MKG127 is pleased to present verisimilitude(s) and permutations an exhibition of new work by Jayce Salloum.

Opening Saturday, September 7 from 2:00 – 5:00PM

These are contested territories, the colonial presence permeates all – built upon the ruin(s) of others, showing promise for more of the same and slim chances of a break in the continuum. The skeletal structures of society personify the state we are in, of governance, control, the regulating bodies/regulations of the body in (moving through) these spaces and places. Public space, private enterprise, governing and corporate (in)security all channel us through their/our systems of being. The individual exists, an embodiment, a figment of the imagination subtracting our responsibility to each other as individuals in society. Intimacy and personal space persevere, in lived-in, lived-on, passed through, travelled spaces, as notions of a ‘commons’ drift by. This, a colonial impasse, a real fiction, no longer stewards but enablers and financiers, consuming, disposing, the price we pay is endless. The commons calls out into the expanse, an exigent voice. We are an extension of territory, lands that seeps into us, and us into them.

This work, these pictures, an imprint, a extracting filtration of sorts, permutations where images collapse and fold space into verisimilitudes of the daily/present. The structural reference to the array or panorama, is both to the literal and linear ideological processes which frame our living as well as to the possibilities that a social engagement enables fragmentation of the tautological and teleological binders that encroach/encompass our lives.

There is a capital residue in these signifiers – these photographs that would like to be more than they are, tableau vivant(s), collapsing nature, colliding histories – equivalents, evidence of us – the danger of humans. detritus rises and floats upon our entrails end-tales. Salloum gathers sites of the intangible and tangible – finding an intimacy in-between and out of place, to acknowledge a dialectical relationship with the photographs themselves, anchored intending for you to sense a/the scene, the presence of a greater geology or specific/disparate encounter, palpable paradigms, whereas the intangible weighs equally to any sense of stasis, and a sense of a normative uncanny outweighs all.

As if an itinerant geographer, Jayce Salloum observes the world and creates a subjective archive of images that he either gleans or produces. He tends to go only where he is invited or where there is an intrinsic affinity, his projects being rooted in an intimate engagement with place. A grandson of Syrian immigrants he was born and raised on Sylix (Okanagan) territory in Kelowna, BC. After 22 years living and working in San Francisco, Banff, Toronto, San Diego, Beirut, and New York he has been based on the unceded Xwmetskwíyem/xʷməθkʷey̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh/sqʷx̌ʷoʔməx (Squamish) + Selíl̓witulh/səíl̓wətaʔł (Tsleil-Waututh) land of ‘Vancouver’ for 23 years. His videotapes, photographs, installations, and other cultural projects engage the personal/subjective, reconfiguring notions of identity, community, history, boundaries, exile, (trans/inter/intra)nationalism and resistance. His work has involved production and facilitation in many locales including Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, Europa, San Francisco, San Diego, New York, Central America, Mexico, Columbia, Ecuador, Kamloops, Kelowna, Cumberland House, Vancouver, Aotearoa, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Philippines and Australia. He has exhibited pervasively at the widest range of local and international venues possible, from the smallest unnamed storefronts in his downtown eastside Vancouver neighbourhood to institutions such as the Musée du Louvre, Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, National Gallery of Canada, Bienal De La Havana, Sharjah Biennial, Biennale of Sydney and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Review: Terence Dick reviewed verisimilitude(s) and permutations for AKIMBO