Gabi Dao (Canadian, b. 1991) is an artist and organizer currently based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Dao’s research-based practice culminates in collage, sculpture, sound and moving image installations. They also generate olfactory experiences in both their installations and their small-batch perfume business, PPL’S PERFUME. Through non-linear conceptions of memory, time and truth, Dao confronts Western ocularcentrism and the rigid binarism of capitalism. Dao also engages with writing and community building in her work. Dao is currently an MFA candidate at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, and received a BFA from Emily Carr University. Dao was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award (2021) and received the Portfolio Prize Award for Emerging Artists (2016). She has exhibited in galleries and artist-run spaces across Canada, Asia and Europe, including solo exhibitions at grunt gallery and Spare Room, Vancouver; as well as group exhibitions at the Vincom Centre for Contemporary Art, Hà Nội, Vietnam; Centre Clark, Montreal; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Kamias Triennale, Quezon City, Philippines; Nanaimo Art Gallery; Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University, Vancouver; Burnaby Art Gallery; Vancouver Art Gallery; Audain Gallery at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver; Western Front, Vancouver; Artspeak, Vancouver; 221a, Vancouver.
Gabi Dao’s mineral still is on display at the Walter C. Koerner Library as part of the exhibition The Willful Plot, which runs at the Belkin from 13 January-16 April 2023.
Gabi Dao’s research-based practice culminates in collage, sculpture, sound and moving image installations. Through non-linear conceptions of memory, time and truth, Dao’s digital scans and methods of compost – garden and kitchen scraps in the process of decay – evoke themes of consumption, globalization, labor, history and time. Much like the process of decomposition that allows new life to flourish, Dao recomposes her source material to create a new installation for the Koerner Library that links to her collage and film work in the Belkin exhibition The Willful Plot. The large-scale image of compost encourages viewers to ruminate on the cycles of their own histories in order to embrace the meanings they make for themselves.
The Willful Plot brings together artists’ practices to expand the notion of the garden as a site of tension between wild and cultivated, temporal and perpetual, public and private, sovereign and colonized. Here, the garden is considered by the artists not only as a delineated patch of earth, but as a story and a will to drive that story to complicate the way in which cultures and individuals see themselves in relation to ecology, sociality, belief and possibility. It is an opportunity to look at human relationships with land, flora, fauna and their interrelatedness. In its willfulness, the resistance garden is a counter-site, a heterotopia for alternative cultivation and potential transformation.
This installation is a collaboration of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Walter C. Koerner Library at the University of British Columbia made possible by the generous support of the Audain Foundation. Art in the Library offers new perspectives on contemporary art by presenting art that questions our current perceptions about the world around us.
Gabi Dao, mineral still, 2022, installed at the UBC Walter C. Koerner Library. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography
Gabi Dao (Canadian, b. 1991) is an artist and organizer currently based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Dao’s research-based practice culminates in collage, sculpture, sound and moving image installations. They also generate olfactory experiences in both their installations and their small-batch perfume business, PPL’S PERFUME. Through non-linear conceptions of memory, time and truth, Dao confronts Western ocularcentrism and the rigid binarism of capitalism. Dao also engages with writing and community building in her work. Dao is currently an MFA candidate at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, and received a BFA from Emily Carr University. Dao was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award (2021) and received the Portfolio Prize Award for Emerging Artists (2016). She has exhibited in galleries and artist-run spaces across Canada, Asia and Europe, including solo exhibitions at grunt gallery and Spare Room, Vancouver; as well as group exhibitions at the Vincom Centre for Contemporary Art, Hà Nội, Vietnam; Centre Clark, Montreal; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Kamias Triennale, Quezon City, Philippines; Nanaimo Art Gallery; Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University, Vancouver; Burnaby Art Gallery; Vancouver Art Gallery; Audain Gallery at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver; Western Front, Vancouver; Artspeak, Vancouver; 221a, Vancouver.
The Willful Plot brings together artists' practices to expand the notion of the garden as a site of tension between wild and cultivated, temporal and perpetual, public and private, sovereign and colonized. Here, the garden is considered by the artists not only as a delineated patch of earth, but as a story and a will to drive that story to complicate the way in which cultures and individuals see themselves in relation to ecology, sociality, belief and possibility. It is an opportunity to look at human relationships with land, flora, fauna and their interrelatedness. In its willfulness, the resistance garden is a counter-site, a heterotopia for alternative cultivation and potential transformation.
[more]The Willful Plot brings together artists’ practices to expand the notion of the garden as a site of tension between wild and cultivated, temporal and perpetual, public and private, sovereign and colonized. This online Reading Room includes texts expanding on different notions of the garden and more-than-human relationships, as well as the political implications of thinking willfully, with and alongside.
[more]Join us for a series of lectures at the Belkin. We invite Jane Wolff, Desirée Valaderes and Sara Jacobs to address The Willful Plot.
[more]Philippe Raphanel’s Poisons/Phobia series combines drawing, photography and painting. The botanically accurate drawings of indigenous flora from British Columbia are the basis for ten large oil-on-canvas panels, each of which incorporates a laminated photographic enlargement depicting gay pride day in Vancouver. The works reference themes that reflect on nature, AIDS, violence and desire.
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