Stitched at Gordon Smith Gallery explores the boundaries of photography

While the 12th annual Capture Photography Festival has officially come to a close, there are still numerous exhibitions and public art projects on view. One such exhibition is Stitched: Merging Photography and Textile Practices at the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art in North Vancouver. The series features works from nine different artists. 

Spanning the month of April, the Festival presented lens-based art through a multitude of exhibitions, public art projects, events, and a speaker series across Metro Vancouver, that celebrate lens-based art, and artists who innovatively push the boundaries and disrupt our expectations of the photographic medium. 

This is immediately evident in Stitched—it is a photography exhibition, but it doesn’t look like it. Instead, weaving, beading, sewing, sculpture, and tapestry dominate. Co-curated by Capture’s Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director and Chief Curator, and Chelsea Yuill, Assistant Curator, the exhibition reveals how contemporary artists use photography and textiles in distinct and interesting ways. 

As the title suggests, Stitched merges two disparate mediums: photography, historically dominated by male practitioners, and textile practices, historically regarded as craft rather than art and in most cases confined within the domestic realm. 

A mix of emerging and established artists, eight of whom are women-identifying, explore “ritual, memory, aesthetic inheritance, immigration, technology, and colonial and embodied archives.” In the catalogue essay, Yuill continues, “In a cultural landscape that continues to become more and more digitized, and a political landscape that becomes ever more cruel, their work asks what it means to create images that evoke the desire to touch and feel.” 

The first work you see when entering the gallery is Maya Beaudry’s Gateway (2025), which consists of a wooden frame made of two-by-fours, wrapped in printed, colourful fabric, with sewn, angel figures. The stitching on the edges remains visible. Commissioned specifically for the exhibition, the structure extends from wall to wall. It serves as a gateway into the exhibition, inviting the viewer to walk around it and through it. The fragmented pieces of imagery printed on the fabric are photographs that the artist has taken around Vancouver, the artist’s hometown, of tear-down houses, perhaps a reflection of the housing crisis and housing market in Vancouver. 

As Wall described in a radio interview on CBC’s North by Northwest, “Photographs in the past have been associated with a document of the truth, some kind of archival knowledge, one-to-one representation of what's out there in the world.” She elaborated, “If you look around the space, you’ll notice that artists are not working in that way anymore, they’re obfuscating the image, making it ambiguous, painting over it, stitching through it, beading on it, obscuring the subject.” She continued, “you have to work at what you’re looking at to get what’s going on in the pictures.” 

After you enter through Gateway, there are two fireboxes at the back of the gallery. These are backlit photographic portraits by Dana Claxton from the artist’s Headdress (2018-23) series. Crisp and precise, these are the only straight photographs in the exhibition, and, as Wall says, “anchor the show.” 

Here, the subjects’ faces are entirely covered in beadwork—bags, jewellery, hair/head accessories—from the models’ personal collections. Claxton describes: “In these portraits, the beadworks cover and espouse the womxn’s silhouettes, becoming more than just objects: the beadworks are cultural belongings, and the womxn are cultural carriers.” 

We also see photography used for its materiality—printed paper—where the captured memory, the document of a specific moment in time, or the perfectly composed photograph, is no longer the focal point. We see this in Jayce Salloum’s photo-sculptures, where he takes personal photos, tears them into smaller pieces, and stacks and threads them, creating long, narrow, undulating sculptures that hang from the ceiling down to the floor. These sculptures are, in fact, fabricated by the artist’s studio assistants, thus, one sculptural tower differs from the other in how the photos have been torn and reassembled. 

In Montreal-based artist Michaël Sergile’s series of Ombre portraits, the artist uses a Jacquard loom to create incredible, woven portraits, based on family photographs from her parents’ generation in Haiti. Some portraits hang on the wall, others are displayed as part of a beautifully constructed wooden screen.

Threads are left to hang from the weavings, further emphasizing the woven nature of the works and their fabric. While these are portraits, the figures are silhouettes without identity. 

In Simranpreet Kaur Anand’s large-scale, multi-faceted installation, titled Wake of Departure, the artist explores the personal and community histories of the Punjab and Punjabi diaspora. Specifically, the work looks at the legacy of Sikh labour protests within the past few generations in British Columbia. 

The installation consists of multiple works, installed specifically for this exhibition, and comprises repeated risograph prints depicting people with megaphones and people yelling, a woven cotton rug in the centre that reads, “100 % no guarantee! DREAM WORLD”, hand-embroidered protest photographs, and photographs that have been deconstructed and re-woven. 

As our daily lives are saturated with digital imagery and media, what’s apparent in Stitched is the emphasis on the handmade, tactile, often laborious work, where photography is an integral part of the work, but not necessarily the end. The works in the exhibition are deeply layered and demand our attention, to consider where the images have come from, which is utterly contrary to the way we have become accustomed to consuming images with the speed of a scroll or swipe.