Portable Walls
Collaboration between Ya-chu Kang & Christian Nicolay
Portable Walls is a collaborative exhibition of new work by Christian Nicolay and Ya-chu Kang exploring contemporary narratives of safety and identity, man and women, East and West, in a post 9-11 age where it seems more rules, regulations and checks on our privacy continue to grow and change. Through the use of video, sculpture, mixed media drawing and installation the artists collectively and individually explore the polarities between life and death, public and private, safety and danger, comfort and distress particularly examining the similarities and differences between Canada and Taiwan.
Both artists work deal with found material of the everyday from various topographical landscapes like Nicolay’s mixed media on paper drawings or Kang’s reconstructions into sculptural forms and clothes. Through this exhibition the artists works examine cultural borders and social constructions of the human identity and how we identify ourselves in a growing global fabric increasingly becoming crisscrossed and blurred.
port·a·ble walls
1, a temporary or nomadic shift serving to enclose, divide, protect or change ones identity (i.e.: your identity shifts depending on where you are) 2, To adapt to ones surroundings. 3, What is destroyed is reborn (i.e.: A wall is meant to set a barrier from one area to another, but making it portable means you have to set it up and take it down each time) 4, fluctuating re-occurrences. 5, Paradigm shift. 6, a person who creates more than one identity, traces of digital footprints, profiles and usernames. 7, Cultural landscapes that become crisscrossed and blurred from globalization, shifting borders, war, geo-politics, digital revolution, etc. 8, paying attention to the constant flux of rules, regulations, definitions, checks and changes on privacy laws and the ability to relearn what is learned.