Immigration and the Canadian landscape explored at latest Deer Lake Gallery exhibit

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The latest art exhibition “Walking to Know the Land” featured at Deer Lake Gallery in Burnaby is a multi-medium walk-through of experimental art and panoramic landscape photography, created by two Filipino brothers, Karl and Khim Mata Hipol. 

The brothers, who both graduated with fine arts degrees from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, applied for an open call from the Deer Lake Gallery and won the opportunity to present their work. 

The exhibit showcases the interweaving of their Filipino culture as well as a conscious acknowledgement for Canadian lands, ultimately finding their sense of place. 

Walking was part of that process when they first arrived in Canada. 

“It’s knowing the land and knowing this new place that we immigrated to. We’re pretty new and so it’s finding familiarity with the environment to help us adapt,” Karl says. 

The thought process behind the art is more than the mere physical act of walking or getting orientated. Karl drew inspiration from Ernesto Pujol’s book Walking Art Practice: Reflections on Socially Engaged Paths, which explores intentional thinking during walks. 

Coming from one colonized country to another, Karl says he wants to understand how to become a more conscious citizen.

“That’s something we would always consider as Filipino settler immigrants here in Canada,” Karl says. 

“So within my own practice, I started relearning our own history with the goal of trying to position myself in Canada and how I can be a better citizen here on the traditional lands.” 

Being environmentally and socially conscious influenced Karl to choose cyanotype photography as an art form, a camera-less technique that involves laying objects on paper, using iron salt solutions, exposure to sunlight, and water. The end result creates a bleached out silhouette of the objects against a midnight blue background.

“I lent the medium to the Earth itself. Letting the soil, the gravel, do its thing without my interventions. But it’s also through thinking these ideas that I try to counter narratives. I think that’s where decolonization comes in,” Karl says. 

The prints show natural products like foxtail grass and soil, but also human waste like plastic bottles and construction fencing. The objects used were from local development sites to showcase the changes and destruction happening to the natural spaces. 

“I was using a bunch of piles of gravel and sand that [are] being used to build those houses. I was thinking, ‘How do we develop the land? What stories are being unearthed? What stories are being covered up in the soil?’” Karl says. 

While Karl’s work was created in the Moodyville area of North Vancouver, Khim’s landscape photography continues higher up to Lynn Canyon Valley. His photographs are panoramic landscapes and include a small figure of himself dressed in white against the endless greenery, which he says conveys a sense of nature’s grandness.  

“It’s immersive in a way. So the portraits that you’ll see in the images [have] me, but in this tiny perspective, because it’s interpreted in the way that humans are smaller than nature,” Khim says. 

Khim says sticking mainly to photography as his medium is a strong form of communication, and a way to easily absorb ideas and information. A set of his photos are inspired by a school project. 

“The prompt was ‘I am here.’ So for me the landscape [prints] from Lynn Valley was my answer to that. It’s also as a poetic homage to the land acknowledgement being just a text, and so creating that as a visual form,” he says. 

Just like his brother, Khim says he’s trying to find his sense of placement and positionality in these new lands, both through his work and as a person. 

“I’m [at] the time where I’m just really exploring my Filipino identity within the Vancouver society and in Canada in general. I think that’s a big relationship itself,” Khim says. 

The exhibit can be attended free of cost or by donation, and is open until Oct. 1. For more information, visit https://bitly.ws/V4gV.