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Editorial

Around the editorial advisory table at _C Magazine_, we had long been mulling over the idea of an issue on public art or public space. Last year we finally landed on “the monument” as one of the most consequential areas of discussion to be had around art in the public realm today. In the last two years, attention has been placed on monuments with unprecedented urgency. This is my final issue as Editorial Director at _C Magazine_ and the theme seemed both vital to address and a significant swan song. 

_C Magazine_ addresses critical issues from the perspective of art and artists. As such, this issue circumvents broader and more frequently asked questions like, “what do we do with monuments that no longer reflect us?” and instead takes up the monument via artists’ engagement with notions of history and memory, and with art in the public realm. What is deemed monumental in art? How is the monument related to materiality? To questions of temporality? In the call for proposals, we asked: How do artists address, challenge and intervene on historical narratives, tradition and memorialization? How does this relate to future-building? How else might stories be recorded, either materially and immaterially? What are the possibilities for art in public space, whether IRL or online? 

The issue came into focus for me after a trip to Vancouver, where I met artist Charlene Vickers and she told me about her ongoing project, “benchin.” Benchin refers to regular social gatherings on a bench in Vancouver, as part of _Cool Indians on Main Street_, a project/group started in 2007 by Vickers and Neil Eustache. In 2015, artist, curator and writer Stacey Ho programmed benchin as part of Vancouver’s LIVE performance festival, and in this issue, they revisit the project in a short essay. Vickers’ and Eustache’s project speaks volumes about the ways that we use public space, and who and what urban public space is planned and zoned for. On one hand, benchin is a simple hangout on a bench at the corner of Main Street and 13th Avenue, for _Cool Indians on Main Street_ and their friends and joiners. But it is also a quietly political action, claiming space for Indigenous gathering on unceded land in a rapidly gentrifying part of Vancouver. Benchin resonated deeply with me in the context of the monument or monumentality. It is a completely anti-performative performance project that has now been taking place for 12 years. More than that, with a touch of humour, benchin subverts the grandiosity that we associate with the monument or with public art. Without any fanfare, the project has turned a section of Vancouver’s sidewalks into an active place for gathering and conversation in a way that most public artworks or monuments rarely accomplish. 

It is in this spirit that the issue came together, gathering many voices and practices that come to monumentality sideways, in subtle, unexpected yet potent ways. Theodore (Ted) Kerr outlines the history of AIDS memorials, asking a question that is relevant far beyond AIDS: how do you memorialize an ongoing crisis? Kerr brings up the work of artist and performance scholar Marc Arthur who asks whether pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) itself might be a form of memorialization—a daily ritual undertaken by HIV\-negative people to remember the decades of loss and grief, and the advances that have brought us to where we are now. In his essay, Kerr ultimately suggests that the best way to memorialize AIDS is to support the work of those living with it—the artists, dancers, musicians and writers who, on an ongoing basis, share stories, reduce stigma and create open, unprescribed platforms to consider both past and future. 

The summer issue also features an artist project by Pejvak (the collective work of Rouzbeh Akhbari and Felix Kalmenson); an essay by Aylan Couchie on the role that social media and digital networks now play in how we engage monuments; a reflection by Elwood Jimmy on the vandalism of Rebecca Belmore’s sculpture _Freeze:_ _Stonechild Memorial_ —for Neil Stonechild; and interviews with artists Stephanie Comilang and Life of a Craphead. 

At the front of the magazine you’ll find our first “Letters” column, with four letters reflecting on our spring Graphic Design issue. This is now an ongoing column and we encourage readers to submit more letters, to continue the discussion sparked by this issue. The next issue will be the first developed by _C Magazine_’s new editorial fellow, Merray Gerges, who, together with C’s editor Jaclyn Bruneau, will be carrying on the conversation from here. 

Many thanks to our readers and the _C Magazine_ team and advisors for an enriching 4 years on the editorial team.

Kari Cwynar is a curator, writer and editor based in Toronto, where she is Director of Kunstverein Toronto and Editorial Director of _C Magazine_. She writes on contemporary art for publications and catalogues, contributes regularly to _Frieze_ and _Metropolis M_.

Editorial Director

Monument

issue-142-p9-10.pdf

Representation

History

Public art

Kari Cwynar introduces the theme of “the monument” for the issue. The discussions brought forth by the authors and artists include public art and space, monumentality, memory and history, and other critical artistic and creative engagements. This will be Kari Cwynar’s final issue as Editorial Director at C Magazine.

Editorial: Monument

Feature

Aylan Couchie is an interdisciplinary artist and sometimes-writer hailing from Nipissing First Nation in Northern Ontario. She is a NSCAD University alumna and received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design at OCAD University, where she focused her studies on reconciliation and its relationship to monument and public art. Her written, gallery and public works explore histories of the colonial landscape, Indigenous erasure and issues of representation and cultural appropriation. Aylan currently lives and works in Toronto.

In July 2016, I, along with thousands of smartphone users across Canada, became captivated by an app-based game called Pokémon Go, built upon Google mapping and location-service technology. Users must venture to specific locations in order to progress to new levels. Public spaces are designated locations where users can “level up,” which means landmarks, monuments, memorials and sites of historical significance become destinations for players on a regular basis. I lived in Halifax at the time of the game’s release and can attest to the short distances I had to walk between monuments—the city is rife with them. I often looked around and wondered if other players in the vicinity were taking any opportunity to engage with and learn from these objects.

By August, this question began to be addressed when CBC News wrote about Pokémon Go players (mostly adults) disrespectfully sitting and even lying on Winnipeg’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) monument. When players were confronted by a concerned MMIW family member, they appeared to be unaware of what the monument represents. As the family member recounted, “They just said, ‘We didn’t know. We didn’t know what it was for,’ and they stood up and they moved.”[^1] This indifference, juxtaposed with impassioned and zealous protests over recent monument removals, lends itself to ask a larger question: what role are monuments playing in our current society?

Outside of the Pokémon Go phenomenon, public indifference toward commemorative objects can also be examined via ongoing critique and dialogue surrounding photography and selfie culture at sites of memorialization. Writer William C. Anderson documents his frustration over witnessing this activity at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (informally, the National Lynching Memorial) in Alabama. Anderson writes, “When I came upon a white man taking photos of the columns, I couldn’t help but think, They’re still taking photos. Lynching itself, like many forms of anti-Black violence, is something we have so much record of, partly because white people rigorously documented their own evil.”[^2]

Israeli-German artist Shahak Shapira has also engaged in this critique with his web-based project dubbed _YOLOCAUST_ (2017), a combination of the popular culture acronym “YOLO” (You Only Live Once) and the word “Holocaust.” As part of this project, the artist turned to social media to collect selfies and other photos people had taken while visiting Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. Shapira removed the backgrounds from these collected images, editing them to superimpose the subjects— some doing yoga poses or juggling—overtop of historical photos documenting the real-life horrors of the Holocaust.[^3] This re-contextualization not only reminds viewers of the events that begot the Holocaust Memorial but also provides a platform for interrogating how contemporary society interacts with monuments.

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While some monuments reflect tragedies or collective memorialization (9/11, MMIW, Holocaust), others commemorate historical figures (John A. MacDonald, Robert E. Lee), which may tacitly or explicitly perpetuate erasure, represent outdated ideologies or present half-truths. In other words, not all monuments were created equal—some exist to identify and revere structures of power. This is reinforced by Natalia Krzyżanowska’s writing on the semiotics of commemoration in urban spaces, which states:

> Apart from strategies of naming (places, squares, streets, etc.) and designing spatial order, commemoration remains the key tool of symbolic power and enacting symbolism and axio-normativity[^4] in city spaces.… Therein, the salience of monuments and commemorations becomes crucial … as a tool of creating an identity of a place and providing various tools for its redefinition and re-construction.[^5]

In Canada, creating national identity was— and still is—dependent upon the selective commoditization and erasure of Indigenous people, culture and lands. Tokenized objects of Indigenous culture—maple syrup, Inuksuit, totem poles and dreamcatchers—line the shelves of tourist shops at airports, landmarks and historical attractions. The Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., adorns its entry, lobbies and hallways with Inuit sculptures, Northwest Coast prints and artworks inspired by First Nations people and cultures. Yet Indigenous histories and landmarks have been largely omitted from textbooks, geographical wayfinding and public commemorations, resulting in a considerable gap in Canada’s collective education.

Brian Osborne, professor emeritus of geography at Queen’s University, writes about the creation of a national identity that relies on lack of knowledge or collective amnesia, upon which idealist myths are constructed and then reinforced through selective collective remembering. Osborne asserts:

> National mythologies and symbols are manipulated to encourage identification with the state and reinforce its continuity and ubiquity. Through various devices, otherwise detached individuals are implored to recognize one another as being members of a larger group sharing a common historical metanarrative. In this way, states create a common heritage or identity for new generations on the foundations of a “should have been” past, rather than an actual history.[^6]

The power wielded through selective commemoration narratives becomes acutely significant considering that colonial monuments hold space upon lands acquired through ongoing violence and dispossession. As Osborne notes, “Monuments attempt to mold a landscape of collective memory, to conserve what is worth remembering and discard the rest.”[^7]

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Reflecting upon the history of monument removals—such as Louis XIV’s monument during the French Revolution, Napoleon’s Colonne Vendôme during the Paris Commune and statues commemorating Hitler following the fall of Nazi Germany—proves, firstly, that historical figures are not erased or forgotten despite the removal of their monuments, and secondly, that monument removals both follow shifts in social and political ideologies and compel new ones.

Two events in summer 2017—the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12 and the Proud Boys’ “Halifax Five” counter-protest in July—illustrate how protesting the proposed removal of monuments is an attempt to uphold structures of power; in these instances, white power or white supremacy. The principles and ideologies of the alt-right and alt-lite people behind both events are no different than their KKK and neo-Nazi predecessors, save for the ways they use technology— gaming platforms, social media, YouTube, reddit and 4Chan—to indoctrinate, recruit and organize. In a sense, these technologies are what produced the turnout in Charlottesville, resulting in the death of Heather Heyer, and what ultimately catalyzed the removal of Halifax’s monument to Edward Cornwallis. In both instances, rampant nationalism, amped up through online discourse, manifested itself in physical form at monument sites.

The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was planned to unite all factions of “the right” in a show of solidarity using the proposed removal of a monument to Robert E. Lee as pretext. While many are familiar with the now- iconic tiki torch march held the night prior to the failed rally and ensuing riot south of the border, few understand the events that led up to the removal of Halifax’s monument to Cornwallis. Though touted as Halifax’s founder, the man was also genocidal and, in 1749, issued an order that came to be known as the Scalping Proclamation against Mi’kmaq men, women and children. The monument had been the subject of protests and actions calling for its removal for years but, that July, it became the site of an altercation between the Mi’kmaq, their ally activists and five members of the Proud Boys, now known as the “Halifax Five.” Much of the Canada-wide attention surrounding this incident came directly from videos posted to social media following the altercation.

Halifax City Council had, one year prior, outrightly rejected a proposal requesting a preliminary discussion about the future of the city’s Cornwallis landmarks and statue; the July altercation between the Proud Boys and anti-Cornwallis activists forced this issue onto the table again. A staff report called the monument “a protest flashpoint,”[^8] and concerns over public safety were cited. On January 30, 2018, City Council convened and, with a quick vote of 12–4, made the decision to remove the statue.[^9] With the rest of Canada now watching, Halifax Mayor Mike Savage took a political opportunity to frame the monument removal as an act of reconciliation, stating: “The Cornwallis statue has be- come a powerful symbol … I believe its continued presence on a pedestal in the middle of a city park is an impediment to sustained progress and forging productive, respectful and lasting relationships with the Mi’kmaq in the spirit of truth and reconciliation.”[^10] The irony in this whole course of events is that, in trying to protect the Cornwallis legacy, the Proud Boys ultimately caused the removal of his effigy.

Monuments like the Cornwallis statue commemorate the instigation and sustenance of power structures that Indigenous people are forced to continually fight, both politically and socially. These effigies represent Indigenous oppression and, as the alt-right has clearly demonstrated, are revered as important structures for upholding white supremacy and Canadian nationalism. To give another example: when the City of Victoria, in 2018, removed its statue of Sir John A. Macdonald—a founding father who oversaw the implementation of the Indian Act and residential schools—a handful of protestors draped themselves in Canada flags and sang the national anthem as a crane lifted Macdonald off his platform outside City Hall. Central to their protest was the notion that Macdonald was being erased from history, despite the fact that his legacy lives on through the millions of Indigenous people across Canada who still endure the harmful and ongoing effects of policies he instituted.

In comparing the general disinterest and indifference toward monuments—as illustrated by the initial examples given above—to the outcry of attention they can suddenly receive when their removals are suggested, it seems possible that perhaps objections to removals aren’t based on the fear of erasing a historical figure, but instead on a refusal to consider that history was written with particular motives. Acknowledging and reckoning with those motives will be a crucial component of moving forward in Canada. As monument removals[^11] have historically followed shifts in political and social ideologies, the significance of these actions as they pertain to establishing new and respectful relationships with Indigenous people cannot be understated. If Canadians are to seriously embark upon (re)conciliatory futures, making space and clearing new paths will, at times, require old colonial structures to be knocked down—systemically and physically.

[^1]: Jill Coubrough, “‘Like Walking on Someone’s Grave’: Pokemon Go Players Seen on MMIW Monument,” CBC, August 9, 2016, [http://cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/pokemon-go-mmiw-monument-winnipeg-1.3713435](“cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/pokemon-go-mmiw-monument-winnipeg-1.3713435”)
[^2]: William C. Anderson, “When a Lynching Memorial Becomes a Photo Opportunity,” Hyperallergic, December 27, 2018, [https://hyperallergic.com/477049/old-habits-die-hard-when-a-lynching-memorial-becomes-a-photo-opportunity/“](“hyperallergic.com/477049/old-habits-die-hard-when-a-lynching-memorial-becomes-a-photo-opportunity/“)
[^3]: Andrius, “Artist Shames Tourists Taking Inappropriate Selfies At The Holocaust Memorial Site In Berlin (NSFW),” DeMilked, March 5, 2019, [https://demilked.com/holocaust-memorial-selfies-yolocaust-shahak-shapira/](“demilked.com/holocaust-memorial-selfies-yolocaust-shahak-shapira/”)
[^4]: The “normal” cultural and social orders to which members of a society adhere.
[^5]: Natalia Krzyżanowska, “The Discourse of Counter-Monuments: Semiotics of Material Commemoration in Contemporary Urban Spaces,” _Social Semiotics_ 26, no. 5 (2016): 465–85.
[^6]: Brian S. Osborne, “Landscapes, Memory, Monuments, and Commemoration: Putting Identity in Its Place,” _Canadian Ethnic Studies_ 33, no. 3 (2001): 39–77.
[^7]: Ibid.
[^8]: City of Halifax memorandum on commemoration of Edward Cornwallis, January 30, 2018, [https://documentcloud.org/documents/4361546-Commemoration-of-Edward-Cornwallis.html](“documentcloud.org/documents/4361546-Commemoration-of-Edward-Cornwallis.html”)
[^9]: Brett Bundale, “Halifax council votes to immediately remove Cornwallis statue from downtown park,” _The Toronto Star_, January 30, 2018, [https://thestar.com/news/canada/2018/01/30/halifax-council-votes-to-immediately-remove-cornwallis-statue-from-downtown-park.html](“thestar.com/news/canada/2018/01/30/halifax-council-votes-to-immediately-remove-cornwallis-statue-from-downtown-park.html”)
[^10]: Ibid.
[^11]: Due to constraints on length, I did not speak to monument re-contextualization. However, this is an area in which I’ve also researched and worked. I acknowledge that re-contextualization through relocation, updating texts or counter-monuments is another way to engage with colonial monuments.

Writer

issue-142-p10-14.pdf

Critique

Indigenous

Aylan Couchie asks: what role are monuments playing in our current society? By surveying how monuments are erected and removed to signify shifting historic, social, and political ideologies, Couchie turns to the treatment of Canada’s colonial monuments to think of ways we could move forward with reconciliation.

We Didn’t Know What the Monument Meant Until Someone Said It Should Be Removed

Theodore (ted) Kerr is an Edmonton-born writer and organizer. He teaches at The New School and is a founding member of the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do?

Arguably, the most well-known undertaking of HIV memorialization is the NAMES Project’s AIDS Memorial Quilt, imagined by activist Cleve Jones. First presented to the public in 1987, 1,920 handmade quilt panels covered a space larger than a football field on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Each panel was a tribute to a friend, lover, parent or stranger who had died with HIV. 

In 2012, for the XIX International AIDS Conference, hosted in D.C., the Quilt was shown again in its entirety, for the first time in 16 years. Too large by that point to be displayed all in one place, with over 47,000 panels dedicated to more than 90,000 individuals, the quilt “blanketed the capital”—as promotional material at the time declared—laid out over the National Mall, as well as across museums and other cultural spaces throughout the city. 

In 1986, a year before the Quilt’s debut, Michael Lee and a partner cultivated an abandoned plot of land in Houston, left by a railroad company, to create the Texas AIDS Memorial Garden. Since then, the site has become, as Lee describes on his website, “a verdant flowering oasis in the midst of the city, dedicated to the memory of those who died of AIDS. It translates their memory into a garden full of life and a habitat for butterflies and other wildlife.” Over the years, countless community members have tended to the garden, cultivating its growth while fighting for the land’s integrity from would-be garbage dumpers, developers and the City of Houston, which cut through the garden with the construction of a bike path that many in the community didn’t want.[^1] 

Unlike many monuments or memorials in the west—most often created in the aftermath of war, or in honour of a noteworthy person, long dead—the Quilt and the Garden are constituted and reconstituted from the ever-emergent frontlines of the epidemic. Existing panels of the Quilt are stored and brought out again. New panels are made. Shrubs in the garden are pruned, flowers are planted. 

Conceived of at a time of mass death, intense activist mobilization, government neglect and public apathy, the Quilt and the Garden— like so much of the AIDS\-related culture made in an earlier era—are assemblages of multivalent purpose: to honour the dead, provide shape to the crisis, educate the public, increase AIDS awareness and provide a platform for activism. Take, for instance, Montreal’s Parc de l’espoir. The journey to create an AIDS memorial in the city began when activists started to occupy an abandoned lot in the city’s Gay Village in 1990 with ribbons and mementos— only for the lot to be cleared repeatedly by city workers. Finally, in 1996, the City relented and the lot was designated a commemorative space. The Parc, the Quilt and the Garden embody what memory scholar Marita Sturken wrote about in her 1997 book, _Tangled Memories_: “the desire to memorialize the AIDS epidemic while it is still occurring reveals the need to find healing amid death.” 

Fast-forward to the 21st century. In the decades since the medical world first began to recognize HIV, there have been many advances: the rollout of life-saving medication in 1996;[^2] the understanding that if someone living with HIV is on treatment the virus is untransmittable;[^3] the functional cure of two to three people once living with HIV in Europe;[^4] and the introduction of PEP and PrEP.[^5] Yet, the crisis of HIV remains. Worldwide almost 1 million people died with HIV in 2017\. Of the 36.9 million people currently living with the virus, 40 percent do not have access to medication.[^6] It has been estimated that 3.3 percent of the homeless population in the US is HIV positive (compared with 1.8 percent in the stably housed population), and in Canada, there have been almost 200 people sentenced to jail for having HIV. 7 The burden of the virus is intensified for women, people of colour, people living with multiple disabilities, people detained in prison and people living in poverty. HIV is one more obstacle to survival. With all of this in mind, what is the role of an AIDS memorial in an ongoing crisis? 

There are over 40 AIDS memorials and monuments across the US and Canada (memorial referring to a site that names and remembers the dead; a monument being a marker of a period or an event). Like much of AIDS culture, memorialization projects reflect the nature of the crisis as it was when they were created. In the silence around AIDS that permeated western culture after 1996 and in the shadow of 9/11, memorials made in the early aughts are intimate, hyperlocal and often tucked away or hiding in plain sight. They are the work of small yet mighty communities using modest means to remember dead friends, and the Herculean efforts that were mounted against their premature death. Examples include a walkway approaching White Street Pier in Key West, Florida; an etched glass window at the AIDS Memorial Chapel in Albuquerque, New Mexico; a multimedia memorial panel at the AIDS Committee of Newfoundland and Labrador; and a series of glass discs depicting the faces of local people living with HIV in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Among existing monuments and memorials, the most common format is the garden. There are more than 20 across Canada and the US, not necessarily modelled after the one in Houston, but in the same spirit. The most well known is the National AIDS Memorial Grove in San Francisco, which opened in 1991, with the city’s mayor and others planting trees to mark a decade of struggle with the virus. 

What many of the earliest memorials and some of the ones created after 9/11 have in common is a space to list the names of the dead, to be added to over time, and seen and read aloud at annual World AIDS Day vigils. The importance of naming is an example of what African American literature and art scholar Dagmawi Woubshet, in his 2015 book. _The Calendar of Loss_, has lovingly called the “trope of inventory taking” that permeated the earlier periods of AIDS cultural production, marked by compounded loss and trauma, resulting in compulsions to say and re-say, share and share again, the names of the dead. 

Recent AIDS memorialization projects are different. Not only are they in central, visible locations, but they have also moved away from the inventory trope. Central to the Provincetown AIDS Memorial, in Massachusetts, unveiled in 2018 near the City Hall, are engraved poems and the word “remembering.” Similarly, the latest New York City AIDS Memorial, opened in 2016 in the heart of Greenwich Village, features a Jenny Holzer installation of a Walt Whitman poem. Beyond the East Coast, a different yet related tactic is becoming apparent. The AIDS Memorial Pathway in Seattle and STORIES: The AIDS Monument in Los Angeles are both set to open in 2020, also in highly visible locations. The role of names in either project is not clear, but marketing for both focuses instead on incorporating stories from the community into the final designs. Rather than centring names, these new and emerging memorialization projects in high-profile locations suggest AIDS is being understood less through individual loss and more through the lens of collective history, (re) marking AIDS as a national issue. 

These developments echo a phenomenon that AIDS activist and academic Alexandra Juhasz and I call the AIDS Crisis Revisitation8— a name for the current cultural moment we see as starting around 2008, in which AIDS of the past is being historicized in art exhibitions, documentaries, books and feature films. Within the Revisitation, important discussions have emerged: whose histories and experiences are being shared? What stories are being told and untold? What impact is the focus on the past having on people living with HIV/AIDS in the present? How do you remember something while it is ongoing? 

Last fall, I taught a class on the very question raised in this essay: how to have an AIDS memorial in an epidemic. After looking at the landscape of AIDS culture (past and present), my students and I came to the conclusion that AIDS memorials work best when they:  
1\. Maintain and build upon the activist goals of the movement.  
2\. Create culture about the past, present and future of AIDS.  
3\. Say not only the names of people who died with HIV, but share the ways they lived, and the tactics they used to love, fight, die, etc.  
4\. And, most importantly, communicate the uniqueness of HIV: a deadly virus linked with intimacy, pleasure, stigma and transmission; treatable—but not cured—by medicine and community, yet exasperated and prolonged by systemic bias and inequitable social and political forces.

Ideally, we argue, memorials should be done in ways that reflect aspects of the crisis itself, which is to say: be collaborative; involve risk and shared vulnerability; be replicable, while also being disruptive, educational and able to change, accumulating meaning, stories and history over time. One prime example of that for us was the 2016 dance, _how to survive a plague_, by Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr. and Ricarrdo Valentine of Brother(hood) Dance! The duo claimed the name of their performance back from an HIV\-related, Oscar-nominated film famous for its lack of representation of black people and people of colour. In their work, Hunter, Jr. and Valentine express generations of black life with HIV, honouring the ways that people, including themselves, thrive, survive—and at times die—with HIV. Throughout the show, names of people with the virus are evoked, and near the end, a soul train is created. Members of the audience join Hunter, Jr. and Valentine, glowing with sweat, on stage to dance. _how to survive a plague_ provides ritual, education and celebration. 

Other examples of memorials that embodied our considerations included Food For Thought in Forestville, California (which is part of a food bank); The Wall Las Memorias Project in Los Angeles, which is a physical monument (with a wall of names and murals) but which also includes a nearby health clinic for people impacted by HIV and other chronic illnesses; and Day Without Art. This annual event was created by Visual AIDS in 1988 to pressure art organizations, museums and galleries to take direct action regarding the plague decimating their world. My class and I were impressed that 10 years after it was created, VA changed the event’s name to Day With(out) Art. They added the parentheses, as explained on the VA website, “to highlight the ongoing inclusion of art projects focused on the AIDS pandemic, and to encourage programming of artists living with HIV,” a result of people with HIV living longer. The recurring nature of the event and the title shift reflected our four considerations, and—most importantly—centred people with the virus, both those who are alive and those who have died. 

Notions of process are central to current thinking around AIDS memorialization. Both the National AIDS Memorial Grove and STORIES are including programming as part of their work. In his 2015 text, “AIDS Memorialization: A Biomedical Performance from Viral Dramaturgies,” academic Marc Arthur wonders if PrEP isn’t a monument of sorts, a daily ritual done by HIV\-negative people to consider (and remember) the history that led them to be able to distance themselves from the stigma and the virus. And in a 2013 essay in which he provides a people’s history of Clean Needles Now—a needle exchange program that grew out of overlapping activist and artistic communities in LA in the 1990s—AIDS activist and artist Dont Rhine makes the case that needle exchange is as foundational to the stories we need to tell about AIDS as Freddie Mercury, red ribbons and ACT UP. As life-giving institutions, birthed in the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic, _all_ needle exchange programs and supervised injection sites are memorial sites; every clean needle is a torch passed, a tactic shared, a monument to caring. 

Thinking about _how to survive a plague_, PrEP, Day With(out) Art and needle exchanges, the story of AIDS memorialization is a history of process-as-AIDS\-memorials that begins with the AIDS Quilt and the Texas Memorial Garden. Both are sites of communal happenings, in which participation is encouraged not merely through awe (as is the case with more traditional memorials), but through participation: stitching, tending, witnessing. These forms of memorialization are examples of what scholar James Young proposes in his writing on counter-monuments, \[9\] which he argues use tactics to place the work of memory back onto the public as a process and as a practice of living with the past. In this way, memorials change over time, with the past and present collectively negotiated in public. Not forgetting is not enough. In the face of the ongoing crisis, action is needed. 

Last month, as I began to get ready for my AIDS memorial class, which I will offer again in the fall, I began looking for content to teach. Around this time, my friend, artist Julie Blair, released new stickers she had created to raise money for her band, the Epidemic Saints. The merch is sweet and familiar: a yellow happy face sticker, with one eye represented by an oval and the other, a plus sign. I ordered a bunch, and when they arrived a few days later, I noticed the back: “here’s a sticker so everyone knows your \[sic\] Poz Friendly.” I turn the sticker over again, and get it: the plus sign is a wink of positive disclosure, a nod to positive people who may catch the visual nuance in public and possibly feel seen and welcome. 

The music of the Epidemic Saints is grounded in the experience of people living with HIV. Their first single is entitled “The City of Otherly Love.” Their swag is then as good a response as any to the question of how to have an AIDS memorial in an epidemic: create situations around which people who care about the virus can gather, and from there share resources with people living with the virus. After all, if living well is the best revenge, maybe supporting people living with HIV is the best memorial. Memorial work can be that easy.

[^1]: See Lee’s website for more information: www.aidsmemorialgarden.com
[^2]: For more information, see Benjamin Ryan’s “How Antiretrovirals Transformed the HIV Epidemic: A Timeline,” _POZ Magazine_, June 24, 2016.
[^3]: For more information, see: www.preventionaccess.org
[^4]: A story in process as of the writing of this essay. For more information, see: www.livescience.com/64938-hivcure-third-patient.html
[^5]: Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PEP or PrEP) are medical interventions that prevent HIV\-infection in a negative person exposed to the virus. www.cdc.gov/healthcommunication/ toolstemplates/entertainmented/tips/HIVprevention.html
[^6]: According to UN AIDS, “in 2017, 59 percent (44–73 percent) of all people living with HIV were accessing treatment.” www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet
[^7]: The Canadian Coalition to Reform HIV Criminalization reports that at least 184 people have faced charges related to HIV non-disclosure in 200 cases in Canada since 1989.
[^8]: Since 2014, Juhasz and I have written online articles, book chapters and presented at conferences on this subject.
[^9]: James E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” _Critical Inquiry_, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), 267–296.

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Illness

Activism

Memory

Theodore Kerr asks: how do you memorialize an ongoing crisis? Introducing the history of AIDS memorials and the work of artist and performance scholar Marc Arthur, Kerr suggests that not forgetting is not enough. Instead, the best memorial is realized by actively supporting the work of those living with HIV.

How to Have an AIDS Memorial in an Epidemic

Heather Canlas Rigg is an independent curator and writer based in Toronto

<h5>_Yesterday, In The Years 1886 and 2017_ (2017) is a two-channel video installation by Stephanie Comilang that collapses documentary and science fiction to tell a story about Philippine migration to Germany. The work is narrated in Tagalog by the film’s unseen protagonist, Paradise, who speaks from our future. Her past is one of reincarnations. She has lived as the lauded Filipino nationalist José Rizal, who migrated to Germany temporarily in the 1880s—a statue of whom was erected in the small town of Wilhelmsfeld in 1978—and the Berlin-based archivist and Filipina migrant Lourdes Lareza Müller, who relocated to Germany in 1968, both of whose lives are fictionalized here. José and Lourdes were two of very few Filipinos living in the country in their respective times.

Paradise lives in a space and time free from the oppression of colonization, heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. Comilang engages both historical and personal narratives, filtering them through a semi-fictive sieve as an imaginative decolonization strategy that at once forges an alternative archive of Philippine migration to Germany and points to a utopic future.</h5>
  
  
**Heather Rigg:** Your work often merges fiction and reality, in a hybridization that you’ve referred to as “science fiction documentary.” In _Yesterday_, Lourdes’ and José’s lives are reimagined, but unlike historical fiction where people’s lives are dramatically retold, here, fiction and documentary seem to overlap and entwine together without becoming each other. Can you speak about this aspect of the work and of your practice?

**Stephanie Comilang:** I like using the combination of words “science fiction documentary” because it evokes a clear picture of two opposing concepts. I’m interested in real-life stories and being told those stories by the people themselves. That’s usually a starting point for me: listening to a truth and then shifting the narrative to create a new one. For example, in _Yesterday_, the pineapple is an object that comes up in both Lourdes’ and José’s storylines that didn’t exist before. Lourdes talks about the fruit as a cherished food item from home that was exorbitantly expensive to buy in Berlin in the 1970s, while José tells the story of a bomb disguised as an ornate, jewel-encrusted pineapple that was offered to colonizers. In Lourdes’ original story, the pineapple was a chayote and in José’s, it was a pomegranate. The narrator in _Yesterday_, Paradise, also weaves a pineapple—a burnt one—into her own story, to describe the colour of her skin. The pineapple is a fruit which has travelled alongside histories of colonization; it follows a line from South America, to Europe and finally, Asia. The fruit has a migration history, one that echoes the movement and trajectory of the characters in this work.

**HR:** Can you tell me about what was happening in the Philippines and in José’s life that led him to move to Germany?

**SC:** José belonged to a class where it was possible for his family to send him overseas to study. But there was also political turmoil in his home country, and he was very critical of the ruling Spaniards. In the book _One Hundred Letters of Jose Rizal to His Parents, Brothers, Sisters, Relatives_ (1959) is a letter he wrote to his brother Paciano on May 20, 1882, saying that he wanted to go to Europe to observe the different cultures, customs, commerce, industries and laws of the different countries so that he could use the knowledge gained there to free the Philippines from the tyranny of the Spanish.[^1]

**HR:** Paradise speaks about her life as José by showing viewers the statue of him that exists in the small town of Wilhelmsfeld, Germany, stating: “That’s my body in stone. The year is 1886\. My name was José Rizal. I left a home ruled by the colonizers and came here, to this small town in Germany.” I find it fascinating that this monument of José Rizal, a political revolutionary and a martyr, remembered for his dedication to his homeland and the mark he made on a certain moment in colonial history— but also a minority, migrant person while in Germany—exists there to this day. What do you know about the erection of the statue?

**SC:** I know, the statue is a funny inversion. In the West, monuments of brown people aren’t usually erected in small, predominantly white towns. At least this isn’t the narrative that we’re used to. In Cebu, Philippines, which is the first place Magellan landed and where the Spanish conquistadors first developed their settlements, the ceilings in the main cathedral depict the conquistadors “taming the savages” and \[other acts\] of Christian reform. It’s gross. Seeing the statue in Wilhelmsfeld felt like stepping into an alternate universe.

Created by Filipino sculptor Anastacio Caedo, it was unveiled on September 2, 1978\. Franz Josef Weyand, who was president of the German-Philippine Association at the beginning of the ’70s, initiated the idea of erecting this monument, which came into being through his significant fundraising efforts, and with the support of the local community, who helped build Rizal Park where it would be placed. Rita Weyand, a core member of the Association, and then-Mayor Manfred Holzmann laid the first stone in the park. In the early 2000s, Holzmann, having since retired, banded together with Fritz Hack-Ullmer, the great-grandson of the pastor and former host of José in Wilhelmsfeld to raise money for the successful renovation, expansion and improvement of the park.

Lourdes was a part of the Order of the Knights and Ladies for Rizal, a group that started in the Philippines in the early 20th century and has since extended to 61 countries across the world. To this day, the group still activates commemoration events in Rizal Park twice a year—on José’s birthday and the day of his execution.

**HR:** What presence did Philippine migrants have in Germany at that time?

**SC:** The history of Philippine migration to Germany is fairly recent: in the 1960s, there was an influx of guest workers employed as nurses, in the 1980s, there was an influx of women migrants arriving through marriage migration. When José and Lourdes migrated to Germany in the 1880s and 1960s, they were pretty much one of a kind. When I was making _Yesterday_, I was thinking about them walking down the street and it being really exciting to be in a new space with no one familiar around, but also of the alienation that they possibly felt.

**HR:** How did you meet Lourdes? And how did you decide she would be a character in your film?

**SC:** The personal story of the migrant is a record that is always on repeat in my head when I spend time in a place, mainly because it’s what I thought about growing up. Being in Berlin has been no different. I knew Rizal had spent time in Germany so this spurred thoughts on the history of Philippine migration to Germany. I came across Lourdes in an article entitled “Meet Berlin’s Filipino Grandmama.”[^3] Of course I had to meet her.

When I visited her at her home in East Berlin, I knew the importance her voice would have in the film. Her home was filled with Philippine tchotchkes, family photos and newspaper clippings, and Philippine food was cooking in her kitchen. She showed me photos of herself in her early thirties, sitting in a classroom at The Institute of Documentation in Frankfurt where she learned the German library system. She showed me her life and I thought about how she contained an infinite number of stories around finding your own space in an alien one.

**HR:** The narrator, Paradise, is drone-like, hovering in spaces and places familiar to her from her lives as the other two characters. You’ve mentioned previously to me that she symbolizes the idea of home. How do notions of home function for you in this work?

**SC:** I like the drone for a number of reasons. In my films, Paradise exists as an entity who moves through history and \[creates\] alternate histories. As she interacts with and experiences people and places, the information she gathers through her encounters is held and stored within her cache. She is rendered as a supercomputer, carrying information as well as emotion. She becomes all of the things that get uploaded on to her. Because the things she lives through and the people she meets are constantly redefining what home is, Paradise is also continually altering her definitions of home, which is a shifting idea and concept to me as well.

**HR:** I have been referring to Paradise as female, as I hear her voice as such, and because of _Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso_ (2016), an earlier film of yours that also employs a drone-like female protagonist (Paraiso/Paradise) that we also never see but hear. Could you speak about the “femaleness” of the narrator?

**SC:** When I initially thought of Paradise as a character, I was working through different possibilities of who could narrate the voice. During this time, I was in Berlin and my mother—who was helping me with translations— was in Toronto, and we would communicate over Skype. It wasn’t until I recorded her on my phone while she recited some translations to me and played them back that I heard the sound and voice that I wanted. And it made sense to me to use my mother’s voice. Paradise is maternal and watchful, a caregiver and an emotional cyborg. My mother embodies the idea of the character.

**HR:** In the last scene of _Yesterday_, you, quite literally, present Lourdes and José in an equal, horizontal manner, by focusing the two-channel installation on the statue of José on one side, and Lourdes in her backyard on the other. This is an especially poignant scene for me in that it monumentalizes Lourdes. What links are there for you between the narrator, the monumentalizing of Lourdes and a feminist futurism?

**SC:** For me, Lourdes is an archive. Much like her life’s work as the archivist at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, one of the largest libraries in Europe, her body also contains a multitude of information. When I visited her, she talked a lot about her work as an archivist. This made me think of how we all carry information within us, how our bodies are our own archives. Our DNA is encrypted with our histories.

**HR:** When reminiscing on her life as both Lourdes and José, Paradise often mentions skin colour. When living as Lourdes in Berlin, for example, she reminds us that her body and skin set her apart when walking down the street. When living as José, she wanted to escape the colonizers who were trying to “shape us to be like them … to brighten our golden-brown skin.”

There is a distinct before and after in _Yesterday_. Paradise explains that she now exists after the “bang” that occurred. She states: “Before the huge bang, white was prized. Whereas now, in this future time, white turns to dust. Unprotected skin, light skin, fair skin, is swallowed by the elements.” This bang, or apocalypse of sorts, allowed for a rebirth into a space and time that is free of white supremacy—a utopic place. Do you see this kind of utopia as striving to recalibrate our goals as a society? Or is this more personal than that?

**SC:** The piece references a recalibration of history through a certain “bang” that, as a result of the new environmental climate, favours melanin. Skin is a recurring theme in _Yesterday_. I thought a lot about José and Lourdes living in Germany, and how their skin colour would have set them apart. Both of them came to Germany as thinkers, pursuing academic careers, yet I am certain that they experienced positive and negative exoticizing. I think both of them must have been anomalies to the Germans that encountered them. Eugenics, an early 20th-century crusade that envisioned a blond, blued-eyed, white-skinned utopian society, was created by a German biologist and culminated as a result of the colonizing efforts of Germany in Africa in the 1880s. But in the “now” that Paradise speaks from, white skin is the anomaly. In the last line of _Yesterday_, she says, with bravado: “I am the colour of burnt pineapple, mango, lemon.”

**HR:** I love the poem that’s in the film. Your reincarnating protagonist unknowingly wrote the same poem twice, once in her life as José and once again while living as Lourdes.

**SC:** Yes, I was thinking about how things are passed down through shared culture and genetic memory. Or how, in reincarnation, a person has a very strong memory of an event or thing, but because it has nothing to do with their current life, \[they presume\] it must have been from a past life. Because the two protagonists are linked by spirit, culture and a closeness to literature and language, a poem seemed like a fitting way to reinforce this connection.

**HR:** When we spoke last you mentioned that Angela Merkel’s comment, uttered in 2010—that multiculturalism has “utterly failed” in Germany—is something that is countered in your work, in _Yesterday_ as well as in forthcoming projects. Can you unpack this a bit for me?

**SC:** Berlin’s Preussen Park (aka Thai Park) is situated in the area of Wilmersdorf in the west of the city in a predominantly white, middle-class area. The park, a rather nondescript space in the colder months, flourishes and blooms into a Thai food haven in the late spring and summer months. The grassy expanse in the centre of the park turns into a market and food vendor utopia, selling everything from basic pad thai to Southeast Asian groceries. Berlin residents from all demographics fill the park and share the space in the most multicultural way. Far more mixed and integrated than the ghettoized neighbourhoods of Neukölln or Wedding, Thai Park seems to have proved the famous Merkel quote wrong. Here, multiculturalism has flourished and succeeded as a result of Thai women creating a space for themselves. And it seemed even more interesting to me that as a result of economic inequality—Thai women and German men, marriage migration and sex trafficking—came this utopia.

For a future project, I will be looking at Thai women who have migrated to Germany, and how under unfavourable circumstances these women have managed to create a space for themselves while also encouraging a space for others—flipping this idea of Merkel’s failed multiculturalism on its head.

issue-142-p40-45.pdf

Migration

Film

Heather Rigg interviews Stephanie Comilang about her two-channel video installation _Yesterday, In The Years 1886 and 2017_ (2017). Comilang reinterprets the history of Philippine migration to Germany through “science fiction documentary.” The Filipino nationalist José Rizal’s statue, erected in Wilhelmsfeld, Germany, becomes a prism for unraveling the filmmaker’s decolonization strategy.

“I am the colour of burnt pineapple, mango, lemon”: An Interview with Stephanie Comilang

Stacey Ho is a 90% chill 10% not artist who’s into community building, books, and being sort of boring. They recently finished writing a short novella about aliens, love and boundaries tentatively called _George the Parasite_.

The original bench, on Main Street in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, was made from driftwood and tree stumps. Someone from the neighbourhood had planted a little garden there and the bench was right next to it. Starting in 2008, artists Charlene Vickers and Neil Eustache would go hang out on the bench every week. They would spend a long time sitting around and looking at people going by. Special guests were invited to join them or sometimes people would just drop in. Maybe there would be coffee or snacks or someone would bring music or a radio. They would watch for people who looked interesting, or look to see if there were other First Nations or Indians going up and down the street. They would try to spot all the people wearing Cowichan sweaters. After being out in the cold for a while, maybe they would go get an all-day breakfast at Bert’s Restaurant. The price of the breakfast was about the same as a single artisanal donut that you can now buy at the spot right next to where Bert’s used to be. Bert’s has been replaced by a bar called, of all things, Colony. 

Anyway, after a while, Eustache and Vickers started putting out “benchin” calls for people to join them at their spot (informally called the littlest rez in north america). They formed a society, Cool Indians on Main Street, which had its own Facebook group. Everyone was invited to come and hang out. Sometimes people would bring cameras and post pictures on the internet, either of themselves or of people that they saw while benchin. Word spread and lots of people joined in. But, at some point, someone wanted to put up a new building where the bench was. A fence was built around the bench and the little garden, and eventually concrete was laid over the garden and the bench was dismantled. But, this didn’t stop people from benchin. They would post photos of themselves sitting or gathering on benches in locations around the world. Benchin had become a gesture you could take anywhere. 

Benchin is about looking. I think of James Luna’s iconic _Artifact Piece_ (1986), which powerfully pointed to how looking consumes and categorizes non-white and particularly Indigenous bodies within the context of the museum. Luna laid in a vitrine at the San Diego Museum of Man with labels that described the scars on his living body, while another case exhibited ephemera from his life—records, divorce papers, political buttons, shoes. On the flipside, Vickers, Eustache and their collaborators reversed this institutional gaze by looking outward. However—just as looking from within the context of a museum is buoyed by particular forces, ideas and experiences, and these forces in turn calcify into historical narratives, colonial structures and racist institutions— the conditions necessary for looking outward must be fundamentally different from such structures and point to different ways of knowing and being in the world. As people visibly and consistently read as Native, Vickers and Eustache emphasized a way of looking back and out that was informal, open, inclusive, fluid and participatory. 

In a city where $1,730 per month for a one bedroom apartment is defined as affordable housing, benchin is also about taking up space. While low-income, historically targeted populations are pushed out of Vancouver by gentrification, the question of who gets to shape and safely occupy the spaces that we share arises out of extreme necessity. In the face of this neoliberal dystopia, it gives me hope to see that the stratification of public space can be resisted vernacularly through acts such as tent cities, guerrilla gardening and street protests, as well as by performative and relational gestures as humble as benchin. As Vickers put it, “It’s our right to hang out and sit on this bench and if people want to sit with us they can and if not it’s just us.” Instead of top-down, exclusionary constructions designed by developers that centre the (boring) desires of the white and wealthy, benchin articulates that space on unceded land can be inclusive, decolonial and anti-capitalist through centring Indigenous bodies and experiences. By extension, I can’t help but think of public acts that have specifically centred the xʷməθkʷəyə̓ m, Sḵwxw̱ ú7mesh and səl ̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples whose territories are occupied by Vancouver. 

Even though the beloved, original Main Street bench is now long gone, benchin still enjoys a prolific and colourful life over a decade later. In 2013, Eustache and Vickers reimagined benchin as a performance and installation for Not Sent Letters, which is an ongoing series of interdisciplinary art evenings curated by Jeremy Todd. And in 2015, Vickers presented a version of benchin at the LIVE Biennale Performance Art Festival. In this iteration (full disclosure, curated by me), the bench was cordoned off by a red velvet rope so that benchers could get the full VIP experience. Nearby, Vickers ran a table displaying objects borne out of collaborations with artists like Maria Hupfield and Robert Chaplin. There was also a book from her dad, a Walkman with which to play powwow music to people, Cool Indians on Main Street T-shirts for purchase and smokes on sale for 25 cents. This summer, not too far from the original benchin spot, Vickers is planning a benchin video for an outdoor video screen on the corner of Kingsway and Broadway. In typical Vancouver fashion, the screen will be displayed on the side of a 21-storey condo called, no joke, The Independent, which was built upon the former site of artists’ studios destroyed in a mysterious 2009 fire. 

“We’re all benchin right now,” Vickers cryptically told the audience while accepting the VIVA Award for Visual Arts last year. A highly professionalized contemporary art awards ceremony is not typically where anything as fun as art happens, but that evening, some special people in the know got to participate in a pretty good art piece; benchin took place in the bodies of the people who had benched together, both those present in the space of the awards ceremony and those who were not there. It took place in their experiences, in the intangible friendships, stories and community ties that connected them to each other. Benchin exists in this way because this is how it was created in the first place. Vickers’ simple statement may seem like an irreverent gesture (and it is a bit irreverent), but it also alludes to a network of relationships that don’t just happen overnight, but must form over time. The shape and structure these connections take on is just as real and as important as a building, a city, a monument or a museum. And, crucially, such connections—their enactments, materializations and their histories— will exist as long as there are people who recognize and remember their power, significance and creative possibility.

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issue-142-p31-34.pdf

Urban studies

Performance

Collaboration

Stacey Ho traces the history of “benchin” (2007-ongoing), a social gathering reimagined as a collaborative performance and installation by artists Charlene Vickers and Neil Eustache. Supported by exclusionary and colonial structures, gentrified neighbourhoods in Vancouver become the context for how benchin could foster community building and inclusion in public spaces.

Benchin

Currently based in Toronto, **Elwood Jimmy** is originally from the Thunderchild First Nation, a Nêhiyaw community in the global far north. He is a learner, writer, artist, facilitator and collaborator. For 20 years, he has played a leadership role in several art projects, collectives and organizations locally and abroad.

I was very young when I heard about the death of Neil Stonechild, but I remember the story well and I remember how it unravelled for years after. I did not know Neil, but we were both from Treaty 6 territory. We were only a few years apart in age and living in urban centres, with roots in rural First Nations within the territory. There is no doubt in my core that we encountered the same systemic and structural barriers imposed upon Indigenous people that, with age, I have had the opportunity to name and frame. He did not have that opportunity.

Almost 30 years later, in March 2019, I read an article on the CBC website[^1] reporting the vandalism of _Freeze: Stonechild Memorial_ (2019), a sculptural installation by Rebecca Belmore and Osvaldo Yero. The sculptural installation, made of ice, is in memory of Neil Stonechild. Accompanying the installation is a text:

> last seen alive in police custody under the influence  
> found 5 days later frozen to death in a field  
> wearing one shoe  
> marks on his body likely caused by handcuffs  
> aboriginal teenage boy  
> dropped off and walking to where?

> In memory of Neil Stonechild (1973–1990))

This was the fourth time _Freeze_ had been mounted, but the first time being mounted in Saskatoon, where Stonechild lived and died. It was mounted outside the Remai Modern, an art museum situated on the banks of the Saskatchewan River. The Remai Modern was hosting _Freeze_ as part of _Facing the Monumental_, a retrospective exhibition of the work of Belmore, curated by Wanda Nanibush and organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario. In the CBC article I read, scarce information was given on the vandalism of the work, apart from an assertion that “it’s believed the sculpture was pushed down and broken” and “out of respect to the family, the artists and the museum have decided to remove the work.”

I have never seen _Freeze_ in person at any of the sites where it has been mounted. I have only seen images of it online and in print. I might never have the opportunity to see an iteration of it in person. In spite of not having experienced the work firsthand, there is a resonance with the complexity of intentions and its execution that I feel is compelling: _Freeze_ gestures towards a humble honouring and remembering of a young Indigenous life lost through the violence of the colonial project. But is it enough when the work is situated in the city where many of the elements of this narrative remain unresolved? Does it have to be enough? After reading the original CBC article reporting on the vandalism of the installation, I listened to an audio statement on the CBC website[^2] from Jeff Crowe, the childhood best friend of Neil Stonechild. He expressed his disappointment in the work because the installation did not explicitly and legibly present Stonechild’s last name, and he interpreted this particular aspect of the work as “hiding the truth.” Within the same statement, he said that Belmore had reached out to him to talk about the work as well as to listen to his perspective.

While I do not agree that Belmore’s intention was to hide the truth, I can understand where the apprehension and suspicion comes from. Stonechild’s life was extinguished by the colonial continuum that drives this place we now call Canada. The narrow, pervasive colonial narrative that Canadians are indoctrinated into is not truthful. It is an exclusionary tale that upholds colonial entitlements and colonial habits of being. Nations and its people kill when those colonial entitlements and habits are interrupted. This place, like many other places around the world, was built upon the assimilation and genocide (or “cultural” genocide, as this country calls it because it cannot sit with its own truth) of Indigenous people. That Indigenous people still exist here is a living, breathing interruption of colonial entitlement. And that is still unacceptable to many Canadians. This plays itself out in a nation where the numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women is at an epidemic stage, and where there is no justice for the killing of young Indigenous people like Neil Stonechild and Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine—and countless others who do not capture national attention.

Indigenous people’s lives have value. Neil Stonechild’s life had value. By living, breathing and being, he intrinsically contributed to our world, to the water, to the land, to the sky, to a larger metabolism that we are all a part of and connected to. Almost 30 years after his death, his life, his spirit, his story will always have value. But within a colonial narrative, Indigenous people do not have value. How does one interrupt a historical and embedded colonial belief that Indigenous people are not people and are not valuable?

How do you address the trauma that we all hold—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—from the overarching narrative that underwrites all of our lives? This is not to say that all trauma is equal. It is not. All Indigenous people and Canadians hold trauma from this colonial narrative, but it has been unequally distributed, and the trauma is sourced from different parts of the narrative. But we have to address this trauma. We need to restore our connection with our own exiled capacities to sit with the trauma, and to let the wounds from this narrative heal and scar before we can move in a more generative calibration. Right now, the wounds are still open, and are far from healed, far from scarring. If we look at this within a linear frame, we are not even at zero yet. So, would a tangible, legible, physical monument gesture towards something more generative within this narrative in which we are all entangled? What is the role of the artist in holding space for generative relationship building? What is the role of the museum? Can a museum structure that very often replicates colonial habits and entitlements hold space for trauma and for difficult conversations, learning, unlearning in enlivened and embodied ways? It is hard to say. I think part of the answer is in the chain of events that happened in Saskatoon at the Remai Modern. There is something very intriguing and very revelatory in that story, about how even an ephemeral work needed to be interrupted.

[^1]: CBC News, “Remai Modern removes ice sculpture honouring Neil Stonechild after vandalism,” March 13, 2019\. [https://cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/remaimodern-neil-stonechild-vandalism-1.5054493](“cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/remaimodern-neil-stonechild-vandalism-1.5054493”)
[^2]: “An ice sculpture dedicated to Neil Stonechild is not sitting well with one of his closest friends,” on Saskatoon Morning, CBC Radio, February 17, 2019\. [https://cbc.ca/player/play/1439635011925](“cbc.ca/player/play/1439635011925”)

issue-142-p20-24.pdf

Death

Installation

Elwood Jimmy reflects on Rebecca Belmore’s vandalized installation _Freeze: Stonechild Memorial_ (2019) to understand how Canada’s colonial narrative could be disrupted. The death and memorialization of Neil Stonechild become discussion points for exploring ways artworks, artists, and institutions address trauma in a colonial narrative that continually undervalues Indigenous experiences.

Trauma as Monument

> I met up with Amy Lam and Jon McCurley for a _casse-croûte_ breakfast at Canada Hot Dog in Montreal’s Rosemont neighbourhood following the opening of their exhibition _Entertaining Every Second_ at Centre Clark and a few weeks before the unveiling of their two-part billboard project _$100 Bill With South Asian Scientist Added Back In_ (2019) with Dazibao. Having rarely shown or performed in Montreal, Lam and McCurley arrived with an exhibition tuned to a fine pitch, following presentations in Calgary at Truck Gallery and in Saskatoon at AKA artist-run. Addressing Western imperialism in Asia—Vietnam in particular—and systemic anti-Asian racism within the Canadian art milieu, the exhibition at Centre Clark marks a turning point in their more-than-a-decade-long practice, notably occupied by the long production period for their feature film, _Bugs_ (2015), made in parallel with their performance art show and online broadcast _Doored_ (2012–2017). Understandably, after touring the exhibition this past year, Lam and McCurley shared questions of their own on the methods behind their practice.

> Compared to research-based or documentary practices in artmaking that look for oblique angles into the archive or suggest neat speculative histories, Life of a Craphead’s work is rigorous memory work. This is memorial work, the painful and vulnerable work of research set on personal and collective trauma with a close watch on the violence behind it. It’s accompanied by straightforward titles: _Find the US Soldier Who Killed Your Grandma_ (2018), _Making Something Positive out of Chris Cran’s Painting ‘Self-Portrait with Combat Nymphos of Saigon’_ (1985) (ongoing), _Angry Edit_ (2018) or _The Quiet American but Only the Parts Where the White Man Main Character Tells the Asian Woman to Do Stuff for Him_ (2018). Each title plays the setup to—but not, to my mind—an assurance of a laugh to follow. Instead, they are setups that leave you time to trade your anticipation for attention and understand in this suspension that you’re now to follow up on the details.

**Robin Simpson:** Let’s start with the place of monuments in your work over the past decade.

**Jon McCurley:** We’ve done three projects explicitly about monuments: _Double Double Land Land_ (2009), _Bugs_ (2015) and _King Edward VII Equestrian Statue Floating Down the Don_ (2017). We have been asked do monument stuff since our successful monument thing in the Don and it seemed like, “well, what can we actually say about monuments?” But then, looking back, we’ve been thinking about monuments for many projects.

**Amy Lam:** _Double Double Land Land_ was this play about this town that nobody wanted to go to. One of the plot points was that they built this public sculpture to attract people, a giant spring that, when you go to look at the spring, it bounces you out of town. In _Bugs,_ there’s this Douglas Coupland _Monument to the War of 1812_ (2008) statue at King and Bathurst in Toronto that’s a part of the story. We renamed the statue for our purposes and put tape on it and stuff…

**JM:** …and a plot in _Bugs_ is that the characters are trying to install a new public monument, too.

**RS:** I wanted to ask about _Double Double Land Land_ and _Bugs_ and the place of civic life in your work.

**AL:** Both of us don’t come from art. Jon went to art school for one year, but I definitely did not understand what visual art was until my twenties. I had never been to a gallery and I just didn’t know. Public statues are what you see, in terms of art, if you don’t go to museums and galleries. We don’t necessarily think about Toronto, it’s just important to use whatever is close to us. The statue at King and Bathurst… literally, for our movie, we asked: “Where can we shoot?” We can shoot in parking lots, because it’s free if you don’t get stopped. We can use this street corner and we can use the bathroom at Jon’s house.

**JM:** I really enjoy and wish I could work more in community-building. I value that a lot—building something with the people around you. That must be the way to succeed, because it just seems to be so much more honest. But as far as critiquing city planning and stuff in our projects \[deep sigh\], it’s just bad writing.

**AL:** We have had a few city-planningstyle projects, like _Model for Waterfront Development_ (2016).

**JM:** Oh yeah, that piece is bad.

**RS:** I was going to ask about that work. 

**JM:** That’s a deep dive.

**AL:** Maybe we should take all the bad projects off the website.

**RS:** What stands out with that project is your play with a certain style of institutional language on the panels. This can also be seen in the didactic text panels in _Entertaining Every Second_. Maybe this could lead to thinking about editing, but let’s start with the adoption of that particular tone.

**JM:** The way that all of that past work ties into what we’re doing right now is totally the text panels. That’s the comedy part: you have to get the one-liner out of the text. It’s like setup and punchline. You have to tell them straight out or you’re wasting their time. It’s true with _Model for Waterfront Development_ that the text is the best part because it has this subtlety and satire.

**AL:** For _Fifty-Year Retrospective, 2006–2056_ (2013) at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the text panels were written like museum texts. It comes out of being asked to do things in these spaces. How does a museum work? There’s a painting and then there’s a text beside it. That’s what people see. They don’t just see the painting, so it doesn’t make sense to only make the painting. Why wouldn’t the artist also control all the other elements? Maybe it’s us wanting to direct the audience response in a very specific way, but then also point out all the other parts of how art is shown.

**JM:** About editing, maybe it’s because there are two of us. If an artist is one person, they don’t have to do the added step, which is convince someone who probably doesn’t want to do it. That is probably why language and editing are such a big part of our work. I think we’re trying to get away from it because, after about 40 projects, they all kind of have this one-liner feel. What do you do when you can see that about your own work?

**RS:** Even if this current project is a turning point for you, the process of taking into account the audience’s reaction as well as your own is something that you’ve carried over from work you’ve done over the past decade. Could you talk a bit more about this question of address?

**JM:** We built _Entertaining Every Second_ thinking about the audience and our relationship to the audience. Maybe that is something we’ve taken from thinking about how comedy works.

**AL:** What’s annoying about comedy—but also what is so great about it—is that it is so clear. You want these people to laugh. That’s relaxing for people: “Okay, I only have to do one thing and that’s laugh.” It’s annoying because, when I go to comedy shows, people are laughing at so many things. “Why are you guys laughing so much? Do you actually think this is funny, or just because you know you have to do that?”

Maybe when we started out, we were looking at art from this outsider perspective, asking: “What is this? What are these people doing? Why don’t they try harder to make their audience understand something?” Very bluntly: “Well, we should do something very clear.”

**JM:** Maybe we started as some idea of anti-art. There is something that is art and we are not part of it. Maybe that still exists in some things: we have this really strange, destructive name, and the fact that it’s not just one person, because you can’t do all this stuff that an artist would usually get to do, which is be a stoic supergenius, idol character that everybody worships.

**AL:** We don’t get to do that?

**JM:** No, we don’t get to do that. So, instead, it’s just work. I mean, when one of us has an epiphany—“Okay, I’m baby genius idol”—the other is, like, “Stop,” or just “No.”

**AL:** A lot of it is us trying to make the other person laugh, then talking about it and thinking about all the angles of why it’s funny, and trying to see if those reasons are solid.

**JM:** A conversation that happens is: “I don’t relate to this at all.” We’re different people with different identities. You can say, “Wow! This really expresses my soul,” and the other person can reply, “I don’t relate…”

**AL:** Your soul expression is not interesting to me.

**JM:** Maybe this is a stretch, but in order to really convince someone of your soul expression, you have to be really aware of them as an audience. You gotta sell it to them. You gotta make them get that your “whatever” is worth anything.

**RS:** What’s interesting with _Entertaining Every Second_ is how many different tones there are. Obviously, both your voices are in there—there isn’t one uniform voice for Life of a Craphead. Then there is taking on the institution’s tone in the panels and a conveyance and an amplification of comments made on your practice, as well as the voices behind historical narratives and cultural objects. I’m curious about this exhibition series being itself, so to speak, in response to encounters with these tones. You spoke about audience reaction. Further to that, what do you think of this exhibition being seen as consequential?

**AL:** Maybe that’s the part that I have the most questions about, because so much of the work in the show is: “Here’s this novel and here’s me writing about the novel. Here’s this painting and now we’ve made a tote bag out of it. Here’s this curator telling us that our work isn’t funny enough, so here’s us telling him off…”

**JM:** …“I’m a victim” art.

**AL:** I think the work is not just reactive: it comes from so much other stuff, obviously—everything that we have experienced. But I do wonder about it and I think I’m not really interested in making work like that anymore.

**JM:** Maybe being an artist is that you figure stuff out in front of everyone, everyone gets to see you make mistakes, you just figure it out. So, in this period, when we’re being critical of ourselves, we say that we’ve made a lot of “poor me” art, which is just a way of making fun of ourselves and pointing at the “reactive” element that’s in all that work. But maybe in a positive way we’re building a narrative around it that is really easy to understand and it tells our story.

**RS:** What are some of the underlying processes of the exhibition that are not public but buttress your practice?

**JM:** If there is any theme of victimhood, I think it is paired with this idea of: “This makes me really mad, I’ve got to do something about this.” I find it very empowering to share with people that making _Find the US Soldier Who Killed Your Grandma_ (2018) was motivated by hating the 2016 Ken Burns and Lynn Novick Vietnam War documentary—which is a monument in a way—because it is what most people will watch to learn the history of the American war in Vietnam.

It’s this 10-part documentary, praised for being unbiased and fair. When I watched it, it made me so mad. They are all pro-America and pro-soldier stories. Seeing that, and having access to what is missing and not feeling represented, seeing these white people praised for telling their understanding of Vietnamese stories is infuriating. Even in our art circles in Canada, people don’t know this stuff. We’ll make this work, show it to them and they still won’t really get it. Seeing that barrier and thinking about all those things feels very motivating.

**RS:** Amy, in an earlier conversation about _Entertaining Every Second,_ you spoke about uncertainty and how people dodge uncertainty by declaring some easy summary of the project. Could you expand on that?

**AL:** That thought was coming out of people who see the show and have this pat response: “I know what this is about, I understand the content.” And I’m talking about white audiences. This is Jon’s family story, not mine. I’ve learned a lot about the situation and the context \[of the war\] but I still don’t know. I am very aware that I don’t have any experience of it, or an embodied experience. When people see the work, or when curators talk about the work in a certain way—“Oh, this is about trauma. Oh, this is about race and identity.”—to just put it into these categories feels deflating.

I guess the uncertainty part is that there is this enormous pain and poison in the _Find the US Soldier who Killed Your Grandma_ project—at least in us experiencing it. We’re looking at the Facebook page of this guy \[the soldier\] and it is just horrifying. We’re reading all these trial documents, containing all this detailed information that is not in the project and that should not be shared at all. By putting some of this information into our work and making it public, in some way, we don’t know what that means and we don’t know what could happen with that. In terms of a white audience, or presenters who don’t have an experience of racialized trauma, saying, “This work is so great. It’s about these themes. It’s so important…” I mean, yeah, I guess so, but also there’s this question of, “Who knows? Is it actually good? Is this actually too much?”

**JM:** I ask it all the time. Maybe it’s exciting because we don’t even know. It’s new to us and then we put it in an art gallery, and maybe it’s new to the audience. “What is an art gallery being used for? What is happening? What is this information exchange?”

**AL:** I mean, the pain is the piece of art, but there’s also the pain that has been there the whole time. It’s the pain of that history. Thinking about monuments… this is why people don’t make monuments like this, because it’s too vulnerable. That’s why you show the sealed-off version, so that’s safe for people in a way.

**RS:** Briefly back to comedy and audiences; earlier you mentioned watching the film _Get Out_ in theatres and noticing white audiences laugh at different parts of the film than black audiences or people of colour. Have you applied this to _Entertaining Every Second_?

**AL:** I think the clowns that are part of the _Ceilings with Clowns_ (2018) sculpture are interesting because that’s this audience response thing. We wanted to add clowns to insult \[the festival’s curator and board\], and to remember the experience of proposing a sculpture specifically about racism for a public art festival and then being fired because they didn’t like it… What we proposed—the original version of the Ceilings sculpture—is a structure that’s the “glass ceiling” and the “bamboo ceiling” combined in a checkerboard. And our line was that “you can stand underneath it and feel what it’s like to be an Asian woman.” The festival said, as part of their reasoning for firing us, “it’s not that funny”—so \[in subsequent iterations of the sculpture, as shown at Centre Clark\] we added clowns. Being fired speaks specifically to what the sculpture is about: that people don’t entirely perceive this kind of racism against Asian people.

**JM:** They enacted the bamboo ceiling.

**AL:** Because of all these things about anti-Asian racism—like the idea of the model minority—they don’t perceive it as an issue. It’s not important enough to make a sculpture about, it’s not entertaining. When we decided to make the clowns, we weren’t thinking that we needed a colourful part to this show that’s all about pain and death. We made them as a very sarcastic response to “it’s not that funny.” And in making them, they became this thing that does something we didn’t anticipate. They are not just clowns, they’re things that people really like to look at and take pictures of. Specifically, audiences who don’t have a personal connection to the work. Why do they feel that they can take pictures of the clowns and put them online? This response to the aesthetic of the clowns is something that we didn’t necessarily prepare for—or anticipate or plan—and it’s been a part of the show that makes it this other thing that people can access. In previous iterations of the show—without the clowns—in smaller towns where we didn’t know as many people, some people would have a really hard time talking to us. People just didn’t know what to say at all.

**JM:** It’s a lesson that we have learned. They look nice. Everyone loves a clown. That’s a really fun thing to brag about! We’ve never made statues before. We’ve never made those clowns. How did those clowns not turn out bad? Can you imagine never having made three five-foot clowns before and then having to make ones that people like enough that they’re not depressed by the story or the context? But just they look at it and they like it? That’s hard! That’s a really tall order!

**RS:** You’re going into the shiny genius baby form, Jon.

**JM:** Damn. Wow.

**AL:** He got you! He got you!

**JM:** That’s the kind of cold, cynical, no-mincing-of-words that I usually get from Amy.

**AL:** Journalism! Journalism!

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Conceptual

Robin Simpson interviews Life of a Craphead, the conceptual duo consisting of Amy Lam and Jon McCurley, about their body of work and artistic methods. Their series of memorial works address vulnerable memories of personal and collective trauma, particularly echoes of Western imperialism in Asia that are still prevalent in the domain of Canadian art today. 

Histories and Setups: Interview with Life of a Craphead

Genevieve Flavelle is an independent curator, writer and PhD student in the Department of Art History & Art Conservation at Queen’s University.

How can a riot be memorialized? Specifically, in the case of the Stonewall riots—the legendary five days of rioting in 1969 that launched the gay liberation movement in New York—how did the act of fighting back against cops enforcing the criminalization of being queer and trans so quickly become a corporate-sponsored parade in which the police participate? Why does the _Gay Liberation_ monument (1980), a George Segal commission for the 10th anniversary of the riots, depict four figures quietly socializing in Christopher Park instead of scores of drag queens throwing high heels and ripping parking meters out of the ground? In the leadup to this year’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, artist Chris E. Vargas chose, in his residency and exhibition at the New Museum, to focus on the park as a fraught site of representation and shifting historical memory. 

_Consciousness Razing—The Stonewall Re-Memorialization Project_ was produced under the banner of Vargas’ ongoing project The Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art (MOTHA). The semi-fictional institution, of which Vargas positions himself the executive director, seeks to “bring a cohesive visual history of transgender culture into existence,” while also questioning if such a history is productive or even possible. Functioning as a parasite that redirects the resources and authority of larger institutions, MOTHA employs a variety of legitimizing platforms, such as lectures, exhibitions, artist awards and public programs, to promote trans artists, historians and scholars. _Consciousness Razing_ is the latest iteration of MOTHA’s ongoing exhibition series _Trans History in 99 Objects_, which parodies exhibitions such as the British Museum’s _A History of the World in 100 Objects_ and the Smithsonian’s _History of America in 101 Objects_ to interrogate the role of display in narrating dominant histories. The twist of MOTHA’s exhibitions is the addition of objects created by contemporary artists and the renouncement of boundaries between the known and the unknowable. Each exhibition builds toward the 99 promised objects and focuses on local trans histories and legends to engage with “the real and imagined pre-histories of the identity and community formation we call transgender.”[^1] In keeping with this format, _Consciousness Razing_ takes up the Stonewall riots and Segal’s monument in Christopher Park as a contested site of transgender representation and historical narration. 

Much like artworks or objects on display in a museum or housed in an archive, monuments are presented to the public with a limited amount of contextual information and a heavy dose of unnamed authority that selectively narrates history. Questions of authority and power are raised when considering who pays for monuments, who the intended audience is and how monuments work to contextualize or decontextualize historical events. Segal’s monument is a prime case study of contested historical representation. The sculpture, which lives in Christopher Park directly across from the Stonewall Inn, depicts two couples convening in the park. The figures are life-sized, made from bronze and painted white to resemble the original plaster used to cast the models. It is only in the context of the historic site that the figures’ proximity and forms of touch—such as a hand on the shoulder—encourage a reading of the same-gender pairings as romantic couplings or queer friendships. Furthermore, the monument, though commissioned in 1979 for the 10th anniversary of the riots, was not installed until 1992 due to the city’s aversion to courting controversy, which retroactively feels extreme given the timid representation of queer couplings that the monument depicts. In defending the monument against censors, Segal acknowledged that he used these figures in other monuments and that they are not specifically queer portraits. 

In the last several years, the monument has been called out as emblematic of the whitewashing of the gay liberation movement. In 2016, the figures were painted brown and clothed in colourful drag by anonymous activists to call attention to the erasure of racialized trans and gender-non-conforming activists like Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and many others who held the frontlines of riots.[^2] This act of redressing the figures is illustrative of how monuments are primarily contested or pulled into dialogue through acts of vandalism or calls for removal. The _Gay Liberation_ monument also actively quells Stonewall as a site of complex queer community and revolutionary energy through a heteronormative framework of intimacy and coupling. Segal’s monument is illustrative of how, as Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant write, “a complex cluster of sexual practices gets confused, in heterosexual culture, with the love plot of intimacy and familialism that signifies belonging to society in a deep and normal way.”[^3] The affective encounters of the two couples staged in the park neutralize difference and obscure the cruelty of dominant culture that the Stonewall riots contested. 

So, how might space be held for a multiplicity of subjective and contradictory histories in a place where forms of racial, economic, gender and sexual oppression intersected and ignited a riot for liberation? How can a monument to Stonewall pay tribute to the drag queens, trans people, lesbian women and gay men who joined together to protect a space of queer gathering against the daily violence of the police? Can the space acknowledge that not everyone who fought that night achieved freedom, that Stonewall continues? In _Consciousness Razing_, Vargas addresses these questions by employing strategies of queer curatorship, which scholar Jennifer Tyburczy has defined as “a curatorial activity that can highlight and rearrange normative narratives about what it means to be a historically and geographically specific sexual subject. It can also materialize a spatial and discursive approach to display that utopically imagines new forms of sexual sociality and collectivity between bodies, things, and nations.”[^4] 

The exhibition brings the public space of the park into the gallery in the form of a meticulous, laser-cut 1:7 scale model, powder coated white. Twelve colourful maquettes of new monuments, created by the invited artists, are displayed on high shelves with written proposals and sketches for full-scale implementation both mounted underneath and available as a broadsheet takeaway. The 12 monuments, while each taking a week-long turn in the model park, importantly continue to sit in conversation with each other in the gallery. The maquettes are not uniform in size or construction—some are sharply fabricated while others look like the product of arts and crafts sessions. This material irregularity, along with frequent use of bright colours, contrasts with the slick model park to create a decidedly queer intervention. 

The 12 artists work in various ways to pay tribute to Stonewall without foreclosing it as an ongoing catalyst of revolution. Sharon Hayes’ _Stonewall is not yet here_ draws on José Esteban Muñoz’s queer utopian methodology to create a monument that resists stasis, both physically and temporally. The monument takes the form of a 1969 Pontiac Bonneville station wagon mounted with a public address system that would travel and stage a series of readings and speeches. Each event would begin with a reading of Rivera’s 2001 speech to the Latino Gay Men of New York (LGMNY) and then proceed with pre- and post-Stonewall texts to connect the past to the present and influence future liberation movements. Nicki Green’s proposal, _Forces of Faggotry_, similarly seeks to link the historic riots to future revolts through the material form of bricks. The loose pile of 200 Stonewall-branded ceramic bricks references both people (in trans vernacular, a “brick” is a trans woman who does not pass as a cis woman) and weapons. The loose configuration of bricks represents the 200 people said to be in the Stonewall Inn when the police raided it. The bricks can be reconfigured to reflect “the fluidity of community dynamics” or taken to be used as tools in future riots. Not all of the proposed monuments are as materially feasible as Green’s and Hayes’. The format of the exhibition as “proposals” leaves open the option to create a purely conceptual or desire-based work, like Catherine Lord’s _Reliquary_, a tall tube that piles activist T-shirts worn by lesbians into an obelisk-like tower. The materials list includes “lesbian sweat, lesbian blood, lesbian thought, lesbian humor, miscellaneous lesbian secretions.” The intended sensory impact of a tower of visibly used T-shirts, which seeks to give presence to lesbian activists often unrepresented in the male-dominated movement for queer liberation, is, however, lost in the scaled translation. 

One of the most effective and affective aspects of the exhibition was the adjacent _Resources for Resistance_ room created by Vargas and the New Museum’s education staff in collaboration with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Visitors could read relevant texts, listen to speeches and write postcards to currently incarcerated trans people. The room connects the exhibition to what was at stake in 1969 and continues to be at stake today for trans and gender-non-conforming people (poverty, homelessness and other circumstances deemed criminal) and creates an opportunity for engagement that many of the monuments propose but cannot execute in their nascence. 

While limited in impact by the constraints of museum and gallery spaces, curatorial and artist projects like _Consciousness Razing_ are increasingly becoming important sites where histories are questioned and reconstituted at the complex intersections of evidence, absence and desire. By giving artists the opportunity to mobilize a critique of history through proposals for monuments, Vargas practices what Muñoz calls an act of “educated hope.” For Muñoz, practising educated hope and “participating in a mode of revolutionary consciousness is not simply conforming to one group’s doxa at the expense of another’s… It is thinking beyond the narrative of what stands for the world today by seeing it as not enough.”[^5] _Consciousness Razing_ shows that no single monument to Stonewall will be enough because the revolution that Stonewall birthed continues to be, in the words of Stonewall veteran and artist Thomas Lanigan- Schmidt, “coming into being and being into becoming.”[^6]

[^1]: Chris E. Vargas, “An Introduction,” _Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects: Legends and Mythologies_ exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles: ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, 2015), 4.
[^2]: This action happened shortly after the release of the major motion picture _Stonewall_ (2015), which centered on a young white male protagonist. The film was widely criticized and boycotted.
[^3]: Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” _Critical Inquiry_ 24.2 (Winter, 1998): 554.
[^4]: Jennifer Tyburczy, _Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display_ (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 4.
[^5]: Lisa Duggan & Jos. Esteban Muñoz, “Hope and hopelessness: A dialogue,” _Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory_ 19:2 (2009): 278.
[^6]: Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, “Mother Stonewall and the Golden Rats,” 1989\. Reproduced in _Consciousness Razing—The Stonewall Re- Memorialization Project_ exhibition broadsheet (New York: New Museum, 2018).

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Museums

Sculpture

Genevieve Flavelle asks: how can a riot be memorialized? Part of the many iterations of monuments dedicated to the Stonewall riots, artist Chris E. Vargas’ ongoing curatorial project _Consciousness Razing_ explores how artists expand, question, and critique the dominant historical narrative. Flavelle suggests that memorials should be understood as plural rather than singular.

Not One Monument but 12: Re-memorializing the Stonewall Riots

Letter

Jacquelyn Ross is a writer based in Toronto.

Fan Wu is currently seeking synthesis between _qi_, Daoist energy cosmology, and _libido_, Freudian erotic drive. He loves to be in touch: write to him at fanwu4u@gmail.com.

##### Dear C Mag,

Thank you for highlighting so many smart, alternative design practices that have nothing at all to do with that already mile-high stack of slick-looking photo-lifestyle magazines that drain my soul and make me question the role of publishing. 

In respect to Chris Lee and Ali S. Qadeer’s question, “how graphic design as a visual practice gives form to power,” I couldn’t help but think of the many artists and micro-publishers I know working around me today (many of them, internet-savvy millennials) whose practices are similarly involved in calling out the design industry’s obvious complicity with the status quo. What’s different about these practices, though, is that most often they take a playful and/or ironic approach to this warfare—one that, in its _self-consciously_ “bad” design, takes into account our own roles as consumers and purveyors of trends.

The bad design that I am referring to looks rather amateurish, and intentionally so. It crowds information rather than communicating it clearly. Its graphics are clumsy, noisy, awkward. It has no message, or at least not one that’s literal or straightforward. Sometimes it has the look of a zine you put together with friends one night while drinking heavily, with pages so ephemeral that they may not exist tomorrow. Sometimes it has the look of a website from another century, an overly personalized Myspace or Geocities profile. Or maybe it is a painting that uses an ironically airbrushed effect, or a piece of video art featuring a poorly rendered three- dimensional object (in spite of all the technology that typically makes this kind of thing easily avoidable). Almost always, bad design embraces a quality of effusiveness, of too-muchness, and what I would argue is our long overdue rebellion against that rather boring _minimalist_ design trend. In short, bad design is everything that no _real_ client (outside of the art world that is!) would ever, ever want.

Sadly (or not), even the bad design I am describing here has been catching on as a trend in recent years (just take a look at any number of contemporary art museum websites these days, designed with the same _so bad it’s good_ aesthetic), something that David Schnitman’s “Now in Circulation” addressed in the issue. Just like any other anti-trend-turned-trend, it will finally face its decline. For now, though, I’m happy to support whatever it is that it’s doing—at least until Kinfolk is off the rack for good.

##### Jacquelyn Ross

##### Dear Ms. Bruneau and Ms. Cynwar,

Issue 141 elucidates, examines and interrogates design and power’s vine-like entanglement and moves the discussion forward with timely regard for a particular manifestation of this coupling: design as resistance.

In his interview with Winona Wheeler and Joi T. Arcand, Chris Lee asked Wheeler if her partiality for paper is linked to its ease in securing institutional approval. Wheeler asserts “I’m a little too rebellious for that,” and explains, more specifically, that she operates unfettered by dominant or prescribed forms of academic legitimacy. This lack of concern with being _recognized_ (as Glen Sean Coulthard would likely articulate it) and valued by the dominant group is brave. However, her familiarity with creating academically sanctioned knowledge, which, with its standards of production and presentation, could be considered a graphic form in its own right, is an advantage. She is able to reap the benefits and presumptions of legitimacy and intelligibility afforded to academia while embedding it with alternate narratives that challenge colonial myths, like the missionary James Evans’ establishment of the Cree syllabary. Wheeler’s academic work offers a form of resistance that facilitates a broad engagement and support in a diversity of communities, an important step in building networks of care and action.

Arcand’s resistance work in her _Here on Future Earth_ series, takes a less accommodating approach by comparison. The images—bridges between speculative futures and ancestral tributes—demonstrate how design can help to legitimize and create oneself. The Cree syllabic signs in Arcand’s work are meant to be understood, meant to designate places of community, commerce, nourishment—but only to those with a particular knowledge or understanding. Arcand resists colonial intelligibility in her work and in her choice to not translate the text within it (sometimes to the disdain and discomfort of her audience). This resistance is in service of giving autonomy to the community of people who do understand syllabics and concurrently, teaching those who don’t to eventually discern the visual poetry of this typeface and link it to the Indigenous communities that established it.

##### Salena Barry

##### Hello,

I’m a graduate student and graphic designer at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. I did an archival research project last fall examining the logo and graphic design of a 1970s Asian American magazine called _Bridge_. In it, I argue that the evolution of its logo from the Chinese character for “bridge” to a more inclusive English text reading “BRIDGE: An Asian American Perspective” demonstrates the entanglement of ideographic and political concerns. I find that graphic design’s built-in concern for legibility and efficacy (political or otherwise) are powerful lessons for the present world of contemporary art. Controversies like Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till or Omer Fast’s installation in NYC’s Chinatown stem, in my view, from clinging to the dated notion that authorial intent trumps actual reception. It is 2019, and yet artists and curators seem to continue to struggle to shed Alfred Barr’s treatment of viewers as “idealized, atemporal” (and most definitely white and able) bodies.

So, my answer to Chris Lee and Ali S. Qadeer’s question “What does design _do_?” is this: design is intrinsically attuned to audiences in a way that I think artists, curators and critics must be in order for their work and their shows to not only aspire or proclaim to do such and such, but to _actually do it_.

To acknowledge that our work, our art history, our exhibition frameworks are mired in an “unjust epistemology” is to acknowledge the need for more diverse and direct ways to speak through art. This requires systemic changes to bring marginalized voices into the fold, and demands that critics understand that art must acknowledge the physical, cultural, sociological specificities of its viewers. No clever design will resolve all of our problems, but absorbing design’s intrinsic creative attentiveness to audience and specificity, I think, can be part of the answer.  

##### Muhan Zhang

##### Dear Abby,

I swallow graphic design subliminally. Because I am ignorant of its histories and techniques, and know only its effects on me, graphic design moulds the geometry of my unconscious. It blends into the worldhood of the world as such, much like the forbidden Pop-Tarts that Tucker McLachlan—writing about “incidental design” in issue 141—snuck onto his parents’ grocery list.

While I’m reading C Magazine in a Parkdale waiting room with its carefully arranged new layout, I’m surrounded by hideous yellow posters in a clinical incidental design; CP24 hisses out a continuous stream of drivel; the baseball-capped boy beside me (whose hat reads “McCheezus”) plays Bejeweled. Graphic design always takes place in a dynamic scene; because I’m poor at boundary-crafting, I cannot see design apart from the sensual complexity of each moment. What comes into focus is not the design of things themselves, but spider-webbing relationships that draw across scenes of attraction and repulsion, reality and fantasy, the arrangement of text on a bag of beans and the way a lover flicks back his hair. It is my desire, with its frazzled attention span, that designs the graphic world for me, intention extracted from the picture.

McLachlan outlines four categorical quadrants of graphic design, in the vein of Rumsfeld’s famous schema of “known unknowns,” which are: expected content- expected form, expected content-unexpected form, unexpected content-expected form and unexpected content-unexpected form. Both design and desire are, it would seem, haunted by two extremes: a totalitarian conservatism where only the same repeats itself, and an apocalyptic radicality that swivels reality into an utterly new arrangement.What would it mean to never think about graphic design as an art or skill or disciplinary object, but instead as an element in the singular, unique, unrepeatable scenes of our lives?  

##### Fan Wu

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Four letters reflecting on the spring ‘Graphic Design’ issue.

Letters

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**Jac Renée Bruneau** is a writer, editor and organizer based in Toronto. She was formerly the editor of _C Magazine_.

Editor

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

We came across the following documents during our research residency in Tbilisi at Georgia’s State Silk Museum in March 2019\. Reviewing the extensive archives maintained by the museum’s library, in preparation for our upcoming film on the Silk Road, we were captivated by a series of notes and illustrations that felt oddly out of place in the collection. These documents stood out from the rest of the archives not only because of their seemingly disconnected subject matter but also because of their disparate sorting logic and clandestine placement amongst various expedition reports and personal notes written by Nikolay Shavrov, a Russian biologist and the founder and first director of Tbilisi’s Sericultural Station. At first glance, these records appeared to be little more than incidental entries or misplaced files, but soon, with the help of Darejan Demetrashvili, the librarian, and Mariam Shergelashvili, our research coordinator, we uncovered a series of interconnected narratives concerning a monumental intervention in the environs of Mount Ararat in modern-day Turkey. 

Nicknamed the “Silk Cocoon General” by the owners of mulberry plantations in the South Caucasus regions, Shavrov was celebrated in the scientific community for his devotion to empirical accuracy. In 1879, while studying in Moscow, he attended an anthropological exhibition at the museum of the Moscow University. It was here that he met for the first time Evgeny Dmitrievich Felitsyn, an officer in the Imperial Russian Army from Stavropol. Felitsyn was presenting his paper “Дольмены – богатырские дома ст. Баговской” (Dolmens – Giant Houses of Bogovskaya Station) based on his ongoing research into the dolmen structures found throughout the northwest Caucasus. We can speculate that their encounter was amicable because later they often met in Tbilisi to discuss their overlapping interests in Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeology. 

Furthermore, Felitsyn’s research is frequently referenced in Shavrov’s journals, particularly in his _Caspian Expedition_ (1904). Shavrov had become particularly fixated on a narrative Felitsyn recalled regarding the famous Armenian writer Khachatur Abovian. During his travels to perform cursory examinations of the Tsaghkahovit Citadel in Armenia, Felitsyn had been hosted by a Yazidi man who claimed that Abovian’s trusted friend Chief Timur Aga was his grandfather. During a prolonged conversation covering diverse topics—including famed ascents of Mount Ararat and Armenia’s Mount Aragats—the Yazidi man brought out a series of curious journals that he alleged had been written by Abovian and entrusted to Aga during a visit with Baron August von Haxthausen, a German agricultural scientist, economist, lawyer, writer and collector of folk songs whom Abovian was escorting around Armenia in 1843\. The journals recount a hitherto unknown chapter in Abovian’s celebrated first ascent of Mount Ararat with the naturalist and mountaineer Friedrich Parrot. A large portion of these notes was dedicated to their observations of proto-cuneiform glyphs and several elaborate and interlocking Cyclopean ruins in the vicinity of the Armenian monastery of St. Hakob, from which they made their first successful ascent on October 9, 1829\. 

Abovian supposedly became preoccupied with these ruins, formulating a theory that they were part of a Bronze Age ritual complex dedicated to a volcanic mountain god associated with Mount Ararat. He postulated that the site had been constructed in anticipation of a future volcanic eruption and that the linear assembly of Cyclopean corridors—which were the site’s main feature—would direct the anticipated flows of magma into channels of subterranean intake valves: a casting system that would create a massive bell, measuring an estimated nine metres in height and five metres in diameter. In these letters, Abovian relates his reticence to publish his preliminary findings, having been met with disdain by colleagues and clergy, and so had been venturing to return for further in-depth investigations the following year. Felitsyn went on to tell Shavrov that around the time of Abovian’s second and third ascents of Mount Ararat with Otto Wilhelm Hermann von Abich and Henry Danby Seymour in 1845 and 1846, respectively, he’d become increasingly despondent, having found these ruins and the monastery completely buried by an avalanche unleashed by the earthquake of July 2, 1840\. Felitsyn speculated that Abovian’s quest to prove the veracity of his bell theory had so engrossed him that it might explain his sudden disappearance in 1848, which Felitsyn assumed was instigated by a clandestine attempt to uncover the buried ruins. 

The narrative about Abovian’s fixation on these ancient structures greatly fascinated us. Particularly, we were captivated by the monuments’ unique relationship to scale, both temporal and spatial, to be reified only at the moment of catastrophe—in effect, functioning as a final testimony of an extinguished civilization. In addition to the records inserted within Shavrov’s _Caspian Expedition_ notes, we came across several illustrations in an unmarked folder buried under piles of old documents that had yet to be sorted in the librarian’s office. These illustrations, allegedly commissioned by Shavrov, depict a hypothetical mechanism for realizing the passive casting of a bell by guiding lava through gating systems into a gigantic subterranean mould. Alongside these illustrations were several reproductions of research papers and diagrams of Cyclopean burial mounds and dolmens, packaged with a peculiar set of constructivist architectural drawings depicting what appears to be a similar casting mechanism. We found little evidence to point to the provenance of these additional documents aside from a signature on the back reading “это кто, 1922,” most likely a pseudonym translating to: “Who is this?” Curious to find out more about the origin of these illustrations, we inquired with the librarian who mentioned that the grounds of the Sericultural Station and the current museum had been intermittently occupied by Bolshevik forces from the time of the Soviet invasion in 1921 and that perhaps one of the officers had taken the liberty of rearranging, manipulating and making additions to the old archives, leaving us with this enigmatic folder.

—Pejvak

Artist

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Narrative

Landscape

Pejvak, the long-term collaborative project between Rouzbeh Akhbari and Felix Kalmenson, encounters the seemingly disconnected and misplaced documents in the archives of Georgia’s State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, during their research residency in March 2019\. With the aid of their research coordinator and the museum’s librarian, Pejvak attempts to reconstruct the hidden narratives interwoven in these disparate documents. Poster insert.

The Bell at the End of Time

Review

**Weiyi Chang** is a curator and writer currently based in Vancouver.

Thermodynamics is a branch of physics that studies the relationship between heat and other forms of energy. As a field of study, it emerged in tandem with the development of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution and the zenith of European imperialism. In Steven Cottingham’s exhibition _Heat, Death_, the first principle of thermodynamic theory—that energy can neither be created nor destroyed but only transformed—becomes a metaphor for reflecting on the developments of these historical moments and their lasting reverberations into the present.

Whereas a decade ago, one might plausibly have argued that climate change was primarily a technocratic problem resolvable through tweaks to existing practices— tougher fuel efficiency standards, say, or more recycling plants—today such approaches feel inadequate. We are confronted with the totality of what is yet to come (or, rather, what is unfolding as we speak). Increasingly, there is a sense that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with a sustainable planet and furthermore that ecological violence is also a form of human violence, as has been articulated by numerous Indigenous voices over the years. When rising ocean levels displace coastal communities, for example, or when resource extraction industries are given precedence over Indigenous land rights, issues that may have once seemed remote are brought into view as inherently political and social questions of justice.

The exhibition’s title, _Heat, Death_, references another thermodynamic theory, this one about the end of the universe. “Heat death” refers to a hypothetical state of maximum entropy in which energy can no longer be extracted to perform work. Working against this imagined end, Cottingham argues in an essay accompanying the exhibition that capitalism is perpetually warding off entropy, recuperating energy by putting it to work for further productivity gains. The title thus has two meanings, equating the death of capitalism with the death of the universe and implying a relation- ship between heat and death via a strategic comma. Heat is not merely an adjectival modifier but also an allusion to rising global temperatures, warming oceans, burning forests—the equivalence of heat and planetary death we are witnessing today.

Cottingham’s work, then, nestles into a rapidly growing field of discourse entwining environmental decay, capitalism and colonialism. How to make sense of the convergence of these issues that are complex unto themselves? For Cottingham, energy and its flows bear the conceptual burden of linking these processes and structures. By relying on thermodynamic theory, he strategically eschews the particular in favour of the general. The metaphor—of all energy being finite and subject to perpetual transformation—evades the weight of concrete circumstances, so loaded as they are with specific histories and narratives. Instead, thermodynamic principles—unchanging, universal and universally accepted—become a base upon which to re-evaluate the conditions afflicting us.

Formally, this effort manifests as a series of sculptural assemblages made from found objects and industrial materials. Cottingham’s object selection, however, isn’t interested in the nominative gesture of the artist or in exposing each object’s social history. Rather, objects are used metonymically, as signifiers of more complex phenomena. Aluminum stands in as the material embodiment of the workings of capitalism, its heat conductivity analogizing capital’s tendency to control, subjugate and strategically dissipate entropy. Throughout the gallery, prefabricated aluminum objects, including baking foil, heat sinks and extruded bars function as display surfaces for seemingly inchoate things like desiccated sea sponges, pyrolyzed bread, antifreeze reductions, a rusty bell-clapper and flat screen monitors displaying Schlieren videographs of hot air. The pristine quality of so much of the aluminum in this show—the delicate fins of the heat sinks, the creaseless foil surfaces, the sleek angles—highlights how seductive and potent capitalism is as a construct. In one work, _No failure but the properties of matter_ (2018), molten aluminum has been poured over a sea sponge, collapsing its internal structural integrity and legible as a reflection on the corrosive effects of capital on organic forms of life. Floating like islands or planets in the abyss, each pairing seems to constitute a closed system of endless repetition in which energy flows back and forth between aluminum and object.

An exception to these unyielding dialectics is a mound in a front corner of the gallery, the remnants of _Value form phase transition_ (2018), which was at one time a large block of ice flecked with misshapen molten aluminum. Subjected to the heat of the sun through a window and compounded by the body heat of visitors moving around the space during the opening reception, the ice block melted over the course of several days, its water seeping beneath the floor tiles and pushing them upwards to form a low mound, a kind of volcanism. Paltry and exposed, the small aluminum lumps that lay scattered atop the mound vacate the material of its slick surfaces, alluding to the distortion of capitalism under environmental and social duress.

Fredric Jameson once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism; judging by the apocalyptic tenor that underscores so much anti-capitalist climate discourse, this remains the case today. What differentiates and refreshes such themes in _Heat, Death_ is the metaphor itself. Reducing the immensity of capitalism to a method of energy diversion and control, the work avoids proselytizing as well as the panic and political lassitude that accompanies environmental concerns in the public sphere. Spare, restrained, quiet, it offers no consolation or solution, preferring instead to ask what it means to have capitalism (aluminum) as the base upon which things and persons act, and what conditions may be produced to disrupt its seamless governance of energy.

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Weiyi Chang reviews Steven Cottingham’s exhibition _Heat, Death_ at Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver. (October 18 – November 17, 2018).

Steven Cottingham: Heat, Death

Emma Sharpe is an MA candidate in Ryerson and York University’s Communication and Culture program in Toronto. She’s interested in bridging the gap between creative practice and scholarship, and focuses on themes of tactility, printed matter and mediation in the visual arts.

I first encountered Mike Goldby’s _Silver 35_ through Instagram. Being out of town until the final days of Sibling’s inaugural exhibition meant that I watched its rollout via social media, catching glimpses of hanging frames and subtle colours in the garage-cum-gallery of Little Sister’s newly-branded and relocated project. But the nine photographs hanging in Silver 35 seemed to elude documentation, as the highly reflective surfaces of their frames created deceptive layers of content. I could never quite tell what the pictured photographs were actually of—what was a reflection and what wasn’t—until I was in front of them.

That’s because the seven 60 cm x 91 cm and two 91 cm x 121 cm framed digital chromogenic prints that lined the gallery walls were treated with a special film: Silver 35, earning the exhibition’s title. The 35 refers to the percentage of light let through the UV protectant film, with the remaining 65 bouncing back. This off-kilter ratio between image and reflection had the two constantly competing for attention. Through the crisp reflections of the gallery space itself, with the frames from the opposing wall creating a sort of infinity mirror effect, we see slices of busy urban scenes. Taken from low vantage points, the photos often centre on an anonymous body, almost always in motion. We see suits and blurs, smartphones and totes, a hand on a weary back. Goldby often ventured to the downtown core and financial district of Toronto, seeking a sort of chaotic oasis away from his west end home. I couldn’t help but romanticize the artist’s process: I pictured a broke bohemian floating through the bustling crowds as observer, never participant (other than libatious splurges on $18 glasses of wine). The text that accompanied the show, written by Goldby in the first person, offered a glimpse at these moments. Like an interloper in a thronging downtown, Goldby watched people cycling through the business district, comparing their imagined lives with his empty pockets. There’s a generosity to the tone: Goldby admires, or at least benevolently pities, the “beautiful souls” labouring their way through the work week.

Like an errant legal document that had slipped out of a briefcase, this text sat in the middle of the gallery’s cement floor. Goldby’s “sheet,” cleverly camouflaged as a printed Microsoft Word document in 12 point Times New Roman font, was actually heavy. _Passage For Capital_ (2018) was a flatbed-printed metal sculpture masquerading as an accidentally dropped press release. This heartier-than-it-looked piece roved around the gallery space throughout the duration of the show, sometimes being picked up by a surprised onlooker who had perhaps planned to crumple it into a ball and recycle it in a small deed of Good Samaritanism. The sculpture’s material deception recapitulated a recurring theme throughout the exhibition: objects may not behave how we expect them to.

This subtext was especially pronounced in the frames and glass, the apparatuses of display traditionally designed to invisibly showcase their content without disruption. But Goldby’s frames upended this dynamic, instead foregrounding their presence with gusto, relegating the photographs themselves into relative obscurity (65 percent obscurity, to be exact). The resulting effects caused a constant dilation of the pupils as they jumped between image and reflection in a continual cross-dissolve, with actively changing opacity levels and a fluctuating depth of field.

These qualities thrust a dynamism into the static images, in a sense, digitizing them, animating them, amplifying their energy and rocketing them into the now of omnipresent screens and constant interactivity. But in contrast to our beloved touchscreens—their linear scrolls activated by the finger—Goldby’s images responded to movement of the whole body. Rearranging your position in relation to the work seemed to be a necessary dance in order to bypass the reflection and actually _see_ the photographs. I found myself snaking my head to the left, dodging and crouching, squinting and sidling up to the frame trying to side-eye it into submission. Goldby, through his panes of glass, seemed to pass the movement from his hurried subjects onto the audience: suddenly the spectator was the one moving, bobbing and weaving in relation to the now-still commuters.

In this way, the pieces were playful, flirty, frustrating in their coy elusiveness and begging to be photographed. The extreme reflectivity of the Silver 35 film tempted viewers with their own narcissism—a quality that resulted in a wide proliferation of selfies, or at least accidental portraits, sprinkled across social media. The exhibition’s documentation, therefore, went far beyond formalized photographs to include casual, personalized shots, capturing social moments within the gallery space. Goldby, I would guess unwittingly, capitalized on our seeming inabilities to resist our own faces. The seductive allure of grabbing a good selfie provided many, like me, with their first encounter of the work through a handheld screen.

It begs the question then: where does the work actually live? On a screen, in a space or both? And maybe more ambitiously: what’s the role of the framed photograph in a contemporary art gallery these days? This is where I think Goldby got it. These weren’t photos, but interactive objects. Without resorting to video, Goldby created frames that were ever-changing and images that were never static. Almost like an evolutionary adaptation, _Silver 35_ updated photography’s presence in the contemporary art gallery, dispersing cheeky images able to stand on their own across digital channels while still maintaining a unique IRL experience exclusive to the gallery.

By flinging its photographic offspring into the social media-verse, _Silver 35_ capably straddled that still awkward chasm between the analogue and digital, between physical space and its cyber equivalent. It invited the audience to insert themselves into its frames, creating a new network and a reciprocal gaze. Like that startling moment of catching your own reflection in a passing window, Goldby’s pieces never let us forget that while you gaze at them, they’re looking right back at you, too.

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Emma Sharpe reviews Mike Goldy’s exhibition _Silver 35_ at Sibling, Toronto. (November 17 – January 5, 2019).

Mike Goldby: Silver 35

**Justin Langlois** is an artist and Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art & Design. His practice explores collaborative structures, critical pedagogy and custodial frameworks as tools for gathering, learning and making.

Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed’s collaborative practice winds through socially engaged art, unruly educational experiences and long-term institutional interruptions. Multiple Elementary, published and distributed at the moment of Black Dog Publishing’s harrowing implosion, is one of only a few publications dedicated to exploring a single socially engaged project, and a Canadian one at that. Whereas seminal texts by Claire Bishop, Grant Kester or Shannon Jackson tend to explore socially engaged art through encounters with artist projects (either witnessed or by way of archives) alongside larger framing arguments that aim to consolidate a field of practice, Jickling and Reed’s book refuses this model, both in terms of its disregard for any officious canonization of the project and in its ambition to present a constellation of discussions around the foundational concerns of this work.

You may have heard of some of their recent projects carried out as part of _Big Rock Candy Mountain_, which they explain as a “flavour incubator and taste-making think-tank” operating out of classrooms at Queen Alexandra Elementary School in East Vancouver. Last Halloween, they launched a chewing gum-based multiple, _QA Chew’s Bubble Trouble_ (2018), developed through a series of workshops at the school with students, teachers and food scientists. The gum was made available at select retail locations throughout East Vancouver and distributed on Halloween night by homes across the city. Before that, and in collaboration with a Grade 3/4 class and local social enterprise East Van Roasters, they created the _SOUR VS SOUR_ (2017) chocolate bar as an unlimited edition. Created from a series of classroom taste tests, along with field trips to East Van Roasters, the bar clashes both natural and synthetic sour tastes, and kid and adult desires. Laying the foundation for _Big Rock Candy Mountain_, in 2012, Jickling and Reed were artists-in-residence of _The Pedagogical Impulse_, a tri-council-funded research project initiated by Stephanie Springgay at the University of Toronto that explored educational settings and pedagogical approaches as sites for artistic research. While in Ontario, in collaboration with a group of sixth-grade students, Jickling and Reed created _Ask Me Chocolates_ (2012), a limited-edition collection of milk and dark chocolates cast in custom moulds designed by the students. It was this project that served as the catalyst for _Multiple Elementary_.

The collected essays in the book provide meaningful investigations into the ideas that surround the project and contextualize the histories, challenges and ambitions embedded therein. Here, we get a glimpse at a model of disseminating and writing about socially engaged art that activates the social in its very creation. Conversations stop and start, sometimes linking across multiple essays and other times finding their own bit of space to explore. This is less a project report or archive than a document that feels alive, self-aware and unruly. It aligns with the ethic of the work as well as with Jickling and Reed’s larger practice, trusting a polyvocality to bring out the complexity embedded in it.

The book’s sleeve, itself a multiple of sorts, displays all 26 chocolates in the _Ask Me Chocolates_ collection, providing a first peek into the project and foregrounding the role of students as collaborators. On the reverse is each student’s unedited summary of their experience with the project. In a companion text, “Hershey Squirts,” at the end of the book, Jickling and Reed unpack moments with the students through annotations of these brief descriptions. The artists’ careful attention to situating the students’ voices both as a wrapper for the book itself and as a removable poster that has the capacity to wander away from the other texts in the book is indicative of their commitment to seeing that their elementary collaborators can indeed, as the artists write, “secure the first word, and the last.”

In the diverse collection, Sydney Hermant unpacks the notion of “contact high,” a regular ingredient in the duo’s practice, discussed here in relation to children, whose “world is in a constant state of becoming.” Jack Halberstam’s contribution on the wildness of childhood—“the non-verbal, anti-normative, unruly bodily choreographies that constitute experiences of child bodies”—builds on this. Further along, Sita Bhaumik draws linkages to other food-based projects, detailing the stakes of working with food as both a medium and as a site of engagement in and of itself. Bhaumik notes: “While food fluctuates in a precarious state of consumption and disappearance, it creates spaces to tell stories and ask questions.” In passages like this, we are offered a gentle invitation to map the social practices that make Jickling and Reed’s work possible and find bridges towards its relationship with a larger field of artistic concerns. In this vein, Mark Clintberg’s essay looks at the fugitiveness of multiples and links _Ask Me Chocolates_ to a lineage of interrogations of authorship and value through the production of artist multiples, from David Hammons to Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski’s _Conflict Kitchen_ (2010– present). The book concludes with Maiko Tanaka’s incredibly clear “Lexicon for Thinking-with-and-Extending the Knowledge of _Ask Me Chocolates_.” Built with terms like “burr as pedagogue” and “fermentive methods,” it generates the potential for new understandings of and meaningful connections with the work itself—as durational, messy, unruly and unwitnessable as it may be—and provides the language we need to understand its position at the vibrant intersection of pedagogy, participatory research and art.

A study in the formal possibilities of translating a single project through a constellation of activities, ideas and tastes, _Multiple Elementary_ provides an instructive reference point for presenting socially engaged work to new audiences.

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Justin Langlois reviews Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed’s book _Multiple Elementary_ (2018) published by Black Dog Publishing.

Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed: Multiple Elementary

sophia bartholomew (they/them) is a non-binary femme and interdisciplinary artist, currently based in suburban Vancouver. Their forthcoming publication—“Solutions for the Problem of Staying Alive” (M:ST festival, 2020)—is part of an ongoing conversation and collaboration with Calgary-based artist Hannah Doerksen.

I arrive at this exhibition deeply shaken by months of public discourse denying the existence of trans and gender-non-conforming bodies, denying women’s experiences of sexual harassment and rape and deny- ing the basic human rights of displaced people. The artworks in _Not the Camera, But the Filing Cabinet: Performative Body Archives in Contemporary Art_ feel like a safety net, catching me, seeing me, speaking their own stories. At first glance, the room feels crowded, but it quickly becomes clear that the sparse conventions of contemporary exhibition-making have been deliberately flouted in favour of creating an atmosphere of solidarity—a feeling of standing together, arm in arm. In this exhibition, curator Noor Bhangu brings together projects by 10 women, queer and non-binary artists that articulate experiences of emotional intimacy, tenderness, violence and grief. Taken together, they refuse a colonial-capitalist logic of extraction and accumulation, which presumes that knowledge can be removed from human bodies in the way minerals are mined from the earth. Rather, these works assert that knowledge is an exchange requiring due process, mutual vulnerability, relationship and time, and that, in the end, there are many things that cannot be known or shared.

Upon entering the gallery, Dayna Danger’s large-scale photograph _Gi Jiit_ (2017) stands sentinel between two doorways, its subject making unwavering eye contact with the viewer, but turning her glistening body away, a large pair of antlers pressed to her hips. The pink tones of her skin match the flat pink background, becoming expansive. Facing this work are fleshy body fragments, eerily lifelike and built from silicone and foam. These are parts of Susan Aydan Abbott’s _R.O.T. (Rape Over Time)_ (2017) series: a foot, a leg and a section of upper body with purple pooling over a pink-white skin colour, flapping over a curdled yellow. Though both works invoke the leering presence of systemic misogyny, Danger’s subject projects a coded counter-narrative, a wholeness, a certainty, while Abbott’s subject conveys physical dissociation, pain but also healing—processing trauma.

On the left wall are bedsheets billowing on a clothesline and disguising a woman’s body—as seen in Sophie Sabet’s nine-minute-long video work _Though I am Silent, I Shake_ (2017). Here, Sabet gently traces moments of tension in a conversation in Farsi with her mother, as they stumble over definitions of woman- hood, motherhood and gendered family roles. Nearby, Ayqa Khan’s grid of photographs, _untitled_ (2018), feels similarly layered, coded, only partially legible to me. Photographs of photographs pressed up against a body, flowers; a hennaed hand, brown skin, black hairs; a golden anklet, an ankle, skin covered in clear plastic. A screenshot of angry texts from mom: “U fk need to put your life together if u want me to stay in ur life I am done with u.”

Remnants of Christina Hajjar’s performance remain in the back corner of the gallery: rose petals encased in gelatin, carved to form the Arabic word _ghanouj_ —which translates as “spoiled brat”—an affectionate name from her mother. In a glass pitcher are the chewed-up remnants of the carving process, which were first carved with a knife and then passed through her mouth but not swallowed. These residual actions give substance to both the incongruity I imagine is felt in diaspora and to thick layers of cultural inheritance echoed in Sabet’s and Khan’s works.

On the final day of the exhibition, Luna’s performance _que dira la santa madre_ (2018) began with dancing and music, initiating a sense of warmth and celebration, but broke open into sudden and startling grief, recalling the violence of the 1973 Chilean coup with devastating intensity, bringing it into the room and holding it. Similarly, Matea Radic’s gouache and graphite on paper—red, white, grey, black, yellow—diagram how loss lives on, attaching itself to the body. Titled _We’ll Never Be Silent_ (2017) and _They Took You From Us_ (2017), her works commemorate children she knew who died in the Yugoslavian Civil War. Having grown up in Sarajevo, she depicts herself as a young woman, walking the city streets. She is holding a faceless figure, and is being clung to by a grasping shadow.

The theme song from _Match Game ’75_ underscores the entire exhibition: it is the soundtrack from Kablusiak’s video _an exercise in not taking myself so seriously_ (2016). For them, the song is nostalgic—taken from a game show they watched with their mother growing up—but in this context, the chipper melody is so absurd as to be deeply unsettling. In their video, Kablusiak cuts between close-up shots of scars on their wrist, upper arm and upper thigh, tracing them with a bright pink, viscous paint, allowing it to drip down slowly. Beside this work, Leesa Streifler’s painting _Her Body: Fragility: Legs_ (2016) also drips—its pair of aged and emaciated legs covered in streams of translucent purple and green. Here, a phrase from Sarah Ciurysek’s intimate audio work _Dear Mary_ (2013) resounds: “I have been longing to spend time with an old woman, longing for the image of a self-determining woman…” In the 16-minute-long piece, she describes a found photograph, and then goes on to address the old woman—Mary—who it gives her cause to remember.

In a slow and calming voice, she relates the love and admiration she felt from their encounter.

Seen together, these works materialize the violent exclusions of colonial-capitalism’s History and Archives, its forcefully policed categories of Gender, Sexuality, Cultural Identity, Age and Ability, and its newly formed structures for Diversity and Inclusion, which are at best highly inadequate, and at worst disingenuous, insidious. In emphasizing the transference of embodied forms of knowledge, _Not the Camera, But the Filing Cabinet…_ ultimately speaks to something both vital and uncontainable—a web of truth that resists being written down.

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Body

sophia bartholomew reviews the group exhibition _Not the Camera, But the Filing Cabinet: Performative Body Archives in Contemporary Art_ at Gallery1C03, Winnipeg. (September 13 – November 24, 2018).

Not the Camera, But the Filing Cabinet: Performative Body Archives in Contemporary Art

Jesse Cumming is a writer and curator based in Toronto.

<h5>“\_You don’t like drama but it is not really drama because it is virtual\_.”

– Anonymous, _Admirer_</h5>
  
  
In 2015, Finnish artist Pilvi Takala initiated the project _Invisible Friend_, in which she and a host of writers served as digital interlocutors to anyone who texted a specific number during specific hours over a set period. “Send an SMS to 04573963166\. Invisible Friend will text you right back,” read the poster, which was distributed around Helsinki. The service emphasized confidentiality and anonymity, on the part of both participants and responders. Rupturing this system, one participant discovered who was behind the project and bombarded Takala with increasingly aggressive online messages sent via Facebook Messenger and email, using 20 different accounts.

Takala eventually proposed the development of a contract between herself and the individual, the purpose of which—according to the document itself—was “to establish guidelines regarding collaboration in the process of Pilvi Takala’s Work (to be titled later by the Artist),” after which all further communication would be terminated. This five-page document and its attendant email negotiations form the basis of _Admirer_ (2018), a multimedia installation that examines power and gender in digital spaces, with the legally binding contract as a means to tether the exchanges to the lived world.

The correspondence included in the show is almost exclusively contained to the period between the first and final draft of the contract, without any messages sent before the duo’s tentative agreement (to create an agreement). At Stigter van Doesburg, Takala displayed it on eight different flat-screen monitors in an unconventional arrangement, including some screens hung high on the gallery walls and others propped up on the ground. While on any given screen the exchanges were consolidated and linear in their relay, a scan around the room offered fragments of conversations related to different minutiae and concerns from throughout the period, with the steady stream of text amplified by the added audio of keyboard clatter.

Formally, Takala chose to colour-code the exchanges, with Anonymous’ emails on a blue-green background and her own responses on a dark cream. While presumably employed as a means of clarity, it also offers an efficient visual metaphor for the nature of the exchanges, with the room more often than not dominated by Anonymous’ unreserved commentary, which regularly spills out across several consecutive messages, only occasionally punctuated by Takala’s generally clear and unadorned responses.

Amidst notes related to the contract under negotiation and their demands for an eventual exhibition, Anonymous’ emails are regularly littered with insults, threats and appeals for sex, as often as they include claims of love and admiration for Takala, at one point professing viewing her as “a kind of godly figure.”

“I do not want sex,” responds Takala in one of her typically direct and unambiguous responses that adheres to the well-established online axiom of not feeding the trolls. “The contract makes it perfectly clear why these messages are exchanged.”

_Admirer_ was first exhibited in the Finnish National Gallery’s Kiasma museum, as part of a larger show entitled _Second Shift_ dedicated to Takala’s video work. The latter title’s reference to Arlie Russell Hochschild and Anne Machung’s book on the double burden placed on working mothers extends to the concepts of emotional labour that exist at the core of _Admirer_, with a particular emphasis on the gendered nature of online abuse.

In a number of past performance and video works, Takala has infiltrated and upset coded spaces like offices, shopping malls and public transit with her unconventional actions, serving to place the often invisible standards of such quotidian locations into stark relief. With Admirer she does the same in a digital space, proving that for women and other marginalized people, the long-trumpeted claims of the internet being democratized, utopian and emancipatory are unfounded.

Scholar Emma A. Jane has proposed “e-bile” and “cyber VAWG (Violence Against Women and Girls)” as useful terms that encompass several forms of online abuse, including trolling, cyberbullying and cyberstalking. In her research, she has analyzed and established a taxonomy of responses from women faced with e-bile of varying degrees, including distancing, rationalizing, technological hygiene and “digilante” activism, which can include exposing the identity of the abuser.

The premise of the latter and the broader tension between anonymity and exposure emerges as the crux of _Admirer_, something Takala makes explicit in one of her responses, writing: “I am interested in our positions which are different, you being anonymous and me being an artist, the maker of this piece, and not a private person. Both positions have their pros and cons, both hold a certain power over the other.”

One imagines that the use of the name Anonymous for Takala’s admirer exists as an explicit invocation of the nebulous digital activist group of the same name, suggesting the various ways in which anonymity can be wielded for particular means, whether political or personal. While potentially a means for political disruption, the position of anonymity also enables abuse with impunity. Additionally, anonymity forestalls any real connections and hinders potentials for meaningful, mutual trust, something Takala repeatedly reminds her communicant-cum-collaborator.

“I want the exhibition visitors to sign a contract before seeing the exhibition which says that they won’t try to find out the anonymous identity,” writes Anonymous, early in their exchanges. This request is (partly) heeded in the contract and in subsequent installations through the inclusion of an additional monitor at the exhibition entrance that serves to implicate any visitor into the duo’s arrangement, declaring: “ATTENTION! By entering this room, you agree to make no attempts to identify Anonymous. Please, DO NOT ENTER if you cannot agree to the condition.”

The uncertainty around this condition is discussed in the duo’s exchanges, and written into the contract, which _also_ requires that Takala provide an opportunity for visitors to contact Anonymous if they’d like. “I dont want to be anonymus. Of course i want real friends” \[sic\], they write at one point. Throughout the piece, Anonymous seems to be openly weighing the value of revelation, whether as a means for connection or as an exertion of power. Such a point is made explicit in a de facto coda to the piece, a series of (unanswered) emails from Anonymous sent around the date of the exhibition’s opening—long after the conclusion of their negotiations—in which they threaten to expose Takala’s “sociopathy” to the museum. “I will do it with my real name and if they don’t believe the email i will go there in person so they will definitely believe,” they write, before eventually backtracking in the final written exchange, in an act of sophistry and unsettling pseudo-“incel” ideology that serves as the end of the piece while hinting at its continuation in countless online exchanges. “Actually nevermind, not sending the message, I’m such a reasonable person. Even if I’m being treated badly I don’t do that to others.”

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Jesse Cumming reviews Pilvi Takala’s video installation _Admirer_ (2018) at Stigter van Doesbug, Amsterdam. (January 26 – February 23, 2019).

Pilvi Takala: Admirer

Caitlin Chaisson is an independent curator and critic based in New York. 

_“But John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition \[…\] So I will let it alone and talk about the house.”_  
– Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)

These are familiar little things. Unfolding like a banquet of discriminating tastes, I savour the trifles in silver, fastening ties sweetly knotted, trims dressed in wooden pearls. On first entering the room, the sculptures appear in carnivorous arrangement, a tangled density in which shapes assume and consume other shapes. But as I advance, step after step, the pieces settle into good-humoured positions and remain handsomely spaced at an agreeable distance. Anne Low’s solo exhibition, _Chair for a woman_, features six meticulously crafted sculptures that could be classified as: a writing desk, a fire screen, a stool, a step, a chair, a doorway. The finely made pieces appear summoned out of ancient palaces and historic parlour rooms, bringing with them the affects of their matrilineal relations. 

The gallery bulletin claims the exhibition disrupts strategies of display in decorative arts museums, but stakes this assertion almost entirely on the pale implications of a bespoke plinth. Its lancet shape transects each of the uncased sculptures in an unusual way, but to think that this gesture somehow unhinges museum customs or conventions is unsatisfying. But rather than dwelling on the incorrigible nature of exhibition practices, I will let it alone and talk about the sculptures. They offer an understanding of the sometimes surprising and circumstantial nature of object use, and the expectations we have for materials around us to perform. 

I am charmed into the space by _Ancestress_ (2018), a maple writing desk with a drawer pulled slightly ajar. A scrap of green-striped cloth plugs the space where there might have once been a knob, a handle, or— perhaps—even a keyhole, to guard the loose-leaf contained within. Atop the surface of the desk is a sheet of paper a stubby eraser, three silver casts of candle stubs, and two pencils foil-stamped with the phrases “bent back branches” and “in a thicket,” respectively. As though hastily abandoned, the undecipherable note on the desktop appears sealed into the varnish itself, the blotched confidences absorbed into the sculptural form. _Ancestress_ coyly makes reference to Edith Wharton’s novel _Age of Innocence_ (1920), a love story whose tragedy is owed to the aristocratic social mores of old New York. The sylvan fragments inscribed on the pencils allude to the moment when Wharton’s protagonist is caught in a lie of affections; the thorny graphite points are reminders of how easily one might find oneself ensnarled. But Low’s attentiveness to craftsmanship—particularly towards objects produced and owned by women—suggests that _Ancestress_ is less a proposition of romantic longing than an homage to the author herself. Wharton’s personal history encompasses that of both novelist and esteemed designer. In addition to her Pulitzer-prize winning title, Wharton co-authored _The Decoration of Houses_ (1897) with architect Ogden Codman, Jr., which quickly became an iconic manual. The repressive dictates of idleness and censured employment prescribed to the particular class of women to which Wharton—and many of Low’s other influences—belong are impudently challenged here. 

How hungrily we peer into private spaces, I think, as I find myself pulled towards the far end of the gallery, which is flanked by another discreet opening. _Bed chamber of a paper stainer (wall)_ (2018) is a relief sculpture that has been affixed directly to the white wall of the gallery. A hand-painted wallpaper clads the sculptural surface with the coiled tendrils of grape vines. The architectural fragment is entirely emptied of its framing details, apart from a heavy black moulding that adorns the doorway “opening” into the exhibition space. The doorknob is conspicuously missing, but this time the gaping hole is plugged with a crumpled piece of paper. I am tempted into the angled space behind the hinged door, where flaking papers have been scrappily pastiched and blotched by the occasional illegible mark. Three sheets of softly flocked wallpapers are neatly poised over the door, as though readied to finish the job of covering the hesitant untidiness of the previous styling. I think of the desire to pull off yards of the old and embrittled paper, under circumstances where the decorative gesture might be read less as frivolity and more as a self-sustaining gesture of occupation and activity within domestic space. 

These sleights of openness keep me captive; this is the great curiosity of the work. The rest of the bric-a-brac is fussily congregated in the centre of the room. Everything has been so thoroughly touched: hand-painted, hand-woven, hand-dyed, hand-forged. But the clever details are not just ornament to the structural form, or subservient to some firmer substance. In the titular work of the exhibition, _Chair for a woman_ (2018), a maple and basswood lion-footed frame lacks the actual seat that would be needed to constitute the piece as a proper chair, but care has been taken to apply subtle mother of pearl inlay to the vampiric puncture wounds in the joinery. Unconcerned with use-value—whether it will hold, whether it will close, whether it will bear weight—the sculptures are withdrawn into the tensions of making.

Appreciating these sculptures in the contemporary moment lodges an unsettling feeling in my chest. The continuity between past and present, which Low has materialized through crafts left alone by time, is marred by small gestures of pinching and plugging, cramming and scratching. I wonder what shock led to the draining of colour from the upholstered stool, _Dead blood_ (2018), and I am concerned by the jerky countenance laboriously sequined across _Grubby_ (2018), a decorative fire screen guarded by an armour of cheerfulness. The exactitude and finesse of each sculpture is subtended by acts that are only vain in the sense that they aim to recoup an element of privacy and power in a space of such small allowance. I keep myself busy appreciating every considered detail in impossible proportion, to somehow offset the narrowness of a life imposed.

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Caitlin Chaisson reviews Anne Low’s solo exhibition _Chair for a woman_ at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. (January 18 – March 24, 2019).

Anne Low: Chair for a woman

Sheila Regan writes about dance, visual art and performance, with bylines appearing in _Hyperallergic, Bomb, artnet News, The Minneapolis Star Tribune_ and other publications.

A monument is a kind of story. It tells the narrative of a place, a time and a people, and it does so from a very particular perspective, just like history books. And just as the veracity of history books suffers from their having been written by those in power, monuments are built by ruling forces. In the innovative two-channel video piece _Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer 1 & 2_ (2018) Sky Hopinka reaches back into a specific facet of Native American history in order to deconstruct it and ultimately offer a more complex version. 

The oldest masonry fort in the US, San Marcos, also known as Fort Marion, was built in 1685 by the Spanish, and changed hands among Spain, Britain, the United States and the Confederate States of America six times in total. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, under US control, the fort was used to imprison people from a number of different Native American tribes, including the Seminole, the Chiricahua Apache, the southern Cheyenne and members of the Plains tribes. While imprisoned, many prisoners created ledger art—an artform with roots in Plains Hide painting—which has survived and is brought to life here in Hopinka’s visual document. In developing _Cloudless_, Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, spent time at San Marcos, located in St. Augustine, Florida, as well as at the St. Augustine Historical Society Research Library, where much of the ledger art created by Native Americans imprisoned in the fort is kept today. 

The two videos book-ended an evening of Hopinka’s films at the CAVE Festival, but are also known to have been shown simultaneously on opposite sides of a gallery. Both channels frame the immensity of the ocean as an ominous presence locking in the prison and its prisoners, capturing the water’s danger and role in San Marcos’ isolation. In the first channel, indigo water billows toward the camera, seemingly floating on the surface, bobbing above and below. The second uses a lens that distorts the water’s shape, as if the viewer were looking through a prism. The water seems to move in slow motion, and is accompanied by echoing sounds that recall a well or a sewer. The fort, which had dungeons in the basement, was once surrounded by a 40-foot-wide moat (now filled with sand), and guarded by a watchtower that had a clear view of the surrounding area, including an inlet leading to the Atlantic Ocean. 

After the watery beginning, the first channel shifts to the fort itself. The camera hovers outside of its sinister windows and grim walls while text by the Seminole warrior Coacoochee, describing his ingenious escape from the prison in 1837, scrolls over the screen. According to his testimony, he and his fellow escapees purposefully lost enough weight in order to abscond through a window. The video concludes with a long shot of the fort, which Hopinka slowly overlays with a baby blue fade that bleeds into the fort’s formidable structure, eventually making it look as though the building is flying. As Robin D.G. Kelley writes in _Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination_ (2002), “The most radical art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling.” Following the sequence of shots that illustrate the fort’s forbidding presence, the dreamlike last trick of the camera acts as a clever way of disrupting not only the dominance of the monument’s physicality but also, by extension, its atrocious, traumatic legacy. 

Much of the second channel is spent examining ledger drawings and sketches that were made by those held at San Marcos, beginning in the 1870s. At that time, the fort was supervised by Richard Henry Pratt, a proponent of aggressive assimilation tactics, who provided ledger paper and art supplies for the prisoners as a way of “rehabilitating” them. Ironically, ledger art became a tool for Plains Indians and others to preserve their own cultural traditions. As Diane Glancy writes in _Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education_ (2014), “Captain Pratt cut the prisoners’ hair and dressed them in army uniforms. He sat them in chairs at a table. Captain Pratt gave them ledger books. At first, they drew to remember. But then drawing became an act of memory. They remembered because they drew.” Depicting hunting scenes, battles and circus performers, the 150-year-old drawings today provide insight into the subjectivities, memories and imaginations of their makers. 

At one point in the second channel, a cellphone camera comes into view and snaps a photo of one of the drawings. Here, Hopinka points firstly to a new, self-determined means of constructing history, one that leaves traditional archival processes out of the equation. Secondly, the moment reveals the importance of inscribing such a deeply personal layer of this history into our contemporary psyche—a layer of nuance not included in school curricula—and for these overlooked histories to move beyond the walls of tidy, sterile archival rooms and into general public consciousness. 

Whereas the first channel included the words of Coacoochee’s escape, the second features descriptions of prisoners’ experiences taken from Glancy’s book, such as this observation of Howling Wolf, who became well known for his artistic ability: “After Howling Wolf saw the ocean, he thought the moon was water. It had the same marks as the shore where they walked. He knew there were waves on the moon as they looked at it above them.” Later, Hopinka includes the poetic words of Cheyenne artist Bear’s Heart, from Glancy’s book: “I dreamed they tied a pencil to my hand. I dreamed they tied the ocean to our beds.” Like the ledger drawings created by Howling Wolf and others, Bear’s Heart’s quote speaks to the power of imagination as a tool for surviving the most inhumane degradation.

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Sheila Regan reviews Sky Hopinka’s two-channel video work _Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer_ at the Festival of Cinematic and Audio Visual Experimentation (CAVE), Minneapolis. (January 5, 2019).

Header

C Mag

Issue 142

Monument

Credits

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Monument

Explore Issue by Images

Features

We Didn’t Know What the Monument Meant Until Someone Said It Should Be Removed

How to Have an AIDS Memorial in an Epidemic

“I am the colour of burnt pineapple, mango, lemon”: An Interview with Stephanie Comilang

Benchin

Trauma as Monument

Histories and Setups: Interview with Life of a Craphead

Not One Monument but 12: Re-memorializing the Stonewall Riots

Artist Projects

The Bell at the End of Time

Reviews

Steven Cottingham: Heat, Death

Mike Goldby: Silver 35

Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed: Multiple Elementary

Not the Camera, But the Filing Cabinet: Performative Body Archives in Contemporary Art

Pilvi Takala: Admirer

Anne Low: Chair for a woman

Sky Hopinka: Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer

Esmé Weijun Wang: The Collected Schizophrenias

Tamara Lee-Anne Cardinal: Mekinawewin, to give a gift

Vajiko Chachkhiani: They Kept Shadows Quiet