Art for everyday, the genius of in-between ✨
I’m kinda new at this whole market thing.
In the last 10 months I’ve done four different ones and at first I thought it would just be nice to see what people gravitated towards, how they made their selections to come up with some sort of strategy.
So far there have been no discernible patterns, like at all, which I guess should be alarming but instead there’s something else - so far at every market, there’s been one or two conversations that take my breath away with both my smallness and the beautifully vast ways we are rooted together.
A mother whose daughter just came out to her, who will be pursuing gender studies, someone who is finding their wings again after leaving a harmful relationship, someone who wants to be there for her friends during loss. At the Port Moody art shuffle, it was a little girl asking me about a painting “Tyger Dreams” (its on my website btw) was about, so I tried my best to share how when I was 4 (about her age) I came to Canada and there are so many aunts, uncles, just like the folks that help her grow now, that weren’t physically around me anymore but this painting was about making sense of my connection with them while growing up here, that’s how I imagined all the hands that are sort of in my life and sort of not. Her father chimed in “poh-poh is from Hong Kong”, and just like that it hit me like a ton of bricks that I make my work for people just like her, people of mixed heritage, people of the diaspora, people not quite sure what cultural identities fits - that we are 100% of both, each quarter or 1/16th regardless of what it may look like.
Each of these moments of connection are tiny miracles to me. The very best of humanity glimpsed in the joints of everyday moments. When I think about the reason I make its in these sinewy connections, the way moving my hands, heart and mind help me to connect with others and ponder big ideas.