Ghostly Makers and Tending Otherworlds: New Acquisitions

Ghostly Makers

This exhibition looks to generate discussion surrounding the prevalence of diasporic, displaced and disrupted hauntings in craft and textile practices. Drawing from Avery Gordon’s definition of haunting as “an animated state in which repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known,” Ghostly Makers utilizes haunting as an alternative lens that materializes and uplifts narratives of resistance. Including the artists Samar Hejazi, Jacqueline Morrisseau-Addison, Keysha Rivera, Arezu Salamzadeh, and Lan "Florence" Yee, each work critically examines contemporary constructions of visibility while re-imagining ways for thinking about identity and the commemoration of time.   

In a time defined by our widespread access to information—individuals are today, more than ever, filling in and interrogating the gaps that western historical documentation leaves behind. Through highlighting these haunting narratives that oppressive structures have sought to suppress, Ghostly Makers does not attempt to seek resolutions to or contain these discourses, but rather, looks to unravel violent and colonial legacies while weaving threads of resistance into narratives of absence, time and memory.

Tending Otherworlds: New Acquisitions 

Collections offer an almost infinite possibility of readings, despite the limitation of the vault space to which they are bound. Tending Otherworlds celebrates new acquisitions to the City of Burnaby Art Collections, exploring conceptions of beauty, history and desire. A playful challenge to the conceived limitations of “works on paper”, and of divergent histories, the exhibition explores alternative propositions of self and place. Following the 2015 decision to prioritize, by purchase, the acquisition of works by women artists, the Gallery has since expanded to reflect its communities more accurately by prioritizing works by racialized, Indigenous and gender-variant artists.  

For this exhibition we highlight a notion of queerness, calling upon writer bell hooks’ invitation to think of “queer as not being about who you’re having sex with—that can be a dimension of it—but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” Bringing together a selection of recent gifts and purchases, the exhibition demonstrates the Burnaby Art Gallery’s challenge to the boundaries of its mandate as the only public art museum in Canada dedicated to works of art on paper. Further, the works presented offer vantage points which diverge from dominant understandings of place and history.

Hours
Tuesday - Friday: 10 am-4:30 pm
Saturday - Sunday: 12-5 pm

Admission
Suggested donation is $5