It’s like psychic mining. Or maybe how to be human. This is what comes to mind lately. Maybe the hope is for gold—or, for the new gold: “critical minerals”—to be unearthed. And where to dig? Who knows? Such things could be anywhere these days. Often it’s about how to look without looking; how to follow a scent, as if… As if it were possible. Is it a chase after the impossible? That sounds hopelessly romantic. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is an excuse to go somewhere and really attend deeply to something—it could be anything, anywhere across time and space. And then, sometimes, there’s the surprise—the charge of energy in finding something other than expected. Maybe something is exhumed from deep memory. A memory before me maybe.
Lisa Gama works and resides in Vancouver, Canada. A long journey has brought her back to her roots in art-making. An extended art-world hiatus, illness, and ongoing recovery were part of it—during this time she drew and painted anyway. In her work, relays open up between various modes of making, thought, feeling, and action—an experience that produces a charged mnemonic trail where material realities mingle with perception. Liquids, sediments, prints, traces, surfaces, and materials intersect with histories, memories, feelings, and sensations.
The role of chance and qi is important—qi is the animating energy of the artist, all beings, and the universe according to some currents threading through Chinese philosophies, including thoughts on painting, politics, and medicine. Gama explores energies in a sort of “call-and-response” practice, where image/non-image, idea/non-idea, abstraction/signification, and me/not-me flicker or blend. This is where an interest in eastern philosophies combines with western traditions of thought in her art practice, with care to avoid simply appropriating, problem-solving, or following a set of rigid proscriptions, and while also acknowledging debts to historical crossovers long before her time.
Memory and history—accessed through moments of pareidolia, flashes of feeling, and developed through a semi-intuitive process—influence what happens along the way. Some works start out as chance marks moving on to impressions that seem to suggest themselves, while others start out squarely in the zone of figuration, moving the other way, or back-and-forth between layers and zones of abstraction and representation. Either way, Gama’s works tend to evolve to explore zones where meaning might be conjured. She takes up the challenge of an archive that has grown impossibly vast and wide, hoping to chart pathways through it that still have some capacity for resonance.
Lisa Gama holds an MA in Art History from the University of British Columbia and a BFA in General Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She is also a published writer, a working designer, and a recipient of grants from SSHRC and the BC Arts Council. Lisa Gama is also known as Lisa Gayle Marshall.
The studio is located within the unceded territories of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Peoples, in an area otherwise known as Vancouver, Canada.