Charlotte Zhang: Pine Street

Charlotte Zhang, Pine Street, Now and Again, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

Charlotte Zhang: Pine Street

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Since April 14, 2020

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Online Launch: Tuesday, April 14, 2020, 3 PM PST / 6 PM EST

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Centre A is pleased to co-present Charlotte Zhang’s Pine Street in partnership with the 2020 Images Festival and Critical Distance Centre For Curators (Toronto).

Pine Street, Now and Again (2019) is a looping two-channel video installation by Nanaimo-raised and Los Angeles-based artist Charlotte Zhang. Commissioned by the Nanaimo Art Gallery for the group exhibition Estuary, the film is composed of sequences conceived in collaboration with former Chinatown residents and people who are connected to them. For this installation, Zhang was thinking about the parallel structure of conversation and “the ways in which we build and dismantle Chinatown over and over again through conversing.”

The sequences are edited to appear at moments that sonically conflict: a cast of local residents armed with metal detectors swarm an unassuming hill; we witness a conversation between former classmates at the Chinese senior home; the artist goes hunting in a chicken coop. With every loop, these and other images, dialogues, and sounds are recut through the process of recollection. 

This double presentation mirrors the structure of Zhang’s work itself, two channels facing one another with overlapping audio. Critical Distance is located at Artscape Youngplace Toronto and Centre A at Sun Wah Centre in Vancouver’s Chinatown. In noting that both venues are located within artistic and community-driven spaces entangled in creative city planning, Pine Street wades into the forces of erasure Zhang’s grapples with in her film. 

Charlotte Zhang (b. 1999) is an artist from Vancouver Island, currently studying Film/Video at California Institute of the Arts. She is interested in expressions of translocational kinship, technologies of legibility, surplus and refuse, scammers and acts of scamming. She lives and works on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation and the Fernandeño Tataviam.

Pine Street, Now and Again was initially scheduled to exhibit at Centre A and Critical Distance Centre for Curators as part of Images Festival’s OFF Screen program and has since been adapted for our online program. 

Please see below for the links to view Pine Street, Now and Again, and follow the recommended Viewing Instructions to experience the work at home. The installation is also hosted on the main Festival site and Critical Distance. This work is closed-captioned in English and Traditional Chinese.

View Channel 1 HERE.

View Channel 2 HERE.

Download the Viewing Instructions HERE.

Translation: Henry Heng Lu
Captioning: Karina Iskandarsjah

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Online Public Program: Monday, April 20, 12 PM PST / 3 PM EST

IN CONVERSATION
Q&A with Charlotte Zhang and Friends of Chinatown TO
For more information: imagesfestival.com/programs/charlotte-zhang-x-friends-of-chinatown-toronto

To bring about a skill-sharing dialogue between artist and organizer, Charlotte Zhang will moderate a Q&A with Toronto-based community group, Friends of Chinatown TO (FOCT).

Centre A is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.