Candice Okada
Artist
Biography
Candice Okada is a Vancouver-based artist working primarily in photography, ?bres, needlework and installation.
In 2008 she received a BA in Sociology from the University of British Columbia and in 2016 she received a BFA from the University of the Fraser Valley, focusing on both art history and contemporary artistic practices.
She recently completed her MFA in Visual Art at UBC. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and the US and she has participated in artist residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Toronto’s Artscape Gibraltar Point and this fall she participate in a residency at AADK, in Spain.
She was the recipient of the Roloff Beny Scholarship for Photography, a BC Arts Council Scholarship and a Canada Graduate Scholarship.
Artist Statement
I engage in art as a trans-disciplinary research and critical practice significantly informed by my previous studies within sociology and political science.
By employing artistic mediums I am interested in exploring, exposing and questioning the deep and often hidden structures of power and control that dominate the contemporary moment and frame our cultural imagination.
The questions that intrigue me are philosophical, scientific, political and theoretical. From these inquiries comes research and then written work which I undertake before beginning a project. This helps direct my artistic vision and how I creatively approach the material.
Drawing from diverse practices including photography, installation, and primarily, numerous forms of fibres,and needlework, my work attempts to reveal and critique hegemonic apparatuses of power that control and structure our daily lives.
Ultimately, I am working towards an artistic intervention that translate social tensions (be that environmental degradation, global inequality, etc.), into narratives, my artwork exist to create alternative perspectives to acknowledge and address the tension between contemporary politics and poetics, and attempts to understand the contingent relationship between the two.
