Indian Summer Festival returns again in 2024, holding host to a breadth of musical and artistic talent. While many of the most prominent artistic events include various musical acts, the festival also includes the work of returning set designer and artist Kimira Reddy, in collaboration with Boca Del Lupo arts company.

Having previously created Under the Banyan Tree for the 2022 festival – an interactive, naturally-inspired, communal space – Reddy says she’s hoping to capture the same level of emotional magic in her new exhibit, Drift.

“It was amazing to see what happened in [2022]. There were a lot of people who came in and cried in the space. There was lots of laughter. Kids loved it and didn’t want to leave,” says Reddy. “There’s a lot of emotion that came out of it… So I think [emotion] was a very important theme for me.”

From tall trees to driftwood aloft

With Under the Banyan Tree, a central piece of the space was a tree composed of fallen branches, composing her own vision and representation of Banyan trees native to South Asia, and adorning it with ribbons, fabric and colour. Reddy, who was raised in South Africa before coming to Canada, says she aimed to draw on her South Asian cultural roots to inspire a piece that could allow individuals to connect with one another in a newly post-pandemic-lockdown space.

In a way, Reddy says her new installation, Drift, uses similar materials and themes with the goal of developing a space that is meant to be visited and engaged with on both a spatial and emotional level.

“I wanted to create a space to just allow people to come in, take a moment or two, pause, reflect, and just reconnect,” says Reddy.

Drift follows a new journey of some of those same wood-like, natural materials, but with an added emphasis on the them of paradox. Rather than using regular tree branches to construct a tree, the exhibit consists largely of driftwood: once alive, but now dead, material that was once on land, washed up from the sea.

In that way, the exhibit serves as a kind of reflection or extension of Under the Banyan Tree, borrowing natural elements from her home in British Columbia, and putting a greater focus on contrasting opposites.

“I live on the Sunshine Coast so I spend a lot of time on the beach, and there’s something about the color of driftwood and just the history that it holds where I’m always like, ‘Where did you come from?,” says Reddy. “[Driftwood] is a strange material. It’s hard, it’s lifeless, it’s very gray. It almost looks like bones to me… So I wanted to create a piece that brings pieces of driftwood into the space, and create a canopy with Indian fabrics that flow through it to show the contrast between life and death and just to introspect.”

Becoming part of the space

But beyond simply being an artistic exhibit, Reddy says that Drift is also meant to draw people in and immerse them within its spatial elements: audience members see much of the work installed above, enabling viewing of much of the installation from below.

“I wanted… for everyone to come in and look up, and almost feel like they’re underneath the tree that’s been uprooted. And then to experience what new growth in new life is like,” she says.

In keeping with the theme of audience interaction, the fabrics wrapped around the driftwood aren’t meant to be the only sources of life within the installation. For Reddy, the audience members who enter are intended to serve as a key element of the space, themselves bringing a level of life and vigour to the scene.

“I think about the space as well. I kind of feel like the space is more like the driftwood and the people coming in and playing and experiencing and talking and just being there are the threads, and that’s life,” says Reddy. “You are the threads. You are the sound, the music, the ribbons, all the color that you bring into this world.”

Drift will be on display at the Indian Summer Festival from July 6 to July 14 at Ocean Artworks on Granville Island.

For more information about Indian Summer Fest, visit: www.indiansummerfest.ca