Karen Zalamea

In consideration of bodies of water and their significance as markers of distance and of connection, I reflected on what would be deeply rooted yet adaptive, from a trans-Pacific diasporic perspective. I focused on the taro, a staple crop in the Philippines dating back to 3900 BCE. The taro leaf, in particular, is known for its superhydrophobic or water-repellent feature.

Starting from a scanning electron microscope image of a taro leaf’s surface topography, the work offers an expanded view of its honeycomb-like structure through a series of photographic processes—from digital manipulation, to production as a cyanotype on cotton sateen exposed to sunlight and developed in the rain, to a flatbed scan and its eventual output as a detailed large-scale photographic grid. The sourced scientific image was deliberately diverted through a course of image-based transmissions to give prominence to its structure of resistance.


Taro
2023
25 archival inkjet prints
65 x 85 inches

Featured in group exhibitions Surface, Sample, Site (Gallery 44, Toronto, 2023), Coursing (Or Gallery, Vancouver, 2023).

Installation photos of the exhibition at Or Gallery: Michael Love

Working with my family photo archive from my ancestral house in Quezon City, Philippines, I scanned, enlarged, and printed selected images on canvas, and cut them into strips to be woven into 50-foot photographic ropes. Sunken Garden (Family Album) is an ongoing labour of love, an intimate material handling across intergenerational memory, time, and distance.


Sunken Garden (Family Album)
2022–
Inkjet prints on canvas, nylon rope
0.5 x 600 inches each

Featured in group exhibition image/object: new approaches to three-dimensional photography (The Reach Gallery Museum, Abbotsford, 2023).

Installation photos of the exhibition: Rachel Topham Photography

Sunken Garden originates in my ancestral house in Quezon City, Philippines. The project considers the house as archive—from the intimate scale of the familial, with each surface holding intergenerational memory, to the expansive scale of resources and building materials.

In this work from the series, a visual aggregate of the home’s marble staircase digitally merges the individual steps together to form one monumental photograph, where the veining and texture of the marble is connected in an imagined restoration of the extracted stone to the land. The large-scale image is paired with a constructed photograph of a marble quarry that combines images sourced online.

As a growing series, Sunken Garden speaks to the possibilities of bridging distance and to notions of trans-Pacific kinwork through photographic assemblages of speculation, approximation, and invention.


Sunken Garden (Staircase)
2020-2021
Inkjet print on banner, grommets
96 x 144 inches

Sunken Garden (Quarry)
2020-2021
Inkjet print mounted on Dibond
12 x 24 inches

Featured in group exhibitions image/object: new approaches to three-dimensional photography (The Reach Gallery Museum, Abbotsford, 2023), Tuloy, Tawid (Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, Grande Prairie, 2021).

The long-term photographic project began during an artist residency in 2015, and continued in a second trip to Iceland in 2018. To produce the images, I handcrafted a 4 x 5 analogue film camera and froze local water samples in specially fabricated lens moulds. With the camera and ice lenses, I photographed the Icelandic landscape.

The title quotes Halldór Laxness’ novel Independent People, and speaks to the material and immaterial aspects of the project—optics, time, light, atmosphere, and weather. The photographs offer a range of views, from descriptive to more ambiguously articulated landscapes. The work explores the camera and its optics as sites of experimentation, the translational capacity of photography, the perimeters of vision, and the possibilities of the landscape to reveal and render its own image.

Now available as a limited edition artist book presenting the full suite of 80 photographs with essays by Katie Belcher and Sara Matthews.


They are lost as soon as they are made, 2015–2020
80 archival inkjet prints, 16 x 20 inches

Featured in solo exhibitions The Prefix Prize (Tangled Art Gallery, Toronto, 2023), Subarctic Phase (Access Gallery, Vancouver, 2019) and group exhibition Beyond the Horizon (Gordon Smith Gallery, North Vancouver, 2021-22).

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Weathering explores representations of landscape deployed through a range of photographic processes, from silver gelatin prints to laser-cut inkjet prints on silk. As material responses, the photographs function as topographical skins that shift between surface and image.

Weathering, 2017–2018
Silver gelatin prints
10 x 18 inches, 12 x 18 inches
Laser-cut inkjet prints on silk
33 x 50 inches, 15 x 40 inches

Featured in group exhibition image/object: new approaches to three-dimensional photography (The Reach Gallery Museum, Abbotsford, 2023), and in solo exhibition When the sun rises, we keep the fire aflame (Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver, 2018).

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Through the material handling of landscape imagery, Scene presents a photographic installation that experiments with the textures and volumes of represented space.

Scene, 2018
Inkjet prints on canvas, metallic paper, matte paper, and fibre-based paper
Variable dimensions

Featured in group exhibition image/object: new approaches to three-dimensional photography (The Reach Gallery Museum, Abbotsford, 2023), and in solo exhibition When the sun rises, we keep the fire aflame (Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver, 2018).

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A public art project created specifically for various storefront windows, Vitrine is a series of 14 subtle photographic gestures in conversation with the possibilities of display. The window serves as a point of departure, functioning as a threshold between interior and exterior spaces and as an aperture that frames our field of vision.

Presented in partnership by Capture Photography Festival and the South Granville Business Improvement Association.

Vitrine, 2017
Inkjet prints on vinyl, 20 x 30 inches

Light & Variation is a body of photographic work that visually experiments with dimension, light, and materiality. Constructed in the studio and photographed with 4x5 and 8x10 cameras, the complex arrangements are grounded in analogue and hands-on processes.

Light & Variation, 2014–2016
Archival inkjet prints, variable dimensions

Featured in solo exhibition Spectres of Desire (Franc Gallery, Vancouver, 2016).

Pierre/Paysage (Stone/Landscape) is a collection of 10 photographic images that presents transformed representations of space. Printed as black-and-white C-prints, the images show layers of acetate cut into different geometric shapes that have been carefully placed and lit to construct formal arrangements. The images articulate the possible representational slippages in the visual language of cartography, topography, and three-dimensional models.

Pierre/Paysage, 2012
C-prints mounted on Dibond, variable dimensions from 17" x 12" to 30" x 60"

Featured in solo exhibition Form in Matter (Gallery 295, Vancouver, 2013).