Young Joon Kwak and Kim Ye promenade down a small–town sidewalk in flowing pastel robes and lingerie. They feed each other ramen with seductive and messy fervor. They wrestle provocatively, thick makeup smearing down their faces. These vignettes weave in and out of each other, a fractured narrative filmed in 2018 in the idylls of Banff, Canada. The dreamlike three–channel film serves as the backdrop for the artists’ performance…

-The Wattis Institute

Beginning with a screening of Maternal River of No Return, a 3-channel film commissioned by the Walter Phillips Gallery, we embark on a psychodramatic journey into motherhood at The Wattis Institute. Traversing the installations of Diamond Stingily’s Doing the Best I Can and Rosha Yaghmai’s Miraclegrow, the performance takes the audience back through the womb, exploring both the ambivalent and expectant qualities of pregnancy and birth. Responding to Stingily’s and Yaghamai’s installations as part of their built environment, Mama and Baby continue their saga together through The Wattis Institute’s galleries. Via regression and projection, Motherhood moves through time both forwards and backwards, and explodes the oneness of prenatal space into a thousand sparkling splinters.