As I closely followed and learned about the work of artist Keg de Souza during my time with the CAG, blogging about her process and project, and creating educational materials about her work to be used by high school teachers, there were a handful of terms and concepts that became central to my writing and reflection. For my creative response I created two textual collages inside of vacuum-sealed bags. In creating my collage, I focused on typing out the following phrases and words repeatedly in different size fonts: displacement, conversation, community, origin, politics of space, and objects. These words refer directly to the themes and practice of Keg’s work, as well as the mandate of the CAG that I learned about during my time there, which largely focuses on engaging with the community and facilitating conversation and learning with youth and children. In wanting my creative response to embody the kind of work that I completed during my internship, which was largely writing, I felt as though typing and printing these phrases was an appropriate medium to use to convey the conceptual aspects of my experience with the CAG.

I displayed these collages on the windows of the third floor Audain lounge space for our presentation. I wanted to reference Keg’s project in China Town, Appetite for Construction, in which she placed various objects in vacuum-sealed bags, creating a transparent cube-like structure, in which the bags became a sort of frozen form of evidence, suspended the objects. In my repetition of the words, I wanted to examine the language, and the layers of meaning that these concepts carry. As I have been repeating these words and concepts within my work and reflection during my internship, their meanings have grown and become more nuanced. I attempted to capture this reality inside these collages. This response was also related to Keg’s work in mapping concepts and conversations that she facilitates within communities. I wanted these collages to act as a sort of jumbled and complicated word map of concepts that I have collected and learned about through this internship.

Lola and I wanted our creative responses to engage with one another, creating a dialogue of our experiences that reference the work of Keg de Souza’s art practice. As Lola prepared Holly Schmidt’s favorite food, we felt as though hanging my vacuum-sealed collages above the food would reference Keg’s use of food in her projects. Keg places food in dialogue concepts, giving a space for people to visually consider objects and themes while enjoying various foods. I also felt that hanging these collages on the window was successful in that it created a transparent effect of the paper layered over the open backdrop of Vancouver, which framed the words “place” and “origin” within a geographical context of the outside world.