Enchantment: Rebecca Bair, Julian 伊 中 Hou and Byron Peters
Or Gallery, Vancouver, BC - To Jan 11, 2025
Vancouver, BC’s passage from resource port to tourist resort has been a relatively quick one. Long-time residents talk of key moments in this transition—like the provincial government’s Expo 86, whose advertising slogan “Invite the World” set the stage for a series of social engineering manoeuvres cloaked in a tourist campaign that boasted the province’s “Super, Natural” attributes. It is “enchantments” like this that guest curator Phanuel Antwi and artists Rebecca Bair, Julian 伊 中 Hou and Byron Peters appear to have set their sights on.
Although referring to Vancouver in general, the exhibition, according to its media release, focuses on “the way that Chinatown–Downtown Eastside … enchants international capital, investors and tourists.” In an effort to bring this to light, the artists and curator have taken a dialectical approach, a “counter enchantment”—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.” The results are newly commissioned works in sculpture, sound installation and video poetry.
An exemplary work of Bair’s is Because They Were There (2024). What appears at first to be a gathering of different coloured starfish on a rock in shallow water is interrupted by an unidentifiable white presence (the sun’s glare?) and, secondary to that, a fainter veil-like presence that could be seaweed. The uncertainty of this latter presence allows the arms of a starfish to suddenly look like the fingers of a human hand, and what was once that (glaring?) white presence is just as suddenly irrelevant compared to the communion of those starfish that make up Bair’s intertidal world.
