Karen Zalamea

The artist’s ties to the Joyce-Collingwood food hub in East Vancouver, a cluster of local businesses primarily run and supported by the Filipino diaspora, stem from her childhood and adolescence in the neighbourhood. As a longstanding community locus where connection is sustained through the consumption of traditional Filipino foods and products, a looming development proposal threatens its displacement. Sensing the potential loss of these cultural assets through gentrification, Zalamea records what may be erased in the near future in this urban streetscape photograph. She uses the visual strategy of the panorama – which offers an unbroken view of an area surrounding an observer – to uphold the cultural significance of this site. Zalamea actively recalls the work of senior, lens-based practitioners of the Vancouver School who explored the constructed nature, large-scale, and cinematic qualities of the photograph. By laboriously stitching together 60 images to create a single monumental photograph, Zalamea honours the fortitude required to establish and maintain these Filipino businesses that are built by, for, and sustained by racialized working class communities. This panorama celebrates this vital community space for gathering and exchange. When considering Vancouver’s history of displacement, this work speaks to how disposable communities are to gentrification and how this act of erasure dilutes the already existing cultural fabric of what makes Vancouver vibrant, unique, and a place of belonging.

Featured in group exhibitions Prevailing Landscapes (Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art, North Vancouver, 2024), Here and Now (Pendulum Gallery, Vancouver, 2023)