Part Two: Adam 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 Adam 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.

Adam 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.

Adam 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.  

The Queer World of Relationships: In Conversation with Francesco Esposito


Francesco Esposito self-portrait, 2023, Courtesy of the artist.

By Irene Bernardi

The photos taken by Francesco Esposito tell more than meets the eye. They are visual poems that narrate what new generations are experiencing in an increasingly complex world. Through the lens, the Italian artist tells the delicate relational entanglements of a polyamorous couple that he follows step by step in their personal growth. 

Born in Naples in 1997, Francesco Esposito moved to Bologna where he started his artistic career. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and received his BA in Graphic Arts and MA in Photography. Esposito’s works have been exhibited in major art events such as Open Tour and Art City promoted by the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, IBRIDA Festival of Multimedia Arts, and BASE Milano.

Irene Bernardi: In your early work, you expressed yourself through graphic signs and engraving, then later you switched to photography, using a completely different medium. Did you ever find a meeting point between the two?

Francesco Esposito: Absolutely. I have been taking photographs since childhood. Later, I started combining these two disciplines and making photogravures. My approach to etching was born from the desire to learn about a new medium of expression and the extreme similarity between these two techniques. Both mediums involve the use of external agents to create an image. In the case of etching, the agent is acid that etches the material, while in photography it is light that impresses a photosensitive surface.

IB: The themes you deal with in your photographs are relevant to today’s society, which tends to suffocate us more and more and homogenize us as a function of productivity: we need to be perfect and neither feel nor demonstrate our emotions. What drives you to confront these major issues characteristic of Generation Z?

FE: Being born between two generations has exposed me to changing ideals and perspectives on life. This [has] had a significant impact on my perception of the world and my artistic expression. Becoming aware of the major issues that have come up in our society at the level of mental health and sexuality, I decided to make them central themes in my poetry. I am talking and taking pictures about these issues to contribute more information and awareness for part of the public.

Understanding and acceptance of sexuality can have a direct impact on people’s mental health, while mental health can influence self-perception and one’s relationship with sexuality.

Worry, 2022, Courtesy of the artist.

IB: Looking at your portfolio, I was very impressed by the Worry series where you discuss when anxiety becomes pathological and the sufferer dissociates from reality, losing control of it.
What technique did you use to make these shots? How did you conclude that it was the best method to render that feeling of loss and dissociation?

FE: When I decided to start this project, I was going through a period in my life fully involved with this theme.
The choice of this technique came from the idea of “glow,” something that blinds you, distances you, and alienates you from reality. I wanted to reproduce these “glows” by using flash on smooth, reflective surfaces; however, the result did not satisfy me. However, I continued to think about the idea of reflection, something that we cannot eliminate, something that often attracts and obsesses us.

The solution came when I visited an Anish Kapoor exhibition in Venice: the Indian artist used distorting mirrors, which made me realize that the distortion effect could best represent my state of mind. So, I began taking photographs of my everyday life using the bottom of a bottle as a distorting filter.

Installation view, QueerPandèmia. Artistic contaminations of other kinds, 2023, Base Milano, Courtesy of Riccardo Ferranti

IB: Your latest project, People’s House, has been selected to be part of QueerPandèmia. Artistic contaminations of other kinds, an exhibition hosted at Base Milano as part of Milano Pride in July 2023. This show by ULTRAQUEER, a project of TWM Factory, aims to give space, voice, and representation back to the Queer community, centering the discourse on how it is perceived by the outside world. Reflections take place on queer identity and its relationships, going through tools, struggles, and new practices with which to invade spaces and gain a place in the world.

The People’s House series includes very complex and delicate shots that run through the lives and relationships of Enea and Luna, a polyamorous couple living in Bologna. How did this collaboration come about?

FE: After becoming interested in the topic of polyamory, having never had this kind of relational experience, I realized that I could only know more about this topic by getting to know people living in that kind of relationship. Conversing with some friends, I met Luna and Enea who gave me the possibility to collaborate with them, making me [closer to] this world.

IB: Photographs of their daily lives are accompanied by shots of natural elements that dialogue with forms and compositions that the bodies create. Flowers, stems, shoots, but also water and light, reflect the relationship of mutual love and trust that polyamory creates, as in the relationships between plants and natural elements.

Nature is wonderfully homosexual, non-monogamous and queer, which is the basis of Queer Ecology(1) theories. This scientific theory aims to unite queer theories and ecology to shift paradigms from binary, rigid, and heteronormative ways of understanding nature toward interdependence and fluidity. How does this theory relate to your shots?

People’s House, 2022, Courtesy of the artist.


 FE: These shots representing nature, aim at an analogy with polyamorous relationships. They don’t have a scientific basis, they are only metaphors for this. Often, we are wrongly pointed out to how the queer, polyamorous world is “against nature.” I tried to metaphorically counter this word with these shots.

People’s House, 2022, Courtesy of the artist.

“Today, polyamory is often misunderstood as strictly sexual behaviour or an open relationship. In reality, this kind of relationship implies much more: it implies bonding, involvement, freedom, and shared growth with multiple individuals, just as it happens spontaneously in nature.”

IB: I think this quote from your project is very important for today’s society to revisit the concept of a “natural relationship” by stepping out of heteronormative dynamics—the queerness of nature has long been ignored, suppressed, and dismissed to reflect society’s underlying prejudice against non-heterosexual and non-cisgender identities.

What reflections arise from this project of yours and your personal experiences?

FE: People’s House is not exclusively about polyamory, but also about freedom and spontaneity. Realizing this project, meeting people, and talking to the people who were part of it, I realized how there is no difference between a polyamorous relationship and a monogamous one. It is often considered a happy little bubble, but what makes it true and equal to monogamy are precisely the same issues that are faced.

Spending time with people who collaborated on the project, I also decided not to focus on the sexual and carnal dimension of this type of relationship more than necessary, but more on their sentimental reality, on the understanding that is normally created in any type of polyamorous or non- polyamorous relationship. This is precisely to depart the idea of polyamory from the concept of an “open” or exclusively sexual relationship, something which it is often confused with.

People’s House, 2022, Courtesy of the artist.

IB: Your photographs give a very strong and pleasing intimacy and delicacy. Is there a shot (or more than one) that is particularly meaningful to you?

FE: It’s hard to find one shot that I consider more meaningful than the others, precisely because from a personal point of view, each shot tells the story of the path that I took with the people I portrayed. Therefore, they all have great meaning for me, even the discarded images.

If I had to choose the most emblematic ones, I think they would be the one depicting hands crossing and the one in which two guys lying in bed, naked and conversing with each other. The first is because I think it is also the one that best summarizes the entire work, the second shot chosen I find is perfect for explaining how much intimacy and freedom there is between each individual member in that relational situation.

IB: As the last question, can you share some visual and non-visual artists who have accompanied you in your personal artistic process?

FE:In this last period I was very inspired by the shots of photographer Ute Klein (2).She is young but with her photography she creates bonds between people by intertwining their anonymous, unidentifiable bodies.
These bodies have souls, feelings and just like the bodies of Enea, Luna and their partners: intertwining they tell us the beauty and fragility not only of their story but of the stories of all.

You can find more of Francesco Esposito’s work on his Instagram @serafjno. You can find out more about Base Milano on their website and Instagram. Check out Ultraqueer on their website and Instagram.

You can find the QUEER PANDÈMIA book here.

1 Ingrid Bååth, Queer Ecology, Explained, https://www.climateculture.earth/

2 Ute Klein, https://cargocollective.com/uteklein


Part One: Adam 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 Adam 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.

Adam 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.

—

Adam 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.  

“The Professor’s Desk” by Zinnia Naqvi: Mayworks Festival

Zinnia Naqvi. Before the Settlement – Professor Chun’s Desk, Inkjet Print, 2023.

Interview by Aysia Tse

“The Professor’s Desk” series by lens-based artist and educator Zinnia Naqvi features archival materials from four specific cases of racial discrimination in or about Canadian universities. Naqvi uses her own student/professor’s desk to frame these cases of systemic racism and considers the impact and legacies of each case, reflecting on the ongoing struggle for racial equity and justice in academic institutions.

As a selected artist for the 2022 Mayworks Labour Arts Catalyst, Zinnia Naqvi worked with the Asian Canadian Labor Alliance (ACLA) with support from OPIRG Toronto to create the photo-based series “The Professor’s Desk.” The series was co-presented with CONTACT Photography Festival at the Whippersnapper Gallery from May 4-31st for the 2023 Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts. Mayworks’ Labour Arts Catalyst is a program that helps to facilitate the collaboration between local labour organizations and artists. As Naqvi describes, her creative and research processes for this project came together organically. After connecting with the two ACLA chapters based in B.C. and Ontario, Naqvi accessed an online archive of digitized materials from ACLA’s 20 years of activism which was her jumping-off point for her research.

I spoke in depth with Naqvi about her process, creative and political considerations for each of the six images in the series, and what she has learned from research into Professor Kin-Yip Chun’s case.

Aysia Tse: Can you discuss your deeply collaborative and multi-focus research process for this series?

Zinnia Naqvi: ACLA hired filmmaker Lokchi Lam to make a video for their 20th anniversary. Lokchi spoke to members and gathered many materials from past events they supported and organized them into five Google Drive folders. One of the folders they made was about instances of anti-Asian racism on Canadian campuses was called “White Fear on Campus.” Lokchi Lam put three events together; Professor Chun’s case, Maclean’s Magazine “Too Asian” article from 2010, and the W5 CTV News segment from 1979, which is what I [made] the project about.

Professor Chun was exploited and wrongfully denied a tenure track position four times at the University of Toronto in a span of 10 years. In 1998, Professor Chun launched a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission for unjust dismissal. His case soon attracted national and international attention.

On the panel, Chris Ramsaroop was one of the founding members of ACLA Ontario, and a student at the time of Professor Chun’s case. He was very actively involved in supporting Professor Chun’s case and there were a lot of student organizers, so he was able to give me insight on the significance of the case from a student perspective. I teach part-time at the University of Toronto and was able to access historical newspaper databases by having institutional access. I found all the Toronto Star articles written about his case specifically and visited their picture collection at the reference library to access images. It was through my own digging that I then found out about OPIRG and the Dr. Chun Resource Library of feminist and critical race theory. Professor Chun donated funds to support the library during his case and it was later renamed after him.

Zinnia Naqvi. After the Settlement – Professor Chun’s Desk, Inkjet Print, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Aysia T: It’s great to hear how bits and pieces of the research came through. OPIRG sounds like a cool grassroots organization whose work relates to what you’re doing. So that was a great collaboration opportunity.

Zinnia Naqvi: Yes, I reached out to them while I was making the project and they generously agreed to support the panel and partner with Mayworks. As a result, we [could] fly Professor Chun to Toronto for the panel. It was interesting looking at this case 20 years after it happened because it isn’t part of the collective memory of the current students.

When I came across this research that Lokchi did, what stuck out to me about Professor Chun’s case was that someone was able to speak out against such a big institution as the University of Toronto and take them to court for racial discrimination. As someone who teaches sessionally in universities and has recently been a student, I have dealt with instances of racism or prejudice in the institutional space. However, to prove that in a court of law and in front of the Ontario Human Rights Commission is significant. There’s a report called the Chun Report that’s a very comprehensive study of the case and all the events that unfolded. It illustrated how toxic the environment was and how blatant the racism was that he faced. I realized that it got to a point in which he had no choice but to take legal action from the school because his treatment was damaging his life and career.

After he reached an initial settlement, he received significantly more discrimination or hostility from other people in the department. Journalists like Margaret Wente wrote very damaging articles in the Globe and Mail, saying that Professor Chun was just trying to get attention. Still today, Professor Chun takes care to not call the University of Toronto racist or any specific person racist, but rather he was talking about systemic racism at a time in which people were not used to hearing that term. That’s another reason why his case felt so significant because it started to change the discourse and language around these issues.

In the Chun report, there is an account stating that at one point Professor Chun was put in an office that had sewage, cockroaches, and mice in it. That’s when the report started to paint a visual picture for me. I started to imagine how experiencing that might look or feel. So that’s the approach I decided to take with this project, to frame it within the space of the office. I’m placing myself in his shoes in a way, but it’s a flex space that’s my imagination of what his desk would be like.

Zinnia Naqvi.What’s Behind the Diversity Numbers?, Inkjet Print, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Aysia T: Your desk compositions feature small details including those cockroaches that allude to these important aspects of Professor Chun’s case. What are some of the symbolic considerations you had when curating these pieces? Can you walk me through your thinking about the details you included?

Zinnia Naqvi: With “Before the Settlement,” I wanted it to be this space that’s in between balancing his career as a seismologist, who studies earthquakes and teaches physics. He talked about the personal significance of what this case caused him. He is also a father and there’s a family photo on the desk. He’s an incredible scientist – he received a lot of national funding for his extraordinary research. A lot of that got sidestepped because of the case and the toll that the case took on his life and his career.

The second image is called “After the Settlement.” That’s when I’m imagining the case taking over even more of his life. Things start to get messy and unravel even further.

Then there are also the other images that address different instances from ACLA’s archive. With the images of the controversial 2010 Maclean magazine “Too Asian,” I wanted to show the article and then there was also a book that I have placed on top of it, which was made directly in the aftermath of the article in which many scholars address Anti-Asian racism in universities.

The other image shows the cover of the same Maclean’s magazine, and it was interesting to me to see this image of two students with the Chinese flag that was taken, from what I understand, without their permission. However, the cover image of the magazine is of this very happy-go-lucky white student and the contrast of that was interesting to me.

It also started to make me think about diversity images and when images of diverse people are used for profit. Those images are used to attract students to apply to schools, but then a lot of people who are working or studying within those spaces are not actually supported. This also relates to the other image of the posters; those are current posters that I took from both University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University where I work. It was interesting that I would see a lot of the same posters in both schools. There are a lot of posters about mental health studies, tutoring, and scholarships. It just shows the precarious financial situations of students, especially international students who are brought to these schools and don’t have citizenship status and are not able to work or are limited to how much they can work.

The last image I made is about the W5 CTV News segment from 1979. CTV aired a special that was [essentially] saying that international students were taking the place of Canadian students, especially in medicine and dentistry programs. Then there was a rebuttal by the Chinese Canadian Council, saying how that was factually incorrect and very racist, and there were a lot of protests about that. I have included excerpts from that news segment, articles about the protests, and then again, my school materials and other props to situate these issues in physical space. With these three cases from the past, it was significant to see how the rhetoric was so similar from 1979 to 2010 and continues today.

Zinnia Naqvi. What’s Behind the Diversity Numbers?, Inkjet Print, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Aysia T: As a part of the Mayworks Festival programming, you had a public talk with Migrant rights organizer Chris Ramsaroop, moderator Furqan Mohamed and of course Professor Chun about his story and wider conversations about Indigenous, Black, and racialized workers in academic institutions. Can you share more about this discussion or any highlights that came out of that conversation?

Zinnia Naqvi: All the materials I took about Professor Chun’s case were from public archives. But it also felt like at the end of when I read his report, I wasn’t sure where he lived or if he would be interested in the project, but it felt important to me to reach out to him. He originally had said that he would like to be part of a Zoom panel and then later, he said he wanted to come in person. This was significant because it has been 20 years since his case closed and he hadn’t spoken publicly about it for a long time.

What I was interested in with research on Professor Chun’s case is that I wanted to pay homage to his struggle because now, especially in the arts, we’re seeing the flip side of what he had to go through. We’re seeing now that institutions are aware of their lack of diversity and are trying to rectify that by holding targeted BIPOC hires. We’re aware that there’s a problem that’s trying to be resolved. There are still a lot of flaws in that process too as it can be tokenizing. A lot of times people are again invited into the institution, but they’re not supported once they’re there.

But we are at least in a moment where people are openly recognizing that there’s a problem and I do think, we [must] thank people like Professor Chun for making that part of the discourse. He sacrificed a lot to shift the public conscience and I wanted to pay homage to him in this project. Now that we’re in a different moment that still needs a lot of work, but we are trying to make change. We discussed that he wasn’t the only person who had public legal battles with universities in Canada. Many other racialized scholars are still in legal disputes with schools for not being supported or for speaking out against discrimination.

…You’re expected to keep your head down and be grateful that you’ve been given any place at all, even if it’s a precarious one.

Aysia T: I imagine you’ve been thinking about your own role or your own experiences within the institution and with your students. How has that informed your thinking about this project?

Zinnia Naqvi: I was thinking a lot about my own experience, but also about my students. Although I was and am a minority student and faculty, especially in the arts programs that I was in, I was also born here, and I wasn’t an international student. That was one thing I wanted to also be aware of as I was making the work.

We don’t always think of professors as workers because there’s a certain prestige that comes with the academy. That was another thing that stood out about this case. To me it felt like Professor Chun did everything right, he went to these Ivy League schools, and he did everything that you’re supposed to do on paper. Yet you’re expected to keep your head down and be grateful that you’ve been given any place at all, even if it’s a precarious one.

I was thinking about the way that my students, especially the ones who are international students, manage work, worry about grades, and all the pressure that the school puts on them. I’ve had a lot of support from the institutions that I’ve worked at but again, I feel that has come at the expense of others who have come before me.

Aysia T: I think some people dislike when people ask, “What do you dream of?” or “What would be an ideal change?” but I’ve learned to ask it anyway because it’s important. Do you see this work as a call to action for better support for BIPOC artists, students, workers, and staff within academic spaces? What do you hope to see in the future regarding these topics?

Zinnia Naqvi: I’m teaching a digital photography class at U of T right now, and I brought my students to the [Professor’s Desk] exhibition on the first day. It’s funny because it’s a photography class, and I’m making this very political work.

It’s always an awkward space because sometimes as professors, we don’t want to push our own work or our own research too hard. But I would hope that showing this work makes students feel like they can talk about these issues within the space of the school. It’s interesting with Chris Ramsaroop and some of the other student organizers who helped Professor Chun’s case, many of them are working in universities now.

I’m not sure if students today would do a one-week sit-in at the president’s office where they slept there for a week in support of Professor Chun. I just don’t think that we protest in the same way as they did in the nineties. But I think it just shows the impact that students have in these cases. I’m not sure if young people feel like they can make that change [through the idea of collective action]. I think this can be an example that they can. It takes a lot of resources and a lot of confidence to be able to do it. I think it’s also amazing and important to remember. They were able to create collective action and Professor Chun really got the most support from his students. I think talking about these issues and feeling like we can also be peers with our students is important.

You can view all of the images from “The Professor’s Desk” series online on the Mayworks Festival website and read more about OPIRG Toronto’s work on their website.

You can find out more about Professor Chun’s case through the Chun Inquiry.

Check out more of Zinnia Naqvi’s work on her website.

From Women to Everyone: In Conversation with Mulieris Magazine

Muleiris team. From left to right, Greta Langlianni, Chiara Cognigni and Sara Lorusso. Photo by Arianna Angelini.

Interview by Irene Bernardi

Mulieris Magazine was born in 2019 in Italy as an online platform. Greta Langianni and Sara Lorusso, the founder and co-founder, with the collaboration of Chiara Cognigni as graphic designer & Art Director, wanted to create a space for women and non-binary artists who usually find themselves on the margins of the art scene. Mulieris is a Latin word that means ‘of woman’: the magazine started online and has a printed issue in which the team asks women and non-binary artists to work on a specific theme.

This year Mulieris celebrates its fifth birthday—In addition to the print magazine with the fifth open call that has just ended, the opening of Mulieris Studio marked another big step for the community.

Irene Bernardi: I want to start at the beginning: I remember your first print issue Shapes. After all this work and success, what would you like to tell yourself about the past looking back now?

Sara Lorusso: After all the hard work of these years, I would try to motivate us! The project managed to grow and become more important and concrete; for all the times we thought of giving up or did not know where to start, I would like to tell ourselves that with calmness, perseverance, and determination, we came out much more mature and enriched.

Mulieris Magazine. Photo by Sara Lorusso.

How important is having an online platform and a print issue? What strengths and weaknesses have you found in using these two different media?

SL: The online platform made it possible to attract a part of the public that would never have bought a printed magazine. The audience of a print magazine is very specific, and we have always thought that Mulieris is purchased first for the topics and then for the design. In the end, we created two different communities and now they coexist together.

Talking about connection is very important for us, especially since today’s society wants us to be more individualistic: creating connections with others is the last chance to save us.

The Degrees Between Us is the name of the publications’s latest issue about the power of connections, and how far we are from each other. Every person on the planet can be connected to every other person through a five-degree chain: many times, I wonder how healthy these connections are and how important they are for everyday life. How important do you think it is to talk about connections in today’s society?

SL: Talking about connection is very important for us, especially since today’s society wants us to be more individualistic: creating connections with others is the last chance to save us. Mulieris for us was just that, in fact, this issue is about us. We were completely lost at the end of university, it seemed impossible for us to enter the creative world and so we tried to create a space for ourselves and for all creative women who were trying to make their work visible.

Installation view of the exhibition DREAMTIGERS.The Rooom 2023. Photo by Alexa Sganzeria

On the occasion of ArtCity 2023 in Bologna, Mulieris opened the exhibition DREAMTIGERS curated by Laura Rositani in collaboration with the concept studio The Rooom. Six international female artists, Lula Broglio, Alejandra Hernández, Joanne Leah, Sara Lorusso, Sara Scanderebech, Ayomide Tejuoso (Plantation), and The Mosshelter by Marco Cesari, lead the visitors in a sort of “dream world” where plants, humans, and animals mutate and dance together in the secret gardens of unconscious. What do you want to tell with this exhibition?

SL: The works in the exhibition are choreographies of bodies with blurred faces and are stills of animalistic details. They are the tigers mentioned by Jorge Luis Borges in his book Dreamtigers[1], those animals so admired in childhood and only to be encountered in dreams. Dreamtigers is talking about us, we are “tigers” to know. I quote an excerpt from the critical text written by exhibition curator Laura Rositani:

“The works create a succession of visions that immerse us in a fusion of animal, plant, and human worlds. They are a network of cracks to rejoin a sphere of memories. They are ever-changing, vegetal extensions, they are curtains ready to open. Through photography and painting, they look like snapshots of a past event that does not want to give up. They are dreams from which we no longer want to wake up. The surfaces of the works acquire volume and tactility, becoming unreachable to our senses.”

I have a question for Laura Rositani, the curator of DREAMTIGERS. I visited the exhibition twice and it reminds me of some passages from the book The Promises of Monsters by Donna Haraway, a book that is undoubtedly complex, but reasons about the relationship between human and nature. Haraway cites Spivak[2] and explains how nature is “one of those impossible objects that we cannot desire, that we cannot do without and that we cannot in any way possess”[3]: once we wake up from the ‘“dreamtigers” where everything coexists and mutates together, what awaits us in the real world?

Laura Rositani: I’m very interested in your association between the exhibition, this publication, and with Donna Haraway’s studies in general. “Dreamtigers” was meant to be a safe space, unreal at times and suspended in space and time. The nature portrayed is a changing nature, a hybrid one.

The awakening, the return to the real world is probably very disappointing. In reference to what you were quoting: we cannot be without nature, but neither can we possess it. Nature is not an essence, a treasure, a resource, a womb, a tabula rasa. Nature cannot be grasped in its totality, nor can its boundaries be established. Let’s consider what it is currently happening in Italy with continuous climate emergencies.

Perhaps the only way is precisely what Haraway points us to: to think of ourselves as virtual, that is, able to do things together.

Orchid Flowers. Artwork by Sara Lorusso.Installation view of the exhibition DREAMTIGERS.The Rooom 2023. Courtesy of Alexa Sganzeria and the artist.

In DREAMTIGERS, a few of your photos are also included in your first photo book As a Flower published by Witty Books. Specifically, the picture of the orchid, a beautiful flower that is usually fragile. In the image, the flower definitely refers to a vulva, but with an almost punk and rebellious hint, with these piercings hanging from the petals. Could the main picture represent the mission of Mulieris and the studio?

SL: I usually say that this photograph is a self-portrait of me in 2017 when I took it. When I took that photo, I did not yet know that I suffered from chronic pelvic pain and I had not yet come out as a queer person; this made me smile a lot because I knew practically nothing about myself but now, looking back at that photograph, things appear clear and simple to me. I like to find new significance to my photographs and associating this picture in particular with Mulieris and our mission as a project could be very powerful.

The last question is about the future of Mulieris: do you have any new projects on the horizon?

SL: There are many projects planned, the most imminent of which is the release of the new issue and the Launch Party on 23th of June in Milan. We are also organizing a new exhibition in collaboration with an art gallery in 2024!


You can find more about Mulieris Magazine and Studio Mulieris on their website and you can pre-order the new issue on Frabs Magazines.

View more of Sara Lorusso’s work on her website and Instagram, and her book As a Flower.

[1] Borges L. Jorge, Dreamtigers, translation by Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland, illustrated by Antonio Frasconi, Texas Pan American Series, 1964.

[2] Theory by Gayatri Spivak, american philosopher of Bengali origin. Active in the fields of postcolonialism, feminism, literary theory and gender studies.

[3] Haraway D., The promise of monsters: a Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others, Routledge, 1992, pg 37.

Clayworx: Fostering Art Education in the Community

The updated exterior of Clayworx: Ceramic Arts Learning Centre in Old East Village.

By Adi Berardini

Clayworx: Ceramic Arts Learning Centre, formerly known as the London Clay Art Centre, is setting a new precedent for clay education in Old East Village, London ON. The charitable arts organization was founded in 1981 to provide a shared studio for members of The London Potters Guild, to host more classes, and foster an appreciation for clay in London and the Southwestern Ontario region. Currently, Clayworx has around 40 active volunteers and runs approximately 70 classes a year, every day of the week, for 300 days of the year.

Volunteers from The London Potters Guild started a capital fundraising campaign in 2003 and purchased 664 Dundas St. in March 2008. Thus began the enormous task of iteratively raising additional capital funds and renovating the Victorian-era building in Old East Village over five years. Clayworx has always had devoted members and volunteers to help build a sense of artistic community thriving in the two-level space, with a retail shop and artist studios on the ground level and a workshop space on the second floor. Clayworx has also been at the forefront of conceiving, financially supporting, and facilitating the large-scale, community-engaged mosaics in Old East Village, led by ceramic artists Beth Turnbull Morrish and Susan Day, making it a landmark neighbourhood for public art in London.

Clayworx Executive Director Bep Schippers and Board of Director John White at the new brand unveiling on March 31st, 2023.

In March 2023, the London Clay Art Centre and The London Potters Guild consolidated the two brands under the name Clayworx: Ceramic Arts Learning Centre. The initiative began under Clayworx’s former executive director, Darlene Pratt. She says, “We felt strongly that we needed to adopt an entirely new name that embodies the wonderful people and the inspiring place that brings them together. We wanted a name that is easy to understand, feels welcoming to everyone, and reflects our standing as the premier location for ceramic arts education in London and the region.” As Clayworx’s current executive director, Bep Schippers, explains, “Our new goal and vision is to provide everyone access to exceptional educational, artistic, and community building experiences with clay.” Schippers explains that the new brand is both playful and approachable featuring bright colours and the fundamental shapes used in all art forms, including ceramics.

Clayworx offers classes and workshops to support beginners working with clay and training and professional development specifically for emerging artists and artists of all levels. As Schippers further explains, “There are some people that just want to come here and make a couple of things and then go home and that’s fantastic. Then we also have artists who want to build their skills and maybe eventually open their own studios and become exhibitors elsewhere in Ontario or [across] Canada.”

Our new goal and vision is to provide everyone access to exceptional educational, artistic, and community building experiences with clay.

The organization aims to provide an accessible space for anyone interested in learning to work with clay and practicing the ceramic art form. Schippers details how Clayworx has been supported by instructors who have devoted countless hours to teaching ceramics to their students. Clayworx also engages BealArt students and alumni who have explored ceramics in their education nearby at H.B. Beal Secondary School.

The Indwell Mosaics project located at Embassy Commons (740 Dundas St).

Clayworx has also established itself as a leader in public art creation in London, placing Old East Village on the map with their many large-scale mosaics. The most recent mosaic project was installed on the new Indwell Embassy Commons building, by lead artist Beth Turnbull Morrish and assistant artists Taryn Imrie and Cassandra Robinson. This massive project includes three large-scale panels that surround the exterior of the building.

Lead Artist Beth Turnbill Morrish hard at work on the Indwell Mosaics panel.

The mosaic panels comprise over 10,000 handmade tiles, created in workshops by artists and members of the community. As Turnbull Morrish details, “Early on in the design process, I had the opportunity to meet with some of the residents and staff of Indwell, as well as tour one of their other buildings. I asked them to express what is the true essence of Indwell, and the intention for its residents. Hope, belonging, and safety came up again and again, as well as the cycles in life that we all go through.”

The process of creating the large-scale mosaic panels was both a collaborative and labour-intensive one. The design and tile creation took 8 months and installation took 8 weeks. As Beth explains, “panel one depicts the dawn, a symbol of new beginnings, the centre panel shows a mid-day sun, a flowing river and blooming flowers, representing a thriving, love-filled life, and finally, in panel 3 we see birds in the sunset.” She also explains the symbolism behind the elements such as the “native Ontario flowers depicted, the shape of the Thames or Antler River, and the birds that represent peace and freedom, as well as being part of a flock and the ability to fly alone.”

Detail of one of the Indwell mosaics panels.

For Clayworx’s next public art project, look down— mosaics will be inlaid in the sidewalks along the commercial corridor of the Old East Village. The sidewalk tiles were created by different community groups and organizations in the neighbourhood. Inspired by a tree with decorated leaves or “dyad” shapes, reminiscent of the London, Ontario logo, the project will bring a sense of storytelling and colour to Old East Village.

Local pottery and ceramics at the Clayworx retail shop.

Clayworx has expanded its reach in London and beyond by offering accessible clay education while sticking close to its roots. The thread that brings it all together is the passion for arts education and community building. If you’re interested in taking ceramic classes or workshops, check out their upcoming classes and available programming. Make sure to also visit their on-site ceramics shop to view the creations of local artists who use Clayworx as their studio.

To learn more, visit Clayworx‘s website and social media. This article is published in partnership with the Old East Village BIA.

Soft Bodies: Marianne Burlew and Brianna Gluszak

Marianne Burlew and Brianna Gluszak. Soft Bodies installation Shot. Wall Space Gallery. Photo credit: Ava Margueritte.

By Moira Hayes

Vulnerability of the self is created in how we choose to take up space. How do we present ourselves to others? What choices are we making to allow space for others? And more presently, what space are we holding for ourselves?

Soft Bodies was exhibited from March 11th through to April 4th at Wall Space Gallery in Ottawa. Marianne Burlew and Brianna Gluszak were paired together by the gallery’s curator, Tiffany April, to deliver an exhibition hinged on the idea of vulnerability.

Burlew is based in Ottawa. She draws from a background of video and sculpture to create her current work; emotionally driven pieces in a 3D modelling software. While her work is direct, the colourful imagery offers multiple interpretations for the viewer; striking questions about seriousness versus sarcasm. Burlew received her MFA from the University of Waterloo.

Gluszak is Ohio-based. They work in sculpture to create glasswork and textile rug hooking, addressing ideas of gender and body. Gluszak draws inspiration from cartoons and how viewing one another can become gendered. The varying scale of their work between the textile pieces and the glass work impose different connotations for the viewer. Gluszak has an MFA from The Ohio State University.

Marianne Burlew, Folly, Ed: 1/100, archival print on Hot Press paper, 16 x 20 in. Framed by Wall Space.

Marianne, you work with digital 3D modelling software, and working digitally makes things accessible. The feelings you point at in your work, patheticness or being a fool, are universal emotions. Can you speak to using digital software to express human emotions?

MB: My background is in sculpture and video. One of the biggest obstacles I was having was getting my work into a space due to budget, facilities, distance, and accessibility. In my current job at an engineering company, I weaseled my way into learning this modelling software.

I just fell in love with the software, and I saw it as an opportunity to make things that could reach a lot more people. You can make a print, put it on a screen, or put it on social media or different places a lot more easily.

I do feel hesitant in some ways to share work online publicly, just because it is easy to have your work taken. I’d love to have it on screens and more readily available on social media if I had a little bit more protection in that area.

I’ve also fallen in love with the print aspect of it. When it gets printed, there’s another transformation that’s amazing for me. That bright, vibrant, densely saturated paper with the colour, and how different parts of the work will be flat, and others will be three-dimensional is interesting to me.

Brianna Gluszak, Please don’t forget me, Blown glass, 19.5 x 12 x 7.5 in.

Brianna, can you explain the process of composing the positions of your glass pieces? They kind of look like people playing Twister.

BG: I love that read. First off, I think one thing I do with the glass works, in particular, is that I’ll make a bunch of them. I don’t know which ones are going to go with which ones. So, it ends up being a process of almost creating a library of glass objects. I’ll have a period of making in the studio where I’ll be doing drawings, and then I’ll be going into the glass shop trying to make that original drawn form.

But the glass is like, “No, I don’t wanna be that form.” I’ll go back to drawing, I’ll draw the form it did become, and through that translation, we’ll build up a variety of different shapes and colours and textures and objects. And then I play with them in my studio, and I just see which ones fit together and which ones I like together.

And maybe I’m too much of an object oncologist where I’m like, okay, so this one wants to be with this one today, and this one wants to be with that one. They’ve sort of become personified in a lot of ways for me. I do see them as being a representation of gender and body.

Marianne Burlew, Pathetic, archival print on Hot Press paper, 28 3/4 x 36 in, framed by Wall Space Gallery.

Marianne, you face the unavoidable, uncanny imagery of worship in your pieces. But you derail that with a practiced absurdity. Can you discuss the process of choosing the keywords in your pieces?

MB: You’re right about worship. My family is Christian, but I didn’t grow up going to church. I’ve never read the Bible.

There’s a lot of Western influence in what I make and so I just try to play with it. I’m not necessarily trying to cite any kind of religion, but for this series, I was very interested in shrines or putting together devotional pieces where it’s almost more of a spiritual devotion where the piece sits as an architectural niche.

Sometimes there are other objects. Sometimes it’s just the glass itself creating these moments where you can sit with these things and meditate on them. 

And for me, the word [aspect] of it seems essential. And choosing is hard to describe. It’s trying to capture things that are succinct and hard-hitting but don’t lean completely in one direction.

When I was making “pathetic,” I felt like it was harsh and I [thought] this might be too mean to just put pathetic in a window like that. You’re going to reflect that criticism of yourself. I feel like the colours were so nice then making it like that’s the twist, taking something so devastating and then trying to make it beautiful and fun.

I am interested in active looking and when a look becomes ingrained in gender.

Brianna Gluszak, I kissed a girl and I liked it…, tufted rug, 52 x 26 1/2 x 1/2 in. 

Brianna, your rug work possesses an unavoidable gaze disguised as fun and playful. The sheer size of the work denotes power over the viewer, especially up close. Are you proposing a struggle between the work and the viewer? What did you aim to convey with the choice of scale? It feels like a staring contest between the viewer and this work.

BG: I think the scale has become kind of like a natural choice for that work. The rugs started during COVID when I got locked out of the studio, and was like, okay, let’s figure out a way to make things at home.

This particular series of rugs is about research that I’ve been doing on Tex Avery’s character Wolfy, from “Red Hot Riding Hood,” which is the first instance in cartooning where the eyes come out of a character’s head at the sight of a woman.

The version available on YouTube ends as Wolfy pulls Little Red Riding Hood off a stage after his eyes have shot out at her. But that’s not where the cartoon actually ends. From going into the cartoon archives, I found the other half of the cartoon.

Wolfy goes to grandma’s house and grandma oogle’s him back with AWOOGA eyes, and the wolf runs away. But what I thought was so interesting about the archive version versus the version that was available on YouTube is that role switch.

We always constantly think of the wolf’s eyes shooting out at Little Red Riding Hood, but we don’t really think about grandma. You know, how she sort of gets him back because she’s like, “oh, you’re sexy wolf. I’m gonna look at you that way.” 

I am interested in active looking and when a look becomes ingrained in gender. When a look is perceived to be the male gaze or the female gaze and what things we like to note between that.

Marianne Burlew and Brianna Gluszak. Soft Bodies installation Shot. Wall Space Gallery. Photo credit: Ava Margueritte.

There is a conversation between the works about depth. Marianne’s work draws the viewer inward, holding space inside the pieces. Whereas Brianna’s work pushes into the viewer’s space, demanding room from the viewer. How do you find this lends to the overall idea of vulnerability in Soft Bodies?

BG: Some of the work stems from things that could be seen as vulnerable, but I am more interested in the opposite end of that word, and it being more explorative in an empowering way. Or in a way to have the viewer understand a different identity than they came in understanding.

For me, that kind of pushing out, and enveloping of the viewer, is about how to involve them in the work or have them gain a connection to it. The allowance of the viewer is to take as much or as little as they want of what I’m trying to get across.

And I do think that one of the interesting things about Marianne’s work is that you’re almost sucked into another world versus being present in this space.

MB: Brianna’s work is a lot more present in the space. Each piece is like its own body. And then mine is much more about an internal space or having space within them. But I think that push and pull can be great. I mean, vulnerability is just about rethinking or allowing yourself to be open to rethinking. I think Brianna’s talking about reaching into space being confrontational with the gaze and that engagement, whereas a lot of my inclination is to go smaller and deeper internally. I think the show has a good balance and a good variety to it because there are many different ways that you’re being reached out to, or you have to reach into.

And I don’t necessarily think we have to have done the same thing or have the same method to accomplish that. Vulnerability would just be like that shift of a boundary, right? Or that invitation to change your mind.

You can find more of Marianne Burlew and Brianna Gluszak‘s work on their Instagram.

How We Came to Be and Why We’re Here: In Conversation with Djenabé Edouard

Here & Home

The Riverdale Hub

Mayworks Festival of Working People & the Arts

Felicia Byron, Sydellia Ndiaye and Shai Buddah, curated by Djenabé Edouard

Here & Home Postcard. The Dive by Felicia Byron. Photos courtesy of Djenabé Edouard and the artist.

By Elizabeth Polanco

My eye first lands on the soft pink ear of a conch shell resting on a stack of books that are arranged just so. Crochet doilies make spiderwebs on a carved wooden coffee table and the soft red arms of a couch. Leaning against a steamer trunk with a record player rigged on top is the shining face of Rita Marley; I catch her smiling up at me through the thin plastic of a vinyl sleeve.

Mismatched wooden frames, the kind that would dot a grandmother’s wall with dated photos of weddings or graduations, enshrine a variety of portraits. There’s a smiling line of schoolgirls in lilac uniforms. There are solemn men, a mother and child, and boys playacting toughness. A young boy backflips off a pier in a glorious arc, his arms outstretched to the streak of azure waiting below.

Everything here – the photographs, the living room mise en scène – has been tenderly assembled to create the visual language of somewhere. The room is permeated with a distinct, diasporic feeling of place and belonging – to a somewhere that isn’t here. Yet this space understands that a sense of home can be conjured by something as simple as a meal, a song, a photograph, or a dance.

Here & Home, a group exhibition at the Riverdale Hub, explores the rocky, tenuous borderland between these two disparate places. In collaboration with Mayworks, the labour-centered community arts festival, the show celebrates Afro-Caribbean experiences of migration while addressing the difficult realities — exploitation, alienation — forged by unjust systems of labour. The exhibition is a patchwork of different mediums, featuring portraits from the photographic series “Out of Many, One People,” by Felicia Byron, “Visionary,” a choreographed dance film by Shai Buddah, and “Wild Flower,” a poem by spoken word artist Sydellia Ndiaye. It’s a project deeply invested in exploring how it feels when home is beyond reach, and cultivating growth often means forsaking the fruits of your labour.

I spoke with multidisciplinary artist Djenabé Edouard, the show’s curator, whose devotional approach to bringing visibility to Afro-Caribbean narratives and legacies radiates throughout Here & Home. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Here & Home Installation Shot by Djenabé Edouard. “Wild Flower” by Sydellia Ndiaye. Photos courtesy of Djenabé Edouard and the artist.

I’d love to start with your vision of the show and how things manifested.

Right away, looking at themes of labour in the arts, I was immediately thinking about the photographer Felicia Byron and her work. I had actually mentored her as part of the NIA Centre‘s Creative Catalyst program in 2020; she showed me this series [Out of Many, One People] and it stuck with me for a while.

I was thinking about creating a dualistic approach within the Afro-Caribbean lens of here and home and what that feels like — where home truly is for Afro-Caribbean people of the diaspora — and Felicia’s series stood out as such poignant portraits of folks from Jamaica. It felt timeless, in the sense that we can always pinpoint these little cultural moments within these portraits and relate to them. People at the opening reception made remarks that these photos feel like they’re from St Kitts or Barbados, all the different islands. That was the key point, that it resonated with the whole Caribbean diaspora.

It was around themes of labour and legacy and migration and belonging, and how we have this nostalgic feeling of family being elsewhere, and our home being where we are. There’s a lot of layers to it, but the portraits were the cornerstone.

Then Sydellia’s poem followed. I had followed her work for some time and that poem really stood out as something that could be versatile, that the context could shift towards relating to someone in the labour field, who may not feel nurtured or even visible.

Felicia Byron. St. Hilda’s Girls. (Brown’s Town, Jamaica 2015). Photos courtesy of Djenabé Edouard and the artist.

One thing that really struck me in the exhibit was the lived-in feeling. There’s a couch, records, and even the frames for the photos — these feel like they would be in someone’s home, they’re not sterile gallery frames. I was curious about the importance of reminiscence or nostalgia to this show.

Creating a sense of home was a very big part of it. We wanted to create a living room installation and I actually worked with my mother, who selected the frames from Value Village! It was really meant to feel quaint and homey in that sense. Some of the pieces came from my mother’s house, like the conch shell, and that’s my vinyl player. It was about creating that space where people feel like they belong, and it feels familiar and nostalgic.

Felicia brought in some books and other trinkets from her mother, so it was a culmination of these little collected items from past generations. That’s what made it even more special. It was across time that these things were collected, instead of my contemporary belongings. We looked for those pieces that we could be like, “This is what I saw when I grew up.”

I feel like it’s more effective in creating recognition for a viewer than just looking at a framed photo on a wall. There are other markers in the space that tell you that you can see yourself here.

It was so important for people to feel like they were allowed to engage with the living room space. Often in galleries, you see this sterile set up, and I wanted people to feel like they could sit on the couch, flip through the books, hang out and take in the work.

Here & Home. Visionary Still. Choreography by Shai Buddah and Cinematography by Patricia Ellah. Photos courtesy of Djenabé Edouard and the artist.

Scanning the show, there’s a lot of different media being used. There’s photography, dance, and spoken word poetry — was it intentional to have artists from different pockets of the art world?

I wanted to merge these different mediums, as far as text, visual art, and movement — I felt like there’s these different capacities to evoke emotions from each of them. The dance piece was created specifically for Here & Home. Shai choreographed it, and Patricia Ellah was the cinematographer. That piece was really to speak to how the Afro-Caribbean diaspora moves through migration, emotionally, and how disorienting a lot of that can feel.

The dance itself was very intricate, in that it had these moments of rejoice, and other moments of depletion, sadness, and hopelessness. We wanted to capture the range of emotions that happens for folks who remove themselves from their initial home, and in coming to a new home feel alienated, unsure how to belong, how to feel and fit in. Those elements of culture shock came into play as well. The different mediums were very intentional — I wanted more ways than one to express the emotional arcs of migration and shifting where your home is.

Felicia Byron. Ride Through Town (Discovery Bay, Jamaica 2015). Photos courtesy of Djenabé Edouard and the artist.

Since this exhibit is in collaboration with the Mayworks Festival, there’s a heavy focus on labour. Can you speak to wanting to show the Afro-Caribbean experience and its relationship, as fraught or interconnected as it is, with labour and migration?

A lot of Felicia’s portraits spoke to the folks that are in the labour field, but with an intent to humanize them — to humanize our family members who work hard to give us the privileges we have, to put us in the positions we’re in as the following generation. And Sydellia’s poem was the narrative arc of how Afro-Caribbean people engage with the labour force and the sentiments that come from that: not feeling nurtured, like they don’t belong, and constantly questioning their worth.

We also had the chance to engage with the Black Class Action lawsuit folks. We went through a lot of their materials, and these narratives were coming up again and again. These workers come to a place to plant their seeds and grow, but they’re being continuously stifled, unable to be promoted, and kept in these same positions for years on end.

These were the big things we saw across the board, how stifling it can be to migrate and labour in a new place and not feel like you can grow there. You’re this specific cog in this specific wheel and that’s your only position. And it made me think back to a lot of my own family members — my uncle came from Jamaica; he was a butcher and had his own shop there. Here, he’s working for Maple Leaf and he’s still a butcher, but he hasn’t been able to cultivate more autonomy or promotions.

We create comfort back home, but we know that the shift is inevitably to grow and to access more, and that’s where the disconnect comes. With not being able to access more, we’re not able to give back to the next generation, and that creates a rupture in the legacy that our communities are trying to build overseas.

Legacy was an inherent theme that was going to run throughout the exhibit. 

You’ve written about preserving oral histories and its importance to your work. There’s so much that can be left behind — memories, myths, even entire ways of living or taking care of the land. What is it about that idea of legacy that attracts you as a curator?

It’s such an underlying factor in making work as an Afro-Caribbean person. It’s the same way that making art as an Afro-Caribbean person is inherently political — we’re always trying to build a legacy through art and tell our stories, ones that aren’t often told in the broader context of academic spaces. It becomes the only medium in which we can tell our stories — through art, through creating space for other artists. Legacy was an inherent theme that was going to run throughout the exhibit.

Sydellia’s poem follows you as you move throughout the gallery, it’s not fixed in one place. Can you speak to that process, and the intention?

That ended up being the most difficult part. Initially, I thought to have it in its own space, but I saw the value in breaking it up into stanzas and lines and placing it in particular areas, around certain photographs, to further amplify the message or call to it.

When Sydellia and I spoke about doing that, she was very open to it, which I was happy about — I know most artists want their full piece to be acknowledged as is. So that choice was intentional, but the actual placement and decisions were difficult. We tried to let it flow.

What would you like to see more of in curatorial practices, and in art spaces, moving forward?

More work from artists of colour, women artists. I advocate very heavily for Afro-Caribbean art and culture and heritage, and specifically, the female gaze. It’s a component that’s often missing — the female gaze unfiltered or unobstructed by male perspectives or input. That’s something we often lack in the art space. You’ll see female artists in a show, but with a male curator, and it’s still going through their lens. Being able to work with all women, all Afro-Caribbean women, and be the curator, was a very privileged opportunity for me. Allowing our work to speak from the core of our heart, what we really wanted it to mean, and how we wanted it to resonate was very important.

I also love that you got to collaborate with your mom on this. Legacy is really the glue between this show’s themes.

She’s such a creative person; I always love to engage her in that way and create that dialogue through art. And seeing work across generations is important — the older generation still has a lot to say, and we don’t take it in. We feel like we know what’s best now, how things work. But in the spirit of preserving oral histories, there’s still so much that has been left unsaid, so much that they can offer us, show us, teach us. We get wrapped up in this contemporary lifestyle — tech, advancement — and we forget the past and the value and gems that exist in those ideologies and ways of being. When we hear more of these backstories, of our families, we recontextualize our own stories in new ways. We have a broader perspective of how we came to be and why we’re even here.

Here & Home runs from May 2 – 18, 2023 at the Riverdale Hub as part of the Mayworks Festival of Working People & the Arts. You can find more of Djenabé’s work on her website and social media.

On May 17 at 7PM, attend a performance by spoken word poet Sydellia Ndiaye at the Here & Home Closing Reception.

Memory Mirror by Lares Feliciano: A Reflection on Recollection

Lares Feliciano. Memory Mirror, 2021-2023. Images of Memory Mirror courtesy of Lares Feliciano and the Denver Art Museum.

Lares Feliciano

Denver Art Museum

July 4, 2021 – June 18, 2023

By Alida Kress

Lares Feliciano transforms the Denver Art Museum’s Precourt Family Discovery Hall into a timeless, vibrant sanctuary of nostalgia with her multimedia installation, Memory Mirror.  Her stylized work moves viewers to confront their relationships with memory and explore the history of the marginalized communities who have shaped Denver’s history. Feliciano’s extensive use of the gallery space encourages viewers to interact with the installation’s various elements. As such, she creates a piece that invites viewers to see her work and become part of it themselves.

As I approach the gallery, I am beckoned in by the sounds of jazz softly underlying an audial collage of recorded memories. Enormous flowers bloom on vintage wallpaper adorning the walls in a 1970s supergraphics style, and from behind the colorful blossoms, grey-toned faces peer down at me. 

Shadow boxes containing sentimental items donated by the Denver public hang on the wall and, across the room, two vintage chairs invite me to sit. An old TV, globe, rotary phone, and other vintage items accompany the chairs in their place on a large rug. Although these items were foreign to me, something about their arrangement felt comfortable, almost familiar. 

Lares Feliciano. Memory Mirror, 2021-2023. Images of Memory Mirror courtesy of Lares Feliciano and the Denver Art Museum.

Graphics stylistically akin to hand-drawn, children’s book illustrations are projected on a large oval frame. The cheerful animations provide visual accompaniment to the memories being recounted overhead. I felt compelled to look at each item in the shadow boxes, sit in the chairs, spin the globe, and even dial my number on the rotary phone. All elements of the installation work in conjunction to instill a sense of hazy nostalgia in me which I yearned to follow to some philosophical conclusion. 

Lares Feliciano is a Denver-based artist from California who works in multimedia design to create interactive art installations. The local artist has another installation at Meow Wolf Denver, an artist collective that collaborates with local artists to create maximalist, interactive art installations at permanent locations across the U.S.[1] At the installation in Denver, Feliciano applies her unique artistic style to breathe life into the Portals of Theseus collection.[2] The whimsical nature of her work with Meow Wolf remains evident within this installation as well. 

 Memory Mirror opened in July of 2021 and will continue through June 18th of 2023. Prior to the installation’s debut, Feliciano set up an in-person event and a phone number at which the public could leave a voicemail recalling a significant memory of theirs. Participants were also invited to donate images and items of sentimental value to be displayed in the gallery. The photographs incorporated into the wallpapers are partially these images donated by participants, but most were taken from the Denver Library’s official archives and depict a wide range of Denver’s diverse cultural history. 

Lares Feliciano. Memory Mirror, 2021-2023. Images of Memory Mirror courtesy of Lares Feliciano and the Denver Art Museum.

In my conversation with Feliciano, she shared that her inspiration for the piece came largely from her dad who passed away from early-onset Alzheimer’s when she was 16. Recalling her own relationship with memory and her dad, she notes that memory is an intangible thing, the loss of which, however, is incredibly tangible. Thus, in Memory Mirror, she attempts to capture tangible markers of memory that not only reflect the associated moment in the donor’s life, but also their relationship with the memory as they recall it. She stated that the installation is not trying to make sense of memory or give it any type of order, but simply to give it a place. 

In asking Feliciano about what she hoped viewers might gain from experiencing the installation, she said, “Hopefully their own nostalgia is triggered and they are forced to remember… anything.” For me, the piece was a way to interact with and process trauma. The nature of the space encouraged me to recall difficult memories and sit with them in ways I hadn’t before. The space was soft and calm, and it felt as though the words tumbling from my mouth had a safe place to exist outside of my own mind.  

In an interview with Westword, Feliciano shared, “My work often evokes a dreamlike nostalgia where decades overlap and all of time exists at once.”[3] This sentiment is incredibly apparent in the installation. While much of the installation is a call to self-reflection, just as significant is how it spotlights the history of Denver’s marginalized communities. The images Feliciano edited into the flowers on the wallpapers feature mainly people of color. These photos feature nostalgic photographs of varying levels of formality. Feliciano showcases a history of people of color in Denver by including everything from images of CU Denver’s minority student organizations in the 1950s to an image of Denver’s Bruce Randolf at his street naming ceremony. Feliciano described this part of the installation as a method to “give them their flowers,” sharing that she “had no idea what sort of celebrations have existed for any of these people, but they’re here if nothing else.”

Lares Feliciano. Memory Mirror, 2021-2023. Images of Memory Mirror courtesy of Lares Feliciano and the Denver Art Museum.

In the wake of the pandemic, Feliciano wanted to acknowledge how hard it is to exist, but also how powerful it is to be able to remember something good. We discussed the potential of all of time existing at once, and how recognizing that is an incredible way to deal with grief and trauma. For anyone who has read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Memory Mirror is a step towards seeing every moment of life all at once, like one would behold a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.[4]

 Feliciano’s work urges her viewers to lean into the resemblance Memory Mirror holds to a relative’s living room. It encourages viewers to sit in that nostalgia either to process their relationship with memory or to learn a little more about Denver’s collective memory and the histories of marginalized communities so often written out of colonial history books.

Memory Mirror facilitates a multifaceted experience in which the viewer is invited to explore not only their own memories, but the memory of the city they are in. Feliciano has created a piece that cradles the viewer’s internal child and allows them the space and safety to sit, feel, and remember. 

[1] “Meow Wolf: Immersive Art Experiences,” Meow Wolf: Immersive Art Experiences, accessed April 2023, https://meowwolf.com/.

[2]“Meow Wolf Denver Introduced Portals of Theseus,” Taking The Kids, January 7, 2023, https://takingthekids.com/meow-wolf-denver-introduced-portals-of-theseus/.

[3] Kyle Harris, “Lares Feliciano Wants Your Memories for a Denver Art Museum Installation,” Westword (Westword, March 17, 2021), https://www.westword.com/arts/lares-feliciano-collects-memories-for-memory-mirror-at-the-denver-art-museum-11921404.

[4] Jr Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five: The Children’s Crusade (London: Vintage Books, 2000), 86.

Make Me Less Evil: In Conversation with Angie Quick

Angie Quick. Make Me Less Evil installation shot, Museum London. Image courtesy of the artist.

By Adi Berardini

The first thing to know about Angie Quick is that she isn’t afraid to express herself. Whether that means speaking her mind or making fluid and fleshy paintings, Quick has a way of captivating an audience. I have gotten to know Angie since she is my studio mate and last spring, we switched studio spaces. We helped each other move our paintings and supplies, and I admit, I may have gotten a bit excited about stumbling upon one of the erotic lesbian magazines she uses as a reference. Tenderness across time is at the forefront of Quick’s mind. Inspired by the everyday and encapsulating effortless eroticism, she is interested in how modern life can seem just as antiquated as the classical periods before and what it means to envision a more empowered way of being.

Working in both painting and performance as a medium, Quick is a self-taught artist who has established herself in the local London art scene over the past years. Her recent solo exhibitions include The Moonlight Made Me Do It at the McIntosh Gallery in 2021 and when i die i will have loved everything at Glenhyrst Gallery in 2019. She has had an exciting year with her first commercial solo show at the Michael Gibson Gallery, A Life of Crime, and an exhibition at Museum London, entitled Make Me Less Evil. Quick forefronts the question: Can art make you less evil? 

Angie Quick. i won’t be happy until you’re dead, 72x60in., oil on canvas, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

Can you explain more about your exhibition ‘Make Me Less Evil’ at the Museum London and your inspiration behind it?

I didn’t know what the show was going to look like. I was just looking at stuff, researching, trying to figure out what I wanted to make. The earlier paintings were the Vermeer paintings. I was looking at a lot of Vermeer work and that was the impetus for it.

I was looking at classical works and the idea of the figure within them. That body of work is about tenderness and vulnerability and looking at intimacy. And I think that was often portrayed through bodies and the title Make Me Less Evil. That came midway while I was working on the series.

I was thinking a lot about personal ethics, like the idea of [someone] asking to be made less evil. But then also the power of art and if art can make one less evil, by the viewer looking at the work. I like that title as an overarching theme because as I was making the work, it just seemed fitting. I think because people find some of my work eroticism or see erotic things within it there’s like this “turning away.” I think it’s asking a question of the viewer and embracing it.

Angie Quick Make Me Less Evil installation shot, Vermeer inspired series. Museum London. Image courtesy of the artist.

The way I interpreted it is a lot of times, especially women, if they’re promiscuous or sexual, they’re made out to be “evil” when that’s not the same standard as men. So, I thought that was an interesting title because it’s almost reclaiming eroticism itself.

 I felt like the title could mean something to anyone who reads it because I think anyone could have a sense of what that looks like to be made less evil or what they carry within themselves or what society puts on [them]. I think a lot of my work is breaking down those boundaries of what we consider right or wrong or what we’re allowed to do or not allowed to do.

In addition to ‘Make Me Less Evil’ you recently had a solo show at Michael Gibson Gallery, A Life of Crime. A Life of Crime deals more with the implication of people in the space, with a more abstract approach and an inspiration from the Rococo era of opulence. On the other hand, ‘Make Me Less Evil’ is more erotic and depicts people in intimate settings. Can you explain the difference in your artistic vision in ‘A Life of Crime?’

I feel like the difference is more something I can see once I saw both works separately, but they almost bled into each other. They were similar and yet different. I made the museum work, but as I was making the museum work, Michael Gibson asked me to do this exhibition.

I made a whole new body of work and some of the work that was going to go to the museum ended up going to the Gibson Gallery. I think there must have been a shift occurring where fewer bodies were visibly present within the work. And it was almost like the bodies are present but absent at the same time. Whereas within the museum work, they’re very much in your face and present. I don’t know why that shift started happening. I do think I was looking at more Rococo work and more at the furniture and the interiors and the sense of someone maybe having just left the room or the memories that exist within the room.

Angie Quick. the night you wore your jogging suit to bed, 60 x 60, oil on canvas, 2022. Museum London. Image courtesy of the artist.

You can see the influence of your everyday life in your paintings. For example, referencing parts of your living room in ‘A Life of Crime’ or your self-portrait Make Me Less Evil depicting yourself napping on your studio couch. Can you explain more about your interest in referencing the everyday in your work? 

 I think everything that I experience in a day culminates onto the canvas. Not so much that it’s a portrait of myself, but I think my interest in being obsessed with something in my everyday life can make its way into the canvas and then it is next to something not directly related to me.

I think those things being in relation allows room for a viewer to make their own narrative within the canvas. So [that’s] why I like having personal stuff—it’s the same with my titles. My titles are probably the most autobiographical parts of all the paintings because those are usually direct snippets from my life while I’m working.

I think that kind of sensibility also lends itself to personal items that make it into [the work]. And I like the idea that there are moments in the canvas that are maybe just for me, but then suddenly it’s for everyone else. I think that the difference between what’s personal and impersonal. The lines blurring is exciting to me.

Can you touch upon your interest in depicting vulnerability in ‘Make Me Less Evil’? Can you also expand on your interest in intimacy and eroticism through your paintings?

It’s one of those things where I maybe am not hyper-aware that I’m making very erotic work. It’s maybe after the fact, having people look at the work and then tell me it’s either shocking or erotic. I don’t think I’m aware of it when I’m making a painting. I like the interactions of bodies and self and it just feels natural for me to come out into those dialogues. I don’t know if it just comes down to being shameless or if that’s just what I’m fascinated and obsessed with.

I love how you spoke about how butts are universal because everyone has one during your artist tour at Museum London.

I don’t even know what the psychoanalysis of that is, but I think there is something about how it’s a non-gendered thing. Everyone has a butt. And I also like the idea of the naked body just existing almost in a timelessness.

But are we just like a Caravaggio painting with a cell phone?

I sometimes wonder how much we’ve progressed or changed as people, when I’m looking at so much classical work and stuff, I think okay, now we have cellphones. But are we just like a Caravaggio painting with a cell phone? There’s so much moralism that still exists and restrictions that I have a hard time thinking that there’s much liberation within a lot of how we live.

I think it’s an interesting parallel to think of, they had letters before, but now we have texts. There are a lot of parallels even though it’s such a different time. 

I think now we can get things more immediately. We still love Shakespeare so much. It makes me think that as people, we only have a certain [number] of emotions and that’s why Shakespeare still seems relevant because it still resonates with all that we can express.

I also love Anne Carson. She’s like a classicist and she’ll take classical work and make it relevant to today so it’s almost like collapsing the timeline. But sometimes I can find that depressing too. It’s not that I don’t believe in progress necessarily, but sometimes when people look at my work and they’re like, “oh, this is happening,” I think that shouldn’t be shocking. It just seems like there’s no change.

You hope and you think that there’s progress, but even just seeing what’s happening now politically, rights are being rolled back. How far have we actually come?

It seems medieval almost. I feel like one of the differences now is that we do have the internet so it’s easier to make propaganda, but it’s also harder at the same time to control a whole population. I can be in communication with somebody in Europe and finding out information and stuff can be translated quicker. But sometimes I think we’re just very medieval, just wearing Adidas or something. Then that sense of humanity is important to me in my work and when I’m saying tenderness, it is seeing people as people.

Angie Quick. the cannoli eaters, 60x120in., oil on canvas, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

You have explained how you are interested in certain symbolism such as animals (lambs, rabbits, etc.) and religious symbolism in art historical contexts. Can you explain more about your use of symbolism?

I think because I was raised by two atheists that religion and Christianity are constantly very shocking to me. I was talking to my mom today about how people can be so horrified about sexuality or just like the freedom of an individual to be themselves.

And yet we can walk by churches all the time and there’s just like crosses and crosses resemble someone being killed. A naked man dying on a cross is constantly in our subconscious. Since I was a kid, I was wrapping my head around that.

I think I find it fascinating how so much of western art history uses those things, but they don’t necessarily mean what they’re supposed to mean to me, they become something else. I think I’m creating a personal narrative and ownership of certain symbols and then playing against universal ones. 

I think I just get attracted to certain things and I’m also really into emojis. I think the emoji is like the modern-day crucifix. It’s a sense of using something to delineate information in the shortest amount of time. And so, utilizing that in painting is interesting to me. And then, I can have my own symbolism that I start to create in my work by constantly or obsessively using it. I think they relate to each other since it’s a pictorial language and that’s why I find it exciting. I like the idea of information being condensed and then becoming something that can mean something to everybody. And then maybe skewing that slightly.

Who are some artists (or other inspirations such as books or music) that influence you and your work?

I like Salman Toor a lot. I liked like his sense of playfulness in his work, but then also there’s like a very strong resonance of personal meaning within it.  

I’ve read a lot of Sheila Heti this year, I read all her work. And Jesse Ball wrote Autoportrait, which is inspired by a [memoir by a French writer Édouard Levé], but I was reading a lot of works of autofiction and auto portrait. I think I was also listening to a podcast, and they were talking about how that’s like a new feminist way of writing and I think it’s taking control of one’s narrative. I find that was very influential in how I was working. I don’t know exactly how, but like somehow just taking in all that information. Anne Carson is also a huge influence.

I’ve always loved Cecily Brown because I think she’s like a good painter’s painter. Yeah, I feel like since I was fifteen, I’ve been haunted by Cecily Brown’s paintings.

Do you have anything you’re working on that you’d like to share?

I’m interested in the idea of horniness. At the Gibson opening, someone described my work as being horny and I love that. That’s the best compliment to me because I feel like that’s such a huge encompassing feeling. I’m interested in it and countering the impulse to procreate, the idea of being horny being almost universal, and the way that we can engage in that and the sense of purpose in life and horniness, but in a liberated sense. Like that horniness is liberation.

I was listening to a podcast with Meeka Walsh, who’s the editor for Border Crossings [Magazine], and she was talking about how a good piece of art makes you want to make love. And I was like, oh, horny. It was a more intellectual way of saying horny—I love that.

Check out Angie Quick’s exhibition Make Me Less Evil on view at Museum London until May 28th, 2023.