Memory and Place: In Conversation with Michelle Paterok

Michelle Paterok. Night Snow, oil on panel, 9×12″, 2021.

Interview by Adi Berardini

Michelle Paterok’s paintings are hauntingly arresting, depicting everyday landscapes and portraits of those surrounding her using deep hues of violet, cerulean blue, and pale pinks. In her painting untitled (snow) (2021), footprints in the snow lead over the scene as if walking over the horizon at the end of the earth, depicting a solemn landscape. Almost as if viewing the surrounding environment in a nightscape, the imagery in her work looks like it’s been pulled from a dream, like emotive snapshots of everyday life.

In the painting Spring Ends (2019), leaves are suspended in space, falling from mid-air amongst the obscured background. Although they take a familiar shape, the leaves seem uncanny like another dimension exists within them. The overlapping imagery is reminiscent of the difficulty in remembering life moments as they replay in our heads repeatedly, each variation straying from the next like an altered reel.

Paterok often uses photography from her travels abroad and everyday life as a starting point in her work, allowing for interpretation in the rendering of the images to embody memory and lived experience. Through this, she is interested in capturing the “poetic infrastructures” of everyday and exploring the subjective nature of memory and how it relates to place. Michelle Paterok is currently pursuing her Master’s in Fine Arts at Western University. She speaks more about her practice in the following interview.

Michelle Paterok. Night on Earth, oil on linen, 14×18″, 2021.

Can you further explain your interest in place and how you address the poetics of everyday life through your work? Can you speak to your interest in travel as well?

When I was an art student in my undergraduate years, I had the opportunity to travel abroad to complete a research project. Something about being in a completely different environment and country made me consider my immediate surroundings more closely than when I was here in Canada. For that project, I had a specific research interest, but the idea of a fascination with my (often mundane) immediate surroundings has persisted, and I have redirected that lens to my local environment here. I’ve found that if I pay everyday scenes enough attention, they often transform into unexpectedly beautiful, interesting things. In a way, it’s also destabilizing: looking at something seemingly familiar long enough, it starts to become unfamiliar. The practice of closely at things I may have otherwise taken for granted or not noticed—examining and reflecting on the things I encounter in everyday life with more consideration—is part of what sustains my interest in making art. When I sit and I paint a landscape, I have to contemplate what it meant to be in that place as I record it on a canvas. That exercise is fascinating to me.

I’ve noticed that in your work too. The paintings are of everyday scenes but the way you approach them is other-worldly, it reminds me of dreamscapes.

I like that idea of the dreamscape. When I was first learning how to paint, I aimed to represent things as realistically as possible—but once I felt I had a good handle of the medium, representing reality became much less interesting to me. Right now, I’m thinking a lot about how I can convey a precise emotional atmosphere in my work. What interests me the most currently is representing subjective experience and a sense of mood. The recent work has drawn just as much on imagination and memory as it has on references from life or photos.

I’ve found that if I pay everyday scenes enough attention, they often transform into unexpectedly beautiful, interesting things. 

You have a strong sense of layered imagery in your work, almost like double exposure photography. Can you describe your process of using photography as reference in your paintings? How does this tie into the broader themes of your work?

Working in layers started by accident. It was a way to reuse old canvases that I had deemed unsuccessful and left in the corner of the studio, hoping for a solution to materialize. After a few weeks (sometimes months or years), I lose my attachment to these images and feel less precious about them. Usually, rather than trying to complete the painting, I paint something new on top of the old image. Through this process, incidental narratives are created, and later I embraced them. I like the idea of material memories embedded in the layers of the paintings.

The relationship between painting and photography has a long history—the invention of photography fundamentally changed the medium of painting. Painting has existed in dialogue with photography ever since. In my own work, I think about painting’s affordances—what can paintings do that photos might not be able to? One of these is the kind of emotional atmosphere I mentioned previously. Representing subjective experiences, like perception, memory or dreams, is one of the affordances I think painting has. I often use photos as a kind of foundation for some of the work’s formal aspects, but reinterpret light, colour and composition through the process of painting. I’ve recently tried to challenge this working process, as it’s become something like a habit for me over the years. These days I’m more often working from observation or memory—the latter of which has really changed the direction of the work.

Michelle Paterok. Spring Ends, oil on wood, 10×16″, 2019.

In your work Spring Ends, you use a sense of obscurification that provides a snapshot glimpse into a landscape from the outline of falling leaves which I was intrigued by. I was wondering if you could speak more about this piece and your use of both opaqueness and fragmentation?

At the time I painted it, I was living in rural Japan and making work about my experiences there. I initially painted a landscape. Where I was living, the landscape was full of rice paddies, which farmers flood in the spring. I tried to capture the reflection of the sky in the flooded fields, but (as often happens when I try to paint a scene that’s already too beautiful) the painting wouldn’t work—it gets dangerously close to hyper-sentimental territory.

The painting sat unfinished for a while. A few months later, in the fall, the ginkgo tree near my workplace shed its leaves, which covered the ground in a huge yellow and green blanket. I thought the silhouette of the leaves might speak to the landscape I had painted previously. Both scenes—the flooded rice field and the fallen leaves—indicate seasonal change and time’s passage. Using the silhouette of the leaves to reveal and obscure parts of the landscape, I was thinking about how time exists in our memories: some aspects of memories obscured and others clear, but both experiences of memory are mediated by the present moment.

It might also be important to mention that all of the images that I use in my work are based on sketches or photos I took. I don’t usually go on missions to find art photos or anything like that. Often, I’ll be going for a walk, or be on my way to work, and I’ll see things on the street that I think are interesting or poetic [so] I try to record them.

I’m also a walker. I love to walk, especially when I lived in Vancouver, and even here, I just walk around my neighbourhood. If you look you can find some interesting things. Even though they’re just part of everyday life, they can spark interest in different ways.

Yes! I’ve always gravitated towards walking as a means of collecting references. I used to be self-conscious of this way of working, especially among peers with more research-based practices. Although, I guess walking is its own form of research, a kind of local research. It reminds me of the flaneurs—the idea of wandering as a means of reflecting on contemporary life.

Michelle Paterok. Existing Among Others, oil on linen, 14×18″, 2021.

What has your process been working on larger paintings? How do you think scale affects your process?

When I was living in Japan, I converted my living room into a studio, and there wasn’t much space to make large work. The pandemic added more challenges, and the result was that I didn’t make any large work for about three years. It wasn’t until recently, when I started my MFA, that I had the space to work large scale again.

It might just be a result of working this way for such a long time, but small-scale comes more easily for me: I can approach the canvas intuitively, and if I need to make a big change, the stakes (cost of materials, time) are low. There is also something important to me in the small-scale work about the economy of the brushstrokes. When the work is scaled up, for me it requires more planning—sketches, colour studies—and being minimal in my mark-making becomes much more challenging. That said, it seems like the current work is asking to be big. I’m interested in creating work that’s more immersive. I’m trying to listen to the work more and let it go in the direction it suggests it wants to, rather than imposing my own restrictions on it.

Who are some artists that inspire you and your work?

Even though I’m mostly making paintings these days, print artists have been a really big influence. I saw a retrospective of Tetsuya Noda’s work at the British Museum a few years ago, and I was really moved. I still think about it often. Since the late 60s, he’s created a diary series that’s become his life’s work—he has a distinct process of photographing places, objects or people in his daily life, then screen printing them onto paper printed with a subtle woodblock texture. I think the woodblock is a nod to the tradition of ukiyo-e, but his works depart significantly from traditional Japanese printmaking due to his use of a camera. What I really love about his work is that it’s personal and specific, but at the same time, somehow highly universal. Compiling all these seemingly mundane moments from daily life, when done over such a long period of time and with such focus and craft, turns them into something that feels really meaningful.

Of course, I also love paintings! Vija Celmins is my current favourite. I’ve also been staring at Maja Ruznic’s work a lot. My friend also recently introduced me to Agnes Pelton’s work, those paintings are magical.

Michelle Paterok. Ghost Plant, oil on canvas, 24×24″, 2021.

There can be a lot of meaning in the everyday. I think that’s the biggest question with painting is “what do I paint?” And like you were saying, there’s so much you can do with colour—It’s so tied to emotions. I’m drawn to your work because of the way you use colour too.

Before I start a painting, I ask myself, “what kind of emotional climate do I want this to have?” like I mentioned before. Often reducing my variables in terms of my palette has been a lot more conducive to capturing what I’m after as opposed to working with a lot of colours. This has grown into working with more of a limited palette in a more intentional way than what I used to. 

I was looking at these historical palettes, limited palettes people used to use. I made a few paintings with the Zorn palette, which is traditionally white and only three other colours—but its namesake (Anders Zorn) was able to get almost a whole spectrum of hues with just these colours. Working often with fewer hues, but more intention, has been useful for me lately in addressing the question of “how do I want this painting to feel?” Colour can be so evocative, and it’s one of those things that artists can spend their whole lives trying to understand. There are almost endless combinations and colour relationships. As a painter, you can never get bored.

Do you have any plans or projects coming up in the future that you’d like to discuss? I will be part of a Western MFA show in the fall—date TBA. My work right now is all very much in development, and I’m spending most of my summer in the studio seeing how things progress. I love this stage of the process where things feel like they could go in any direction. I’m excited to be starting a new larger-scale body of work and I’ll share things as they develop.

You can view more of Michelle Paterok’s work on her website and Instagram.

Presence and Absence: In Conversation with Julia Rose Sutherland

Julia Rose Sutherland. Npuinu ên·pu·i·nu- (Corpse). 2019. Photo Courtesy of the artist.

Interview by Margaryta Golovchenko

CW: Discussion of trauma, death, police violence against Indigenous people

There is an unwavering sense of presence in the interdisciplinary practice of Julia Rose Sutherland, an artist and member of the Metepenagiag Mi’kmaq Nation. Whether documenting performances and installations that have long since ended or calling for action and justice, Sutherland’s works are always a link in a conversational chain—with ancestry, with the earth, with the social and political. The living and fluctuating nature of Sutherland’s corpus-like practice is closely intertwined with the constant presence of the body in her work. Whether the body is there physically or indicated through absence, or even referred to through the traces that are left behind by the manual labour of quillwork and sugar casting, the viewer is always in the middle of an encounter—with Sutherland and with the realities of colonial and ecological violence, as well as with themselves as a witness and participant in these dynamics.

MG: I was really interested in how you are physically present in your work, especially in your performances. In a lot of other cases, the body is noted through absence. I was wondering about this relationship, these different forms of corporeality.

JRS: I’ve been attracted to the representation of the body throughout my whole artistic career and as a child. I’m a portrait artist, that’s how I started. Then I went on to my undergraduate degree and started working with the body in more abstract ways, so this duality between absence and presence. I’m so attracted by the body — I’ve always felt that I live in such a liminal space, whether it’s between races or, as a queer person, between heterosexuality and homosexuality. I think a lot of the time, especially for people who undergo trauma, the body becomes this separate thing, a separate entity.

It also ties a bit to healing. I think that is what I’m trying to do, whether it’s healing myself or healing other groups of people or having conversations about tougher subjects. In my culture—and in many cultures—our histories and stories are orally passed down, whether through dance or through the body itself. Monique Mojica coined the term “blood memory” and I think there’s something really beautiful about that, what the body holds and how we can physically manifest it. For me, the body is a site to be used as a material and drawn from. I’m interested in what the body holds, what it remembers, what it can be, what it represents. I think there’s something to be said about confronting blood memory and what that looks like, confronting the histories that are intergenerational and that travel through time. Of course, time’s not linear. And I think that’s what’s neat about using the body, is that it, too, is not linear. It’s constantly living and moving and breathing and you’re being affected all the time.

Julia Rose Sutherland, Gesipatl Iga’latl (Pain and Release). 2019. Photo documentation by Erik Sirke, Courtesy of the Artist.
Julia Rose Sutherland, Gesipatl Iga’latl (Pain and Release). 2019. Photo documentation by Erik Sirke, Courtesy of the Artist.

MG: You talked about your own identity and one of the things that I’m often curious about, especially in performance pieces, is how much of the artist is put into them. I know some artists think of performance as assuming a kind of persona like they’re stepping away and existing in a liminal state. I was wondering how you engage with this because you’ve touched upon it in a lot of your works, this kind of intergenerational trauma and focusing on the colonial history of Canada and decolonizing it.

JRS: When I was younger, a lot of my work was purely about my experience, about me and my family directly. I wasn’t talking about colonialism, but at the same time, I was, because I was talking about systems and frameworks of trauma. And then I was thinking so much about my positionality and the extreme privilege that I do have. [It’s important to] recognize that, because I’m so pale, especially in comparison to most of my family, I’ve experienced a different threshold of life.

I think in my performance work—which is newer for me because usually, my work was performative or [there was] something about it that was performative—people would be like, ‘Oh, this is interesting,’ but I’m not in it. Now, I’ve centered myself in it but I’m not talking about [myself] so much as about systems or overarching ideas. The performance is still talking directly about my body, about pain and release, about bleeding out of my body. It has a lot to do with confronting my positionality within current events and social issues that are happening, especially around Indigenous people all over North America, but especially my own family.

MG: You talked about this interest in skin-to-skin contact and how that was a big part of your MA. Is that something you think about now, during the pandemic when people are thinking about alternative forms of gathering?

JRS: The pandemic has been difficult for anyone, especially creatives who are at home by themselves [and] thinking about their work, or who have had plans canceled. Everyone I know has ‘postponed due to COVID’ or ‘canceled’ on their CV nowadays. But it has been really interesting because I’ve been working with exploring alternative healing practices and practices of Indigenous communities, especially of the Mi’kmaq, which I am. In particular, I’ve been looking at the sweat lodge, which involves people gathering together, talking, being close in an unventilated, [hot] space. I’m also working with the sun dance, thinking about powwows, people coming together, regalias, which [is] no longer happening in this physical manifestation. I had a residency at Bemis Contemporary Arts Center for this summer that got cancelled [and] postponed to next summer, which is based on this way of coming together with communities from other Indigenous groups in the Nebraska area, so the Pawnee and Ponca people.

It’s been hard because I can’t get together with people and do these things, but it’s also creating a dialogue that I’m having [online]. A lot of the time, I’m finding I’m getting these necessary conversations or growth of ideas through just talking with my family more, and I think that’s kind of [due to] the pandemic. But the skin-to-skin contact or that relation of gathering has been difficult because it’s so important to the work, a lot of [which] is participatory—it needs to either be witnessed or it needs to be participated in physically, where someone’s physically touching something or someone’s physically doing something. I don’t know how that’s going to progress over time.

I’m [currently] running a collaborative work at the Calgary Women’s Center, where I’m a resident. I’ve been asked to reformat the project so it can be run online. In a way that’s great because it’s more accessible for people at home or anyone who’s vulnerable and doesn’t want to leave the home. But it makes me wonder what the future of these kinds of community-based things [looks like]. I’ve been thinking about tea a lot, about gathering and sipping tea and being there with your family, your colleagues, your friends, strangers, and having conversations. But you can’t have them the same way, which also talks about energy, because that energy is not the same and screen fatigue is a thing.

MG: Is working within a community central to your practice? There’s still this idea of the lone artist in their workshop, going ‘I work alone, I have to do these things by myself.’ Being in a safe space like a women’s shelter—what role does that play in your work?

JRS: Well, [there are] two kinds of ways it functions. I like to produce alone. I don’t mind doing my sugar casting in my studio alone. I don’t mind doing my quillwork alone. But I’m never making work alone. That’s not a concept that makes any sense to me. Community is very important. Conversation and dialogue are very much central to my practice. Otherwise, I don’t know what you would be making or how you’d be progressing your work. I think this idea of the lone artist is a myth and I don’t think it’s productive. Myself, I gain inspiration from literature and conversations, just reading a lot of weird snippets of things. It’s about seeing things or experiencing something, like walking down the street and then drawing a correlation between this and this thing.

[F]or me, time, or the concept of time, is not linear. It’s rhizomatic in the same way that we’re learning and gaining things and being influenced. An artist is influenced by everything happening in their life. I think that’s also part of making work that is maybe heavier or harder to talk about, that is draining and exhausting, which I sometimes feel is what I do. I feel exhausted by everything I’m doing—not necessarily the physical work, but the mental and conceptual backing behind everything is so hard. Like, I made that quillwork piece Rest in Peace (2020) after my family member, Rodney Levi, was shot and killed, shot twice in the chest by an RCMP officer this summer. That work was really hard to make but it was also really important to do that, too, to be working with my hands [using] a traditional material. And that’s also based on community. That’s based on sitting there with my sister [and] doing it at the same time, or on the phone with family, not being able to go home or be around anyone because of the pandemic.

Julia Rose Sutherland, Rest in peace, Rodney Levi 2020. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Julia Rose Sutherland, DEFUND THE POLICE. Rest in peace, Rodney Levi series. 2020. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Julia Rose Sutherland, REFUND THE COMMUNITIES. Rest in peace, Rodney Levi series. 2020.Photo courtesy of the artist.

The quillwork pieces, especially Defund the police, are heavily influenced by Black feminist ideology stemming from the BLM movement and the actions and writings of Angela Yvonne Davis and Robyn Maynard on abolition. These two women are considerable influences to me, and of course, were not the first to push forward to the notion of abolition. I am thinking about Frances E.W Harper, Sarah Parker Redmond, Elizabeth Freeman, and Sojourner Truth.

MG: My condolences. As a response to that, do you view your art practice as a form of release and healing or is it more of a labour? The two tend to be dichotomies, in a way. Is it private and like a healing process, where you feel lighter by the end of it, but you’re so absorbed in it that you’re working on art? How do you situate yourself and your own work between these two dichotomies?

JRS: I’m an empath and I think I’ve always been one. It’s great and it’s bad. It’s an unfortunate side effect of being a child brought up in [and through] trauma because you feel like you have to solve everything or you have to be active enough in things and if you do it wrong, therefore it’s your fault. It’s hard because I make this artwork and some people are like, ‘Oh, maybe it’s like art therapy, it helps, it’s soothing.’ Maybe the physical making can function that way, like when we talked about the tactility of busy hands and working with regional craft work. A lot of times, these monotonous, slow, kind of beautiful ways of working are helpful, but my research, my writing, my lived experience, is sometimes overwhelming.

Most of the time, I find I’m absorbing so much of this content, these ideas, that maybe it’s a burden, but I [have to] look at the stuff or talk about the stuff I make work about, especially in my place of privilege as white-passing, as someone who’s gotten an education. I’ve been so fortunate to have access to education. I’m healthy, I eat, I’ve traveled around the world. I’m very privileged. I was brought up by my grandma, Noella, on my mother’s side. She really raised me. She is the most amazing, strongest, most resilient woman I’ve ever met. She’s been dealt the most insane deck of cards I could ever imagine, and she is so strong for it, so forgiving and loving. She’s always taught us to have honest dialogue. It was so important for her to talk to us about issues and to have frank conversations about [them], [to] be open and honest, and I think that’s why, for me, my work can function that way for other people. I hope that people find some of the work approachable. I know it can be antagonistic, but I want it to be approachable enough that we can have honest conversations, that it centers people and humanity with Mother Earth at the core of taking care. To me, that is the most important thing, and that can be a burden but having [that] usability of conversations and not hiding things can make things easier in different ways, like self-realization. It really help[s] to know who you are, what is happening, and to be heard. I think what anyone in the world wants, or what every sovereign nation wants, is to be heard and have their space. And if the world were more empathetic, if everyone was an empath, it would be great. I mean, we’d probably be crying all the time, but that’d be great!

Julia Rose Sutherland. P’twewi (Be’de’wey) “Tea” 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist.

MG: I feel like that’s a good jump back to what you talked about with the tea bags, the tea bag quilt you made. You talked about community and I was really interested in the context of that.

JRS: I use Red Rose Tea. It’s so nostalgic and evocative for me, the smell of it. I mean, olfactory senses are just so charged. I smell it and I’m transported to Red Bank, at my great grandma’s—coffee or dinner tables, sitting there and drinking tea, talking about whatever. It reminds me so much of my grandmother, my great-grandma, all these amazing women in my life who would sit at a table, at any given time, and just have conversations over tea.

[For this reason,] I was thinking about comfort. I think a lot of people find comfort in tea or in these conversations. There’s sitting by the window on a cold day and being warmed inside by [a] body of water. It’s beautiful. I was [also] thinking a lot about blankets [and] the Hudson Bay Company, especially in my master’s degree, thinking about what a blanket means and the history of the Hudson Bay blanket, how it gave a lot of strength to Indigenous communities over time but was also exploitative in many ways. It almost allowed us to have a lot of rights, in different manners, and to be seen as a useful trade system, in a way. But then also thinking about germ warfare. We’re in a pandemic now, but I was thinking of biological warfare, of the blanket itself. [A] blanket could bring comfort. It is something that we can resonate with and see. And then [I thought] about comfort in other ways, as a conversation and dialogue. That’s what tea is for me: a symbol of dialogue and frank conversation. It’s also a symbol of something that’s weighted [and] can hug you, that could be on you.

I really like the tea piece. [T]his is what I was supposed to be doing with the Women’s Center of Calgary. It was essentially supposed to be a hooded cloak on the ground, a pleated, quilted thing. People could sit in it and be weighted down [by it]. [It would] mimic the Mi’kmaq bonnet but as an interactive tea sculpture, which would have been really beautiful, I think, the smell of black tea all over you and weighting you down like a weighted blanket, hugging you. Again, that [idea of] skin-to-skin contact. It didn’t come to fruition, but maybe one day.

MG: It sounds like a very interesting dichotomy because I’m thinking of your work with the porcupine quills and I know that when I saw your performance with the porcupine quills (Gesipatl Iga’latl (Pain and Release), 2019), I had a very visceral physical response, which was directly opposite to the comfort of the tea piece. I actually felt the smell of the tea. It seeped through the screen as I opened that piece. It’s interesting how it is like a conversation across all of your pieces.

JRS: I really feel like I’m so influenced by everything in my life and every piece must connect to the next one. I feel like, for me, everything is connected, because I’m talking about [my] perspective an[d] experience, and that’s what’s coming through. I think that everything [is] compounding together and growing. For instance, the corpse body, which was this nugget of an idea that I had because I had been working with a body and doing sugar casting previously, but in a different way. I went to the Alberta College of Art and Design—now the Alberta University of the Arts—for my undergrad and there I was making sugar sculpture with fabric. I was super saturating sugar water and cotton and then casting it over bodies. The first time I did it was because I was walking to work one day and I found a dead body, and it was such an awful time. It was Mark Mariani, 47. He was beaten to death by a group of three white supremacists. It was essentially [because of being there at the] wrong place, wrong time that this happened to him. I just happened to find him and called the police and then that escalated. Years later, I had to go to court and testify about the timeline, the body, all these different things. At the time I was taking a class with Sondra Meszaros and we were doing a memento mori piece, so I started casting then.

The reason I started thinking about that in particular—about trauma, especially the head trauma that this man went through—was indicative of something that happened to my mother when I was a child, which really strung it along. Years later, when my mom passed, it was my 21st birthday and I had to go identify her body. It was stuck in my head, [the image of] her in the gurney. I have hundreds of drawings of her body on this gurney, which are also indicative of this cast. I ended up making this cast of my body out of sugar. When my grandmother—so my mom’s mother—came to Buffalo to see my thesis show, Npuinu ên·pu·i·nu- (Corpse) (2019), she walked into the room and she just turned to me and said, ‘This is your mother. This is Barbie.’ These things are all connected, whether or not I think they are. A trauma that happened to me when I was seven when a head trauma was afflicted upon my mom, that was then also afflicted onto this man, who was unjustly beaten and killed by white supremacists, to my mom dying, to me going back to this, thinking about the body and how to represent it, to my grandmother seeing the sugar body; it’s all connected, and I didn’t think about it until my grandma said that. At that moment, I thought, ‘Oh, you kind of knew what this was about.’ I mean, “Npuinu ên·pu·i·nu-” is a piece directly dealing with the consumption of Indigenous women and trans people on Turtle Island. It’s talking about mortality but it’s also talking directly about my family and how that affects me, [where I’m left wondering] who will be next, whether it will be me, my sisters, my cousins, my aunts.

Julia Rose Sutherland. Npuinu ên·pu·i·nu- (Corpse). 2019. Photo Courtesy of the artist.
Julia Rose Sutherland. Npuinu ên·pu·i·nu- (Corpse). 2019. Photo Courtesy of the artist.

MG: I got that very strong, hospital-like atmosphere when I looked at that piece. It had this somberness to it. What happened after, to the sugar? It made me think of this process of regeneration and how, in a lot of cultures, the body returns to earth, regardless of what you think happens to it after.

JRS: I’ve been working with sugar before and thinking about [it] in correlation to many health issues surrounding Indigenous peoples, whether it’s diabetes—which is a big thing in my family—or heart disease. [I was also] thinking about [the] separation of trauma and [different] coping mechanism[s], like eating sweets, [as well as the] loss of tradition and values. [E]ssentially [I was] making rock candy, so it’s sugar, water, and cream of tartar [boiled] to 310 degrees to burn it slightly. You get this caramelized color and a sickly-sweet smell. I did small batches and layered and layered it. I was thinking about ancestry a lot, too, because each layer [is] the slight small layer, depending on the topography of that part of the body. [In] the end, when you take it out, it’s like sedimentary rock; there’s so many different layers. I thought that was a really beautiful metaphor for thinking about ancestry and also how we communicate with our ancestors. I pray to my ancestors every day.

[I was] also thinking about that relationship to earth. I’ve done other performative work where I literally bury myself in the land. [T]he [cast] body goes back to the ground and the ants eat the sugar and the ants go crazy and they build these mounds and there’s all this productivity about it, but it also can be toxic, in a way, like we’d be overloading the environment or doing terrible things. What [really] happens is, [since] the body is made of sugar, [it] absorbs air [and] moisture. So, I’m in Buffalo, New York in the spring, when this was put up originally, and of course it’s absorbing and it’s melting. [It] was beautiful because [the sculpture’s] changing constantly. It’s organic living material [that’s] not leaving anything anywhere, it’s just changing into something else and functioning in a different way. Actually, at the end of the show, instead of being the sedimentary rock, it became glossy. It amalgamated together, became almost transparent. [It was] melting but still kind of there.

Julia Rose Sutherland. ANGO’TG “ Taking Care Of”. 2019. Photo Courtesy of the artist.

MG: What is the relationship between the past and the present in your work? A lot of it is very much rooted in the present, as we talked about with the performance pieces, which need audience interaction or presence, or the sugar sculptures, which are very temporal and melt and make one aware of the passing of time.

JRS: Presence and the now are really important, in the sense of the viewership of the work. But I would say that the philosophy or concept behind it is all the same. It doesn’t change. And—for better or for worse—maybe that’s sad, that you look at 50 years ago and we’re still talking about the social issues. But we’re talking about it like an SOS. This is a state of emergency that can’t be ignored anymore and yet somehow, we still are. We don’t deal with these root issues. This is how lateral violence succeeds, or how colonialism succeeds because first, it breaks down the system of the people to capitalize off them. I guess I would like to say that the past and present are not different nor are they the same. They’re just there. Thinking a little bit more about the non-traditional linear space, it’s all irrelevant, but the physical actuality of the work, if you want to see it, is relevant. It is relevant because it’s happening, or it’s gone. None of my work is commercial or stagnant. None of it—other than maybe some of the [newer] quill work—is something you could have. It’s installation work that then disappears and goes up until nowhere. Then it exists in a different plane—it exists as documentation, maybe as a scene, in the function of writing. I think it’s also indicative of how historically, in my culture [and] in many [others], oral history works. But maybe it’s not as productive in terms of art history or sustainability. I’m also interested in the ephemeral. I think it’s poetic. And maybe that’s how I think about the body, too, because it is there [and] then it’s not. It’s ephemeral and only temporary. It’s a thing, but it’s so important and it’s something that we all crave.

MG: The question that instantly came to mind is do you then think of your art as being in opposition to the art market, which is very much all about ownership and creating something that you can slap a number on and take to a big art fair and create a lot of buzz so that people buy it. Where do you see yourself in opposition to these kinds of power systems?

JRS: I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I’ve recently shown work at the Toronto Art Fair, at the pop-up they had for WAAP gallery. I really love [the founder], Wil Aballe—we have a great working relationship [and] great conversations. But I don’t resonate with that community, with this capitalistic construct of buying and selling work, because, at the end of the day, I’m not buying or selling things. I’m trying to exchange ideas [and] dialogues, [to] have discussions and make people feel better or feel realized or heard. A lot of my work deals with people who don’t have the agency to have this dialogue. [T]hat’s what I’m interested in. I do feel like I’m resistant to that kind of market that, like you said, slapped a tag on it and gives you worth and says, ‘This is how much it is and someone’s going to buy it.’ [T]he artist doesn’t make as much money and the gallery makes more money, then [the work] goes to an auction and [becomes] an investment piece for someone else. I don’t find it that interesting. Actually, I find it kind of repulsive.

But I also understand that you want to have money [so that you can] pay rent. It’s this idea of having artists laboring away for free or the starving artist. I think it’s outdated and I also think it’s unfortunate. I personally would rather be engaged in academia and teaching, thinking of my work with other people in greater dialogue [and] having a discussion of social frameworks. This capitalist system, is it bestowed upon us? How do we resist that as a group? It exists—you could look at artist-run centers and government programs, which are amazing. In Canada we have some amazing artist-run centers. We look at CARFAC fees [for] paying artists. I love that system. But then, what’s the recognition? What does that look like? I guess it also depends on what you want. I personally don’t care about selling a lot of work and making a lot of money, but I also want to live my life, and I live in a capitalist society, so I guess I have to play the game, to some degree. But I think maybe I do resist that by making work that is not sellable or long lasting or has longevity.

MG: We’ve talked a lot about systems of power and oppression, and I was wondering—and this is a bit of a utopian question—what are your hopes or what lessons do you hope are learned, to put it in a kind of cheesy way? Where do you hope we go from here, whether socially, culturally, [in] the art world?

JRS: I think that my greatest thing would be for people to have a self-realization, to think about the systems in place in their lives that they may not have control over but which they are very much playing into it and allowing to run their lives. It would be great if we could look at that and have frank discussions about that and ask: could there be a better way? Could we not look at other places in the world that don’t do what we’re doing? You’re playing into [a] system that’s hurting you by saying you can’t have things that you need, that society can’t take care of you. So, questioning capitalism and recognizing that we’re together as a collective and we’re better together as a society. All these things are expansive and big, so you could say, ‘I wish capitalism was gone,’ but what does that mean? What does that look like in the real world? I’m a socialist at heart and that’s how I feel. I think that we should just take care of each other. My thesis show was literally called “Ango’tg” (2019), which means ‘to take care of.’ I feel like we need to take more care of each other; it would be much better. I just wonder why we divide each other so much instead of supporting one another.

You can find more of Julia Rose Sutherland’s work on her website and Instagram.

Transitions by jailli

By Charlotte Rainville

Jailli. Transitions, Julie. 2019-2020. 35 mm film. Images Courtesy of the artist.

Biography

Charlotte Rainville (she/her), also known as jailli online, is a Montreal-based twenty-one-year-old freelance photographer, graphic designer, illustrator, and calligraphist. She is also a second-year Photography major and Psychology minor BFA student at Concordia University.
Rainville views experimenting with the mixture of photography, art therapy, event planning, cinematographic photo direction and psychology as her life’s purpose. Creatively, Charlotte focuses on storytelling portraiture, making people feel confident, educating herself on human psychology, and challenging her depicting and understanding of others’ selfhoods as well as her own. She defines her practice as creating light-and-minimalism-focused scenes, showcasing human connexions, and having a cinematic photojournalistic approach.

Project Description

 In “Transitions”, Charlotte Rainville analyzes self-shifting in women. She aims to immortalize teenager and newly “adulted” women in the middle of their own perpetual transitions. By doing so, Rainville wants to highlight the perseverance, instability, awkwardness, and vulnerability that growing-up shifts cause. Simultaneously, “Transitions” is her attempt at freezing subjects amidst their mutation, her invitation for them to look at their transitions from a more detached and objective perspective.


Unraveling our identity is a task which may seem very isolating at times, but in fact, it is tied to a broader and common search of each member of society’s goals and self-defining, marked by vulnerability and “existential crises.” With this project, Rainville, therefore, aims for the public to rally around the universal experience of transitional change, inviting the viewers to introspect about their own transitions: How has time imposed its oeuvre within you, how has it made you leave your mark on the world? What would you tell your fifteen-year-old self or future ninety-year-old self? Are you who you thought you would be? How have you changed for the better? For the worst? It’s worth pondering about.

Jailli. Transitions. 2019-2020. 35 mm film. Images Courtesy of the artist.


Jailli. Transitions, Zelie. 2019-2020. 35 mm film. Images Courtesy of the artist.

Furthermore, “Transitions” is a reminder that what is even more unnatural than telling women that they are an object or that who they are is inherently sexual is stripping them of the right to represent their body as they please. Therefore, “Transitions” is also an attempt to establish a conversation around unjust censorship, specifically targeting social media’s censorship rules. Indeed, platforms like Instagram, whose censorship of the breast reflects the social norms that affect the female body, only contribute to the sexualization of women’s bodies. Through this series, Rainville addresses that the unfair censorship of women that happens online also impacts what happens off-screen, only feeding into an already vicious cycle of objectification and women’s self-hatred. 

Adrien Crossman: Fake Childhood, No Future

Adrien Crossman. Lavender Culture. digital render, 2018. Courtesy of the Artist.

By Adi Berardini

CW: Brief mention of transphobic/homophobic media tropes; discussion of LGBTQ+ suicide

When my friends had discovered that I had never seen But I’m a Cheerleader, they were appalled and assigned the film to me as queer culture homework. After watching it, I could tell why—I had never seen a feature film that distinctly depicted the experience of being femme before. The protagonist Megan is a stereotypical blonde cheerleader; however, she doesn’t realize that the Melissa Etheridge poster in her room, not being that into her boyfriend, and checking out other women, points to the fact that she is a lesbian. Although with a light-hearted approach, the film, with its campy, John-Waters-like, pink and turquoise aesthetic, depicts her condemnation to a conversion camp where she learns the ‘how-tos’ about heterosexuality and gender roles. Any attempt to brainwash Megan into straightness dramatically fails, and (spoiler alert) she falls for the dreamy rebel, Graham. It’s no surprise that the film has now become a cult classic within the LGBTQ+ community. It’s also no surprise to me that I was late to learn about this film since I didn’t fully come to terms with being queer until early adulthood, and like Megan, I think my friends picked up on my queerness first. Although not to be mixed up with confusion, it’s more like a lack of realization as a result of under-representation and erasure.

Often referencing cult-classic films such as But I’m a Cheerleader, interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator Adrien Crossman both unpacks and reclaims the ambiguity of queer culture, in a heteronormative society that struggles to acknowledge and accept queerness. They are interested in critically analyzing how media largely depicts queerness as either “abhorrent or invisible,” with reference to what Adrienne Rich calls compulsory heterosexuality, the idea that heterosexuality is assumed and enforced by a patriarchal society.[1] Further, Crossman is interested in how the potential of queerness can provide space for exploration beyond rigid binaries and gender roles. They reference how popular childhood characters, such as SpongeBob or Furby, have queerness built into their creation or storylines but were protested by religious groups due to a sense of “moralism” and “protection” of children. As a result, these pop culture figures are often reclaimed or named by the community as signifiers of queer identity.


Crossman’s work heavily points towards queer iconography itself, whether it’s a virtual projection of a neon sign reading ‘lavender culture’ or felt pennants reading ‘Silence=Death’ reminiscent of the posters of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Just as the edited volume Lavender Culture attempts to explore, the neon sign had me thinking what I am always asking myself while doing a project like Femme Art Review—what exactly is lavender culture? The introduction to the book notes how more mainstream culture is influenced by queer culture, yet there’s a failure to name this influence due to homophobia.[2] However, Crossman is more interested in establishing a queer sensibility, or perhaps a shared frame of reference, than defining queer culture, recognizing that queer experiences are intersectional and widely differ. Although without this sense of shared understanding and reference, it can create a sense of isolation within being queer, especially when aspects of queer history remain in the background yet still influences our lives today. For example, the trauma of the 1980s/90s HIV/AIDS crisis that perpetuated, and still perpetuates, stigma towards queerness due to the homophobic media coverage and lack of government response due to conservatism. The Lavender Culture sign is digitally rendered instead a physical object in space, which speaks to the intangibility of lesbian culture often existing on the fringes of LGBTQ+ narratives.

Adrien Crossman. Queer Still Life, digital render, 2016, courtesy of the artist.

In addition, Crossman is interested in challenging the binary of the real versus artificial, or fiction and reality. They form a 3D rendered stack of queer theory books as a still life, including a Furby and a Tamagotchi, that subversively reads an Audre Lorde quote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”[3]  They explore their relationship to these objects and texts, and the power structures that Lorde references in the quote, the force of the white, cis-heteronormative patriarchy that leaves little room for queer expression, particularly for racialized queer people. Crossman has a distinctly digital way of working to subvert the binary of digital and real, rendering in 3D, then casting in aluminum, then back to the digital plane, in order to transcend these binaries and fixed categories. They define these objects, such as Tamagotchis and Furbies, as “relational artifacts” that possess a sense of queer affect and intimacy.[4] The Furby symbolizes the potential for queerness since they are objects undefined by gender or race. Crossman also explores how certain technologies, like the beloved 90s toy Tamagotchi, require human care and attention as a way to exist out outside of the binary of real and fake.

There’s also a lack of representation of outwardly queer women and Non-binary/Trans characters in television and media which perpetuates this sense of isolation and erasure. There’s the obvious L-Word, or Orange is the New Black, however the lack of media representation from our own perspective haunts us with the misunderstanding of our own identities (and other people misunderstanding them, too). Tinky Winky from the Teletubbies carried a women’s handbag, potentially signalling his gayness and gender non-conformity, which was made out to be blasphemy. The original L-Word misconstrued Trans men as violent. Orange is the New Black has representation of queer and Trans women, yet in the setting of a women’s prison. How do we come to terms with queer identity when it’s not depicted at all, or if so, so inaccurately; being fetishized and sexualized, or being made out to be monstrous or criminal? The lack of queer media representations often leads to depictions that are able-bodied, cis-gender and white, which are deemed more ‘palatable’ under the male gaze and white supremacy. The erasure of queer experiences in pop culture and media ultimately contributes to the erasure of us.

Adrien Crossman. Exist, video still, 2019, courtesy of the artist.

For this reason, the words I see depicted on Adrien’s ankle tattoo of a flag reading ‘EXIST,’ and their leg tattoo spelling out ‘NO FUTURE’ in their film Exist, hit me hard. In the film, they tattoo their own ankle with a version of their artwork to address that being queer is an act of resistance in a heteronormative society, providing a new queer orientation.[5] The words of their one tattoo are in reference to the queer theory text No Future by Lee Edelman in which he challenges the archetype of the child symbolizing future and innocence, positioning the embodiment of queerness as anti-social and future-negating.[6] The self-inflicted pain of their stick and poke tattoo reflects the pain queer people experience, a pain that is often left undiscussed or brushed over. To ‘exist’ is to live under adverse conditions—it’s exhausting being labelled as resilient or strong in a world that so often deems queer as “abnormal.” The lack of the reflection of our experiences and the way that queer identity is depicted as too taboo to explicitly address in film and television, re-upholds the belief that it’s morally wrong for us to authentically exist as ourselves. This framework of thinking is so often why we internalize homophobia, it contributes to feeling ashamed to be who we are, and why we lose lives in the queer community to suicide. Countering this, the flag that reads ‘EXIST’ reaffirms that existing in a heteronormative regime is an act or resistance in itself for queer and marginalized folx. The flag signals a sense of protest, pride, and celebration, counteracting the sense of shame these harmful ideologies perpetuate. The film is a meditation that affirms that you are enough—you’re more than enough.

Adrien Crossman, Heaven is a Place on Earth install shot, 2019, photo by Polina Teif.

The title of Crossman’s 2019 exhibition Heaven is a Place on Earth at Patel Projects is not only in reference to the Belinda Carlisle song, but the Black Mirror episode, San Junipero. In this modern cult classic, the shy Yorkie, eventually meets the uninhibited Kelly, a soulmate connection that encourages her to let go. With its 1980s bisexual colour scheme, the episode details their relationship, including hookups in a beach house and convertible rides along the shoreline. Although, (another spoiler alert) the episode becomes a utopia within a broader dystopia—the couple is in a simulation that the dead can live in and the elderly can visit as part of immersive nostalgia therapy. In reality, their lives were much more plagued by hurt and pain. Trans and bi activist and scholar Julia Serano theorizes that the “bi” prefix of bisexuality is not between two genders, but of two worlds—navigating one of heterosexuality and one of queerness.[7] Although she was happily married to a man, Kelly, who is bisexual, feels the grasp of compulsory heterosexuality and never acted upon her desire for women during her lifetime. Yorkie was also never able to act on desire since she was brought up in a highly religious family. The episode uses imagined reality to create an alternate space, one that’s not confined by fear or repression, but love and connection that moves beyond gender and racial boundaries. In Heaven is a Place on Earth, Crossman references Toronto queer spots like the Henhouse bar, addressing how spaces that formed a sense of queer community are vastly disappearing at the hands of capitalism and gentrification. Crossman also subverts the rainbow ‘Cocksucker’ matchbox in But I’m a Cheerleader to the ‘Henhouse’ reflecting on how LGBTQ+ spaces often center cisgender gay men, perpetuating lesbian, bisexual and trans erasure. The necessary physical spaces also disappear, leaving little room for queer connection.

Adrien Crossman. Dystopia, neon sign, 2019, photo by Polina Teif.

All too reflective of the current moment, Crossman forms neon signs reading ‘dystopia’ and ‘utopia’ in Heaven is a Place on Earth. This touches upon utopia and queer futurity (the concept that queerness exists in a futuristic potentiality) with such reference to Cruising Utopia by José Esteban-Munoz, and how it’s necessary to form a sense of political imagination, particularly for queer people of colour.[8] The etymology of the word utopia is ou-topos or ‘no place,’ which is a void that queerness knows well—neither here nor there—but a space of infinite in-between. And with this potential ambiguity or space for liminality, endless possibilities beyond binaries emerge.

Additionally, Crossman co-runs an online publication called Off Centre with artist Luke Maddaford, which covers art exhibitions that exist outside of metropolitan city centres. In my own experience in London, Ontario, a mid-size, conservative city, my queer friends and I create small pockets of utopia in order to counter the outsider feeling of living in a city filled with frat bros and toxic masculinity (a personal dystopia). In the midst of a global pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests standing up to the injustices of a white supremacist police state, things seem rather dystopic. However, there’s an importance of having a sense of hope and collaboratively working towards a goal of a better future. An imagined place, a utopia, where everything is perfect may seem overly naïve, but demanding that queer identities are seen as valid and that our humanity is recognized should not be too much to ask.

Adrien Crossman. Utopia, neon sign, 2019, photo by Polina Teif.

But I’m a Cheerleader likely resonated with young queer people since it was written and directed by Jamie Babbit, a queer director—the fact that so many saw their experience reflected back to them is meaningful when LGBTQ+ experiences are often erased and ignored. Crossman references visual imagery, from pop culture and cult-classics, to ground a sense of unity, countering how queer identities become fragmented due to erasure both in the mainstream media and in physical space. They refuse to let queer culture fade into an un-defined background by reclaiming it through the assertion that, try as you might to erase us, we’re here and we’re queer.

[1] Rich, Adrienne (1980). “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 631–660.

[2] Ed. Jay, Karla. Lavender Culture. NYU Press. 1994.

[3]Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110- 114. 2007. Print.

[4] Relational artifacts, also known as sociable robots, was coined by Sherry Turkle. Crossman speaks more to this in their artist talk as part of Art Intersections Meetup found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55PlIb5fHlY

[5] From Crossman’s description of Exist for Barbed Mag. https://barbedmagazine.com/Beyond-Measure-A-Performance-Art-Survey-in-Metro-Detroit-and-Windsor Likely in reference to Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke UP, (2006).

[6] Edelman, Lee. No Future. Duke University Press. 2004.

[7] Serano, Julia. “Bisexuality and Binaries Revisited.” 2012. http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2012/11/bisexuality-and-binaries-revisited.html

[8] Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

totally ruinous/ totally ruin us: In Discussion with Kim Neudorf

Kim Neudorf. Untitled, 12 x 12 inches, oil on canvas, 2020.

Interview by Adi Berardini

Weaving dream-like, obscured imagery in neutral tones of peach, rust brown, and green, Kim Neudorf’s paintings are dense with textual reference. Although their process starts with collaged images and film stills, the imagery is blurred and abstracted with intricate brushstrokes. With a focus on fluidity and the non-linear, their paintings delve into affectual territory, referencing ‘psychic material’ and how trauma shows up in the body. As mentioned in their artist bio, Neudorf’s writing and paintings “explore themes of resilience, healing, and survival, while seeking to undo easy legibility in order to honor the daily, more complicated modes of visibility and existence.” Recently, they have connected their art with their poetry practice, also referencing poetry fragments through small-scale watercolour paintings. Neudorf speaks more about their process and exhibition totally ruinous/ totally ruin us ,currently on display at Support project space until October 17th.

Neudorf’s work has also appeared at DNA Gallery, London (ON); Paul Petro, Toronto; Franz Kaka, Toronto; Forest City Gallery, London (ON); Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, Kingston; Evans Contemporary Gallery, Peterborough; and Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto. They live and maintain a writing and studio practice in London (ON).

Kim Neudorf. totally ruinous / totally ruin us, installation, 2020.

You take an abstract approach to painting. Do you work intuitively or from a certain representational subject matter at first? Can you further explain your process?

When I work out ideas for a painting, this can begin in visual research, collage, or writing, such as poetry. I get information that is almost always a feeling or signal first. I have to work backwards; I search out more and more information that matches the signal (a colour, a visual expression of energy) and create folders and sub-folders as themes begin to emerge. Then I write about what I’ve found, and through this writing, I start to understand what the signal is about. The word intuitive does not always mean vague or mysterious. For me, it means making connections that skip a step-by-step process, so reverse engineering is necessary.

There’s a lecture by Jan Verwoert on how bodily and facial communication “has no story,” or transmits via affect; affect as transmission rather than an effect or product to be capitalized on. It makes more sense to me to create writing and artworks which use visual fragments, like body-forms rather than figures, to hold bodily and unconscious information.

In earlier paintings, I didn’t include specific symbols or visual information from my reverse-research in the work itself. When I started to do this, I could see clearer connections to my past and daily experiences. I had to make work for a long time to see what it was telling me. I started to see that the paintings create spaces/contexts for bodily and unconscious information to live, to communicate. The states in which that information is in relates very well to how painting can show shifting material space, physical states, and multiple temporalities existing together. The partially clear, rough, scribbly, half-formed material states in the paintings are deliberate. The way in which I use paint actively tries to resist a certain legibility to avoid grafting a false sense of resolution or story onto the work.

Kim Neudorf. inner sanctum, 5 x 7 inches, watercolour and acrylic on paper, 2020.

Your paintings have a sense of closer looking that’s required, almost leaning into a sense of opacity or refusal. How is your work influenced by these concepts, if at all?

The paintings and poems may seem like they are deliberately withholding information, but they give partial, unstable information the way dreams do. It’s not about deciphering a code. It’s about looking at each painting as its own context. A dream may not be at all about its content, but how it feels and the dynamics between people and things in a non-linear sequence. There are eyes, hands, bones, wings, flowers, various body parts, and also layers of energy or even tendrils or veins that link things together in the paintings. I’m asking viewers to think about how these visual elements are linked. How is something mashed together or sliced through (or slicing through) or emitting energy or interference in the paintings?

In the work there is a refusal to be or perform what it is to be “correctly” visible. Every day, bodies exist amidst public and social rules that are not designed to include them, even within spaces that advertise themselves as supposedly safe or inclusive.  In my own experience, feeling unsafe has been such a daily experience that blending in is a form of survival, which is simultaneously part of my own privilege. The body-forms in my work try to exist in a state where they are both themselves, in pieces and in process, and where they mimic their surroundings. There is no narrative or ultimate state or goal—only in allowing a continual, daily movement and transformation of form.

Kim Neudorf. totally ruinous / totally ruin us, installation, 2020.

Your recent work in the exhibition totally ruinous/ totally ruin us is connected to your writing practice, and more recently your poetry practice. How has poetry influenced your art (or vice versa?)

Recently I attended a workshop on metaphor in poetry, and I was surprised to learn how a lack of linear narrative can provoke some extremely negative reactions. I’m very new to poetry, but I’ve recently found that it is the closest form of writing to allow very personal, unprocessed information to communicate in its natural form, in a way that doesn’t force it into a normative, linear narrative. Finding a way to tell your story can be lifesaving, as every other form of communication can feel designed to violently suppress and reject that story. To not feel safe to communicate is traumatic. Information that needs to be externalized often appears in abstract or exaggerated forms, which can cause knee-jerk reactions. I want to be compassionate to that kind of externalization.

How is this body of work in totally ruinous/ totally ruin us influenced by healing and psychic material?

The inherent violence of being projected into a story that is not one’s own can embed itself within the body and create specific behaviours of self-protection. Trauma becomes embedded in my body in a way that it reconstitutes rather than rejects, like shrapnel that it grows around. The words that I associate with this are always very sharp and painful, appearing as tiny abstract fragments, which feels like the body getting rid of toxins. I started to see this reflected in my work, along with themes like disembodiment, dysphoria, gestures of contact and intimate touch, and the abstractness of emotional energy. The body-forms in the paintings are also genderless or nonbinary, and I think it says a lot when viewers want to project specific, digestible or normative identities onto them.

The term ‘psychic material’ can mean the way unprocessed trauma or energy take certain forms/states that interrupt daily life, or how trauma shows up in the body. Maggie Nelson writes about how psychic material won’t accept being hidden and controlled in private space but emerges in ways that are very public. My body has often reacted in extreme ways when I had no tools or language to process experiences. In somatic- and trauma-informed therapy, there’s a term ‘co-regulation’, meaning that to create a safe space for someone to feel heard/seen means you need to know how to self-regulate, or not be triggered yourself. Part of this can mean knowing how to decipher your own energy and emotional stuff from others. The body just stores all of it until it’s externalized or until it comes out on its own involuntarily. Visual and verbal externalization, including writing, can be accessible, daily strategies of healing.

The title “totally ruinous / totally ruin us”, as well as the small text paintings, are riffs on poems that I started this summer. Only after I read the poems did I realize that they were referring to recent experiences of violence. Part of the process involved revisiting my writing about those experiences, and listening to the information between the words, like a kind of mishearing. This was a way of getting closer to the information stored in my body.

My brain also supplied some cinematic references, which added a lot of comic relief to the process. The exhibition title also refers to astrology, specifically the 8th and 12th houses, which can be about forms of “undoing” from within, but instead of something negative, the tools for healing in this instance are internal and appear only after undoing, or ruining, old, unhealthy patterns.

Kim Neudorf. para dies, watercolour and acrylic on paper, 6 x 4 inches, 2020.

Who are some artists that influence you and your practice?

Joy Hester influenced me when I started art school in my 20s, and I’ve been returning to her work. The eyes of her figures are prominent and inward-looking, and cartoony without losing their emotional edge. Didier William, Lee Lozano, Gertrude Abercrombie, Michaela Eichwald, Amelie von Wulffen, Leonor Fini, and Jutta Koether are also big influences.

I’m also reading a lot of Johanna Hedva, CA Conrad, and Ariana Reines, and the work of poets who flip or subvert language in a way that gets at hidden structures of power within so-called common or everyday exchanges, as well as showing how multiple temporalities exist in the same space – Harryette Mullen and Gertrude Stein especially.

Do you have any future projects or news you’d like to announce?

I have some writing projects in the works that are in process, including collaborative writing I’m doing with Liza Eurich (more information TBA at a later date). During the present state of the pandemic, it makes more sense to me to focus on learning as much as I can online, particularly from contexts and voices that help me think beyond my own perspective and privilege.

totally ruinous/ totally ruin us is on display at Support Gallery, London ON from Sept 5 – October 17, 2020. To view more of Kim Neudorf’s work, you can visit their website or Instagram.

THIS IS GREAT MATERIAL: Rearranging Remnants for Resiliency

Tamara Bond, A Pearl in N’s Hair, 2016. Collage (silkscreen, intaglio fragments, acrylic on paper). 22 in x 22 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

By Ella Adkins

THIS IS GREAT MATERIAL

Gallery Gachet

July 17-August 21, 2020

Unprecedented times call for unprecedented futures. Within the unknown future, there’s the potential to re-imagine our known spaces. There’s a possibility for a new; a never before.

THIS IS GREAT MATERIAL, an online exhibition and poster series exhibited by Gallery Gachet, explores the notion of reimagined spaces and potential realities through the celebration of collage. The exhibition features the work of five artists: Marissa Diamond, Afuwa, Tamara Bond, Mary Phyllis O’Toole, and Krystle Coughlin Silverfox, all of whom are located throughout the region of the unceded Esquimalt, Songhees, Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territories.

As I meander through the virtual exhibition, I first find pause in the vibrant patterning and diverse textures of artist Marissa Diamond’s work. Throughout her five works, I get lost in the layers of cross lateral landscapes of vibrant pinks and greens, triangles of orange felt, a cheetah print ‘x,’ and a hole punched strip ripped out of a Hilroy notebook. I’m reminded of my own past doodles in the margins of my Hilroy as I panic about my upper lip acne, wishing for high school and hormones to be over.

Marissa Diamond, Broken Limbs, 2020. Collage on paper: paint remnants, acrylic paint markers, fabric, plastic, pen. 8.5 in x 11 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

 The title of her fifth piece ‘Skinny Dip’, prompts me to look for the naked body. I cock my head at the purple and the pink with black dots and focus on a small curved pink shape submerged in a blue mass. There is no resolve as to whether or not this is a ‘human’ body, I’m only reminded of the tingling sensation of my bare skin entering cool water.

Through her titling and abstract shapely reminders of bodily parts and forms, Diamond reworks preconceived ideas about the body:

“Piecing and rearranging the components of each artwork allows me to create this new ‘world’ where bodies are liberated. The shapes I use are bodily, but simultaneously reference things found in landscapes and nature such as the moon, sun, sky, plants, rocks, hills, and animals — I think of the collages as ‘bodyscapes.’”

         Diamond cuts and peels remnants of dried paint, as well as other scrap materials, that no longer exist in their wholeness. She sees this discarded material as a speculative metaphor for bodies and physical traits that do not meet the westernized standards of beauty. ‘Unconventional’ bodies are discarded by the male gaze and no longer have use in being ‘beautiful.’ Diamond recuperates these discarded parts and re-appropriates the ‘useless’ body into a useful, functional, and celebrated state and space.

Mary Phyllis O’Toole, Who Am I? An Old Hag or A Beautiful Young Woman?, 2019. Mixed-media collage. 11 in x 15 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

Throughout the exhibition, there is a repeated theme of collecting ‘scraps’ of reality in order to recreate a more inclusive and celebrated future. In Mary O’Toole’s work, she utilizes collage to present the dichotomy of realities she experiences as an individual with schizophrenia.

O’Toole explains that individuals with schizophrenia “view themselves as the person they are and as an imaginary person.” She uses magazine cutouts of recognizable forms such as images of cars, cartoon and real-world animals, and depictions of female bodies and faces. This keeps the viewer rooted in reality, however, her arrangement of this media creates new shapes and spaces, such as that of a castle, or the silhouette of a face, or a neighbourhood. O’Toole depicts the unseeable—her own experience with schizophrenia living between two realities. She hopes to create landscapes “without discrimination and acceptance” for those with schizophrenia.

The exhibition also presents the possibilities for healing through the process of collage. Artist Tamara Bond utilizes collage to cover up written diary entries she crawled on sheets of paper during a past psychotic episode she experienced. The writing is hardly visible: the viewer is enchanted by fantastical fairy-like figures, horses, faces with large exaggerated mouths and gouache strokes. Bond uses collage as a healing practice, almost like placing a whimsical medicinal cloth over a written wound.

‘THIS IS GREAT MATERIAL’ not only strives to create resilient future worlds of healing and inclusion, but calls upon the interconnection of history, land, and culture that makes up an individual and a life story. Both artists Afuwa and Krystle Coughlin Silverfox loosely use the form of the portrait paralleled with textured materials to recall ideas of belonging and interconnectedness. 

Krystle Coughlin Silverfox, Hats’adän echo (Elders teachings) 2, 2020. Digital collage. 18 in x 12 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

Coughlin Silverfox’s works Hats’adän echo (elder’s teachings) are four digital collages inspired by family photos. Each work contains a silhouette of bodies in different constructed landscapes. In one work, two figures stand on a deck near the ocean, in another, two figures are in an upside-down forest next to a bridge to the moon. The spaces that the silhouettes leave are filled with their own landscapes whether it be blue sky, a mountain view, a fir tree branch, or fluffy clouds.

Regardless of the lack of a human figure, these portraits seem to more viscerally connect people’s narratives and history to place and landscape. The non-human elements construct the personal narrative and connection without the human being present. Each figure is outlined with small coloured beads, which recalls Coughlin Silverfox’s Indigenous heritage and practices. The beads act as a visual and tactile tether, evoking the traditional Indigenous craft and demonstrating how one’s cultural traditions and practices form their identities. Coughlin Silverfox creates the shape of her familial figures with evocative elements from her own heritage, figuratively reminding us of the interconnected cultural elements that construct an individual.  

Afuwa, The Matriarch, 2014/16. 23K gold leaf, handmade paper, and hand-painted paper on wood panel. 12 in x 13 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

Afuwa also employs the human empty portrait silhouette in her collection Familiar Icons in order to explore the precious bonds of blood, land and spirit. Her works have a rich opulence in colour and texture—gold leaf on wooden panels make up the background of each work, and each figure is made up of handmade printed patterned paper of rich blues, reds, greens, purples and oranges. These portraits evoke a stunning and iconic family, saturated in colour and intricate textures.

“I focused on the precious and the portable, using handmade paper and 23 karat gold — not only to underscore the value of these relationships that resisted the destruction wrought by enslavement and indentureship, but to lay claim, as well, to the gold and other resources extracted with neither recompense nor acknowledgement of the poisoned landscape left behind.” The process of assembling for Afuwa is part of the gratitude to the sacred artefacts of her history, as part of the ritual and prayer.

This exhibition externalizes anxieties, intimacies, and connectivity in a tactile and visceral sense. Through the process of collage, we can see the layering, recognize material and forms, and are reminded of our reality. However, we must abandon what these familiar images, textures, and titles signify in order to experience these works. We don’t see the naked woman’s body skinny dipping into the cool water in Diamond’s work. Instead, the feeling of the ‘skinny dip’ is evoked, allowing for all ‘imperfect’ shapes forms, and bodies  to experience the sensation. We aren’t seeing the family posed portrait, rather we are  seeing  the opulence and vibrancy of history and blood love, and the felt natural manifestations of one’s heritage. Collage has a foot rooted in reality, and the other in the imagined, a speculative metaphor utilized by O’Toole to explore the experienced dichotomy of the schizophrenic mind.

Collage collects the discarded, the scrap, the small, the insignificant, the forgotten, and blends, mixes, layers, and weaves known materials into new imagined spaces. These are spaces built on the remnants of our troubled worlds that envision more resilient and respectful potential futures. The five artists show how picking through the troubles and complexities of our current realities can result in portraying progressive and magical future perspectives, creating imperfect possibilities through a hopeful craft.

‘THIS IS GREAT MATERIAL’ was exhibited from July 17-August 21, 2020 at Gallery Gachet . Gallery Gachet is located in the DTES neighbourhood of Vancouver, British Columbia. http://gachet.org/

 

Self-Love Tribute: In Conversation with Elia Fushi Bekene

Elia Fushi Bekene. What Home Means series. Image Courtesy of the Artist.

Interview by Adi Berardini

Currently based in Berlin, Elia Fushi Bekene is an African/French Queer-Feminist artist. Using a range of visual and audio approaches, their projects— including a podcast and a newsletter— are combined under ‘Self Love Tribute.’ Through their practice, Elia focuses on the strength that lies behind vulnerability and the power of radical self-care to counter the forces designed to oppress individuals based on race, gender, class, and power.

Bekene’s work explores the intersectionality of LGBTQ2IA+ communities, intimacy and vulnerability between women of colour, and how home relates to identity. Bekene is artistically driven by people and the psychological complexities of everyday interactions—reaffirming that emotions are not something to hide away but embrace and work through. Their work ranges from portraiture and video, to audio exploring topics such as decolonization, dating, and spirituality. Currently, in the midst of the intersecting crises of a global pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, Bekene explains that although everyone has a role in the revolution, it’s time to center the Black women and femmes who have been doing the work for years.

I was wondering if you could speak more about how the Self Love Tribute Project started and the project itself?

It started in a funny way—I believe in signs or at least in my story. I moved to Berlin from France three and a half years ago now. I was working as a business analyst in a company and I hated my job at the time. I was also in a relationship that was not really serving me. Even in terms of relationships, and patterns and emotions, I felt like I was always doing circles. I was worried since I was meeting the same patterns over and over and I thought that it must be me since I am the common denominator in all of this.

When I went home after my job, I would take classes [about] feelings since I realize I don’t come from a family where feelings were explained, we just didn’t sit down at the table and talk about things like that. So, I thought that I would learn what those feelings mean, just on Google and I would Youtube what those feelings mean. Like what is jealousy, what is anger, what is hurt, all of the feelings that I felt at the moment? I would write down what would resonate for me. After a while, I [had] a book of just my thoughts. I would read it to a very close friend of mine, and he told me that I should publish it since it actually really helped [him]. I was telling a friend that I was hating my job, and she asked me, “Well what do you want to do?” And I said, “I don’t really know but I know that I want to help people.” Then she said, “Well what is it that you want to do?” And I said, “I love writing.” My first memory in my whole life was writing. I would ask my mom to write down “Maman” so that I could write, even before I knew what “M” was or “A” was, I just wanted to write.

The next day, my friend told me to publish my feelings, and it was just an email that I would send out every Monday. It would be just a newsletter, basically. I called it a Tribute to Self-Love since I realized I just didn’t love myself enough and I was on a quest to love myself more and understand myself more. I started this email sent from selflovetribute@gmail.com and it’s still the same up until now. I just asked 10 friends [if they could] be in my newsletter and they were like okay, whatever. Then I started to send a Tribute to Self-Love every Monday. It’s still going on now, I think it’s been almost two years—tomorrow I will be sending my 130th tribute to self-love—[that] I was fired on that same day. At that time, when I went out of this building, I knew it was a sign telling me that this is my new career, but more than a career, a path. It’s exactly what I’m meant to do. And of course, I am involved in a lot of things, doing photography, audio work and a podcast and everything. The essence of what I want to do is self-healing and sharing my ideas to the world and hoping it will resonate and help others with their quest to also love themselves more.

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Elia Fushi Bekene. Home is a place, from the What Home Means series. Image Courtesy of the Artist.

Your work explores the concept of home, and you discuss how colonization fractures home and culture through displacement in your audio piece “Decolonizing Myself from You.” Could you speak more about the significance of home to you and your practice?

I think it’s also a thing that comes back in my practice without me noticing because it’s just so part of my identity. Like so many people, I think that when you’re a Black person living in a white society it’s something that you always come back to since you question whether you belong here—people always make you question your belonging. The whole notion of having a home is a privilege, since so many people are refused a home or have to leave their home since people try to make other people’s home, their home.

It’s always this thing that I think is very personal and very political and very global especially now, with borders and all of that stuff. It’s something that comes up in the collective conscious but also personally being Black and [through] my mixed identity. I think being mixed is feeling like I’m always in the middle. White people tell you that you’re Black, and Black people tell you that you’re white. I think being mixed race, especially being mixed with white, is almost like a weapon against anti-blackness since it’s also light-skinned people who can be centered in Black Lives Matter movements. I think reconstructing the mixed identity is important especially when dismantling anti-Blackness.

It was always something I came back to, even when I went to Ghana. I wanted to document this whole thing around the 400th anniversary of when the first African people were taken off the shores of Africa to be slaves. I went there since I knew there’d be so many things about those topics. Then I found myself having so many feelings and documenting what I feel is home. When you travel geographically, you also travel within. I found myself asking—what does having a home mean? It’s something I think about even if I don’t really want to. I think it’s also in the collective consciousness, it’s on a lot of people’s minds, where is my home, where do I feel most at home and who is my home?

I found your video ‘dating in berlin’ to be hilarious but also heartbreaking when you explain how the queer community loves to hate and divide each other. I was wondering if you could speak more about the video and your process of creating it?

I feel like the more I learn about humans I realize the more we recreate our circles of oppression. I think there’s this sociologist who described it as “close domination.” She gave the example of white women who dominate women of colour in order to have close proximity to white men. [They have] the same hurdles as other women, but at the same time, they still dominate other women because of race.

At first, I just give my tea to everything and everyone in the community around me, but then in the second part of the video, I talk about how everyone wants to recreate their circles of oppression. I think like that’s what hurts me the most, colourism in the Black community. I’m a light-skinned person here in Berlin, I see how people just don’t want to understand their light-skin fragility or their light-skin privilege. For me, it’s so hard to understand that they don’t get it, it’s just so easy for me to get that we may be Black, but we don’t live the same Blackness. We don’t live the same oppressions based on our gender, how we look, if we’re able or not, if we’re older. There are so many things you can think about and I find it so disappointing when a person knows what it’s like to be discriminated against, but they cannot understand their own oppressive ways or that they have certain privileges.

If we don’t protect the ones that we should protect the most, then that’s problematic. If we don’t make sure that Black Trans women are at the center of everything we do, how can we go any further? 

For example, there’s a lot of queerphobia coming from Black people. I just think why would you do that to someone who looks like you? Why are there so many asterisks in your Black liberation? Like “Yeah, I want Black liberation but not for Trans women though.” Why? It just doesn’t make sense. I found it so fascinating but there’s so many “buts” behind liberation. In many ways in Berlin when we get together, there’s so much trauma Olympics, everyone wants to say I’m hurting the most. Of course, not Black Trans women who are actually the most oppressed in our community. It’s not a matter of you not being oppressed, it’s just a deep insecurity of being so rejected outside of this world that we’re just trying to have light when we’re together, so we create this huge amount of pain on top of pain.

Of course, I think the queer community has given me so much, not just here but everywhere. I religiously only listen to Black people or queer people because I find myself so much closer to [them] with politics and spirituality. I just find we can be so destructive when we want to make it personal and not think about the biggest purpose, which is liberation for all. A lot of us personally, we’ve been so rejected, and we didn’t get the space and time to speak. So, when this happens and the ego comes up, on an [intrapersonal], political level it’s interesting to see, but on a personal level, it just feels relentless.

My video was more like, it’s great that we’re all queer and people of colour, but we are still hurting ourselves. If we don’t protect the ones that we should protect the most, then that’s problematic. If we don’t make sure that Black Trans women are at the center of everything we do, how can we go any further? There’s so much racism, there’s so much fatphobia, or femmephobia, or anything, there’s always something. In my videos I give a “Yeah, I’m just done,” since sometimes I really just do feel like that, that humans are just trash since the society is trash. We will never get out of a situation where everyone understands that it’s not about us personally, it’s about the bigger purpose. I’ve also tried to make everything about humour since I know most of the time things are so sad that I try to make people laugh.

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Elia Fushi Bekene. Home is the Home-ies from the What Home Means series. Image Courtesy of the Artist.

The Black Lives Matter movement is currently at the forefront globally after many years of activism. What role do you think art has in social change and how does this intersect in your practice?

I think art is such a powerful practice and I believe that everyone has a role in the revolution. There are people who cannot go to the protest, physically or mentally for different reasons, but they will do something for Instagram to spread ideas, some people will make food for people who go to the protests, some people will be able to console or hold space for others emotionally, some people will heal. I think it’s so important to know what role you want to have in the revolution.

The Black Lives Matter movement is not new for us at all, so for us it’s a new wave of consciousness for other people to understand, and people in power. I am grateful for—well, it’s terrible to say this—but the horrible consequences. I’m glad that people are listening even though they don’t want to listen. People will hold them accountable for not listening.

Anything with human rights, for women, for Trans people, for Black people for anyone—I’ve learnt that compassion is not something everyone gets under capitalism, so we have to teach them. I’m worried that I get so emotionally drained from explaining things that are so obvious. I do this without me knowing, I know a lot of people tell me, “you opened my eyes to this.” It’s great, but I still try to stay selfish in all of this since I am a Black person in a white supremacist system and a queer person on top of this. Prioritizing this is such a “fuck you” to the system. I’m going to log off of social media, I’m not going to talk to people, I’m going to stop talking to my mother if she doesn’t want to understand. Social change and social justice are part of what we do because when you’re a Black and queer person everything that you do or say is political, even though I don’t even think of it as political. White, straight men have so much of the power outside that everything I do looks super horrendous or something when it’s not.

Now, I think that art has been such a powerful way to show people that actually [connects] the human experience, change is the only constant. There are people who are trying to put change and revolution down, but at the end of the day with social media, things spread so fast. People are willing to change, hopefully, and willing to learn. I think it’s beautiful to see. I think art is definitely such a privilege, I realize that when I talk to white people about racism they might have problems or things in the way to understand it, but if I do it as an art piece, they will feel more receptive to it. But now it’s so white-washed, museums are just full of white men.

I think everyone is an artist, really and truly, everyone is creative in their own way, but they just don’t put it outside in the world to judge it. Art is definitely important in the revolution. I think it’s the most comfortable way for me to participate while still having pleasure and that’s very important to me. If I just talk and have a dumbass conversation about race and I’m not having pleasure, then I’m depleting myself from my energies and not [getting] anything back.

It’s great that people are doing work with grassroots organizations, like designing posters or graphics to spread the word on Instagram. It’s so powerful, but at the same time it’s a little bit sad there’s been so many people in these organizations who have been doing the work for years and years, oftentimes Black women, and people don’t give them enough flowers while they can still smell them. At the same time, if you can help the revolution to go somewhere and to be even brighter, I’m all for it. This may be the best way.

Do you have any news to announce or projects coming up that you are working on that you’d like to discuss?

No—I think it’s great for people to see. It’s hard to be an artist in this world, especially when you’re Black and queer. I want people to see that I have nothing coming up. I was just going to apply for grants or residencies but not anymore that things are so up in the air. You’re not tied to your productivity. Of course, the financial part of it is really hard because you need money to pay your rent. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic with so many things happening so it’s really okay that I don’t have anything going on. The world has so many other things to take care of. It’s also good that we take a little time off to reflect. Let’s use 2020 as a time to stay home and reflect on the things we can do better and decolonize ourselves more.

To check out more of Elia’s work, visit their website and Instagram, @selflove_tribute.

Josiane Vlitos: Illustrating Environmental Awareness

Josiane Vlitos. Feminist Editorial Illustration, 2020. Image Courtesy of the artist.

By Juilee Raje

As we make our way through the last quarter of 2020, most of us are growing accustomed to turning our screens on around midday and intuitively scrolling through informative graphics peppered across social media. Some offer new developments and tips on how to run alongside, rather than into, the mouth of a stealthy virus which has been slithering into our communities overnight. Conversations bounce back and forth between anti-maskers and compassion fatigue. As most of the world is recovering from sheltering in place, the residue of an impulse to collect vast bits of information from various sources and then retreat deep into ourselves remains. 

In survival mode, it can feel familiar and comforting to circle certain questions while avoiding larger, or more difficult ones about our planet and violent interactions with environmental diversity—preventable measures often ignored most by people who have the power to implement them. Journalist and scientist Sonia Shah, who authored the book Pandemic in 2017, explains that rather than a reductionist approach of framing ourselves simply as victims of a foreign invasion, we should reconsider environmental and social policies—such as deforestation and a failure to resolve a persistent housing crisis among vulnerable communities—which are the real culprits behind harmless microbes developing into irreversible outbreaks. Indigenous scholar and environmental activist Melissa K. Nelson refers to the Ojibwe edgewalker and tidewalker trickster figure Nanabozho to explain the urgency of cultivating marginalized ecological biodiversity, and that our relationship to nature should be regenerative and reciprocal. Having truthful understanding of the communities and animals that thrive in our inherited environment, and the complex challenges they face at the hands of other humans, is the first step to influencing policy and strengthening inter-social well-being. 

In these times, mindful image-making is vital in allowing more people to flip to the same page faster. Illustration is an essential artistic practice that has the ability to compartmentalize issues beyond our immediate realm of understanding, especially when it comes to rapidly evolving topics. Around the beginning of summer, I interviewed North-Vancouver based Illustrator Josiane Vlitos to gain more insight on her research-based art practice and her work around intersectional environmental activism. Vlitos studied Communication Design with a focus on Illustration at Emily Carr University, and has since worked on various children’s books and freelance projects. She is an arts and design educator, as well as the author and illustrator of the picture book Bee Friend. Her endearing characters with carrot-shaped noses and their expressive journeys stem from mindful storytelling and her English roots, and her contemporary style certainly shows an experimental approach to representation.

Josiane Vlitos. Togetherness, 2020. Image Courtesy of the artist.

 Sometimes, a message can be driven further when there is a face associated with the words. A distinctive attribute of Vlitos’s work is her ability to conjure characters which feel simultaneously unfamiliar and familiar; especially in her editorial works. Though there is representation of bodies and faces that don’t often receive enough overt visibility, Vlitos finds a way to avoid reducing them to stereotypes by switching up details of attire and palettes of appearances on a spectrum of realistic skin colour shades to blues, greens, and yellows. Curiously, though they rarely show a relationship to each other or hint at an interpersonal dynamic, their individuality is affirmed when they are shown in very specific contexts of coming together as an intersectional community to spread urgent messages, as seen in Feminist Editorial Illustration (2020) or Togetherness (2020).

Seeing yourself represented in a feminist illustration around topical content can inspire more personal accountability and less political apathy. Vlitos says, “As an engaged citizen, I desperately want to contribute to meaningful social dialogue… Illustration empowers me to participate in these important conversations and allows me to engage with people who might otherwise be disengaged from the discussion.First and foremost, when I’m creating an image with a message, I spend a considerable amount of time on research—images can be powerful, so I need to be sure that my message is grounded in truth.” She explains that though her degree in communication design has equipped her with the skill to distill a few key points of research into an image, fine-tuning work is necessary as social dialogue evolves.

Josiane Vlitos. Bee Friend book page spread. 2019. Image Courtesy of the artist.

The artist borrowed from these values when she wrote, illustrated, and self-published the children’s book Bee Friend at the brink of her professional career. The story is spearheaded by a gender-neutral character named Charlie and pulls young readers’ attention to the issue of colony collapse disorder among honeybees. Vlitos shared some insight on why children’s books are a great vehicle to tackle unfamiliar topics by revealing, “As a child, because of my dyslexia, picture books were my only means of reading to myself. Decades later, I’ve never outgrown their charm, both as a reader and an illustrator.” The severity of CCD has fortunately been on the decline; according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the number of hives lost was halved between 2008 and 2013. Still, as of the last five years, beekeepers see colony loss as a concerning matter that may not be paid attention to due to a skewed stigma of honeybees and lack of public awareness around the role our globalization footprint plays in interfering with pollination.

Josiane Vlitos. Bee Friend book page spread. 2019. Image Courtesy of the artist.

Bee Friend pulls inadequate forage and poor nutrition into focus as a cause of colony collapse disorder. The “cuteness” of the artist’s style takes away the threatening reputation of a honeybee, making it seem more likeable and invoking sympathy, while chipping away at some of the stigma. Though the bee is fleshed out as a mystery and a difficult guest to entertain, its presence in the community is welcomed. The focus leans on Charlie as he engages in trial-and-error in order to learn what is causing the bee to become disempowered and ill. Through tuning into the bee’s reaction to holding a lone flower, the solution is eventually discovered; the book then shifts gears into subtly putting out a call to action to adults and children alike to plant more bee gardens if they are able to do so. While reading aloud Bee Friend to young children, Vlitos engages the bustling class by asking them what flowers and vegetables they are able to identify in a brilliantly illustrated fold-out section. Though it is natural to feel frustration over an initial lack of knowledge or understanding of biodiversity, the character of Charlie illustrates that remaining open, listening to the affected party, and showing reflexivity in his desire to help is the successful approach.

In every form—whether they are erected on the walls in our homes, spread across books and magazines, or present on social media—images undeniably take up space in influencing public perception surrounding an issue. For the visual learners, for disabled individuals, for young learners, and many others, images are more powerful than words alone in creating an emotional and rational impact. During the Black Lives Matter social movement and global pandemic, illustrators are in the position to sketch an accurate portrayal of issues outside of our windows. The good news is, these subjects are not exhaustive and accessible illustration practices make headway for many entry points into engagement. The responsibility of the viewer, however, is to recognize that the images we consume often have short lifespans, and to extend their messages and how they apply to our own practices or routines.

You can view more of Josiane Vlitos’s work on her website or her Instagram.

Profiles on Practice: Khadija Baker

By Nadia Kurd

Khadija Baker. “Birds Crossing Borders.” 2018. Photo Courtesy of Artist.

In 1987, Chicana poet and feminist Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, “a borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.”[1] Born in the Northern Syrian town of Amûdê‎, Montréal-based multidisciplinary artist Khadija Baker fully understands this constant state of transition as her birthplace sits uneasily between Syria and Turkey. “I always saw the border in Northern Syria in the Kurdish region where I was born as a tool to divide and stop the fluency of daily activities,” reflects Baker.[2] 

As an artist, the border, both as a metaphor and the actual division between nation-states has long informed her approach to art making. Baker reflects that she has, “developed various ways to reflect on the re-creation of what we can literally and conceptually call a map in my artwork…[in my work], the border is a developing, changing form that can reflect our connection and comfortable daily lives and can also respond to human needs.”[3]

However, Baker’s work is not only informed by her lived experiences as a Syrian Kurd, but also the current events and Kurdish oral storytelling traditions. For example, in My little voice can’t lie, (2012/2019), Baker sits motionless on a plinth, with small speakers braided into her long hair. Gallery visitors can approach Baker, take hold of a braided plat and raise the speaker to their ears. What they will hear are the recorded stories of displaced women from Kurdish, Palestinian, and Persian backgrounds. Here, Baker’s body becomes the medium for these narratives, collapsing the distance between the women’s stories, the artist and the audience.

Khadija Baker. “My little voice can’t lie.” 2009, 2012. Photo courtesy of the artist.

The multimedia installation Behind Walls (2008/2017) looks at the systematic program of renaming of Kurdish places in Northern Syria since 1962.[4] To visually acknowledge this history, Baker made 80 clay spheres that are connected by a mesh of strings suspended overhead. These strings are spun from clothing and combined with sand to create an altogether web-like formation. An audio soundtrack that accompanies the installation and audio soundtrack of recordings by Kurds living in Montreal. Fading in and out, is a projection onto the clay spheres also reveals the Arabic names—directly onto the names of Kurdish places which have been inscribed in the clay. Viewers can walk through the work and reflect on the impact of a forced map on the daily lives of stateless Kurds—ultimately, to show audiences, as they move through the installation, “the arbitrary nature of maps and history, the fragile nature of memory, and even the interconnectedness of a diaspora scattered across the globe.”[5] 

Khadija Baker. “Behind Walls.” City Hall, Karsh-Masson Gallery, 2008,2011. Photo Courtesy of the artist.

In another installation, Birds Crossing Borders (2018), Baker weaves together a complex assemblage of water-filled and tube-connected Plexiglas boxes, video and live performance. One Plexiglas box is filled with tinted water, and with the connecting tubes, transports its contents to the next box, and so on. The eventual transference of colour serves as a metaphor for both migration and adaptation. Moreover, the videos that document the stories of Syrian refugees surround the linked containers, further emphasizing change and movement. In this project, Baker asks, “How will the host society own the collective memory and generate the sense of understanding? How will it grow more familiar with the newcomer?” In the installation space, the viewer is confronted with these questions, but more importantly, they are asked to examine disconnect in humanistic values that separate the refugee from the citizen.

Khadija Baker. “Coffin/Nest.” 2007, 2017. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Coffin/Nest (2007-2019) take up borders and displacement in a much more personal and material way. Using recycled clothing from friends and acquaintances, Baker weaves a circular nest around herself. Surrounding her woven fabric nest, are long, life-sized bundles of fabric, which mimic a cocoon or womb (or alternatively, body bags). As Baker weaves, she becomes fully immersed in her protective nest, and each time this work is performed, the final outcome manifests in different ways. The work examines on the difficult history of systemic mass murder and burial of people in northern Iraq (mostly ethnic Kurds, but also Shia Muslims), and how the only way to identify human remains was through articles of clothing.[6] The self-made nest also acts like a shelter – Baker enfolds herself within this history in a way to commemorate lives lost and to also recognize survivors.

An intuitive process guides much of Baker’s work, and she often relies on stories and materials to guide each project. “I work against a specific methodology,” notes Baker, “my work reflects things I have witnessed and lived.”[7] In other words, in each of her projects, Baker researches, embodies and pushes the narratives she gathers. Varied and never totally finished, her multidisciplinary performances and installation works are highly emotive and fused with a lived, collective sense of pain and mourning. Baker’s art channels and comes to terms with the current turbulent history of Kurdish displacement through performance and storytelling. By placing herself publicly at the forefront of this lived reality, Baker seeks to present and visualize not only her experiences, but also the humanity of Kurdish people.

Since completing her MFA (Fine Arts) in 2012, Baker has remained a core member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University (Montreal). A participant in numerous international exhibitions and residencies, Baker’s work continues to articulate the story of forced displacement and struggles especially women and children who face violence around border issues in all its aspects. Her life and work straddles place, language and belonging – all borne from cruel necessity to preserve Kurdish life. The precariousness of life also echoes the poetic words of Gloria Anzaldúa when she writes:

This is her home

            this thin edge of

                        barbwire.

To see more of Khadija Baker’s artwork and upcoming projects, visit:  http://khadijabaker.com or follow her on Instagram @bakerkhadija

Nadia Kurd (she/her) is an art historian and curator based in Amiskwacîwâskahikan  (Edmonton, Alberta). Her work can be found on www.nadiakurd.com.

[1] Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (aunt lute press: San Francisco, 1978), 25.

[2] Baker, Khadija. “Imagining Borders” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2016), 1.

[3] Ibid.

[4] As Human Rights Watch reports, “In 1962 the government carried out a special census in al-Hasakeh province in northeast Syria on the pretext that many non-Syrian Kurds had crossed illegally from Turkey. Kurds had to prove that they had lived in Syria since at least 1945 or lose their citizenship.” This evolved into land expropriation and a process of “Arabization” of the region. For more on this history, see: “Repression of Kurdish Political and Cultural Rights in Syria,” Human Rights Watch (2009) https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/11/26/group-denial/repression-kurdish-political-and-cultural-rights-syria

[5] “Artist Spotlight: Khadija Baker’” Aesthetica Magazine https://aestheticamagazine.com/profile/khadija-baker/ (accessed 25 August 2020).

[6] Artist website, http://khadijabaker.com/index.html.

[7] Artist interview with the Author, 2020.

The figure does not win every time: In Discussion with Celeste Rapone

By Elaine Tam

March in London gifted a few spring pleasures; memorably that telltale smell of oil paint, one takeaway impression among many from Celeste Rapone’s exhibition Retreat at Josh Lilley gallery. Dressed by electrifying palettes and deftly rendered textures, her eccentric characters go about their daily dealings in paintings oscillating between figuration and abstraction. Swelling to their borders, they occupy “impossible positions” and defy gravity in multiplanar views. Yet it seems that — for all their brazen flair and over-zealous accessorizing — a maelstrom of incidental activity surrounds the figures, swallowing them.

Rapone never does preliminary studies, which means that any self-doubt, struggle, or transformation becomes part of a complex unfolding on the canvas as the painting is realised. The result of this highly personal process is not overtly autobiographical. Nonetheless, the paintings impart an intimate insight into the painter’s psyche, and the ways in which the discomforts and discontents of painting parallel universal human experiences. With remarkable reflexivity, Rapone explores the many personalities of failure and the possibilities for invention, humour and discovery that lie therein.

Celeste Rapone. Flirt, 2018. Oil on Canvas. Image courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey and the artist.
Celeste Rapone. Artist Wife, 2018. Oil on Canvas. Image courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey and the artist.

Elaine Tam: How do you begin the process of creating new work?

Celeste Rapone: I’ll start a painting by mixing colour, usually with some sort of narrative prompt in mind. One of my favourite challenges is assigning a palette to a narrative that has no colour associations. I start my paintings like an abstract, rather than figurative, painter — with colour, shape, composition, form. The figure and environment are secondary elements that come after. There’s a lot of wiping down; I really like figuring it out on the canvas and having the problem exist there.

Elaine Tam: How does this tension register on the canvas or in its contents — with the presence of more control or less gestural swathes of paint?

CR: I’m constantly skeptical of my decisions as a painter. That’s one of the prerequisites of being a painter, right? Doubt about everything. The paintings I struggle through I have trouble seeing after they’re finished; it’s like seeing your significant other for the first time after a really big fight. There are ones that go a bit more effortlessly, but I’m also skeptical of those. Maybe I’ll second guess the speed of something being resolved.

Yawn
Celeste Rapone. Yawn, 2020. Oil on Canvas. Image courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey and the artist.

ET: Slightly earlier works like Flirt (2018) or Artist Wife (2017) centre on Guston- or Eisenman-esque caricatures, whilst a recent work like Yawn (2020) is more scenic and features lots of minutiae. How do you relate to your earlier work and the way your practice has developed?

CR: There’s something about the idea of the women contained, occupying these impossible positions anatomically, but also in terms of expectations, ambition, defeat and self-awareness. It is a lot of what embodies painting as a process and practice. In the past couple of years, I started having the figures fill out the entire composition, taking away flattering cropping. When the whole body is exposed, there is a discomfort [and] vulnerability.

ET: The objects slip and slide through the viewing corridors created by the entangled bodies. On your flattened planes, there is no hierarchy — the body never seems to fully possess or grasp the objects. You have described your paintings as anxious. Is anxiety an intended effect?

CR: I don’t set out to make anxious paintings. I see the paintings as an intersection of my personal history — growing up Italian Catholic in North Jersey — art history, and whatever the current circumstances are, both in my studio and in the world. Your comment about hierarchy is something I think about a lot. I’m interested in the figure sort of drowning in their environment and being totally overwhelmed by their context. When I was in grad school, an advisor once asked me: “How do you make figurative painting and not let the figure win every time?”

Screen Shot 2020-07-30 at 1.17.58 PM
Celeste Rapone. Practice for the Real Thing. 2017. Oil on Canvas. Image courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey and the artist.

ET: Yes, and in many of your paintings, certain objects are very prominent. Some are even named or branded.

CR: There is a specificity to the imagery. But because of my illustration major at Rhode Island School of Design during undergrad, I’m aware of not being too specific — that the narrative is not overly linear or only hits one note. RISD is a pretty technical school, [so] my whole background is in observational figure and portrait painting. I realized quickly I was not an illustrator. That’s why I went back to grad school for painting.

ET: So as to not be only illustrative or purely representational?

CR: It was about trusting and translating the skillset [so] that I had enough to make totally intuitive work, invent light scenarios or palettes for convincing flesh tones… For years, I was painting with a hyperrealist approach. Sometimes, I have to re-train my hand to paint in a way that’s looser, more gestural, guttural [and to] not paint this thing the way I know, but paint it for what the painting needs. One of my favourite essays is Mitchell’s What do pictures want? I’m interested in that dialogue.

ET: Your background as an illustrator explains so much, as your work certainly exhibits moments of stunning technical prowess. Yet the faces of the characters are mysteriously smudged and less defined…

CR: That’s been happening more lately; the portraits are getting more generic or partially concealed because they are less overtly autobiographical. I don’t know the identity of the person I’m painting, so it seems like a lie to give them a specific face. The more autobiographical elements have been popping up as objects and accessories, [such as the] sneakers I always wanted in junior high that my parents wouldn’t let me buy. I’m making a painting of a woman fishing right now. It’s a night-time painting, and just yesterday, I added those glow light necklaces.

ET: Of course! The ones that crack —

CR: And then they light up and they don’t last long. That was a very popular thing [to wear] when I was growing up, [if you wanted] to look really cool.

ET: Very raver chic.

CR: Totally! Except back in Jersey we weren’t ravers or chic. It was a thing you would wear to a party to have the aesthetic of raver chic. Some of these little nods in the paintings are [to] my own history and life, where I come from: a cough drop wrapper, tooth flosser, or a can of something on the floor of my studio that just makes it into the painting. But these are not things viewers need to know — I don’t want the paintings to turn into an archaeological dig — it’s about how they all collide in a composition.

27941_Rapone_Four Eyes
Celeste Rapone. Four Eyes, 2019. Oil on Canvas. Image courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey and the artist.

ET: For someone unfamiliar with “Jersey” as a cultural phenomenon, how would you describe it?

CR: I was growing up in Jersey, amongst all these opulent, maximalist visual stimuli, adopting bad taste tactics. And now I’m working through some of that when making the paintings. I’ll make a painting and look at an area and go, “That’s a real Jersey move”.

ET: That’s so telling!

CR: You know, I heard a recording of Charline von Heyl for her show at the Hirshhorn, and she talked about finding this level of “upgraded cringe”. What a wonderful phrase, right?

ET: It’s a fine line though. How do you distinguish between cringe and upgraded cringe?

CR: That’s a question I ask myself all the time in my studio. What’s one step too far? What’s about bad taste versus just bad taste? I’ve always been interested in this gentle idea of shame and embarrassment in the paintings, and that has become heightened in some of the moves I’ll make in recent ones.

ET: Could we consider these kinds of questions the “narrative prompts” that help you to start a work?

CR: What gets me into a painting can come from anywhere, which is one of the reasons I reference Dutch Golden Age painting. I love the idea of a simple start. There’s something in simplicity that allows me to have total freedom to take it wherever I want, like the women playing dominoes in Yawn. “What a dumb idea for a painting!” I’ll say in my head, but I love that because it’s something to push back against. What’s more interesting to me is the absurdity in how a painting is constructed. A woman stretching canvas, who would want to look at a painting of that?

Swan
Celeste Rapone. Swan, 2019. Oil on Canvas. Image courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey and the artist.

ET: It’s funny you say that, because I find this work of yours delightfully witty; the painting becoming the back of its own canvas, revealing its sub-structure. Why did you title it Swan (2019)?

CR: There’s something awkward about your body stretching a canvas. I wanted to play with that in the title; the lack of grace and this idea of transformation. But even if there are sub-narratives occurring in the paintings, inherently they are all about trying. That notion of effort or expectation that goes into trying, which tries to counter failure. But failure is always one aspect of a larger cycle, in life and in painting.

ET: That reminds me of the famed Beckett phrase: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

CR: Absolutely. I see it as this overarching thing, and I like to think that failure enters the work in different ways: humour as a coping mechanism or trying really hard as the concealment of failure. It shows up in the painting as, perhaps, one too many accessories. She’s trying just a little too hard. Am I trying too hard to paint this necklace perfectly?

Viewfinding
Celeste Rapone. Viewfinding, 2019. Oil on Canvas. Image courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey and the artist.

ET: It’s like that fine line regarding “upgraded cringe.”

CR: Right, like I’m gonna paint this rainbow and it’s going to be très embarrassing, but is it going to be more embarrassing if it’s a perfect rainbow, or if it’s a crappily painted rainbow? These are conversations I have with myself ten hours a day, so it’s an all-encompassing practice: thinking about trying too hard, failing, starting over again. I always have to be really honest with myself about the painting. There has to be an evocative undercurrent. Then, there’s the laughter, which lets me know I’m hitting on something. There are times I tell my husband, “I haven’t laughed yet, so I don’t know how it’s going.”