Column

Isabel Lewis (born 1981, Santo Domingo, DR) is an artist and choreographer who creates spaces of alternative sociality between human and other-than-human agents in the format she’s named the hosted occasion. Lewis’s multi-sensorial occasions and other live artworks have been presented internationally, most recently by Kunsthalle Zürich, Sharjah Biennial, Gropius Bau, Roskilde Festival, Dia Art Foundation, and Tate Modern among others.

##### Check out this immersive hour-long sound work by artist and choreographer Isabel Lewis, dovetailing from her Composition column published in our latest issue 148, “Body Language.” Best known for her lushly diffused gatherings that sensuously dismantle hard coded sociality to see how we might find each other anew under other conditions, she offers an invocation of something similar here. At once a meditation, performance transcription, and reflection on the unique intersubjective exchange inherent between performer and viewer, Lewis makes yet another case for the unbounded self: “The constancy of your movement renders you uncapturable as an image. You are many-headed, many-limbed, and monstrous, desperately attractive to the eye which must engage differently to see you at all.” 
  
  
[cmagazine](https://soundcloud.com/user-935781686 "cmagazine") · [Isabel Lewis – Invocation 1](https://soundcloud.com/user-935781686/isabel-lewis-invocation-1 "Isabel Lewis - Invocation 1")

\[prelude\]

The following is meant to be read to another—human or other-than-human, perhaps more than-human—at a distance of approximately 60 cm.

Find this position in relation to them in space. Hold them in your peripheral vision, gently. Attune yourself to their materiality. What volume of space do they displace? What compression or expansion of your own body would be required to fill that volume? Can you sense their weight? What is the timbre of their vibration? Can you transpose this into audible tones? Do you pick up on the smell of them from this distance? Without touching, is there a discernment that can be made about their temperature in relation to your own?

Mind this.

\[bodymorphing\]

You are moving. Dancing is happening. It’s slow. You’re horizontal to the floor and your limbs seem to move at an even, uninterrupted pace. A continuous effect of fluidity is produced—the fluidity of a viscous material in a steady and constant rate of change.

The body morphs from one shape or suggested image into another in a gradual process of transformation: an arched back, a twisted tree trunk, an animal (perhaps a puma), an ancient Greek statue (perhaps the figure thought to be Dionysus on the east pediment of the Parthenon), and many more strange reorganizations of limbs that continually suggest, but change before fully delivering an image, before concretizing.

You are in quiet concentration, sinking down, receding into the back of your consciousness. You are even slower now in your movements, in your state of being. There are no calculations happening, no verbal constructions sounding in your head. You are awake in another way. You feel the pleasing sensation of both slip and stability at once.

There seems to be very little resistance on the surface of the skin and within what it assembles. The joints give the impression of swimming and the muscles and tendons remain softly pliant, pulled along by the will of the bones.

The ground complies as well, allowing an effortless glide over its expanse. This dance changes the surfaces of the body and the surfaces of other things too. The sequence of forms as they emerge and disappear on your body is not the dance; rather, the dance is a conductive medium, a kind of mediating jelly that gathers and connects without binding the elements of the situation. After a while, the flesh of your outer thigh is colder and the ground beneath you slightly warmer.

You find yourself standing. The hips begin to sway, smoothly describing a figure eight in space. The spine writhes snake-like to the boom of a lazy bass beat. Has it been there the entire time? You hadn’t noticed it before but its steadiness belies a beginning or ending point. The dance is like club dancing now but dramatically decelerated—an unambitious and excruciatingly slow striptease, but the eyes are different. Rather than outward-oriented, your gaze is turned inward and the dance carries on without a demand for attention, without a goal, without an end; it just keeps moving, languidly, to the beat of that pervasive bass, dragged out at 60 beats per minute, like the human heart during rest.

\[hosting\]

Someone or something is watching now and you know it because you experience a combination of kinesthetic pleasure and generative stress that compels your movement. Stopping doesn’t occur to you at all. You are hosting the gaze of another upon your sensate surface and it is energizing, like the slightest touch perambulating over your skin. With your own eyes, you gaze down upon your torso, observing its undulations—an implicit offer to guide the other’s gaze. Offer accepted, it’s warmer there now. You continue. 

The orientation of your spine indicates a warm vector of verticality around which your torso and hips wind. Spiralling, curvilinear movements course through you as effortlessly and smoothly as be- fore. Starting from your fingertips, the arms begin to engage as your hands travel over the rolling landscape that your body has become. Here, in perpendicular relation to the floor, your hips find mobility as the legs bend and spread and the dance coils and uncoils, furls and unfurls in infinite inscriptions, double helix after double helix in all directions. The constancy of your movement renders you uncapturable as an image.

You are many-headed, many-limbed, and monstrous, desperately attractive to the eye which must engage differently to see you at all. You welcome the other’s gaze which roves around the entirety of your surface. This form of seeing is active, almost muscular; it can neither identify with nor plunge into the depth of a single image and so surrenders to immersion. In lieu of the possibility for sharp focus, in the ambiguity of blur, other sensual pleasures emerge.

You expose your neck, looking upward toward your hand extended above your head and follow its trajectory down. It lands on your shoulder, then brushes over your chest and belly before coming to rest at the hip. You turn away from your observer and there is an instant of panic for the other, unmoored without your eyes. You experience this proprioceptively, as though your internal organs are for a moment more noticeably pressed upon by the air surrounding you. Your hand takes over as the guide, inviting the focus to drift down the lower back, ass, upper thigh, and side of your leg until you’re crouched down, grazing the gentle bulge of your ankle with your fingertips.

\[postlude\]

You pause, slowly lifting your eyes to meet the gaze of the other. Something far more nuanced than the usual shock of eye contact happens. You have borne a responsibility as a host, the other has been imprinted by gestural resonances, each of you has sought the other’s trust and risked being deemed unworthy of it. There is a fine-tuning of your mutually mediated corporealities.

Writer

Body Language

issue-148-p58-60.pdf

Performance

Text

At once a meditation, performance transcription, and reflection on the unique intersubjective exchange inherent between performer and viewer, Lewis’s text constitutes one of many cases in this issue for the unbounded self: ”You are many-headed, many-limbed, and monstrous, desperately attractive to the eye which must engage differently to see you at all.”

Composition: Invocation 1 

Dayna Danger is a Two-Spirit, Métis/Saulteaux/Polish multidisciplinary artist whose work primarily focuses on their Indigenous cosmologies, kinship, gender, and sexuality. Danger lives and loves in tio’tia:ke, while pursuing a PhD focused on hide tanning practices from their great-grandmother, Madeline, at Concordia University.

Aaniin, Dayna Danger ndizhinikaaz, Métis – Saulteaux ndaa. waabi-mukwa dodem niinda’aw, Wini-nipi ndoonjibaa.

My mother, Debbie, was the first one to teach me about what a bundle is, what its role is in Anishinaabeg and Métis protocols of care, and what it has meant in our family. Each bundle is different, but they all carry deep significance. It’s a gathering of precious and sacred medicines and objects. In mine, you will find one braid of sweetgrass, Redbird matches in a Ziploc, empty pill bottles full of ground lavender and weekay, an abalone shell for burning medicine, red broadcloth, a leather- bound goose fan, and a red pipestone pipe with an eagle engraving, wrapped in soft blue fabric. My mother taught me to care for my bundle like you would a small child. Without you, they are defenseless. They rely on you to take care of them and activate them when the time is right. When we do, we engage all of ourselves: our emotions, our spirituality, our stories, and our teachings. We give to them, and they give to us. My bundle has taught me how to nurture my relationships to my kin, my spirit, my body, and my ancestors.

• • •

When I was 13 years old, I would sneak onto the home computer after dark, when everyone had gone to bed, and start up the 56K dial-up modem. Growing up in the freezing Prairie city of so-called Winnipeg, many complicated feelings about my sexuality arose. Not only did I not have queer elders then to look up to, no one in my world talked openly about sex, let alone queerness. I felt isolated and lonely at times, but my young spirit was mischievous and curious to find others like me. It wasn’t long until I found my favourite on- line chat room. My intention was not to meet anyone in person; I just needed a small pocket of the internet where a group of role-playing freaks from different parts of the globe could come together and escape our current realities. What I lacked in experience, I certainly made up for with imagination!

I became obsessed with tales of vampires, undead immortal beings, and mythical beasts. In church, I used to sneak Anne Rice’s novels inside the middle crease of the bible during mass; through them, I was introduced to imaginings of romantic relationships beyond the heteronormative binary of man and woman. Rice’s vampires were attracted to each other’s minds; gender and genitalia were inconsequential. As they aged, they lost their ability to procreate as humans, but would seduce their human lovers in order to feast on them. Vampires enjoyed single or multiple partners, both undead and alive, and these relationships were of- ten sexual without physical intercourse, which opened up a whole world of possibility. These stories became a way for me to express myself through characters that, at the time, I could only dream of embodying.

Back in the 2000s, at the old gay stomping grounds, Gio’s, knowledgeable kinksters in the community hosted monthly informative gatherings aimed at providing young, experimenting kinksters proper play techniques and toy usage. I had longed to enter play dungeons and Black and Blue balls hosted by local, well-known kinksters, and wanted to know how to play, while keeping myself and my culture safe. However, I felt uncomfortable right away in these spaces; while BDSM is seen as an alternative to monogamy, heteronormativity, and vanilla sex, it is rife with tired, cis-hetero, binary-affirming dynamics (“male” dominants and “female” submissives). And there was another glaring disparity: there were virtually no QTBIPOC in attendance, who have many hurdles in the BDSM scene to overcome before they even walk in the door including racial violence, triggering dynamics (such as master/slave) without care or consideration, and overt sexualization and fetishism of race and culture, just to name a few.

While colonization has done its best to erase Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer realities through forced performative gender roles and segregation, we push back by defining our own practices and making our existence visible. In my work, Anishinaabeg and Métis culture intersect with BDSM aesthetics materially—such as leather fetish masks adorned completely with black beads, or up-cycled bike tire tubes turned into floggers, with black beaded handles. I carry these handmade items in my bundle, right next to my prairie sage and bootleg tobacco, along with all my multiplicity—being queer as fuck, loud, energetic, kinky, smoked-hide obsessed—and stories, imagined and actualized. Indigiqueer _zaagi’idiwin_ (which translates to mutual love) and kin-making shifts the dominant, normative, Western scientific conception of relationships toward an embrace of reciprocity, fluidity, and possibility.

The community—the Indigenous ancestors seven generations back ’til present day, the matriarchs, the tough-love sweat lodge conductors and elders, waiting for the youth to come knock on their door, the ceremonial people, the fierce aunties and tattooed uncles, the Indigiqueers and Two-Spirits, the cousins (blood or not), the gookums, kookums, and those who carry and give life—has the responsibility of passing knowledge to the next generation, our children. Indigenous cultures have an intimate way of being given through oral traditions such as storytelling and listening, which requires reciprocity between the giver and receiver, much like in healthy BDSM circles. When I found my Two-Spirit elders, with whom I went to sweat lodges conducted by queer and trans women—gender outlaws sweating and healing together—I felt my heart explode with gratitude and relief. With this in mind, I was compelled to share a scene from my bundle between two Anishinaabe lovers, to inspire the next generation of Indigiqueers.

• • •

_how do you say “consent” in Anishinaabemowin?_

_close your eyes_  
_an expanse of white pine flooring_  
_unravelled prairie bison pelt, golden brown fur facing the_ _sky lay your body down_

_slide your belly along the coarse expanse_  
_stretch your limbs like a star,_  
_reaching arms, grasping fingertips, where hooves used to be_ _press your face, where shoulder blades used to be_

_I can weave my hands through your sea of hair_  
_clenching strands between fingers_  
_pulling tight to scalp_  
_pushing gently, coaxing down_

_a mound of musky fur, curling into flared nostrils_  
_breathe in rotten birch turned into smoked magic_  
_penetrated skin_  
_breathe out_

_little dad, how do you say “can I continue?”_

_thick, rubbery buffalo sinew—_  
_laid out long and wet_   
_harvested from tawny legs_   
_soaked overnight_  
_I’ve been waiting_  
_—Mashkode-bizhiki rope_  
_to wrap around your tiny fox wrists_   
_round and round your ankles, too_   
_pulling taut to four directions_

_we use everything, nothing goes to waste_

_every last drop_

_auntie, how do you say “safe word”?_

_I’ll scrape your rump with my moose bone tool_   
_like a fresh skinned hide ready to be fleshed_

_decorating your expanse of flesh_   
_speckles of purple, red bruising_   
_black and blue constellations_   
_connecting to form close bonds_   
_a cycle of the moon_

_Elder, how do you say “open your mouth”?_ 

_a flowery black hanky_  
_balled up and stuffed_   
_silent orifice_

_a sacred teaching of respect_

lg_148-DANGER

md_148-DANGER

sm_148-DANGER

thumbnail_148-DANGER

148-DANGER

issue-148-p76-79.pdf

Photography

Sexuality

Dayna Danger writes about bundles—a collection of precious and sacred medicines both material and immaterial—and generously details some of the contents of their own, illuminating the range of influences that contribute to one’s central support system.

One Thing: Bundles

thumbnail_WPG_Web 1_Apr1-Jun30_desktop.jpeg

WPG_Web 1_Apr1-Jun30_desktop.jpeg

md_WPG_Web 1_Apr1-Jun30_desktop.jpeg

sm_WPG_Web 1_Apr1-Jun30_desktop.jpeg

thumbnail_Smith_Web1_May15-Jun30_mobile.jpeg

Smith_Web1_May15-Jun30_mobile.jpeg

md_Smith_Web1_May15-Jun30_desktop.jpeg

sm_Smith_Web1_May15-Jun30_desktop.jpeg

thumbnail_Smith_Web1_May15-Jun30_desktop.jpeg

Smith_Web1_May15-Jun30_desktop.jpeg

Smith Foundation

lg_C154-Cover.jpg

md_C154-Cover.jpg

sm_C154-Cover.jpg

thumbnail_C154-Cover.jpg

C154-Cover.jpg

Editorial

Early in the autumn, we issued a rare call for pitches that didn’t lead with a theme, giving our communities and contributors a chance to have a say in shaping the next issue in a time of such trenchant irresolution. In response, we heard meditations on the rampant shift of the art world’s activities into online space; pained expressions of longing for IRL connection in the forms of exhibitions, openings, residencies, house parties, sex; ruminations on health and non-health of physical, mental, and psychic strains; and reflections on the now dramatically apparent reality that the self is an assemblage of continually unravelling experiences, many of which hinge on the involvement of others. Body language—that mysterious, intuitive social science and gestural repertoire that allows us to send and receive messages without words—in its straight-up definition, and in the more imaginative discursive possibilities it makes space for, seemed a fitting centre for these disparate parts whose tethers are perhaps only discernible in the light of our collective hindsight.

Dovetailing with our previous issue, “Gather,” which offered a multifaceted study on ideas around coming together, this issue brings focus to the idea of the individual as inextricable from the collective, conceiving of identity as accruing meaning, definition, and transformation through relationships, interactions, and impressions with others—in both physical and non-physical ways. While this effect of others on who we are is at once involuntary, in-built, and natural, the contributors to this issue make a strong case for the wilful porousness of the self as a way to shed toxic pasts, make stronger, stranger bonds, access experiential wealth, and, simply: survive.

In “‘Cells interlinked within cells interlinked’: On Ambivalent Contamination,” Alex Quicho reflects on the pandemic’s impact on our conceptions of intimacy and the erotic pulse that shoots through new negotiations of proximity, considering all the while the broader risks of our new-ish requirement (preference?) for distance. Flirting with the fine line between desire and disgust, she vouches for porousness as a methodology for relation—always, but especially in spite of our protracted hermetic conditions and the momentous exacerbation of societal inequities. “\[P\]orousness felt more grounded, more active, than simply being impressionable; a sponge, after all, is not fundamentally altered by any liquid that soaks it.” Through the work of Anicka Yi, Victoria Sin, Patrick Staff, and others, Quicho assembles a compelling and shape-shifting paradigm for practicing this sensibility. I can’t help but think of Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz’s invocation of Amador Fernández-Savater in her introduction to the “Health” installment of the Whitechapel Gallery’s _Documents of Contemporary Art_ series; she writes that Fernández-Savater “tempts us to transform ourselves, create new logics, populating this ‘exception’ with our thoughts, affects and desires so we don’t merely become spectators or victims of this crisis: to ‘inhabit the exception so we don’t simply return to a ‘normality.’’” I think of this as a kind of bone-deep queer opportunism.

Harking to another wet metaphor (fitting in this age of droplets), Preston Pavlis discusses Shikeith’s “embrace of _the spill_.” Reckoning with his identity as a gay Black man who grew up Christian in America— with all the attendant ghosts in each faction of his being—the artist blurs possibilities for ecstasy, relief, and liberation that are available through them all, even when they might be seen to be at odds with each other. Shikeith convenes not only with the ghosts of his ancestors whose experiences he inherits, but with the whole living group of those possessed by the same osmotic forces. As he says, “To spill is to resist being constrained to boundaries, it is to take up the form of freedom. It is known as a failure or an accident, everything that people think is wrong. \[…\] To spill is to point towards a sort of self-determination and a freeform way of being, way of existing.” This concept is in conversation with Anna Binta Diallo’s artist project, guest curated by Noor Bhangu; the collaged figures bookending the issue represent the latest iteration of the artist’s series _Wanderings_, which aims to tackle some of the shortcomings of identity politics by creating unexpected confluences of artefacts, references, and textures that angle toward more intercultural conver- sations. As Bhangu writes in her accompanying text, this “work embodies a move toward relationality that is vital for creating pathways to a less divided future. \[…\] \[T\]here is a clear message that identity is not singular but dispersed.”

Diallo’s rhizomatic and sometimes even speculative triangulation of facets of certain histories, cultures, and belief systems with others—without concretizing the relationships she’s mapping out—primes the viewer for Isabel Lewis’s entry in this issue’s Composition column. Here, the artist and choreographer best known for her “hosted occasions,” which are lushly diffused gatherings that sensuously dismantle hard-coded sociality to see how we might find each other anew under other conditions, offers an invocation of something similar in text. At once a meditation, performance transcription, and reflection on the unique intersubjective exchange inherent between performer and viewer, Lewis makes yet another case for the unbounded self: “The constancy of your movement renders you uncapturable as an image. You are many-headed, many-limbed, and monstrous, desperately attractive to the eye which must engage differently to see you at all. \[…\] This form of seeing is active, almost muscular; it can neither identify with nor plunge into the depth of a single image and so surrenders to immersion. In lieu of the possibility for sharp focus, in the ambiguity of blur, other sensual pleasures emerge.”

Speaking of such pleasures, the artist Dayna Danger, who is perhaps best known for their deployment of Métis and Anishinaabe material practices in creating BDSM implements (think: a handmade, intricately beaded black gimp mask), writes about bundles in our One Thing column. Comprising “precious and sacred medicines” both material and immaterial, a bundle is engaged in a reciprocal relationship with the person it belongs to—at once requiring care as well as generating it, as I understand. Danger generously details some of the contents of their bundle—“one braid of sweetgrass, Redbird matches in a Ziploc, empty pill bottles full of ground lavender and weekay, an abalone shell for burning medicine, red broadcloth, a leather-bound goose fan,” as well as numerous kink narratives— illuminating the range of influences that contribute to one’s central support system. Having been taught about bundles from their mother, and acknowledging the significant impact of finding and communing with other kinky BIPOC and Indigiqueer ancestors, Danger’s piece ends with a poetic, erotic offering to inspire the next generation of Two-Spirit folks: perhaps something to add to their bundles.

Lauren Fournier’s feature, “The (Im)possibility of Healing,” engages a long-standing, evolving conversation about healing, intercultural sharing, and inevitably, (mis)appropriation. The focus is on the work of the queer, Crip, Berlin-based, Canadian artist Lauryn Youden, whose most recent exhibition _Visionary of Knives_ at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien brings together a substantial set of materials that she uses to treat her ails. Though the artist had intended to use the exhibition opportunity as a much-needed gathering space for the Sickness Affinity Group (SAG)—a collective of chronically ill and disabled artists, activists, theorists, and their allies who support each other—the pandemic obviously prevented that. And so, Youden’s project of making the space tangibly community-centric and polyvocal was challenged, forcing her to consider how else the multiple influences, sources, and collaborators in her care regime might be represented, thus coming up against some of the challenges of intercultural exchange that Diallo’s project earnestly lays the groundwork for without necessarily plumbing its depths.

Johanna Hedva, the artist, writer, musician, and astrologer, is perhaps best known for their searingly vital essay “Sick Woman Theory,” which articulates the complex paradox of wanting to congregate in the name of social resistance, but because of illness or disability, not being able to IRL, and so thinking about resistance as deeply embodied—sickness and protest as having this ouroboros relationship—and operating from that place. Here, in “Soft Blues,” they offer an autopathography of sorts, drawing thought-provoking parallels between symptoms of mania and those of toxic masculinity. As with many medical conditions, in mania, women and non-binary folks get the short end of the stick—being villainized for embodying the same characteristics that are lauded (or at least permitted) in bodies socially coded as male. In this text, there’s a sharp honouring of the fact that the body speaks for itself, that language arises from its chemistry, afflictions, experiences, and ways of knowing: notably, the text centres around the coinciding of the author’s first period of mania with an especially acute reckoning with their gender identity (italics indicate where the writer temporarily occupies a male subject position). In a non-linear mode, they meticulously stitch the personal into the social, the systemic, and the historical, concretizing that individual health issues are always but a thread in a wider web. Recalling Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of “the flesh of the world” and Karen Barad’s satisfyingly scientific shattering of the nature-culture binary in “Nature’s Queer Performativity” (2011), Hedva seems to ask: what is your body saying to you, and how do cultural norms colour your interpretations of those messages and shape how you act on them?

Theodore (ted) Kerr’s feature importantly links the ongoing history of HIV/AIDS to the latest pandemic, focusing on Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger’s ongoing project _DNCB_. The title is an acronym for dinitrochlorobenzene, a chemical created for use as a photochemical, but taken up in the ’80s and ’90s as an experimental topical treatment for AIDS, and/ or AIDS\-related opportunistic infections. In the duo’s latest installment, a video work, bodies enact care on other bodies, applying a visual proxy for DNCB to each other’s skin and bandaging it up, all while a deep, thick club track throbs in the background. (I’m reminded here of Lewis’s summoning of “the beat of that pervasive bass, dragged out at 60 beats per minute, like the human heart during rest” and Shikeith’s conception of sweaty basement parties as sites of healing.) As Schroedinger explains, she and Husain sought “to diffuse the naturalness of skin as a sort of boundary of the individual subject (as if the body ends with the skin).” This uptake of porousness is not just physical, either; further solidifying threads of interdependence and entanglement that run through the issue, much of the duo’s project has been focused on connecting with queer folks who watched DNCB circulate in real time who, together, assemble a rich portrait of the wherewithal of a community alienated by government, press, corporations, and the medical establishment. Taking up Didier Fassin’s notion of the “embodied past,” Kerr writes that “no one can actually know something on their own, even as it relates to one’s own past. Information is not (just) content, it is also the result of collection and assemblage, which, when explored with others, can highlight the multiple stakes undergirding a life, a movement, or even a shared community ethic.”

By activating unexpected and familiar intersections between performance, disability, illness, queerness, community, intimacy, and eros, “Body Language” offers numerous channels through which to consider how subjectivity is being dramatically re/mediated and re/thought by current conditions, when we are at once more aware than ever of the microbiome that unites us (like it or not), and yet forcibly (and foreseeably) keeps us apart. In this issue as in the world, practices that destabilize the notion of a singular state of being—as in _static_, but also as in _normative_: healthy, productive, heterosexual, legible—critically inform, cohere with, and complicate new reflections on selfhood that are coming to bear. As Hedva writes: “Am I defined by the house I was born in? Or, can my definition come from how I’ve gotten lost?”

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

Editor

issue-148-p14-16.pdf

Language

Body

Editor Jaclyn Bruneau introduces the issue’s theme and contents.

Editorial: Body Language 

Feature

Alex Quicho is a writer and associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins. _Small Gods_, her book on terror and transcendence in drone technology, was published by Zer0 Books in 2021. 

sm_148-Quicho

thumbnail_148-Quicho

148-Quicho

issue-148-p18-26.pdf

Illness

Alex Quicho reflects on the pandemic’s impact on our conceptions of intimacy and the erotic pulse that shoots through new negotiations of proximity. Through the work of Anicka Yi, Victoria Sin, Patrick Staff, and others, the author assembles a compelling and shape-shifting paradigm for practicing porousness as a methodology for relation. 

"Cells interlinked within cells interlinked": On Ambivalent Contamination 

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

lg_148_Kerr

md_148_Kerr

sm_148_Kerr

thumbnail_148_Kerr

148_Kerr

issue-148-p26-34.pdf

Activism

Medicine

Linking the ongoing history of HIV/AIDS to the latest pandemic, Theodore (ted) Kerr focuses on Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger’s _DNCB_ project. Named after a photochemical that was taken up as an experimental AIDS treatment, _DNCB_ homes in on the complex psychology of a community alienated by government, press, and the medical establishment.

What Are They Fighting For? On Oliver Husain, Kerstin Schroedinger, and the community who embraced DNCB as an experimental treatment for HIV

Lauren Fournier is a writer, artist, and curator. Her book _Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism_ is forthcoming through The MIT Press (2021).

lg_148-FOURNIER

md_148-FOURNIER

sm_148-FOURNIER

thumbnail_148-FOURNIER

148-FOURNIER

issue-148-p34-42.pdf

Accessibility

Through the work of the queer, Crip, Berlin-based, Canadian artist Lauryn Youden– whose most recent exhibition _Visionary of Knives_ brings together a substantial set of materials that she uses to treat her ails– Lauren Fournier engages a long-standing, evolving conversation about healing, intercultural sharing, and inevitably, (mis)appropriation.

The (Im)possibility of Healing: On Lauryn Youden 

Johanna Hedva is the author of the novel _On Hell_ and _Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain_, a collection of poems, performances, and essays, which was published in September 2020\. Their new album, _Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House_, a doom metal grief ritual informed by Korean shamanism, came out in January.

lg_148-Hedva

md_148-Hedva

sm_148-Hedva

thumbnail_148-Hedva

148-Hedva

issue-148-p42-50.pdf

Painting

Johanna Hedva offers an autopathography of sorts, drawing thought-provoking parallels between symptoms of mania and those of toxic masculinity. In a non-linear mode, they meticulously stitch the personal into the social, the systemic, and the historical, concretizing that individual health issues are always but a thread in a wider web. 

Soft Blues

Preston Pavlis is a painter and textile artist currently based in Edmonton, AB. His work is an attempt at traversing liminal bridges through poetic association and metaphor.

Perhaps the first suggestion to the presence of a haunting is the trace of something out of place, unsettled, or unsaid.

Although I can’t say that I’ve ever definitively believed in spirits, other-worldly spiritual forces are a deep part of my family’s lived experience. Spiritual faith has been a life-saving, revelatory vigour for some; an older male relative of mine had an epiphany one morning while walking through the woods that awoke within him a new vision for life: to educate those around him about the all-delivering power of the Lord’s love. As for me—a closeted gay Black boy growing up in Southern California—I felt an internal conflict with notions of the spiritual, particularly the Christian worldview embedded so deeply within my family’s history. The burgeoning question of my sexual identity was mired in a fear of social retribution, owing to an unspoken expectation that I would fit the mould of the man that God had destined me to be.

Many queer Black people have experienced this conflict, and the crushingly limited rendering of Black masculinity in the North American imagination is a ghostly legacy with which all Black men therein are forced to contend. By osmosis, we have accumulated centuries worth of psychological harm about our own masculinity through racist and homophobic ideas, institutions, and histories. For me, “ghostly” brings to mind Hollywood horror stories of object- or person-possession; rarely depicted are stories of group possession or the haunting of a society at large. For the American artist Shikeith, real ghosts linger over Black men in North America and have far-reaching implications, despite that they have been exorcised and remedied over a period of generations.

I had the opportunity to speak with him about his research in creating his latest exhibition, _Feeling The Spirit In The Dark_ at the Mattress Factory, which— in both name and approach—references E. Patrick Johnson’s 1998 journal article “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark: Expanding Notions of the Sacred in the African-American Gay Community” and Aretha Franklin’s song, and eponymous album, “Spirit in the Dark” (1970). Its four installations offer an expansive reading of the emotional lineage of Black men in the United States, blurring boundaries of the secular and the sacred in bodies that have known chains, the church, and the club. Through his use of what he calls “fugitive” materials, like glass, water, soil, and light, Shikeith unearths the incorporeal forces that seek to damage Black emotional potential. Equally, he aims to “trace the ways in which Black people have been able to generate remedies,” he tells me, “that we’ve used to navigate ourselves toward freedom.”

Witnessing the first installation from my computer screen, I am doused in deep light and deep sound; also titled _Feeling The Spirit In The Dark_, it is a room with curved walls and a wooden walkway that leads over a rippling, reflective, dark pool of water. The walls are painted haint blue, a colour traditionally used by the Gullah people in the Lowcountry regions of the southern US to ward _haints_, or ghosts, away from homes. Emanating from a line of LEDs covering the top of the gallery wall is a shade of midnight blue, with a staining saturation that evokes memories of basement parties. A nineminute soundtrack composed by collaborators Trapcry, Corey Staggers, and Justen LeRoy echoes the space’s sensual lighting in a mélange of Gospel, R&B, and the Blues. For Shikeith, the Blues in sight and sound are part of the same pedigree: “The Blues have always been a huge part of Black expression,” he says, “particularly Black queer expression. \[I’m\] thinking about the different Blues artists who identified as queer, male, and female, and how that was an early way of finding out about their existence.”

_Feeling The Spirit_ begins to conjure a variety of collective Black memories affixed to water, ranging from the womb, to the horrors of the Middle Passage, to the sanctifying powers of baptism. Although vacant of bodily presence, _Feeling The Spirit_ evokes something similar to an earlier sculpture of Shikeith’s, _Revisions, or standing where the deep waters of everything backed up_ (2018), in which a Black male figure’s blue, glass-blown “reflection” runs twice as deep as he is tall. Both works create a strong desire to _go deeper_ through the waters of memorial heritage, the former’s deep-violet blaze and accompanying soundtrack creating a sensuous and protected encounter against immaterial forces of harm along the way.

_Feeling The Spirit_ is part of Shikeith’s exploration of “blue space,” which began in previous exhibitions, such as _notes towards becoming a spill_, part of the Long Road Projects residency at Atlanta Contemporary and _The Language Must Not Sweat_ at Locust Projects in Miami. Notably, _Feeling The Spirit_ harks back to exhibitions by David Hammons in the late ’90s and early 2000s, such as _Blues and the Abstract Truth_ at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. Whereas Hammons’s installations were diaphanous and ethereal, the light in Feeling The Spirit is nocturnal and, along with the soundtrack, positions the exhibition within an underground setting where queer ecstatic experience is found. Foundational to Shikeith’s working practice is contributing to the formation of a distinctively Black queer vernacular, in the footprints of Black gay artists like Marlon Riggs and Rotimi Fani-Kayode. In his process of creation, he employs a methodology of gumbo which is, in his words, “the mixing and meshing of ideas to create a new language,” which elucidates his acceptance of multiplicity in form and content.

In _Altar (Held After)_, a confessional stall sits within a dark, earthen “chapel,” which is empty, save for piles of dirt in the corners that ground the structure in an unmistakably southern locale. A variety of collected and original images are pinned to the walls: diagrams of slave ships are juxtaposed with photographs of Black men in various expressions of intimacy with one another; there are found images of Black children, and portraits of prominent Black queer figures. The soft light is considerably warmer than the tenebrous blue of the room adjacent; emanating from the enclosure behind the confessional’s facade is a glimmering glass sculpture of the artist’s head on a mound of dirt. Here, the conflation of spirituality (as defined by the Christian church) and Black queer identity comes into question. The light escaping from the glass head casts shadows of the cross-patterned gate across the interior of the chapel, signifying the interior fracture that religion causes in the lives of many queer Black men—but the light is also numinous, rooting its definition of faith in an acceptance of one’s own existence.

In front of the gate sits a prayer kneeler with a “glory hole” carved into its base, containing a small three-minute video of filmed and found footage; to view it, one must kneel and move in close. Echoing the aesthetics of collage on the chapel’s walls, the video is a montage of psychic film that blurs barriers between the sacred and the secular. Set against faint audio and footage of ships that once used to transport human beings as cargo across the Atlantic, Black men undergo various articulations of spiritual and sexual reconciliation. In one moment, a sweat-drenched body writhes in bed; in another, a man is baptized in a tub of water; a gay Black couple kiss passionately in the next. The most transfixing of these clips is footage shot by the crumbling ruins of a church; here, the Black male body attains an almost paranormal agency. Rooting itself in an acceptance of tenderness, _Altar (Held After)_ is, according to Shikeith, about “surrendering to a history that is our own,” and works to disinter a buried lineage of emotional potential within Black North American men. Foregrounded here is a politics of emancipation in which the boundaries between secular and sacred dissolve, and Black men are presented with full access to both experiences, as well as the experiences that are produced in their blurring.

To reach the final room of the exhibition, one must go up a flight of stairs, thus encountering the work _Autoeroticism_. The saturated blue light from the first installation bleeds into the stairwell, sustaining the atmosphere, and a steady flow of water runs down the banisters. There is a luminous projection on the ceiling of Caravaggio’s \_\_The Incredulity of Saint Thomas\_ (1601–1602), viewed most legibly at the top of the stairs. In this markedly queer painting, Jesus guides the hand of Thomas into his open wound, confirming to Thomas his physical existence in the world. Shikeith reimagines Jesus as a Black man and leaves Thomas white, cropping the image into a close focus of Thomas’s doubtful gesture. In this repictorialized act of Thomas “penetrating” the wound of Jesus, Shikeith shows the invasive effects of racism and homophobia on the physical and psychological well-being of Black men in North America. Thomas’s gesture suggests the fear of a continent that has long castigated both queerness and miscegenation. Conversely, Jesus shepherds Thomas’s hand _inward_, suggesting the need for Thomas to have a visceral reckoning with the spectres that he himself created.

Ascending the stairwell, the soundtrack that echoed across the bottom floor of the exhibition gives way to a pensive rendition of “’Round Midnight” by Corey Staggers. Echoing the lyric of the first three installations, _The Beauty of Recovering What Has Been Lost_ rejects the diurnal and instead finds consolation in the low light of the stars. Seven illuminated glass-blown sculptures of penises are suspended from the ceiling with twine in the formation of the Big Dipper. A two-hour durational projection onto the ceiling gradually invades the surrounding darkness with a pale haint blue. As in the first installation, the glass sculptures resurrect past recollections, in this case the physical and sexual violence of lynchings with their customary practice of castration, as well as the promise of liberation found on the Underground Railroad. Shikeith is attracted to the mutability of glass and its refusal to exist in any one state, which complements his meditation on Black manhood: “It can be a liquid, it can be a gas, it can be a solid,” he tells me. “But it holds this fragility. And then, you know it can cut you! This is how I want to exist, in many different ways.” Masculinity, in all of its crushing fragility has potential for beauty.

For Black queer folks (including myself) raised in environments where institutional trace of religion and racism become entangled with the many things we are, where do we find solace?Central to Shikeith’s work of disentangling is his definition and embrace of the “spill.” Speaking to me, he says, “To spill is to resist being constrained to boundaries, it is to take up the form of freedom. It is known as a failure or an accident, everything that people think is wrong. I wanted to take up that language in my work, because in spite of a failure to perform a certain kind of way, as a young Black gay man, I was still self-determined.” He holds: “To spill is to point towards a sort of self-determination and a free-form way of being, way of existing.” I listen.

lg_148-PAVLIS

md_148-PAVLIS

sm_148-PAVLIS

thumbnail_148-PAVLIS

148-PAVLIS

issue-148-p50-58.pdf

Race

Preston Pavlis explores Shikeith’s “embrace of the spill.” Reckoning with his identity as a gay Black man who grew up Christian in America, Shikeith blurs the possibilities for ecstasy, relief, and liberation available through each faction of his being, even when they might be seen to be at odds with each other.

Feeling The Spirit in The Dark

Letter

##### Dear C Mag,

The season has come again with a cold, sandy wind that disables me from breathing well. I have had mild chronic asthma since I was 21, and the freezing wind in Canada that dries out each of my breaths has worsened the illness. When I cough excessively, I realize I am living matter. Then, my negative spaces hiding in my body and mind are finally revealed and recognized by my pain and the extreme loneliness in the struggle with the shortness of breath. It is bizarre that each confrontation of negative space entails an individual’s agony and solitude.

This is probably why “Evaporative Losses” in your latest issue grasped my eyes. When Jenna Swift brought up an image of the negative space depict ed in the text, I breathed in and out, thinking of my negative space lingering in between the outside and myself as a lonely insider, or the _insiders_ and myself as an utterly tongueless outsider. Since I was becoming aware of my own negative space hurt by underlying tints of imperialism and westernization, my inner voice has cried out to share what has hurt my friends and me throughout the consecutive hollers in my work. This holler ignited re-examination on the realistic boundaries and their possible approachableness, and more importantly, re-imaginability.

The pandemic has subjugated everyone into confronting their negative spaces. Some lost their jobs, some got respiratory diseases, some felt suffocated while stuck at home, some lost loved ones, and some people died. It may be the time for us to open the doors of our negative spaces and let yours stay in _my room_ and vice versa. These considerate movements for internal and external accessibilities can bring fresh air and ease my—and your—breathing problems, even if we sometimes find “crip hope” in the exchange.

##### Ivetta S.Y. Kang

##### Hi C Mag,

As an arts administrator and arts practitioner, I have a conflicted relationship with the word “timely.” Used to describe something that bears significance to a certain moment in time, the term reiterates that the decisions we make are tethered to the world around us, emblematic of the cultural zeitgeist of right now. Moving through the world with a racialized, queer identity, I constantly witness the term’s tokenizing qualities when wielded by those with power. It renders the involvement of marginalized communities as useful and productive rather than valuable and generative, entirely governed by dangerous opportunism. I’ve grown somewhat distrustful after all the times my own involvement in projects has been wielded like this.

Inversely: in my work within arts organizations and collectives, I’m constantly having to reconcile with the paradox of tokenization and holding space, especially when opportunities for emerging artists are scarce, and exist within a sector that basically operates with little to no money. When “space” itself is so precarious. This is the inherent failure: institutions have harmed marginalized people for so long (and still do) that the line between meaningful support and optics may not and cannot be so easily navigated.

I recognize how important C147 is. The theme of “Gather” is glaringly relevant to this pandemic we’re living through, as our ability to gather (at least physically) has been halted by it. As both a collaborator and an organizer, I cannot help but think of the back end considerations that went into composing this issue: the ethics of representation in unprecedented times and the responsibility that comes with providing opportunities to writers and artists on the margins. As a reader, I’m also thinking about how I perceive these editorial decisions versus what voices I want and _need_ to read right now.

Though I won’t congratulate any institution for doing the necessary work, it is edifying to read Su-Ying Lee’s words on the need for image and media literacy in “Reading Images Against Racism,” Mercedes Webb’s in-depth exploration of Christina Battle’s ongoing seed redistribution project, _seeds are meant to disperse_, in “To Reciprocate All They Freely Offer,” and the many other insightful works that have been brought together in this issue. Though this collection of texts will inevitably be seen as “timely” regardless, I’m grateful to C147 for allowing me the space to ruminate about what this term can really mean.

##### Philip Leonard Ocampo

##### Hi C Magazine,

If the “Gather” issue of _C Magazine_ was a party— compiled of its writers and their subjects—I’m happy to note I wouldn’t be out of place, having a few direct or twice-removed connections that I could saddle up to and make conversation with while sipping a soda and snacking on a communal chip bowl. After a year in lockdown, why does the simplest gathering sound illicit?

A magazine issue is a bit like a party. You need a balance of personalities and tones, some to compliment each other, others to counter the energy in the room. I’ve been known to throw awful parties for my inability to curate a guest list: I invite everyone I know and let my friends, from vastly different areas of my life, fend for themselves. I tend to leave parties early, even when I’m the one throwing them, retreating to my room and into comfortable clothes.

I guess what I’m saying is I don’t miss parties, I have magazines. And Zoom. And also other places to gather, as articulated by the “Gather” issue of _C Magazine_: in recipe swaps with my aunt, a monthly library meetup to discuss art, a performance streamed online by Lex Brown, internet rabbit holes and comment sections, taking photos of birds to identify, studio visits where the artist lets me make art alongside them, and in gathering wildflowers from the side of the road. I ordered Anne Boyer’s book after reading Lauren Fournier’s review, the act a kind of cross-medium book club that goes one way—a form of gathering that doesn’t depend on anyone else, but me, doing the work.

Gathering as a form to connect—in spite of difficulties born from either accessibility or circumstance— can be achieved through magazines, especially within the relatively small community of the Canadian art world. No opening party needed.

I guess this turned into a bit of a love letter.

##### Tatum Dooley

issue-148-p12-14.pdf

Letters reflecting on issue 147 “Gather.”

Letters

lg_148 cover

md_148 cover

sm_148 cover

thumbnail_148 cover

148 cover

Designer

Publisher

Maya Wilson-Sanchez is a curator and writer based in Toronto.

Associate Editor

Artist Project

**Noor Bhangu** is an emerging curator and scholar of South Asian descent, currently based between Winnipeg, Treaty 1 and Tkaronto/Toronto.

Twenty-two years ago, Gayatri Spivak largely denounced postcolonial theory, citing its stagnating effect on the work of its celebrated practitioners. Despite its failures, however, she maintained that by using it, we could opt for an ethics of alterity rather than a politics of identity to make our way through the climate of cultural polarization—seeing identity politics as an awkward tool that uses identities to account for histories, and forgoes multiplicity in the process. An ethics of alterity does not necessarily smooth out identity politics’ shortcomings but instead merges it with the sharing of time, space, and experiences with others; it is on the side of relations and linkages. Since encountering these theoretical positions, I have been consumed by locating this call for an ethics of alterity in the local and global art worlds that are, in many ways, still reel- ing from rigid identity politics of the late 20th century. More specifically, I am interested in seeing how an ethics of alterity can be used to better reflect composite and overlapping histories.

Anna Binta Diallo is one of many artists in recent years to use the archive to explore how identity has become history, to investigate the relationship between image and knowledge production, and to radically disorient histories that have been falsely presented as complete. In more ways than one, her work embodies a move toward relationality that is vital for creating pathways to a less divided future. Upon encountering Diallo’s work, there is a clear message that identity is not singular but dispersed.

Seeing herself as a devout collector of images, the artist approaches the abundance of the materials using the specific framework of folk tales. Beginning with her experience as a new mother in 2019, folk tales became a curious site in which to examine the oversimplification of race, origins, and meanings. _Wanderings_ is an ongoing series that started by exploring archetypes and folk tales drawn from her own mixed ancestry, including references to West African, Franco-Canadian, and Métis traditions. To be sure, these narratives are only a starting point for Diallo to create visual constellations; the culmination of these exercises remains ambiguous and open for interpretation. The figures are also not limited to these roots but rhizomatically involve other cultures and histories that have shared or could speculatively share space with her own. It is no coincidence, then, that collage is the chosen medium here, through which diverse histories can be brought together to visualize the intimate possibilities, tensions, and mutualities.

In this iteration for _C Magazine_, for instance, Diallo engages with my own South Asian cultural background through the story of the snake charmer—an epitome of the artist’s porousness and sensitivity to the contexts she creates work within. Crystallized in the West on the cover of Edward Said’s canonical book, _Orientalism_, featuring Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painted work _Snake Charmer_, this ancient, heavily orientalized myth is explored amid research into the appearance of the snake in other cultures, such as Meso-American, Egyptian, Chinese, and Hopi traditions. While composing the life stories of these new characters, she reflected on the dialogues we’ve had in the last few months—just as she’s done with other collaborators, curators, and writers in this series. The artist at once honours our collaboration and broadens the possible readings of this myth; these “charming” acts obscure orientalist fantasies to instead focus on relationships between human beings and other species, signalling yet another layer of her commitment to disavowing singular identity in favour of ethical relations.

Despite the specificity of Diallo’s compositional choices, the figures in _Wanderings_ are left open to interpretation. Another way of saying this might be that they are shrouded by opacity—which, continuous with an ethics of alterity, abandons identity as the primary political concern. We see the figures in all their detail, but their many intersections—charged, curious, playful— are never fully transparent. I think here of _Prairie Girl_, a body that is reiterated throughout Diallo’s oeuvre and defined by its duality. The bottom of the silhouette is filled with a map of the world and the chest carries a Prairie heart. Like blood vessels, the waterways of the Prairies provide familiar, life-giving texture to the _Prairie Girl_ and set her in fluvial relation to the bigger world. _Prairie Girl_ carries two stories: one that embodies the artist’s personal relationship to the land, and the second for the viewers to write on their own.

_Wanderings_ holds space for the critique of colonial- ism and its culture of representation from multiple and ever-expanding vantage points: Diallo’s, my own, and all those who have become entwined in this series. In this, the artist is consciously visualizing the process of linking, creating bonds across difference, which might finally allow us to access the power of postcolonial critique, reduced and eventually deserted by the think- ers critiqued by Spivak. It is a difficult task to pursue the rhizome while committing oneself to opacity, yet _Wanderings_ takes this on as part of a responsibility, in this contemporary moment, to explore relations be- yond one’s own boundaries while protecting our com- munities from the breach of the colonial gaze, which has been destructive to our ways of life.

**Noor Bhangu** is an emerging curator and scholar of South Asian descent, based between Treaty 1/ Winnipeg and Tkaronto/Toronto. In her recent work, she employs archives and exhibition histories to explore notions of aesthetics and race.

**Anna Binta Diallo** is a Canadian multidisciplinary visual artist who investigates memory and nostalgia to create unexpected narratives surrounding identity. She was born in Dakar (Senegal, 1983) and raised in Saint-Boniface, Winnipeg, on the traditional territory of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation.

The Artist Project is supported in part by Partners in Art.

sm_148-Diallo_Bhangu

thumbnail_148-Diallo_Bhangu

148-Diallo_Bhangu

issue-148-p80-81.pdf

Collage

Identity

Accompanying text to Anna Binta Diallo’s collaged figures, which bookend the issue, and represent the latest iteration of the artist’s _Wanderings_ series in which she creates unexpected confluences of artefacts, references, and textures in the attempt to angle toward more intercultural conversations. 

Wanderings by Anna Binta Diallo: Text

Artist

issue-148-p0-6.pdf

Anna Binta Diallo’s collaged figures, which bookend the issue, represent the latest iteration of the artist’s _Wanderings_ series in which she creates unexpected confluences of artefacts, references, and textures in the attempt to angle toward more intercultural conversations. Accompanying text by guest curator Noor Bhangu. 

Wanderings

Review

Huda Hassan is a writer, critic, and cultural studies professor who lives between Toronto and New York. 

It’s impossible not to see Ebti Nabag’s 24-foot-high portraits when you pass by two schools in the Toronto east-end neighbourhood of Scarborough. The piece, _I’m Listening_ (2020), is of two teenaged Black girls sporting Air Jordans and athletic wear, standing side by side as they stare at their phones, displaying no interest in speaking to each other. Taken together, the size and colouring of the piece, as well as the demean- our of the subjects, command you to stop what you’re doing, and observe.

When imagining power, some might be compelled to consider external structures and bureaucracies, and how those structures shape or impose themselves on our lives. The exhibition _Three-Thirty_, however, con- siders the power and autonomy of youths and the ways they enact their presence in the space and cities they live in. Scarborough-born curator and artist Anique Jordan interrogates these questions in the exhibition. The project is a multi-site, map-making exercise that connects different public spaces within Malvern, an east-end neighbourhood that has the highest population of youth in Canada. The exhibition reckons with how geographies are transformed by young people living at the margins of power.

_Three-Thirty_ is an ode to the after-school programs accessed primarily by Toronto’s working-class families who need additional care for their children—a pivotal part of Jordan’s upbringing. This multi-site exhibition, co-presented by Jordan as part of the CONTACT Photography Festival, occupies prominent cultural landmarks in the Malvern neighbourhood: local high school Lester B. Pearson Collegiate Institute, the Malvern branch of the Toronto Public Library, and the Doris McCarthy Gallery (at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus).

A blown-up copy of a 1969 Ontario Housing Corporation (OHC) document greets visitors at the entrance of the Doris McCarthy Gallery, confirming the state’s interest in Malvern as a housing project to be focused on in the years to come. Although Malvern’s open spaces near its river valleys are a local tourist attraction, in the late ’50s it was largely an industrial and agricultural area. The OHC document outlines the needs for the emerging community: malls, stores, recreation spaces, and housing. It also shares plans and the necessity to develop public transportation access—access that still doesn’t exist 50 years later. This is a common narrative for a city where urban design failed to anticipate the magnitude of Toronto’s expansion. Beside the OHC document is an archival picture of a large expanse of empty land, occupied right in the centre by one building: a small grocery store called FreshLand. The picture evokes narratives told by colonial archives that implicate a place as having a lack of history or presence. Today, that land is the site of Malvern Town Centre, and the grocery store remains open.

By the late ’80s, Malvern had been developed into a multi-ethnic and vibrant neighbourhood that quickly became home to many low-income residents. By the early 2000s, public investment in the community led to the development of the Malvern public library, new parks, stores, and further expansion. But this process also subjected residents to over-policing, surveillance, and criminalization. _Three-Thirty_ offers an alternative perspective, providing glimpses into the day-to-day life of youths in the areas that contribute so much to Toronto culture.

Using archival images, Aaron Jones’s _Seeking Knowledge_ (2020) explores knowledge production about Black people in Canada. Presented at the Malvern public library, the work uses images from the Rita Cox Black and Caribbean Heritage Collection. Using the archival photographs in a colourful and vibrant collage format, Jones compels the observer to think through histories of Black diasporas beyond what we might already know. The images used include artists, revolutions, protests, sports, and titles of texts important to the Black radical tradition, such as _We Are the Young Magicians_ by Ruth Forman (1993). Jones also includes a bibliography: an archive for the seeker of knowledge to explore further. He leaves one empty citational note called _Unknown Unknowns_ blank—albeit intentionally—as a gesture toward the overlooked and unidentified components of Black archives. Archives allow us to trace the histories, ideas, existence, and contributions of communities. But in Canada, Blackness remains what Rinaldo Walcott calls an absented presence, in that Blackness is foundational to the nation-state but cannot cohere in the national archive. Jones’s engagement with Black Canadian archives, overflowing with detours and complexities, compels his audience to render Blackness anew, and always in continuum.

In Nabag’s life-sized portrait exhibition, _The Bubble of Youth_ (2020), she intimately depicts the students of Pearson Collegiate Institute exploring the physical, spiritual, and aesthetic components of teenage friend- ships. On the walls of the Doris McCarthy Gallery, Nabag mounted life-sized photographic murals of young people interacting through conversation and laughter, captured with their friends, smartphones, and skateboards. The portraits reveal the wide range of youth diasporas and aesthetics in the Malvern neighbourhood.

Kelly Fyffe-Marshall’s three-channel video, _POWER_ (2020), produced by Tamar Bird, explores the collective anxieties and strife of Black artists and community members during the COVID 19 pandemic. In the video work, artists and community members discuss what their lives looked like before the pandemic, what they look like now, and the insights that this experience has brought out. Simultaneously displayed on three different screens, the conversation is intergenerational, with subjects reflecting on the meaning of power during a global health and climate crisis that cannot be separated from anti-Black racism. Observing the testimonies is chilling, as Fyffe-Marshall’s project speaks to the urgency of these times.

The purpose of _Three-Thirty_, Jordan explains, is to use art in public spaces to visually and psychologically shift our understanding of who occupies power. She centres Blackness both thematically and geographically, reclaiming the narrative of Toronto culture back to its various points of development. It took two and a half years to develop the exhibition, and the team struggled with funding along the way, relying on limited local resources to transform a part of the city. Thinking about the recent critical attention on the cultural work and producers of Scarborough—a borough that is often falsely compared to Brooklyn Jordan is committed to cultivating spaces that reveal the multiplicities of Toronto. _Three-Thirty_ uses Scarborough as a backdrop, and Blackness as a lens, to reveal the possibilities, and impossibilities, of power.

lg_148-HASSAN

md_148-HASSAN

sm_148-HASSAN

thumbnail_148-HASSAN

148-HASSAN

issue-148-p60-62.pdf

Urban studies

Public art

Huda Hassan reviews multi-site exhibition _Three-Thirty_, featuring Ebti Nabag, Aaron Jones, and Kelly Fyffe-Marshall. Curated by Anique Jordan, the project is an “an ode to the after-school programs accessed primarily by Toronto’s working-class families” and “reckons with how geographies are transformed by young people living at the margins of power.” 

Three-Thirty: Ebti Nabag, Aaron Jones, and Kelly Fyffe-Marshall

_Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience_, Kent Monkman’s nationally touring exhibition, began at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in late 2017 and stopped in every region throughout the country except the Arctic before arriving at the Museum of Anthropology (MOA), where it will end its run in early 2021\. The exhibition consists of paintings and dioramas from Monkman’s studio alongside historical works and objects borrowed from public and private collections from across Canada, including the moccasins of the Plains Cree Chief Pîhtokahanapiwiyin; Benjamin West’s painting commemorating the 1759 Battle of Quebec titled _The Death of General Wolfe_ (1770); baby carriers from Plains Ojibwa, Sahaptin, and Iroquois peoples; and antique metalwork and dinnerware. Importantly, the exhibition was conceived after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was active from 2008 to 2015, the purpose of which was to document the history and lasting impacts of the Indian residential school system in Canada on Indigenous peoples. The exhibition was also initiated in observation of the 150th year of Canadian Confederation which saw a tremendous surge of interest from museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions in representing Indigenous engagement with the colonial history of Canada. While much of the programming supported by Canada 150 provided a necessary course correction concerning the under-representation of contemporary Indigenous artistic practices in all realms of Canadian culture, exhibitions which sought to speak to Canadian history in such a broad comprehensive manner, such as _Shame and Prejudice_, gloss over the diversity of Indigenous experiences and histories.

Vancouver, like any part of Canada, is not representative of Canada, and it would be a mistake to reduce it to being merely “Canadian.” The MOA understands the importance of this, and engages in programming that is connected to local audiences and their histories. For example, an understated monument at the MOA’s entrance signals one of the ways the institution engages with its specific location on the traditional and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking Musqueam people. In 2015, MOA, in collaboration with the Musqueam First Nation and Museum of Vancouver, presented _c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city_, an important exhibition concerning the living culture of Musqueam people and Vancouver as an ancient landscape. What feels like a crucial centring of the institution’s complicity in the ongoing displacement of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories and the ongoing dispossession of their land and resources is lost upon entering _Shame and Prejudice_, where the exhibition is narrated in French and English, the official languages of the state, along with the Cree language rendered in syllabics in exhibition texts. This effectively centres Monkman’s own cultural and ethnic specificity as a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation, rather than offering a dialogue with the Musqueam people in the spirit of reconciliation. Instead, Cree is presented with the authority typically granted to the languages of the state with all of their colonial power, and therefore made complicit in the linguistic displacement of _hən̓ q̓ əmin̓ əm̓_. The presence of the Cree language seems to only contribute to the exhibition in terms of optics, representing an image of Indigeneity without presenting a reasoning for the presence of this specific language in the exhibition texts. We are led to believe that the importance of this choice should be self-evident, and that representations of Indigeneity— _any_ Indigeneity—can only be good or beneficial. Much of the exhibition feels as though it has been dropped in from above without any effort to find ways to articulate its concerns in relation to the Musqueam people or local historical trajectories. An overly general history of Indigenous life in Canada is thus imposed upon this place without nuance.

This history is narrated by Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Monkman’s genderfluid, time-travelling alter ego. Presented in nine chapters derived from the fictional memoir of Miss Chief, it covers a broad history of Canada including Confederation, Indigenous relations to health and sickness, and contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples in urban centres. Monkman’s work makes extensive references to art history, with Monkman stating his aim in the exhibition’s small accompanying publication to “authorize Indigenous experience into the canon of art history.” This claim appears especially strange considering MOA’s recent support of solo exhibitions by both Carl Beam and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, two Indigenous artists that have made significant contributions to the narrative of Canadian art history.

One aspect of Monkman’s engagement with art history is especially troubling; in “Chapter VI: Incarceration,” Monkman portrays Miss Chief as an inmate in a sculptural diorama titled _Minimalism_ (2017). While the entire exhibition offers a broad critique of Canadian history in order to make the figure of a reductive Indigeneity visible, \_ Minimalism\_ is a misguided critique of late modernist art, specifically the work of American artists James Turrell and Donald Judd. The latter’s work is referenced in the furniture of the inmate’s prison cell and the former in the form of a glowing colour-changing screen before which Miss Chief kneels, as if in awe. Miss Chief is presented as a stand-in for imprisoned American Indian activist Leonard Peltier who is referenced in paintings later in the exhibition. The work conflates two types of institutions, the museum and the prison. While plenty of criticism may be offered to implicate western institutions in the limiting of Indigenous knowledge and culture, museums are not prisons. The work is accompanied by drawings and letters to family, friends, and allies from incarcerated Indigenous peoples in the US who are denied a proper place as artists and named subjects within the work or exhibition. The presence of these letters is not addressed in anything but the labels; they are denied a contextualization that would make their inclusion truly meaningful. Framed and presented on the outside of the diorama, they may be missed by inattentive viewers. While Indigenous peoples do face overrepresentation in Canadian penitentiaries, it is entirely distasteful to represent yourself—even via an alter ego playing Leonard Peltier—as the subject of that suffering and struggle.

_Shame and Prejudice_ flattens the complexity of Canadian history and the diversity of Indigenous peoples and nations who live on this land. To use Miss Chief as the protagonist of this historical narrative can only be seen as self-aggrandizing. While Monkman wants to represent all Indigenous peoples, he appears to have only thought to represent himself.

lg_148-BOISJOLY

md_148-BOISJOLY

sm_148-BOISJOLY

thumbnail_148-BOISJOLY

148-BOISJOLY

issue-148-p61-63.pdf

Indigenous

History

In a review of Kent Monkman’s touring Shame and Prejudice exhibition, during its stop at Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology, Raymond Boisjoly examines how the exhibition glosses “over the diversity of Indigenous experiences and histories.”

Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience: Kent Monkman

**Greta Hamilton** is a writer and artist working between Toronto and rural British Columbia. They are an editor of _Silverfish Magazine_.

“Some things are only imaginable in the third person,” Moyra Davey writes, paraphrasing Roland Barthes in her new book, _I Confess_ (2020). She acknowledges that, for both of them, writing in third person is typically “unimaginable.” But throughout her book, Davey refers to herself interchangeably as “I” and “she,” distancing herself from the autobiographical text through third-person narration. _I Confess_ was published alongside Davey’s retrospective exhibition, _The Faithful_ (2020), at the National Gallery of Canada. The book is a monograph of Davey’s new film of the same title; it includes stills from the film, a selection of Davey’s drawings and photographs, as well as the film’s script and two contributor essays.

_I Confess_ is a meditation on Davey’s upbringing in Catholic school in Quebec, on the revolutionary work of James Baldwin and his criticism of the American Dream, on settler-independence formations in Quebec during the ’60s and ’70s, and on the death of her father. In reference to Davey’s formative memories of the October Crisis in 1970, the core thread of _I Confess_ considers Pierre Vallières’s book _Nègres blancs d’Amérique_ (1968), or in the English translation, _White N\[-word\]s of America_, which Davey refers to as _White Negroes_ in her text. Vallières, a member of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), was arrested during the October Crisis and wrote _Nègres blancs_ while in jail. Davey recounts her father’s role as an adviser to then prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who aided in coordinating Vallières’s arrest along with other members of the FLQ. In his book, Vallières argues that the francophone Québécois population is a low-class disfavoured people, falsely equating their socio-economic struggle to that of Black people in the United States. In order to create the scaffolding of this autobiographical text that draws on personal anecdote and historical events, Davey weaves between her childhood memories, her father’s connection to the events of the October Crisis, and her memories of visiting Vallières’s commune one summer as a teenager and photographing him.

As a counterpoint to Vallières’s false equation of francophone Québécois struggle with the civil rights–era struggle of Black folks in the United States, Davey introduces writer and thinker James Baldwin as an additional thread throughout the text. Davey draws on Baldwin’s debate with conservative American public intellectual William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965 on the topic “Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro.” Baldwin argues that the people who built the United States, enslaved Africans and their descendants, have not profited and do not profit from American economic or socio-political structures. Davey notes that Baldwin’s naming of Black Americans as a disfavoured class is taken up by Vallières toward the francophone Québécois fight for independence. While Davey uses Baldwin in opposition to Vallières’s appropriation of Black struggle, she does not criticize Vallières for this false equation.

I see Davey grappling with her typical way of working—her citational style, her photographs of everyday life—and questioning whether it resonates with the urgency of the contemporary political moment. Her work often uses distance as a narrative strategy. In her films, she records herself reading the script aloud, then plays the audio back through an iPod, speaking as she listens to her recorded voice. The result is a flat affect in her tone as her embodiment becomes once removed. In her writing, Davey constructs bibliographies through collections of citations, allowing serendipitous connections to form between texts and thinkers as a mode of non-personal narration. _I Confess_ follows suit: Davey distances herself from the scenes depicted in the book by photographing herself in scenarios she has written about in third person. I find this lack of embodiment troubling. This narrative distance, enacted through Davey’s method of citation, obscures her positionality as a white artist more than it attempts to rectify the potential oversights a white positionality holds. Her typical modes of working fail to properly address this issue, concluding in a book where Davey seems to lack a critical position.

In a later section of _I Confess_, Davey considers a remark a student of hers made regarding her photographic practice: “It is not enough to just point to a problem.” Davey mulls over this comment: both her photography and her writing tend to point to a scenario, a place, a phenomenon, but don’t go so far as to critique the subject at hand. Davey uses citation to distance herself from the subject matter, allowing the cited thinkers to narrate the text on her behalf, effectively sidestepping the work of criticism or a deeper attempt to trouble or problematize the cited thinkers.

In a seeming attempt to reconcile the problem of citing Vallières, the book includes excerpts from correspondence between Davey and Québécois political philosopher Dalie Giroux, inviting her into the text to critique Vallières, among other things. Of their correspondence, Davey notes, “\[Vallières\] came under harsh critique from Dalie for his appropriation of the \[B\]lack struggle and his treatment of women. I had read _Nègres blancs_ through the lens of literary and biographical themes, whereas Dalie employed the tools of political theory and philosophy to construct another, at times damning, interpretation of the book.” Davey’s inclusion of her correspondence with Giroux, and her later contributor essay, act as a second leg of \_I Confess\_—a relational intervention in the text that makes the citational aspect of the book more critical.

Despite this attempt at rectification, there remains for me the troubling effect to Davey’s stylistic distancing. Her choice to obscure herself from the narrative is a strategy of risk mitigation; the lack of embodied writing throughout _I Confess_ stifles the possibility for criticism toward her positionality as a white artist. If Davey’s work can be characterized as a practice of citation, I wonder what citation is for? While citation has historically been a perpetrator of exclusion in the curation of a canon, I think of citation as a construction of lineages of writers, artists, and thinkers who have been overlooked by that canon. It is a site of generosity between thinkers and their ideas—an acknowledgement of intellectual indebtedness. I want citation to _be enough_, but the problematics of this book seem to be proof that citation only begins to lay the groundwork for criticism. I have long fawned over Davey’s photographs. I adore her eroticization of banal domestic scenes and applaud her citational generosity—but I think art has non-negotiable obligations. Images especially need to do more than point a camera or a finger; they are a symbolic language that carry with them a potential for political change.

lg_148-HAMILTON

md_148-HAMILTON

sm_148-HAMILTON

thumbnail_148-HAMILTON

148-HAMILTON

issue-148-p63-65.pdf

Autobiography

Film

Publishing

Greta Hamilton reviews _I Confess_ (2020) by Moyra Davey, co-published by Dancing Foxes Press and the National Gallery of Canada. In response to this meditation on Quebec’s settler-independence formations, James Baldwin, and the artist’s upbringing in a Quebec Catholic school, Hamilton questions the political implications of Davey’s distantiated style and citational practices.

I Confess: Moyra Davey 

I perform a series of manual gestures leaving the gallery: a parting wave, a pump of sanitizer, one curt pull to open the door, another to unmask, and a plunge into my pocket to retrieve my phone. My touches continue as I walk away from Xpace and its artworks, unpausing a podcast or sighting my phone’s camera on the spectacles that beckon me home through Toronto’s west end.

This procession of gestures moves me away from _Hands that gather and forget_, an installation work by Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz and Sebastián Rodríguez y Vasti, which showed at Xpace in the fall of 2020\. _Hands_ comprises an archive of images selected from a merged collection of photographs taken between 2015 and 2019 during the artists’ annual trips to their family homes in Venezuela. Printed on silk organza, the scenes—embraces, portraits, seascapes, and domestic interiors—hang by their corners, dispersed among a cloudscape of white gauze. The fabrics confront the viewer as a diaphanous mass animated by currents of air, inviting the viewer to enter, brush aside the immensity of the archive’s blanks, and pull an image up by its corner. Even then, the photographs that stand out against the countless absences barely register on the silk whispering in the din of the gauze.

As I walk home, the city’s immodest scenes begin to fray my nascent impression of the work. At some point, my eye catches a thread of white gauze clinging to the breast of my coat. Despite my care while moving through the archive and handling its records, my sense-making was a disturbance into the archive that loosened its weave. Pinching the thread, I begin to appreciate the gravity in the gestures that _Hands_ invites. My interaction with _Hands_ was part of an unbroken movement of the day’s acts. It existed not only as an archive to be viewed, but as a reality to be lived through, calling on the same kinds of gestures through which I grasped at door handles, tapped my phone, or embraced lovers. In this haptic archive, the act of memory takes on a concreteness, as manual labour. At the same time, this gesture becomes intimately bound up with the unravelling and absence of the world it intends to recall from the archive’s burdened records— an intrusion which the viewer’s self-awareness only intensifies through their act of looking.

At the end of September, I meet with the artists via Zoom to ask about their documentary practice, and the work of materializing the resulting archive in _Hands’_ sculptural form. Bernárdez and Rodríguez speak of a shared compulsion to register their affective experience of place on their yearly visits home. The artists describe how, like memory, their photographs emerge as an unpremeditated gesture that arises with the fullness and impermanence of feeling. As the young artists persistently assert in their growing bodies of work, familial AND documentary objects ambivalently measure this fullness, but also the loss, of each vital moment that they register.

As a sensory response to precarity, too, the artists’ documentary practice shoulders the immense uncertainty of Venezuela’s political situation, a crisis whose magnitude is reflected in the vastness of the artists’ archives. The scale of their archive amassing under these precarious circumstances made for a daunting, melancholic task of sorting through the images, a stationary labour only recently afforded to the artists by the pandemic and its temporality of pause.

Handling the photographs, I sense how these contexts loom over the installation, woven not only through their scenes but in the physical form of the installation itself. Like the ongoing pandemic, _Hands’_ tissues hang in delicate suspension, demanding that the viewers navigate with a heightened awareness of their intrusion, their touch and presence. Yet, this intensified sensitivity also resonates beyond the pandemic’s epoch, arriving out of a broader sculptural tradition concerned with generative ruptures in ordinary sense-experience. Originally coined by Carter Ratcliff to describe early installation works in this tradition—notably Bruce Nauman’s corridor pieces of the early ’70s— the notion of an “adversary space” helps account for Hands as a provocation within, but not of, the gallery’s sightly environment. As the viewer-participant moves into the installation, _Hands_ pressures them with a heightened sensitivity which, along with the demand for—or anticipation of—movement, lends the installation sculptural texture. If the gallery or photographic archive is a primarily sight-based situation consisting of diaphanous screens imaging distant times and places, _Hands_ opens itself differently. It registers what it activates: a gesture, a performance of awareness, and a haptics of inspection.

Considering how it dismantles the archival object into a sensuous performance of gestures, _Hands_ also recalls the work of Lygia Clark, who gradually divested her sculptural practice from the production of objects. Midway through her career, Clark self-exiled to France in 1968, during the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship. Having gained proximity to French psychoanalytic milieux, she produced a late body of prepositional works in which she used a variety of objects to provoke bodily sensations in private sessions with participants. However, as the psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik notes in an interview with Lars Bang Larsen, Clark’s mobilization of sense-feeling as the primary artistic and therapeutic medium made documentation of these experimentations difficult. Her sessions were inherently intersubjective, processual, and, in a way, too private to be captured. Nevertheless, Clark did not work in isolation from the gallery or, for that matter, the broader social and political contexts of individual feeling. Within these contexts, Clark asserted her art/therapy hybrid as an intervening poetics of sensation.

Like Clark’s late work, _Hands_ also refashions the documentary object as a means to a sensuous experience, particularly one of memory. In one regard, the diaphanous images deny outright the possibility of a clinical revival of experience from the photographs.  
Yet, this denial also advocates for sensuous immersion in a fraying archive, even demanding that the viewer perform a labour of remembrance to animate the weave of memory and interstitial absence, regardless of the outcome of these gestures. As _Hands_ shows, remembrance comprises both a holding-to and a holding, as if the two are the same gesture applied with the soft force of the hand.

lg_148-LEPIANKA

md_148-LEPIANKA

sm_148-LEPIANKA

thumbnail_148-LEPIANKA

148-LEPIANKA

issue-148-p64-66.pdf

Memory

Textiles

Reviewing the exhibition _Hands that gather and forget_ by Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz and Sebastián Rodríguez y Vasti at Xpace Cultural Centre (September 8-October 2, 2020), Alex Lepianka explores how the exhibition “refashions the documentary object as a means to a sensuous experience, particularly one of memory.”

Hands that gather and forget: Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz and Sebastián Rodríguez y Vasti

Missy LeBlanc is an arts administrator, curator, and writer of Métis, nêhiyaw, and Polish decent currently based in Mohkinstsis/ Calgary. LeBlanc is currently the Curatorial Resident at TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary, AB, and in 2019 she was the winner of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators and a runner-up for the Canadian Art Writing Prize.

amiskwacîwâskahikan/Beaver Hills House/Edmonton is centrally located in the Treaty 6 region and is the tra- ditional home of the Papaschase. From the rolling hills, aspen forests, verdant grasslands, and the flowing life way of kisiskâciwanisîpiy/North Saskatchewan River, the region has been a site of gathering for many Indigenous peoples sharing the land and resources since time immem- orial. It is on this land, overlooking kisiskâciwanisîpiy, that the Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre stands. Ociciwan, translated from nêhiyawêwin to mean “the current comes from there,” references the kisiskâciwanisîpiy, the people it has brought to this region, and the link between the past, present, and future.

Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective started in 2015 and over the years has undertaken a series of projects—including visual art exhibitions, a large-scale experimental music performance, and producing a double vinyl record—presented in partnership with local and national partners while building capacity to open their own, mostly Indigenous-run, arts centre and community space. After years of hard work and dedi- cation to growing and supporting the Indigenous arts scene in amiskwacîwâskahikan, and six months of de- lays due to the COVID\-19 pandemic, Ociciwan finally welcomed people into the centre on September 30, 2020, with the _amiskwacîwâskahikan_ exhibition. Paying homage to the land that Ociciwan is situated on and its history of gathering and connecting, the exhibition features the works of eight Indigenous artists that have strong ties to or call amiskwacîwâskahikan home.

When I first walked into the new space, my eyes were drawn to Tanya Harnett’s _Genocide_ (2020), a large-scale hand-drawn map that depicts the route of a smallpox epidemic along the Missouri River (in what is now known as the American Midwest) to where Harnett’s ancestors once lived. The Great Plains small- pox epidemic (1836–1840) reached its height in 1837 when the American Fur Company’s St. Peters steam- boat travelled up the river along the route depicted in this work, carrying with it infected people and supplies. Reminiscent of the hand-drawn maps created by colo- nial cartographers and explorers, _Genocide_, although illustrative of Harnett’s familial history and ancestral kin, is also reflective of the violent histories of loss that many Indigenous people can relate to.

To the left of _Genocide_ are two larger-than-life portraits by Lauren Crazybull of their siblings, _Jordan_ (2019) and _Autumn_ (2019), painted on unstretched canvas. Wearing a jean jacket, head tilted back and eyes closed, Jordan appears to be lying peacefully in a bed of yellow and pink flowers. Autumn, with shadows of tree branches marking their body, stands with arms crossed over their torso in front of bare branches and the sky as a budding tree branch rests on their temple. The way that Crazybull has captured these details—the tattoo on Autumn’s wrist, how the light reflects off of their sibling’s glasses, the light shining on Jordan’s facial hair—brings the paintings to life. They are ever- present in the gallery, watching over the works with care and love—the same care and love that Crazybull imbued into the paintings of their kin.

Reminiscent of a dreamcatcher, MJ Belcourt Moses’s _From the Beginning_ (2018) is a cast of a pregnant person’s torso made using deer parfleche suspended in a red willow–branch frame depicting a nêhiyawêwin syllabic chart painted onto the stomach. The installation alludes to the ancestral knowledge that is passed down from generation to generation. Although living in a colonial society which continues to dismiss this knowledge, it is inside all of us as Indigenous people. Lana Whiskeyjack’s painting, _Painting my anger, praying for stolen medicine(s)_ (2020), depicts a person wearing dentalium earrings and a beaded necklace in the shape of a vulvar strawberry. Painted over the image is the text “I WILL BE CAREFUL WHO I SHARE MY MEDICINE WITH”—a reference to Whiskeyjack’s beaded strawberry necklace titled _Three Generations of nitêh (my heart)_ (2019), which was stolen from the centre prior to its opening to the public. The statement is bold, succinct, and relatable for many Indigenous people— we must protect ourselves and communities from the harm that colonialism continues to do to us.

In the downstairs Media Gallery, Dwayne Martineau’s backlit film prints hang heavy in the dim lighting. _ONE DEAD TREE #2_ (2012) and _Propagation_ (2020) are illusory mirrored photographs of a dead tree found in an Edmonton ravine. Martineau’s use of photo manipulation creates an uncanny symmetry which gives the installation a haunting quality. Ghostly pareidolic faces appear among the details of the trees, peering out from between the branches and watching my every move in the gallery. In a corner of the gallery is Conor McNally’s spectral 16mm Ektachrome film _nisîmis, or my brother’s dream of a bicycle_ (2020). McNally’s experimental film, silently looping, provides an ephemeral and fleeting quality to the space. Like a dream floating away, when one grasps on to what little detail is memorable, flowing images of his brother manipulating a bicycle pump move back and forth in a rhythmic pattern overlaid onto an abstract background of ink. Martineau’s and McNally’s ephemeral and ethereal works are in stark contrast to Jane Ash Poitras’s _Fort Chip Future_ (2000) in the same space. Using pop-culture images and her children’s artwork, Poitras’s collage alludes to Indigenous Futurisms—connecting the past, present, and future in non-linearity with hope for what is to come.

The undercurrent of this exhibition is connection: connections to kin, connections to the past, and connections to the future. _amiskwacîwâskahikan_ is rooted in family and in land. The shared and collective experience of Indigeneity flowing through each of the works is reflective of the history of amiskwacîwâskahikan. As a gathering place, this exhibition nourishes and enriches the lives of those that come together, like the Beaver Hills and kisiskâciwanisîpiy have since time immemorial.

lg_148-LEBLANC

md_148-LEBLANC

sm_148-LEBLANC

thumbnail_148-LEBLANC

148-LEBLANC

issue-148-p66-68.pdf

Collective

Missy LeBlanc reviews the group exhibition _amiskwacîwâskahikan_ at Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre (September 30-November 28, 2020). As LeBlanc writes, the exhibition pays “homage to the land that Ociciwan is situated on and its history of gathering and connecting.”

amiskwacîwâskahikan: Jane Ash Poitras, MJ Belcourt Moses, Lauren Crazybull, Tanya Harnett, George Littlechild, Dwayne Martineau, Conor McNally, Lana Whiskeyjack

Brynn McNab is a writer, curator, and uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ) and Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) Nations. She is a PhD candidate at Concordia University, in between the Mathematics and Philosophy departments.

_the commute_, a project commissioned by Arts Assembly’s Whitney Brennan long before the events of this year, is a series of three audio works. Originally meant to be listened to on each piece’s corresponding transit line in Vancouver, the works become more expansive than their original premise as the experience of commutes become distant. Listening to the works by S F Ho, jaye simpson, and Helena Krobath creates a double experience of space and time. The listener is in their own body and location, but also elsewhere, moving along distinct routes and timetables of another body.

The commute as a concept is travel structured around labour and falls into a category of peripheral unpaid time. This is what Henri Lefebvre called “constrained time,” which Kristin Ross summarizes as “the time of repeated formalities and obligations that, like the departmental cocktail party, are neither precisely work nor, in any real sense of the term, pleasure.” A shift from the labour body to the contemplative self occurs along familiar routes in these audio pieces. The body is lulled by this familiarity, and the mind takes us elsewhere. The passage is not a smooth transition, but a trading in, a compromise made to facilitate movement. This time, like the time of these audio works, is both ours and not ours.

Ho’s piece, _Guts_, deals with the commute as a perambulation of one’s own living space, and one’s own body, both of which are evidently compromised. They vocalize a parody of wellness and spirituality by applying the calm tone of inner peace to the lived discomfort of sickness. The cadence in the work is set by a breath, dragged across the soundscape in irregular intervals, distending time. In _Guts_, Ho directs the listener to attend to the “conditions of the unarticulated present,” through dense layers of simultaneous contradictions. The travel in the work is interior, and they insist that it is not empty. They emphasize a cyclic time that contains—and is contained by—other cycles: “Feel the material of the world move into your body and out again in a continuous circle \[…\] these visceral cycles are a microcosm of the cycles of the universe.” Time in _Guts_ is looped inside the body, but subject to the loops of the external world as well. It becomes that which heals and poisons, and is both interior to and external from the body at once. The work ends with a reversal exemplary of the complexity of the work, with the incantation “a body is a virus, and you are its host.”

simpson’s work, _Migrational Memories_, details their own experiences and orientation around the roadway Commercial Drive. The work begins with a mysterious gap in the migration of monarch butterflies, a displacement that is a part of their genetic memory. simpson’s voice is measured out by a three-tone piano refrain and breath with the rhythm of walking. The story moves up and down Commercial Drive with the frequency of the No. 20 bus. The narrative of memory is insistent on its gaps, what it avoids, with “open windows and doors,” and creates form from what is necessarily hidden. simpson’s writing knows the violence of replacing one thing with another, echoing the replacement of their name with their case file number. As the stories weave through movements between memories, the concepts of migration and displacement become netted together, necessary for either to be thought. The piece reminds me of another statement by Lefebvre on time, that “life is trapped in an intermediary zone between cyclic and rationalized linear time.” The spectral time of simpson’s ellipses slips out of this trap.

Krobath passes through various forms of complicit engagement in everyday exploitation by envisioning a ghost that inhabits the commuter trains of the West Coast Express. Titled _Ghost Story Commute_, this piece tells stories of the varied passengers on the long commute out of the city. The curiosity of the ghost is what drives the stories, as it passes through the lives of those aboard. There is an administrative efficiency to the violence of capital that runs along the tracks with the train and dissuades reproach. Krobath asks how the city’s organization impinges on those living in and around it. She questions what exists outside of our externally formed selves: “What is your spine made of? What do you think when you wake? When the light inside comes on? What owns you? What does a boot taste like? Or a knife? Have you tasted safety? Who built you?”

The encounter with these works is a layered experience, a passage from specificity of material circumstances to interior contemplation. The audio works generate their own interior space, in a _trompe-l’oreille_, and any encounters with the world while listening become an arbitrary coincidence. Lines of colonization, capital, and ableism trace over each other repetitively, making them difficult to untangle, but these works begin to tease them apart. Fundamentally, the audio pieces speak about the potential impossibility of an “end” given these conditions, but this conception is approached not with pessimism, but with a move toward a non-linear continuity. The repetition of our circles of life are inscribed more quickly these days, in smaller circles. They must become blurred or more precise, mush or infinite.

lg_148-MCNAB

md_148-MCNAB

sm_148-MCNAB

thumbnail_148-MCNAB

148-MCNAB

issue-148-p67-69.pdf

Travel

Sound

In a review of Arts Assembly’s online project _the commute_, Brynn McNab explores how audio works by S F Ho, jaye simpson, and Helena Krobath, related to daily commutes on Vancouver’s various transit lines, prompt important reflections on colonization, capitalism, and ableism. 

the commute: S F Ho, jaye simpson, Helena Krobath

Jesse Cumming is a writer and curator based in Toronto.

Love has been a central concern of writer, artist, and educator Masha Tupitsyn throughout her career, appearing in the titles of both her 2013 book Love Dog, a Roland Barthes–inspired collection of brief reflections initially published as Tumblr posts, and _Love Sounds_ (2015), an imageless 24-hour-long video in which the black screen serves as a backdrop for an edited audio compilation of movie sequences related to love and romance. It’s unsurprising, then, that one of the most resonant moments in Tupitsyn’s new essay collection, _Picture Cycle_ (2020), involves a discussion of onscreen kisses. “Kisses are always vérité,” she writes, the declaration related to an investigation into the nature of film and authenticity that stretches across several entries; “Does the kiss belong to the fiction of a film or to an actor’s real life?”

Collecting texts written over the past decade, the book’s contents range from personal memoirs—the most formally experimental inclusions, several of which can be considered prose poems—to more traditional film and cultural criticism, with the majority operating somewhere in the middle. The porous nature of the book’s essays is frequently exploited, with episodes from Tupitsyn’s memories stretching back to her childhood invoked, to elucidate her reading of particular films and stars; for example, a moment of personal heartbreak and writer’s block supports an essay on Ingmar Bergman and _The Shining_ (1980). At the same time, Tupitsyn notes the influence of movies and television on her own life, particularly the point in her youth when ubiquitous mainstream fare like the original _Miami Vice_ inspired thoughts on gender and fashion.

In Tupitsyn’s consideration of the nature of actors and acting, the moment of a celebrity sighting serves as an instant of either elucidation or confusion, one that either confirms or muddles the relationship between the performer, their public persona, and their onscreen roles. These moments occur at multiple points in the book, whether referencing her pre-teen glimpses of Johnny Depp in ’90s TriBeCa (“You might not look at him unless you knew you were supposed to”); an early encounter with Ralph Macchio of _The Karate Kid_ fame, at one point a figure of infatuation for the young Tupitsyn; or tales from a co-worker about encounters with John Travolta at the Paradise Garage, suggested to be erotic in nature.

_Love Sounds_ and _DECADES_ (2017–present), Tupitsyn’s ongoing project tracing the sonic qualities of 20th-century cinema, are proof of Tupitsyn’s indefatigable cinephilia and her maximalist approach to assemblage. These two admirable qualities don’t always work in the context of _Picture Cycle_’s essays, which feature several entries that would benefit from a more condensed and focused style. Rather than a Benjaminian approach in which excerpts and reflections are able to shape a resonant whole, essays centred on topics like ’80s fashion and pop culture or the relationship between cinematic faces and voices are regularly distracted or derailed by unnecessary shifts in focus and content.

Although it’s true that introducing David Bowie, Mark Zuckerberg, Radiohead’s “Creep,” Luchino Visconti, _American Psycho_, and more alongside each other in a single essay makes it possible for one to draw a connection between these entities, their conceptual linkage doesn’t necessarily serve to support any broader argument or offer any cumulative import. At their worst, the connections can tend toward the facile—as in the book’s predilection for anagrams— or simply thin, like the posited comparison between Bowie’s late-’70s artistic retreat to Berlin with Zuckerberg’s escape into the internet when faced with social alienation at Harvard. The overstuffed nature plagues other essays like “Devil Entendre,” which begins as an examination of horror but flits unsatisfyingly from _Rosemary’s Baby_ to _No Country for Old Men_ to _Se7en_ to Naomi Klein to Rumpelstiltskin, with the connections drawn rarely productive.

The brief chapters are the most interesting for their focus and formal play. They largely abstain from engagement with the cinematic arts in favour of personal memories, employing techniques like second-person perspective or, in an explicit reference to Joe Brainard’s experimental memoir _I Remember_ (1975), the use of a repetitive, rhythmic refrain. Technology and the apparatus of media appear on occasion in these entries, sometimes offering resonant moments that consider how such devices trace and mediate our relationships, whereas other entries are reduced to unfortunate similes comparing emotions to green screens.

The benefits in the personal writing of a focused conceptual conceit or container also hold true for the book’s most successful writings on film. Chief among these examples are Tupitsyn’s examinations of Robert Bresson and Catalan artist-filmmaker Albert Serra. Her writing on Bresson, which explores certain motifs across the French filmmaker’s body of work, also examines the kinship between his films and brief book of artistic treatises _Notes on the Cinematographer_ (1975), and her own past work, noting, “Like Bresson, I use form to work through form, which is how I work through ideas.”

In her writing on Serra, Tupitsyn approaches the work through her trained ear, which introduces a sonic consideration alongside an engagement with the films’ themes, historical influences, and formal emphases on faces and landscapes. As the essay turns to Serra’s _Story of My Death_ (2013), where an unconventional and largely imagined portrait of the infamous lover Casanova appears alongside a wholly imagined Dracula, Tupitsyn’s twin interests in love and sound are again reunited. While elements of _Picture Cycle_ tend to float freely without coalescing, this essay concludes with a rich bit of fusion, positing sound as a representation of the film’s sinister desire. In a reversal of her projects of sonic separation, Tupitsyn situates sound within the cinematic mise en scène rather than as an entity alone and above it.

lg_148-CUMMING

148-CUMMING

In his review of _Picture Cycle: Essays_ (2020) by Masha Tupitsyn, published by Semiotext(e), Jesse Cumming observes that the genre-fluid collection—spanning poetry, cultural criticism, and personal memory—is regularly “derailed by unnecessary shifts in focus and content.” 

Header

C Mag

Issue 148

Body Language

Credits

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Body Language

Explore Issue by Images

Features

"Cells interlinked within cells interlinked": On Ambivalent Contamination

What Are They Fighting For? On Oliver Husain, Kerstin Schroedinger, and the community who embraced DNCB as an experimental treatment for HIV

The (Im)possibility of Healing: On Lauryn Youden

Soft Blues

Feeling The Spirit in The Dark

Artist Projects

Wanderings by Anna Binta Diallo: Text

Wanderings

Columns

Composition: Invocation 1

One Thing: Bundles

Reviews

Three-Thirty: Ebti Nabag, Aaron Jones, and Kelly Fyffe-Marshall

Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience: Kent Monkman

I Confess: Moyra Davey

Hands that gather and forget: Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz and Sebastián Rodríguez y Vasti

amiskwacîwâskahikan: Jane Ash Poitras, MJ Belcourt Moses, Lauren Crazybull, Tanya Harnett, George Littlechild, Dwayne Martineau, Conor McNally, Lana Whiskeyjack

the commute: S F Ho, jaye simpson, Helena Krobath

Picture Cycle: Essays: Masha Tupitsyn

Gaawiin Ogiibagidenaawaasiiwaawan / They Did Not Let It Go: Robert Houle

The Gas Imaginary: Rachel O’Reilly