Twenty-Three Days at Sea, box set of logbooks

Twenty-Three Days at Sea is an unconventional travelling artist residency, produced by Access Gallery in partnership with the Burrard Arts Foundation and the Contemporary Art Gallery, offering selected emergent visual artists passage aboard cargo ships sailing from Vancouver to Shanghai. Crossing the Pacific takes approximately 23 days, during which time the artists are considered “in residence” aboard the vessels. This program offered us the opportunity to ask an important set of questions relevant to our own socio-political coordinates as culture-makers in a major port city on the Pacific Rim: How can art responsibly bring visibility to systems within which we are implicated, but which we neither see clearly nor fully understand? How might this residency draw attention to and query romanticism about the role of the artist as “witness”? What is the role of artist residencies in today’s increasingly peripatetic and globalized art world? What does risk mean in artistic practice today?

Twenty-Three Days at Sea, Chapter Two presents new bodies of work produced by the second group of residency artists in response to their time spent on the open sea. While diverse in their treatment of both media and subject matter, each of these exceptional artists’ practices is marked by a perceptible state of seeking. Their works on exhibition do not directly convey their experiences on the cargo vessels, but rather query the complexity of witnessing, explore the relationship of maritime song to labour, and consider our complicity in the global system of seaborne freight. This exhibition includes the launch of limited edition (hand-sewn, signed) reproductions of the logbooks each artist kept while at sea.

Printed in Vancouver by Precision Graphics

Bound by Richmond Custom Bindery

Boxes printed by Fantastapack