Grace

For over fifty years, Bryce Kanbara has been working across painting, printmaking and sculpture. Grace is a solo exhibition featuring Kanbara’s wall relief sculptures, a practice he began in the 1980s and continues to this day. Named after the first drywall sculpture he made in this ongoing series, Grace brings together selected works that speak to how daily life entwines with intergenerational knowledge and cultural histories.

Comprised of offcuts and found objects, Kanbara’s assemblages combine jutting drywall, ragged masonite and splintered wood with useless items such as empty cookie packaging, a CD shard, a single takeout chopstick or a hairless paintbrush — all cobbled together with screws, nails, tape and glue. Amongst the rawness of these structures, Kanbara occasionally nestles various mementos including a googly-eyed seashell handicraft won at a Lithuanian church dinner raffle, a faintly penciled stanza of a Christopher Smart poem, stray wooden lids of daikon-pickling pails handmade by his father, or a small painting of an archival photograph depicting POW’s at the burial of Mr. Masanoa Shirokowa, a 46-year old issei, in Angler, Ontario, where his father was interned along with other Japanese Canadian dissidents in the 1940s.

Seen together, these sculptures are a complex archive that vacillates between the personal and the collective. Touching upon layers of art, memory, and the everyday experiences of nikkei – immigrants and descendants of Japan – Kanbara’s work refuses precision or the foregrounding of any singular element in particular. While the sculptures bear traces of abstract expressionism and junk art, they also carry the spirit of wabi-sabi and the makeshift /make-do ethos inherited from the issei and nisei generations of his grandparents and parents. Kanbara’s bricolage process of reclamation and improvisation creates staggered forms with a sense of awe and ambiguity. Grace invites us to consider what can be realized through the rough.