Launch Pad is an initiative by the Public Art Program to provide a platform for a diverse range of emerging artists to step into the dynamic field of public art. Artworks are showcased on 5 billboard spaces along the Arbutus Greenway, between Fir Street and Burrard Street on West 6th Avenue. The exhibitions rotate, with each series displayed for approximately 6 weeks.

Solange Adum Abdala (b. 1980) was born in Lima, Peru and is currently based in Vancouver. She is a research-based interdisciplinary artist and photographer whose practice is influenced by her migratory family heritage. This legacy of unrooting and mobility shapes her relationship and understanding of territory as well as her sense of
belonging.

Her practice mainly expands between photography, science, and history. She analyzes how the photographic apparatus and image have been used by dominant narratives as tools of power and indoctrination. Through this medium, she explores the cultural and visual conception of landscape in the Anthropocene, examining the relationship between
nature and spacetime. Solange proposes her work as a process of "de/re/construction," in which technical images are examined, dismantled, and reconfigured to reconstitute imposed beliefs.

In BlowUp on Hasenheiden Park #2, the artist uses a microscope to re-photograph a photo from her own recent archive, tracing silver halides and color couplers on medium format film as a way to extend perception and reimagine the image from within. Both works operate through acts of fragmentation and recomposition, revealing how photography can be both an instrument of authority and also a site for speculation.