EASTER EGGS | Patrick Cruz and Qian Cheng | January 2021
In their first collaborative piece, Qian Cheng and Patrick Cruz compose a virtual mood board layered with seemingly random images devoid of text. Inspired by their dérives across Vancouver, Easter Eggs was conceived as a way to share and disseminate knowledge and information. Each image within Easter Eggs is embedded with a link dictated by Cheng and Cruz’s wide range of interests, from K-pop culture, climate change, Japadog, Pleiadeans, hamsters, and restaurant reviews to name a few. Like small portals opening to new worlds, the links embedded within the images mimic a sense of daydreaming where one thought leads to another.
Patrick Cruz is a Filipino-Canadian artist based in Quezon City, Philippines, and Vancouver, BC as an uninvited guest on the land of the Coast Salish peoples –Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. Cruz studied Painting at the University of the Philippines and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, a certificate in clownology, and a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Guelph. His intuitive inquiry is informed by his interest in occult practices, cultural hybridity, the project of decolonization, and the paradoxical effects of globalization. Most recently, Cruz’s work has taken form in playful configurations manifesting in various activities such as cooking, curating, trading, and freestyle rapping.
Qian Cheng is a first-generation, Chinese immigrant artist and organizer based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ Nations. She is interested in alternative organizational structuring, experimental ways of being together, and dreaming of better modes of living and working. Recently, Cheng co-founded gnome, a garden project in collaboration with her uncle, and is currently a research fellow with M:ST Performative Art and the Black Empowerment Fund, focussing on mutual aid and resource distribution practices outside of the non-profit sphere.
SPAM (Special Presentation Art Mail) is an email-based art series where artists work collaboratively to create a digital artwork. Through the link below, viewers can sign up to partake in the project by volunteering to receive upcoming interactive Number 3 Gallery emails.
For the most part, the only art we encounter these days arrives via digital means. You may receive emails announcing exhibitions—both online and in person (often by appointment)—and documentation of process work on your feed in lieu of studio visits or art crawls. When we consider how this changes our perception and relationship to artworks we might also reflect on how many folks have been exclusively viewing artwork this way long before our current infectious disease concerns. This said, online art can just as easily connect us as it can be ignored entirely. If we start to question whether the work we see is losing something to these platforms we might also note how art and technology are almost irreducibly connected—be it the tools we use of the visual influence it can catalyze.
This is not a new dynamic; mail artists have long used postal technology as a way to share snippets of their progress or work, which often intentionally took the place of formal in-person exhibitions. Not unlike our current email subscriptions, mail art (an inherently collaborative medium) would enclose participatory or interactive project and publication opportunities. Given that technology is presently the lifeline to connectivity for many of us, what better time to reconnect with the spirit of the early mail and e-mail artists who used their choice method of distribution as a transfer of aesthetic information to surmount geographical and cultural boundaries.
To view the project please contact number3gallery@gmail.com