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Workman 1

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Mackenzie

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Plural

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Review

Alaina Perez is an artist, writer, researcher, and MFA student in the Individualized Program at Concordia University. She is a member
of the Tahltan Nation and was raised in Vancouver, BC, on unceded Sḵwxwú7mesh, Sto:lo, and s ̱ əlilwətaɬ and xwməθkwəy̓əm territory.

The seventh iteration of the Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone/Contemporary Native Art Biennial (BACA) spans seven exhibitions across Quebec, all centred on the eponymous theme of “Creation Stories.” In the exhibition hosted at Art Mûr, the work of 33 artists was curated by Lori Beavis, Emma Hassencahl-Perley, Jake Kimble, and Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé, each of whom approached the exhibition from the four cardinal Directions of Spirit. 

Entering the gallery space, I encounter seven poraits featuring women across different generations. One of these images, Cora Kavyaktok’s Cora DeVos, _Family Portrait_, 2022 (2022), is a richly lit digital print that illuminates the smiling faces of three women from three different generations. Their gazes fill the space with a sense of care that makes me feel welcome, as if my presence does not carry the sense of voyeurism I often feel when looking deeply at portraits of women I do not know.

In Sandra Racine’s _Basket_ (2024) series, three baskets are crafted from the most intricate synthesis of form and colour: black ash bark, sweetgrass, and dye all come together in an astonishing tactile composition. Flowers made of black ash bark lie gently upon the surface of the baskets, placed as if they may float away in a strong breeze. Despite the sharp curls of bark that jut outward in every direction, the baskets look inviting to touch. I had a difficult time staying within the permitted station of the viewer. Baskets are made to be touched. They were touched for countless hours during the time of their creation, and I wonder when they will get to be touched again. Racine’s _Basket_ series prompted me to consider how creation itself is a dialectical form of Indigenous relationality. Twisting between the contours of desire and realization, creation is like a memory of a touch that was not felt on our own skin, or a memory of a language that did not even pass through our own lips. It is a language that is older than words, than time itself.

I make my way to the second floor of Art Mûr and find myself in an atmosphere filled with dreamlike sound. I soon learn that this ethereal music is emitted from Cheyenne Rain LeGrande’s ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ _Mullyanne Nîmito_ (2022), a video projection of the artist draped in a radiant fringed shawl constructed of pull tabs. The artist stands strongly in a pair of striking platform moccasins at the edge of a body of water. The song trickles like water in the air, setting a calm tone for the entire floor as it follows me into a large room. I am drawn to the far left corner, where a hide is placed on the floor with the fur side down. Etched onto its skin is an impression of a map, and the words “Home Some of it that I remember.” A small paper house stands upright on the hide, which is placed below a shelf that holds a series of four red walkie-talkies. This installation by seth cardinal dodginghorse, titled _last night I had a dream I was home again_, is a mnemonic re-enactment of the artist’s experience of forced displacement from their ancestral homelands in 2014 due to the construction of the Calgary Ring Road. In my initial encounter with dodginghorse’s piece, I was struck by the contrast between the artist’s playful approach to mapping a familiar place, and the extractivist context of Land surveying invoked by the walkie-talkies. Unlike the imperialist cartographic grid system used to measure, monitor, and control people and Land, dodginghorse’s map is etched onto the irregularly shaped hide. This is a map that cannot be divided into a collection of squares seamlessly integrated into imperialist informational systems. The topography of hide defies the grid—its skin only lends itself to the systems and practices of creation, memory, and storytelling that exist within families and their relations to homelands. 

“Creation Stories” intricately folds together experiences of creation as a relational topography, with textures formed along familial and community lines. Taken together, the works in the exhibition reach far and beyond the telling of any singular genesis—these are stories that have continued since time immemorial, stories of creation that will never end, so long as there are artists who carry the desire to realize new worlds.

Writer

In _C Magazine_’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

In C Magazine’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

Almanac

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“Creation Stories” featured artwork by Eruoma Awashish, Kaylyn Baker, Haley Bassett, Jordan Bennett, Alison Bremner, Christian Chapman, Craig Commanda, Renée Condo, seth cardinal dodginghorse, Tarralik Duffy, Marcy Friesen, tīná gúyáńí, Jay Havens, Cora Kavyaktok, Uumati Kisoun-Inuarak, Corey Larocque, Cheyenne Rain LeGrande, Maria-Margaretta, Calvin Morberg, Meagan Musseau, Lisa Myers, Melaw Nakehk’o, Luke Parnell, Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley, Shane Perley-Dutcher, Melissa Peter-Paul, Jobena Petonoquot, Sandra Racine, Natasha Sacobie, Heather Shillinglaw, Jason Sikoak, Michelle Sound, and Alan Syliboy, and ran from 4 May to 22 June 2024 at Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone/Contemporary Native Art Biennial, Art Mûr, Montreal.

“Creation Stories” at the 7th Contemporary Native Art Biennial

Maya Burns lives in Montreal. She has an MA in Contemporary Art, Design, and New Media Art Histories from OCAD University and a
job at _C Magazine._


The effect of _The Plot_ is similar to a theatre adaptation of an English textbook written, rehearsed, and performed by children in the space of an evening. Emma-Kate Guimond’s video performance possesses the curious quality of being earnestly reverse-engineered from a formula of narrative devices. It’s a little confusing, very delirious, and while I left thoroughly charmed, it would be inaccurate to imply the experience was merely or immediately agreeable. Like a young actor-director supplementing performance with explanation, _The Plot_ demonstrates the expediency of language, but, heavy with words and bloated by suggested meaning, the work also illustrates how easy language is to get lost in.

Extended by its careful installation at Centre CLARK, _The Plot_ rests on the premise of a missing original called “The Source.” Wearing the definite article as a mark of true, almost religious singularity, The Source haunts _The Plot_’s three central characters— “The Protagonist,” “The Writer,” and “The Voice Actor” (later “The Dancer”)—who instead waver in the relativity that comes with being a type. The three actors who play them also do so abstractly, tasked with improvising movement in response to a score that’s not heard in the final edit. Taking turns as “The Teller,” characters narrate themselves and each other in third person, which further muddles their identities, and in a matter-of-fact tone that pairs uncomfortably with their surreal gestural vocabulary of prodded flesh and gaping mouths. The Teller’s version of events is at once suspect—subject to subtle variations between accounts, and the distortion suggested by phones, videoconferencing, and a shift from English to French—and definitive. Wielding momentary narrative control, each Teller adds new terms that throw the story, its characters, and the viewer off-course. Made further duplicitous by the appearance of mirrors, cameras, and screens, _The Plot_ presents a quasi-social exercise, shared by characters who are still “figuring things out” and an audience made responsible for discerning them, in reorienting oneself to unstable meaning and shifting perspectives. 

Soliciting the first of many soon-to-be-subverted expectations, the opening lines of _The Plot_ introduce The Protagonist (twice) and her (then his) desire to make a movie. “What are you scared of?” asks his companionable Dog. Rather than a movie about making a movie, _The Plot_, better predicted by the Dog, unfolds one episode after another in thwarted creative partnerships and projects, beset by ego, insecurity, and questionable intentions. The Protagonist asks The Writer, who “he admires both sexually and professionally,” to collaborate. The Writer wants a new voice (!!), hires The Voice Actor, and schemes to steal his (!!!). As it builds—a process the title highlights—_The Plot_ and its characters assume and shed new significations. The Writer, a Tortured (hot) Genius, squints, presses her fingertips together, and transforms. She directs the Dog, now her evil henchman, to snatch the new voice. Supplanting the subtly inscribed politics of gender and voice with the peculiar moralistic brutality of a didactic myth, this climax—also the Dancer’s origin story— works like many uncanny parabolic and allegorical constructions in _The Plot_; it presents familiarly, in the shape of a story with a message to impart, but it never specifies one.

There’s a pervasive sense of non-resolution in _The Plot_. Every obtuse symbol functions to set up the audience because, as Hanako Hoshimi-Caines writes in the exhibition text, the lost Source is “[a] post-structural prank.” In two text-based companion pieces, Guimond put the video’s non-committal symbolism to writing, with the quality of a cipher. On a table across from the screen, fragments of text laid out like evidence of a crime or findings from an archeological dig suggested a deconstructive approach to the work. In these declarative sentences, apparently action cues or qualifications for _The Plot_ and its characters, I found the promise of an explanation. I took the bait. I contemplated everything I’d ever read, lamented it didn’t amount to more, and then stared at my own reflection. Because, in a tidy encapsulation of the punchline, the surface of the table was mirrored. Bobbing beneath text and its double, my head clouded my reading, a personalized lesson in context-contingency and the mutability of meaning.

Not to be contained to something so tidy as a punchline, this essential meaninglessness is also the medium through which Guimond reflects the messy intricacies of interdependence. After The Protagonist enlists The Writer so as to become the filmmaker he knows he is, and after what’s subsequently referred to as “the dog incident,” The Voice Actor (robbed of their voice) makes a name for themselves as The Dancer and stages a debut in which they perform as The Writer (who stole it). Then, in the final scene, a question comes: “Who is the most relatable character?” Answering herself, The Teller makes an overwrought case for The Protagonist, and I realize he was missing through most of the video. It’s an intelligent caricature of the empty-vessel-main-character. But unlike the trope, Guimond’s Protagonist and his peers are written with decisively indistinct personalities. It’s a credit to their actors and the chemistry between them that The Writer, The Protagonist, and The Voice Actor/Dancer emerge as precise and endearing portraits of insecure youth. From within tender and domineering entanglements, embodied articulations of confusion, impressionability, and self-doubt give a human face to _The Plot_’s pitiless indeterminacy, and emphasize the stakes of bearing witness to it.
 
As a victim of _The Plot_’s practical joke, I was made painfully aware of my preconceptions. The work’s screening environment, which was set up like a continuation of the video’s modest theatre setting, rounded out what was a thoroughly self-conscious experience. Effectively recast from gallery visitor to the role of “The Audience,” and implicated by watching it, _The Plot_ also trained my attention to the act of looking and its consequences. Listening to The Teller expose the interior lives of other characters with an unnerving lucidity I never want turned on me, I appreciated _The Plot_’s fickle provocations to look harder, and then ease up, but never look away; asking first to be figured out, _The Plot_ reveals itself to be unsubstantial but cautions against drawing one’s own conclusions. Completely vulnerable to The Teller’s overbearing gaze, without which they would not have stories, The Writer, The Protagonist, and The Voice Actor/Dancer are caught between the threat of being defined and the necessity of being recognized. I empathize with their predicament, because I am in more or less the same one. We all are. 