DRESSES AND VEILS AS GALLERY ART
At the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Fashion Fictions, Burnaby Art Gallery’s Karin Jones: Ornament and Instrument, and the Audain Art Museum’s Gathie Falk: Revelations
Divine dresses and veils took on socio-political weight at stunning exhibitions throughout 2024. At the Vancouver Art Gallery’s massive Fashion Fictions, Ronald van der Kemp’s Overcoat stood out, a swingy, chain-looped gown of felt made from textile trash—and a gorgeously couture statement on waste and recycling in the fashion industry. Over at the Burnaby Art Gallery, we were blown away by a firsthand look at artist Karin Jones’s Worn, on loan from the Royal Ontario Museum, in the Ornament and Instrument exhibition devoted to her work. The black Victorian mourning dress was meticulously crafted from synthetic extensions and the artist’s own hair, braiding together profound ideas about the invisible labour of Black women behind the wealth of the British empire with themes of African identity, colonial displacement, slavery, and oppression. And in Revelations at Whistler’s Audain Art Museum, you still have the chance to see Gathie Falk’s haunting, papier-mâché The Problem with Wedding Veils up close, with its flowing train weighed down by rocks—unoccupied and ghostlike. The messages around marriage are left up to the viewer.
WE LOVE ARABS
Presented by The Dance Centre at Scotiabank Dance Centre
Israeli choreographer-dancer Hillel Kogan is also a comedian, as he proved when he brought his cuttingly hilarious We Love Arabs to Vancouver for its Western Canadian premiere. Teaming up with Arab dancer-actor Mourad Bouayad, Kogan pulled out a bowl of chickpea dip as a prop, the food becoming a metaphor for everything from identity to world peace.
PIÑA
Presented by SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs and The Dance Centre at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre
Just a few moments into PIÑA, a work by Ralph Escamillan named after the national textile of his native Philippines, the choreographer and three other performers broke into a folk dance, each one wearing what looked like enormous butterfly wings made of the fabric. There was a kind of geometry to their steps, tracing square patterns on the floor, but what was most striking was the sheer sense of palpable joy. You could feel the dancers’ pride as they crisscrossed their way around and between each other. A simple and lasting image.
THE PIGEON & THE DOVE
Presented by the Vancouver Fringe Festival at the Revue Stage
Substance and gambling addiction, LGBTQ youth being shunned by their parents, low wages, domestic abuse, and the challenges that Indigenous people—especially Indigenous women—face. Each of Carolyn Victoria Mill and Reid Jamieson’s songs at this timely Fringe show traced the various roads that lead from being housed to living on the streets. But what brought it all affectingly home was Mill bravely sharing her own true story of housing insecurity, while dressed in a delicately beautiful pair of grey pigeon wings—a metaphor for those we judge to be “lesser”.