Saturday, March 19, 2022
2-4pm PDT
Belkin Art Gallery: 1825 Main Mall, University of British Columbia
Free Admission
Please join us for a reception to celebrate Laiwan’s exhibition Traces, Erasures, Resists, guest curated by Amy Kazymerchyk, and the launch of The Capilano Review’s first 50th Anniversary Special Issue in which Laiwan is featured.
The reception takes place at the Belkin from 2 to 4 pm. Remarks begin at 2:30 pm; the artist and curator will be in attendance.
Laiwan: Traces, Erasures, Resists opened quietly in January without fanfare due to BC’s provincial health orders in response to COVID-19. The exhibition highlights the artist’s attention to the material and symbolic vocabularies of print and lens-based media between 1980 and 2000 and features her early interventions into the logic of the book form and the ideology of historical and encyclopedic genres. The exhibition title references processes related to printmaking, while also speaking to the absent narratives, redacted perspectives and critical refusals that are latent in official publications.
Issue 3.46 (Spring 2022), the first of The Capilano Review’s 50th Anniversary special issues, features Laiwan’s AGILE (2021), a work commissioned for TCR’s three-part glossary. Of AGILE, Laiwan remarks, “In the mid-1980s I found a partial Chinese dictionary discarded in a dumpsite that has since become the Strathcona Community Gardens. AGILE emerged from the pages of this dictionary, each page representing a letter—A-G-I-L-E—which together form the word. It continues the ongoing project dotting like flatheads: this is the english I learn, started in 1996, where I use correction fluid—a tedious medium that dries quickly, not agile in the least—to “white out” a bulk of each page, leaving behind poetic fragments.”
This collaborative event highlights the strong community connections Laiwan has developed and sustained over her literary and artistic career that spans from the 1980s to the present.
Accessibility
When you arrive at the gallery, you will be asked to present one of the following (plus a piece of valid government photo ID for visitors ages 18 and older):
- BC Vaccine Card
- Provincial/territorial vaccine record or federal proof of vaccination
- Proof of vaccination used to enter Canada for visitors from outside Canada
The main entrance to the Belkin is located on the east side of the building next to Main Mall. This entrance is level and accessible and has both power and revolving doors. For people requiring easier accessibility, use the ramp from Crescent Road to access the main door. Other accessibility features include an accessible elevator and washroom. More information about accessibility and COVID-19 protocols can be found here.
Land Acknowledgement
We respectfully acknowledge that this event will take place on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the ʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations.
