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Six Must-Read Books by Trans and Queer Authors

By Adi Berardini

To celebrate and recognize Trans Awareness Week from November 13-November 19, Femme Art Review highlighted some books written by talented transgender and non-binary authors and/or books with trans themes for what we deemed as “Trans Lit Week.” By sharing the books of transgender and non-binary authors, we hope it will help increase awareness of trans stories and experiences. Ranging from fiction to poetry anthologies, read on to see why so many of our favourite books are written by trans authors.

ZOM-FAM

by Kama La Mackerel

The newly released poetry collection ZOM-FAM is by Kama La Mackerel, who you may recognize as a Montreal-based Mauritian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, and community-arts facilitator. Kama La Mackerel mythologizes a queer/trans narrative of and for their home island, Mauritius. Composed of expansive lyric poems, ZOM-FAM (meaning “man-woman” or “transgender” in Mauritian Kreol) is a voyage into the coming of age of a gender exploring child growing up in the 80s and 90s on the plantation island, as they seek vocabularies for loving and honouring their queer/trans self, amidst the legacy of colonial silences. (Adapted summary from Metonymy Press).

Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian)

by Hazel Jane Plante

Vancouver-based writer Hazel Jane Plante’s debut novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) explores a queer trans woman’s unrequited love for her straight trans friend who passed away. Acting as a love letter and homage, the story is interspersed with encyclopedia entries about a fictional TV show set on an isolated island. The experimental form functions at once as a manual for how pop culture can help soothe and mend us and as an exploration of oft-overlooked sources of pleasure. Heartbreakingly beautiful, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) reveals with distinct detail the level of loss she experiences in losing her close friend and love, Vivian. (Adapted summary from Metonymy Press).

Girls Mans Up

By M-E Girard

Girl Mans Up by M-E Girard is a young adult novel that provides ground-breaking representation of a gender non-conforming teen named Pen. Dealing with not fitting the box of womanhood defined by her strict Portuguese family and a friendship with the local cool kid turned sour, Pen learns how to assert herself against people who don’t have her best interests in mind.

Rebent Sinner

by Ivan Coyote

Rebent Sinner is Ivan Coyote’s take on the patriarchy and the political through personal stories of what it means to be trans and non-binary today. Coyote traces back a heartbreaking queer history while combatting those who try to misgender them and deny their existence. Through these relatable and often humorous stories, Coyote also paves a path for younger trans folk to realize that there is hope and a way out of the darkness. Coyote is a gifted storyteller who we recommend seeing speak live in person if you get the chance! (Adapted summary from Arsenal Pulp Press).

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir

by Kai Cheng Thom

In Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom, a lyrical and winding sort-of-true coming of age story, a young girl runs away from an oppressive city called Gloom where the sky is always grey in search of love and sisterhood. She finds her true family in a group of larger-than-life trans femmes who live in a mysterious pleasure district known only as the Street of Miracles. Under the wings of this fierce group, the protagonist becomes the woman she has always dreamed of being.

When one of their number is brutally murdered, she joins her sisters in forming a vigilante gang to fight back against the transphobes, violent johns, and cops that stalk the Street of Miracles. But when things go terribly wrong, she must find the truth within herself in order to stop the violence and discover what it really means to grow up and find your family.(Adapted summary from Metonymy Press).

it was never going to be okay

by jaye simpson

jaye simpson is an Oji-Cree non-binary trans woman writer who lives in Vancouver. Their debut book, it was never going to be okay, is a touching collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to terms with how trauma does not exist in subsequent happenings, it was never going to be okay breaks down years of silence in simpson’s debut collection of poetry:

i am five

my sisters are saying boy

i do not know what the word means but―

i am bruised into knowing it: the blunt b,

the hollowness of the o, the blade of y

(text via Nightwood Editions)

We hope you enjoy this selection and make sure to check out these books this Holiday season!

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

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

Interview by Adi Berardini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who are some artists that influence you and your practice?

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

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

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

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

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

Folklore and Fashion: In Discussion with Reilly Knowles

Reilly Knowles. “Taking, Giving Root.” Embroidered fabric collage (cotton, linen, wool, beeswax, sumac, yellow onion, black-eyed Susan, goldenrod, avocado, wood and nails). 16¼”x9”. 2019.

Interview by Adi Berardini

Using the language of feminism, folklore and religious icons, interdisciplinary artist Reilly Knowles visualizes the liberation of monsters living somewhere between life and death, male and female, human and nonhuman, and reality and fantasy – exploring the creative, liminal space between dualities. Drawing particularly from ancient Irish art and an eco-centric ethos, he constructs artworks which celebrate living entities that society attempts to tame into exploitable classifications, including the land itself. Knowles addresses how the western obsession with binaries hinders the spectrum of possibilities.

Working in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, textiles, and using natural dyeing techniques, Knowles creates art that explores how women, queer and transgender people are labelled as ‘Other.’ He envisions a radical enfolding of these bodies into an understanding of nature, with care towards women, queer people, and the environment as crucial components of working towards a healthier ecosystem. Recently, he also started a project called Swingout Sewing to document his process of hand-sewing a 1920’s wardrobe while conducting historical research, adapting the designs to meet his needs as a trans man.

Splitting his time between London and Milton, ON, Knowles is a recent graduate of Western University’s Honours Bachelor of Fine Arts program, with a Specialization in Studio Arts. He has exhibited work since 2015, showing in such venues as Artlab Gallery (London, ON), Good Sport (London, ON) and Holcim Gallery (Milton, ON). He is a recipient of the Gray Creative Arts Award in Visual Arts, the Mackie Cryderman Award for Excellence in Visual Arts, and the Kate and Robert Taylor Scholarship in Visual Arts, among others.

Reilly Knowles. “Nativity.” Wood, acrylic paint, coloured pencil, straw, sand and found figurines. 18 ¾”x16¾”x11¾”. 2019.

Your piece Nativity (2019) is a sculpture depicting a nativity scene, constructed from wood and painted, featuring straw and figurines. Can you speak more about how you use religious iconography, symbolism, and folklore in your work?

I’m really drawn to working with myths and legends. I love stories that use the fantastical to describe earthly experiences, like the cycles of life and death. I accumulate these stories over time, and they cross-pollinate in my imagination, sometimes reinforcing one another and retaining their recognizable points, while other times reassembling into personal mythologies that aren’t as easily picked out.

Stories are constantly changing, even though we might be able to trace their lineages into the far past. Biblical stories are interpreted in a wide variety of ways according to the disposition of whichever Christian culture, sect, or individual is telling them. Since these stories are meant to describe reality, the storyteller holds the immense power of ostensibly interpreting truth. For myself, even though I wasn’t raised as an active Christian, I absorbed Christian stories and their messaging around gender and bodies on a deep level. Nativity marked the beginning of an artistic exploration into stories surrounding the Virgin Mary. I wanted to see what would happen to the Nativity if Mary’s presence was centralized and liberated from a focus on her reproductive capacity. I think the result is a different kind of nativity – a birth into an exultant and independent female power.

How does your art explore the liminal gap between binaries, such as man and woman, life and death, and human and non-human? How do you find navigating this in-between space encourages you creatively?

Western society is very dualistic, but things aren’t nearly as black-and-white as we’d like to believe. For example, the male/female binary, which overwhelming favours males, collapses under a recognition of intersex individuals. The human/non-human binary, which favours humans above all other lifeforms and finds its logical conclusion in environmental destruction, becomes a mostly arbitrary distinction when we grasp the depth of our relationship with other living beings, like the trillions of bacteria that make up our bodies. These liminal gaps between binaries have immense creative potential because they’re so expansive. Embracing liminality is like getting to paint with infinite shades of grey as opposed to just that black and white.

One way I try to work with liminality is by combining supposedly opposing imagery. I like to create characters that are both male and female, plant and animal, or dead and alive. One of my favourite subjects is the mandrake plant. In legend, its root resembles a human body, and when torn from the earth, it kills its attacker with its piercing cry. The mandrake is at the fascinating intersection of fact and myth, growing and destroying, human and inhuman, and above and below. I like how it’s neither here nor there, and that’s precisely what makes it potent.

Reilly Knowles.”The Mandrake Field.” Oil on wooden panel. 36″x48″. 2019.

Your work touches on environmental themes, addressing how people attempt to classify and restrict living things including the land itself. In what ways do you address the environment and ecologies through your art?

I think my relationship with the environment is always going to be evolving, along with the ways I express that relationship in my work. I’m hesitant to make any definitive statements about what the environment signifies to me as an artist, because I know I have a long way to go in terms of fully unpacking what it means to be a white settler relating to the land in Southern Ontario. But in terms of what I’ve produced up to this point, much of my work has been about using religious imagery to frame my immediate environs as spiritual. I think that if white people put the same energy into venerating and glorifying the rivers and woodlands in our backyards as has been expended on cathedrals and illuminated gospels, then maybe we wouldn’t be experiencing environmental catastrophe.

By the land being classified and restricted, I mean that Western society teaches that humans are separate from the environment, when in reality we exist on a continuum in which we rely on and blend into one another. I’m trying to make art that collapses my body back into everything around it. One of the ways I’ve been doing this is by dyeing textiles with plants available within walking distance of my home. To be a responsible natural dyer, I have to learn what plants to use, and where and how they grow. I have to think about the seasons, the weather conditions, and the sensitivity of London’s ecosystems. It’s a slow process. It means I have to pay attention to and care about the land. It forces me to see first-hand that all art does have an environmental impact, one way or another.

Who are some artists that are influential to you and your practice?

Definitely Kiki Smith and Shary Boyle. Seeing [that] there were artists engaging with fairy tales, and that they were being taken seriously, really encouraged me early on to explore folklore without feeling apologetic. Also, Allyson Mitchell. A lot of her work operates at this intersection of crafting and queer culture, which is where I like to be.

I noticed that you have started a new project called Swingout Sewing. Can you explain more about the project and what your process has been like? In what ways do you think constructing vintage clothing can help navigate gender and queerness?

Swingout Sewing is a project where I’m documenting my process of hand-sewing a 1920’s wardrobe using historical research, while also adapting designs to meet my needs as a trans man. Right now, I’m working on the undergarment layer, which has involved reading period sewing manuals to figure out historically appropriate sewing techniques, as well as adapting original patterns. After each stage of construction, I post an article about it to the project’s website, swingoutsewing.ca.

I never knew I could be a man when I was a kid because I didn’t know trans people existed. I didn’t see them in the media, and I certainly didn’t see them in history class. When you don’t exist in the cultural imaginary of the past, it’s hard to imagine yourself in the present or the future. So, for me, making historical garments specifically designed for my trans body is about imagining those invisibilized folks of the past we might today consider transmasculine, and connecting to them in a very real, material way through the act of getting dressed. It’s also about honouring my trans body and attending to its needs, about adornment over camouflage. So much advice given to trans men beginning their transitions is about disappearing into mainstream masculine tastes. I want to follow my passion for vintage despite the threat of a conspicuous masculinity, while also rejecting the problematic attitudes (namely racism, misogyny, ableism and queerphobia) associated with the past.

In addition, there’s something delightfully queer about transitioning to live in the world as a man but poring over antique seamstress manuals and perfecting my buttonholes. This act of learning vintage menswear construction actually involves learning a lot about historical femmes and feminized labour.

Reilly Knowles. “Swingout Sewing, documentation.”2020.

Do you have any advice for someone who is first learning how to sew or work with textiles?

My first piece of advice is that just about every community is going to be chock full of elders who’d love to pass down their skills. Online tutorials can be very helpful, but they can’t compare to one-on-one teaching from an experienced textile artist. If you’re in a larger city, then you may even have some textile guilds at your disposal. Granted, your mileage in these spaces may vary if you’re visibly queer, but it’s worth considering.

Secondly, you shouldn’t listen to the people who are definitely going to tell you textile art isn’t art. Textiles are devalued because they’ve tended to be made by women. If people look down on your practice, it’s not a reflection of your practice’s worth, but rather of their unexamined sexism.

You can find more of Reilly Knowles’ work on his website, Instagram, and at Swingout Sewing.

Male Fear: Encounters with Roxanne Jackson’s Ceramic Monsters

bark at the moon (1) — Bark At The Moon. (View 1). Ceramic, glaze, underglaze decals, luster, hoop earrings; 19 x 16 x 10 inches. 2016.

By Chloe Hyman

A monster is a personified manifestation of societal fears. Some anxieties are primal, like a fear of death, while others are social, directed towards those whose distinctive appearance or behavior renders them dangerous. Sexual difference has long necessitated the creation of maternal monsters to legitimize a fear of the feminine. This anxiety motivates the policing of women’s bodies, in an effort to enforce a heterosexual gender binary. By transforming women and femmes into demons, patriarchy equates femininity with evil and masculinity with good; monstrous women keep men in power.

That is, until they don’t. Banshees and harpies that subvert monstrosity’s patriarchal parameters dispute the validity of gendered social divisions, threatening male dominance.

Such creatures abound in the oeuvre of Roxanne Jackson, a ceramicist who dissects the politics of monstrosity. In works like Bark at the Moon (2016) and Third Eye Fuck (2019), she oscillates between wish fulfillment and stereotype subversion, crafting figures that embody and disrupt tropes of feminine monstrousness.

The latter’s sexual title accentuates the comingling of fear and desire in monster tales. Film scholars Barbara Creed, Jeffrey Cohen, and Barry Keith Grant discuss how cinematic monsters attract and repulse men, fulfilling their submissive fantasies with the threat of the monstrous woman, and their dreams of domination when said threat is vanquished.[1]

This essay considers how the relationship between straight men and female monsters informs the same audience’s interpretation of Jackson’s work. Analyzing the interaction between an artwork and a particular viewer necessitates an understanding of art as a cultural product; although the artist’s intentions contribute to its significance, its many meanings are also a product of symbolic codes, dominant social ideology, and the viewer’s perspective.[2] By modeling the straight male’s encounter with subversive female monsters, this essay explores what Jackson’s work signifies to a powerful group—the descendants of the architects who constructed the myth of female monstrosity.

bark at the moon 2 (1) — Bark At The Moon. (View 2). Ceramic, glaze, underglaze decals, luster, hoop earrings; 19 x 16 x 10 inches. 2016.

The Archaic Mother

In The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, psychoanalyst Barbara Creed describes a number of monstrous cinematic archetypes. Her analysis provides a blueprint for an examination of fear, desire, and monstrosity in the bodies of monsters coded female. Creed’s description of the archetypal archaic mother elucidates how two of Jackson’s ceramic sculptures are implicitly gendered. Furthermore, it suggests that male viewers will respond to Bark at the Moon and Third Eye Fuck with repulsion, arousal, and fear.

The myth of the archaic mother centers parthenogenetic procreation—that is, female reproduction without a phallus. Mythological figures like Gaia (Greek), Coatlicue (Aztec), and the Spider Woman (Navajo) illustrate the historical lineage of self-reproducing mothers.[3] They appear today in cinema in the guise of monsters, like the titular figure in Alien whose eggs require neither phallus nor fertilization, but a human host. According to Creed, the archaic mother presents as “the voracious maw, the mysterious black hole that signifies female genitalia which threatens… to incorporate everything in its path.”[4]

At the center of Bark at the Moon sits such a mouth, its gaping lips emptying into nothingness. Ridged white tubes, caked in muck, wriggle around it like maggots. With their rounded ends, these tubes could be fallopian or phallic, an ambiguity that, paired with the mother’s vaginal maw, points to her self-reproduction. She also threatens to consume the viewer, who cannot escape her slimy hole. If the archaic mother faces him, he risks obliteration, but if she turns towards the gallery wall, then he must be inside her—an embryo-corpse.

The divine symbols ornamenting Third Eye Fuck invoke the archaic mother in a different context. Unblinking eyes adorn the deity’s cheekbones while cobalt spiders traverse her neck—a powerful allusion to her ancestor, the Spider Woman. Furthermore, the creature’s pearly-white face is bifurcated, revealing a fleshy, womb-like cave. The womb’s proximity to the creature’s mouth literalizes the narrative of the devouring mother. As Creed explains, “The archaic mother threatens to cannibalize, to take back, the life forms to which she once gave birth.”[5] Third Eye Fuck embodies this threat, collapsing the metaphor of the vaginal mouth into a single fleshy cavern, capable of consumption and ejection.

Due to their self-reproduction, Jackson’s creatures render the phallus superfluous. And because they layer vaginal and oral imagery, they threaten to consume man whole. According to Creed, this evisceration of man’s social status and bodily integrity appeals to “a masochistic desire for death, pleasure, and oblivion” that is common amongst men.[6] And yet, it is also repulsive and terrifying, which Creed attributes to abjection.

Roxanne Jackson. Third Eye Fuck (View 4) Media: Ceramic, glaze, luster; 18 x 15 x 10 inches. 2019.

Roxanne Jackson. Third Eye Fuck (View 5) Media: Ceramic, glaze, luster; 18 x 15 x 10 inches. 2019.

Abjection

The theory of abjection was introduced by the psychoanalyst and semiotician Julia Kristeva, who defined it as “that which evades borders and rules which define identity and maintain order.”[7] When matter passes the skin as it does during birth, people are reminded of their mortality and animal nature. Subsequently, the transgressive matter—in this case, blood and placenta—becomes abject, along with the tools that facilitated the transgression: the reproductive system. Men are more disturbed by abjection because they are less accustomed to the sight of blood than those with ovaries. Thus bleeding, birthing bodies become beacons of man’s inescapable death and epicenters of abjection.[8]

Historically, men in power have expressed their fear of abjection by demonizing the female body. Christian art abounds with womb-like depictions of hell and uteruses adorned with devil horns. Leviticus, for example, associates birthing bodies with decaying corpses, linking femaleness and death.[9] As Creed notes in her analysis of Alien, this trend continues in horror cinema. She describes crewmen entering a spaceship through a vaginal doorway and walking down narrow corridors (echoing fallopian tubes) to an egg-filled, womb-chamber.[10] This intra-uterine imagery roots the alien’s monstrosity in the abject female body.

A mass of tubes, holes, and flesh, Bark at the Moon and Third Eye Fuck exude abjection. Furthermore, each contains a passage through which organic matter can be imbibed or ejected. These vaginal/oral mouths repulse and terrify because they are abject reminders of human mortality.

Roxanne Jackson. Third Eye Fuck (View 3) Media: Ceramic, glaze, luster; 18 x 15 x 10 inches. 2019.

Subversion

While Bark at the Moon and Third Eye Fuck embody the archaic mother, they also subvert stereotypes of female monstrousness. Both are decadently glazed, their uterine linings shimmering like dew or diamonds rather than blood. Bark at the Moon is awash in lime, turquoise, and salmon pink, which almost obscures a floral motif that emerges from its crevices. This blue pattern, an allusion to Delft porcelain, features prominently on the pale skin of the deity that is Third Eye Fuck.

The ornamentation of monstrous bodies with bright, shimmering colors and courtly motifs subverts the binary between beauty and monstrosity.

The ornamentation of monstrous bodies with bright, shimmering colors and courtly motifs subverts the binary between beauty and monstrosity. Jackson’s sculptures occupy a liminal space between the two, where gender and morality also blur; Bark at the Moon is ambiguously gendered and Third Eye Fuck depicts a monster with an eye for Dutch design. The more viewers peer at each, the less frightening, and more intriguing, they become. To understand why this subversion elicits discomfort for male viewers, the theory of abjection proves useful.

Aesthetic codes, which are tied to gender and moral binaries, function like skin. Just as the epidermal layer protects man from blood and, therefore, the recognition of his mortality, social divisions protect members of the dominant group—men—from the knowledge that their superiority is unearned.

Media maintains these divisions by reinforcing the myth of female immorality. It also demonizes the defiance of heterosexual gender roles by giving female monsters traditionally masculine traits, like promiscuity or voracious appetite. Cinema is ripe with archaic mothers and other monsters who elicit fear in a controlled environment, for the sexual satisfaction of men whose dominance is never really at stake. It is expected that the banshee will be vanquished before the screen darkens, reasserting heterosexual gender roles.

But the fate of Jackson’s sculptures is not predestined. By deconstructing the notion that beauty equates goodness and gender clarity, while ugliness signifies immorality and gender ambiguity, the artist produces creatures of ambiguous moral character. Luminescent and bright, Bark at the Moon and Third Eye Fuck engage in an active dialogue with the male viewer. They threaten him, they tantalize him, and ultimately, they will dethrone him.

Editor’s Note: The beginning paragraph has been edited to use more inclusive language, recognizing and clarifying that these cinematic tropes affect both cis and trans women and femmes.

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Notes

[1] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 7-17; Barbara Creed, ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,’ in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), pp. 42.

[2] Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1984)

[3] Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, 1993 (London and New York: Routledge, repr. 2007), pp. 104-112; Shohini Chaudhuri, Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Creed (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 95; American Museum of Natural History, ‘The Spider Woman,’ AMNH

< https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/totems-to-turquoise/native-american-cosmology/the-spider-woman > [accessed 20 November 2019];

[4] Creed (1993), p. 116.

[5] Ibid. p. 83.

[6] Creed (1993), p. 170; 470-471.

[7] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Seuil: Paris, 1980) quoted in Creed (1993), p. 51.

[8] Creed (1993), pp. 190-193.

[9] Kristeva quoted in Creed (1993), p. 184; Margaret R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious meaning in the Christian West (Beacon Press: Boston, 1989), quoted in Creed, p. 170; Creed, p. 170.

[10] Creed (1993), pp. 83-85.

LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS by Rea Sweets

LMD_DOCUMENTATION-5586 — Rea Sweets. LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS installation shot, Charles Street Video. 2020. Photo by Roya Delsol. Images courtesy of the artist.

LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS

Charles Street Video

Organized by Margin of Eras Gallery

February 14th – March 14th, 2020

By Adele Lukusa

LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS is both a figurative and literal invitation to Rea Sweets’ bedroom. Tucked into Margin of Eras Gallery’s Charles Street Video space, on the second floor of Toronto Media Arts Centre (TMAC), the immersive installation explores being a neurodivergent, mad, and disabled individual pursuing higher education. Swept in red lighting and underscored by soft indie tunes, the disheveled and realistic bedroom evokes the artist’s presence: a desk with stacks of discarded clothes, notebooks, and food; a bed and screen-printed pillow to rest your head on; and two towers of stacked empty prescription bottles, with an LED sign with the word “take your time” sitting between them. Slide the headset over your ears, and get transported to an all-nighter with Sweets typing rapidly with coughs. A short film documents her executive dysfunction. And if you’re lucky, you could converse with Sweets herself (or scribble messages in her guestbook if you miss her).

LMD_PORTRAITS-8277 — Rea Sweets. LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS installation shot, Charles Street Video. 2020. Photo by Roya Delsol. Images courtesy of the artist.

If madness is messy, then Sweets embraces it passionately and unabashedly. At its heart, LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS is an ode to Sweets’ relationship — or rather, her break-up with post-secondary education. Through the interactive nature of the work and the accompanying public programming, LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS also demonstrates how vulnerable art can foster community dialogue.

Incorporating disability and madness into her art had not come to full fruition until Sweets signed up for Ryerson’s Cripping the Arts in Canada and A History of Madness.

Both classes are rooted in disability justice and encourage students to think critically about the ways in which society has created and enforced “normality” in relation to disability and madness, while examining the overlap between those two communities.

According to Eliza Chandler, former artistic director at Tangled Arts + Disability and disability studies professor at Ryerson, the term “mad” refers to individuals with a history of mental health diagnoses or experience with the psychiatric system, which may include institutional stays, prescribed medication use, therapy, and other medical intervention. Members of the mad community may identify as consumers, survivors, and current or ex-patients of the psychiatric system. Historically considered a slur, “mad” is currently being reclaimed by those classed as mentally ill or neurodivergent. It can encapsulate all who experience oppression due to sanism.

“[Mad] a small, monosyllabic three-letter word, but it really did afford me the kind of freedom to stop pretending,” said K Zimmer, a poet and English Literature student at the University of Toronto.

LMD_PORTRAITS-8426 — Rea Sweets. LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS installation shot, Charles Street Video. 2020. Photo by Roya Delsol. Image courtesy of the artist.

“Language is power,” said Sweets. By learning about terms like neurodivergent and mad, as well as hearing students speak about madness and disability, Sweets could better articulate her own experiences, specifically her executive dysfunction that had only been exacerbated in university.

“It’s like your capacity is always on cooldown mode,” said Sweets of executive dysfunction. “You’re smashing buttons, trying to get yourself to do things but your body-mind says ‘We can’t do that yet. We’re still recharging’.”

Within a university setting, Sweets routinely had to pull all-nighters to finish essays when professors refused accommodation.

“No matter how much you accommodate me, or think you’re leveling the playing fields, it will never be as if I am on the same level as of a neurotypical student,” Sweets says, “I’m still going to have to sacrifice my health or in some way, shape, or form.”

Art was a way to motivate herself to create beyond the academy. “At least if a situation is incredibly shitty, I can make and mold something out of this, she said. “Creating artwork for myself as a form of agency is really important for me.”

For folks like Sweets, stepping into mad-positive spaces is essential. Classes in disability studies were the first time she felt “welcomed and encouraged.” Instead of handing in an essay for her final Cripping the Arts assignment, Sweets asked if she could submit a proposal for a showcase idea. Chandler gave her the okay, and so LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS came to be.

At the front of the room, Sweets is on the mic asking about the ways madness manifests itself in art. By Sweets side are fellow mad student-poets Zimmer and Twoey Gray, as well as Max Ferguson, her mentor. Though set up as a panel discussion for the public, the conversation shared by these four artists is filled with uncommon honesty and vulnerability.

There’s no sugarcoating their experiences of sanism, of the ways pursuing post-secondary studies has impacted their desire to succeed academically at the expense of themselves. Their stories are being told, not as a heartfelt tale to make others feel better about themselves, but to embrace the good with the bad that comes with being mad.

Gray described the panel as a very “affirming” space, a sentiment echoed by Zimmer.

“There were times [when I thought], ‘Oh, I’m royally fucking up’,” they said, “[But] I could trust that I was going to be accepted in that space.”

LMD_PORTRAITS-8310 — Rea Sweets. LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS installation shot, Charles Street Video. 2020. Photo by Roya Delsol. Images courtesy of the artist.

The comfort, acceptance, and vulnerability present within that discussion is an extension of Sweets and the artwork itself. Take, for example, the wall of actual diary entries, email exchanges, and therapy notes speaking to her madness, a kind of vulnerability described by Gray as “hypersharing.”

“In some ways, the more naked and exposed and vulnerable I am, the more I’m giving [to the audience] and the more affirming my artwork happens to be,” said Sweets.

It’s what makes Sweets’ artistry so brave, according to Ferguson. “She’s incredibly good at balancing being approachable and being brave,” he said, “And she inspires others to be brave.”

When doing outreach for this show, both in-person and online, Sweets ensures she can be at the gallery. In order to accommodate for COVID-19 measures, she also narrated an online virtual tour of the exhibit through Facebook Live.

“Listening to and seeing the comments is inspiring,” Ferguson said, “It’s inspiring to see [Sweets’ art] inspire other people.”

That inherent reciprocity is what distinguishes LOVE MY DYSFUNCTIONS and all of Sweets’ work.

“That has helped me feel like [sharing] my vulnerabilities are worth it and I feel less like an open scar,” she said. “It doesn’t burn. It’s good.”

Lena Chen in Conversation with Chun Hua Catherine Dong

Chun Hua Catherine Dong. *I Have Been There.* 2015 – ongoing. Photo credit: Oliver Santana & Elizabeth Ross. Photo Courtesy of the Artist.

By Lena Chen

The expansive practice of Chun Hua Catherine Dong utilizes the artist’s own body as a bridge between immigrant and nation, mother and daughter, and the personal and the public.

First and foremost a performance artist, her work has taken the form of photography, video, installation, and more recently, animation and augmented reality. Born in China, Dong immigrated to Canada, where she received a BFA from Emily Carr University Art & Design and an MFA from Concordia University. Her experiences occupying a racialized body and adapting traditions from her homeland have played heavily in her practice, which has explored marriage, death, and maternity.

Having performed and exhibited internationally, she was also a 2014 recipient of the Franklin Furnace Award for contemporary avant-garde art and a finalist for Contemporary Art Award at Le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec ( Prix en art actuel du MNBAQ) in 2020.

Dong spoke with us about her experience of creating intimate body-based works that engage the participation of public audiences and spaces.

Lena Chen: I noticed that your most recent work, Skin Deep, and your long-running series I Have Been There, share a similar aesthetic through the use of traditional Chinese embroidered fabric. Can you talk about how they evolved?

Chun Hua Catherine Dong: These two works actually do not have many connections except using the same fabric. In 2014, I bought some fabric in Chinatown in Montreal, where the supply is very limited. The fabric was wrapped on my face very randomly and looked terrible, so I didn’t develop it further. But in 2017 and 2018, I went back to China and collected all kinds of new fabric that I began to work with. More recently, I expanded Skin Deep to animation and augmented reality to make this work more alive and architectural.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong. *Skin Deep.* Photographs with Augmented Reality. 2014-2020.

You have performed in performance art festivals around the world from The Great American Performance Art in New York to Infr’Action in Venice to Dublin Live Art Festival in Dublin to Miami Performance International Festival. Can you talk about how the site-specific performative work I Have Been There came out of your lifestyle as a traveling artist?

I started I Have Been There in 2015. I love traveling and really miss it right now [because of COVID-19]. One of the good things about being a performance artist is the chance to travel because the body is your material and your body is your work. If you travel to a new city, you need to see the tourist attractions. But I’m also a bit of a workaholic, and I considered it a waste of my time to just go see attractions without doing anything. I thought what if I could visit these sites while making work?

Chen: I’m interested in how the work deals with your relationship to your own mortality and Chinese traditions around burial, especially because of the material you’ve chosen to use.

Dong: In my hometown, there’s a tradition that when the parents die, each daughter of the family makes a shroud and they cover the body with it. When my father passed away, he had six daughters. So, his body was covered with these six layers that he was buried with.

According to Chinese tradition, it’s your children who bury you. And if you don’t have children, it’s your family. But I live here in Canada and everyone else in my family is in China. I decided not to have children, so I thought nobody’s going to bury me. But I’m still very young. I have these fantastic [opportunities] to travel around the world, so why don’t I just bury myself in the most beautiful desirable spaces wherever I want?

I have been doing this project for five years right now. Every time I travel to a new space, I would do another part of the series there. So far, I have traveled to 33 cities and 15 countries in the world. My plan is that I’m going to do it until I die or until I can’t travel anymore. This is my commitment.

Chen: Death seems to be a common theme in your work. I was also very moved by how you made peace with your mother’s passing through your art.

Dong: I was supposed to visit my mother in the summer of 2016, but I went to London because a curator invited me to do something. Then in October, she passed away very suddenly, so I have a lot of regrets about that. In the tradition of my hometown, they only keep the body for three days, and after three days that they have to bury her. But my passport was expired at the time and I couldn’t get my visa in three days, travel to Beijing, and then travel to the village. It would have taken me at least five or six days.

I wanted to do something dedicated to her because I feel I should have been there for her death, but I wasn’t. So in 2017, I went back to China, and originally, I wanted to find her personal belongings – her shoes, her clothes, her bed – so I could do something right. But after her death, my family burned everything because of tradition. They believe when a person is dead, they need access to their belongings right away in the afterlife.

I was very disappointed there was nothing left of her belongings. It was very sad. There were no smells. There were no visible things. When I was in China, I realized I was looking for my mother everywhere. If I walked around and heard a voice that sounded like my mother, I would turn around and see this old lady and I would notice that the way she walked or wore her hair would be like my mother. Her smile would look like my mother, so I was looking for my mother through other people’s mothers.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong. Mother. Photograph & Video: 14 pieces of photographs, inkjet prints, size varies, 2017.

Chen: Can you talk about how you decided to honor her memory by engaging with the women who were close to her?

Dong: I decided that I was going to looking for my mother’s childhood friends and relatives because since I came to Canada, I barely had contact with them. I visited them and I asked them because I don’t have any clothes to wear from my own mother if each of them could offer her clothes [for] me to wear.

My mother also always loved these traditional beautiful cotton flower shoes. So, I brought a pair of shoes to each mother in my project. I thought about this kind of Cinderella story of whoever fits this crystal shoe is the bride. I started [to] imagine, whoever fits these shoes is my mother. I would take a photograph of us together, with me wearing their clothes and them wearing the shoes. At that time, I didn’t even think about what I was doing as work. I was doing it for myself, as a memorial to my mother.

Next year, I will return and live with each mother for a day as her daughter. I will document this day with the 14 mothers. This film is called Mothers with No Names.

Chen: Even though the work is very much tied to your own relationship with your mother, grappling with the death of a parent is such a universally understood experience. How has the public received this piece?

Dong: The mother is universal. Every time I show this work, people become very emotional, People connect themselves to the mother in the photograph. When I showed it in Istanbul, this woman came to me and she was crying. She showed me that the jewelry she was wearing belonged to her mother.

The first time I showed this work was in South Korea and the curator said it made her think of her mother as well, who was getting older. When I had my artist talk, she left and later apologized, saying that she knew I’d be talking about the piece and it was too emotional for her to be there thinking about her own mother.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong. *Husbands and I.* Photography and performance. 2009-2011. Series photo credit: Ruth Skinner and Chad Darnford. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Chen: Even though they’re very different works, I see connections in the methods you used for your series Husbands and I, in which you documented entire days you would spend with strangers who you “married.” How did you go about getting participants for that work?

Dong: That was 11 years ago when I was still in art school. I used Craigslist and dating websites, hung flyers on the street, passed them out to people, and left them in coffee shops. At that time, I was very passionate about a performance. But now if you asked me to do it, if I could spend a day with a stranger, no, no, no, I wouldn’t. I never thought about the fact that there could be danger there because I was meeting this person I didn’t know and I went to this person’s home to spend a whole day with them. I could’ve been killed.

Chen: And did participants know this was supposed to be an artwork or was there also an expectation of intimacy?

Dong: Of course, they knew it, because I asked them to sign the contract. But also, there were many men who wanted to spend a day with me, until I said, “Okay, I’m going to film it. It will be an art piece and exhibited.” And then, 90% dropped out. They said, “Oh, I would love to spend a day with you without the camera” and I refused.

I remember two participants. One still calls me his wife, but of course, he knows I’m not. We had a ceremony, because he had a party, and I was at his house and he announced me as his wife, that we were getting married. He put a ring on my finger, and he felt that he really married me.

There was also another guy, and he was begging me to spend a day longer with him. He wanted me to be in his real life, but I couldn’t. Before this, I believed in the idea that art is life, but then I realized, if your art is really your life, you are going to mess with your life. I could not bring those men into my real life. I didn’t want to have any more connection with them, but of course, after that, [they] kept calling me, and I had to say no.

Chen: How did the project affect the way you thought of power and identity, as an Asian woman living in a Western society?

Dong: A reason I stopped doing the project is [that] after I spent the day with some of the men, I actually felt a little bit like I was taking advantage of them. The reason I was able to stay a day with them is because they don’t have partners. They are lonely people. Otherwise, they were not going to allow me to be in their life. Even though they know, it’s going to be filmed and it’s going to be an art piece, they still wanted to take this chance, because they needed this company and this kind of excitement. [In] the beginning, this work was a political piece because I always felt like I was an outsider despite living in Canada for a long time. But when you close the door and spend a day with this so-called privileged white person, I realized we were just two normal people, staying together and chatting. Before I was working on a lot of identity issues, but my work started to change after that.

Chen: What guidance do you have for other artists working in performance?

Dong: If you don’t doubt yourself, then other people won’t doubt you. When you do the performance, you have to 120% believe in what you’re doing at the moment.

In Discussion with Nathalie Quagliotto: Safety Yellow, Play, and Pilot Art List

NQuagliotto_new-carts_600 — *Twisted Reality*, fused damaged metal shopping carts colliding, 2014.
Presented in Sudbury for the FAAS4 May residency organized by the Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario.

Questions by Adi Berardini

Nathalie Quagliotto’s sculptures add a sense of playfulness to conceptual art. By using play and the uncanny, Nathalie challenges what a typical gallery experience can look like for viewers. She looks at architecture and questions how the materiality of everyday spaces can form our experiences. Quagliotto is well-known for using “safety yellow” in her work adapted from the industrial yellow found in caution signs or playgrounds, making subversive statements that often linger between innocence and adulthood or caution and action. Additionally, by using the language of consumer culture such as neon signs and shopping carts, she makes us consider our roles within larger societal structures. She has recently started PILOT: Art List featuring paid opportunities for artists.

Quagliotto is a Toronto and Montreal based conceptual and social practice artist. She received an MFA in sculpture from the University of Waterloo in 2009 and a BFA in studio art from Concordia University in 2007. In 2008, she was Martin Creed’s studio assistant in London, England. She has shown nationally and internationally, such as the Museum of Design in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and her work is in private and public collections, such as the Collection Majudia in Montreal, Quebec. She has shown at various artist-run centres and galleries across Canada, namely the Khyber Centre for the Arts, the AGO, Blackwood Gallery, UAS, Neutral Ground, Langage Plus, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, and the Estevan Art Gallery. Additionally, she has partaken in residencies, such as the Calumet artist residency in Indiana, the Accessibility CMD+R media art residency in Tennessee, USA, and more recently the Vancouver International Sculpture Biennale artist residency.

I was wondering if you could explain your interest in subverting everyday objects? Are you interested in their connection to the uncanny or how they can critique social structures?

I like to take everyday objects in my work, whether it’s a neon sign, a lollipop, playground objects, or tote bags (the list can go on and on) and reconfigure them ever so slightly that your interaction and relationship with them is disrupted. I like that an object can get really unsettling when you change its intended purpose or form.

It seems that you use interventions that encourage play, like tic tac toe in your piece ‘Maturity Turn’ Can you explain more about the sense of play, intimacy and social connection you explore in your practice?

Yes, this is particularly evident in the playground installations I’ve created, like in this piece you mention, “Maturity Turn”. Such installations are participatory and play on the notion of how a form or structure can be safe at the same time as it can be a challenge, and how the invitation to play with the work can act this out.

My interest in the playground sculptures and installations lie in play theory and incorporating the history of playgrounds as being objects of social reform. Playgrounds have a long history, from the early 1900s, of making a gradual change to society by improving the lives of the public through play. The more dangerous a structure was, the more challenging it was and thereby made a person more productive in other aspects of their life. These structures, built quite high at the time, have disappeared because of being labeled as dangerous. Lower playgrounds appeared in the second half of the 1900s, specifically around the time of the playground construction boom of the 1960s. Many of these metal and concrete playground pieces have also gradually disappeared in our time and are being replaced by safer plastic items: the kind of metal structures that playground architects Paul Friedberg and Richard Dattner would have agreed on in the 1960s and 1970s. I am attracted to such older objects because they were once solid, acceptable pieces to be placed in public. However, as time progressed, so did ideas surrounding public safety, and this affected social reform through time.

NQuagliotto_galleryarena — Nathalie Quagliotto. Gallery Intervention. 2013. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of the artist.

I notice that you use signifiers of capitalist ventures (like neon signs etc.) for public interventions, for example, in Gallery Intervention where you place a neon sign that says “Gallery” in the hockey arena. I was wondering if you could speak more about this piece? In what ways are you interested in these unconventional signifiers?

This was a rather quirky intervention! I was invited by the Blackwood Gallery of the University of Toronto Mississauga campus to create an installation for “Door to Door 6” back in 2013 and the point of the exhibition series was to place art completely outside of an art context. I decided to place three yellow neon signs that read the word “GALLERY” in the Streetsville hockey arena in the Vic Johnston Community Centre in Mississauga. By placing commercial gallery signage in a completely different environment where it would normally be found, the project created a type of pop-up art space. The gallery context was transformed into a site-specific intervention that pushed the public who possibly had little experience with art to think about what an artwork, an exhibition, and a gallery could potentially be.

I’ve used neon various times for different installations and interventions. I think neon as an object has an incredible potential to attract attention because it can get kind of strange and unsettling if you take it out of its commercial context of store and restaurant windows in society.

D.D_N.Quagliotto.TH-14_600 — Nathalie Quagliotto. Gallery Intervention (2013) Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid courtesy of the artist.

Your work seems to bring a sense of critique to the gallery itself. I was wondering you could speak more to the critique of the gallery space and your approach through your work?

I like to disrupt conventional notions of behavior in the gallery context and allow people to hang out and interact with the work. I like to encourage participation. This I’d say is more evident in my installations and sculptures involving playground equipment or general objects of play in the gallery context where I invite the audience to touch the objects.

Who are some artists that you admire or look to for inspiration?

Lately, I’ve really been into Alicia Eggert’s and Alejandro Diaz’s neon work.

Do you find that there are challenges working as a conceptual artist in a male-dominated art world? If so, what are some challenges?

I’d like to see more women land museum shows. Also, I definitely think there are challenges that women artists face on a commercial level in terms of selling artwork.

Nathalie Quagliotto. Carry Yourself. 2019. As part of Vancouver Biennale.

Can you speak more about Pilot: Art List? What was the inspiration behind starting this new project?

The project started in November 2018 as a way to encourage a multitude of professional artists out there to only apply to opportunities from institutions and galleries that pay them. I look at calls all the time and I have for years, and I have to say that in the 10 years I’ve been out of my MFA degree, I’ve never found a list on any platform on only funded calls, so I finally decided to make one. This is probably the most beneficial list that an artist can sign up to and it comes out every two weeks. I got the word out through social media over the past year and there are currently hundreds of artists signed up to the list across Canada and in the USA. The calls on each list are researched and hand-picked for funded exhibitions, residencies, fellowships, and public art primarily from Canada and the USA. Right now, artists can sign up at https://nathaliequagliotto.com/PILOT-ART-LIST . I honestly think this is one of the best social projects I’ve created because of the number of artists it’s actively helping.

You can view more of Nathalie’s work at https://nathaliequagliotto.com/.

Profiles on Practice: Yen-Chao Lin

Yen-Chao Lin. The Eroding Garden. Copper, glass enamel, stainless steel. 200cm x 49cm. 2019.

By Nadia Kurd

Dowsing is known as the process of finding water using divination rods. This old technique of sourcing water can be found in various cultures across the globe. For modern-day dowsers, in addition to sourcing water, “they frequently can report its volume, depth, flow direction and potability.”[1]

For Taiwan-born, Montréal-based multidisciplinary artist Yen-Chao Lin, this practice has been a significant inspiration to art. Many of Lin’s works begin organically and can be sparked by the items she collects, hears or senses. The combination of spirituality, folklore, and DIY practices—as found in dowsing— has foregrounded much of Lin’s film, installation, and textile-based works. Moreover, as a child, she was exposed to a variety of religious philosophies, as her mother would take her to places such as Buddhist temples, Sunday mass, and Mormon gatherings.[2]

Yen-Chao Lin, portrait. Photograph by Ashutoshk Gupta. Courtesy of the artist.


Yen-Chao Lin. The Eroding Garden. Copper, glass enamel, stainless steel. 200cm x 49cm. 2019.

Lin’s long-term research into dowsing which included conducting interviews and attending monthly meetings with the Ottawa Dowser’s, led to the creation of her installation Eroding Garden (2019). As a result, Lin created a three-part installation that combines 2000 glass enamelled Canadian pennies, a porcelain bowl with an erected chopstick, and several suspended, casted hands holding dowsing sticks, both in real and imaginary ways. As Lin writes, the work also incorporates her own family history. This history is symbolically reflected, as Lin notes;

The porcelain bowl with the chopstick is drawn from my family oral history, where my grandmother made a chopstick stand in water and communicated with the spirit of a deceased relative who was causing illness to my mother. In many East Asian cultures, chopsticks should not be left vertically stuck into a bowl of rice because it resembles the ritual of incense-burning that symbolizes feeding the dead.[3]

While the work evokes a more intuitive approach to connecting with land and water, dowsing also has an insidious, political history as well. As Lin points out, “dowsing is also used by the petroleum industry to locate oil wells, mining companies for ore, as well as the US army in Korea and Vietnam, to find tunnels and food caches.”[4]

EG_Bowl_02 — Yen-Chao Lin. *The Eroding Garden*, 2019. Porcelain, hand-forged steel, 22k gold leaf. 12cm x 12cm x 25cm.

In another installation Perchance (2018), 23 booklets, silk tapestries, and several divination sticks are arranged in a way that creates a space where “self-administered divination is offered.”[5] For this project, Lin “visited fortune tellers in Hong Kong and Taiwan, observed different collective and individual divination practices, studied the ancient tradition of I Ching and explored the materiality of silk.”[6] The work melds the sensibilities of traditional East Asian aesthetics and religious practices to forge a contemporary ‘system for divination.’ Here, visitors are permitted to interact with the I-Ching bundle (placed in the centre of the silk banners) and interpret their own numerically based fortune from reading the 23 booklets on the wall. This process ultimately melds chance and instruction and asks visitors to reflect on “socially determined networks of information distribution.”[7]

2018-04-18-SBCDeadLetter-021 — Yen-Chao Lin, *Perchance*, 2018. Photography by Paul Litherland, courtesy of SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art.

Her most recent project, The Spirit Keepers of Makut’ay (2019) also follows a highly intuitive process. This short, experimental film was shot on the rural coast of Taiwan in collaboration with the local Amis Indigenous community. Largely abstract in nature, the film poetically “unravels mixed-faith expressions from Daoist ritual possession to a Presbyterian funeral” to reveal the past Amis healers. For Lin, this work brings together the past and present to show how “nature, colonization and population migration” comes together in Taiwan’s unique spiritual landscape.[8] The Spirit Keepers of Makut’ay will have its Canadian premiere the Vancouver International Film Festival this October.

Makutaay still 10 — Yen-Chao Lin. The Spirit Keepers of Makuta’ay Still. 10:57. 2019.

Since migrating to Canada at the age of thirteen to pursue an education, Lin recalls that she had, “this overwhelming strong pulsation darting out from my heart, telling me I must leave in order to pursue what I want out of this life. I wanted to leave since I was 11, it took two years to convince my parents and it was not easy.”[9] This determination led her to pursue an arts education. After earning a Cégep (Studio Arts) diploma and a BFA (Film Production) from Concordia University (Montréal) in 2008, Lin has gone on to participate in numerous residencies, exhibitions, and performances in Canada and abroad.

With an understanding of how she may be perceived as an immigrant woman of colour, a large part of Lin’s work has also involved working with arts organizations to develop equity policies and practices. In 2019, she was the Equity Officer for La Centrale Gallerie Powerhouse, a feminist artist-run centre in Montréal. This experience made her realize “how important and challenging it is to make space for equity-seeking folks within institutions, and how education, leadership development, and solidarity can contribute to change.”[10]

Combined with an intuitive sensibility, Lin’s practice, on the whole, is rooted in examining equity and justice. “I believe in self-empowerment, the accessibility of arts, and the possibility of change through art,” reflects Lin, “I’m a critical person and I will always question the dominant structure of power, either through my work as an artist or as a cultural worker.”[11]

To see more of Yen-Chao Lin’s art and upcoming projects, visit her website: yenchaolin.com

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

[1] Canadian Dowsers Association. https://canadiandowsers.org/introduction-to-dowsing/ (accessed September 10, 2019).

[2] Yen-Chao Lin, interview by author, Edmonton, AB, September 6, 2019.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Yen-Chao Lin, Artist Website: yenchaolin.com, (accessed September 7, 2019).

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid. Note: I Ching can be described as “philosophical taxonomy of the universe, a guide to an ethical life, a manual for rulers, and an oracle of one’s personal future.” For more information, see: http://www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb-china-archive/what-i-ching

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Interview by author.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

The Poetic Everyday: In Conversation with Natalie Hunter

02_NatalieHunter_RodmanHall_2019 — Natalie Hunter. *Staring Into The Sun*. Solo exhibition at Rodman Hall Arts Centre. Hansen Gallery. 2019. Documentation image by Jimmy Limit.

Questions by Adi Berardini

Natalie Hunter’s work brings the everyday experience into a wondrous technicolour world, where the present moment meets that of memory. Bridging photography, sculpture, and installation, photos of interior domestic spaces are re-imagined through a kaleidoscope of colours, cyan meeting magenta, yellow and violet. She often produces experiential installations using photographs on transparent film, light, and other fragile materials that engage with the poetics of time, memory, perception, and the senses.

Natalie holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo, and a Bachelor of Art in Visual Art with a Concentration in Curatorial Studies from Brock University. She has shown her work in Canada and the United States in numerous exhibitions, including Rodman Hall Arts Centre, Centre 3 for Print and Media Arts, Art Gallery of Windsor, Hopkins Centre For the Arts at Dartmouth College, Museum London, University of Waterloo Art Gallery, and the Hamilton Supercrawl. She is the recipient of several awards including an Ontario Arts Council Creation Project Grant, and a Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grant.

08_NatalieHunter_RodmanHall_2019 — Natalie Hunter. *The sky seemed to fold in ribbons of palest sunlight*. 2017. Giclee prints on transparent film, poplar, light. installation dimensions variable. 12” x 72” each print. Documentation image by Jimmy Limit.

It seems like your work facilitates a “looking closer” since it often uses colour and layering of translucent images until they are nearly rendered abstract. Can you speak more about the conceptual ideas in your work and your process? How does it relate to perception and memory?

Natalie Hunter: My practice is multidisciplinary and concerned with the transformation of materials, objects, and images in ways that evoke an emotive or psychological response in the viewer. I often make images and installations and think of myself as a sculptor who fell in love with images. I’m interested in process and materials just as much as concepts. The starting point for most of my work boils down to light and time, both of which can be experienced differently through image and sculpture. I’m interested in really ephemeral things like light, air, memory, the senses, motion, stillness, and time. Things we can feel the effects of, how they shape experience, and how these concepts can be articulated in material ways. I very much look at photographs as material fluid things that are tangible objects vulnerable to the elements. I find sculpture and photography related in some way. There is an element of stillness in sculpture and photography that speaks to the present moment, but also the past. The negative and positive aspects of photography mirror that of sculpture and casting—both are traces just in different ways.

I’m really interested in the exploratory, transformative power of materials to translate these experiences of the everyday.

For the past seven or eight years, I’ve been working with layering images both physically (layering transparent photographs to make new images and spaces), and inside of the camera (multiple exposures). I find this act of layering both inside and outside of the camera transcends logical ideas of time. For me, the act of layering images subverts expected notions of a perfect photographic image and notions of linear time. I use layering in an attempt to connect with the processes of human memory. Layering both accumulates and loses information, and this is what happens as we accumulate memories, sensory information, and thoughts over time. Detail is lost, while sensation is accentuated.

When making images, I use colour filters to bring attention to these layers. They help me slow down and separate different moments of time while leaving clues as to how the images were made. I choose combinations of colour filters emotively; choosing colours that naturally occur in the spaces I occupy to further accentuate them. Colour is sensorial in the visual sense. I believe that the addition of colour heightens awareness. When I think about the strongest earliest memory that I have, I can’t identify details, but I can describe the sensations, and for me adding colour through the use of filters is a way of exploring sensation or sensory information through photography. In this way, I hope to make a predominantly visual medium physical.

06_NatalieHunter_RodmanHall_2019 — Natalie Hunter. *Helios* (interior day view). Hand-applied dichroic film on window, light. variable dimensions. 2019. Documentation image by Jimmy Limit.

You take photographs of what may seem ordinary or mundane, like the interior blinds and curtain shots in As the Light Touches and create something quite awe-inspiring and vibrant. Can you speak more about the transforming of everyday, familiar spaces?

NH: Artists should make work about their experience and how they perceive and understand the world. The mundane experiences we find ourselves in on a daily basis are often those in-between moments that we don’t really count as experiences. I’m really interested in the exploratory, transformative power of materials to translate these experiences of the everyday. Memory is just as important as breathing in our human experience and I’m interested in exploring how that manifests and transforms through time. I feel like we are all unconsciously shaped by the spaces we inhabit on a daily basis, and I know that my work is often influenced by the spaces I spend the most time in. Space is something psychological just as much as it is physical, and I want to explore both of these aspects of space in my work.

Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is a text that I return to a lot. It has been influential in how I understand my work and its relationship to space, time, and memory. We participate daily in the creation of spaces we unconsciously make for ourselves. I don’t wish for my work to merely represent these spaces, but instead, act as experiences in and of themselves that become new spaces and encounters in their own right.

05_NatalieHunter_RodmanHall_2019 — Natalie Hunter. *Helios* (interior day view). Hand-applied dichroic film on window, light. variable dimensions. 2019. Documentation image by Jimmy Limit.

Your work seems to incorporate the surrounding architecture of the space it occupies. For example, your installation Helios at the Rodman Hall Art Centre, a site-responsive piece that addresses the ephemeral qualities of light and how it affects familiar spaces, the body, and our perception. I was wondering what your process is like in terms of creating work that is more site-specific?

NH: I don’t like to ignore the space my work exists in. I try to consider the space it exists in at the time of exhibition as an element of the work itself. Often, my work changes when it’s installed a second or third time, or from my studio to the gallery space. I need to do site visits when thinking about site-specific work, and I usually respond in an emotive way that speaks to a unique characteristic of a space in order to converse with it. Memory plays a big part in this. When responding to a space site-specifically, I hope to produce a kind of encounter between viewer and work that elicits memory or a sensorial response.

Helios was a site-responsive installation at Rodman Hall Art Centre exhibited in my solo exhibition Staring into the sun. When making Helios, I wanted to consider it a gesture, response, or conversation with Rodman Hall; a connecting work that bridges outside and inside and only exists for a short time in the space. I was really influenced by my memories and experiences of Rodman Hall as a student. I remember ascending the stairs and seeing the stained glass, which is located in various locations in Rodman Hall’s domestic spaces. I wanted to converse with these architectural elements while at the same time make something new. Something that made you more aware of time, your body, and the space you exist in a very present, albeit slow, way. Change and fluidity are important to this work. And the work took on its own life as winter stretched to spring and the light changed.

I think Helios points to the process of how I create images and think with materials. I spent about a little over a month playing with samples of dichroic film, doing material research, finding out what it does in different lighting conditions, bending, folding, layering, and draping it in various situations, and mixing it with different materials. A lot of my inquiries stem from testing materials to see what they will do. Helios is much about slow movement, the slowness of time, and how we perceive it through our human senses. I hope to continue exploring what I learned in making this work.

07_NatalieHunter_SunsRays — **Natalie Hunter. *The Sun’s Rays Do Not Burn Until Brought To A Focus.* Installation at Centre 3 For Print and Media Arts, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. 2018. Documentation courtesy of the artist.**

Q: Your installation The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus creates a “temporal experience for the viewer since as the sun moves across the sky, each work is animated with their own ephemeral rhythm.” I was wondering if you could speak more about this work and the use of natural processes, light and time?

NH: I use light in the making of images, but also physically in how they are exhibited and exist within space. For me, light is quite kinetic or makes the work kinetic through the passage of time. There is both stillness and subtle motion in my installation The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus, achieved through different uses of artificial and natural light. I use light in this installation as a material that activates spaces.

Light is fundamental to photography, and I consider its manipulation as a material process in my work. Light is also fundamental to sculpture because it is how we are able to situate and perceive objects in space. Light is ephemeral, like time and memory. Natural sunlight is always changing, where as artificial light is static. In The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus, natural sunlight is used in a kinetic way, gallery lighting is used in a rather still way, which casts latent imagery on the surfaces of the exhibition space. A viewer’s experience of the work is not static but always changing. Elements move with the subtlety of the air movement in the space, and the installation seems different on a cloudy day, or between dawn and dusk.

It’s hard to discuss photography without discussing time because time is so essential to the medium. Photography is always seen as a frozen moment, but for me, photographs are fluid things. A lot of my transparent film works require active movement in the space that they occupy in order to experience them. The light activates them, but the viewer does through movement too. For example, in The sky seemed to fold in ribbons of pales sunlight, it appears different when standing at different points in the room. When standing directly in front of the piece, the physical images almost disappear, and you only see latent imagery on the walls. When standing at an angle, the images appear layered with themselves and the latent imagery on the walls. You aren’t sure what the true image is; the physical photograph or its latent reflection.

Q: Who are some artists that are influential to you and your practice?

NH: A lot of the artists I admire often explore quiet and overlooked elements of our being and how they shape experience. I look to artists like Tacita Dean, Uta Barth, James Welling, Sabine Hornig, and Sarah VanDerBeek for their consideration of materiality in lens-based image making. I feel a kinship to artists like Ann Hamilton, Roni Horn, Kimsooja, and Alison Wilding for their conceptual and material research, and multidisciplinary approaches to working. In 2012, I spent a summer internship working for sculptor and installation artist Soo Sunny Park. This was a priceless opportunity and an integral part of my artistic development and education in terms of understanding space and place. She encouraged me to think about my images in material ways and take my interest both in sculpture and images into installation territory. She taught me that sculptors have a unique understanding of space. I want to continue to develop and explore that in my work—subverting expectations of what images and installation can be.

09_NatalieHunter_Dappled — Natalie Hunter. *Dappled* (detail). 2018. Archival inkjet prints on backlight film draped over poplar and aluminum sculptures. Approximately 24″ x 60″ x 36″ each. Documentation courtesy of the artist.

Q: Can you speak more about the upcoming exhibition Shaping Time: Natalie Hunter, Xiaojing Yan and Lois Schklarat at Latcham Art Centre? What work will you be displaying?

NH: Shaping Time: Natalie Hunter, Xiaojing Yan and Lois Schklar at Latcham Art Centre considers ideas of memory and time through a multimedia lens. Elisa Coish curated Shaping Time around the 40th anniversary of Latcham Art Centre. Part of her curatorial strategy involves inviting artists at different stages of their careers to create a larger dialogue surrounding these concepts and the different approaches and discussions that can arise from it. Both Xiaojing Yan and Lois Schklar are well recognized and established artists that have exhibited with Latcham Art Centre in the past. Elisa Coish invited me as the emerging artist to exhibit work in Shaping Time after my solo exhibition Staring into the sun closed at Rodman Hall in May. I will be exhibiting some of the work that was shown at Rodman Hall in Staring into the sun, but also some work that has never been exhibited that I made in 2018 with an Ontario Arts Council grant. The work going in Shaping Time is an overview of the many approaches and materials I use to consider light, time, and memory in both installation and photo-based ways. It will be interesting to see how I respond to the space during installation because Latcham Art Centre is essentially a white cube. Corners are often considered non-spaces, and I am fond of corners for their surreal shape and potential for activating a space. In this way, I’m hoping to converse with some of the architectural elements in the space during installation.

You can view more of Natalie Hunter’s work from July 10 – August 24^th 2019 in Shaping Time: Natalie Hunter, Xiaojing Yan and Lois Schklar at Latcham Art Centre, curated by Elisa Coish and on her website.

Profiles on Practice: Soheila K. Esfahani

Soheila Esfahani. The Immigrants: Canada 150. Installation shot. Courtesy of the artist.

By Nadia Kurd

From manuscripts featuring gilded vegetal motifs to the tiled geometric interiors of mosques, design and ornamentation have played a foundational role within Islamic art. Such designs have long adorned a wide array of objects and buildings. While some historians attribute the prominence of patterning to the preference of non-figural representations in Islam, others argue this is a rather overstated misconception, noting the often-tenuous lines between secular and religious themes within Islamic art.

Artist in Studio — Soheila Esfahani. Courtesy of the artist.

Since graduating with a BFA (Studio) in 2003, artist Soheila K. Esfahani has merged both the patterning traditions of Islamic art (particularly from Iran) and an approach informed by the “terrains of cultural translation.”[1] For example, in her early painting series titled “Reed Flute” (2008), Esfahani drew from the well-known poetic work of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (1207–1273) to create a number of calligraphic, acrylic on canvas works. These paintings feature verses in Perso-Arabic script and involve a process of pouring paint directly onto the canvas, which abstracts the text — ultimately rendering it illegible — and transforming it into pure design.

soheila_reed-flute_within the Notes III”, Acrylic on canvas, 8”x10”, 2008, Collection of Accelerator Centre — *Soheila Esfahani. “within the Notes III”, Acrylic on canvas, 8”x10”, 2008, Collection of Accelerator Centre. Courtesy of the artist.*

From painting to installation, The Immigrants: Canada 150 (2017) is comprised of 60 custom-made ceramic plates that are infused with images of clothing labels that emphasize the country of origin. Drawing inspiration from the theme of Frederick H. Varley’s painting the Immigrants (1922), the installation is made up of plates that are similar to the tourist souvenirs commonly found in North America that have been transformed to correspond with individual immigration stories. The installation was spurred by a story that resonated with Esfahani involving her second-generation Canadian-Bangladeshi friend. When Esfahani asked her to describe her culture, she provided Esfahani with a “Made in Bangladesh” clothing label from her favorite garment. By accentuating the manufacturing label, Esfahani writes that this installation, “questions displacement, dissemination” by “re-contextualizing culturally specific ornamentation and various collected souvenir objects.”[2]

Her more recent work has continued to explore the circuitous yet closely regulated nature of global trade. For instance, in Cultured Pallets: Small Arms Inspection Building (2018)[3] Esfahani takes the ever-present wooden industrial pallets and stencils onto them a nineteenth century William Morris floral motif named the “Persian,” a pattern very likely inspired by the historic sixteenth-century Ardabil carpet — one of the most prized examples of Islamic and Safavid art at the V&A Museum.[4] Not only do these wood pallets feature floral designs, but they are also inscribed with the artist’s email so that when Esfahani disperses them, their new owners may be in touch.

Soheila Esfahani Cultured Pallets SAIB 2018 acrylic on wooden shipping pallets — Soheila Esfahani. Cultured Pallets: Small Arms Inspection Building. 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Upon a closer examination of the histories between the West and East — an exchange frequently under the guise of resource control and colonialism — one sees how patterning and design are deeply ingrained in cross-cultural trade, which often sees objects being moved from its place of origin to be transformed into something else entirely. Moreover, while the floral motifs have roots in Iran, the attribution to Morris for the ‘Persian’ speaks to a sense of authorship and authority over the design. Esfahani brings together these layered histories to her work to rethink the meaning and implications of these exchanges on common and even disposable objects.

Esfahani once again explores earthenware and the subject of cultural exchange in Pattern (dis)Placement (2019). Here, the plate becomes a metaphor for “portable culture”, which “can be carried across cultures and nations.”[5] In the Magic Gumball Machine of Fate (2019), for a fee of $2, visitors to the exhibition of this work are invited to take a piece of this patterned displacement home from a gumball machine. Within small plastic enclosures, the artist’s work is distributed and the recipient is encouraged to colour and share the image on social media. Much like the pallets and plates, these small drawings travel and exchange hands at every turn. For Esfahani, it is important to show the instability of categories and ideally, challenge the viewer to situate their own histories through her work.[6]

Soheila Esfahani The Immigrants Canada 150 detail 1 (1) — Soheila Esfahani. The Immigrants: Canada 150. 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

Esfahani’s practice shows the interconnectedness of global networks to emphasize how it is almost wholly informed by political and cultural attitudes, clearly seen in the ongoing economic sanctions on Iran. Despite complying with international regulations on their uranium enrichment program, everyday Iranians continue to endure the most due to the lack of goods entering the country and the resulting widespread failing economy. These sanctions have “slapped barriers on trade involving Iranian metals, as well as its automotive and airline industries” and have adversely affected Iran’s oil and banking sectors, which have faced the most detrimental consequences.[7]

In linking design with trade, manufacturing, and history, Esfahani’s work reminds us that the realm of design, including ornamentation, and concepts of beauty are deeply rooted in our values and ideas as a society – and that these are not merely aesthetic concerns. “My work,” writes Esfahani, “evokes issues on migration as people, ultimately, function as ‘bearers’ and ‘translators’ of culture in our current globalized state.”[8]

To see more of Soheila K. Esfahani’s artwork, visit her website soheila.ca or follow her on Instagram @soheila.esfahani.

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

[1] Soheila K. Esfahani, Artist Statement, 2019.

[2] Artist Statement, 2019.

[3] The Small Arms Inspection Building is a historic, multi-purpose arts and education space in Mississauga, ON: smallarmsinspectionbuilding.ca

[4] http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/p/plant-motifs-in-islamic-art/

[5] Artist Statement, 2019.

[6] Soheila K. Esfahani, interview by author, Edmonton, AB, May 31, 2019.

[7] Colin Dwyer and Larry Kaplow. “U.S. Is About To Reinstate Iran Sanctions. Here’s What That Means,” NPR, last modified November 2, 2018, accessed May 29, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2018/11/02/663377999/u-s-is-days-away-from-reinstating-iran-sanctions-heres-what-that-means

[8] Artist Statement, 2019.