Reconnecting Through Recipes: Reflections with Meegan Lim

Meegan Lim. Harvest Garden Zine Interior View. Image Courtesy of the artist.

Interview by Aysia Tse

Meegan Lim is an illustrator based in Brampton, Ontario whose practice meets at the intersections of food, culture, storytelling, and social change. Since graduating from the illustration program at OCAD University in 2021, she has been working on zines, comics, illustrative work, various public and community art projects, and editorial initiatives. She was recently awarded the “Best Political Zine” for her publication Harvest Garden by the Broken Pencil Zine Awards in 2021. Lim spoke more about her love for food, zine-making, and the sometimes-bumpy journey of reconnecting to your cultural identity through art. 

You create personal and socially engaged zines that explore your cultural identity through discussions with food. Can you speak more about how you came to develop your practice at the intersection of these topics?

During school in my second year, there was more autonomy with the projects that I was able to tackle. I saw it as an opportunity to explore my cultural identity, but by food, it was kind of an epiphany moment I would say. I’ve always been a big foodie, always loved the Food Network as a child, and of course, familywise has been a way for me to connect to my own culture, but I never thought to combine it with my art. When I did, it was an obvious pairing. That was the start of it, it was just right in front of me and then I realized that there was just so much more beyond my own culture, of course. It’s beyond the actual physicality of food and tastes, it goes back to memory, it goes back to history, and it carries so many different meanings for all kinds of people. That’s what keeps me going back to it. 

Meegan Lim. MSG: The Craving for Cultural Embrace Cover. Photo Courtesy of the Artist.

In your zine called MSG: the Craving for Cultural Embrace, you reflect on the Asian minority trope and resisting these definitive boundaries of identity. Can you speak more about your reflective process when digesting these topics and then having them as a part of your creative projects?

I didn’t dive into these tropes or these histories until I moved away from home. That distance forced me to think about it more, I was researching on my own and trying to make it make its way into my own schoolwork as well, in my conceptual focus through my illustration work. I got into a big wormhole of the internet, going through big journals about all of these tropes, the history of Chinese restaurant syndrome. It threw me into a little crisis because it was the first time where I sat with those ideas and those concepts. I didn’t have that context, so once I was able to identify that, I wanted to document it because I have a hard time feeling my feelings. 

I don’t know if it’s like an Asian thing, but it was something that I just really wanted to capture in my art form, and it coincidentally lined up when I was visiting my family back in Malaysia. I wrote the majority of MSG while I was there. It was a mind trip of sorts because I was writing it in the same environment where I was experiencing those first cultural identity crises. The first time we went back to Malaysia I was maybe seven or eight years old and having that realization that you can’t fully communicate with your family, or you feel that big disconnect culturally, it’s an interesting feeling. It was like art journaling of sorts. I was not able to speak the language, but I [could] still understand that my family was talking about me, about how Westernized, how white, or banana I was. So, it was interesting to reflect on that 10 years later.

Meegan Lim. MSG: The Craving for Cultural Embrace Interior View. Photo Courtesy of the Artist.

I love the colorful and playful aesthetics of your personal risograph zines. I loved to hold it when I experienced it in person. What drew you to zines as the medium for the topic you address? I’m curious as I know you’re also a drawer, painter, and illustrator.

It’s exactly what you described. It’s the feeling you have of that physical item in your hands because it’s just so intimate. You’re like really intimate with the person, that person who’s reading it. I love how it can sometimes feel like those little notes your friends pass in class. It’s almost like having a direct conversation with the people who pick [it] up. I’m allowed to be as personal as I can. Zines were like a journal for me—It’s like art therapy of sorts. I had a box of zines where I just used old copy paper, no one has ever seen them, but some are just doodles, and some are just a bunch of words. It’s very much a very cathartic medium for me. 

Using food as a medium for storytelling can be the source of a very meaningful conversation for other people.

Are there specific things that excite you about using food as a jumping-off point for storytelling?

When I was identifying that food was something I wanted to focus on, I was also a bit nervous because with illustration, you can be focused on having a certain style or you get pigeonholed into certain topics or aesthetics. I was worried I was going to be known as the food illustrator, but also, I don’t mind it now. There is so much more than just food. Using food as a medium for storytelling can be the source of a very meaningful conversation for other people. It doesn’t really matter what my initial intention is with the illustration or the zine, it’s what carries on afterward because who knows what other people are going to get from it. I know you’re Singaporean, so you were able to get lots out of it [since] it carried back some other memories. And that’s something that I didn’t initially intend through sharing my mom’s recipes, but it happens and it’s really cool.

Meegan Lim. Red Pocket Recipes. Interior View. Photo Courtesy of the artist.

Yeah! In (Red) Pocket Recipes you share Chinese-Malaysian recipes, some of which are nostalgic for me, as I was born in Singapore! You included Laksa, a fish-based rice noodle soup that brought me back to some of my own childhood memories. Can you speak a bit more about your love for recipe sharing?

Recipes always just made their way through my childhood. Being able to share my mom’s recipes and some of my own recipes with other people, it’s the satisfaction of seeing other people create it or resonate it, or be like, “thanks for sharing this recipe with me, it turned out really good.” It’s almost a level of trust. Recipes are a form of oral and written history that isn’t captured a lot, especially in my family. It took a lot to get my mom to sit down and write the recipes with me. I locked my bedroom door and said, “sit on the bed” – we’re getting teaspoon, tablespoon measurements out of her.

It means a lot to be able to capture that because I’ll never hear the end of my aunts saying “oh, you better get your mom’s recipes, because she’ll go someday and you won’t have that.” You won’t be able to capture your heritage if you don’t actively practice it, right? 

Meegan Lim. Icing on the Cake. Photo Courtesy of the artist.

Do you have any advice for other artists who are just beginning to explore and reconnect to their cultural identity through art? 

I mean, I’m still figuring it out. My main point of advice would be to go at your own pace and be kind to yourself because it can be very emotionally heavy to discover all those different layers that you might not have realized were there when you were a kid. So just take your time. It can be hard to digest and uncover a lot of those memories that can be triggering and weird to uncover when you’re an adult. 

I guess my second advice point would be to just look to other artists, creators or educators who are talking about similar experiences, not only for comfort and relate-ability but also just inspiration for your own work. You’re most definitely not the only person experiencing that, so it’s important to recognize those other people, and use those avenues to understand what has already been shared, that way you’re able to really explore your own intricacies and details of your own experience.

When I was initially exploring it in my own art, I was very hyper-aware of self-tokenization and how it can impact how others see you. That shouldn’t be how you go about things, but it is something to consider, especially in an Asian community where tropes easily develop. After I published MSG, I was very hyper-aware of the lunchbox moment and I was like, am I just repeating the same thing in an echo chamber? So that’s something to be aware of but try not to let other people dictate how you are experiencing your own cultural identity because it is different for each person. 

What’s next for you?

I don’t think I’m going to stop drawing food anytime soon. I keep saying there’s going to be like a Red Pocket Recipes Two or I that I’m going to post new recipes, but it’s so hard to sit myself down to do that. Hopefully, I’ll be able to make that time in the next year or two to really distill all those recipes. I want to fulfill my own personal creative goals through those home recipes from my family. In terms of the rest of my practice, I just want to learn more of other cultures and how food is very much a catalyst for all those histories and memories. I’m consistently learning more and more, and it’s humbling because of course I’m not going to know the world’s culinary history. It’s very motivating to know that there’s always something new to learn.

I am doing illustrations for a Dumpling Anthology. It’s been really cool because I’ve been able to read essays from all these food writers about their favourite dumpling from their family. Dumplings are such a universal food! Hopefully, I can take on more projects like that.

Check out What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings, published by Coach House Books. You can follow Meegan on Instagram @meeganlim and see more of her work by visiting her website, www.meeganlim.com.

Talking EXTRA STRENGTH + PAIN RELIEF with K. MacNeil

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

Interview by Adi Berardini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a slap in the face, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Muscle Memory: In Conversation with Michèle Pearson Clarke

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

Interview by Adi Berardini and Aysia Tse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Method of Attunement: In Conversation with Candice Hopkins

Portrait of Candice Hopkins.

Interview by Adi Berardini

The focus and mandate of The Toronto Biennial of Art is to “make contemporary art accessible to everyone.” From March 26 to June 5th, local, national, and international Biennial artists will transform Toronto and its partner regions with free exhibitions, performances, and learning opportunities. Although the Biennial has its roots in diverse local contexts, it sparks global conversations through its exhibitions and city-wide programming. This year’s Biennial has the theme What Water Knows, the Land Remembers, expanding from the inaugural 2019 edition, A Shoreline Dilemma. In this interview, Candice Hopkins discusses her curatorial vision for the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art and her exhibition ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision at the Textile Museum of Canada. Within the conversation, Hopkins speaks of the importance of the Biennial being place-specific and curatorial practice as a method of attunement.

Candice Hopkins’ writing and curatorial practice explore the intersections of history, contemporary art, and Indigeneity. Originally from Whitehorse, Yukon, Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation. In addition to her role as senior curator for the 2019 and 2021 editions of the Toronto Biennial, she works as the Executive Director of Forge Project in New York. Additionally, she was part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media art collective Isuma. She is co-curator of notable exhibitions including Art for New Understanding: Native Voices 1950s to Now; the 2018 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Casa Tomada; documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany; Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada.

Can you explain your curatorial vision for the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art, with the theme of What Water Knows, The Land Remembers? How does it expand on the last edition focusing on the shoreline? 

We’re a team of three curators myself, Katie Lawson, Tairone Bastien, and we also worked on the first edition. We always knew from the beginning that the curatorial team would carry over. And we always imagined that 2019, and what’s now 2022 because of the six-month delay of the pandemic, [would be] two chapters and two editions of a whole. That means that some of the artists extend their projects over 2019 and 2022 with a thematic extension as well. The title of 2019 was A Shoreline Dilemma, and most of the venues were centered on the shoreline and the shoreline as spaces of imagination, colonial construction, militarization and demilitarization, [and] various kinds of expansion into the lake. Also, shorelines aren’t fixed; they’re constantly shifting and moving, they’re fractal. And because of their fractal nature, they resist any conventional forms of measurement, because they are constantly changing space. We see the 2022 edition as stemming from these initial questions.

The 2019 Biennial was centered around the question of what does it mean to be in relation? In 2022, we thought it was important to think about how in this case, many of the works are situated up the various tributaries of those lost and extant rivers in Toronto. Toronto is located on one of the largest natural watersheds in the world, which means that there were a lot of creeks and there were a lot of rivers that were feeding that lake. We have been thinking collectively together with artists and curators what does it mean to be in relation to the water? And through that, what does it mean to think about the kind of deeper and in some cases, the sediment of history, on this land that we’re on?

In 2022, the title is meant to be a kind of lead into some of the explorations various artists were taking on, what water knows, the land remembers. One of the things that we were struck by when we were meeting and speaking with artists was one, as far as we understand it, water has memory. It contains and remembers anything that has happened to it on a molecular level. So, we can understand water as an archive, but we can understand the land as an archive too. Last fall, I was part of a meeting with a soil scientist who’s at Duke University and he said, certain soils slowly move upwards, like a river, over in some cases thousands of years. In a way then, it’s almost as though the soil is constantly revealing its past to us if it’s left undisturbed.

What does it mean to attune ourselves to these histories that might be located under concrete, underneath our very feet? 

That was a moment of revelation for me and the curatorial team that if the land was always trying to reveal its history to us, what does it mean to attune ourselves to that? What does it mean to attune ourselves to these histories that might be located under concrete, underneath our very feet? I think one of the projects that we first initiated in 2019 that carried towards 2022 is a kind of direct response to this. So, that was what’s called Concepts and Contexts for Toronto and that was authored by Ange Loft with various collaborators. Ange Loft is a Mohawk artist, historian, playwright, and theatre director. And this year in 2022, we have been working together with Camille Turner and Yaniya Lee to add a kind of another layer to this idea of concepts and contexts for Toronto. They’ve been working on, a set of cards, like a deck, that looks at Black histories in Toronto. And one of the things that Yaniya and Camille noted was that these aren’t sedimented histories—that’s kind of an easy way out. They were saying that these pasts and these futures are right here in front of us, but not everyone pays attention to them. Sometimes we think that these histories are obscured, whether it’s the histories of people who are newcomers to these lands, or people who’ve been here for thousands of years, but they’re not for the people who’ve lived those histories.

We’ve also been very inspired by the fugitivity of water. The fact that even though something like Taddle Creek or Garrison Creek has been covered over, water still always finds a way home. It flows underneath houses, underneath real estate developments, it erodes concrete, it continues to flow. We thought of that fugitivity of water and what it carries with it and its insistence on its path. And I think that’s what we can learn, not only as curators but as artists too.

Jeffrey Gibson, I AM YOUR RELATIVE, 2022. Installation views, MOCA Toronto. Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Roberts Projects, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Stephen Friedman Gallery. I AM YOUR RELATIVE is co-commissioned by MOCA and the Toronto Biennial of Art.

What are some considerations you have curating a biennial that’s place-specific, such as the Toronto Biennial? And a place that’s so diverse too. Do you have specific aspects you look for in artists and work and how it connects to place?

We knew that on embarking on the Toronto Biennial from the beginning, it needed to be place-specific. It couldn’t feel like an exhibition that could take place anywhere, it had to be done in relation to place. Whether that’s thinking about histories or various ways that we might shape the narrative of a place for ourselves. When we started in 2019, we brought artists together, especially those who were coming from outside of Toronto together with artists that were here. They met with Ange Loft, who generously shared some of the research she had done. And that Toronto context from Concepts brief was shared with all the artists who were working with the Toronto Biennial of Art as a kind of primary document. I think it’s really important to share histories, knowledge, and tools about a place. The pandemic shifted working models; we all went online like many teams. We worked with artists remotely, of course, some are still based here. A big part of that was being in dialogue.

Many of the artists that we worked with have created responsive works to this place or the Great Lakes, more in general, or to other narratives of lakes such as Great Bear Lake in Northwest Territories is one good example of work by Ts̱ēmā Igharas and Erin Siddall. Other projects looked very far into the future, such as part two of Syrus Marcus Ware’s Antarctica piece. I think every artist took it from their own perspective, but I think [most of the] work is grounded here. Part of that idea though was because a lot of biennials operate almost like a parachuting model that let’s say emerged in the 1990s with the proliferation of biennials around the world. What started with less than a hundred, is now I believe over 400 around the world. And there needs to be specificity to those, they can’t feel like there’s very little relation. I think audiences feel that too. One of our methods as well is that we are primarily a commissioning biennial, which differentiates us from some others.

Installation view of ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision: Jessie Oonark, Janet Kigusiuq, and Victoria Mamnguqsualuk. Photo by Darren Rigo.

Can you discuss the Biennial exhibition ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision that you curated at the Textile Museum of Canada and its focus on sharing Inuit histories?

In early 2013, I did travel to different communities in Nunavut, including Baker Lake. And I had already known, of course about ᔭᓯ ᐆᓇᖅ Jessie Oonark’s work, ᔮᓂᑦ ᑭᒍᓯᐅᖅ Janet [Kigusiuq]’s work, and ᕕᒃᑐᕆᔭ ᒪᒻᖑᖅᓱᐊᓗᒃ Victoria Mamnguqsualuk’s work. What I found when I was in Baker Lake was this matriarchy—The way that a lot of artistic production in Nunavut is done through mentorship, artist to artist, family member to family member, sometimes with the support of the co-op system, sometimes not. And the co-op in Baker Lake kind of operated in fits and starts. It was really production led by artists themselves. Jessie Oonark began making work only after she and her family relocated to Baker Lake. Baker Lake, as far as I know, is the only inland community in Nunavut so it’s not on a major water body, like other communities. And I was interested in how women’s perspectives were shaping the content of their work and how they made the work itself.

Installation view of ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision: Jessie Oonark, Janet Kigusiuq, and Victoria Mamnguqsualuk. Photo by Darren Rigo.

Jessie is primarily known for her textile work. She’s the only artist from Baker Lake to be included in the Cape Dorset print collection and she had her first prints included in 1960. They’ve all worked across media, drawing, prints, textiles, some sculpture even. What I was interested in was how pattern is both a tool and a technique for all of them. Janet later in her life, when arthritis didn’t allow her to make the kind of very high detailed drawings that she was known for began a different kind of practice. It began through a workshop in 1998 I think, with someone who was up there for a time teaching, making these paper collages. They are extraordinary because people might see them immediately as pure abstraction, but they’re not. Many of Janet’s collages are made to reference very specific places that they would visit, places where they’ve fished, for example.

Then Victoria Mamnguqsualuk, Jessie’s other daughter, was known for her narrative works. A figure that recurs in her practice is a migrant traveler–Kiviuq. He occurs a lot in her work and even intervened at certain moments like in the cold war. He’s a figurative legend, let’s say. [What is] fascinating to me about that was that Janet said in an interview that Victoria would stay up late at night, listening to their grandmother, Natak, tell stories. In a way, she became a chronicler through her prints and drawings, and textiles, of this oral history, which is fascinating. And then their mother, Jessie Oonark, is one of the best-known Inuk artists to have lived. What really struck me was the repeated representations of women, the tools of women, including the ᐅᓗ Ulu women’s knife, ᐊᑯᖅ amauti, ᖃᒧᑏᒃ qamutiik; and how pattern for her, again, became a kind of tool and technique, particularly in her textile works. But the title of the exhibition, in general, comes from, and I believe it was Jack Butler who said this, he described Jessie Oonark’s work as “double vision” because she used a lot of symmetry, but it was, I think quite deliberately, not perfect symmetries, so each side might look slightly different. In a way, what that does is it makes you pay attention to the variation of form. I feel like as the central point of the Biennial, we have a lot of matriarchal and matrilineal narratives. And I think that’s why Double Vision is one of the centerpiece exhibitions of the 2022 Biennial.

I also feel like personally, the work of Inuit artists isn’t always contextualized in this way, although increasingly more now. I wanted the audience to focus not just on the content of the work, but the kind of conditions of production in Baker Lake, who is teaching who, how they are communicating it, and seeing these pieces as a conceptual marker of art history.

Installation view of ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision: Jessie Oonark, Janet Kigusiuq, and Victoria Mamnguqsualuk. Photo by Darren Rigo.

Can you speak more about the practice of collaboration and listening in your curatorial practice and its significance while showcasing work by Indigenous artists and artists whose histories have been underrepresented?

I think sometimes curatorial practice is about resonances. We can understand resonances as part of an auditory experience, but also in many ways, curatorial practice can be a method of attunement. You’re attuned to not only what is taking place in society at any given moment, but [you are also] attuned to what artists are interested in communicating with their work. I think that you’re attuned to what ideas are forming and your potential audiences for an exhibition too. As well as the kind of practicalities of putting together a show in multiple venues where there’s different relations being formed in each of the spaces.

I think as well, and this happens very distinctly in the first edition of the Biennial too, we wanted to work directly with artists whose practices we were most excited about, of course. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that the artists that we worked with had a kind of corresponding place within what we might consider the larger artistic ecosystem. So, sometimes they might not have any commercial representation, for example, or maybe they’re just starting in their career. I think these kinds of exhibitions can be platforms for artists to make something new, for artists to make something responsive and I think for myself, paying attention to people who are making good, challenging work. We can use the exhibition as a kind of stage or a platform for what they’re making and doing. I think as well, curatorial practice is inherently dialogical. It’s in relationship to the ethos of our time, working in tandem with an artist as they develop something new.

Do you have any advice for emerging Indigenous artists or curators starting off their careers?

There are two different answers depending on whether you’re looking to pursue more of a curatorial track or an artist track. And that’s not to say that the two aren’t contingent or that people do both, because often people do both. I started out as an artist, for example.

I would say that for emerging curators, mentors have been the most important figures in my life and they sometimes come to you in expected ways. When I was very early in my career, I was grateful to have been mentored by folks like Lee-Ann Martin or Anthony Kiendl, or Sylvie Gilbert . I was able to work alongside them through my work at the Banff Centre. And I started at the Banff Centre as a work-study, that’s essentially like an intern. I think that we all start in various ways. I was incredibly lucky to have received a grant through the Canada Council for the Arts at the time. It was a grant that was for emerging Aboriginal curators, that was the terminology then.

I worked directly with Lee-Ann, and I learned so much from her, you know, she was one of the co-curators of Indigena, which is still a watershed exhibition. It was kind of like the political foil to Land, Spirit, Power that was on at the same time at the National Gallery of Canada, just across the river from one another.  She was both the person who was one of the Project Coordinators for the Task Force on Museums and First Peoples that was in the 1990s that emerged out of the kind of conflicts and direct open protests around the exhibition The Spirits Sings in 1988, which was one of the first publicly protested exhibitions. So, she was one of the people at the forefront of trying to negotiate a different relationship between Native people and museums and our representation.

Choose your mentors and work with them, and these relationships are always reciprocal, right? What can you give in exchange or provide as an exchange? I’m not implying monetary of course. Developing relationships with artists is incredibly important as a young curator, because those are your peers, and they might be people that you work with for the rest of your life in various ways. That’s definitely been the case for me.

I would say as well, understanding if you do want to work with museums or artist-run centers, or other alternative or commercial spaces, trying to find out how they function is important too. I think that these institutions are not always transparent, they don’t always speak from that subject position at all. I think any experience you can get within those places is always beneficial.

If you’re an emerging Native artist, do whatever you can to make sure that you can maintain a dedicated studio practice, even if your studio is your desk. It’s important to put a lot of energy into your work. Find out what kinds of funding opportunities are out there if you’re living and working in Canada, which is a very different funding landscape that the United States. I would say, think of your peers as you’re sounding board.

I always encourage people, and this might be intimidating for younger artists, to reach out to a curator. If there’s a curator you like, send them your work, and see if they’ll do a studio visit with you, with no expectation. What you’re trying to do is develop a dialogue and a relationship. As a young artist, I think it’s incredibly important to see as much work by others as you can, especially those artists that you respect so that you can learn from how work is installed. You can learn from one another, including other ways other [artists] might be contextualizing their work. This is your field. Spend as much time looking and watching as learning as you can.

Check out the Toronto Biennial of Art from March 26th to June 5th, 2022 at the 9+ Biennial sites across Toronto and Mississauga.

Clay Bodies: Interview with Olivia Turchyniak

Olivia Turchyniak studio portrait by Oriana Confente.

By Oriana Confente

Olivia Turchyniak is a ceramicist based in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal, Canada. As a newcomer to the city who wanted to support local artists during the pandemic, I started a growing collection of mugs by Olivia. I was drawn to the materiality of her pieces, like the organic and grounding qualities of the clay she uses which connect to deeper themes present throughout her work.

While she makes vessels for hot beverages, Olivia’s conceptual projects concern vessels of another kind. I learned her ceramic practice began with abstract representations of bodies – hollow sculptures that take shape as folded, dimpled mounds of flesh. In her artist statement, she declares that the body itself is also a vessel, one we need to “mold into a home.” Olivia’s artworks have been featured in group exhibitions at the FOFA Gallery and most recently, at the Montréal Art Centre.

Curious about her interpretations of human anatomy and the lumpy forms she creates, I wanted to know more. Olivia and I chatted over coffee and cannoli before visiting her studio, our discussion spanning flesh, functionality, and fine arts. The conversation that follows has been edited for clarity by us.

Olivia Turchyniak studio portrait by Oriana Confente.

Oriana: I’d like to start by learning more about your choice of medium. Can you tell me about the materials you work with?

Olivia: Ceramics has been my main medium for about five years now. I work mostly with stoneware clay because I prefer a mid-to high-fire clay with structure to it – I’ve found a clay body that I like.

Oriana: They’re called clay bodies?

Olivia: Yeah! A clay body is a mixture of different materials to make it workable. It’s a man-made product, versus clay, which is a natural resource.

Photograph of Olivia Turchyniak’s studio by Oriana Confente.

Oriana: You’ve drawn striking comparisons between human bodies as fleshy vessels and the organic aging of clay bodies. Can you go into more detail about the themes of your work?

Olivia: I’m primarily working with themes that have to do with the body and the earth, with permanence and impermanence. My most recent project, “SEED/SOIL,” is a self-portrait. The forms are abstract figures that have my tattoos to make them identifiable. It’s a lifelong project. Each sculpture features a different body part, and I’ll keep creating them until I stop getting tattoos.

We tend to view tattoos as permanent but in the grand scheme of things, our bodies aren’t that permanent. Clay is technically one of the most permanent mediums you can work with, it can last thousands of years. I’m playing with that idea of im/permanence. Clay also ages in stages, it matures with time. While clay is sourced from the ground, our bodies also end up in the earth when we die. There are so many parallels between clay and bodies and there’s a quality of clay that inherently reflects the body.

Photograph of Olivia Turchyniak’s studio by Oriana Confente.

Oriana: How does it feel to look back on earlier projects? Do you see yourself reflected differently in those artworks?

Olivia: For some reason, I depict myself a lot, maybe unintentionally. My most recent project is the most conscious self-portrait compared to others, which are reflections of subconscious mental states or reflections of my environment. “MAMMARY,” a series from 2019/2020, is a representation of a female form. It’s a grotesque image that’s strangely appealing at the same time. Breasts are really sensitive in our society and I wanted to represent a feeling of being uncomfortable. From the beginning, what’s tied my projects together is my interest in the human body and how I can express that.

Oriana: I want to discuss your functional wares too because, as you know, I’m a big fan. I’m curious about the connection between your functional pieces and your fine arts pieces.

Olivia: The functional wares started about a year ago, mid-COVID. I really wanted to learn a new skill. I think what I like about the functional stuff is that it’s not conceptual at all. It’s something I do when I don’t want to think too hard, and I just want to make something that serves a utilitarian purpose. I do see the practices as separate, but I think I need both practices in my life – I find that I’m not always inspired conceptually and sometimes I need a break from that. The functional wares are easy to go back to and I can produce work without thinking too hard.

Oriana: How does the making process differ between a thematic project and your functional wares?

Olivia: My sculptural works are hand-built using a coiling technique, which is when you roll out cylindrical, tube-shaped pieces of clay and stack them to make a hollow sculpture. My functional wares are made on a wheel which is very different from hand-building. Quicker, too. I can bust out ten mugs in the same amount of time it would take me to do a tiny portion of a sculpture.

Photograph of Olivia Turchyniak’s studio by Oriana Confente.

Oriana: Which process is easier for you, mentally and physically?

Olivia: It’s physically exhausting either way, but mentally, the functional work is easier because I’m repeating something very technical. With the sculptural work, I’m figuring it out as I go, and I have to think about gravity too.

Oriana: Is it messy?

Olivia: It’s very messy. Very dusty.

Oriana: Do you like that?

Olivia: I love the tactility of it. Making sculptures is meditative for me. It’s very grounding and the sensation is something I’m addicted to, I guess. While I’m working, it’s really like a flow state. My mind is just so hyper-focused on what I’m doing. I think that’s beautiful and I’m constantly chasing after it.

To see more of Olivia’s work, visit oliviaturchyniak.com or @_vie_lo and @_vie_pot on Instagram.

Part Two: Ash Barbu and Deirdre Logue in Conversation

Recess, Cultural Production, Checking Out

From Empty History: Deirdre Logue, Home Office, 2017, 03:33 minutes; Lucas Michael, Audentes Fortuna Iuvat,2011, Nickel-plated silver-plated steel, polished steel. Image courtesy of Vlad Lunin and Vtape.

By Ash Barbu

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

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

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

AB: Rereading part one of our article, it seems that we were both in a different place. At that point, I was on the verge of checking out completely. However, I still believe in creating space for apathy in this conversation about ambition, productivity, and success in the artworld. How can we begin to address these pressures while occupying that space together? What do we do with that stress? How do we make sense of it? These are some of the thoughts I return to today—about three months after that earlier conversation.

DL: A few things happened to me after we hung up the phone. Sometimes, when something truly confuses you, it compels rather than repels you. It brings people closer. My questions are related to the potential of this discourse, as well as our shared interest in various topics that, if manifested in practice, could in theory erase each other. In this mutual commitment to exploring the limits of counterproductivity, we almost set ourselves up for the perfect failure. To begin, we should pool together works that might help us build a larger frame of reference for a kind of working that commits itself to recess, to unworking progress, works that undo themselves or resist a kind of accomplishment. I have a long history of working with futility in subject matter. So, my interest in checking out comes as no surprise. But it also occurs to me that we’re both going through our own transitions. We’re changing as people. Perhaps the most important question for us to consider is one of kinship. What could be gleaned from conversations taking place over a longer period?

From Empty History: Curator’s research materials. Image courtesy of Vlad Lunin and Vtape.

AB: We first connected during my research residency for the exhibition Empty History, which included your video Home Office. As a reflection on solitude, labour, and recess, Home Office raises important questions that mirror life in a pre-post-pandemic world. Nevertheless, Empty History originally sought to address a different set of questions I faced following my graduate studies. Working on the exhibition offered me the chance to grapple with my toxic relationship to curating and publishing. I was so focused on being productive, creating more output, and filling a CV, that I lost touch with my practice. I burnt out. During my residency, I was drawn to Home Office because of how it embraces slowness, repetition, and worklessness, creating space for alternative counterproductive histories to be imagined. What continues to connect us is an interest in doing nothing as a form of something. Or, put differently, doing the action of nothing as an artist or curator. As you can imagine, there isn’t a lot of grant money available for this kind of work.

DL: Maybe that’s the problem with curating today—it has more to do with art-ing than living.

AB: I’m ambivalent about the term ‘curator’ because it has come to signify something so operative, so productivist. A few years ago, I invited Feminist Art Gallery (FAG), founded by you and your partner Allyson, to contribute to a discussion article I was writing for Canadian Art. In response to a question about defining the term ‘queer curating,’ FAG argued: “We feel it is important to productively question the authority, economy and adoration of the notion of the curator—lots of people want to be one—we do not. Instead, we concentrate our queer feminist energies on enabling and nurturing queer and feminist art and ideas…”[1] When you’re an anxious graduate student, trying to construct an identity at once personal and professional, it’s difficult to hear that. At that point in my life, I was living and working inside the artworld machine.

DL: I’ve been championing cultural production for a long time. Still, I believe in a regenerative approach. Sometimes you’ve got to burn it to the ground and rebuild the house you want to live in. That’s true for a lot of things, including our sexual politics, our relationships, and some of our artworld definitions. For example, in a recent interview, I proposed the idea that artists choose their curators and collectors, thus inverting the pyramid. They would make a choice to form a relationship that suits them. I said no to a commission during the first summer of COVID. There were very few restrictions—the work could have been anything I wanted. So, I must ask myself: Where does checking out really lead? What does recess do to reset the spirit?

Sometimes you’ve got to burn it to the ground and rebuild the house you want to live in.  

AB: As a graduate student trying to find their way, I remember the thrill of an accepted proposal. It tickles the ego. Recognition is comforting as hell—it’s an affirmation of identity. But the relationship I built with that ‘yes’ was frenetic, if not totally destructive. So, I’m touched by your gesture of refusal. That ‘no’ exists so far outside the realm of where I used to be.

DL: Here, we can’t lose sight of the effects of the public funding system. Say I apply for a grant and receive the money, after which I change my mind. Well, I can’t. I’ve got to do the thing that I said I was going to do. Then I must show my work to prove that the work exists. These transactional relationships don’t just make problematic the relationship between artist and curator. They make problematic all our relationships with institutions, funding bodies, and consequently, each other. These problems are more systematic than they are simply individual. Oftentimes, we find ourselves operating within frameworks that don’t serve the goals we have. When it comes to the question of a living wage, for example, we’re looking at a system that is struggling. You and I have deeply individual responses to that system, which are specific to several different conditions under which we live. We’ll call it a combination of situation and circumstance.

AB: Preparing for our talk today, I thought we would finally understand why it is that we find recess, or, checking out, so compelling. Art doesn’t always have to be about changing the world. Sometimes, it’s simply an antidote that reduces suffering. These conversations are records of our attempt to reconnect and work on ourselves, together. As a result, we’re proposing a mode of workless collaboration in which we are connected by pure means, as opposed to ends or means-to-ends. This sense of connection, of mutual commitment, might allow us to rethink the kind of working relationships artists and curators are supposed to uphold within the system.

From Empty History: Lucas Michael, Fixed Kilometer, 2018. 46:35 minutes. Image courtesy of Vlad Lunin and Vtape.

DL: I’ve experienced how the relationship between an artist and a curator can verge on the therapeutic. Inside those therapeutic moments, we face an intimacy that is not necessarily well defined. I’ve had powerful curatorial relationships marked by very un-curatorial moments. They’ve been emotional, they’ve been fraught, but they’ve been real. In a word, they’ve been tender. Certain works I have made bring up a lot of difficult feelings in the viewer. And they can create real discomfort for curators who choose to show the work. So, as artists and curators, we take on these difficult feelings together. But it’s also important to state that not many people think about what is happening to the curator personally—what brings them, in other words, to follow certain ideas or create certain exhibitions. You and I feel compelled to disrupt the conventional relationship between artist and curator because it appears to be completely un-feeling. I believe there is something our work shares that goes beyond mere subject matter. If we were to continue to explore this, we would have to do so knowing that it could lead to a bit of an undoing, right? It could be unintentionally upsetting.

AB: Speaking of means and mutual commitment, I can’t help but think of the new Jasper Johns retrospective, Mind/Mirror, co-produced by the Whitney Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. According to one New York Times article, during the planning phase of the two exhibitions, Johns maintained an “Olympian detachment from the preparations.”[2] In response to the project, Johns himself stated, “These are not my ideas. The show is not my idea.”[3] On the one hand, we see two exhibitions so stoic in their neutrality, so preoccupied with tired questions about what art is. On the other hand, we see the total fracturing of the relationship between the artist and the curator. And with this project, there are two curators, each with different creative visions, who also happen to be fighting. So, nobody’s listening, nobody’s talking, and somehow, a blockbuster show is created.

DL: I would struggle to think of an artist more collected or exhibited than Johns. What heights must one reach to be able to say no, and still keep going? However, I do appreciate that he made the statement and maintained a relationship to the actualization of the exhibition, instead of pulling out entirely. I’m interested in how that gesture serves the audiences that will interact with the exhibition. Further, what does it mean to the curators?

AB: This reading of intimacy, of kinship between artists and curators, is oftentimes overlooked in contemporary discourses on curating. I’m currently working on remaking an exhibition that was originally presented at Videofag when I first moved to Toronto and began graduate school. Recently, I lost the hard drive that contained all the images and documentation for the project. This is quite a private, personal endeavour. I doubt many will come to see the re-made exhibition. I’d like to use it as an opportunity to reconnect with the artists after more than seven years.

DL: I am drawn to the idea of curating for no one. Peeling back the layers, we begin to see how the activity of curating feeds the system. A museum is built upon various organized economies. In fact, museums are some of the most capitalist systems of all. You and I have tried to work ourselves back through the coat check, through the kitchen door, right at the restaurant. Suddenly, it happens that we’re out by the garbage. We’re redefining where we can feel comfortable in this system based on the choices we’ve already made. Because, in truth, neither one of us would be here, right now, if we weren’t invested in the system. We’re troubled by it, yet we’ve also been privileged by it. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t need to be seen by each other as troubling the system, because goddess forbid we do it alone. We are finding kinship in the complication of trying to get back to something we’ve lost. And that’s not necessarily about recovering the hard drive, for instance. It’s about memory and friendship. It seems we’re both looking for something that we think we can find through each other.

Read part one of Barbu and Logue’s discussion here.

Notes:

[1] Barbu, Adam, Queer Curating, from Definition to Deconstruction, Canadian Art, April 4, 2018, https://canadianart.ca/features/queer-curating/

[2] Solomon, Deborah, Seeing Double with Jasper Johns, New York Times, September 13, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/arts/design/jasper-johns-mind-mirror.html

[3] Ibid.

Part One: Ash Barbu and Deirdre Logue in Conversation

Recess, Cultural Production, Checking Out

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

By Ash Barbu

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

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

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

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

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

AB: I would love to hear about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AB: Is everyone okay?

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

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

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

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

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

AB: Yeah, why don’t you?

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

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

AB: It’s such a generous invitation.

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

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

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

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

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

Read part two of the discussion here.

Beyond Binaries: In Conversation with Mahsa Merci


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

Interview by Adi Berardini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tufting the Everyday: In Conversation with Mychaelyn Michalec

Mychaelyn Michalec.It’s not attractive for every use base. 42 x 42. 2021. Hand and machine tufted yarn rug on stretched cloth. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Interview by Adi Berardini

Mychaelyn Michalec is a fiber artist and painter based in Dayton, Ohio, depicting the mundane matters of domestic life and translating the documented scenes into tufted rug tableaus. Her meticulous tufting often features imagery in bed with her partner or her son looking nonchalant with his phone in the background. Addressing the “gendered issues of caretaking addressing both invisible and emotional labour,” Michalec’s work explores her home life with her partner and child and what it means to be an artist and a mother. She is also interested in the influence of life decisions and the ever-present force of technology in our lives, depicting text conversation bubbles and juxtaposing the tactility of texting with her textile work.

Michalec earned a BFA with distinction in Painting and Drawing and a BA in Art History from The Ohio State University and an MLIS in Library and Information Science from the University of Southern Mississippi. She has shown her work internationally and has been awarded residencies at The Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts Residency in New Berlin, NY, and The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, in Nebraska City, NE. Additionally, Michalec is a 2021 recipient of an Individual Excellence Award in Craft from the Ohio Arts Council.

You capture everyday domestic scenes with your partner and family in your work. Can you speak more about the meaning behind capturing these domestic scenes for you as an artist?  

 I think a lot about Virginia Woolf bemoaning of “the accumulation of unrecorded life” in A Room of One’s Own. Women are disadvantaged by the lack of a comprehensive narrative of their own history. The quotidian is something that drives my work. I took a break from my studio practice that lasted over a decade. For me, the drive for making work again became about the thing that I felt prevented me from making work in the first place, which was everyday life. So, the work is a direct portrayal of the complexities of contemporary family life. 

Mychaelyn Michalec. I thought things were better but they were not. 2021. 35 x 28 IN. hand and machine tufted yarn rug. Photo courtesy of the artist.

I have followed your work in the past couple of years, and how you’ve transitioned from using paint to using textiles as a medium. Can you explain more about this transition and its significance to your practice?

 When I was painting with pigments, I was considering different ways to bring my concept full circle in both terms of material and subject matter. My subject matter, the domestic, the mundane is often critically overlooked, so I feel like craft which is often considered a lesser artform in some aspect is a good pairing for this work. I started looking at different methods and traditions in domestic craft that might suit the way I wanted to create.

I love the immediacy of paint on canvas, so a process like weaving wasn’t an option for me. I saw a video of an industrial rug tufting gun in my searches, and I thought that it looked great, and I could draw with it. I started teaching myself how to make rugs about 4 years ago. Some people see this as a huge transition, but I feel like what I do is still painting. Sure, I am using textiles and technically they are rugs, but I frequently stretch the rugs over stretchers just like paintings. A lot of utility is stripped just from their presentation alone. 

My subject matter, the domestic, the mundane is often critically overlooked, so I feel like craft which is often considered a lesser artform in some aspect is a good pairing for this work.

Mychaelyn Michalec. Mom@work on Facebook. 2021. 36 x 18. Hand and machine tufted yarn rug. Photo courtesy of the artist.

There’s an interesting tension at play since you use textiles and rug tufting to capture everyday life that is often dependent on technology and screens like texting, zoom, and phones, which are more urgent and fast-paced. Can you speak more about this juxtaposition?  

I think something is interesting in the works of artists who take things that are so fleeting and ethereal as screenshots and phone photos and recreate them using processes that are so labor-intensive. It was Berger who said, “We never look just at one thing, we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.” The contemporary nature of carrying a tiny computer around with us always is that we are constantly inundated with the visual and I can’t imagine we give it much thought due to this bombardment. But I do think something interesting happens when you turn these visual castaways into things. I am still figuring out these tensions.

Mychaelyn Michalec.I’m doing a poor job with life at this moment. 2021. 18 x 19 IN. Hand and machine tufted yarn rug. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Can you talk further about your interest in humour in your practice? 

I admire artists who can successfully employ humour in their works. 

I find that it is both difficult to do successfully and a necessary way to express my feelings. There is a duality to my life. I have both chosen a more conventional lifestyle—a partner, children and I also loathe the conventionality of my choices because as artists we [can] see all possibilities. I think humour helps me to address what I love and what I hate about my life.

Who are some artists that you are inspired by? 

I will only talk about living, working artists because the dead ones don’t need more credit. I love the work of Erin M. Riley (@erinmriley), not only is she extremely hardworking and dedicated to her practice but her work is unbelievable. It is some of the most powerful contemporary work about women I have seen. I also think that Meg Lipke (@meglipke) is an amazing artist. Her work is such a fine example of contemporary textile work- it is painting, it is sculpture. Meg is also very generous with her time and community building which is something that also inspires me. Plus, my three friends who I always bounce ideas off and share my failures and triumphs with- textile artist Heather Jones (@heatherjonesstudio), sculptor and painter Bridgette Bogle (@bridgettebogle), and painter Tania Alvarez (@taniaalvarezart).

Do you have any recent or future projects and exhibitions you’d like to mention? 

Currently, I’m the artist in residence at The Object Hotel in Bisbee, Arizona. All That We Went Though was for Nothing, a solo show of my work is opening in December at Sean Christopher Gallery in Columbus, OH.

You can find more of Mychaelyn Michalec’s work on her website and Instagram.

Respect Your Elders: In Conversation with Biju Belinky

Biju Belinky. Drawing based on a 1993 photograph by Del LaGrace Volcano. 2021. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Interview by Adi Berardini

Based in Brazil, Biju Belinky is a visual artist and illustrator who recreates historical queer photographs, reinterpreting them into colourful and vibrant illustrations. Belinky captures the tenderness of these relationships, depicting the queer romance throughout history that has always existed but is rendered invisible by society. Often sensual and emotive, her drawings bring fresh energy to the historical photographs of the LGBTQ+ community of yesteryear.

Biju Belinky studied at Central Saint Martins and the London College of Fashion. Before working as a visual artist, she worked as an arts and culture journalist for seven years, which aligned with her interest in queer archives and documentation. Belinky also finds inspiration in tarot and magic, her drawings inspired by the bright colours and pastel palettes of animated shows and vintage Japanese advertisements. In the following interview, they speak more about drawing inspiration from historical queer photographs, overcoming self-doubt, and their creative process.

Biju Belinky. Self Portrait. 2021. Photo courtesy of the artist.

I am drawn to how you recreate historical and contemporary queer photos and create new energy and vibrancy to them through colour and line work. Can you speak more about your practice and why you use these historical photos and references? Do you have an example of a favourite photograph (or era) that you’ve recreated?

To talk about how I started working with that kind of subject matter, I would have to go back to four years ago, when I went through a long period of time not making art at all because it fucked with my self-esteem a lot. I just had a lot of issues with thinking that everything I did was not good enough. But I could see that not doing art was also fucking with my brain, so I decided that I was going to challenge myself and force myself to finish things without thinking too much about it. And I knew I had to do it working with something I thought was beautiful constantly, so that I was sure that my brain couldn’t go “this isn’t interesting anymore.”

I initially drew from my personal collection of images of queer love and affection that I had saved on my computer from previous research I had been doing for a while, and I started creating artwork from there. From then on, I kind of noticed that this subject was just an endless source of inspiration, and the documentation on it varies so much, from tender to sexy and affectionate. [There are] so many different expressions of queerness and women-loving-women relationships and through that, I had found a way to express myself through my art in a way that didn’t make me suffer. 

It was a cool exercise to find these photos and the history behind them. You end up finding more about these photographers that worked throughout the centuries, these images that were lost through time. For a while, I was interested in more Victorian photographs and women seemingly in love in vintage photos from the 1920s and the 30s. It was quite interesting spending a long time thinking “Where does this photo come from?”, “What’s their relationship?”. And the stranger one to research: “Are these women together or are they sisters?”, because oddly sometimes you’d find a photo where you think that they’re definitely a couple, but you do research and find out that they’re actually sisters. 

I always try to research a lot and find sources, to make sure I’m representing people correctly, [which] allows me to develop my practice more. Once I became more comfortable with drawing regularly, I started adding colour and I started figuring out again what I wanted to experiment with and the [types] of images I wanted to see in my work. From then on, I started to add different vibes to the images. When I started doing bright, colourful monochromatic representations of the black-and-white photos, it was fun to look at the photographs and think of what colour this makes me think of in a completely subjective way. I couldn’t explain why [one] feels pink or [one] feels purple. I’m not going to say it’s the aura of the photo because it’s not. It’s just me looking at the photo and feeling it. Like this thing feels yellow and so on.

My work and the images I draw from are not all soft; I hate describing them as soft. But they do exist at the intersection between sensual and tender. I’ve had long arguments with people about this because some people are like “your images are sexual.” And they are, but they aren’t. I’m not making explicit erotica. Even the images that are more overtly sexual where [the subjects] are naked or half-naked, have tenderness and sensuality to them. They’re not geared towards creating the sort of “Oo you’ll feel hot and bothered by this” feeling. If you find them sexy that’s cool, but at the same time for me, there’s more of a tenderness to it and I try to communicate that with my pieces.

Biju Belinky. Drawing based on a chloe atkin’s photograph from Girls Night Out. 2020.

That’s interesting. I wonder since they are queer images too, how that influences how sexual they seem. 

Yeah, people hypersexualize my work a lot. I’ve had quite a few commenters, especially men, come up and be like, “Oo sexy, threesome,” just that kind of gratuitous bullshit. If you want to consume sexy content geared towards straight men, there’s plenty of it out there. This work, my work, is not for them.

I think seeing my work as purely sexual kind of stems from the same type of thought where people see queerness as something that’s purely linked to sex and that’s it. Of course, sex and romance are a part of it, but queerness is such a complex, whole identity. So, for people outside of the community to just try to narrow it down to “oh it’s about who you want to bone,” feels reductive.

If queer women see it as super sexy it’s cool because it’s self-representation. But when it’s straight men projecting, fetishizing, and commenting weird stuff then it always makes me really uncomfortable. There is this skewed way of thinking that if something is queer and it involves women, it’s perceived by men as inherently sexual and often performative “for them.” So yeah, I think there is a hyper-sexualization of my images because they represent queer women being affectionate in a variety of ways. At the same time, thankfully my art has seemed to reach mostly the people it’s meant for.

Biju Belinky. Drawing based on an image printed on postcards by Steven Meisel for the SAFE SEX IS HOT SEX 1991 initiative, organized by the Red Hot Organization. 2020.

I think it’s good to have that sense of softness and tenderness in your work. I was drawn to it since it highlights that queerness has always existed by going back to the archive.

I think a lot about queer elders and older LGBTQ+ people and how many of us got the chance to meet older LGBT people that were around us growing up. It’s such an important reference to have and I didn’t realize how important it was until I met someone over the age of 60 who was a married woman with a wife, and I was like “you have so much knowledge in life.” I think this absence of role models doesn’t happen only because of the silence around sexuality but also the fact that almost an entire generation of LGBTQ+ people died throughout the 80s. There were so many major losses during that time that it just became commonplace to not know older LGBTQ+ people.

One time, I was showing my cousins some of my drawings. Only the very tame, appropriate ones, mostly from Victorian times, and with their mothers’ permission. My one cousin is around thirteen, and the other one is around ten, and they asked to see the drawings since I had been working on them nearby. My 13-year-old cousin was like, “How come none of these people are old? How come so many of them are so young?” And I was like, “Well it’s hard to find photos of older LGBTQ+ people to draw. I’d really love to do that, but it’s hard to find people above a certain age that you can draw. And in this era, people were often made to get married after a certain age, even if they weren’t in love.” And she [said], “That’s sad, I hope that you can find many pictures of old people and that you [can] draw them soon again.” 

I was emotional about that because she was rooting for there to be older queers. I never expected that at all. I [thought] how do I explain to this young child the horrible, horrible things that might have happened? I was coming up with ways in my head to explain it in a way that was simple but also was true.

I think that growing up as queer people in the 90s, we didn’t see cheerful representations of queerness. We saw the struggle, you see the trauma, you saw people coming out, and then how their parents now hated them. But we hardly ever saw affection for the sake of affection, in all its forms. I mean, small acts between queer people are revolutionary in themselves. But at the same time, it’s nice to just see yourself represented in something soft and loving without feeling like it needs to be a statement all the time. 

It’s nice too because a lot of the narrative in mainstream media is about coming out or trauma. I don’t want to say there’s a shame, but there’s stigmatization to queerness. To see that queer joy, does bring you so much joy.

I just want to see happiness; I want to see queer happiness and show as many sides of it as I possibly can and as many different types of relationships and kinds of people as I can because I feel like there’s not enough of that out there. I mean other artists are doing this kind of stuff, but when you look at other media like movies or TV shows it’s still so rare for you to be able to watch a film where the characters are queer and in love and that’s that, a film where you don’t have to watch a straight relationship for two hours just hoping for the side plot to be kind of queer. Sometimes you want to watch something sweet and soft and it’s not about suffering or about shame. Violence might happen in the street, that’s a reality, I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been afraid at one point or another. But it’s exactly because of that reality that I feel like my illustrations exist in a space outside of that, where violence is not a concern and there’s just this mutual understanding between the viewer and me of what the illustrations are and what they’re representing.

As much as we know this, logically, our history has been erased so many times that sometimes it’s good to remember that queer people have always been around, they’ve always been affectionate.

There’s a lot of art that I want to make about queerness that is a lot more painful or might be more complex in the way it develops and builds. But to have a space where I’m just able to see, especially when you look at older photographs, that queer people have always been around, is amazing. As much as we know this, logically, our history has been erased so many times that sometimes it’s good to remember that queer people have always been around, they’ve always been affectionate. People kissed and hugged and had sex and everything else for centuries. Queerness is not a side note in history, an imaginary bond we project today between “best friends” from the 19th century; it exists, it is registered. Its evidence is scattered throughout history and lives on even after so many attempts to wipe them out. It’s nice to be able to bring all that memory back to the surface through my work and to consume that for myself through my research.

Biju Belinky. The Lovers, 2021. Photo courtesy of the Artist.

Who are some of your artistic influences and artists you look up to?

I love anything by chloe atkins, her photos are amazing, and she did the Girls Night Out photography book. That photobook has such sexy and fun photos of nightlife. You can see that the people in the photos are so into each other, and drawing-wise it’s such a cool series of photos with so many dynamic poses. 

I also love the archival work that Gerber/Hart does. They have an online database of queer everything, they have zines and photography and stuff. They’re such a good reference, whenever I’m stuck, I always scroll down their website and Instagram [to find] inspiration. 

I’m really drawn to colour, not only in my drawings but also in the tarot series. I love the aesthetic of 70s and 80s Japanese advertisements for toys. They’re so bright and in your face, while still combining pastel tones with everything else. That is such a huge inspiration for me. As for artists that inspire me, there’s Nanaco Yashiro (@nanaco846) who’s a Japanese artist, and there’s also Choo (@choodraws) – they do very dynamic comic book-y scenes. Choo can draw clutter like no other person can. 

A lot of artists I’m inspired by have a unique voice to [their work]. I feel like I can see what type of person they are since they have such a clear visual language. Having that language [as an artist] is a huge ambition of mine. There’s an amazing wood engraving artist who does images of lesbian couples, Gessica Ferreira (@gessicaferreira100). There’s also Katie Aki (@miss_luckycat), Peter McAteer (@pete.ey), Anna Dietzel (@anna.dietzel), Helena Obersteiner (@helenaobersteiner), Savanna Judd (@heartsl0b), Joanna Folivéli (@foliveli), and Ing Lee (@inglee).

Biju Belinky. Spooky Girlfriends. 2021. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Do you have any advice for emerging artists who are just discovering their style and sensibility as an artist?

I’m an emerging artist myself – but a huge thing for me was a conversation that I had with one of my best friends, Helena, when I was initially getting back into writing. She has built her whole practice on the idea of mistakes and how accepting mistakes [can be one] of the best things that can happen to you. It was so important to talk to her and accept that my work isn’t going to immediately look the way that I want it to look. And it’s in the path of trying to make it look the way that it does in your brain that you’ll find the best things about your work. There’s a big way to go between your brain and your hand. When the image in your head is not doable hand-wise, you should just try to do it anyway—You’re never going to know what you find unless you try. That reaffirmed the phrase, “better done than perfect,” for me. I tend to be a perfectionist, but I can’t let my frustration stop me from finishing things. 

Another piece of advice I have is don’t be afraid to take breaks. I think we live in a culture where people want to consume things at way faster pace than what we produce things in. It’s okay to rest and take time for art. There’s a huge benefit of recognizing and respecting your limits. Do you, but don’t die trying to do you. Take breaks when you need them since it takes a lot longer to recover from burnout than it does to just stop once in a while.

Do you have any other future projects that you’d like to share?

I am currently working on my store that [has recently opened]. I will be including my art and an entire series on tarot cards. I am working on a zine with 20 other female artists in Brazil and the UK. It’s about myths about vengeful and raging women from across the world. We’re looking into feminine anger and stories of mythical creatures that are [based off angry] women. We’ve been working on it for a year and it’s in its finishing stages now.

[My friends and I] just opened a tattoo studio called Arachne (Arachne.tt). named after a mythical woman. The three of us have different levels of tattooing, I’m still starting out and practicing on willing victims. It’s all original designs by primarily fine artists in the language of tattooing. If you’re in Brazil come and get tattooed by us!

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