During the Covid pandemic I stumbled across the quotation by the Nobel Prize winning author and activist, Olga Tokarczuk. Her words inspired me to create this series of photographs entitled, Apoptosis.
She writes, “Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism — it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components — the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means ‘the dropping of petals.’ The world has dropped its petals.”
My desire was to create imagery that reflected the world surrounding me at the time — lockdowns, illness, uncertainty, and fear but also the transcendent beauty resulting from the world hitting pause for a while.
Archival pigment print
Editions of 5
The poppies of Apoptosis flare and fade from within the void, isolated from their familiar surrounds, they are all the more spellbinding. These compositions bring forth contradictory thoughts and senses. Teaming with life, withering and fading, we pendulum swing between the heavens and the underworld. Reaching, opening, striving, thriving, bursting through, falling, wilting, turning, closing, folding, retreating, disappearing. Each poppy offering its own fixed moment in time, coexisting amongst a bounty of other vivid and complex instants of life and decay.
Breath… slowly, deeply. Eyes and heart focus us on the priorities of our soul, time to heal. Time to listen. In our mind, our thoughts explode and scatter like stardust.
What is within our reach? What is worth mending? Where does one begin?
Text by Sunshine Frère
Archival pigment print
Editions of 5
In 2019, I had the great privilege to travel to Uganda with the Obakki Foundation to document their work at the Bidi Bidi Resettlement Camp. It was a great honour for me.
Featuring Vancouver artists in their studios.
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
Anais Nin
Archival pigment prints
Edition of 7
Trespass l and Trespass ll are originals
Palimpsestic Places
A few years ago Yasmeen Strang was invited by a close friend to join her on something of a pilgrimage to visit and photograph the Winters Hotel. An iconic Vancouver building in Gastown, it carried a storied past not just in city lore, but especially for her friend whose parents had lived there when they first arrived from Korea in the 1960s. Weathered and worn by the time of their visit in 2017, the building had become an SRO in a complicated neighbourhood struggling with the twin realities of decline and gentrification, a painful if familiar urban dynamic. Over the course of her brief visit that afternoon, Strang feverishly documented whatever she found in the rooms, hallways and stairways of the building. The result of this invitation, or furtive incursion, is Winters Hotel: A Sense of Place, an archive that gathers together photographic documentation, at once meticulous in its observation and uncanny in its affect. This is a body of work that is chiefly concerned with what is transient and ordinary, the ephemera of immigrants and the otherwise vulnerable.
Many of the photos beautifully capture the light from the curtainless windows, as in a shot of a corridor; the broken furniture, peeling paint, exposed wires, and bare beds evoking a sense of tragedy; the payphone connoting the will to communicate beyond borders, languages and personal histories. Strang’s seemingly matter-of-fact photographs are uncanny. We are palpably aware of the ghosts of those who stayed here. She tells stories that question the relationship between self and other, stories we tell about ourselves, traces that others leave.
Strang uses negative space where someone has been to discern their outline, like a painter whose sitters have gotten up and left. The absence of her subjects is a provocation to us, it agitates – Who lived here and why? For how long, where from, where to? Strang provides a kind of inventory of place, as if working backwards from the clues of this space to find the cause – the story or the person – that produced them. Her authority as a detective, an historian, a storyteller, as an artist, depends upon her acuity and discernment, as well as her profound empathy. In this catalogue of objects there is narrative tension too, between those things that make us feel at home and those things that make us acutely aware that we are not. Emptied of people, these photographs have a beauty, a poignancy, an ache, which makes the past feel intimate.
The question of what lives were lived in the hotel hover ominously over the images. That everything is given the same attention, the documentary lens, lends a sense of importance to every detail. Is an object suspicious, central to the plot, an accessory to a trauma that may or may not have taken place? This invitation to projection is one that the artist willingly accepts. She seems drawn to the narrative potential of the quotidian objects left behind. The effect is to make time static, as in a hotel. We stay for a few days, for work or an occasion, or while we acclimate to new life coordinates; it is a rupture from our everyday. Nonetheless, we have no choice but to bring those lives with us, in what we pack and carry, what we leave out and what we retain. We are always aware that the people whose beds and rooms we’re observing exist beyond these photographs, even as they remain out of reach. The works simultaneously exude a kind of photorealistic starkness and the care of a family photograph, disparate registers coexisting with deep resonance in single simple wood frames.
Evidence and portrait in ghostly captures, spectres of lives lived in every arrested moment. One can’t help but wonder if we ever really know anyone except via the surfaces, surfaces and of course stories that we tell. Strang’s photos are deeply compelling, their gravity pulls at us. Finding stories in the ordinary and creating spectacle from the voyeuristic, this archive is presented with both forensic precision and a complete lack thereof. We are left to make our own assumptions of the artefacts and their supposed significance. Strang exposes the texture of a place built from past lives and previous inhabitants, and reveals the shadows and ghosts that we see when we experience a space. We are so curious about the tenants that lived here and how they fared in the ensuing years and decades; we are fundamentally curious about how others live. Yet more essentially, there is also the matter or our own transience, the fact that we will all eventually disappear. What we leave behind is precisely what’s recorded in these images. The paradox is that even as we peruse the scattered evidence Strang gathers, her subjects continue to elude us. Or maybe that’s the whole idea.
Yaz and I have been friends for a long time, and from the very beginning the narrative thread that wove us together was one of shared family histories of diaspora and displacement. We share stories and food and wild affection, the kinds that make you laugh and sob at the unbearable beauty and love that come from this peripatetic life. Is it any wonder then that this artist finds voice in creating and articulating for us the welcome gesture of a sense of place?
Shelly Rosenblum, PhD is Curator of Academic Programs at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and a Wall Associate at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, UBC.
Archival pigment print
Editions of 5
An ongoing series in the healing powers of nature.
Vancouver Love Story was born from a conversation with writer, Moira Chicilo, about the survival of local, independent businesses during the time of Covid. We decided to reach out to Vancouverites via social media and ask them three things. We asked them to name a small business they love; we asked why they loved that business; and lastly, we asked what could people do to help that business survive during the Covid shutdown. We received over 120 nominations and learned a lot about our city!
These businesses, in our opinion, represent the heart and soul of our city. These images are our personal love letter to Vancouver.
Archival pigment print
Edition of 5
My travels through Japan