Lucie Chan
To Be Free, Everything You Most Hate and Fear

July 15 — September 10, 2022

The Blue Building Gallery is proud to have hosted To Be Free, Everything You Most Hate and Fear, a solo exhibition of work by Guyana-born artist, Lucie Chan.

Chan is best known for large-scale, multi-layered drawing installations that foster cross-cultural conversations between seemingly disparate lives. Her work often involves one-on-one interviews to gain deeper understandings of race-related, immigrant experiences. Out of conversations like these and historical research of her own, Chan produces drawings, photographs, videos and installations that share the complex meetings of many stories.

To Be Free, Everything You Most Hate and Fear is one such project. Featuring drawings, photographs, videos, found-materials, an audio recording and more, To Be Free... arose from Chan’s curiosity about how the experiences of people of colour, specifically Black people, differ and are intertwined. In the installation Chan brought together many explorations of how race has been represented, misconstrued and reclaimed, framing all with a set of questions:

How close can we get to understanding the complexities of experiences that are different from our own?
How are those who experience oppression remembered and interpreted?
How do we carry forward these questions in relation to identity and commodity?

Documentation of the exhibition and a statement from the Director follow below.

Note from the Director

I had the pleasure of teaching alongside Lucie for many years at NSCAD. On Saturday’s we would often both be at an open figure drawing session where faculty and students would come together to draw. I was always leaning over to see what she would do next, what kind of mark she would make. Lucie has a way of drawing which feels as if she is peeling back the layers to reveal a figure that has been there all along.

The title of her first solo show at the Blue Building Gallery, To Be Free, Everything You Most Hate and Fear nods to Adrian Piper’s The Mythic Being: I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear (1975). In nodding, Chan leads us to question what has changed with regard to the representation and misrepresentation of race since Piper made her work in 1975. By drawing on stories and histories from this place, she invites us to join her in questioning how and why particular imagery and distinct documentations get buried and yet seem to continually resurface and remain.

Using several seemingly disparate historic and current-day elements Lucie reflects on her own layered inquiry around a Black experience. We are presented with the violent history of a black licorice candy which continues to be sold at many stores today. We are shown portraits of Black artists drawn as if they are arriving and disappearing all at once. We are told the story of a man beaten down by the reality of his Canadian immigrant experience in Halifax. And Angela Davis is behind the wall watching it all.

Thank you, Lucie, for bringing this work to this place.

Emily Falencki
Founder and Director
The Blue Building Gallery