Richmond Art Gallery is displaying four talented artists’ work to across the cities of Richmond and Vancouver from April 6 to May 27.
RAG will present four public installations along four Canada Line stations as well as Vancouver’s Waterfront Station. This will be the first time art has been displayed at Canada Line stations in Richmond.
There is also a gallery exhibition by Karilynn Ming Ho, showing her work titled For the Left Hand Alone and Ho Tam, who is showing Cover to Cover. The open reception is on April 7 from 7-9 p.m. at RAG.
Two other artists, Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes and David Semeniuk will solely display their works along the Canada Line stations.
Here are some details about the artwork from RAG’s website:
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.
For more information about the upcoming event, visit Richmond Art Gallery
