’s Art Centre, and the Smithsonian. In 2021 he was elected to the College of New Scholars by the Royal Society of Canada.

Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda (Ph.D.) is a media artist and cultural historian with a research focus on feminist media art, aesthetics of interaction and research-creation. She is the author of the award-winning book Women Made Visible: Feminist Art and Media in post-1968 Mexico (Nebraska Press, 2019). She produces video installations, sculptures, digital projects, print media and live performances that investigate the body as a site of cultural, gendered and techno-scientific inscriptions. She directs the Critical Media Art Studio at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Simon Fraser University, and is a member of art/mamas, a Vancouver-based collective of artist mothers.

prOphecy sun (Ph.D.) is an interdisciplinary performance artist, queer, movement, video, sound maker, and mother. Her practice celebrates both conscious and unconscious moments and the vulnerable spaces of the in-between in which art, performance, and life overlap. Her recent research has focused on ecofeminist perspectives, co-composing with voice, objects, surveillance technologies, and site- specific engagements along the Columbia Basin region and beyond. She hosts Tapes and Beyond on Kootenay Co-op Radio and is the Arts Editor for Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities. She performs and exhibits regularly in local, national, and international settings, music festivals, conferences, and galleries and has authored several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and journal publications on sound performance and domestic spheres.

Freya Zinovieff underwent her MFA at University of New South Wales. She holds a first class honors degree from Cambridge School of Art at Anglia Ruskin. Her research looks at how sound can mediate relationships to landscapes in the Anthropocene age. She is interested by the potential for digital audio technologies to reimagine the narratives of digital media, deep, and cyclical conceptualizations of time, and how sonic art practices can explore human history and geo trauma. Freya has received multiple awards, including an Endeavour Scholarship, and has exhibited her research across the globe in various formats, including writing, choral singing, and curating.

Curator: Rhys Edwards
Origin of Exhibition: Surrey Art Gallery

This annual display of artworks by local school students is a long-running highlight of Surrey Art Gallery’s exhibition program. Since 1983, the exhibition has showcased some of the finest work made by young artists from across the Surrey School District, the largest in the Province of British Columbia. 

This year, 51 students from across 17 different elementary schools were selected to show their art at the Gallery. Through the support and guidance of their teachers, each student was asked to share their artistic vision and creative skills. Class exercises explore the breadth of artmaking across historical, experimental, and technical perspectives, encouraging students to both understand visual expression throughout the world and to find their own creative voice. 

Over the course of the exhibition, Surrey Art Gallery, in conjunction with the School District, will release a series of short videos on their YouTube channel. The videos will feature the voices of both teachers and students speaking in further detail about selected artworks as well as the importance of art education. 

Artworks on display capture the themes and subjects that interest children today. Some work celebrates the things that they love, such as animals, nature, food, and fashion. Other works speak to broader anxieties and social issues: judgment from others, systemic racism, and war.  

Art by Elementary Students is not only a display of artworks, but also a view into art education today. Through their nurturing, teachers encourage students to relate to the world around them through artmaking. In a world that seems increasingly uncertain, art allows young children to exercise their own agency and think through difficult ideas. 

Origin of Exhibition: Surrey School District

This exhibition centres around an interactive installation by the late media artist Nancy Paterson (1957–2018). Entitled Garden in the Machine, the artwork invites visitors to pull a lever on a slot-machine styled device that manipulates images on display on a series of nearby monitors. Each monitor cycles through a series of television clips pulled from news programs, cartoons, gameshows, religious programs, advertisements, and more. Every time the lever is pulled, the resulting display is random, producing a possible 729 different combinations of images.  

Though developed in 1993, Paterson’s installation is timeless in its distillation of popular television culture. In presenting visitors with random combinations of footage that vary in tone between light-hearted comedy and serious-minded news reports, Paterson anticipated the rise of the internet and the now endless stream of content available to consumers. In places such as Twitter feeds, Instagram’s “Explore” tab, or TikTok’s “For You” page, browsers can access an endless stream of messages that both terrify and titillate. 

Also in the exhibition are key selections from the Gallery’s permanent collection, most of which, like Paterson’s artwork, have never been exhibited before. These include an unusual two-sided print by 1970s video and media artist Michael de Courcy, photographs of the West Edmonton Mall by Vikky Alexander, and a colourful silkscreen print by Robert Davidson. 

During a time when television, image-making, and internet culture have completely saturated both our public and private lives, On Air illustrates the ways that media works to shape our worldviews—for better or worse.  

Curator: Rhys Edwards
Origin of Exhibition: Surrey Art Gallery

This exhibition celebrates alternative and traditional darkroom processes with techniques and media dating from as far back as the 1860s. Methods on display include cyanotypes, carbon transfer, platinum palladium, silver gelatin, and Vandyke brown prints. You'll see a range of striking images produced via the darkroom process, in which an image is developed through exposing certain kinds of chemicals to light. The resulting photographs—of architecture, nature, and still life scenes—are stark, beautiful, and moving.

Although digital photography is widely popular today, the analog techniques on display in Joy of the Photographic Print are still used by both professional artists and amateur photographers around the world. The Darkroom Group, a Lower Mainland-based group of photographers, seeks to celebrate the slower, more labour-intensive methods used to traditionally produce photographic art. Their way of working encourages a more thoughtful approach to both making and looking at images.

Most of the prints in the exhibition were created through the silver gelatin process, a method of photography that dates back to the nineteenth century. Photographers produce silver gelatin, lith, and pinhole prints by exposing a negative of an image, captured by either digital or film photography, onto a paper coated in silver salts. Other related methods like platinum palladium, carbon transfer, and even pinhole photography are also on display in the exhibition.

The images are a testament to the patience and acumen of each photographer. But they are also a snapshot of a certain time and place, calling for a moment of reflection amidst the business of everyday life.

Origin of Exhibition: The Darkroom Group