Libby Leshgold Gallery


The Libby Leshgold Gallery is pleased to announce the launch of Diyan Achjadi’s new video work Hush, as part of the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program for Emily Carr University's Urban Screen. The screening will commence on March 1st, 2021.

 

The small-scale, ink and watercolour drawings of Hush were made between August 2020 and January 2021. In these fraught times, where most interactions and gatherings are mediated by technology and take place in virtual rooms — with all their attendant glitches, lags, and disembodied communications, and the fatigue that ensues from navigating these multi-modal environments — the tactility, simplicity, and materiality of working with brush on paper became an antidote, a way of seeking a semblance of balance and presence. As time seems to move in a strange pace — painfully long in its duration while also feeling so fleeting — so do these animated drawings, compressing hours of the slow labour of placing water and pigment on paper, to mere flickers and seconds of viewing.

 

Diyan Achjadi was born in Jakarta, Indonesia and spent her formative years negotiating different educational, political, and cultural systems, leading to an ongoing interest in the ways that images travel and move across and through multiple spaces, and the (mis)representations, (mis)translations, and syncretizations that arise through this process, particularly as they appear in decorative, ornamental, and popular-cultural forms.

 

Achjadi received a BFA from the Cooper Union (New York, NY) and an MFA from Concordia University (Montreal, QC). She has exhibited widely at galleries and film festivals across Canada and beyond, including recent group exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC); Pride in Chinatown (Vancouveer, BC); CSA Space (Vancouver, BC); Elizabeth Leach Gallery (Portland, OR); Two Rivers Gallery (Prince George, BC); Roedde House Museum (Vancouver, BC, 2018); and Open Studio (Toronto, ON) and solo presentations at MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) (Montreal, QC), The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (Victoria, BC), Oboro (Montreal, AC), and AIR Gallery (New York, NY). She has been an artist-in-residence at Malaspina Printmakers (Vancouver, BC); Fanoon: Centre for Print Research (Doha, Qatar); the Frans Masereel Centrum (Kasterlee, Belgium); The Banff Centre (Banff, AB): and the Vermont Studio Centre (Johnson, VT). Recent projects include Coming Soon!, a year-long commission for the City of Vancouver Public Art Program that took place on the fences that surround construction sites, and NonSerie (In Commute), part of How far do you travel?, a year-long exhibition on the exterior of public buses, commissioned by the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) in partnership with Translink BC. Achjadi is a Professor in the Audain Faculty of Art at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

 

The urban screen, located on the north-east wall of the Wilson Arts Plaza, is an initiative of the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program in conjunction with the Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. To date, the program has included the work of Barry Doupé, Dana Claxton, Marina Roy, and Cole Pauls. The screen operates daily from 8am-9pm.

 

Image: Video still, Hush, Diyan Achjadi, 2021

 


 

 

 


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