Damla Tamer
27 Jan to 23 Mar 2024

Biber Bahçesi / Pepper Garden brings together a large body of textile works that speak to the post-Gezi period of the last ten years in Turkey. By weaving, knotting, twisting, packing, unraveling, and dissolving various fibres, Tamer exercises a deep care for craft and its physical possibilities in a material-bound yet symbol-laden world. While grieving the collective collapse of narrative capacities under the rise of securitarian regimes, the works invite a playful curiosity towards the possibilities brought upon by becoming undone. Tamer asks, “When fragments are scattered, what could a feminine reorganization of relating to one another look like? Are our previous ways of staying together still legitimate? When our sensed linearity of time is broken, what grows from the fracture point? When Law starts spinning out and Language starts thinning, where do their previous patriarchal projections on “woman” land?”

The exhibition features two monumental scale weavings made of pulped copies of the 2011 Istanbul Convention and the 2021 Turkish presidential verdict to withdraw from it, sprayed onto woven substrates of clear monofilament thread. Elements of these documents, such as Turkish flags, Council of Europe emblems, phrases, words, and letters, can be found in the final tapestries. Turkey’s ratification of The Istanbul Convention as a binding framework to combat gender-based violence was made possible by the relentless labour of grassroots collectives in Turkey. In 2021, the country’s participation was annulled overnight with a verdict from an increasingly authoritarian government, which claimed that the convention was “against family values.” By working with motions passed and annulled, Tamer highlights the generative and destructive potentials of legal frameworks, and the manufactured ideas of womanhood and citizenship expressed through the flattening effect of law.

In smaller works in the exhibition, Tamer inserts dyed threads, printed text, hair, pigeon feathers, and various found materials into nearly flat configurations through weaving, lace, and paper-making. An abundance of dandelions collected by Tamer and her son are dried and transformed into sculptural objects. The garden is a metaphorical space where sustenance and emergence occur together. By wilfully wishing for such a space, Biber Bahçesi / Pepper Garden places faith in the personal and collective capacity for growth.

read essay “The Garden of Undigested Experiences” by Begüm Özden Fırat
read essay “Drawn down, drawn closer” by Katie Belcher

Image: installation view of Biber Bahçesi / Pepper Garden by Damla Tamer at Access Gallery, 2024 (photo by Rachel Topham Photography)

Financial support form the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and City of Vancouver is gratefully acknowledged.

Carrie Allison
22 April to 15 July 2023

A bead, a breath is an exhibition that thinks through caregiving, motherhood, intergenerational connections, stories, and memories, through three works My Moon, Our Hands, Our Body, Our Spirit, and BEADZ. My Moon is a stop-motion animation of the artist’s beading, set to an audio recording of her newborn’s breath. Exploring ‘a bead, a breath’ as a meditative approach used to work through the artist’s anxiety of being a new mother during the COVID-19 pandemic. The artist combined images “in a painstakingly laborious way, each bead is laid, stitched, a photo taken, then edited, and finally placed in sequence with the sound of my child’s breath.” A second video work, Our Hands, Our Body, Our Spirit, documents a three-hour performance by the artist at Middle Cove in Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) during a 2019 land-based residency through Eastern Edge (an artist-run centre in St. John’s, NL). Critiquing Western notions of ‘Land Art’, Allison carried rocks up a bluff from the beach below to position them in a circle the diameter of the length of her body. She then returned the rocks to the beach, leaving behind an imprint of the rock—her body—on the land. Of this work, the artist writes, “The emotional labour and craft-based labour of Indigenous beadwork artists and caregivers are similarly undervalued, and by bringing together these linked elements of land art and beadwork, I create systems of value according to Indigenous concepts of stewardship.” Accompanying these video works are large sculptural BEADZ, which invite the audience, child or adult, to play or rest as they watch the videos. In both videos, time spent honours anxiety, labour, resistance, and tenderness, connecting the artist to a lineage of mothering—whether that is caring for a child, taking care of our bodies and communities, attending to our practices, or stewarding the land.

read the essay

Image: installation view of a bead, a breath at Access Gallery, 2023 (photo: Rachel Topham Photography)

Financial support form the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, Arts Nova Scotia, and City of Vancouver is gratefully acknowledged.

Sooyeong Lee
14 January to 8 April 2023

The Tangerine Project presents work by Sooyeong Lee (Toronto, ON) which considers vulnerability, our shared anxieties, deterioration, the body, and care. The artist uses tangerines as a point of departure to consider surface and interior—not only of the physical body but of our psychological and social worlds. In this body of work, the artist takes thoughtful attention to carrying, documenting, and keeping decaying tangerines. Inky prints of deteriorating peels collected during a performance exercise reference medical transparencies. Photographs of dried tangerines point to museological curation—providing care to her collection of curiosities. She’s crocheted netted bags to carry fresh tangerines and sewn Bojagi—a traditional Korean covering cloth—from solar-printed fabric. Of her laborious learning processes, she says, “with every trial and error I’ve encountered…I celebrate the tenderness and care I’ve learned from sharing the fruit.“ The exhibition as a whole presents the artist’s attempts to hold vulnerability and generosity in a photographic moment or handcrafted object—a bruised fruit, a protective cloth, her body, our handwritten notes, a rotting peel. ”This is a survey of the tangerines as an extension of myself—my resilience, vulnerability, and restoration—my journey.”

read the essay

Image: installation view of The Tangerine Project by Sooyeong Lee, 2023 at Access Gallery (photo: Rachel Topham Photography)

Financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and City of Vancouver is gratefully acknowledged.

Anna Binta Diallo
Katie Belcher, curator
30 September to 14 November 2020
Access Gallery (Vancouver, BC)

In Wanderings, Anna Binta Diallo presents an installation of photographic collages in both two-and three-dimensions. The works consider how folk stories influence the formation of identity. Iterative in nature, the ongoing installation-based project shifts with each presentation, sometimes expanding into the exhibition space through sculpture. Of her work, Diallo writes,

“Casting a wide net on our Collective History, I reinterpreted folk stories and reimagined or reused them in my own way to create new mythologies. Using archives, books, found imagery, the Internet, memory, and oral traditions, I created a series of new images that can be continuously re-organized.”

Drawing on a wide array of stories and perspectives, Diallo reveals the affinities and tensions that exist between these and the mythologies of her own Franco-Métis and Senegalese ancestry; striving to make work that questions and subverts patriarchal ideals and racism. If photography freezes a moment in time, these collaged images release and recapture this moment, turning photographic fact to expansive folklore. Refusing to privilege any fact over folklore, Diallo makes space for complex and contradictory experiences, upending the linear narrative privileged by colonial histories. Diallo’s images reject a single truth, implicating countless and complex understandings of Self and Other.

An installation of Wanderings will also be on view at the Waterfront Canada Line Station as part of Capture Photography Festival 2020.

read the essay

Image: installation view of Wanderings at Access Gallery, 2023 (photo: Rachel Topham Photography)

Financial support from Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and City of Vancouver is gratefully acknowledged.

Lou Sheppard
Katie Belcher, curator
29 June to 10 August 2019
Access Gallery (Vancouver, BC)

Lou Sheppard’s work aims to disrupt systems of power, considering in particular how bodies and identities are shaped by language. Working with the idea of the lacuna—the space between understanding in a translation—Sheppard uses GRAPHIC or conceptual scores to interrogate legibility. Taking as its structure the libretto of an opera, the installation at Access acts both a record and invocation of an action. My Fears of Tomorrow Are Melting Away is a score in five parts, situating the tasks of self-affirmation and self-actualization as the central labours of the individual in late capitalism.

read the essay

Image: installation view of My Fears of Tomorrow Are Melting Away at Access Gallery, 2023 (photo: Rachel Topham Photography)

Financial support from Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and City of Vancouver is gratefully acknowledged.

Karen Zalamea
Katie Belcher, curator
27 April to 8 June 2019
Access Gallery (Vancouver, BC)

This exhibition is part of the 2019 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program

In keeping with the ephemeral nature of the photographic process, Karen Zalamea used a handcrafted 4×5 camera and fashioned lenses out of ice to produce her newest series of photographs, They are lost as soon as they are made. Working in collaboration with technicians to fabricate lens moulds, she used these moulds to freeze local water while in Reykjavík, Iceland. The work explores the possibilities of deconstructing the mechanics of image-making, and of capturing the natural landscape with elements of nature itself.

read the essay

Image: installation view of Subarctic Phase at Access Gallery, 2023 (photo: Rachel Topham Photography)

Financial support from Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and City of Vancouver is gratefully acknowledged.

Alana Bartol, Lindsay Dobbin, Ursula Handleigh, Pavitra Wickramasinghe
curator, Katie Belcher
2 March to 13 April 2019
Access Gallery (Vancouver, BC)

found/held presents work by Alana Bartol, Lindsay Dobbin, Ursula Handleigh, and Pavitra Wickramasinghe. Riffing on the idea of capture, the exhibition treats photography not as a technical medium, but as a linguistic prompt—photos + graphos—situating these works in a conversation about drawing. Each artist uses concrete materials—water, air, metal, paper—to capture phenomena—resonance, breath, energy, the fold.

Inspired by reading about the disappearing skill of wave pilots in the Marshall Islands—specially trained in the ancient art of reading the waves by feel and sight—Wickramasinghe’s Coral bones/La mer are a return to these innate navigation skills and of the body to the environment. Dobbin’s practice of drumming the surface of the Bay of Fundy is reflected in Arrival, in which they build a spacious soundscape with two tones acting as waves. With her video reading wild lands, Bartol re-imagines dowsing (also known as water-witching) as a technology for remediation of contaminated land. Lastly, Handleigh uses experiential photography and alternative processes of image making to record personal histories, such as I can feel you forgetting, which captures the pacing of her walking breath.

read the essay

Image: installation view of found/held at Access Gallery, 2023 (photo: Rachel Topham Photography)

Financial support from Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and City of Vancouver is gratefully acknowledged.

Genevieve Robertson
Katie Belcher, curator
12 January to 23 February 2019
Access Gallery (Vancouver, BC)

Genevieve Robertson’s forthcoming exhibition consists of large-scale drawings on paper using pigments made with found carbon-based compounds—coal, graphite, and charcoal—in a sustained effort to capture an elemental and lively quality embedded in these fossil and plant derived materials. Unified by their simple, figure-ground relationship, the works read like large-scale taxonomic or botanical interpretations.

read the essay

Image: installation view of Carbon Study: Walking in the Dark at Access Gallery, 2023 (photo: Rachel Topham Photography)

Financial support from Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and City of Vancouver is gratefully acknowledged.

Katie Belcher, curator, with Em Lawrence (2016) and Camila Salcedo, with additional work on this project by Julia McMillan (2017)
Eyelevel (Halifax, NS)

This discussion series aimed to de-centre western notions of an artist-talk. Featuring Amy Wong, anna sprague in 2016; and Annie Onyi Cheung, Cinthia Arias Auz and rudi aker, Russell Louder, Sooyeong Lee, and The Magic Project in 2017. As a gallery-less artist-run centre Eyelevel prioritizes programs that take the visual arts into the public sphere. Through off-site talks, potluck picnics, podcast episodes, a publication, and a picnic starter pack, Food for Thoughts prompted critical discussions surrounding art practices while sharing food.

photo: Emily Lawrence for Eyelevel

Financial support from Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Nova Scotia is gratefully acknowledged.

Gary Markle, Anna Torma, Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, and Colette Whiten
Katie Belcher and Ingrid Jenkner, curators
12 May to 12 Aug 2012
MSVU Art Gallery (Halifax, NS)

The Art Gallery’s special mandate to collect textile-based art, due to the medium’s traditional association with women, is augmented in this selection by the inclusion of another material associated with domesticity—aluminum foil. All of the works have in common the tactile quality of softness. Acquired over the last decade, these works display further, unexpected affinities when seen together. Each in its own way, the works resist structural fixity—some through their soft material and others in their surrender to gravity.

photo: Steve Farmer for MSVU Art Gallery

Financial support from Canada Council for the Arts is gratefully acknowledged.

Cal Lane, Sarah Saunders, and Janice Wright Cheney
Katie Belcher and Ingrid Jenkner, curators
21 May to 8 August, 2011
MSVU Art Gallery (Halifax, NS)

In counterpoint to Lucky Rabbit Pottery’s refined installation on view in the lower gallery, Dirt, Detritus and Vermin presents a room resembling an abandoned studio. The artists apply the techniques of fine craftsmanship to degraded materials and subject matter, obtaining effects that alternate between attraction and repulsion.

photo: Steve Farmer for MSVU Art Gallery

Financial support from Canada Council for the Arts is gratefully acknowledged.

Nancy Edell, Kim Morgan and Susan Wood
Katie Belcher and Ingrid Jenkner, curators
10 October to 23 November, 2010
MSVU Art Gallery (Halifax, NS)

The Nova Scotian artists Nancy Edell, Kim Morgan and Susan Wood share an interest in corporeal experience. In these works from the MSVU Collection, the artists present metaphors for the invisible, sometimes pathological processes at work within the body.

photo: Steve Farmer for MSVU Art Gallery

Financial support from Canada Council for the Arts is gratefully acknowledged.

David Dahms, Lucie Chan, Sophie Jodoin, Michelle Gay, Massimo Guerrera, Audrey Nicoll, Anne Macmillan, Ed Pien, and Lucy Pullen
Ingrid Jenkner and Katie Belcher, curators
10 October to 22 November 2009
MSVU Art Gallery (Halifax, NS)

As a signifying practice in its own right, a drawing can be thought of as the record of its making, showing the interventions of chance, system and intention in the decision-making process of the artist. Amplifying the emphasis on process-oriented execution, the drawings in this exhibition depict motifs in transition: dissolving, connecting, fusing and forming.

photo: Steve Farmer for MSVU Art Gallery

Financial support from Canada Council for the Arts is gratefully acknowledged.