Sandeep Johal: Rest in Power

×

Expand

Sandeep Johal: Rest in Power

Swarm 18 @ Gam Gallery Friday, September 8, 7 pm - 11 pm

You are invited to attend Swarm, the annual festival of artist-run culture, at ACME Studios (108-112 East Hastings St). This one-night event opens the building to the public with multiple exhibition spaces, open studios, and entertainment. We are pleased to present two exhibitions in the Gam: Sandeep Johal: Rest in Power in the main gallery and Studio Series: Vanessa Lam in the studio.

This exhibition features new works from Johal's recent project Rest in Power, a body of work dedicated to twelve women from various cultural backgrounds whose murders have impacted her deeply. Johal stresses the distinction between identifying the women’s passings as murders and not only death, to emphasize the inherent daily threat of violence faced by women across the world. The women featured in Rest in Power suffered domestic abuse, honour killing, and femicide. The title serves to restore their power in the afterlife, and in turn resurrect their memories in peace.

Shauna Singh Baldwin’s novel The Selector of Souls serves as a framework for this project. The ten drawings are inspired by the fictional goddess from Baldwin’s novel while the four paintings incorporate two scenes from the novel and show a transformation of sorts.

Sandeep Johal is a Canadian-born South Asian artist living and working in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice moves between bold, colourful geometric forms and intricate black and white illustrations, both aesthetically and conceptually inspired by her heritage. Her work has been featured on Vancouver’s CTV Morning Live and Zee TV Canada, as well as in the Spring Issue of Gray Magazine. Sandeep recently completed a design for the Front Street Mews Barrier in New Westminster and has created a mural for this year’s Vancouver Mural Festival.