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  • Jasmine Baetz

    Baetz has exhibited in Canada, the United States and Mexico. She holds a BA in religious studies from the University of Toronto and a diploma in Fine Arts from Langara College in Vancouver, and is currently attending Massachusetts College of Art and Design where she will graduate with a BFA in ceramics. Baetz’s clay education includes workshops at Penland School of Craft, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center. She identifies as Canadian, German, Indian and ancient Persian.

  • Christian Vistan

    Christian Vistan is an artist and curator from the peninsula now known as Bataan, Philippines, living and working on unceded and traditional Musqueam, Squamish, Tsawwassen, and Tsleil-Waututh territories. They make paintings, texts and collaborations that describe a hybridity in form, folding together elements of biography, material exploration, poetry, and abstraction. This work is rooted in their inquiries into place, language, and memory, as well as water as a material and an agent in painting and in migrant-settler histories. Their work has been presented in Canada, US and the Philippines. In collaboration with Aubin Kwon, they run dreams comma delta, a space for artist projects and exhibitions located inside Vistan’s family home in Delta, BC.

  • Bopha Chhay

    Director/Curator 2016–2022.

Exhibitions

Perla/Pervize

CHRISTIAN VISTAN, JASMINE BAETZ
November 26–January 21, 2017

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In her discussion of the importance of friendship as a form of solidarity in cultural production, artist Céline Conderelli posed the question “How do you want to inhabit the world, in whose company, and upon what terms?”[1] Jasmine Baetz and Christian Vistan have continued to work in a way that has foregrounded their friendship, guiding how to speak to and engage with the often fraught terrain of personal identity and histories. Their work in Perla/Pervize echoes Conderelli’s proposition of friendship as an organizing social principle in forging bonds and structures of support to enable a means to explore mutual associations and affinities.

With Vistan living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia and Baetz in Boston, Massachusetts, distance and proximity have guided their collaborative work through which the artists frequently consider geographic borders as legal jurisdictions and sovereign states that determines or denies access and movement between countries. In this body of work, limitation becomes a material in itself. Repetitive forms mark an attempt to create and locate a psychic transformative agency through material and newly formed familial bonds. The title of the exhibition Perla/Pervize takes the names of family members as an initiation of a matriarchal incantation; Perla, Christian’s mother and Pervize, Jasmine’s grandmother.

Perla

Pilipino Fainting Filipino Painting Pilipino Fainting Filipino Painting Pilipino Fainting Filipino Painting

The repetition of these words in their type set pattern almost appears to mimic code, an immersive physical poetic intervention. Assonance as repetition emboldens the words to take on a perfunctory incantation, where the limitation of these four words within themselves becomes the material. They bring together two bodies; that of the artist Christian Vistan, and that of his mother Perla. The words personify and rehearse the repetitiveness of labour becoming the embodiment of Christian and Perla’s daily rituals and tasks. They command concentration and acknowledgement of being present in the moment, an attentive activity in their work that demonstrates respect for our environments and social relationships that we nurture. Perla’s drawings punctuate this repetition. Read yourself into the world. Slowly. Carefully. Precisely.

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Read, each and every word at your desired pace. Pilipino Fainting Filipino Painting Pilipino Fainting Filipino Painting Pilipino Fainting Filipino. It seems crass to reduce such complexity for the purposes of efficiency however functional they may be. O.F.W. a three-letter acronym that in its brevity suggests a confident familiarity, devoid of an emotive core, also working to obscure the entanglements. Overseas-Filipino-Worker. The formation of these three words locates this three-letter acronym within a very specific lived experience, along the intersections of class, race and gender. Whether these work conditions are temporary or not, the body is now a diasporic body. Words shaped through repetition reveal a working rhythm attached to a body that is stretched, a body stretched and worn across continents and seas. What are the narratives that we embody as we write ourselves into the world?

Pervize

While the limitation of words forms the material basis in Vistan’s work, the limitations of the material of clay determines Baetz’s work. Third shift signifies a revision, a reworking of the same form; a retelling, or the production of a new version. The material fragility and suspension of Third shift defies its assumed lightness and instead the ceramic carries weighted histories. The haphazardly forged links and bonds, cloaked in a rust like surface, tenuously connected resemble chain mail. The mass of ceramic chains and the repetitiveness of the forms implies continuity, shackles or a burden carried, wrought in clay and fire. An arduous desire and measured reenactment guided by hands is evident within its production; proposing invocations of embodied forms of knowledge, histories, herstories, and narratives shared. Third shift maintains an openness that allows for vulnerability to permeate. What is it to acknowledge and embrace vulnerability as we read and write ourselves into the world?

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A singular Dr Scholl’s sandal (which belonged to Baetz’s grandmother Pervize) rendered in clay, sits by the door. The sandal is without a companion. Disembodied cacti limbs, skeletal in form endured the heat of a kiln. While these remnants of broken bodies, missing companions and absent ties of kinship might assume narratives of loss and mourning; deterioration and production start to fold into one another creating spaces of healing and renewal. In his poem Pilipino Fainting Filipino Painting Vistan mentions “The labour of painting often hides itself”. The mass of entanglements permits not only fragments of a narrative, but fragments of forms start to emerge and bind themselves together through familial ties of friendship that were not there previously.

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Perla and Christian; Pervize and Jasmine; Jasmine and Christian; Perla and Pervize…

NOTE

1 Céline Conderelli, The Company She Keeps, London: Bookworks, 2014, p. 116.

 

Postscript 67: Dada Docot on Jasmine Baetz/Christian Vistan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Talks & Events

  • Response

    SOLEDAD MUÑOZ FIEGEHEN, CHRISTIAN VISTAN, JASMINE BAETZ
    January 21, 2017

    Soledad Muñoz Fiegehen will close the exhibition ‘Perla/Pervize’ by deconstructing Jasmine Baetz’s sculpture ‘Third Shift’. Her response through sound will incorporate samples of audio recordings of construction sites, OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) and various forms of artistic production as well as readings by herself and Christian Vistan. Her engagement with the deconstruction of the work, whilst introducing audio recordings of different forms of labour into the exhibition invites us to attune ourselves to the works through acoustic means. The gradual shift and process of deconstruction offers a layered sonic reworking of the space of the exhibition as a site of continual cultural production.

    Soledad Muñoz Fiegehen is an interdisciplinary artist born in Toronto, Canada and raised in Rancagua, Chile. Currently based in Vancouver, her work seeks to explore the analogy between the ever-changing social spaces we inhabit, the inter-connectivity materialized in the woven structure and an embodied experience of sound. While still living in Chile, she studied Film Arts at Universidad de Artes y Ciencias Sociales (ARCIS). After returning to Canada she completed the Textile Arts Program at Capilano University and earned a BFA at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. In 2014 she founded Genero, an audio project which focuses in the distribution and greater representation for women working in the sound realm. Soledad was the recipient of The City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist in Craft and Design and The Emily Carr President’s Media Award – Installation/Interactive Media.

Publications

  • Slow, incremental, non-linear

     

    Title: Slow, incremental, non-linear
    Series Title: Beacon – a series in ten issues
    Author: Bopha Chhay
    Artist: Laiwan
    Series Editor: Bopha Chhay
    Design: Vicky Lum
    Copyeditor: Alexandra Bischoff
    Publisher: Artspeak
    Printed by: Metropolitan Fine Printers
    Year Published: 2023
    Cover: soft
    Binding: staples
    Dimensions: 15.2 x 22.9 cm
    Edition of 100
    ISBN: 978-1-927630-23-5
    Cost: $12
    Subscription: $100


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    BEACON Subscription (Ten Issues) – Choose Shipping Option



     

    ‘BEACON – a pamphlet series in ten issues’ focuses on how the commitment of artists’ to wider social movements informs contemporary artistic practice. The series will feature texts by artists whose practices engage with language and visual arts.

    Current issues:
    01 – Ruth Buchanan
    02 – Hong-Kai Wang
    03 – Christina Battle
    04 – Justine A. Chambers
    05 – Sameer Farooq and
    Jared Stanley

    06 – Gelare Khoshgozaran
    07 – Lana Lopsei
    08 – Be Oakley
    09 – Bopha Chhay
    10 – Nasrin Himada