Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Saturday May 10 - Winterlong by Deon Feng, Violet J & Felix Rapp


WINTERLONG

Deon Feng, Violet J & Felix Rapp

Opening Saturday May 10, 7 - 9 pm

at People (4277 Fraser St.)


I utilize the darkroom as both a space of production and refuge.

Well, production is probably a generous term.


In some ways it has become a place, perhaps the only one, where I allow myself to purposefully not understand something.


I want to believe that there is more to this place than what can be explained of it.


I’m not anti-science, but I am skeptical of the ways in which we try to legitimize every experience under the domain of knowledge. On a moody day, I might even think of it as the last room on Earth without language.


It’s a good place to feel like you are doing something, when you’re really just indulging in the present. I tell myself I’m working as I tap along that linoleum counter, trying to find my Pixies CD. Miraculously, it appears unscratched, doublestacked inside the Talking Heads Greatest Hits.


When winter made the nights long, I went there to look for a sense of agency. Sunset at 4PM? No problem, I’ve been in the dark all day anyways. I don’t believe in linear time and losing things; light just finds different ways to reoccur in my life.


You hold a strong conviction in the value of the analog. An unwillingness to accept the obsolescence of the silver gelatin print. I see myself in you: that beneath the cynicism, you care a lot, so much so it pains you sometimes.


I often say I’d like to haunt the darkroom. I think I already do. Some version of me does, at some place in time. I sense that things, as they are, will soon end. In time, my ghost and I will pack our bags, and move on.


One time, exiting the in-between room together, I asked you: “what’s that behind you?” and you were actually spooked. It’s childish, but I take pride in managing to scare a future ghost. Does she drink redbull too?


You say the darkroom is like a casino, which is perfect because I love gambling.


I remember the first time you brought bingo scratch tickets into the film developing area, and we won $5 that have yet to be redeemed. It’s waiting on that cork board alongside the forgotten goodbye card. The future always seems to be deferred.


For many months, my film didn’t advance a single frame. I felt no necessity to recount the present, as I welcomed the passage of the long winter.


Up until now you’ve never seen me with a camera. It’s true, so much of my time in Vancouver passed with a monochromatic ambivalence. Everything here was just a facility to process something more profound elsewhere.


We find common ground in our futile attempts to remember what we’ve decided was worth forgetting.


As it always goes in the twisted clairvoyance of leaving, I realized that we might be drawn to the darkroom simply for company. Funnily enough, now it almost seems like there is nowhere else but here: inside this old building surrounded by constructions of newness, sitting on the counter every Friday afternoon.


Will you be here for a while?


Text by Deon Feng and Violet J

































Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Thursday April 3 - Al McWilliams & Kyla Gilbert: Test Kitchen


Al McWilliams & Kyla Gilbert: Test Kitchen

organized by Scott Kemp

April 3 to April 19, 2025

4277 Fraser Street


A recipe can build from a single ingredient found at the back of the fridge. It can grow from the harvest of a backyard garden, or spill from a memory of flavours eaten under cool fluorescent lights in your aunt’s tiny kitchen. The art practices of Al McWilliams and Kyla Gilbert approach material and form as a chef might approach onions and olive oil; both artists draw from life experiences and experiences in the studio to make works that engage the body. They are related in their commitment to process-based making but unique in the logics they bring to those processes. In Al McWilliams & Kyla Gilbert: Test Kitchen the distinct logics of these two artists are presented in dialogue, much as one might present a meal in multiple courses. Here is the dinner, here is the dessert.


Al McWilliams graduated from the Vancouver School of Art in 1969. Since that time he has exhibited extensively in both solo and major group exhibitions throughout Canada, the United States and Europe and has represented Canada in exhibitions in Germany, France, Japan, Korea and the United States. His work is in most major public collections in Canada including The National Gallery, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Art Gallery of Ontario and the Musee D’art Contemporain, Montreal. Along with his curiosity around the genesis of form Al's work has always been noted for its foregrounding of materials. Whether wax, lead, gold, bronze, stone, fire or water, there is a recognition that materials carry cultural weight, are not merely passive presences but actively affect us through their historical, metaphorical and symbolic dimensions.


Kyla Gilbert is a visual artist based out of Vancouver BC on the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Swwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She graduated with a BFA in performance from Concordia University in 2017 and spent the two subsequent years touring as a puppeteer with DJ Kid Koala. Her current practice revolves around intuitive encounter with materials. As a former puppeteer and performer, she approaches her process as an improvisation that results in the creation of objects full of discrepancy, juxtaposition, awkwardness, and joy. Kyla completed her MFA in Studio Art from Emily Carr University in spring of 2022.