Column

Writer

Gather

issue-147-p16-19.pdf

Poetry

Social

A poetic composition by Rob Jackson and Mackenzie Ground engaging the relationship between the sociopoetics of gathering and nêyihaw (Cree) perspectives on treaty.

Composition: Alongside Underbrush

Jenna Swift is an independent writer and artist based on the Canadian Prairies.

Breath travels. Our mouths are broken-open places—a house where only wind lives, searching the cupboards and closets. I replace your missing mouths with those of jars, mines, graves. What is gathered and dissipated by mouth? Once alternately filled and emptied, the cloistered breath swallows itself—\_Dies irae\_, desire drawn back in along a taut, slender rope. 

When my late father was a child, he helped as a seasonal farmhand on an arid ranch near the Old Man On His Back Plateau. Lent out to extended family for manual labour, he carried a deep scarring love originating from that corner of southwestern Saskatchewan. Each scarce story I’ve been told from that time seems to encompass beauty and desolation in equal measure. As a child made responsible for the care of roaming cattle, he was dropped into the grasslands underprovisioned. To quench his thirst, he would search for cairns of culled fieldstones where a relative had hidden caches of water. The mythos surrounding that specific choreography of searching parches my genes also—evaporation a kind of deletion. 

I subtract with my tongue; what I miss becomes inscribed on the roof of my mouth. My seemingly inexorable breathing is an extension of my father’s final exhalation that, left alone, could not last. The you I address now is diffuse. When the last breath is out and gone, its innate circularity is broken. Breath leaks from us invisibly, a kind of vector beyond the prone form, as in sleep, pointing toward a sense of relation beyond this discreet, visceral loop. Our many overlapping breaths accumulate. Dreams trace their circular logic through the air. I imagine what is under each breath as being weighted under a cairn. What traverses the pleural space among a pile of rocks? Vows and accusations make an instrument of heaped stones. The placement of these stones is a commitment to memory, the repetition of which we perform over time. 

What we can’t hold in our mouths or hands, we’ll hold with our eyes. When craving to gather the world closer still, I often think of “Savoir,” an essay by Hélène Cixous recounting the author’s myopia and subsequent vision correction. Cixous observes that “eyes are miraculous hands … the delicate tact of the cornea, the eyelashes, the most powerful hands, these hands that touch imponderably near and far-off heres. … Violent gentleness, brusque apparition, lifting eyelids and the world is given to her in the hands of her eyes.”[^1] 

Seeking out the glacial erratic in Okotoks, AB, recently, I found such near and far-off heres.[^2] The attractive magnetism of mutual loneliness drove me out of town at midnight under the pretext of viewing the comet NEOWISE,[^3] though I did not encounter the remoteness I expected. Viewing the comet from a ballast of massive, quartzite boulders were dozens of others—flashlights bouncing off the fragmented rock faces in glimpses. 

“This constant looking out! Is it the hunter inside me, or the lonely one? What different things do they make me see?”[^4] 

It is possible to love based on outline alone, that you can love shapes even as they recede in the dark. The reason we can see the tails of comets is by virtue of their evaporation nearing the sun. Sitting in the negative space between the cleaved boulders at the Okotoks Erratic, I could smell the cloaking charge of pollen accumulating. It is said in many cultures that bees are messengers of the dead. Inert stones house the narrowing and closing of time before propolis seals them together as tightly as forgetting. Propolis functions as a kind of glue manufactured by bees to seal cracks detected in their hive. As a matter of duration, it is possible to imagine the split rock healed into a unified whole again. The saliva of bees, mixed with beeswax and botanical resins, speaks the pathway shut. 

The dead, in their bone forests, know the weather first. Predictions borne in the ground spread as leaching cold or surface humidity. Seeds can carry these secrets for generations. Outside of the Toronto Magnetic and Meteorological Observatory, I gathered seed heads from dormant hydrangea stalks. Plant life exists as an inherent form of instrumentation as keen as any anemometer, measuring wind speed and direction. At the time of this private ritual act of collection, I did not know of the Observatory’s role in an historical, worldwide research project to determine the cause of fluctuations in magnetic declination. Measurements originating from this site discerned that sunspots are responsible for this effect on Earth’s magnetic field. What does it mean to inhabit this space between earth and sky? What responsibilities are incurred? 

Early in my own grief, the wavering compass needle found me in a cemetery sowing these seeds as weather and communion. Rather than feigning an unearned closeness, this communication progressed slowly—germinating murmurs underground. Surrounded by the graves of strangers, it was my father I was still searching for. Sunspots in my eyes misdirected me… 

I caution you—rinse your hearts through the sieve your hands make, but don’t wring them. Return the heart to its rib cage by blinking hard and swallowing. The metallic cold of the spigot resounds in an aching there. An invisible weight of stones holds the heart’s place upon each retrieval. By the time you look up again, the flashlight of canola fields will have been switched on. 

[^1]: Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, _Veils_, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford University Press, 2001).
[^2]: The Okotoks Erratic is a 16,500-tonne boulder, cracked down its centre and isolated on the surrounding prairie. Originating from a distant rockslide 10,000 to 30,000 years ago near what is now Jasper, AB, the Okotoks Erratic travelled to its present location on a sheet of glacial ice, where it was deposited following the glacier’s subsequent abatement at the close of the last ice age.
[^3]: NEOWISE is the moniker for the telescope that first identified the comet—the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.
[^4]: Lorna Crozier, _Small Mechanics_ (McClelland & Stewart, 2011).

issue-147-p62-64.pdf

A poetic prose piece by writer and artist Jenna Swift.

Composition: Evaporative Losses

Henry HeavyShield is a Blackfoot (kainaiwa) writer who is currently based in Lac La Biche, AB. He has studied English and Indigenous literatures at the University of Lethbridge and University of British Columbia. He would like to thank his brother and sisters for their support and his aunts and uncles for their guidance.

I first visited Iniskim Umaapi, the Majorville Medicine Wheel, in 2017\. I had recently dropped out of graduate school and moved back home from Vancouver, homesick for the wide open Prairie. Moonlighting as a chauffeur for the day, I borrowed my sister’s Pontiac Montana and picked up a group of _Niitsitapi_ youth and their caseworkers and my mom in Standoff, AB. Thanks to my infallible, GPS\-like sense of direction we got lost twice, only. 

The site isn’t particularly difficult to find; we headed east on the highway from Lethbridge, then hit some gravel stretches and, finally, winding dirt roads carved in crown land. The ruts did a number on the Montana’s suspension but like a true rez car, she proved her strength. There, at its base, we met archaeologist and historian Blair First Rider, who led us up to the medicine wheel’s summit. Following his prayer and offering of thanks, he welcomed us to walk the site before we went _iniskim_ hunting. 

Medicine wheels are stone structures consisting, albeit with variations among subgroups, of a centre mound surrounded by spokes, corridors, or crosses connected to a perimeter wheel. They hold practical and symbolic value for _Niitsitapi_; the wheels are astrological tools, altars, boundary markers, and calendars. They also designate important hunting sites, sources for collecting medicine, sanctuaries for dreams, and most significantly, places for people to gather. Iniskim Umaapi is centred on top of a large hill at 900 m above sea level. A stone cairn, which is about 10 m in diameter and about 2 m tall, composes the wheel’s hub, and from this centre radiate 26 to 28 spokes. The stones vary in size, shape, and colour but if there’s one thing they have in common, it’s that they’re all large enough to have required serious work for the Old People to transport and assemble. 

I chose a random spoke, and walked out until I reached one of the perimeter rings. I was awed by scale, standing on a mountain in the middle of the Prairie with untold vantage: the sky, the river valley, the dark sliver of the Rockies on the western horizon and the Cypress Hills to the east. Having just been told the wheel began construction 5,000 years ago, I felt small and impermanent but, above all, connected. The open ness of the landscape engulfs me; _I am home_. 

These stones have travelled through time, through countless generations; throughout the millennia, they and the land upon which they’re arranged have carried different meanings and uses for their visitors. Liz Bryan, in _Stone by Stone_, notes that, according to astronomers who have analyzed the site, Iniskim Umaapi’s architecture accurately marks the position of sunrises and sunsets for the solstices and equinoxes, as well as seasonal positions of _Iipisowaahs_, the Morning Star. When the Old People placed these stones, they made scientific instruments. Based on the presence of offerings recovered during archaeologic digs of the site, others saw, and indeed still see today, a place of spiritual significance, a place of meditation, and a place to express gratitude. Perhaps for others, still, the stones were practical, useful; it must have been easy, from the hilltop, to spot herds moving across the land or to gauge the distance of neighbouring camps. I wonder, too, if the stones of the medicine wheel weren’t also, like tipi rings, a way of writing on the landscape, stories in stones. 

On the side of a coulee sloping toward the Bow River, Blair explains what we’re looking for: pieces of baculite, the fossilized remains of cephalopods, dwellers of the oceans that covered what is now Southern Alberta during the late Cretaceous period, approximately 100–66 million years ago. When whole, the fossils look like thick rib bones covered with an iridescent shell. Baculites break easily along the seams or septa of their former shell and the resulting pieces are what we refer to as _iniskim_: buffalo-calling stones, redolent of bison, complete with a head, humped back, and legs. A rock, it seems, isn’t always a rock. 

Once, during a time of famine, as winter gripped the Prairie, the bison herds had migrated and wouldn’t return. Game became scarce and the people began to starve. Weasel-Woman was sent from camp to hunt or gather firewood. On her way back, she heard a voice. She followed the chirp-chirping to its source, where she found a peculiarly shaped stone wrapped in fur. The stone called out to her, and when she picked it up, it taught her a song and ceremony that, when shared with her people and performed, allowed them to call back the herds, guaranteeing a successful hunt and ending the famine. The stone taught Weasel-Woman to cast it as if it were a die. If the stone landed face down, she was promised happiness and bounty for her and her family. I find an _iniskim_, and throw it. Likewise: it lands face down. Because the stone is slightly concave, the outside of the curve, which has the bison’s face, is also always the heaviest side. Throwing an iniskim, then, is a bit like rolling loaded dice. 

In Leslie Marmon Silko’s _Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit_, she writes that “\[t\]hose who pay no attention to rocks may be surprised, but the appearance of a rock may change from hour to hour.” Describing one of her walks around the lava hills near Tucson, AZ, she finds a shape-shifting basalt forma tion that, depending on the light, angle, and time of day, sometimes takes on the appearance of a bear. The _iniskim_ and the stones of the medicine wheel are indeed shape-shifters, too. Through time, the stones change depending on what use we have for them. The constant, however, is that they connect past and present. In researching the etymology of Iniskim Umaapi, I have been unable to find an adequate translation for the name’s second half. After consulting with family and knowledge-keepers, I find the closest word is _aomoii’pi_, which means “to gather all people to one spot.” Iniskim Aomoii’pi is a place of gathering, both in the explicit sense of coming together as family or community, but also as a means of gathering through time, with the Old People who came before us. 

lg_Henry Heavyshield.jpeg

md_Henry Heavyshield.jpeg

sm_Henry Heavyshield.jpeg

thumbnail_Henry Heavyshield.jpeg

Henry Heavyshield.jpeg

issue-147-p64-66.pdf

Indigenous

Time

Henry HeavyShield notates his reflections on a guided visit to Iniskim Umaapi (aka the Majorville Medicine Wheel), a 5,000-year-old gathering site on Treaty 7 territory with great practical, symbolic, and spiritual significance to Niitsitapi. Through an absorbing narrative that weaves wisdom from many different thinkers, he charts connections within the space that link past, present, and future.

One Thing: A Rock Isn’t Always a Rock

lg_VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeB.png

md_VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeB.png

sm_VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeB.png

thumbnail_VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeB.png

VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeB.png

md_VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeA.png

sm_VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeA.png

thumbnail_VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeA.png

VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeA.png

Varley 1

md_Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_mobile.jpg

sm_Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_mobile.jpg

thumbnail_Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_mobile.jpg

Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_mobile.jpg

md_Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_banner.jpg

sm_Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_banner.jpg

thumbnail_Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_banner.jpg

Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_banner.jpg

Federation of Canadian Artists 1

thumbnail_Eyelevel-CMAG-WebAD-B.jpg

Eyelevel-CMAG-WebAD-B.jpg

md_Eyelevel-CMAG-WebAd-A.jpg

sm_Eyelevel-CMAG-WebAd-A.jpg

thumbnail_Eyelevel-CMAG-WebAd-A.jpg

Eyelevel-CMAG-WebAd-A.jpg

eyelevel

md_C_MAG_call_mobile.jpg

sm_C_MAG_call_mobile.jpg

thumbnail_C_MAG_call_mobile.jpg

C_MAG_call_mobile.jpg

lg_C_MAG_call_web.jpg

md_C_MAG_call_web.jpg

sm_C_MAG_call_web.jpg

thumbnail_C_MAG_call_web.jpg

C_MAG_call_web.jpg

Artch 1

thumbnail_300x250.png

300x250.png

md_970x180.png

sm_970x180.png

thumbnail_970x180.png

970x180.png

TBA (b)

md_cover image.jpg

sm_cover image.jpg

thumbnail_cover image.jpg

cover image.jpg

Editorial

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

Ginger Carlson is a writer and curator based in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, on Treaty 7 territory.

Natasha Chaykowski is a writer and curator based on Treaty 7 Territory in Calgary. Currently, she is the Director of Untitled Art Society.

The story of this issue begins with the provisional confluence of C Magazine and a committee of the Alberta Association of Artist-run Centres (AAARC) who have spent more than two years planning a gathering called Lands to Travel Through (LTTT) in partnership with the Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Conference (ARCA). Following an early April editorial advisory meeting, it became clear on C’s end that the shifts brought on by the pandemic and the groundswell of Black Lives Matter activism would come to have inextricable influence on the formation of the Autumn issue: specifically, the paradox of so urgently, vitally, needing to convene, during a time with unparalleled restrictions on gathering. Scheduled for August 2020 in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, LTTT was to address many facets of artist-centred organizing, including a focus on resources: limited resources, sharing resources, resources in the context of capitalism’s perennially churning demand of growth and accumulation, and integrally: how can such logics be resisted through artist-centred models? When the physical gathering had to be postponed as a result of the pandemic, AAARC sought to pursue a project that would honour and extend from plans already made, while also considering the gathering’s concerns in concert with C’s editorial team’s own, replete with distinct yet overlapping conditions, contexts, and contributors. After many conversations among us, and an agreement to share resources (itself a form of radical collaboration that is rather unprecedented at C, and an enactment of some of the central aims of LTTT), the “Gather” theme was established, and we began to think anew of what the word means at its very core: not only for us humans, but all of “us”—stones, gravestones, Prairie grass, comets, seeds, travelling envelopes, berries, buried jugs of water, frozen pixels, iridescent sheets of acetate, bees—who comprise the many concentric circles of our shared world.

The issue opens with an interview with Elders Jerry Saddleback and Jo-Ann Saddleback, who together own and operate Câhcacêp Art & Tea House in Amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton (Treaty 6 territory). Throughout their discussion with Dawn Saunders Dahl, they “illuminate the importance of intentionality in all aspects of life,” and emphasize how the pandemic has forced us to pay closer attention to the ways we gather. As Jo-Ann puts it: “I think we have a great opportunity to really pay attention to the space that we’re occupying, especially the space between us. Like our Old People say, there are a million deities that we can’t even see between you and me.” Such a fulsome examination of the amorphous, universal, and specific experience of sharing space with others sets the stage for many more contributions that home in on the profoundly complex, sensuous, and shimmering nature of gathering, within and exceeding the particularities and impossibilities imposed by our current pandemic- engendered life.

“Spaces like \[this\] don’t just appear, they must be painstakingly created and maintained,” writes Kelsey Adams in “My Words Will Heal You: On RISE Edutainment.” Here, she’s referring to the many spaces created by Randell Adjei, the founder, director, and host of RISE Edutainment, who has spent the past seven years ardently organizing and empowering folks from marginalized communities—largely from the outskirts of Toronto—through music and performance. Boasting 28,000 guests since the organization’s start, “Adjei himself is unsure if he’ll ever fully grasp the impact that RISE has had on artists and the general community throughout the city.” Closing one’s eyes for a moment, the immensity of the endless speculation of this impact blossoms out. How do we affect each other? How do we leave impressions, breadcrumb-like, as we move through our lives? How do these impressions unfurl into unseen constellations constantly? How can we connect with these constellations in times of separation? RISE did partner with the Art Gallery of York University and Jane Street Speaks to mount Remote Control—a version of their regular performance series, but sited on Instagram—which functioned as a candid and deeply felt arena for folks to process what was transpiring in the wake of George Floyd’s death, an arena for “transmuting pain into power.” Ultimately, Adjei “wants to leave behind a legacy, one rooted in community care,” and his reflections on how to centre that sparkle with wisdom, hope, and joy.

Indeed, our ways of gathering have shifted just as the shared world we inhabit has evolved, adapted, and existed in symbiosis for many billions of years. In her in-depth consideration of Christina Battle’s ongoing project seeds are meant to disperse (2015–), Mercedes Webb considers the nutritious-yet-punk methods Battle uses to disseminate seeds as a form of anti-capitalist resource sharing. Battle uses seeds to create virtual, ancestral, anarchist, and physical spaces of gathering, all in the form of gardens: feral, small, connected, expansive, related. “seeds are meant to disperse is an unrulier endeavour, one that summons the whims of seeds outside of the auspices of human control,” as Webb writes. What is the role of humans within the multiple agentic systems that make up our shared realities? And how can we shift our ways of being to better enact reciprocity with and care for our other-than-human relations? To put one’s hands in the earth, to care for tender sprouts, to nurture growth is, after all, such a communion, and outside of colonial-linear time. To plant a seed is to gather with those who’ve come before us, and those who are to come still.

Diffuse forms of gathering and the handling of living matter to unite geographically disparate communities are similarly considered by L. Sasha Gora in “Cooking the Books: Recipes by Artists.” In it, she takes us on a grand tour of several decades’ worth of artist cookbooks and asks: “How are these \[cookery\] collections venues for communication, ways to gather? How do recipes connect people, plants, and places, both near and afar?” Whether documents of meals past, instructions for future ones, or one of many wild card approaches to the recipe format, Gora’s colourful examination of this specific strain of art publishing reminds us of the invisible choreographer behind every recipe, “pull\[ing\] and push\[ing\] our bodies like each limb is attached to a string.” The intimacy (sometimes playful, sometimes pressuring) inherent in the relationship between recipe writer and reader is touched upon, as are the power dynamics entrenched in local, national, and international food-production systems. Food, cooking, eating: all ways in which we are all eternally connected.

In “Reading Images Against Racism,” Su-Ying Lee gives a critical overview of the representation of yet another meeting place—wet markets, or shìchǎng in Mandarin—in western media following the hypothesis that COVID\-19 was born of one in Wuhan, China. After being stricken by her art world peers’ unscrupulous sharing of articles that employed images that augment racist content, Lee identifies an urgency to return to the essentials of visual and media literacy. In doing so, she traces the connections between wet markets—which “reflect and affirm the cultures and traditions formed by communities over hundreds of years“—and the internet as gathering places, and the tangible impacts that one’s behaviour in the latter has on the former. “Ultimately, the condemnation of wet markets is merely one example of how gathering spaces are besieged by whiteness and other forms of normativity that are corroborated by poor media literacy, denying groups their essential places and ways of living and being together.” Following discussions with curator Heather Rigg about the politics of the representation of marginalized people in photography, Lee leaves the reader with the imperative for embodied reading as a methodology to counter white supremacist propaganda, “taking agency to unravel imperialistic images and their claims to veracity.” Readers are called to consider the ways that images are sites of congress, and thus to acknowledge their responsibilities to those with whom they gather through images, those who are imaged.

To think further about the ways that the body can spur new conditions, Christiana Myers turns to the roles that artists and institutions alike can take up in creating spaces using lenses of accessibility that are sincerely empowering, and advance artistic discourse. In “Crip Hope,” she begins by outlining some of the logics by which disabled and chronically ill audiences and artists have been, and continue to be, left out of conversations and spaces that seek to be perceived as inclusive and open to all. As the pandemic precipitates a shift in how institutions understand and attend to the safety and vulnerability of bodies, Myers asks: how might this shift translate into concrete changes that “allow for fluid, intuitive, and flexible access,” with “the capacity to enrich the engagement of a diverse range of visitors, blurring the hard lines between disability accommodation and alternative gallery experiences”?

Aislinn Thomas’s artist project (one of, exceptionally, two in this issue) A convex, minutely puckered surface could be called a vertical sea unfolds across media, between the physical pages of this issue as video stills intersected with writing by Daniella Sanader, and online, where the video may be viewed in full with or without closed captioning. Riffing on the accessibility format known as visual description, the project captures an abstracted portrait of Thomas’s domestic space, which is continually re-rendered in words read aloud by writer and poet Anna Bowen. Her imaginative musings, metaphors, and other non-literal interpretations amount to an expansive, experimental visual description that conjures “clouds in long white streams overhead” and “blown glass hot out of the fire” from unassuming forms. As Sanader reflects, Bowen’s “vocal description is not secondary to Aislinn’s video—not a reactive measure or a quick attempt at compliance—but rather, the two formats are deeply entwined. They grow and adapt; it’s an ongoing conversation.”

The first of two Composition columns (another reflection of this issue’s unusual, abundant nature) is a collaboration by Mackenzie Ground and Robert Jackson, a nehiyaw writer and a settler writer, respectively, who use a shared poetry practice to attempt to cut trails through the dense bush. “Alongside Underbrush” is one outcome of their mutual effort to unearth, understand, and rewrite settler-Indigenous relationships—especially as they have been and continue to be oriented around treaties—and to work toward futures that have purposefully severed the tendrils of colonial oppression. The second Composition column, by Jenna Swift, uses the sturdy warp of loss, loneliness, “a house where only wind lives,” with a weft of ineffable wonder to weave a rare material of words that holds the way Prairie wind smells in the dark, the way water feels on parched lips. “Our many overlapping breaths accumulate. Dreams trace their circular logic through the air. I imagine what is under each breath as being weighted under a cairn. What traverses the pleural space among a pile of rocks?” she writes.

In this issue’s One Thing column, “A Rock Isn’t Always a Rock,” Henry HeavyShield writes about his first visit to the inexactly named Iniskim Umaapi, a 5,000-year-old medicine wheel in what is now known as Treaty 7 Territory, lands that the Blackfoot have called home since time immemorial. “In researching the etymology of Iniskim Umaapi, I have been unable to find an adequate \[Blackfoot\] translation for the name’s second half. After consulting with family and knowledge-keepers, I find the closest word is aomoii’pi: which means ‘to gather all people to one spot,’” he tells. The medicine wheel, then, is one of the oldest architectures of gathering, on these lands, and indeed, in the world. Its annular form, as well as its relationship to Prairie lands and histories of gathering, flows through Faye HeavyShield and Lauren Crazybull’s collaborative artist project, Miinakii and me, which considers the interconnected nature of the world we are all part of and thus beholden to. In their corresponding conversation, Faye says, “I remember one time, years ago, thinking that if nothing else happened to me from that day on, I would still have all these stories, experiences, and references to make art about and with.” Together, they invite us to consider reaching back to our formative pasts, our memories, our lives—lands in their own right, that can be travelled through—with gratitude, as we move forward through confluences of uncertainty, perennially unfurling universes of shifting conditions. To create a circle with this time, a gathering within and among us, rather than a line.

issue-147-p14-16.pdf

Editor Jaclyn Bruneau, together with the issue’s two co-editors Ginger Carlson and Natasha Chaykowski, reflect on the issue’s theme: Gather.

Editorial: Gather

Feature

##### _Câhcacêp_: a Cree word that means a little bit of everything. When elders speak with us, even when telling specific stories, it is also about everything. In this conversation, Jerry Saddleback and Jo-Ann Saddleback tell us about Câhcacêp Art & Tea House, the space they recently opened in Edmonton wherein they host exhibitions, bow-making workshops, Cree language classes, and more. Here, they generously share their thinking about how to cultivate gathering spaces that are meaningful, educational, self-determined, and grounding for a wide variety of participants, focusing on the activities in and around this new space that’s been in the making for several decades. The Saddlebacks elegantly illuminate the importance of intentionality in all aspects of life, including artistic practice, and how the pandemic generatively reframes, renews, and refreshes intent in many different contexts.
  
  
**Dawn Saunders Dahl**: I thought we could start off by you telling me a little bit about the tea house. 

**Jo-Ann Saddleback**: We opened up last August but, in our hearts, for the last 25–30 years, we thought that we would like to do something like this. It’s not exactly as we planned but what we had wanted to do is to fulfill ourselves—both my husband and I are artists—and to be able to promote, help, establish, and give other artists a \[space\] to show their art. So, we have a space big enough and beautiful enough that we’re able to exhibit other people’s art as well as have workshops in the space to work on our own. 

The whole idea of the tea house is that you just don’t stop by. It’s about Indigenous approaches of: you come and eat, you come and drink tea, you come and visit. You come to get to know us and the artists that we exhibit here and who make some of the crafts that we also sell here, and to help bring a community together. Before COVID, I’d often have other artists say, “Can I come and work in your workshop with you?” Of course! Of course you can. We wanted to… help give other artisans and artists a space to work. _Câhcacêp_ itself is a sacred word that means a little bit of everything—so, that was the idea in our hearts and in our minds when we fulfilled this rather lifelong dream.

**Jerry Saddleback**: Yeah, \[we try to\] highlight all of the different things that exist out there. It makes me think about the four main types of bow-making within \[our\] culture. Back in the day, prior to contact, they all had to be Buffalo killers. All the science and physics that go into \[a\] bow made it the hunting weapon it that was; there’s a very specific reasoning \[for\] its form, and why it’s so fast. To make a long story short, the four types are kind of like your high school degree, bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and doctoral degree. And that’s kind of how we’re trying to do it with \[Câhcacêp\]— we’re trying to give people a little taste of everything.

**JAS**: It’s not just about visual arts; we wanted to be able to enhance the community’s knowledge. We saw all of these knowledge-keepers as artists, as fantastic orators, \[and wanted them\] to be able to do that \[at\] Câhcacêp.

**JS**: Our long story, or History of Creation Story, is in four versions: an intro version, general version, recited version, and ceremonial version. The intro version was four days, four nights long, and the ceremonial version was four months long. _Câhcacêp_ is what they call the intro version—the highlights of that whole entire history of creation story. Anytime Treaty 6 reservation schools come in, they really want information like that. So that’s when we would provide a _Câhcacêp_ —not really the four-day, four-night version, what with their time allotments, but an intro to the intro version. An extremely, even further, highlighted version, so that at least they’ll be able to have something that they can stand on: a stable thing, a foundational base that would hold them together as far as their history.

**JAS**: So, we try to just make it all around. Before COVID hit, \[Jerry\] was teaching Cree language classes here and drumming, too.

**JS**: There’s multiple levels. We do a kind of intro Cree; it’s how we communicated for centuries and since time immemorial, just one- or two-syllable words, kind of like really basic communication skills. And then we have regular conversation, and high or holy Cree—the sacred Cree. 

**DSD**: I think it’s absolutely crucial that spaces like this survive, because you’re about educating the community as well as supporting your artists. You’re affecting people, and \[promoting\] a greater understanding about our history, so thank you. Considering all this connective work, I’m wondering how you’ve been adapting how you gather over the last few months?

**JS**: I was in sessions with the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations; they set up some elder-only telephone sessions related to COVID\-19\. They had me \[tell\] stories I know from the different pandemics from the past, like the infested blankets pandemics, and in pre-contact circular encampments. What happened? What did people do that time? That kind of thing. When the infested blanket came in as a present… they were caught off guard. Some of them died the same night. It was so fast and so rampant that as soon as they found out there was something wrong with their bedding, they did what they needed to do to start alleviating the stuff that otherwise would have just totally wiped them out… Talk about resilience! As soon as they detected \[it\], they had things in place—preventative things, and medicinal healing things that were already available that they were able to spontaneously administer, to hit that thing right there on the spot. Therefore, they were able to stop a lot of that. 

Now, I know with the changes \[brought on as a result of\] the colonized society over several generations, a lot of our people converted into that colonized way of thinking. Some of the older elders that I knew said that most of \[their\] people had been really subjected to colonization to a point where they almost lost everything within their culture, and those are the ones that were the most vulnerable to disease, ’cause they weren’t ready. Whole households full of people got wiped out. In fact, they say that some of the chiefs called, for the very first time in history, for mass cremations; they were forced to. That’s the kind of stories these elders were talking about. And distinctively spelling out who made it and what they were using, what they were doing, and what the ones that didn’t make it were using and doing. They were trying to give us teachings like that.

**JAS**: When HIV/AIDS hit the world, our Old People said that it was the first of 10 new diseases coming to us. They called HIV a shape-shifter because of the way it worked in our bodies, and they called AIDS the great teacher. They said: it’s here to teach us how to respect ourselves and how to respect each other, because it comes into where people are most vulnerable, and that’s the intimacy that they share with one another. They said: if we don’t learn from this disease, then when those nine other diseases \[come\], they’ll have no compassion for humankind. With COVID comes the hardest lesson that we could possibly learn: that we have to earn the right again to gather. And when I see people carelessly gathering, with no respect for this disease and what it can do to us, then I think that we haven’t learned. But for those people who respect the disease, it’s teaching us how to respect that space between us. We have to learn again: _how_ is it we gather? 

Our ability to continue that flow of art to the community is what we’re figuring out with all of these \[online platforms\], to keep that human relationship going. \[But\] we can’t keep going if we do not keep that physical contact with one another; we can’t all just live on the computer. So, when we’re in each other’s space, \[we need\] to really think about our immune systems, and respect them. We have deities that are specific to the immune system. How do we recognize them again in our space? How do we talk to them again and ask for their help? We can’t stop our ceremonies— the very things we go to for health, for help. So, make that circle, yes, but respect that virus, and the space between us, and recognize what lives between us. As Indigenous people, \[we believe that\] when there is a crisis, there’s either great danger or great opportunity, and I think we have a great opportunity to really pay attention to the space that we’re occupying, especially the space between us. Like our Old People say, there are a million deities that we can’t even see between you and me.

**JS**: With that one art class that I’ve been running, we tell \[the students\] certain Cree words for the types of media that they’re using. When we say things in the Cree language and interpret \[them\], translate \[them\], we do a little etymological breakdown afterwards to \[figure out\] why that was the closest translation. And they get a lot out of that—it hits home in a certain way—because of how we \[are\] one with the Earth, with everything. And \[as a result\], even though they use innovative new concepts of creativity and interpretation, they still have a certain kind of a foundational base. And that’s \[important\] to be able to articulate to whoever in the future, as they get into that more professional field. It gives a well-rounded educational approach to their specialization. 

**DSD**: I think that’s interesting—that people are diving deeper into their cultures, and that’s coming out in the artwork they’re making now. Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking a lot about how people seem to be taking this time, while we’re precluded from travelling, to grow roots, ground themselves in their local communities, and connect with the land.

**JAS**: We were actually discussing this quite a bit at breakfast this morning, and one of the things that I had noted was that we were more focused on the actual ground that we walk on. There’s more gardening going on. When I was a little girl, everybody had a garden and we used to garden; people have gone back to that. Even if it’s a balcony, people are working more outside, just to be outside. And you know, banging pots and pans, or, going outside and singing, starting the whole neighbourhood chorus. 

A lot of Indigenous people have opted to go \[out to\] their land. Like we have 160 acres, in Maskwacîs on Samson \[Cree Nation\], and \[it’s incredible\] to be able to take our grandsons, our granddaughters, out on that land to learn what’s actually on that land, the medicines that grow on that land. For them to have their rites of passage on that land, for them to have a relationship \[with it\]. And there’s lots of people who have taken their school-age children and done land-based teachings. If you’re on a reserve or on a Métis settlement or Métis community, you don’t have to go far. We’re a land-based people, so I think it’s much, much easier for us.

**JS**: Just last week, my daughter went over to my son’s house and \[brought\] two students, wanting \[them\] to see what you can actually find inside of the yard. I showed them over 50 different types of plants inside my son’s yard. We taught them about medicinal and edible \[plants\], though the edible plants can be considered as medicinal, too. \[We\] have words for each one: a descriptive word of the functionality of that medicine, or the parts of the medicine. We went through a lot of stuff like that, just in that yard, just like… freaking out. There it goes, just the whole day inside the yard.

**JAS**: I just wanted to leave you with one last thing about \[not\] being able to travel, and things like that. My old uncle, he was a powerful, powerful healer, at Saddle Lake Cree First Nation. His name was Ralph Cardinal. And he used to say \[that\] the human being is so powerful that, if you think of \[a place\], you close your eyes and your mind is there. So, you can travel anywhere you want. All you have to do is think of it. You concentrate on it and you’re there.
  
  
**Dawn Saunders Dahl** has been actively working with Indigenous arts communities in Alberta through public art opportunities, art exhibitions, projects, and events, since 2008\. The responsibility to understand her ancestry, to care for the land, and to share are teachings that are repeated in her everyday conversations with communities that influence her work and perspectives. Dawn is of Métis (Red River Ojibway) and European (English, Scottish, Irish, Norwegian, Swedish, French) ancestry. She is honoured to have been gifted the Stoney Nakoda name Âba Thâ Wîyâ.

**Jo-Ann Saddleback** is Elder Advisor for the Edmonton Public Library, City of Edmonton on various levels, Canadian Research Initiative in Substance Misuse (CRISM), Dreamspeakers Festival Society, and many others. She is asked to many reserves and organizations to share her teachings.

**Jerry Saddleback** is the Elder-in-Residence for Maskwacîs Cultural College, where he was Dean of Cultural Studies on and off for decades. He was Spiritual Advisor to Truth and Reconciliation Commission and is Elder for many organizations including City of Edmonton. He works with reserves and organizations across Treaty 6 territory.

Together they work on their art, and own and operate Câhcacêp Art & Tea House in Edmonton, Alberta.

lg_147-Dahl

md_147-Dahl

sm_147-Dahl

thumbnail_147-Dahl

147-Dahl

issue-147-p20-25.pdf

Collective

In an interview with Dawn Saunders Dahl, elders Jerry Saddleback and Jo-Ann Saddleback ruminate on the importance of intentionality in all aspects of life—especially in the ways we gather. They offer anecdotes from their newly opened Câhcacêp Art & Tea House in Amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton, which centres community, capacity-building, and transmission of Cree culture.

Câhcacêp Art & Tea House: A Conversation with Jerry Saddleback and Jo-Ann Saddleback

Randell Adjei’s wide, toothy grin fills the screen.   
“Hello, hello everybody! If you don’t know, my name’s Randell—” 

He interrupts his own introduction with a constant string of enthusiastic interjections. “Hello Emily! How y’all doin? Allison! I see you Maya G! Stretch is in the building!” 

With eyes shut, one could easily imagine he was up on a stage while a stream of exuberant spectators filled the room, all regulars he knew intimately, of course. In reality, it’s a one-way conversation, limited by the restrictive social parameters of Instagram live-streaming. The people tuning in, introduced by a quick flash of their Instagram handles, are not in the room with Adjei, but his warmth permeates through the glitchy, technological disconnect. 

As the director of community arts collective Reaching Intelligent Souls Everywhere (RISE) Edutainment, this is not the type of open mic event he’s accustomed to hosting. Since 2013, on 46 Mondays out of every year, RISE has hosted open mic nights that invite emerging poets, rappers, and musicians of all kinds to perform, specifically those from communities that are underfunded and undersupported, whose cultural contributions have long gone unrecognized. 

In a phone interview, Adjei recalled feeling silenced as a youth growing up on the outskirts of Toronto, in Scarborough, as if his and other young people’s stories were omitted purposely from the cultural conversation. “They’ll \[media outlets\] come to Scarborough when a shooting happens. But they won’t look into the poverty, they won’t look into the unemployment or the disadvantages or the lack of resources; they’re just always reactive. That’s what I mean by silence. They didn’t want to hear what we had to say.” Adjei, a poet himself, was 20 years old when he started the organization, and it’s ballooned into a tour de force leading to many arts and community-centric awards, including Adjei being chosen as CBC’s Torontonian of the Year in 2015\. Christening the first Nuit Blanche in Scarborough in 2018 with live poetry and performances that lasted the whole night, RISE solidified its status as a beacon for the community. 

Originally housed in the community resource centre of a local mall, the Scarborough Town Centre, RISE’s essence is rooted in intimate gatherings that empower, instill confidence in, and soften boundaries between performers and audience. Now boasting 28,000 guests collectively throughout the past seven years of events, they’ve maintained their tight-knit community spirit because at its heart RISE is a space that welcomes performers of all kinds to express themselves. “What I wanted to do was create a platform that could allow our voices to be heard. \[…\] I recognized how much our pain festered and how that festering pain turned to anger and how that anger turned to violence, when realistically many of us are just looking for an opportunity to be heard.” 

RISE avoids one of the pitfalls that ensnares many other arts communities—becoming so insular that they seem impenetrable to outsiders—because it was designed for outsiders to begin with. The organization’s members have a vested interest in spotlighting those who have never shared their talents before, who aren’t part of the “right” social circles, who don’t have the social capital or clout to get on the “best” lineups. RISE does away with all that pretense with the simple invitation: show us what you’ve got and we’ll welcome you with open arms. 

RISE was running events out of their most recent venue, Burrows Hall Community Centre, in Scarborough until March 2020 when the province declared a state of emergency following the outbreak of the COVID\-19 pandemic. Throughout the lockdown, they adapted and pivoted their events to being online, mostly on their Instagram page. _Remote Control_ was a collaborative Instagram takeover between RISE, another local community arts organization called Jane Street Speaks, and the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) that ran from April to July. _Remote Control_ is the most recent series in an ongoing history of collaborative community-centred practices, exhibitions, events, and workshops between RISE and the AGYU. Together, they won the Key Partnership Award at the 2019 Ontario Association of Art Galleries Awards, a testament to the fruitful and generative nature of their work together. Senior curator at the AGYU Emelie Chhangur is known for her curatorial ethos of “in reach,” a play on the word outreach, that involves in-depth, personal, and prolonged engagement with art institutions in collaboration with individuals, groups and communities—creating a symbiotic kind of relationship, transforming the institutions from within. 

An earlier product of the long-term collaboration between the AGYU and RISE is the award-winning short experimental documentary film _RISE_. Shot in 2018 and directed by Brazilian filmmakers Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, it is an exploration of identity, connection, self-representation, and agency. Conceived following Truth Be Told, a joint AGYU and RISE spoken-word mentorship program, the film finds poets, rappers, and singers from across the Greater Toronto Area performing intimate pieces in the newest extension of the city’s transit system. The setting, which is a figurative but also literal symbol for the connection between the outskirts where many of the performers reside and the city centre, provides a stark and pristine backdrop to performances that are vulnerable, boastful, and explorative in their delivery. The diasporic nature of being, specifically as it relates to the first- and second-generation Caribbean and African immigrant members of RISE, is the crux of this collaboration. The poems and songs are odes to their motherlands and their conceptions of hybrid identity, as well as a way to work through myriad marginalizations. The film won the Audi Short Film Award at the 2019 Berlinale and was screened as part of an installation at the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art in 2019\. 

_Remote Control_ is a different kind of community project, although equally moving and sentimental. The performers were selected for their particular ability to engage with an audience that isn’t directly in front of them, artists whose energy can tangibly pass through screens. Most of the artists were from across the GTA, with some dropping in from as far as the UK. Some were familiar faces from the days of in-person meet ups, and others were artists that the team had been hoping to work with in some capacity for a while, this series presenting the perfect opportunity. 

The May 19 iteration of _Remote Control_ started with Adjei imparting a few motivational words about learning the lessons the pandemic has offered up. A discussion followed in the chat about epiphanies around sense of self, purpose, faith, trust, intention, discipline, running from trauma, and counting blessings. Playful banter and camaraderie between acts cut the displays of public vulnerability, balancing emotion al catharsis and reflection with joy and entertainment. It’s a good environment for artists to play new material for the first time, since the audience is so engaged and receptive; the hollers and claps of the live setting have been digitized and transformed into flame and bull horn emojis, and heart reactions. 

Of course, technical difficulties ensue, and as a director that typically manages weekly performances, Adjei is acquainted with rolling with it but Instagram is a different beast. Internet connection issues, lagging video, pixelation, the app’s irritating insistence to automatically end all livestreams as soon as they hit 59 minutes and 59 seconds. Luckily, these are all minor hiccups compared to the satisfying sound of an artist’s soulful mezzo soprano or their intricate guitar strum ming flowing out of an iPhone speaker.

The platforms we are using to convene online during this new period of adaptation—Twitch, Zoom, Instagram, and the like—all existed before this current cultural moment, but we’ve harnessed their potential for connectivity more in the past year to fill an encroaching void. We crave interaction, as it used to be, and have been looking for fillers in the meantime. The way we define arts communities will probably have to change for an indefinite amount of years, until gathering en masse is safe, from a health standpoint, and also comfortable, after such long periods of isolation. “I’m so used to being out there. I’m used to being in the community, connecting, going to difficult events. I think it’s really difficult to not have because that’s where my community is: creative people who come together and are able to embrace our creativity. And I don’t know if I’ll ever really get comfortable with the online community in the same way,” said Adjei. 

During this worldwide, pandemic-fuelled slowdown, there has been a rise in civil unrest, two inextricably linked phenomena. As a result of the lockdown, many people now have more mental capacity to deeply critique the hegemonic structures governing our daily lives and the time to actually enact systemic change. Following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, eruptions of anger, frustration, and exhaustion spread across the continents like wildfire. Anti-Black racism, police brutality, and abolition became the _mots du jour_, and campaigns for education and action swept across social media. The Show Must Be Paused was an initiative started within the recording industry to critique the unbalanced nature of the contributions Black artists bring to the multi-billion-dollar music industry. On June 2, the organizers, industry executives Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang, planned to have a social media blackout day where no Black artists would post or release anything to illustrate the colossal absence of culture without them. One of _Remote Control’s_ streams had been set to fall on the same day and some performers suggested postponing it to stand in solidarity with the initiative.

The June 16 iteration of _Remote Control_ was the second livestream following The Show Must Be Paused and the energy was noticeably different from previous weeks. Adjei skipped his usual opening remarks and pleasantries and went straight into introducing the artists. There seemed to be an emphasis on letting the artists speak to the ways they were grappling with the current cultural moment through their music. First up was Charmie Deller, a RISE regular and a performer Adjei has been working with for eight years, watching her grow and develop her craft. She performed an original song called “Black Lives Matter.” From her balcony, as the evening sun shone a warm light across her face, her breathy and textured voice sang the harrowing opening lyric: “do I really need to bleed for you to see me?” After the performance, she and Adjei had a candid conversation about what she was feeling following the protests. She spoke of the challenge of writing from a place of anger about the treatment of Black people but wanting to convey the feeling of love that propels her to keep fighting—a concept Adjei refers to as “transmuting pain into power.” Next up, ZeneSoul was also inspired to write new music about the debilitating forces inflicted against Black people. Her lyrics, “I will not be silenced, I will not yield, I will not be quiet,” became an anthem, growing more powerful with each refrain. This particular livestream laid bare the importance of art in protest, the need for artistic expression as a place for healing after the battle.

But spaces like that don’t just appear, they must be painstakingly created and maintained. Adjei himself is unsure if he’ll ever fully grasp the impact that RISE has had on artists and the general community through out the city. He wants to leave behind a legacy, one rooted in community care, making it better for whoever comes next. 

The “edutainment” part in the collective’s name comes from the acclaimed OG of conscious rap, KRS One (whose other stage name is, fittingly, Teacha) who coined the term on the 1990 Boogie Down Productions album of the same name. The reason Adjei wanted to add the word edutainment to their name was to home in on the fact that he wanted performers who could put on a show while teaching the crowd something meaningful. “I’m looking for artists that understand the power of being in front of a crowd and that there’s inherently a lot of responsibility in that you have an opportunity to inform, to inspire, to empower, and to really give people something that they can remember for the rest of their lives.” 

lg_147-adams

md_147-adams

sm_147-adams

thumbnail_147-adams

147-adams

issue-147-p26-30.pdf

Performance

Identity

Kelsey Adams explores the work of Randell Adjei—founder, director, and host of _Reaching Intelligent Souls Everywhere Edutainment (RISE),_ which amplifies the vibrant yet overlooked creative output of Caribbean and African diasporic youth in the suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area. 

My Words Will Heal You: On RISE Edutainment

Christiana Myers is a curator, writer, museum educator, and artist living on Wolastoqey territory in Saint John, NB.

Many Canadian art institutions assert their desire to be considered gathering spaces for diverse communities while claiming tenets of inclusion and openness. As a result of the COVID\-19 pandemic, most, if not all, were forced to close their doors to the public and find other ways of engaging with their audiences. The term “accessibility” has been circulated widely in order to encompass an alternative to the conventional institutional experience. While many organizations’ responsive new methods of engagement proved meaningful, they also served to eclipse demands for access that had been made consistently by disability arts communities for years. These ostensibly innovative methods of engagement include increased digital access to collections, livestream artist talks, virtual tours, and the digitization of publications, to name a few. In other words, the same practices that disabled, crip, Deaf, and neurodivergent artists and audiences had been requesting were suddenly being fast tracked for the convenience of the general—and non-disabled—public. In the process of reopening, institutions continue to make further operational adaptations, many of which would benefit disabled and chronically ill visitors, like wider paths of access (the suggested turning radius for a wheelchair is nearly that of social distancing), augmented sanitation practices, and a reduction in the number of simultaneous visitors. These previously unprioritized accommodations are now being carried out as standard practice. The question now is if increased multi-dimensional accessibility in art galleries will become an embraced and sustained part of post-pandemic institutional practice.

Whether physically, intellectually, socially, or economically, entire communities continue to be left out of conversations and out of museum and gallery spaces that claim to be for everyone. In 2017, students and faculty members of the department of Applied Research & Innovation and the School of Media Studies & Information Technology at Humber College with artists from Tangled Art + Disability in Toronto developed the _Accessibility Toolkit_, which uses knowledge and leadership from the disability arts community to suggest best practices for exhibition catalogues, lighting, language use, signage, and more.[^1] In its opening pages, institutional approaches to accessibility are broken down concisely into two distinct methods of framing disability within the arts sector—the medical model and the social model. Many institutions continue to rely on the medical model of disability, which defines an individual as disabled based on their impairments or differences, and suggests that physical, sensory, or mental limitations can and should be treated by the medical field. In practice, this model contributes to othering disability communities by directing blame toward an individual’s limitations rather than toward the barriers to access that are built and enforced around them. Considering accessibility through the medical model may also encourage a misguided sense of institutional accomplishment when physical access alone is granted. The social model, on the other hand, was developed by people with disabilities, and addresses disability as a social construct made up of structural, cultural, economic, or attitudinal barriers that exist outside of individual difference. For example, a wheelchair is not the reason a person cannot enter a space—the steps are. The social model serves to identify the causes of exclusion and suggests that inclusion is not constituted by the addition of surface-layer accommodations, but rather the removal of barriers that extend deep into institutional function.

Meaningful inclusion practices that allow for fluid, intuitive, and flexible access to institutions and their programming have the capacity to enrich the engagement of a diverse range of visitors, blurring the hard lines between disability accommodation and alternative gallery experiences. By looking critically at the responses of institutions in implementing their COVID\-19 coping and reopening strategies with the social model of disability in mind, an undercurrent of ableism is revealed. While these new services and precautions, intended to counteract illness, distress, and isolation, are valued and encouraged, they were frequently deemed too expensive or too radical until they became a concern of the masses. Until now, communities who were made vulnerable by art spaces were expected to navigate around barriers and adapt their behaviour to function within ableist systems under the medical model. However, when gallery engagement was interrupted for the “typical” visitor, institutions responded quickly, allotting human and financial resources to these new services. What these institutions had evidently overlooked is that inclusion is neither exclusively required nor exclusively enjoyed by specialized minority audiences, but actually serves to benefit visitorship more broadly.

As Sean Lee, Tangled’s director of programming, put it in a discussion over Zoom, “You don’t need to be disabled to experience ableism.” Accommodations and access are not about revising a world that some miss out on but, rather, thinking about new avenues of engagement. Tangled’s executive director, Cyn Rozeboom, described this perspective as “hacking,” essentially reimagining the ways that institutional output can be created and experienced in a way that prioritizes flexibility in order to navigate changing— and even conflicting access needs. Tangled’s 2020 curator in residence, Max Ferguson, went on to emphasize the importance of empowerment: that these shifts begin with thinking of accessible programming as complimentary rather than as charity. Oppressive language and framing, like allusions to the “fight against” disability, do not allow individuals or institutions to move beyond pathological perspectives of difference. The threat of COVID\-19 has provided a glimpse into the often rejected universality of illness and vulnerability to the human population. While newer modes of access like podcasts, streaming content, or audio guides could be interpreted as frivolous conveniences for able audiences, it also means that the spectrum of users of these tools widens, encouraging developers to funnel more resources toward their development—and, perhaps most importantly, toward their use becoming normalized. As audiences gain familiarity with engagement tools that can be opted into as needed—rather than creating scenarios where people endure barriers in order to avoid segregation—systems of ableism can be dismantled.

Alexis Bulman is an artist from Prince Edward Island, currently based in Montreal, whose practice focuses on trust, belonging, and access in public space. Her work frequently addresses the hyperawareness that people with disabilities can have of their bodies in daily life, and particularly in public spaces like art institutions. In my conversation with Bulman, she stated that the demands for alternative modes of access spurred by the lockdown have encouraged greater institutional awareness of the bodies of their visitors, which she hopes will have a lasting impact, whether audiences are engaging with content from home or entering a physical space. Following the completion of a nine-month Interrogating Access residency at OBORO in Montreal, Bulman had just secured an exhibition opportunity at Artspace in Peterborough for the work she produced when the pandemic lockdown struck in March 2020\. This forced her, along with the exhibition’s curator, Hannah Keating, and collaborating artist Aislinn Thomas to make the decision either to postpone for a year or to move forward with an online model, shedding the usual trappings of a gallery exhibition— no opening reception, no live performance, and no live workshop or artist talk. Having produced several bodies of work related to accessibility and her own experience with scoliosis, Bulman had already been working toward making the pieces accessible through digital methods such as 360-degree photography, and working with Thomas on audio descriptions and closed captioning.

The exhibition, titled _MAKE/SHIFT_, which opened and went live in September, explores ableism in the gallery setting. Five of Bulman’s sculptures from her _Remodel_ series and a video-performance installation titled _Tending To_ address the physical and ideological barriers frequently put in place by art spaces. All of the works and their associated text are made available both in the gallery and online; however, the ways that they are experienced in these environments differ. Online, viewers can find installation shots and image descriptions of the exhibition in its entirety, 360-degree photographs of the sculptures, and the video work with described audio. As one of the galleries at Artspace has been rendered inaccessible by stairs, Bulman created a scenario that makes it impossible for in-person visitors to be able to optimally view the video installation by barricading the entrance. This initiates an isolation dynamic that parallels that of the COVID\-19 lockdown and one all too familiar to gallery visitors—or aspiring gallery visitors—with limited mobility. Viewers are then required to go online in order to see the video in full and are thereby subject to othering by seeing an artwork through alternative means—reinforcing that access alone does not produce an equitable experience. In the curatorial statement, Keating writes, “A makeshift is something that serves as a temporary substitute—a sufficient device for now, but one that will be replaced when an improved solution comes along; in this work, Bulman suggests there is somewhere else for her and you to go and invites visitors to participate in reimagining what access should and could look like today.”[^2] Also available online is a collaborative workshop called _archive of sensation_ hosted by Bulman and Thomas. In it, participants are asked to describe what they see or feel when experiencing Bulman’s work with prompts developed by Thomas. They are encouraged to respond in any medium with which they feel comfortable including writing, voice recording, or drawing in order to acknowledge the scope of sensory methods that can be used in experiencing and interpreting artwork. Thomas hopes that online access strategies like captioning and streaming will continue beyond the reopening of galleries and museums, at the same time acknowledging that “virtual access cannot be an excuse for \[galleries\] not doing the work required to remove barriers to in-person participation” upon reopening. As Bulman states, it is imperative that artworks and exhibitions be produced through the lens of accessibility rather than adding it on as an institutional formality.

The precariousness of the pandemic, with many people working from home and others losing employment altogether, has given curators, educators, and audiences a glimpse into a concept called “crip time.” Crip time is a flexible approach to understanding and experiencing time that prioritizes comfort and care and subverts ableist expectations related to productivity, levels of output, and conventional professionalism. In “Crips and COVID in Canada” by Esther Ignagni, Eliza Chandler, and Loree Erickson, the authors suggest that although COVID time is not equivalent to crip time, it is still a valuable starting point for understanding and, moreover, can offer “crip hope”—that is, to have faith that some of these adapted practices rooted in disability access will become standardized. With increased criticality toward the use of public spaces and a commitment to community wellness and care, the removal of barriers and the creation of alternative pathways of access will be prioritized. Whereas COVID time is unplanned and must be constantly navigated, crip time is “built collectively, maintained, and sustained.”[^3]

Meaningful inclusion has the capacity to be transformational. In shifting from the medical model, currently embedded in the bureaucratic and oppressive frameworks of many institutions, toward the social model—which ultimately better suits the gathering places that art spaces claim to be—there lies the capacity to plan, design, build, curate, and program for access from the ground up. Disability access is not a problem to be dealt with or a series of requirements to meet, but rather a lens that can be respectfully utilized to enrich the engagement experience and well-being of all visitors. The sweeping sense of vulnerability brought on by COVID\-19 has increased awareness of the precarious nature of safety and comfort inherent to many public spaces, as well as a broader understanding of the limitations of alternative forms of access when they are not prioritized from the outset. In implementing rigorous mutual exchange and by leveraging the newly embodied knowledge resulting from the pandemic, there is hope that a message is finally being received. If these experiences can linger in public and institutional consciousness and are acted on as diligently as the pandemic response of many galleries, multi-dimensional accessibility in art spaces will be taken off of checklists and instead implemented through thoughtful creative strategy.

[^1]: Anne Zbitnew, _Accessibility Toolkit: A Guide to Making Art Spaces Accessible_ (Humber College, Tangled Art + Disability, 2017); [tangledarts.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Accessibility\_Toolkit-1.pdf](https://tangledarts.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Accessibility%5FToolkit-1.pdf)
[^2]: Hannah Keating, “Curatorial Statement for Alexis Bulman _MAKE/SHIFT_ exhibition at Artspace, Peterborough” (forthcoming, 2020), typescript.
[^3]: Esther Ignagni, Eliza Chandler, and Loree Erickson, “Crips and COVID in Canada,” iHuman; [ihuman.group.shef.ac.uk/crips-and-covid-in-canada/](http://ihuman.group.shef.ac.uk/crips-and-covid-in-canada/)

lg_147-Myers

md_147-Myers

sm_147-Myers

thumbnail_147-Myers

147-Myers

issue-147-p31-39.pdf

Institutional critique

Accessibility

Christiana Myers attends to the overlap between accessible design, and social distancing protocols, as well as the ableism of institutions that catered to the latter overnight, despite previous advocacy for such changes by the former. Myers explores what an accessibility lens can teach us about equitable institutional/physical arts architectures. 

Crip Hope

The Mandarin word _shìchǎng_ translates into “wet market”—a term that entered Western vocabularies with reports of the COVID\-19 pandemic due to the theory that the virus was passed on to humans by an animal sold in a Wuhan, China wet market. Media misrepresentations of the markets have been prolific, drawing readers to join xenophobic calls for their global eradication, perpetuating a long history of associating racialized bodies with disease. In most neighbourhoods there is a wet market located within walking distance. These markets—which exist on six of the seven continents and go by many names—are natural meeting places. In afternoons, school children, parents, and elders transition together out of daytime activities into family and social time as they prepare for the evening meal. Local markets reflect and affirm the cultures and traditions formed by communities over hundreds of years. Ultimately, the condemnation of wet markets is merely one example of how gathering spaces are besieged by whiteness and other forms of normativity that are corroborated by poor media literacy, denying groups their essential places and ways of living and being together. 

The volume of these entwined problems became increasingly troubling to me when I noticed a social media post made by an art colleague in late April. Without comment, they posted a _Guardian_ article titled “Halt destruction of nature or suffer even worse pandemics, say world’s top scientists,” written by Damian Carrington, environment editor. Below the headline is an image of the butcher section of a wet market. Four Asian people are visible. In the foreground, at the viewer’s left, a man wearing an apron and sanitary mask worn below his nose and over his mouth stands slightly away from a meat counter, where his eyes rest. His body is turned toward the camera. Behind him is a woman in profile, nose and mouth covered with a mask, standing at a display of whole chickens, in rows, lit by pendant lamps. He wears a _ketayap_, she a _tudung_, head coverings indicating that they are Muslim. Partial views of two men wearing masks over their noses and mouths are in the background. Above them hang white-and-red striped flags with a navy blue rectangle in the upper left bearing a yellow crescent and 14-point star. Various cuts of meat, a scale, a bowl, cutting boards, and knives are on the counter and haunches of meat hang above. Occupying the bottom right quarter of the image is the head of a cow. The image description: “A poultry butcher at a market in Kuala Lumpur.” Masks, a wet market, meat that westerners may find confrontational, and Asian people—these have recurrently been used as representations of the pandemic, but why? Why was this image chosen by the newspaper? How are the parts of this news story to be read as a whole? And what effect does sharing this representation have?

Although the shared _Guardian_ article was a catalyst for this exploration, I have seen many art colleague posting unchecked information in light of recent events. Those of us working within art, it would be assumed, have a level of attunement to images, an understanding of how to analytically approach them, and the critical ability to perceive their implications— in short, visual literacy. I spoke to Thy Phu, whose research and public humanities practice examine the intersections between media studies, diaspora, migration, vision, and justice. When looking at photographs, Phu reminds us, we must begin with these fundamental questions: what’s in the image? What isn’t in the image? How do objects in the image relate to each other and encourage identification with the perspective that is primarily emphasized? What kind of identification does the composition encourage? While asking these questions, it is essential to be aware that we bring our own biases, and to critically unpack why certain stories resonate with us, so that we may understand how we as viewers shape the meaning of an image. Photographs, a seemingly innocuous inert object existing in a period of time, are activated by viewers who play a major part in making meaning. As such, we must consider: who is looking? Who is being looked at? What’s the relation ship between the person who is looking and the person who is looked at? How am I as a viewer implicated? 

To return to my case study, Carrington states that deforestation, expansion of agriculture, farming, mining, infrastructure development, global travel, and exploitation of wild animals bring humans in contact with animals, where 70 percent of emerging human diseases originate. All to reiterate that “we did this to ourselves,” as the subtitle “Exclusive: only one species is responsible for the coronavirus—humans—say world’s leading wildlife experts” had pronounced. But _which_ humans does the writer consider responsible? Near the end is a quote stating that the pandemic was brought about through the wildlife trade, “in particular the wildlife markets, the wet markets, of South Asia and bush meat markets of Africa.” Although the environmentally destructive activities that North America, Europe, and others wholly participate in were listed to begin with, “Yellow,” Brown, and Black humans are given prominence in both image and text, in effect exempting the former regions from culpability. Carrington’s accusations follow in the footsteps of the British colonial invention of tropical medicine used as a tool of European “expansion” to declare populations diseased and dispossess them of their lands, the perceived existential threat of East Asians encapsulated in the phrase “yellow peril,” and myths about the physiology of Black bodies created to justify enslavement. Although these racializing systems were formalized in the 19th century, their legacies continue today. 

Given the article’s brief word count, the image is a substantial part of the “text.” The image of the wet market is used to illustrate the writer’s point that racialized people are too near to animals, making them the cause of disease; tailored for the white gaze, it was selected to evoke repulsion and perpetuate othering. Wet markets differ, and it’s misleading to imply that they all sell wild animals. Not to mention that the un usual animals sold legally for meat in China’s wet markets are raised on small-scale farms. The not-so-subtle subtext of racism in this piece seems ingrained to the point of being considered appropriate to repeat.

I continued this discussion about photographic literacy with Heather Rigg, formerly of the CONTACT Photography Festival, who now works as the curator of exhibitions and public programs at Gallery 44, and is a co-founder of mama. Her work at CONTACT included the curation of _An unassailable and monumental dignity_ (2017), an exhibition that explored the representation of Black men in the public sphere. Through this exhibition, and her ongoing curatorial research, Rigg recognizes that a broad problem exists: photographs are unquestioningly read as truth. For this reason, she discusses intersectionality, the implicit racism that is part of the medium’s history, and ethics as part of the Contemporary Photographic Art course she co-teaches at Ryerson University. Rigg emphasizes scrutinizing captions—and the role that they have played in creating versions of history—as one way of making inquiries into context. She reminds us, too, that the media participate in generating propaganda through the continued use of racist imagery and text that validates and normalizes white supremacy. In the _Guardian_ article, the caption provides the distinction that the poultry butcher is at a market in Kuala Lumpur, supporting the writer’s mounting racial propaganda. Poultry butchers and local markets exist in the publisher’s geographical context, too, and to avoid this is again to bypass the West’s part in environmental and health crises. 

Heather and I turned to the complexity of developing methods for critically reading images, for those of us who are portrayed through limiting narratives, and came to identify the role that embodied responses play. Ideologies such as ableism, heteronormativity, and white supremacy are dependent upon enforcing belief in a normative body and thus deny self-definition and inherent worth to those who fall outside such narrow terms. Under such strictures, our images are abject and discomforting. The mechanisms of normative belief systems dismiss the embodied reactions of those that they illegitimate, negating our discomfort. To remain attentive to those sensations is to resist those ideologies, taking agency to unravel imperialistic images and their claims to veracity. Embodied responses to images are a valid and valuable location from which to read against structures of power hoarding. 

Body-mind engaged reading can be demanding, especially now when discourses in broad community spaces can be found to lack sensitivity and nuance, and sometimes show up as outright attacks. One essential socially produced space, online communities, has become a platform for the attack of another, thewet market. Because of this, the internet, which has been a solace as a stand-in for in-person community for some, is at the same time an emotional and psychic minefield for many. The news of COVID\-19, and the social conditions it brings to the fore, comes through a never-ending feed alongside a great reckoning with the abuses of power and privilege that reverberate into our own art communities. In relation to these matters, I observe the desperate haste to demonstrate that one is on the right side and is making the right argument—instead, it comes across as hollow at best. Investment in sharpening visual and media literacy, and cultivating a consciousness of one’s social location, is a more potent way to contribute to collectively producing intentional online gathering spaces that are beneficial to more of us and avoid reproducing harm. 

None of us has a universal perspective. Art consists of a vast ecosystem of individuals— including artists, curators, educators, marketers, fundraisers, directors, writers, editors, publishers, and so forth—making decisions about which images to communicate through. I encourage everyone, but particularly those with any degree of decision-making power to put forth selected images, to return frequently to the sets of questions that have been discussed. Though harmful historical beliefs and practices may seem distant, they continue by way of reader participation and replication. Posting an article with a racist angle—because I believe it is sometimes done without malice—reveals that bias exists deep within the unconscious, unchecked. These posts demonstrate how institutional racism endures, through effortless replication of harmful stories by individuals within. The voices insisting upon account ability, radical change, and divestment from white supremacy from art institutions are reaching a crescendo. These demands are part of the greater project of liberation that is gaining ground, and require profound care toward your role as a maker of meaning.

md_147-LEE

sm_147-LEE

thumbnail_147-LEE

147-LEE

issue-147-p40-43.pdf

Illness

Photography

Mass media

Responding to art world peers’ unscrupulous sharing of articles invoking dangerous “yellow peril” tropes, Su-Ying Lee traces the connection between wet markets and the internet as gathering places, underscoring the importance of media literacy and embodied reading during this critical rallying for systemic change. 

Reading Images Against Racism

L. Sasha Gora is a cultural historian and writer with a focus on food and contemporary art. Based in Munich, she is a lecturer at Ludwig Maximilian University and is currently working on her first book, _Culinary Claims: A History of Indigenous Restaurants in Canada_.

##### A marriage of ingredients and instructions, recipes seek to standardize. They translate how hands fold and pinch and how temperatures heat and cool. Cooking’s mother tongue is a physical one and recipes translate these acts into words. They sort through the messy and often improvisational practices of turning plants and animals into food. They’re time based and relational. Written in second person, a recipe is a script. To follow is to trust, sometimes blindly. Other times, a cook wanders off course. And sometimes, a recipe even requests such wandering, as artworks often do. Either way, a recipe’s author pulls and pushes our bodies like each limb is attached to a string. Playing these strings, its author has intimate control. Knead this, taste that.
  
  
Pork adobo and Coca-Cola in Guelph. _Maruya_ —battered banana fritters—in Mexico City. Pancit—both the Filipino word for noodles and the name of a noodle dish—in Berlin, and, most recently, “Swedipino” shrimp lumpia—spring rolls—with vinegar dipping sauce in Malmö. Under the title of _Kitchen Codex_, multidisciplinary artist Patrick Cruz has been cooking Filipino fare at galleries in exchange for visitors’ recipes since 2015.

It began with the impetus to share recipes: a trade between Cruz’s cooked food and the instructions to make someone else’s signature dish. It’s telling that _Kitchen Codex_’s debut bore the subtitle _A Community Portrait_.[^1] Between stewing pork in vinegar or deep frying spring rolls, Cruz asks visitors for their favourite recipes, or ones they know. “A lot of people who don’t cook recall something from their family,”[^2] he points out. Cruz asks them to write down their ingredients lists and instructions. Some are in Korean, others in Spanish. “It can be very impenetrable, which I like. It doesn’t have to be accessible for me or for anyone,” he explains. By welcoming recipes in any language, Cruz broadens the range of culinary knowledge visitors can contribute. He compares it to a secret ingredient—that feeling when a dish enchants you and you ask for a recipe only to find your attempt misses some sparks. The diversity of languages mimics this sense of what a recipe holds back. Just like Cruz shares his personal cooking—seasoned to his palate and informed by his own geographical and cultural history—visitors share recipes that are often biographical, connected to memories, knowledge, and lived experiences. Instructions for private meals shared in a public space. But visitors share these edible scripts on their own terms, not standardizing meals into a clear formula of: serves X number of people or goes best with Y.

_Kitchen Codex_, like much of Cruz’s work, is open-ended and ongoing. Yet, he plans to turn this collection of handwritten recipes into a cookbook of sorts. A future contribution to the library of artist cookbooks. After all, there is nothing novel about art’s interest in food. From subject to material to choreography, there has been a long-term entanglement between artistic practices and the social and political concerns of eating. As Jennifer Higgie writes, “\[N\]ot everyone makes art, but everyone who makes art eats.”[^3]

More than a genre, cookery books are an artistic medium. There are titles penned by artists who work with food in their practices, but also ones by those who don’t. That so many of these titles are collaborative efforts reveals that cooking—whether as art, sustenance, or both—is never a solo endeavour. Artist cookbooks are worth considering at a time when the COVID\-19 pandemic is forcing gatherings to distance and diversify. How are these collections venues for communication, ways to gather? How do recipes connect people, plants, and places, both near and afar? And, by travelling from studios and exhibitions to home kitchens, how do these recipes diversify access to art at a time gallery contact is limited?

Some of these cookbooks serve as records of previous gatherings and instructions for future ones, like Salvador Dalí’s _Les Dîners de Gala_ (1973), a catalogue of recipes from the uncanny dinner parties he and his wife Gala threw. At their 1941 _Night in a Surrealist Forest Ball_ in Pebble Beach, California, Gala wore a unicorn costume and Bob Hope ate a fish course served in satin slippers.[^4] _Studio Olafur Eliasson: The Kitchen_ (2016) chronicles daily communal lunches the studio’s employees line up for, fill their plates with, and sit down to eat together (many of its recipes serve 60). Others deliver manifestos, like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s _The Futurist Cookbook_ (1932) and Antto Melasniemi and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s _Bastard Cookbook: The Odious Smell of Truth_ (2019). The former employs cooking to further nationalism, enthusiastically waving the Italian flag and even concluding with a “Little Dictionary of Futurist Cooking,” which proposes to replace the use of foreign words like bar and sandwich with the Italian _quisibeve_ and _traidue_.[^5] Melasniemi and Tiravanija’s book, in contrast, promotes hybridity, a dissolution of nationalism through the mixing of the authors’ Finnish and Thai backgrounds. In it, there are recipes for “Nam Pla Ice Cream” (fish sauce) and “Bastard pad Thai” Thailand’s and Finland’s most famous dishes, pad Thai and oven-baked macaroni casserole, baked together in a single ovenproof dish.

Some books are artworks themselves, like _Dorothy Iannone: A Cookbook_ (1969), _FOOD SEX ART: The Starving Artists’ Cookbook_ by the duo EIDIA (1986–1991), and Aleksandra Mir’s _The How Not to Cookbook: Lessons Learned the Hard Way_ (2009). Rather than record past actions, these cookbooks initiate and stage projects of their own. Iannone’s cookbook is indistinguishable from her paintings and drawings that celebrate female bodies, pleasure, and ecstatic unity, and often include text. A record of her favourite recipes, her cookbook is written by hand and layers instructions over boldly coloured pages. Between ingredients lists of rice and parsley are confessions, self-reflexive questions, drawings of bodies, and other doodles. In 1986, artists Paul Lamarre and Melissa P. Wolf named their collaborative practice EIDIA, an acronym with multiple meanings, including “Everything I Do Is Art.” Bored of cooking, the duo solicited recipes—in the widest sense of the word— from other artists, including Hannah Wilke’s “Mussels Manna from Hannah.” Komar and Melamid’s recipe for “Burger Pravda” instructs cooks to take four shredded pages of one _Pravda_ (the official newspaper of the Soviet Union, although the artists suggest experimenting with _The New York Times_ as a substitute), moisten them with water in a meat grinder or food processor, mix, and then form into patties. Beyond the recipes, the project’s archives include photographs and an accompanying video series; running nine hours long, the videos log the recipes’ authors cooking in their studios, including footage of Louise Bourgeois using a table saw to prepare oxtail.[^6] Lastly, as part of Mir’s 2009 show at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, she asked over 1,000 cooks to transform tales of kitchen failures into advice. Covering explosions, dating, and everything in between, the advice ranges from the practical to the berserk. For instance, “Do not check out the benefits to your arms when whisking Meringue because someone will notice and you will be teased forever.”[^7]

Similar to EIDIA’s cookbook, Julia Sherman’s _Salad for President: A Cookbook Inspired by Artists_ (2017) documents the artist’s own recipes together with gifted ones, like “William Wegman’s Charoset: Toast with Minced Apple, Concord Grape Juice Poached Figs, Pecans, and Balsamic Drizzle,” “Tauba Auerbach’s Shredded Brussels Sprouts Salad with Lemony Almonds and Shaved Apple,” and “Ron Finley’s Banana Blossom and Green Mango Salad.” In 2014, Sherman, an artist who has made growing, making, and eating salad a collaborative and performative affair, invited Alison Knowles to perform her classic 1962 Fluxus piece _Make a Salad_ with greens Sherman had grown on the MoMA PS1 roof.[^8]

Coding experiences into recipes that can be shared, exchanged, and brought to life remotely is a way of cultivating community. From 2017 to 2019, AKA Artist-Run centre on Treaty 6 territory (Saskatoon) hosted _Locals OnlY_, a community-based project exploring food security through intergenerational exchange between artists, elders, cooks, activists, and scholars in its neighbourhood, Riversdale. Partnering with local initiatives like the Child Hunger Education Program (CHEP Good Food), _Locals Only_ employed art as a way of initiating discussions about local access to food. The poet and artist Kevin Wesaquate, for example, planted 200 _misaskatomina_ (Saskatoon berry shrubs) as part of an effort to re-indigenize the neighbourhood’s ecology. Future berries for all. One of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods, Riversdale is now experiencing unequal development and economic change. As another response, artist Jordan Schwab developed the project _Somewhere between a chicken and a T-Rex_. This installation of mobile carts functioned in part as tables from which participants distributed fresh fruit, and part as a blank slate, where locals scribbled their wishes and worries for the neighbourhood’s future.

_Locals Only_ celebrates community through food but without sentimentalizing it, acknowledging that food can be violent. Across the lands now called Canada, food has been a means of colonial control. For years, government regulations have threatened Indigenous food sovereignty, from restricting access to traditional hunting and fishing lands to culturally assimilating children at residential schools with meagre portions of dishes made from wheat or dairy, ingredients imported from Europe’s culinary canon. Yes, food can bring people together but also, in the words of a T-shirt designed by the Bronx-based culinary collective Ghetto Gastro, which works at the intersection of food, art, and design to raise awareness and funds in light of the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020, “Food is a weapon.”

In its engagement with food’s many faces, _Locals Only_ concluded with a catalogue of conversations, poetry, projects, and recipes generated from its events. From Holly Schmidt’s _A-Y_, a bread-making exchange between elders in Riversdale, came recipes for “Steamed Braided Buns” and “Rolled Bannock with Poppy Seeds,” which map the neighbourhood’s Indigenous history layered with stories of migration and exchange. There are also recipes for “Puerto Rican Lentil Soup” and “Pickled Cattail Heart.” The nine artists behind the ongoing collaborative project Garden Don’t Care[^9] also contribute a recipe. Among a collage of photography documenting different aspects of their work together, _a list of ingredients, or Adanac kebab_ is a handwritten “Recipe for Justice.” Its ingredients list inclusion and imagination, compassion and community. “Take the best of what we each have to offer,” it instructs, and “focus on that. Elect governments that support community-building initiatives and social justice actively and financially. … Do it again and again. … Share with all.”[^10] These instructions serve as an example of Susannah Worth’s claim in _Digesting Recipes: The Art of Culinary Notation_ that the recipe’s “status as banal and domestic allows it to speak suitably messily about whether to impose new realities or to challenge existing ones.”[^11]

Trusting the author’s authority, recipes chronicle a before and project an after. The ingredient list portrays the before, and often a glamour shot—or even just the dish’s name models the after. Recipes promise transformation: what you can eat after you follow the steps. They are aspirational. Their goals are clear. And yet no matter how detailed, a recipe can never be definite. It may instruct when and how to eat a dish, but never where or with whom. And during this time when people are cooking more and more at home out of necessity, recipes feel even more like suggestions and less like scripture. More people are learning to improvise, to use a recipe to cook up an after of their own.

“The writing of a recipe,” curators Marisa Jahn, Candice Hopkins, and Berin Golonu explain, “almost always occurs as a deliberate _pause_ and anticipation of the future.”[^12] The pandemic has fused this sense of pause and anticipation, further abstracting what comes next. I asked Cruz about this. “I wonder about the next _Kitchen Codex_, post-COVID: will I be wearing a hazmat suit cooking something in the kitchen?” he laughed. His plan for the next edition was to print the donated _Kitchen Codex_ recipes onto a tablecloth, centring this textile as a place where people would come to eat. “I imagined this tablecloth to be continually growing until it could be used to drape something or create a very architectural space where the recipes become the space,” said Cruz. Converted into an installation that takes the form of a tent or a fort, the recipes—and everything behind each one—would become the roof under which visitors meet. Especially while such a cozy congregation seems distant, artist cookbooks operate as other sites to gather, however diffusely, with their authors, and other readers. To follow artists to our kitchens to conduct our cooking, guide our hands.

[^1]: _Kitchen Codex_ performances include: _Kitchen Codex: Swedipino_, as part of _Ghost Collection_, Whose Museum x KRETS, Malmö, Sweden, 2019; _Kitchen Codex_ (Mexico City) as part of _ALIMENTARY_, Obrera Centro, Mexico City, Mexico, 2019; _Kitchen Codex_ (Berlin) as part of _Transparencies II_, feldfünf, Berlin, Germany, 2019; and _Kitchen Codex: A Community Portrait_ as part of _People of Good Will_, Musagetes, Guelph, 2015\. Additionally, the artist has done a couple of “unofficial ones.”
[^2]: Skype conversation with the artist, June 17, 2020.
[^3]: Jennifer Higgie, “Food for Thought,” Valeria Napoleon’s _Catalogue of Exquisite Recipes_ (London: Koenig Books, 2012), 75.
[^4]: Longtimers, “Dizzy Dali Dinner,” YouTube, September 13, 2006, [youtube.com/watch?v=vg6i4E0Woak](http://youtube.com/watch?v=vg6i4E0Woak)
[^5]: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, _The Futurist Cookbook_, trans. Suzanne Brill (London: Penguin, 2014), 235.
[^6]: This video, as well as others from the project, is available on YouTube: [youtube.com/watch?v=N-769LUQOvw8](http://youtube.com/watch?v=N-769LUQOvw8)
[^7]: Aleksandra Mir, _The How Not To Cookbook: Lessons Learned the Hard Way_ (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2009), 111.
[^8]: While shut down during the pandemic, MoMA PS1 is running a _Cooking with Artists_ story series on Instagram that shares recipes like Anicka Yi’s lemon and herb pasta: [instagram.com/momaps1/](http://instagram.com/momaps1/)
[^9]: Garden Don’t Care is Derya Akay, Vivienne Bessette, Conor Fanning, Rowan Fanning Blackwater, Julia Feyrer, Tobin Gibson, Salem Sharp, Emma Sise, and Kurtis Wilson.
[^10]: _Locals Only_ (Saskatoon: AKA Artist-Run, 2019), 96\. 
[^11]: Susannah Worth, _Digesting Recipes: The Art of Culinary Notation_ (Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2015), 9.
[^12]: Marisa Jahn, Candice Hopkins, and Berin Golonu, eds. _Recipes for an Encounter_ (Vancouver: Western

lg_147-GORA

md_147-GORA

sm_147-GORA

thumbnail_147-GORA

147-GORA

issue-147-p44-49.pdf

Food

Artists Books

L. Sasha Gora provides an overview of artist cookbooks, exploring the relationship between food, cooking, and collective meal consumption, to make a case for the artist cookbook as a communal genre, inflected by the power dynamics of food sovereignty and coloniality, and ultimately facilitating the congregation of author and reader.

Cooking the Books: Recipes by Artists

Mercedes Webb / ma̱lidi / məlidi (they/she) is a writer, art historian, and artist with mixed ancestry; Kunn janaas, Mama̱liliḵa̱la, Fort Williams First Nation, Italian, and Welsh. Language reclamation, currently Kwak̓wala, figures prominently in their practice. Central to their practice is perennially learning non-authoritative, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-ableist ways of being.


_Bees shimmy into apple blossoms, their wings making music with the petals. Ants crawl on peonies, so their petals, now tightly wrapped, may shortly bloom. Basil left uneaten, basil gone to flower, to seed, with one more gift to offer: a promise of future sustenance. These are my relations, and the relationships I want. Let the mycorrhizal net be our connection while we tend to our gardens, across space and generations. Here, I will take the time to learn what these relations can teach and what they need to thrive. I want to reciprocate all they freely offer._

On Instagram, I take screenshots of Indigenous friends’ stories identifying plant relatives as a way to learn. Mediated by a screen, for now I keep myself at a distance as a means to alleviate anxieties that stem from alienation from ancestral knowledges. I wonder: how do I reframe my ways of learning to be hands-on, experiential, and communal? How do I do this amid a revolution and pandemic? I believe revitalization and reclamation work asserts futurities and a “returning to ourselves,”[^1] but I struggle with starting. I want to learn more about medicines, about how plants support other-than-human beings, protecting, cooperating, sharing knowledge, gathering, and passing down through generations a lineage of this land and the lands they have dispersed from, stories held within their seeds. Christina Battle’s ongoing and itinerant project _seeds are meant to disperse_ (2015–) encourages reconnection with our other-than-human relations, through a methodology that employs seed saving, sharing, and trading as an anti-capitalist strategy for food sovereignty. Battle’s project encourages us to become literate in the language of our other-than-human relations who make our persistence possible. For the past five years, the artist has approached this project with tenderness and sincerity; what has resulted is an accessible DIY aesthetic. Seeds are dispersed to friends, family, and participants, some through barter and trade. Some, still, are kept so Battle can grow her own plants and save seeds for the next year. All of this is part of a “survival kit for the future— a future that \[Battle hopes\] has shed the cruelty and inequality resulting from capitalism for an alternative that is more humane.”[^2] _seeds are meant to disperse_ is an effort to shift the recipients’ relationship with seeds: from a commodity-based exchange, store-bought, to something more generous, something that feeds a hunger for anti-capitalist nutrition. 

Seed saving is nothing new, but the practice is imperative for a sustainable future. After 20 years away (some spent in much more humid climates), Battle moved back to Amiskwacîwâskahikan / Edmonton, and her gardening practice had to adapt to the sunny and arid climate; she had to relearn her role in the ecology she grew up in. To garden is to directly interact with how other-than-human relations persist. In some ways, to engage with the territory you’re living on through gardening is to learn what it needs in return to sustain you. What is the quality of the soil where you are? How long is the season? Who are the pollinators and what do they crave? And how has colonization forced certain unnatural ideals onto the natural spaces we occupy? 

Seeds saved by Battle are packaged with an appropriately honest disclaimer that reads “I don’t always follow the rules & sometimes am kinda lazy (seeds are not guaranteed to produce)” that further underscores a feeling of wanting to eschew capitalism and its iterative demands of professionalism while also speaking to the agency of the seeds themselves; they have a life of their own. Like us, seeds are beholden to others in our shared world. Interspecies conversations can happen at frequencies to which we are not attuned: the hormones given off by trees, the dipping bee populations, the new inhabitants of a warmer north, the results of climate change. The packages are adorned with four interlocked hexagons, one of them solid black and containing the project’s title; the plant’s English and Latin names live in the bottom right corner. On the back, a single black hexagon reads “HEX SEED PACKS” and below is information on the seeds and the year they’re from. Battle intends these packs as a hexing of capitalism, a hopeful ending to _this world_. Fitting, then, that _seeds are meant to disperse_ was initially titled _seeds for the end of the world_. The shift from world ending to dispersing was to attenuate a misreading that evokes apocalyptic end-times imagery when it referred to the end of this world—infested with capitalism and white supremacy. This new name reflects an acknowledgement of our current and ongoing resistance and generosity that emboldens the hexing of capitalism, its demise a hopeful, ongoing beginning. 

Battle’s DIY form of seed saving demonstrates that you don’t need vast spaces and resources, like those required for more fastidious seed-saving processes—think seed banks or corporate seed selling—that mitigate cross-pollination and otherwise intervene in the natural course of things. _seeds are meant to disperse_ is an unrulier endeavour, one that summons the whims of seeds outside of the auspices of human control. In Battle’s zine _seeds for the end of the world_ (2018) she says, “Saving your own seeds and sharing them with others operates in direct opposition to the industry standard of copyrighting and restricting seeds while ensuring a wide range of varieties remain viable.”[^3] In a recent iteration of Art From Here, a collaborative project that showcases new work by Amiskwacîwâskahikan artists, hosted by Latitude 53, The Mitchell Art Gallery, Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective, and SNAP Gallery, Battle described her excitement for the surprises—changes in taste, colour, physical qualities, fertility, and resiliencies—that may show up in her saved seeds, the wayward results of not mitigating cross-pollination and plant proximity. These changes are passed on through continued seed saving and participant engagement, emergent lineages held within each seed, storying its connections.

Most recently, Battle has been collaborating with the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC) on their long-term, multifaceted project called _Ishtar’s International Network of Feral Gardens_, which extends many of the ideas inherent in _seeds are meant to disperse_ and involves numerous other other artists. The namesake is fertility goddess Ishtar—“Lady of the Date Clusters, Inanna, Aphrodite, or Venus”—a befitting namesake given that the program considers reproductive justice, climate care, and psychic resilience through experimental food sovereignty initiatives.[^4] Dispatches are released through Ishtar on the state of race, food security, and anti-capitalist forms of exchange in the time of the pandemic. Each provides information on how capitalist food systems disenfranchise BIPOC communities, as well as resources to empower these communities to resist. 

_Ishtar’s International Network of Feral Gardens_ marks a commitment to facilitating the cultivation of feral gardens around the world, to open new food economies. Here, as in _seeds are meant to disperse_, Battle sends seed packs to participants, and the labour of growing is divvied up among all the recipients—a form of gathering through shared action, while physically, geographically distant. With each seasonal change, Battle releases a chapter through _Ishtar’s_ website that will eventually culminate as a guidebook. Chapters are designed to be viewed on a phone while sitting with your plants, providing prompts for engaging with your garden like “Sit in your space at three different times of the day and take note of how the sun passes,”[^5] and “Listen to what your plants are telling you,” with suggestions on how to accomplish this.[^6] Chapters also provide information on gardening, and other writing. This project creates a network of intergenerational knowledge-sharing and exchange that overflows well beyond Battles’ practice. 

The new connections made with other-than-human relatives through the feral gardens may end up spanning forthcoming generations and perhaps repair ancestral rifts resulting from the ongoing machinations of white supremacist colonialism, machinations that have asserted genocidal and ecocidal ideologies that “we know better,” despite other-than-human realities existing far beyond the narrow individualism of colonized temporality. Early settlers embarked on an unnecessary reckoning with the ecologies of so-called North America by manufacturing wilderness (read: national parks) as a false binary with civilization—a white supremacist fallacy used to justify genocidal projects. To create a feral garden is to move beyond the colonial binary of wilderness/civilization; here, our stifled curiosity is nurtured by engaging with the feral possibilities of Battle’s project. To be feral, after all, is to be liberated from domestication. What comes after the feral, the liberation from binaries? Untold possibilities. 

As becomes obvious through iterations like _Ishtar’s International Network of Feral Gardens_, Battle’s project lives outside of formal beginnings, outside colonial notions of time as a linear march of progress. Instead, there’s a cycle, a continuation of the practice of gardening passed down to her by her grandmother and mother, an intergenerational practice not unlike the lineage of land-based knowledge plants pass down through their seeds. Battle has continued this other-than-colonial form of care in that _seeds are meant to disperse_ brings people together across distances through learning, together, how we can relate to our other-than-human relations by acknowledging their ongoing presence in our lives, whether we are able to sense them or not. We can learn how to support them, we can gather with them by tending to them, sharing their fruits with our communities, being grateful that we get to share space with them. Congregating in this way—ancestral, generational, spatial—collapses past, present, and future across climates and expanses of land, expanses that abound with relations ready to freely offer their other than-capitalist teachings to those willing to gather with them. To come together with plants is also to gather with all of those who have been and who still are tending to these lands and all that compose them, fighting for them, protecting them—ancestors past and future.

[^1]: Grace Dillon, Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2012). 
[^2]: Christina Battle, seeds for the end of the world zine (self-pub., 2018), 3.
[^3]: Battle, 3.
[^4]: Ishtar’s International Network of Feral Gardens, SAVAC, www.savac.net/ishtars-international-network-feral-gardens/ishtar
[^5]: Christina Battle, “Chapter One,” seeds are meant to disperse guidebook (Toronto: SAVAC, 2020), www.savac.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/feral\_gardens\_battle\_chapter\_one\_may.pdf
[^6]: Christina Battle, “Chapter Two (Look Closely),” seeds are meant to disperse guidebook (Toronto: SAVAC, 2020), www.savac.net/ wp-content/uploads/2020/04/feral\_gardens\_battle\_chapter\_two\_fi- nal\_june14\_UPDATE.pdf

lg_147-Webb

md_147-Webb

sm_147-Webb

thumbnail_147-Webb

147-Webb

issue-147-p50-54.pdf

Environment

Nature

Mercedes Webb uncovers the intricacies of Christina Battle’s ongoing seed harvesting and intimate distribution project called seeds are meant to disperse, which epitomizes an other-than-capitalist ethos by shifting focus towards the physical, psychic, and communal nutrition that small-scale and feral cultivation can offer. 

To Reciprocate All They Freely Offer

Letter

##### Dear C Mag,

The last issue spoke to something I’ve been thinking about often: that one of the most effective ways to neuter a destructive force is to laugh at its desperate fervour to harm. I think about the New York artist Betty Tompkins who turns crowd-sourced submissions of the cruel things men say to women into carefully rendered paintings and drawings. Divorced from their original contexts, violent phrases like “You are a dumb bitch” become neutered and bizarre. Similarly, the Hong Kong video artist Wong Ping uses gallows humour in his brightly coloured, jovial animations to critique the complexities of an increasingly authoritarian society. Even as freedoms of expression in his city have drastically diminished, Wong’s work functions as a trojan horse with potential to slip under the radar. I love artists like this. Comedy necessitates both sharp social awareness and an empathetic understanding of the pain of being human—all jokes are a little bit sad. That’s why a date who is very funny becomes all the more attractive.

But above all, the issue made me think about the nature of conversations between artists and critics. The best kind of studio visits resemble conversations between friends, and often contain escalating banter and laughter; humour is a looseness which allows for slips, gaps, and honest revelations. That type of camaraderie translated wonderfully in Paul Chaat Smith’s conversation with New Red Order. So, I wonder why, if so much art is funny, more art criticism isn’t humorous too. Can we overcome the self-seriousness of an art world, which Jaclyn Bruneau succinctly described as “hyper-selective about sentimentality and hell-bent on justifying its ever-troubled existence,” and laugh at ourselves?

##### Elliat Albrecht

##### Dear C Mag,

Recently, while visiting over horchata, my friend vehemently stated that fungi are related to plants as rock is to music. After a weighty pause, I burst into laughter I could not control, my stomach beginning to cramp up, my face blushing red and tears starting to pool in my eyes. In my head, I had envisioned a sandstone boulder sitting on a patch of grass, wholly unrelated to music—an inflexible form faced with the living elasticity of music. Between sucking in quick breaths and giggling, I struggled to explain to my friend what I found so funny, only able to push out the word “rock.”

As Caitlin Chaisson mentions in “No Laughing Matter,” in issue 146, the circumstances of a joke are that of something mechanical encrusted on the living; what evokes laughter is the inflexible mechanical reaction to something that called for something else entirely. What evokes giggles? What makes sense? What is unexpected? Inherently a mode of investigation of relativity—of who laughs and who doesn’t—humour reveals what is expected, and thus the systemic structures  
that form our expectations. If humour reveals what’s real and known, anti-humour encourages complex multiplicities of funny.

In “Tragicomedy, a Toolkit,” Parker Kay turns the spotlight onto the tightrope that comedic performers walk, never falling and yet always falling between their personas and their personal lives, making funny a spectrum of emotions against simplistic and binaristic emotional states. Tragicomedy, as a form of anti-humour, is suspicious of the binaries of our perceived neoliberal reality, and functions as a method with which to search relationality, allowing for the more complex understandings of oppressive systems of power and of what’s funny. With “rock,” I see the awkward space between my friend and I in that moment highlighting the relativity between my reading and theirs, nudging us both to comprehend the other’s perception. When I contemplate how anti-humour creates new relationships to the word “funny,” and the overarching idea of laughing at power structures that is present in C146, I imagine that perhaps these new relations can aid in envisioning new expectations and new structures where yes, that rock joke really is funny.

##### Alexa Bunnell

##### Dear C Magazine,

Issue 146 had me wondering about the relationship between humour and precarity. In physical comedy and slapstick, putting one’s body in a precarious position can be quite funny. Think of any number of Buster Keaton’s stunts which are played for comedy but could easily be rendered for terror—jumping from the rooftop of one tall building to another (and missing), or sliding under a moving vehicle. These feats are dangerous and perhaps a bit foolish, but also incredibly clever and impressively executed. Both comedy and horror work to create pleasure in discomfort, and build moments of tension and release.

Similarly, finding the means to place a ladder over an open stairwell in order to hang an artwork, or creating a provisional blender using a power drill requires a bit of risk but also ingenuity. This is the territory dealt in by Art Handler Mag, an Instagram account that works to mine what’s funny in the precariousness (both physical and financial) of arts labour. Art Handler Mag illuminates the largely invisible, blue collar side of the art world inhabited by art handlers, installers, and technicians, who are, more often than not, artists themselves. It’s niche humour for sure, and while it’s peppered with explicit critiques of the inequalities and precarious working conditions that many museums and galleries uphold, it’s dominated by one of the most common internet tropes: hacks. These hacks are either ridiculous or brilliant, and often both. A hack usually involves using materials in ways for which they weren’t necessarily intended, as does art installation and,  
quite often, art creation. Something that’s provisional doesn’t need to last forever; often it’s created with the intent that it should eventually (sooner rather than later) be replaced. In its makeshiftedness, nonchalance, and anti-commitment, what’s provisional is often deeply funny.

I thought about this while reading Karina Irvine’s feature about Mike Bourscheid’s work _Ledgers_, which bears a relationship to the artist’s day job as an art mover. As an artist who has also spent some years working as an art technician/installer, I was interested by the way that Irvine folds details about this line of work into the piece. In his performance, Bourscheid uses humour to address precarity in relation to art workers, but also to a more general shift in labour conditions. As the effects of COVID\-19 eliminate work for many and create dangerous, unsupported conditions for others, it’s hard to see precarity in a particularly humorous light; however, reading about Bourscheid’s work was a gentle, funny reminder of, as Irvine puts it: “the importance of building alliances through laughter at a time when it is most seriously needed.”

##### Anna Hawkins

issue-147-p12-14.pdf

Letters reflecting on Issue 146 “Humour.”

Letters

lg_147

md_147

sm_147

thumbnail_147

Editor

Guest Editor

Publisher

Designer

Artist Project

Daniella Sanader is a writer and reader who lives in Toronto. 

###### \*Anna Bowen describes an abstract video—a close-up of a blue foam roller with a piece of acetate moving in front of it crinkling loudly and reflecting white and, at times, iridescent light
  
  
What else can I describe to help create a more complete picture?[^1]

There are approximately 11 seconds of silence before her voice begins, a silence that is loud and grainy when the volume is maxed out on my laptop—punctuated with a few disembodied clicks and what I imagine to be a slow intake of the speaker’s breath. Then, that particular unfolding, wet sound of a mouth as it prepares for speech: “a convex, minutely puckered surface could be called a vertical sea,” she says. Throughout her sentence she leaves small beats after certain words— _convex, surface, could be called_ —pauses for emphasis and an additional breath.

The title for Aislinn Thomas’s video is pulled from Guelph-based poet Anna Bowen’s first attempt to describe what she is seeing: to translate her visual field into a linguistic one. It’s a practice commonly referred to as audio or image description: when tracks of recorded speech are designed to accompany visual media—movies, TV shows, art objects—providing further information on visual details for those who are blind or have low vision. In her book _More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art_, Georgina Kleege discusses the standardized frameworks for composing audio descriptions: to maintain as much objectivity as possible, avoiding personal interpretation, speaking in a flatly pleasant tone. As she explains, audio descriptions are texts that are typically left unauthored, compounding the assumption that they are neutral parcels of data to be accessed by those who need them: “if the describer simply chooses the correct words, an image will be transmitted directly to the blind person’s mind’s eye where she can form an independent, aesthetic judgement about it.”[^2] As a blind person herself, Kleege adds, “I am not sure if I have a mind’s eye, or if I do, its vision is impaired precisely to the same degree as my physical eyes.”[^3]

Instead, Kleege wonders how audio description could be recognized as “a literary/interpretive form with infinite possibilities,”[^4] one that understands that any individual description is as active and mutable as access itself—there are no universal perspectives, no one-size-fits-all approaches, no neutral stances. While people who are blind or have low vision can make use of audio description, so too can those who have sensory sensitivities, those who are neurodivergent or non-visual learners, those who appreciate the guides for their attention, those who love the possibilities of language, or those who reject the compartmentalization of these very categories. When it comes to audio description, perhaps instead, as Kleege explains, there is simply conversation. A gathering of three equally relational, contingent voices—a describer, a listener, an artwork—an ongoing and active collaboration between what is seen, what is said, what is heard.

What else can I describe?

What Bowen says “could be called a vertical sea” is in fact a closeup of Thomas’s blue plastic foam roller, filmed behind a wrinkled sheet of acetate that wiggles hazily in front of the camera, producing what Bowen describes as “clouds in long white streams overhead.” Occasionally the plastic refracts in such a way that there’s a quick hint of the body holding it—flickers of a green shirt or pink-white skin—but they don’t last long. The vertical sea’s upended horizon line falls to the right of the screen, beyond which are the blurry-yet-quotidian signs of Thomas’s home: maybe it’s a coffee table, maybe a stack of books. The first in a series of short videos, _vertical sea_ was produced by Thomas with intentionally limited means—the available objects within her apartment—as the artist learned to adapt to her own barriers of access to public space, brought on through chronic illness and disability. When the video was completed, Bowen was invited to write a poetic description to accompany it. As Thomas explains, the video component of _vertical sea_ had been made in anticipation of this subsequent description; it moves slowly, it’s repetitious and partially abstract. In other words, _vertical sea_ is spacious, and it invites Bowen’s language to stretch out and wander in different directions. The vocal description is not secondary to Thomas’s video—not a reactive measure or a quick attempt at compliance—but rather, the two formats are deeply entwined. They grow and adapt; it’s an ongoing conversation.

“A convex stippled surface is a landscape of white peaks and shadowed, indigo-blue puckered valleys,” Bowen describes, and the topography shifts again underneath my feet. She returns again and again to these starting points—Thomas’s blue foam roller, Thomas’s acetate sheet—and gives them language, a little bit different each time. Each description is partial, temporary, grazing gently against its subject before retreating again. Taken individually, they cannot build a complete picture—nor do they attempt it. Instead of vying for completeness, they produce something different from an accumulation of oblique angles: the acetate is at once a range of wispy-thin clouds, a slow waterfall, a transparent mask, an invisible cloak, a twitching eyelid, triangular pools of light, a crease and a wrinkle.

What else can I describe?

I watch again and listen again. “And in this movement of clear thin cloud plastic, you might catch the things your mind imagines.” I track on how often Bowen relies on conditionals, on questions— _you might, if you, could be, do we_ —and I start to grow cozy in the space they leave behind. After all, like any form of translation, description is always already a speculative process, an exercise in making choices: it produces new gaps as it tries to fill existing ones. Description and art writing are old, reliable companions, yet I wonder why the former is routinely considered insufficient for the latter. “That text doesn’t go far enough,” I hear people say, “It only describes the artwork”—as if the work of description is fundamentally neutral, voiceless, and apolitical. As if there isn’t a long literary and poetic history of ekphrastic writing, of texts that revel in the interpretive, critical possibilities of committing visual works of art to language. Ultimately, _vertical sea_ stands as a reminder that description is never as simple as it seems; it can open up any artwork to a sensory field beyond itself, inviting new forms of access and imaginative potential.

“We see a rich, ocean blue,” Bowen says. I’m nearing the end of Thomas’s video now, the sounds of crinkles reaching a muffled crescendo before receding in favour of another patch of dusty silence. I count myself among Bowen’s “we,” but I understand the collectivity of that statement to be increasingly malleable, complex. Of course, Thomas recognizes that this experimental approach to audio description will never fulfill everyone’s needs. There are no complete pictures here, no sweeping promises of universal access—acknowledging that such a thing was simply never possible in the first place. Instead, this “we” that sees the ocean blue is a pronoun that unfurls with as many interpretive possibilities as Bowen finds for a simple sheet of acetate. In Thomas’s work, access is exactly that: simultaneously specific, incomplete, loving, and potentially endless.

What else can I describe?

—Daniella Sanader 
  
  
**Anna Bowen** is a Guelph, ON-based poet and writer. She has collaborated with visual artists on projects related to space, care labour, landscape, and access.

**Daniella Sanader** is a writer and reader that lives in Toronto. [desanader.com](http://desanader.com)

**Aislinn Thomas** is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes video, audio, performance, sculpture, installation, and text. Her recent projects explore the generative nature of disability while pushing up against conventional access measures, treating access as an art-form in itself.

The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council, and the generous work of consultants Ramya Amuthan and Michael Arnowitt in the creation of this piece.

**ERRATUM** Re: _C Magazine_ Issue 147, pgs 56-59\.   
The booklet pertaining to Aislinn Thomas’s Artist Project was incorrectly inserted and bound between pages 58-59; the intended location was between pages 56-57\. For this inaccuracy, we heartily apologize to: the artist; the author of the accompanying text, Daniella Sanader; and, to readers for any confusion experienced while viewing the work.

[^1]: A question typically asked to blind and low-vision visitors participating in the Mind’s Eye Program at the Guggenheim Museum, developed by Georgia Krantz. Cited by Georgina Kleege, _More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 118\. 
[^2]: Kleege, 101.
[^3]: Kleege, 101.
[^4]: Kleege, 108.  
  

issue-147-p57-61.pdf

Video

Abstract

Accompanying text to Aislinn Thomas’s video stills of her blue plastic foam roller, interpreted by poet Anna Bowen’s alternative audio description. Here, the domestic and quotidian are co-authored via a visual text, where the ekphrastic and the visual are co-constitutive. Thomas’ full video is available through the website. 

A convex, minutely puckered surface could be called a vertical sea* by Aislinn Thomas: Text

Lauren Crazybull / Miinaakii is a Niitsitapi, Dené painter living in Amiskwaciwâskahikan / Edmonton.

Faye HeavyShield is a member of the Kainai (Blood) Nation in the foothills of Southern Alberta.

##### In this collaborative artist project, Faye HeavyShield and Lauren Crazybull have created new work through intergenerational conversation, exchange, and kinship. Calling out and responding to each other in turn, the resulting works reflect the many ways in which all things are connected: berries, ancestors, Prairie grass, time, stories, relations, ceremony. All part of a wildly complex and beautiful form of gathering, the form of gathering that is life, itself.

  
**Faye HeavyShield:** I work with the idea of temporality and how time can shift. Time can’t be tied, and neither can our connections to our environment and our history—these things remain a part of us. Niitsitapi have always gathered food, for sustenance, for medicine, and for ceremony. In this pandemic, even though some things are not as physically possible as before, that meaning and feeling of gathering is not lost, not gone. The berries are still here, the land is still here and because of that, so are we. The absence of physical gatherings does not negate that this is the season for berries.

**Lauren Crazybull:** When I hear you talk about gathering, and about how berries connect us to our ancestors, stories, and land, I feel like there’s just so much that it could mean, there is so much behind the act of gathering berries; it can ultimately connect us in ways that aren’t just physical. Can you tell me about how these ideas informed your material choices?

**FH:** I use the image of Prairie grass often because I’m surrounded by it. I chose to use berries as a tie to another form that is often present in my work—the circle (and sometimes the spiral). The _okonokiistss_ (Saskatoon berries) are the stones in the medicine wheel, tipi rings, the remains of the old camps. The land, the berries, and the stone markers signify our strength as Niitsitapi. In this work, they indicate our history, and who we are today. They stand in for stories we have heard. Connecting this further, _okonokiistss_ are imprinted on the second image, the juices leaving a vivid trace.

**LC:** Seeing the berries layered over the photograph of the grass made me go back to my drawings and think: How can I make these images more physical? How can I move them toward embodying something you can touch? I didn’t want to make images that felt disconnected or far away.

**FH:** Where did you start in making this work?

**LC:** I looked at my copy of the Blackfoot dictionary and there were so many different definitions of gathering, I thought it was kind of funny: gathering for an event, gather all people to one spot, gather fabric, raking… there was even a Blackfoot phrase for gathering at Walmart (_Iitáóhkanáóo’p_). I took these unpeopled, solitary photos of the land in Blackfoot Territory, then I looked at images of past gatherings that were important to me, like of my family’s annual justice walk for my late aunt Jackie Crazybull, and of the time me and my siblings went to Nose Hill Park to learn why it was an important Blackfoot landmark. I gathered all these images and memories on top of one another, thought about how I feel right now being away from people I care about, and tried to emulate  
that feeling. And then I got some objects together: the sweetgrass I was gifted last time I was in Sikohkotoki (Lethbridge) and the mint you gave me when I visited your home. I wanted there to be a trace, a memory of these past gatherings, mixed with these images of the land—peopleless, for now, but not empty. I guess I like to map out these images that can tell a story, or many stories.

**FH:** What does solitude mean to you?

**LC:** For me, it can be a nice thing, but like everything, it works in moderation. Solitude can help me feel more human… I can sit with my thoughts, map them out, and try to think of my next steps. Without it, I feel like I am just going through the motions. My practice thrives in solitude, so I find a lot of value in it. I’m a slow thinker so I need that time to organize my thoughts. What about you?

**FH:** Solitude is when I can devote my whole self to this other entity in my space and that is my art. I need that intimacy in my work. To be able to make decisions, to question myself, and to feel good about the choices I make. I remember one time, years ago, thinking that if nothing else happened to me from that day on, I would still have all these stories, experiences, and references to make art about and with. I feel richer every day that happens. Even when you think you’re not moving, you are. You’re ruminating. You’re making decisions. It’s not all just doing. It’s about thinking, deciding—for, against, instead.

lg_c147-AP1

md_c147-AP1

sm_c147-AP1

thumbnail_c147-AP1

c147-AP1

issue-147-p80-82.pdf

Collaboration

Lauren Crazybull and Faye HeavyShield’s new project is born out of intergenerational collaboration. Manipulated photographs, berries, and prairie grass offer forms of gathering that are at once old and new. Accompanying text by the artists. 

Miinakii and Me

Artist

issue-147-p56-62.pdf

Aislinn Thomas’s video stills of her blue plastic foam roller are interpreted by poet Anna Bowen’s alternative audio description. Here, the domestic and quotidian are co-authored via a visual text, where the ekphrastic and the visual are co-constitutive. Thomas’ full video is available through the website.

A convex, minutely puckered surface could be called a vertical sea,* with: Alternative Audio Description by Anna Bowen

Review

Cason Sharpe is a writer based in Toronto. His first book of short stories, _Our Lady of Perpetual Realness_, was published by Metatron Press in 2017, and his subsequent writing can be found in various places in print and online.

W. E. B. Du Bois coined the term double consciousness to describe a particular phenomenon of Blackness. The term refers to an ability to see oneself from a subjective vantage point, and simultaneously from the vantage point of the whiteness that oppresses. It’s a concept of enduring relevance, especially in the contemporary moment, when various institutions, both inside and outside the art world, have had to create ad hoc committees in order to make the simple declaration that Black lives matter. I tried to suspend my judgment as these statements of solidarity began to flood the feed, but I couldn’t help but read them as carefully crafted pieces of PR. My skepticism led to the uneasy feeling of double consciousness, the value of my Black life reduced to a question of bad press. 

In _Consciousness_, published in 2019 by New York’s GenderFail Press, Lex Brown uses the form of the monograph to pick apart Dubois’s concept from an artist’s view. _Consciousness_ is a collection of song lyrics, photos, films stills, and drawings by the Brooklyn-based artist, whose practice jumps between music, songwriting, video, and performance. _Consciousness_ surveys Brown’s work from 2011 to 2019, using her lyrics as its narrative spine. She breaks the book into nine sections, each containing the lyrics to three or four songs, laid across the page like poetry. These lyrics/poems are intercut with images from Brown’s video and performance work, creating a fuller picture of her multidisciplinary practice. A subjectivity forms throughout the course of the book, one that is created both on its own and in response to its audience. 

_Consciousness_ is arranged thematically rather than chronologically. Instead of charting her development in a linear fashion, Brown leads her audience around in circles; themes, images, and phrases loop back on themselves like an internal monologue. Photos and film stills move us from green screens to forest floors to backyard art parties and back again. The section titles express Brown’s revolving door of concerns: “Body/Image,” “Lights Camera Action,” “Everyday Life,” “$5.99 or $9.50 with a Milkshake,” “Say There Was A Pain…,” “Woods,” “Hello.,” “Data Trauma,” “The Acid Year,” “Togetherness.” These sections are imperfect containers, the ideas held within one spilling into the next. I notice Brown has a habit of lifting a line from one song to repurpose it in another, creating a layer of lyrical repetition that highlights the importance of revision and recontextualization in her practice. The cover and the title page of each section are printed on semi-transparent paper. You can see the palimpsest of lyrics behind each title page, and traces of previous songs imprinted onto future ones. 

Brown recognizes that the work that she does live with her body is different from its documentation, so rather than try to reproduce her performances in print on a one-to-one scale, she takes the opportunity to create a book that’s something else entirely, a political tactic as much as an aesthetic one. In her foreword, she identifies herself as an artist-singer, which is, in her words, “not \[a\] conceptual theory or poorly executed character, but \[a\] purveyor of a bodily medium which has the unique ability to critique our relationship to images and technology by being leveraged alongside them within a singular practice.” If this is a book about the development of a particular consciousness, it’s also a book about the bodily manifestation of that consciousness, and the political implications of the slippage between body and mind as a marginalized subject. How does audience perception of the body impact the way ideas are received? How does audience perception of the body impact perception of the self? The questions that Brown poses throughout the book dovetail with a broader history of Black thought, which can be understood as an ongoing attempt to under stand a personhood that is continually denied. 

_Consciousness_ explores these ideas through a subversion of reader expectations. If readers are interested in the chronology of Brown’s work, the book contains an index at the back, but the non-linear ordering of its contents denies the neat narrative of professional development that most monographs seek to highlight. There’s no clear path from early to recent work, only a series of concerns that reoccur and overlap, the result of which is much messier than a straightforward survey. If the goal of most monographs is to canonize an artist, to document their work in order to place it with in a particular art-historical discourse, _Consciousness_ nimbly elides this archival impulse. This manoeuvre allows Brown to reject the fetishistic grasp of a contemporary art market, with its impulse to collect the work of Black artists under the reductive banner of diversity. In order to consume Brown’s work, an audience has no other choice than to engage with the ideas contained therein. 

Similarly, Brown’s lyrics upend audience expectation through jarring tonal shifts that move from irreverence to sober reflection, and play between simplicity and nuance, self-righteousness and self-parody. In “Worst Behavior (Drake Cover),” she changes the rapper’s famous hook “Motherfucker never loved us” to “Ciabatta on my big sub,” a clever jab at the snobbery of the Brooklyn creative class to which she belongs. In “FEELING,” Brown declares “But goddamn I’m glad to be alive goddamnit.” I relate to the contradictory subjectivity that Brown builds throughout the book; it’s that double (or perhaps triple, even quadruple) consciousness, one that is forced to reconcile how it conceives of itself with how it’s seen by the world. If I had to identify the book’s thesis, it would come, in classic non-linear fashion, in the middle, toward the end of a tune called “B-Song”: “And I had a sense that what I had to do was collect something from the sky / Put like with unlike, and unlike with like / And put these disordered ducks of one kind in a row / In harmony.” Perhaps it’s this unifying impulse, the desire for a whole self with all its contradictions, that led the artist to title the book in the singular. _Consciousness_ is a slow unveiling of a complex self, one that Brown’s body of work seeks to create and expose. If the art world wants to make the claim that Black lives matter, its institutions have to reckon with the multifariousness of Black art and Black thought. Otherwise, as Brown’s work suggests, the claim is only good PR. 

lg_c147-sharpe

md_c147-sharpe

sm_c147-sharpe

thumbnail_c147-sharpe

c147-sharpe

issue-147-p66-67.pdf

Cason Sharpe reviews the book _Consciousness_ (2019) by Lex Brown, published by GenderFail Press.

Consciousness: Lex Brown

Emma Steen is a curator, writer, and the Outreach & Membership Coordinator for the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective in Toronto/Tkaron:to, her hometown. Emma’s area of interest lies in the intersection of self-determined Indigenous sexual agency and anti-colonial strategy within the arts.

Walking into the Native Art Department International (NADI) _Bureau of Aesthetics_, I am immediately greeted by the rhythmic sound of jingles. They are coming from _There is No Then and Now; Only Is and Is Not_ (2018), a projection of Bronx-based artist Dennis RedMoon Darkeem dancing in an empty theatre in his powwow regalia. At the end of each loop, his statement reads across a black screen, “I feel like everyone has had a hand in defining Native people, except ourselves.”

When Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan began planning for the first Canadian solo exhibition of their long-term collaborative project, they could not have imagined that just as it was set to open, the world would shut down. How bizarre it feels to be in a gallery right now; its rules of engagement (where we can and cannot sit, stand, or lean while considering work that we can or cannot touch) feel heightened with the presence of COVID\-19, but are also elements of the kind of curatorial rigidity that NADI turns a spotlight on. _Bureau of Aesthetics_ has been closed to the general public since its opening in March, and there is something strangely familiar about entering a room full of Indigenous creative excellence that has been silenced. This is of course through no fault of Mercer Union— who had expected to run the show until the end of May and host a full month of performances by Hupfield— but being in an empty gallery reminds me of entering archives and seeing shelves of carvings, paintings, and masks that have been left mostly on their own. It is that exact culture of curating—one that projects reductionist assumptions onto the work of Indigenous cultural producers—that NADI does so well at satirizing and dismantling. The show emphasizes kinship, relationality, and methods of disruption, all of which seek to liberate the confines of so called authenticity and classification that are so ingrained in a colonial approach to art history and exhibition.

Working across various media, NADI’s artworks actively aim to upend essentialist expectations of Indigenous aesthetics in their viewers and decentre aestheticism in their   
work. In _Untitled (Carl Beam)_ (2017), a “No U-turn” neon sign is overlaid on a print of Carl Beam’s _Traffic_ (1997), which depicts a lithograph of a raven above a traffic sign. It was inspired by Lujan and Hupfield’s visit to a Beam retrospective, the artists observing that major institutions, galleries, and private collectors were only interested in purchasing artwork with traditional Indigenous imagery. The artists’ response was to problematize the notion of an “Indigenous aesthetics,” deciding to honour Beam’s work here by intentionally obstructing the view with unconventional materials that seek to decouple Beam’s aesthetics from any supposed such thing. With the sign, NADI is directing how we now approach and value Beam’s work—directed by Indigenous artists themselves and not, as RedMoon Darkeem cautioned against, by others. In a similar vein is the structural sculptural work _Maintaining Good Relations_ (2017), a neon-pink Plexiglass light box with a mirrored floor, originally installed in Artists Space (New York), illuminated to signify when NADI’s independent FM radio broadcast was on air. The broadcast, which spanned a full day, hosted conversations with an array of guests which sought to prioritize intersectionality between artists and arts communities. In these works and others, Hupfield and Lujan consistently poke and prod at the ways in which art, especially art made by non-white artists, is categorized and contained within rigid boundaries. In turn, they create works and spaces that negate colonial art-historical structures and instead promote anti-colonial discourse and strategies to enact reciprocity, care, and knowledge sharing.

Exhibited at the back of the gallery is _Everything Sacred is Far Away_ (2019), a video series of public access television–style satirical scenes which feature Hupfield, Lujan, and a cast of characters from their network of peers, discussing authorship, anthropology, and the invisibility of Indigenous agency in art in pseudocientific fashion. At one point Lujan, clad in a lab coat, holds up a print of Southern Cheyenne multidisciplinary artist Edgar Heap of Bird’s _Point Of Sword Who Owns History_ (2004) as well as a crudely done painted copy and asks another cast member, “Which is more authentic?” _Everything Sacred is Far Away_ embodies NADI’s approach to collaboration, focusing on humour to create non-competitive structures that include many different participants with the shared goal of solidarity and relationality. This collaborative practice seemingly extends to the viewer as well, asking us all to consider how to use non-competitiveness to foster care within communities and interrogate the capitalist structures within art that focuses on individual success, a concept which NADI can be seen actively resisting.

As their collective’s title suggests, Hupfield and Lujan draw upon academic and administrative language to cheekily push back against the limitations many Indigenous artists face as their work in placed in a box of what is and isn’t considered Indigenous; they quite literally build their own box in the case of _Maintaining Good Relations_. Their approach to addressing the double standard in art, which seeks uniqueness while punishing Indigenous artists for stepping away from traditional cultural signifiers, is to laugh openly, in the case of _Everything Sacred is Far Away_ —at the ways in which art historians, curators, and critics have been trained to use academic language to engage with Indigenous art but ultimately fail to understand the complexities of its practitioners’ self representations. It is because of this active energy to disrupt the expected that _Bureau of Aesthetics_ still accomplishes what it has set out to do, despite a global pandemic getting in its way.

NADI’s _Bureau of Aesthetics_ promotes an understanding of Indigenous lived experience and identity as complex and ever-changing. As the audience, we are clearly expected to take time and care to challenge our own preconceived ideas around Indigenous art and aesthetics, and to leave feeling implicated in their project. I consider RedMoon Darkeem’s words as I watch him dance in an empty theatre, as I stand in an empty gallery. Keeping each other company in our isolation, a new form of kinship rises. With each step and jingle, I feel a bit lighter. I expect the unexpected with NADI and was thrilled by the bright colours, humour, and moments of pause that this show offered.

md_147- STEEN

sm_147- STEEN

147- STEEN

Emma Steen reviews exhibition _Bureau of Aesthetics: Native Art Department International,_ featuring Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan at Mercer Union, Toronto. (March 14 – October 31, 2020).

Header

C Mag

Issue 147

Gather

Credits

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Gather

Explore Issue by Images

Features

Câhcacêp Art & Tea House: A Conversation with Jerry Saddleback and Jo-Ann Saddleback

My Words Will Heal You: On RISE Edutainment

Crip Hope

Reading Images Against Racism

Cooking the Books: Recipes by Artists

To Reciprocate All They Freely Offer

Artist Projects

A convex, minutely puckered surface could be called a vertical sea* by Aislinn Thomas: Text

Miinakii and Me

A convex, minutely puckered surface could be called a vertical sea,* with: Alternative Audio Description by Anna Bowen

Columns

Composition: Alongside Underbrush

Composition: Evaporative Losses

One Thing: A Rock Isn’t Always a Rock

Reviews

Consciousness: Lex Brown

Bureau of Aesthetics: Native Art Department International

David Wojnarowicz: Photography & Film 1978–1992 Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver Jan 10–April 5, 2020

The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology Edited by Karina Vernon Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2020

Revisiting ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ (2013): Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero

The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Issue 07: TILTING (1), TILTING (2) Edited and published by Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga

darkness is as deep as the darkness is: Rita McKeough

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer

This is the future: Hito Steyerl