July 14–September 24\, 2023
Opening R
eception: Thursday\, July 13\, 7–9PM
Public critique
with Olumoroti Soji-George: Sunday\, July 23\, 2–4PM
Burnaby
Art Gallery
6344 Deer Lake Avenue
Burnaby BC Canada
Tuesda
y–Friday: 10AM–4:30PM
Saturday–Sunday: 12–5PM
Curated by Carmen Levy-Milne
For those makers whose lived experiences are haunted by diasporic\, displaced—or perhaps more generally\, disrupted identities— craft and textile mediums offer particularly poignant techniques of articul ation. In Ghostly Makers\, these experiences and enunciations of h aunting that exist in relation to the artists’ distinct social positions or cultural specificities take on similar material vernaculars. Acting as veh icles for storytelling\, the craft methods employed go beyond their aesthet ic appearances to imbue works with culturally specific meaning by way of th eir materials and processes of creation.
Bringing together the artist s Samar Hejazi\, Jacqueline Morrisseau-Addison\, Keysha Rivera\, Ar ezu Salamzadeh\, and Lan “Florence” Yee\, this ex hibition utilizes material vocalizations to critically examine and re-imagi ne contemporary constructions of visibility and their influence on various aspects of cultural identity. Hosted by the Burnaby Art Gallery\, the work in this exhibition also comes into critical conversation with the history o f its environment as the legacy of its previous occupants\, existence as a shared domestic space\, and contemporary methods of collecting provide pote nt contributions to discourses on the construction of memory and commemorat ion.
The title Ghostly Makers functions here as a play on th e influential text Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagi nation by Avery Gordon. As a critical intervention into the limitation s of traditional sociological thought\, Gordon recognizes haunting as a nec essary mode for responding to and framing history whereby she describes hau nting as a contemporary culmination of previously unspoken responses to opp ressive violence. As she explains\, “what’s distinctive about haunting is t hat it is an animated state in which repressed or unresolved social violenc e is making itself known\, sometimes very directly\, sometimes more oblique ly.”[i] Haunting can therefore be unde rstood in these artists’ work as the traces of those impacted by erasure\, exclusion\, and other oppressive violence\, who are now given the opportuni ty to be seen and heard.
In a time that is increasingly defined by ou r widespread access to information—individuals are today\, more than ever\, filling in and interrogating the gaps that western art historical document ation leaves behind. In response\, the artists represented in Ghostly M akers push individuals to recognize haunting as a combatant to narrati ves that seek to locate specific histories\, people\, and cultures as invis ible or in the past. Instead\, the language of ghosts functions as an alter native lens that imagines otherwise and returns agency to those who have su ffered at the hands of erasure\, forced displacement\, and settler-colonial ism. Through highlighting these haunting narratives that oppressive structu res have sought to suppress\, this exhibition does not attempt to seek reso lutions to contain these discourses\, but rather\, looks to unravel violent and colonial legacies while weaving threads of resistance throughout narra tives of absence.
Carmen Levy-Milne (she/her) is an emerging cultural worker born and raised on the unceded land of the xʷməθkʷ əy̓əm people. She is a Master of Arts Candidate in Critical & Curatorial St udies at the University of British Columbia and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Cultural Studies with a Minor in Religion and Cultures f rom Concordia University. As a diasporic Jewish settler\, her practice is p rimarily concerned with the Jewish philosophy of tikkun olam (“the repair o f the world”)\, where she sees her work in the arts sphere as responsible f or uplifting reparative\, decolonial\, and critical artistic responses to b roader social\, political\, and cultural circumstances.
With supp ort from the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studi es through the Department of Art History\, Visual Art and Theory in collabo ration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of Br itish Columbia.
[i] Avery G ordon and Janice Radway\, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociologica l Imagination\, (Minneapolis\, MN: University of Minnesota Press\, 200 8)\, xvi.
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