Canada

Cheryl Hoffmann

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Cheryl Hoffmann

Photographer Cheryl Hoffmann had a short stay at Rimbun Dahan in April 2025.

Cheryl Hoffmann is a friend to and of Malaysia. Originally from Canada, she landed in Kuala Lumpur in 2005 and stayed for 15 years. Always a historical geographer at heart, Cheryl photographed traditional performing arts, religious festivals and rituals with a focus on exploring the interwoven belief systems of Southeast Asia. Her work has been shown widely in Malaysia and in Canada, contributing to the awareness and documentation of Malaysia’s rich culture milieu.

Recently, Cheryl returned to Canada to be closer to family, but visits Malaysia often, continuing her involvement in Malaysia’s photography scene. Cheryl’s ongoing project The Liquid Land, with photographer Mark Morris, explores the immensity of tin mining in Malaysia. Iterations of this work have been shown in Kuala Lumpur as part of KL2020 and in Toronto at the Contact Photography Festival. To compliment Mark’s introspective images of the present-day mining landscape, Cheryl has focused on tiny animal money made from tin. For her, these talismans are the storytellers and each has a connection to Malaysia’s path to the present day.

With this project in mind, Cheryl has come to spend a week at Rimbun Dahan. In the peace and tranquility of the garden, Cheryl can contemplate a history of natural resource extraction that is evident in nearby industrial parks and housing developments sitting on former tin mines. She has spent her time exploring different ways of printing images of the tin talismans, using alternative photography processes, that include cyanotypes, anthotypes and transfers.

Cheryl says her role as the artist is to bring things together and see what happens. Sometimes it’s magical! She has brought together her camera, the tin talismans, the sun, the inspiration of shadows, the colours of the plants, different kinds of papers and mingled them into this place and time. The results are themselves a whole new set of stories, as we reflect on these remnants of the past in the present moment.

On Open Day on Sunday 27 April 2025, Cheryl will be set up in the heritage Rumah Uda Manap to show you her work in progress from this week. She will have some materials for you to use if you would like to make your own cyanotype art work.

Jeannette and Michel Lambert

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Visual score by MIchel Lambert

Michel Lambert is an accomplished jazz drummer, composer and visual artist. He is currently working on a series of visual scores, collages and drawings combined with music that will eventually be performed by improvising musicians as well as classical trios. Jeannette Lambert is a jazz vocalist and multi-media artist who uses active dreamwork in her creative process (click here to see one of her works, Dream Haiku). She uses intuitive techniques to write poetry that is then performed by her trio which includes Michel Lambert and her brother, jazz guitarist Reg Schwager. Currently she is studying the idea that dreams, imagination and improvised music all inhabit the same space. They are both based in Montreal, Canada.

During their residency in July, Jeannette and Michel will gather ideas and inspiration from the surroundings and work on compositions and artwork for their upcoming performance later in the month in Toraja, Sulawesi. They are joined in their stay by their two sons who are also highly artistic, both in music and visual art, like their parents. As a family, they love to travel for inspiration and collaboration while dedicating their time to creating art. In previous summers they have attended artist residencies in Paris, Barcelona and Italy.

Jeannette, Michel and Reg have a musical collective called Jazz from Rant and have produced over 50 recordings of jazz and improvised music. Raised in Canada, Jeannette and Reg are from Dutch Indonesian parents and many of Jeannette’s songs reflect this cultural identity. Michel is from Quebec City, descended from a family of many classical musicians and composers and he draws on this background for many of his orchestral works.

For more information on their projects and creative ideas you can visit Jeannette’s website and Michel’s website. Jeannette, Michel and Reg gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

"Walter’s offerings” – Jeannette's photo of the fruit and nuts picked from Rimbun Dahan’s herb garden
“Walter’s offerings” – Jeannette’s photo of the fruit and nuts picked from Rimbun Dahan’s herb garden

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Bruce Pashak and Janet Langdon

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Where Are You From, 3D lenticular, Bruce Pashak

Bruce Pashak is a multidisciplinary unrealist artist who uses imagery, text and technology to create abstracted anti-narratives that both affirm culturally-encoded associations and break free of these limitations. The images become an experience, a slippery personal tour through existentialism where the meaningful is unhinged and the meaningless finds its private value. He creates art forms as playgrounds for the imagination. Pashak calls them, “riddles that you might try to puzzle out but never need to solve”.

A masters graduate of the University of Calgary, Bruce Pashak continues his theoretical inquiries into the construction and dissemination of perception with a studio practice that includes combinations of painting, drawing, sculpture, mixed media and 3D lenticular technology. Pashak has had over 40 group and solo shows throughout Canada, the USA and Europe, including the Toronto Art Fair and most recently the Miami Art Fair, Dec 2015 with Back Gallery Project. He has an upcoming solo show in Nov, 2016 at Back Gallery Project in Vancouver, BC. Pashak was a professor in the Faculties of Fine Arts at three Canadian universities for a culmination of 16 years. His works are in private and corporate collections, including the University of Calgary, University of Lethbridge, Nickle Arts Museum, Vancouver General Hospital and the Art Hotel in Calgary. He is represented by Back Gallery Project in Vancouver, BC, Paul Kuhn Gallery in Calgary, AB, and Buckland Merrifield Gallery in Saint John, NB.

Pashak has recently formed the creative collaboration “PLACE” (Pashak Langdon Affirmative Common Experience) with textile artist Janet Langdon. Langdon studied serigraphy at Langara College and textile design at Capilano College and ran her own furniture upholstery business in Vancouver for 10 years. Her textile background brings the element of pattern design into the art works, aligning itself with the philosophy of the neopatternist theory of connections.

Bruce and Janet will be in residency at Rimbun Dahan from February to end of March 2016. For more information on Bruce’s work, you can visit his website.