Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit: “Out of nothing, nothing comes”.

This was a solo exhibition held at the Maillardville Cultural Appreciation Society, an experimental exhibition space curated by Zebulon Zang, in his childhood bedroom in Coquitlam, BC.

The show consisted of materials I’d found. I made ballpoint ink drawings on: records from the free bin outside Audiopile Records (I couldn’t afford to buy records as an International student with no work permit); Yves Saint Laurent ads featuring celebrities, torn from free copies of Frieze and Artforum that I saved from the trash of the art galley bookstore I did a work-study at'; and I “colored” in most of the space with cheap black electrical tape.

The themes of the exhibition were the commodification of art, the classism of art vs artworld, desire, and power. The sound piece looped, the lighting was lower than in these pics, and the entire space smelled like vinyl. Viewers commented that they felt a strange gravitational pull towards the black corner, and that the exhibition made them feel uneasy. There was also a small triangle left open to the outside world—in the portal’s view was a tree with another very large triangle made from black electrical tape. In the end, like the nothingness the show was created from, it also went to as it was mostly left to exist in documentation.