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BLOOMDOOMROOM: Face to face with the slow apocalypse

BLOOMDOOMROOM

the plumb

March 12 – April 8, 2021

By Angel Callander

One prominent outgrowth from the beginning of last year was the rush from European intellectuals to contextualize a burgeoning global health crisis for a frightened global public. Notably, Bruno Latour and Slavoj Žižek connected the pandemic to its already existing relatives in climate and economic crises. Giorgio Agamben, on the other hand, was heavily criticized by colleagues and journalists for his reactionary take on the false choice between health and privacy—neither mutually exclusive nor binary opposites—decrying quarantine as a loss of freedom (proceeding from a cynical and individualist definition of ‘freedom’).[1] Žižek’s book Pandemic!, an expansion on his mid-March essay “Monitor and Punish? Yes, Please!”, was offered for free pre-orders at the end of the same month, and available for eBook download by mid-April. This rush to add multiple voices to dissect a new crisis is characteristic of our oversaturated information economy within a larger system of excess.

Even so, it was smart for leftist thinkers to be quick in shaping a straightforward narrative that connected the dots from systemic exploitation to the Sixth Mass Extinction and something as (quasi-)unpredictable as a pandemic. By attempting to mediate our material processes through knowledge, there was a fundamental truth emerging about how regular people, particularly in the working class, are increasingly broken down to maintaining the bare minimum, to the fight for sheer survival. Horizons of understanding and possibility, cycles of growth and recovery, are all often forestalled by desperation. Solidarity—with each other and our environments—is clouded by obligation and discord.

The group show BLOOMDOOMROOM takes up a response to these problems. Described as “an exhibition about flowering, fruiting, ecological fall-out, late-stage environmental capitalism and art at the end of days,” the show adopts a unique approach in the ecosystem of art shows about climate anxiety and slow apocalypse. On view at the plumb gallery in Toronto from March 12 – April 8, 2021, partially during a spring lockdown, the exhibition uses these themes to tease out the necessary symbiotic relationship of vitality and entropy in all life, aspects of the fundamental dialectics in which all things are constantly in a dance with their own contradictions. It accentuates both the human and non-human dimensions in tandem,showing plant and animal life as equal agents in creative endeavours, while the human dimension fades into the background, revealing itself only through artifacts.

Zooming both in and out, the works in the show invoke larger philosophical and political questions as well as personal inventories of being in the world presently, conjuring a darkness without nihilism or despair.

Contrary to the didactic and moralizing strategies of large institutional shows like AGO’s Anthropocene in 2018, which seek to show ecological ruins that elicit feelings of despair—while also being beholden to not offending the capital interests of museum donors—BLOOMDOOMROOM benefits from the DIY artist-run model, allowing for a more autonomous approach. Zooming both in and out, the works in the show invoke larger philosophical and political questions as well as personal inventories of being in the world presently, conjuring a darkness without nihilism or despair.

Unsurprisingly, Anthropocene did not point to capitalism, instead vaguely referencing “how we, individually and collectively, are leaving a human signature on our world.”[2] Far be it from a large institution to do so, it is probably high time to dispel with the narrative that naming the system is radical, or that the responsibility for causing and consequently solving the crisis should be equally placed at the feet of every person on earth. Accepting that climate change is not just anthropogenic, but, to use Jason W. Moore’s word, capitalogenic (“made by capital”)[3], it is more apt to shift the focus in a different direction. BLOOMDOOMROOM carves out a space to contemplate these multifaceted relationships, aesthetics of transformation, and the value of creatively interrogating the present.

HaeAhn Kwon, *The Baroness Model. 1874*, 2021. Documentation by Alison Postma, courtesy of the plumb.

HaeAhn Kwon’s The Baroness Model. 1874 (2021) consists of an open suitcase with a working pond pump and small fountain inside, attached to meandering latex tubing and extension cords. As the fountain thoughtlessly dribbles into the suitcase, I imagine an abandoned airport strewn with long-neglected luggage. At once deliberate and involuntary, it is a strange relic. Describing her practice as recombinations of everyday objects, Kwon uses these items to emphasize a tension between our culture of excess and the ingenuity that emerges out of crises. This work emblematizes a certain feeling throughout the show, as though documenting not a human civilization as such, but its legacy through strange, disembodied artifacts, repurposed and repossessed by non-human entities and the passage of time.

Alex Tedlie-Stursberg, *Woolly Marker*, 2018. Documentation by Alison Postma, courtesy of the plumb. 2021.

Woolly Marker (2018) by Alex Tedlie-Stursberg lingers across the room, producing a similar impression. A tall abstract figure made with a mud-like texture, adorned with tufts of white fur and an artificial schefflera branch, the sculpture has the aura of something made with a distinct purpose and left behind long ago. The neon eyes of Colin Miner’s Untitled (red eye) (2017), one at each end of the room, along with sets of amphibious eyes peering out of Sarah Davidson’s paintings along the walls, follow and keep watch like portraits of ageless mystics as non-human stewards for the space.

Brennan J. Kelly, SUM, 2021, publication, 11 3/8” x 14 7/8.” Documentation by Alison Postma, courtesy of the plumb.

SUM, a broadsheet published by Brennan J. Kelly and available to take away, acts as a companion and sub-exhibition to the show through an archival object. Featuring works by Shannon Garden-Smith, Alex Tedlie-Stursberg, Sarah Davidson, Sonya Ratkay, an interview with HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander, and a recipe by Mohammed Rezaei, among other texts and printed works, the publication provides an alternative presentation space for creative experiments. In the same DIY model as the plumb itself, together they demonstrate the types of creative ecologies available outside of the institution.

Susannah van der Zaag, *Gloriosa* and *Hellebore*, 2021, Inkjet print on archival paper.16” x 14” framed.
Documentation by Alison Postma, courtesy of the plumb.

Susannah van der Zaag, *Untitled arrangement*, 2021, Documentation by Alison Postma, courtesy of the plumb.

Susannah van der Zaag contributed a series of photographic prints and a floral arrangement to the exhibition. A farmer and florist, as well as a multidisciplinary artist working in photography and ceramics, Van der Zaag has expressed her mixed feelings about making a living that revolves around the consumption of nature, and the demands for perfection from something so diverse and imperfect in service of a huge aesthetic industry such as floristry. Her prints play out this tension by composing plants she grows with less traditionally photogenic items, like bread, driftwood, and a cracked vase, while the large floral arrangement is left to decay and dry out in the gallery in front of where they hang.

Latour discusses the plight of a Dutch tulip grower, interviewed for the news in an emotionally wrought state at having to discard several tonnes of tulips, as fewer customers around the world meant fewer shipping opportunities. I recall a local news story at the time of a nursery in the Niagara region with the same bent, in which a certain shame about discarding beautiful things—things of nature—meets the fear of economic collapse. Latour notes a camera shot behind the florist of the tulips under artificial lights, not growing in any soil, in preparation to be shipped to the airport and flown on commercial air-freighters. He asks plainly about whether it is useful to maintain this model for producing and selling flowers (of course, it isn’t), following with a phrase that has deeply resonated: “Injustice is not about the redistribution of the fruits of progress, but about the very manner in which the planet is made fruitful.”[4] I would contend it is both in equal measure, accounting for multiple dimensions of our capitalogenic crises in both the environment and the economy.

Since the early to mid-2010s, there has been an influx of texts within the canon of Western science and academia (such as Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think, and much of Donna Haraway’s oeuvre from the 1980s onward) that encourage a well-rounded, fundamentally anti-capitalist understanding of ecology as the solution to environmental crisis, invoking the knowledge Indigenous peoples have had for thousands of years. Nevertheless, the prevalence of these ethical discourses has not done much to sway policy makers. Because we live in the empire, theory in and of itself is non-threatening; it is only when knowledge resonates to precipitate a mass movement for serious changes that those with power may have their hands forced.

I have been thinking more about the text Desert (2011), written by a self-proclaimed British anarchist in their late 40s, but otherwise anonymously, and titled as a double entendre: one, detailing the rapid desertification of more regions on Earth through global warming, and two, the desire to desert the society that created this crisis as such. One particular line stands out to me within the scope of this exhibition: “Our lives can be better, freer, and wilder than this… we do our utmost to make them so, not in the ever-after of post-revolutionary heaven, but now.”[5] There are always small opportunities to make each other’s lives more liveable, even amidst collective anxieties and despair. In Pandemic!, Žižek describes an ecological public as “a group of bodies, some human, most not, that are subjected to harm.”[6] Hopefully, we have moved beyond internalizing this as true even if Western society at large does not reflect this understanding. BLOOMDOOMROOM takes this as a starting point, evaluating natural life in its many incongruities, and with the implied viewpoint that recognizing our larger entanglements is the most substantive.

[1] See Latour: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/P-202-AOC-ENGLISH_1.pdf; and Agamben: https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/

[2] https://ago.ca/exhibitions/anthropocene

[3] Jason W. Moore, “Capitalocene & Planetary Justice,” Maize Magazine 6 (Summer 2019), https://jasonwmoore.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Moore-The-Capitalocene-and-Planetary-Justice-2019-Maize.pdf

[4] Bruno Latour, “What protective measures can you think of so we don’t go back to the pre-crisis production mode?” p. 3, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/P-202-AOC-ENGLISH_1.pdf

[5] Anonymous, Desert (2011), p. 59

[6] Slavoj Žižek, Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World (OR Books, 2020), p. 97

The Power is in the Black Gaze: Out of Many

Out of Many, Jorian Charlton – Curated by Emilie Croning

Online Exhibit Launched February 6, 2021

Wedge Curatorial Projects

Jorian Charlton, *Untitled (Georgia)*, 2020. © 2021 Jorian Charlton.

By Nya Lewis

Outside of my grandmother, whose matriarch status reigned supreme, the second most important member of my family puzzle was the uncle with the camera. He showed up at family picnics, at weddings, on front stoops. He captured us in our most intimate and vital times and held an ever-present commitment to capturing us in our truth. The keeper of this title changed from generation to generation, but never the importance. The see-er, the documenter, every Black family deserves an archivist. Author bell hooks describes the snapshot as the launch point of the visual in Black life, and I immediately consider the Caribbean proverb “We are the stories we are allowed to see.” The power of the snapshot is that it exists in opposition to the imposed imagery of Blackness. It is self-preservation. It is a representation of self-love and understanding. The Black family snapshot is a declaration of worthiness and authority, returning a sense of presence, too often lost in the white imagination.

In collaboration with Gallery TPW, Wedge Curatorial Projects presents Out of Many. Curated by Emilie Croning, the exhibition pairs vintage 35mm slides loaned from photographer Jorian Charlton‘s family archive from the 1970s and 80s in Jamaica, Toronto, and New York, with Charlton’s photographic practice exploring contemporary visuals of Black aesthetics and Jamaican-Canadian identity. Both the exhibition and archive explore the inter-relations of the immigration story, new ways of thinking about Caribbean-Canadian culture, and rediscover the family album through a contemporary lens.

Jorian Charlton, *Untitled (Ayo & Georgia)*, 2019. © 2021 Jorian Charlton

Out of Many, the exhibit’s title is a nod to Jamaica’s national motto, ‘Out of Many One People,’ created in 1962 to celebrate the unity of the country’s multiracial roots. The motto is represented on the Coat of Arms. Like many of its neighboring Caribbean populations, the stain of British colonization is imprinted on the makeup of its people: Indigenous, African, Chinese, South Asian- all brought to the island as enslaved people, or indentured laborers now contribute to this quilt of Jamaican identities. Large waves of forced and independent migration shifted the quilt’s makeup as early as 1960 as Great Britain and Canada called for British colonized Caribbean countries to send their best and brightest overseas.

According to Statistics Canada, Canadians of Jamaican origin make up one of Canada’s largest non-European ethnic groups. Ontario is home to 85% of the total Jamaican Canadian population. It is here that the impact of Jamaican culture and its people permeate North America. The landing pad for the travel and spread of their intergenerational stories and the dialogue surrounding the preservation of Afro-diasporic identities and imagery become prevalent.

At the center of this conversation, a Toronto-based, Black, Caribbean-Canadian powered organization: Wedge Curatorial Projects, “a non-profit organization with a focus on Black identity in contemporary art.” Under director and founder Kenneth Montague, Wedge explores Diasporic narratives, identity, and representation issues through exhibitions and lectures. Established in 1997, Wedge Curatorial Projects was initially conceived as a private and public art experience. Since then, it has evolved into a curatorial organization, representing national and international artists, creating a much-needed shift in Toronto’s art community, “wedging” Black artists into a mainstream market from which they are too often excluded.

Vintage 35mm slide *(Ja Maica No Problem)*, photographed by Clayton Charlton, c.1979. Collection of Jorian Charlton, reprinted 2020. © 2021 Jorian Charlton.

Charlton’s father’s archive presents an opportunity for intergenerational dialogue on lineage, culture, and land. In an intimate welcome into the so-called “living room” of the contemporary Black experience through the Charlton family, we are given familiar representations of home, freedom, agency. Displayed in conjunction with the slides, Jorian Charlton uses analog and digital photography to visualize new storytelling methods. As Croning describes, together these images create a tangible remembrance of “what was, what is, and what will become.” Autonomy captured -the ultimate snapshot, Charlton’s work, influenced by fashion photography, centers Black bodies and reflects self-awareness and acceptance. Confident and direct, yet delicate and playful, the audience is all at once given and denied access to inter-communal recognitions of beauty and existence. In a country where the Black community encounters displacement, transformation, and mending, mitigated by site, the subjects actively communicate the complexities of agency simply by existing in contrast to their surroundings. Their “Home.”

Jorian Charlton, *Untitled (Jem & Mikki)*, 2020. © 2021 Jorian Charlton.

The beautiful, light-filled, colorful photos, oozing melanin, capturing piercing gazes, embody a sense of joy and freedom that is truly a relief. They are relatable; they are humanizing. Acknowledging the power of the Black gaze, the exhibit calls the audience making the invitation clear, an opportunity for the Black Caribbean community to see themselves. To discuss the importance of capturing images of the Black experience is to discuss civil rights, equity, and access. In full participation, the photography positions itself as a powerful reclamation, a visual resistance. To Black families, cameras give access to critical intervention, a disruption, shifting from being seen to seeing. Out of Many emotionally contextualizes immigrant Canadians’ experiences and the interconnectedness of their impact on first-generation Canadians. The exhibit homes in on the joy of photo taking, which is as important as displaying them when capturing marginalized groups. There is magic in documenting an existence that is consistently challenged. Through Black portraiture, Out of Many carves out an empowering show of record and representation on their terms.

Impenetrable intimacies: the body as a fever dream

the body as a fever dream

Xpace Cultural Centre

October 9 – November 7, 2020

Séamus Gallagher, Eija Loponen-Stephenson, Sheri Osden Nault, Camille Rojas, Lauren Runions, and B Wijshijer

Curated by Dallas Fellini

By Dana Snow

The back of my head rests at a right angle on shutters made of composite wood pulp, craning at my laptop screen—I have forgotten about good posture. Trapezius muscles in my neck hold the tension of overdue bills and the strain of a heavy grocery load. The sharpness in my tailbone presses into my partner’s firm mattress. My hamstrings are taut after a morning run in old sneakers. In the privacy of the bedroom, my body belongs to me, supporting and warming the person asleep next to me. I am fully present, existing on my own terms. I am safe from consumption.

The body as a fever dream teeters between thresholds of the corporal, constricting and constructing form. Spectral absences refuse the optical cannibalism lurking around every sightline in the gallery space. I have seen many exhibitions on the Body — in its academicized capital B — it has become synonymous with an essential identity, co-opted most frequently by a cis-white feminist framework.¹ The body as a fever dream works outside of this history, centring the body as an opaque form; one that honours trans experience. Using elements of absence, refusal and opacity, the exhibition refigures the body as something that exists in the slash between either/or, granting self-governance to a form that has historically been framed under the cisgender gaze.

Séamus Gallagher, THINKING OF YOU THINKING OF ME. Video. 2019. Photo credit: Roya DelSol. Courtesy of Xpace Cultural Centre.

Scarlet LCD screen emissions beckon me into the gallery—I think of Sara Cwynar’s Red Film first. An examination of ideal cosmetic femininity under late-stage capitalism, Red Film’s didactic lines have stuck with me the most: “Remember that dull scanners and digital cameras have problems with highly saturated reds.” Artist Séamus Gallagher plays with these “problems” in THINKING OF YOU, THINKING OF ME. After an opening close up of artificial flowers printed on foam core, the camera cuts to ersatz velvet red shower curtains in the middle ground. Gallagher emerges as their drag persona, Sara Tonin, dripping in ruby sequins. Her Oz-worthy strapless dress blows out the focus on the torso of her performer, focusing the viewer’s attention on her paper maquillage. Under her mask, she— or perhaps Gallagher—speaks to biological “cheap imitations” in animal behaviour. Sara Tonin is a construction of mimetic lust. She moves just beyond reach, a technicality away from tangibility. “I am thinking of you, thinking of me. Watching myself the way you watch me.” In the wash of reds, I can’t tear my eyes away from her face, her décolletage. Gallagher’s use of red is a formal refusal to be completely captured as an object of desire. It’s a performed understanding of the freedom afforded by elusiveness — a refusal that grants breathing room. I think about my own red slip, a silky garment that lays in a whisper against my skin. A reminder of sensuality against exposed flesh that stretches over my bones and often feels like it does not belong to me, especially when it is on view. Wearing the garment becomes a literal exposure therapy. I think it is my form of a cheap imitation, that I am playing a vision of a woman that I will never be. But it also means that I do not have to truly reveal myself, I remain unwounded through performance. I re-watch THINKING OF YOU, THINKING OF ME hoping that I will catch a glimpse of Gallagher revealing an aspect of themself, something that will point me to the person behind the performance. I am unable to find anything.

Eija Loponen-Stephenson, Net Interface. Forest-green privacy netting, button thread, brass grommets. 2019. Photo Credit: Roya DelSol. Courtesy of Xpace Cultural Centre.

Eija Loponen-Stephenson’s Net Interface leaks into my space before I can tear myself away from Sara Tonin. A wheat-pasted image of a construction shroud veils while Sara bares her collarbones. As I wander over to the installation, I think that it might be out of place, until I see the four drooping gloves protruding like weeds from the netting. I feel like I am intruding on this work, like a voyeur unable to access their subject. Within the folds that reach the floor, I find a knuckly plaster mass. Sheri Osden Nault’s Mimic, Lake Ontario offers relief, an assurance that my own body is not implicated to fill the vacant gaps in the work.

The two installation pieces lap at each other’s edges in the gallery space. They contain complimentary absences— while the site-specific images of Net Interface sever a body into limbs, Mimic, Lake Ontario materializes the body as a larger contextual whole in the space. As I walk around gently heaped piles of sand, I imagine the animate plaster peeking through to have spindly roots, a nearly neural network of connection between the islands in the gallery. The piles lead me to Hold, a sculptural work from Osden Nault using the same technique of cast plaster fingers inside a burrowed-in log. Corroded by insect trails, the work centers the embedded remnants of bodies reliant on one another. I am looking at the intersection between the human artist and the movements of insects as artists in their own right, one tracing another’s presence. I am reminded that I am not the sole being in the gallery space. Underneath my feet and poured concrete flooring there is soil, microbes, water. I am reminded of the mask I am wearing in the gallery to keep out virulence, and the open wound in my hand the sanitizer sears into upon entry—we are all embroiled together. In the unease, I recognize the intimacies of interconnection.

Sheri Osden Nault, Hold. Log, plaster, acrylic medium, epoxy resin. 2017. Photo credit: Roya DelSol

Sheri Osden Nault, Sovereign Bodies 01. Found wood, human hair, epoxy, nylon rope.
2018. Photo Credit: Roya DelSol. Courtesy of Xpace Cultural Centre.

Sovereign Bodies 01 hangs within the sightline of Hold, the boughed found wood and human hair evoke a closed eye with lashes looking over their fleshy parts. Osden Nault’s works contain what feminist scholar Donna Haraway would call a “becoming-with… the cat’s cradle games in which those who are to be in the world are constituted in intra- and interaction.”² The independent works become an involved landscape. If Net Interface asks you to fill its voids, Hold, Mimic, Lake Ontario and Sovereign Body 01 interpellate the viewer’s body into their becoming. In their use of abstraction and union with the non-human, Hold and Mimic, Lake Ontario deny a singular corpus, allowing a horizontal relationship to the other bodies of the landscape (including the viewer’s) to emerge. I cannot distance myself from the objects as a singular viewer to gaze at the landscape the works create. I can only become a subject with an impact in their world.

B Wijshijer, How to Edit Your Selfies. Video. 2019. Photo credit: Roya DelSol. Courtesy of Xpace Cultural Centre.

B Wijshijer’s How to Edit Your Selfies flashes west of Hold, jarring the world it has built for me. The artist sifts through filters on FaceApp, a popular application used to swap genders and ages, predominantly for social media posts. After each filter a screenshot is taken, moving Wijshijer further and further away from their origin point. Over time, the face of the artist becomes exponentially more bizarre, unrecognizable by mid-film and at the end, reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s suffering figures. Wijshijer’s face is not absorbed by the algorithm, but defiant to the cis, neoliberal “beautiful” versions of the self the app was created to produce. In their exhibition essay, curator Dallas Fellini describes Wijshijer’s transformations as “monstrous.” As I embrace my own femme identity, monstrousity is somewhere I feel most comfortable. Tracing the scholarship of Judith Butler, the monstrous is “a way of writing ourselves out of the ‘bind’ of gender binaries, heteronormative desires and traditional forms of kinship.”³ Wijshijer has written themself out of the teleological nature of cis beauty the app promises to deliver, and into a cyborgian realm of possibility. How to Edit Your Selfies feels like a finale to Gallagher’s THINKING OF ME, THINKING OF YOU, a performance of data mined mimicry stretched beyond recognition. A mutated, distorted face is one that has agency over its aesthetic co-optation, one that cannot be easily digested — it is what I would call a “power move.”

Quartet with “Net Interface” and “Mimic, Lake Ontario”, Performed by Camille Rojas and Lauren Runions. Work by Sheri Osden Nault and Eija Lopponen-Stephenson. Photo credit: Philip Leonard Ocampo. Courtesy of Xpace Cultural Centre.

Quartet with “Net Interface” and “Mimic, Lake Ontario” punctuates the exhibition in its notable absence of action. The only ephemera left from the performance between Camille Rojas and Lauren Runions are fingers scraped through the sands of Mimic, Lake Ontario. The atemporal aspect of the performance is a spectre in the gallery, stretching from far before I arrived when the act took place, and realized in a video work I pulled up from the comfort of my own home. I could describe the curious movements made by Rojas and Runions, inhabitants of the work and the space before I, or any other viewer for that matter, saw the work. I could speak to their loving cradling of Mimic, Lake Ontario or I could tell you about the playful insights bodies in movement bring to Net Interface. But I think the work is at its strongest in its frustrating inaccessibility. What the viewer can know in the space is that an activation took place, but until they seek it out for themselves, they cannot see through anything but its remnants. In its frustrating opacity, Quartet is whole—a completely inconsumable body of work, a haunting refusal to be present. It reminds me that as you read my words, I am not the voice that exists in your head. Or, that I am becoming another as you digest me. And I can exist as both, unburdened.

¹Louis Fermor, “The Feminine, The Grotesque and the Reclaimed,” Canadian Art, November 24, 2020.

²Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 4-5

³Judith Butler, “Afterword.” In Animating Autobiography: Barbara Johnson and Mary Shelley’s Monster. (Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 2014) 40.

Pleasure Prospects: Counter-Prospective Feminist Futures

TBA_NewMineralCollective_259LakeShore_02 — New Mineral Collective, *Pleasure Prospects*, 2019, single-channel video, 4k. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. On view at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019). Courtesy of the artists.

295 Lake Shore Blvd, 2019 Toronto Biennial

September 21-December 1, 2019

By Courtney Miller

The calm, soothing voice of a narrator asks the viewer, “…how to extract meaning, not material?” Pleasure Prospects, a video installation by the New Mineral Collective (NMC), analyzes the current state of resource extraction industries, countering realities of environmental destruction with imagined reparative futures. Responding to the Toronto Biennial’s overarching question what does it mean to be in relation? artist duo Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė present a dreamy, placid recourse through contemporary dance and alternative medicines, refusing a capitalist trajectory of progress. In an era of panicked attempts to combat the climate crisis, what function does feminist utopian dreaming serve? Positioning environmental ruin as a continuous invasion against a shared life body, NMC knows that this crisis is already well underway, in which Pleasure Prospects demonstrates the impetus for healing.

What happens when artists create space for dreaming and respite?

Beginning with what appears to be footage from a mining trade show, suited bodies strike-through booths and across polished floors, while screens depict the earth’s surface in networks of grids and topographical markers. The counter-narrative to surveying from an overhead view presents the viewer with gentle caressing gestures, touching both human and earth bodies. Whether skin or sand, hands move slowly across surfaces with the intention to console rather than siphon. Shifting from cold, hard edges and detached socialization, machinery is replaced by moving bodies, and what the NMC calls ‘geo-trauma healing theory’; dance, acupuncture, and hydrotherapy. Pleasure Prospects introduces what ‘the least productive mining company in the world’ offers as an approach to repairing and softening, in resisting extractive industry through radical care and rest. The setting of this presentation is Toronto’s Cinesphere, recycling the 1971 geodome theatre to a site of future projections. In the literal slowing of time, dancers glide in undulating and rotating motions, as synchronized swimmers float in star configurations through purple plumes of smoke— possibly a nod to Judy Chicago’s Biennial iteration of her Atmosphere series.

TBA_NewMineralCollective_02 — New Mineral Collective, *Pleasure Prospects*, 2019, columns, casts of prospecting bore holes, rammed earth, hand-pulverized black copper slag, copper, zinc, steel, aluminum, fine gold and silver shavings, concrete. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. On view at Small Arms Inspection Building as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019). Photo: Vlad Lunin. Courtesy the artists.

The Pleasure Prospects narrative begins with an overview of the extractive mining industry’s penetrative effects stemming from a decidedly neoliberal drive for supply and demand. Thinking through what it means to be in relation, the NMC recognizes human impact on land by acknowledging the “apocalypse all around us, and how to alter it.” Current conversations of the climate crisis from a Western perspective tend to position environmental threat as a future concern, rather than a process already begun. Recently, Métis scholar Zoe Todd and settler scholar Heather Davis have argued that the beginning of the Anthropocene on Turtle Island coincides with colonial contact, marking the beginning of apocalyptic changes for Indigenous nations ^[1]. The Biennial’s curatorial vision of The Shoreline Dilemma calls attention to the shifting and evolving Toronto shoreline, the history of this area as a meeting place for Indigenous societies for over 12,000 years. While the Pleasure Prospects video installation does not touch on Indigenous realities or colonial systems of the Toronto area, the focus remains on extractive industry as the culprit for one of the most aggressively scarring enterprises. Furthermore, NMC offers a contribution to WalkingLab’s and RiVAL’s programming The Bank, The Mine, The Colony, The Crime, in the form of an audio therapy guided tour of the headquarters of a mining company in Toronto’s Financial District. Although the Cinesphere and brief aerial views of Ontario are recognizable locations in the film, the Toronto shoreline is not specified, suggesting that the NMC operates through a global lens. The Biennial’s overarching question, what does it mean to be in relation? can be interpreted within this work as everyone in relation to each other, or extractive industry versus everyone else.

TBA_NewMineralCollective_259LakeShore_13 (1) — New Mineral Collective, *Pleasure Prospects*, 2019, single-channel video, 4k. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art. On view at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art (2019). Courtesy of the artists.

In directly challenging the monetary driven power of the extractive industry, what happens when artists create space for dreaming and respite? Rest becomes a radical concept when the NMC touts itself as the least productive mining company in the world. Delivering a persuasive and soothing pitch for their services, the collective seeks to engage in counter-prospecting, the opposite of production, yet not the antithesis of work. The idea of counter-prospecting involves resting, dancing, repairing, and calming, as methods of extracting meaning fueled by desire, poetry, love, and resistance. A minimal amount of technology is present in the film, functioning more as props than tools: two women relax on the beach with a filing cabinet and laptop, and an indeterminate measuring/recording device fashioned out of aggregate materials, is carried in one hand and placed on the ground while dancers whisk by. The reparative approach towards resisting extractive industry, represented through dreaming of a feminist utopia may not outline a definitive plan of action, but rather an alternative to incessant production. This method calls to mind strategies within Afrofuturism and Indigenous futurities to invest power in imaginary prospects. In being ‘unproductive’, the NMC gently calls to halt further destruction of the environment in recognition of the damage already done.

The title, Pleasure Prospects, speaks to the pursuit of pleasure as an industry as well as to the connotation of the equine hobby. Whether this link is intentional or not is uncertain; a pleasure prospect is an equestrian term denoting a horse representing an aesthetic standard of balance, grace, and willingness. Given that these standards place human expectations on the output of intelligent animals, this can be paralleled with a Western view of the earth as an endless resource, taking without giving back. Within the spoken narrative is a clearly defined intention for resisting female characterization of the earth – a protective move in avoiding the essentialization of the earth’s body. Resisting extraction through gestures of care, the New Mineral Collective illustrates a compassionate alternative future.

^[1] Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME: A Journal for Critical Geographies, 16(4) (2017): 761.

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Emotional Objects: Contemporary Textiles and Queered Femininity

Emotional Objects curated by Emily Gove

Ana Morningstar, Yasmeen Nematt Alla, Yahn Nemirovsky, Danny Welsh, Hannah Zbitnew, and Lisette Markiewicz

Xpace Cultural Centre

January 17th-February 15^th, 2020

xpace_image_install — Left: Hannah Zbitnew, The Absence of the Witch Doesn’t Negate the Spell, 2018. Right: Ana Morningstar, I Am Buying My Land Back One Bag At A Time & I am Getting A Receipt This Time, 2019. Photo credit: Polina Teif

By Rebecca Casalino

The intersection of textile work and femininity becomes increasingly complex as more women and non-binary folks introduce their narratives into the public discourse. This active queering of textiles lends itself to the undervalued history of artworks created in the margins and the ‘low’ aesthetics associated with craft. Emotional Objects exhibits work that explores textiles through lenses of Indigeneity, affect and witchcraft. Artists Ana Morningstar, Yasmeen Nematt Alla, Yahn Nemirovsky, Danny Welsh, Hannah Zbitnew, and Lisette Markiewicz present their works in tandem; queerness and femininity act as threads weaving through the exhibition.

Dealing with topics of beauty, land, and magic, curator Emily Gove presents a range of artworks, each employs unique understandings of materiality. Artists Welsh, Morningstar, and Zbitnew use feminist, queer and Indigenous frameworks to create art objects that challenge formal material norms and that inject their narratives into the exhibition space. In choosing these artists, Gove presents works that employ “construction, de-construction, and re-forming to re-imagine garments, samplers, and practical everyday items” [1] to interrogate emotions often dismissed in the public sphere. Exploring the emotional possibilities in textile-based materials and techniques, each artist untangles the medium using feminist sensibilities.

Danny Welsh, Behind Closed Doors, 2019. Photo Credit_ Polina Teif — Danny Welsh, Behind Closed Doors, 2019. Photo Credit: Polina Teif

The inclusion of non-binary artists in feminist conversations allows for slipperier definitions of womanhood and a more nuanced understandings of gender expression. Welsh’s Behind Closed Doors (2019) presents a quilted tunic displayed on a soft fabric backdrop installed with a photo of the artist wearing the piece as well as an incantation. The photo features Welsh modeling the garment against peach velvet backdrop with a serious look, sporting slicked-back hair and contoured cheekbones. This dramatic presentation creates an aura of beauty and glamour around the work. Used makeup wipes create a patchwork of the artist’s daily routine, holding their pigment in a tie-dyed fashion. The rotating blocks of beige, black, blue and pink reveal a palette that exists in a domestic oasis, hence the title of Welsh’s work. The collection and use of materials that are usually waste evoke an abject nature within the otherwise beautiful work. Welsh pushes this contrast further with previously golden safety pins adding a broken, now oxidized green, border to the soft material of the garment. The changing and deteriorating nature of the garment elevates the fragility of the piece and, simultaneously, pushes it further into the realm of decay.

The garment is paired with an incantation on the wall. Highlighting a few stanzas themes within the work become evident:

“body-centric eccentricity

metamorphic multiplicity

authenticity

synchronicity

…

a preformative reoccurring ritual

secretly spiritual

heavily habitual

hybridization

embodied transformation

manifestation

domestic Dalmation

…

durational display

today’s the day time to play

wipe away” [2]

This magical layer of the incantation adds a witchy femininity which speaks to the ritualistic aspects of makeup and gender presentation. Makeup becomes armour and a mask as people who embody feminine characteristics walk through the world. The celebration of femininity outside of the domestic space, beyond closed doors, allows for conversation around gender’s performative aspects and an exploration of modes for expressing power and agency. The added dynamic of the abject allows for a more complicated embodiment of beauty. Welsh’s presentation of their garment, photo, and poem creates a quilt of dialogues for viewers to interpret.

Ana Morningstar, I Am Buying My Land Back One Bag At A Time & I am Getting A Receipt This Time, 2019. Photo credit_ Polina Teif — Ana Morningstar, I Am Buying My Land Back One Bag At A Time & I am Getting A Receipt This Time, 2019. Photo credit: Polina Teif

Centering on the conceptual, Morningstar’s installation sits as a pile of white tarp bags filled with black soil tucked in the corner of Xpace’s main space. The collected earth is interrupted by small glass trade beads, adding symbolic value. Morningstar captions documentation of the work on Instagram, writing about her use of blue and red glass trade beads, “[t]he blue beads are a direct reference to treaties on ““canadian”” soil, Red are referencing the spirits in the soil-not only of the animate but of the ““inanimate’’”[3]

Stenciled with red paint are phrases like “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rez Dirt” and “For up to 500+ Years of Resistance!” Morningstar uses satirical humour to engage with land rights. Her piece is titled I Am Buying My Land Back One Bag At A Time & I Am Getting A Receipt This Time (2019), which is a direct reference to a Facebook status meme written by Jay Jay Tallbull.

natives-be-like-8-hrs-today-i-was-at-the-27802975 — Facebook status meme via Jay Jay Tallbull.

Meme-slinging in Indigenous communities acts as a humourous, entertaining, and educational way of spreading content about resistance and resilience. Watching Indigenous meme creators drop truth bombs across social media platforms cracks the facade of a happy multicultural Canada presented by mainstream accounts. Morningstar manifesting Tallbull’s meme in sculpture adds a physical presence and weight to the issue of land rights. With the RCMP roadblock on Gidimt’en territory, again, a tense sense of deja vu hangs ominously. Memes about the racist origins of the RCMP, the issues surrounding resource extraction and UNDRIP (The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) are circulating fast as supporters of the Wet’suwet’en Nation strive to educate and inform Canadians. The issue of land is now at the forefront. Morningstar’s gesture of collecting the land in bags and “Getting A Receipt This Time” emphasizes past and present instances of Indigenous land rights being ignored by white western bureaucracy.

The aging woman is an uncomfortable concept in western culture, which emphasizes youth and beauty as markers of womanhood. Displayed on a custom shelf at eye level with stairs ascending upwards into the gallery wall, Hannah Zbitnew presents three pairs of hand fabricated shoes. Each set uses leather, terracotta-coloured ceramic, and woven fabric producing an earthy tone to the objects. The shoes follow the order of the Triple Goddess presenting Maiden, Mother, and Crone (which represent women’s life cycle) in the design and treatment of the shoe. The Maiden is represented with a sensible chunky heel, made from clay, with an open toe design. These shoes’ uppers are loosely woven with green cotton—they are casual and easy to slip out of. The Mother is represented by a closed-toe open back shoe with a tan leather sole. Sensible shoe design is stereotypically associated with motherhood, and the aging Maiden losing her beauty but gaining wisdom. A clay rope wraps around the beige woven top of the shoe adding stability and form. The Crone is characterized by simple flat slippers with a pointed toe, leather sole, and a woven beige upper.

Hannah Zbitnew with Lisette Markiewicz, The Absence of the Witch Doesn’t Negate the Spell, 2018. Photo credit_ Polina Teif — Hannah Zbitnew with Lisette Markiewicz, The Absence of the Witch Doesn’t Negate the Spell, 2018. Photo credit: Polina Teif

This movement through the life cycle of a woman characterized by footwear creates a visual dialogue that allows viewers to engage and respond with their own understandings of the correlation of aging and fashion. The silliness and extravagance of high heeled shoes make young women feel sexy, successful, and sore. This sexuality is lost in the more muted tones of Motherhood where practicality and fashion become equally important. Finally, the Crone is comfortable and wise but pale. Zbitnew’s title The Absence of the Witch Doesn’t Negate the Spell (2018) is a quote from an Emily Dickenson poem [4], hinting at feminist undertones to the work, but also functions to lead the viewer into her neopagan understanding of Mother, Maiden, and Crone. Zbitnew allows femme magic into each stage of life. Bending the western perspective on aging and womanhood Zbitnew invests care into each pair of shoes meditating on the value of each phase of life; recognizing that women’s power does not come from the heel of her shoe but from the spell they cast.

The multiple narratives and truths explored in Emotional Objects rejects monolithic and universal biases surrounding textiles and femininity. This multimodal approach to tackling issues important to individual artists highlights the multifaceted nature of queerness and femininity. Gove’s emphasis on textiles privileges affect as a source of knowledge. This epistemological contrast to masculine western modes of understanding elevates witchcraft and queerness as alternative methods for exploring complex emotions. This feminist untangling allows women and gender non-binary people to gather in spaces to discuss new forms of knowledge and art-making without the hinderance of phallocentric narratives or ideals.

Bibliography

[1] Gove, Emily. “Emotional Objects Curated by Emily Gove.” Xpace Cultural Centre.

[2] Welsh, Danny. “Danny Welsh, Behind Closed Doors, 2019. Photo Credit: Polina Teif.” Xpace Cultural Centre.

[3] Morningstar, Ana, ““I’m Buying My Land Back One Bag At A Time & I’m Getting A Receipt This Time”. Instagram.

[4] Gove, Emily. “Emotional Objects Curated by Emily Gove.” Xpace Cultural Centre.

Productive Discomfort at Xpace Cultural Centre

By Rebecca Casalino

Xpace_Productive Discomfort_003 — Productive Discomfort, 2019. Installation view, works by Jessica Watkin, Anne Ruccetto, Susan Blight, and James Yeboah in view. Photo credit: Polina Teif

March 1-30, 2019

Anne Rucchetto, Kaythi, Seiji, Susan Blight, Jessica Watkin,

Heidi Cho, and James Yeboah

Curated by Lauren Cullen

As part of Myseum Intersections Festival: Revisionist Toronto.

Women’s craft and labour is a topic explored in feminist circles, yet we do not see it often directly reflected in the mediums of contemporary artists’ practices. I myself am guilty of this, citing women’s labour in my own work, and comparing the repeated actions in my practice to sewing or knitting. Walking into Xpace and seeing Productive Discomfort for the first time I was happily surprised by bright colours and political discourse. This was not the women’s craft I had grown up learning.

Xpace_Productive Discomfort_004 — Susan Blight, An Unwelcome Mat for these Times, Niwiiji Anishinaabeg, 2019. Photo credit: Polina Teif

One of the carpets that caught my eye hung from the west wall and had long trails of pink and red yarn streaming down from a rectangle emblazoned with an Anishinaabemowin phrase. The artist, Susan Blight, lifts the rug from the floor indicating to the viewer they are not easily welcomed by the artist. This challenge presented by Blight is delivered with an object filled with labour and embroidered with a language foreign to a settler audience. The anger surrounding Canada’s relationship to the Indigenous communities is felt in Toronto with protests supporting Wet’suwet’en land defenders gaining momentum and residents choosing to call the city Tkaronto, a Mohawk word meaning “where there are trees in the water”. Land acknowledgments have become the standard at gatherings to keep the history of colonial violence in our minds. This infusion of Indigenous politics into the urban settler mainstream discussion is long overdue. In my own primary and secondary education, the history of Turtle Island’s Indigenous peoples was a hasty stereotypical sketch of a complex culture the invading settlers refused to acknowledge. It was only in university, through my own course selection, I began to learn about the rich art historical canon of the Aboriginal, Metis and Inuit peoples. As settlers, we must pressure our institutions to engage with Indigenous voices so we can honour the flourishing communities on the land they cared for long before settlers landed here. Blight’s refusal to lay down her welcome mat reads as a message to myself and fellow settlers that our presence is still not welcome, and our support is too little and too late.

Xpace_Productive Discomfort_010 — Kaythi, Our Lady of Profound Failure, 2019. Photo Credit: Polina Teif

Our Lady of Profound Failure created by Kaythi was another rug that drew my attention. It’s deep red subject popped against the blue background. The rug had oranges and greens, woven as a kind of collage, dancing around the edges making the composition playful and fun. Visitors are encouraged to kneel on the rug; this made me giggle, thinking about kneeling in connection to prayer and oral sex. The rug pops with its bright colours and DYKES ONLY is written in bold black across a bent figure. The red distorted figure bends with its back arching along the top of the rug. This work claims space by welcoming an exclusive social group. Spaces reserved for ‘dykes’ are rare and usually very fluid, for example, The Beaver, a gay bar/café. I don’t consider myself a dyke, but I feel the word hooked into a rug allows queers like myself to be in on the joke.

Xpace_Productive Discomfort_009 — Kaythi, Our Lady of Profound Failure, 2019. Photo Credit: Polina Teif

What interests me most about this exhibition is the dedication to labour and the dissemination of knowledge. For the exhibition, Lauren Cullen taught the artists how to make hooked rugs, a craft she has been practicing for nine years. This passing of knowledge without the platform of a classroom or the internet is labourious and intimate, creating an immediate community. I attended Cullen’s event at Xpace to learn how to make hooked rugs and happily sat at a table with a graphic design student, an architect, a jeweller, and a comedian. Cullen stood in front of the video projecting artists in the show making their rugs. Each of us peeked up at the video from time to time to compare our tiny squares to their work. Cullen came around to each table spending time with attendee’s offering them tea and cheezies. The room was filled with light conversation as everyone concentrated on their tiny rugs. Materials were spread across a table complete with leggings, shirts, yarn, and pre-sliced striped of cloth. At the end of the session, we were all hesitant to leave and crowded around Cullen to individually thank her for such a lovely day of bonding and making. Cullen’s practice seems to revolve around these kinds of exchanges and community building as she discussed with one of the participants her passion for “unlearning”. Artists from the show were also in attendance and sat at the tables with participants happy to talk about their experiences learning with Cullen for the show. Cullen created a learning environment of balance and calm.

Cullen uses “the social practice and conventions of rug hooking as a tool for critical education, grounded in anti-racist, anti-colonial and feminist queer crip frameworks” to replace traditional institutional and academic methods of teaching. In creating these ‘unwelcome’ mats Cullen leads artists Rucchetto, Kaythi, Seiji, Blight, Watkin, Cho, and Yeboah in their rug hooking practices to convey their own political narratives surrounding craft, textile works, and labour. Productive Discomfort engages with a myriad of political topics allowing each artist to harness textiles to hook their point of view. My relationship with textiles has never been so complex and politically engaging. As a child, I sat with my Nonna on the couch watching her crochet blankets and listening to stories about her younger more nimble fingers embroidering sheets, handkerchiefs, and pillowcases for her wedding chest. Cullen uses feminist theory and rug hooking to identify, “a significant site of matrilineage: a site of material culture gaining legitimacy through an inter-generational practice of passing down rugs and skills between women.” This summarizes my experience with textiles and shapes textile art in a feminist light allowing myself and other contemporary artists to engage with rug hooking on a new level. Productive Discomfort brings the conversation around textile arts into the conversation surrounding community, marginalized narratives, and women’s labour.