IN CONVERSATION | Aaniya Asrani and Annie Canto | OCTOBER 2022

Both Aaniya Asrani and Annie Canto identify as immigrants and uninvited visitors to the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh land we call “vancouver.” On unfamiliar ground they move through spaces like sponges, absorbing sensory knowledge in hopes of finding a kind of understanding that might bring them closer to home.

For In Conversation, the artists draw on characteristics and materials encountered while moving through public spaces. As a way to bring the public into conversation with their surroundings, Aaniya and Annie have created a digital (and physical) scavenger hunt guided by digital technologies, like QR Codes, Video Ask and My Maps. The materials they encounter in public spaces between their homes become embodied and personified as human-adjacent forms through the various stop motion animations included in each of the hunt’s prompts. The dripping tap of a water fountain asks what sound makes you happy? The slightly browning grass asks if the grass was greener on the other side? The rolling chestnuts want to know where you are going. Through this project they hope to learn from and connect with the community they invite to interact within their neighbourhoods.

Aaniya Asrani is an interdisciplinary artist, graphic designer and visual storyteller from Bangalore, India—living on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples including the Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish and Musqueam Nations. On this land, she spends her time working to build bridges across lines of difference as a community artist and designer for InWithForward and as sessional faculty at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Her art seeks to investigate social, political and cultural systems in order to unpack the world as we know it, with the ultimate goal of facilitating understanding across diverse communities and systemic disparities. She aims to use art as a conduit to foster more moments of connection, and to create the conditions for community to thrive. 

Annie Canto works mostly with text, comics and food to acknowledge the complexities of the other and question the overarching systems that govern our relationships. She emphasizes creative practice as elemental, radical and subversive in her art classes for ages six to twenty six and thinks of the classroom as a rare and purposeful place to meditate on the ways we build relationships. She currently works as an uninvited guest between Tr'ondek Hwech'in land in the Yukon and Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh land in so-called Vancouver. As a second generation mixed Filipina immigrant, she draws from cultural and familial hosting practices as ways to facilitate comfortable spaces. For the last few years, Annie has been world building with young people in the Artist Residence Program in Vancouver Public Schools and teaching at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

This project is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts

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