CVAG South Gallery | Window + Plaza Media Gallery | GATHER:PLACE | George Sawchuk Gallery
PAS-À-PAS; NOT INTENT ON ARRIVING
A Multidisciplinary Meditation on Mourning + Memory
Visual Artist | SD HOLMAN + Pianist | RACHEL KIYO IWAASA
Artist Statement by SD Holman:
We all will grieve. This may be my journey, but it is not about me. I am not the first to observe that grief is both solitary and universal; that we find ourselves utterly alone with feelings shared by all at some point for as long as beings have lived and died. That crazy with grief is not a metaphor, but the literal truth. That the path is not linear but cyclical; we are urged to move on, but if we get to the other side, we find ourselves on the other side of an ouroboros, forever devouring ourselves and being reborn. That grief is love; with us always and everywhere, no matter how far we travel. And if we do not recoil from its enduring, faithful constancy, in it, we may glimpse the eternal.
I had no intention of making art when I stepped out my door and took a little walk across Canada after my beloved Catherine died. I needed to walk; walk out my door and keep walking. She died in a plane crash. I couldn’t make sense of it. I don’t like walking. I walked for 3 months / 2500 km. I took a little G11, because taking a camera is what I do. I made 8,000 images — 99 videos — 30,000 words. These are some of them.
There is no arc to this story. I did not come out of it healed.
I later learned that the grieving often go on walking pilgrimages. Walk. Breathe. Think. Don’t think. Circle. Repeat. Step. By step. Try to change the outcome as you move over unfamiliar terrain. Different and the same. No epic Canadian landscapes here, instead tiny human steps cycling endlessly in an intimate vista.
I looked at the ground, a lot;
I was moving on through, not during the golden hour, not lugging my 4×5 and tripod; I was
alone;
the same every day, every day different as I tried every day to
commute the ending;
like the ground under my feet it changed and stayed the same;
I took a semicolon;
a pause, rather than the full stop.
Collaborating with pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, Bach’s Goldberg Variations became the organizing principle for this work. The musical variation form, and these Variations, in particular, are a solace in grief with their orbital gravitation around a theme. Milan Kundera captures this peregrination of loss in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
“Variations are like a voyage. But that voyage does not lead through the infinitude of the exterior world…The voyage of variations leads into the other infinitude, into the infinite diversity of the interior world hidden in all things….Variation form is the form in which the concentration is brought to its maximum; … to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter. …as if down a shaft leading into the interior of the earth. The voyage into that other infinitude is no less adventurous than the voyage of the epic. It is how the physicist penetrates into the marvelous depths of the atom…
“We know we cannot embrace the universe with its suns and stars. Much more unbearable is to be condemned to lack that other infinitude, that infinitude near at hand, within reach…We all lose in whatever we do, because if it is perfection we are after, we must go to the heart of the matter, and we can never quite reach it. That the external infinity escapes us we accept with equanimity; the guilt over letting the second infinity escape follows us to the grave.… there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved, those … measures and the interior world of their infinitude of possibilities.”
Notes from the Pianist, Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa:
Legend has it Bach composed the Goldberg Variations for a count who, experiencing excruciating pain, commissioned a piece to help him make it through the night. Brahms, who played them obsessively after his mother’s death, is only one of the many people who have turned to this piece when mourning. Approaching this work in tandem with SD Holman’s artistic journey through grief, I learned things I cannot imagine having found on my own.
As pianists learning Bach, we are taught to strive toward maximum independence between individual lines. But this music calls us to attune to the voices as interdependent.
In life, we are taught to seek harmony and avoid discord. In music, and in Bach in particular, dissonance is where all the emotion — the juice — resides. Musical dissonance lets us practice dwelling in the incongruity between how we think things should be, and how they actually are. There are many categories of musical dissonance; Bach’s favorite kind were suspensions, those heartrending clashes when some notes stubbornly refuse to let go, though the rest of the music has moved on to the next chord. There are so many of these in the Goldberg Variations, I stopped hearing them as dissonances in need of resolution. Instead, I listen for the consonances to blossom into the next suite of bittersweet suspensions.
In the Goldbergs, Bach crafts dissonance not only in pitch but also in time. We hear melodies imitated in different voices, like the past echoing into the present. The music is radically polyrhythmic, with incompatible or ambiguous rhythms concurrently unfurling, like different timelines coexisting in the same space. There were many passages I found impossible to learn until I reconceived the musical motives at cross-purposes with the written time signature, much as in grief, our present becomes overlaid with might-have-beens.
I usually work with living composers. Playing Bach, we collaborate with the dead. We spend endless hours trying to figure out what our absent partner might have wanted, gleaning hints from the traces they left, trying to do them justice. It is one of the few ways our culture gives active permission to dialogue with the deceased — but like grieving, it is a process we are expected to keep behind closed doors. The raw, the fractured, the fixated — these we cloister in solitude, emerging only when we can hold it together.
The recording that plays when I am not here was made in a single take, part of a practice in coming to terms with my human failings and the irretrievability of the past. In its flaws and fumbles, witness me learning to live with regret.
SD HOLMAN
Artist Biography:
“My pronoun is art.”
This isn’t metaphor — it is an invocation. Holman’s identity refuses linguistic containment: not he, not she, not they — but art itself, capacious enough to hold transformation, loss, play, erotic charge, and world-making.
For over four decades, SD Holman has moved between and witnessed cultural terrains across Canada, the U.S., and Germany. Born in Hollywood, Holman has been foundational in queer and environmental arts communities. In 2025, King Charles III awarded them the Coronation Medal for significant contributions in arts, culture, and human rights advocacy. Described by curator and scholar Jonathan D. Katz as “visionary,” Holman occupies the edge of visibility, embracing the conceptually rich terrain of the Interbeing, and continues to advocate for artistic dissent in an age defined by ecological collapse and social precarity. Their work is a call to presence in a world precariously losing its capacity to attend.
Holman’s art unfolds in the spaces between: between photograph and ritual, performance and installation, visibility and elision, grief and emergence. They adopt the role of participant observer — a position that Judith Butler theorizes in social participation within the matrix of intelligibility, where gender, identity, and culture are continually produced through relational visibility. Holman enters this matrix to disturb it, to uncover the unseen, to dignify those cultural subjects forced into erasure.
SD Holman’s work champions the Symbiocene, a term as a counterpoint to the Anthropocene, which is the current geological epoch characterized by human impact on the planet. Coined by Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2011, the Symbiocene envisions a future where humanity re-integrates with natural systems, fostering mutualistic relationships rather than exploitation. Holman, a graduate of ECUAD, was awarded the King Charles III (2025) Coronation Medal for significant contributions in arts, culture and human rights advocacy and is a laureate of the YWCA Women of Distinction Award, and Founding Artistic Director Emeritus of the transdisciplinary QAF+SUM gallery.
Holman’s work is collected privately and exhibits internationally, including Wellesley College, Amherst College, CLGA ArQuives (Toronto), the Advocate Gallery (Los Angeles), the Soady-Campbell Gallery (New York), the San Francisco Public Library, On Main Gallery, The Helen Pitt International Gallery, Charles H. Scott, Exposure, Gallery Gachet, SUM gallery, the Roundhouse, Vancouver East Cultural Centre, Artropolis and Fotobase Galleries (Vancouver). Holman’s portrait project BUTCH: Not like the other girls toured North America and is going into its third print edition, published by Caitlin Press. Seven written and produced art books: found here. Art published in printed books: Culture and Education, Wadham, Pudsey & Boyd, (Pearson Education Australia: 2007; 2nd ed. 2009); Femme/Butch: New Considerations of the Way We Want to Go, Gibson & Meem (Routledge: 2002); Fusion (Link publications: 2002); The Mammoth Book of Erotic Photography, Jakubowski & Jaye Lewis (Robinson Publishing: 2001). Studio Q, Holman’s notorious DTES Art Salon in Vancouver’s Chinatown, was featured in Secrets of the City (1st edition).
Holman’s earliest work emerged in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Chinatown — sites of cultural survival, grit, and radical community. Straight out of Emily Carr University, they joined the Vancouver Association for Non-commercial Culture (the NON), positioning themselves early in the artist-led salon and activist milieu.
By 2008, Holman directed Pride in Art and spearheaded the founding of Queer Arts Festival (QAF) — ranked among the world’s top queer arts festivals — and founded SUM Gallery, Canada’s sole 2SLGBTQ+ mandated art space. Their DTES salon, Studio Q, became notorious for mixing art, politics, erotics, performance, and care — in a salon environment where art wasn’t shown, it was enacted.
RACHEL KIYO IWAASA
Musician Biography:
“Keyboard virtuoso and avant-garde muse” (Georgia Straight), Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa is “among Canada’s foremost contemporary music pianists” (Paolo Pietropaolo, CBC Radio). Rachel’s reputation for fearless performative risk has inspired many of Canada’s most notable composers to write for her, including Hildegard Westerkamp, Rodney Sharman, Jocelyn Morlock, Cris Derksen, Nicole Lizée, Farshid Samandari, Emily Doolittle, Jeffrey Ryan, Leslie Uyeda, and Jordan Nobles.
Rachel’s recordings, available from Redshift Records and earsay music, are frequently broadcast on CBC. Rachel’s album Known & Unknown: Solo Piano Works by Rodney Sharman was praised as “exceptional, gripping and timeless.” (Tom Haugen, Take Effect), and listed in the Top 10 Modern Composition Albums of 2024 by The Wire Magazine (UK).
Rachel’s art practice explodes expectations of what is possible at the piano, flowering most powerfully in liminal collisions between artistic genres. Her interdisciplinary adventures include work with visual artists SD Holman, Camille Georgeson-Usher, and Tanya Willard, film director Nettie Wild, playwright David Bloom, choreographers Jennifer Mascall, Idan Cohen and Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, and multi-media provocateur Paul Wong.
With SD Holman, Rachel co-founded the Queer Arts Festival in Vancouver, acknowledged as one the top festivals of its kind in the world. Rachel teaches at the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra School of Music and lives in the sovereign unceded territories of the shíshálh and Squamish Nations.
Rachel’s roots in the Comox Valley go back to 1908, when her grandfather Tadao Iwaasa arrived in Cumberland from Hiroshima, Japan. She is currently working on a transdisciplinary project about madness, suicide and the wartime uprooting of Japanese-Canadians, through the lens of the Iwaasa family history, in collaboration with SD Holman, composer Keiko Devaux and dramaturg/director David Bloom. Portions of this work, 千代 Chiyo: a Thousand Generations, can be viewed at the Cumberland Museum through 2027.
