Who Taught You to Love? In Discussion with Pamila Matharu

Pamila Matharu, Where Were You in ’92? Installation view. Photos courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, photography by Paul Litherland.

Interview by Paniz Vedavarz and Adi Berardini

Pamila Matharu is a multidisciplinary artist of Panjabi descent (maternal roots from pre-partition Lahore of former British India (now Pakistan), then Jalandhar (Panjab, India), and paternal roots from Bhano Langha, a village of Kapurthala district, Panjab, India, born in Birmingham, England, and arrived in Canada in 1976. They are based in Tkarónto/Toronto – Treaty 13 territory. Approaching contemporary art from the position of critical pedagogy and using an intersectional feminist lens through counter-archiving, their work culminates in a broad range of forms, including installation art, collage, social practice, and experimental media art.

Matharu speaks more about their art practice and their exhibition, Where Were You in ’92? at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, curated by Emelie Chhangur, Nasrin Himada, and Charlotte Gagnier, and their multi-media installation as part of the 2024 Toronto Biennial, tere naal _ with you, that pays tribute to the enduring influence of the artist Winsom Winsom. Pamila was introduced to Winsom through the Fresh Arts program, a Black artist-led initiative that opened doors for numerous artists. The installation was deliberately designed as a space for rest as defiance, nurturing, and replenishment. Reflecting on standing up against current and past injustices, Matharu uses the space to instill a sense of hope, asking participants to reflect on the question, “Who taught you to love?”

Paniz Vedavarz: Your zines and installations interweave your personal experiences with wider community stories. How do you navigate blending your own voice with the voices of others, particularly when dealing with sensitive or painful histories?

I’m coming at it from lived experience. My storytelling is being accessed through my own lived experience, my memories, visceral memories. What I’m trying to do is use history as a medium, and I started to realize that history wasn’t changing much around looking at police brutality on Black and Brown lives. What does it mean to witness it at 19 or 20 years old? What does it mean to witness it in my 40s and my 50s now?  In some ways, I’m using the circle as a framework, but has the needle really stretched that far? In some cases, yes, I would say. But still, there’s a way to go.

Adi Berardini: For sure. Especially seeing everything right now in the news and politics, it feels like we’re going so backward.

Pamila Matharu: This is what I mean.  It’s when people ask, “Why are you delving into the past?” Well, you can’t figure out the future without looking at the past.

AB: You address mentorship through your practice, such as your exhibition ‘Where Were You in ’92?’ at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, which looked at the Fresh Arts multi-disciplinary arts program in the 90s that created space for Black and Indigenous youth, and later racialized youth. You particularly reference your relationship with artist Winsom Winsom. Can you explain more about this pivotal mentorship and how you’ve used it as inspiration in your practice and as a mode to research and display the under-recorded impact of the program that impacted generation(s) of artists?

PM: Fresh Arts is a period that comes up in the Black Arts Movement. And when we talk about movement, when it comes to art history, it’s always Western methodologies and Western art history, yet the Black, Indigenous, and racialized artists are nowhere to be found. And we are always the sidebar or the thin chapter at the end, or perhaps the last couple of lectures in a Western art history survey course.

The project I was invited to at Agnes Etherington Art Centre was to “roll out the red carpet,” or metaphorically, finally give my flowers to Winsom. What I mean by that is to explain my relationship to her, and how I have spoken of Winsom informally in spaces and with curators and with artists, with institutional folks for the last 25 years; my relationship passed 30 years in 2024, when I met her in the summer of 1994.

In 2022, the project at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Where Were You in ’92?, was mostly research-based. I often use my platforms strategically to invite other underrepresented artists who I reckon could use exposure from the platform I’m initially asked to take up space on. In this case, I was asked by Emelie Chhangur, the [former] Executive Director & Curator at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, to examine Winsom’s relationship to the city of Kingston, Ontario.  At the time, before or while the request was happening, Winsom’s actual archive was being shipped from Belize to the AGO Edward P. Taylor Library and Archives.  I had to access her archives at the AGO Library and Archives, which I had previously had a relationship with through an earlier project I did in 2019 at A Space Gallery, where I found some discarded material from their library and archives. I built an entire exhibition, and that’s where this moniker of counter-archiving came from, because I did not undertake an information sciences degree or anything of the like.

Pamila Matharu, Where Were You in ’92? Installation view. Photos courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, photography by Paul Litherland.

I’ve always had a strong interest in research from primary sources like books and literature. I’m not a practicing writer— I write for pleasure and my own studio practice, well, grant applications really! I definitely dabble in creative writing, but I don’t make it one of the things I share openly too much, and Emelie was aware of that. In terms of my lived experience and narrating this story and legacy, in a former project we did earlier than that, back in 2012 at the Art Gallery of Peterborough, in an intersectional feminist exhibit curated by Pamela Edmonds and Carla Garnet. Emelie had already, in some ways, planted the seeds of inviting me into Agnes and to do this project. Chhangur really is the constant gardener!

But in some ways, I was circumventing and ‘migrating the margin’, which was also a show that we did at the Art Gallery of York University [Now The Goldfarb Gallery of York University]. But I’m using the terminology of migrating the margins, where I was looking at Winsom’s archive at the AGO Library and Archives, which houses six boxes of fonds.[1] I think it might be growing for Winsom’s practice, in terms of her materiality, her research material that she’s archived. And I was asked to focus solely on Kingston, Ontario.

Winsom spent close to 30 years in Kingston, Ontario, and I believe that she helped establish Black Kingston, and what I mean by that is community-engaged, artistic programming, as well as organizational activities. Kingston has five jails, and there are a number of hospitals. It’s also formerly Upper Canada, and that was the “center” prior to Ottawa becoming our federal capital. In terms of the nation-state history, there are a lot of layers, and I was challenged to think through and grow a methodology from the archives and unofficial records.

I say it’s a methodology because my methodology is collage. I use it in the most abstract sense as well as the most very minute kind of paper collage: paper and cut and paste. But then I also collage in space, through sound, video. I created a handmade collage mural on the walls of Agnes, where I surveyed Winsom’s 30 years and all the material that was within that roughly 30-year span in Kingston.  I selected over 100 fonds initially. And then the designer I worked with, Cecilia Berkovic, and I whittled it down to about 50, about half of what I gathered. It was things that were of interest not just to me, but I was thinking through the prospective audience who would come through, perhaps former student-artists, like the child artists that were in some of the photographs I selected. People did arrive and say, “Oh, this person taught me in this program here in Kingston.” Or a person would come in and say, “I did a cooking thing with Winsom, or I did this, or that with Winsom,” so all these wonderful stories started to unfurl in Kingston.

[Since] I was also looking at the story of Fresh Arts, what I decided to do was predate Fresh Arts and look at the origins of the Black Action Defense Committee, which was very instrumental during that time, and it predates Black Lives Matter Toronto.  And the history of how one arrives here, with whatever historical incidents that happen in your DNA when you arrive on Turtle Island. Then there’s a whole other battery of ways in which you are an uninvited guest received on Turtle Island. Whether that is the government-funded institutions like the police or formal K-12 schools or the publicly funded medical system, we have seen how these institutions have repeatedly failed non-white bodies of cultures, as well as white bodies, right? “Bodies of culture” is a term that I have learned from the social worker and somatic practitioner Resmaa Menakem, who wrote My Grandmother’s Hands; it’s not a term I came up with. So, white bodies of culture versus racialized bodies of culture, Indigenous bodies of culture, and Black bodies of culture.

Pamila Matharu, Where Were You in ’92? Installation detail. Photos courtesy of Agnes Etherington Art Centre, photography by Paul Litherland.

I was thinking through this visibility lens in terms of Winsom not only coming from Kingston, Jamaica, to Kingston, Ontario, but also establishing and bringing her young family there with her partner at the time. And then how they utilized numerous forms of education, not just in the public education system, but also as community-engaged public educators. It was just wonderful to see how she used her gifts as a visual artist, as a gifted culinary artist, and as a food justice practitioner to really make relational gathering spaces where people would come together and share, whether it was her storytelling or listening to invitational guest artists’ stories. The images were not of that sharing, but there was ephemeral documentation that these things did happen in Kingston. Then the other wall was about the Black Action Defense Committee up to and towards the Yonge Street Uprising.

[Regarding] Fresh Arts, the Yonge Street Uprising, which occurred in the summer of 1992, May 1992.[2] It was an incident in which a plainclothes police officer shot at a young Black man who was assumed to be affiliated with drugs and drug trading. Assumed is the keyword here. This narrative doesn’t change, right? It happened in the week that the verdict came out in LA about the Rodney King trials. The L.A. uprising happened in the same week, so Toronto and L.A. were both burning, literally and figuratively. I wouldn’t say fires were happening in Toronto, but they were in L.A., and there was definitely social unrest in both cities. In Toronto, there was a loss of businesses, and the very institution of policing is about protecting property, right? So, there’s a whole argument there to be analyzed around, well, what’s important?  Black lives or property?

I happened to be at the action. It was a peaceful demonstration for the day, until the Yonge Street uprising started later in the evening.  But I was not at the uprising. I was at the protest. I used the protest as a key event, and then I looked at the before and after, on one wall, the Yonge Street uprising. The Black Action Defense Committee organized the protest for the death of Raymond Constantine Lawrence, and then a look at today’s Black Lives Matter movement.

History becomes an active agent in that telling. That could have taken place in the form of a zine, but to me, I felt like I was using the walls as my substrate and then doing this gigantic mural-like zine. Those two narratives, I cannot separate my story about Winsom Winsom without talking about being at this protest [about] police brutality on Black life. It was my first public protest; about to graduate from AY Jackson Secondary School that spring, and I was just about to turn 19 that Labour Day weekend. And two years later, before I turned 21, youth of racialized communities were invited to enter Fresh Arts, and then I joined.

AB: Thank you for sharing that generous history and trajectory.

PM: I would like to stress that there’s never been an exhibit about Fresh Arts, and even around the Black Arts Movement in Canada. There hasn’t been a significant effort to bring this history together in something that can be catalogued. But I don’t think I’m the only one here sharing these narratives. As I mentioned, I’m using lived experience to tell these stories—They’re not fiction in any way.

Pamila Matharu, tere naal_with you, 2024. As part of the Toronto Biennial of Art at 32 Lisgar, 2024. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Photography: Toni Hafkenscheid. 

PV: Your installations, specifically tere naal _ with you, seem to invite viewers into shared or communal spaces, such as the baithak (lounge) you incorporated into the exhibition. Could you talk about how you approach audience engagement when designing these immersive environments, and what role community-building plays in your overall practice?

PM: I think as a diasporic artist growing up in a South Asian household, or particularly in a Panjabi Sikh household, intergenerational sittings and gatherings are very indicative of our cultures. A lot of Pan-Asian cultures focus on tea gatherings, rituals, and ceremonies, and whatnot.

We don’t really have a tea ceremony per se, but we definitely have loads of tea time that happens, and you can have cups and cups of cha (tea) all day in Panjab, all over India, as well as in the diaspora. This is a very common thing to do, much like café culture. I reckon that café culture started in Europe, and it arrived in North America with the European settler culture. I was using the baithak space as a social sculpture, something that is more informal than western chairs and sofas. The sitting aspect is on the floor, with pillows and carpets to gather folks on and to have some much-needed respite and rest alone or in community.

What I have understood growing up watching my parents and all their peer groups is that BIPOC individuals don’t have the same playing field if we really examine labour markets and their operating systems. Who gets to rest, and who gets to just keep working, or has to? It’s not who gets to, as that implies a choice, but who has to keep working nonstop?

And often we hear this because the term self-care did not come from my culture, particularly. We have words for that, but no word says, “self-care.” That terminology came from movement elder Audre Lorde, African American thinker, writer, academic, and poet.  I was raised in that time period for Fresh Arts. I am reflecting on the second-wave Black feminist cultural producers who raised me as an artist. There’s no other way for me to address my communal gatherings of joy, grief, and solace. They’re not necessarily in a tavern or a bar, as a lot of folks in the community are sober.  It’ll be around non-alcoholic beverages, things that are specifically accustomed to our culture.

I didn’t necessarily serve during the installation; it was more of an action for holding space.  And when we talk about holding space, it’s creating that gathering space.  I’m implying, come and rest, or chill with your kids, or if you want to read a book, write, or draw, please come and do that. I was thinking through the space of the biennial: who gets to [rest]? It could be an active young family, or it could be elders.

I put two modern Adirondack chairs in there for folks who might have accessibility issues. I’m always thinking about who has access to these spaces physically, mentally, and intellectually as well. Access is not just about physicality. It’s also about all these kinds of capacities around human activity through one’s mind, body, and spirit.

The video was the one thing that I brought from the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. It’s an 11-minute video that basically draws on my history on Turtle Island. Fred Moten, African American poet, thinker, writer, and academic, has a teaching strategy with his students where he asks his students when they arrive at their first meeting, “How did you get here?”  So, I use the framework of asking myself, “How did I get here?” When I think back to my past selves, how did I get here from May of 1976 and, prior to my arrival, my overall community from the early 1900s?

I delved into not just my lived experience in that 11-minute video, but I tracked the history and inquired about the history of when my people arrived and what happened after that. I go back to looking at the early 1900s, and a lot of people don’t know that over 2 million Indians were in World Wars I and II. In some ways, I’m using it as a pedagogical tool, but I don’t want to hammer it over the head. If you want to look at it through a contemporary art lens, I kind of throw that out the window. I’m going to play with all these strategies— arts pedagogy, critical pedagogy, and contemporary art design.

I am a former co-founder of the Come Up to My Room exhibit in Toronto, which lasted about 17 or 18 years, so site specificity and immersive installations were very significant in informing this work. I would say that I’m trying to disrupt the gallery space using that installation strategy, perhaps with how one would consider “community engaged.”

Pamila Matharu, tere naal_with you, 2024. As part of the Toronto Biennial of Art at 32 Lisgar, 2024. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Photography: Toni Hafkenscheid. 

PV: I enjoyed that point about the privilege of who gets the right to rest.

PM: Exactly. Yeah, who gets that? It might be a [day off] for us today, but we’re working, right?  It’s a Sunday. A Sunday implies a lot of different things, but we’re working right now. We’re both labouring, right? Who gets to have the privilege of a Saturday and Sunday off? I’m taking my first rest from doing two careers. I’ve been a practicing artist for 31 years, and I have been a high school teacher for 21 years. It’s the first time I’m taking a break to go to grad school. I’ve been doing both full-time. In fact, I was worried about all this time/space, but my graduate seminars and TA and sessional work filled it right back up!

We’re all students of life until our very last breath.

AB: It’s quite amazing that you’re also a high school teacher. Can you expand on the role and the relationship of being an educator and how that plays into your practice a bit further?

PM: I was worried in the beginning about how full-time teaching would impact my art career. But then I realized they were interchangeable once I entered the high school classroom. It was almost like I was the visiting artist every day, but teenagers don’t see you as that. They have an idea that this is a classic high school experience. When you ask folks, “Did you love school?” You’re going to get a mixed bag of answers. But if you ask folks, “Did you love learning?”  Nobody’s going to say, “No.” Learning is a continuum. We’re all students of life until our very last breath. 

Schooling, though, is a whole different playing field because it’s about conformity; it’s about the nation-state, and how we’re taught. You’re going to go from that starting point to find your calling, your passions, and your purpose. If you look at the inception of schooling in North America, it was really from the Industrial Revolution forward. It was about getting folks in line for the masses to help generate and continue to build society. And that is going to happen with the masses, not necessarily the elite few that basically rule us. 

Once students and learners understand there’s a difference between schooling and learning, the synapses start going off. It’s like, “Yeah, I suck at this, but yeah, you’re right. I’m creative.” We have the natural ability to be creative. I think there’s a difference between looking at how education and my art practice are in some ways interchangeable and intertwinable. I look at my practice as a tapestry, rather than separating it into silos.

PV: As you develop Toronto Biennial of Art’s Zine Three, which focuses on futurities, what do you envision for the next generation of counter-archivists, activists, and artists committed to addressing underrepresentation in the arts?

PM: We’re centering Black feminist cultural producers of today in that third zine through the lens of futurities. It will be a gathering of the activities archived by the Toronto Biennial of Art. And Zine Three will focus on voices who were present during TBA24 and the resulting documentation of what happened. There was this wonderful project the storytellers made in my installation, and it was because Siki Soberetonari, one of the storytellers, said that she wanted to collect people’s responses to my question, “Who taught you to love?” What I suggested recently was that we gather all the responses and edit them because it’s about young people, zero to 100, who added their responses to the question I put up on the wall, “Who taught you to love?”  Love, meaning the idea of love and teaching. We’re talking about arts pedagogy and myself as a teaching artist; I use my art life as a form of cultural resistance.

 “Who taught you to love?” is not necessarily in the Ontario curriculum. I’m going outside of that, but it’s in my curriculum because I’m also reflecting on my relationship with Winsom Winsom. She taught me that teaching is love, which is a form of care. I’m also tuning into what I was doing and thinking with her at the time, and what she saw in me. Had she not seen me, I don’t think I’d be here today. She witnessed that I had something to offer the world and just encouraged me in a variety of ways over one summer, really.

I’m asking the public, “Who taught you to love?” and then that was recorded and taken up. The idea is that I want to build something where people can feel inspired by social change and how the arts are a fantastic tool for that, especially in a world that is so fraught right now. These are the conversations I want to hold space for. And again, thinking through that space, it was a container for all the programming that happened. I make these spaces so I can hold space for socially-engaged activations. The idea then becomes a little bit unsettling for the idea of a museum visit, a gallery visit, or a biennial visit.

Who has three hours right now? We are in an attention-deficit economy! No one has the time, or space, or bandwidth. So, when you intentionally create a space for care, when you intentionally create a zine for reflection, what can that then go on to produce for that individual or perhaps a group tomorrow or throughout the path they’re on? I’m just thinking through and around Futurities and the conversation around hope. The last conversation we had through my public programming was called Some Kind of Hope. So, it’s about hope. It will be about some kind of hope.

Check out this year’s Toronto Biennial of Art, Things Fall Apart, curated by Allison Glenn, from September 26 to December 20th, 2026.

[1] A fonds is a natural accumulation of records a person or organization makes or receives through their daily activities.

[2] For more context on the Yonge Street Uprising: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/activists-reflect-on-30-year-anniversary-yonge-street-uprising-1.6439452

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

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

By Alexandra Hulsey 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eternally Shadow-Banned

On Bodies Being Bodies and Confronting the Algorithm

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

By Taylor Neal

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

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

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

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

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

On Bodies Being Bodies

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

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

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

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

Taylor Neal. Strawberry Moon, 2021.

The Algorithm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Silencing

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

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

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

Whenever I mention sex work, I am silenced.

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

Whenever I show body hair, I am silenced.

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

Whenever I show fatness, I am silenced.

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

Whenever I show intimacy between lovers, I am silenced.

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

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

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

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

F*ck The Algorithm

And yet, we simply cannot stop sharing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labour Care: A Poem & Conversation with Camila Salcedo

Photo of Labour Pains curated by Emma Steen for Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts at Workers Arts & Heritage Centre. Photo by Carolyn Combs.

By Kalina Nedelcheva

Labour Pains, an exhibition curated by Toronto-based curator and writer Emma Steen for Mayworks Festival of Working People & the Arts 2024 at Workers Arts and Heritage Centre, takes the body of the precarious worker as a starting point. Within the context of a capitalist system that approaches the body as a tool to be exploited in the name of profit — where accessibility and support often come as an afterthought or are completely ignored — the body is in constant danger of breaking down. Labour Pains surveys the challenges workers with varying needs and abilities face while accessing healthcare. Steen brings artists Camila Salcedo, Peter Morin, and Sean Lee and Birdie Gerhl together to explore the uncertainty of freelance employment, Indigenous relations to healthcare, disability, accessibility, and Crip Politics. The exhibition frames healthcare as a labour rights issue while shedding light on the sinister capitalist and social structures that prevent healthcare from being accessible for all.

The following interview is an experimental conversation with multi-disciplinary artist Camila Salcedo who contributed a series of care objects to the exhibition. Through a series of conversations with artists and cultural workers who have experienced serious brain injuries, Camila reimagines homemade remedies through a creative lens. While the objects figure as acts of care from one precarious worker to another, they also touch upon the risk of healthcare privatization for freelance artists and the financial strain unexpected illnesses or injuries can have on the precarious body. Drawing inspiration from the artist’s playful approach to guiding attention to bodily ails under capitalism, the interviewer paired each question with a poetic verse that reflects and responds to Camila’s practice and the ethos of Labour Pains in general.

Camila Salcedo. taking care: brain injury stories (2024). Photo by Kafayé Clarke. Image courtesy of the artist.

stone-walled to

hear my thoughts;

misshapen and delirious,

though, still here;

at least they’re still here;

What has been your experience with the healthcare system?

Camila: I’ve noticed that doctors don’t have a lot of time and often, you have to advocate for yourself a lot within the healthcare system. Nurses and other types of healers — like massage therapists and chiropractors — have been angels in my experience because they pay attention to the emotional aspects of health issues; they’ve treated me more like a human being whereas oftentimes doctors just want you in and out. Doctors want you to get better as quickly as possible so you can return to the capitalist lifestyle.

It is apparent to me how little mental health supports exist to guide one in dealing with the healthcare system. It is not very holistic. I’ve also had drastically different experiences, depending on whether I was covered by insurance or not at the time of my visit. When you don’t have insurance, it is more difficult to navigate the system.

It is apparent to me how little mental health supports exist to guide one in dealing with the healthcare system.

Emotional support and mental health integration in the healthcare system is necessary and should be a priority. Recently, I’ve been reading a few books — one of which is The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté — that point out how stress can cause different types of illnesses and issues to the body. There is a huge correlation between experiencing stress and the efficacy of healthcare that is missed.

keep working, still working

still working, keep working;

I feel my body rumble

because of the intensity but

my thoughts are calm;

they must be calm.

Camila Salcedo. taking care: brain injury stories (2024). Photo by Kafayé Clarke. Image courtesy of the artist.

How do you embody the precarity freelance workers experience in the healthcare system through your art?

C: I am an artist who is in a precarious situation and that seeps into my work because when I don’t have funding, I am unable to make the work. That in itself is part of my process. The pieces I made for Labour Pains also touched on this. I interviewed three individuals —  musician and facilitator Carmel Farahbakhsh, curator and educator Patricia Ritacca, and musician and media artist Katie Kotler — who’ve had brain injuries in different capacities. I asked what tools help them in alleviating their symptoms and had conversations with them about the challenges they’ve experienced in accessing care.

With Carmel, we discussed how there should be more funding for administrative assistance for disabled folks. With brain injuries, people might have difficulties being on screens so there needs to be additional support that would help with that. In my conversation with Patricia, we chatted about insurance and how not having access to physio and other types of care work can exacerbate symptoms. These conversations informed the works I made for Carmel, Patricia, and Katie. I wanted these wearable art pieces to respond to their symptoms while visually conveying some of the topics that came up in our conversation. Katie, for example, spoke about how brain injuries are invisible, even within queer and disabled communities. People may not often believe you because you’re not showing physical symptoms of pain. I used neon colors in Katie’s pieces to account for that. It was also important to draw on their personal style because I find that a lot of disability tools are clunky and ugly. I wanted my pieces to be fun and something my interviewees would want to wear. I see it as a labour of care toward them because when I had intense symptoms, they really created a sense of community care for me.

Speaking to each other can be a huge help in navigating the system. Wage transparency is a great example of this. For people with chronic pain, discussing and sharing strategies about how you are making it work is important. Spaces like Tangled Arts and Mayworks Festival are doing a great job; they really consider disabled artists. I do think access is improving over time in the arts sector but I want to see more of it. In one of my recent curatorial projects with Mending the Museum, we put a clause in the artist contract that stated if the artist experienced any sort of health issue that prevented them from completing the work, we’d still honor paying them for their time. I’ve had students in the past who’ve paid for my sewing classes asking me for additional time and resources. We need to be aware that sometimes someone might not be able to show up in a timely way or deliver within a specific timeline. There is no such thing as an art emergency. There is no rush, even though the world tells us that there is. I would like to see more art spaces embrace that mentality.

it’s locked away

behind the pain of labour,

a hand reaching out;

still reaching,

keep reaching;

it grasps at the thread of my hope.

Camila Salcedo. taking care: brain injury stories (2024). Photo by Kafayé Clarke. Image courtesy of the artist.

What are the remedies for your labour pain? Are they obedient/disobedient (toward the system)?

C: I’ve tried navigating the terms of stability versus instability as an artist and explored to what degree I felt okay inhabiting those levels of comfort. At times, this meant having part-time jobs in order to sustain my practice but after spending two weeks in the hospital last year with severe health problems, this is no longer the case for now. Even though I don’t discard it as a possibility, I am unable to work an office job in the same way right now.

in the realm of precarity—

health, is it only for some

and not for others?

how do we decide?

How do you categorize the objects you exhibit in Labour Pains?

C: My objects can be described as helpers. The work is about caring for each other and wearable art is an expression of that but also a tool. My goal is to honor and take care of my community in response to how these folks have shown me care throughout the years.

hope that there is better,

hope that there is care;

what is care?

Camila Salcedo. taking care: brain injury stories (2024). Photo by Kafayé Clarke. Image courtesy of the artist.

Are there any radical ‘traditions’ for the healthcare system that you feel would be useful to a movement toward healthcare for all?

C: Community care happens naturally. At the opening of Labour Pains, Emma Steen, the curator, mentioned that without being prompted all the artists in the exhibition incorporated people they worked with in their artworks. It was evident that collaboration and coming together within the community was really important for this project.

Anytime I’ve experienced heavy health problems, I’ve been bolstered by an entire community of friends, family, and chosen family. Community Care should be translated more systemically within the healthcare system. We should have a team helping us out and not one singular doctor who refers us to a specialist. People have specialties but it would be better to have multiple people helping to come to a solution to your health problem. We should have a therapist, a nurse, and so on. They should be able to communicate better with each other too. I think that would really help. There should also be more accessible ways to access health insurance. We do have free healthcare in Canada but there are so many levels of care that are more holistic and natural that are not covered. Oftentimes, those are more useful. Family doctors usually prescribe you medication whereas other types of care work help you more somatically.

You can find more of Camila Salcedo’s artistic work, workshop offerings, and practice on their website and Instagram. For more information on Labour Pains and the wonderful artists involved in the project — visit the Mayworks Festival website here.

Talking EXTRA STRENGTH + PAIN RELIEF with K. MacNeil

K. MacNeil. Natura Morta. Image Courtesy of the artist.

Interview by Adi Berardini

K. MacNeil is a genderqueer artist, educator, and curator working in a range of media including printmaking, video, performance, and drawing. Referencing their own experience, their work addresses grief, chronic and mental illness, and the supports within the Western medical system. Their latest exhibition at home apothecary: OR EXTRA STRENGTH + PAIN RELIEF at Centre [3] in Hamilton features an interdisciplinary body of work that started as sketchbook ink paintings. As they describe, the series grew in its scope over six years, capturing the everyday objects used to manage self-care. The exhibition also addresses the resiliency needed while facing marketing schemes of care products in a capitalist society and the actions taken towards healing.

Currently residing in Toronto, ON, MacNeil has an MFA from the University at Buffalo and a BA in Studio Art from the College of Charleston. They serve on the executive board of SGCInternational and work as the College Printer at Massey College. MacNeil’s work has been exhibited internationally in Paris, France; Beijing, China; Canada, and throughout numerous institutions across the US including the International Print Center New York, the Western New York Book Arts Center, and CEPA Gallery. Additionally, they are the Hexagon Mid-Career Artist in Residence at Open Studio in Toronto. Read on to learn more about their work and the exhibition at home apothecary: OR EXTRA STRENGTH + PAIN RELIEF.

AB: Your exhibition at home apothecary: OR EXTRA STRENGTH + PAIN RELIEF addresses the wellness industry and how it treats health care as transactional and the resiliency it takes to navigate this. Can you speak more about your thinking and concept around the exhibition?

KM: The exhibition is thinking about transactional healthcare and how to be resilient in this sort of late-stage capitalist world that we find ourselves in. Developed over six years, I started this work as illustrations in my sketchbook and I didn’t think that they were going to go anywhere. At some point — after about two or three years — I just kind of kept making them. I [felt that] I need to commit if I’m going to just keep making this work and see it through to some type of conclusion.

I realized that what I was focusing on with these paintings, these sort of still lifes of objects that I was surrounded by, were an autobiographical body of work focused on what I’m using to try to take care of myself. A lot of my work has always been about mental health and stigmas and my own daily struggles with depression and anxiety. Naturally, these were all the objects that I used to treat my anxiety and my depression and various other ailments. So, it was everything from pill bottles to sunglasses and Q-tips. Sometimes it’s vitamins or band-aids and other little things like books.

K. MacNeil. Gender Dysphoria Hoodie in the Morning. Installation shot courtesy of the artist.

One of my favourites is a painting of a sweater that says ‘Awful’ on it, based on an actual sweater I own. The title is Gender Dysphoria Hoodie in the Morning. It refers to the gender dysphoria hoodie that [many] people in the trans community use to manage their dysphoria. When you’re dealing with this dysphoria, you just kind of put a big hoodie on and hide within that. That’s a way of taking care of yourself and a way of being resilient as a trans person.

I decided to take a broad lens and address everything that I use to take care of myself in all these different facets of my life. Through that, I was also examining the way these things are branded and marketed to us and the language used around them—and how interesting and problematic it can be. The way I like to think about this exhibition is a Venn diagram of what it means to self-care and self-medicate and treat yourself that’s the intersection of where all these works fall. It’s not exclusively critical of the medical industry but it’s also not exclusively favourable.

I was also examining the way these things are branded and marketed to us and the language used around them—and how interesting and problematic it can be.

It’s just trying to take a realistic look at like, for example, how I need ibuprofen and I hate how much I have to take ibuprofen, but it’s part of my life. I was recently diagnosed with chronic pain and they basically [told me] you just have to take ibuprofen all day, every day, which is what I do. And there are a couple of supplements that help, but that’s about it. It’s frustrating, but it’s also like that’s the best that the medical community has got in terms of treating that illness, which is pretty sad.  

K. MacNeil. I think my cough drops are gaslighting me. Installation shot courtesy of the artist.

Your piece ‘I think my cough drops are gaslighting me’ has printed HALLS wrappers and the messages seem to address how manufacturing health and wellness plays into toxic positivity, especially during the pandemic. Can you speak more about this piece and the interactive aspect of it as well?

The piece is a pile of replicated HALLS cough drop wrappers that were printed using a linocut block for the logo and then letterpress for the motivational pep talks that they use. The whole thing is hand-printed and handmade. I say that because a lot of people thought that they were real cough drop wrappers and a pile of garbage on the floor. It’s art—I swear.  

I made just under 1,300 of them and all the phrases that are on them are phrases that I got from HALLS cough drop wrappers themselves. They’re from something called “a pep talk in every drop,” a HALLS marketing campaign that they wrap their cough drops in. And they’ve been doing it for years. The piece is installed as a pile on the floor and viewers are encouraged to take one of the wrappers with them and slowly deplete the pile throughout the exhibition. It’s a reference to the work of Félix González-Torres, who used depleting piles of candy in reference to the AIDS crisis and inter-personal relationships. I won’t get too much into his work cause there’s a lot to be said there. But I was interested in how Félix González-Torres was responding to a pandemic of his time, as I am with this work.

The idea initially came to me near the start of the pandemic in April of 2020. I had a cough, I didn’t have COVID, but I was still taking cough drops. I was opening up and reading these motivational statements when I was going through genuinely the worst month of my life. Several people I know had recently died and I had to quickly move over the border. I lost one of my jobs and just like everybody else, I was in a state of financial disarray as the entire world was ending. And it was like, what are we doing here? And this cough drop wrapper is telling me, “March forward,” “Get back in there, champ,” “Get through it,” and “Go for it.”

K. MacNeil. I think my cough drops are gaslighting me. Installation shot courtesy of the artist.

It’s a slap in the face, right?

Yeah, it was. I just [thought], “Wow, these don’t hold up so well in the pandemic.” The one that really got under my skin was the one that said, “You’ve survived tougher.” It hearkens back to that phrase that a lot of people like to say, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

It’s this kind of problematic idea that you can just withstand trauma after trauma and you’re going to be stronger for it. And it’s not always the case, but specifically with COVID, a lot of people didn’t survive tougher—a lot of people died. A lot of people got long COVID, and a lot of people’s lives were dramatically and permanently affected by this. And I think this culture of getting through it and surviving tougher is more harmful than just admitting, “Hey, we’re all going through a hard time right now.” We could use a little bit of softness instead of toughness, you know? The piece is kind of commenting on how those phrases are pretty gaslighting.

It’s also thinking about the amount of waste that’s produced by the medical industry. That’s a big part of this exhibition too, is just thinking about how much crap we accumulate from cough drop wrappers or pill bottles or random packaging. And how these things that we genuinely need to get through and to survive also come with a fair share of packaging and environmental waste that’s ultimately contributing to climate change. It was a way of encouraging viewers to take one of the wrappers home with them, instead of just mindlessly throwing stuff away in the garbage. What if we kept and took care of these things and tried to find alternate uses for them? I’ve been doing a lot of research into the zero-waste movement and trying to find how that works within my lifestyle. This is sort of my way of exploring that idea.

K. MacNeil. WITNESS MY SHAME. Installation shot courtesy of the artist.

Something that draws me to your work is how it fosters dialogue around mental illness and the stigma surrounding this. Can you speak more about how you address mental illness and mental health, especially in your piece ‘WITNESS MY SHAME’ which addresses how mental illness is discussed in society?

I would say that WITNESS MY SHAME and I THINK MY COUGH DROPS ARE GASLIGHTING ME have a lot in common. I was recently thinking about how it’s interesting to see this thorough line in my work because I made WITNESS MY SHAME many years ago and I didn’t think I was still working in that vein. Now I can see how that idea really stuck with me. 

WITNESS MY SHAME was a series of shadow boxes that highlighted phrases in a bold, black font that have been said to me personally, by close friends and family. I think they are phrases that you hear more frequently in response to mental health issues or chronic health issues. So, those phrases are, “I’ll pray for you,” “Just smile,” “Suck it up” and “You don’t have to talk about that right now.” Those were phrases that just shut a conversation down. If you’re trying to talk to somebody about what’s going on with you, whether it’s physical or mental illness, and the person you’re talking to doesn’t know how to respond, [they] use one of those types of phrases. It just completely shuts a conversation off—It’s their way of getting out of talking about something that might make them feel uncomfortable.

I took those phrases and I screen-printed them in these shadow boxes in this black font. And then over the top of them in the Plexiglas, I scratched several other phrases that might elicit those responses. Some of those phrases are, “I feel like I don’t have control,” “I just feel kind of numb,” “It feels like a life and death kind of thing,” “and “I can’t experience any more joy.” Those phrases came from a series of interviews I did for a sound piece, so they are phrases from other people who are experiencing mental illness trying to share what it feels like to have their mental illness.

What happens when you look at the piece, because you can’t see the scratched phrase super well, you have to look incredibly closely and come up to the piece and inspect it because you see it’s a bit blurry—your vision is slightly blocked. It was kind of interesting because a lot of people just walked right past the boxes and didn’t take that closer look. Then somebody would take a close look and then somebody else would take a close look and you’d see them kind of pull a whole bunch of people and [realize that] there are these phrases that are scratched on top of it. I appreciated how that happened because that’s what the piece is about. Some people are just oblivious, and they say these phrases that sort of steamroll over a conversation when you’re trying to reach out for help and other people stop and listen and take that closer look.

It’s more of a response to how people handle mental health and chronic illness in general. I think it kind of points to the stigma that it’s difficult to talk to people when they’re talking about mental health and that it’s something that we really shouldn’t even be talking about. It comes from that mentality that you should just suck it up, put a smile on, move on, and not talk about these things because it makes other people uncomfortable.

K. MacNeil. at home apothecary: OR EXTRA STRENGTH + PAIN RELIEF Installation shot courtesy of the artist.

I was wondering if you have any artists or other things that inspire you that you’d like to discuss?

I’ve already mentioned Félix González-Torres, his work is hugely influential to me. I don’t think you’d necessarily see a direct correlation when you look at my work but he’s one of those artists I’m always thinking about when I make work. He’s like the Patron Saint of printmakers. I don’t think he’s technically a printmaker, but every contemporary printmaker who is concerned with the multiple [loves him].

For this exhibition, I was also looking at a lot of painters. I technically did my undergrad in oil painting. In particular, Wayne Thiebaud: I have always been amazed at his sense of colour. Getting to see his work in person, find[ing] a subtle stroke of neon orange or a lime green underneath the form. I’ve always been fascinated by how his paintings come together and the little pops of colour that peek out. And certainly, I would say his composition is impactful on me too. I’ve spent a long time just looking at his work.

Another artist that I looked at a lot is Giorgio Morandi, a painter from Italy. His work is so lovely. It’s funny, when I would show his work to students, they were like “I don’t get it. It’s boring.” And that’s kind of what I’m interested in, the way he explores the banality of household objects. I’d say the last one for this exhibition is Philip Guston. I’m in love with the work that he does. I mean, especially the stuff he did later in life with the self-portraits and the more expressive caricatures that he was doing. But specifically, I’ve always been a strong admirer of the confidence of his painting stroke. You can tell that he just goes in, and he paints a line and that’s it, he doesn’t fuss with it. That’s something I always try to keep in mind when I paint because I fuss with things, and I want to get to the point where I’m not fussy. I want to paint a line and that’s the line.

One other artist that I wanted to mention is Finnegan Shannon. They do this piece called, Do you want us here or not which are these blue benches that they install in art spaces that say things like, “This exhibition has asked me to stand for too long. Sit, if you agree,”“I’d rather be sitting. Sit, if you agree,” and “There aren’t enough places to sit around here. Sit, if you agree.” You engage with the work by sitting on it. It’s just this brilliant and much-needed conversation about the accessibility of art spaces and public spaces in general.

Especially as someone who lives with chronic pain, I’m constantly telling people, “I’m sitting, I’m not lazy. I just have to sit, it’s just what I do.” I love those pieces because one, I wish there were more chairs everywhere in the world, and two, I think we’re on the same wavelength in terms of what we’re talking about with ableist language and spaces.

Do you have any upcoming or current projects you’d like to mention?

I’m currently an artist-in-residence at Open Studio. That residency is winding down, but I’m still working on that body of work, which is a series of etchings exploring waiting rooms and healthcare institutions. I feel like it heavily relates to this exhibition as well. 

It’s a commentary on the inaccessibility of healthcare spaces. Waiting rooms are some of the most boring places on the planet and yet there’s so much pain and trauma and suffering that happens [in them]. I’m very interested in the banality of pain and suffering and trauma and what that banality means. You sit in a room with a blank wall and generic seating that’s terribly uncomfortable for hours at a time, waiting to be seen by a doctor, and sometimes they catch your issue and sometimes they don’t.

I have this series of drawings of waiting rooms that I’ve collected over the past several years. I’m turning them into etchings, which I’m going to string together into one long, never-ending waiting room.

You can find more of K. MacNeil’s work on their website knmacneil.com and their Instagram, @kit.macneil.

Muscle Memory: In Conversation with Michèle Pearson Clarke

Michèle Pearson Clarke, Still from Quantum Choir, 2022. Images courtesy of the artist.

Interview by Adi Berardini and Aysia Tse

Michèle Pearson Clarke is a Trinidad-born artist, writer, and educator working in photography, film, video, and installation. As Clarke describes, using performative gestures, her work “situates grief as a site of possibility for social engagement and political connection.” Currently based in Toronto, Clarke holds a Master’s in Social Work from the University of Toronto and received her MFA in Documentary Media from the Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson), where she is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Photography and Image Arts. Additionally, Clarke was the inaugural 2020-2021 artist-in-residence at the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies and has recently served a term as the Photo Laureate for the City of Toronto (2019-2022).

In the following interview, Clarke speaks more about her most recent exhibition Muscle Memory at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. The exhibition features the film Quantum Choir, a piece exploring queer female masculinity and vulnerability through the shared experience of four participants learning how to sing. Also featured in Muscle Memory, is the photo series The Animal Seems to be Moving, which explores growing up and grieving her sense of boyhood, going from being read as a young Black boy to being seen as a middle-aged Black man. Clarke uses personally significant emblems of masculinity to reflect on both grief and the more playful aspects of queerness. Read on to learn more about the thoughts and process behind Muscle Memory.

Michèle Pearson Clarke, Still from Quantum Choir, 2022. Images courtesy of the artist.

Adi Berardini: Can you speak more about how Quantum Choir addresses queer kinship through the vulnerability of learning how to sing?

I’m not sure that it addresses queer kinship, but rather, it harnesses it because I knew I didn’t want to do this by myself. It’s always easier to do something difficult if you’re holding somebody’s hand. I knew that I wanted to harness that sense of togetherness and queer kinship, and that sense that it takes a village to do this hard thing that I wanted to do. I found three other people (participants Naisargi N. Davé, Kerry Manders and Kimiko Tobimatsu) who also wanted to do this hard thing, and I think none of us could have done it by ourselves. Maybe I could have hired a coach to get over my shame. It’s possible I eventually would have gotten there and just done it as an individual personal thing. But as an artist, you get to create these experiences and these processes, you can bring a process into being that is just so much more rewarding.

 I think a lot of people can relate to the shame of feeling like you can’t sing, but also lots of people will happily get up at a bar, sing terribly at karaoke, and think nothing of it. I think the four of us deeply understand how difficult this was for each of us. Even though I think some people in our lives, our community, may not understand. We feel bonded because I mean, everybody almost dropped out before each singing lesson. And as I said, I cried. One participant almost wasn’t sure she would be able to come and see it in person because she just wasn’t sure she could bear seeing herself singing publicly, even though she had been through the process. So, it is extremely challenging for all of us to share our voices. This is the first time we’re all singing publicly.

And I understand what it means to not just do it but to make something that you can share with an audience. Laverne Cox introduced the term “possibility model,” how you have to see it to be able to be it. We offer each other a sense of permission and possibility through all our choices and actions. That’s something I try to do with my artwork. Not to say that everybody in the audience needs to go and learn how to sing, but if these four people could do this hard thing, what hard thing in your own life might you want to harness, tackle, or work through?

Michèle Pearson Clarke, Still from Quantum Choir, 2022. Images courtesy of the artist.

Aysia Tse: You use performative gestures and repetition in your work. I’m wondering how intentional those choices that you make are, and if you see them connecting to your discussion of visibility and invisibility?

I would say performance is one of the bedrock strategies for me in my practice because I’m very interested in the relationship between looking and seeing, and thinking and feeling, so affect is something I’m always thinking about. How do I produce an affect in the work that I make? I find performance and repetition are strategies that generate a lot of affect. I’m just completely compelled by what repetition does. We learn, we gain knowledge, and gain experience through repetition.

Half of Quantum Choir is just us doing our vocal, upbeat exercises on our vocal warmups. We say words in the singing, but we never speak. So instead of interviewing those three people to ask them about their experiences of being masculine and the vulnerability associated with that, it’s like we’re expressing it through this metaphorical way of communication. For the first time, I worked with a choreographer having people do the same movements. We spent the day with our movement coach and did a workshop where we talked about our relationship to masculinity, our relationship to our bodies, movement, gesture, and performance. And then, collectively, we listened to the song that we were learning to sing. And we all just decided on these simple gestures, we performed for the camera when I shot.

I knew that with Quantum Choir, I was filming everybody separately, but that [most] of the piece I would have two, three, or four voices together. And I knew that in the scenes where it’s only one person singing, that is the peak vulnerability, right? Because when there are two voices, your inability to sing is a little bit lost by somebody else’s inability to sing. But at that moment where it’s just [one person] singing, I was thinking, how do I communicate and express an enormous amount of solidarity and collectivity? When the three of us are moving and one person is singing, I wanted that choreography and that intentional movement to emphasize that we are in sync, we are together. We got you. We’re not just standing there listening to a person singing. Almost like a boy band, there’s something about movement together that expresses we are all one, we belong, we are a group.

Quantum Choir, 2022. Four-channel 4k video installation (colour, sound, 12:46), soccer balls, and training cones. Photo credit: Natalie Hunter.

AT: I love how you integrate sport into your practice. I see that there are soccer balls in the exhibition, and it seems like you’re thinking through the architecture of the space very thoroughly. Can you explain these creative choices?

It’s exciting for me because when you’re an emerging artist, you’re not always able to realize your ambitions. Institutions don’t give you enough space and resources. Muscle Memory is the first time I could design my dream installation. But one of the things I have been grappling with in the first stage of my career is the power dynamic of consuming moving image work in a gallery space. Most video in the gallery is projected on a wall. You walk in, you sit on a bench, and there’s this kind of passive consumption of the work. I’m always thinking about what it means to share the vulnerability, the griefs, the pains of queer folks, Black folks, of people of colour in a gallery space that, as we know, has colonial power dynamics still embedded in it.

And when I think about that history, particularly of making Black pain a spectacle for public consumption we go right back to the circulation of the lynching postcard. Even though I’m not showing that kind of violent pain, I am still showing pain. This piece is more of an extreme step in beginning to think about how I introduce more opacity and refusal into my work. With this piece, I wanted to think about how I ask the viewer to be an active participant in bearing witness to this vulnerability.

I’m always thinking about what it means to share the vulnerability, the griefs, the pains of queer folks, Black folks, of people of colour in a gallery space that, as we know, has colonial power dynamics still embedded in it.

The soccer balls have two functions. One, for all of us, sports is the only place in our life where masculinity has been supported throughout our life and for three of the four of us, that sport is soccer. Beyond that, the grid on the floor is a small ask from the viewer since you have to pay attention to where you’re walking. It’s a bit of labour and effort on the part of the viewer to come into the installation. Because of this design, even though we’re always on screen, you can never look at all four of us at the same time. This is what I mean about opacity and refusal—how do I hold something back for each of us? As a viewer, you have to make decisions from second to second about where you’re looking and who you’re looking at. It’s not just sitting on a bench and it’s all coming at you.

Glitter Stache, 2021, Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Hemp, Alupanel mounted, 40” x 50”

AB: Can you speak more about your photo series, The Animal Seems to be Moving, and how you use humour to address aging and racial stereotypes surrounding Black masculinity?

MPC: This is an ongoing project that I started in 2018, I was 45 when I started it. I decided that I would work on it for five years and finish the project next year when I turn 50. This series is just really rooted in how I’ve always been read as younger than I am. For [most] of my life, I have been read as a young Black boy. Then before I started working on this series, I was brushing my teeth one day and I thought, “Oh, your face is finally beginning to catch up to you.” And then I just found there was a span of particularly hostile encounters with strangers. Obviously, I don’t know what’s in people’s minds, but I started to surmise that I am moving from being read as a young Black boy to being read as a middle-aged Black man.

Even though Black boys do have their innocence robbed and often get read as older than they are, a Black man is to many people more threatening than a Black boy. I was thinking “Now I have to worry about more risks and less safety for myself in the world as I age.” Then I was just struck by how absurd that is. Using humour and leaning into the absurdity of oppression is not a new strategy, right? It’s something that if you’re a woman, if you’re queer, if you’re trans, or come from any minority position, if you face oppression, then humour is in your tool belt for coping with oppression. It might be you read some nonsense in the paper, and you just laugh. If we responded to everything with anger and grief, we wouldn’t get out of bed. There’s grief, right? Every time I walk into a woman’s washroom and a woman shrinks in fear because she thinks I’m a man coming to hurt her, there’s grief. There’s grief that people see me that way, that people respond to me that way, that [my presence] in their world can create that kind of interaction.

It’s absurd also that people see Black men as a threat but that gets transferred to me because of my gender presentation. Oppression, at the root of it, is absurd and I wanted to incorporate that. How can I work these ideas of performance in a photograph? But it also helped me, [that] with both pieces there’s play and there’s humour. Both pieces are about [the] vulnerability and grief of being seen in ways that are not how you feel yourself to be in the world. In both pieces, rather than foregrounding victimhood or a trauma position, they foreground the pleasure that’s part of the experience too. Both are trying to acknowledge that oppression exists, and the pain is real, but it was fun to make Quantum Choir. It is fun to be gay.

The absurdity is both trying to point to the absurdity of the gaze and the assumptions about me, but it’s also a way for me to express the joy, pleasure, and the fun that I’m having aging. And how do I prioritize that for myself? How do I let [myself] define my experience of aging and not that external gaze? I have to live with it, I have to contend with it every time I leave the house, but how do I foreground my pleasure and experimentation and play? And a little bit of that series is also melancholy in terms of feeling like I’m saying goodbye to my boyhood as well.

They’re also intentionally photographs because when I’m out in the world, I don’t want people staring at me trying to figure out my gender or trying to figure out if they should be afraid of me or not. The photograph freezes that moment. In the exhibition design, I put seating in the room with the photographs because it is an invitation to look and stare as long as you want at these photographs.

I wanted to play with tropes and ideas of masculinity, and many of the ideas are rooted in my childhood memories because I wanted to be a boy when I was a kid. And I remember the things that my child’s mind associated with manhood, like in one of them I’m wearing one of those tree-shaped air fresheners. As a kid growing up in Trinidad, I remember it was something that taxi drivers had. I’m wearing it on like a gold chain, which is another kind of Black manhood.

Little Trees (Hold), 2021, Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Hemp, 24” x 30”

AT: I think that you’ve expressed beautifully how grief is personal for you and your boyhood and kind of moving through different stages of life. Do you also see it as personal and collective in your work?

MPC: Absolutely. As I said before, there’s nothing I feel that only I feel. My work is also ethnographic versus autobiographical because I feel like the things that I feel are not because I’m Michèle—they’re because I’m Black, I’m masculine, I’m queer, and I’m an immigrant. There are these systemic, historical, and cultural factors that mean that people respond to me in certain ways, which make me feel a certain way. Anybody who occupies my identities, those same cultural, historical, and social factors are [imposed upon them]. The feelings I’m exploring are not individual feelings. They’re political feelings, they’re public feelings that are produced by political and social forces.

To me, grief itself is something that in Western culture we are told should be private, not public. By bringing it into the gallery space, I’m bringing it into a public space. I do think that grief is one of those things where everything is politicized. We see it in the world’s response to Ukraine, not that the world shouldn’t have responded to Ukraine the way it has, but the world didn’t respond to Yemen in the same way. The grief of certain people has more value to a degree than other people. We’re not free of systemic forces with anything, even when it comes to grief.

I also feel that one of the ways that Black people have been robbed of our humanity is the ideas that white supremacy brought into being to justify slavery and similar for Indigenous people. We are not seen to have rich interior lives—That’s not a coincidence. It’s white supremacy [proclaiming] “Let’s reduce these people so that we can justify the way that we treat them.” This lingers in contemporary culture.

When I lost my mom, I couldn’t find anything that [spoke to] the experience of a Black queer person losing their mother. I couldn’t find a book; I couldn’t find a tool. I couldn’t find anything. Everything about Black loss is homicide or violence. The only grief that our culture wants to talk about is hurt and anguish, not just the everyday thing like losing your mom. We don’t get to be seen as having [that kind of grief]. It hurts since it’s just the most mundane kind of everyday grief. That’s what I mean about grief as a site of social engagement and political connection. It’s a way to connect to the impacts of these larger forces.

For people who feel like they are different from me in the world and that we have nothing in common to sit and watch Parade of Champions, which is the work I made about grieving my mother—It sounds so ridiculous but I’ve met the little old ladies who don’t understand, nothing in their life has ever prepared them to think that somebody who looks like me could feel what they feel. We are the same in that way and grief is the most universal human experience. And so, by sharing queer grief, by sharing feminist grief, by sharing Black grief, it is a way, hopefully, for people to feel that kinship across differences.

Michèle Pearson Clarke’s Muscle Memory is on view at the Art Gallery of Hamilton until September 5, 2022. This interview will be featured in our second print issue on Queer and Feminist collaboration, launching later this summer.

Meditations on “Positive Energy” with Jen Rao

xiukouxiaoxing, illustration by Jen Rao.

By Jen Kwan

正能量 (zhēngnéngliàng) [positive energy] rose to fame as a catchphrase on Chinese social media in the early 2010s. Anything – a TV series or news article – had zhēngnéngliàng if it could spark optimism and hopefulness. This is easy to apply to the creations of Jen Rao. But there is little to be said for taking art at face value.

“A lot of my personal projects are expressions of identity—as a woman, a queer femme, a sexual person, someone with Chinese diasporic origins…Marginalization is a big motivation for trying to express a darkness beneath the outward appearance of color and positivity.”

Jen left Chengdu in southwest China’s Sichuan province at the age of five. She lived in a few North American cities—mostly in Canada—in suburban, predominantly white neighborhoods. She graduated with a business degree, in her parents’ best interests.

“I struggled to connect with both the children of the Chinese immigrant families we had banquet dinners with and the white children that went to my school, from whom I desperately sought approval. I distanced from the Chinese kids, feeling deeply different from them, rejecting the behaviors and identifications that I felt were traditionally Chinese.”

Over the years, Jen’s perception of China has changed from what was presented to her as a child during trips to “the motherland” (“a patchwork of historical sites and commerciality”) to what she saw after relocating to Beijing in 2015. One night, a Tinder date brought her to School Bar, where she watched all-women Chinese punk band Free Sex Shop. It began a journey of rediscovering cultural identity through the discovery of subcultures she long resonated with outside of China.

“I was surprised to see these empowered and expressive women perform before me, completely uninhibited and unafraid to express their vulnerabilities. My eyes were opened to a scene that I had no idea existed.”

such a cafe, illustration by Jen Rao.

By the time Jen had moved to China, the concept of zhēngnéngliàng was shaping the country’s societal and political messages. It ran parallel with the government’s plans for economic development. In 2014, it announced a campaign to decongest Beijing through urban rejuvenation. Three years later, the “Great Brickening” in 胡同 (hútòng) [traditional alleyway] areas unfolded.

“Buildings that were deemed not up to code or operating under the incorrect zoning were demolished. Windows and doors were bricked overnight. I began, almost obsessively, documenting the changes in the hutongs through watercolor illustrations.”

Under the moniker “drift & dune,” she depicted shopfronts of businesses at risk through a series of postcards, which these establishments would display and sell as souvenirs. Most of them no longer exist. In 2018, she exhibited for the first time in a group show called “Hutong Art Project Vol. 1 — Vitality Remains.”

“The event felt like a collective goodbye to the hutongs as we knew it, and although we were brought together by something that was less than desirable, it felt unifying.”

Ironically, zhēngnéngliàng originates from the Chinese translation of a self-help book by British psychologist Richard Wiseman titled Rip It Up. Ironically, it was through this pivotal event—also colloquially known as the 拆 (chāi) [tear down]—that Jen had inadvertently carved a path for herself in the local art scene. One day, at an affordable art market, she met the co-founder of a Beijing collective that documents underground culture through illustration.

thinking of you zine by Jen Rao.

“Shuilam Wong encouraged me to put my work out there, and so I created my first self-publication, a mini-zine that could fit in your pocket that explored the sentimentality of inanimate objects. I printed 40 copies and sold them at Shui’s table for 5 kuai ($1) a pop. Despite the tiny physical size of the creation, it felt like a milestone.”

In Chinese media, narratives that appear to get a zhēngnéngliàng stamp of approval feature the quality of overcoming a setback. In Jen’s case, that anecdote likely begins with the rescue of a partially blind pug named 包子 (bāozi) [steamed stuffed bun], who sometimes went by “nugget.” When she and her then-partner Dave Carey lost their teaching jobs and studio to the COVID-19 pandemic, they took a leap of faith and invested their life savings into a business venture. The stylized name and image of Baozi’s face became the symbol of a cassette label called nugget records, with a quaint space that houses a café, bar, recording studio, and music venue.

baozi, illustration by Jen Rao.

“We were not experts on any of what we were doing, but everything was done with a lot of heart.”

nugget upholds a purpose to be an inclusive and accessible convergence point for Beijing’s local and foreign communities, which has somehow propelled Jen into a coincidental role as an ambassador for the Chinese diaspora.

“We occupy both of these spaces and I think that’s kind of rare [in Beijing] for someone from the diaspora, so I don’t take that lightly. I want to utilize and implement the things I’ve gained from experiences of my North American upbringing in a household of Chinese values…It’s important to me to operate a radically accepting space, especially in China, where that’s not always the case.”

While co-running nugget, Jen has expanded her creative practice and collaborations in digital art and live visuals. It has brought exposure on local media platforms, including the Chinese-language editions of the Wall Street Journal and Kinfolk magazine. But she often also speaks of the challenges as someone whose identity intercepts peripheral minority categories.

“I experience micro-aggressions and discrimination regularly due to being a young female business owner…Even though my work has been published, I still suffer from imposter syndrome.”

Less than a year after nugget opened, Jen found herself coming to terms with keeping a friendship and business with someone who was no longer a long-term romantic partner. Although she questioned her queerness for years, the breakup prompted a search for answers.

 “I started a journey of introspection. I started reading about comp-het (compulsory heterosexuality). I started sharing with people. They really encouraged and supported me, and it did lead to my coming out…I know how much chosen family and community is important to me. And I want to be able to extend my own communities in a way that might touch upon my insecurities and experiences of marginalization. But I am also compassionate to the fact that other people will want this, too, and I want to bring it to them.”

séance salon graphic by Jen Rao.

For six months, Jen lived in a housing collective, fondly referred to as Studio 702—a nod to the New York night club of the late 1970s, Studio 54. The storied 300-square-meter apartment, infamously known for its parties, has been home to a range of Beijing creatives in the past decade. There, Jen introduced the séance salon, a project aimed at creating a space for women and non-binary people to share knowledge and art and discuss topics related to intersectional feminism in a non-commercial and uncensored setting. The small 20-member gathering is a relatively big feat in a country where there are unpredictable consequences to crossing or even towing the boundaries of censorship.

“We’ve covered menstruation, fertility, birth, abortion, sex, sexuality, and relationships…It was my first time having to be able to speak about these things in such an uncensored way. And just being able to create that for other people’s involvement as well as my own was really rewarding, liberating, and empowering.”

While nostalgia and idealizations of periods, places, and objects have been key to Jen’s art, expressions of vulnerability have become the core of her work. In the process, she is reclaiming a once-rejected heritage, presenting a counter-argument to a homogenous vision of China instead.

火花 illustration by Jen Rao.

“I want to continue to represent and communicate things that are important to me—to strengthen femininity, female sexuality, subjects and themes of the Asian diaspora, and a sense of being embedded in our generational and locational context.”

In China, many are attuned to seek zhēngnéngliàng, even if it means overlooking the direness of a situation. Separate from its political stigma, zhēngnéngliàng denotes proactive optimism that should not necessarily equate to toxic and relentless positivity. For about two months, Jen lived in Guangzhou, southern China, where she opened another nugget under a government-sanctioned program. Since then, efforts have also been made to keep the flagship in Beijing afloat. Operating amid a pandemic has been accented with financial woes and noise complaints about the space’s signature tiny stage concerts and gender bender parties. But Jen believes there is hope to be had from the community she has integrated with, helped cultivate, and given back to in ways beyond business and art.

“It’s hard to say these things with confidence, especially in a time that is plagued with uncertainties. Even though operating from Beijing is so difficult, we’ve been granted a lot of opportunities and have a lot of exciting things on the horizon. So, I’m generally very optimistic, and I know that our community will come through in the end.”

You can find more of Jen Rao’s work at drift-dune.com and on Instagram at @nekObean. Also check out nugget records on Bandcamp.

Talking to Myself: On the Occult

The Star Card display. Photo courtesy of Emme Lund.

By Emme Lund

In 2015, in the shed behind the Small Press Distribution warehouse in Berkeley, CA, I had a tarot reading with CA Conrad during Halloween weekend. The shed was warm. Christmas lights lined the crease where the walls met the ceiling. The poet’s painted fingernails bent over the edge of the deck, bracelets dangling from their wrists. “What would you like to ask the cards?” they said.

            “I’m stuck. How do I unstick?”

            I’d had a terrible week, month, whole year, actually. My partner and I were moving to Portland, OR in a couple of weeks. When I first moved to Oakland, I thought I would live there forever, eventually dying in the Bay Area, but capitalism ruins all and the tech industry had pushed rents far past what we could afford.

            CA Conrad shuffled the cards, their eyes closed.

            They laid out three cards on the table in front of me. One for the past, one for the present, and one for the future. I don’t remember the exact cards, but I remember the story they told.

            The first card was a jumbled mess, a forest burning to the ground. They tapped the card. “You’ve had a hard time. Your past was difficult.”

            There’s a feeling I get when something rings true for me, a feeling that I’ve chased for much of my life because, for a long time, most things did not ring true. Everything felt wrong, even things that felt right to others. This feeling comes up in my chest, catches in my throat, and a burning finds the backs of my eyes. I have always been quick to tears. I was reckoning with a lot then. My drinking was out of hand. Queerness was bubbling inside of me but right beside it was bubbles of shame. I had been thinking a lot about that feeling of wrongness I’d felt my whole life, the thing that made it so that many things did not ring true.

The Death Card display. Photo Courtesy of Emme Lund.

            They moved on to the next card. Someone walked among the burnt forest, assessing the damage, a card later in the same series. “Here you are now,” they said, “going over your past, understanding how hard it was for you.”

            This rang less true for me. I wasn’t dealing with my past. I was looking to the future, looking for a way to happiness.

I must have made a face, because CA Conrad smiled and then tapped the next card, a star exploding. “This is a very good card,” they said. “In this card, you are surrounded by people who love you. Life feels like a party. This is your future, but you won’t get there until you’ve reckoned with your difficult past and figured out who you are.”

I felt a kinship to these people and so I let them read tarot for me, I looked up my natal chart, and over and over again, I experienced that feeling of something ringing true, a feeling I had not felt in some time.

It took me a long time to find a home in reading tarot and following astrology. I was raised in a devoutly Evangelical Christian home, a household so strict that I was once forbidden from owning anything related to aliens after my grandfather walked in one day and claimed all things outer space to be the work of Satan. My aversion to the occult was based on the false dichotomy that if tarot and astrology were the work of the Devil, the opposite to Christianity, then it was also a religion, the opposite side of the same coin. I didn’t want anything to do with any religion. I’m a queer trans girl who asks questions about everything around her. All I ever heard was that I was either born wrong or choosing a path that led to my own destruction, all in the name of religion.

            I must admit that when I first left Christianity, I swung too hard into the world of logic and reason. I abandoned any search for magic out of fear that I would find myself trapped in another religion. But I quickly found that something deep inside of me wanted me to explore my depths. My gravitation towards the occult grew out of a desire to know myself.

            And some magic cannot be denied.

            In 2005, I met the person who later became my wife. I fell in love. Early on in our relationship, they said something to the tune of, “Magic is simply science we can’t explain yet.” We moved to the Bay Area together and quickly fell in with a crowd of witchy poets, the kind of friends who throw parties where someone is reading tarot in the corner and new acquaintances ask what your sun, moon, and rising sign is as soon as they learn your name.

I felt a kinship to these people and so I let them read tarot for me, I looked up my natal chart, and over and over again, I experienced that feeling of something ringing true, a feeling I had not felt in some time.

The High Priestess Card display. Photo courtesy of Emme Lund.

           

I don’t think astrology or tarot can predict the future.

I believe astrology lays out a blueprint for the kind of person we may become and the challenges we may face within ourselves, but I don’t believe it is absolute nor is it the totality of our person. We are also our genetics and our social status and where we were born and who raised us and so much more. We have been watching the stars for thousands of years and astrology is a collection of our observations.

For me, tarot offers an opportunity to inquire how I feel about something, a chance to convene with my intuition. In 2017, exactly two years after CA Conrad read tarot for me in the shed, I got sober. I don’t think the cards or the stars could predict I would get sober, but I think I knew, deep down, that sobriety was something I wanted and astrology and tarot gave me the power to tell my story in a way that led to sobriety. For humans, stories help us make sense of the world. Astrology and tarot are a way for our intuitions to apply form and structure to the chaos of this life on earth. They lead us to what we want.

If you do A and B, eventually you will find C.

What I like about astrology and tarot, about magic in general, is that it does not care if you believe in it. It is not like the religion of my youth, full of absolutes. A refrain I hear often when I listen to horoscopes or teachings on tarot is “Take what you will and leave the rest.”

Nearly every morning begins with me seated at my altar, lighting a candle, and drawing a card from my tarot deck. In the quietness of the room and the space between my dreams and the emerging day, I can find a stillness that lets me consider what I’m feeling. Some mornings the card I draw feels exciting. Sometimes it is harder for me to understand what a particular card could mean in the context of the day. Often a card will only make sense later when I look back at what I was doing at the time I drew it, when the details of what my intuition was working on become clear.

             When I look back on my life now, it seems inevitable. Like, of course, I would end up here, a sober trans woman who knows herself better than she ever thought possible. I often think about that time in the shed with CA Conrad, when they told me I would not find happiness until I came to terms with my difficult past and got to who I truly was. I don’t know. Maybe my life was inevitable, but really, I can’t help but look back at all those times I’ve shuffled a tarot deck or read about what the stars were doing, trying to apply both to the context of my life. There’s no doubt in my mind that astrology and tarot gave me the space to convene with myself, to speak with my own intuition, and to choose which way I wanted my life to go. But as with all things: Take what you will and leave the rest.

The Boy with a Bird in His Chest by Emme Lund.

Check out Emme Lund’s debut novel, THE BOY WITH A BIRD IN HIS CHEST, out from Atria Books on February 15, 2022.

Part One: Ash Barbu and Deirdre Logue in Conversation

Recess, Cultural Production, Checking Out

Deirdre Logue, Home Office, 2017, 03:33 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and Vtape.

By Ash Barbu

Ash Barbu is a writer and curator based in Ottawa, Ontario. Deirdre Logue is a film, video, and installation artist and cultural worker based in both Toronto and Brighton, Ontario. They first met during the research phase of the group exhibition Empty History, presented at Vtape from November 20 – December 14, 2019. Curated by Barbu, Vtape’s 2019 Researcher-in-Residence, Empty History explored the ways in which artists use video to interrupt narratives of so-called ‘queer progress.’ Alongside contributions by Paul Wong (Vancouver, BC) and Lucas Michael (New York, NY), the exhibition featured Logue’s Home Office (2017). Shot on location during a residency at The Yukon School of Visual Arts in Dawson City, the work consists of a single-shot, 3:33 minute recording of the artist attempting to balance on top of a slide-out shelf from a wooden writing desk.

Home Office does not seek to repair the unjust and the uncertain by fashioning new utopias. Offering performances of solitary, inoperative gestures and activities, the works of Empty History construct impossible narratives without purpose or end, carried out at the limits of what is deemed recognizably ‘queer’ or ‘political’ content. In this refusal of resolution and finality, they occupy the difficult space in between meaning and dysfunction, acting out and stepping back, and seeking change and giving up. Within the frame of the screen, life itself is presented in a fixed state.

Barbu and Logue met on August 27, 2021, and again on November 19, 2021, to reconnect for the first time since the presentation of Empty History. In this two-part discussion article, the artist and curator consider personal changes that have taken shape over the past year and a half, including Barbu’s shifting creative practice and Logue’s decision to move away from the city. Together, they discuss feeling stuck, checking out, and moving on.

Ash Barbu: It’s nice to see you. I know that we planned on meeting earlier this summer. Life got in the way of that. I’m feeling somewhat rested, having just returned from Vancouver.

Deirdre Logue: I don’t know if you know where I am, but I left Toronto. I moved away to a hobby farm just north of Brighton, Ontario. It’s about an hour and a half from the city. My partner Allyson and I sold our house in Parkdale.

AB: I would love to hear about it.

DL: In some ways, what has transpired over the past year and a half will help us continue the conversations we started during your research residency at Vtape. We could continue to talk about doing nothing as a form of something. We could also talk about why no one is doing anything when we need to do more—more about other things other than this preoccupation with the self and the relative notions that surround the self, particularly in the context of an art career or a studio practice.

I love the idea of talking about recess, the kind we are introduced to as elementary students, as a moment of release from a regime known as education. Once we are outside of the classroom, what are those moments of freedom supposed to mean? Are they supposed to help us extend our servitude and fulfill the expectation that we [should] be productive? Or are they moments to teach us that we can be free? I don’t know. But I loved recess. You’re allowed time to experience something other than the system that you are stuck with, or, as is true for most people, perfectly content with in some kind of way. Your trapped-ness can feel good, right? So, during recess, you’re exercising a muscle within this system, asking: Can I move freely between absence and presence? Am I in or am I out?

At my new house, I have wild guinea fowl. There is always one that, when you set it free, just runs back into the cage. It huddles in the corner without any real desire to be free. And then there’s one that’s always fucked off, at risk of being killed. But it’s been in the cage too long. It has no skills for the wild. My desire is to protect them from being wild things because being wild things means they’re part of a system that I can’t control.

What you and I started talking about in 2019 has, in a way, led me to leave the city. It has led me to question the role that artists can play in providing respite for other artists, at a distance from some of the frameworks that both force us into production and expect us to do more with less. Two years ago, we started looking for a place where I could put up a tent and stop freaking out. Allyson and I found a house that had been on the market for a while. We realized that this would be a tectonic move. But being here has bought us a very sweet and extended recess from a routine that we were starting to feel trapped in—both of our commutes to work were becoming more like a demolition derby, with buildings coming down and condos going up all around us. Toronto is in a constant state of destruction. It was starting to affect me. Navigating those stresses within the context of climate change, I just couldn’t reconcile it anymore. I couldn’t live with so many people living in such deep denial.

Since we got the house last August, we’ve set up a bunch of systems. We heat our house with wood. We have water recovery systems. We have chickens and eggs and a giant garden that we eat from almost exclusively. And we renovated and reconstituted a woodshop that acts as the site for an experimental studio program called FAR (Feminist Art Residency). Imagine FAG (Feminist Art Gallery) shifting to feminist land art meets community of care. We’re not totally off the art grid. We’re hybridizing the idea of stepping off the treadmill and stepping onto a different kind of path.

AB: As you know, I have long fantasized about moving on and checking out, too. We share that. When we met at Vtape, I was just coming to terms with my fragmented work life and my decision to walk away from more grad school. We spoke about burnout and queer failure. Today, we’re speaking about choosing recess from the art world. Perhaps we can start to think about recess as a modality, as a means of open experimentation, without any determinate end or outcome—recess as unbecoming.

Deirdre Logue, Home Office, 2017, 03:33 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and Vtape.

DL: At school, during recess, you’re also in a panic state—you’ve only got a short amount of time. It’s very Pavlovian. The bell rings and you all run outside. The bell rings again and you all run back in. We forget how much we have been trained to be trapped, trained to have difficulty making decisions about freedom.

I think it’s important for us to take time to find forms of recess, not abscess, and try to challenge ourselves as humans, as artists, to examine the systems within which we work and decide whether or not they work for us.

I’m not suggesting that we all need to drop out of the artworld. Nor am I suggesting that we spend any more time deconstructing notions of what art is or can be. What I do think about is our personal accountability to the idea of being a cultural producer and what it is that we allow or ignore in order to see our own cultural productions surface and survive while others are made invisible. I think it’s important for us to take time to find forms of recess, not abscess, and try to challenge ourselves as humans, as artists, to examine the systems within which we work and decide whether or not they work for us.

Oh, I see a fox. It’s actually not a good thing. Hang on one second, please.

AB: Is everyone okay?

DL: Yes. Well, not really. I mean, we had six chickens, now we have two. We had ten guineas, now we have four. We are definitely guests here.

AB: How do you strike a balance with the wildlife?

DL: I suppose you get a dog. Dogs and foxes have a common language. Our friends lent us their dog, and I watched what Clarence did. Now, I’ve been marking territory like he does. Observing and assessing is truly the hard part.

AB: In 2019, we spoke about grant writing in the culture industry as a means to an end. On the farm, life moves with a different rhythm. You are observing minor tragedies, making the decision not to intervene every single time.

DL: I’m distracted by the fox. Can I call you back?

AB: Yeah, why don’t you?

Deirdre calls back in 15 minutes. After reconnecting, she takes me on a virtual tour of her farm using her laptop camera.

DL: I want to invite you to come here and do a writing residency, or non-writing residency, or resting residency, or any number of experimental versions of a residency that would be perfectly suited for you right now in your life. As we develop this program, we’re using people’s experiences of residencies that they didn’t enjoy as a guide.

AB: It’s such a generous invitation.

DL: Look at your calendar. We want to encourage guests to use the farm as an open, unrestricted space. We just did the Witch Institute, an academic conference produced by Queen’s University in collaboration with the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. What is the opposite of an online conference? An outside conference, I suppose. So, we held an opening ceremony and introduced three projects made by people that are part of our ongoing life relationships.

Syrus Marcus Ware is making a garden of future Blackness. With our friend Tracy Tidgwell, we produced a 250-foot-wide meditation walk through the five points of a pentagram (love, connection, grief, accountability, healing, love, etc.). We also invited the FASTWÜRMS, who performed a live raku firing about death and wonder. As senior witches, they had the showstopper. A lot of the people that visited had been working in isolation for a year and a half. It was very moving to see everyone together, outside, reconnecting, as if emerging from a chrysalis or something.

Deirdre Logue, Home Office, 2017, 03:33 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and Vtape.

AB: I wanted to speak with you about process, non-productivity, and worklessness—in short, how we might begin to reject conventional measures of art world success, choosing something other than desperation and burnout. I think we’ve done that in our own way.

DL: Everything needs a reconnect, and that’s what we did today. How are we doing? What are we doing? Where are we in the world? There are other questions that connect us as well—questions that were revealed to us when we first met during your residency. And to me, that’s a form of kinship. I do find your proposals compelling. I’m also compelled to speak again so that we might manifest something tangible that could be useful to you as a curator, useful to me as an artist, or useful to other curators and artists. Maybe more so than just me running around the house after a fox.

Read part two of the discussion here.

Beyond Binaries: In Conversation with Mahsa Merci


Mahsa Merci, Silent Stars, Mayten’s Projects. 2021. Image courtesy of Amir Sohrabpour / Mayten’s.

Interview by Adi Berardini

Mahsa Merci is interested in challenging society’s traditional concepts of beauty. Through her paintings, sculptures, and mixed media work she expands notions of the gender binary by depicting queer, trans and gender non-conforming individuals using viscous oil paint and building up layered textures. Born in Tehran, Iran, Merci holds a Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design from Tehran University of Art and a Master of Painting from Azad University. Currently based in Toronto, ON, she has recently completed her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba, Canada.

In her latest exhibition Silent Stars at Mayten’s Projects, Merci displays two years of work examining the restrictiveness of social norms that affect the LGBTQIA+ community. Merci explains how “painting is one of the best ways to challenge strict binaries.” Through bending the binaries between man and woman, and beauty and the grotesque, she invites the viewer in closer to her work to experience the textures and relate to her subjects.

Along with her queer portraiture, in Silent Stars Merci explores the terrain of sculpture, often referencing Islamic architecture and broader queer culture. For example, her sculpture Find Yourself Through Myself consists of a figure with light teal hair peering into a mirror of another among a shrine of sequins and pastel pink candles, evoking both oral sex and self-reflection. Also referencing Islamic architecture and miniature painting, Merci includes portraits as an homage to the Iranian LGBTQ+ community. Merci’s depiction of identity is not edited or airbrushed, but displays imperfections and flaws, challenging society’s restricting binaries and expectations.

You depict the queer community, particularly drag queens, gender non-conforming, and transgender people in your work. How did you first decide on depicting the queer community as your subject matter?

I always worked on gender identity, beauty, and sexuality as a subject in my country [for] more than 10 years. In 2017, I was watching a documentary about a transgender [individual] in Iran who had to leave for Turkey since they could not live in our country. That documentary was like a hammer on my mind. I could see beauty, grotesque, sadness, all of these things. I started to work on this subject in 2018 and one year later, I understood my sexuality when I was 28 years old. After that, I understood why I decided to work on this subject in my art career. My subconscious knew about it, but my conscious mind didn’t know about it at all. We don’t have any education or educational materials, living in a religious country. When the educational materials don’t exist, how can you understand your sexuality soon and in a good way? In 2018, I understood my sexuality, but it was so hard for me until now.

I can relate in a way. I felt like I was late coming into my sexuality as well. It took me until my early 20s to clue in that this is who I am, and this is who I’ve always been. But because of religion or compulsory heterosexuality, you lose that.

Exactly. It’s hard to know that you are part of this community when you don’t see anyone, or you don’t hear anything, it takes so much time to find it. It is not easy.

Mahsa Merci, Stay, Oil on Canvas. 30 x 40 cm. 2020.

Can you talk further about how you use painting to challenge binaries such as masculinity/femininity, beauty/ugliness, etc.? In what ways are interested in redefining societal beauty standards through painting?

I can say I am multidisciplinary [since] I’m working with so many materials—I’m working with painting, sculpture, animation, collage, so many things. But with painting I [can] find something so special. I never had an academic background with painting, I never had an apple on a table that I had to paint. When I’m painting, it’s like I print the portrait—I start to build up the materials and textures. I find painting as a material that I can show myself [through]. I’ve always really liked to share the spectrum of everything: softness and harshness, beauty and grotesque, femininity and masculinity and I find that painting can help me to do it. Every stroke with my brush that I do I feel myself in it.

I want to make an atmosphere that the audience wants to come closer to the portrait. Heterosexual [people] may not want to come closer to our community. I don’t want to have two categories, heterosexual and homosexual, I want to see more friendship together.

Your work uses a great amount of texture through the building up of paint. Can you explain more about your use of texture and its significance?

I work with oil colours which help me get the textures that I use. I like working with oil on small portraits that invite the audience in closer to see the portraits. When paintings are larger, physically the viewers need to go far to view it. I want to make an atmosphere that the audience wants to come closer to the portrait. Heterosexual [people] may not want to come closer to our community. I don’t want to have two categories, heterosexual and homosexual, I want to see more friendship together. I want them to come and see the portrait and see the details, the textures, the beauty, and the grotesque of the characters. Some parts come out of the canvas, like nose, lips, hairs, and jewellery—they are 3D works and not flat works. It’s kind of a metaphor for me to show that these are real people. I want to show the feeling that they are coming out of the canvas.

Mahsa Merci, Silent Stars, Mayten’s Projects. 2021. Image courtesy of Amir Sohrabpour / Mayten’s..

Can you explain your inspiration for your latest show, Silent Stars at Maytens?

The main inspiration is myself and the challenges and concerns that I am facing as a queer person. I always look at the other LGBTQIA+ people all over the world. I feel all of us have the same problems living in a patriarchal society, but the level is just a bit higher or lower. Sometimes when I see my friends and some portraits on social media or the website, they are an inspiration to me—their clothes and the queer culture. Then, I reach out to them and paint them. I am inspired by two books, Gender Trouble by Judith Butler and Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards written by Afsaneh Najmabadi, an Iranian writer.

Mahsa Merci, Silent Stars, Mayten’s Projects. 2021. Image courtesy of Amir Sohrabpour / Mayten’s.

Your work featured in Silent Stars also plays upon sculptural and Islamic architectural elements. Can you speak further about these elements in your work?

The inspiration is from the book I mentioned, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards written by Afsaneh Najmabadi. She is an Iranian professor from Harvard working on gender, sexual identity, and beauty in ancient Iran. Through reading this book, I found that there was no heterosexuality or homosexuality in ancient Iran. It was surprising to me that two men or two women could have love or a relationship together without judging or explaining it to anyone. You can see in the paintings that the male and female clothing was the same. But when the Europeans came, they changed the culture little by little. They enforced the idea that men and women should be together. Now, if you are part of the LGBTQ+ community in Iran, you [may wish to] escape from the country or not say it too loudly since your life can be threatened by your family or your government. Although it is not us, it was brought to us.

The portraits inside the mirror frame are all Iranian LGBTQ+ [people]: one of them is queer, one is bisexual, and in the middle two portraits; one of them is lesbian, and one is non-binary. I wanted to [display] Iranian LGBTQ+ people as monumental. I get the shape of the mirrors from a very old and traditional Iranian art called miniature. Miniatures are very old paintings that Iranians and Persians painted of a building, spaces, or narratives with very, very small brushes. It is very special.

Do you have any upcoming projects that you would like to speak further about or things you’re working on?

I just moved from Winnipeg to Toronto. I still don’t have a studio, so I don’t have any big project or exhibition planned. Although, a project I’d really like to start is to make more sculptures. I found that sculpture can show very different things than painting can, so I’d like to continue that. I also want to take more photography from the background of drag shows. I have so many ideas from quarantine that I’d like to do.

You can view more of Mahsa Merci’s work on her website and social media. The Silent Stars exhibition is on display at Mayten’s Projects until January 15, 2022.