CURRENT
December 5, 2024: Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity Announces Karen Zalamea Winner of the 2025 Barbara Spohr Memorial Award.
The photography prize, established by the friends and family of the late Canadian artist Barbara Spohr, awards a mid-career artist whose work has made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary Canadian photography a fully funded residency in the Leighton Artist Studios at Banff Centre.
April 2024–March 2025: Ensemble, Anvil Centre, New Westminster, Canada
Commissioned by the City of New Westminster, this temporary public art installation is presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival.
June 19, 2024: Read the Ciel Variable article by Karen Henry on the 2024 Capture Photography Festival
April 10, 2024: Read the Pancouver article Artist Karen Zalamea celebrates Filipino culture with Ensemble at Capture Photography Festival
PAST
July–August 2024: Woodhaven Artist in Residence Program, Kelowna, Canada
Karen Zalamea is the 2024 Woodhaven Artist in Residence, hosted by the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
July 25, 2024: Read the UBC Okanagan News article Artist in Residence will share her passion for creating cyanotypes
August 8, 2024, 1:00–2:30 PM: Collaborative Cyanotype Workshop
Zalamea’s artist residency will include a free collaborative cyanotype workshop for the community at the Woodhaven Eco Culture Centre. Participants will work together on a large-scale cyanotype created with natural and human-made matter from the surrounding area.
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April 1–June 22, 2024: Prevailing Landscapes, Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art, North Vancouver, Canada
The exhibition features works by Kim Dorland, Stan Douglas, Tim Gardner, Cameron Kerr, Krystle Silverfox, Ian Wallace, Jin-me Yoon, Karen Zalamea, and is curated by Jackie Wong.
Prevailing Landscapes is an inquiry into the state of the contemporary Canadian landscape. The landscapes showcased here reflect on the politics of land, responding to nature as a system in flux, and working to adapt to altered material resources and new environmental and political conditions, meditating on a sense of place and the capacity to belong.
May 9, 2024, 6:00 PM: Speaker Series - Art Education Unveiled. Perspectives from Prevailing Landscapes moderated by Andrew Booth. Join exhibiting artists and educators Stan Douglas, Ian Wallace and Karen Zalamea as they discuss the intricate relationship between art and education. This discussion will offer a rare glimpse into the minds of artists who are shaping the landscapes of contemporary art and molding the future of artistic expression through their roles as educators.
April 24, 2024: Read the Stir article At the Gordon Smith Gallery, Prevailing Landscapes contrasts Canada's distinct wilderness with urban forces
April 14, 2024, 3:00–4:30 PM: Artist talk: Karen Zalamea | Ensemble
Meet the artist and learn about Ensemble, on view at the Anvil Centre April 1, 2024–March 1, 2025. This event includes a conversation between the artist and Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Capture Photography Festival.
March 8, 2024: SNAP Photographic Art Auction, Toronto, Canada
September 8–October 28, 2023: Surface, Sample, Site, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto, Canada
The group exhibition features the work of Víctor Ballesteros, Ramey Newell, Tara Nicholson, Deb Silver, Karen Zalamea.
The sample can be an aspect of scientific objectivity or part of ecological ethics of connection—allowing artists to explore what experimental film historian Kim Knowles calls an “aesthetics of contact.” Through formal and material interventions, images can represent fluid agencies of non-human natures linking the surface of a photograph to a site that supplements and complicates the representational image. Addressing the role of photography in modern scientific paradigms of vision, the artists invite microbes, plants, fungi and other critters to render their images in unexpected ways.
For more information read Aesthetics of Contact: An Eco-Materialist Photography, an essay by curator and writer Laurie White.
August 12–September 9, 2023: The in-between, Flat File Project, Gallery 881, Vancouver, Canada
The Flat File Project features artwork from five locally based artists who were invited by curator Kate Henderson: Romane Bladou, Michelle Sound, Chad Wong, Gerri York, and Karen Zalamea. Through their work, the artists speak to the intersection of ancestral bonds, memory, identity and artistic labour, while also considering the constructed image and camera-mediated experience. Their disparate practices find common ground through their unique approach to process and materiality—surface, light, assemblage and the body’s relationship to material, sculpture and technology are just a few of the themes explored in this exciting selection of work.
May 4–July 22, 2023: The Prefix Prize, Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival, Toronto, Canada
Karen is the recipient of the third annual Prefix Prize in photography. Launched in 2021, the Prefix Prize is awarded annually to a photographic artist of any nationality. Designed to honour artists at any stage of their careers, the prize consists of an exhibition, a publication, and a cash award. The prize is presented by Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art with the support of presentation partners, Contact Photography Festival, Tangled Art and Disability, and Underline Studio, and founding partner, Partners in Art.
Curated by Scott McLeod, the solo exhibition of They are lost as soon as they are made (2020) will be presented as a core exhibition of the Contact Photography Festival.
May 11–June 30, 2023: Coursing, Or Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
This exhibition brings together artists Ana Valine, Karen Zalamea, and Sidney Gordon to examine the run-off of everyday industry and cultural production. In their lens- and light-based practices, these artists explore site-specific treatment of the hydrocommons and its broader impacts.
June 15, 2023: The Smith Foundation Brilliance Gala, North Vancouver, Canada
January 27–May 6, 2023: image/object: new approaches to three-dimensional photography, three-person exhibition at The Reach Gallery Museum, Abbotsford, Canada
This exhibition presents work by three contemporary Canadian artists – Karin Bubaš, Natalie Hunter, and Karen Zalamea – who each explore the potential for photographic images to be spatial, experiential, and material, but who do so in different ways and to different ends.
March 27–April 28, 2023: Here and Now, Capture Photography Festival featured exhibition, Pendulum Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
Here and Now celebrates Capture’s tenth anniversary by commissioning ten local artists to create new lens-based artworks. The artists, selected for their varied approaches to the medium, have each been asked to respond in some way to this place – by considering the landscape, history, people, or culture – with an aim to produce a dynamic exhibition that revels in the diversity of the city itself. The artists in Here and Now include Jaiden George, Khim Hipol, Tom Hsu, Alexine McLeod, Dana Qaddah, Isaac Thomas, Ian Wallace, Gloria Wong, Jin-me Yoon, Karen Zalamea.
March 23, 2023: SNAP! Photographic Art Auction Gala, Toronto, Canada
November 2022: Photography Enrichment Mentor and Artist in Residence, Artist for Kids, North Vancouver, Canada
Karen is the Fall 2022 Artist-in-Residence with Artists for Kids in their photography enrichment program. Senior high school students nominated from North Vancouver and West Vancouver schools worked with Karen during a three-part workshop that began at the North Vancouver Archives. The students learned about the history of the North Vancouver waterfront through photos, maps, and newspaper clippings, followed by photographing on location at the Shipyards District. In reflecting on how photography impacts our relationship to place, the students worked through merging the historical documents with their own photographs through hands-on strategies of collage, folding, sewing, and weaving, to digital manipulation.
September 7–21, 2022: Capture Photography Festival Benefit Auction
Presented in partnership with Heffel, the auction included 26 lens-based works that reflect the diversity of artists that have participated in Capture over the years, from emerging to established, local to international.
April–May 2022: Griffin Art Projects studio residency, North Vancouver, Canada
May 28, 2022, 12:00–5:00 PM: Open Studio with Parvin Peivandi and Karen Zalamea, Griffin Art Projects, North Vancouver, Canada
Join our current artists in residence in the studio for an in-person chat about the work they have undertaken during their time at Griffin.
May 15, 2022, 1:00 PM: Live from the Studio with Karen Zalamea, Griffin Art Projects, North Vancouver, Canada
April 9, 2022, 12:00 PM: Saturday Session, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
One Saturday each month, CAG invites a guest host to lead walkthroughs of its current exhibitions, offering their insights and response to the works on view. In April, Karen Zalamea will speak on the work of Michelle Bui.
September 25, 2021–February 24, 2022: Beyond the Horizon, a group exhibition curated by Karl Hipol at the Gordon Smith Gallery, North Vancouver, Canada
The full suite of 80 photographs from the series They are lost as soon as they are made is included in Beyond the Horizon.
Beyond the Horizon is an expression that encourages us to consider what is "farther than the possible limit of sight, beyond what we can foresee, know or anticipate." It is both visual - what we see - and conceptual - what we know. The horizon as a metaphor provides us with an opportunity to challenge and evaluate our own ways of knowing. The artists in this exhibition expand conventional uses of materials and explore modes of making through collaboration with other artists and the land.
Featuring works by Alan Wood, Angela George, Betty Goodwin, Bill Reid, Elizabeth Angrnaqquaq, Esteban Pérez, George Littlechild, Gordon Smith, Greg Murdock, Holly Schmidt, Irene Whittome, Jack Shadbolt, Jane Ash Poitras, Karen Zalamea, Robert Davidson, Rodney Graham, Sylvia Tait, Takao Tanabe, Toni Onley, Xwalacktun.
November 18–December 4, 2021: Photorama, Gallery TPW, Toronto, Canada
An editioned photograph from the series They are lost as soon as they are made is included in Gallery TPW’s annual exhibition Photorama, as part of a collection of contemporary photography and lens-based art by over 50 artists. Sales from Photorama directly support the gallery’s charitable mandate of exhibiting underrepresented artistic and curatorial practices that push the boundaries of lens-based work.
October 29–31, 2021: Edition, Toronto International Art Book Fair with Art Metropole, Canada
July 4–11, 2021: abC Art Book Fair with Art Metropole, Beijing, China
June 24–September 20, 2021: A new body of work in progress, Sunken Garden, is part of Tuloy, Tawid, a group exhibition curated by Kuh Del Rosario at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie. The exhibition features Zeus Bascon, KoloWn, Greys Lockheart, Julius Poncelet Manapul, Marigold Santos, and Karen Zalamea. Through the unique perspective and geographical position of each artist, this exhibition examines the Filipino experience, entangled and layered by the diaspora.
June 2021: An early video work, Self Geste, screens as part of the program [RE] EJECT Revisión al Festival Internacional de Videoperformance, livestreamed by Ex Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City.
May 2021: A book review of They are lost as soon as they are made by Bernard Schütze in Espace art actuel, Issue 128 (Spring-Summer 2021).
April 2021: Online feature: On Karen Zalamea’s They are lost as soon as they are made in The Capilano Review.
February 24–28, 2021: Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair with Art Metropole, New York City, USA
February 25–28, 2021: BOOKED: 2021 Art Book Pop-Ups with Art Metropole, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong