In the corner of the fourth floor of Chinatown’s Sun Wah Centre lies the On Main Gallery hosting Varied Editions, a small but hearty exhibit in this year’s Queer Arts Festival (QAF).
The QAF — first started in 2008 — is a multidisciplinary art festival that incorporates exhibitions and events “presented by and for and about Queer arts,” according to Paul Wong, one of this year’s artists. Wong, a Vancouver-based artist, recently finished his artist-in-residence term at UBC’s department of art history, visual art and theory and has been involved with the QAF since 2012.
Varied Editions is a curated gallery featuring work from six artists, focused on printmaking and its intersections with Queerness and activism.
“Borrowing its name from the printmaking technique where artists alter individual prints within an edition, the exhibition reflects on queerness as a shared yet uniquely expressed experience,” the festival’s website reads.
The exhibit is located in a small room but the works fill it intimately without making the space feel crowded. Exhibition Curator Cheryl Hamilton’s collage of drawn and printed pieces featuring drag queens, fire alarms, smiles and bricks stood out immediately with its neon colour palette. Cut-out pieces from the collage extended past the gallery itself, hanging from the ceiling to greet audiences in the narrow hallway leading to the room. Hamilton embodied a non-digital method with her work, using torn cardboard and different types of paper.
“Printmaking is an old school and tactile form. You can see and feel the layers,” said Wong. “It has its limitations ... and people in arts are constantly pushing the edges of those limitations.”
Wong’s displayed piece, “Chinese Cafes: The Five Energies,” was initially made for Them = Us, a photographic exhibition that travelled across Canada between 1998–2000 aimed at promoting diversity. Varied Editions is the first time “Chinese Cafes” has been unpacked since that viewing.
To create the piece, Wong glued black-and-white photographs to contact sheets, double-exposed prints, other photographs and even a cafe menu — blending various techniques of screenprinting and film photography. The final products are five differently coloured panels of intentionally scrapbooked layers.
“That, in a sense, [was] very experimental when I made that, and obviously still stands out as an interesting form and content,” he said.
The second panel particularly resonated with Queerness through its visual motif of reflections. On top of a red and gold double-exposed screenprinted image of two men were eight black-and-white images that each had an element of reflection. The photos taken through a window or focusing on a silhouette spoke strongly to the theme of individual, yet shared, experiences of marginalization and Queerness.
“It’s about ways of looking,” said Wong.
The evolution of meaning in “Chinese Cafes” since its first exhibition was one of its most compelling dimensions — despite being made in the ‘90s, it still felt reflective of today’s society; something Wong agreed with.
“I don’t think it even matters,” he said. “I could have dated it today. I think Mark [Takeshi McGregor], the director of the Queer Arts Festival, was shocked that it was not a current work.”
The piece evolved from Wong deciding to follow different kinds of connection pathways — literal ones, like railways or highways, and metaphorical ones, like language-speakers and Chinese Canadian cafes. Wong went on a road trip through Western Canadian rural towns, photographing the people he met and stories he heard along the way in an attempt to highlight the ups and downs of the cafe industry and its intersection with immigrant culture.
“Mine is not specifically Queer in content except that I identify as being Queer,” he said. “I think that being out and proud as someone who identifies as a Chinese Canadian Queer artist might be of specific interest to others, to see that represented.”
While some of Varied Editions’s other displays were more explicit in their connections to Queerness, the pieces that were less overt proved the most thought-provoking. This exhibit offered much to ponder regarding Queer art — what it is, what it can be, how to push its limits and its role in fostering community.
“I think that this festival has been now going on for [17] years, that it continues to evolve in a kind of grassroots level, that it continues to provide access to artists and access to community, access to the public,” Wong said. “I think that has [played], and continues to play, a very important role, particularly with the huge orchestrated dismantling of all types of ‘woke culture,’ as they say it from south of the border.”
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, there are over 595 anti-queer bills tabled across the United States. But this trend is influencing rhetoric and legislation in Canada as well. In the past two years,Alberta and Saskatchewan have both passed legislation restricting queer freedoms. Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre promoted anti-trans views during April’s federal election campaign.
“Now more than ever, this work needs to be made, needs to be seen and needs to be celebrated and discussed,” Wong said.
Varied Editions runs Tuesdays through Saturdays at the On Main Gallery until June 28. More information can be found here.
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