Incidental Proximities

In collaboration with Kristina Guison
Angle Iron, Two-Way Mirrored Acrylic, Projection.
36" x 204" x 78"
2017

Incidental Proximities examines time and collective memory in between socio-political power struggles, using familial photographic and video archives from Western Colonisation/Occupation in Asia, WWII-era Europe, and our current North American post-9/11 Century. The exhibition is a site-specific installation in response to a contemporary art space constructed within a Canadian Armed Forces shipping container.

Drawing from Levinas’ Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, the work examines points of tension created by proximity and distance between site-specificity, historical warfare, and psychological warfare propagating in virtual spaces. The video intervention appears at a crucial time when, globally, there is an alarming increase of unequal access to mobility and communication. Using two-way mirrors as projection surfaces to critique the marriage of surveillance and virtual areas, the installation questions the politics of memory in virtual, physical, and epistemological spaces.