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Ngukkei: Family House Home Brenda Joy Lem knows that banners have been used to encourage collective idealism, but that they have also been draped to promote charged social and cultural issues. She has carried more than a few banners during her 15-year-long career as an artist and activist. She also knows that an abbreviated history of Chinese Canadians is scrolled through this country's changing signage. The English-only poster that once filled the windows of West Coast residences and businesses; the nomadic restaurant signs of a Chinatown rezoned away from Toronto's City Hall in the 1970s; the protest placards carried by Chinese Canadians rallying in Ottawa for government redress; these are visual triggers imparting messages about the shifting status of one diasporic community and its frustrated search for Family House Home. Brenda Joy Lem ventures on her own metaphorical and historical search for Ngukkei: Family House Home. What she finds is that there are no ready-made trails to community and collective memory. Hemmed by machine, Brenda's silkscreen banners are made of utilitarian, unbleached cotton. Pomp and flourish have given way to the practical. The first time I saw them, I was reminded of freshly laundered linen dangling from the clothes line of my neighbors backyard. This subtle but insistent reference to domestic labour serves as a potent motif that seeks to place semi-private indignities and memories into the public sphere of art. The aesthetic powerfully reflects the "everyday" aspects of her family's lives as they have unfolded against a larger backdrop of legislated racism and hardship. Using a banner format, Brenda provocatively repositions disparate family memories within the public viewing space of the open atrium at the Market Arcade Complex. As visitors standing amid these streaming sheets, we are invited to experience the visual chatter of memory. Condensed biographical details unfurl with no apparent rank or order. History emerges as parlour talk spoken by eager tongues. We learn of a paternal grandmother who remained feisty and charismatic despite the abuse she endured from her spouse. We see a photo of the artist's parents, relaxing in a garden, flanked by two Head Tax certificates, which document their arrival in the early 1910s. A "knock, knock" joke printed below these images wryly dramatized this period of legislated exclusion, while the immigration photos raise immediate questions about the critical role photography has played in defining public images of minorities. From mug-shots on landing cards to postcard portraits of Chinese railroad workers, public photos have made inequality seem mundane and hierarchies quaint. Reckoning with the power of the picture, Brenda attempts to reframe traditions of historical thinking and portraiture. Her art of photo-based recording restores new energy to collective memory, reminding us as John Hersey once wrote that "The very word record, in its ancient origins, meant to 'bring back the heart.'" Aunt Marg could have been a cover girl. Photographed alight a 1920s car with fresh coiffure, she beams with sunny confidence. The subject of one of eight banner-portraits, Aunt Marg's youthful vitality shines alongside her vitals, recorded with sparse nostalgia as follows: she could do "25-30 shirts with one hot iron." Aunt Marg's mother is shown outside the Ontario Laundry. If the earlier image did not support the text's invocation of hardship and labour, this photo of her mother with creased face and simple smock does. This is pop art with a twist. At a glance, Brenda's blown-up portraits, her large emblematic images of carp, have a Warholian appeal. Like Andy Warhol, the 20th century's most famous proponent of silkscreen, Brenda has used enlarged repros of photos and flat solid coloured shapes to highlight the basic stencil features of the medium. Unlike Warhol, however, Brenda does not take her images from the public domain of mass-media. Her found images have been peeled out of old family albums and retrieved from dusty drawers. We have Uncle Man, a tailor, who made beautiful custom fit men's suits that were sold at great mark-up in expensive shops. We have unsung people made photogenic before the lens. We have everyday people - labourers and service providers for the most part - rendered remarkable by their larger-than-life placement. Yet, despite the zoom-in history feel, it is interesting to note that these are not puffed-up portraits. You won't find Romantic idealizations of workers. The history of European oil painting is full of portraits of tailors and labourers, so elaborately rendered that poverty and toil disappears amid the resulting richness of surface. By contrast, Brenda's choice of silkscreen - a low cost, mass-produced medium - allows her to develop a humanizing iconography that gently insinuates an immigrant family's complex encounters with Canada. The colourful flash cards printed at the bottom of each banner, which register the rudiments of life and language, convey something about the artist's humility in approaching her familial story. Borrowing from sources ranging from basic language primers to the I-Ching, Brenda evokes a building-block approach to collective memory. Nothing is too small. The casual remark, the intrigue of the unsaid, the throw-away comment, the little gesture, are all treated with attentive patience. Through her use of simple composition and bold graphic type, Brenda infiltrates the pop art genre. She undermines its hidden precepts of hero-worship, challenging cultural assumptions of privacy and publicity at every turn. Leaving the mantle of mythology aside, her banners help us locate meaning in the seemingly minute events of daily life. Amid old commodity wrappers, restaurant menus, take-out cartons, Brenda sees all those things and people relegated to the periphery of Canadian history and society. In the end, it doesn't matter that Aunt Marg's steamy life had less to do with the Hollywood lifestyle of hot love, flashy cars, and high fashion than with her work at a dry cleaning press. If all photographs fiddle with the scale of a person or event, any portrait can be invested with collective personality and significance. Conceived to remind us of the love enjoyed and the violence endured by one extended family over the past century, Brenda's banners represent the flip-side of forgetting. The question of what will endure in the perception of history's recording is left to us to answer. Of course, some memories are more persistent than others. It is difficult to predict which memories will linger, which ones will withstand the vagaries of time and intention. Long after viewing, I carry with me a few indelible moments: an image of uncles clad in blue overalls and aunts in white dresses reunited after the Depression on a farm in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan; an anecdote recounting how restaurants were called "cafes" to save money when ordering neon signs. These scattered signs of diaspora, beautifully inflected with the artist's touch, are small but precious openings. Together, they provide a poignant reminder that history is comprised of bits and pieces and we are its curators.
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