Re–Pro
extended until 18 July
This exhibition brings together the photographic work of Marisa Kriangwiwat with a living installation by Polish arts collective M.E., cultivating plants within the gallery itself for later dissemination amongst the public. The exhibition highlights a shared inquiry into reproduction through both image and biological process. The works consider reproduction not simply as replication, but as a process of circulation, mutation, and proliferation. Kriangwiwat’s photographs linger on the unstable boundary between document and inheritance, tracing how images reproduce intimacy across time while also altering it; while the collective’s evolving ecosystem extends this logic into biological and social space: growth becomes collaborative, distributed, and impossible to fully contain within the gallery itself.
Kriangwiwat’s photographs attend closely to the instability of memory, gesture, and inheritance. The camera becomes not simply a recording device, nor the only path towards taking an image, but a reproductive mechanism through which intimacy, circulation, and transformation are continually negotiated. The artist pushes the instability of the camera through mark-making, cropping, and subversions of the matboard. At once analog and hyper-contemporary, her mode of working draws attention to the ways in which the meaning of the image is equally inferred from the interface in which it is laden, as from the image itself. In other terms, the photograph accrues various readings as it passes from hand to hand, from one context of display to another.
The collective’s gradual propagation of plant life positions growth as a distributed and participatory act that exceeds the authority of the singular author. The selected plants have significant relationships to both Poland and Canada, as both endemic and invasive. Now, these plant examples are commonly used in various agricultural practices. Visitors are invited not only to witness the work’s development over time, but ultimately carry fragments away in later summer 2026, dispersing the exhibition into new social environments.
Together, these practices frame reproduction less as replication than as transmission: mutable, ecological, and contingent upon care. In this sense, the exhibition resonates with recent conversations in contemporary art around cultivation, stewardship, and the politics of living systems. A particularly timely point of reference is Abbas Akhavan’s 2026 presentation at the Canada Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, which transforms the pavilion into a greenhouse-like environment structured around botanical transport, fragility, and cohabitation. Akhavan’s project similarly foregrounded plants not as symbols, but as active agents within histories of migration, exchange, and survival, offering a compelling contemporary framework for understanding the exhibition’s entwined reflections on photography, propagation, and collective forms of renewal. In a different register, this exhibition similarly approaches reproduction as both a poetic and political condition: images proliferate, plants propagate, and the artwork continues beyond exhibition space through acts of carrying, tending, and replanting.
M.E. is an artist collective exploring anonymity and nostalgia. Their projects recall simpler times, pointing to and remembering the past that, in a sense, felt more rich, vibrant and alive. M.E.’s collective roots materialize a highly nomadic and transient practice, often focusing on resourcefulness and play as key tools for creative production. By utilizing motifs of the kitchen, the garden and other domestic sites, including the heavy use of recycled & common materials, M.E. attempts to use all resources to their maximum potential, resulting in artworks that engage functional reappropriation.
Untitled, 2026, cuttings, water, buckets, light & oxygen, dimensions variable
Marisa Kriangwiwat (b. 1991, Hong Kong) lives and works in New York. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Dear Big Hush, Towards, Toronto, Canada; Tells, april april, Pittsburgh, USA; Infinity Ball, Unit 17, Vancouver, Canada; My Owns, Project Native Informant, London, UK; Everything Leaks, Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver; and Keep Your Eyes On Your Prizes, Calaboose, Montreal. Select group exhibitions have been presented at 47 Canal, New York; Unit 17, Vancouver; Iowa Projects, Brooklyn; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; Rose Easton, London; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
In 2022 Kriangwiwat was the recipient of the New Generation Photography Award from the National Gallery of Canada. She was the winner of the second annual Lind Prize in 2017. Holmes received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and MFA from Hunter College in New York.
The Van, 2024, inkjet print on music paper from a 19th century beginner’s piano book, 60 x 72cm (framed)
In this work, Kriangwiwat presents us with a kind of diptych. Each half of this dyad is formed out of two splayed-open sheets of music — two pages for each half, or four for each (totalling eight) if we are to count the pages denied to us in their affixion to the mat board below. Here, we are confronted with several different mobilizations of denial as a mode of artistic play. At a basic level, the legibility of the sheet — indeed, its function as a kind of text — is troubled through its orientation; here, each half has been flipped on its side. Secondly, there is denial through mark-making and collage. Her friend Kate reposes in the bottom left corner and on the right, her partner Nick looks at his phone in contemplation. Sections are soaked in pigment; muddied, earth-tone browns, yellows, and cool purples and blues oscillate between readings of stains and applications of color field-esque technique. Occasionally, these areas of hue come to enter the arena of resemblance — on the right hand sheet, a solitary appearance of fuschia tone forms into a six or a spiral; elsewhere, geographical features and foliage are hinted at. One could extract a biographical read from the work, with both the artist’s and her partner’s backgrounds being situated firmly within Vancouver’s underground music scene.
However, what is to be foregrounded here is a continuation of Kriangwiwat’s forays into probing the ways in which design is perhaps the foremost determinant in the reception of meaning. Furthermore, this questioning departs from (but is inextricable from) her beginnings as a photographer, particularly more traditional modes such as her time as a band photographer, photographer for Vancouver’s Hastings Race Track or studio assistant to Stan Douglas. Over time, the primacy of the image in her practice has given way to ways in which we receive it. Indeed, the conditions of reception have been not only the foremost concern of artists practicing in the 20th and 21st centuries (The Pictures Generation and many members of the diaphanous Post Net Art movement being among them) but also in world writ large. Indeed, within the deluge of images we now face, the formal and graphic conditions which frame them arguably trump the image itself. The crop of a phone screen; the UI of an app or website; the glossy paper of an advertisement — these all constitute major components of an image's ability to signal meaning.
Often, Kriangwiwat has explored these dynamics via the matboard, as both a concealing element and one that reveals, as a way of stitching together seemingly disparate images which psychically mirror the schizoid mode of image consumption we encounter today. Here, the music sheet is where this play materializes through a reverberating conceptual affinity between the function of the sheet and the image. On the one hand, if we are to think of a music note or an image as a basic unit of signification, akin to language, the music sheet (like the photo album or the magazine) is the way in which we order in temporally, give it syntax, a logical progression. On the other, if the mode in which the artist consists as a kind of “remixing” of images, this technical quality is mirrored in the treatment of the music sheet — not as a blunt allegory for remixing in a musical production sense, but if the music sheet is a visual language meant for the organization of the sonic textures of music, here it is spatially re-mobilized in order to accentuate the textures of the visual.
Group Setting Compliment, 2024, individual glossy giclée prints, mat board & found frame, 58 x 42cm (framed)
In this work, a series of peephole cutouts revealing croppings of images are arranged vertically. Slight cues obliquely point to possible readings. With the silhouette of a head at the top and an image of a cat's feet at the bottom (mirrored so that the two mammalian paws from the original image appear as an insect-like multiplicity) are punctuated by a series of miniature coin-sized cutouts that appear more as pure color than image, with possible readings of the whole composition ranging from a diagram of the body’s chakras to a cosmological map of the world. In the middle sits a cropping of a music sheet marked by gestures executed in dark inky blue and oxidized red. At the bottom sits a narrow horizontal slice of a black and white image of Kriangwiwat’s friends. Here before the viewer sits an instance of the artist’s explorations of how context forms the reception of the image — not necessarily context in a socio-cultural sense but context at a material or physical level.
Kriangwiwat’s lens-based practice addresses the image not through the thing pictured but the how. Growing out of movements such as The Pictures Generation and certain members of the loose web of artists belonging to Post Net Art, Kriangwiwat holmes draws attention to the ways in which the frame inserts itself into the process of meaning-making. Indeed, what is at stake here is an attunement to the often undersung issue of the ways in which the material and formal framing devices and underpinnings of the image often go unnoticed; an app’s UI, the glossy paper of an ad, the specific cropping of a phone’s camera. Oftentimes, these explorations are done through analog means, particularly via the matboard, a classic material used to mount photographs in the framing process. Here, rather than top mounting the image onto the mat (a way of highlighting the subject) the image sits underneath, partially obscured yet ironically drawing more attention to the thing partially revealed. In this way, the artist draws attention to the issue of framing while through analog means of making, mirrors our chaotic and rhizomatic contemporary mode of consuming images in which we encounter a deluge of individual images subject to haphazard thematic linking. However, Kriangwiwat exploits this mode of encounter, poetically leaning into the ways in which (conceptual) montage and collage in the arrangement of images can become a fecund ground for the production of secondary orders of meaning.
Good Inner Balance, 2025, custom mat board, glossy inkjet prints with acrylic, 67 x 44cm (framed)
The fulcrum of this work revolves around a reproduction of a sick note recently forged by the artist as her childhood self. This reproduction of a forgery hints at a structural issue at the core of memory itself; as the historical fragment travels through time it must adhere itself to various forms in order to travel, but through this process it is inevitably subject to increasing levels of abstraction (and formal breakdown). The scatter-plot layout of the image peepholes in this work further this kind of reading. Among the images here (cropped by the surface of the matboard) are snippets of patterns, a hand, a woman rendered anonymous through the partial obfuscation of the top of her head, and a dog. As in many of her matboard works, the cut-outs are not the products of care incisions but controlled burns, as evidenced by scorch marks that subtly extend or frame the cuts — another example of the artist’s playful subversions of the norms of photography, here, an engagement with the tension between preservation and destruction. Here, objects can be identified, but the scene as a whole remains withheld. The sick note in the middle is also subject to a kind of editing towards a more convincing forgery; words repeat, are drawn out, and become the site of composition. Good Inner Balance clearly articulates the artist’s concerns with ways in which the design and material of the photograph’s frame or support the production of meaning. Equally centered here however is the ways in which design — in conjunction with the photograph — allows for seemingly endless variations in both the affective quality of the image and what it signifies. Here, the generation of meaning or narrative is not produced through the images as standalone objects, but rather through a kind of editing-logic produced by the framing generated by the cut-outs.
Once Went to Wonderful Concert, 2024, silkscreened silk & fabric toy with inkjet photograph transfer, 76 x 51 x 5cm (framed)
Once Went to Wonderful Concert marks a moment of formal and material exploration by Kriangwiwat. Eschewing her typical foregrounding of mat board and prints-on-paper, this work takes as its focus a fabric toy. This rabbit-like figure becomes the substrate for the prin. Scraps of texts float across its anatomy; “Dear”, “Instructor”, “10:30 AM”, and “Drive to WalMart to Get Greens.” Accompanying this linguistic coterie are an assortment of doodle-like floral forms and silk screened photographs. As the mounting element, the artist has used a swath of rosey-pink screenprinted silk adorned with a floral pattern. This work continues Kriangwiwat’s re-use and re-appropriation of forged sick notes produced as a child found throughout this recent body of work. Generally in these “note works”, the syntax is elongated, chopped up, and troubled. In this case, it has been pushed into more extreme territory, strung out over the rabbit’s limbs and rendered quasi indecipherable. This work continues to elaborate and toy with many of the thematics at play in the artist’s oeuvre; framing elements in which we receive photographs, the material substrate of photographs and their produce affects, a series of experimentations with surface. This work marks a series of recent singular work by the artist in which she has probed at the extremities of these thematic engagements at the level of material, occasionally surfacing as double sided works meant to be viewed on the round, found object assemblages bereft of images as a whole, and in this case, textile-on-textile compositions.
Pattern with Self Portrait, 2024, inkjet print on music paper from a 19th century beginner’s piano book, 36 x 30cm (framed)
Pattern with Self Portrait is a continuation of Kriangwiwat’s engagement with mark-making and printing on found pages of sheet music. In a relatively rare instance of self-portraiture by the artist, she occupies the upper-center portion of the work ensconced within a rounded area of grey. The sheet is bisected by a series of strawberry-red lines and patterning the rest of the sheet are daubs of yellow (which come together at one point to form a star-like shape) and a cluster of dark brown-purple dots. The artist often refers to the so-called decorative elements of her work as “flourishes”, a kind of centering of design and pattern as human elements rather than neutral visual framing devices. As is often the case in Kriangwiwat’s work, these “painted” sections are a trompe l’oeil. In making these works, the artist paints on an initial version of the work and repeatedly scans and prints it — what appears to us as painterly composition is in fact its spectre, the index of repeated gestures of mediation and reproduction. Here, we encounter an unsteady process of reduction, preservation, and redeployment at the level of the painted form and the music sheet. The partial sheet, through its partiality, is no longer functional as a full musical “text.” Rather, it is reduced to both form but also fragment - a sample of sonic texture (if ever played). The marks here have lost their painterly texture through repeated printing but in this process draw the full weight of attention onto color, onto gesture. In this work, arguably the only element maintaining its medium specific essence is the photograph of the artist. In Jeff Wall’s terms in his 1995 text "Marks of Indifference": Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art:
“Photography cannot find alternatives to depiction, as could the other fine arts. It is in the physical nature of the medium to depict things. In order to participate in the kind of reflexivity made mandatory for modernist art, photography can put into play only its own necessary condition of being a depiction-which-constitutes-an-object.”
In this case, Kriangwiwat has not shed the depictive core fundamental to photography but rather, through formal and material experimentation, focused on the conditions that surround the photographic object: the surface, the frame, abstraction (as a counter weight to the image’s naturalism), and design itself.