Sena Cleave is an artist living and working on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, or Vancouver, Canada. Working across text, sculpture, and photographic image-making, Cleave explores the slippage that occurs when ideas and materials travel between cultural sites. They pilfer cultural matter from everyday life and repurpose it to address issues of legibility and hybridity in Japanese Canadian experiences. The found matter (which includes objects, images, and textual passages) become recontextualized among one another and, together, they generate something that resembles a whole — one that is jumbled and misbehaving.

 

Together with artist Debbie Chan, Cleave runs The Couch, a mobile art space inspired by carpenter ants to ‘infest’ art infrastructures and platform emerging artists.