HEARTH   •   ABOUT   •   PROGRAMMING   •   MULTIPLES   •   SPACE LIST   •   WAGE TRANSPARENCY PROJECT

Written in Water

July 4 – August 2, 2021
Ft. work by Nabil Azab, Rixt de Boer, and Christian Vistan

Written in Water offers artworks that consider the processes of memory, recollection, and forgetting. Aristotle distinguishes memory and remembering by assigning pathos to the former and attributing deliberate action to the latter. At the heart of this distinction we might discern the nascent refutation of a linear reading of time, instead understanding the two as working radially to interpret events and experiences. The artists in this exhibition propose misalignments and fallibility, but of memory or remembering? The authority of the past desanctified into phantasmata, what feels familiar also dapples in sway. A glint, a glyph, gripping onto the sticky nodes of associations. By and by, memory’s finger curls within the nook. A bed of moss and weeds envelop its trace.

1 / 32
2 / 32
3 / 32
4 / 32
5 / 32
6 / 32
7 / 32
8 / 32
9 / 32
10 / 32
11 / 32
12 / 32
13 / 32
14 / 32
15 / 32
16 / 32
17 / 32
18 / 32
19 / 32
20 / 32
21 / 32
22 / 32
23 / 32
24 / 32
25 / 32
26 / 32
27 / 32
28 / 32
29 / 32
30 / 32
31 / 32
32 / 32

About the Artists:

Nabil Azab is a visual artist working and living in Tiohtiá:ke. His work considers the relationship between images and memory, as well as the camera’s capacity to act as an extension of the author within this relationship. His works employ various methods of gathering, capturing, and manipulating to create images and moments which are firmly present in the un-real. He holds a BFA in Photography from Concordia University.

Through her installation-based work Rixt de Boer investigates the possible meaning of recognizable and everyday situations, by juxtaposing media such as photography, video, drawing and ready-mades. Her work emphasizes elements that characterize a place to tell something about our relationship to the landscape, such as its history, tradition or local craft. Recurring is the emphasis on the changeability of space, objects and materials through human or natural interventions and appropriation. De Boer’s interdisciplinary work derives from gestures of walking, observing, collecting and re-framing. A constant investigation and framing of the characteristics of place result in documents of ephemeral realities that merit closer looking. 
 


Rixt de Boer attended the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, NL, where she received her BFA in Photography in 2014. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Sculpture / Ceramics at Concordia University, Montréal. She was the recipient of several awards including the Young Talent Award by Stroom, The Hague, NL and the Stipendium for Emerging Artists by the Mondrian Fund, NL. Her work was selected for group shows at the GEM / Museum of Contemporary Art The Hague, Art Rotterdam, the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, and Photo Ireland, Dublin.

Christian Vistan is an artist and curator from the peninsula now known as Bataan, Philippines, currently living and working on the unceded and traditional lands of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam and Tsawwassen First Nations. They make paintings, texts and collaborations that describe a hybridity in form, exploring notions of surface, sound, place and memory. Their work is embodied in their inquiries into identity, diaspora and the materials they work with: water, paint and language among others. 


Their artwork has been exhibited at Artspeak, Unit 17, and READ Books in Canada; mild climate and Atlanta Contemporary in the United States; and Kamias Triennial and Green Papaya in the Philippines. Their curatorial projects and exhibitions have been presented at Vancouver Art Gallery, Libby Leshgold Gallery, Centre A and Vancouver Art/Book Fair in Vancouver and Nanaimo Art Gallery on Vancouver Island. 

Recently, Vistan and artist, friend and collaborator Aubin Kwon started dreams comma delta, a space for artist projects and exhibitions located in their family home in Delta, BC.

<3<3