"Natural Digital" Selection of poems by Aly Laube
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The sky opens
And I walk right in
Up into a sick pale yellow light
Where I could belong to something
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Incidental Reflections on the Urban in Taizo Yamamoto’s Carts, Hedges, Lions
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Carts, Hedges, Lions reads as an urban archival project featuring detailed illustrations by Taizo Yamamoto that render moments and decades of Vancouver’s landscapes. Complimenting his drawings, Aaron Peck, Kevin Chong, and Jackie Wong bookend each collection of illustrations with an essay, rooted in their own relationships with the titular images. Yamamoto, an architect by trade and Principal of Yamamoto Architecture, has his works interspersed throughout the landscape of the Lower Mainland, representing perhaps, what may be ambivalently considered “modern builds.” Knowing that Yamamoto plays a role in the construction of Vancouver’s future urban landscape, these drawings in reverence to the Foo Dog, hedges, and shopping carts evoke a particular nostalgic effect. In an email exchange, Yamamoto speculates that this nostalgia is activated because these drawings “[record] moments that are already passed and lost.” I am one to agree.
Read MoreConfronting Silence: Family Reunification and Mental Health in the Filipino Diaspora in Inay
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Thea and cinematographer Jeremiah Reyes—a Filipino husband-and-wife team—turn the camera on themselves in Inay (Tagalog for “Mama”) to explore the cultural and psychological impacts on children whose mothers left the Philippines out of economic necessity. Thea begins a thoughtful inquiry into the experiences of family separation by interviewing her husband, Jeremiah, and her best friend, Shirley. Through her explorations, Inay intertwines personal narratives with historical context to shed light on the impact of migration policies created by the Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP). As a viewer, I stumbled with Thea as she navigates the pain and trauma her partner and friend have experienced through migration and mental illness and challenges the notion of normalcy within Filipino immigrant experiences.
Read MoreSell Out, A Series: 5 Questions with Ziggy Mimloid
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Sell Out is a series by interdisciplinary artist Angela Fama (she/they), who co-creates conversations with individual artists across Vancouver. Questioning ideas of artistry, identity, “day jobs,” and how they intertwine, Fama settles in with each artist (at a local café of their choice) and asks the same series of questions. With one roll of medium format film, Fama captures portraits of the artist after their conversations.
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Walking the Garden with Asia Jong
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Asia Jong is a curator who has flowered roots in Chinatown. For the first two years after she moved here, she never left. Her work feels like a love letter to this place. As a diasporic Chinese settler herself, Asia is attuned to the nuances of this deeply political, ever-changing community. At the core of her curatorial practice is people – and a way of being in relation that is as malleable, dynamic, and fluid as water. Her earlier works invite audiences to thoughtfully create relations to Chinatown, sending you searching for the color gold down Pender St, or offering cheap date ideas in Chinatown that are tenderly allusive to the intimacies of her own memories.
Read MoreNovelette Is Trying: An Ode to Black Femmehood in "Vancouver"
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Novelette is Trying is a heartwarming five-part series about a Black, disabled, bisexual woman falling into a sudden transitional journey in her late twenties. The catalyst of this new era is, unfortunately, a result of her being subjected to the ableism of her ex-boyfriend amidst being broken up with, and being painfully unequipped to articulate the emotional harm that he is causing her through his insensitive justifications for ending their long term relationship of six years.
Read More"Under the Canopy" and "Last night, I named my body Solace" by Hanna Formosa
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Last night, I named my body Solace, which means that I am a grown-up
kid, in blue Adidas track shorts, with a face flushed from either sunstroke or
rage, where rage refers to my pillowcase soaked with spit and two decades’
worth of silence. Silence, of course, gives way to sound, and this afternoon’s hymn
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