SUM GALLERY

Unsavoury Witness — Alejandro A. Barbosa

Apr 16 – Jun 6, 2025

Unsavoury Witness is a photo-based installation that includes laser-engraved photographs, photographic murals, intermedia, print media, and court transcripts from the Supreme Court of British Columbia on the 2001 murder of Aaron Webster in Stanley Park. This immersive exhibition foregrounds homophobia’s intimate connections with public spaces, institutionalised systems, societal responses, queer bodies, and desire.

Alejandro A. Barbosa combines photography and excerpt with placemaking to conceptualise pause as an agency of justice. By working from official documents and media archives surrounding a pivotal case in the history of homophobic violence in Canada, they complicate the certainties of queer pleasure and integrate the inconsistencies of justice when prejudice, silence, and risk intersect desire. Within the safety of SUM gallery, the exhibition is crafted as a diorama where artist and viewer intersect the public figure of the witness toward a queer ethics of memorialisation. Unsavoury Witness is Alejandro A. Barbosa’s debut solo presentation in Canada, their first with SUM gallery, and is curated by long-time mentor Patryk Stasieczek.

Unsavoury Witness is generously supported by The Parachute Fund and the Deux Mille Foundation. This exhibition is part of the 2025 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.

ABOUT ALEJANDRO A. BARBOSA

Alejandro A. Barbosa (they/he) is a 2SLGBTQIA+ latinx visual artist and curator born in Argentina who lives and works on the unceded, traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples—the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Alejandro’s practice focuses on lens-based media and investigates the flaws of representation, queer lived experience, and the politics of looking. Alejandro holds an MFA in visual art from the University of British Columbia, and a BFA in photography from Concordia University. They work as a Sessional Lecturer at the University of British Columbia and Non-regular Faculty at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Their work has been exhibited and collected in Canada, Argentina, Peru, and the United States.

ABOUT PATRYK STASIECZEK

Patryk Stasieczek is a Polish Canadian 2SLGBTQIA+ visual artist and curator currently working as an Assistant Professor of Photography at NSCAD University. Patryk’s practice explores photography as an embodied, interdisciplinary queering of image histories, actions, and materials. Their research is informed by their investment in pedagogy and delves into the emergent conditions of photography and the physical relationships images create as forms of experiential knowledge. Patryk’s work as an artist and curator has been featured in collaboration with the Pensacola Museum of Art (USA), Peripheral Review (CA), Centre Clark (CA), Libby Leshgold Gallery (CA), and the Magenta Foundation (CA).

SUM AiR—January 2025

Jan 7 – 31, 2025

SUM-AiR is excited to announce January’s artist residency. Paige Bowman (@birdfingersss), Soren Dyck (@taliruq), Addison Finch (@zebrafiinches), Jamie Lauder (@mxlauder), Liam Murley (@liam.lovelock) and Dee Twentee (@dees20stitches) will be using this residency to create work for a group exhibition at the SUM Gallery in the fall of 2025. Each artist will be creating work in response to their individual relationship to gender as non-binary, gender non-conforming and trans artists.

Through this residency + subsequent exhibition the group aims to not only shed light on these important issues, but also to celebrate the diversity of gender identity within us all.

ñ (enye)—ilvs strauss

Nov 19 – 29, 2024

ñ (enye) is a multimedia bilingual installation / listening party by ilvs strauss (ilvs pronounced “elvis”). Visitors are asked to bring their ears for a guided journey through a labyrinth of intentional sound, audible and otherwise. Along the way, we’ll flip through the catalog of basic human needs and delve into an inquiry re: the advent of language, amongst other things. Ultimately, ñ (enye) raises the questions: What is it we hear? What is it we want to hear?

This exhibition also features strauss’ illustrated zine, “everything i heard over the course of my day all at once,” which was the original inspiration for her installation.

Join us at SUM gallery on Nov 19 for the opening reception of a new multimedia bilingual installation by ilvs strauss.

ABOUT ILVS STRAUSS

From a sociodemographic standpoint, I am a 45 year old educated, queer, mixed-race, white-passing, female bodied, Honduran-American artist. From a non-sociodemographic standpoint, I’m still those things, but manifest in 3D by the ethereal: experience, values, judgement, desire, need, love, motivation, inspiration, etc. The list goes on, but for now I’ll focus on the last three.

I love language and how it relates to the body.

I love surtitles, subtitles, and translation studies.

I love blurring the line between technician and performer.

I love the science and philosophy of sound – What is sound even? What are the effects of sound on our body, in our minds? How do our bodies/brains receive and interpret sound?

I’m motivated by considerations of accessibility – the show I am working on relies heavily on projected text, it is a lot to ask of an audience, to read for a sustained amount of time. How can I change the work to become accessible to those of different vision/hearing levels while maintaining the spirit and integrity of the piece?

The physics of sound inspires me. Sound is not a singular tiny object that travels along a wavy line from Point A to Point B. It is vibration – not a thing at all. Something (a voice, the slamming shut of a book, bird song) makes a molecule vibrate, which in turn makes the adjacent molecules vibrate, etc. A chain reaction radiating out in 3D. This has been a vital paradigm shift for me, a shift from thinking of singular entities on solo journeys to communities of entities vibrating in an iterative process.

I’m inspired to stop calling my ‘solo’ show a ‘solo’ show, for there is absolutely nothing I have done or will do that does not require the help/contribution/support/assistance of another.