Generation
The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art
Project Gallery
March 28 - May 10 2025
Generation:
“all of the people born and living at about the same time, regarded collectively”
“a single stage in the history of a family”
“the production of something”
(Oxford Languages)
This exhibition explores possible understandings of the word “generation.” Loosely referencing a living room, the exhibition space merges a transparent inflatable couch, popular white IKEA furniture, and cellophane curtains with colourful, crafty works that speak to my Millennial upbringing.
On the LACK-coffee-table-as-display-table, viewers will find the original and digitally reproduced copies of my artist book project, album. It is inspired by the format of a family photo album. I use it as a framework to examine what is celebrated, what is omitted, and what is interpretable via the social apparatus of photography.
The book features scans of snapshots from my youth. Some were taken by my brothers or I with disposable film cameras or with digital point-and-shoot cameras. Others were taken by my mom. I selected photos that were not featured in family albums and were instead stored in boxes or on hard drives. My book gives these ‘leftover’ photos a new life. Iridescent cellophane—a symbol of celebration from childhood birthday parties—appears prominently in the book, both as colorful scans and actual pages. The same cellophane acts as a curtain behind the book viewing area.
I used responses from an AI app designed to interpret images to help craft the captions on the backs of the snapshots. I was interested in the AI’s limitations in interpreting obscure images, and I was also struck by its ability to be both naive and sometimes poetic. It made me think of how working with AI, still in its infancy, mirrors my early experiences with cameras—pressing a button and seeing what happens.
The book is organized into chapters based on experiences from my upbringing in the Okanagan, including camping trips, birthday parties, forest fires, community barbecues and swimming. Photographs from family vacations are also included. Selfies and other pictures of myself make regular appearances. I grew up fat, and experienced a great deal of shame about my body as a young person. Contextualizing these images in this way is a gesture of reclaiming and validating my physicality.
On the LACK-side-table-as-plinth, a papier mâché boombox plays repetitive, sampled music from the instrumental intros of hit songs from the 1960s-80s (my parents’ generation, and the music I heard often growing up). This piece meditates on the feeling of hearing a familiar song begin to play on the radio, and the collective experience of popular music. On the walls, cross stitch pieces derived from smartphone snapshots of fleeting light are simplified to 40 colours by a cross stitch pattern-generating software. As I stitch, I omit areas of the pattern, furthering a sense of non-resolution and abstraction.
All three projects involve intersections of digital and craft, as well as gestures of the hand (taking pictures, flipping pages, pressing buttons, stitching). These acts of looking and making connect across generations: crafts taught by mothers to daughters, the family experience as seen by both parents and children, and music from one generation playing on another’s technology.
My work critically engages with nostalgia—a sentiment often exploited for political gain. However, nostalgia isn’t simply a longing for the past. Rather, it can be understood as a yearning for home. I believe in its ability to speak to our surreal experiences of time. Through visual culture especially, nostalgia gives us a space to grieve a time and a place we didn’t realize we would miss. Or, it reminds us of how much we, and our world, have changed.