Kindred Tracings brings together the work of four contemporary artists who apply strategies of abstraction to give shape, substance, and colour to the experience—and failures—of language. By dismantling and then reconstructing language, each of the exhibiting artists affirm the ancestral connections and traditions they’ve inherited. Through a variety of artistic mediums, they explore kin and connection. Tracing lineages across silenced histories, there is an emergence of new visual vocabularies that celebrate family and the domestic lives that have survived. While each artist is responding to particular family histories, they explore the potential of abstraction to transcend the particular and resonate universally.

As Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt notes, “no language is placeless.” It is meaningful that new works created for the exhibition are influenced by the unique setting of Fairacres Mansion, built in 1911 and home to the Burnaby Art Gallery. Original features of the house and the Century Gardens provide context and provocation for artists to explore how visual symbols have been passed across histories of imperialism and architecture.

Curated by Emily Dundas Oke
A catalogue is forthcoming, September 2024.