Art Metropole

Seen Through Red presents reproductions of nightlife ephemera from Jordan King’s personal archive, bringing together posters, flyers, and Polaroids documenting parties, performances, and drag shows that took place in Vancouver between 2000–2006. Exploring personal histories of photography and trans visual agency, the risograph publication offers an archival unearthing in the dissemination of an unmined expressive period in King’s early creative life.

Accompanied by essays from Jordan King and Dallas Fellini, Seen Through Red maps a transient nightlife scene alongside emergent modes of transfeminine aesthetic production. Through a revisitation and recontextualization of King’s collected ephemera, she positions the disassembly and dissemination of her archive as an informal ritual, a final farewell to the visual record of a closed chapter in her life.

ma ma at The Table began in 2019 with a collaboration between The Table (Brittany Shepherd) and ma ma (Heather Canlas Rigg and Magdalyn Asimakis) – a dinner on a hot July day with fifteen guests, sharing the food they grew up eating, reading out loud together, and discussing how familial relationships to food function as sources of knowledge. The invitation asked guests to reflect on something they have learned through food: What was the dish? How did you learn about or experience it? What was lost, or gained in translation? How has it affected you?

This publication collects the 15 stories of difference, love, spirituality, mystery, and myth shared that night, and develops them into expansive cookbook with personal recipes, photographs, and reflections on the emotive impact of food and family.

Building loosely on the form of a pocket-sized travel guide, this artist’s book unfolds into a 731.52 cm wide miniature landscape. Composed of hand-painted and digitally illustrated images stitched together into a continuous sequence, the book includes a poem and short narrative by the artist, an essay co-authored with Daniella Sanader, and an afterword by Heather Canlas Rigg. A sticker sheet featuring animal and plant forms is included as an insert.

Functioning as a poetic visual-textual essay, the book unsettles the familiar logic of travel guides and the explorer’s gaze. It troubles the impulses of sightseeing, navigation, and tourism, while calling into question the authoritative languages of archaeology, botany, taxonomy, and cartography. It emerges from ongoing inquiries in Nour Bishouty’s practice around permission, legibility, and understanding.

Through critical reflections, lyrical fragments, and visual fictions, the book offers a layered exploration of artistic inheritance, colonial spectacle, and epistemic dissonance. It challenges legibility and authority, foregrounding ambiguity, misunderstanding, and refusal as generative strategies.