Vega as Floodwater
2025
silk fabric, chicken wire, dye, thread, glue
The exhibition Some Things Held Together began as a half-remembered story about two celestial beings. A weaver (the star Vega) falls in love with a cowherd (the star Altair) who lives on the opposite side of the milky way river. The weaver is consumed by love and falls out of practice with her weaving, and as a punishment for failing to labour, the river floods so high that she can no longer cross it to see her lover. She is confined to her work and, in the half-memory of the story, she tries and fails to weave a fabric so tight it would carry her across the water.
This exhibition also originates from a different kind of flood, more immediate and material. Near the artist’s workplace in Vancouver, storms cause water to accumulate and spill onto the streets and sidewalks. The city’s drains regularly become overwhelmed during heavy rains, prompting residents to navigate space in new ways.
These infrastructural and symbolic failures are processed through water, fabric, metal grilles, and dyes made of materials that were found or easily accessible. The exhibition draws upon an imperfect memory of the Japanese folk story of the weaver to consider her in her form as Vega, one of the brightest stars in the night sky, and against whose light is calibrated the brightness of other stars.
— Some Things Held Together exhibition text, The Fifty Fifty Arts Collective, 2025