Figure 1. Cindy Mochizuki, Things on the Shoreline, 2016. Access Gallery.

Access Gallery currently has a lovely show up by local artist Cindy Mochizuki. She collaborated with children from both Lord Strathcona Elementary and the Vancouver Japanese Language School. The exhibition is up from February 13 — April 16, 2016.

On February 18th from 7-830pm there is also a panel discussion with Cindy Mochizuki, Hannah Jickling, Helen Reed, and Vanessa Kwan on artistic collaborations with children.

Owl and I had a chance to view the work on the opening night. Flashlights awaited us at the front door. Children are encouraged to come as there are activities they can participate with to add to the exhibition. The piece speaks volumes about collaboration, time, experimentation and creative possibilities.

The presentation text for the show states:

“When we are bored, the landscape appears barren, empty. But it is precisely this arid space in which the imagination can run wild, and produce whole populations of teeming, whimsical, creaturely life. Things on the Shoreline is a collaborative project initiated by Access Gallery, visual artist Cindy Mochizuki, and the students of Lord Strathcona Elementary School and the Vancouver Japanese Language School. From October to December of 2015, Cindy was a guest artist at both schools, and in a series of image- and story-making workshops, worked closely with students in grades four and five. The starting point of these workshops was the visualization of an empty, barren seashore—the empty page—and, working with ink, salt, and words, and then to slowly draw out the myriad possibilities that lie await in that space. The results of the workshops—a raucous population of whimsical inky creaturely things and the invented environments in which they live—is the focus of the exhibition at Access Gallery. The project culminates in the launch of a limited-edition, hard-bound children’s storybook, which incorporates both Mochizuki’s Things and those of her student-collaborators.

Things on the Shoreline draws on Mochizuki’s established practice of mining community stories and folklore, and sees her extending her drawing practice in new experimental ways. Here she investigates the art of slowness, and explores the ways in which something wondrous can arise from nothing, revealing the emancipatory potential of the “messy antics” (to use Walter Benjamin’s term) of play.”