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/

 

Photography, Collage and Nostalgia: An Interview with Foxtrapped

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Foxtrapped, Untitled Collage 01 (That Photo I Stared At Every Time). 2018. Archival Inkjet Prints and Found Photographs on Masonite.

Questions by Adi Berardini

When I first saw two large-scale collages by Brit Moore-Shirley, otherwise known as Foxtrapped, I felt nostalgic for moments I’m not even sure exist. The collages, pieced with pastel colours and childhood photos, made me feel a sense of freedom like driving down a highway with my hair tumbling in all directions. I remembered the time I should have kissed someone in a parking lot with slick streets from recent rain. These nostalgic feelings are too often related to temporary freedom or pangs of sadness and regret.

Foxtrapped is a young emerging artist from London, Ontario, currently undergoing studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, pursuing a BFA in interdisciplinary studies. Brittany’s process has grown quickly into an interdisciplinary (post-medium) practice that relies heavily on elements of photography, collage, and installation, alongside sculpture and ceramics. They came out of the closet when they were 17 and have since utilized their position as a visual artist to encourage a dialogue about narratives and lived experiences that are often overshadowed and overpowered by louder more dominant voices. They hope to provide an opportunity for the audience to allow themselves to empathize with these voices and narratives that are often ignored and are commonly scraped from history.

  1. I find that your work is rooted in nostalgia and some pieces seem tied to childhood memories. Can you further explain the influence of nostalgia on your work?

While I do consider nostalgia to be a part of the conversation surrounding my work, it’s never what I think the conversation is primarily about. Nostalgia, this longing for a return to something, is an exploration mostly through the media; it has a very direct relationship with nostalgia. This is because I’m attempting to document my own history (whether that be personal family history or the history of the various aspects of my identity). The usage of these traditionally nostalgic items is more to analyze than to convey a homesickness or a sentimental yearning for that which was. The items I’m using are done so to displace nostalgia and displace the associations we have with items and memories from our past rather than yearn for them. I want to create a conversation that places those of us with a past we find difficult to navigate, at the forefront. Susan Sontag has this quote from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh in which she writes: “My loyalty to the past – my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most”. To me, nostalgia seems neither good or bad but rather a very delicate and potentially volatile idea. We frequently assume a nostalgia for childhoods or our pasts and I find myself wanting to create from an analytical position that challenges this.

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Foxtrapped, Still from Home (Searching), 3:03, 2018. Experimental Film, Found Footage.

  1. In your work Queer Ephemerality, you address the fact that home is not a queer concept but one rooted in patriarchy. I found this work incredibly moving, especially since a large percentage of homeless youth are queer. Can you further explain this piece?

Queer people have this very interesting relationship with the idea of home and I started realizing that a lot of queer media centres around that exploration. Of course, the obvious queer relationship to home is one that shifts and may possibly fracture when we start coming to terms with our identities and whether we decide to come out or stay closeted – it’s so much more complex than that. The environment we’ve created wherein queer people have to come out, also means that we’ve created a society where queer people don’t frequently have the privilege of aspiring towards home, both in the classical idea of that term (a nuclear family) and the comforts it brings (security, love, safety, support, etc.). In so many ways, we are exempt from this possibility and we function in this state of homelessness. So, even if our trauma isn’t strictly related to being kicked out of or escaping from a family home, home is still really difficult to navigate as people who exist outside of the patriarchal, heteronormative, and cisnormative ideas of this ‘happy ending’: bury your gays tropes, lack of meaningful representation, the closet, and inadequate legal systems all contribute to this homelessness. Queer people routinely seek alternative homes, places that tend to be temporary. We find these in other people, in community centres, in spaces that are set aside for being queer, or in any possible narrative that presents happiness as a queer option.

My hope is to present queer people (specifically queer youth) with the various possibilities of home – so that while we’re mending the harm caused by the patriarchy and cis/heteronormativity we can still find comfort, safety, security, and love in our own ways.

Childhood Inastalled 1
Foxtrapped, A Childhood in Pixels: The Place On My Mother’s Sweater Where I Rest My Head. Scanned Analog Photographs, Archival Inkjet Prints, Acrylic on Wood. 2018.

  1. In your work A Childhood in Pixels, you use abstracted childhood photos that are reduced to pixels with subtle variations of colour. Can you further explain this work?

This is a good example of my attempts at documenting and deconstructing my own history. Family photo albums are these amazing objects — almost everyone has family photos and so they’re this incredibly accessible object. They often hold so much importance to us as individuals but they mean nothing if they’re not yours. The clarity of the image becomes pointless. At no point in these pixelated photographs does it matter if you can see my father and I’s feet in the sand when I tell you that’s what the photo is of. [Consequently], you are asked to bring your own experiences and relationship to symbolism to the work. Each print is part of a photo from my childhood, I’ve isolated the parts of the photo that sticks out to me – the punctum. I further this by asking the viewers to hold the voxels (a 3D pixel) placed on plinths in front of the photographs in their hands. Each voxel is painted to match a pixel within the print, making the photograph physical and pairing that with the trust of asking my audience to hold something that is so ephemeral and fragile in its relationship to myself.

Just a Photograph
Foxtrapped, Fatigued Nurse. Found Imagery, Photo Collage, 2018.

  1. Your work addresses queer (in)visibility and the lack of empathy towards the queer community. What first inspired your series, Look Who’s Really in Pain, about the lack of empathy and objectification of HIV/AIDS patients?

Three months before I was born my Uncle Steve took his life after a lifetime of abuse from our family – I’ve slowly started uncovering his life and collecting the few remaining pieces of him – the horrendous obituary and the only photo of him I could find. I want to protect him. I feel the same regarding those who were directly and indirectly impacted by the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s.

There’s this huge gap in queer history, you can read so much on how we practically lost an entire generation of people and AIDS survivor syndrome has altered the rest. Yet so many of us don’t know this history —and certainly not as well as we ought to. This generational gap is scary because it means we have less ownership of our history and history in our current world comes with a sense of belonging and the right to our identities. Somewhere along the lines older queer people and younger queer people stopped communicating. We, as a community, survived the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s because we fought for and with our lives. Their deaths are the reason I have the privileges I have today, yet so much of that history suffers from being rewritten with a hetero/cisnormative bias. Now it frequently serves to give fame to the straight and cisgender people who were empathetic to us. These pieces largely stem from that frustration. I am extremely protective of our history. These people who had so much taken from them: if their stories aren’t being told truthfully, they are being used as pawns to sell this completely false narrative about how painful the AIDS crisis was for straight people – I want to undo this. Disrupting the imagery serves to relieve them of their indebtedness to this false history. In the end, drawing direct attention to a washed over history, protecting them from these lies, and stitching queer narratives back together.

  1. Who are some artists you find influential?

I have had the privilege of being surrounded by artists I truly admire and gain inspiration from so I’d like to mention some of them as well as those I’ve come to know through research, so in no particular order and from no particular time: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Kiam Marcelo Junio, Robert Mapplethorpe, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Annie Leibovitz, Claude Cahun, Hank Willis Thomas, Lynn Park, Brooke Tomlinson, Brody Weaver, Monica Joy Peeff, Madison Powers, Jeffrey Heene, Julian Miholics.

  1. Where do you see your art practice going in the future?

So much of my work depends on an understanding of contemporary assumptions that we make, I look forward to the day when the work I’m making now becomes contingent on its history and setting. There will be a day when people look back and have to remind themselves of the assumptions we used to make because we’re no longer making them. That will mean things have changed for the better, and I can move on to critiquing some other system in place and helping these changes continue to grow.