Ron Tran. The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store, 2015; installation view, 221A, Vancouver. Courtesy of the artist and 221A. Photo: Dennis Ha.

In The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store, the viewer is transported to a landscape filled with objects made unfamiliar. A parasol protrudes from a wall, spinning with a hypnotic rhythm; a single blonde hair extension is attached to a tensor bandage held by a white mannequin hand; a room divider has been outfitted with pungent dried fish that hang from the screen’s top rung; a basket is retrofitted as a lamp. Adding to this dynamic effect, reams of colorful wrapping paper are pasted from floor to ceiling on the gallery’s east wall, and the west wall is covered in garish tablecloths. Throughout the gallery, sagging cardboard boxes that read “Product of China” act as supports for many bizarre and beautiful things.

221A is primarily concerned with the impact of design on lived experience. This exhibition highlights the high cost of low prices by showcasing products that make the trip from China to Chinatowns all over the world. The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store addresses the way in which low-cost production strategies are enjoyed by the West and endured by the East, and the impact on laborers that is often obscured by the abundance of cheap items available in trinket shops in the city’s east end.[1]

Ron Tran. The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store, 2015; installation view, 221A, Vancouver. Courtesy of the artist and 221A. Photo: Dennis Ha.

The objects in the exhibition are tagged with prices, inflated only slightly from the price point we’ve come to expect—though they are low by fine art standards. The prices include the value of the original materials and the artist’s labor. Tran has transformed the gallery into a domain for both economic and social exchange, creating a snapshot of modern life influenced by mass production and mass culture.

The gallery is located in Vancouver’s Chinatown, and by sourcing products exclusively from this part of the city the exhibition also comments on the changing face of the neighborhood. This historical community, once almost exclusively inhabited by immigrant families, has witnessed an expected but swift wave of gentrification. An uneasiness haunts the changing blocks as galleries, condos, and trendy minimalist restaurants move in.[2] Vancouver’s Chinatown is also flanked by a site populated by drug-users and drifters. The area is considered Canada’s poorest postal code, yet so far the communities are working together to revitalize abandoned spaces and empty storefronts.

Ron Tran. The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store, 2015; installation view, 221A, Vancouver. Courtesy of the artist and 221A. Photo: Dennis Ha.

At 221A, The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store is the inventory of a shopkeeper gone mad, driven to insanity by the senselessness of consumption. Artificial flowers beautify the ugly reality that defines the gallery’s location. Baby harnesses are filled not with babies but with fake plants. A periwinkle fan spins slowly, acting as the lower half of an armless mannequin’s abdomen, whose eye peeks through a sun visor. It is perhaps not important what is for sale, as long as the impulse to buy is intensified and subverted, displacing the use value of the object and replacing it instead with pure aesthetics. A fruit-print tablecloth is wrapped tightly around stretcher bars to make a canvas, elevated to high art yet rendered unusable.

Ron Tran: The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store is on view at 221A in Vancouver through May 23, 2015.

[1] For more information about workers’ rights violations in China, visit chinalaborwatch.org, a New York-based organization that documents unfair treatment by international companies in Chinese factories. Also, for an example of factory violations in exchange for cheaper production read: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/05/workers-rights-flouted-apple-iphone-plant.

[2]For varying responses to the changing face of Vancouver’s Chinatown see, http://www.vancouversun.com/touch/news/metro/Battle+Chinatown/10384991/story.html?rel=10403843 and http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/behind-the-changing-face-of-vancouvers-chinatown/article7282156/

Patryk Stasieczek. Gestured Interference (13), 2015; UV laminated digital light-jet print on metallic chromogenic paper, mounted on foam; 16 x 20 in.

Psychedelic and transcendent, Asking For It transgresses the traditional boundaries of the photographic medium by rejecting the representational in favor of total abstraction. As a record of their own production, these works emphasize the materiality of analog processes while denying the figurative intentions typical of photography. Conceived by the artist as interventions within stages of image production, they are innovative in a way that resists the banal simplicity of the digital.

In the Gestured Interference (2015) series, which includes multiple iterations, Stasieczek has taken a cellphone camera and smashed it with varying amounts of force against a number of telematic devices (technologies that transmit computerized information across long distances). This physical collision of technologies causes interference in the transmission and reception of a light frequency via the camera’s sensor. Gestured Interference (11), for instance, was achieved by striking a camera phone against a tube monitor while simultaneously taking images of the resulting effects.[1] Like the other works in the exhibition, the colorful lines of Gestured Interference (11) document the moment of the image’s making. The essence behind the image is the physical action, and it points to nothing outside of the technologies that were used for its production.

Patryk Stasieczek. Gestured Interference (01), 2015; UV laminated digital light-jet print on metallic chromogenic paper, mounted on foam; 16 x 20 in.

Moiré (Light Painting Study) (2013) is as technically complex as it is visually stimulating. A moiré pattern is a visual motif achieved by overlaying two identical series of straight lines or dots slightly askew from one another to produce a wavy pattern. Moiré also refers to the manifestation of unintentional visual artifacts in digital photography as an effect of the medium’s technological composition. Moiré patterns can be detected on television screens when a person wears patterned clothing—the interlaced scanning in televisions and digital cameras cause this moiré pattern to appear. The pattern is also evident when a television screen is photographed with a digital camera due to the scanning technique used by both devices to produce and capture images; the conflicting sets of lines cause a moiré to appear. Stasieczek has captured this effect by projecting a patterned image through an enlarger twice, and shifting one image slightly.

The artist further explores the potentials of optical techniques in Untitled (Scale) (2015), a photogram in which shapes and images are produced directly on light-sensitive paper. The photogram is a technique made famous by early-20th-century photographer Man Ray; it is achieved by placing objects on photo-sensitive material and exposing them to light.[2] Stasieczek dramatically enlarges his works, with the largest photogram extending to forty-eight by sixty inches. Like Man Ray, Stasieczek is an innovator who traverses the border of photography by wandering toward painting. The commingling of photographic technique with the sensibilities of painting results in a sophisticated collection of images that are both formally and technically intriguing. 

Patryk Stasieczek. Symphony of Greys (King Photo/Custom Colour/The Lab), 2015; photogram on digital light-jet chromogenic backlit paper on fluorescent lights, as found light box fixture; 48 x 72 x 9 in.

Symphony of Greys (2015) makes use of a light box, again invoking the technology related to photography but avoiding the camera itself. Additionally, this light box has its own past; it belonged to various Vancouver-based photo studios (King Photo and Custom Colour) before ending up in Stasieczek’s hands. The artist plays with the essential elements of photography—the agency and operation of light—and modifies the fluorescent lighting tubes by wrapping them with color gels and changing the industrial object into a delicate, colored display. Stasieczek extends his fascination with the light box by modifying the gallery’s street sign (which reads “FIELD”) by wrapping the internal light tubes with theater gels.

Asking For It, Patryk Stasieczek, Installation View at FIELD Contemporary, 2015. Left: Moiré, Pock, Wiggle (Light Painting Studies), UV laminated light paintings on chromogenic paper. Center: UV laminated digital light-jet print and photogram on metallic chromogenic paper, mounted on dibond. Right: Gestured Interference (07, 10, 01, 13, 08), UV laminated digital light-jet print on metallic chromogenic paper, mounted on foam.

Stasieczek’s experiments necessitate a relinquishing of power. Chance operates in the works’ production, whether through violent acts in the Gesture Interference series or through chemical and light interferences that occur in his photograms. The unpredictability of the darkroom contributes to the dynamism of this collection. The artist creates the conditions under which his images emerge, developing a creative authorship that rests somewhere outside his complete control.

Patryk Stasieczek: Asking For It is on view at FIELD Contemporary in Vancouver through April 25, 2015.

[1] Patryk Stasieczek, email message to author, April 2, 2015.

[2] Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A History of Photography (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000).

Tatiana Grigorenko. Swimming, 2014; archival ink-jet print on Hahnemühle cotton rag paper and collage; 16 1/2 x 11 4/5 in. Courtesy the Artist and Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography.

The artists’ processes are foregrounded in this exhibition, as both Grigorenko and Heyn-Jones perform acts of historical revisionism by dealing with materiality and form. Grigorenko modifies images unearthed from her family archive by the use of paint or collage. With clinical accuracy, she excises herself from these relics, carefully covering up the evidence of her existence by replacing herself with blank space. These works are grouped on the gallery wall much in the same way as a family photo collection, and intimacy is evoked by this familiar arrangement. Between the collaged images hang Grigorenko’s school portraits (School Portrait #1–#9 [2014]), her youthful face blackened out with paint. The organization of the work allows the viewer to gaze at a girl who is simultaneously coming of age while being denied her full identity.

Tatiana Grigorenko. Grand Canyon, 2014; archival ink-jet print on Hahnemühle cotton rag paper and collage; 16 1/2 x 11 4/5 in. Courtesy the Artist and Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography.

In Grigorenko’s Swimming (2014), a single man (presumably her father) appears amidst a vast lake. His arms are raised. A conspicuous square covers the space where Grigorenko was once pictured; without her there, the man seems unsettled. He gazes not at her but into the blank water that surrounds him, creating a listless and haunting effect. Each work in the collection exhibits this methodical practice, the subtle rearrangement of domestic life with backdrops that range from a Russian grocery store (Russian Grocery Store [2014]), vacations at the Grand Canyon (Grand Canyon [2014]), and dance recitals (Ballet [2014]), each combining the fastidiousness of a family photograph with the intentionality of its deconstruction.

Tatiana Grigorenko. Bridge to USA, 2014; archival ink-jet print on Hahnemühle cotton rag paper and collage; 16 1/2 x 11 4/5 in. Courtesy the Artist and Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography.

While working on this exhibition, Grigorenko discovered a photograph in her family’s collection that eerily recalls the formal nuances of her artistic practice. In a splendid act of serendipity, the picture she found shows the artist as a child, in the arms of her grandmother. Her grandfather, a famous Soviet Army commander, also stands in the frame; along with her uncle, born with Down Syndrome, who looks off into the distance away from the camera. In a version of the photo reproduced for Grigorenko’s grandfather’s biography, her uncle had been violently and anonymously removed. The image, in both its original and altered form, has been reproduced for the exhibition and welcomes visitors as they enter the space.

Zoë Heyn-Jones. Atitlán 1 (Feliz Viaje), 2014; ink-jet print on celluloid; 36 x 150 in. Courtesy the Artist and Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography.

Zoë Heyn-Jones also grapples with the hidden truths that define her former home. In Guatemala City to Santiago Atitlán (2014), a 16mm film transferred from hand-processed Super 8, the artist documents her recent journey traveling between the two cities of the film’s title. Taken as still frames and edited together, the black-and-white film is jerky and disorienting as the images that quickly cross the screen go in and out of focus. Fleeting glimpses of clouds, mountainous landscapes, hand-painted signs, barbed-wire fencing, palm trees, and city buses provide little explanation of the surroundings. Marked by the scratches and imperfections typical of Super 8 film, the film portrays a dreamscape that remains forever just out of reach; the fragmented and wistful images of her journey belie the country’s horrific past—in a war that lasted from 1960 to 1996, over forty-five thousand Guatemalan civilians were forcibly “disappeared.” Heyn-Jones, remaining always behind the camera, is rendered tenuously invisible. Guatemala City to Santiago Atitlán is supplemented with six film stills, presented in light boxes at the rear of the room. The stills, removed from the context of the frenetic loop, appear cold and less affecting than the moving film from which they are drawn. One large-scale panorama, titled Atitlán 1 (2014), leads the viewer from one room to the other and provides the transition between the two artists’ bodies of work. The image, seemingly a composite of several film stills, contains a hazy view of an unnamed horizon, treetops, a boat, and one legible phrase, written in Spanish: Feliz Viaje, which translates to happy journey.

Both Grigorenko and Heyn-Jones challenge the indexicality of the photographic image and the camera’s ability to show memory, the past, and personal histories. Their images, though representational, always point to something less tangible and often menacing beneath the surface. No matter how much each artist tries to disappear from her work, residues remain. Traces are left in their attempts to vanish, manifesting as shadows, scratches, and empty space.

The Disappeared is on view at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography through February 21, 2015.