Lani Maestro’s “her rain” will close at the end of day this Sunday, January 8, so this week is your last opportunity to experience this exhibition. Over 35,000 have visited Plug In since it opened, so please be sure not to miss out!

Using minimal and simple visual language, Lani Maestro’s work addresses the complexities of human nature and dignity in the conditions of the social, cultural and political realities we experience in everyday life. Her works are poetic and powerful; they defy conventional interpretation.

Plug In ICA has commissioned and presents for the first time a new installation entitled “she laughs”. “her rain” is a highly poetic, text-based show that was first exhibited at Centre A, Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and has been adapted to the new Plug In facilities at 460 Portage Avenue, acting as a response to the architecture and central location of the gallery. With the installation entitled “No Pain Like This Body”, Maestro transforms the gallery space into a large sculpture, with the placement of very minimal elements: a text articulated in neon, and its reflection on the floor reiterating a “mindful presence.” These two works are accompanied by a third, “brenda console”, a video that acts simultaneously as sculpture, architecture and body posing questions of voice. Who is speaking? The work raises questions of subjectivity, agency and worldview that ultimately bring us to a coming to “difference.”

Lani Maestro was born in the Philippines in 1957. She came to Canada in 1983 and pursued an MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in 1989. In that period, Maestro’s work was included in the Segunda Bienal de la Habana in Cuba (1985) where it received the Bienal Prize. Since then, Maestro has received increasing international recognition for her work and she has exhibited widely across the world. Last year, Maestro mounted two exhibitions in Canada, “l’oubli de l’air”, in collaboration with American composer Malcolm Goldstein at the Darling Foundry in Montreal, and “her rain” at the Centre A, Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art co-organized by Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art.

The forthcoming exhibition publication includes writing by the award-winning Montréal-based poet Erin Mouré and an introduction by curator Makiko Hara.

Presented with the support of l’INSTITUT FRANCAIS – Ministère des Affaires étrangères et européenes.

The commission of “her rain” was made possible with the funds from Arts Partnership Creative Development (BC).

This exhibition was organized in conjunction with Centre A, Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

This exhibition is free for all and all are welcome.