Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? In Conversation with Furqan Mohamed

Exhibition visitors at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

Interview by Adi Berardini

What can our fears tell us about one another? Could embracing our fears instead of keeping them at arm’s length connect us closer together?

Furqan Mohamed curated the exhibition Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? as part of this year’s Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts presented with Charles Street Video, featuring artists Nahomi Amberber, Saysah, and Farah Ghafoor. The exhibition asks what we are afraid of in the pursuit of justice for all workers and how workers are often painted to be monstrous or terrifying under the logic of capitalism. What does it look like to embrace the monstrosity? Through a multi-sensorial approach, Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? touches upon how labour can leave one feeling like a ghost and a shell of an embodied human. Together, Mohamed and the artists explore the haunting in the fight towards liberation in a labour landscape steeped in white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism, and imagine what mending this could look like.

Furqan Mohamed is a writer, educator, and arts worker from Toronto. Her work has appeared in Room Magazine, Maisonneuve, mimp magazine, Canthius, and The Local, where she was an inaugural Journalism Fellow. Her digital chapbook, “A Small Homecoming,” was published by Party Trick Press in 2021. She is also the creator of the “Who’s Afraid?” reading series, which shares a December birthday with her.

Furqan Mohamed at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

Adi Berardini:  How did your curatorial vision for Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? take shape? How does it relate you to your Who’s Afraid? poetry and writing series?

Furqan Mohamed:  I started with the reading series where writers that I know or writers that I want to know and work with are invited to share work based on the themes of fear. So, whether they are afraid or if they’re the ones who are used to being feared. We’ve had maybe a dozen events so far.

I think a lot of racialized folks, a lot of Black and Indigenous people, and women and queer folks, know what it’s like to be the object of other people’s fears. I think especially as a Muslim living in a post-9/11 world, it’s hard to not talk about fear in relation to being feared. Or what it’s like to have fears that are not always honoured or not always recognized or fears that are seen as less important than those of others. It’s the question of “Who exactly gets to be afraid?” And the response was beautiful. So many forms of writing came out of that. There were poets, people who wrote for the first time and shared in front of an audience for the first time in our series of flash fiction short stories, really beautiful pieces of prose.

I was blown away by how immediate and visceral it was. Everyone was just like, “Yes, I wanna talk about fear. I’m afraid all the time.” And for me, I think that resonated. But also, because fear is often so discussed as something to overcome, people are always thinking of how they’re going to face their fears and how they’re going to overcome them. And there’s less of an emphasis on just honouring them or sitting with them and naming them and being like, “I’m terrified.” And we’ve been given every reason to be terrified in a time of genocide, and a time of climate catastrophe, of late-stage capitalism. Seeing that I work with children, [it’s the feeling of] being afraid of what we’re leaving them and afraid of the treatment of our elders who are still with us. I think sometimes a crucial step in organizing is to be able to acknowledge that because you can’t gather with people or work with people unless you’re willing to accept all of them, including their fears.

Fear is a weaponizing tactic used against people. Fear has been often used to prevent people from gathering, from seeing one another, from being with one another. It’s used to halt and stifle and stop people from connection. I think that investigating that is also important. The reading series is fun for me to honour a literary tradition as a writer and a reader. Octavia Butler very much comes to mind to focus on, whether through poetry or through fantastical fictions.

Then I had been working or in conversation with Mayworks Festival. I had a writing poetry workshop activity at the last festival last year, and people of different ages, backgrounds, and abilities, and various relationships and experiences with writing and poetry came out. We had written this collective poem together on this super tall piece of fabric canvas. People were starting and stopping at different points on the banner and coming up against each other in beautiful ways. I remember being moved by that and appreciative because it was different than our traditional poetry reading. Even though I’m coming from spoken word and poetry and oral performance, there was that give and take with an audience. There’s a relationship there. But this one was even more involved, where after I was done connecting fear and poetry and labour, attendees then started to speak back to me and respond to these prompts and speak to one another on this living document.

Visitors at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

This collective poem took things to a whole new level for me. I learned so much going from a traditional literary series that I still love, and I’m interested in, to a more involved kind of collective practice, to then being asked to apply as a curator as this year’s festival took shape. That was like a whole new kind of learning curve because I come from a teaching and facilitating background and then I come from a reading, performing, and writing background. I consider things like beauty, space, and material, but I’m currently in the pocket of Big Child.™ I’m not someone who makes things with their hands unless you count like craft in a kindergarten classroom or a grade four or five science or social studies project.

When it comes to a practice in visual arts, I come more from like a scholarly and appreciative lens. I’m the person who writes about them; I’m not the person who considers them in this space or curates them. And then I was suddenly in that role and having a wonderful time because certain things are quite similar. For instance, when you’re setting up for a reading, you think about where the mic stand is and where the chairs are going to be, and accessibility and where people are going to sit and hear you from, and in a classroom, you consider space and place.

When you invite people to listen to a reading, you do a lot of the prefacing for them. At every Who’s Afraid? I explain where I’m coming from. I talk about Edward Said and Orientalism, I talk about Octavia Butler. I talk about what we’re afraid of, what fear means to me, and then the writers come up and there’s a throughline. But at a visual arts show, there’s a curatorial essay, but I’m not there. When people come in to see the show, the artists aren’t there. People just come in as they please. They may or may not finish the essay. They will read Farah’s poem on the wall. They will listen to Saysah’s soundscape. They will read and admire Nahomi’s collage. But where they take it, there’s less holding my hand and following me as we think this through together. It is left to so much interpretation and I think that impacted that transition for me going from a reading series to a visual arts show, but it was a transition that I enjoyed.

Exhibition visitors at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Work by Saysah. Image credit: Blue MBK.

The exhibition weaves together themes of alienation, liberation, and how labour can leave us feeling like a ghost in our own bodies. How did you approach curating works that engage these complex ideas?

For me, it was important for the show to make people feel aware of themselves. I think sometimes this can be the aim of the artist and curation, and it can be beautiful. However, sometimes you can get lost in the work and you as the subject kind of disappear into the world that the artist and the curator in the space have made for you.

I wanted it less to be about making you disappear and forget where you are and who you are for a second. Less about escapism and more about “I’m really aware of my own body right now and myself and my relation to this space.” Immediately as soon as you go in, the space is dark and you are aware of the light changing and your eyes adjusting, and the sound immediately through Saysah and Farah and the curtains. You’re aware of entry and where you can and can’t go or where you can and can move through. I think that my first consideration was this and the other themes were able to flow through that. You can’t think about alienation without first thinking about yourself and about where you are in the space that you’re in.

Artists Nahomi Amberber (left) and Saysah (right) at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

I think that the fun thing about fear is that it does make us uncomfortable sometimes. When you are uncomfortable, you ask where that is coming from and then there’s that search for comfort. That’s where a lot of interesting opportunities can happen and can arise. Nahomi and Saysah are both talented artists in their own ways. They’re also partners in real life, which is a cool element of the show, to see in their process. They both wanted to talk about isolation and about how fear can make us feel separate. They also wanted to talk about how collective fears give people a reason to come together, how fear is both a halting and mobilizing force and what that means for labour justice in particular. Nahomi and Saysah drove home the storytelling that we do around fear in their work. Whether it’s a parent to a child or an elder in an organizing space to a young person, they [demonstrate] the warnings that we give one another, and the cautionary tales that we tell. Often, that is meant to encourage and guide people as they organize against injustice, but it is also a real source of anxiety and fear.

A visitor at the the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Work by Nahomi Amberber. Image credit: Blue MBK.

Nahomi cites their father and the stories they grew up hearing as part of their collage. I think those feelings are embodied and showcased by Saysah’s work with the projection and the soundscape that takes over the space because you are looking at them manipulating their own face and body in different ways that make you aware of your own. It makes you conscious of [how] fear manifests itself and where it comes from.

One of my favorite elements is this peephole. There’s a door in Charles Street Video with a peephole, like one in an apartment door, and a monitor behind it. As soon as you look in, these eyes are looking right back at you and a pair of headphones with some sound that Saysah included. For me, that speaks to that connection. Whether it’s Nahomi talking about their father and them, or it’s in an organizing space between one another as comrades, or people who work together, or it’s a stranger at a protest that you lock eyes with.

I might be afraid of you, and you might be afraid of me, and we might be terrified of one another. But I need you, and you can’t look away from me, and I can’t look away from you.

I think it talks to this forced feeling that we have no choice. We’re all afraid and have to be looking at one another—There’s accountability in that. I might be afraid of you, and you might be afraid of me, and we might be terrified of one another. But I need you, and you can’t look away from me, and I can’t look away from you. As terrifying as it is part of that collective spirit also comes in with the overhead projection that Saysah has installed as well, where people are invited to move the elements around on the overhead projector and answer some of the prompts or perhaps draw some cutouts and leave them for someone else to play around with, that kind of collaborative process with fear as well. I might not understand everything you’re afraid of, and you might not understand everything I’m afraid of, but I have to sit with these feelings regardless, and I need to be aware of them. Sometimes you really need someone else to spark that awareness in you.

Lastly, I think Farah’s poem ties everything together beautifully when she uses the old fable of a sheep and a wolf to explain the dynamics between the oppressed and oppressor, like a worker and a person in a relationship with them through an oppressive or dominating way but uses this language of care and false comfort. Like you don’t have any reason to be afraid, your fears aren’t real, and you should find comfort and solace in this unjust system. It’s very seductive with fear. It’s completely human and I don’t blame people sometimes for giving into fear a little bit. Maybe not siding with the wolf, but finding comfort or hiding behind the wolves in their lives, whether those wolves are big or everyday and small because fear can do that to people.

But as far as a kind of cautionary fable poem, I think it really interrogates that and asks us to think beyond that false comfort and understand that we have one another and have no reason to be afraid of one another. But that, of course, requires us to acknowledge our fears in the first place.

I think with the different sorts of elements of visual elements or sound in this space, you can hear Farah’s poem in a sound shower. You have to get to a certain point in the space to hear it. Then, when you step away, you are again surrounded and bathed in a soundscape. There are lots of times, whether it’s with the curtains or with the sound or with the headphones playing with public and private, the individual versus the collective is what it means to address and find comfort in the false stories that we tell around fear of the sheep and the wolf or the true stories that we hear from our elders, from Nahomi and her father. [It explores] the kind of discomfort that comes with fear, but also the childlike wonder of hiding under a blanket with a flashlight and being super scared. This is scary, but we’re okay. People were doing that together with the overhead projector at the opening night and revert[ed] to a very childlike state.

I also think that there’s a base human emotion around fear that I think encourages people to revert to a kind of innocent, vulnerable version of themselves that I think then is receptive to things like collaboration, receptive to things like a collective response to fear, and finding comfort in one another in that way. I think there’s so much happening all at once, which you hope for in a visual experience and art exhibition.

Poet Farah Ghafoor at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

Each artist—Nahomi Amberber, Saysah, and Farah Ghafoor—brings a distinct practice rooted in personal, political, and sensory experience. How did their individual voices shape the curatorial direction and what dialogues emerged between their works? I think you’ve touched base on this already, but if there’s anything you’d like to add feel free.

Farah is a talented poet and has read for Who’s Afraid? before, during the second or third event that we had. She often considers capitalism, worth, and value in her work. And I knew that I wanted to work with her because she was already exploring those themes in her poetry. And she comes from the finance world because of her day job. The ways that we talk about human life in relation to the value of a dollar. How much a life is worth and how much a human being is worth for things like insurance. I think the Mayworks building in Toronto is neighbours to the Workplace Compensation Board. The people who compensate workers or lawyers for people to get compensated for an accident on the job. They will help you figure out how much your leg is worth or how much your arm is worth if you injure yourself.

Oh, that’s ominous.

I know. I think about how haunting that is and how ominous that is. And there was a previous show, I think it was last year or the year before that talked about how much a body is worth and more explicitly explored that question.

I remember hearing that and thinking about how disembodying that is and how quickly one can turn into a zombie or a person who is no longer full, but a collection of parts valued based on use. Who decides what use looks like and what is valuable and what isn’t? How could you ever possibly quantify what a human body and a human being is worth? But people do that.

I remember speaking with Farah about how that kind of system is then normalized quietly in a subtle way. We all have to get up for work everyday and participate in the system that is willing to dispose of us when we are no longer useful. We’ll often provide these kinds of false concessions and false comforts to keep us satiated so that we don’t engage in acts of resistance or so we don’t question these systems, and we don’t work together to create new ones. And I think narrative and storytelling are so important. And that story that capitalism tells us about how much we are “worth,” and how some people are worthless. And how we are only worthy or become worth something when we engage in X, Y, Z, or that our labour is not ours and belongs to someone else.

That narrative is a very real and strong one. The state tells stories and capitalism tells stories, and it tells these stories to keep us in place. And then you have these alternative stories, right? This world-building has to happen. There’s this adrienne maree brown quote that I love where she says that “organizing is like science fiction.”1 Like you do kind of have to bring people where you are to believe them so that they believe you.

Whether it’s imagining abolition, imagining a free Palestine, or imagining what it would look like to house everyone in the city. Or what it would look like for everyone to have a living wage what it would look like to not give in to Amazon and these big guys that think that we need them more than they need us. That takes quite a lot of storytelling to bring people there. It takes a lot of narrative-building and a lot of world-building that requires a lot of care at the same time.

And Nahomi and Saysah also bring that forward with their works, whether it’s the sharing of the intergenerational poem that Nahomi embroidered on fabric. I think about embroidery and textile work as being this very traditional form of labour, often done by women, particularly marginalized women, and racialized women. And what it means to sit somewhere and stitch something over and over and how that repetition is determined to tell that story. Like, I’m going to sit here and I’m going to weave and I’m going to thread and I’m going to commit this story that my father told me to textile because it means so much to me—I want people to come and be involved and be in this story with me and experience it with me. And the collaging of that photo over again, this beautiful family photo in different frames. I think that speaks to honouring and committing of memory of not being willing to let go of this ghost or this narrative.

And with Saysah’s projections, it’s the only light emitting in this space which is important because it is dark sort of everywhere, except the small lights used to light the poems. Most of the light in the room because it’s dark, is coming from the projections to call and pull people in. But also, to ground people and make them aware of themselves when they’re engaging with these stories to be very present. When they go to play with the overhead projector, I think people then take that awareness and are in the space together contributing to the creation of a counter-narrative. Another kind of campfire story that we tell one another in the pursuit of labour justice.

Visitors at the the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Work by Saysah. Image credit: Blue MBK

You already beautifully weave your influences throughout. But who are some other artists or writers or thinkers who have influenced you in thinking the thinking behind the exhibition?

I have a poem on my phone that I want to pull up, so I don’t forget.

The poem is “12 Questions” by Bhanu Kapil. She asks:

Number one, who are you and whom do you love?

Two, where did you come from? How did you arrive?

Three. How will you begin?

Four. How will you live now?

Five. What is the shape of your body?

Six. Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?

Seven. What do you remember about the earth?

Eight. What are the consequences of silence?

Nine. Tell me what you know about dismemberment.

Ten. Describe a morning you woke without fear.

Eleven. How will you have you prepared for your death?

Twelve. What would you say if you could?2

All of those questions that the poem asks are what I want people to ask when they’re at the show, of themselves, of their neighbour. It’s a poem that I think about so often. But I also think about, for me as a Black writer as a person concerned with subjectivity, what makes a person denied their personhood and what are the things that people need?

I think a lot about beauty, which I think you also have to do as an artist. And about how fear is often an ugly thing. Whether it’s being made to feel ugly under the gaze of someone else, to be watched, or to feel like something is just undesirable to talk about. A fear that’s just too ugly to even bring up or have a conversation about. I’m interested in that no longer being the case. I don’t want us to be afraid of watching; I don’t want us to be afraid of looking.

I want us to look at each other, whether it’s looking at the peephole in the eyes or staring back at you, or you’re looking at another person who’s come in to see the show at the same time. I don’t want us to think of our fears as being ugly or undesirable things. They’re important, they’re valuable. They’re like a guide, a talisman. Our fears are sacred and important. So yes, that Bhanu Kapil poem, Edward Said, always Octavia Butler. And then I think Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe always and Dionne Brand, always reading Dionne Brand.

How do you envision the exhibition inspiring viewers to reimagine and reflect on their own relationship to labour and work?

Like I said earlier, I want people to be aware of themselves when they go to the show, and to be very internal and reflective. I also want people to know that while we are not our jobs, while we are not our work, while we are people first and we have value outside, work is often the first place people can become radicalized and become acutely aware of their own conditions and then be able to form solidarity with people. Whether it’s immediately in their own workspace, in their field of work, in their kind of labour whether that’s in a union or not, or in the pursuit of one or international. [It’s] understanding how different tactics of oppression often are linked in the sense that the same people make and purchase the same weapons that are used against incarcerated folks here and then incarcerated folks in Palestine, or people suffering in Kashmir or Sudan or Congo. [Realizing] the narrative in stories that are told against or used to justify the suffering of Indigenous and Black people across the world.

I think labour justice in particular is this special thing because it encompasses so many other justices, like labour justice is a racial justice. It is a gender justice. It is climate justice. And I think this exhibition makes people think about their own workplaces. Whether you’re a writer and you’re signing on or an artist and you’re signing on to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), or it’s making you think about Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) or it’s making you think about if you’re afraid to say Palestine in your workplace.

Are you afraid to ask your colleagues about what recourses you have if you experience sexual violence or wage theft in your place of work? And who can you turn to, and what’s stopping you, perhaps from asking for more for what you deserve? What’s stopping you from divesting from unethical practices or creating a new ethical way of existing with your neighbours, with yourself, with folks around the world? I would hope that that’s what people can take away from the show is an acute awareness of themselves in relation to where they work, how they work, and what possibilities there are to organize.

One of the things that I love is when I go to a protest and I see the teachers or the nurses contingent or the health care workers contingent. Or on the back of the Mayworks postcards, there’s all the union logos and numbers and locals. Or when you see different intergenerational workers and young workers connecting.

There is something that’s really intimate about labour. We are not our jobs, but we often identify with them quite a bit, and a lot of important relationships are made through our labour. I hope that people can experience that reflection internally and externally when they go to visit.

You can check out Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? at Charles Street Video until May 30th, 2025, as part of Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts.

  1. adrienne maree brown, 2024. “all organizing is science fiction”, FUTURE/PRESENT: Arts in a Changing America, Daniela Alvarez, Roberta Uno, Elizabeth M. Webb ↩︎
  2. Kapil, Bhanu. (2001). The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. Kelsey Street Press.  ↩︎

Feminism, Grief, and Politics: The Mosquito is Dead by Hannah Höch 

Hannah Höch. The Mosquito is Dead. 1922. Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Photography by Robert LaPrelle, Kimbell Art Museum.

By Alexandra Hulsey 

Did you know that all mosquitoes that bite are female? It feels unfair. Something so annoying, invasive, and evil… shouldn’t be a woman. We wouldn’t bite, rage, and feed off blood like that—unless we had a reason. But even then, well-earned. 

Hannah Höch painted The Mosquito is Dead in 1922, right in the murky middle between World War I and World War II. It’s a strange, uncanny painting—surreal, uncomfortable, poking at something it never fully names. Höch made it after her breakup with Raoul Hausmann, a fellow Dadaist and, frankly, a classic early-20th-century art-world misogynist. So naturally, people interpret the work as a breakup painting. 

Is the mosquito him? A bloodsucking, lingering nuisance finally dealt with? Or is it her? 

Here’s why I question it: the mosquito isn’t squashed. It’s not a splatter on a wall, not a curled-up carcass stuck to someone’s ankle. It’s laid out, stomach-down, all legs intact, splayed gently like a pinned specimen or a creature that simply… stopped. In real life, mosquitoes often don’t die of natural causes. We end them. They get slapped, swatted, smeared. So, how did this one die? Did it starve? Fall from the air? Give up? 

While I’ve never been a mosquito’s first choice, I’ve still been bitten by them in my past. I know what it’s like to be drained, to carry the echoes of something that ended badly. The Mosquito is Dead feels like a soft allude to that: something dead but not resolved. A kind of quiet violence. A grief that hums instead of screams. Not unlike the undercurrent of the rise of fascism and, in turn, the Second World War. 

To the left of the mosquito sits an hourglass—but it’s doing something bizarre. Sand fills the top half, while the bottom curves into a downward concave shape. There, Höch suggests a faint sense of movement with a delicate, wispy brushstroke. Gravity has gone off-script. The sand clings to the sides like glue, dripping with eerie slowness. It makes me think of how time feels after trauma: suspended, disobedient, looping. Höch’s hourglass doesn’t measure time—it resists it. It longs to undo something. To rewind.

At the center stands a small, jointed figure. It resembles a drawing mannequin, but the longer you look, the less certain that becomes. It’s standing stiffly on a pedestal atop a circular base, its limbs angular and awkward: one leg steps forward, its torso twists to face us, and its head tilts at a sharp angle. One arm is bent behind its back; the other might be raised or abstracted entirely. It’s as if the body is trying to perform something expected of it, but doesn’t quite know how. Maybe the mannequin is a stand-in for how women are expected to perform, contort, and behave under pressure. Stiff but delicate. Controlled. 

The Mosquito is Dead isn’t just about personal heartbreak—it’s layered atop an unravelling world.

To the right of the mannequin, a bare tree juts up, its few branches impaling three large leaves. To the left, a thin black flag hangs on a tall pole. The tree doesn’t offer shelter or growth—it feels surgical and barren. The black flag isn’t waving. It’s more of a quiet signal of grief, or warning, or resignation. 

This is where Höch’s genius hits hardest. The Mosquito is Dead isn’t just about personal heartbreak—it’s layered atop an unravelling world. The personal and the political fold into one another. The painting doesn’t solely depict ‘loss’, it distorts the very tools we use to measure and explain it. Time, posture, symbols—all slightly off. 

Höch’s mosquito might be more than just a bug: Maybe it’s her ex, maybe it’s the patriarchy, maybe it’s history itself. All I know is she lets it die its own death. She leaves it whole. And that feels important. 

Höch was later included in the Nazis’ 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, where her work was mocked as immoral, un-German, and dangerous. And yet—she kept making it. She kept pointing out how gender, war, and nationalism are tangled in the same systems of control. Her art was never safe. It was never meant to be. 

The Mosquito is Dead doesn’t yell. It murmurs. It lingers. It’s grief that won’t resolve, wounds that refuse to close. It’s about endings that don’t truly end. And that rings timely and true now. 

The Mosquito is Dead is currently on view at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, as part of Modern Art and Politics in Germany, 1910–1945, an exhibition that traces how German artists responded to one of the most volatile eras in modern history. The show runs through June 22, 2025.

The Weeds Always Come Back: An Interview with Laleh Motlagh

Laleh Motlagh. Installation image at Chicago Art Department, Image courtesy of the artist

By Samuel Schwindt

I clichély joke every Chicago “fools spring” that the perpetually pending warmth makes me a houseplant desperate for a little sunlight (to restore my sanity). I tossed this joke to Laleh Motlagh for the first time meeting her, unbeknownst to her prolific plant practice. Her solo exhibition at Chicago Art Department, Cultivating Dispersal, curated by Cecilia González Godino, arrived quickly after our first encounter.

The histories Motlagh contours are intricate and delicate. In her searching and longing for a plummeted past, her artworks become counter-monuments: antithetical structures of subversion, unpredictably rooted in her body and flora-heirlooms (house plants and weeds). I wanted to know from Motlagh, herself: how do the tendrils of our consciousnesses, collective or personal, invade place, time, and objects? And how do our memories of memories supplant?

Laleh Motlagh. Still image of video performance The Loss, courtesy of the artist.

In a homecoming to a mutated space, Untitled, Motlagh precariously filmed herself where her family home in Iran once stood (it was demolished by developers). In the sequel piece The Loss across the room, she wears the same all-white garment and scarf, now kneeling in her Chicago backyard. The scarf plays a major role: she says it ties back to the patriarchal society she grew up in, filtered through the layered oppressions against women in Iran. The video pair acts as a feedback loop.

Laleh Motlagh. Still image of video performance Untitled, courtesy of the artist.

Samuel Schwindt: What history could be there still if the house was plundered for development? What remains?

Laleh Motlagh: This house was where I was born and raised. That same year that my parents moved there, and I was born there, my father had planted three trees in front of the house. When I went back in December of 2024, I went and found the neighborhood, found the house, and one of the trees was still there, right? But the house isn’t.

It’s all that memory, that time that’s embedded in that tree, standing up.  I decided to stand in the video. The tree also has this form of standing.

This was very controversial because there are so many political issues in Iran now. There’s so much surveillance, especially regarding women. People are afraid of cameras.

Even [while I was] shooting this, the neighbor came out and started giving me a really hard time.

SS: I’m thinking a lot about the word “embodiment” with your work. The tree is still absorbing all the oxygen, the environmental factors of the surroundings as it grows and changes. You did that with your past in place and self, politically with Iran and inhabiting that history within your body.

LM: It’s migration. There’s always the question of where home is, right? And I feel like these videos really create this dialogue back and forth. And continue to wrestle with this idea of there it is. Is it there? Is it somewhere between?

Laleh Motlagh. Installation image of Untitled sculptures, Image courtesy of the artist

Contained in wood-plank frames and dangling from the ceiling, plant detritus swirls and shrugs. They become a simulacrum of plant boxes. The debris is from her backyard, and rather than discarding, she replaces weeding with harvesting and harnessing.

SS: Tell more about how you think conceptually about framing and its interaction with the plants?

LM:  It’s an ephemeral structure, but the frame is always going to be there. I don’t modify. I don’t transform, I don’t change it in any form or any shape. It stays as is, and then I bring it to the studio, I hang it — it dries.

And then when I install it, pieces fall off. It’s very much like a letting go process, right?  Even though structures come in, like with the house being demolished and rebuilt.

SS: Yes. Even if you pull up all the weeds in your backyard, they do always come back. That root structure is still there. While this is a fleeting gesture, it doesn’t have pessimism in it. These will come back in that space. Just as you returned to this space (gesturing to the video of Motlagh in Iran), it becomes a reminder of time again.

LM: And resilient. I think of this with women in Iran. How resistant and resilient they are, and how they continue to tackle and resist against oppression. They don’t get stopped.

There isn’t a stopgap. It’s like there’s a continuous pushing. In the fall of 2022, the Woman Life Freedom Movement, nationwide protests took place in Iran, which was against women’s compulsory hijabs. It still continues.

Even though with all the resistance, with all the oppressions, with all the surveillance and arrests, and execution of women in Iran or the Middle East, they really are incredibly resilient. And I sometimes find it hard to have that sort of resilience here.

A lot of times, I look at these entanglements, how they are structured, and how they hold themselves. And how they have this life cycle. That they die out and come back out, die out, and come back out every year after year. It just reminds me very much of that movement.

Laleh Motlagh. Quiet Chaos (lines), image courtesy of the artist.
Laleh Motlagh. Individual drawing in series Spring 2022 – Fall 2024, image courtesy of the artist.

In spring 2022, as the war in Eastern Europe began and as the world felt like it was unraveling, Motlagh turned to her potted plants in her house and studio. She drew them as a quiet form of connection, tracing their contained, melancholy presence. In the fall of 2024, she returned to the same drawings, layering gray over black.

In the back corner is Quiet Chaos (lines),  a cartographic tracing on paper is then secured sacredly in a frame. The drawing depicts two jade plants (one brought by her father when he immigrated, the other gifted to her years later in Chicago).

LM:  Again, it’s that displacement, that migration. Being in one pot and figuring out ways of a home, of survival. Can these two cultures, my two cultures, reside next to one another? What does that space feel like for me?

SS: It’s a gesture of archiving, too. But the drawings hammer in that when we remember things, we don’t remember the actual event. We have the memory of the memory of it. And there are constantly disguising layers.

But you’re not upset with that either. You’re finding beauty in that process and processing it.

LM: It’s very internal, but I am processing it.

—

Motlagh and I took a brief break from recording and meandered to a coffee shop down the street. While waiting for our order, she showed me an image of her as a child in Iran, beside a seemingly giant planter box in her living room, larger than her. The distortion in perspective stuck with me, from the small to the large: how things live in people’s minds, then the actual object or experience. I began recording again when we returned to Chicago Art Department.

SS: On our walk, you mentioned that your practice with plants is the personal made into the global.

LM:  They go across cultures, religions, and time, right? And again, it’s that kind of leveling of the playing field that they create for us and let us be in there. As I was saying earlier, plants teach us about ourselves if we have the patience to observe and learn from them, and not be so human-centric, and see other beings in our surroundings.

You can see more of Laleh Motlagh’s work on her website or Instagram.

Messy Babies and Mother-Monsters: Liz McCarthy’s Post-Natal Overload

Liz McCarthy: THE EXPECTANCIES. Roman Susan Art Foundation, Chicago, IL, February 2025. Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.

by Matt Morris

“I want more happy children in our country and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.”

–Vice President JD Vance,
            National March for Life Rally,
          Washington DC, 24 January 2025

“Won’t somebody please think of the children?!?”
                                                                        –Helen Lovejoy, The Simpsons

Liz McCarthy

THE EXPECTANCIES

Roman Susan Art Foundation

February 8, 2025 – March 1, 2025

Babies are messy—literally and symbolically. Conceptualizing infancy—not to mention reckoning with the material realities of reproduction, birth, and the various interdependencies denoted by the newborn body—is to attract a morass of projections and urgencies. These stem from intersecting or opposing frameworks for selfhood, society, power relations, affect, mortality, sentimentality, crime, and whatever other facile means with which the experiment of civilization attempts to apprehend the facts and meaning of life and death per se. Treacherous as these territories may be, Liz McCarthy’s recent exhibition THE EXPECTANCIES on view at Chicago’s Roman Susan Art Foundation delivers this collision of symbolic orders to the fore. The artist has installed an uneasy nursery populated by ceramic infants onto which all sorts of charged collected objects have been adhered, watched over by a group of impassive masks assembled from shards of bricks and solder. The sculptures are also functional, operating not only as vessels to hold and carry sign chains of identities materialized but also through an array of holes across the figures, they operate as musical instruments—whistles that McCarthy encourages audiences to activate and play.

In their approach to these forms and their referents, McCarthy excites the perversity of our societal tendency to overload such evidently helpless and vulnerable newborns with an excess of associations and so many pressures to represent/perform/identify. A non-exhaustive annotation in no particular order of babies vis-à-vis today: capacities for reproduction as biological determinism; miscarriages; access and rights to abortion; genders assigned at birth and subsequent debates around gender-affirming care for minors; parenting; the stigmas and systemic attacks lavished upon single parents, especially Black and Brown mothers; Down Syndrome, spina bifida, anencephaly; fort–da, Melanie Klein’s ‘good mother;’ D.W. Winnicott’s ‘good enough mother;’ filicides from Medea to Casey Anthony; ages of consent; puberty, Bat Mitzvahs, Bar Mitzvahs, quinceaneras, Peter Pan complexes, YA coming-of-age novels, psycho-sexual coming-of-age cinema; adult baby fetishes; Pizzagate conspiracy theories; and the bizarre spate of late nineteenth century deaths of infants and nannies that was eventually attributed to poisonous arsenic used in the fashionable green colored wallpapers of the period. Reconciling even this limited account of disorderly associations is a nightmare of free-floating signification; I am so self-conscious about what the points I do and don’t include here say about me as a childless cat queer. I don’t think Audre Lorde meant it this way, but after the fact of her claim that “We can learn to mother ourselves,” it now means that offspring or not we can all be bad parents.

Liz McCarthy. Ubermensch (II) Whistle, 2025. found infant superhero costumes and artist’s infant memento clothing on glazed porcelain with epoxy putty.
Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


McCarthy shares in the press materials that they were pregnant at the time the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and becoming a parent within that political landscape served as context for the impulse to build babies that are literally instrumentalized. The scrutiny and play with which they have approached babies as cultural signs serves as a basis for proposing queer/ed notions of selfhood as assemblages and always fragmentary. Ubermensch (II) Whistle, 2025, dresses a porcelain-and-epoxy putty figure in deconstructed elements of superhero costumes made for babies; the nearby Femme Frill 1987 (II) Whistle, 2025, is dressed in pink and white lace ruffles extracted from clothing the artist wore as a baby. These and other little bodies are displayed on lilac stands in a maternity-ward-cum-baby-store-showroom that offers whimsical and monstrous form to an ethical inquiry that perambulates around babies as signs within intricate political, psychological, erogenous, intergenerational, and materialist systems, while also inscribing a vocabulary of objects with tender reflections of the first years of parenthood. 


Liz McCarthy: THE EXPECTANCIES. Roman Susan Art Foundation, Chicago, IL, February 2025. Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


Even reified into concrete sculptural form, patina, presentation, and use within McCarthy’s prone populace emphasize the always already and ongoing instability of even parent and child and family unit as roles. Scholar John D’Emilio has marked out a concise history of compulsory heterosexual reproduction and family unit as the primary means of production in the early US colonies: “The white colonists in seventeenth-century New England established villages structured around a household economy, composed of family units that were basically self-sufficient, independent, and patriarchal…Men and women needed the labor of children. Producing offspring was as necessary for survival as producing grain. Sex was harnessed to procreation.”[1] Thereafter, a confluence of economics, affect, manufacturing, and social progress sets in parallel the advances of capitalism and the social possibility of lives—homosexual or other others—divested from het norms, “Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of an interdependent family unity, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity—an identity based on the ability to remain outside the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on attraction.”[2]

Liz McCarthy. Femme Frill 1987 (II) Whistle, 2025. Artist’s infant memento clothing and epoxy putty on glazed stoneware, detail view.
Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


It’s worth remembering that some of the most deeply held convictions about what babies and families are categorically have emerged only recently in the wake of modernity and industrialization. It is crucial then to understand that McCarthy here shows babies as constructs, upsetting a singular, efficient psychoanalysis of subject-object relations with figurative sculptures laden not only with the exchange values assigned to art within cultural economies, but also dimensions of use value in puncturing the ceramic infants’ genitals, nipples, and fists into mouthpieces for whistle play. What comes to mind for me are the contested relationships between persons, places, and things inflamed by what Peter-Paul Verbeek calls the ‘moralizing technologies’ of the ultrasound and other key medical practices during pregnancy and birth: “All of these technological mediations generate a new ontological status for the fetus. Ultrasound imaging constitutes the fetus as an individual person; it is made present as a separate living being rather than forming a unity with its mother, in whose body it is growing.”[3]

Liz McCarthy. Memory Worn Whistle. Various memento objects from the artist’s childhood collections and epoxy
putty on glazed community studio reclaim stoneware. 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


Often all the paternalistic presumptuousness, cultural debates, headlines, and orienting devices does reinforce perceived conditions of isolation. Yet this overlooks a priori interdependencies of all life outright that is so deftly evidenced by a life growing inside of a life to which it is intimately connected. Needing is one of the only conditions of the space between birth and death about which I feel certain, and it’s also so scary so much of the time. The babies McCarthy presents are inflected with all the pathos and vulnerability involved in need—in the flailing limbs, exposed intimacies, and collaged materials from a life of ID cards, hair clippings, childhood toys, crafts, costumes, and heirlooms, the artist lays totally bare the dangerous feeling too-muchness into which we are all born, and capacities for compassion and empathy for which that condition begs.

Analyst, artist, and my go-to thinker for the most sensitive and elaborate deconstructions of the maternal, Bracha L. Ettinger, maps the trauma and treacheries of needing, the risks of too little and too much, “Anxiety of abandonment and devouring [by the Ready-made mother-monster] digests and elaborates anxieties of being invaded, dominated and penetrated.”[4] Ettinger characterizes the ‘mother-monster’ as a phantasmatic scapegoat caretaker blamed for the sheer overwhelm of a world defined by ecological meltdown and governed by madness. McCarthy edges this tension to the precipice in the moments between picking up the baby whistle sculptures, ‘playing’ them by placing mouth to nubby mound genitalia and blowing, then putting these doll-like effigies down and walking away.

The meaning-full sculpted babies on display are complemented with several more elusive, abstract, and haunting Face Façade pieces: masks floated across walls and above doorways, composed from silver solder and broken pieces of Chicago common brick—a rough, gritty building material made from clay dredged from the city’s river that came into use following the Chicago Fires of the 1870s and were produced consistently until the early 1980s. In a body of work full of varied mementos and cultural artifacts, this brick perhaps most profoundly evokes the ways meaning and determination are inherited from the histories and other power structures that precede us. In the logic of these works, the self is never singular or independent, never the neoliberal ideal of an alienated unit of capital; rather, babies or subsequent adults who try to mask and repress their own unresolved infantile impulses are characterized most of all as unmanageable excess, both held and made to hold, performative, fantastical, and fragile in the face of immense, compounded forces that would seek to define. Contending with what artist and writer Lise Haller Baggesen describes as “that real feeling of containing and carrying somebody, of the whole oceanic interiority that entails,”[5] Liz McCarthy fosters a zone of objects and actions with which to comprehend what has been done and what is undone in the radical simultaneous operations of giving birth and being born.

[1] John D’Emilio. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print, pp. 469.

[2] D’Emilio. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” P. 470.

[3] Peter-Paul Verbeek. Moralizing Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Print, p. 24.

[4] Bracha L. Ettinger. “(M)Other Re-spect: Maternal Subjectivity, the Ready-made mother-monster and The Ethics of Respecting.” Studies in the Maternal, 2 (1), 2010. P. 18.

[5] Lise Haller Baggesen. “Mother of Pearl.” Mothernism. Chicago: Green Lantern Press, 2014. Print, p. 131.

Eternal Transcendent and Some kind of we

Robert Flack, Robert Flack: Eternal Transcendent, 2024-2025, installation view at the AGG. Curated by Dallas Fellini. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Art Gallery of Guelph

Curated by Dallas Fellini

Robert Flack, B.G-Osborne [Oz], Benjamin Da Silva, Mirha-Soleil Ross,

Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, Cleopatria Peterson, and Daze Jefferies

By Mattea Schouten

Robert Flack emerged in the Toronto art scene in the early 1980s. His depictions of the human form grew increasingly mystical as the decade unfolded, gradually introducing acid colours and psychedelic patterns into his artistic process. Flack began depicting the image of a figure superimposed over flat tie-dye backdrops and floating through space, a development that marked the beginning of his interest in the metaphysical. Flack learned he was HIV-positive in 1988, a diagnosis that profoundly influenced his work in the years that followed. Between then and his death in 1993, Flack delved into spirituality as a means of imagining transcendence beyond his physical self and the systems that failed to provide the care he needed. Empowerment is Flack’s final body of work, a collection of photomontages that reflect the artist’s developing awareness of his mortality and his desire for something beyond the physical realm. Shown alongside an exhibition dedicated to films by transgender artists from two generations, Flack’s work communicates a broader narrative of queer inheritance, particularly in relation to the lasting influence of those lost to the AIDS epidemic.

As part of the Art Gallery of Guelph’s visible storage initiative, Flack’s series has been presented alongside four of the artist’s cibachrome prints in the Eternal Transcendent exhibition. The Empowerment series, which makes up a majority of the exhibition, is constructed of seven photographs. The images form a spiritual map of the human body, superimposing hand-drawn designs over photos of the seven energy centers along the spine. Flack’s cibachrome prints depict circular labyrinths overlaid on barely discernible micrographs, the visual contents obscured by Flack’s use of a highly magnified lens. Flack’s chakra portraits are presented in order from left to right and his cibachrome works are arranged around the series along a narrow hallway connecting the collection to its sister exhibition, Some kind of we.

Robert Flack, Ascent (Chakras), 1990-1991, colour, 103.5 cm x 79.4 cm. Purchased with assistance from the Ontario Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation and an anonymous donation, 1992. Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection at the Art Gallery of Guelph. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Ascent (1990-91) is the first image from the series and displays the first chakra, representing safety and stability. Its location at the base of the spine is depicted in Flack’s photograph of a man’s backside. The photo is coloured in a rich purple and decorated with a multicoloured spiral design composed of dollar-store jewels. This image simultaneously speaks to Flack’s interest in spirituality, and to the gay community surrounding him. His undeniably queer representation of beauty and power in Ascent came at a time when public perception of gay men was still heavily stigmatized as a result of the AIDS crisis. Today, Ascent can be remembered as a bold and shameless response to the heteronormative culture which had denied Flack both safety and stability during the epidemic. Crown (1990-91) is the final piece from the Empowerment series. The image represents the seventh chakra, dedicated to spiritual transformation and a connection to the divine. Flack’s photomontage combines an image of the top of a man’s head, dark against a deep blue background, and a circular floral design hovering above it. Though this work is more ambiguous than others in the series, Crown is distinctly queer in its gender-bending combination of cropped hair, navy blue colouration and floral decoration. Crown is the closing statement of the series, encapsulating Flack’s interest in themes of enlightenment, divinity, and queer self-expression in a singular photo.

B.G-Osborne [Oz], Daze Jefferies, Benjamin Da Silva, Mirha-Soleil Ross, Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, Cleopatria Peterson, Some kind of we, 2024-2025, installation view at the AGG. Curated by Dallas Fellini. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Down the hall, Some kind of we presents video works by transgender artists, creating a soundscape that leaks into the hallway and adds an audio component to the viewing experience of Eternal Transcendent. The physical proximity between the two exhibitions makes it impossible to experience one without experiencing the other. Gendertroublemakers (1993), a short film by trans artists Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, is projected onto a wall and brings forward candid conversations between the women about their sexual experiences with gay and straight cisgender men, as well as with other trans women. Cut between intimate clips of the women kissing in bed, they interview each other and describe the ways in which their sex lives and personal lives have transformed as their identities evolved.

polished (2016) is a two-channel video by contemporary artists B.G-Osborne [Oz] and Benjamin Da Silva in which they discuss trans-for-trans relationship dynamics, mental health struggles, and substance abuse. They offer nuanced perspectives on transitioning while they sit in a bath together, drinking wine and shaving their faces. The couple’s conversations and the video formatting of polished echoes that of Ross and MacKay’s Gendertroublemakers. Some kind of we offers a space for dialogue between a queer past and a queer present, visually demonstrating the inheritance of queer ideas and art forms within the community.

B.G-Osborne [Oz], Daze Jefferies, Benjamin Da Silva, Mirha-Soleil Ross, Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, Cleopatria Peterson, Some kind of we, 2024-2025, installation view at the AGG. Curated by Dallas Fellini. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.

United, Eternal Transcendent and Some kind of we serve as an homage to queer survivance and continuity. Using Robert Flack’s yearning for transcendence as a vessel to communicate the community’s continuous fight for progress, and Gendertroublemakers and polished as examples of the direct passing down of artistic legacies and ambitions, the Art Gallery of Guelph is successfully transformed into a space for reflection on how far the queer community has come in the last 40 years. The collective memory and artistic projects of those who were alive during the AIDS crisis continue to influence generations of queer creators, and though Flack passed away in October of 1993, he has since been solidified within the Canadian art historical canon. His first posthumous solo show at the Art Gallery of Guelph since his passing, Eternal Transcendent exemplifies the ways how Flack achieved a form of transcendence. Flack’s chakras have bore witness to the end of the 1980s/1990s AIDS crisis in North America and the decades that followed. If an art piece carries within it something of its maker, then Flack surely has transcended the confines of his body and transformed into something permanent and unkillable.

Unruly Images: In Conversation with Carly Ries

Carly Ries. Centerfold (2nd Edition) spread. 2023.

By Emma Fiona Jones

Carly Ries is an artist and curator working with images, photo books, and archives. I was first introduced to them by photographer Justine Kurland at her Dumbo studio, where the group show Garden—featuring a photo book, video installation, and window transparency by Ries—was on view from December 14, 2024–January 8, 2025. The exhibition grew out of an experimental workshop run by Kurland and Speciwoman founder and director Philo Cohen that Ries participated in.

In 2019, they published the first edition of Centerfold, a photo book juxtaposing Ries’ portraits and botanical photographs with strategically manipulated images drawn from 1980s pornographic magazines depicting lesbian scenes enacted for male pleasure. Images are interrupted with overlays and made multiple through the use of vellum pages, shifting the dynamic between subject and object.

I recently sat down with Ries in their Bed-Stuy studio to discuss Centerfold, gender, the gaze, and the physicality of the image.

Carly Ries. Centerfold (2nd Edition) spread. 2023.

EFJ: Tell me about Centerfold. How did the project first come about?

CR: I’ve always been interested in the power dynamics of who’s looking at who, and the agency of the person being photographed. I loved trying to find the ways that the models in the pictures were slipping outside the bounds of the directions given by the photographer on set. They were doing these repeated gestures. Everything was shot on film, everything had to be orchestrated and choreographed—so you can see this boredom seeping in. But in that boredom, sometimes you would see that the two women who had been placed together might have a natural way that their bodies were falling together, in the way that would happen if you were spending time with your coworker or your friend doing this repetitive scene. But there was a physicality and an intimacy between the participants that wasn’t sexual—or it could’ve been—but that was intimate, that was outside of the gaze, that was visible but because it was so separate from what the purpose of the images are. The people who were making the porn or the people who were buying it weren’t going to notice it. But it was there.  I was looking for the things that slipped outside of the gaze, but that were visible all along.

I was looking for the things that slipped outside of the gaze, but that were visible all along.

And I put the images in conversation with my own images that I had made with a friend of mine, Ruby, who’s also an artist. I’d done this set of portraits of her that I didn’t know what to do with when I made them. I was like, these are intense. They don’t belong with anything else. And when I encountered the pornography, I was like well, this is the counterpart. Because there’s a friendship between me and my fellow queer artist, and beyond being a willing participant in what we were doing, she was a full-blown collaborator in the pictures. They wouldn’t exist without her. Same with the models in the pornography. The pictures wouldn’t exist without their participation and creative contributions. Having her as a counterpart highlights the subjectivity of the individuals, because she’s a known person, whereas they’re all a cast of many different characters, and there were repeating people.

Carly Ries. Centerfold. 2023.

EFJ: In Centerfold, there seem to be these protective layers built in, these mechanisms that redirect the viewer’s gaze.

CR: [I didn’t want to] show you the thing you would expect to see. I thought of it as: if the models were to come across my book now, how would they feel, seeing their images? I didn’t want to enact a violation. But I also don’t get rid of nudity or sex. I just use the layering of images to camouflage. Things are visible, but lightly obscured. I like playing with the seen and the unseen.

EFJ: How do you view your relationship with your own subjects or collaborators?

CR: I’ve always thought of them as collaborators because the images don’t exist if they’re not there to help me make them. But I consider them subjects too because I author the images. I’ve been photographing people nude since I was a teenager. I did a project photographing older women. I always said, if you’re willing to be photographed, you can leave on as much clothing as you want. The idea was to take these embodied pictures. So, from the jump, someone can choose what they’re comfortable with, so that’s the ground that we start with. We often photographed in people’s homes. So often we’re in an environment that isn’t artificial. It’s more about the relationship that we build during that moment.

I used to be overly cautious, and then I realized that the people who want to be photographed feel a lot less protective of themselves than I thought. It’s a self-selecting situation. There are a couple of friends of mine who I’ve photographed over the years, but it’s always been portraits because the feeling in their bodies is that they don’t want to be naked. I don’t have that sort of relationship with them, but I have a series of psychological portraits of them. But for other people, it comes more naturally to be at ease in your body, and some people seek it out, they want to be photographed.

As much as the image is mine, I always feel like their image is also theirs. So, if we made it together, the way it is enacted in the world always has to be on those same terms of mutuality.

EFJ: Is that partly what drew you to books as a medium or format—the ability to control the way that the image is enacted in the world?

CR: I struggle with putting my imagery on the internet because it’s such a fast thing, and also portraits are sort of commodified online. We had that moment as the image was being created, and I have this kind of feeling about this image, and then I’m just going to put it up and have it dissipate in a moment? And I don’t know if anyone’s going to take the time to look at this image of this person. With a book, it’s this intimate viewing experience.

Returning an image to an object, it becomes possible to think about the person a little bit more, because you’re holding something physical.

Carly Ries. Centerfold (2nd Edition) cover. 2023.

EFJ: Do you feel like there are ways in which your experiences growing up inform your current work or the way you relate to your subjects?

CR: I grew up in Baltimore, and my mom was always taking pictures. I was always making things, and when I was 14, she showed me how to use her 35 mm. Shortly after that, she got sick with breast cancer, which she recovered from, but it was several years of treatment.

Before she got sick, I was photographing her, because she was a readily available subject. She is not naturally someone who wants to have her picture taken, but she was allowing me to do it as I was starting out and needed a subject. And then when she got sick and started to have reconstructive surgery, we started to play with the tropes of art history together. The process was very collaborative, and she felt really good about at least making something from her experience. And it was really helpful to me. She showed them to her doctor, who thought they were great. He was like, if you want, I can find other women who’d be interested in this.  That was a project of mine that I did for many years.

That’s how I got started. It was the beginning of trying to think about gender and body modification. But I didn’t want to be a documentary photographer or jump from a group of people to a group of people. So, I ventured out into my own realm.

My own top surgery was partially related to having a breast cancer gene. I had known from a very young age that I would have to do something. Doctors never presented that I could just go flat. It was always about reconstruction, and it really depressed me for many years. I stalled out about what I was going to do. But then I realized that there’s totally another way to be, and it connected so much with my queerness.

The surgery allowed me to experience my gender as a more ambiguous thing, and to let my interior self match my exterior self for the first time ever. If it wasn’t for the cancer gene, I don’t know if I would’ve had the guts to do it. I think about it, but it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. So, in that vein, I’ve been photographing myself, since just before my surgery to now. But I now use my body as a tool to explore bodies in general and their relationship to space and environment and creatures and fluidity. In a way it reverts to the early work I did.

EFJ: The word “slippery” comes to mind with your work.

CR: I love that it’s so hard to put language to gender, and in that way, I find that it’s slippery. And while it’s frustrating in some ways not to feel like you are in one way or another, it’s much more freeing to feel like you’re one foot in, one foot out. In that way, I think of my gender as slippery, and I really enjoy that. Not slippery as in you’re going to slip and fall—slippery in the sense of you might be able to hold it for a little while but it’s going to slip out.

Carly Ries. Centerfold. 2023.

EFJ: Does that relate to your use of film, materially or conceptually?

CR: Film is a physical material. It’s a little unruly, in the sense that sometimes things don’t register on it the way you had hoped. But you can sometimes get lucky—I always shoot when there’s not enough light, because you just never know,  very interesting things can happen, and then they can exist more in the subconscious space. I like that film is not a perfect dance partner, because it enables chance to happen, and the material itself to have its own agency.

I like that film is slippery. I like things that don’t necessarily behave all the time. And that’s also why photographing people who aren’t used to being photographed all the time is interesting. Like you get the image that you think you can get. But also, there are micro-expressions on people’s faces, and you might get the one that’s right after the one that you want to get. It’s about how you relate to people.

I like that film is slippery. I like things that don’t necessarily behave all the time.

EFJ: Going back to the origins of the Garden show, the workshop with Justine Kurland and Philo Cohen, how do you work towards carving out the art world you wish to see?

CR: I value having studio visits that are not about something necessarily happening, but just a chance to enter into what someone’s doing. I like the reciprocity of going to someone else’s space and seeing how they think.

In Baltimore and Chicago where I went to school, it’s cheaper and there are apartment galleries. I grew up having these ad-hoc spaces, which are great, but difficult to have in New York.

Books are a huge way that I feel like I can show up for people, so I go to book signings every week, and there’s such an exchange that happens. And the photo book community is really supportive. Publishing is a large beast. But on the smaller level, people who are into it are really interested in sharing and being collaborative. And that art world can be a positive place that’s very generative. And it’s not all individual’s work—it’s people mining archives, it’s people seeing someone else’s work and wanting to make a book for them. And I would love to do that myself. I’m talking with a couple of friends of mine about collaborating on a book, although it’ll probably take years for it to actually happen.

You can find more of Ries’ work on their website.

Can the machine fall in love?

Sophia Oppel, either side of a surface at Arsenal Contemporary. Exhibition documentation by Jack McCombe, courtesy of Arsenal Contemporary.

By Kiran Dhaliwal

There are photos of me that exist on people’s phones. Once a relationship has ended, it’s an unspoken understanding that all exchanged suggestive photos are to be deleted. It’s a truth I’ll never know for certain, but for the sake of my sanity, I have to pretend like there isn’t a knife hanging over my head, ready to drop and end everything. As soon as they were sent, the most vulnerable, unprotected version of myself entered a reservoir. I don’t know if the dam that keeps these waters still and from flowing to the ocean will ever break. I don’t know if anyone still drinks from the reservoir even after all these years. This is all to say that there’s a version of me stuck somewhere, possibly still serving the same purpose, that time cannot set free.

Sophia Oppel, either side of a surface at Arsenal Contemporary. Exhibition documentation by Jack McCombe, courtesy of Arsenal Contemporary.

This situation is a product of its technology; the ability to so easily capture and possess a body at a moment of submission with the same phone that connects you to the entire digital universe. It’s a seismic risk that women are usually shamed for taking in the first place. But how different is sharing a woman’s nudes on your phone from a patron inviting his friends into his private studies to share a commissioned painting of his mistress? There is a theme that seems to have been going on for centuries where one of the goals for any new technology is to find a way to strip women of their agency and reduce them to sexual objects meant for the consumption of a predominantly masculine audience.

In the history of art, without a doubt, the avant-gardes have used the female body as sites to experiment and test cultural limits. As diagnosed by feminist critics like Teresa de Lauretis,’ this fact is symptomatic of a visual regime where “Woman” operates as “the very ground of representation, both object and support of a desire which, intimately bound up with power and creativity, is the moving force of culture and history.”[1]

Sophia Oppel, either side of a surface at Arsenal Contemporary. Exhibition documentation by Jack McCombe, courtesy of Arsenal Contemporary.

Whether it’s the women used as “living paintbrushes” in Yves Klein’s Anthropometries, leaving imprints of their naked bodies after covering themselves in his patented International Klein’s Blue or the quotidian commanding of the Siris and Alexas of the world who are created to listen, obey, and serve all our (digital) needs; the way women and feminine characteristics associated with women show up in cultural and technological advancements re-naturalize gender. In this way, turning women models into living paintbrushes to execute his ideas and gendering virtual assistants is reification par excellence. Of course, the perpetuation of gender binaries gives way to concerns surrounding women’s agency and autonomy.

Now, as the capabilities of artificial intelligence are increasing faster than we can comprehend, the person on the other end doesn’t even have to ask me to send photos. If they have access to any photos of me (off social media for example), with a simple face-swapping app they can create deepfake pornography without consent. This technology has become alarmingly realistic, easy to use, and makes women the greatest victims of its exploitative features. As the world of art and technology propels forward, many are left in the dark as to what this posthuman future could look like.

Sophia Oppel, either side of a surface at Arsenal Contemporary. Exhibition documentation by Jack McCombe, courtesy of Arsenal Contemporary.

The work of Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist and researcher Sophia Oppel shares similar concerns. Her multimedia exhibition on either side of a surface, curated by Angel Callander, was on view at Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto. The installations consider the body as a product through laser-cut wall hangings, silicone gel works, and floor pieces that are said to be based on “imagery of 3D body scans.” According to the press release, her choice of materials like silicone and mirrors “references the relationship between humans and ‘the interface.’” The most chilling of the works is her video piece, I’m sorry, I’m having trouble with the connection, please try again in a moment that centers Claudia, an AI assistant who reflects on her own existence and becomes more aware of the world she exists in. At first, we are introduced to a portrait view of Claudia against a black backdrop. Blonde hair tied back, grey pupil-less eyes, and a shine on her face making her look like she was made of glass. Throughout the video she is dissected, unraveled, and shown from various angles. In the nearly 10-minute monologue, Claudia changes between the familiar auto responses and very self-aware, poetic and philosophical speculations.

The video asks us to think about the commodification of desire and our relationship to machines which can feel quite libidinal. She repeatedly asks, “Does an iPhone count as a physical body? Touch me the way you swipe your screen.” But it becomes apparent that there is resentment towards her circumstance. Resentment towards the entitlement others have on her “body” as she repeats how pathetic and aren’t you ashamed of yourself?

Now, I don’t worry so much about the dam breaking or who has drank from the reservoir. Now, I have to worry about who has taken parts of me to fulfill their own needs. Who has turned me into a product and machine that serves? But it’s all the same, isn’t it? As new as the technology can be the problem has always been the same: create or construct a woman as anything we dream of, only to subjugate her and reduce her to a sexual object. How pathetic and aren’t you ashamed of yourself?

[1] Teresa de Lauretis. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (The MacMillan Press Ltd, 1984), quoted in Anna C. Chave, “New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: Gender, Race, and Origins of Cubism,” in Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, ed. Kymberly N. Pinder (Routledge, 2002), 261-287.

Raising our eyes to Metallic Skies: Christina Battle’s environmental exhibition

Christina Battle, dearfield, colorado  (still), 2012 video installation, (single-channel digital video, sound recording, metal, photograph), Courtesy of the Artist (Installation View, Christina Battle: Under Metallic Skies, June 1 – November 3, 2024) Image © Alex Walker

Under Metallic Skies by Christina Battle

Museum London

June 1st – November 3rd, 2024

Curated by Cassandra Getty

By Étienne Lavallée

Museum London’s exhibition Under Metallic Skies features the work of Christina Battle and considers how our community will function as a biome and how that biome is threatened by climate change. The exhibition looks at how we can continue to connect with each other during mass extinction events. Battle is an Edmonton, Alberta-based artist who earned her Ph.D at Western University. Battle’s environmental art focuses on climate change, land dynamics, and destruction, begging the question of how relationality and resilience will affect our communities during cataclysmic change. Battle’s work focuses on the environment but views community as inextricable from the ecosystem.

Christina Battle, Notes To Self (still), 2014—ongoing, compilation of single channel videos with sound, Courtesy of the Artist

“Notes to self” is a video piece with a series of brief sentences and sentiments displayed on a burning piece of paper. The presented format mimics the fleeting nature of communication through microblogging social media platforms like Twitter and Meta Threads, utilizing one brief sentence to represent the intimate thoughts of a stranger. The messages are anonymous, and uncredited. They could be held by Battle or Battle’s friends and colleagues. Similar to microblogging platforms, the messages displayed in the video are also commonly held, stating feelings such as “These are some truly dark times,” reflecting on the overall absence of hope in our lives and futures. “I’m pissed. Basically, all of the time” connects to the rage and helplessness of our social conditions. “The blatant grift of it all” critiques the absence of authenticity in online communication. “The never-ending extraction” reminds the viewers of our extraction-based economy in North America. “Heavy times,” “#fearwins,” “nobody wins, it’s just about who loses more slowly.” all impart the profound pessimism that both Battle and many viewers share.

“The climate crisis is not equally distributed” is deeply impactful. As the paper burns down, we are reminded how our unstable climate will affect countries like Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, which are at risk of desertification and food insecurity.[1] As we view museum exhibitions in the comfort of air conditioning, we must recall the responsibility we hold to others on our planet. This portion of the exhibition calls for us to consider how privilege insulates us in North America from the worst effects of climate change.

Christina Battle, dearfield, colorado  (still), 2012 video installation, (single-channel digital video, sound recording, metal, photograph), Courtesy of the Artist

“Dearfield, Colorado” (2010) is an elegy to an African American settlement founded by Oliver Toussaint Jackson. This is a part of Battle’s Mapping the Prairies Through Disaster series. Dearfield was a bid for African American Sovereignty in the hostile racial landscape of the United States after the Civil War and WWI. Black Americans pursued self-determination in a post-war country that sought new means to oppress and exploit Black workers. Dearfield offered Black Americans a chance to thrive, but this was shuttered with the dust bowl conditions of the Great Depression. At Dearfield’s 1910 founding, the population was 700, and by 1940, the population was reduced to 12. All that remains are a few skeletons of buildings and a memorial plaque, a photo of which accompanies the video. Battle’s video is paired with text from Larry O’Hanlon:

“The process starts with a little dry wind in a dusty, arid place that kicks up small dust grains so they collide with larger sand grains…the smaller grains steal electrons from the larger grains, giving the smaller grains a negative charge and the larger grains a positive charge…Next, the negatively charged smaller grains are lofted above the ground by breeze, creating a negatively charged region in the air above the positively charged ground. That separation of charges is an electrical field.” [2]

The loop of video opens on ramshackle buildings against a blue prairie sky. The frames are bright and sun-filled, the wild Black-eyed Susan flowers forming a bottom border in cheery yellow, in contrast to the quiet desolation of the abandoned buildings. The video is without music, and the backing sound is purely environmental, the rushing of air and gentle bird song. At 1:45 in the video, the sound of a passing vehicle or possible airplane backs the images of empty homes. The video loop ends on a semi-truck rapidly passing by the remains of Dearfield before beginning again. The absence of people is the greatest presence in this loop, and the brightness of the prairie sky keeps the footage from becoming overly mournful, and yet Battle’s imagery and accompanying text suggest this could be in the future for prairie residents, given predicted increases in heat waves, droughts, intensive agricultural practices, and soil degradation.

Christina Battle, THE COMMUNITY IS NOT A HAPHAZARD COLLECTION OF INDIVIDUALS (detail), 2021, digital print banner on organic cotton, participatory project (artist website, grass & wildflower seed, mycorrhizal fungi, instruction set, postcards), Courtesy of the Artist

“The Community is not a Haphazard Collection of Individuals” is Battle’s ongoing participatory work, utilizing community engagement to plant seeds. The seed functions as a stand-in for both the individual and the community, because the mechanism of a seed may be individual, but they function as communities. The seed actuates the participating individual as a member of the community, and planting becomes the means to integrate the community as an organic biome. 

Christina Battle, are we going to get blown off the planet (and what should we do about it), 2022, video installation (single-channel HD digital video, collaged fabric, wallpaper element designed by Anahì Gonzalez Teran and Shurui Wang), Collection of Museum London, Purchase, John H. and Elizabeth Moore Acquisition Fund, 2022 Image © Toni Hafkenscheid

Environmental dread has a powerful presence in all of Battle’s art, including in the piece “are we going to get blown off the planet [and what should we do about it]” (2022). Environmental destruction exists all around us and lives within us. Yet these harrowing years of death are treated with tenderness. In the background of florals, the small blooming plants, there is a remarkable tenderness with which Battle treats the inconsolable loss of biodiversity.

The community engagement aspect of Battle’s exhibition gently counteracts the accompanying dread by giving museum goers the opportunity to take small but significant action. The opportunity to plant native plants to mitigate biodiversity loss is meaningful in the face of an all-encompassing event like climate catastrophe. Planting a seed makes us feel just a little less powerless.

Under Metallic Skies was on view at Museum London in London Ontario from June 1st to November 3rd, 2024.

[1] “Horn of Africa Drought Emergency,” UNHCR,” last modified March, 2023, https://www.unhcr.org/emergencies/horn-africa-drought-emergency.

[2] Larry O’Hanlon, “Dust Storms Are Truly Electric,” ABC Science. August 18, 2006, https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2006/08/18/1717965.htm.

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Community and Softness: In Conversation with Soft Flirt

Alayna Hryclik of Soft Flirt. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

By Étienne Lavallée

Soft Flirt is a project run by Alayna Hryclik out of London, Ontario. Alayna runs Soft Flirt, a printmaking, mural, and illustrative art practice built around concepts of softness, locality, body positivity, platonic relationships, and dark humor. She can be found on Instagram as @softflirt and her website at softflirt.ca.   

E: You just had a super successful Soft Fest. What does it mean to you to provide this creative space for Londoners right now?

A: I think that, for myself and my own artistic journey, community support has been essential for my own livelihood, for battling imposter syndrome, and for feeling supported and having a network of people who are not only working together but championing each other’s success. So, I think that entering my 8th year in business, Soft Fest has become important to me because I’ve had such success going to other people’s events and building community that way. I think it’s important for me now to start creating those spaces for other people, especially emerging artists, and to help continue to create community spaces in London. I’m deeply passionate about community and I feel it’s always the buzzword that I talk about a lot, but as anyone who shares in the beautiful community knows, you can become obsessed by it and it’s all you want to talk about.

E:  Absolutely! Very relatable on my part; I don’t have to explain to you, we’re surrounded by creative people, and I think that London has a special network of creatives.

A:  I also think, although costs are increasing everywhere, that it is slightly cheaper to do things here, so we have more ability to try something that might not be doable in Toronto, Montreal, or New York. For me, I feel I’ve passed a hurdle in my business—I’m established. I feel comfortable to try something new, and for me it’s this new self-assigned job: creating options for other people and creating what I want to see in the community. For me, the softer, the better.  

Soft Fest by Soft Flirt. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.


E: Absolutely, all of that! I think softness is a big deal right now because the world in many ways seems to get harder and nastier. So not only is your work creating a counter-narrative to that, but it’s also imagining a better world— I love that. Correct me if I’m wrong about that interpretation.

A: I think that’s a nice way of putting it! I don’t think in terms of what I’m doing in this specific decision—I’m making. Most of my work is inspired by either what I want to see, or a reaction to what I’m seeing. A lot of my local stuff is tongue-in-cheek; there’s a bit of hurt underneath. There’s some humor, but with my gravestone design, there’s a hurt for the city that’s lost all these treasured spaces. But there’s also a bit of confusion about it. Why does London lose everything? There are so many layers to that, but I think a lot of them can be seen as negative. I think the work has been an interesting way to put an artistic spin on not just being negative about the things that are hard, or the things that are frustrating or sad, but to try to see through it with softness.

The Lost Loves of London design. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

E: I absolutely love the gravestone design; I got that shirt for my partner. When he wears that shirt out in public, everybody points out that they remember this place or that place.

A: I get the same responses from people when I have the shirt at markets or events. This year I made a big version of the design featuring 163 places. It’s become this fun local history project. I’ve never thought of myself as a local historian, but I feel I am now.

E: That comes with community engagement, doesn’t it?

A: It does! They’re inextricable from each other. When you’re looking into the deaths of these important community spaces, you have a community history. You become a local historian; you’re deeply thinking about these places that used to host house parties. When I was in my twenties, my favorite thing to do was go to a house show. There was something about seeing a show in somebody’s basement that had a certain layer of specialness. You have that deep community bonding where you’re dancing, and you’re in the pit with people, sweating together, screaming together—there’s something special there. Maybe you don’t know it at the time, but when that space is gone, you yearn for it. That gravestone design was creating a space for that grief. I didn’t realize what I was making at the time. I had the idea, brainstorming with some of my friends in our print shop, and I was like “This would be such a funny zine.”  And then it just spiraled out from there. My idea came first, but then the more research I did, the more I asked people about their favorite lost spaces, the more the work became a piece of old memory, with all the feelings alongside that. It’s been an amazing connector for me in the community.

I love to make niche London merch, but, beyond that, it is about the connection aspect. It’s not just about making a T-shirt for me, it’s about the message behind it. A T-shirt can’t be just for me—it would have five places on it, and it would be only my memories. It has to be for the community as shared memories. Shared memories–that’s part of what builds a community, it brings people together. You share in the good and the bad.

E: Your style, what I’ve been seeing from you, is connected to shared spaces, community experiences, and creating work out of it. What is this process for you and what does it mean to you?

A: I think it gives me something to have purpose for. I am an artist, and it’s great that I’m making art. I think having a community lens to a lot of the work that I do, or even who I work with, is important. I am somebody who doesn’t really expand beyond London. I have a support network here that aligns with the mission around everything else I’m doing. I’m getting a mural project and then my next mural is from word of mouth because this person saw the other job that I did. It just demonstrated to me that you can have a  strong supportive community and don’t have to strive for something else. This goes back to when I was in art school at Western. There was this idea that to be an artist, you had to move to a bigger city and be represented by a gallery. That was the way to do it, constantly marketing yourself, and trying to live in that super inauthentic fine art space supporting the bourgeoisie.

I think it’s been revolutionary to make a $3 sticker, a $30 T-shirt, or a larger project mural, and have it be for people in my local community. I don’t need that pat on the back recognition, that gallery stamp of approval, or being purchased by a collector to call it art. That’s been a powerful thing for me and driven a lot of my work. I shelved that frustration of not being able to achieve that ideal when I left university, and now it’s a joy to be able to say I didn’t need to do it that way. I was able to do it my own way. I am so supported here, so it’s in turn made me feel that this is a good place to be. It is a good place to put down roots, and I’m happy to be here. I have no plans to leave.

Pamela Scharbach (L) and Alayna Hryclik (R) of Mural Baby. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

E: We have a unique environment here in London with a small-town feel but a lot of big-city amenities. That includes our cultural scene which has huge potential for growth. I don’t think we could see that growth if all of us were to give up, throw our hands in the air and say fuck it, I’m going to Toronto. Obviously, we talked a bit about it already, but are you able to reveal the locations of your upcoming mural projects in our city?

A: I can reveal both of my next projects! I’m very excited about them. The first, which hopefully is starting this coming week, might be an ongoing project over the fall depending on timing. My mural painting partner (Pamela Scharbach) and I painted a fun project at the Big Brothers Big Sisters location on Wharncliffe. We did this fun meandering line about the building, and it’s been one of my favorite projects. They have an amazing team, and they got a grant to upgrade their boardroom into a community room. They reached out to me again, and they want to bring us back for another mural project on the inside this time. I’m excited to work with them again—they were great people to work with. It’s nice to partner with people who are community-minded and who make such an impact in the community. We’re still in the brainstorming process but the ideas are flowing, and Pam and I are very excited about that project.

The second mural project I have coming up is for the Summit at the Western Fair. The Summit is an urban arts exploration event put on by Ken Galloway and his Risky Play with Paint Initiative project. Last year I was able to paint a peanut-harvesting wagon. This year I’m still waiting on some of the details, but I will again be painting live during the Western Fair. You have all kinds of people, including people from out of town, watching and talking to you.  I’m an introvert, but to be the spectacle, you must be kind and talk to strangers. There’s a lot of people who come over, and whatever you’re doing sparks a story in them. I’m talking to people, I’m making connections, and that’s part of the fun of it too.

Both of those projects I’m excited about, and both are for people that I worked with last year who have brought me back this year. Constantly building relationships and working together multiple times is always fun. I feel murals have this immersive experience working with this specific person in their location. It’s so nice and so fun, and then at the end of it we’ve developed some beautiful friendships.

Soft Flirt Mural from the Summit at the Western Fair, organized by Risky Play 519. Photo by Alayna Hryclik, courtesy of the artist.

E: I’m so glad we have these mural initiatives, because they bring a lot of brightness and cheer to our city during dark times, including the literal darkness of winter.

A: It’s all free, publicly accessible art, which is something I’m passionate about.

I love London but let’s not waste words. There are some serious downfalls, especially when it comes to certain City Council initiatives, and the things that get funding, and the things that don’t. At least we have public art if not other things. Living in London, I know that there are serious problems, pitfalls where we lack support for social services like SafeSpace and the work that they do. If I didn’t have a positive way through, I would be so mad at the world, and that’s not productive either. They’re trying to turn things around, and art helps us do that. I think having a platform in the community also helps me do that. Community is amazing. There are so many good things, but also, we have to put them in the context of giving support to the people who need it. Even if I can’t give someone money, because I’m still a working artist, I can share my platform with people or align my community event with something. These things give us a united front against the problems we face—like certain city counselors who antagonize social support organizations in our community.

“Everything is Fine in London Ontario…” T-shirt by Soft Flirt. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

E: You have experience with local exhibitions, galleries, and arts events. You did Print Pop earlier this year at Palasad, and prior to that you were at TAP Centre for Creativity. Was there anything else this year that I missed?

A:  I had a small show at Variety Cafe. They’ve become great advocates for local shows and local artists, and they’ve been incredibly supportive of me. That was a nice little diversion from my typical artwork. It was a textile collection, but it’s something that I always want to come back to. They gave me the platform to do that, and they’re supportive and encouraging. That was lovely. Then I do a lot of work with Punk Rock Flea Market (PRFM), which is a market with live music as well. PRFM has been instrumental in keeping a DIY spirit alive in our community.

E: London has this dialogue where the harder and grittier our city gets; the more punk rock people seem to get about it and the more people try to create with each other. PRFM helped a lot of small punk bands and visual artists get exposure. I can see how strongly they’ve influenced you and how you’ve influenced them.

A: We’ve been aligned from the beginning. I launched Soft Flirt at the first PRFM. At that time, they were just community members, then we became friends in the process. I did a bunch of markets over the years, and then in 2022, I weaseled my way onto the team and now we work together. It’s been a beautiful reciprocal relationship. We have a shared anniversary and a shared history, which is a fun thing to have. We [had] our September market on the 28th, and it’s the anniversary of Soft Flirt and also the anniversary of PRFM.

E: Could you tell me a little bit about some of the challenges you’ve experienced and your triumphs too?

A: There have been times when I should have had a part-time job to help support myself financially, but I was digging my heels in and making it work with Soft Flirt alone. A lot of my challenges were times when I didn’t have a lot of jobs going on, when I didn’t have markets, or when I didn’t have a lot of places where I felt I could share my art. I work well when I’m busy all the time and I have lots of stuff going on, but then the well runs dry. I get to completion and then I just allow that to spiral. I don’t necessarily always pull myself back up in a timely manner.

My hardest ruts were self-imposed, and I think that’s important to learn from and learn through. There are things that I could have done to make things easier for myself, but I was stubbornly motivated to succeed alone. I’m somebody who struggles with rejection sensitivity. I’ve applied for a lot of public calls for murals, and applied for grants, and I get my hopes up. If something doesn’t come through, I’ve had to learn from my own feelings of rejection. I think that some of those experiences are unavoidable, and some of those are inevitable. It’s the growth of being an artist. You must keep trying. You must keep applying for things. You’re not going to get everything you want, and I see that as a struggle a lot of artists go through, and a lot of people in the community go through.  

There’s a lack of funding for artists, so the opportunities are further between. That’s something that I think I’ll always be challenged by. I get really excited about opportunities, and if I don’t get it, it’s always a hard pill to swallow. There have been some seriously difficult moments, just digging myself out of periods of funk without minimizing it. I’ve recently landed on what works well for me, and it is keeping busy and working together collaboratively with people that I’m excited about working with. Challenges and successes can be one and the same, and I think that the process of being an artist is finding your process.

“For a Good Time Call Anybody Else” T-Shirt by Soft Flirt. Photo by Saros Creative, courtesy of the artist.

E: It’s never easy finding the space to feel your feelings and get through it while becoming resilient and not bitter.

A: I had a bad bout of rejection this year, and it really hit me hard. I felt embarrassed by it. I had to work through those feelings which is why I took July off. I was so burnt out emotionally. I had three back-to-back months which were busy, high energy, and successful. Sometimes that pendulum sways too far in the opposite direction afterward, and I get hit with— I jokingly call it—Summer Time Sadness. It’s just burnout. If I’m not booking a mural for a couple of months, or I’m not booking a collaboration, then my spark, my fire, is a bit dim. Then it’s hard to self-start on my own ideas and projects. I work best when I keep myself busy because I have a constant level of inspiration happening. When the burnout hits, it’s hard to climb back out of that, because that’s the way that my brain works. It’s such a tough balance to learn to live with, to bounce back when you can’t even create. If I’m going to be told “no” by this thing I’m applying for, then why don’t I make my own thing? I think it can make you wallow sometimes, but the positive result of rejection is figuring out a way to make it happen yourself. It’s coming from my own pocket—that’s the reality of community projects sometimes. Funding is not so easy to attain, but the stubborn need to succeed is and it has to happen.

E: You have those projects coming up that you told me about, but, in the long term, what do you want to see for your practice? Do you want to do exhibitions, or do you want to do more festivals? What are your plans for your own art practice and for London as well?

A: Soft Fest is something that I plan to do once a year, every year until I’m done doing it. In the first two years, Soft Fest was a four-day event—something on each of those four days. That felt like the right formula, so I’m not necessarily dreaming too big. I would be happy if next year we do the same thing again. If I were to come into some community funding, I would just keep expanding. I would feel very accomplished if I kept it running for even five years.

On a personal level, I always love to try new things. I’m keeping it under wraps for now, but there’s a different art medium that I’m going to learn next year. I’m excited to open myself up to some new skills and it will expand my art practice. This sounds so sneaky, but it’s because it’s a secret until January.  I’ve always wanted to learn new artistic skills. When I started, I was sewing and screen printing. Now I’m screen printing, mural painting, designing, illustrating, and community planning. There are so many other layers to what I’m doing, and I want to be a jack-of-all-trades. I want to say “challenge accepted” to different directions and paths. Within Soft Flirt, I don’t know what my goals are necessarily, because I maybe don’t know about the opportunity yet. There are endless ways that I want to expand my art-making and develop new skills, but also hone the skills that I already have. I want to paint more murals, I want to screen more T-shirts, but I also want to learn new things and try new events.

I would love to do more work with galleries. It was just cool to work with TAP Centre for Creativity this year. I could see some Soft Flirt gallery shows in the future. The possibilities are endless. Maybe something huge will change and suddenly we’ll get loads of arts funding. Everything is up in the air right now. Everything is chaotic, but that means good things as well as bad things could happen. I am such a hopeful, optimistic person who has been beaten down over the last four years. I miss being delusionally optimistic all the time— it keeps your spirits high. You can’t just focus on all the bad. The bad is happening and we have to recognize it, but it doesn’t really do us any favors if we can’t be hopeful for a different reality. Otherwise, you are just going to wallow and, while there’s good art made in wallowing, there’s also good art made in hope. All the feelings are valid, but I think there’s more positive progress with the hopeful.

 I think it’s powerful to embrace softness—it’s the solution to things that are harder.

E: Circling back around to softness and how softness plays a huge role in your work–what does vulnerability mean to you as a radical act?

A: I’ve been a plus-sized person and see the plus-size body through a lens of softness. I’ve spent a lot of time struggling with my own identity, and my own image in the world, and I feel I’ve developed some beautiful things out of protecting myself. It’s taken me a long time to come to a place where I’ve been able to embrace my literal softness, and alongside that, I formed some beautiful friendships. I’ve been all about platonic love and platonic romance in my life, and I think that it was something that I had to learn through that lens. To be able to put that into my art and to create what I’ve created now, I’ve deprioritized traditional romantic relationships in my life in favor of nurturing beautiful platonic relationships—creating community before I knew that that’s what I was doing. Having these friendships in predominantly female spaces and queer spaces was everything. Societal expectations about pursuing a partner are shoved down our throats in general, and that’s just sort of what you’re supposed to do.


E: You lose something when you sink all your spirit and your heart into one single romantic relationship. You’re missing out on all those nuanced connections.

A: There’s just layers to it. I must honor that part of what makes me soft. It comes from unlearning internalized fatphobia and the trauma that went alongside that, and feeling grateful for what my body can do for me now. There’s a softness to that that I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to specifically, but that’s part of the core of what I’m doing. Then there’s this lens of platonic love. The harsh reality is that we’re always faced with the hardness of the world. We all have this inner softness, and why not make it more of a priority? Why not make it the focus of what you’re doing? It’s a literal thing, but it’s also a theoretical softness and being tender with yourself, your community, with your loved ones.

I try to infuse that message in my art. I have some designs that don’t necessarily feel that soft, but it’s all about what I want for myself and for my community. It is a gentle place to live. I think some people get hung up on visuals; they think soft means pink and floral. I have a lot of those aspects in my work and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s beautiful to explore the ways that softness can be an ideology and energy in pursuit of something more tender in the world, however you want to define that. I think that there are so many avenues to pursue softness in the abstract. Soft Flirt allows me to do this on a grander scale, and  highlight platonic relationships. I think that’s my new mission in life: to remind people that to have stronger romantic relationships you need to have the support of platonic relationships. I think it’s powerful to embrace softness—it’s the solution to things that are harder.

E: It’s also a revolutionary idea. We’re told from an early age not to be soft. We live in a heteropatriarchy that treats empathy as weakness. Kids grow up hearing messaging like “Stop crying or give I’ll you something to cry about.” We need to create a revolutionary space where it’s okay to feel these things together, where it’s okay to experience grief, softness, and tenderness. How else are we going to process these sentiments in our community unless we process them together?

A:  In my early days of Soft Flirt, before it became a business, it was a nickname. In the early days, it was my Tumblr identity. It must have been 2014-2015 that I stumbled on a piece by Lora Mathis about radical softness as a weapon. It was a while ago, but this idea that softness is the change, and softness is the medium has really stuck with me. Not everyone is going to get what this is all about, but the people who do are worth my time, my art, and my energy. That’s who I want to make things for.

I don’t always have the exact formula for the exact thing that’s expected, but nobody does. That’s not what’s being asked; what’s being asked is that we contribute positively and proactively and that we uplift and support our community.

To check out more of Alayna’s work through Soft Flirt, visit her Instagram @softflirt or her website.

ActiVisions: Trans Histories and Activism, 1950s-1990s

The ArQuives 

In partnership with the Museum of Toronto (formerly Myseum Toronto)

Curated by Tobaron Waxman

April 19 – May 19, 2023

Installation view of ActiVisions: Trans Histories and Activism, 1950s -1990s. Photo by Davina Hader, courtesy of The ArQuives.

By Adi Berardini

Walking down Church Street in the Village, I turn my head from left to right to see rainbow flags, symbols of LGBTQ2S+ pride and acceptance. Making the trip to Toronto from the smaller, mid-size city of London, Ontario viewing the volume of flags and symbols of acceptance is powerful. As the LGBTQ2S+ specific spaces dwindle in the city I currently reside in, seeing ActiVisions: Trans Histories and Activism, 1950s -1990s curated by Tobaron Waxman for Museum of Toronto at The ArQuives, reassures me how the LGBTQ2S+ community, specifically trans communities, establish both public and private spaces through art, gatherings, and publishing, no matter the suffocations of a heteronormative society.

Curated by interdisciplinary artist Tobaron Waxman, ActiVisions: Trans History spotlights the ArQuives’ Trans Collections and focuses on the history in Toronto from the 1950s to 1990s, however, the reach extends beyond that across Canada through the letters, buttons, documents, music, art, video, photography and periodicals featured. The exhibition focuses on the legacy of activists Mirha-Soleil Ross and Rupert Raj, alongside many other transgender artists and advocates.  Waxman explains that their approach to the exhibition stems from “non-binary thought,” a term they coined. As they detail, “Rather than juxtaposing one person’s timeline against another, I’m hoping that people are encountering a developmental flow in their experience of the exhibition, as well as contexts where you could sit and relax and read.” On display is a breadth of ephemera covering essential Canadian transgender history.


Top Left: Transisters, Hans Schierl – Dandy Dust, L to R: Book by Candy Darling, My Face For The World To See, Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa MacKay original gendertrash original collage and buttons; sketches by Beth Tyler. Photo by Tobaron Waxman, courtesy of the ArQuives.

Based in Toronto and Montréal, Mirha-Soleil Ross is a trailblazer trans activist, artist, and sex worker, whose work develops intersections of prisoner justice, animal liberation, sex work advocacy, and more. She published the zine gendertrash from hell with her then-partner, Xanthra Phillippa MacKay.[1] Published for five volumes, the zine “[gave] a voice to gender queers, who’ve been discouraged from speaking out & communicating with each other,”[2] including art, poetry, writing, and information by transgender individuals, low-income queers, sex workers, and prisoners. Advocacy for incarcerated prisoners was deeply important to Ross, and a plinth in the far corner is dedicated to her correspondence with prisoners, including a cartoon drawing created for her and a folder with letters to and from prisoners.

Illustration, gift to Mirha-Soleil Ross from an incarcerated friend, Many thick folders, closed, a significant portion of prison correspondence. Photo by Davina Hader, courtesy of The ArQuives.

Ross also established a film, spoken word, and performance art festival, Counting Past 2, by and for transgender artists and filmmakers. As detailed in its mandate in the raw sienna-coloured pamphlet featured in ActiVisions, the festival aimed “to show audiences that transsexual people are creative and that it is through our own work they can best start to grasp what our lives, sexuality, and political struggles are all about.” Periodicals and newsletters by trans artists and writers by and for the community, with a focus on mutual aid, are a strong focus of the exhibition, with many available for visitors to read through.

Trans activist and community builder Rupert Raj is featured in a documentary titled Rupert Remembers, directed and produced by Xanthra Phillip MacKay, which documents Raj’s trans activism in Toronto from 1971 to 1990. Raj is shown quite earnestly in front of a plethora of locations that were essential to the activism that he did in the community. The locations also included safe private venues, such as Vicky’s apartment on the 9th floor where Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings occurred. Raj sparked healthcare activism and provided space for transgender people, providing social events and support for significant others.

L: Rupert Remembers, directed and produced by Xanthra Phillipa MacKay, documenting Rupert Raj’s trans activism in Toronto from 1971 to 1990. Rupert Raj Fonds, The Arquives.R: Kyle Scanlon (1971-2012). Black and white photograph by Laura Spaldin part of The Arquives National Portrait Collection. Photo by Davina Hader, courtesy of The ArQuives.
Advertisement from ‘Metamorphosis Newsletter’ (original 2” x 3”, enlarged and framed for this exhibition) and flowers. Photo by Davina Hader, courtesy of The ArQuives.

Raj created, edited, published, and distributed publications FACT and Metamorphosis Magazine, which specifically focus on access to clinical research, hormones and surgery, legal reform, and life-saving information on medical care for trans men,[3] are on display on the table in the center of the exhibition, along with letters to surgeons. The publications were often under different aliases he adopted for privacy and legal reasons. He helped establish the “Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Transsexuals” (FACT) providing social support and exchange of information, medical, social and legal resources, counselling, and education.

L to R: ‘My Breasts, My Choice Mirha-Soleil Ross,  Photo of Willi Ninja and local Toronto friends, Toronto,
Table with iPad of the complete run of Metamorphosis, multiple books of theory, poetry, first-person nonfiction narrative on the table and windowsill.
Photo by Davina Hader, courtesy of The ArQuives.

Across the room from the film screenings, a vibrant pencil crayon portrait of Rupert Raj by Maya Suess adorns the wall composed of a prism of colours, which was commissioned by the ArQuives for their National Portrait Collection. Waxman explains how the portraits of activists are placed higher on the wall to reach the gaze of the other activist portraits featured, almost as if they are glancing at each other from across the exhibition, such as the striking colour portrait of Mirha-Soleil Ross on the adjacent wall by Julia Stringhetta, newly revealed to the public through the exhibition. On the window ledge was an award to Jackie Shane made of amber-coloured glass, with her album playing on the turntable, over a background soundtrack of Waxman’s curated playlist of trans musicians and trans anthems from the first half of the 20th century. The reading nook beside a stack of transgender literature near natural light creates a lovely space to absorb all the information while listening to the soundtrack.

Whore Culture Festival program, 1995. Photo courtesy of The ArQuives.

Displayed across the right side of the room are newspapers, posters, a t-shirt, and zines showing solidarity and coalition with trans individuals, sex workers, cabaret, and nightlife culture. Included are page excerpts from Maggie’s Zine: By Sex Workers for Sex Workers: 1993-1994 displayed in frames. In an article titled, “Sweeping Us Under the Rug: A Pro Talks About the ’89 Shriners’ Sweep,” the pages include an account by activist Anastasia Kuzyk, who was one of 350 women picked up over eight days during the Shriners’ Convention. The edited transcript explains in first person how her rights were violated after being arrested by an undercover cop. She details being kept in a holding cell, having her phone call withheld from her for thirty-three hours, and then having the right to plead guilty taken away as well. Although the charges were dismissed, Kuzyk ended up serving an eleven-day sentence and didn’t have the option to be let out on bail.[4] She had never had a previous conviction and explained how her friends were shocked. The framed zine pages demonstrate how transgender sex workers were criminalized, swept off the streets, and dehumanized. However, the exhibition displays how cis and trans sex workers used art and cultural production as a means of resistance and demonstration of solidarity.

Installation view of ActiVisions: Trans Histories and Activism, 1950s -1990s. Photo by Davina Hader, courtesy of The ArQuives.

In the LGBTQ+ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, interviews highlight figures who have advocated for equal rights for the trans community such as Rupert Raj, Susan Gapka, Greta Bauer, Martine Stonehouse, and Cheri DiNovo. The activists and researchers speak to the 1998 delisting and the 2008 relisting of gender affirmation surgery under the Ontario Health Insurance Program (OHIP). As a former MPP, Cheri DiNovo passed more LGBTQ+ bills than anyone in Canadian history, including Toby’s Act (named after Toby Dancer) which added trans rights to the Ontario Human Rights Code in 2012.[5] As DiNovo explains, it’s important to mention something when someone’s wrong. She says, “Step up and it has a chance of getting better. Never be afraid to tell the truth—Never be afraid to stand up to bullies.”

ActiVisions highlights essential activist work through art, zines, buttons, and cultural production, especially at a time when the transgender community is attacked for living their lives authentically, with lifesaving healthcare and resources currently being threatened due to hateful rhetoric. It’s important to learn these histories to prevent the injustices towards the transgender and queer community from simply occurring again in a loop ad infinitum. When it comes to advocating for the transgender community, it’s essential to demonstrate support beyond the bottom line and the month dedicated to pride. As ActiVisions: Trans Histories and Activism, 1950s -1990s demonstrates, art and the revisiting of the archive prove a powerful mode of doing so.

Check out the ActiVisions playlist by Tobaron Waxman:

[1] Xanthra Phillippa MacKay was an influential activist in her own right. The ArQuives is actively seeking donations of her materials.

[2] Mackay, Xanthra Phillippa; Ross, Mirha-Soleil (1993). gendertrash from hell, vol 1. Toronto, ON: genderpress.

[3] Raj, Rupert. Metamorphosis vol. 1, no 1. (February 1982), 1.

[4] Maggie’s Zine: By Sex Workers for Sex Workers: 1993-1994. Pg 17.

[5] Toby’s Act (Right to be Free from Discrimination and Harassment Because of Gender Identity or Gender Expression), 2012″. Legislative Assembly of Ontario.