Parallax(e): Perspectives on the Canada–U.S. Border

The Reach Gallery Museum, Abbotsford, British Columbia

The Reach Gallery Museum’s exhibition, Parallax(e): Perspectives on the Canada–U.S. Border, invites visitors to reconsider the Canada–U.S. border and the ways it has shaped identity, belonging, and power.

The culmination of Dr. Julia Lum’s seven-year research project, the transdisciplinary exhibition brings together rare watercolours, photographs, and maps from the Northwest Boundary Survey of 1857–62 with contemporary artworks. Drawn from ten institutional repositories across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the archival works are presented as fraught attempts to naturalize a geopolitical fiction.

Developed with five Indigenous commissioned artists and curatorial collaborators — Dr. Shawn Brigman, Dr. Michelle Jack uɬ snəmtÌtkʷ, Deb Silver, Xémóntalot Carrielynn Victor, and Dr. T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss — and organized by Kelley Tialiou, Curator of Art & Visual Culture, the exhibition’s countercolonial framework reveals how the boundary disrupted longstanding Indigenous networks of kinship, ecological stewardship, cultural practice, and trade. By presenting multiple perspectives, Parallax(e) questions what a border is, whose interests it serves, and what meanings it continues to hold.