Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada
While at the Belkin Art Gallery, we visited the Laiwan: Traces, Erasures, Resists exhibition. During our walk through, we had a few questions in mind relating to our shadow tree such as Why has a living thing been represented as a still or restless image? What does this tell us about the species and the land we are on?. The exhibition is speaking to the absent narratives, redacted perspectives and critical refusals that are latent in official publications. This ties into our inquiry because we find the shadow tree as “absent” or a “still” image in that there used to be many “live” Douglas Firs around and now they are being represented as an image on the ground and not live ones around the campus anymore.
