By: Jaclyn Hayward
As you walk along Downtown Vancouver’s wet and windy streets this season, just off the beaten path on Nelson Street near Richards you can find solace in the beauty of the industrial with Lotus L. Kang’s latest installation In Cascades, on display now at the Contemporary Art Gallery.
Free and flowing off of steel joists hung high, several layered, coloured pieces catch light and hover over the gallery floor. Industrial precision mixed with imaginative openness are presented through long strips of film that hang and develop throughout the duration of the exhibit, creating a loud contrast in materials—thick and solid paired with thin and wispy or hard and shiny matched with soft and opaque. Earthy hued visions and images are illuminated on film as the gallery light flows through, exposing magnified, open-ended forms and figures that look vaguely familiar. Shadows bouncing off of different walls, in different shapes.
Kang brings us through a journey of structural and organic forms that live and breathe the same environment as us, and exist and change just like us.
I catch myself wondering about the life of the steel joists before they existed in this time and space to hold this film—was there an entire life before they served this purpose? Will there be an entire life after it? In this moment, they hold film that has yet to be fully developed but presents itself, openly, evolving, alive, in pieces. Each footstep around the exhibit reverberates differently against the materials used. The echo urges the viewer to see if they can yet recognize the images on film as they’re slowly revealed over time, like the shadows on the gallery wall, from day to night.
In Cascades is on at The Contemporary Art Gallery (555 Nelson Street) Tuesdays to Sundays, from now until January 7, 2024.
SkyTrain: 10-minute walk from Granville SkyTrain Station.
For more information, please see TransLink’s Trip Planner.