By: Maya Barillas Mohan, Staff Writer

Vancouver-based artist Laurie Landry’s exhibition hosts a collection of oil paintings that command attention. Noted on her website, “Her expressive paintings explore themes of identity, embodiment, and non-verbal communication, deeply informed by her lived experience as a Deaf woman raised orally in a society that privileges spoken language.” In an exclusive interview with The Peak, Landry talks about her work in the gallery All the Hands You Cannot See and what it communicates. 

Landry states her central question, “Am I being seen?” and orbits her work around the solution of this query. Large paintings “insist on presence,” while small paintings require “care and attention.” The range of sizes enlists a catalogue of strategies for visibility because “that question doesn’t have a simple answer when you exist in a world that systematically overlooks you.” 

Landry’s tactile painting style encourages viewers to have an “embodied, physical” connection to her work. She wants them to “feel her presence through evidence of her hand, movements, and insistence on taking up space.” The visible brushstrokes demonstrate the “physical gesture of making,” to translate her sensory contact; “in some ways, all three senses are collapsed into one experience.” As a Deaf person, she accesses spoken information visually through lip reading and then translates it to canvas through visible strokes. This tactile information is communicated to the viewer by sight: “What should be heard becomes seen, and what was touched becomes seen.” For Landry, being seen is more than being glanced at; it’s being “truly attended to.” She reports that her work isn’t something to be “passively consumed,” but engaged and reckoned with.

Landry believes that “everyone has a story to share,” and it is worth being heard despite an ableist assumption that it’s not.

So many disabled people ask themselves her central question, “Am I being seen?” She urges minorities to begin making art, even against internal fears. “We have something valuable: perspectives that challenge, complicate, and expand what art can be and who it is for.” 

Landry’s paintings are tethered to her lived experience. “I read lips because I can’t rely on hearing alone. I navigate spaces that weren’t designed for me. I experience being overlooked, ignored, treated as an afterthought. All of that is in the paintings.” There is no filter between Landry and her art but she elaborates that her work is larger than just herself — it’s about demanding visibility for systematically overlooked Deaf and disabled people.

Continuing the largeness of “disability [as] a global experience,” Landry reflects on how interpretations of her work change as it tours Canada, France, and Korea. Her art doesn’t transcend boundaries, but rather “invites conversation across them.” Her central question is a “human question about connection,” not just for disabled people with her specific experience. 

When asked about what she learned about herself or the audience through her exhibition, Landry says that she discovered “curiosity about the world.” She describes this as a “willingness to engage with perspectives different from your own,” which “creates real understanding across all kinds of boundaries.” Through the exhibition her brush strokes proclaim: “I was here. I made this. You cannot overlook me.”

You can visit the exhibition at August Studios, 1320 East Pender Street, until March 8. 

The gallery is open on Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday from 12:00–6:00 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 12:00–8:00 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday.