Spawning Sockeyes

Description:

As part of the series Luminous Sites, Tomiyo Sasaki presented Spawning Sockeyes, a two-channel, multi-monitor video installation that transposed the dramatic life, reproduction, and death cycle of Pacific salmon into an urban setting. The work featured twenty Sony television monitors strewn among boulders in the Vancouver Art Gallery lobby, evoking a riverbed. With audio and video recorded at the Adams River near Sasaki’s birthplace of Vernon, British Columbia, the monitors alternated between shots of glinting water and vivid imagery of the salmon in their final, most brilliant phase as they wriggle in the shallow water, batter their bodies on the riverbed rocks, and ultimately die in the act of spawning. Sasaki’s repetitive editing accentuates the movement, colour, texture, and sound of the salmon, distorting and reconstructing time to evoke a liminal rhythm—one that mirrors the return to a place of origin and the quiet culmination of a life cycle. 

Video documentation is available upon request. 

Curated by Daina Augaitis and Karen Henry.