Talks
Enchantment: Rebecca Bair Artist Talk + Tour
20 November 2024
1:00pm
Please join us for an artist talk and guided exhibition tour with interdisciplinary artist Rebecca Bair. Introduction by Or Gallery Director Jenn Jackson.
This public program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Enchantment, on view at Or Gallery from October 9, 2024, to January 11, 2025.
Enchantment is a group exhibition that looks at the way that Chinatown-Downtown Eastside (and Vancouver in general) enchants international capital, investors, and tourists. Rebecca Bair, Julian 伊 中 Hou and Byron Peters insist upon a counter enchantment. To these artists, this counter enchantment comes from reworking archival materials, to insisting on the lived experience of having relations in this neighbourhood, to mobilizing speculation, and fiction, to listening to the knowledge of the surrounding communities. In a political sense, there is a degentrification of enchantment at work in this group show, and the artists invite us to reclaim the means of enchantment. Through sculpture, sound installation, and video poetry, these newly commissioned works remain alive to the ready-made imaginings of this space at the same time that they rework the knotty ties that secure the image of this place.
Enchantment is presented with additional support from The Studio for Racial and Colonial Tidalectics (Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies).
Participant Bios
Rebecca Bair
Rebecca Bair is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples. Her research aims to explore the possibilities of specific representation and of identity through abstraction and non-figuration. Bair uses multimedia approaches and Sun collaborations to illustrate her exploration of identity and intersectionality, through the lens of her own experience as a Black Woman on Turtle Island. Her artistic, professional and educational goals revolve around common themes of celebrating Black plurality, as well as enabling interpersonal and intercultural care, and her work acts as a vehicle through which the complexities of history and identity can be uncovered, redefined and expressed.