The Suitcase Project - Opening and Performances

add to outlook add to google calendar remind me

Tuesday, July 9th, 2019
5:00 PM to 8:00 PM

THE SUITCASE PROJECT: JULY 5-26th M-F 11-5, Sat. 12-3, opening and performances July 9th 5-8 p.m.

“If you were going to lose everything – your home, your business, memories and personal possessions – what would you take outside of things for survival?” -- Kayla Isomura, photographer and fourth-generation Japanese Canadian. The Suitcase Project, photographed and curated by Kayla Isomura, will be exhibited in the Cowichan Valley, July 5th – 26th, Cowichan Valley Arts Council [CVAC] Arbutus Gallery, Cowichan Community Centre, 2687 James St, Duncan. This exhibit is being sponsored by the Cowichan Public Art Gallery Society. Kayla Isomura’s poignantly meaningful multi-media exhibit explores the generational impact of cultural dispossession and loss of the heart’s home. Subjects range from infants to 51-years-old and were photographed in the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island and Western Washington. Stemming from the history of Japanese Canadians and Americans during WWII, this multimedia exhibit highlights why this history is relevant more than 75 years later. The Suitcase Project recognizes the on-going dispossession and discrimination of minority groups and people of colour today. During WWII, thriving and demonstrably loyal Japanese-Canadian communities on the West Coast were packed up in 24 – 48 hours, ripped from successfully integrated lives, beautiful homes and gardens, businesses, small-hold farms and commercial fishing fleets, and crammed into cattle pens at the PNE before being shipped to ghost towns in the BC Interior and eastern Canada. In Duncan, the land between our present-day Centennial Park and the train tracks, was rich with immaculate Japanese market gardens. Japanese-Canadian loggers and engineers worked alongside Sikh and Chinese Canadian loggers and engineers at the Mayo Company’s operations in Paldi and Hill 60. These model Canadian citizens were refused any recompense for their properties, possessions and commercial enterprises, and there is no record of what became of their property. Children who played so happily together in the woods after school the evening of April 20th, 1942, arrived at school the next morning to find their best friends literally disappeared. How do we understand citizenship in the face of nationalistic exclusionism? As Canadian citizens, are we not all, by definition, a richness of cultural diversity?