For Caryn, the extensive digital documentation of her early childhood is a bittersweet reminder that memory is a luxury. She is part of the first generation in her family to have a life this carefully documented. A greater family history has been lost to time, and the messy, indelicate process of movement from one country to another. Her practice of reproducing these intimate captured moments of her childhood in paint allows her to grapple with the guilt and the grief of this loss, while preserving those memories to ensure her family’s legacy survives in the future.

Meenakashi has always been drawn to her parents' extensive wedding album and the cultural and religious traditions that it captures. She attempts to insert herself into the experiences of those who have come before her, and reimagines past histories through a queer and feminist lens. Through comparing these analog photographs with current everyday documentation, she contrasts past realities in India, with her present experiences in Canada.

CARYN WEI YA XIE

Caryn Wei Ya Xie (b. 2002) is a realism artist from Whitby, Ontario currently based in Katarokwi/Kingston, where she is pursuing her Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) with a minor in History and a Bachelor of Education at Queen’s University. As a Cantonese Chinese-Canadian painter, Xie’s work satirizes techno-Orientalist rhetoric by appropriating digital aesthetics to reimagine archival family photographs. These digital interventions translate a personal history of immigration into a broader conversation on the diasporic experience of fragmented identity and memory. In doing so, her paintings bring to attention the contrast between the analogue and the digital, the ‘East’ and the ‘West,’ and the past and present. She has exhibited locally at the Window Art Gallery, as well as at the Bevy gallery space in Toronto. The Chinese Neo-Realists, as well as her current professional work as a graphic designer, largely inform her personal visual language and her thematic emphasis on Asian agency and Asian narratives.

MEENAKASHI GHADIAL

Meenakashi Ghadial (b. 2001) is a visual artist from Brampton, Ontario currently based in Katarokwi/Kingston. She creates representational oil paintings on non-traditional substrates that explore themes of marriage, love, intimacy, grief and sexuality. She presents the car as a multifaceted liminal space that functions as a safe space for her as a queer Punjabi-Canadian woman. Her inspiration draws from personal experience navigating her queer identity as a second-generation immigrant in her family. Through the use of current documentation as well as archival family material, Meenakashi creates narratives that explore the particularities of intergenerational experiences. Ghadial received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) with a Minor in Art History and is currently working towards her Bachelor of Education at Queen’s University. She is an active member of the Ontario Kingston Women Artists Association, and will be completing her second artist residency in Kingston at the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning in April where she plans to explore themes of memory, movement, and queerness through more interdisciplinary approaches.