Karen Zalamea

Art Gallery at Evergreen
Coquitlam, Canada
Curated by Katherine Dennis
March 7 - May 24, 2026

Every Surface Is a Shrine brings together a selection of photo-based works that traces the shifting boundaries between material, memory, and place. Rooted in a critical exploration of photography’s expanded possibilities, Zalamea’s practice reimagines the medium not only as an image-making tool but as a methodology of care, labour, and cultural inquiry.

Spanning sculpture, installation, video, and historical processes, the exhibition highlights Zalamea’s sustained engagement with her diasporic identity. Central to the exhibition is Sunken Garden (2020–), a growing body of work that transforms her ancestral home in Quezon City, Philippines, into a site of archival and speculative reconstruction. From manipulated still and moving images of chico trees to hand-woven photographic ropes made from reprinted family archives, Zalamea enacts what she terms “trans-Pacific kinwork” – a way of linking generations, geographies, and embodied histories through intimate material processes.

The exhibition takes its title from a sculptural object: a marble slab, with its inscription of text evoking geological memory and the embedded weight of repeated touch. The concept of surface as a site of memory further expands in Herbarium (after Flora de Filipinas) (2024–), which reconfigures nineteenth-century botanical illustrations as cyanotypes – layering colonial histories of extraction with photographic processes tied to scientific imaging and feminist authorship.

Across these interconnected works, Zalamea meditates on photography’s role in holding, translating, and reanimating histories. Her practice foregrounds the photograph not as a static representation but as a mutable object to forge correspondences between the personal and the political, the archival and the embodied.


Installation photos of the exhibition: Rachel Topham Photography

Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art
North Vancouver, Canada
Curated by Jackie Wong
April 12 - June 22, 2024

Prevailing Landscapes is an inquiry into the state of the contemporary Canadian landscape. What does it mean to be living with and among a world of swiftly changing resources? The landscapes seen here reflect on a politics of land, responding to nature as a system in flux, and working to adapt to altered material resources and new environmental and political conditions, meditating on a sense of place and the capacity to belong.

The exhibition features works by Kim Dorland, Stan Douglas, Tim Gardner, Cameron Kerr, Krystle Silverfox, Ian Wallace, Jin-me Yoon, Karen Zalamea.

The Joyce-Collingwood Food Hub, 2022-2023
Archival inkjet print
22 x 90 inches

Installation photos of the exhibition: Rachel Topham Photography

Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography
Toronto, Canada
Curated by Laurie White
September 8 - October 28, 2023

The sample can be an aspect of scientific objectivity or part of ecological ethics of connection—allowing artists to explore what experimental film historian Kim Knowles calls an “aesthetics of contact.” Through formal and material interventions, images can represent fluid agencies of non-human natures linking the surface of a photograph to a site that supplements and complicates the representational image. Addressing the role of photography in modern scientific paradigms of vision, the artists invite microbes, plants, fungi and other critters to render their images in unexpected ways.

The group exhibition features Víctor Ballesteros, Ramey Newell, Tara Nicholson, Deb Silver, Karen Zalamea.

For more information read Aesthetics of Contact: An Eco-Materialist Photography, an essay by curator and writer Laurie White.

Taro, 2023
25 archival inkjet prints
65 x 85 inches

Installation photos of the exhibition: Darren Rigo

Tangled Art Gallery
Toronto, Canada
Curated by Scott McLeod
May 4 - July 22, 2023

Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art is thrilled to announce that the winner of the third annual Prefix Prize is Karen Zalamea, a Filipino-Canadian artist who resides in Burnaby, B.C. With an interdisciplinary practice rooted in photography, Zalamea is adept in the use of a wide range of photographic substrates, creative approaches and installation strategies. The prize, which is juried by a panel of art and photography professionals, is a core programme of the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival.

As the recipient of the Prefix Prize, Karen Zalamea receives an exhibition, a publication and a cash prize of $5,000.00 CA. The exhibition, which is presented in the window gallery at Tangled Art Gallery, highlights They are lost as soon as they are made (2020), a series of archival inkjet prints that was produced during an artist residency in Iceland. The associated publication P.S.–3.1, which is the sixth in this series of exhibition catalogues produced by Prefix ICA, features an essay by Scott McLeod.

They are lost as soon as they are made, 2020
50 archival inkjet prints
16 x 20 inches

Installation photos of the exhibition: Darren Rigo

Or Gallery
Vancouver, Canada
Curated by Katrina Goetjen
May 10 - June 30, 2023

In the hydrocommons, everything stays coursing, everywhere is downstream.

This exhibition brings together artists Ana Valine, Karen Zalamea, and Sidney Gordon to examine the run-off of everyday industry and cultural production. In their lens- and light-based practices, these artists explore site-specific treatment of the hydrocommons and its broader impacts.

Our coastal city—known for its historical contribution to photoconceptualism and for its role as “Hollywood North”—has yet to issue guidelines for waterway care in relation to darkroom practices, illuminating the limits of other industries’ protocols. Coursing explores the shifting conditions and contaminations of our waters using photographic emulsion as a marker. Through their embodied practices, the artists invite contradictory methodologies together—wet versus dry, analogue versus digital, natural versus human-made—thus drawing out poetic connections between waterways and watery beings.

Together these works highlight the liquid intelligence entangled in their production, and question the assumption that our surrounding waterways hold the capacity to absorb our activities.

Taro, 2023
25 archival inkjet prints
65 x 85 inches

Installation photos of the exhibition: Michael Love

Pendulum Gallery
Vancouver, Canada
Curated by Emmy Lee Wall and Chelsea Yuill
March 27 - April 28, 2023

Here and Now celebrates Capture Photography Festival’s tenth anniversary by commissioning ten local artists to create new lens-based artworks. The artists, selected for their varied approaches to the medium, were each asked to respond in some way to this place – by considering the landscape, history, people, or culture – with an aim to produce a dynamic exhibition that revels in the diversity of the city itself.

Artists in Here and Now include Jaiden George, Khim Hipol, Tom Hsu, Alexine McLeod, Dana Qaddah, Isaac Thomas, Ian Wallace, Gloria Wong, Jin-me Yoon, Karen Zalamea.

The Joyce-Collingwood Food Hub, 2022-2023
Archival inkjet print
22 x 90 inches

The Reach Gallery Museum
Abbotsford, Canada
Curated by Adrienne Fast
January 27 - May 6, 2023

From the earliest days of the history of photography, there have been determined efforts to expand the medium into physical space and three dimensions. Devices such as the stereoscope, 3D movie glasses, and virtual reality headsets have offered ever more realistic three-dimensional photographic experiences, but these have largely remained in the domain of popular entertainment, intended to “trick” the eye into seeing a sculptural object where only a flat image (or a digital image) truly exists.

Recently however, a number of contemporary artists have begun exploring the potential for three-dimensional photography in ways that embrace and revel in the material qualities of photography itself – its palpable physicality, rather than its representational or symbolic capacities. This exhibition presents work by three contemporary Canadian artists – Karin Bubaš, Natalie Hunter, and Karen Zalamea – who each explore the potential for photographic images to be spatial, experiential, and material, but who do so in different ways and to different ends.

Weathering, 2017–2018
Laser-cut inkjet prints on silk
Various dimensions

Scene (installation), 2018
Inkjet prints on canvas, metallic paper
Various dimensions

Sunken Garden (Family Album), 2022–
Inkjet prints on canvas, nylon rope
0.5 x 600 inches each

Sunken Garden (Staircase), 2020-2021
Inkjet print on banner, grommets
96 x 144 inches

Sunken Garden (Quarry), 2020-2021
Inkjet print mounted on Dibond
12 x 24 inches

Installation photos of the exhibition: Rachel Topham Photography

Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art
North Vancouver, Canada
Curated by Karl Hipol
September 25, 2021 - February 24, 2022

Beyond the Horizon is an expression that encourages us to consider what is "farther than the possible limit of sight, beyond what we can foresee, know or anticipate." It is both visual - what we see - and conceptual - what we know. The horizon as a metaphor provides us with an opportunity to challenge and evaluate our own ways of knowing. The artists in this exhibition expand conventional uses of materials and explore modes of making through collaboration with other artists and the land.

Featuring works by Alan Wood, Angela George, Betty Goodwin, Bill Reid, Elizabeth Angrnaqquaq, Esteban Pérez, George Littlechild, Gordon Smith, Greg Murdock, Holly Schmidt, Irene Whittome, Jack Shadbolt, Jane Ash Poitras, Karen Zalamea, Robert Davidson, Rodney Graham, Sylvia Tait, Takao Tanabe, Toni Onley, Xwalacktun.

They are lost as soon as they are made, 2015–2020
80 archival inkjet prints, 16 x 20 inches

Art Gallery of Grande Prairie
Grande Prairie, Canada
Curated by Kuh del Rosario
June 24 - September 20, 2021

Through the unique perspective and geographical position of each artist, Tuloy, Tawid offers an exhibition with both breadth and specificity. Featuring works by Zeus Bascon (Laguna, Philippines), KoloWn (Philippines), Greys Lockheart (Cebu City, Philippines), Julius Poncelet Manapul (Toronto, Canada), Marigold Santos (Calgary, Canada) and Karen Zalamea (Vancouver, Canada), this exhibition examines the Filipino experience, entangled and layered by the diaspora.

By selecting artists from such diverse backgrounds, with distinct relationships to their own Filipino ancestry, Tuloy, Tawid proposes new ways of continuing on and crossing to a more inclusive and generous future.

Installation photos of the exhibition: Michael Love

Access Gallery
Vancouver, Canada
Curated by Katie Belcher
April 27 - June 14, 2019

The exhibition presents 80 colour photographs from They are lost as soon as they are made, a series photographed in Iceland with a handcrafted 4 x 5 analogue film camera and lenses made of ice. The work explores the camera and its optics as sites of experimentation, the translational capacity of photography, the perimeters of vision, and the possibilities of the landscape to reveal and render its own image.

They are lost as soon as they are made, 2015–2020
80 archival inkjet prints, 16 x 20 inches

Two production images from They are lost as soon as they are made, 2018
Archival inkjet prints, 12 x 18 inches

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Installation photos of the exhibition: Rachel Topham Photography

Burrard Arts Foundation
Vancouver, Canada
March 22 - May 12, 2018

The exhibition presents two bodies of work, Weathering and Scene, which contemplate photographic representations of landscape. The works examine the relationship between camera and vista, and the experience of space as photographic surface. 

Weathering, 2017–2018
Silver gelatin prints, laser-cut inkjet prints on silk

Scene (installation), 2018
Inkjet prints on canvas, metallic paper, matte paper, and fibre-based paper

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South Granville (13 public sites)
Vancouver, Canada
April 2017

Created specifically for various storefront windows along South Granville, Vitrine is a series of photographs in conversation with the possibilities of display. The window serves as a point of departure, functioning as a threshold between interior and exterior spaces and as an aperture that frames our field of vision.

Presented in partnership by Capture Photography Festival and the South Granville Business Improvement Association.

Franc Gallery
Vancouver, Canada
March 17 - April 9, 2016

Spectres of Desire is a collection of images that visually contemplate the physical properties of light through the use of various light sources and objects. Hue, pattern and surface come into play in the images, amplifying light as both material and facilitator in the photographic exposure.

Zalamea creates light forms documented via large-format analogue photography. The resultant works demonstrate a fascination with the amorphous and ungovernable, with the vestiges barely visible on the edges. Rooted in an experimental hands-on material engagement, Zalamea’s work embraces ranges of brightness and shadow, aberrations, moiré effects, and zones of reflection and refraction. The work exists within dialogues on photographic methodologies, optics, and perception, while being driven by a desire to render ephemeral luminescence perceptible.

The exhibition is accompanied by a text written by Kimberly Phillips.

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SÍM House
Reykjavík, Iceland
November 2015

The exhibition brought together 11 international visual artists who were participating in SÍM’s artist residency:
Kristin Abhalter (USA), Juliette de la Mer (Ireland), Henry Detweiler (USA), Patricia Farrelly (Ireland/Scotland), Sarah Gerats (Norway), Gabrielle Kroese (Holland), Sebastian Mügge (Sweden), Elia Nuñez (Spain), Clairissa Stephens (USA), Lucy Jane Turpin (South Africa), Karen Zalamea (Canada).

Study for They are lost as soon as they are made
Ice lens, vintage postcard

Gallery 295
Vancouver, Canada
December 14, 2012 - January 26, 2013

Exploring the visual language of maps and modeling, the photographic images present transformed representations of space. Qualities of line, light, shadow, and transparency permeate the images of deconstructed maquettes. Photographed in the studio, the resulting grayscale planes and fragments suggest shifting spaces and perspectives rendered displaced, dislodged, disoriented.

Toronto, Canada
Exhibition Area C curated by Nicholas Brown
October 1, 2011

Two looped video streams of Stereo Efficiency Cheer were exhibited on Jumbotrons on Yonge Street at 1 Richmond Street West and 1 Adelaide Street East.