The One and the Unfathomable Many: A Lament for Gaza
Join us from 4–7 pm on Wednesday, January 21, at the Dal Schindell Gallery for the opening reception of Joy Banks's installation The One and the Unfathomable Many: A Lament for Gaza. The following month she will give an Artist Talk from 6:00–7:30 pm on Wednesday, February 25.
Bringing together printmaking, carved wood, and pit-fired ceramics, this installation seeks to create a space of shared lament for Gaza. Hanging fabrics printed with over 65,000 figures, representing the number of Palestinians killed, form a grief-labyrinth to walk through, inviting visitors to witness, grieve, and engage with the scale and impact of the genocide. The installation will be set up in the gallery until March 28.
Parking: Regent College no longer has its own parking lot. Paid parking options are available nearby with metered parking on Western Parkway, among other locations, and covered pay parking at the Thunderbird Parkade. See parking.ubc.ca for more info.
Artist Statement
This work began when I started carving tiny figures into printmaking blocks to represent Palestinian lives taken in Gaza, as I tried to grasp the scale of the genocide. Carving small, simple figures gave me a way to acknowledge each person as an individual with a story, even as I sought to visualize the scope of over 65,000 people killed. I carved hundreds of figures and realized I could carve every day, all day, for a year and still not come close to the total. To continue the practice in a way that could hold the scale, I began printing the blocks repeatedly even as the death toll continued to climb. Using the same carved figures as a base, different large-scale pieces on fabric emerged, shaped by the stories and laments emerging from Gaza. This process became the seed of the project: a small attempt to honour each life while wrestling with the unfathomable scope of the genocide.
As I worked, I also wondered what was being eroded within those of us outside Gaza, as we witnessed these horrors through the isolating medium of our screens. Images of genocide appeared alongside advertisements promising abundance and luxury, a jarring dissonance that left me unsettled. What does it do to our collective humanity to witness such atrocities and scroll on by, even while Palestinians continue to endure daily attacks and loss? What is the impact of witnessing a genocide so closely and yet so disconnectedly at the same time? I grappled, too, with the sheer impossibility of really absorbing or processing this horrific reality as an individual, even as other atrocities unfolded in other parts of the world. At a certain point, the scale exceeds what any individual nervous system can take in, even as we feel compelled to remain present. While I created art as my own small response, I found myself wondering how embodied expressions of grief and lament could help us face what we are witnessing, and move through the overwhelm rather than becoming stuck in it, or trying to numb it away.
With these questions in mind, the project grew into a participatory installation that brings together printmaking, carved wood, and pit-fired ceramics to create a space for shared lament. White cotton hangings printed with over 65,000 figures form a grief labyrinth to walk through. Each unique hanging expresses aspects of lament or reflects facets of the realities in Gaza. The carved wooden elements and smoke-marked ceramic vessels extend this sense of tactile, material lament shaped by hand, fire, repetition, and sorrow. Visitors are invited, not to attend as spectators, but to move through the space as an act of keeping vigil and bearing witness to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In a world that often turns away or numbs itself in the face of such violence, shared lament offers a space to pause and reconnect with the wrongness of the injustice we are witnessing. The installation provides an opportunity for participants to engage in collective lament and to attend to the weight of what is happening in Gaza. Perhaps grieving together in this embodied way will open pathways within us and among us for deeper compassion and action.
Joy Banks
Joy Banks is a printmaker and multidisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, Canada, the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She has been carving linocut prints for over twenty years, creating work that flows out of engagement with marginalized communities, a concern for social justice, and questions of meaning and spirituality. She also facilitates creative and reflective spaces for individuals and groups. Her work invites viewers into moments of reflection where the ordinary and the sacred meet, and where art becomes a mirror for both social reality and personal meaning. Her work has been shown in exhibitions, featured in books and album covers, and is held in private collections worldwide.
