Apparition Room. Western Front, Vancouver, BC. January 14 – April 1, 2023. Curated by Lee Plested. Scenography by Nile Koetting

The four exhibitions took place in the main gallery, while different works played in their entireties in the ground floor reception area including Corinne Sworn’s Rag Papers, Jane Ellison and Eric Metcalfe’s Oh Yes, Oh No, and Abbas Akhavan’s Plant, to name a few. Expanding the exhibitions beyond the gallery walls granted visitors an opportunity to also consider the building itself in relation to the archives. While the exhibition text is silent on its history, the building dates back to 1922, when it was constructed as a hall for the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal organization and secret society. Having worked in the archives at Western Front from 2018 to 2019, I know that the Pythian Knights, as well as the many artists, musicians, poets, and dancers who have moved through these rooms and hallways, have all left traces in the archives. Upstairs in the library, in close proximity to the Grand Luxe Hall and Western Front’s archival holdings, sat two chairs facing iPads suspended from the ceiling: an open invitation for guests to sit and watch the full-length exhibited works and browse the digital archives. While the library viewing room was only mentioned as a small note in the exhibition brochure, its inclusion as part of Apparition Room is evocative, bringing attention to the digital archives and the entangled roles of the curator, artist, and archivist today. As this was an archival exhibit celebrating the last 50 years of activities at Western Front, I expected to see a comprehensive display of archival records, but instead, the archives were used primarily as artistic materials to be sampled: the curator sliced, spliced, and collaged excerpts from different works and formats to create whole new works – more specifically, an assemblage that could “[bring] to life digitized artworks.” While the archival turn and archival impulse in contemporary art and beyond are not new, the recent creation of Western Front’s digital archival database and its ongoing digitization efforts are cited as primary catalysts for this exhibition. It goes without saying that the digital was a strong underlying conceptual framework in Apparition Room – an unexpected centrepiece for a brick-and-mortar archival exhibition. Despite this futuristic curatorial approach, Plested’s perception of a digitized artwork (a digital record) falls into a trap common to perceptions of the act of digitization – that is, of thinking that digitization renders the work lifeless and in need of reviving post digitization. This assumption represents an underlying anxiety or fear about loss: loss of authenticity through transfer to a new format, loss of meaning through abstraction into digital coding, loss of information via the obsolescence of media technology, and, ultimately, loss of access to memory. Plested’s choice to create new works parsed from fragments of digitized archival materials feels like an attempt to represent and capture a prevailing collective anxiety around digital loss; it evokes the way we fear our own memories blending, fracturing, and fading with the passage of time. By presenting the materials as a bricolage of different records and formats, Plested recalls familiar contemporary acts of “skimming” and “browsing” – assembling the archives into digestible components to ward off the impending feeling of information overload in the archives. But similarly, I wonder how this history – represented as fractured and elusive, with minimal context – somehow lends itself to evading the past and what the consequences of this evasion might be. Whose stories are included, and whose stories are left out of this history? To a formally trained archivist, the practice of removing an archival record from its original context of creation – …