An opening party takes place at The Reach Gallery Museum on Friday, May 26 to celebrate the opening of two new exhibitions.
The event begins at 6:30 p.m. and includes light refreshments and a cash bar.
The following day at 1:30 p.m., Amsterdam-based Dutch artist Karin van Dam and Toronto-based Canadian artist Ed Pien will give a talk in which they discuss their recent and new solo and collaborative work on view in their exhibition, Drawn from Water. Admission is by donation.
Drawn from Water is a presentation of van Dam and Pien’s recent investigations of water not only as a source of vitality, mystery, and enchantment, but also as a co-creator in their individual and collaborative practices.
The two artists first met during a Paris residency in the late 1990s and have been collaborating regularly over the past three decades.
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Canada has been a recurring meeting place for the two. Following a cross-country road trip together in 2017 – which inspired some of the prints, drawings and photographs in Drawn from Water – and separate site visits to The Reach in 2017 and 2022 respectively, van Dam and Pien returned to B.C. this spring for an artist residency at the Burnaby Art Gallery.
During this time, they have used field and archival research to engage with the complex natural and social histories of Sumas Lake and its surroundings in the Fraser Valley.
Their collaborative investigation will culminate in Surfacing, a new mixed-media, site-specific installation presented as part of Drawn from Water.
Presented in dialogue with Surfacing is a selection of van Dam and Pien’s solo works.
The second exhibit opening at The Reach is Jennifer Willet’s travelling exhibition When Microbes Dream. The exhibition presents a futurist vision, in which the human (scientist) is displaced from the top of the ecological hierarchy and agency is redistributed amongst ecosystems’ many non-human and human beings.
The exhibit includes a large-scale installation incorporating live cultures and a selection of digital prints, populated by a menagerie of mammals, microbes, insects and plants working together to enact biotech processes for human audiences.
Willet is internationally recognized as a pioneer in the emerging field of bio art. Her research explores notions of representation, the body, ecologies and interspecies interrelations in the biotechnological field.
When Microbes Dream premiered at Kapelica Gallery (Ljubljana, Slovenia) in October 2021 and then travelled to Ectopia (Lisbon, Portugal) in September 2022 and i3S (Porto, Portugal) in January 2023. The Reach is the first Canadian venue of the exhibition’s international tour.
The two exhibits run until Sept. 16. Visit thereach.ca for a full schedule of summer 2023 events at The Reach.
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