Category: Reviews | Page 3 | Femme Art Review

Early Riser: A Perspective on Marclay’s The Clock

The Polygon Gallery

July 5- September 15, 2019

Admission by donation

Christian Marclay The Clock 2010 (high res) 2 — Christian Marclay, *The Clock*, 2010, single-channel video installation, duration: 24 hours, © the artist. Photo © White Cube (Ben Westoby)

By EA Douglas

It is just after 5:30 a.m. as I descend my front steps, the sun is rising but the sky is a cool ceiling of gray. I am on my way to The Polygon Gallery’s inaugural overnight viewing of The Clock by Christian Marclay.

I first learned of this piece reading Sarah Thornton’s 33 Artists In 3 Acts in the bathtub back in 2017 when as a form of self-care, I took to submerging myself in hot water as well as the contemporary art world. The Clock is essentially a twenty-four-hour film montage about time. It’s composed of thousands of clips taken from years of T.V. and movies and is synced to the local time of where it is playing. As each minute of the film progresses, the audience watches the people on the screen check their clocks in one continuous loop. Although I’m not a cinema buff, an audio-visual collage of this size is fascinating to me. Seemingly, others feel the same way too, as The Clock has been well received in the art world, being described as “one of the first masterpieces of the 21st Century,”^[1] Unfortunately, in this age of online streaming, there are only 6 copies of the film available for viewing. Fortunately for me, the National Gallery of Canada and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts acquired a copy in 2011 and it is playing at The Polygon Gallery all summer long.

As I enter the glass underbelly of the building on North Vancouver’s waterfront, the employee behind the desk throws up his hands and welcomes, “Go on up!” There are a few pieces of trampled popcorn on the stairs from the previous evening’s art party. I am not one for the crowds that go along with show openings, especially now that social media has made viewing art so trendy. Although you’re not allowed to take pictures or record while watching the film, you can still scroll #theclock. Since the viewing is going all night, I am skirting the masses by getting up early on a Saturday morning. It has paid off, as I get into the exhibition-space-turned-cinema there are only a handful of others lounging on the low IKEA couches.

Christian Marclay The Clock 2010 (high res) 6 — Christian Marclay, *The Clock*, 2010, single-channel video installation, duration: 24 hours, © the artist. Photo © White Cube (Ben Westoby)

Quietly settling in, the atmosphere feels akin to that of an airport waiting area, but on the screen above me, Kirsten Dunst awakes in a field. The time is now 6:06 a.m. and the film portrays an early morning. The scenes flicker by, actors I do and do not recognize open their eyes, pull up the blinds, put on their slippers and their robes. Some lay awake through ominous ticking, the familiar wide eye of those who long for sleep. In most shots, I can pick out a clock or a watch, either on the wall, the desk, an arm— it becomes a game of eye-spy for the recurring object linking everything together. But at times it is more subtle, the golden glow of early dawn illuminates the aftermath of a wild night, with characters clearly out of sync of the circadian rhythm. As the minutes pile on, I am amused by the abundance of travel alarm clocks, as in my life they’ve been replaced by cellphones, although cells themselves, do not make much of an appearance.

I also begin to notice the women in these scenes; the roles they play and the patterns that emerge. There are those who are awoken in some dramatic way and those who sleep on, completely unaware that they were being watched. Or, the ones who can’t sleep, but instead stare blankly into the air above them as a man in their arms snoozes on oblivious. There are the women who jump up suddenly, leaving a man coiled in sheets, or the women who enter rooms peacefully, to wake a man or small children.

In all circumstances, there are similarities in how women are represented. Perfectly coiffed hair, with not a bang out of place. Dressed in sateen, satin and lace nightgowns, with the floral detailed embroidery or wide flowing sleeves. Their necks, wrists, and ears adorned in jewelry, finely-manicured fingers rocking rings of significant size. Even the ugly sleepers, the women in curlers snoring loudly, are spotless. There is no drool, no rheum (the technical term for eye gunk). It is a picture-perfect depiction.

Christian Marclay The Clock 2010 (high res) 4 — Christian Marclay, *The Clock*, 2010, single-channel video installation, duration: 24 hours, © the artist. Photo © White Cube (Ben Westoby)

Then there are the women in the background, the domestic workers, the servants. They are the ones cooking, cleaning, or making beds. These women are not characters, they are only props in other people’s stories. This feeling is best summarized in one quick scene of a business-type fellow passed out in a bar’s booth, the viewer sees the body of a headless cleaning lady, her chunky, ergonomic shoes behind the vacuum, an apron protecting her dress, as she moves into frame. Even as she collects the dirty glass from his hand, there’s no glimpse of her face.

These portrayals of women are not unexpected, but they leave me downhearted. Looking past the stereotypes and unrealistic beauty standards, there is a severe lack of the LGBTQ+ community, a shortage of people of colour, an absence in the scenes to make them look like real life. Here’s what’s described as one of the first masterpieces the 21st Century and I don’t see myself in it, but Sir Michael Caine is there thrice.

The completist in me wants to see the whole thing before I form an opinion, wants to judge based on the entirety of the work. Due to the nature of this piece that’s impossible, even when I am distracted by the person waking up on the couch directly in front of me—they were there the whole time, asleep out of my sightline —I miss part of the action. While the representation does feel insufficient in the single hour of The Clock that I see, I must also acknowledge the limitations of the materials Marclay is working with. It’s only quite recently that there has been a push for more diverse characters on our TV sets and in our movie theatres.

Christian Marclay The Clock 2010 (high res) 3 — Christian Marclay, *The Clock*, 2010, single-channel video installation, duration: 24 hours, © the artist. Photo © White Cube (Ben Westoby)

Letting go of my awareness, I am pleasantly surprised to notice myself becoming immersed in the work. I realize I am introducing a narrative overtop of the scenes. As I watch, the protagonist and antagonist metamorphize. Their faces age and change shape, their bodies evolve through gender, clothing, posture. It continues as the clips switch from colour to black and white, English to foreign language. The ability to do this, to make me construct an inner storyline, is the art of the piece. It allows me to forget any physical manifestation of character and see only human interactions. This must be chalked up to Marclay’s editing, which he focused on for the majority of the three years it took to make this film, hiring out the video watching to assistants. Prior to the viewing, when I considered a montage of film clips I expected something similar to a Vine compilation video, however, this is so not the case. It is thoroughly enjoyable to watch and not a moment of what I see is choppy. The flow is subtle but astounding.

As 7 a.m. rolls around, the audience is cajoled by a chorus of coo-coo clocks and I feel ready to restart my day. For the rest of the morning, I am hyper-aware of the time. As I observe someone wearing a watch on the bus home, I think to myself with a laugh that The Clock may not be this summer’s biggest blockbuster, but it is still a marvel to behold.

^[1] Luke, Ben. The Art Newspaper Podcast: “Van Gogh in the Asylum. Plus Christian Marclay on The Clock.” Produced by Julia Michalska, David Clack and Aimee Dawson. Aired September 13, 2018, 48 min. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/podcast/van-gogh-in-the-asylum-plus-christian-marclay-on-the-clock

Miss Meatface: Kat Toronto at The Untitled Space

July 2-13, 2019

The Untitled Space

By Chloe Hyman

Starting Tuesday, July 2^nd, The Untitled Space in New York City will present a solo exhibition of interdisciplinary work by the artist Kat Toronto, a.k.a. Miss Meatface. The exhibition, curated by Indira Cesarine and named for the artist’s pseudonym, highlights the performance-based photography that Toronto is known for, as well as video and ceramic work and a limited edition of zines. On opening night, the artist signed zines and gave a talk about her practice.

Kat-Toronto-Miss-Meatface-Working_From_Bed-The-Untitled-Space copy 2 — Kat Toronto. *Working From Bed.* Courtesy of The Untitled Space.

Toronto chose her pseudonym as a way to process her hysterectomy, a traumatic procedure that alienated the artist from her body. The persona of Miss Meatface provided Toronto an outlet to explore her sexuality beyond what is typically expected of those who have ovaries. “I found myself stopping to think… about what the heck gender really was,” the artist recalls, “and why society historically placed so much emphasis on sculpting gender stereotypes.”

In her self-portraiture, Toronto stages erotic scenes that play with dominance and submission—games of power that mirror heterosexual power hierarchies—but her sexually ambiguous figures subvert societal standards of beauty, gender, and power. Their skin is replaced by latex which also serves to obscure their genitalia. Dressing in fetish-wear is a joyous process for Toronto, as it frees her from the restraints set on her physical body by a society obsessed with defining and policing gender.

Kat-Toronto-Miss-Meatface-ForniphiliaThe-Untitled-Space copy — Kat Toronto. *Forniphilia.* 2016. digital photograph. Courtesy of The Untitled Space.

Historically there has been a tension between liberation and objectification when it comes to fetish in art and cinema. Forniphilia bears semblance to the work of Allen Jones, who was also involved with the artistic design of ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ However, Toronto’s identity as a female artist, and her emotional relationship with the persona Miss Meatface, lend her work both agency and depth. There is a raw truthfulness to her photographs that Jones’s Barbie-proportioned fem-bots lack. It radiates from her pink flesh inked with tattoos, and from the realism of her tableaus. Though Toronto visualizes herself in Forniphilia as a submissive sexual object, she remains deeply human, and therefore claims pleasure for herself.

“I found myself stopping to think… about what the heck gender really was,” the artist recalls, “and why society historically placed so much emphasis on sculpting gender stereotypes.”

Central to the realism of the artist’s work is the accoutrement of each domestic space. In Forniphilia, a wall yellowed by an invisible light source, a hard-wood floor, and vintage furniture, paint a simple, albeit dated, interior. A beige lampshade transforms Toronto into a standing lamp, and she assumes the connotations of the room she is in, reading as a willing participant in a sexual game of dominance and submission.

In other photographs, Toronto constructs more overtly retro tableaus, but her utilization of natural lighting maintains their authenticity. These shots, with their unbalanced streams of light, recall old family photographs rather than slick Hollywood sets. In No Time for Tears, a bedside lamp shines so brightly its own form is nearly abstracted—a beacon of blindingly white light. In Parlour, the source of light comes from a window that is almost overexposed by the angle of the sun.

Kat-Toronto-Miss-Meatface-No_Time-_For_Tears-The-Untitled-Space copy — Kat Toronto. *No Time for Tears.* 2016. Digital photograph. Courtesy of The Untitled Space.

The settings of these works also have a lived-in quality that renders them deeply intimate. Toronto has decorated each space in a manner that recalls a specific time period, but never attempts to achieve Hollywood set design levels of polish. In No Time for Tears, a floral sheet peeks out from the corner of the frame, gently clashing with Miss Meatface’s cheetah-print dressing grown and the burnt-orange walls of her bedroom. Several tissues dot a green doily on her bedside table—an ironic detail given that her nose is obscured by a centimeter of latex. And finally, the strange landscape hanging above her bed follows the room’s color scheme almost too closely, adhering to a 1970s decorative trend that today would be considered tacky.

These elements minimize the work’s artificiality, and as a result, No Time For Tears never registers as a staged scene. Instead, Miss Meatface looks right at home smoking her cigarette on the bed. She is a person engaged in a sexual game rather than an artist’s model posed to elicit shock or titillation. Her agency and comfort enforce the work’s eroticism without subjecting Miss Meatface to voyeurism. Instead, the viewer is privy to a private moment in which Toronto is entirely in charge of her own pleasure.

Kat Toronto. Parlour. 2016. Digital photograph. Courtesy of the Untitled Space.

The quality of tackiness that is present in Miss Meatface’s room décor and choice of dress is emblematic of a recurring theme in Toronto’s work—kitsch. The term ‘kitsch’ has historically been employed by the cultural elite as a foil for good taste. Twentieth-century avant-garde artists believed nostalgia and materialism were the greatest obstacles to their utopian goals, and designated any object they deemed sentimental or excessive, ‘kitsch.’ Politically motivated by the perceived need to eliminate kitsch mentality from society, male cultural critics adopted femaleness as a rhetorical device to demonize kitsch objects and champion avant-garde art. This practice led to the debasement of female artists/craftspeople and the women who collected their work.

Despite—and perhaps because of—the history of kitsch, Toronto loves the term. “I don’t happen to think of kitsch as being a dirty word,” she said. “I think it should be celebrated and revered.” She goes on to exalt the kitschy objects she admires, from “doilies, granny squares, and novelty teapots” to “vinyl furniture covers and crochet toilet roll covers.” There is an abundance of such objects in Parlour, which features an array of lace doilies draped over a crimson sofa and a number of whimsical figurines perched on a round table. The inclusion of such kitsch details lends Toronto’s photographs a sense of intimacy that communicates the artist’s comfort in these scenes.

In embracing kitsch, Toronto is part of a generation of artists—often women and/or LGBTQ+ —who are reclaiming a style once used to debase their identities. It’s hard to ignore the gendered history of the term when consuming the artist’s sexually-charged images. After all, she situates submissive figures within historical domestic spaces, which naturally suggests a link between sexual submission and gender hierarchies in the twentieth century. Considering this history is an element of experiencing Toronto’s work, but the artist’s assertion of her agency—communicated through her intimate tableaus—takes center stage.

Kat Toronto aka — Kat Toronto. *Meatmaid.* Courtesy of The Untitled Space.

The history of kitsch is also the history of porcelain, a material that has been connoted with both masculinity and femininity throughout history. Because it signaled wealth, power, and intellect, porcelain was gendered masculine in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries in Western Europe. Sensing the material’s political significance, French court women amassed their own collections, thus refashioning themselves as connoisseurs of court taste and key players in the trade. However, following the French Revolution, the material came to be associated with the materialistic whims of Marie Antoinette and thus fell out of fashion. It’s not surprising that nineteenth-century critics castigated porcelain as feminine, excessive and materialistic, as this rhetoric drew upon existing cultural norms that tied immorality and femininity.

This pattern repeated itself at the turn-of-the-century when many female artists crafted whimsical figurines and charming tableware from porcelain and other cheap substitutes. The masculine cultural elite regarded such goods with disdain, as their predecessors had in the courts of Britain and France.

Given the gendered history of porcelain, it is notable that Toronto has superimposed her photographs onto a number of ceramic plates. Meatmaid Plate is decorated with dainty pink flowers that encircle a photograph of Miss Meatface and her leashed latex pet. The work toys with dominance/submission and masculinity/femininity— themes that are common in Toronto’s practice—but it gains deeper significance by representing such themes on the surface of one of the most gendered materials in history. Sexuality, like porcelain, is marked by a history of power hierarchies that depend on a binary understanding of gender. By fusing the two, Toronto references the past in order to shed light on the present.

In addition to photographic and ceramic work, Miss Meatface will feature a limited-edition zine produced and signed by Toronto. The zine, entitled Prurient Apparitions, is printed on silk 170 paper and is sold within a hand-sewn slipcover. Asked about her motivation for incorporating zines into her practice, the artist cites her childhood exposure to the format. “As a child of the 90s zines were a huge part of my high school experience,” Toronto explains. “They were an amazingly cheap and effective way of getting the word out about subjects and interests that were important to us and helped to share information in a pre-internet world.” Although the internet has simplified methods of communication, fine art remains an elusive realm to many and collecting is not financially viable to all. Zines enable more people to collect Toronto’s work, and the portable format of the zine allows the artist’s work to travel with her new collectors and be seen by infinitely more curious viewers.

Prurient Apparitions is emblematic of Toronto’s other work, as it fuses vintage and fetish iconography on a single plane. But what makes this zine particularly intriguing is the seamless blend of contemporary fetish and Victorian iconography within its twenty-four pages. While anachronistic juxtaposition is at the heart of Toronto’s ceramic work, Prurient Apparitions succeeds in its unexpected harmony.

The page Tip Toe situates a polaroid shot of black latex bondage heels within an oval frame. The old-fashioned layout resembles an old scrapbook, with its burgeoning white flowers and the delicately-rendered garden scene peeking out from the top-left corner of the photograph. And yet, the contrast between the shiny black shoes and the frilly femininity of the flowers does not register as dichotomous. Perhaps this is because the artist senses the eroticism lurking beneath the flora in Victorian visual culture.

Toronto describes the Victorian Period as the epitome of sexual repression and rigid gender roles—and the plethora of Victorian pornography confirms this point. “It only seemed appropriate to place my images within Victorian album pages,” the artist says. “When you are flipping through the pages of the zine it feels like you are taking a naughty peek back into a secret Victorian photo album.”

She explains how the repressive atmosphere of the period can be felt in certain Victorian motifs, notably, the orchid. Toronto quotes John Ruskin, the lauded Victorian art critic, to elucidate the significance of the white flower. Ruskin, she says, frequently voiced his disdain for orchids due to their cultural eroticization. The presence of the white flower, therefore, imbues the pages of Prurient Apparitions with a strong sexual charge. Toronto goes on to say that the orchid is a metaphor for her own sexuality, which she feels is instinctive and deeply erotic but often fetishized and objectified by society. The artist and the orchid are similarly stigmatized due to their eroticism, which explains why Toronto’s fetishistic imagery blends so easily into the pages of a Victorian book.

Miss Meatface opens Tuesday, July 2 at The Untitled Space. Please note that the gallery will be closed for the holidays July 3-7, and will re-open on July 8. Miss Meatface will then be on view through the 13th.

Nevertheless, We Persist: She Persists by Heist Gallery

May 11th–June 10th 2019

Palazzo Benzon, San Marco 3927 – 30124 Venezia

She Persists’ by Heist Gallery 15 — *She Persists*, exhibition installation. 2019. Courtesy of Heist Gallery.

By Adi Berardini

As I walk up the stairs of the Palazzo Benzon, I am greeted with two large poster works by the Guerilla Girls, the anonymous, feminist art group famous for their furry gorilla masks. Known for using humour as a form of activism, one reads:

“The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist

Working without the pressure of success

Not having to be in shows with men

Having an escape from the art world with your 4 free-lance jobs

Knowing your career might pick up when you’re eighty…”

Sadly, many women artists can relate to this work. I can’t help but wonder if it’s the improvement that the Guerilla Girls hoped for when they first convened in the 1980s. Although there may be more gallery representation of women artists, there still isn’t equal representation (especially for LGBTQ2+ artists and artists of colour). Additionally, many pioneering women artists are just seeing the recognition they rightly deserve now. She Persists, curated by HEIST gallery founder Mashael Al Rushaid and art historian Sona Datta, is an exhibition with an intersectional approach to feminism. Twenty women artists from all over the world are featured, highlighting how western feminism is far from universal. The exhibition has a strong roster of feminist art legends and contemporary talent, addressing everything from displacement and diaspora to motherhood and the environment.

She Persists’ by Heist Gallery 18 — *She Persists*, exhibition installation. 2019. Courtesy of Heist Gallery.

The walls are painted a blood-red and chandeliers hang like crystal stars of the decorated ceiling of the Palazzo. Upon entering, a sculpture by the notable feminist artist Lynda Benglis lies on the floor on a platform. The growing metallic object constructed by spray foam cast in aluminum is similar to a blanket of silver vines. Benglis often involves the body in its relation to the environment when it comes to creating her art, creating poured sculptures from latex, wax, metal, and foam. Yasue Maetake’s, Urethane Flower on Steel Stem Clad with Foam also has an industrial sensibility melding with the organic. Maetake’s work has a sci-fi element that anthropomorphizes a gigantic sunflower and a white horse’s hoof into an unconventional nude. This futuristic, morphed object appears to have a raised fist like it’s about to give a sucker punch. Depictions of female nudes are often depicted as passive in classical paintings, but Maetake’s sculpture has a sense of agency and power. Maetake addresses the Anthropocene and the overtaking of nature by humans, commenting on the obsession of altering the natural.

She Persists’ by Heist Gallery 12 — *She Persists*, exhibition installation. 2019. Courtesy of Heist Gallery.

In a room focusing on art and motherhood featured prominently is a tall sculpture Stack 8 (Viridian) by Annie Morris, a stack of turquoise, cobalt blue, crimson, and olive-green spheres, similar to gigantic, saturated pompoms. Although the sculpture seems playful like an enlarged craft, it is ultimately serious in nature, like scientific cells joining together through a microscope. The sculpture echoes the narrative happening now of the autonomy of women’s bodies but also addresses the societal stigma around discussing lost pregnancies, miscarriages, and abortions when they are something that significantly affects women’s lives. The sculpture has a sense of wonder with a close and cutting relationship to loss.

She Persists’ by Heist Gallery 4 — Annie Morris, Stack 8 (Viridian). She Persists, exhibition installation. 2019. Courtesy of Heist Gallery.

Displayed on the far wall of the room are selected lavender prints by Judy Chicago, as part of Birth Project 1980-1985, that feature childbirth in an abstracted and almost psychedelic way. The series was initiated since Chicago could not recall any depictions of childbirth in Western art. The project is a collaborative one, since Chicago worked with 150 textile artists, through the mail, and in person, to create variations with different needlework for the designs. Undertaking this project gave her a glimpse of the realities of many women artists within the domestic sphere. Chicago also changed her name to reflect her birthplace rather than her last name, an action releasing her from the patriarchal confines of an inherited family name that is ultimately determined by the father’s side.

Parallel to the room, Souvenir by Anna Boggon uses dozens of collected dolls from Mexico, touristic treasures collected specifically for this work. Dozens of figurines hang upside-down from the ceiling, sparse apart and traditionally dressed. However, once you glance down on the mirror placed on the vitrine, the dolls appear right-side up, reminding us how there are multiple ways to approach seeing and experiencing art and culture. Timely, the work is respondent to the blind hate that is directed towards Mexico in the Trump “fake news” era. Boggon captures the enthrallment of travel which can alter misconceptions held out of ignorance.

She Persists’ by Heist Gallery 16 — Anna Boggon, *Souvenir. She Persists*, exhibition installation. 2019. Courtesy of Heist Gallery.

Walking through the wondrous space, I pass through a room with projected Islamic patterns, an engulfing swirl of lace-like shadows. The installation, Shimmering Mirage, by Anila Quayyum Agha addresses the exclusion from her worship as a Muslim woman, often confined to worshipping at home. Intrigued by the detailed tiling of the exterior mosque, the installation highlights how when she moved to America, there was the opposite effect—she was included as a woman but felt excluded from aspects of American society due to being Muslim. This room creates a sense of wonder since what is tightly confined and detailed becomes elaborate and all-encompassing. Capturing the endless integration of multiple identities due to diaspora, once you get to know someone, their dreams and ideas start to spill over, uncontained. Once you genuinely connect with someone you can see them for their intricate details instead of the labels that society places on people through prejudiced stereotyping.

She Persists’ by Heist Gallery 10 — Anila Quayyum Agha, *Shimmering Mirage*. She Persists exhibition installation. 2019. Courtesy of Heist Gallery.

The exhibition also critically addresses the exoticization of women and the trope of the “submissive” nude within the framework of the East and West. Lalla Essaydi’s Les femmes du Maroc Odalisque (2008) critically addresses Grande Odalisque by Ingres, a painting that depicts a Turkish Odalisque sensually reclined back. Famous for adding in a few vertebrae too many, this historic artwork quite literally unrealistically depicts women. Essaydi uses a photograph with the same composition as the painting and adds Arabic calligraphy using henna, reclaiming and restoring agency within the image. Essaydi is not only critiquing the sexualization of these nudes but also how they were exoticized and viewed as consumable through the art historical male gaze.

She Persists’ by Heist Gallery 2 — Hamra Abbas, Paradise Bath. She Persists exhibition installation. 2019. Courtesy of Heist Gallery.

In Hamra Abbas’s Paradise Bath (2009), displayed as eight large photographs, there’s an uncomfortable politics at play since a woman of colour is explicitly seen serving a nude white woman. Further, the women being catered to is viewed as sexual and carefree, even at times with a smirk on her face as the women worker is working away scrubbing diligently. The washing in the Ottoman bathhouse holds symbolic importance in Islam as regaining purity. These images are unsettling, but it causes one to reflect on how often these politics of exploitation play out in reality. The photos display objectification of women on multiple levels: it deliberately points out the ignorance and self-indulgence of the oppressor who benefits from the labour of women of colour and also critiques women as objects with one main benefit—sex. Critically addressing race and violence, if these images were to return to Abbas’s home country, they would have to be destroyed since they are considered pornographic.

She Persists’ by Heist Gallery 19 — *Indecision IV (2018), She Persists*, exhibition installation. 2019. Courtesy of Heist Gallery.

Notably, the exhibition includes the film Indecision IV (2018) directed by Tonia Arapovic starring Rose McGowan, the well-known actress and figure in the Hollywood Me Too movement. In her immersive performance, McGowan responds to ambient sounds in a former Welsh Chapel, paired up with contemporary dancer, James Mulford. The black and blue light casting shadows, McGowan stares vividly with black eyes in a suspenseful and haunting way. She responds with rigid movements to his sounds and dancing, as Mulford grunts and taps, shifting around her. The accompanying acoustics sound like tides rolling in on a beach. The performance is largely inspired by the painting The Allegory of Indecision by artist Maria Kreyn, a painting depicting three dogs leaping up towards a blue heron over a fallen figure. After Mulford’s performance, he lies down silently and McGowan acts in control—she finally can sit down at ease and sing out. The film captures McGowan’s chaotic time while coming forward in the context of the resurgence of Me Too (originally started by activist Tarana Burke) and comments on the resiliency it takes to heal.

Overall, the strength of She Persists is its multiplicity and focus on intersectional feminism. When feminism does not address viewpoints from multiple identities, it cannot achieve what it’s for—equality and space for everyone. With representation from around the globe, She Persists addresses how women of colour are excluded from the art historical canon as a result of Eurocentric patriarchy. The artists in the exhibition possess an unapologetic, feminist approach to their art, challenging the viewer to reconsider their perspectives on topics such as motherhood, the environment, gender, and diaspora. Both women and LGBTQ2+ individuals have been silenced, erased, and spoken over for too long—it’s time to do better. Even though it’s a difficult battle, nevertheless we persist.

Enchantment by Greg Ito at Arsenal Contemporary

January 26-March 30, 2019

Greg Ito, *Enchantment* *installation shot*, 2019. Courtesy of Arsenal Contemporary Toronto.

By Adi Berardini

At the opening reception of Enchantment by Greg Ito, I met a woman who was very intrigued to discover what the symbolism in the show meant. As a result, she wanted to find the artist and have him explain it to her. Courteously, he did and explained to her not only the general symbolism but also how the neon lights and the tinted glass windows worked. He went into detail about how the warm and cool colours correspond within the paintings. There’s a sense of theatricality behind the exhibition—once you entered you could tell that you’d see photos splattered on social media of people posed beside the life-sized neon candles or beside the gigantic frog. But what’s underneath? Surely something so seemingly strong is inspired.

This woman disclosed to me afterward that although it was kind of him to explain, somehow having the exhibition explained to her ruined the mystery of it all. Ito’s paintings are technically amazing, so crisp that they first appear like silkscreened prints rather than acrylic paintings. However, the magic that elevated the show is its surreal quality and the wonderment within it. The exhibition engages in the emotionality of his family history, Ito’s grandparents falling in love despite being imprisoned in an Arizona internment camp. The symbols used in the paintings such as a rabbit, a spider, and snake, could symbolize rebirth and resiliency, addressing love as a powerful force of spiritual rebirth after significant trauma. The following is a text that I wrote as a response to the show in a Toronto cafe.

Within a warm bog, an oily frog leaps

mushrooms grow on the peripheral.

A romance ignites, the lovers’ hands reaching out for each other.

If you wander deeply enough, witness the neon flames

Fire growing from tragedy, candle wax trapped in time and space

The lovers met entrapped;

the cell gave way to a new life.

Still together, their hands joined

since the night is long without one another.

Without hope, life becomes a perpetual spiral.

Black and white swim with cerulean, teal, rose and blood-red

The blood the colour of the hourglass tipping

acting as a thread.

Whatever time they had they spent it together

The snake with two heads is the memories haunting them

slipping and sliding unexpectedly

they can never prepare for when it arrives.

They gaze at themselves through a magnified keyhole

sailing on a ship across the Pacific

What does it mean when from great suffering, love grows?

Could there be anything more poetic,

than two lives binding after the panic?

Is there anything more powerful

than love emerging from darkness, a white rabbit running

Productive Discomfort at Xpace Cultural Centre

By Rebecca Casalino

Xpace_Productive Discomfort_003 — Productive Discomfort, 2019. Installation view, works by Jessica Watkin, Anne Ruccetto, Susan Blight, and James Yeboah in view. Photo credit: Polina Teif

March 1-30, 2019

Anne Rucchetto, Kaythi, Seiji, Susan Blight, Jessica Watkin,

Heidi Cho, and James Yeboah

Curated by Lauren Cullen

As part of Myseum Intersections Festival: Revisionist Toronto.

Women’s craft and labour is a topic explored in feminist circles, yet we do not see it often directly reflected in the mediums of contemporary artists’ practices. I myself am guilty of this, citing women’s labour in my own work, and comparing the repeated actions in my practice to sewing or knitting. Walking into Xpace and seeing Productive Discomfort for the first time I was happily surprised by bright colours and political discourse. This was not the women’s craft I had grown up learning.

Xpace_Productive Discomfort_004 — Susan Blight, An Unwelcome Mat for these Times, Niwiiji Anishinaabeg, 2019. Photo credit: Polina Teif

One of the carpets that caught my eye hung from the west wall and had long trails of pink and red yarn streaming down from a rectangle emblazoned with an Anishinaabemowin phrase. The artist, Susan Blight, lifts the rug from the floor indicating to the viewer they are not easily welcomed by the artist. This challenge presented by Blight is delivered with an object filled with labour and embroidered with a language foreign to a settler audience. The anger surrounding Canada’s relationship to the Indigenous communities is felt in Toronto with protests supporting Wet’suwet’en land defenders gaining momentum and residents choosing to call the city Tkaronto, a Mohawk word meaning “where there are trees in the water”. Land acknowledgments have become the standard at gatherings to keep the history of colonial violence in our minds. This infusion of Indigenous politics into the urban settler mainstream discussion is long overdue. In my own primary and secondary education, the history of Turtle Island’s Indigenous peoples was a hasty stereotypical sketch of a complex culture the invading settlers refused to acknowledge. It was only in university, through my own course selection, I began to learn about the rich art historical canon of the Aboriginal, Metis and Inuit peoples. As settlers, we must pressure our institutions to engage with Indigenous voices so we can honour the flourishing communities on the land they cared for long before settlers landed here. Blight’s refusal to lay down her welcome mat reads as a message to myself and fellow settlers that our presence is still not welcome, and our support is too little and too late.

Xpace_Productive Discomfort_010 — Kaythi, Our Lady of Profound Failure, 2019. Photo Credit: Polina Teif

Our Lady of Profound Failure created by Kaythi was another rug that drew my attention. It’s deep red subject popped against the blue background. The rug had oranges and greens, woven as a kind of collage, dancing around the edges making the composition playful and fun. Visitors are encouraged to kneel on the rug; this made me giggle, thinking about kneeling in connection to prayer and oral sex. The rug pops with its bright colours and DYKES ONLY is written in bold black across a bent figure. The red distorted figure bends with its back arching along the top of the rug. This work claims space by welcoming an exclusive social group. Spaces reserved for ‘dykes’ are rare and usually very fluid, for example, The Beaver, a gay bar/café. I don’t consider myself a dyke, but I feel the word hooked into a rug allows queers like myself to be in on the joke.

Xpace_Productive Discomfort_009 — Kaythi, Our Lady of Profound Failure, 2019. Photo Credit: Polina Teif

What interests me most about this exhibition is the dedication to labour and the dissemination of knowledge. For the exhibition, Lauren Cullen taught the artists how to make hooked rugs, a craft she has been practicing for nine years. This passing of knowledge without the platform of a classroom or the internet is labourious and intimate, creating an immediate community. I attended Cullen’s event at Xpace to learn how to make hooked rugs and happily sat at a table with a graphic design student, an architect, a jeweller, and a comedian. Cullen stood in front of the video projecting artists in the show making their rugs. Each of us peeked up at the video from time to time to compare our tiny squares to their work. Cullen came around to each table spending time with attendee’s offering them tea and cheezies. The room was filled with light conversation as everyone concentrated on their tiny rugs. Materials were spread across a table complete with leggings, shirts, yarn, and pre-sliced striped of cloth. At the end of the session, we were all hesitant to leave and crowded around Cullen to individually thank her for such a lovely day of bonding and making. Cullen’s practice seems to revolve around these kinds of exchanges and community building as she discussed with one of the participants her passion for “unlearning”. Artists from the show were also in attendance and sat at the tables with participants happy to talk about their experiences learning with Cullen for the show. Cullen created a learning environment of balance and calm.

Cullen uses “the social practice and conventions of rug hooking as a tool for critical education, grounded in anti-racist, anti-colonial and feminist queer crip frameworks” to replace traditional institutional and academic methods of teaching. In creating these ‘unwelcome’ mats Cullen leads artists Rucchetto, Kaythi, Seiji, Blight, Watkin, Cho, and Yeboah in their rug hooking practices to convey their own political narratives surrounding craft, textile works, and labour. Productive Discomfort engages with a myriad of political topics allowing each artist to harness textiles to hook their point of view. My relationship with textiles has never been so complex and politically engaging. As a child, I sat with my Nonna on the couch watching her crochet blankets and listening to stories about her younger more nimble fingers embroidering sheets, handkerchiefs, and pillowcases for her wedding chest. Cullen uses feminist theory and rug hooking to identify, “a significant site of matrilineage: a site of material culture gaining legitimacy through an inter-generational practice of passing down rugs and skills between women.” This summarizes my experience with textiles and shapes textile art in a feminist light allowing myself and other contemporary artists to engage with rug hooking on a new level. Productive Discomfort brings the conversation around textile arts into the conversation surrounding community, marginalized narratives, and women’s labour.

Dana Buzzee: The Coven on Her Back

Punishment Rituals

LEFT Contemporary March 1-May 4, 2019

By Lucas Cabral

I walk in and I get a little excited. This excitement has been growing with every image the artist and LEFT Contemporary have posted of works and installation progress leading up to the opening. The imagery and energy are something I’ve been looking for (and missing) since I moved from my Toronto-adjacent hometown whose proximity to Toronto’s queer density granted me easy access to bondage and fetish communities and their meeting spaces. Is this excitement the effect of the spell cast by Buzzee’s work? Or is it evidence of my newfound curse?

Why not both?

The constellation of works making up Punishment Rituals forms a warm entanglement of community and queerdos spanning generations and geographies. Buzzee has inducted viewers, makers, participants, and their predecessors, materializing them in studded leather collars and cuffs, a wide-cast web woven of leather and chain, and prints retelling possible engagements of these or similar sculptural works, all of which in this space cast a circle around an a-frame and knot of nylon rope.

005_PunishmentRituals_DanaBuzzee_LEFTContemporary — *Punishment Rituals,* installation view. Dana Buzzee. 2019. Size varies. Courtesy of the artist and LEFT Contemporary.

Hand-pulled images of rope and leather-bound performers on newsprint reference and resurrect community-based erotica like that found in publications like On Our Backs, the first women-run erotica magazine that featured lesbian erotica for a lesbian audience. Images are captured when Buzzee opens calls for community members to perform freely with the leather works she makes. Groups, pairs, and strangers, bond over a shared bondage experience. Buzzee captures these moments of liberation, exploration, and connection, offering the images as a part of an incantation. Like with the previously mentioned On Our Backs publication, Buzzee continues a legacy of by-and-for community erotica. An exhibition poster with exhibition text by Taylor Harder has a likeness modeled after On Our Backs and chronicles the development of and differences between British and North American traditions, making note of the ways that intimacy is an activator during initiation.

Punishment Rituals, installation view. Dana Buzzee. 2019. Size varies. Courtesy of the artist and LEFT Contemporary.

The exhibition reclaims the formula of ritual witchcraft initiation ceremonies, making space for homoeroticism which is rejected by British traditions (heavily informed by the legalization of witchcraft preceding the legalization of homosexuality in Britain), and taking up traditional initiation elements like blindfolds, nudity, bondage, and whipping not adopted by North American traditions.[1] In Punishment Rituals, artwork takes the spot of coven members who typically circle the initiator and postulant during the ceremony. These stand-ins are embedded with the energy of those who have been a part of their making. Buzzee engages community members who are also artists, writers, printmakers, leatherworkers, arts administrators and peers in their production. With the intention of initiation being “spiritual rebirth into new identities and new communities,” Buzzee sets the stage for those possibilities to be impacted by queer-femme homoeroticism.

001_PunishmentRituals_DanaBuzzee_LEFTContemporary — *Punishment Rituals,* installation view. Dana Buzzee. 2019. 9′ by 9′. Courtesy of the artist and LEFT Contemporary.

The show, the space, and it’s making reflect the collective queer mobilization that’s taken up out of necessity to meet the needs of one’s community that aren’t satisfied or even acknowledged by the heteronormative structures that dominate our spaces. As we pay more attention to the disappearance and lack of queer spaces especially for femmes (even in bigger cities), it is important to celebrate the perseverance of those who dedicate their time and energy into producing space and opportunity for their community to gather and engage. In connecting community members with the knowledge, perseverance, and legacy of those before to produce the various elements of the show, Punishment Rituals penetrates communities past and present and binds them together through webs of leather, chain, intimacy, and possibility, creating an opportunity to find community and affirmation, and to reflect on the ongoing task of collective queer organizing and reclaiming.

[1] Harder, Taylor, Art Thou Willing to Suffer to Learn: An Analysis of Witchcraft Initiation Rituals, 2019.

Carbon Study: Walking in the Dark by Genevieve Robertson

Access Gallery – January 12 to February 23, 2019

By Caitlin Almond

Access_Robertson_carbon_study-1 — Genevieve Robertson, *Carbon Study Installation,* 2019. Photo by Rachel Topham Photography.

Carbon Study: Walking in the Dark is the result of Genevieve Robertson’s recent residency at the artist-run centre Access Gallery, curated by Access’s director and curator, Katie Belcher. Carbon Study: Walking in the Dark invites the viewer to enter Robertson’s captivating microcosm of monochromatic drawings of organic forms delicately oscillating between figuration and abstraction. The exhibition is a continuation of Genevieve Robertson’s current drawing practice, which taxonomically explores ephemeral materiality and organic forms of carboniferous flora and fauna, as a means to interrogate British Columbia’s exploitative landscape economy. In Access Gallery’s small space, Robertson deftly navigates the challenges of creating politically charged works without sacrificing any aesthetic sensibility.

Gr Access 2 — Genevieve Robertson, *Carbon Study Detail,* 2019. Photo by Caitlin Almond.

Access_Robertson_carbon_study-5 — Genevieve Robertson, *Carbon Study Installation,* 2019. Photo by Rachel Topham Photography.

The curation of the space very effectively guides the viewer through the gallery space. Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is directed to the right of the gallery where the three large focal works are situated, a large drawing of a horizontal leaf fragmented onto four pieces of paper, a grid composed of several smaller bituminous abstract drawings, and a large amorphous drawing of a lichen. The viewer is then slowly guided out of the space by six smaller works unified by scale and composition which are comfortably spaced throughout the rest of the gallery.

Access_Robertson_carbon_study-4 — Genevieve Robertson, *Carbon Study Installation,* 2019. Photo by Rachel Topham Photography.

The drawings, have a distinctly monochromatic palette of white, black and gray, appearing simultaneously crisp and soft on the ever so slightly warped and unframed white paper, asserting the ephemeral materiality of the medium itself. Robertson’s large-scale drawings on paper are made with coal, charcoal, and graphite – foraged by the artist herself during walks through British Columbia’s fire-ravaged landscape (a process which informed the title of this exhibition). This use of carbon-based materials in Robertson’s work is a provocative effort by the artist to create an elemental sense of life through inherently decayed materials, teasing the viewer with a simultaneous experience of both construction and destruction.

Although, Robertson’s works are self-contained, marketable objects, they share a commonality with earthworks and land art in that they are conceived and created as “Fully engaged elements of their respective environments that asserted new conditions, […] They were (among other things) expressions of a dialectic in nature – the opposing forces of creation and destruction.” (Beardsley 1). While the simplistic figure-ground relationship employed in all the drawings, does initially serve the artist and curators intention for the works to read as taxonomic botanical drawings – it very quickly becomes repetitious and overly contrived in the gallery’s small space. This serial repetition of the minimalistic figure-ground relationship causes the work to appear less like a taxonomic study and more like a predictable sampling of slides from a Rorschach inkblot test. The strength of Robertson’s work in Carbon Study: Walking in the Dark rests in the materiality and physicality of her handmade pigments. The crystalline texture of her foraged graphite glimmers on the paper’s surface, creating a startling texture to her drawings which disrupts the viewer’s expectation of the medium itself.

Works Cited

Beardsley, John. “Traditional Aspects of New Land Art.” Art Journal, vol. 42, no. 3, 1982, pp. 226–232. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/776583.

Sorry, I’m Busy: The Meticulous Art of Capricorns

Support Project Space

December 22 – January 19th, 2019

51251539_302907963697536_1885132111959031808_n — *Sorry, I’m Busy,* 2019. Installation shot courtesy of Support.

By Adi Berardini

If you’re a Capricorn, chances are we’re compatible—both Earth signs, something about our qualities match up well. As a Virgo, I am analytical, practical, and dare I say, I have an unruly habit of worrying about everything and working non-stop. Perhaps we get along well based on our shared anxieties.

Sorry, I’m Busy is an exhibition of Capricorn artists that looks at the relationship between artistic connections and work ethic. Curated by Tegan Moore and Liza Eurich, they shared the challenge of curating a show so seemingly random since the main commonality is based on the time of year the artists were born. However, the string that ties the work together is the shared qualities that Capricorns are said to possess—ambition, practicality, wisdom, and pessimism, to name a few. There are also a few recurring themes such as the use of fruit as a subject matter, humour, memory, and the imagery of a page turning. The exhibition seems paired down since it consists of smaller works, but its strength lies within the context of the work and how it demonstrates the artists’ personalities as distinctly Capricorn.

*Sorry, I’m Busy,* 2019. Installation shot courtesy of Support.

Pessimism and Humour

The collage work Flip Off (2018) by Maryse Larivière is comprised of two main elements—a middle finger and a lovebird against a millennial pink background. It could be interpreted that the work is giving the middle finger to a catcaller, or perhaps the patriarchy itself. Perhaps, the middle finger is towards the unrealistic expectations put on women altogether. Further on, haphazardly placed at the top of the stairwell, Water for America (2018) by Anna Madelska consists of a white fur patch and a crumpled poster. Madelska references the distribution of wheat-pasted posters used for political propaganda or advertising. This piece is quite cheeky as well since the cliffscape poster appears to look like two legs spreading—the placement alludes to looking up a skirt. She is also flipping off someone in a metaphorical way.

The sculptural work KFC by Kotama Bouabane displays this sense of Capricorn humour—the sculpture reads as a pile of materials stacked on the tile floor. The neon reflection on the black and white materials evokes a piece of technology with its streamlined rectangles; I immediately read it as an Ipad. However, at a second glance (and perhaps by reading the name KFC), one can infer that there’s a plaster cast piece of deep-fried chicken sitting on top. What appears to be a lime green painted piece of wood is, in fact, a stack of napkins.

*Polvos*, Susanna Browne,2017-2018. Installation shot courtesy of Support.

Need for Control

A quality distinct to Capricorns, so I am told, is a need for control in long-term relationships. In the inkjet print from the series Polvos, Susanna Browne uses the imagery of a chameleon on a horseshoe from a label on a Mexican love potion that gives you the power to control your man. Sounds pretty useful in all honesty. I propose that another Capricorn quality is resourcefulness.

Control also is conveyed by the second work by Kotama Bouabane, with Stereo Quality Photo Finishers. 1989. Hong Kong (2018), the print of a fruit still-life pinned to the wall with a jet-black chopstick. At the bottom, the illusion of the flipped page reads “Kodak.” I read this piece as re-establishing representation when it comes to the typically euro-centric painting trope of a fruit bowl. This particular fruit bowl image originated from a book produced in Hong Kong. Reflecting on the means of production, Bouabane is interested in the production of the paper used for printing. He explained that he visited different paper manufacturers in Japan and Germany: the Japanese factory was more traditional, whereas the German factory was driven by man-made machinery. The idea of copying and circulating imagery and the importance of cultural context as it relates to reproduction is explored.

Wisdom

The Capricorn is said to be the wise sign of the zodiac. This wisdom is demonstrated through the sound work by Niloufar Salimi, how she remembers it (2018). Both poetic and wise, this haunting work transformed the space. In the audio Salimi explains an early memory described to her of a grandmother singing to calm a two-month-old baby’s crying. On the small shuffle iPod, a voice singing a lullaby in Farsi travels through the listener’s eardrums. The lack of accuracy and subjectiveness of memory is addressed since later on, the story that was explained to her was denied by the same person. The painting hung on the door by Kim Neudorf also addresses the theme of memory—the neutral, earth-tone colours bleed together alluding to a figure. The sensibility that it’s painted in seems like a foggy memory itself, like trying to recognize someone from a dream without being able to pinpoint them.

Additionally, the piece by Shane Krepakevich seems to look towards a higher power for wisdom— the print The Book of Sand, p. 19, 022 (2018) addresses space and philosophy, the name referencing a short story by Jorge Luis Borges about the protagonist getting lost in a seemingly infinite “Holy Writ” book and attempting to escape impending infinity. The work parallels the similarities between light, space and the beating of the blood in one’s arteries. Whether or not you believe in astrology, it’s nice to think of constellations like threads binding us together by our shared qualities.

The loneliness factor (2016), a film by Aryen Hoekstra, also draws a parallel to space and the extra-terrestrial. The black galaxy background is like an ink void spilling endlessly, the planets are blips of light shining through. Suddenly, a metal oscillating calendar appears in the corner resembling a spinning globe. The hypnotizing video reflects on post-war space exploration that attempts to search for the unknown, trying to determine if there’s potential for more life out there. Analyzing the positioning of the globe in correlation to the rest of the galaxy, it projects what life could be like in the future when there are only remnants of humankind. Even on a planet of over seven billion, we’re still surrounded by the vastness of it all.

Parallel to the video in the basement, Loadout (2018) by Jonathan Onyschuk has a curious texture and materiality. The work consists of a table formed of thin aluminium that appears to be made of painted crumpled paper. Formed from WW1 barbed-wire and named after a shooter game, it references a similar post-war theme to Hoekstra’s film. Placed on the table, two melted silicone spines lie inside a styrofoam pit. It seems to allude to the collective trauma of war and violence embedded in identity, although the reception of this piece showed that its meaning got a bit muddled. Sometimes you have to embrace the unknown.

*Maquette for Unrealized Monument,* Trevor Mahovsky, 2013. Installation shot courtesy of Support.

Meticulousness

The Capricorn is known for being meticulous, which is portrayed in the work Maquette for Unrealized Monument by Trevor Mahovsky. The work is a maquette for a brushed-bronze apple with a detail-oriented rendering of a bee resting on top. The sculpture has an environmental undertone, creating elevated importance towards bees as pollinators. Whenever I see a bee, I associate how their hard work as pollinators is diminished; their population dwindling. Like the bee, the Capricorn is also hard-working. The attention to detail in the bee at this minuscule scale displays their meticulous effort—always down to the last detail.

I believe in horoscopes since, at least for me so far, they have yet to be proven wrong. Sure, maybe I just see the truth in what I want to believe, or they are obscurely written, or maybe I refuse to live in a universe that is completely random. A dice game will demonstrate that there is some predictability behind probability. After all, there must be similarities between us somehow. It’s poetic and comforting to think that we’re more alike than different based on a common factor. The beauty of Sorry, I’m Busy is uniting through art to celebrate Capricorns and their distinct qualities. This is wonderful because if they are anything like their fellow Earth sign, the Virgo, they’ll forget to celebrate their accomplishments, too busy looking towards their next goal.

Refrain / Reframe: I Learned I Had A Body by Vivek Shraya

By Maeve Hanna

Saag_00018 — Vivek Shraya, *I Learned I had a Body,* 2018. Installation photo by Jaime Vedres Photography courtesy of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.

Trigger Warning: This text reviews work by the artist, writer and musician Vivek Shraya which deals with suicidal ideation.

Please god, don’t let me wake up.

A repeated refrain, spoken over and over, awakening in the viewer anew the realization of what it feels like to have no hope.

Can the desire to die be inherited?

One among many, or few, seldom questioned, tumbling out of mouths, written, spoken, voiced. A different kind of intergenerational trauma.

It’s just a number / it’s just a body / it’s just a life.

Is life only relatable to a number, as if it is a giant paint by number, one colour per year, fading away from one hue to the next?

These are some of the refrains that echo through Vivek Shraya’s hauntingly powerful video work I Want to Kill Myself. No shying away from the topic at hand —suicide: no shame; no hiding. Shraya unabashedly opens herself wide like an oyster pried free of its shell and allows us to sit with her and her emotions. It might be uncomfortable. We may squirm and wriggle. We may want to escape but her arresting voice, her gaze, holds us steady. The red lines of her tattoos draw circles around us, keeping us still in our place.

Saag_00016 — Vivek Shraya, *I Want to Kill Myself,* 2018. Installation photo by Jaime Vedres Photography courtesy of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.

Her words slice through the air with a force that is both brutal and tender in its tenor. The ferociousness of her words reaches the depth of our spirits as we sit humble and vulnerable with her, listening to the darkness she has faced—although a delicateness is evoked. Swimming through the imagery and verse, tying the two together as the text and images converse and the viewer passively eavesdrops on this conversation, the viewer becomes an intimately connected third member.

I Learned I had a Body is the body, but more than the body, it is the alienation from one’s body in a society regimented by heteronormative and patriarchal systems. Shraya, being a trans woman, has learned, as one of the lines from I Want to Kill Myself, suggests “… I had a body through your condemnation of my body,” understanding the body and, in particular, her body through various relational means.

Referencing a relationship to the sacred, the familial, and other relationships that emerge in life, Shraya battled with her own acceptance of her identity and body as well as how others saw her, looked at her, gazed upon her. With the video/photo essay I Want to Kill Myself, The viewer is placed in a realm of watching, gazing passively and absorbing her visage and the armature of her being while simultaneously hearing the haunting experience of suicidal ideation and deep depression. More people than one might realize relate to this work. However, Shraya revealed in an interview how touched viewers have been by it, “The work was launched on my birthday last year by CBC Arts and it had a tremendous response from the public. It was really powerful for me. What was surprising though were the comments from people I knew. It was a strong reminder to be conscious that what we see is not always the truth and that these are important conversations to have.”

Recitation like resuscitation from walking into the lake, the great lakes, (maybe it could be): Walking into water, like the great great lakes, a recitation similar to the resuscitation of the authorly tradition, as Shraya suggests recalling Virginia Woolf’s last moment on this earthly plane. But at the age of thirty-five, her resolve seems to change, her vision shifts. The red lines loosen their grip, the letters she writes, those lines of words drawn out in tendrils unwind themselves and drop off the page as if they never existed. The story ends at the age of thirty-five. But not with the taking of a life —but the resolve to live a life.

I wanted to kill myself at thirty-five.

Shraya says again, but this is the last. In the finitude of this remaining stanza, the writer names how she came to this finishing moment. Like Virginia, but not. She names out loud, speaks the words clearly, vocalizing it to those who love her the most, allowing her to get the level of care she so desperately needed. I Want to Kill Myself names her pain. In so doing, Shraya releases some of the hold and power her pain held over her. Equally, in so doing as she states, kept her alive. In saying she no longer wanted to be here, naming this deep, guttural form of pain, Shraya aided herself in living, remaining, finding love and hope where there had been none.

Shraya wrote her suicide notes in red, the colour that adorns her skin, the colour of our life force coursing through our bodies.

We wear our scars proudly.

We bear witness to her pain and triumph in being present with this piece.

This work takes a kind of courage not many individuals possess.

Red on red, words on words.

Red on red dress.

Saag_00011 — Vivek Shraya, *Trisha,* 2018. Installation photo by Jaime Vedres Photography courtesy of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.

Equally moving is Trisha the accompanying photo essay in I Learned I Had a Body. Here Shraya recreates photos of her mother by presenting herself as her mother. She speaks in her text to the overwhelming desire to escape her own body, that which literally resembles her father’s, and to make her mother, the matriarch of the family happy and proud. She suspects that her mother always wanted a girl but prayed for two boys to give them a better life, one without the suffering, ridicule, pain and disadvantages that come with being a woman. In Trisha the artist reveals another instance where the body comes into play – adorning herself playfully in all the accoutrements from the chosen photographs, Shraya masterfully mimics the original image, creating a mirroring effect both literally and metaphorically, revealing how she “…modelled [herself] – my gestures, my futures, how I love and rage – all after you,” her mother. She revels in the joy that her mother had felt as a woman prior to her immigration to Canada and becoming a mother and wife and muses about how she can live that out on her mother’s behalf now as a trans woman. Perhaps one of the most stunning images in the series is a photograph of Shraya and beside it, her mother, lying supine on a reclining chair mirrored within the image as if seen through a kaleidoscope. Repeated upon itself it’s a joyful revelation in celebrating womanhood. Dazzling in red, enjoying the sunshine, Shraya and her mother arrestingly hold the audience’s gaze.

Reading I’m Afraid of Men in tandem with this exhibition brings the theme of the body throughout Shraya’s work into clearer focus. Throughout her latest book, Shraya highlights the ways that her body validated and also betrayed her and her identity. In one instance Shraya observes how she studied men in order to portray herself as more masculine:

Consumption is a key to masculinity. … I lift weights, all the while reprimanding my body for not conforming, for never quite looking buff or white enough. What would my body look like if I didn’t want affection from gay men and protection from straight men? What would my body look and feel like if I didn’t have to mould it into both a shield and an ornament? How do I love a body that was never fully my own? (31).

While the book focuses on the fear of the male sex, this instance where the body emerges refocuses how internalized our vision understanding of our bodies can become. Shraya reveals in this excerpt how displeased she is with her body, how she feels about accepting it in all its realities. What becomes compelling is the observation of how Shraya comes to accept what she has seen as flaws within herself and finds courage therein. Writing this review as a queer white woman, I am at a disadvantage of deeply understanding the trauma this instance, among others she recounts, inflicted on Shraya. However, bearing witness to and acknowledging her story by being present and allowing this work to take the space it needs within me and the gallery space provides a platform for this necessary dialogue.

Saag_00013 — Vivek Shraya, *Trisha,* 2018. Installation photo by Jaime Vedres Photography courtesy of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.

The compelling presence of words in this exhibition is not to be overlooked. I admitted to Shraya that I knew her primarily as a writer, while she sees herself first and foremost as a musician. Language and narrative present themselves as the foremost forms of expression for her. This is not to say the work requires the accompanying narratives, but more so that the work is activated by it, that through language Shraya is able to build a visual and auditory experience for the viewer.

Shraya offers a forum and platform for having critical yet tender conversations, for providing a space to be vulnerable, to be uncomfortable, yet acknowledge it, to push ourselves a little, to attempt to understand the limits of hope and despair, love and unconditional kindness. It is an offering to those who have struggled, who have attempted or contemplated suicide, who have been down that dark road. It demonstrates that even in the darkness, there is a light. And as a friend has said to me, it is when you hit the ocean floor that you are able to push yourself back up to the surface. Shraya’s hand is there as an offering to help you step out of those icy waters.

Anticipating the Avant-Garde: Hilma af Klint’s Prescient Aesthetics

By Lauren Fournier

HilmaAfKint_image1 — Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen; Installation view; Serpentine Gallery, London (3 March – 15 May 2016); Image © Jerry Hardman-Jones

It was the spring of 2016 when I first saw Hilma af Klint’s work, sumptuously hung throughout the space of the Serpentine Galleries in London, nestled in the corner of the bustling Hyde Park. I was particularly lonely that day, walking through the streets of London alone, near the beginning of my 3-month research trip. Hyde Park was filled with smiling groups of families and friends, lovers, congregating in circles and sharing picnics and stories, drinking wine. When I reached the Serpentine Galleries, the aim of my pilgrimage that day, I walked through the glass doors to the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Painting Unseen. Melancholic and sweaty, I suddenly found myself enveloped by the works on the walls, forgetting about my body for a few sweet seconds.

As I walked quietly through the exhibition, I bared witness to the body of Klint’s work: her work was spiritually otherworldly and startling contemporary in its feel. There was a sensuousness to it—mesmerizing, aesthetic—and a palpable intellectual presence that was at the same time extra-rational and metaphysical. How could an artist so gorgeously integrate these concerns and make tensive forms that are so visually compelling? I took in Klint’s mid-sized canvases—richly coloured and saturated with symbolism—and then the giant canvases, on which Klint’s mystical abstraction and shapes were on full display. The hanging of Klint’s work in the space of the Serpentine galleries felt like a temple, meditative and warm. That these paintings had been created by Klint in a prophetic act—made for the temple she had been receiving visions of in her mind—made the experience all the richer, especially for an intellectually curious, spiritually hungry feminist art researcher wrestling with how to reconcile their own Evangelical upbringing with their ecumenical-dreaming present.

fullsizeoutput_14f0 — Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen; Installation view; Serpentine Gallery, London (3 March – 15 May 2016); Image © Jerry Hardman-Jones

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a Swedish-born artist working in painting in the latter part of the nineteenth century through to the turn of the twentieth century. I’m still baffled by how, throughout my studies in art history and feminist art history, I had never learned about Klint’s work. In Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic Art History (MIT, 2004), Amelia Jones writes through the figure of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, making the case that not only ought the Baroness be recognized as a Dada artist in her own right—one who has been, and continues to be, violently suppressed in histories of modern art and the avant-garde—but that the Baroness could be said to be more Dada than the male Dada artists who are recognized (such as Duchamp, Man Ray, and Tristan Tzara). Paradoxically, it was the Baroness embodying the purported tenets of Dada—blurring art and life, playing with the limits of legibility and intelligibility—that concretized her status as abject, shunned from the elevated spheres of artist or thinker. This was in contrast, Jones notes, to the male Dada artists who maintained their “otherwise bourgeois lives” when they weren’t making art. While different contexts and practices, Klint’s work, both as an individual and in her collaborations with De Fem—a 5-person collective of Klint’s female artist/mystic contemporaries— prompted me to reflect on the ways in which experimental artists whose gender identities lie outside of the cis-male standard make innovative work that might not be recognized as such until decades, maybe even centuries, after the fact: and that the work of BIPOC, feminist, and queer art historians is essential to unearthing the suppressed practices of artists like Klint or the Baroness.

fullsizeoutput_14f3 — Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen; Installation view; Serpentine Gallery, London (3 March – 15 May 2016); Image © Jerry Hardman-Jones

Currently, Klint’s work is receiving a new surge of critical attention, perhaps as the result of her current exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future at the Guggenheim in New York City (2018-19). Browsing through articles on Klint’s work—many of which describe her as “pioneering” in her contributions to the development of abstraction and modernist avant-garde practices (“pioneering:” a word I’m starting to bristle at a bit, with its colonial connotations)— prompted me to revisit the text I wrote in response to seeing Klint’s work in Painting Unseen at the Serpentine Galleries. During that trip to London, generously funded by SSHRC, I had set myself the task of writing a short, stream of consciousness response to each exhibition I went to. I didn’t want to write exhibition reviews, exactly–I didn’t think I’d have the intellectual energy, since the focus of this trip was developing my doctoral research on the histories and practices of feminist autotheory—but I wanted to record, in a more open-ended, ephemeral way, all of the work that I saw. The day prior, I had written a response to Electronic Superhighway at Whitechapel Gallery, a group exhibition I found more troubling than anything and the response to which I had provisionally titled “men’s use of women’s screams needs context” [my shorthand critique of American artist Ryan Trecartin’s installation: for someone with complex PTSD—who is particularly sensitive to sound—the work felt unnecessarily triggering.] I was so hungry for context through which to understand works like his, why they were being displayed in 2016 and what the work was intended to do.

fullsizeoutput_14ee — Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen; Installation view; Serpentine Gallery, London (3 March – 15 May 2016); Image © Jerry Hardman-Jones

Coincidentally or not, I’d later learn that one of the many practices that Klint engaged in, both on her own and when meeting with the De Fem collective, was automatic writing and drawing. Automatic writing and drawing are embodied acts of a stream of consciousness responsiveness attuned both to the present context and to one’s phenomenological response as an artist, thinker, feeler in a given space and time. As an avant-garde practice, it would later become associated with the male Surrealist artists, though with Klint’s 2016 and 2018 exhibitions we’re pushed to acknowledge the feminist histories of such a practice. Now, I share with you my response to Klint’s Paintings Unseen, which I wrote as I sat in front of her works. I spent a few hours in the gallery, sharing space with the paintings and letting them wash over me, trying my best to tune out the sounds of children jumping up on the bench and shouting. I decided to try and incorporate such “distractions”— part of the context of viewing, no?—into my response, instead of resisting what was going on around me and inside me that day.

When I left the gallery, I felt spiritually nourished. I was still lonely, walking through the streets of London, visiting places that my parents have never had the resources to visit, ruminating on ideas that can feel so privileged, so at odds with my uneducated working-class roots or my born-again upbringing. I wondered whether other people felt as lonely as me, clustered and laughing together in pubs, and then I started to feel Klint’s presence—like a strange spiritual ally. I could hold the impressions of her work as I walked along, reflecting on her images and on my own complicated relationships to femininity and spiritual life. I was energized by the possibilities of a feminist ecumenical practice of abstraction, and my burgeoning revelation that abstraction could be accessible.

That evening, I’d go to sleep dreaming of peach spirals, blue backgrounds, and so many weird eggs in the night.

something like prophecy

new cosmologies of 1908
theosophy and darwin
slit and cross
spiral and triangle
it’s all in there this
dark ecumenicism

two figures raise arms
to a chalice in the sky
from which they drink:
potion flows down from a goblet,
a blue spiral, a yellow spiral
forming a spirographic knot
and the two are no longer
divisible
is this evolution?

a prophecy from the beginning
of the twentieth century
“EVOLUTIONEN”
repeated ad infinum
male and female and
something outside this—
their bodies strong
canvases of pink and
a spectrum of greys

funny fertilities these
massive canvases of colour-joy
are those eggs
yes eggs! but not just eggs

eggy eggy
iggy iggy
aggy aggy
prophecies
prophet sees

lavender, red
mustard, white
easter colours, but not
exactly Ēastre, not
exactly austron, not
exactly spring

women+ artists, mystics, seers
were doing what the Surrealists
became famous for
but decades earlier
these prescient practices

women practicing
automatic writing
when male contemporaries
were taken by impressionism

but here we are given more than impression:
these are the paintings for the temple she saw

women are avant-garde, more?
women are avant-garde, more?
women are avant-garde, more?
women are avant-garde, more?

the baroness wasn’t seen
as avant-garde at all
just a freaky chick
a deranged non-artist
stinky and fishy

seance        science
seance       science
seance       science
seance       science

says

klint’s largest paintings are said to represent
“the four cycles of life”
visually indistinguishable, all just as colourful
and i think about aging and death

eggs in dots
dotted eggs
women in seance
seance says

fuck the magic

uu uu uu uu
uu uu uu uu
uu uu uu uu

endings and rebirth
and sex and death
and death and birth and
sex and death
and pleasure

black wings of eggs
symmetry that sways
women in seance
seance says

the material and the spiritual is a chicken and egg situation
there are children getting in the way of the art
I like that one I like that one I like that one!
i’m at that age, with that body, wrestling with the idea of
children as futurity, children as a future

I want to be alone with the art, and I realize
that maybe this is selfish
I want to have some quiet space, and I realize
that maybe this is impossible

is the contemporary art gallery a temple
for intellectuals or is it something else altogether?

wx ox oo ax ex
swx sox sax sex
uu uu uu uu
uu uu uu uu

wu rose blue green
eros in yellow

primordial symmetry in
chaos sym-metry in

chaos

their abstract order
feels so balanced,
like wholeness
something aspiring to
closeness

reigns

circular spiral snail
mustard moon hand
emanating to grab
muddy earth elevated

medeltiden over nutiden
yellow under blue
neu neu neu neu
eus eus eus eus

tiny pyramid in circle
black outline thick
moons of gold
old shade spectra
descending ascending
both valid it seems

ave maria
ave maria
ave maria
ave maria
ave ave ave

a wreath of dripping lilies
arms splayed, so sad

birthing bulbs
origins unknown
opening up and up
to infinity

red and black cookie
moon tree and venn
when sox sax sex
when sox sax sex

birthing bulb two
petals only

fling drop
drip drap
flung floof

dreaming of a place where
gender can be something other
no longer a competition
a place where no one is more
and Avant-Garde is a bore

then an old man shaky
leaning over to sit
his belt pulled down
and i want to help

leaving the gallery I walk
into the rare sunshine of
London in the springtime
and I’m vibrating
from Hilma’s work

Written by Lauren Fournier in response to:
Hilma Af Klint, “Painting the Unseen,” Serpentine Gallery, London UK
On May 8, 2016