Artist Talk: Karen Zalamea
Sunday, April 14, 2024 | 3:00 - 4:00pm
In Person Or Via Zoom: https://t.ly/W8U1D
Free – All Welcome | No Registration required
This event includes a conversation between the artist and Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Capture Photography Festival.
Ensemble is derived from an image sourced from a newspaper clipping that depicts a row of female dancers from the Ramon Obusan Folkloric Group of the Philippines. The dancers are performing the ragragsakan, a traditional Kalinga dance in which women carry water pots and baskets on their heads in preparation for a feast. For this project, Karen Zalamea selected a photograph from the June 12, 1986 issue of The Province that features the Filipino dance group performing as part of Expo ’86 in Vancouver. Zalamea was intrigued by the sister-city relationship established in 1991 between the City of New Westminster and Quezon City in the Philippines, the artist’s matrilineal hometown. She approached Ensemble as a means of tracing a potential motivation for the pursuit of this formal agreement.
About the Artist
Karen Zalamea (she/her) is a Filipino-Canadian artist, educator, and cultural worker based in Burnaby, Canada, on the ancestral and unceded homelands of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples. Her interdisciplinary practice is rooted in photography and critically considers methodologies, materiality and modes of presentation. Zalamea’s work has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council and Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Zalamea has attended artist residencies in the Philippines, Iceland and Canada and was the recipient of the 2023 Prefix Prize. Zalamea holds an MFA from Concordia University and a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
On view from April 1, 2024 – March 1, 2025 at the Anvil Centre, 777 Columbia Street, New Westminster, BC and will be presented as part of the 2024 Capture Photography Festival.