Moozhan Ahmadzadegan, where are you really from?, textile sculpture (detail shot), (2020-2021)
Who: Exhibition featuring Maura Tamez, Cassandra Adjetey, Shimshon Obadia, and Moozhan Ahmadzadegan.
When: February 11 to 23, 2022
Where: FINA Gallery, UBC Okanagan Campus, 1148 Research Road.
With support from UBC’s Equity Enhancement Fund, Black Liquorice Studio, a BIPOC artist collective founded by UBC-O MFA candidate Michaela Bridgemohan, presents its inaugural show, Rooted Sentiments. Bridgemohan has organized the show as part of her ongoing work to create space for BIPOC artists.
This exhibition features the work of four Okanagan-based artists: Maura Tamez, Cassandra Adjetey, Shimshon Obadia and Moozhan Ahmadzadegan. While diverse in subject and medium, their work investigates the way an exploration of roots and intersections of identity informs and creates our sense of home—home as a material reality, a network of relations and a place in the imagination.
Some pieces explore a diasporic experience. Through film and sculpture, Maura Tamez examines how to be at home when such a place is rooted in a physical relationship with Land, while Moozhan Ahmadzadegan’s suspended canopy, titled Where Are You Really From?, evokes a floating place of cultural in-betweenness. With Promises in Vacationland, Shimshon Obadia interrogates the ways our Okanagan home, as a tourist destination, is crafted and presented for outsiders, and the intersections of gender and sexuality in such a performance of place. Cassandra Adjetey’s intimate portraits speak to the idea of home as a place in the imagination—making home is an act of creation, revealed through the material production of familiar faces.
Rooted Sentiments invites viewers to consider the ways we make home for ourselves, and the ways we invite or exclude others from doing the same.
Black Liquorice Studio’s next event, an expanded group exhibition that includes the artists featured in Rooted Sentiments, takes place at Lake Country Gallery in September, 2022.
To learn more about Rooted Sentiments, contact Michaela Bridgemohan at blackliquoricestudio@gmail.com.
Maura Tamez, our memory, video still, run time 5 minutes and 25 seconds (2021)