Unsolved Mysteries engages the genre of momento mori or vanitas through artworks designed for meditation on the tentative, ephemeral, and the presence of absence. Comprised of a memorial ‘garden’ and video work, Renay Egami pursues the question of death prompted by the passing of her father by giving form to materials as stand-ins for the body unbound. 

In Trace, the perfection of the manicured domestic lawn, a public image of private life, has gone awry and symbolically transformed into a site of remembrance.  Housed in a mausoleum-like structure with a gazing window reminiscent of Japanese gardens, the viewer is positioned to gaze through this portal and reflect upon their own mortality and perhaps question what lies beyond. 

Witness, a video work filmed in time-lapse mode, depicts a life-size ice pillow with a depression of where a head once lain melting and then re-forming itself back to its frozen state in a continuous loop. Filmed at five-minute intervals over several hours, the pillow melts demarcating time – a recording of an event and the aftermath.  Egami  confronts the daily tension between life and death; the body in transition, one that is unbound, permeable, shifts, and dissolves.  This work offers the viewer a glimpse into mortality that is metaphorically depicted through the flowing mediums of water and time. 

Originally from Vancouver, Renay Egami is a visual artist currently based in Lake Country, B.C. on the traditional and unceded territory of the Syilx (Okanagan) People. She completed her undergraduate studies at the Emily Carr University of Art & Design and received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine. Renay is an Associate Professor at UBC Okanagan where she teaches in the Faculty of Creative & Critical Studies.

Renay’s art practice is diverse, conceptually grounded, and employs a wide variety of processes and materials ranging from the impermanent to the enduring and in various combinations of sculpture, immersive installations, ceramics, and textiles. Her research engages diaspora studies including the immigrant experience and labor, language, memorialization, and traditions relevant to her Japanese Canadian identity and history.  Renay has exhibited her work across Canada, in the US, and in Japan. She is the recipient of several grants and scholarships including the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, FCAR: Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l’Aide à la Recherche – Masters Research Scholarship, Conseil Des Arts et Des Lettres du Québec-Artistic Practice Grant, the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture Full Fellowship – New York, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation NY, and the Organization of American States Academic Studies Program Fellowship, Washington DC.

The artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts & BC Arts Council.

Redo it Yourself // Interpretive Essay by Randy Grskovic

Heather Maxwell combines the practical with the absurd. Her work consists of hybrid structures that create a common ground between architecture and sculpture. The ‘dysfunctional’ architecture creates a space within the gallery space that distorts the gallery’s construction and function.

Despite the pristine but unusual formal qualities foremost in her work, Maxwell’s conjunction of common building materials with impractical domestic construction allows a unique dialogue with the viewer. By creating a variation of the practical and normal, Maxwell challenges viewers to question their immediate surroundings. Maxwell’s structures expose hidden aspects of the rooms construction, allowing viewers to consider new facets of the building’s original design.

Maxwell highlights the pervasive influence of architecture on our social patterns. Architecture, like art, is the physical manifestation of specific thoughts and ideologies. It serves as a reminder of past thought and experience yet it also shapes our daily interactions. Maxwell engages the viewer by altering the original space and highlights the constructs in which we spend our lives. While our culture has formed these spaces, Maxwell suggests that these spaces in turn form us.

Contemporary North American society has an obsession with personalizing habitats through home décor. With popular home redecoration television programs and the emergence of Feng Shui, Maxwell’s work is poignant in considering how we externalize our beliefs through buildings in which we live and work. The home is seen as a reflection of lifestyle, philosophy and identity. Maxwell’s personality and aesthetic concerns are apparent in her architectural installations. Her atheistic choices are similar to those that could be made in decorating a home, but they go further into what could be described as absurd.

While awkward in appearance and complex in thought, Maxwell’s installations subtly encourage us to be critical builders and thinkers.

Heather Maxwell

Linda Duvall takes as her focus the formation of individual identities and the way they are revealed in societal contexts. She collected oral histories and recorded ordinary conversations, creating a hybrid merging of video and participatory performance. Tea & Gossip addressed ethically complex circumstances concerning wrongly attributed paternity. Viewers were invited to gossip about what they had seen on video and write their opinions on cards that were displayed in the gallery.

Linda Duvall is a visual artist based on Treaty 6 territory in Saskatchewan. Her work exists at the intersection of collaboration, performance and conversation. Her hybrid practice addresses recurring themes of connection to place, grief and loss, and the many meanings of exclusion and absence.

To learn more about Linda and her current work, visit her website.