Undercurrents and Folds: Reading the Migration Library with Deanne Achong, Lois Klassen, Candie Tanaka, Tania Willard, and Clare Yow

As part of this spring’s EDI event series, we invite the university community to explore the role of art and publishing in shaping conversations around migration, diaspora, and Indigenous sovereignty. This panel will feature artists talks that highlight diverse perspectives on movement, belonging, and resistance. Faculty, students, and staff are encouraged to join this engaging discussion on the power of creative communities in addressing structural inequities.

Undercurrents and Folds is the third series of small-edition artist publications in the long-range and wide-reaching project, Reading the Migration Library. RML3 is hosted by artists Deanne Achong (Newfoundland) and Lois Klassen (Vancouver), and features six new publications by artists, Leah Decter, Peter Morin, Sarah Shamash, Candie Tanaka, Tania Willard and Clare Yow. Each artist has contributed new work reflecting their diverse perspectives on migration, diaspora, and travel through and in defence of sovereign Indigenous territory.

RML is a publication and event project that was initiated by Lois Klassen (Light Factory Publications) in 2017. This event will include artist talks related to the project by Deanne Achong, Lois Klassen, Candie Tanaka, Tania Willard, and Clare Yow. 

Deanne Achong is an artist who works across disciplines, including digital and lens-based projects, installation and public art. She has a daily drawing habit, one which acts as a counterpoint to her digital practice, playing with the boundaries of domesticity and technology. Growing up in a multi-racial family, her work is influenced by stories she heard as a child from Trinidadian jumbies to Irish fairies. These mythological elements shape her perception of the world and materialize in her practice. Deanne’s work has been exhibited in Canada, the US, the Caribbean, and Europe. She has been an artist-in-residence in Montreal, Quebec City, Newfoundland and Trinidad. In 2020, she was honoured by the Electronic Literature Organization as one of a group of women who are “pioneers of electronic literature.”

Lois Klassen is the hosting artist of Reading the Migration Library (RML) and founder of Light Factory Publications (publisher of RML and Present Cartographers). Klassen’s writing has appeared in Media-N, Public Journal. Parse, Fillip, Border Crossings, C Magazine, and more. She has exhibited and partnered with programs at The Reach Gallery, Dunlop Gallery, MAWA, Union Gallery, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, and others. Klassen is currently an Adjunct Professor, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, and the coordinator of the Emily Carr University Research Ethics Board.

Candie Tanaka is a multiracial trans writer, artist and librarian challenging the binaries continually reconstructed between self and other while exploring archive and memory in a socio-political context. They are a creative writing graduate of The Writer’s Studio program at Simon Fraser University and have a BFA in Intermedia from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. Their first YA book, Baby Drag Queen was published with Orca Books in April 2023 and was shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award. They’ve also published work in Resonance: Essays on the Craft of Life and Writing with Anvil Press and This Will Only Take A Minute: Canadian Flash Fiction with Guernica Editions.

Tania Willard is a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist whose research intersects with land-based art practices. Her practice activates connection to land, culture, and family, centering art as an Indigenous resurgent act, though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalization in Secwépemc communities. Her artistic and curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012-2014) and Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe (ongoing). Willard’s work is included in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Forge Project, Kamloops Art Gallery, and the Anchorage Museum, among others. In 2016, she received the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. In 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her their VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice, and in 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice. In 2023 BUSH Gallery was named as a Future Studies recipient from Ruth Foundation for the Arts.

Clare Yow is a Chinese-Canadian visual artist working primarily in photography with documentary as its basis. Her practice is concerned with the politics of identity, community, and labour, taking on various forms of making and mothering including through her work as co-founder of United Aunties Arts Association. Born in Singapore and based on the unceded, ancestral and occupied homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw and səlilwətaɬ, so-called Vancouver, BC, Clare holds an MFA in Visual Art and Honours BFA in Photography Studies. See more at clareyow.com and @studioclareyow

We acknowledge the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).