They Lift the Sky

Miko Revereza, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Reyhan Yazdani

Curated by Bopha Chhay

July 12–August 25, 2024

Reyhan Yazdani, She Who Observes (نظاره گر), mixed paper, soil, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.

They Lift the Sky brings together the work of Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Miko Revereza, and Reyhan Yazdani, who engage distinct methods of writing and publishing to explore and negotiate the material limits of language and translation within their practice. Over the course of the exhibition poet Sheryda Warrener will facilitate two writing workshops. Through installation, workshops, screenings and discussion, the exhibition offers alternative forms to reimagine and think through different modes of artists’ writing and publishing.

The Summer School for Artists’ Publishing expands on Libby Leshgold Gallery + READ Books’ mission to create a platform and social space for experimental practices in publishing. By bringing leading local and international artists and practitioners together to present exhibitions, seminars, and public events, the Summer School explores the role of publishing in an expanded field of teaching, learning and production.

*They Lift the Sky is a line borrowed from Etel Adnan’s book ‘Shifting The Silence’ (2020) published by Nightboat Books

Public Programmes

Opening Reception
With performance by Andrew Yong Hoon Lee
July 11, 6 PM
Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Ekphrastic Translations
Workshop with Sheryda Warrener
July 30, 6 PM–8 PM
Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Activating the Archive
Workshop with Sheryda Warrener
August 20, 6 PM–8 PM
Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Biographies

Andrew Yong Hoon Lee is an artist working with performance, music, sound, video, drawing and text, exploring themes of memory, movement and distance. His work often culminates into installations where relationships between media and sensory perception operate as a field with objects, images, and sounds. Lee’s work highlights the contrasts and commonalities between location and dislocation, perception and unknowability, and visibility and legibility.

Lee has presented work at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (2024); Catriona Jeffries (Vancouver, Canada, 2023); Friedman Gallery (New York, New York 2022); New York Artist Residency Foundation (Brooklyn, New York 2021); Achtung Cinema (Paris, France 2019); Kinoskop International Analog Film Festival (Belgrade, Serbia 2019); Mono No Aware Festival of Cinema-Arts (Brooklyn, New York 2018); and the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012).

As a musician, composer, and performer, Lee has released numerous recordings, scored music for feature-length films, and toured throughout the United States, Canada, Western Europe, South Korea, and Japan.

Miko Revereza is a filmmaker whose upbringing as an undocumented immigrant and current exile from the United States informs a relationship towards moving images. He has directed a series of personal documentaries, DROGA! (2014), Disintegration 93-96 (2017), No Data Plan (2018), Distancing (2019), El Lado Quieto (2021) and Nowhere Near (2023). These works have been screened at festivals and institutions such as Locarno, TIFF, NYFF, and MoMA. No Data Plan is recognized with such honors as the Sheffield Doc Fest Art Award, as well as being listed in BFI Sight & Sound Magazine’s 50 Best Films of 2019, Hyperallergic’s Top 12 Documentary and Experimental Films of 2019, and CNN Philippines Best Filipino Films of 2019. Nowhere Near (recipient of Hubert Bals Fund) was among Film Comment Best Undistributed Films of 2023, and CNN Philippines Best Filipino Films of 2023. Revereza was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s New Faces of Independent Cinema, a Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker. Revereza holds an MFA from Bard College.

Reyhan Yazdani (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and designer currently based in Vancouver, the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) people. Her research-driven work migrates between a range of media including works on paper, objects, social invitations, and poetry to engage with ontological, material and spatial inquiries around themes of exile, language, and diaspora.

Yazdani received a Master of Architecture from the University of Tehran in 2017 and an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2019. Over the last two years, her research has been supported and presented by multiple grants, galleries, and publications including the Canada Council for the Arts (2023- 2024), artist-in-residence programs with the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, Alberta; Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, Burnaby; and Access Gallery, Vancouver; exhibitions at Kelowna Art Gallery, Seymour Art Gallery; Centre A; Open Studio Toronto and publications such as C Magazine. She currently teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design as an associate professor in the Faculty of Culture + Community.

Bopha Chhay is a writer, and curator of contemporary art. Her research interests are guided by transnational and diasporic histories, collective models, artistic labour, and artists’ publishing practices.

Influenced by a long-standing involvement in artist-run culture, her curatorial work aims to broaden an understanding of artistic practice and cultural production within a wider social and economic context. She has worked with artists to develop exhibitions, publications, and public events.

Chhay has held positions at Artspeak Gallery (Vancouver, BC); 221A (Vancouver, BC); Enjoy Public Art Gallery (Wellington, NZ); Afterall, a contemporary arts research and publishing organisation (London, UK); and has worked as a sessional instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She graduated with an MA in Art History from the University of Auckland, NZ.