Step into the unfamiliar for a moment. How do you feel? Are you exhilarated, anxious, curious or intimidated? Or do you feel strong and fearless? Are your senses confused, or are they signalling a peculiar sense of comfort? What is your body telling you?
Between 2016 - 2018 I travelled throughout the Middle East and North Africa to challenge my misconceptions about cultures I knew virtually nothing about. I started my journey in Ethiopia and over the course of three years travelled to Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Egypt and Morocco. A gradual unravelling began to occur and common interactions with people, patterns, colours, smells and sounds from home, curiously greeted me in unexpected ways in these foreign lands. It is in these tiny curious moments that I could connect more deeply with people and do away with perspectives like “us versus them.” It’s really just ‘us’, and anywhere is everywhere.
In “The Truth Is..”, artists and collaborators Lindsay Elliot, Sarah Tesla and Adele Thomas present a selection of their photographic works focused around the interrelationships between people and place.
Using a mix of landscape and portraiture, each photograph embodies an individual truth as it is manifest in experience: from the beauty of our very own backyard here in Vancouver, to several locations across North and West Africa and the Middle East.
This event is taking place on the Unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tseil-Waututh Nations.
Feb 8 - March 7, 2019
Massy Books Gallery
229 East Georgia Street
Vancouver, British Columbia
Hamar Tribe By Sarah Tesla
Dancers Series: By Adele Thomas
Moroccan Landscape By Lindsay Elliott