Shaw Multicultural Channel – Nov 30, 2021

Galleries West | April 14, 2021

Trauma Clown, by Vivek Shraya, on view as part of the Capture Photography Festival at Vancouver’s SUM Gallery until July 1, is a soft but potent critique of audiences and viewing institutions in an era of virtue signalling. 

The Trauma Clown is the effect of the very contemporary thirst for stories of suffering. In a series of 10 portrait-like photographs, Shraya’s performer steps progressively deeper into the role of the clown, to greater and greater praise and public affection. This series questions the emphasis on trauma narratives in queer artistic expression. What is the danger of trading stories of trauma and redemption as cultural currency?

Shraya plays the character of the emerging artist, steadily revealing more of herself until she becomes the caricature of her suffering. She moves from the Lovesick Clown, a hoody-wearing, guitar-strumming singer-songwriter to unveil the clown with increasing intensity. This steady transformation plays across her body and weaves a deft relationship between the audience’s desire for her to expose more of herself and the increasing commodification of her performance.

In the sixth photograph, she is finally the Trauma Clown: on her knees among piles of flowers, her clown makeup streaked by sweat and tears, arms open in full availability to the unseen crowd. From this triumphalism, she begins to fade from view. Gallery Clown sets her inside the window of an iPhone, while Media Clown is an ‘image of her image’ in a magazine. Ultimately, in Your Clown, she is a framed photo on your wall, among the artful tableau of your things. 

Prepare to be implicated. Shraya takes aim at mainstream audiences, art institutions and popular narratives. In an interview with Shraya and curator SD Holman on the show’s opening weekend, Holman pointed to the effect of the trauma narrative in the reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race – the ways in which sad backstories propel participants to victory. Shraya’s point is that the demand for stories of queer oppression have become the bread and butter of the queer artist in the mainstream media.

If, as a viewer, you come to this show as a member of the mainstream (white, straight, cis to be sure), however educated you may be, the temptation might be to connect these photographs to drag. This would be an easy misconception since the photographs are not accompanied by any text. It’s left to the audience to get things going, so one might find oneself mentally thumbing the pages of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble to make connections between what is taught about drag and the trans body we see.

I was grateful that Shraya, in her talk, cautions her audience not to conflate transness with drag. As I see it, the connection to drag in Trauma Clown, if any, is more carefully embedded in the performance imagery, where hyperbolized acts form a critique of the institutions from which they are born.

Shraya’s exhibition is an opportunity for audiences to consider their role in the capitalist viewing machine, and the ways that looking can make objects of the real bodies we see. ■  

Vivek Shraya: Trauma Clown at the SUM Gallery in Vancouver from April 1 to July 1, 2021. 

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Canadian Art | March 30, 2021

ZINNIA NAQVI

Public installation, Canada Line, April 2 to September 30

Each image from Zinnia Naqvi’s Yours to Discover series is a dense tapestry of meaning. Naqvi stages the immigrant dream—a washed-out, middle-class suburban bliss—and unravels it at once, illuminating the threads between nostalgia and colonization. A self-aware critic, Naqvi has a humour that gets punchier the more it is taken seriously: manicured nails and lawns, stacks of heavy-hitting titles on race, toy cop cars and Monopoly houses. Installed at the Broadway–City Hall Skytrain station, a literal cog in the facilitation of movement and economy, Yours to Discover is cheeky yet incisive, inviting us to think critically about our attachment to place. —Coco Zhou, editorial resident

WILL KWAN

Centre A, continues to May 29

“There are more important things than living.” So said Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick in April 2020, opining for an end to pandemic lockdown. Will Kwan détournes this phrase in Death Cult #1 (There are more important things than living) (2021), a black granite slab etched with Patrick’s visage and quote. In “Exclusion Acts” Kwan showcases this and other sharp reflections on pandemic, capitalism and white supremacy. Kwan is a thinker and maker who has been critiquing colonialism, racism and commercialism for 20 years; to witness him going to work again, subverting these phenomena in link to a grievous and heightened moment, feels vital. —Leah Sandals, content editor

WILL KWAN

Centre A, continues to May 29

“There are more important things than living.” So said Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick in April 2020, opining for an end to pandemic lockdown. Will Kwan détournes this phrase in Death Cult #1 (There are more important things than living) (2021), a black granite slab etched with Patrick’s visage and quote. In “Exclusion Acts” Kwan showcases this and other sharp reflections on pandemic, capitalism and white supremacy. Kwan is a thinker and maker who has been critiquing colonialism, racism and commercialism for 20 years; to witness him going to work again, subverting these phenomena in link to a grievous and heightened moment, feels vital. —Leah Sandals, content editor

VIVEK SHRAYA

SUM Gallery, April 1 to July 1
Artist’s talk, April 3, via Zoom

Multidisciplinary artist Vivek Shraya merges tragedy and humour seamlessly into her playful yet compelling photo exhibition “Trauma Clown.” The artist poses as said “trauma clown,” accentuating the contentious desire by audiences to consume her pain as her success grows. Shraya performs her trauma in order to keep up with the insatiable demand for her anguish, which presents a dynamic and powerful message in her solo exhibition. —Adrienne Huard, editor-at-large

ERIKA DEFREITAS

Art Gallery at Evergreen, February 13 to April 25

The clarity of Erika DeFreitas’s gestures and objects in the photo frame, ever in acts of searching, is a slow-burn kind of magic. These sharp edges of fragments—whether of performance, writing, still-lifes or research processes—can appear like collages or mise-en-scènes of unanswered questions. Sometimes the search is for who and what is lost from canonical art histories, or about relations marked by hands and bodies. In “close magic” many of the works drawn from the past five years also feature DeFreitas’s mother and show the two together, giving spatial form to quietly monumental intimacies. —Joy Xiang, assistant editor

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Georgia Straight | March 30, 2021

Multidisciplinary Canadian artist, author, and University of Calgary professor Vivek Shraya has quite the week lined up for Vancouver audiences.

The writer, visual artist, performer, and musician will participate in a literary discussion tonight before launching a solo visual art show (her first in Vancouver) later this week.

Shraya is the author of The Subtweet: A Novel and I’m Afraid of Men, and a six-time Lambda Literary Award finalist.

Tonight, she’ll be speaking with author Joshua Whitehead, whose novel Jonny Appleseed won the 2021 Canada Reads annual debate about what is the one book that all Canadians need to read.

Whitehead is a two-spirit Oji-nêhiyaw member of Peguis First Nation and a Ph.D. candidate, lecturer, and Killam scholar at the University of Calgary. Jonny Appleseed follows a two-spirit Indigiqueer man who faces his past after heading home for his stepfather’s funeral.

The novel is also the pick for SFU Library’s One Book One SFU.

At 7 p.m. tonight (March 30), Whitehead will discuss the book with Shraya at a free online SFU event. More information and registration is available at the event webpage.

After that, Shraya’s photo series Trauma Clown will open on Thursday (April 1) at SUM Gallery (425–268 Keefer Street), and continues until July 1.

With elements of suffering and satire, this solo visual art show (which is part of the 2021 Capture Photography Festival) will explore issues of entertainment, spectacle, and trauma through the life of a trans woman of colour experiencing success at the price of performing pain for audiences.

More information is available at the gallery website, which also has online booking available for visits.

Demand for the opening reception on April 1 was so great that after attendance for that event sold out, a second reception has been scheduled from 5 to 8 p.m. on Friday (April 2)

Shraya will participate in an online talk about the exhibition at 3 p.m. on Saturday (April 3). To RSVP for the talk, visit the event webpage.

You can follow Craig Takeuchi on Twitter at @cinecraig or on Facebook. You can also follow the Straight’s LGBT coverage on Twitter at @StraightLGBT or on Facebook.

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