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Review

Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer and researcher. Engaging Black Studies and related cultural production, her writing is featured in _Real Life_, _C Magazine_, and _Canadian Art_. 

“I have landed in this place as a stranger. I have been formed from the refuse of the humanities,” read one of the texts that accompanied Tau Lewis’s exhibition _Sparkle’s Map Home_. Through sculpture, Lewis approaches Black diasporic cosmologies. Her world-building is both intentional and refreshingly impenetrable, engaging a long history of radical Black feminist illegibility. In the work _Sparkle & Sparkle’s map home_, Sparkle is seated in a chair facing a quilted map. Composed of a woven collection of textiles, assorted objects and found family photographs, the map offers no colonial signposts, directions or borders to situate home. Similarly, another sculpture titled _The Octonaut_ features remnants of a globe; Lewis’s sculptures work against the violent geographies that seek to understand and contain Black lives. Instead, as James Baldwin reminds us in _Giovanni’s Room_, “home is not a place, but simply an irrevocable condition.” Only Sparkle has access to this map of ancestral memory; it’s uniquely theirs. Lewis’s mythmaking imbues memory work with care, trading the colonial map’s legibility for a path home that might feel “just right,” for Black people—like listening to jazz or flipping through old family photographs (“because sometimes in life you need to listen extra hard for your lucky stars,” Lewis writes in the accompanying text). If you know, you know.

In Katherine McKittrick’s “Keeping the Heartbreak,” from _Don’t Wear Down_ (2019), she recalls a conversation with Lewis, along with certain details:

> When Lewis and I met to discuss her visual art, she mentioned to me that part of her practice is to find something—a special object—and enclose it in the art, so it can no longer be seen. The intention is not to seek out and hide, from what I understand; rather in the process of putting things together, objects are lost or obscured from view. In line with much of \[B\]lack studies, the question of representation here is not only unfinished and momentary, it is comprised of things we cannot see or capture. Even though the monumental work of racism presents our lives and our art and our geographies as transparent, knowable, and always tied to oppression, there are some parts of blackness they just cannot have or imagine or grasp. In Lewis’ work, the seen and the unseen and what we cannot know, speaks to the radical interdisciplinarity that, for me, defines all aspects of \[B\]lack life. The finding, gathering, and stitching together do not end in conclusion, but instead offer uncomfortable openings and wonder.

Many contemporary cultural institutions have a stake in discourses of representation, and stand to benefit materially from inclusion and diversity projects, with the condition that such representations of Blackness are made legible and digestible to the institution and its mostly white audiences. McKittrick’s observations highlight precisely how those “things we cannot see or capture” offer us a generative Black elsewhere that is not beholden to the institutional or representational gaze: a Black elsewhere that simply is. And this engagement with the illegible is nothing new to Lewis. When I first encountered their work via the _cyphers, tissue, blizzards, exile_ show at 8eleven in 2017—the same show that compelled McKittrick to write about Lewis—Lewis was engaged with similar themes of excavating memory beyond representation.

The illegibility of Lewis’s sculptures makes sense, given their sacred subject matter. Deeply personal, Lewis’s origin stories are in communion with Black pasts, and ancestral memory, with each sculpture affectively charged with familial histories and ephemera. Not everyone is owed exegesis. Encountering the works in _Sparkle’s Map Home_, I felt, at once, something as significant as the weight of Black diasporic histories, and something as particular as one individual’s reckoning with them. As Lewis’s accompanying text insists, in the ancestral register, “I came down to earth to let you know / your lucky stars were there all along…”

I’m especially compelled by sculptures of Thumper and Harmony, characters which recur throughout the show. In one room, they sit across from each other, with legs crossed. Each sculpture explodes with detail. I notice a flower painted on one of Thumper’s toenails and almost immediately their floral earrings catch my eye, the motif from the toenails repeating itself. In Harmony, I find part of a globe that could have been repurposed in _The Octonaut_; there, I notice assorted trinkets and even rings. In another room, in _I heard a heartbeat down in the blackhole_, concentric circles of recycled leather form an intricate black hole. With each encounter, over time, I see the sculptures in a new way. You must sit with them; such care is necessary if we are to attend to the ancestral mythos as Lewis describes it—of “staring into the heaviest mightiest black.”

Writer

Humour

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Maandeeq Mohamed reviews Tau Lewis’ exhibition, _Sparkle’s Map Home_, at Oakville Galleries. 

Sparkle's Map Home: Tau Lewis

Emily Pelstring is an artist, filmmaker and professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University. [www.emilypelstring.com](http://www.emilypelstring.com)

_The Pathos of Mandy_ (2020) functions like an expanded autobiography of Walter Scott’s previous quasi-autobiographical work about an aspiring artist named Wendy. The show coalesces around the new eponymous alter-ego, Mandy, and his struggles with a Wendy-like creation. Excessive mediation, overlapping narrative frameworks, and a preoccupation with in-between states pervade _The Pathos of Mandy_. Characters traverse media and formats, performing themselves in ways that are simultaneously genuine and feigned, drawn and sculptural, documentary and fictional. Ultimately, Scott’s intentional confusion is a witty reflection on the mutability of identity and authorship, and a critique of rigid categorization.

When I visited the exhibition space, it was strewn with glossy, black-on-pink prints and animated neon works, all rendered in a napkin-sketch style. Wires dangled from the neon tubing, and prints hung dramatically askew. One print depicts an artist (recognizably Wendy) feverishly drawing self-portraits that come to life, poke her in the face and proclaim, “Art is supposed to be fun!” Another print dissects the motion of a boot taking a single step, separating it into three phases: “ACT 1,” “ACT II,” and “ACT III.” _See Yourself in the Work_ (2019) is a two-step animated neon piece installed directly on top of that boot print. In the first step of the neon animation, a figure appears to hold the print from above, smiling. In the second step, the neon figure appears to fall _into_ the print, screaming and pushing against the edges of its rectangular frame.

Spatial jokes abound in Scott’s universe. A print depicting a wine bottle pouring into a puddle was draped over the floor line, making it three-dimensional. A simple black print of a T-shirt lay face up on the floor, as if someone had forgotten to clean up. As Scott put it, some of these works are “2D in drag as 3D.” Not only do these pieces perform across their dimensional categories, but they also transcend their status as inanimate objects. Fragments of beings, in the form of disembodied, chunky boots, white-gloved hands and freaked-out faces made the whole space seem slightly animated, as if it were puppeteered. Scott’s fluency in the visual shorthand of the cartoon caricature enhanced this illusion. His ability to render a distinct mood with just one mark—that perfectly placed eyebrow—made objects come to life. This aspect of the show filled me with the kind of joy I experienced as a child, tuning into _Pee-wee’s Playhouse_ to join the strange and friendly company of furniture that talked and had eyes.

A number of works poked holes in romantic conceptions of the creative process, focusing instead on the mundane reality. A series of mixed-media drawings called _Six Acts of Writing_ (2019), framed on the wall, illustrated stages of the creative process—including napping and drinking. In the drawing _The First Act of Writing_ (2019), a snake-like form that is a pencil at one end and an arm at the other rips a drawing in half, while Wendy awkwardly kneels on it, reading an apparently distressing book. The words “BUT,” “THEN” and “LATER” punctuate bizarre scenarios across these drawings. Throughout the show, the comic strip as form and language was repeatedly deconstructed and rearranged as contemporary art.

In another room, the show’s titular video piece, _The Pathos of Mandy_ (2019), offered a story about the pitfalls of commercial success in creative fields. Mandy loses creative control over a character he created after his LA agent shops her around the world of showbiz. Having shaped his career around the character, he is understandably upset. He soaks in a gross bathtub and reads Barthes, feeling pathetic. The narrative is neatly resolved when Mandy finds a random new focus for his practice: QUILTS. This glimpse of the creative life, offered through animation layered on top of photos of Scott’s actual daily life, directly addresses the “art people” most likely to engage with the work. It is a confession of the unglamorous and fraught aspects of artistic identity and practice, like self-pity and narcissism.

Scott has made a mess of the identity, status and output of the artist. Along with the graphic litter, embarrassing pathos was spilled everywhere. I understood this disarray and the accompanying, collapsed categorical divisions—to be a critique of the tendency to apply rigid rules that categorize, essentialize and assign value to everything and everyone. As one of the “art people” implicated by the work, I was compelled to reflect on my own motivations and those of the people around me. Doesn’t our proclivity for neat, clear structures and hierarchical distinctions reek of competition, territorialism and pride? Shouldn’t we all be ashamed? Sure, but we can also look in the mirror and laugh. Scott’s world of beings, with their flaws on the table, tells us there is room for compassion. Even if we are sometimes vain and insecure like Mandy and Wendy, we are not alone, and we are more than one thing. We are redeemed by the acknowledgement that being a person is hilarious and messy.

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Emily Pelstring reviews Walter Scott’s exhibition, _The Pathos of Mandy_, at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston.

The Pathos of Mandy: Walter Scott

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C Mag

The Pathos of Mandy: Walter Scott

Sparkle's Map Home: Tau Lewis

Condolere Sanctuaries: Eve Tagny

My Crops are Dying But My Body Persists: Bridget Moser