Kevin Lee Burton and Raeann Kit-Yee Cheung | Intervening Light
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Gallery Gachet 9 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6B 1G4
Kevin Lee Burton, "Shy one," 2020
wooden lightbox, Plexiglas, inkjet print, 106.68 x 152.4 x 182.88 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.
Intervening Light combines the practices of Cree photographer and filmmaker Kevin Lee Burton and Chinese Canadian photographer and archivist Raeann Kit-Yee Cheung. The works presented here are rooted in the ever-expanding tactics utilized by minority bodies that aim to disrupt and reinvent the archive. In Burton’s work, the artist attempts to create a new archive that considers the existence and deterritorializing nature of the queer Indigenous imagination. In Cheung’s works, the artist utilizes interventions on found archival images of Chinese Canadians to explore the muted suffering and successes of economic migrants to Canada.
Brought together, Burton’s and Cheung’s practices act as a testament to the agency and life of minority populations in Canada. These works recognize history but also create and rewrite it, informed by the experiences of the “other.” Burton’s and Cheung’s practices also directly respond to, and intervene in, the ways that the bodies of the “other” are perceived and remembered in the history of the West.
The union between the artists and the curator of Intervening Light reflects the growing movement of solidarity and intersectionality amongst members of the BIPOC community. Their work testifies that, although they have different relations with the states of Canada, they share a history of being oppressed and othered by the state, and once brought together, they can reimagine history and futurity rooted in anti-oppression and equity.