Love Letter
April 29 - May 9, 2026
Works by Solange Adum Abdala, Rosamunde Bordo and Amber Frid-Jimenez. Curated by Ignacio Adriasola.
Springtime. A bee looks for flowers. Waves crash on the ocean. There is fire on the horizon. Someone, somewhere, has received a letter that never ceases to be written.
About the Artists:
Amber Frid-Jimenez works at the intersection of art, culture and technology in installations, video, printmaking, code and artist’s books. Frid-Jimenez is Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she directs the Studio for Extensive Aesthetics. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Queens Museum, New York; the Maison Européenne de la Photographie; Ars Electronica, Linz; and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Solange Adum Abdala is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, whose practice engages with photography, vision, history and nature. Her work has been shown internationally and in Canada as part of solo and group exhibitions. She holds a MFA from the University of British Columbia as well as two BFAs from Centro de la Imagen (Lima, Peru).
Working through the logic of the detective genre, Rosamunde Bordo’s interdisciplinary practice probes narrative, materiality, and the construction of meaning. Her solo exhibition Magic Show will be held at the Western Front gallery from May 2nd to July 25, 2026.
Ignacio Adriasola is Associate Professor of Art History at UBC. He is also a Lacanian analyst in independent practice. He participates in NLS Initiative Toronto, and is a founding member of LOV-The Lacanian Orientation of Vancouver.
Works by Solange Adum Abdala, Rosamunde Bordo and Amber Frid-Jimenez. Curated by Ignacio Adriasola.
Springtime. A bee looks for flowers. Waves crash on the ocean. There is fire on the horizon. Someone, somewhere, has received a letter that never ceases to be written.
About the Artists:
Amber Frid-Jimenez works at the intersection of art, culture and technology in installations, video, printmaking, code and artist’s books. Frid-Jimenez is Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she directs the Studio for Extensive Aesthetics. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Queens Museum, New York; the Maison Européenne de la Photographie; Ars Electronica, Linz; and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Solange Adum Abdala is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, whose practice engages with photography, vision, history and nature. Her work has been shown internationally and in Canada as part of solo and group exhibitions. She holds a MFA from the University of British Columbia as well as two BFAs from Centro de la Imagen (Lima, Peru).
Working through the logic of the detective genre, Rosamunde Bordo’s interdisciplinary practice probes narrative, materiality, and the construction of meaning. Her solo exhibition Magic Show will be held at the Western Front gallery from May 2nd to July 25, 2026.
Ignacio Adriasola is Associate Professor of Art History at UBC. He is also a Lacanian analyst in independent practice. He participates in NLS Initiative Toronto, and is a founding member of LOV-The Lacanian Orientation of Vancouver.
Rosamunde Bordo
On-the-off-chance (after Joan Brossa), 2026. Mixed media (lock, deck of cards).
On-the-off-chance (after Joan Brossa), 2026. Mixed media (lock, deck of cards).
Book Launch
Wednesday, April 29 at 6PM
Nancy Gillespie in conversation with Sanem Guvenc.
Lacan and the Question of Love, edited by Nancy Gillespie (New York: Lacanian Press, 2026).
A set of essays by psychoanalysts, developed around a question: "Is This Love?" This book is the first of a new anthology series presented by Lacanian Compass that collects lectures and writings produced each year around a different clinical theme.
The Editor, Dr Nancy Gillespie is a practicing analyst (A.P.) of the New Lacanian School and the World Association of Psychoanalysis, nominated by the NLS in 2018. She has also been an active member of the Lacanian Compass since its inception in 2017, and from 2010 to 2017 was part of the New York Freud Lacan Analytic Group (NYFLAG) in New York City. As well as being the Editor of Lacan & the Question of Love, she is continuing to work on a series of books for the Lacanian Press. She is also a founding member of LOV, Lacanian Orientation Vancouver.
Dr Sanem Guvenc is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Vancouver, Canada, practicing in English and Turkish. Her analytic formation is within the World Association of Psychoanalysis. She is a participant of the NLS-Initiative Toronto since 2024 and a founding member of LOV - The Lacanian Orientation of Vancouver. Dr. Guvenc is also a Lecturer at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
Lacan and the Question of Love, edited by Nancy Gillespie (New York: Lacanian Press, 2026).
A set of essays by psychoanalysts, developed around a question: "Is This Love?" This book is the first of a new anthology series presented by Lacanian Compass that collects lectures and writings produced each year around a different clinical theme.
The Editor, Dr Nancy Gillespie is a practicing analyst (A.P.) of the New Lacanian School and the World Association of Psychoanalysis, nominated by the NLS in 2018. She has also been an active member of the Lacanian Compass since its inception in 2017, and from 2010 to 2017 was part of the New York Freud Lacan Analytic Group (NYFLAG) in New York City. As well as being the Editor of Lacan & the Question of Love, she is continuing to work on a series of books for the Lacanian Press. She is also a founding member of LOV, Lacanian Orientation Vancouver.
Dr Sanem Guvenc is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Vancouver, Canada, practicing in English and Turkish. Her analytic formation is within the World Association of Psychoanalysis. She is a participant of the NLS-Initiative Toronto since 2024 and a founding member of LOV - The Lacanian Orientation of Vancouver. Dr. Guvenc is also a Lecturer at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
Readings in Love
—Ignacio Adriasola
If any of you knows not the art of loving,
Read this, and reading my poems learn to love.
—Ovid, Ars amatoria
Late spring. A bee sets out looking for pollen. Waves crash on the ocean. There is fire on the horizon. Somewhere, someone has received a letter.
A letter is to be read. One learns to read just like on learns how to swim in the ocean. We only learn by doing. But, like loving, there is nothing obvious about reading. Reading and loving go hand in hand, Laure Naveau notes. To those who know not how to love, Ovid says, “Read this and learn.”
The artists in this exhibition invite viewers to learn to read again. While their works are formally distinct, they share an important trait. Each artists’ material practice condenses a dense conceptual operation. In these works things look like they mean something else. They allude to what is secret, underlying or emergent. They also suggest a point of anxiety: here, there is an absent body; there, an indeterminate sensation. A scene unfolds into an open-ended narrative. Taken together the works invite viewers to contemplate the trace as it leaves its imprint on the surface, and the reading act that circulates the letter.
Taken in an area called Los Órganos, close to the border between Peru and Ecuador, Solange Adum Abdala’s photographs present different views of the sea: the coast, the horizon, the sand, the waves. In excess of their surface reading, each photograph attests to something unfathomable, beyond meaning. The surface of the water conceals something underneath it. There is danger, in a foreboding image that shows a boat aflame on the ocean. The crashing waves dissolve into dotted patterns of refracted light and overblown halides, and saline traces left on the wet sand appear like some sort of antediluvian writing.
That boat that catches fire connects to the history of oil extraction in the area, which having scaled down, dotting the landscape with industrial ruins. Nowadays, extractivism of a different sort leads local businessmen to run illegal whale-watching tours. These illegal boats promise tourists close access to migratory humpback whales, so they can be captured with their cameras. But whale-watching, as an activity, often entails long periods without seeing.
A whale is immense—in true romantic fashion it can only be grasped in pieces. Its body is formed out of fragments. For us humans above water, until its emergence a whale is a punctuation in the ocean, shots of spray, an admixture of air and water, pieces that we have to recompose in our minds into a coherent whole. Like Captain Ahab’s Moby Dick, the whale is the elusive object of desire: an impossibility, perpetual in-satisfaction. In this series, the whale is a stand in-for the origin of the gaze. But in this study, the photographer resists, and instead of pursuing the decisive moment, she yields to not-seeing and not-knowing. In this sense alone, perhaps, Abdala’s project stands as a type of anti-documentary practice. In other regards it develops a document of the body of water that connects Abdala’s movement up and down the coast, which is not unlike that of the migratory pattern of humpback whales traveling from South to North and back again, that she has registered for over a decade.
Laure Naveau, “Exiles in Love: Fragments.” Lacan and the Question of Love, ed. Nancy Gillespie (New York: Lacanian Press): 85-86.
At a meta-photographic register, however, the images remind us of the camera’s capacity to produce different types of signifiers, which always exist in excess of meaning. For where there is smoke, there is a smoker, Lacan wryly used to note. The index here stands alone as a type of un-signifying unit--littoral, at the edge between the water and the shoreline, between meaning and non-meaning. Abdala reminds us of the key distinction between sign and letter. A sign means, whereas a letter is: the letter is the signifier as it hits the surface of the body, which circulates beyond any given signification.
In etched paintings, Amber Frid-Jimenez highlights the electricity of encounter. Layers of pollen and ink accumulate on corrugated cardboard, whose repetitive textural pattern makes one think of the hexagonal structure of honeycomb and likewise, the bee’s hexagonal, mosaic-like visual field. Also, it reminds one of the placement of typeset writing—waiting to be read.
But rather than simply translating “bee vision” in human terms, Frid-Jimenez attempts to present us with a model that captures the moment itself of encounter, when bee meets flower. Instead of a whole, ideal image, the bee seeks out the electrical field of the flower. A flower’s pollen is negatively charged; the bee is positively charged. Together they generate a field of interaction that could be imaged as a type of continuous cylinder. The artist abstracts this interaction, by playing with a readymade diagram. A simple equipotential diagram presents a cross-section that captures the encounter of bee and flower and its ripple effects as a most basic way to calculate attraction.
There is nothing certain about the flight that this tiny, heroic animal makes from hive to target, and at times takes her far beyond the usual five kilometre radius. (Bees are known to fly up to sixteen kilometres if resources are scarce.) In the encounter between flower and bee, multiple variables enter into play. The stochastic element of this encounter is incorporated into the work as variations of intensity. The artist changes the parameters in the operation, by playing with different materials applied on the corrugated surface—pollen, honey, ink—and their interaction with the heat from the laser used for etching, by changing the printer’s speed and power.
The resulting work shows the bee’s encounter with the flower itself—and the work thus gives insight into a program for jouissance built into the bee’s body. But what type of knowledge is this—what does the bee know? “Consider the bee’s flight,” says Lacan, “she goes from flower to flower, she forages. What you have learnt, is that she will carry at the tip of its legs pollen from one flower to another’s pistil. That is what you read in the bee’s flight… But do they read? Does the bee read that she helps the reproduction of phanerogamic plants? … In your analytical discourse, you suppose that the unconscious knows how to read… you also suppose you are capable of teaching it how to read. Except that what you can teach it to read has nothing to do with what you can write about it.”
1 Laure Naveau, “Exiles in Love: Fragments.” Lacan and the Question of Love, ed. Nancy Gillespie (New York: Lacanian Press): 85-86.
2 “Entre centre et absence, entre savoir et jouissance, il y a littoral qui ne vire au littéral qu’à ce que ce virage, vous puissiez le prendre le même à tout instant.” Jacques Lacan, “Lituraterre” in Autres écrits: 16.
3 Jacques Lacan, Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975): 37-38.
4 Laure Naveau, “Exiles in Love”: 89.
5 Laure Naveau, “Exiles in Love”: 93.
6 Pamela King, “A New Take on Love,” in Lacan and the Question of Love: 31.
All the bee needs is pollen; her knowledge of how to fetch it is articulated in the Real. Unlike bees, humans live in language and our knowledge exists beyond the Real. Because of language and its inadequacy we are doomed to misunderstanding. Our correspondence is made out of missed connections—and because of the fact of language, we suffer and enjoy. Lacan defines love as that supplement (suppléance) that covers up the gap between two individual modes of enjoyment that can never truly become one. We can work with this (missed) correspondence as long as we understand its participants to be ultimately singular and thus their interaction fundamentally disjointed.
Rosamunde Bordo alludes to love as alchemical transformation. A glass alembic is a vase holding a mysterious potion. A copper etching presents a laconic figure by the window. There is the tracing of the first word that opens correspondence with a longing appeal—“Dear"—and a lock closed on a deck of cards. The Surrealist gesture is plain to see: love is encounter, at once chance and necessity. But it can also be painful, and there are no guarantees. As Naveau writes, “the courage of the partner in love is linked to the confrontation with the real, to the impasse, to the impossibility that the real entails, and which puts love to the test of its possible failure.”
The glass work with its intricate pipes, goblets and potion ingredients, neatly contains the parameters of Bordo’s work. Elements recur from her ongoing “Denise files” series—based on a mysterious semi-fictional character the artist has crafted out of found belongings. Witness the deck of cards, the allusion to correspondence, and hotels. Bordo presents information as deliveries in piecemeal fashion, in works that coax the viewer into the position of the hardboiled PI sifting across reams of fragmentary evidence while chasing after an elusive whodunnit. Ultimately, the procedure is meant to elicit in the viewer an intuition regarding the limits of what is presented to them, for that visible evidence conceals something that cannot be seen and is much more fundamental: desire, memory, longing, the space that joins and separates people; in sum, what it means to seek what she has called a relationship without images.
Naveau reminds us that for Lacan “courage in love has to do with the contingency of encounter,” one that exposes us to the Real of the non-existent rapport between the sexes. This condition he refers to as a type of exile. “Thus placed in relation to the courage and reality of this exile in love, what Lacan calls the ‘on-the-off-chance’ of the amorous encounter leads to a logical confrontation between these terms, to their knotting. … What is encountered in the affect of love gives the illusion, for a moment, that something ceases, which articulates and inscribes itself in the destiny of each individual.
As Pamela King writes, “We know that with love there is always trouble ahead. In our love stories, things can go awry. Despair, passion and misunderstanding play their part. But the fact remains, with love, everyone is touched in their most intimate self.” In this exhibition each artists suggests a different way of reading love. But there is in common an assumption of longing and the impossibility of satisfaction: a kind of incompletion that points us to the not-all as horizon. Together, these works prompt us to think of what with Lacan we might call a more dignified love—one beyond narcissistic identification, founded on the recognition of what is extimate, exterior yet intimate, in each other.
1 Laure Naveau, “Exiles in Love: Fragments.” Lacan and the Question of Love, ed. Nancy Gillespie (New York: Lacanian Press): 85-86.
2 “Entre centre et absence, entre savoir et jouissance, il y a littoral qui ne vire au littéral qu’à ce que ce virage, vous puissiez le prendre le même à tout instant.” Jacques Lacan, “Lituraterre” in Autres écrits: 16.
3 Jacques Lacan, Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975): 37-38.
4 Laure Naveau, “Exiles in Love”: 89.
5 Laure Naveau, “Exiles in Love”: 93.
6 Pamela King, “A New Take on Love,” in Lacan and the Question of Love: 31.
This exhibition and this essay respond to some of the discussions developed over a yearlong seminar held by Lacanian Compass, New York, and collected in a brief volume titled Lacan and the Question of Love, edited by Nancy Gillespie. This joint exhibition and book launch celebrate the second year of activities of the Lacanian Orientation of Vancouver.
—Ignacio Adriasola
If any of you knows not the art of loving,
Read this, and reading my poems learn to love.
—Ovid, Ars amatoria
Late spring. A bee sets out looking for pollen. Waves crash on the ocean. There is fire on the horizon. Somewhere, someone has received a letter.
A letter is to be read. One learns to read just like on learns how to swim in the ocean. We only learn by doing. But, like loving, there is nothing obvious about reading. Reading and loving go hand in hand, Laure Naveau notes. To those who know not how to love, Ovid says, “Read this and learn.”
The artists in this exhibition invite viewers to learn to read again. While their works are formally distinct, they share an important trait. Each artists’ material practice condenses a dense conceptual operation. In these works things look like they mean something else. They allude to what is secret, underlying or emergent. They also suggest a point of anxiety: here, there is an absent body; there, an indeterminate sensation. A scene unfolds into an open-ended narrative. Taken together the works invite viewers to contemplate the trace as it leaves its imprint on the surface, and the reading act that circulates the letter.
Taken in an area called Los Órganos, close to the border between Peru and Ecuador, Solange Adum Abdala’s photographs present different views of the sea: the coast, the horizon, the sand, the waves. In excess of their surface reading, each photograph attests to something unfathomable, beyond meaning. The surface of the water conceals something underneath it. There is danger, in a foreboding image that shows a boat aflame on the ocean. The crashing waves dissolve into dotted patterns of refracted light and overblown halides, and saline traces left on the wet sand appear like some sort of antediluvian writing.
That boat that catches fire connects to the history of oil extraction in the area, which having scaled down, dotting the landscape with industrial ruins. Nowadays, extractivism of a different sort leads local businessmen to run illegal whale-watching tours. These illegal boats promise tourists close access to migratory humpback whales, so they can be captured with their cameras. But whale-watching, as an activity, often entails long periods without seeing.
A whale is immense—in true romantic fashion it can only be grasped in pieces. Its body is formed out of fragments. For us humans above water, until its emergence a whale is a punctuation in the ocean, shots of spray, an admixture of air and water, pieces that we have to recompose in our minds into a coherent whole. Like Captain Ahab’s Moby Dick, the whale is the elusive object of desire: an impossibility, perpetual in-satisfaction. In this series, the whale is a stand in-for the origin of the gaze. But in this study, the photographer resists, and instead of pursuing the decisive moment, she yields to not-seeing and not-knowing. In this sense alone, perhaps, Abdala’s project stands as a type of anti-documentary practice. In other regards it develops a document of the body of water that connects Abdala’s movement up and down the coast, which is not unlike that of the migratory pattern of humpback whales traveling from South to North and back again, that she has registered for over a decade.
Laure Naveau, “Exiles in Love: Fragments.” Lacan and the Question of Love, ed. Nancy Gillespie (New York: Lacanian Press): 85-86.
At a meta-photographic register, however, the images remind us of the camera’s capacity to produce different types of signifiers, which always exist in excess of meaning. For where there is smoke, there is a smoker, Lacan wryly used to note. The index here stands alone as a type of un-signifying unit--littoral, at the edge between the water and the shoreline, between meaning and non-meaning. Abdala reminds us of the key distinction between sign and letter. A sign means, whereas a letter is: the letter is the signifier as it hits the surface of the body, which circulates beyond any given signification.
In etched paintings, Amber Frid-Jimenez highlights the electricity of encounter. Layers of pollen and ink accumulate on corrugated cardboard, whose repetitive textural pattern makes one think of the hexagonal structure of honeycomb and likewise, the bee’s hexagonal, mosaic-like visual field. Also, it reminds one of the placement of typeset writing—waiting to be read.
But rather than simply translating “bee vision” in human terms, Frid-Jimenez attempts to present us with a model that captures the moment itself of encounter, when bee meets flower. Instead of a whole, ideal image, the bee seeks out the electrical field of the flower. A flower’s pollen is negatively charged; the bee is positively charged. Together they generate a field of interaction that could be imaged as a type of continuous cylinder. The artist abstracts this interaction, by playing with a readymade diagram. A simple equipotential diagram presents a cross-section that captures the encounter of bee and flower and its ripple effects as a most basic way to calculate attraction.
There is nothing certain about the flight that this tiny, heroic animal makes from hive to target, and at times takes her far beyond the usual five kilometre radius. (Bees are known to fly up to sixteen kilometres if resources are scarce.) In the encounter between flower and bee, multiple variables enter into play. The stochastic element of this encounter is incorporated into the work as variations of intensity. The artist changes the parameters in the operation, by playing with different materials applied on the corrugated surface—pollen, honey, ink—and their interaction with the heat from the laser used for etching, by changing the printer’s speed and power.
The resulting work shows the bee’s encounter with the flower itself—and the work thus gives insight into a program for jouissance built into the bee’s body. But what type of knowledge is this—what does the bee know? “Consider the bee’s flight,” says Lacan, “she goes from flower to flower, she forages. What you have learnt, is that she will carry at the tip of its legs pollen from one flower to another’s pistil. That is what you read in the bee’s flight… But do they read? Does the bee read that she helps the reproduction of phanerogamic plants? … In your analytical discourse, you suppose that the unconscious knows how to read… you also suppose you are capable of teaching it how to read. Except that what you can teach it to read has nothing to do with what you can write about it.”
1 Laure Naveau, “Exiles in Love: Fragments.” Lacan and the Question of Love, ed. Nancy Gillespie (New York: Lacanian Press): 85-86.
2 “Entre centre et absence, entre savoir et jouissance, il y a littoral qui ne vire au littéral qu’à ce que ce virage, vous puissiez le prendre le même à tout instant.” Jacques Lacan, “Lituraterre” in Autres écrits: 16.
3 Jacques Lacan, Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975): 37-38.
4 Laure Naveau, “Exiles in Love”: 89.
5 Laure Naveau, “Exiles in Love”: 93.
6 Pamela King, “A New Take on Love,” in Lacan and the Question of Love: 31.
All the bee needs is pollen; her knowledge of how to fetch it is articulated in the Real. Unlike bees, humans live in language and our knowledge exists beyond the Real. Because of language and its inadequacy we are doomed to misunderstanding. Our correspondence is made out of missed connections—and because of the fact of language, we suffer and enjoy. Lacan defines love as that supplement (suppléance) that covers up the gap between two individual modes of enjoyment that can never truly become one. We can work with this (missed) correspondence as long as we understand its participants to be ultimately singular and thus their interaction fundamentally disjointed.
Rosamunde Bordo alludes to love as alchemical transformation. A glass alembic is a vase holding a mysterious potion. A copper etching presents a laconic figure by the window. There is the tracing of the first word that opens correspondence with a longing appeal—“Dear"—and a lock closed on a deck of cards. The Surrealist gesture is plain to see: love is encounter, at once chance and necessity. But it can also be painful, and there are no guarantees. As Naveau writes, “the courage of the partner in love is linked to the confrontation with the real, to the impasse, to the impossibility that the real entails, and which puts love to the test of its possible failure.”
The glass work with its intricate pipes, goblets and potion ingredients, neatly contains the parameters of Bordo’s work. Elements recur from her ongoing “Denise files” series—based on a mysterious semi-fictional character the artist has crafted out of found belongings. Witness the deck of cards, the allusion to correspondence, and hotels. Bordo presents information as deliveries in piecemeal fashion, in works that coax the viewer into the position of the hardboiled PI sifting across reams of fragmentary evidence while chasing after an elusive whodunnit. Ultimately, the procedure is meant to elicit in the viewer an intuition regarding the limits of what is presented to them, for that visible evidence conceals something that cannot be seen and is much more fundamental: desire, memory, longing, the space that joins and separates people; in sum, what it means to seek what she has called a relationship without images.
Naveau reminds us that for Lacan “courage in love has to do with the contingency of encounter,” one that exposes us to the Real of the non-existent rapport between the sexes. This condition he refers to as a type of exile. “Thus placed in relation to the courage and reality of this exile in love, what Lacan calls the ‘on-the-off-chance’ of the amorous encounter leads to a logical confrontation between these terms, to their knotting. … What is encountered in the affect of love gives the illusion, for a moment, that something ceases, which articulates and inscribes itself in the destiny of each individual.
As Pamela King writes, “We know that with love there is always trouble ahead. In our love stories, things can go awry. Despair, passion and misunderstanding play their part. But the fact remains, with love, everyone is touched in their most intimate self.” In this exhibition each artists suggests a different way of reading love. But there is in common an assumption of longing and the impossibility of satisfaction: a kind of incompletion that points us to the not-all as horizon. Together, these works prompt us to think of what with Lacan we might call a more dignified love—one beyond narcissistic identification, founded on the recognition of what is extimate, exterior yet intimate, in each other.
1 Laure Naveau, “Exiles in Love: Fragments.” Lacan and the Question of Love, ed. Nancy Gillespie (New York: Lacanian Press): 85-86.
2 “Entre centre et absence, entre savoir et jouissance, il y a littoral qui ne vire au littéral qu’à ce que ce virage, vous puissiez le prendre le même à tout instant.” Jacques Lacan, “Lituraterre” in Autres écrits: 16.
3 Jacques Lacan, Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975): 37-38.
4 Laure Naveau, “Exiles in Love”: 89.
5 Laure Naveau, “Exiles in Love”: 93.
6 Pamela King, “A New Take on Love,” in Lacan and the Question of Love: 31.
This exhibition and this essay respond to some of the discussions developed over a yearlong seminar held by Lacanian Compass, New York, and collected in a brief volume titled Lacan and the Question of Love, edited by Nancy Gillespie. This joint exhibition and book launch celebrate the second year of activities of the Lacanian Orientation of Vancouver.