In-person vernissage and poetry readings
Saturday November 9
2:00 – 5:00 PM
Poetry begins at 3 PM
Exhibition runs November 9 – December 14, 2024
Mask Days on Saturday November 16 and 30
Artist Statement - Lan "Florence" Yee
I am currently working on a new body of textile sculptures and installations for an exhibition that asks the question: Do weeds still grow in heaven?
The taxonomic category of weeds can be perplexing, because it is not an actual species of plant, but a behaviour of appearing and thriving in a place where they are unwanted. In my newest body of work, the disparate connotations of weeds have a kinship with racialized queerness/transness, viewed with hostility as undesirable or unorganizable excess. Another analogy looks inwards towards our communities, seeing weeds as the experience of abuse in queer relationships. The subject is often cast aside in the narrow celebratory refrain of queer love–a flawed but strategic way of advocating for belonging. The allusion to ‘heaven’ emerges from this common tactic of hinging hope on a queer utopia, in conjunction with the popular use of Belinda Carlisle’s 1987 song Heaven is a Place on Earth as a sapphic anthem.
The printed images of various places are related together as subjects that are unable (or unwilling) to be claimed. This unfinished business is embodied by the obstacle of the embroidered PROOF watermarks. Inspired by traditional printmaking processes, the series attempts to hold the desire for archival presence with its contradictions. Even as queer and racialized people are gravitating towards archival practices—from which we were once excluded—the form of the archive itself still retains the structure of the problem: their limiting boundaries of authority, (in)accessibility, ethnographic classification, and a penchant towards legible representation. How do we hold space for the unrecorded, the unrecordable, and the yet-to-be-recorded? What if our desire for documentation might be damaging? The challenges of commemoration beckon me to consider what queer theorist Jack Halberstam refers to as “new forms of memory that relate more to spectrality than to hard evidence, to lost genealogies than to inheritance, to erasure than to inscription.”
On the outside of the gallery, a selection of SEEKING posters (or new ones made for the site itself) can cover the gallery exterior and the city’s message boards to act as quiet interruptions in the daily walks of passers-by, as well as ambiguous calls for action on the part of the viewer. Without a means of response, people are left with their own agency in the matter, as to what should be done about this lack.
My current work in progress involves large printed fabrics imitating glass bricks, acting as dividers in the space. The combination of exterior architecture elements and domestic imagery slip between the public and private spheres. The glass brick motif in particular reflects its original use as a twentieth-century innovation to let in as much light as possible while preserving privacy in growing cities’ previously unlightable spaces. The exhibition becomes a tentatively hospitable place for many kinds of weeds to crop up.
Lan acknowledges the support of Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council - an agency of the Government of Ontario, and Toronto Arts Council.