Random Notes – Cadboro Bay: Index to an Incomplete History

Statement by Melinda Mollineaux with a response from Andrea Fatona

The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual past.

Stuart Hall

On that day all the coloured business houses would close up shop and everyone would go in carts or on horseback to Cadboro Bay where whole sheep would be roasted on spits on the beach.

James Pilton

Examining the colonial histories of Canada’s West Coast black settlers I learned that, from the time of their 1858 arrival from California, this community held annual Emancipation Day Picnics every August 1st at Cadboro Bay. The picnics represent for me a diasporic social space and enactment of history counter to official narratives of Victoria’s British colonial “History”. Like the picnics, I use photography to say that despite a certain amount of invisibility, our experience of a life in migration occurs within a sense of place.
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Enmasillada de la Serie Mutantes

MUTANTES

Raquel Paiewonsky

Desde hace anos he estado trabajando casi obsesivamente con el cuerpo humano e investigando la relación de este no solo con su entorno, acciones y las diversas energías que le afectan sino también con su lenguaje síquico y emocional. Me interesa plantear como todos estos factores convergen, y se proyectan a través de nuestro cuerpo. Este proyecto presenta una serie de entidades biológicas ultra humanas suspendidas individualmente pero que habitan en un espacio común. Estos seres mutantes animados por su diversidad de miembros y materia fueron cosidos a mano en una acción minuciosa y casi meditativa.

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The Specimens from Local Ephemera

Nicole Awai

Red Room Limbo

In 2001, I started physically mapping out a psychological landscape that originated in my then red wall bedroom. The word ‘mapping’ is essential here because subconsciously, I began to chart a course to Local Ephemera.

Local Ephemera is the world of in-between. It is a liminal terrain governed by the sensual and the intuitive where concepts, ideas, inferences and innuendoes (ecological, economical, political and art /historical) take on physical form and are constantly in flux. Things seem to be constantly shifting – displacing, evolving – replacing, oozing – relocating.

The residents of L.E. are a peculiar amalgam of contemporary and historical artifacts from our world that when annexed together seem to create a revolving commentary on our social dynamics.

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Double Vision – Optical & Cognitive Meanings & Mythology

Charles Campbell

wall graphic detail

Although I assert strongly that art can be spoken about and that words do play a part in illuminating art works I am never the less uncomfortable when asked to speak or write about my own work. Partially it is the obtuse and hyperbolic language of contemporary criticism that I have never managed to feel at home with, but more importantly I am uncomfortable with the authority my words are assumed to have over my images.

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Proverb

198, London

video still

In Proverb, his first solo exhibition in London, young Trinidadian artist Mario Lewis presents an installation meditating on the diasporan experience, commenting on ‘migration, history and belonging,’ and what he calls a ‘hybrid film’ explores ‘the passing of time, estrangement, [and] alienation as a poetic construct.’

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