Part Two: Ash Barbu and Natalie Bruvels in Conversation

Maximalism and the Postmaternal

Cat Attack Collective, Walk in the Park, 2023, Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery. Image: David Barbour.

In this two-part dialogue, spanning contemporary feminist theory to modernist art criticism, independent curator Ash Barbu and interdisciplinary artist Natalie Bruvels reflect on the relationship between maternal caregiving and collaborative authorship. Specifically, they discuss the recent exhibition Walk in the Park (2023) created by Cat Attack Collective, an artist duo consisting of Bruvels and her 11-year-old son, Tomson. Walk in the Park transforms the white cube Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery into an expansive environment that blurs the line between the surreal and the everyday. Building from the prior exhibition Abound (2022), presented at the Ottawa Art Gallery, the installation incorporates co-created paintings and sculptures of recycled, accessible materials that intersect and overspill. In the exchanges that follow, through considerations of accumulation, refiguration, and immersion, Barbu and Bruvels propose readings of ethics and aesthetics that foreground the inherited context of the work of art.

Ash Barbu: Perhaps we can turn to the various symbols that appear and reappear throughout Walk in the Park. It is an unusual environment that strays from anything we commonly associated with “the natural.” First, my mind travels to the paintings of Roblox gameplay.

Natalie Bruvels: Something I continue to grapple with is the all-at-once feeling being a mother. Recently, I started using Roblox imagery in my work. I used to paint solely from screenshots—these scenes seemed too cool and distant. Eventually, I found pleasure in adding traces, stencils, and layers from the so-called real world. The process simply felt more tactile. Some might assume that I’m addressing the effects of video game culture in the work. In a way, I’m engaging in this discourse, however it isn’t a negative commentary. Roblox was how I could see our family during COVID. These works are family portraits. It is as if the camera, the screenshot, acts as an additional family member. These scenes are tender-hearted, although Roblox doesn’t necessarily look that way.

AB: On representing nature, we should also describe the walls, covered with layers of colourful plastic tablecloths.

NB: Some viewers have a strong reaction to the use of plastic based on environmental ethics. Working with my kid, I find it a useful, workable medium. From a practical standpoint, it is reusable. And I don’t need to clean up after. I can put the sheets in a bag and store them away. Over time, they develop their own character. The more I return to them, the more I might shred them. Sometimes they look like tentacles and sometimes they look like the sky—you never quite know. Too often, we turn to artists with an angst that is rooted in our collective inability to solve environmental problems. In fact, throughout the installation, I’m strategically eliciting judgments. Because you cannot be a mother and walk through this world without judgements.

“You need to be able to provide, you need to be able to think on the fly and problem-solve, you need to be a warm presence they can turn to when they are sick…”

Finally, I’m interested in the reasons why we feel compelled to use these materials in the first place. We might see them at a birthday party, for example. The function of these colourful spaces is simply to say: “I love you.” They have power to communicate the message: “I care you’re here—let’s find a way through this together.” From these different considerations, the plastic allows me to think through the complex processes of mothering. You need to be able to provide, you need to be able to think on the fly and problem-solve, you need to be a warm presence they can turn to when they are sick—all these things are true simultaneously.

Still, I find that I have this fantastic chip on my shoulder. It wasn’t until I attended Andrea O’Reilly’s seminar that I gave myself permission to think about motherhood in a feminist way. Forming that connection, you don’t feel so alone. You don’t feel like a deficient mother. This is what writers like Adrienne Rich were concerned with in the 1970s, namely the everyday experience of mothering coupled with the classist, patriarchal, racist institution of motherhood.

AB: As a poet, Rich also interrogated how this institution is inherited and thus recreated from one generation to the next. I’m thinking of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), where she writes about invisible domestic labour and cyclical gendered violence. For Rich, it is violence that belongs to a culture of silence. Your work contends with the contemporary cultural resonance of this silence. Having this conversation, then, we seem most interested in the words unsaid by the Madonna of the “Madonna and Child.” Raphael’s Small Cowper Madonna (c. 1504-05), for example, offers the viewer legibility. A certain visual transmissibility is at stake. Alternatively, with Walk in the Park,the landscape is rendered abstract. That landscape is unsettled as we move into opacity. A park is supposed to be a shared space. We read books, we watch birds, we visit friends—all in the company of perfect strangers. I think this feeling of community is fictional, though.

Cat Attack Collective, Walk in the Park, 2023, Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery. Image: David Barbour.

NB: Let’s say that our experience of the park is not all the same. A mother is providing care and working to keep it all together on her own.

AB: To the passer-by, the depth of her experience, the context of her arrival, is easily overlooked. A park setting is fundamentally a public setting that is structured according to some contract of social acceptability. Yet Walk in the Park makes visible what has been rendered invisible. That is, we see the physical and emotional labour of maternal caregiving. This is not a walk in the forest. It is a walk in a park, which is itself a constructed environment. In this rethinking of that constructed environment, there is an expansion and contraction between private and public worlds. Here, an aesthetic reinvention occurs. The park is no longer a seamless, smooth surface of leisure activity. It is a texture—an inherited context. The work is doing more with less. And that feminist sense of maximalism offers us the chance to rethink the canon of Western art history. Many would argue that minimalism represents the height of modernism, where the painted surface and sculptural form become indistinguishable through the absolute reduction of the image. Highlighting the maximalism of Cat Attack Collective, we are not simply asking: What is painting? What is sculpture? What is art? But instead: Who is an artist? What is a studio? What is the relationship between maternal caregiving and artistic production?

NB: It makes people upset when you show them this side of art.

AB: According to that inherited myth of modernist art, the studio is a private space where the genius closes his door to the world and goes to work on a masterpiece. I think about Brancusi’s recently recreated studio at the Centre Pompidou and the ways in which this privileged space becomes fetishized. A copy of a copy of a room filled with nearly priceless phallic objects—there is perhaps no greater metaphor for the historical durability of these relations.

Cat Attack Collective, Rough Around the Edges, 2020, University of Ottawa MFA Final Critique. Image: Cara Tierney.

NB: Our work is maximalist with a Dollar Store budget. The artist Jenny McMaster called it “messimalism.” I think about the notion of spilling over from a feminist theoretical perspective. The emphasis on plastic originated from practical considerations leading up to an MFA critique. I was grouping my paintings together into one expansive blob. Tomson’s work was on the other side of the room in a smaller formation. The two bodies were approaching each other, almost touching. But the surface underneath looked like a studio wall—it became distracting. I needed color quickly. And it needed to be inexpensive.

AB: The plastic tablecloths are readymade. They also behave as a connective tissue, a second skin for the gallery walls. In this sense, Walk in the Park rejects the visual logic of the white cube gallery. What the white cube shares with the park setting is the myth of neutrality—the fiction of a common ground. In the installation, the ground of meaning emerges from a place of visual and material excess that is, paradoxically, tied to a series of constraints. It is, as you suggest, a context that spills over. It is a textured surface of meaning that begins, first and foremost, with the question of feminist worldmaking.

NB: Returning to the question of legibility, I don’t think children are viewing the installation as an aesthetic reinvention of the park or an interrogation of modernist neutrality. In the busyness of creating the work, you don’t have time to sit and enjoy it until much, much later. For me, that much, much later, came the day before the show closed. I could feel the space. It made me emotional because I saw it as beautiful. I was proud of what we were able to do. I was having a heartfelt introspective moment when several children came in running, laughing, and screaming. And that is how they view this space. So, legibility varies.


AB: Walk in the Park offers a feminist critique of maternal erasure that is born from sensorial pleasure. For any viewer of any age, that visual excess is the pull inward. But what is made visible only scratches the surface of an inherited context, in art and life.

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

Ash Barbu is a writer, curator, and researcher who holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of Toronto. A recipient of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators, they have produced numerous group exhibitions foregrounding the limits of reparative visibility, including Words Unsaid: Autobiography and Knowing at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Visual Arts (2023). Their recent writings have appeared in publications such as OnCurating, Peripheral Review, and Esse art + opinions. Barbu lectures on queer theory and trans studies locally, nationally, and internationally.

Cat Attack Collective consists of Natalie Bruvels and her son, Tomson. They are a multidisciplinary collective working primarily in painting and large-scale installations. Established in 2020, Cat Attack Collective has exhibited at the University of Ottawa, Art Mûr, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and along the Greenboro Pathway as part of Microcosm, the City of Ottawa Public Art Program’s COVID-19 pilot initiative.

Natalie Bruvels holds a Master of Fine Arts and a Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Theory, both from the University of Ottawa. She is currently enrolled in the Feminist and Gender Studies PhD program at the University of Ottawa. Bruvels is researching maternal subjectivity in art and visual culture, while advocating for caregiving supports in a university setting. Bruvels has presented the work of Cat Attack Collective at various academic conferences, including the Museum of Motherhood in St. Petersburg, Florida. She has subsequently published writing in The Journal of Mother Studies.

Tomson is in grade six and is happy to be back at school in person to spend more time with his friends. He loves dodgeball and has a special affinity for zip-ties as an artistic material. He is the youngest artist to have his work exhibited at the Ottawa Art Gallery.  

Part One: Ash Barbu and Natalie Bruvels in Conversation

Maximalism and the Postmaternal

Cat Attack Collective, Walk in the Park, 2023, Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery. Image: David Barbour.

In this two-part dialogue, spanning contemporary feminist theory to modernist art criticism, independent curator Ash Barbu and interdisciplinary artist Natalie Bruvels reflect on the relationship between maternal caregiving and collaborative authorship. Specifically, they discuss the recent exhibition Walk in the Park (2023) created by Cat Attack Collective, an artist duo consisting of Bruvels and her 11-year-old son Tomson. Walk in the Park transforms the white cube Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery into an expansive environment that blurs the line between the surreal and the everyday. Building from the prior exhibition Abound (2022), presented at the Ottawa Art Gallery, the installation incorporates co-created paintings and sculptures of recycled, accessible materials that intersect and overspill. In the exchanges that follow, through considerations of accumulation, refiguration, and immersion, Barbu and Bruvels propose readings of ethics and aesthetics that foreground the inherited context of the work of art.

Ash Barbu: I often think about research as a parallel life process in which we grant ourselves the freedom to move beyond the limits of the merely possible. Having recently completed the first year of your doctoral studies, how does your academic work reflect your experience as a mother?

Natalie Bruvels: I’m drawn to the concept of the postmaternal, coined and developed by theorist Julie Stephens. This term offers a useful framework to address how caregiving, maternal subjectivities, and maternal epistemologies are erased in university spaces. It is also a framework that allows us to examine how the catastrophic effects of this erasure are objectified in visual culture. During this period of research as a PhD student, I have immersed myself in different concerns about maternal theory. The layered experiences of mothers are incredibly diverse and need to be taught. And they need to be taught in a feminist way. After all, caregiving is a component of reproductive justice. For the time being, I’m exploring questions of pedagogy rooted in a post-structuralist analysis of words that don’t yet exist—words that we need to make sense of our experiences. In the previous year, completing my MA during the pandemic, I don’t think I saw anyone. Researching and homeschooling was difficult. But I had the opportunity to take Andrea O’Reilly’s maternal theory course at York University, which saved my sanity. To be clear, it saved my life as a researcher. It was the first time I saw someone get up in front of a class and unapologetically create space for this discussion.

AB: In academia, sometimes we wander into what feels like an empty landscape. It can be intimidating to create space for yourself lacking the comforts of disciplinary foundations. At the same time, it is a sign there is more to be done there. What we need is more, not less disruption. How do these theoretical interventions on the postmaternal figure in your artistic practice?

NB: A few years prior, during my time in the MFA program, I began thinking about caregiving through alternative forms of collaboration. I always liked the idea of Tomson and I coming to the Visual Arts Building on weekends. As a parent, you try to give your child experiences that will stay with them. I decided we should go ahead and create something new. It was a learning experience, as I had to rethink the meanings we traditionally assign to authorship.

To begin, I assumed that the work would be prescriptive—that we would follow my idea. I quickly realized, though, that I couldn’t be in control. Yes, I’m responsible for this individual’s safety and well-being. But he is going to do exactly what he wants to do, for as long as he wants to do it. What I want to say, though, is that the work is freeing. Completing an MFA, you’re often probed and expected to have the answers. To say that I can’t anticipate where this work will lead in the future might seem like a deficit. Yet it is the only truthful answer. Right now, I’m taking the studio back into our home. We aren’t collaborating much as I try to put the space back in order.

Cat Attack Collective, Walk in the Park, 2023, Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery. Image: David Barbour.

AB: What about the feedback this work has received? A mother and child working together in the spirit of spontaneous production—this is far from conventional artistic research methodology. I sense you have faced gatekeeping regarding the so-called sanctity of art, both institutionally and interpersonally.

NB: There is the question of artistic merit. I have heard people say: “Why should I be looking at this?” While others might bring up the topic of exploitation, which enrages me and sometimes makes me cry. If there is anyone in the room who genuinely cares about this child, if there is anyone who will suffer the consequences of a lack of love, it is me. And if you’re not feeling protected, if you’re overworked, if you’re exhausted, if it is the wrong time in your menstrual cycle—all these things can add up to the point where you lose your equilibrium. Let’s say it can make it hurt more. In another context, I face gatekeeping from simply saying the word “mom” in an academic setting. There is also gatekeeping concerning the acceptable structure of the nuclear heteronormative family. Further, I have seen critics borrow from emancipatory feminist discourses in ways that deviate from their original intent. In the end, we are speaking about a single mother living below the poverty line, trying to raise her kid during a pandemic with no help. Having this conversation today, I feel the need to foreground that sense of judgment.

AB: I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about Cat Attack Collective’s exhibition Walk in the Park at the Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery. From this collaborative, immersive installation, I see two subjects in dialogue, learning and unlearning from one another through artistic experimentation. I can’t help but think that the question of exploitation acts as a form of silencing.

NB: It serves to erase maternal subjectivities from the public forum of art spectatorship. As an MFA student, I immediately knew that the limitations brought on by COVID would interfere with my ability to complete the coursework and develop my studio practice. So, whenever the question of ethics is raised, I wonder why we refuse to consider the opposite point of view? How is this mother going to make new work? She must simultaneously provide care and find an activity that is engaging for her child. Therefore, they are now a collective. If that collective doesn’t exist, she is not making art—that studio practice is erased. What does it mean that we are ignoring this inherited social context of artistic production?

Cat Attack Collective, SS Same Boat, 2022, Ottawa Art Gallery. Image: Justin Wonacott.

AB: Walk in the Park troubles neutral, apolitical readings of maternal caregiving. Through a variety of display strategies, you directly engage the context of your arrival to the gallery space as a mother. To this extent, the exhibition is concerned with means as opposed to ends.

NB: Prior to this exhibition, in 2022 we created an ambitious mixed media work for the final MFA exhibition at the Ottawa Art Gallery titled Abound. In the middle of the gallery sat a towering floor-to-ceiling boat wrapped, draped, and tied in colourful reusable plastics. We called it SS Same Boat. Completing the degree, everyone kept telling me: “Oh, Natalie, you’re fine—we’re all in the same boat.” I often use titles to play against the aesthetic. They allow me to express the inner workings of my discontent, particularly in an acerbic, humorous way. For our current exhibition at the Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery, we wanted to reuse the materials from SS Same Boat. Tomson said he wanted to make trees—it wasn’t a long brainstorming session. The title Walk in the Park is beautifully straightforward and utterly facetious. And I would like both things to remain true. One does not erase the other. Instead, the premise and the critique are always already held in tension. Representing the complex relationship between a mother and child through an accumulation of art objects—it is a fantastic puzzle.

Today, many mothers are making challenging feminist work about the maternal—we don’t hear about it. 

AB: How might we situate this complexity, art historically speaking?

NB: In Western art history, these interactions have been romanticized by individuals who are not mothers. One concern is the curatorial siloing that occurs. We have been led to back into the corner and be a niche. To call motherhood a niche—this itself is an important piece of evidence that demonstrates how we have internalized such restrictive ideals. Today, many mothers are making challenging feminist work about the maternal—we don’t hear about it. I’m not even sure that we have the eyes for it. I include myself in this category. This observation is partly based on philosopher Julia Kristeva’s essay Stabat Mater (1977). She uses psychoanalytic theory to describe what happens when we look at the artistic motif of the “Madonna and Child,” or any idealized representation of motherhood. For Kristeva, it hardly matters if the viewer is a mother or not—they will identify with the image of the child. And this identification with the child involves a primary narcissism. It is that transportation to a place where I’m nourished, where my needs are met, where I receive care before I had a care in the world. Looking at the “Madonna and Child” is like taking an aesthetic drug. Therefore, when we encounter something like a feminist rendering of the maternal, there is room for profound disappointment, affectively or psychologically. With Walk in the Park, the viewer happens upon a scene that seems ultimately unfulfilling. It is an unsettling landscape of entangled contexts. Here, something rendered historically invisible contends with the problem of what it means to be seen.

You can read Part two of Barbu and Bruvels’ discussion here.

—

Ash Barbu is a writer, curator, and researcher who holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of Toronto. A recipient of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators, they have produced numerous group exhibitions foregrounding the limits of reparative visibility, including Words Unsaid: Autobiography and Knowing at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Visual Arts (2023). Their recent writings have appeared in publications such as OnCurating, Peripheral Review, and Esse art + opinions. Barbu lectures on queer theory and trans studies locally, nationally, and internationally.

Cat Attack Collective consists of Natalie Bruvels and her son Tomson. They are a multidisciplinary collective working primarily in painting and large-scale installations. Established in 2020, Cat Attack Collective has exhibited at the University of Ottawa, Art Mûr, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and along the Greenboro Pathway as part of Microcosm, the City of Ottawa Public Art Program’s COVID-19 pilot initiative.

Natalie Bruvels holds a Master of Fine Arts and a Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Theory, both from the University of Ottawa. She is currently enrolled in the Feminist and Gender Studies PhD program at the University of Ottawa. Bruvels is researching maternal subjectivity in art and visual culture, while advocating for caregiving supports in a university setting. Bruvels has presented the work of Cat Attack Collective at various academic conferences, including the Museum of Motherhood in St. Petersburg, Florida. She has subsequently published writing in The Journal of Mother Studies.

Tomson is in grade six and is happy to be back at school in person to spend more time with his friends. He loves dodgeball and has a special affinity for zip-ties as an artistic material. He is the youngest artist to have his work exhibited at the Ottawa Art Gallery.