Visual PDF
Published 2023
Authors: Christina Kim and Kay Slater
Introduction to alternative text catalogue:
The alternative text catalogue project was created by the staff and contractors on the Accessibility Committee at Grunt Gallery. Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, straddling the line between information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience and those better served by text!
Creative Access Descriptions:
Cover (front):
A spearmint green cover features a single image, the show’s date and the title. The top text reads: grunt gallery, September 15th to November 4th, 2023. The bottom text reads Francisco Berlanga Enticed and Entangled en algo Antiguo. The image is of a knit sweater painted with house paint suspended on rusted rebar. Below this is a thick, flat-leaved plant. A clothing line with various hanging cloths is hanging above and to the right. The walls are painted a chewing gum pink.
Cover (back):
This page features the image credits of photos featured throughout the catalogue. The images have included these credits as they appear and are described throughout the catalogue. All photos are credited to Dennis Ha and were shot in 2023.
Cover inside:
The cover’s inside pages are a single image that runs across the folded double-spread, interrupted by the inner catalogue’s pages. The image is a wide shot of the exhibition from the south, with the front windows illuminating the space. A clothesline runs the gallery’s width and is hung with vibrant orange, red, and blue cloths. To the entrance’s left, there is a planter propped on cement paving stones, and to the right, paving stones are interwoven with green houseplants and rebar.
Page 1:
The page is all text. The footer shows the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lower case in white on a black painted brushstroke) above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits.
The interior pages are thinner than the cover but still feel thicker than photocopy paper.
The credits read
grunt gallery
Enticed and Entangled en algo Antiguo
Francisco Berlango
116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca
Curator: Whess Harman
Writers: Whess Harman and Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa
Design: Victoria Lum
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photography: Dennis Ha
Printed in Canada by Mitchell Press
Edition of 200
ISBN: 978-1-988708-24-9
All Rights Reserved
Publication © 2023 grunt gallery
Artwork © 2023 the artists
Text © 2023 The authors
All images courtesy of the artists
© Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.
Note: the following paragraph has Indigenous spellings of nation names followed by the English translation.
grunt gallery is located on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, who have lived in kinship with this land, water and air for thousands of years. We recognize and acknowledge their leadership and our own complicity in settler colonialism, its present occupation and its violent legacy. We acknowledge our responsibility to work actively in support of Indigenous sovereignty, and towards a respectful relationship with this place.
grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Vancouver Foundation.
Page 2 and 3:
The double-page image shows the walls of the grunt gallery exhibition, which is now viewed from the front entrance. The walls of the gallery space are painted in starlet pink. There are two clotheslines suspended diagonally across the space. The clotheslines hold a variety of colourful garments. There are cement bricks and rebar arranged around the space to form smaller installations resembling temporary architecture fragments. Interwoven between the cement structures are houseplants.
Page 4 (left):
The same green as the cover fills the page around a black-bordered photograph. The image is of Francisco’s work titled “I Cannot Imagine Anything Taller Than the Trees in My Own Backyard” (2019) and is credited as installation photo 2023. The work includes an embroidered garment hung on a piece of rebar connected to a structure made of stacked cement blocks. The garment is a neckband jacket made of a smooth woven cream with a zipper on the front. The text on the front of the jacket, “I cannot imagine anything taller than the trees in my own backyard,” is embroidered in all capital letters. The letters have precise cuts along the word to reveal knit material underneath the letters.
Page 5:
A white page titled “Whess Harman, Curator’s Introduction”.
Page 6 and 7:
The essay is laid out in three columns across the two pages.
The essay reads:
I often have difficulty, and stress, and yes, panic, as we start to roll-up to opening night for our exhibitions at grunt, regardless of if the reasons for impending disaster have any possibility of coming to fruition. Some of that came up during the planning of Francisco’s show, but it’s because it’s an (extremely annoying) part of me. My catastrophizing is unfounded, of course; as you walk into the gallery for Enticed and Entangled en algo Antiguo, it’s warm in all the ways that colour can be warm. And it’s alive, and quite literally. There’s the pothos plant crawling up the stack of breezeblocks as you come in the door, or the central work The Wefts Still Have Things to Teach Me perched at waist height, still growing even as the summer ends. This exhibition will shift through its run as we move into autumn with the relentlessness of the school season afoot. I look forward to the reminder that time can be gentle too. There is a gentleness to the vibrancy of Francisco’s work that speaks just as well to assuaging my personal terrors as it does the ideas of memory, cultural identity and family embedded within the work.
Identity-based work has taken up the bulk of my time as the curator at grunt gallery, and Francisco’s exhibition is no exception. But what is unique to me about his work is how open its sentimentality is; as both an artist and curator, I often wonder when and where my work might be selfish and if there is power in that. Here, Francisco’s practice is one that feels like it walks between the personal and speaking to an audience almost effortlessly despite all the work that I have seen go into it; there are moments in this exhibition that satisfy both my curiosity of Francisco as an artist, as well as my interest in understanding the history, experiences and communities that this work comes from. I’ve not had the privilege of visiting Mexico in any part, but learning some pieces about it through the love that Francisco has dedicated to its motifs and domestics feels like an important primer.
In my experience, both in making and viewing, weaving and textile-based practices often require a kind of precision that in the end can feel a bit cold when moved into the exhibition space. There’s a tightness to it because to make something of quality often requires a discipline of focused attention. That is present here, but it is also playfully unwound in applying those practices to living materials. Working with grasses takes a gentler touch lest you break the fibres that give them shape. I see an impulse to work towards care rather than perfection, to explore and spend time with the memories and desires to have a hand in our environments. The way works are casually draped and the inclusion of mass-produced textiles pieces counteract the cold container of the white cube—the pink walls help, too. Moving through this exhibition feels like a dream or remembrance, though strangely not so much of someone else. I recognize the love here, and the attention and feel invited. And in being able to host this work, I hope that our grunt community feels welcomed into our space as well.
Page 8:
The same green as the cover fills the page around a black-bordered photograph. The image shows a pair of star-shaped cement forms on the ground beside a stacked column of cement blocks and rows of paving stones. A white piece of fringed fabric peeks in from the top left corner of the shot, where it is draped over the cement wall.
Page 9:
A white page titled “Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa, Pasele, Pasele”.
Page 10 and 11:
The essay is spread over two pages in four columns. There are 5 footnotes which will be embedded in the edited essay for this alternative text format.
Something I’ve often noticed about people who immigrated as children, or who are children of immigrants, is that we often don’t know if something we associate with our diasporic culture is a part of the broader culture we come from, or something that our family specifically does. This can look like silly phrases in our familial language1, or the way a certain dish is cooked (footnote #1: While writing this article, I serendipitously learned of the term “familect” that describes this.More details is available in “Why We Speak More Weird at Home”, by Katherine Hynes. Transcriber’s note: Keimi includes a URL here. Please contact us if you’d like this link). Because often our family of origin is the portal to our culture or our homelands, which we are separated from for a variety of reasons, it can warp our sense of place. This goes for both the culture in which we are immersed, and the culture we have ancestral roots in. It can be incredibly difficult to untangle the ways we move through the world and connect with others across cultures, identities, space and land. To what extent can we feel equipped to build our own identity when our language, environment and education differ so much from our parents’ and ancestors’?
These questions and quirks are a significant part of what makes me gravitate to Francisco Berlanga’s work. While he and I are from differ ent regions, we have a similar under standing of how growing up in what is colonially known as Mexico leaves an indelible, or permanent, mark on the senses. There are visuals, textures, and smells—which can’t quite be replicated in Anglo North America— that are unforgettable. Francisco approaches these sensory aspects with a level of care and curiosity that I so deeply appreciate. There is tender ness present in the way he’s beaded his dress shoes after they’ve worn to mark the shape of his feet. There is an attention to detail in the way plants and garments have been gently placed throughout the space. These attempts to explore and solidify in his embodied memory the aesthetics2 of existence in Mexico are fascinating to me. (footnote #2: When I say aesthetics, I’m using this as a shortcut. I do not mean solely the visuals, but in fact perception through all the senses.) Francisco, in this collection of works, presents to us fragmented pieces of his own connections with these sensory experiences in a way that is so difficult to put into words.
One of the few who has been able to put some of this fragmented reality into words beautifully is Gloria Anzaldúa. It has been impossible to not have her words ringing in my brain as I think through this presentation of Francisco’s work. One passage that I’ve been coming back to a lot is from one of her pieces in the Woman of Colour Feminism book, This Bridge Called My Back3:
“The mixture of bloods and affinities, rather than confusing or unbalancing me, has forced me to achieve a kind of equilibrium. Both cultures deny me a place in their universe. Between them and among others, I build my own universe, El Mundo Zurdo. I belong to myself and not to any one people. I walk the tightrope with ease and grace. I span abysses.” (footnote #3: Anzaldùa, G. (1981). La Preita. In Anzaldúa, G. Moraga, C. (Eds), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Persephone Press.) While it may or may not be his own specific mundo zurdo, or left-handed world, Francisco presents an expansive space that is both familiar and close to diasporic people, and unique to his own experiences and senses. From his standpoint here, on stolen Coast Salish land, he lays out the trans-national portal that exists through his own family and travels, into the rich and nuanced culture of Mexico he has experienced. I see this approach represented in the title he chose for this exhibition; with Enticed and Entangled en algo Antiguo, Francisco points to how his work is born out of his own interests and narratives, but also tied to some thing much larger and older than himself. It is both ancestral, and of his own design. The specificity from which Franciso works is really important to me. In Anglo North America, conversations around Mexico (which is a part of how North America is colonially defined) and Latin America are flattened, often relying on harmful, colonial notions of homogenized racial identity.4 (footnote #4: Honestly there is so much to say here, but I’ll just encourage you to read Dr. Alàn Perlaez Lopez’ work. I like the way that they talk about this in their article for Refiner 29, “As a Black Oaxacan, I have No Choice But to Betray Mexican Nationalism”. Transcriber’s note: Again, Keimi includes a URL here. Please contact us if you’d like this link.) Francisco is not claiming to hold all the complexities of Canadian Mexican relations, as so often racialized and/or ethnicized artists are expected to do. He is instead bringing us into the expansive world of his own experience, which he is the expert in. This experience is in the sarapes he’s woven himself based on his numer ous memories of engaging with sar apes. It’s also in how he weaves with sisal fibre, the agave plants which he no doubt would’ve seen on a farm on the side of the highway, or in a relative’s garden. Francisco presents us with these living (and unalived) weavings that connect with the grief and transformation and potential and growth that his experience as a displaced person entails. His offering is generous and tender, and both the florals and concrete inspire a liveliness that makes my heart pound in my ears, in the best way.
Because she is already here, I leave you with a final quote from Gloria Anzaldúa: “Being Mexican is a state of soul–not one of mind, not one of citizenship. Neither eagle nor serpent, but both. And like the ocean, neither animal respects borders.” (footnote #5: Anzaldúa, G. (1987), How to Tame a Wild Tongue, In Anzaldúa, G., Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.)
Page 12 and 13:
The double-page spread shows the west wall of the gallery where two clotheslines begin midwall and then spread out horizontally from the centre fold. On the bottom left of the image is a cement stone fence that surrounds the work “I Cannot Forgo Representation”. It contains a Mexican-style hat made from terracotta clay that is placed on a squat pillar. The right page shows the installation work, The Wefts Still Have Things to Teach Me, where live grasses, palms, vines and sisal bre as planted in a wood trough-like planter atop stacked cement flagones. In between these and split by the catalogue’s fold is the embroidered jacket of “I Cannot Imagine Anything Taller Than the Trees in My Own Backyard”.
Page 14:
A white page with the text from Francisco’s bio. His name is bolded. It reads:
Francisco Berlanga is a contemporary textile artist who studied at Simon Fraser University. He obtained his BFA in Visual Arts and he is currently working towards completing his MFA at UBC. His practice is based on questioning identity, particularly his connection with his own Mexican culture and how one can inhabit a culture while being partially absent from it. He engages in discourse with his own identity through the creation of traditional Mexican “manualidades” that often take the form of textile works; weaving has become essential to his practice. His work makes connections between traditional Mexican aesthetics and contemporary visual language. His practice engages with concepts of inaccessibility and the role memory and language can play when someone is distanced from their own culture. He attempts to bridge the gaps between his personal and cultural identities by forcing connections between them and trying to understand the limitations that these identities impose upon each other. Francisco was also a founding member of Withintensions, a monthly Vancouver-based artists magazine, and he is currently artistic director for the magazine. His goal through the publication is to cultivate an accessible space for art theory that engages local arts communities through publication.
Page 15:
A white page with the text from Francisco’s bio. Their name is bolded. It reads:
Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa is a Disabled, bilingual, learner, worker and artist. Her art practice incorporates creative access, reading, writing, weaving, printmaking and more. His work and worldview have been shaped through his learning of Disability Justice and Black Feminist theory. They are interested in anti-colonial research, accessible spaces, and liberated futures.
Page 16:
The same green as the cover fills the page around a stacked pair of black-bordered photographs. The top image shows the work “I Cannot Denounce The Institutions Which Form Me” where hand-sewn, black dress shoes are decorated with a dense, colourful array of beads and rows of patterns. The size 11 shoes have bright, mustard-yellow laces. The bottom image shows a mud-covered weaving suspended between two stacks of cement blocks. The weaving replicates the figures in the stones; a star or four-petalled flower shape. Beyond this and on the back or north wall is the work I Cannot Forget My Mores
(2019), where 3 rows of blocks are stacked on each side ending in a stair case. On two of the steps are long grasses, and a long piece of rusted rebar rests at the top.
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