Opening reception: Saturday, April 29, 2-5PM
Join us for an Artist Talk: April 29, 3PM
An exhibition of new work by Jayce Salloum, on view April 29 – May 27, 2023, in association with Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival
MKG127 is thrilled to present a new installation of photography, drawing, and sculptures by gallery artist Jayce Salloum that reflect the pandemic moment of time.
This is articulated both from a micro and macrospective view: referencing DNA, waveforms, organs, entities broken down and strung together, and the amalgamation of the spacial and the temporal. Salloum works through conditions and relations referencing both a previous life and one we are hurtling towards. In the following artist’s text, Salloum considers his motivations for the project.
“Originally titled ‘experiments in living’ but that was misappropriated long ago. The subtitle could’ve been ‘why does everything have to be a test’ – another condition of a messed up life stressed by a fucked up culture. Basically it’s a collection of objects referential and reflective of the moment in time that we are living in.”
As if an itinerant geographer of conflicted territories, Jayce Salloum observes the world and creates images/texts to re-make meaning from. He tries 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 or Lebanese immigrants he was born and raised on others’ land, the Sylix (Okanagan) territory. After 23 years living and working elsewhere he planted himself on the unceded stolen lands of the xʷməθkʷey̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh+ səíl̓wətaʔł. Recognizing and acting on this is an everyday practice, but let’s face it, he could do a lot more.
Salloum has exhibited pervasively, from unnamed storefronts and community centres in his downtown eastside Vancouver neighbourhood to institutions such as the Musée du Louvre, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; CaixaForum, Barcelona; 8th Havana Biennial; 7th Sharjah Biennial; 15th Biennale Of Sydney; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Royal Ontario Museum; Robert Flaherty Film Seminars; Biennial of Moving Images, Geneva and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. His texts/works have been featured in publications such as; Third Text, Fuse, Pubic Culture, Semiotext(e), The Archive (Whitechapel, London/The MIT Press, 2006), Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice (Wallflower Press, London, 2007), Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists, (Coach House Press, Toronto, 2008), The Militant Image Reader (Edition Camera Austria, Graz, 2015), Performing Utopias in the Contemporary Americas: Between the Local and the Global (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and a monograph Jayce Salloum: history of the present (Kamloops Art Gallery, 2009).
In 2014 he received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Recently the Art Gallery of Ontario made a major acquisition of his work, historical and contemporary from 1978 to 2019.
MKG127 is located in Tkaronto, on the sacred land and home to many Indigenous nations. The territories of the Huron-Wendat, Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nations hold space for the daily activities of every settler that resides in the meeting place of Tkaronto.
This territory exists in connection to the One Dish, One Spoon Wampum belt, a peace treaty dating back to before the 18th century which is a mutual agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and allied nations to share and care for the land and the resources around the Great Lakes; the dish representing the land itself and the spoon representing responsibility in sharing its resources. As a gallery operating on this land, this informs our desire to support our represented artists, and recognize the context we operate within.