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Plural

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Varley

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Workman 1

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Review

Ella den Elzen is an artist and curator based in New York. She was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2023–2024.


Produced between 2023 and 2024, the majority of works within Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s “M∗∗∗∗∗” employ found materials ranging from the keratinous to the botanical to the industrially produced, in order to explore notions of value, labour, extraction, and production—ongoing interests within the artist’s practice. My first sense to be stimulated upon entering the exhibition was scent —specifically the saccharine smell of rotting strawberries hanging from a structure of skeletal, disassembled umbrellas. As sculptures, _Site Parasite Dice Paradise_ and _Octom∗∗_ (both 2023) conjure notions of spawning through rhizomatic wire structures that branch repeatedly, with each arm holding a mobile of strawberries and found magazine clippings. This ready-made imagery, specifically consisting of photographs of fish eggs, tentacles, and the face of Nadya Suleman (an American woman who became famous in the media for being pregnant with octuplets, birthing them in 2009), conflates concepts of pregnancy with the parasitic and parasocial. Hill’s interest in the figure of the octopus is significant conceptually; the octopus, after all, only produces a child once in her life, subsequently dying after giving birth. Suleman’s image connotes notions of both social and physical injury, as her fame emerged alongside the public ridicule and scrutiny cast by her pregnancy.

Placed in conversation with the sculpture are a series of works on silk tissue, hand-dyed in blackberry ink. _Curtains and Fadeout_ (both 2023) are overlaid with pencil drawing and collaged xeroxed photographs of parasites, open-mouthed organisms, spores, and eggs. At first glance, I think the small clippings might be berries, but upon closer inspection, I am struck by how abject the found imagery is. The scans merge suckling with sucking, hinting at ideas of postpartum physical and psychological depletion. Fleshy and viscous collaged clippings are made more unsettling through the olfactory experience of moving through the exhibition space. The discomfort this produces intentionally speaks to larger parasitic structures of colonialism. In the accompanying exhibition text, Tania Willard writes: “Himalayan blackberries are one of the most invasive and widespread plants in the Vancouver area, in xwməθkwəyə̓m, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ territories. Some naturalize, some continue to threaten native species.” For Hill, who is of Cree and English heritage, the blackberry ink as material holds multiple potential meanings, gesturing both to the specificity of her own autobiography and to the larger context in which she grew up. In a 2023 profile for the Sobey Art Award, Hill asks, “What circumstances brought blackberries here? Because they are from England, they were an invasive plant that came here with British people, but they are also a plant I used growing up. Me, my mom, my kokum, my brothers and my dad, we would go berry picking. And that was something my grandmother had grown up doing and passed down to us.” 

This relationship to the land contrasts the private property and dispossession central to the formation of what is now known as British Columbia, the homeland of the xwməθkwəyə̓m, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations where Hill currently lives. Notably, this was where Joseph Trutch served as the first lieutenant governor of British Columbia, after a career as a land surveyor and chief commissioner of land and works in the newly formed colony. His hostile and genocidal policies, such as a memorandum he issued in 1870, denied Indigenous presence on the land by asserting that settlers were entitled to the territory through their “productive” use of land—policies that continue to impact Indigenous land claims today. To Trutch, Indigenous peoples’ relationship to the land did not fall under a British conceptualization of property use. Hill challenges this legal paradigm of property through the evocation of blackberry ink—a trace that is embedded with forms of embodied and ancestral knowledge, and an assertion that berry picking is a kind of land use. These works on paper are part of a larger series of works including _Out of Time_ (2023), _Echo Body (2023), Shadow_ (2024), and _Project_ (2024), which integrate repetitious burn marks, 16mm splicing tape, hair, hair ash, and glue into their material vocabulary. Hill conjures notions of the corporeal and decay, using debris-like materials that are deigned to be of little value, conversely supported by silk tissue substrate. Silk, a precious fabric, is produced by moth larvae who are also killed in the process of the material’s making, further hinting at the cyclical processes of birth, hatching, and death.

In particular, the 16mm splicing tape as material is also used in the artist’s eponymous two-channel video work, _M∗∗∗∗∗_ (2023), the most evocative work within the space of the exhibition. Created by repeatedly burning holes and layering hair over 16mm tape, Hill produces a diptych of imageless video works. Abstracted through this process of enlargement and projection, the burns and hair can be read as moving drawings. The images themselves almost look like organic cells under a microscope, recursively appearing in the projection. Each tape is played through a 16mm projector placed atop a stack of institutional chairs, resting upon four running shoes at the corners of the chair legs. Hill often incorporates pieces of her own clothing in her sculptures, such as in _Counterblaste_ (2021), an earlier work gesturing to sustenance. Here, the presence of these personal articles animates the assembled materials. The projection machines are devices for infinite production and self-replication, yet the forms of extraction she references feel more sinister than those in Hill’s previous work. In particular, the absence of a camera refutes the extractive legacy of image making. Photographs, alongside maps and surveys, enabled the circulation of imagery of “uninhabited” land ready to be delineated into parcels and settled.
 
Hill combines her own autobiography with familial and colonial histories to interrogate the forms of extraction that occur throughout processes of artistic labour. In censoring a word associated with birthing and caring for children from the title of the exhibition, Hill contextualizes this subjecthood—“Mother”—as one that remains entirely unuttered, especially within the context of the art world, and one’s career. This is perhaps the most direct understanding that the title suggests, although the diverse constellation of materials and media that Hill engages allows for a porous set of interpretations to emerge, prompting one to consider: how much is one willing to give and to give up, for the sake of production?

Writer

This issue of C Magazine looks through the mirror as a bleeding surface—a metaphor for acts of seeing, thinking, and creating that return your gaze. We recognize that the way we look in a mirror is also the way we tell a story, as a reflection of value systems and the stakes of lucidity and distortion, especially under colonial systems that would twist their subjects’ humanity. Many texts here, between artists and writers, take the form of dialogues, and think through persistent possibilities of visual revelation, language, and mourning. Formal and symbolic fractures are reflected through chimerical imagery, Hong Kong cinemas of resistance, Puerto-Rican space-time, physical and spiritual intertwining, and a real place to land for both joy and grief—the end of a rainbow, or its burning.

Mirror Mirror

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“M∗∗∗∗∗” ran from 6 July to 31 August 2024 at Mercer Union, Toronto.

“M∗∗∗∗∗” — Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

Yasmina Price a New York–based writer and film curator completing a PhD at Yale University. Her work centers Black Cinema, anti-colonial visual culture, and the experimental practices of women artists.


Even where the earth has been rewritten with the colonizing texts of extraction and ownership, its first poems are still visible. Although reading them requires the work of unearthing, this is not the palimpsest legible to a geologist. In a scene from Cauleen Smith’s new film _The Deep West Assembly_ (2024), a Black woman sits on a shoreline of greyish sand, her legs stretched out, tossing shells or perhaps pebbles at the waves. Loosely dressed as a North American pilgrim, she lists geology’s siblings and cousins—anthropology, archeology, gynecology, ethnography, cinematography, botany, economics, criminology. A chronicle of disciplines, a record of impositions of order. Grounded in the telluric, her new solo exhibition of the same name, curated by Rhea Anastas and Mia Locks, further elasticizes the artist’s mercurial practice, built on touchstones of Afro-diasporic knowledge systems, radical film movements, the inherited communal teachings of Black women, and fabulatory imaginaries. 

The archipelagos of the exhibition include several multi-scalar screening and installation spaces, a banner gallery, a wax room, as well as a verdant cocoon for reading and listening. Here, two walls bear a visual bibliography of book covers, indexing the devotion to study that animates Smith’s practice. The other walls are covered with her wallpaper of jaggedly joyful drawings of the candelabrum tree, titled _The Panadus Matrix_ (2024). Principally found in Liberia, this sculptural plant is currently threatened because of its natural placement on kimberlite rocks, which signal the presence of diamonds, making the plant collateral damage to mercenary mining. Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter informs Smith’s aesthetic challenges to Western humanism, indicting its allied redesignation of nature as the plundered object of capital. As a space, the cushy couches in the study room have the feeling of a summons to collectively participate in the instruction laid out in the title of one of Wynter’s essays, “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism” (1968). An urgent call for relational cultural work is interwoven with the show’s ecological concerns. Smith is careful to not lay claim to inventing new ways to expose colonial violations of the Earth. Instead, she approaches slowly, with curiosity and an understanding that these are occasions to join already rooted efforts, not reinvent them. An essential dimension of the exhibition was a series of public programs and collaborations with Black women culture workers already based in Norway, such as the notable contributions of Ayesha Jordan, reflected in the leafy room of book covers and records. 

As the artist explained at the Oslo opening, the “Deep West” of the title was drawn from the writings of a guiding compass, the late undaunted, bluesy poet of Black Los Angeles, Wanda Coleman. Under this banner, the exhibition articulates a California constructed through the same logics as the South, unearthing the reality of settler-colonial empire barely concealed under the nominal veneer “United States of America.” The delinking of the purportedly liberal, emancipatory regions of the Californian west (and for that matter, the Northeast) from southern areas branded as the unique sites of enslavement and horrors relegated to the past conveniently functions to limit contemporary understandings of their fundamental interdependence. The westward expansion that created California converged the ideological architecture of manifest destiny and the ongoing genocides of Indigenous peoples with the conjugations of labour, finance, and warmongering—all of these, of course, imbricated with plantation economies in the southern states. This rhetorical reassembly bridges the West Coast and Deep South to expose the co-constructed foundational violences that are strategically disavowed in the liberal myth of an exceptional democracy. Smith enters the scene of a covered-up crime to show how it came to be. 

A volcanic element that has been iterated through her more recent work reappears in the objects of “The Deep West Assembly,” with banners and sculptural elements calling on eruptions that are not only a tear in the Earth but an interruption in anthropocentric time. Although it is the most subdued part of the show, the wax room features _NONCONFORMITY 1–5_ (2024), a serialized set of five cake-like rectangular landscapes whose sides reveal their multicoloured layers, dotted with burning tea lights that supply an additional sensorial, olfactory experience. With their jewel-bright colours, tassels, and dimensional cursive writing, the banners in the adjacent space might most evidently carry Smith’s aesthetic signature. Communicating a range of tones, the textile statements here are sweetly tricky (“your rock my world”), lucid or accusatory (“your past made my future”), intentionally citational (“...we must become a menace to our enemies,” from June Jordan), or unsettling or encouraging (“you survived”), mobilizing a tenor of militancy with poetic flair. 

A prosthetic space reached via a walkway houses the new video work that titles the exhibition. The aforementioned Black woman in pilgrim guise, actor Dionne Audain, is the main figure in _The Deep West Assembly_, an MC, narrator, and performer in a theatre of temporal crossings, unevenly imperiled life, and refusals to comply. Formally, the video unravels a pluralistic spool of landscapes and timescapes—painted backdrops of a land violently transferred from Indigenous caretakers to colonizing landowners; 16mm footage of two Black femmes holding a banner inscribed with “BLACK STUDIES IS EARTH STUDIES” in front of the once slave market now federal courthouse of Los Angeles; photographs of geological phenomena; the ecstatic formations of a room of Black people doing the electric slide; fiery footage conjuring the rebellions of summer 2020, which includes a glimpse of a protestor’s keffiyeh creating a thematic link to the two large flags at the entrance of the show. This duo of welcoming sentinels, piercingly titled _The Limits of Hospitality_ (2023) and _Swallowtail Seven Never Surrenders_ (2023), chromatically and symbolically index the history and present of Black-Palestinian liberatory kinship. 

As is often the case in Smith’s moving-image creations, the video’s script is a rich, polyvocal intertext, citing Black thinkers from W. E. B. Du Bois to Katherine McKittrick, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Orlando Patterson. The call of Black Study diagnoses and seeks to see beyond the terms of a world order shaped by the interlinkages of white supremacy, coloniality, and empire. With _The Deep West Assembly_, Smith considers an alternative global choreography through an older clock than theirs, a buried geological time. The video ends with a long stretch of darkness, timed to the arc of Nina Simone’s “22nd Century” (1971), beautifully and unbearably prescient: 

There is no oxygen in the air 
Men and women have lost their hair 
Ashen faces, legs that stand 
Ghost and goblins walk in this land 
When tomorrow becomes yesterday 
And tomorrow becomes eternity.

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“The Deep West Assembly” ran from 14 June to 15 September 2024 at the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo.


“The Deep West Assembly” — Cauleen Smith

Header

C Mag

“The Deep West Assembly” — Cauleen Smith

“M∗∗∗∗∗” — Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

“Sun Moon Stars” — Rochelle Goldberg

“The Traces That Remain” — Shaya Ishaq, Po B. K. Lomami, Zinnia Naqvi, Lan “Florence” Yee