Karen Zalamea: Every Surface Is a Shrine

The Evergreen’s latest exhibition tracks the fluid and sometimes overlapping borders of memory, material and place. For Karen Zalamea and many younger photo-based artists today, the picture is less the finished form than a record of the methodologies and relationships that bring pictures into being. Although she was born and raised in Vancouver, BC, by immigrant parents, much of Zalamea’s work is rooted in her family’s ancestral home of Quezon City
in the Philippines.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is Sunken Garden (2020–), an ongoing project that repositions the family home from a utilitarian site of shelter, rest and refuelling to a living archive and a laboratory for experiments in speculative reconstruction. Works produced from and through this site include refashioned still and moving images of chico trees and hand-woven photographic ropes made from reprinted family photos. Though the works stand alone as objects, they enlarge when taken together, achieve overtone and produce a phantom power that links generations, geographies and embodied diasporic histories in what Zalamea calls the “trans-Pacific kinwork.”

A key work in the Sunken Garden project is Sunken Garden (Every Surface Is a Shrine)
(2025), a marble slab whose inscription provides the title of the exhibition. While the slab itself signifies the weight of geological history, the inscription brings to mind a much younger, impossible to quantify human history, the weight of which can never be held, only touched. And in these touches, both past and present, rests a communion, a prayer, a call to the future. Surface is explored further in Herbarium (after Flora de Filipinas) (2024–25), where 19th-century colonial-era botanical drawings are reconfigured as sun-kissed cyanotypes.

This exhibition is part of the 2026 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.

Sculptural photography workshop with the artist May 9, 2–3:30pm.

Exhibition tour May 16, 1–1:30pm.

evergreenculturalcentre.ca/exhibit