October 23rd – December 12th, 2024 Massy Arts will host, Located in the Ink, a new group show by artists and writers Gary Barwin, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, and Isabella Wang.

Presented in two parts, Located in the Ink contends that a page can be a place of nuanced belonging. Through collaboration and encounters with archival materials, the artists in this show unroot the expectations of text or image in a page to offer unfixed meanings that can be explored, tangled, and expanded by the readers and seers of their work.

WATCHER by Gary Barwin and Elee Kraljii Gardiner starts with the question “Where is the contemporary page, the contemporary poem?”.

In an ongoing virtual, long-distance collaboration practiced from Hamilton, Ontario and Vancouver, BC, Gary Barwin and Elee Kraljii Gardiner created the images in WATCHER. First published as a chapbook from Sweden’s Timglaset Editions, a book that contains no words, each image has an active embedded QR code leading to a videopoem, visualpoem, or songpoem.

In WATCHER, the page is no longer a two-dimensional field but is instead a portal allowing for collaborative possibilities between artist and artist, between watcher and creator, between the haptic and the virtual. 

How do we balance the immediate sensory pleasure of images on beautiful paper with what might be beyond, just a QR code away? 

While Inside Outside Chinatown  by Isabella Wang combines visual and experimental poetry, visual art, and oral narrative to address the disorientating pulse of such a historied, yet, nuanced and very much “troubled” moving present that is Vancouver’s Chinatown. 

The artist shares “In 2019, I had just finished my first year of university at Simon Fraser University and found myself, yet again, homeless. A Chinese immigrant at age 8, I was a homeless youth of the Downtown Eastside at 16, I returned here at 19 after living, secretly, on public university grounds for a year having acquired a lease on a tiny studio located right off Abbott and Pender. My lease ended after three months. I did not come back for several years. Much of the geography and familiar locations had changed or disappeared upon my return after the pandemic. Like my own memories, emotional archives, present, past and future, Chinatown is an unsteady place. Coming here again, I realized that it never registered to me that I was in Chinatown, a place that by name, and projected cultural significance, should have tugged upon even the most remote muscles of my own recognition and kinship. My art speaks alongside these muscles. Sometimes we must create to re-jog connective tissues that had been buried to trauma and loss along the way.

Inside Outside Chinatown combines visual and experimental poetry, visual art, and pastels to address the disorientating pulse of such a historied, yet, nuanced and very much “troubled” moving present that is Vancouver’s Chinatown. What you see is a chapbook I found in an old box at the university, put together originally to document an artistic event that was hosted by the Audain Gallery in Downtown in the 90s. I have collaged over pictures in the chapbook with my own, “moving” impressions of Chinatown— screenshots captured from a video recording as I am moving along Pender St., my former neighborhood of residence—and rearranged into disorientating assemblage of visual effects. These pages thus push the whole of the landscape of Chinatown to the periphery, replacing historical perceptions of this space into a focal arena of feelings of fragmentation and claustrophobia from the inner world perceptions of an artist who should feel a sense of belonging and familiarity with this culturally enriched space. Through blackout poetry, rearranging text that has been formerly written on this space and its surroundings into a different set of meanings, I attempt to “resist / simply / as if / ive / been located in / [the] ink” of text and ink of Pender Street in which I must work to locate myself after coming back here. By documenting my experiences here as a language learner, and language loser; as a former inhabitant as well as homeless youth, my goal is to illuminate upon viewers the divergent, disorientating energies that ricochets off any given place. For Pender in particular—one that like myself, derives a hybrid identity from as much historic and present Chinatown as well as settler- colonial Downtown, Vancouver – I hope that my exhibition will contribute a sense of solidarity through art as witness. Witnessing, not only the visual landscape of shops, buildings, and tourist sites, but also this deeply embodied articulation of placeless and rootlessness, blanketing a community amidst ongoing gentrification and violent homeless sweeps. A community that includes myself–homeless, rootless, anxious, and hybrid nourishing ourselves with this beloved, equally rootless, hybrid place.”

Located in the Ink invites the audience to take an active role in unfolding the poetry of each work and fill it with reader possibility.

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Proceeds from the WATCHER series sales benefit Rainbow Refugee, an organization that promotes safe, equitable migration and communities of belonging for people fleeing persecution based on their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or HIV status. 

This project is supported by the British Columbia Arts Council and Printmaker Studio (Vancouver).

The Massy Arts Gallery is located at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.
The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday, 12pm to 5pm.
Entrance is free, and masks are mandatory.

To contact the gallery, send an email to: info@massyarts.com

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About the artists

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is the author of Trauma Head, a memoir in poetry, and serpentine loop. She is also editor of two multi-genre anthologies: Against Death: 35 Essays on Living and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. A frequent collaborator with authors, choreographers, musicians, sound and visual artists, Elee is currently collaborating with nature via a series of durational installations that investigate the law of thermodynamics and cultural ideas regarding the passing of time. Originally from Boston, Elee lives on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam Peoples, where she directs Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, a program pairing authors with mentors. eleekg.com

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist and the author of 32 books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy which won the

Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was chosen for Hamilton Reads 2023. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was longlisted for Canada Reads. His latest book is Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984 published in Fall 2024. His recent public art installation, be:longings (with Tor Lukasik-Foss and Simon Frank) is a series of bronze sculptures installed in a Hamilton, Ontario park. His artwork has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Hamilton (including a year-long interactive installation) as well as in galleries internationally. Born in Northern Ireland to South African parents of Lithuanian Ashkenazi descent, he lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. garybarwin.com

Isabella Wang is the author of the chapbook, On Forgetting a Language, and her full-length debut, Pebble Swing, shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Among other recognitions, she has been shortlisted for Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Contest and Long Poem Contest, and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Essay Contest. She is currently pursuing her MA in Sociology at SFU. An editor on the Room collective, she is also a youth mentor with Vancouver Poetry House, web coordinator with poetry in canada, and directs her own non-profit editing and mentorship program, 4827 Revise Revision St.