Lisa Gama works and resides in Vancouver, Canada. A long journey has brought her back to her roots in drawing, painting, and sculpture. Currently she is working along several overlapping areas of exploration. Gama holds degrees in Fine Arts (Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design) and Art History (University of British Columbia).
Gama works in painting along with drawing and sculpture, seeing these boundaries as rather porous—collage, photography, computer technology, design, and language come into play. In her work, relays open up between various modes of 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 memories, feelings, and sensations.
Another area of consideration is the role of chance and qi—the animating energy of the artist, all beings, and the universe according to 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, and abstraction-signification flicker between poles and often blend altogether. This is where interest in eastern philosophies combines with western traditions of thought in her art practice, with care that it is not a problem to solve, or a prescribed path to follow.
Memory and history—accessed through moments of pareidolia, flashes of feeling, and embellished through a semi-intuitive process—influence what happens along the process of her art making. 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 is fluid. She takes up the challenge of an archive that has grown vast and wide, 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 Institute 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.