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.

Eternally Shadow-Banned

On Bodies Being Bodies and Confronting the Algorithm

Jada, Unraveling Series 2023.Photo series sponsored by Bonjibon.

By Taylor Neal

I have always been fascinated by bodies and the natural beauty of bodies being bodies interacting with the world.

I grew up as a dancer, which connected me intimately at an early age to the complexities and nuances of different bodies through all stages of life—the ways that youthful bodies move, how these movements change as we age, and the influence of one’s own lived experience on their relationship to their body.

As a student, I became fascinated by fashion and costume and how garments and manipulations of shape and silhouette can alter and interpret bodies—how one’s background, location, and lived experience can influence one’s relationship to their body.

This ongoing fascination led me to photography, to the capturing of bodies in stillness. I have worked in this medium now for over a decade.

Taylor Neal. Jolene (2), Unraveling Series, 2022. Photo series sponsored by Bonjibon.

On Bodies Being Bodies

Through photography, I strive to capture natural relationships between the human subject and the natural world and to emphasize that we are a part of nature, not apart from nature. I refer to my art as an exploration of free beauty, a concept derived from Kantian philosophy, specifically Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Kant defines free beauty as “the experience of beauty rests on what he calls a harmony, or a free play of the faculties of imagination and understanding, punctuated by pleasure. Notably, this free play is supposed to be without a concept.[1]

Kant’s notion of free beauty arrives when we notice a harmony between imagination and understanding, based in pleasure, without predisposition. In our world, we are so often influenced by what we are told is beautiful, what we are allowed to regard as beauty, that we’ve become disconnected from our natural noticing of beauty that resides in the human form. The body is beautiful in a way that we can instinctively perceive. My work seeks to remind us of the free beauty in all of our natural forms.

When we are only able to witness uncensored bodies in sexualized contexts, our detachment from free beauty is extended.

As a queer, femme photographer, I use photography to explore bodily beauty beyond the dominant narratives attached to bodies in media. My work aims to depict genders from a compassionate, intimate perspective, to capture the body in its most natural form in spaces that allow for consent and safety. As most of us working artists in 2024 must, I use social media—primarily, Instagram—to share my work and connect with like-minded communities. The problem, then, is striving to find a respectful balance between maintaining the integrity of my art and mission and satisfying the censorship algorithms that rule these platforms.

Taylor Neal. Strawberry Moon, 2021.

The Algorithm

There are many reasons why these platforms censor and silence bodies. Oversimplified arguments for online censorship are often predicated on maintaining a platform free of sexual content, purportedly to address concerns related to the age of consent. The problem with this practice is that to censor the nude body, especially the femme body, is to link the body inherently with sexuality.

By censoring only certain parts of the body, the genitals and female-coded nipples, the natural body is deemed an inherently sexual image. The body then, is deemed something to be hidden away and ashamed of, where only specific depictions of bodies are acceptable for the platform.

Female-coded nipples are permitted on the platform only within the context of breastfeeding; genitals only concerning birth or as depicted by sculpture or painting. Censors and algorithms decide whether or not, and in what ways, bodies are worthy of being seen. The nipples of femme people are only acceptable if in relation to motherhood, but not by their own autonomous choice.

When we are only able to witness uncensored bodies in sexualized contexts, our detachment from free beauty is extended. In a world that routinely links one’s worth as a human to their sexual desirability, to have our bodies policed in this manner is a constant reminder that our bodies are not our own. Furthermore, in the categorizing of certain bodies as exclusively sexual, and the deeming of the sexual as explicit and subject to censure, our sexuality is silenced. The free beauty inherent in our bodies is silenced.

The western world has suffered for generations from sexual repression. We finally have tools such as social media to generate information, conversation, and education about our bodies, our pleasure, and sexuality, and yet we must use silly type tricks such as “seggs” and “m@sturbation” for these conversations not to be erased on social media— these conversations that have the power to save lives. These censures and erasures also have an outsized impact on sex workers striving to navigate the drastically changing ways of reaching clients and going about their work. Anything outside the lens of acceptability constructed by the platform authorities and algorithms is automatically deemed dirty.

I do the work that I do, to directly confront this silencing.

Taylor Neal. Bri, Unraveling Series, 2023. Photo series sponsored by Bonjibon.

The Silencing

In addition to the many barriers my work faces due to my position as a queer femme photographer, this policing of bodies makes it even more challenging to share my art, which strives to approach the widely experienced trauma of body-based censorship in the western world. My refusal to delete my art from Instagram to satisfy the algorithms means that I am eternally shadow-banned on the platform, which makes expanding my audience next to impossible on the app. Their message: surrender to our guidelines or get lost.

My profile on Instagram aims to be a space where people can come to feel seen, validated, and reminded of their inherent beauty, regardless of what barriers and limitations their body has faced. When I share my other work as a sex educator and writer on the platform, offering access to sex education and conversation on topics of the body, queerness, and sexuality, I face additional censure and silencing.

Even within the policing of bodies in general, there are bodies that face greater barriers than others. I am a white, thin, able-bodied femme living in Canada. Even though I am constantly censored, I still hold privilege in spaces such as Instagram. It is important to note that when I post photos of my own body, these photos are less likely to be flagged or removed than when I post photos of fat bodies, disabled bodies, bodies of colour, queer bodies, and aging bodies. I have learned these facts through experiments with my own social media.

Whenever I mention sex work, I am silenced.

When the sex worker happens to use substances, it is silenced even faster.

Whenever I show body hair, I am silenced.

When that body hair is on a body of colour, it is silenced even faster.

Whenever I show fatness, I am silenced.

When that fatness is showing signs of aging, it is silenced even faster.

Whenever I show intimacy between lovers, I am silenced.

If that intimacy is queer, it is silenced even faster.

Bodies existing outside of what is deemed palatable receive fewer likes, and significantly less views, based on what the algorithm allows to appear on Explore pages within the Instagram app, and often appear on my “restricted content” list. Videos of myself dancing also appear on my “restricted content” list if I dare to touch my body erotically, as though my body is not mine to touch and share how I please. 

The “restricted content list” is a relatively new feature on Instagram, where you can see  a list of which of your posts have been flagged as problematic and why. This list of posts is then used as evidence for “why a profile can’t be recommended,” which means that no matter what hashtags you use or how good your content is, your posts will never come up on anyone’s feed unless they search you specifically. This is harmful for people using this platform for business and for artists striving to share their work and build an audience, because gaining followers and having your content seen is difficult if the algorithm is blocking it from going anywhere. The only way to fix this so that your profile can be seen is to either contest the flagging (which usually doesn’t change anything) or remove the posts that are named “problematic” and wait for the algorithm to re-evaluate your profile.

Taylor Neal. Mosco, Unraveling Series, 2022. Photo series sponsored by Bonjibon.

F*ck The Algorithm

And yet, we simply cannot stop sharing.

We need to see ourselves, our bodies, in the spaces we have access to, not gate-kept behind entrance fees, in art galleries, or on porn websites, run by the same powers controlling our algorithms. In creating a space online dedicated to the expression of free beauty, my intention is to remain available and accessible as a means of safety and support in our collective journey toward reclaiming our bodies, regardless of how the shadow-bans minimize my audience.

I continue to find new and creative ways to share my work within the criteria, and yet I feel a little pang of frustration each time I airbrush the nipples from my photos. Free beauty is meant to refer to the lack of concept, or imposed standard of meaning, and yet to cover nipples is to implicate inherent meaning upon them. But, this platform is what we’ve got for now by way of accessible art dissemination, and so I find ways to share more authentic versions of my work elsewhere, and use Instagram to re-direct folks there. Because we cannot stop doing this work, creating this art, pushing back against the hegemonic standard of acceptable beauty with the bold realness of how it actually looks to be human.

We cannot stop finding beauty in the crevices of the rocks, the way the juice of the pomegranate mirrors the body, and the folds of our skin. Our connection to nature is where free beauty is found, and this unfiltered, raw, organic beauty is the essence of what makes us human. We cannot stop sharing the authentic experience of our bodies, their nuances, and their unique interpretations of life, because we cannot stop expressing our humanity. We cannot stop creating spaces for safety, recognition, and representation. We find ways to work together within the algorithm and to beat it at its own game by using type tricks and blurring our images, or we grind against it together.

So, uplift your favourite artists and share their work. Notice the patterns you see in the algorithms and work to confront them. Call it out when you sense wrongness, in the words of Sara Ahmed.[2]

We must not stop sharing, even if we are eternally shadow banned, because even when it feels hopeless, someone will stumble upon your page and feel seen by your art.

This feature can be found in our third print issue with the theme of Censorship. You can find a copy here.

[1] Kant, I. . The Critique Of Judgement. (1790).

[2] Ahmed, S. . Living A Feminist Life. (Duke University Press, 2017).

Surveillance Eyes: In Conversation with Harley Morman

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT.

Don’t Dream It, Be It

Harley Morman

Southern Alberta Art Gallery

May 11 – June 22, 2024  

Interview by Migueltzinta Solís

There’s something about Harley Morman’s work that makes you want to sink your teeth into it. I’ve been close friends with Harley for seven years – in the good times and the bad – and I always look forward to being transported to the colorful, gummy world that is his trans, queer creative practice. We are at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG) during Lethbridge Pride, a few hours after riding together in the parade as part of our local queerdo bicycle club. After what I felt were too many cheering children, it feels good to bask in the simmering glow of plastic, rubber, and knitted objects that comprise Harley Morman’s solo exhibition, Don’t Dream It, Be It.

The exhibition space, once a library, is transformed by an overlay of trans-metaphysical subliminality. Coloured tape crisscrosses the hardwood floor, mirrors hang from above on bright plastic chains, nearly life-size Perler bead self-portraits stand sentinel, and lenticular images wiggle and wink as you move through the room. A knitted rope sways from the ceiling, delightful yet foreboding, ending in a sprinkling of rainbow aquarium gravel. A full wall is dedicated to an enigmatic map made from strips of tape which, upon scrutiny, reveals itself to be a play diagram for the exhibition space. At the end of the room, behind the hanging mirrors, a scoreboard with a clock, and a rainbow collage of plastic figurines surveil the visitor. Inhabiting the space, one may feel that a game is in play, and one, in their queerness, might feel a looming sense of anxiety about what the game is, what the rules are, and whether they are getting it “right” or not.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

Migueltzinta Solís (MS): Hi, Harley. (laughs)

Harley Morman (HM): Hi, Miguel. (giggles)

MS: My first question is, who are the different Harleys in this show?

HM: There are a lot of different Harleys here. There’s the Harley that is me, that’s my body…

MS: That I’m talking to.

HM: Yes! That is speaking. There’s also a ton of different Harleys. The most literal Harley is the work that is called Megan number 3: Harley. It makes good narrative sense to say it was the last thing I finished for the exhibition. There are three Perler bead works in this show. Each one represents me at a different stage of my transition, which wasn’t the plan at first.

When I made the first Megan, the one that looks like it’s diving for a clock, it’s trying to catch something. That Megan was made during my MFA, for a specific project that was essentially me bouncing around the volleyball or balloon-like heads of teachers who I had worked with during my MFA. I had worked with Perler beads before, and at the time when I made that Megan, in 2016, it represented a new direction in terms of the size and complexity of the pieces in terms of the way I was using and interpreting colour information. I wanted to make more of them.

The second one is from 2019. That was made specifically for the Dunlop Art Gallery in an exhibition of queer art on the prairies. Each one that I make of these gets bigger and more complicated in terms of the pattern. The third one took a long time, much longer than they normally do, even though I’ve gotten quick at it. Although I’m slower than I might have been before 2017 just because of the plaid jacket I’m wearing in the work.

MS: I like this idea of increasing complexity over multiple iterations or replications of Harley. First, I relate to the complexity of embodiment across these different replications of self. In simpler language you could say, “the complexity of gender,” but because of the temporal and kinetic questions here, it’s more than just about gender, which is why I love this work. I’m curious to hear you say more about the kinetic movements or actions that the figures are doing.

HM: Each of the figures represents an evolution of complexity of how I’m working with material. But in terms of the gestures that each of the figures is doing: each one plays off the others but could be understood as – I don’t want to use the word “evolution” – but is a direct response to the others. In the first one, I’m in a diving action pose because originally, I wanted to make it look like I was attempting to catch the heads that were coming at me, that were bouncing all over the place. They were up high and coming at the viewer and at the “me” that was on the wall. I wanted to make it look like that figure was an approximate life-size figure actively interacting with things. But if you look at my pose, the diving pose, it’s very much a responsive pose. I have my hands together, clasped with my wrists flattened, in the way that I [was] taught that you’re supposed to hit a volleyball. I never really knew how to hit a volleyball. It’s watching: that figure is looking up towards stuff but is very much in a ready pose but not in a “go” pose yet.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

In the second one, where my hands are up, I was imagining something akin to a volleyball serve– there’s no reason that I’m using volleyball as a metaphor here aside from the fact that it was a sport that as a girl in the Midwest, I was often called upon to do in gym class. It was also a thing that because of my vision problems, I am hopeless at it and always have been. I’m just incapable of seeing things that come at me fast. Anyway, I was thinking of the jumping up action and reaching for something, so it looks a little bit more active. And here in this exhibition, it’s reaching up towards an alarm clock that’s sitting at the top of the wall.

In this third one, I wasn’t sure if it would quite “go” because it’s not an indoor sport: I’m riding a bicycle. The bicycle is rendered photographically except for the outline of the bike, which is in flat colors that are similar colors to the wall. And it’s away from the others. The other two on either side of the scoreboard are a symmetrical set. But this is something else, it’s away and it’s very much watching what’s happening.

MS: I love this hypothetical engagement with sport. (laughs)

HM: It is very much just an imaginary sport. The lines on the floor seem to be fooling people, and that’s what they’re supposed to do, but they’re not based on any sort of official diagram. I’m looking at the scoreboard with the mirrors, and there is a “basketball key,” a word that I only knew when I said that I wanted to make one. I think sport and activity in this show is not a literal reference to actual practices, it’s more a field on which actors play.

MS: As a gay villain, I, of course, love the language of “fooling people.” I love the queer permission you’ve given yourself to define the space into an imaginary sports field.

HM: Most of the time, a lot of the references really core to this show are not visible. And I don’t expect them to be and it’s not necessary. I wanted it to look like a gym. When I was in elementary school, the only reason I would participate in sports activities was when I was forced to. I was always sitting to the side and crafting. No matter where we were, whether we were indoors or outdoors, I was always finger knitting.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

MS: Is that what this is over here?

HM: Yeah. Kind of. It’s not literally the finger knitting that I made long ago. So, the finger knitting, you’re using your fingers as the pegs or needles so there’s only four of them. It ends up making super thin and loose rope that doesn’t have a really good use.

MS: In looking at this long rope of finger knitting that attaches to the ceiling with a carabiner and ends on the floor in a pool of…is that aquarium gravel?

HM: It’s aquarium gravel, some plastic gems, and a few beads. I wanted something to be on the ground. I wanted for this knit object to look at least as threatening as the original object felt to me. The aquarium gravel is there as an uncomfortable fall, instead of there being a cushy mat underneath. If you attempted to climb this, you’d fall onto an uncomfortable surface that would be super jabby.

MS: That would probably stick to your skin and leave those little indents.

HM: [The gravel] is its own security since it makes so much noise if you step on it. You can hear it, easily, outside of the gallery.

MS: I saw the diagram of the space on the wall, and the thing that made me realize that it was a diagram of the space – a bird’s eye view of the space – was the gravel there.

HM: The diagram is so provisional and messy looking; I don’t expect people to necessarily know what it’s supposed to be. Because my work tends to be so intricately thought out and polished, the way that this drawing came together was kind of uncomfortable. It’s weird to say that fully intuitive making can be uncomfortable, but it is. When I saw the court lines on the floor, they gave me permission to have the drawing on the wall be as wacky as I wanted it to be. I used a level to make the blue and pink lines on the background, but everything else was done by eye. When I look at it, in one sense it’s kind of a picture of how I’m dizzy, because it’s not straight or even kind of straight in a typical way. The whole thing is a bit rotated in exactly the way things are spinning for me all the time.   

…The drawing on the wall was hypothetically meant to represent a real thing but the drawings on the floor – the messiness and the realness, the solid, well-delineated care of the essentially imaginary sport – I feel that is an important dichotomy in terms of “realness” and “imagination.”   

         

MS: I feel like this is a map of how you move as well. I can visualize you moving in this set of blue lines much more easily than I can imagine myself. It represents you offering your own perspective and experience of a space and how you move through it.

HM: I love that. The lines did have a logic when I was making them. I forget what that was, and I don’t think it’s important. The important thing was some of them were meant to represent actual physical trajectories and others, sidelines, looking back and forth.

MS: You described this piece as important as well as uncomfortable.

HM: That is important, oh my gosh. I mean the drawing on the wall was hypothetically meant to represent a real thing but the drawings on the floor – the messiness and the realness, the solid, well-delineated care of the essentially imaginary sport – I feel that is an important dichotomy in terms of “realness” and “imagination.”

MS: I feel like there’s something in here about the difference between the hypothetical and embodied experience, and how it relates to understanding “the rules of the world.”

HM: A lot of my past work has been concerned with the rules and conventions of gallery spaces and institutional spaces. I think part of what I have a hard time articulating is just the fact these are good visual metaphors for the difference between the smooth and the striated.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

The Scoreboard is one of the things that I have shown before. It was in the iteration of the show that was at the Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA). When it was at the AGA, it was much more prominent because of the lighting, and the color of the walls, and the way the space was set up in general. It was essentially the focus of the entire room and it’s not necessarily that prominent here. It reads not as the most important thing that you see upon entering but just as one of many. The Scoreboard was made to only be legible when you stand inside the arc of the mirrors. If you look in a mirror, you could see not only yourself but also the scoreboard and things reflected the right way round. The clock is running the right way in the reflection, you can read the mirrored letters that are on The Scoreboard.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

I love when people take selfies in the reflection, so that things are the right way around. Because generally The Scoreboard is incredibly ambiguous – it is not, and I don’t want it to be, apparent what it’s tracking. I think of it actively, and I know it doesn’t necessarily read like this directly because on one level it is very colorful and full of glittery beads and it’s shiny. But I think of it as a threatening piece, in the same way I think of gross, dirty climbing things as also being very threatening just by their existence. It’s just the idea that you might be tracked or that something about your interaction will be seen and could be accounted for.

MS: It’s a looming metric.

HM: Yeah, exactly! I mean in terms of transness, which was obviously a huge thing when I was making it back in 2021, it’s like competition as a bodily metaphor, but also a representation of tracking in terms of the timelines of change, of transition, and of growth and change in general.

MS: I think we both know that within trans experience and trans societies, there is a weird competitiveness. Whose transition is the best, who’s doing it right.

HM: It’s one of the things everyone knows, and nobody likes, but also you end up participating in it. I often find myself, or parts of my brain, echoing this hypercompetitive [sense]…I don’t think I necessarily have good things to say about that. It’s like tracking bad behaviour, bad feelings in general. This is very different from the affect that I think this show has for most people. I want it to, when you really think about it or look at it in the right way, look not happy but kind of threatening and scary.

MS: I definitely see it as sinister. A lot of people are like, “It’s playful”, “It’s a game”, “It’s a fun thing,” and “Kids will love it.”

HM: Yeah, and it is, and kids do absolutely love it. And I love that they love it, but also that’s only one reading of it and it’s not the most interesting reading of it.

MS: I think it’s interesting in the context of recent trans history, how we are from the late 90s, early 2000s, certainly in terms of FTMs and trans men, which is language that isn’t even cool anymore. We had Buck Angel and Chaz Bono and there were these metrics of passing and who had the most masculinization result. And then, of course, more recently there has been a shift away from that but now we have metrics of who has the better politics. It’s like whose is the best gender.

HM: But the gender isn’t necessarily based on hairiness. The gender is like a different, less physical aesthetic, but a politicized aesthetic.

MS: Hypothetical gender. Who has the most evolved gender and self-contextualization.

HM: Oh my god.

MS: Like the metric is different but there’s still a metric, but what even is it?

HM: In a way a person could think of it as being worse because it’s wider, and there are so many more expectations because transition is very much hypervisible at the moment, and because it’s so visible, the one who is undergoing transition is accountable to an even wider group of people.

As I’m standing over here, through the arc of the mirrors I’m looking at the lenticulars over there and thinking about how the stripes look like bars in a way. Some of them, not all of them.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

MS: Because my work has been about trans self-imaging, I’m curious about the way the mirror’s been working in here and the way time is part of that. Because there doesn’t seem to be mirrors without clocks in here.

HM: I like the mirrors with the references to time because of how it implicates a person and their body at a specific moment. It’s hard to not realize that you’re a viewer, which I insist on hitting people over the head with. I think there are considerably less mirrors in this show than there are in most of my shows. What are they reflecting? It’s kind of like going back in time, in a way. I feel like it’s important to have mirrors with the lenticular stuff because they do a weird thing with simultaneity and travel.

I’ve heard from some trans people who come into the show and see the lenticulars, that they make them feel weirded out and uncomfortable. Because I started transitioning so late and had already been practicing for years, it was not even a thought that I could or might want to be secretive about it. It seems like the obvious thing to do for me at this point in my life and career, to be completely fine with having my old photos interlaced.

MS: Transness has different generations that are not necessarily attached to chronological time. How I feel you and I are of a similar trans generation even though you started your transition later in life than I did, and our transitions happened within distinct decades of trans history and discourse. And it’s very different than the other generations that are simultaneously unfolding.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

HM: Yeah, that makes sense in terms of me because you’re always teasing me by saying how my gender is very anachronistic like my gender is a time period. I’m kind of curious about how my students might interpret the lenticulars. I hope that at least some of them might think that this was naughty. (laughs) Like it was somehow transgressive to show them blending into each other instead of a binary on/off situation.

MS: I certainly find these works to be very transgressive. As a completely immersive space, I sense the question, “Am I doing it right?”, on a societal level. “Is this how it’s done?”

HM: Yes, that exact thing. That nebulous sense of anxiety about “Am I being watched?” and “Is this okay?” is really important.

MS: “Is this how you play the game?” “Am I winning?” “Is this scoring?”

HM: (laughs) Yeah. The fact that it’s in a gallery, in an art space considered in relation to not trans but art communities, which are their own kind of weird hyper-competitiveness.

MS: To go back to lenticulars, and unease, I would say that in their layered-ness, discomfort, and unsettling-ness, they express the embodied experience, that is both uncomfortable and really rich, of being a person stretched across different points of time, mapped through gender pinpoints, kind of like that map over there.

HM: Oh my gosh, I love that. I think that kind of temporal experience of aging and of thinking about yourself…because I think, or hope, everyone would probably think or feel this like they’ve been several different people since they were that age. In the past 25 years, I’ve been a bunch of different people. Some are probably a lot more important than technically whichever gender I might be perceived as. I feel like aside from transness, the depiction of aging might be relatable more generally.

Southern Alberta Art Gallery – HARLEY MORMAN: DON’T DREAM IT, BE IT

This little best girl and best boy (referring to stickers on the gallery wall display) is one of my favorite things in the show. It’s just one of the scholastic stickers and both exist as separate stickers and all I did was just put them together and they worked perfectly. I feel like the scholastic stickers in general are rich in terms of references and material and lend themselves to turning into lenticulars. This cluster wall doesn’t get a lot of attention, but one of things that I like is the big clock. This wall – the eyes that are at the important points, the twelve, the three and the six, etc, are all eyes from stickers. This wall has just a bunch of other references to surveillance and stuff.

MS: Metrics of performance and surveillance. Can we just touch on that? (Referring to the front page of a notebook with handwriting displayed on wall.)

HS: Yeah, that’s an actual page from a notebook because I said I’m a keeper, I do have all the paperwork I’ve produced throughout school and after that because I keep everything. I feel really justified in it because it’s coming in handy, repeatedly.    

MS: Given that the paper refers to Megan’s rules, have you been following Megan’s rules?

HM: I can’t remember what Megan’s rules are. “This is a notebook, my notebook. Don’t bother it or you’ll have to answer to me.” I think that I’ve totally virtually destroyed Megan’s notebook by removing the cover.

MS: “P.S. Have fun”, is that what it says at the bottom?

HM: I think it probably does.

MS: Was there more you wanted to say about this wall?

HM: No, I just wanted to say, “Surveillance eyes!” (Points at lenticulars of eyes.) I just wanted to point them out.

MS: Transness continues to be so surveilled in terms of policy, particularly in Albertan trans and queer school and health policy right now. I think this show expresses the metaphysical experience of that kind of surveillance that is part of trans experience.

HM: Like what are the psychic implications of surveillance that trans people put themselves under before transitioning, or just in general, because of gender feelings.

MS: Yeah totally, think about in medical transition when you go on hormones, you have to do the experimental dose and you self-surveil as part of that. There’s an expectation to self-surveil.

HM: Yeah, it’s a requirement.

For more of Harley’s dizzy delights, follow him on IG: @Harley_Morman.
For more queerdo adventures that include Harley & Migueltzinta, visit his website here.

 

In Discussion with Nicole Chaput: Disobedient Women

Nicole Chaput. Embalsamada con picante [Embalmed in Spice], 2024
9 oil on bleached denim paintings stretched on custom made wooden canvases mounted on a rotating wooden and stainless-steel structure of three tiers, base composed of 9 pigmented concrete cylinders. Photo by Davit Cruz Puebla, Cortesía del Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil.

By Naomi Oko

Embodying what it truly means to be a contemporary artist, Nicole Chaput profoundly toys with and reshapes the dated, conventional, and familiar representation of women and femininity throughout art history. Deeper than the need for expression via painting, is her calling to be a storyteller. She stands as a messenger for and a mouthpiece to the feminine entities she creates, mediating between the feminine in its unruly essence and its traditional representation in materiality. Chaput disrupts established but tired norms, actively manipulating anatomical forms and the materiality of the canvas itself in her search to blur the boundaries between the juxtaposition of what is good and bad, celestial and demonic, or inside and outside. Her oeuvre stands as an excitingly interesting and new inspection and exploration of traditionally feminine portrayal, challenging the ever-present and ever-stifling oppression of existence under the scrutiny of the male gaze. Chaput’s figures serve as more than mere eye candy but rather, as she describes it herself; [as manifestations of the] “defiance and resilience born from enduring hostility. Similar to pearls, which form unique layers as a defense mechanism, her paintings evolve organically, embracing their own anomalies as a testament to their existence.”


Nicole Chaput, born in 1995, is a painter who lives and works in Mexico City. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018) and participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019). She has received numerous grants and fellowships from prestigious institutions during her artistic career; and has shown her work in the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. Embalsamada con picante [Embalmed with spice] is a solo exhibition by Nicole Chaput curated by Isabel Sonderéguer at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, that ran from February 10 – April 21, 2024.

Nicole Chaput. Femme Fillet Formalism. 2023. 2.10 x 1.30 x 15 cm. Oil on bleached and primed denim, hand-sewn silver polyester applications, mounted on custom made wooden stretcher and concrete booties.

Your presentation of femininity and comparison to traditional representations in art calls to mind angels, and the comparison between biblically accurate representation versus secular Western representation in terms of accuracy, conformity, and digestibility. Can you explain this further?

My work is pretty intuitive and research-based because it’s trying to inspect the inspector and the inspector is Western art history. I’m really interested in how women have been represented in that area. And for that, I needed to read a lot about the dissonances. Your first question is so on point because It’s a great example of how I connect art history with storytelling and how an image can tell the story of a misrepresented body to create an idea of femininity. 

I constantly get into discussions about Mary Magdalene. I am obsessed with her as a figure because just by seeing how she has been represented throughout history, you can get a [sense] of the ideals of women at a certain time and the ideologies that paved the way. For example, how women must obey, how women must not act, what is considered beautiful or sexy, for example. 

Nicole Chaput. Sangre Rubia. Oil on bleached denim mounted on custom wooden stretcher. Photo by Ramiro Chaves, Cortesía de Galería Agustina Ferreyra. Courtesy of the artist.

I feel like I created this algorithm of how my research is catalyzed and by chance, I ran into this image of Mary Magdalene covered in hair, like she’s an animal. I became very upset with how she was being represented so I began to question what happened that she had to be represented in that way. I kept reading about her in the bible and in the actual text there was nothing that mentioned or cued why she ended up being represented as an animal. 

Reading about the history of her representation, you can tell that, at first, she’s depicted as this woman who is bathing Jesus’ feet. She discovers Jesus when he is risen, but also by Tintoretto and all these other pictures, she becomes this very sexy woman who has long hair, and then she becomes an animal in a cave in France, then she becomes a hermit doing penance for her sins.

I think that the disruption between the actual tale and how art has illustrated the story is very divergent. A lot of people at the time were illiterate, so images became a theatricalized version of the story and the agenda that the religion was pushing. Iconography has been a storyteller throughout time and images have their own language that we don’t all have access to what we are reading or who is the writer. I think that is the main perversity of images that we see there, we don’t have enough information to analyze who the person saying all of this is or why we are having these subliminal images planted in our heads. I think that happened with Mary Magdalene and it happens today with Kendall Jenner selling us lipstick, this image of a woman that appears to you like a vision followed by this internalization of that face or that idea of sensuality, or beauty, or the grotesque. 

I’m very interested in how these images are like divine apparitions or hallucinations, we can ignore them or dismiss them, but they’ll make some sort of impact on how we read history, or how we read the body. 

Nicole Chaput. Embalsamada con picante [Embalmed in Spice], 2024
9 oil on bleached denim paintings stretched on custom made wooden canvases mounted on a rotating wooden and stainless-steel structure of three tiers, base composed of 9 pigmented concrete cylinders. Photo by Davit Cruz Puebla, Cortesía del Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil.

What sort of reaction do you imagine your work elicits in the ideal audience? Have you had the opportunity to be with some of your audience to see them reacting to your work for the first time?

Yes, it’s one of the things I enjoy the most. The first ones that come to mind are when I had my show Venus Atomica at Galería Karen Huber. It was my first formal solo Gallery show and the last day I visited, I saw this whole family taking a selfie with one of the works as if it was this deity of some sort. I wanted those works to feel like they had power or like they had a soul contained inside of them. It was great when I saw that because they’re doing this touristy thing where they are visiting this goddess-form that they don’t completely understand, but they find beautiful, important, and mysterious.

Recently, in the show I have in Museo de Carrillo Gil, called Embalsamada con Picante, there was this little girl who was about four years old with her dad who was also carrying her sister. He was entering to see the work and she was very scared to go inside the room. Then slowly, she walked in grabbing onto his legs and she pointed out one of the works that is like a medusa. She was crying and I asked her dad why she was crying and instead of saying she was sad or something he said, “she’s emotional.” In Spanish, that didn’t sound like, “Oh yeah, she’s being emotional or irrational,” it was like, “she’s feeling a lot.” It was so beautiful to see how this little girl could connect to that image and feel her feelings. And that translated into emotion and not automatically demonizing her feelings. It was great to see how she slowly leaned into the room and started getting to know these figures. 

Nicole Chaput. Medusa Deluxe. Oil on bleached denim mounted on custom wooden stretcher.Photo by Ramiro Chaves, Cortesía de Galería Agustina Ferreyra. Image courtesy of the artist.

Can you expand on the celestial nature of your work?

I am very inspired by images of celestial beings and also by Celestial beings from the underworld. In Spanish, I like to call these figures, “infra cuerpos,” which would mean “under bodies”, but in Spanish, “infra” doesn’t connote something that is below. The “belowness” is more like they are from this esoteric hell, so they are ardent, not underneath. So, they are bodies that are in this area of not well behaved. Like Mary Magdalene, she is both celestial and this is also [depicted as] this whore that should burn in flames. 

For me, it’s important to emphasize the narrative of how painting can fictionalize itself, similar to the ways women too can fictionalize themselves. Via my installation, we’re able to explore just how those two can come together to create an experience of uncovering and discovering something new while being completely disoriented by your understanding of its ingredients separately but confused and disoriented by their combination and juxtapositioning. One is left with questions like; is it the past or the future? Are we in heaven or hell? Are they angelic or demonic? I think that all of those contradictions coexist in one body: the superficial with the subcutaneous and the visceral with the hyper-airbrushed face. Disorienting someone makes them have to relearn where they are to reorient themselves. 

Nicole Chaput. Mi madre es un ventilador con cara de vaca, 2022. Four anthropomorphized femme cosmetic instruments (mirror, comb, mascara, powder brush) displayed on wooden and velvet badalone. Each instrument is accompanied by a surreal user manual written by the artist and presented in an acrylic frame. Instruments: oil on wood, silicone mascara wand and hand-dyed wood. Installation view of solo show at Biquini Wax ESP, Mexico City.

Your wooden sculptures from Mi madre es un ventilador con cara de vaca resemble ritualistic objects in their form and context. Would you consider the beautification objects to stand as a metaphor for the sacredness of the routines they help in? 

I think that these routines are sacred in an intuitive way, but also in a capitalist way. That was the commentary I was doing in the show or, the question I was asking/answering. These objects were very beautiful and intricate, and I wanted to capture the magic of when you go to the makeup store and just how the packaging is so beautiful to make it an object of desire. The packaging just projects this feeling of luxury and how it’s going to give you the power to be beautiful. Beauty itself is the most political thing because it’s guarded by the most colonial and patriarchal standards. I think that beauty is this thing where we either have the power or we don’t. Makeup is this thing that can give us the power to be more beautiful, more captivating, have more power, and therefore take up more space.

…Makeup and beauty constantly create these images to orient ourselves throughout territories, how we move around the world, how our body is just existing, and how it’s perceived by the other.

This is a construct by consumerist culture but also, I think that there is something empowering in creating these rituals for oneself because they situate you in your own body. They can help you create an appearance or a mask. There is this great anecdote that I love about Marisol the artist, who I’m greatly inspired by. She goes to this party and she’s wearing a Japanese mask. Everyone at the party wonders who she is and asks her to remove the mask. She doesn’t remove it until a while later after they keep pressing her. She removes the mask and has full makeup on, so they can’t see her face. 

I think that’s such a great anecdote because makeup and beauty constantly create these images to orient ourselves throughout territories, how we move around the world, how our body is just existing, and how it’s perceived by the other. Being seen by the other is very present in my life. In me being a woman and living in Mexico, the eye of the other is always there. It just doesn’t go away, it’s ever-present. Haunting, even. 

Painters construct how the eye flows in a picture plane. This is done by contrast, color, texture, et cetera. Formally painting marks draws the path for the eye in a place. I think that similarly, women do this all the time to control when we are seen and when we are not. In that same way, I think it is important in my work to be able to give the women I am representing, volume. Because the idea of flatness and volume in a woman’s body is this canonical culture of where you should have flesh and where you shouldn’t. At the same time, an image in art history is flat and without volume, even volume as sound and volume as shape and space. It’s not decided by the women that are being represented. It’s decided by someone else. If my work would have a volume, I think it would be very high and it wouldn’t be very pleasant. I think about the voices these women would have, and how some of them would maybe cry, like the myth of La Llorona in Mexico, who hauntingly cries for her children.

I had never thought about the voices they would have, but I think it would be interesting because we know so much about, for example, Frida Kahlo as an image, but her voice is very mysterious to us.  And doing that exercise of how strong the voice of these women would be, or how much space it would occupy is important as well. The voice matters as much as the face and the face gives it the voice. As I said, Mary Magdalene would be one of the mothers of my sculptures and Marisol would be one of my mothers artistically. I love to think about genealogy, making a genealogical tree, and to think of contemporary ideas as family inside the world we are creating as artists.

Nicole Chaput. Woman-Comb and Instructions (Detail of Mi madre es un ventilador con cara de vaca).34 x 14 x 2,5 cm. Oil on cut wood. 2022.

You make use of a lot of accessorizing and beautification and yet, the figures still come out resembling these alien strange beings. Do you see your work as an intentional commentary on how people, women especially, go through so much in the process of beautification that sometimes they end up morphing into whole other beings? 

I think that there is this collective dysmorphia of how we want to look and how we want others to see us so much that it’s never enough and it becomes opaque. Many models have been instrumentalized to sell more things, right? And to endure this concept of European beauty standards that leave a lot of women out and create this very narrow idea of femininity. A lot of these Hollywood icons are canons of beauty, but when they start aging, they are not the same as the image we have of them in our heads. I think that these tools for beautification, they’re anthropomorphized women who are grabbed by women to beautify themselves and then be objectified. It’s like this cycle where subjects and objects bleed into each other in a way that they’re almost inseparable.

Nicole Chaput. Woman-Comb and Instructions (Detail of Mi madre es un ventilador con cara de vaca).34 x 14 x 2,5 cm. Oil on cut wood. 2022.

And in that sense, there’s also this funny aspect or fun aspect where the tools with their manuals, they can pull your hair, or they can bite you. They have some sort of autonomy. These wooden tools, the sculptures, have a user manual that is kind of surreal and it speaks to the power of these tools. For example, the mascara wand is an Oracle or the mirror and spits out a flesh-eating worm. I wouldn’t want to look in that mirror. It goes to question these beauty icons, and what their mirror view looks like. What do they see? Especially for [those who] have done so much plastic surgery that they have become totally different people. I can imagine that when you go through that much physical transformation, your psyche is transformed as well. That physical trauma of the surgery, I feel like it speaks to a trauma that is inside. And that trauma inside that wound, I’m very moved by it.

And I think that the image we have as women is that of a wound. And I wonder how we can heal it, or what it would take to look at ourselves without having our eyes played by the male gaze. I think that is the question that encompasses all my work. I don’t have an answer yet, but as I’m making it, I feel more at peace with looking at myself in a mirror.

Beautification has become such a mechanical process in the way it’s carried out and even spoken of, that it’s kind of lost its sacred magic. Your work in Mi madre es un ventilador con cara de vaca ritualizes, romanticizes, and even sexualizes the process involved. Is this something we should all be opening our minds towards when viewing, despite the oppressive nature of conformity?  

Yes, I think it could be very liberating to start seeing everything as a story or as fiction and as different characters. In this work, the comb, the mirror, the mascara brush, and the powder brush are all characters. The installation was inspired by the Beauty and the Beast rose which has this beautiful pink light emanating from it. Next to the rose is a mirror where Belle can see the rest of the world. Instead of seeing herself, she can see as if she were looking at something that is not there. So, that kind of magical tool or magical process I think can lead us to self-invention.

The power of self-invention comes with language, with what each sign means. Having long lashes has certain connotations, having long nails as well. They’re also more related to how animals spread their nails when they want to attack. I think that the way we accessorize our bodies and fictionalize our appearances is by using prosthetics like lashes and nails, for example. All of these prosthetics add to the story of our body. I think we can find a way where those prosthetics are not only accessories for the other, but, thinking about Wonder Woman, where all her accessories have superpowers, like self-defense. If our prosthetics could have superpowers, or if we can imagine, through fiction, what the things we add to our bodies could do? Not just in terms of image, but in terms of narrative. 

Nicole Chaput. Embalsamada con picante [Embalmed in Spice], 2024. 9 oil on bleached denim paintings stretched on custom made wooden canvases mounted on a rotating wooden and stainless-steel structure of three tiers, base composed of 9 pigmented concrete cylinders. Photo by Davit Cruz Puebla, Cortesía del Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil.

Trends and beauty standards change, courtesy of pop culture and mass media consumption. Women’s bodies kind of go in and out of style, almost like vehicles. I like the contrast created between your representation of women as complete sufficient beings as opposed to the mass message being pushed of women eternally needing changes and tweaks just to fit in and exist. How does your work touch more on this topic?

In Embalsamada con picante, I created one woman with three heads, three torsos, and three legs that has 27 possible combinations. What was important to me was that each fragment was autonomous and was a whole, not a part. All the bottoms have heads and faces. The legs have a face, the skirt has a face, and the snail creature that looks kind of like Naomi Campbell has a face as well. 

I think of fragments as a pole that is cut from a larger portion of a thing but can live on its own. When you cut one limb off a salamander, another one grows. I love how Donna Haraway says that maybe we should all cut off our limbs to have new bodies that are monstrous and surprise us in their own regenerative processes. Part of my hope with this show and with my work is that there is a wound and I am going off from an iconographic stump. I think the iconography is basically women trapped inside geometric shapes, their bodies are stumps, and they’re mutilated, so I try to imagine what can grow from those stumps and that regenerative process of the icon and the body.

It’s so amazing to do the exercise of imagining what would grow if we continued having the body grow out of its frame. I think that the irregular figures of all my canvases speak to the intent of having this regenerative process that has its own functionality and intelligence. It’s not necessarily thinking about the other, but it’s thinking about how it exists in the world and the necessities it has; it needs to survive or to evolve even.

You can find more of Nicole Chaput’s work on her Instagram.

Dreaming in Dollar Signs: Russna Kaur at W Projects

Installation view of Russna Kaur: DREAM MACHINE (try walking on a path of splinters with no shoes) at W Projects. Photo: Dennis Ha. Photo Courtesy of W Projects.

DREAM MACHINE (try walking on a path of splinters with no shoes)

W Projects

Vancouver, BC

September 30 – November 18, 2023

By Lauren Lavery

The other day, as I was browsing through unreasonably high prices for olive oil at the grocery store, a woman standing nearby exclaimed, “Why are grocery prices so expensive?!” This moment verbalized my internal thoughts and further solidified the main source of my recent anxieties—money.

Maybe the question I really want to ask is, who doesn’t think about money these days? Amongst the plethora of many things that I think and worry about—a ceasefire in Palestine, climate catastrophe, what I’m going to make for dinner—money consistently floats to the top. In this post-capitalist, consumer-oriented society, we are living at a point in human history that is constantly bombarded with billions of ways in which we should spend money. Despite the increasing cleverness of targeted advertising and AI-curated mood boards, I am personally finding myself more and more alienated from consumption culture at large, but instead more obsessed with the concept of “having” money. How life-changing would having a large sum of money be? What amazing things could I achieve and experience with said money? What about the confidence and peace I could achieve in knowing I could support my friends and family for the foreseeable future? In its essence, these are all questions that make the concept of the lottery so indisputably irresistible.

Installation view of Russna Kaur: DREAM MACHINE (try walking on a path of splinters with no shoes) at W Projects. Photo: Dennis Ha. Photo Courtesy of W Projects.

In Russna Kaur’s solo exhibition DREAM MACHINE (try walking on a path of splinters with no shoes) at W Projects in Vancouver, her distinguishable brightly-coloured abstract paintings are not hung against bare white walls, but on a sea of old lottery tickets. The walls of the entire gallery have been painstakingly wallpapered with (a small portion) of her father’s collection of lottery tickets. Since he immigrated to Canada from India in the 1980s and learned about the prospect of the lottery, he has made a daily ritual of purchasing a ticket. Additionally, his practice includes the dutiful saving and notation of each one, which he stores in dated and numbered plastic bags in suitcases in the basement of their family home in Brampton, Ontario.

Installation view of Russna Kaur: DREAM MACHINE (try walking on a path of splinters with no shoes) at W Projects. Photo: Dennis Ha. Photo Courtesy of W Projects.

In my conversation with Kaur at the gallery, she revealed this information with a sigh and shake of her head, adding that her whole family is perplexed by his lifelong fascination. However unconventional this habit may seem, the accumulated mass of tickets and their physical presence in actual space makes real society’s collective obsession with aspiring to instantaneous wealth. It’s the ultimate dream of any immigrant or underdog story, to strike it rich despite the impossible odds stacked against you.

The collage of lotto tickets spans approximately ten to fifteen years as you move around the gallery, and through this time travel the colour and aesthetic design of the tickets also transform. Beginning in a white base with light green accents, then transitioning through a period of orange in the late ‘90s, and finally returning to the green and yellow scheme, the tickets ebb and flow on your eyes like a wave lapping the shore. But if that description is too cliché, how the subtle gradients of the tickets both collide and integrate themselves with the vibrating lines of Kaur’s paintings was thrilling.

The artist often works on separate panels that are then placed together for installation, resulting in the thickly layered lines either connecting or terminating at the divide. Brightly coloured abstraction can come off as superficial, however, Kaur skillfully defies easy interpretation with the constantly surprising tactility of her surfaces, mixing paint with sand, sawdust, and cut canvas, or through incorporating letters of the alphabet. When compounded with her distinctive bright, often neon colour palette, the textures transform into a kind of alien landscape, pushing the abstraction into otherworldly dimensions.

Installation view of Russna Kaur: DREAM MACHINE (try walking on a path of splinters with no shoes) at W Projects. Photo: Dennis Ha. Photo Courtesy of W Projects.

Viewing Kaur’s work is always a pleasure, but it is in this in-person experience where the details truly sing. Against the backdrop of what feels like a thousand tickets, suddenly the weight of her experience growing up as the oldest daughter in a Punjabi family comes into play. Is it any wonder that Kaur’s father dreamed of the impossible of supporting his family through the luck of the lotto? It’s through this generous and intimate gesture of the tickets that the artist provides the viewer insight into both the eternal optimism and desperation of yearning for a better life.

Now that the show is down, the allure of the lottery continues its physically tempting presence to us in the usual ways. Long lineups of people waiting for their turn at the BC Lottery kiosk in the mall snakes around a set of stanchions, not unlike the thick brushstrokes of Kaur’s paintings. As I walk towards the exit with my expensive bag of groceries, I think about Kaur’s father’s daily ritual that inspires his undying faith and optimism despite the hurdles he has endured throughout his life. If he does finally win one day, maybe that proves that dreams do come true. However naive it may be, I’d also like to believe that this world exists, a humbling reminder to keep pursuing and creating the reality I want for myself and the world. One in which we aren’t always thinking about money would be a nice start.

Taking care but letting go: A Conversation with Jagoda Dobecka

Where are the worlds that flowers long for? Local Memorial Fest, Bródno Sculpture Park, Warsaw, Kacper Szalecki and Frajda Natychmiast performing The story of two flowers growing on opposite banks of the river, photo by Wojtek Kaniewsk.

By Juliane Foronda

Pansies, friendship bracelets, karaoke, and shared meals all function as gentle tethers into the tender practice of Polish artist Jagoda Dobecka. Based in Wrocław, and a current PhD candidate at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Dobecka’s work deals with notions surrounding loss, grief, memory, and nostalgia. With a commitment to gathering being a strong pillar in her work, she often invites the public to join her in planting a garden, sing sad songs, or come and cook nostalgic dishes together.

Jagoda’s practice has this beautiful way of making you laugh just as much as it will make you cry. I often find myself smirking through tears whenever I’m fortunate enough to experience her work in person. The courage to choose the path of vulnerability often goes unacknowledged in a world where softness isn’t always seen as a strength. Her work challenges the norms of hierarchy, patriarchy, accessibility, and most other social conventions in manners that may appear so obvious or simple, but are laced with layers of consideration, comfort, and care the more that the works unfold and let you in.

This conversation sheds light on how much we can learn from our surroundings, the importance of saving others from loneliness, and the necessity of community. Her work is a reminder that much like flowers, strings, songs, and food, we can be something more when we’re united—we are stronger together than we are apart.

Juliane: Can you explain why you make work and what your practice is about?

Jagoda: I am creating or building temporary safe spaces where people can exchange their experiences and emotions. These can be performative events such as dinners, karaoke, or meetings to make a garden together. The important factor of those events is participation and encouraging the guests to take part. Materially, I mostly work with text, food, and plants. This is the framework that I’m using to talk about and share the painful experiences that are connected with loss, grief, nostalgia, and longing. I feel that we can sometimes censor ourselves and we don’t want to share those experiences with other people for different reasons, and I thought that it could be helpful to have that kind of space to talk about stuff and feel a sense of community.

To you, what makes for a safe space?

As the host, I think a lot about the space and its arrangement. I like open spaces such as gardens and parks that often have good connotations and some significance to the project itself. I also consider what guests might expect and what they might be willing to give. I’m just building a frame, which is very easy to build again. For a performative dinner, I bring the table, chairs, and food and invite people to come together. I try to be cautious and observant and to make people who are participating feel comfortable. At some point, I think I’m also trying to be invisible and let visitors hold the space as they are. I’m just starting it, but then other people are kind of doing whatever they want with it. It’s a lot about taking care of the whole situation, but also letting go.

Roots of Community, performative dinner in collaboration with Tomek Pawłowski-Jarmołajew, sessi.space, Brno, photo by Polina Davydenko.

Do you see the guests, in a sense, like materials in your work?

Both yes and no. I started making this type of work quite recently so after almost each event, I interview the people. If I know them already, I can text them afterward and ask questions about their experience and their overall feelings. I’m also trying to be critical and see how people are interacting with the whole situation and get their feedback on it. It’s an important part of my research to listen to people and what they have to say about the whole experience. It’s usually positive stuff, but sometimes people complain or say that they didn’t feel so good when something happened. It’s priceless to have that sort of feedback and to see how I can navigate that next time and consider what to change. During the actual events, I don’t think I have ever seen them as material.

Speaking of research, what do you think the purpose of your artistic research is right now? What are you currently working on, and what has led you to this point?

I was in this moment in life when I felt that everything collapsed, and I really needed some support. Then I realized that there are plenty of people like me out there. I thought that maybe I could somehow create, as I said, this frame, where we can meet and talk about things and just have nice experiences of being together. The events are open to everyone, so whoever comes is welcome to participate and become a part of this temporary community. The range of personas is wide. I know that bonds were created during these events as people got to know each other. I call it temporary, but it doesn’t have to be.

It’s not something special I’m doing. Most of these things happen anyway in life: people already meet and have dinners, sing songs, and read books together. Since I work in the arts, I was also thinking about the institutional and non-institutional context in relation to the types of events I have. Every art institution is talking about care, how they should be more open and more welcoming, and asking a lot of questions about how to do this. I wanted to see if it’s possible to build this space within an institutional context. I’ve made a lot of events myself or worked with artist-run spaces or more independent spaces, but then I also did a few events with art institutions, and I can see the difference. I think that the art institution has stiffness within its structure. It also translates into the events since people are less…open, or less free, or whatever.

Do you see a big difference in the demographic or groups of people that would come to maybe more of an ad-hoc or DIY event versus one that’s run more formally with a museum or another institution?

Yeah, one difference is that I see many more elderly people coming to institutions. I think the reason for this is that many artist-run spaces, especially in Poland, don’t have such a long lifespan. They usually exist for two or three years, and then they die, so these spaces also attract younger people who are usually the ones who are showing in, curating, and creating them.

Friendship bracelet, 2022, photo Piotr Blajerski.

I know you have a background in painting. Can you speak more about how you consider your materials and media in your current practice?

I do have a background in painting, which I think I suppress the more that I focus on other things that I’m more interested in. I can divide my practice into two parts when considering materials. One part is the participatory events. I bring food, karaoke, plants, or texts from books – the meeting is the material. Then there’s this other aspect to my practice where I like to create objects or just interdisciplinary works that could be more traditionally exhibited. For example, I made this huge friendship bracelet, which was three meters long. I wanted to recreate the friendship bracelets that many of us used to make when we were kids as a sort of statement, but also a monument for those relationships that we had when we were young. I got really invested in finding the perfect ropes.

I don’t feel that attached to any material or medium. I think that a very strong basis for my work is text. Making notes or writing things that happened to me. I was recently introduced to automatic writing, which is great. After you experience something, you just write for 10 minutes – whatever comes to your head. It’s like a nice source of raw material that you can use.

Where are the worlds that flowers long for? Local Memorial Fest, Bródno Sculpture Park, Warsaw, Wake Karaoke, photo by Wojtek Kaniewski.

It appears the concept tends to inform the material(s). I also wanted to talk about how a lot of your work deals with grief and the themes that surround it. Do you see grief as inspiration, or what’s your relationship with grief in relation to your work?

I think it’s similar to what you asked about the people who are participating in my events, I see grief as both a material and an inspiration.

I experienced grief, and I’m still experiencing it. And I know that every person who is dealing with this topic also has their own experience as well. I know that each experience is very different; it’s not the same for everyone. It really is both the material and inspiration in one since my own experience of it acts as a material in a sense, but I am also inspired by seeing grief in a broader context where I can just see that it is a loss in a more general sense. What’s the difference between grief and longing? I’m just thinking about those things and how it all binds together. I think grief is a material inspiration.

I think one thing I’ve always found quite special about your practice is how you don’t shy away from heavier topics (such as grief), but, at least from my experience of your work – it doesn’t consume it. You pull in quite nostalgic things to offer a different perspective.

Yeah, I feel like this wasn’t a fully conscious decision to use these nostalgic elements, I think it was just purely subconscious.

Then is it a bit of your personal way of coping?

Probably. The thing with nostalgia is that it is also a sort of loss. And I’m very heavy into nostalgia. I’m nostalgic about all the things and it’s sometimes embarrassing, but I’m really that person who remembers things like games and snacks from when we were younger with a deep fondness. Nostalgia is a loss of sorts, but it’s maybe a bit lighter, or at least within a broader recognition of loss. Nostalgia is emotionally lighter than grief so maybe it’s just preparation for the heavier topics. We can first face the nostalgia to see the comfort in loss. As I said, it’s not something that was really intentional, but it might work as this sort of blanket that you’re wearing to feel safer as you see that things are going away.

It could also be about accessibility. I think this sort of juxtaposition of karaoke, for example, which is a really fun activity that we do with friends to have a good time, but then we’re doing grieving karaoke which is all sad songs about dying, loss, and grief. So, we kind of have both because we settle into the party activity, but with those popular songs that are extremely sad and heavy (because I usually use well-known pop songs), so everything feels kind of like a party.

Thinking about accessibility, maybe it also helps to make it a less scary topic than some people could perceive. I interviewed some of the guests taking part in the grieving karaoke and they said that at some point they felt extremely good and safe being surrounded, and they had this desire to do something festive. After they started singing Viva Forever by Spice Girls, they began to cry as they thought about all kinds of teenage memories and other thoughts came back, like losing their first love. They said that it was so strong emotionally, but at the same time, they felt good because they were with people.

For a recent project, I wrote a script for a performance, which is based on a legend with a dragon, witch, and magic potion. It has the framework of a school theater play, which is not too serious. However, it also talks about more difficult things like a tragic death, grief, being stuck in a cluster of cultural expectations, and being in a toxic relationship. I guess I use nostalgia to open up these bigger conversations.

I also see time as a strong thread in your work, both in terms of concept and literal duration.

More recently, my works have become ephemeral. I don’t really care if some of the things that I create will survive over the years. I’m more focused on the process and being with the people right here right now. I guess a good example could be the Grieving Garden, which is a garden with plants that symbolically refer to death, but also to rebirth, grieving, and many elements that could relate to death, like memory. I’ve planted a few of these grieving gardens since, and they were all made in public spaces, so everyone who feels like visiting can spend some time there. So, they exist, but for a limited period of time because eventually, the plants begin to die. Firstly, because some of them are very seasonal plants, and they live only for one season. Sometimes the weather conditions are also quite hard, and some plants might need more water, or more wet surface, or ground, while others don’t.

It’s also very intuitive. I wasn’t thinking about it in a way that part of the installation is that it has to die. It just happened when I did it the first time and then I thought that maybe there’s some sort of beauty in that as well, that it’s something temporary. If people who I planted the garden with want to continue to take care of it, then it’s great, but if not, I’m okay with that. The garden is also a reflection of life because something dies and then something is reborn out of it, like this circle of life.

Grieving Garden, 2021, view from the MeetFactory studio, photo by Richard Hodonicky.

There’s a constant connection to nature in your work. It seems like something that’s also used a lot to talk about life or time spans as well.

I spent my childhood outside because I was raised in a small village, so I was always deeply connected to nature. It was just part of my everyday life, like running around the hills, being in the forest, or swimming in the river. But then I moved to the city, and I forgot about it. When my brother died and I was experiencing that kind of grief for the first time, I felt that I really needed some grounding. I needed some connection with the planet, and I needed to know that I was here for a reason and like this soil was happy to have me here. I found this in nature; it was like an explosion. It was soothing, but then also gave me a lot of energy to go through these very difficult times. I’m grateful for this and that it stayed with me.

I’m also thinking about going back to my roots, where I came from, and why I love it so much. I just started to use that kind of relationship that I have with nature in my artworks and that just became a starting point for considering many important issues for me. I’m interested in my relationship with nature, but also the relationship of nature, humans, and non-human actors that do not project anthropocentric perception. Is it even possible to do or get closer to that state? I think a lot about how we can use some wisdom from nature and apply it to our everyday life.

You can find more of Jagoda Dobecka’s work on her website and Instagram.

“The Professor’s Desk” by Zinnia Naqvi: Mayworks Festival

Zinnia Naqvi. Before the Settlement – Professor Chun’s Desk, Inkjet Print, 2023.

Interview by Aysia Tse

“The Professor’s Desk” series by lens-based artist and educator Zinnia Naqvi features archival materials from four specific cases of racial discrimination in or about Canadian universities. Naqvi uses her own student/professor’s desk to frame these cases of systemic racism and considers the impact and legacies of each case, reflecting on the ongoing struggle for racial equity and justice in academic institutions.

As a selected artist for the 2022 Mayworks Labour Arts Catalyst, Zinnia Naqvi worked with the Asian Canadian Labor Alliance (ACLA) with support from OPIRG Toronto to create the photo-based series “The Professor’s Desk.” The series was co-presented with CONTACT Photography Festival at the Whippersnapper Gallery from May 4-31st for the 2023 Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts. Mayworks’ Labour Arts Catalyst is a program that helps to facilitate the collaboration between local labour organizations and artists. As Naqvi describes, her creative and research processes for this project came together organically. After connecting with the two ACLA chapters based in B.C. and Ontario, Naqvi accessed an online archive of digitized materials from ACLA’s 20 years of activism which was her jumping-off point for her research.

I spoke in depth with Naqvi about her process, creative and political considerations for each of the six images in the series, and what she has learned from research into Professor Kin-Yip Chun’s case.

Aysia Tse: Can you discuss your deeply collaborative and multi-focus research process for this series?

Zinnia Naqvi: ACLA hired filmmaker Lokchi Lam to make a video for their 20th anniversary. Lokchi spoke to members and gathered many materials from past events they supported and organized them into five Google Drive folders. One of the folders they made was about instances of anti-Asian racism on Canadian campuses was called “White Fear on Campus.” Lokchi Lam put three events together; Professor Chun’s case, Maclean’s Magazine “Too Asian” article from 2010, and the W5 CTV News segment from 1979, which is what I [made] the project about.

Professor Chun was exploited and wrongfully denied a tenure track position four times at the University of Toronto in a span of 10 years. In 1998, Professor Chun launched a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission for unjust dismissal. His case soon attracted national and international attention.

On the panel, Chris Ramsaroop was one of the founding members of ACLA Ontario, and a student at the time of Professor Chun’s case. He was very actively involved in supporting Professor Chun’s case and there were a lot of student organizers, so he was able to give me insight on the significance of the case from a student perspective. I teach part-time at the University of Toronto and was able to access historical newspaper databases by having institutional access. I found all the Toronto Star articles written about his case specifically and visited their picture collection at the reference library to access images. It was through my own digging that I then found out about OPIRG and the Dr. Chun Resource Library of feminist and critical race theory. Professor Chun donated funds to support the library during his case and it was later renamed after him.

Zinnia Naqvi. After the Settlement – Professor Chun’s Desk, Inkjet Print, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Aysia T: It’s great to hear how bits and pieces of the research came through. OPIRG sounds like a cool grassroots organization whose work relates to what you’re doing. So that was a great collaboration opportunity.

Zinnia Naqvi: Yes, I reached out to them while I was making the project and they generously agreed to support the panel and partner with Mayworks. As a result, we [could] fly Professor Chun to Toronto for the panel. It was interesting looking at this case 20 years after it happened because it isn’t part of the collective memory of the current students.

When I came across this research that Lokchi did, what stuck out to me about Professor Chun’s case was that someone was able to speak out against such a big institution as the University of Toronto and take them to court for racial discrimination. As someone who teaches sessionally in universities and has recently been a student, I have dealt with instances of racism or prejudice in the institutional space. However, to prove that in a court of law and in front of the Ontario Human Rights Commission is significant. There’s a report called the Chun Report that’s a very comprehensive study of the case and all the events that unfolded. It illustrated how toxic the environment was and how blatant the racism was that he faced. I realized that it got to a point in which he had no choice but to take legal action from the school because his treatment was damaging his life and career.

After he reached an initial settlement, he received significantly more discrimination or hostility from other people in the department. Journalists like Margaret Wente wrote very damaging articles in the Globe and Mail, saying that Professor Chun was just trying to get attention. Still today, Professor Chun takes care to not call the University of Toronto racist or any specific person racist, but rather he was talking about systemic racism at a time in which people were not used to hearing that term. That’s another reason why his case felt so significant because it started to change the discourse and language around these issues.

In the Chun report, there is an account stating that at one point Professor Chun was put in an office that had sewage, cockroaches, and mice in it. That’s when the report started to paint a visual picture for me. I started to imagine how experiencing that might look or feel. So that’s the approach I decided to take with this project, to frame it within the space of the office. I’m placing myself in his shoes in a way, but it’s a flex space that’s my imagination of what his desk would be like.

Zinnia Naqvi.What’s Behind the Diversity Numbers?, Inkjet Print, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Aysia T: Your desk compositions feature small details including those cockroaches that allude to these important aspects of Professor Chun’s case. What are some of the symbolic considerations you had when curating these pieces? Can you walk me through your thinking about the details you included?

Zinnia Naqvi: With “Before the Settlement,” I wanted it to be this space that’s in between balancing his career as a seismologist, who studies earthquakes and teaches physics. He talked about the personal significance of what this case caused him. He is also a father and there’s a family photo on the desk. He’s an incredible scientist – he received a lot of national funding for his extraordinary research. A lot of that got sidestepped because of the case and the toll that the case took on his life and his career.

The second image is called “After the Settlement.” That’s when I’m imagining the case taking over even more of his life. Things start to get messy and unravel even further.

Then there are also the other images that address different instances from ACLA’s archive. With the images of the controversial 2010 Maclean magazine “Too Asian,” I wanted to show the article and then there was also a book that I have placed on top of it, which was made directly in the aftermath of the article in which many scholars address Anti-Asian racism in universities.

The other image shows the cover of the same Maclean’s magazine, and it was interesting to me to see this image of two students with the Chinese flag that was taken, from what I understand, without their permission. However, the cover image of the magazine is of this very happy-go-lucky white student and the contrast of that was interesting to me.

It also started to make me think about diversity images and when images of diverse people are used for profit. Those images are used to attract students to apply to schools, but then a lot of people who are working or studying within those spaces are not actually supported. This also relates to the other image of the posters; those are current posters that I took from both University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University where I work. It was interesting that I would see a lot of the same posters in both schools. There are a lot of posters about mental health studies, tutoring, and scholarships. It just shows the precarious financial situations of students, especially international students who are brought to these schools and don’t have citizenship status and are not able to work or are limited to how much they can work.

The last image I made is about the W5 CTV News segment from 1979. CTV aired a special that was [essentially] saying that international students were taking the place of Canadian students, especially in medicine and dentistry programs. Then there was a rebuttal by the Chinese Canadian Council, saying how that was factually incorrect and very racist, and there were a lot of protests about that. I have included excerpts from that news segment, articles about the protests, and then again, my school materials and other props to situate these issues in physical space. With these three cases from the past, it was significant to see how the rhetoric was so similar from 1979 to 2010 and continues today.

Zinnia Naqvi. What’s Behind the Diversity Numbers?, Inkjet Print, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Aysia T: As a part of the Mayworks Festival programming, you had a public talk with Migrant rights organizer Chris Ramsaroop, moderator Furqan Mohamed and of course Professor Chun about his story and wider conversations about Indigenous, Black, and racialized workers in academic institutions. Can you share more about this discussion or any highlights that came out of that conversation?

Zinnia Naqvi: All the materials I took about Professor Chun’s case were from public archives. But it also felt like at the end of when I read his report, I wasn’t sure where he lived or if he would be interested in the project, but it felt important to me to reach out to him. He originally had said that he would like to be part of a Zoom panel and then later, he said he wanted to come in person. This was significant because it has been 20 years since his case closed and he hadn’t spoken publicly about it for a long time.

What I was interested in with research on Professor Chun’s case is that I wanted to pay homage to his struggle because now, especially in the arts, we’re seeing the flip side of what he had to go through. We’re seeing now that institutions are aware of their lack of diversity and are trying to rectify that by holding targeted BIPOC hires. We’re aware that there’s a problem that’s trying to be resolved. There are still a lot of flaws in that process too as it can be tokenizing. A lot of times people are again invited into the institution, but they’re not supported once they’re there.

But we are at least in a moment where people are openly recognizing that there’s a problem and I do think, we [must] thank people like Professor Chun for making that part of the discourse. He sacrificed a lot to shift the public conscience and I wanted to pay homage to him in this project. Now that we’re in a different moment that still needs a lot of work, but we are trying to make change. We discussed that he wasn’t the only person who had public legal battles with universities in Canada. Many other racialized scholars are still in legal disputes with schools for not being supported or for speaking out against discrimination.

…You’re expected to keep your head down and be grateful that you’ve been given any place at all, even if it’s a precarious one.

Aysia T: I imagine you’ve been thinking about your own role or your own experiences within the institution and with your students. How has that informed your thinking about this project?

Zinnia Naqvi: I was thinking a lot about my own experience, but also about my students. Although I was and am a minority student and faculty, especially in the arts programs that I was in, I was also born here, and I wasn’t an international student. That was one thing I wanted to also be aware of as I was making the work.

We don’t always think of professors as workers because there’s a certain prestige that comes with the academy. That was another thing that stood out about this case. To me it felt like Professor Chun did everything right, he went to these Ivy League schools, and he did everything that you’re supposed to do on paper. Yet you’re expected to keep your head down and be grateful that you’ve been given any place at all, even if it’s a precarious one.

I was thinking about the way that my students, especially the ones who are international students, manage work, worry about grades, and all the pressure that the school puts on them. I’ve had a lot of support from the institutions that I’ve worked at but again, I feel that has come at the expense of others who have come before me.

Aysia T: I think some people dislike when people ask, “What do you dream of?” or “What would be an ideal change?” but I’ve learned to ask it anyway because it’s important. Do you see this work as a call to action for better support for BIPOC artists, students, workers, and staff within academic spaces? What do you hope to see in the future regarding these topics?

Zinnia Naqvi: I’m teaching a digital photography class at U of T right now, and I brought my students to the [Professor’s Desk] exhibition on the first day. It’s funny because it’s a photography class, and I’m making this very political work.

It’s always an awkward space because sometimes as professors, we don’t want to push our own work or our own research too hard. But I would hope that showing this work makes students feel like they can talk about these issues within the space of the school. It’s interesting with Chris Ramsaroop and some of the other student organizers who helped Professor Chun’s case, many of them are working in universities now.

I’m not sure if students today would do a one-week sit-in at the president’s office where they slept there for a week in support of Professor Chun. I just don’t think that we protest in the same way as they did in the nineties. But I think it just shows the impact that students have in these cases. I’m not sure if young people feel like they can make that change [through the idea of collective action]. I think this can be an example that they can. It takes a lot of resources and a lot of confidence to be able to do it. I think it’s also amazing and important to remember. They were able to create collective action and Professor Chun really got the most support from his students. I think talking about these issues and feeling like we can also be peers with our students is important.

You can view all of the images from “The Professor’s Desk” series online on the Mayworks Festival website and read more about OPIRG Toronto’s work on their website.

You can find out more about Professor Chun’s case through the Chun Inquiry.

Check out more of Zinnia Naqvi’s work on her website.

Soft Bodies: Marianne Burlew and Brianna Gluszak

Marianne Burlew and Brianna Gluszak. Soft Bodies installation Shot. Wall Space Gallery. Photo credit: Ava Margueritte.

By Moira Hayes

Vulnerability of the self is created in how we choose to take up space. How do we present ourselves to others? What choices are we making to allow space for others? And more presently, what space are we holding for ourselves?

Soft Bodies was exhibited from March 11th through to April 4th at Wall Space Gallery in Ottawa. Marianne Burlew and Brianna Gluszak were paired together by the gallery’s curator, Tiffany April, to deliver an exhibition hinged on the idea of vulnerability.

Burlew is based in Ottawa. She draws from a background of video and sculpture to create her current work; emotionally driven pieces in a 3D modelling software. While her work is direct, the colourful imagery offers multiple interpretations for the viewer; striking questions about seriousness versus sarcasm. Burlew received her MFA from the University of Waterloo.

Gluszak is Ohio-based. They work in sculpture to create glasswork and textile rug hooking, addressing ideas of gender and body. Gluszak draws inspiration from cartoons and how viewing one another can become gendered. The varying scale of their work between the textile pieces and the glass work impose different connotations for the viewer. Gluszak has an MFA from The Ohio State University.

Marianne Burlew, Folly, Ed: 1/100, archival print on Hot Press paper, 16 x 20 in. Framed by Wall Space.

Marianne, you work with digital 3D modelling software, and working digitally makes things accessible. The feelings you point at in your work, patheticness or being a fool, are universal emotions. Can you speak to using digital software to express human emotions?

MB: My background is in sculpture and video. One of the biggest obstacles I was having was getting my work into a space due to budget, facilities, distance, and accessibility. In my current job at an engineering company, I weaseled my way into learning this modelling software.

I just fell in love with the software, and I saw it as an opportunity to make things that could reach a lot more people. You can make a print, put it on a screen, or put it on social media or different places a lot more easily.

I do feel hesitant in some ways to share work online publicly, just because it is easy to have your work taken. I’d love to have it on screens and more readily available on social media if I had a little bit more protection in that area.

I’ve also fallen in love with the print aspect of it. When it gets printed, there’s another transformation that’s amazing for me. That bright, vibrant, densely saturated paper with the colour, and how different parts of the work will be flat, and others will be three-dimensional is interesting to me.

Brianna Gluszak, Please don’t forget me, Blown glass, 19.5 x 12 x 7.5 in.

Brianna, can you explain the process of composing the positions of your glass pieces? They kind of look like people playing Twister.

BG: I love that read. First off, I think one thing I do with the glass works, in particular, is that I’ll make a bunch of them. I don’t know which ones are going to go with which ones. So, it ends up being a process of almost creating a library of glass objects. I’ll have a period of making in the studio where I’ll be doing drawings, and then I’ll be going into the glass shop trying to make that original drawn form.

But the glass is like, “No, I don’t wanna be that form.” I’ll go back to drawing, I’ll draw the form it did become, and through that translation, we’ll build up a variety of different shapes and colours and textures and objects. And then I play with them in my studio, and I just see which ones fit together and which ones I like together.

And maybe I’m too much of an object oncologist where I’m like, okay, so this one wants to be with this one today, and this one wants to be with that one. They’ve sort of become personified in a lot of ways for me. I do see them as being a representation of gender and body.

Marianne Burlew, Pathetic, archival print on Hot Press paper, 28 3/4 x 36 in, framed by Wall Space Gallery.

Marianne, you face the unavoidable, uncanny imagery of worship in your pieces. But you derail that with a practiced absurdity. Can you discuss the process of choosing the keywords in your pieces?

MB: You’re right about worship. My family is Christian, but I didn’t grow up going to church. I’ve never read the Bible.

There’s a lot of Western influence in what I make and so I just try to play with it. I’m not necessarily trying to cite any kind of religion, but for this series, I was very interested in shrines or putting together devotional pieces where it’s almost more of a spiritual devotion where the piece sits as an architectural niche.

Sometimes there are other objects. Sometimes it’s just the glass itself creating these moments where you can sit with these things and meditate on them. 

And for me, the word [aspect] of it seems essential. And choosing is hard to describe. It’s trying to capture things that are succinct and hard-hitting but don’t lean completely in one direction.

When I was making “pathetic,” I felt like it was harsh and I [thought] this might be too mean to just put pathetic in a window like that. You’re going to reflect that criticism of yourself. I feel like the colours were so nice then making it like that’s the twist, taking something so devastating and then trying to make it beautiful and fun.

I am interested in active looking and when a look becomes ingrained in gender.

Brianna Gluszak, I kissed a girl and I liked it…, tufted rug, 52 x 26 1/2 x 1/2 in. 

Brianna, your rug work possesses an unavoidable gaze disguised as fun and playful. The sheer size of the work denotes power over the viewer, especially up close. Are you proposing a struggle between the work and the viewer? What did you aim to convey with the choice of scale? It feels like a staring contest between the viewer and this work.

BG: I think the scale has become kind of like a natural choice for that work. The rugs started during COVID when I got locked out of the studio, and was like, okay, let’s figure out a way to make things at home.

This particular series of rugs is about research that I’ve been doing on Tex Avery’s character Wolfy, from “Red Hot Riding Hood,” which is the first instance in cartooning where the eyes come out of a character’s head at the sight of a woman.

The version available on YouTube ends as Wolfy pulls Little Red Riding Hood off a stage after his eyes have shot out at her. But that’s not where the cartoon actually ends. From going into the cartoon archives, I found the other half of the cartoon.

Wolfy goes to grandma’s house and grandma oogle’s him back with AWOOGA eyes, and the wolf runs away. But what I thought was so interesting about the archive version versus the version that was available on YouTube is that role switch.

We always constantly think of the wolf’s eyes shooting out at Little Red Riding Hood, but we don’t really think about grandma. You know, how she sort of gets him back because she’s like, “oh, you’re sexy wolf. I’m gonna look at you that way.” 

I am interested in active looking and when a look becomes ingrained in gender. When a look is perceived to be the male gaze or the female gaze and what things we like to note between that.

Marianne Burlew and Brianna Gluszak. Soft Bodies installation Shot. Wall Space Gallery. Photo credit: Ava Margueritte.

There is a conversation between the works about depth. Marianne’s work draws the viewer inward, holding space inside the pieces. Whereas Brianna’s work pushes into the viewer’s space, demanding room from the viewer. How do you find this lends to the overall idea of vulnerability in Soft Bodies?

BG: Some of the work stems from things that could be seen as vulnerable, but I am more interested in the opposite end of that word, and it being more explorative in an empowering way. Or in a way to have the viewer understand a different identity than they came in understanding.

For me, that kind of pushing out, and enveloping of the viewer, is about how to involve them in the work or have them gain a connection to it. The allowance of the viewer is to take as much or as little as they want of what I’m trying to get across.

And I do think that one of the interesting things about Marianne’s work is that you’re almost sucked into another world versus being present in this space.

MB: Brianna’s work is a lot more present in the space. Each piece is like its own body. And then mine is much more about an internal space or having space within them. But I think that push and pull can be great. I mean, vulnerability is just about rethinking or allowing yourself to be open to rethinking. I think Brianna’s talking about reaching into space being confrontational with the gaze and that engagement, whereas a lot of my inclination is to go smaller and deeper internally. I think the show has a good balance and a good variety to it because there are many different ways that you’re being reached out to, or you have to reach into.

And I don’t necessarily think we have to have done the same thing or have the same method to accomplish that. Vulnerability would just be like that shift of a boundary, right? Or that invitation to change your mind.

You can find more of Marianne Burlew and Brianna Gluszak‘s work on their Instagram.

I know about hidden things by Juliane Foronda

“…between two beings across great distance.”

Juliane Foronda. I know about hidden things exhibition view.
Images courtesy of the artist and Trinity Square Video. Photography by Darren Rigo.

January 7 — February 19, 2022

Trinity Square Video

By Katie Lawson

Those who are a part of artistic communities and actively participate in the work of the artist, curator, or critic, know very well that the presentation of one’s work is merely the tip of the iceberg when below the surface of the water is a matrix of relationships that inform the ‘final’ product.

I know about hidden things is a collaborative project initiated by writer and curator Letticia Cosbert Miller which foregrounds Filipina-Canadian artist Juliane Foronda’s ongoing research concerning feminist hospitality, radical care, and traditions of gathering. The exhibition took place at Trinity Square Video in Toronto from January 7—February 19, 2022, yet lives on through its accompanying publication, an art object in and of itself. Foronda and Cosbert Miller invited Danica Evering, Camille Georgeson-Usher, Karina Griffith, and Ronald Rose-Antoinette to become entangled in the process of the exhibition’s making, meeting regularly in the development of the work. Each collaborator would produce contemporaneously a text to accompany the work, not as didactic works of criticism but as a manifestation of a network of relationships based on symbiosis. The artworks in the exhibition consider the role of physical, emotional, and ephemeral support structures, the concealed labour of care and hospitality in spaces and so-called inanimate objects. The texts that make up the printed edition become a support structure for the visitor, a generous gesture that welcomes the reader into a collective dialogue.

I know about hidden things, publication materials. Photo by Katie Lawson.

This approach to publication embodies feminist practices of lateral citation: to cite one’s peers, friends, cohort, and colleagues rather than citing upwards, towards a hierarchy of ‘legitimized’ scholarship, making visible the de-centered labour within artistic communities that so often goes unrecognized in the ‘final’ presentation of exhibitions or artworks. The printed edition that accompanied the show compels me to think about publication as a form of democratic dissemination, which opens this network of relationships to those who in turn hold and care for and think alongside an artist, curator, or critic. The texts are packaged in a sculptural bundle, with each writer’s contribution taking a distinct design, material quality, and typographic form. What holds this bundle together is a thoughtfully folded shell, which has the primary descriptive exhibition text and checklist on it in an embossed pink that I found myself running my hands over as I walked around the gallery with it in my hands. Foronda’s work becomes the literal and figurative container or carrier bag for the contributions held within.

I was struck by a phrase in Ronald Rose-Antoinette’s contribution that points towards an atmosphere diffused through a workshop held by Foronda, “the function of which is to betray the totality power wants us to recite.” Power might be understood as predicated on notions of totality and singular authorship, ways of working that are rejected even within the context of what is ostensibly a solo exhibition for the artist, sharing that space with those deeply engaged in the process of its very making. Rose-Antoinette’s ‘Support the Notes’ is a series of poetic fragments that dance across double-sided peach paper, with a deep yet vibrant blue serif text. It feels atmospheric and ethereal, with a level of subtlety embodied in two of Foronda’s works that, in particular, speak softly: magic hour and valuable and flawed. magic hour consists of two barely-there projections of past light rainbows, aimed at the infrastructural supports of the TSV space, reminiscent of the reflections of light that might dance across a room with the shifting sun. valuable and flawed uses small quantities of wood, paper, stone, and tape which take the form of makeshift wedges in the minor space between the floor and the base of the eastern wall. These two works draw the eye around the architecture of Trinity Square Video, with its tactile delights and quirks as a post-industrial space with historic resonances. How is the space of the gallery its own structure of support?

Juliane Foronda. magic hour, 2021. video projector installation, images of past light rainbows
Images courtesy of the artist and Trinity Square Video. Photography by Darren Rigo.

One can feel held by a space or a place, after all, as Camille Georgeson-Usher reminds us in ‘On being elsewhere – these archives of guilt.’ Perhaps the most narrative in form of the text contributions, she describes the embodied experience of returning home, to Galiano Island, and how that immersion allows her to feel deeply across time, deep time, feeling the remnants of care from ancestors in the trees, the water, and air. Across this long, narrow yellow paper, which folds down into a square, Georgeson-Usher wonders how to contend with feelings of guilt, getting lost, and displacement. Questions of reciprocity arise in reading this work alongside Foronda’s exhibition. If a place, a space, or a so-called inanimate object can provide and impart care, who cares for them in return?

The spoon is an object that Foronda returns to in her practice and finds its way into the exhibition through unit of measure, a series of plaster casts from the concave bowl of spoons. More specifically, spoons that were used during a residency at MeetFactory in Prague in Fall 2021. Their smooth, ambiguous forms rest on a low lying plinth painted the same soothing peach tone as the feature wall of the gallery. The spoon in its shape and function is not so different from using one’s own hands in sharing and consuming a meal, a practice that is common outside of Western dining traditions. Beneath the surface of this work, I am reminded of how place settings can carry colonial coding and inscriptions of race and class. Karina Griffith’s Did you lay the table? Yes, I set the table consists of a pale manila, single-sided half sheet of paper with deep purple sans serif text, a series or list of eighteen ‘rules embedded into traditions of drinking, dining, and hosting.

Juliane Foronda. unit of measure, 2021. plaster casts of the concave of spoons.
Images courtesy of the artist and Trinity Square Video. Photography by Darren Rigo.

Danica Evering offers a series of text fragments, which literally unfold across the many-paneled, accordion-creased paper, which when collapsed fits in the palm of the hand, much like Foronda’s spoon casts. In one panel, Evering wonders how the ephemeral becomes solid, how “plaster makes this archive tender.” The vibrant green text on soft grey paper draws in quotes from Eugenie Waters, Mark Clintberg, Jennifer Doyle, and Tegan Jones, serving as a further expansion of the matrix of relationships held within this project. This contribution takes up aspects of Foronda’s work most literally or explicitly, as aspects of the exhibition come in and out of focus—the false sense of security given by the examination table paper, a direct response to the work coping mechanisms, and questions of harm and harm reduction. There is only one panel that has the text rotated 90 degrees to the left which strikes me as an outlier, and it reads: “between two beings across great distance.”

I have to remind myself that I know about hidden things went from concept to realization during a time of pandemic and isolation, with Foronda, Cosbert-Miller, Rose-Antoinette, Griffith, Georgeson-Usher, and Evering working virtually across great distances. It is no small feat that their collaboration feels so intimate and deeply connected. There is a warmth and tactility to both the exhibition and the publication that draw the visitor in, much like a good host. Is feminist hospitality an attempt to close or narrow that distance between us?

I feel compelled to mention my own personal connection with Foronda, who I feel very grateful to have had in my life as a friend and peer over the last six years. We met just before she moved to Iceland for her MFA, and what would follow was a period of writing one another lengthy emails and letters that moved between the personal and professional. We would send what others might deem the ‘scraps’ of our day-to-day life across oceans as a part of our growing ongoing long-distance kinship—rocks, dried flowers, transit stubs, and exhibitions pamphlets scrawled with notes, home-mixed spice blends, confetti, stickers, pins, postcards, a carefully selected stamp, a packet of dehydrated sourdough starter. We are both collectors, or hoarders, of curious objects and thoughts. I have been grateful to move between guest and host in this enduring exchange, and I can’t help but imagine the many copies of the I know about hidden things publication existing out in the world, a gift and care package from Foronda. In a part of a recent interview in Contemporary Art Stavanger, a quote from Foronda has stayed with me, that captures the ethos behind her practice, this project, and an unending process of being in relation has stayed with me: “The research alone will only go so far if it’s not shared.”[1]

[1]Foronda, Juliane. “Interview: Juliane Foronda” Contemporary Art Stavanger, November 23, 2021. https://www.contemporaryartstavanger.no/interview-juliane-foronda/

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

Bridge Obscura, a Portal to Iranian Community

Bridge Obscura by Shahrzad Amin. Installation photo. Photo by Shahrzad Amin, courtesy of the artist.

To You, From Me, For Us

May 30th – August 15th, 2022

Ignite Gallery

By Ignazio Colt Nicastro

My steps into Ignite Gallery were met with soothing sounds of retreating waves, a euphony of avian calls, and a rich Iranian voice as it sang throughout the gallery. These varying sounds drew me in deeper through this group exhibition To You, From Me, For Us, by multidisciplinary artists: Elyse Longair, Mohammed Tabesh, Atanas Bozdarov, Cailin Doherty, Ante Kurilic, and Shahrzad Amin. Collectively, this exhibition spoke to each artists’ lived diasporic experiences, forming a cultural exchange of war, disability, immigration, and environmental degradation. For Shahrzad Amin, this became an opportunity to connect herself, and others, to the people of Isfahan, Iran via her installation, Bridge Obscura. This multi-sensory homage houses historical references and iconography from Iran while showcasing contemporary examples of what it means to live within the community of this Iranian city. 

To You, From Me, For Us Installation photo. Photo by Shahrzad Amin, courtesy of the artist.

After following the rhythmic hymns inspired by the Persian poet, Hafez, viewers meet with the physicality of this audio, visual, and tangible installation. Atop a thick black plank, three rows of carved plywood stand firmly ahead of a video projection. Each archway comprised the underside foundation of this bridge that Amin created to extend our Toronto plane into a nostalgic, exploratory, and sensory ethnographic representation of Iran.

Amin invites viewers to step inside the bridge where they first pass under fine engravings along the archway. Upon closer inspection, one will note the tessellation of geometric symbols that are inspired by the star-and-cross design, an emblem that pre-dates the advent of Islam. The intricate engraving is also fused with floral and arabesque patterns and overall is a symbolic representation of the past and present. In some ways, as viewers pass under these engravings they activate the potential of this bridge, this portal, that allows them to transcend time and space. Viewers’ eyes are drawn through the archways that echo through the veil that is Amin’s film, which consists of video and sound compilations taken in Isfahan.

Bridge Obscura by Shahrzad Amin. Installation photo. Photo by Shahrzad Amin, courtesy of the artist.

Throughout this 11-minute film, viewers start at the Khaju Bridge before entering the Boostan Ayineh Khaneh Park. The camera guides viewers through the crowds of Isfahan until they arrive at the Allah-Verdi Khan Bridge. It’s quickly recognized that in every moment of this film, the essence of community is not monolithic and is widespread among the city’s people. Amin presented these various acts of community through the shared acoustic ecology of joyous singers under bridges, free-spirited dancing in the streets, and the act of sharing meals with friends, family, and strangers. This synthesis of personal, cultural, and affective levels of care shown in her community allowed Amin to further develop a bond with her audience.

As an immigrant from Isfahan, Amin tapped into her childhood memories to create this visual experience. The blurred motions of passersby mimic popular media cues that suggest slowed time and flashbacks. By utilizing her auditory and ocular memories, Amin has inserted a sense of nostalgia in this film that resonates with Iranian viewers. Though Bridge Obscura is meant to connect the people of Canada to those in Iran, it is largely a homage to Amin’s first home.

Bridge Obscura is a portal that ties viewers to Iran physically, metaphorically, and emotionally, as Iranian geography, history, and culture act as the foundation of the piece. Bridges play a critical role in the history of Iran as they were connectors between civilizations along trade routes. The engravings in Bridge Obscura specifically speak to a deeper history in Iran. With inspiration from the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan, Amin has extended the Perso-Islamic architecture designs into her work. Designs such as these were common in Iran’s block printing, which has been used for centuries on fabric and cloth for Qalamkar.

Bridge Obscura by Shahrzad Amin. Installation photo. Photo by Shahrzad Amin, courtesy of the artist.

Many guests who are not Iranian may not pick up on these historic and cultural traces, but withstanding, Amin has cultivated this thread of humanity that all viewers can resonate with. The exhibition title itself, To You, From Me, For Us, suggests that the artists are bringing forward their lived experiences for viewers to learn from, but ultimately this act is for their communities. The Iranian diaspora who view Amin’s work will now resurrect and access their memories of home while reflecting on their stories beneath the bridges amongst the isolationism in Iran.

At its core, Bridge Obscura counters the isolationism which has been imposed upon Iran’s everyday citizens via internal and external political factors. Though Amin’s practice has overtly worked against being guided by political discourse, these discussions around everyday life in Isfahan urge us to remain vigilant to the current crisis Iranian women and people are facing in response to the tragic killing of Mahsa Amini. Internally, political bodies segregated Iranian’s from the rest of the world through the prohibition of internet access and the jailing of educators, journalists, and protestors. Externally, media outlets ignored the demands for help until our voices were too loud for them to dismiss. This concept of isolationism is now being challenged as people across the globe rally together to chant ‘Woman, Life, Freedom,’ a courageous act of community that stemmed from the women and people of Iranian diaspora. Bridge Obscura not only connects people to Iranians but also displays how sentiments of community can be shown through more than love and kindness, but also anger and fear. As a child, Amin witnessed community through the street life of Isfahan. As an adult, she witnesses it as the unification of people inside and outside of Isfahan standing together for justice.

There is irony in Amin’s choice of using a bridge to portray this message, as bridges have a specific use of connecting people and things that have been separated. This installation acknowledges Amin’s distance from home while simultaneously connecting her, and others, to it. It reminds her that even amidst the isolationism back home, moments of tenderness, care, and love can be found. Bridge Obscura does not exclusively exist for Amin to hold on to this reminder, it is also for the citizens of Iran and everyone around the world.