Tag: artcriticism | Femme Art Review

Memory Mirror by Lares Feliciano: A Reflection on Recollection

Lares Feliciano

Denver Art Museum

July 4, 2021 – June 18, 2023

By Alida Kress

Lares Feliciano transforms the Denver Art Museum’s Precourt Family Discovery Hall into a timeless, vibrant sanctuary of nostalgia with her multimedia installation, Memory Mirror. Her stylized work moves viewers to confront their relationships with memory and explore the history of the marginalized communities who have shaped Denver’s history. Feliciano’s extensive use of the gallery space encourages viewers to interact with the installation’s various elements. As such, she creates a piece that invites viewers to see her work and become part of it themselves.

As I approach the gallery, I am beckoned in by the sounds of jazz softly underlying an audial collage of recorded memories. Enormous flowers bloom on vintage wallpaper adorning the walls in a 1970s supergraphics style, and from behind the colorful blossoms, grey-toned faces peer down at me.

Shadow boxes containing sentimental items donated by the Denver public hang on the wall and, across the room, two vintage chairs invite me to sit. An old TV, globe, rotary phone, and other vintage items accompany the chairs in their place on a large rug. Although these items were foreign to me, something about their arrangement felt comfortable, almost familiar.

Graphics stylistically akin to hand-drawn, children’s book illustrations are projected on a large oval frame. The cheerful animations provide visual accompaniment to the memories being recounted overhead. I felt compelled to look at each item in the shadow boxes, sit in the chairs, spin the globe, and even dial my number on the rotary phone. All elements of the installation work in conjunction to instill a sense of hazy nostalgia in me which I yearned to follow to some philosophical conclusion.

Lares Feliciano is a Denver-based artist from California who works in multimedia design to create interactive art installations. The local artist has another installation at Meow Wolf Denver, an artist collective that collaborates with local artists to create maximalist, interactive art installations at permanent locations across the U.S.^[1] At the installation in Denver, Feliciano applies her unique artistic style to breathe life into the Portals of Theseus collection.^[2] The whimsical nature of her work with Meow Wolf remains evident within this installation as well.

Memory Mirror opened in July of 2021 and will continue through June 18th of 2023. Prior to the installation’s debut, Feliciano set up an in-person event and a phone number at which the public could leave a voicemail recalling a significant memory of theirs. Participants were also invited to donate images and items of sentimental value to be displayed in the gallery. The photographs incorporated into the wallpapers are partially these images donated by participants, but most were taken from the Denver Library’s official archives and depict a wide range of Denver’s diverse cultural history.

In my conversation with Feliciano, she shared that her inspiration for the piece came largely from her dad who passed away from early-onset Alzheimer’s when she was 16. Recalling her own relationship with memory and her dad, she notes that memory is an intangible thing, the loss of which, however, is incredibly tangible. Thus, in Memory Mirror, she attempts to capture tangible markers of memory that not only reflect the associated moment in the donor’s life, but also their relationship with the memory as they recall it. She stated that the installation is not trying to make sense of memory or give it any type of order, but simply to give it a place.

In asking Feliciano about what she hoped viewers might gain from experiencing the installation, she said, “Hopefully their own nostalgia is triggered and they are forced to remember… anything.” For me, the piece was a way to interact with and process trauma. The nature of the space encouraged me to recall difficult memories and sit with them in ways I hadn’t before. The space was soft and calm, and it felt as though the words tumbling from my mouth had a safe place to exist outside of my own mind.

In an interview with Westword, Feliciano shared, “My work often evokes a dreamlike nostalgia where decades overlap and all of time exists at once.”^[3] This sentiment is incredibly apparent in the installation. While much of the installation is a call to self-reflection, just as significant is how it spotlights the history of Denver’s marginalized communities. The images Feliciano edited into the flowers on the wallpapers feature mainly people of color. These photos feature nostalgic photographs of varying levels of formality. Feliciano showcases a history of people of color in Denver by including everything from images of CU Denver’s minority student organizations in the 1950s to an image of Denver’s Bruce Randolf at his street naming ceremony. Feliciano described this part of the installation as a method to “give them their flowers,” sharing that she “had no idea what sort of celebrations have existed for any of these people, but they’re here if nothing else.”

In the wake of the pandemic, Feliciano wanted to acknowledge how hard it is to exist, but also how powerful it is to be able to remember something good. We discussed the potential of all of time existing at once, and how recognizing that is an incredible way to deal with grief and trauma. For anyone who has read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Memory Mirror is a step towards seeing every moment of life all at once, like one would behold a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.^[4]

Feliciano’s work urges her viewers to lean into the resemblance Memory Mirror holds to a relative’s living room. It encourages viewers to sit in that nostalgia either to process their relationship with memory or to learn a little more about Denver’s collective memory and the histories of marginalized communities so often written out of colonial history books.

Memory Mirror facilitates a multifaceted experience in which the viewer is invited to explore not only their own memories, but the memory of the city they are in. Feliciano has created a piece that cradles the viewer’s internal child and allows them the space and safety to sit, feel, and remember.

^[1] “Meow Wolf: Immersive Art Experiences,” Meow Wolf: Immersive Art Experiences, accessed April 2023, https://meowwolf.com/.

^[2]“Meow Wolf Denver Introduced Portals of Theseus,” Taking The Kids, January 7, 2023, https://takingthekids.com/meow-wolf-denver-introduced-portals-of-theseus/.

^[3] Kyle Harris, “Lares Feliciano Wants Your Memories for a Denver Art Museum Installation,” Westword (Westword, March 17, 2021), https://www.westword.com/arts/lares-feliciano-collects-memories-for-memory-mirror-at-the-denver-art-museum-11921404.

^[4] Jr Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five: The Children’s Crusade (London: Vintage Books, 2000), 86.

(Un)familiar Resemblances: Circularity of (un)knowing

Circularity of (un)knowing: An exploration of embodied knowledge in untitled spaces

Mayten’s Projects

Claire Heidinger, *First Time Homebuyer* 2022, Oil on canvas, 36″ x 30″

By Dana Snow

Circularity of (un)knowing: An exploration of embodied knowledge in untitled spaces ran from July 30th to August 16th at Mayten’s Projects, a tight gallery space in the bustling Niagara and King intersection of downtown Toronto. Opening weekend gallery goers mingled with Caribana attendees, a kaleidoscope of colour decorating the sidewalks of otherwise nondescript gray buildings. The exhibition faced an unexpected early close, leaving the particular heartbreak of losing precarious space in an expensive city that impacts emerging artists.

In Circularity of (un)knowing: An exploration of embodied knowledge in untitled spaces artists Claire Heidinger, mihyun maria kim, Natia Lemay, Par Nair, and Hau Pham refigure absence, cropping and abstracting women’s figures to relay an intimate sense of recognition. Featuring IBPOC women artists, the exhibition avoids the pitfalls of homogenizing “otherness.” Self-curated by participating artists, the exhibition acts as a call-in. What strength does refusal hold in an age of hypervisibility? I don’t have the answers to this question, but I keep revisiting the works to see if I can catch a glimpse of them between the obfuscations of the artists’ hands.

Claire Heidinger’s Pomelo is the first work to invite me into the gallery. Hanging directly beside the didactic text, the work appears as an offering into the gallery space. Waxy green leaves and bright yellow reds glimmer through the oil paint, settling into an ambiguous space between consumable and ornament. This becomes a familiar theme throughout the displayed works, echoing throughout Jade Celadon Peanuts, and Ginger with Red Patterning.

Jade Celadon Peanuts commemorates a casual moment of the artists’ grandfather snacking and monumentalizes a shared experience of ancestral migration. A ceramic ginger root, adorned with delicate floral stippling calms the senses in the same way a ginger tea might in Ginger with Red Patterning. A more insidious connection emerges in Miss Chinese Toronto Pageant. A large-scale oil painting commemorating “Miss Silken Hair,” the work renders the winner in a celebrity glow. Her smile is a dazzling white; her freshly manicured nails atop long slender fingers posed around a bouquet and glass award. The unforgiving crop of the painting right below the subject’s eyes leads me to a clumsy first reading: she too, is to be consumed. And this is the strength of the curation and the work itself. Heidinger works on the assumptions of a colonial gaze and holds back from a one-dimensional reading. Flora, the subject, displays a “hybridized connection to ‘homeland’ in North America” in her bilingual sash, golden dress, and winner’s stance.

In her essay Inscriptions of Truth to Size, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak speaks to the impulse for anonymity when staging one’s ‘origins’: “You can’t have a true fit, just the approximate size, a hand me down for others who must stage the same collective origin as yourself.”¹ By rendering her subjects as complicated aesthetic symbols, Heidinger pushes the discomfort of the objectifying gaze, both daring and denying viewers to replace any of her works’ subjects with their sign.

Hau Pham, *It’s hard work being the Best.* Image courtesy of the artist.

Hau Pham’s and Heidinger’s works speak to one another in their conceptual approach to aesthetic veneer, placed in opposition to one another in the gallery space. In a conversation with the artist, I learn that her approach to painting is informed by her approach to makeup. “The most successful thing oil paint and makeup do is to make something beautiful.” In It’s hard work being the Best, Pham captures the opulence of Buddha in a golden statue lusciously rendered in veneered brushstrokes and surrounded by orchids. Unbeknownst to the viewer, the statue has been likely spray-painted to convey this opulence. Pham begins a painting from candid shots, “they’re not always good photos,” she laughs. Using paint as a beautifying substance, the artist opens a conversation around the value of beauty standards, and the joy, labour, and entrapping of femmes to imbue that value in themselves.

Compelled by her own experience and friendships with South East Asian and East Asian women, she documents items that offer a “false liberation” to the treatment of an individual. Online as a tween, Pham felt the influence of beauty vloggers like Bubzbeauty, and felt the trappings of choice feminism. She captures this viscerally in Trapping a younger version of Myself, a found object sculpture consisting of hundred-dollar bills, a loaded vape, and a set of thick false eyelashes. Each object stands in for an element of the Buddhist philosophy: “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” Lashes weigh down lids, vapes keep mouths busy, and cash makes it easier to ignore weighty issues. In Fall of the French (manicure) Pham tediously renders the classic French mani in its tongue-in-cheek decay. Pham’s work places the gloss of beauty as a point of interest while denying the viewer a visible entry to the works’ true underbellies. Pham’s practice uses elements of beauty to draw the viewer in and then has them sit with feelings of what they may wish to cover up.

miyhun maria kim’s works use casting as a method of translation and obfuscation. Through the gallery entrance, one meets with your tongue goes your memory. These are hydrocal casts of faces with peacefully closed eyes, set atop hand-stitched cushions, mimicking traditional Korean headdresses. kim creates distance from the values of “duty, honour and performance” by rendering the faces in low contrast. The laborious process of creating the cushions points to the time spent processing these values.

Casting is a material method that echoes throughout many of kim’s works, from The Language of Man, a bronze cast of a bare foot pressed against a bare shoulder, installed with an Onngi and scratch paper, to 달과 말 the moon and words, a quiet and commanding installation near the gallery’s exit consisting of thirteen beeswax casts of German versions of the Korean moon jar, set atop hanji (traditional Korean mulberry paper). The artist took inspiration from their various situations in multiple geographic regions for this work, drawing from “perpetual outsider experience as a Korean diaspora.” Using a translated recognition of the moon jar in a Liepzig flea market, kim cast the form in Canadian beeswax, locating their work in three regions simultaneously. Ink and hanji amplify the experience of translation, using abstractions of texts in Chinese characters, further muddying questions of formation. By using cast as translation, the artist creates new material connections to a sense of place. 화병 Squeezed hearts features wrenching ceramics seated on bamboo cushions. The viewer can see the impact of the artist’s hands constricting the clay in the process of making. The works read as the same size as human hearts. Hwa-Byung (anger disease) is an illness that affects the heart as a result of “suppress[ing] anger resulting from family conflict, so as not to jeopardize harmonious family or social relationships.” By exemplifying this internal anger in an object, kim cements the language of translation in their work.

Par Nair, *a mother series,* oil on wood panel, series of 12 pieces 6” x 8” each

Par Nair’s Letters of Haunting consists of two sarees whispering to one another in the slight breeze, separated by a mound of turmeric. The works are hand embroidered, a meditation on homesickness at the height of the pandemic. Embroidery, Nair told me in a previous conversation, is an inherited skill. The work puts us in touch with the maternal labour that came before us. The artists’ mother feels present in the gallery – whether it be her smeared, reworked face and translated face in her passport photos in a mother series, or her sarees, longing for her body and hanging at a monumental scale. At the show, Par let me know exactly how precarious the installation was. One fan was blowing the wrong way and the gorgeous golden spice would leave marks on the sarees. I am left with an insight on grief from a dear friend: “Sometimes, it’s not that the person is out of your life. Sometimes it’s that you know they are there, and you can’t hold them.”

Always but never dreaming exits the viewer from the gallery with the first real presence of a full figure. Swathed in creamy brushstrokes of black, the work unveils the figure of the artist through a half-eclipsed face, forearms, and foot lounging outside the covers of an overstuffed chesterfield. As one shifts around the work, the details of dream catchers, hanging coats, and weave of the blanket make themselves apparent. Lemay begins each artwork as a surface, feeling for a moment in her life where she felt constrained in the same way the surface is. The colour field works act as a literal positionality – the artist describes later to me that each work speaks to feeling confined in a space at a developmental moment in her life. As a child, she couldn’t speak to why intersections such as Blackness, Indigeneity, and girlhood had an impact on the way she was seen, but she could feel why. Blackness functions as a language of ambivalence in the works.

Natia Lemay, *Always but Never Dreaming* 2022, oil on canvas, 62″ x 42″

In Visibly Invisible, a little girl looks toward the edge of the circular panel, body language tense and alert, with the beads in her hair gleaming out a fire engine red. Lemay iterates to me: “Beads and braids are a Black thing, but they’re also an Indigenous thing. Why do we read them in one way, versus the other? If you are looking at the painting and seeing it as a Black person, you’re not really seeing it.” In her seminal essay Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity Lorraine O’Grady suggests a “both: and” ism to approaching critical subjectivity in European-Western theory – meaning that a subject can step away from the essentializing binds of defining what subjecthood can be, take what works for them, and expand.² Lemay’s paintings “poke the bear” in experiential storytelling, demanding the viewer describe what they see, and let them sit with the assumptions they make on gender, race, and life experience.

Circularity of (un)knowing: An exploration of embodied knowledge in untitled spaces is a necessary unveiling. The works demand patience, challenging viewers’ preconceived notions of beauty, consumption, presence, and visibility. Acts of obscuring figures become porous markers for recognition. Those who are looking may find themselves in the spaces left unknown.

Notes

¹Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Inscriptions of Truth to Size. Catalogue essay, Dunlop Art Gallery, 1990.

²Lorraine O’Grady. Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity. AfterImage 20. No. 1 (Summer 1992).

Seeds and Dyes: Queer Tamil Lineages of Art in Scarborough

Vijay Saravanamuthu, *Two Seedlings.* 2021. Film still.

By Vasuki Shanmuganathan

During February 2022, I had the privilege of interviewing emerging artists Vijay Saravanamuthu and Dhiviya Prabaharan about their recent exhibit titled No Vacancy in Scarborough, produced in collaboration with Emily Peltier from Scarborough Arts – on view in Scarborough’s Tamil barbershop SR Beauty Salon, Nov – Feb 2022.^[1]

The exhibition theme contests representations tied to Tamil arrivals (refugees, immigrants, undocumented people, and migrants) as temporary or ahistorical Canada. Re-interpreting these notions, the exhibit centers on narratives of Tamil people bringing with them deep histories and traditions of arts and crafts practices to Turtle Island. No Vacancy in Scarborough invited artists to consider which practices have survived, been inherited, or revived through their families despite forced migration.

The works of Scarborough textile artist Dhiviya Prabaharan titled Shanmugadevi and digital artist Vijay Saravanamuthu titled Two Seedlings highlight cultural production practices passed down through their grandmothers. They continuously explore complex and revelatory narratives about Tamil art forms that have taken root in local neighbourhoods as a result of migration and displacement. Scarborough’s lack of exhibition spaces does not quell the rich heritage of artists in the area nor, as Vijay describes, “how artful living is infused in how we move, our everyday living.”^[2] Historically, the area has been sidelined by Toronto’s concentration of galleries, not to mention the class, race, and economic access barriers visible within the city’s art landscape.

The exhibit took place in a hair salon which is part of a strip mall long occupied by Tamil shop owners but slowly dissipating with transit expansions, gentrification, the rising cost of living, and the impacts of the pandemic. I visited the shop owner, Yoga, who was willing to host the exhibit in the Scarborough neighbourhood of Brimley and Eglinton. He had arrived as a refugee less than a decade ago with his family. In response to the proposed partnership, he shared his belief that Tamil art deserves the kind of recognition that matches its rich history.^[3]

No Vacancy in Scarborough urgently daylights the challenges of charting the survival of Tamil creative practices, familial warmth, and diasporic continuities through revisiting lineages of art and crafts.

To talk about a queer Tamil lineage of art, one must contend with the trauma of conflict and displacement, and the inheritance of practices long lost to time, genocide, and war. Both artists emphasize this common history as significant to understanding their work during our interview. No Vacancy in Scarborough urgently daylights the challenges of charting the survival of Tamil creative practices, familial warmth, and diasporic continuities through revisiting lineages of art and crafts. When the most recent genocide in 2009 took place, old and new generations alike felt deep grief. Displacement means losing connection to the island of Sri Lanka. Displacement has also meant losing knowledge of Tamil art histories and developments. Yet Tamil art in Canada is finding revival of older practices as witnessed by new artists’ lineages and collectives who incorporate these practices in their artworks.

Dhiviya Prabaharan. *Shanmugadevi.* 2021. Batik panels.

Dhiviya Prabaharan’s Shanmugadevi approaches intergenerational relations through an honoring of ancestral creative practices and reclamation of queer connectedness to culture and family. Their batik panels embody a craft-based process of calling in and grieving — repeating the labour-intensive rituals of the past by turning raw cotton fabric into images and patterns tied to natural elements. The exhibit showcased six 15 x 20 batik-resist panels. Prabaharan explains, “This series of work was co-created with the spirit of my ancestor, my late paternal grandmother Shanmugadevi, through the elements of fire and water and its interactions with the batik process. My grandmother was a batik designer, garment worker, and artist. However, because she had passed before I was born, and for many reasons including the war and migration, many of her designs were lost. I grieved this loss deeply, and in feeling and moving it, an opportunity to learn her art was born. This experience has reminded me that I am truly held by my ancestors, the power of trusting in divine timing, and believing that the right people show up at the right time.”^[4]

In contrast, Vijay Saravanamuthu’s short film Two Seedlings seeks to document family histories and art practices between himself and his paati (grandmother) Ranganayaki Chinna Thirucottyappa with visual storytelling using pen and ink drawings and black and white photographs collected on a recent trip back home to Sri Lanka. His paati taught herself how to draw despite the lack of art classes accessible to her on the island by taking remote learning classes using a mail-in critique system in India. Vijay’s work is marked by a sense of visual mourning which forecloses on the totality of loss. Two Seedlings features voiceover and digital weaving as a means to reclaim, “treasured remnants of a life once lived with peace and dignity in pre-1983 Ceylon.”^[5] His relationship to the arts has been influenced by the familial network in initially recording and digitizing existing practices and then adding his digital visual journey which makes use of panning wide sun-filled landscape shots, animated photographs, and voice narration. A second artwork is already in the works as he seeks to turn his intergenerational and collaborative exchange into a durational commentary on the nature of writing one’s history.

He says, “Displaced by the Tamil genocide in Sri Lanka, Two Seedlings explores my relationship with my paati and my homeland, knowing both ancestral mothers only through photographs, phone calls, and short visits. Growing up in a family of storytellers, I often listened to old tales and imagined what my grandmother might have looked like as a child, what her childhood on the island might have been like, and how war and displacement have impacted her. Lacking access to paati in ways that many of my peers accessed their grandparents – exchanging gifts at holiday dinners, as cherished keepers of childhood secrets, or as warm hands tucking you into bed – my relationship with paati lived mostly in my imagination.”^[6]

The intent behind the No Vacancy in Scarborough series was to bring together arts organizations, small businesses, and creatives in suburban neighbourhoods who had been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. Vijay and Dhiviya are part of a growing group of Tamil artists who seek to contribute to this arts landscape by honoring lived experiences and inherited histories from back home. Given the success of this exhibit, another call for Tamil artists has already been launched for the Golden Mile district of Scarborough.^[7] What can be learned from centering queer Tamil artists and their contributions? A process of looking at older practices critically as they too come from histories tied to caste, Indigeneity, gender, and location but without losing the tender ties that carried them through the generations. This approach invites artists to draw on new and existing intimacies through art entwined to local neighbourhoods.

A few months after the closing of this exhibit, Queer Tamil Collective held the first ever Scarborough Pride Event for Tamils which was a historical moment for the community.^[8] There has also been a proliferation of Tamil artists and collectives exhibiting work in the past two years such as most recently Jeyolyn Christi’s thoduvanam (Contact Photography Festival, May 2022),^[9] Whyishnave Suthagar’s Life Cycles (CDCC Gallery, May 2022),^[10] Josh Vettivelu’s prayers for a word (Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, February – March 2022),^[11] for all, I care (Lakeshore Arts, October – December 2021),^[12] and Tamil aavana kaappaka tittam (The Public Gallery, March – June 2021).^[13] Perhaps it is farsighted to conclude these recent exhibits as an indication of a growing Tamil art movement, but consideration of this possibility is long overdue in Canadian art criticism.

You can also find this review in the second print issue of Femme Art Review on the theme of Queer and Feminist Collaboration.

[1] “No Vacancy in Scarborough: Exhibition Description,” Scarborough Arts, November 2021, accessed 1 July 2022, https://www.scarborougharts.com/sr-beauty

[2] Vijay Saravanamuthu, interview by Vasuki Shanmuganathan, online, 17 February 2022.

[3] Yoga Palaniyandy, interview by Vasuki Shanmuganathan, Scarborough, 23 November 2022.

[4] Dhiviya Prabaharan, interview by Vasuki Shanmuganathan, online, 14 February 2022.

[5] Vijay Saravanamuthu, “Two Seedlings,” 2021, accessed 1 July 2022, https://vimeo.com/545097540.

[6] Vijay Saravanamuthu, interview by Vasuki Shanmuganathan, online, 17 February 2022.

[7] “All that is Golden: Call for Artists,” Scarborough Arts, 25 July 2022, accessed 26 July 2022, https://www.scarborougharts.com/news/call-for-submissions-all-that-is-golden.

[8] Adler, Mike, “Scarborough Pride Toronto event first one ever in Canada for Tamils,” The Toronto Star, 17 June 2022, https://www.thestar.com/local-toronto-scarborough/entertainment/2022/06/17/scarborough-pride-toronto-event-first-one-ever-in-canada-for-tamils.html?utm_source=share-bar&utm_medium=user&utm_campaign=user-share.

[9] “Jeyolyn Christi: thoduvanam,” Contact Photography Festival, accessed 20 July 2022, scotiabankcontactphoto.com/2022/open-call/jeyolyn-christi-thoduvanam.

[10] “Life Cycles: Live Performance by Whyishnave Suthagar,” Critical Distance, accessed 20 July 2022, https://criticaldistance.ca/event/life-cycles-live-performance-by-whyishnave-suthagar.

[11] “prayers for a word (or a lack that builds the world),” Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, accessed 20 July 2022, https://www.vac.ca/josh-vettivelu.

[12] “for all, I care,” Aarati Akkapeddi, Luxvna Uthayakumar, Krish Dineshkumar, Vasuki Shanmuganathan. Accessed 20 June 2022, https://forallicare.ca.; queer Telegu-American artist Aarati Akkapeddi was part of this exhibit comprised of Tamil artists. The group of artists had found affinities in how two related racialized communities on Turtle Island shared similar care practices amidst the pandemic.

[13] Tamil Archive Project, “tamil aavana kaappaka tittam,” The Public Gallery, March 2021, https://thepublicstudio.ca/gallery/tamil-aavana-kaappaka-tittam-தமிழ்-ஆர்கைவ்-ப்ரொஜெக்ட்.

Emotional Objects: Contemporary Textiles and Queered Femininity

Emotional Objects curated by Emily Gove

Ana Morningstar, Yasmeen Nematt Alla, Yahn Nemirovsky, Danny Welsh, Hannah Zbitnew, and Lisette Markiewicz

Xpace Cultural Centre

January 17th-February 15^th, 2020

xpace_image_install — Left: Hannah Zbitnew, The Absence of the Witch Doesn’t Negate the Spell, 2018. Right: Ana Morningstar, I Am Buying My Land Back One Bag At A Time & I am Getting A Receipt This Time, 2019. Photo credit: Polina Teif

By Rebecca Casalino

The intersection of textile work and femininity becomes increasingly complex as more women and non-binary folks introduce their narratives into the public discourse. This active queering of textiles lends itself to the undervalued history of artworks created in the margins and the ‘low’ aesthetics associated with craft. Emotional Objects exhibits work that explores textiles through lenses of Indigeneity, affect and witchcraft. Artists Ana Morningstar, Yasmeen Nematt Alla, Yahn Nemirovsky, Danny Welsh, Hannah Zbitnew, and Lisette Markiewicz present their works in tandem; queerness and femininity act as threads weaving through the exhibition.

Dealing with topics of beauty, land, and magic, curator Emily Gove presents a range of artworks, each employs unique understandings of materiality. Artists Welsh, Morningstar, and Zbitnew use feminist, queer and Indigenous frameworks to create art objects that challenge formal material norms and that inject their narratives into the exhibition space. In choosing these artists, Gove presents works that employ “construction, de-construction, and re-forming to re-imagine garments, samplers, and practical everyday items” [1] to interrogate emotions often dismissed in the public sphere. Exploring the emotional possibilities in textile-based materials and techniques, each artist untangles the medium using feminist sensibilities.

Danny Welsh, Behind Closed Doors, 2019. Photo Credit_ Polina Teif — Danny Welsh, Behind Closed Doors, 2019. Photo Credit: Polina Teif

The inclusion of non-binary artists in feminist conversations allows for slipperier definitions of womanhood and a more nuanced understandings of gender expression. Welsh’s Behind Closed Doors (2019) presents a quilted tunic displayed on a soft fabric backdrop installed with a photo of the artist wearing the piece as well as an incantation. The photo features Welsh modeling the garment against peach velvet backdrop with a serious look, sporting slicked-back hair and contoured cheekbones. This dramatic presentation creates an aura of beauty and glamour around the work. Used makeup wipes create a patchwork of the artist’s daily routine, holding their pigment in a tie-dyed fashion. The rotating blocks of beige, black, blue and pink reveal a palette that exists in a domestic oasis, hence the title of Welsh’s work. The collection and use of materials that are usually waste evoke an abject nature within the otherwise beautiful work. Welsh pushes this contrast further with previously golden safety pins adding a broken, now oxidized green, border to the soft material of the garment. The changing and deteriorating nature of the garment elevates the fragility of the piece and, simultaneously, pushes it further into the realm of decay.

The garment is paired with an incantation on the wall. Highlighting a few stanzas themes within the work become evident:

“body-centric eccentricity

metamorphic multiplicity

authenticity

synchronicity

…

a preformative reoccurring ritual

secretly spiritual

heavily habitual

hybridization

embodied transformation

manifestation

domestic Dalmation

…

durational display

today’s the day time to play

wipe away” [2]

This magical layer of the incantation adds a witchy femininity which speaks to the ritualistic aspects of makeup and gender presentation. Makeup becomes armour and a mask as people who embody feminine characteristics walk through the world. The celebration of femininity outside of the domestic space, beyond closed doors, allows for conversation around gender’s performative aspects and an exploration of modes for expressing power and agency. The added dynamic of the abject allows for a more complicated embodiment of beauty. Welsh’s presentation of their garment, photo, and poem creates a quilt of dialogues for viewers to interpret.

Ana Morningstar, I Am Buying My Land Back One Bag At A Time & I am Getting A Receipt This Time, 2019. Photo credit_ Polina Teif — Ana Morningstar, I Am Buying My Land Back One Bag At A Time & I am Getting A Receipt This Time, 2019. Photo credit: Polina Teif

Centering on the conceptual, Morningstar’s installation sits as a pile of white tarp bags filled with black soil tucked in the corner of Xpace’s main space. The collected earth is interrupted by small glass trade beads, adding symbolic value. Morningstar captions documentation of the work on Instagram, writing about her use of blue and red glass trade beads, “[t]he blue beads are a direct reference to treaties on ““canadian”” soil, Red are referencing the spirits in the soil-not only of the animate but of the ““inanimate’’”[3]

Stenciled with red paint are phrases like “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rez Dirt” and “For up to 500+ Years of Resistance!” Morningstar uses satirical humour to engage with land rights. Her piece is titled I Am Buying My Land Back One Bag At A Time & I Am Getting A Receipt This Time (2019), which is a direct reference to a Facebook status meme written by Jay Jay Tallbull.

natives-be-like-8-hrs-today-i-was-at-the-27802975 — Facebook status meme via Jay Jay Tallbull.

Meme-slinging in Indigenous communities acts as a humourous, entertaining, and educational way of spreading content about resistance and resilience. Watching Indigenous meme creators drop truth bombs across social media platforms cracks the facade of a happy multicultural Canada presented by mainstream accounts. Morningstar manifesting Tallbull’s meme in sculpture adds a physical presence and weight to the issue of land rights. With the RCMP roadblock on Gidimt’en territory, again, a tense sense of deja vu hangs ominously. Memes about the racist origins of the RCMP, the issues surrounding resource extraction and UNDRIP (The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) are circulating fast as supporters of the Wet’suwet’en Nation strive to educate and inform Canadians. The issue of land is now at the forefront. Morningstar’s gesture of collecting the land in bags and “Getting A Receipt This Time” emphasizes past and present instances of Indigenous land rights being ignored by white western bureaucracy.

The aging woman is an uncomfortable concept in western culture, which emphasizes youth and beauty as markers of womanhood. Displayed on a custom shelf at eye level with stairs ascending upwards into the gallery wall, Hannah Zbitnew presents three pairs of hand fabricated shoes. Each set uses leather, terracotta-coloured ceramic, and woven fabric producing an earthy tone to the objects. The shoes follow the order of the Triple Goddess presenting Maiden, Mother, and Crone (which represent women’s life cycle) in the design and treatment of the shoe. The Maiden is represented with a sensible chunky heel, made from clay, with an open toe design. These shoes’ uppers are loosely woven with green cotton—they are casual and easy to slip out of. The Mother is represented by a closed-toe open back shoe with a tan leather sole. Sensible shoe design is stereotypically associated with motherhood, and the aging Maiden losing her beauty but gaining wisdom. A clay rope wraps around the beige woven top of the shoe adding stability and form. The Crone is characterized by simple flat slippers with a pointed toe, leather sole, and a woven beige upper.

Hannah Zbitnew with Lisette Markiewicz, The Absence of the Witch Doesn’t Negate the Spell, 2018. Photo credit_ Polina Teif — Hannah Zbitnew with Lisette Markiewicz, The Absence of the Witch Doesn’t Negate the Spell, 2018. Photo credit: Polina Teif

This movement through the life cycle of a woman characterized by footwear creates a visual dialogue that allows viewers to engage and respond with their own understandings of the correlation of aging and fashion. The silliness and extravagance of high heeled shoes make young women feel sexy, successful, and sore. This sexuality is lost in the more muted tones of Motherhood where practicality and fashion become equally important. Finally, the Crone is comfortable and wise but pale. Zbitnew’s title The Absence of the Witch Doesn’t Negate the Spell (2018) is a quote from an Emily Dickenson poem [4], hinting at feminist undertones to the work, but also functions to lead the viewer into her neopagan understanding of Mother, Maiden, and Crone. Zbitnew allows femme magic into each stage of life. Bending the western perspective on aging and womanhood Zbitnew invests care into each pair of shoes meditating on the value of each phase of life; recognizing that women’s power does not come from the heel of her shoe but from the spell they cast.

The multiple narratives and truths explored in Emotional Objects rejects monolithic and universal biases surrounding textiles and femininity. This multimodal approach to tackling issues important to individual artists highlights the multifaceted nature of queerness and femininity. Gove’s emphasis on textiles privileges affect as a source of knowledge. This epistemological contrast to masculine western modes of understanding elevates witchcraft and queerness as alternative methods for exploring complex emotions. This feminist untangling allows women and gender non-binary people to gather in spaces to discuss new forms of knowledge and art-making without the hinderance of phallocentric narratives or ideals.

Bibliography

[1] Gove, Emily. “Emotional Objects Curated by Emily Gove.” Xpace Cultural Centre.

[2] Welsh, Danny. “Danny Welsh, Behind Closed Doors, 2019. Photo Credit: Polina Teif.” Xpace Cultural Centre.

[3] Morningstar, Ana, ““I’m Buying My Land Back One Bag At A Time & I’m Getting A Receipt This Time”. Instagram.

[4] Gove, Emily. “Emotional Objects Curated by Emily Gove.” Xpace Cultural Centre.

Sarah Mihara Creagen: The Sisters’ Fart Corner

_GLH9814_Photo Guy LHeureux — Sarah Mihara Creagen, *The Sisters’ Fart Corne*r installation shot. Photo documentation by Guy L’Heureux, courtesy of Articule. 2019.

Articule

262 Fairmount O. Montreal, Quebec

November 9 — December 8, 2019

By Penelope Smart

The walls at Articule in Montreal are piss-yellow — the perfect backdrop for The Sisters’ Fart Corner, a new series of ink drawings and animation by Brooklyn-based Canadian artist Sarah Mihara Creagen. Fart Corner is a playful body of work that is rated R. For those who do not wish to talk about piss and shit, kindly close your browser.

It would be a shame to shy away Creagen’s subject matter, though, because what she lays bare in black ink and bright backsplashes of watercolour is fascinating: figures playing out imaginative personal narratives of surgery, recovery, sex and IBS-related business. Yes, there are exposed labia everywhere, especially in Grafting: union must be kept moist until the wound has healed, but what is truly explicit here are bodies, consent, and ownership. Creagen’s figures — most of whom have female anatomy — expose truths about bodies that we are happy to accept and own, such as self-love practices in the form of masturbation or reading a favourite book on the toilet, as shown in Washroom Stall Chit Chat w/Chastity belts. Leaking into each frame, however, are a host of corporeal realities that we are quick to reject and shame: sex, BDSM, farts, pee, and other solids and fluids — especially where vaginas are concerned.

_GLH9882_Photo Guy LHeureux — Sarah Mihara Creagen, *The Sisters’ Fart Corne*r installation shot. Photo documentation by Guy L’Heureux, courtesy of Articule. 2019.

Queerness makes its presence known and felt within Creagen’s blurring of bodies, boundaries, and the raucous interplay of the sacred and profane (pure and impure, clean and soiled). Creagen succeeds in translating the mess of gender not only through her representations of genitalia, submission and girly accessories (heart sunglasses, thongs) but in her exacting and elegant script-style coupled with natural untidiness. Sex is a tricky noun and verb in these works: an opening, an incision. An act of self-mastery, a site of violence. As a reprieve, on a separate wall, Creagen offers the viewer an overly innocent animation called Gardening lessons: grafting, examining, splitting. The seven-minute video’s shadow play is pretty, but the value of botany as a motif in Fart Corner is the grounding effect of seeds, earth, soil. Her animation works as a simple affirmation of sexual health.

Hot air is something special here.

Creagen shows passing wind in two distinct ways: In the title piece, The Sister’s Fart Corner — a large diptych that’s properly installed in the corner of the gallery — fart gas takes on a Sci-fi laser-quality or Care Bear count-down rays (out your butt). In Weather Butt, fart gas produces auric colour-fields that expand like smoke-stack plumes. While Creagen’s subject matter is art historically connected to Edo-period scrolls in which a male figure’s farting was competitive and political, the act of belching and flatus here can be read as a personal metaphor for subversion and superpower. Wielded for good or bad, it’s inside your insides — or what’s churning inside your intestines — that count.

_GLH9898_Photo Guy LHeureux — Sarah Mihara Creagen, *The Sisters’ Fart Corne*r installation shot. Photo documentation by Guy L’Heureux, courtesy of Articule. 2019.

To the outside world, Creagen describes herself as “White-passing Japanese,” which is more than a hint that themes of identity and representation are being served up with sides of awkwardness, derision (hissing, even) and self-doubt. Creagen connects her experiences of being mixed-race with the vulnerabilities of the examining table and bondage. Swirling around Fart Corner is a freaky, sneaky message: you cannot cut your feelings out of your flesh, and you cannot flush your feelings down.

Sarah Mihara Creagen, TP Scroll. Photo documentation by Guy L’Heureux, courtesy of Articule Montreal. 2019.

Sarah Mihara Creagen, TP Scroll, detail. Photo documentation by Guy L’Heureux, courtesy of Articule Montreal. 2019.

The pottery humour gets literal with TP scroll, an installation made of pieces of toilet paper sewn together with blue thread. It’s two-ply, draped, and tattooed delicately with Sumi ink drawings. At first glance, it hangs like a detention-worthy highschool prank. Then, oddly, it softens into a recovered memory of the iconic sky-blue book cover for Robert Munsch best-selling Love You Forever (1989). The story tells of a parent’s unconditional love for their child, and on the cover is a turd-cute toddler having a field day with toilet paper. Creagen’s tiny toilet paper narratives, filled with bare butts and roses, speak to reverie, privacy and personal moments.

Fart Corner is an airy, safe space for tits and ass. The stakes are highest, however—in the faces of these figures. Creagen’s careful, caring hand can articulate micro sensations. It is as though her finely tipped brush understands an essential biological sequence: synapses fire, and then muscle, tissue, and cells become the curl of a lip; the twitch of a nose. The bugging of an eye. Squint, look up close, the facial expressions are the most uncomfortable moments — and the most pleasurable. The title piece The Sisters’ Fart Corner, a bodacious woman, with a fart-sister by her side, throws her head back in full cackle. She is fully alive. She gives no fucks and is one hundred percent liberating to look at. She is farting her heart out; she is free.

Tear of Nature: Ajuan Song at Manhattan Graphics Center

August 1-11th, 2019

Manhattan Graphics Center

song_01 — Tear of Nature, 2018. Manhattan Graphics Center. Installation Shot. Image courtesy of the artist.

By Chiara Mannarino

Although she is known for her stunning, abstract work with alternative photographic processes, Ajuan Song’s most recent series, Tear of Nature, reflects an entirely new venture for the artist, one that Song notes has signaled a moment of artistic growth and coming into her own.

Unlike Song’s previous work, Tear of Nature is a deeply personal series that has allowed the artist to explore her own identity as a woman born in China during the years of government-enforced population control along with her relationship to and understanding of femininity. As a second-born child, Song witnessed her mother lose her job by choosing to keep her daughter alive. She grew up in a society where women weren’t permitted to do certain things merely because of their gender. Consequently, she felt so stifled by the societal expectations imposed upon her that she often wished she were a boy instead. Song sees these new photographs as a way for her to softly speak about the issues she has witnessed and experienced firsthand.

Although softness usually carries a negative connotation, Song believes that “soft” does not mean “weak.” While reflecting upon her upbringing in a society where women are expected to be docile and humble, she asked me to consider how water is capable of slowly eroding a stone over time, a testament to the power of gentle, slow work in the face of stubborn persistence.

unnamed (1) — Tear of Nature, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.

As I walked around the Manhattan Graphics Center, I felt Song’s past, present, and dreams for the future coalesce in each photograph. All of the images contain the silhouette of a female figure composed of delicate tree branches, which intersect to create spindly webs that resemble human veins. The female figure is Song herself—each self-portrait is shot with film on the artist’s Rolleiflex camera and then digitally abstracted to include only the body’s outline. The tree branches that live within the figure’s form entirely fill the body and provide it with all it needs to survive, becoming its life force and infusing it with energy and vitality. These fine and bare wooden limbs were captured in photographs taken in parks across New York City mostly in the wintertime and later superimposed with Song’s outline through Photoshop layering. This digital manipulation allows Song to produce composite images that are entirely harmonious, from their serene gray background to their flawless union of images. Her melding of analog and digital technologies yields results that could not be achieved by choosing between the two. This artistic decision demonstrates her belief in the power of union and balance to create otherwise unattainable outcomes.

Every detail in these intricate images is significant for Song, and her choice to include her own body in the work reflects the personal nature of this series. Though natural, her poses are strategic, intending to embody the Chinese belief that one must be humble in front of nature, which holds divine wisdom. By artistically conceiving a harmonious accord between humanity and nature, Song envisions a reality in which all entities sharing this earth are equal, a condition that often seems inaccessible within the context of our current moment.

unnamed — Tear of Nature, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.

In today’s world, the once-ambiguous term “global warming” has become all too tangible, and, in New York, hectic inhabitants often fail to appreciate the few and precious patches of green that exist in the bustling hub of concrete high-rises and construction. Through this series, Song shares her belief that these realities could all be prevented if humans and nature coexisted respectfully and harmoniously with one another. However, she acknowledges the precariousness of this notion in her series title, which references the delicate line that lies between division and unity. Song revealed that she is currently in the process of creating the second part of this series, which will focus on the same motifs but now from a discordant rather than peaceful perspective. Through Tear of Nature, Ajuan Song is claiming ownership of her heritage, exploring the relationships that can exist between dualities, and sharing her vision of what our world has the potential to look like—and what a beautiful world it could be.
Ajuan Song’s Tear of Nature is on view at the Manhattan Graphics Center until Sunday, August 11th, 2019.

Early Riser: A Perspective on Marclay’s The Clock

The Polygon Gallery

July 5- September 15, 2019

Admission by donation

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

By EA Douglas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nevertheless, We Persist: She Persists by Heist Gallery

May 11th–June 10th 2019

Palazzo Benzon, San Marco 3927 – 30124 Venezia

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

By Adi Berardini

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

“The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist

Working without the pressure of success

Not having to be in shows with men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Discussion with Lêna Bùi: Changing Cities, Changing People

home_installation 1 — Lêna Bùi *good infinity, bad infinity* installation shot. Courtesy of the artist.

By Devana Senanayake

Concrete jungles, urban rivers, preserved city spaces, and dynamic mountain villages are all totems in Lêna Bùi’s umbrella project Home. The Vietnamese multi-disciplinary artist takes the audience on her mental journey of processing urban change through breathtaking visuals. Though Lêna is a multimedia artist, her videos function as visual essays that pinpoint the complexities of human life in concrete ecosystems.

“I think that video is very seductive. You have so much to play with: visuals, sound, and light,” Lêna says. “Video is perfect for narrative, but also for abstraction. It can be a story but it does not have to be completely linear. It can also be poetic.”

She focuses strongly on urbanization particularly as her home country, Vietnam, has undergone unprecedented change over the past couple of decades. Statistics by the World Bank confirm that the country’s extreme poverty rate has declined to under 3 percent and the GDP has increased to 7.1 percent in 2018 as a result of a rise in economic activity.

Lêna understands that all change, even positive economic change, comes at a cost to the environment and to the people occupying it. Through her project good infinity, bad infinity, she uses Saigon as a starting point to explore the relationship shared by physical environments and people.

Through this point of focus, her audience is invited to join her on her personal journey to understand human behaviour, relationships, resilience and belonging across the globe.

river_23 — Lêna Bùi. *good infinity, bad infinity*. *Home series.* Courtesy of the artist.

mahankaal temple — Lêna Bùi. *Diagonal Time*. Courtesy of the artist.

I am interested in the depiction of humans and their relationship to urban spaces in your art. Why does this dynamic interest you?

Everyone tries to situate themselves in the environment to make sense of it—this is my way of making sense of existence. Urban development is a tangent of human relationships with the environment and their surroundings.

Saigon has changed so much since my childhood. When I was a kid, it was still mostly bicycles and cyclos [and] there were hardly any cars and very few motorbikes. In the past five to seven years, they started building high rises everywhere so the landscape has transformed.

In Vietnam, the growth rate is very high. However, what are the costs of very rapid development without well-rounded consideration for the future?

I think this is happening all over South-East Asia. Change is inevitable but once we’ve knocked the old things down, we cannot revive them even if we come to regret it.

home_5 — Lêna Bùi. *good infinity, bad infinity* installation shot. Courtesy of the artist.

Waterways are an important totem in good infinity, bad infinity. Why did you focus so strongly on this component?

Both cities developed along waterways. Sharjah is right by the sea. They both have big ports and there is a lot of commerce and exchanges happening there. Saigon is a big port city and along the river are shipyards and ports.

Water is synonymous with life. Large water-bodies connecting to the sea like the Saigon river and the Sharjah creek enable the constant exchange of goods. Nowadays, construction materials are not sourced locally and a lot of it is imported. I was curious about how things were linked and connected to each other.

I was also looking at sand. Sand is a crucial component in the production of concrete [in particular]. For concrete to work, you have to use a particular type of sand with the right texture and size, which is river sand. Though Sharjah has a lot of sand, they cannot use their sand for construction and have to import it.

Vietnam exports sand, often mined illegally, which creates a lot of corrosion along the river-banks. Houses have crumbled along the riverbanks because sand was extracted from the middle of the river without any regulation. In the case of Saigon, you just have to go downstream to see multiple barges extracting sand. If you go a bit further, you see an abandoned cement factory and houses sunken in the water. At the same time, along the riverbanks are booming construction and increasingly large high-rise complex. There’s a full circle of construction and destruction going on here.

macchendranath_2 — Lêna Bùi. *Diagonal Time*. Courtesy of the artist.

What impact did urban developments have on human communities?

In Saigon, over the past ten years, very old structures and areas have been demolished. For example, the oldest shipyard built during the 1790s, during French colonialism has been replaced by villas and high rises.

I’m sure modern high rises cater to certain modern needs, [however] I’m interested in its effect on people. In the past, community networks were very tight which had both good and bad impacts. There was no privacy, everybody was involved in your business. However, people looked out for each other. What modern housing does is, it gives people [the] anonymity and freedom. But does it help people build community? Or, is it detrimental to our ability to connect with each other?

When I was invited to Sharjah for the residency, the reverse was happening there. They experienced a very rapid development phase in the 1970s. Then they realized that they wanted to preserve their old quarters, so they moved everyone out of the area. The old quarters are preserved but they are not lived in. They have become a museum, frozen in time. Even when we want to preserve the old, it changed into something else.

All these old men who had grown up in the area were dispersed all over the city and this broke the social network their old neighborhood provided. Now that they have retired, they regularly come back to the last original teahouse to chat with each other. They do this to find a sense of belonging and to find a community.

sapat shakya — Lêna Bùi. *Diagonal Time*. Courtesy of the artist.

I would also love to touch on your upcoming project based in Nepal, Diagonal Time. What did you learn about people in Nepal, particularly as it is lesser developed than Sharjah and Saigon and has a greater sense of community?

Nepal seems to be changing rapidly but it is a very special place. It’s old but it is alive, it’s not a museum. People still live in old structures, in small and winding alleys, maintaining many old traditions. I think it is immensely rich in culture.

I speak in the film as an outsider looking from the outside in. Many of the shots are through door-frames or alleyways. Then the viewers feel as if they are peeking into something private. Being a foreigner is being ignorant. It’s good because you don’t take anything for granted. It’s bad because often you can’t fully understand, or you misunderstand. My film is a documentary, but in the end, it is also a personal essay.

I was trying to understand human resilience. What aspects of our life contribute to our sense of wellbeing? I focused on the people who have found strength in something or who gave strength to others.

A character featured in the film is a female woodcarver. She spoke of how she learned to carve. Her trade gave her financial independence and agency. She worked hard and with her skills, made enough money to build her house and put her children through school. There was also an astrologer. People went to him with a problem, got his advice and then felt better. I think he functioned like the Asian version of a psychologist.

A solid sense of community is crucial in helping us find meaning in life. There are all sorts of festivals in Nepal that provide opportunities for people to connect and to feel connected. Rituals, music, and dances are all part of a language of unspoken understanding.

Of course, I cannot make a film about Nepal and not include mountains—they definitely belong to the sublime. I don’t care much for the spirituality that is woven into tourism in Nepal but the mountains give a good sense of scale. They let us register how small and fragile human beings are. Traditional mountain villages are inaccessible harsh environments and can be a symbol of human resilience.

rajendra bajracharya_astrologer — Lêna Bùi. *Diagonal Time*. Courtesy of the artist.

What do you hope your audience notices, particularly in relation to the theme of home and changing cities?

In terms of home, home can mean people, home can mean the land and the water. As for changing cities, I’m resistant to changes but also pro-change. A city is a living thing, so it has to change and adapt to keep up, to stay healthy.

I make work about things I don’t understand. I am trying to solve a problem for myself. There is no overarching message and there’s no solution because it is unresolved. I want the audience to look at something they think they know, that they take for granted and see something else in it.

Virginia Lee Montgomery: Ponytails, power drills, and political action

By Laura Demers

3_DEEPSEE_still_1920 — *Deep See* (2017), video still. Courtesy of Virginia Lee Montgomery.

A blinking eye peers through a circular opening in a foam board seabed. A manicured hand then reaches through the hollow, extending its fingers towards a disembodied ponytail that dangles alluringly (Deep See, 2017). The suspended blonde prop appears again on another display screen across the hall. The viewer is transported from a natural environment to a sterile business setting; this time, the prop slithers through a corporate landscape of hotel furniture (Pony Hotel, 2018).

5_PONYHOTEL_press_1920 — *Pony Hotel* (2018), video still. Courtesy of Virginia Lee Montgomery.

Texas-born, New York-based artist Virginia Lee Montgomery’s video practice has recently received great acclaim; her work is accurately described as an exploration of “the economic, ecologic, and emotive uncanny”[1] that characterizes both psychic and daily life under capitalism. Upon first seeing VLM’s work in the New Museum’s Screens Series, I quickly became captivated by the narratives she conjures. Palimpsestic historical references, found footage, sensuous sound samples, and idiosyncratic visual motifs come together in surprising ways, thus “enabling surreal awakenings.”[2] Drawing from materialist philosophy, metaphysics, semiotics, psychology, environmental activism, and personal experience, VLM makes masterfully layered videos. Beyond their initial hypnotizing effect, these pieces left me pleasantly bemused. I revisited her work online, again and again, eventually noticing the cyclical themes underpinning her works; psychic loops, redundancies in history, geological and meteorological patterns, the reproduction of labour, the circulation of symbols and signs, etc. Most striking, I think, is VLM’s way of showing how feminist and elemental agencies are affected by —and implicated in — these cycles of hope and oblivion.

Most of VLM’s videos are set inside hand-built maquettes. She perforates the walls of these fabrications with a Dewalt hole saw, producing holes wide enough to allow parts of her body to interact with objects and substances embedded within. Fingers stretch, stroke, prod, and probe, sometimes wielding power tools or other instruments, while viscous liquids such as tar and pastry frosting drip across various surfaces. Her works bear the same magnetic effect as ASMR youtube clips; uncanny yet appealing.

WaterWitching_image_3_3840 — *Water Witching* (2018), video still. Courtesy of Virginia Lee Montgomery.

At first glance, the works also remind me of Mika Rottenberg’s absurd video installations where female bodies and body parts are compartmentalized according to their function in the production chain. Rottenberg exposes, with perverse humour, the structures that feed off of Sisyphean forms of labor and that embroil women across the globe in complex and rather dubious relations of power. In No Nose Knows (2015), for example, “female workers cultivating pearls on an assembly line [in coastal China] take sustenance of noodles that are sneezed out of the massive nose of their [North American] manager.”[3] Likewise, with works like Innovation Porthole (2015), VLM is interested in the ways in which the body —and perhaps even more so, the psyche —experiences daily life within a neoliberal economy that “emotively engineers [its] employees.”[4] The artist drills through the fabric wall of an office cubicle to grab a gooey pastry from a platter that rests on the opposite side. She drills another hole in the back of a protective helmet in order to better accommodate her ponytail, adjusts the gear on her head, and proceeds to navigate her corporate surroundings like an obstacle course. “The activities you see in the video are […] portrayals of ridiculous hoops that I must jump through, reach through, squeeze through in order to be acceptable”[5], she says. It is important to mention that aside from making art, VLM does graphic facilitation at conferences across the United States. In this particular professional context where women are largely underrepresented, she is required to present herself as a “businesswoman”, an identity that is somewhat at odds with her own —hence the “Business Witch” persona that occasionally makes an appearance in her artistic work.

18_VLM-copy_1500 — *Innovation Porthole* (2015), video still. Courtesy of Virginia Lee Montgomery.

VLM_InnovationPorthole_VideoStill_Image2 — *Innovation Porthole* (2015), video still. Courtesy of Virginia Lee Montgomery.

In one of her latest works, VLM’s focus seems to shift away from the corporate realm of cubicles and conference rooms, and towards the natural world. Water Witching (2018) suggests a scenario where the elemental world and feminism, together, take action against patriarchal structures of instrumentalization and domination. Weaving together images of nature and of feminist protests, this work is about “conjuring the strength to weather chaos.”[6] The artist re-contextualizes the ancient pseudoscientific practice of dowsing — a method by which diviners would, with the help of rudimentary instruments, locate underground rivers and buried minerals — to address current climate concerns. VLM’s interest in dowsing is the result of her foray into the history and philosophy of various elemental materials such as rock, water, and metal, historically activated within theological or medicinal contexts by priestesses and healers. In her video, VLM cuts a wire coat hanger borrowed from a women’s march protest sign (a poignant plea for reproductive justice and for the right to access safe abortions) and bends it into two L-shaped divining rods. The artists’ manicured hands reappear once again, this time covered in blobs of black and blue dye, and re-enact the ritual so as to summon a stream of moving images depicting exploitative operations that continue to endanger the environment and women’s lives/livelihoods. Documentary clips of decaying nature, habitat destruction, and resource extraction cascade at a rapid pace, along with current and historical footage of feminist manifestations, to the sounds of wind chimes, tornadoes, power drills, and field recordings.

WaterWitching_image_2_3840 — *Water Witching* (2018), video still. Courtesy of Virginia Lee Montgomery.

The manifesto titled Feminism for the 99% was recently recommended to me by a friend; this book concisely addresses some issues that are also at play within VLM’s work. Like the artist, the three authors advocate for feminism that does not lean into the capitalist ideology (by “empowering” select privileged women within corporate positions), but that instead seeks to dismantle it. Furthermore, the authors state that “if today’s ecological crisis is directly tied to capitalism, it also reproduces and worsens women’s oppression.”[7]

Indeed, statistical data has shown that in situations of ecological catastrophe, women with precarious incomes and housing situations often become the sole supporters of their families and communities. Their exposure to poverty, displacement, and violence are also disproportionately exacerbated. Using self-organized women’s groups who have struggled for potable water, clean air, and habitat conservation in their communities as case studies, the authors of the manifesto explain that:

“In their refusal to separate ecological issues from those of social reproduction, [grassroots] women-led movements represent a powerful anti-corporate and anti-capitalist alternative to ‘green capitalist’ projects that do nothing to stop global warming while enriching those who [contribute to its abstraction]. Women’s struggles focus on the real world, in which social justice, the well-being of human communities, and the sustainability of nonhuman nature are inextricably bound together.” [8]

Similarly, through visual meta-structures and a panoply of signs that elegantly slip into one another, Water Witching (2018) points to the intimate connection between the exploitation of natural reserves, and that of women’s bodies and social reproductive labour[9] — especially as both are seen as infinitely renewable resources. More broadly, the looping video alludes to circular rhythms and to humanity’s perpetual indebtedness to nature’s processes.

WaterWitching_image_6_3840 — *Water Witching* (2018), video still. Courtesy of Virginia Lee Montgomery.

VLM’s practice as a whole proves to be rather difficult to pin down and can raise more questions than answers. Yet her work, to me, begs for political action that encompasses ecological issues and shows us that for any iteration of feminism to fulfill its mandate (that of emancipation) it must necessarily align itself with environmentalist and anti-capitalist ethics. Her interests, as varied and wide-ranging as they seem, are embodied in the props, gestures, and visual associations that reappear from one video to the next, producing an overarching narrative in which feminist and ecological concerns are tightly enmeshed in the most whimsical and jarring of ways.

[1] http://www.shefolk.com/creatorinterviewsrss/2017/8/17/8y1l5msefksjvf3wanv5mqld34xziz

[2] https://www.banffcentre.ca/articles/its-okay-be-many-things-once-conversation-virginia-lee-montgomery

[3] http://www.leapleapleap.com/2016/02/mika-rottenberg-no-nose-knows/

[4] https://www.banffcentre.ca/articles/its-okay-be-many-things-once-conversation-virginia-lee-montgomery

[5] https://www.banffcentre.ca/articles/its-okay-be-many-things-once-conversation-virginia-lee-montgomery

[6] https://virginialeemontgomery.com/WATER-WITCHING

[7] Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser. Verso Books, 2019. p.47

[8] Ibid. p.48-49

[9] The labour that occurs in the domestic sphere (and is therefore relegated predominantly to women, especially women of colour). This unpaid labour, despite being devalorized and taken for granted within capitalist societies, serves to sustain the economic profit of others in the long run. These “people-making” activities, according to Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, include, among many other things, the raising of children who will one day become compliant adults fit for the workforce, education, and healthcare work.