A multimedia art exhibit presented alongside the World Premiere of Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project, created by Dafne Blanco-Sarlay

Opening Reception: October 15, 6–8 PM, featuring an artist talk. Co-presented with the Vancouver Latin American Cultural Centre (VLACC) as part of the Latin Expressions Festival. FREE Admission. To complete your experience, consider reserving tickets for the Preview of Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project the same evening at 7:30 PM. Bookings can be made at The Cultch Website.

Artist Statement

My paternal grandmother descended from black slaves who escaped from Cuba to Mexico in the early 1900s. My father was a leftist activist until his death. My maternal grandparents were Jews who fled Europe and settled in Mexico in the 1930s. These diverse origins, plus my experiences as an immigrant in Canada, always inform my work, which I consider a juxtaposition of lived realities through a hybrid female body that embodies that multiplicity of voices.

Being an African-Mexican Jew, committed to social justice, the play Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project, truly speaks to me at many levels and inspires me to create this exhibit called The Alchemist Heart based on the concept of an open heart suffering because of injustice and oppression: an image of a heart open to ongoing, active loving and caring for others.

Ultimately, the heart as an alchemy lab where the transmutation from lead –pain and suffering, into precious matter happens through our active commitment to social justice, despite the personal cost of militancy for so many over the course of history.

About Dafne Blanco-Sarlay

Based in Vancouver, BC since 1996, I am a multidisciplinary artist originally from Mexico. My background is multiethnic, including Eastern European Jewish, Afro-Caribbean and Mexican Indigenous. My artwork is embedded in and informed by many human and geographical landscapes, as well as my experiences as an immigrant to Canada.

My artwork represents the crossroads where cultures converge; juxtaposed realities encompassing history and the here and now. The convergence of many worlds, one artistic emergence.

Interestingly, before I integrated this transcultural identity, in a time when was very interested in the concepts of alchemy, I read in an obscure paperback edition adapted for amateur alchemists that there are many worlds, but all exist within this one. This stirred within me an ancestral and profound evocation that without a doubt, determined the search that is present throughout my artistic practice. To me, the work of the visual artist is in fact just that: to develop the ability to catch glimpses of those other manifestations of reality that coexist, that wander around us, and are waiting to be captured by the artist. In the process of recreating them on the canvas or the ceramic sculpture, time and space intertwine and fuse together.

I use mixed media in most of my artwork: multi-layered surfaces where the incorporation of diverse textures and the exploration of their expressive capacity and tactile qualities, become a metaphor for those juxtaposed realities struggling to emerge into the light.

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The Alchemist Heart Exhibition - Opening Reception

WED, OCT 15 | 6:00PM

Inside The Alchemist Heart - A Guided Tour with artist Dafne Blanco-Sarlay (register now)

SUN, OCT 19 | 6:00PM