Canadian art winter 2018 by Lucoment

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CANADA’S BESTSELLER ON IMPRESSIONISM

Helen Galloway McNicoll, Under the Shadow of the Tent, 1914, 83.5 x 101.2 cm, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Arthur-Dominique Rozaire, Nudes on the Beach, 1914, 52.1 x 48.3 cm, private collection.

Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, March Thaw, Evening, Arthabaska, 1913, 73 x 92.1 cm, Power Corporation of Canada.

James Wilson Morrice,The Pink House, Montreal, c. 1905–8, 59.7 x 48.3 cm, private collection.

Maurice Galbraith Cullen, The Ice Harvest, c. 1913, 76.3 x 102.4 cm, National Gallery of Canada.

“Impressionism in Canada: A Journey of Rediscovery ... is essentially a missing chapter from the history of World Impressionism itself.” – GUY WILDENSTEIN, The Wildenstein Institute, Paris

“The fluent style and wealth of information in this book is encompassing and tells the whole story.” – DR. LEO JANSEN, Curator of Paintings, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

“A lavish and expert survey of Canadian artists under the spell of French Impressionism. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the first wave of international modern art.” – DR. CHARLES F. STUCKEY, former Curator, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

“A.K. Prakash’s passion and commitment to the subject are legendary.” – DAVID THOMSON, Chairman, Thomson Reuters, Toronto

“It is a magnificent piece of scholarship … there never was, and I suspect there never will be, a comparable study.” – DR. WILLIAM H. GERDTS, Chairman and Professor Emeritus, Graduate School of Fine Art, City University of New York

“[Prakash is] one of the most appetitive and knowledgeable collectors of what one auction house used to call “important Canadian art” in the country. His is a connoisseurship cultivated over more than three decades, exercised with considerable discretion, not to mention resourcefulness and resources … even acolytes and aficionados are likely to be amazed by the ambition and heft of his latest project. It’s an 800-or-so-page, fully illustrated hardcover book, weighing almost five kilograms, called Impressionism in Canada: A Journey of Rediscovery – nothing less than Prakash’s heroic attempt to fully weave Canada’s contributions into the great narrative of Impressionism” – JAMES ADAMS, Globe and Mail

CELEBRATING CANADA’S 150TH ANNIVERSARY IN FINE BOOKSTORES OR ONLINE ISBN 978-3-89790-455-2 Right: Laura Muntz Lyall, The Pink Dress, 1897, 36.8 x 47 cm, private collection.

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Impressionism in Canada a journey of rediscovery a.k. prakash

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A LANDMARK BOOK ON EARLY CANADIAN WOMEN ARTISTS

Sarah Robertson, Mother House, Nuns of the Congregation, c. 1932, 25.4 x 30.5 cm, private collection.

Mary Bell Eastlake, Girl with Butterfly, c. 1910, 33.7 x 24.1 cm, private collection.

Kathleen Moir Morris, McGill Cab Stand, c. 1927, 45.7 x 61 cm, private collection.

Prudence Heward, Tonina, 1928, 68.6 x 68.6 cm, private collection.

Anne Savage, Quebec Farm, 1935, 63.5 x 76.2 cm, private collection.

“Independent Spirit: Early Canadian Women Artists is the first interpretive study of the subject … The author is to be admired for his passion, dedication, and readiness to break new ground, in this, as in so many other realms of Canadian art.” DAVID THOMSON, Chairman, Thomson Reuters Corporation

“An extraordinary piece of work, rigorously researched, beautifully annotated, and a splendid contribution to a rich and largely unexplored part of Canada’s visual heritage. Years of intensive and hard looking at the art shine throughout this volume. Independent Spirit teems with information and ideas. It will be of great use to scholars and the general public alike.” SHIRLEY THOMSON, former Director, National Gallery of Canada, and former Chair, Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board

“A remarkable achievement … This book fills a yawning gap in our historical knowledge and brings many overlooked and deserving artists back onto the national stage. Prakash’s scholarship, judgment, and unerring eye reveal how accomplished the women artists in our history were and are, and how vitally important their stories and achievements are to us today.” DAVID SILCOX, former President, Sotheby’s Canada; author of The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson

“This is an absolutely stunning book, reproduced with dozens of glorious paintings. But it is also a very valuable book, chronicling the lives and works of three dozen Canadian women painters, few of whom are displayed in the National Gallery.” NICK MARTIN, Winnipeg Free Press

“The only Canadian artists most non-Canadian art lovers can name are those in the all-male Group of Seven and the intrepid Emily Carr. So it is enlightening and gratifying to be introduced to the three dozen Canadian women artists (primarily painters) ... Prakash presents a grand gallery of luscious plates, each accompanied by a crisp expository description ....” DONNA SEAMAN, Booklist, American Library Association

CELEBRATING CANADA’S 150TH ANNIVERSARY AVAILABLE AT DELAKE.COM ISBN 978-1-55407-417-4 Right: Helen McNicoll, In the Tent, 1914, 81.3 x 63.5 cm, private collection.

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Independent Spirit Early Canadian Women Artists

A.K. Prakash

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2017-10-19 1:38 PM

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canadianart W i n t e r 2 01 8

volume 34, number 4

Care and Wellness 52 Living with Crisis Art, anxiety and vulnerability by Saelan Twerdy

56 Access Revived A new model of support by Carmen Papalia

58 The Pick-Up Artist Counsel and complicity in anonymous online realms by Heather White

62 Settler Structures of Bad Feeling Three Indigenous artists on contamination and colonialism by Billy-Ray Belcourt

66 Artist Project

Four Winds by Geoffrey Pugen

72 Getting to Work by Getting Away Artist residencies as retreats by Naomi Skwarna

78 Spotlight Strategies of wellness in the work of 10 emerging artists by Amber Berson G e n e ro us ly sup p o rt e D by r b C

88 Land/Body/ Reciprocity Smashing the mirror to call our bodies home by Lacie Burning and Lindsay Nixon

92 Coming Through Grief Art that eulogizes is an act of survival by Kelli Korducki

94 The Sound of Science Experiments with sand and noise bordering on the divine

Cover:

Ambera Wellmann Untitled Legs 2017 Digital photograph Courtesy the artist

above:

ChloĂŤ Lum and Yannick Desranleau I really I want Time for A Lie â&#x20AC;&#x201C; A Lie 2016 ink-jet on canvas and grommets 1.32 m x 100 cm Cou rtesy Galerie huGu es Charbonneau

by Tom Jokinen

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canadianart

This Issue

20 Letter to the Editors 31 Preview Upcoming openings, events, performances and more

Keynote The Goddess Care by Anne Boyer

Fiction

Paint it Black, You Angels by Lynn Crosbie

Legacy The Great White Plague by Rosie Prata

105 School Guide: Cultures of Care

146 Reviews Recent exhibitions, books, films and more

160 Backstory Forms of Repair by Kader Attia

above:

Kader Attia J’accuse (detail) 2016 Courtesy the artist/Galerie NaGel Draxler, ColoGNe/BerliN Photo axel sChNeiDer

below:

Jeremy Shaw Liminals (still) 2017 hD video installation Courtesy KöNiG Galerie, BerliN

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This Issue

Contributors Carmen PaPalia is a Vancouver social practice artist. His work has been featured in exhibitions and engagements at the Guggenheim, Tate Liverpool, Harvard Art Museums and Gallery Gachet, among others.

In the context of an issue themed on care and wellness, I find little option other than to acknowledge our own failings. On page 138 of our last issue, the subtitle for the article “We Lost an Entire Generation” erroneously suggested that the artist Archer Pechawis is deceased, an inaccuracy repeated on page 18, in the “This Issue” text. (We also misattributed the interactive website BigRedDice as the work of Pechawis; this work is a collaboration among Pechawis, Paul Lang and Lorna Boschman, based on an earlier video installation created by Lang.) The standard public-facing editorial approach to this is to publish something saying, “We deeply regret the error” and “we apologize for any grief or harm that this has caused Mr. Pechawis and his family.” We have done so; we do. Workplace protocol is less tidy. I don’t want to move on quite yet, and you may read Pechawis’s own feelings on the matter on page 20. For our part, excuses, legitimate and otherwise, emerge following such an error. But this error—literally grave, and rippling—was one of communication and thus of care, done by internal, white editorial leadership, and affecting, in addition to Pechawis, our Indigenous Editor-at-Large, Lindsay Nixon, the writer of the piece, who would never have committed such an error, and whose emotional labour in the wake of this and other things is untold. A “This Issue” note can only scrape the surface. Are cultural institutions like Canadian Art really yet equipped, in a fundamental, structural way, to deal with inclusion in the most holistic sense? Can we mirror the anti-oppression frameworks that now comprise our touted content mandates? How are we downloading care tasks to staff of colour? In the context of publishing, industry procedures do not easily lend themselves to sensitivity or flexibility. There is the modernist cliché of the editorial office, still lingering, in which shouting is de rigueur. There are the ulcerous time constraints, ones happening already in the context of overwork, exacerbated by digital imperatives. With paper, there is the fascistic matter, always irritatingly present, of what fits on a page. (Most display copy you read is written to fit, spatially.) There is grammar, house style. And, beyond significantly, advertising pressures. When we are dealing with communities whose very lives have been, and are, at stake, common editorial approaches to, say, limiting space, and common editorial terms such as “cut,” “kill” and “deadline” fall horribly short, taking on profound, different meaning—as, at best, unfriendly, and, at worst, anti-relational, and yes, colonial. At Canadian Art, our endeavour in institutional inclusivity means well, but has been compromised by an internal negligence that is inherent to our industry. Unfortunately this isn’t the only, and won’t be the last, time. We have far to go. Talking about it, alongside constructive action, is a step. Care is so often destroyed by silence. – David Balzer, Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher

Tom Jokinen is a Toronto writer and radio producer. He contributes regularly to the Walrus, the Globe and Mail and CBC. kelli korduCki is a writer and editor whose debut nonfiction book, Hard to Do: The Surprising, Feminist History of Breaking Up, is forthcoming in spring 2018. lynn Crosbie is finishing a new novel called Chicken, which is steeped in Senecan tragedy. A prize-winning journalist and professor, she is now focusing on the visual art she commenced at Dawson College in Montreal, years ago. rosie PraTa is a writer and editor based in London, UK. She is currently associate editor at Monocle, and her writing has also appeared in Canadian Art, the Globe and Mail and elsewhere. amber berson is a writer, curator and PhD student conducting doctoral research at Queen’s University on artist-run culture and feminist, utopian thinking. Her most recent curatorial projects are “Utopia as Method” (2018); “World Cup!” (2018); and “The Let Down Reflex” (2016–17, with Juliana Driever). anne boyer’S most recent book is Garments Against Women. billy-ray belCourT is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a PhD student in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Belcourt’s first poetry collection, This Wound is a World, was released through Frontenac House in fall 2017. HeaTHer WHiTe is a writer and a therapist in Toronto. laCie burning is a Kanien’kehá:ka artist and curator raised on Six Nations of the Grand River. They work in photography, video, installation and sculpture, and are currently studying in the Visual Arts program at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Having come from a culturally and politically grounded upbringing, their work focuses on politics of Indigeneity and identity from a Haudenosaunee perspective. saelan TWerdy is a writer based in Montreal, a PhD candidate in Art History at McGill University and a contributing editor at Momus.ca. naomi skWarna is a writer and actor. Her work has appeared in the Believer, the Globe and Mail, the Hairpin, Hazlitt, the National Post, Toronto Life, Real Life and elsewhere. daniella sanader is a writer and reader who lives in Toronto. CHris HamPTon is a Toronto arts and culture writer. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Walrus, the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail.

Canadian art • winter 2018

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Re: “We Lost an Entire Generation,” Fall 2017 issue

To the editors of Canadian Art,

I am not dead. The declaration of my death in the Fall 2017 issue was my first mention, that I’m aware of, in Canadian Art, and while I am honoured to be featured in any article alongside the late René Highway, Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew and Terry Haines, I was appalled by the poor oversight and lack of awareness of our Indigenous arts community. I am referring here to two problematic aspects of the article: my being reported as deceased in two different sections of the magazine, and having Paul Lang’s artwork BigRedDice misattributed to me. As to being dead, I have been a practicing artist since 1984, and while I haven’t been terribly prolific in the last few years, I am still here, and still making work. This past March I was commissioned by Flux Media Art Gallery in Victoria to create a new performance piece on the theme of personal, historical and cultural traumas. I have a prominent online presence, which includes an artist website, a professional website, a Facebook profile, a LinkedIn profile and a page on my distributor Vtape’s website. I am really, really easy to find. A phone call would have cleared up any confusion. I appreciate that Canadian Art reached out to me via email September 12th, but this mistake was first tweeted about by Canadian Art on September 6th. I would have preferred it if someone from the magazine had contacted me immediately. These things are personal, and should be responded to as such. My brother, Maxwell Harvey Mayling, went missing last November. The RCMP have classified his disappearance as a suspected homicide, but his body has not been found. This made it especially distressing for myself and my family to be falsely declared dead. I did not wish to discuss my brother’s disappearance in this letter, but it links my family to the larger community, and the larger issues we live with, in a terrible and relevant way: like us, so many Indigenous families have lost loved ones to violence, or have otherwise had their lives irrevocably altered by colonial violence in its myriad forms. This, more than anything, underscores the need for rigour and sensitivity when researching and writing about our artists and their place in the community. We have had enough conflict and trauma in our lives and our history. My family, and I personally, have definitely had enough. As I mentioned earlier the artwork attributed to me in this article, BigRedDice, is not mine, it is Métis artist Paul Lang’s. I created the online version of his piece; in the credits section, Paul is listed as, “Concept, big red dice creator, video maker, conceptual 20

terrorism, general troublemaking,” and my credits are, “Flash Authoring, Webmeister, conceptual mechanic, actionscript code monkey.” Article author Lindsay Nixon did attempt to contact me before publication, but couldn’t reach me. Nixon has apologized since in a way that was personal and meaningful to me. It has been an incredible honour to be a part of the Indigenous arts community/movement over the last 35 years. I have had the opportunity to meet, work with and learn from the giants who blazed the trail for us against seemingly impossible odds, combatting racism, incomprehension and indifference to make a space for us in the larger Canadian art milieu. I have had the intense satisfaction of watching my peers achieve some of the highest levels of recognition and success, and perhaps most gratifyingly have watched new cohorts of smart young Indigenous artists pick up where we have left off. Given this history as an Indigenous artist, it is especially disturbing to be erased by a mainstream (read non-Indigenous) publication that is the “preeminent platform for journalism and criticism about art and culture in Canada.” In future I would ask all of you to be more careful. This is our history. Many established Indigenous artists have very little writing about their early work. There is even less mainstream acknowledgement of the artists who were working on the fringes of the art world in those early days. We need rigorous writing to make sure that our art history, our work and the politics of those times survives. We need publications such as Canadian Art to understand the context within which the art was created and how that very important work prepared the ground for where we are now and how it informs the current cultural and political conversations. It is my sincere hope that some learning can happen from this situation, more attention can be paid to Indigenous artists and these mistakes can be prevented in the future. I appreciate Canadian Art reaching out, but I feel that as a respected, mainstream publication, this was a huge error that should never have happened. It had an impact on my family, on me personally, and as an artist. I feel unresolved, but perhaps this is the beginning of a deeper and more meaningful conversation. These things matter. On a personal note, please be careful with our community. We have a lot going on. – Archer Pechawis

Canadian art • winter 2018

ARCHER Letter to Editor—W18_8.indd 20

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canadianart David Balzer Chris Frey

Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher (On Leave) Acting Co-Publisher (Editorial)

Debra Rother

Co-Publisher

Bryne McLaughlin

Senior Editor

Barbara Solowan

Creative Director

Caoimhe Morgan-Feir

Managing Editor

Leah Sandals Yaniya Lee

Managing Editor, Online Associate Editor

Lindsay Nixon

Indigenous Editor-at-Large

Merray Gerges

Assistant Editor

Nicholas Brown Lauren Eisen Valérie Frappier Amy Corner

Contributing Editor and Manager of Programming Copy Chief Editorial Intern Advertising Sales Director

Marian Ruston

Business Development Director

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Marketing and Communications Manager

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Development Manager

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Web Manager

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Norval Morrisseau Norval As Shaman Telling Stories & Legends, 1987 Acrylic on canvas, 95 x 58 ins., 241.3 x 147.32 cms.

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We acknowledge the support of the Government of Canada; the Canada Council for the Arts; the Government of Ontario through the OMDC Magazine Fund, an initiative of Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Ontario Arts Council; and the Young Canada Works Program.

Publication Mail Agreement #40007888 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Canadian Art, PO Box 26251 STN BRM B, Toronto, ON, M7Y 4R1 Offices are at 215 Spadina Avenue, Suite 330, Toronto, ON, M5T 2C7. Advertising and editorial inquiries call (416) 3688854, fax (416) 368-6135 or email info@canadianart.ca. All rights reserved. Reproduction without written permission of the publisher is strictly forbidden. Not responsible for unsolicited material. Publication’s mail-registration number 6477. Postmaster send address changes to Canadian Art. Basic subscription rates in Canada, $33.84 for one year (includes GST/HST). GST/HST number 13294 5908 RT0001. From time to time we make our subscribers’ names available to companies whose products or services we feel may be of interest to you. To be excluded from these mailings, please send your request, along with a copy of your subscription mailing label, to the customer-service address above. Publication date: Winter 2018, ISSN 0825-3854. Printed in Canada. Indexed in the Canadian Business & Current Affairs Database. Distributed by Magazines Canada.

2017-11-03 4:56 PM

WATER WORKS ON VIEW FEBRUARY 10, 2018 TO MAY 27, 2018

Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge (Condé Canadian b. 1940; Beveridge Canadian b. 1945) Fall of Water, 2006-2007 light jet print, Collection of the artists. © Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge WATER WORKS PRESENTED BY

WITNESS EDWARD BURTYNSKY ON VIEW JANUARY 20, 2018 TO MAY 21, 2018

123 King Street West, Hamilton • 905.527.6610 • artgalleryofhamilton.com

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MICHЀLE DROUIN (RCA) 2005 “La Lumiere Jaillit du Puit” 45.75” x 42”

Bugera Matheson Gallery A Canadian Tradition in Contemporary Art

www.bugeramathesongallery.com info@bugeramathesongallery.com 780-482-2854

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07/29/17 10:58 AM

preview Upcoming openings, events, performances and more

Vancouver Women’s Bookstore launch poster designed by Jo Cook 1973 ColleCtion 221A

second take

“Beginning with the SeventieS: gLUt”

Morris and helen Belkin art gallery, VancouVer January 11 to april 8 The Vancouver Women’s Bookstore was the first feminist bookshop to open in Western Canada, in 1973. Alexandra Bischoff’s Rereading Room reconstructs it for an exhibition focused on reading as resistance. AlexAndrA Bischoff: That bookstores like these even existed was an activist strategy in and of itself; the brick-and-mortar locations functioned as activist hubs where people would gather and organize. The Readers is a performance where 13 activists, authors and artists will occupy the gallery to annotate Rereading Room’s collection of early feminist publications. Remounting the past could fall into fetishistic reverence, but this cross-generational interaction will insert a contemporary dialogue to complicate these texts. Books may be static, but their contexts are in constant flux.

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CONCEPT

“COLLECTIVE WELFARE”

BlaCkwood Gallery, MississauGa February 12 to March 10 The hospital, prison and university become ground zero in the crisis of care in this final iteration of the exhibition series “Take Care.” It reveals how these contested sites govern and administer— often unevenly—care and collective welfare. Here, co-curators Greig de Peuter and Christine Shaw describe how the included artworks confront institutional status quos. Sheena hoSzko studied Correctional Service Canada’s (CSC) “Federal Correctional Facilities Accommodation Guidelines,” a 700page document she obtained in 2015 via an access-to-information request. It states guidelines for the CSC’s construction, maintenance and operation of prisons. A section titled “Mental Healthcare Facility” outlines the spatial dimensions of the components in a prison’s mental-health wing. Her installation consists of 1:1-scale replicas of waiting and treatment rooms of mental healthcare facilities—cordoned-off, 10-metre-square rooms that fill the exhibition space and cannot be entered by viewers, even though they are assembled from rented “pipe and drape.” It reveals how people with severe trauma or mental illness are disproportionately incarcerated and provided with inadequate care resources. As Hoszko writes: “Symptoms of mental illness increase when people are incarcerated; the notion of ‘care’ in a carceral context is thus an oxymoron, as the conditions of imprisonment are incongruent with treatment or rehabilitation.” A text by prison abolitionist Nasrin Himada accompanies the installation. Steven eaStwood shot his featurelength film, Island, over a 12-month period at the Earl Mountbatten Hospice on the Isle of Wight. The work addresses the taboo subject of dying, reflecting current attitudes in palliative care and society around end-of-life experience and the visibility of the dying clockwise From top leFt:

Sheena Hoszko Correctional Service Canada Accommodation Guidelines: Mental Healthcare Facility 2016–17 Steven Eastwood Island (film still) 2017 Carolyn Lazard The Undercommons (detail from the series In Sickness and Study) 2017

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Preview THREE OBJECTS

“PEJIPUK | thE wIntEr Is comIng” eastern edge gallery, st. John’s February 2 to March 17

Meagan Musseau learned brick-stitch beadwork on Coast Salish territory and then began this body of work— which honours traditional knowledge with contemporary technique—when she returned home to Ktaqmkuk, now known as Newfoundland, to prepare for winter.

person. Footage from the film is composed into a multiscreen video, The Interval and the Instant, to engender a space where dying can be given an image. Made through close engagement with individuals with terminal illnesses, their families and care providers, Eastwood asks: “What happens when we die? When is death named? Can it be seen?” The installation includes a five-hour piece that features, in real time, the end of a man’s life. As Eastwood learned, death takes its own time. Given the deficit of moving images of death in contemporary Western culture, The Interval and the Instant requires the kind of slow, careful reading and engagement with images that we desperately need. Carolyn lazard’s In Sickness and Study is a series of selfies she posts on Instagram documenting her intravenous iron infusions in treatment of her autoimmune disorders. It brings the chronically ill body into public view to acknowledge that sick and disabled bodies are often kept out of sight by social and institutional codes that deem illness a private and personal matter. Lazard arms herself with books every time she goes to the hospital for treatment. Each photograph is taken from her perspective while sitting in a hospital chair with her arm positioned for the IV, her hand presenting the cover of the book she is reading, and the IV tube extending outside the frame of the photo into a virtual community of other disabled people with whom she studies. The books she reads and documents provide access to other forms of contact and support. For a new, commissioned image, Lazard chose The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, which considers the commons and indebtedness as a response to the crisis of collective welfare.

This is the first pendant I made after learning how to do brick-stitch beadwork from Clairissa Charlie. When I do beadwork, I use a long string and a tiny needle to sew the beads as if I were laying bricks. Sitting with a surface of beads makes me think of stardust and galaxies. It’s a reflexive space to focus my energy, take action, heal and repeat. This reminds me of watching my mother and grandmother sew when I was little.

The caribou-bone pendants tattooed on my arm are Beothuk belongings. They were placed in burial grounds so the spirit could pass on well. I’m reclaiming these pendants because all of our belongings have been stolen from the territory and put into museums. Before creating this piece, all the grandmothers came to me in a dream and said, “Don’t lose the belongings,” and all the pendants appeared. Now I have the skills and the dreams to bring them back.

I designed this piece for a pair of ma’gn (moccasin) I began to make on Lekwungen territory. When I returned to Ktaqmkuk, I spent three days with my grandmother to finish them. The nukumij design is appliquéd to leather, and sealskin is sewn around the ankle. I think of waspu (seal) as a dream keeper of the sea, like grandparents carrying life forces through the ocean. I dance in these shoes to reconnect with the strength of my ancestors and family.

Meagan Musseau niskamij | grandfather 2016 Meagan Musseau Beothuk Belonging no. XXVI-26 photograph reclaiming p'taquwa / our people up the river 2016 Meagan Musseau nukumij | grandmother 2016

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Preview Process

KADER ATTIA

The Power PlanT, ToronTo January 27 to May 13 The centrepiece of the Berlin- and Paris-based artist’s first solo show in Canada, “The Field of Emotions,” is an array of carved wooden busts inspired by the disfigurement of injured soldiers during the First World War, but interpreted here in the context and conditions of colonization. KADER ATTIA: There’s a significant amount of untold stories in contemporary colonization because the narrative of power is almost always the only one that exists. The starting point for my inquiry is rooted in the conception of the racial body and how it has a stake in domination by colonial power. How does this relationship between the colonizers’ descendants, and the system of control and representation of the racialized body play out today in Canada? It was important for me to dialogue directly with the people who are concerned. I spoke with Gerald McMaster, Kwame McKenzie, Charmaine Nelson, Kimberley Anderson and Chief R. Stacey Laforme of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation.

Initial research on the ground is crucial in every place I work; I like to bind the audience to the people who are mainly affected by the issue rather than represent a statement

based on secondary research. I always go by myself, and set up a camera to document a conversation. It’s the beginning of a deeper dialogue and understanding.

Kader Attia J’accuse (detail) 2016 Cou rtesy the artist/Galerie NaGel Draxler, ColoGNe/BerliN Photo axel sChNeiDer

Rick Silva Make It Rain (still) 2016

What began as a joke between artists Rick Silva and Justin Waddell —“We should do a show about the weather!”—turned into a collaborative meditation on the capricious nature of environmental conditions and the creative limits of predictive technology.

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“AFTER WEATHER” STride Gallery, CalGary January 19 to March 2

JUSTIN WADDELL: We make small talk about the weather because it affects our bodies or to relate to other people in social scenarios, but weather phenomena exist outside of us and affect our ability to commune in a way that doesn’t care about us at all, that could just as easily wipe us out and destroy us. 3-D graphic software, used to create weather phenomena for video games, will generate its own weather patterns inside this virtual world. It will set the tone with a series of swirling clouds and rolling fog to reveal patterns in nature and repeated forms in landscape. We’re working on elements of it separately but also simultaneously in real time. It’s almost like playing a massive online player game, except we’re both affecting the environment at the same time. Then it’ll be able to cycle through autonomously. What if it generates a storm? The results pertain to how technology still can’t always predict the weather.

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Preview Context

Naufus RamíRezfigueRoa

AudAin GAllery, VAncouVer February 18 to March 10 Inspired by the mythology of a play censored in Guatemala in the 1970s, performance artist and sculptor Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa will present a solo durational performance in costume and new sculptures based on his drawings of how he imagines the actual physical heart of the scarecrow. Naufus RamíRez-figueRoa: Corazón del espantapájaros (Heart of the Scarecrow) is titled after a play by Hugo Carrillo written in 1962, then staged in 1975 by an experimental art-school theatre in Guatemala City with elements to address local contemporary politics. It wasn’t a very good play but it offended the government and everyone involved got death threats. A lot of the art students who took part didn’t have a normal life after; many felt persecuted and had to leave the country. It’s said to be the most glaring censorship of the arts that happened in the Guatemalan Civil War. I can’t base anything on it because the script disappeared and the theatre mysteriously burnt down, but I’ve been researching it for four years. I commissioned Guatemalan poet Wingston Gonzáles to write about the history and my research. He weaves in stories, some facts and a character that tries to impose their power; it captures the darkness that surrounds this whole case. Other artists and scholars have engaged with it, and perhaps part of the inspiration is asking oneself, “What is the heart of the scarecrow?” Some people say that the scarecrow symbolizes the bodies of political dissidents found in the corn fields. People leaning toward spirituality interpret it within Mayan cosmology: the scarecrow is the deer god and the heart of the scarecrow is the heart of a humming bird, which is incessant and never stops beating.

rIght: Chantal Neveu (with Jessica Charbonneau) La langue de ma mère 2016

Caroline Boileau À fleur de peau 2011–13

above rIght:

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa Corazón del espantapájaros (Heart of the Scarecrow) (performance) 2016

Photo Pedro Ivo trasferettI

Framework

guetteR pRatiqueR aNticipeR tailleR SKol, MontreAl January 11 to March 10

Care is crucial to collaboration for artist Caroline Boileau and poet Chantal Neveu, who will use attention and intuition to merge their practices in the space of this exhibition. CaRoliNe Boileau aNd ChaNtal Neveu: The installation at Skol will consist of Caroline’s drawings and Chantal’s poems. We’ll treat the entire exhibition space as a laboratory. We will be present in the body figurations in the drawings and in the language of the poetry, but will also respond with performance. A key concept for us is adjacence— how can we be side-by-side so that one plus one equals more than two? The answer is found in the verbs in the exhibition’s title: to be in a positon of attention and anticipation, then to make a shared decision of action. ■

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Keynote

The Goddess Care by anne Boyer

In the system of four-letter words, care is short of love, but just beyond work. As an idea, it is both heavy, as in dragged down by sentimentality, and light, as in made stubbornly ephemeral to the history of thought. Care isn’t a thing, but a relation, and as a relation, it adheres to the history of being unmentionable or mentioned mostly as an enforcement of its unmentionable matters-of-fact. Care joins, too, all those other words we might not want to say, words we avoid when we are afraid to call our adventure by its own name, afraid to endorse the debts incurred by suffering by lending them vocabulary. Care is necessary, elusive, maligned, violently sentimentalized, exploitatively structured and coercively deployed. In books, it mostly appears in the apparatus. Any author’s dedication page reading “for my devoted wife” is a novel about care never written. Care’s resistance to representation has a foundation, too, in the inevitabilities of memory. Moments in our lives of epic vulnerability are also moments in which our memory is often laid low. Infancy, debilitating illness and senility are redacted from our episodic memory as a kind of cognitive mercy rule, and it’s the moments in which we cannot remember care that we have the most need for it. In the first century, a story about care showed up in a book called Fabulae written by Gaius Julius Hyginus, a writer so bad his modern editor called him “an ignorant youth, semi-learned, stupid.” It survived via schoolboy’s notebook, then was recorded into a monk’s Beneventan script around 900. In 1535, the monk’s manuscript was printed but was ripped apart soon after, only to return when Heidegger retold it. Now I will tell it again. The goddess Care came to a river. Bored, she sat down on its bank to play around with clay. She formed a head and two arms and two legs. She stared at her artwork almost satisfied. Then Jove came by, and she asked him to breathe on the figure. He did and gave the figure life. Then the two Gods began to quarrel. Care believed that since she made the figure, it ought to be named Care, and Jove thought since he had given it spirit,

it ought to be called Jove. Finally, the earth heard them arguing, rose up, and said they were both wrong, that the figure ought to be called her name—Terra—because she had provided her body as a raw material. So the three gods asked Saturn to help them sort it out. Because Jove gave the figure its spirit, Saturn said that when it died, Jove could have its spirit back. Since Terra had given her body as raw material, upon death, the body would return to her so she could do with it what she wanted. But because Care was the one who had first fashioned this figure, it would be Care that would possess it all its life. And so it was that care became that relation that persists between body and spirit, between birth and death—its ongoingness a sometimes poor reward of having been born, and also its opportunity. ■ Chris Curreri Untitled (Clay Portfolio) 2013 Fibre-based gelatin silver print Cou rtesy Daniel Faria Gallery

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Fiction

Paint it Black, You angels by lynn crosbie

Tran calls herself Trish, two Trans she says, as I hoist my fat legs onto the towel-clothed footstool, and watch her watch the gauntlet of girls in their surgical masks and try to find Lynn and Cindy and Kim who loves Adele, so beautiful is her music! What colour? Tran says, and I tell her to cut at my dinosaur toes, sand and lube them, and paint them black. My wellness—a seventeen-year-old Jack Russell Terrier—is gone. Last seen lying on a pad, his paw wrapped in a blue bandage with a heart appliqué, his life leaking through an amber-coloured tube. Twitching long after his death how he, unable to walk anymore, ran after balls and rats in his sleep and then near the end leaving a spray of blood on the pillows I worship as my Lourdes. Holy, too, his absence and lingering smell of corn chips and bone marrow. Tran, there is no Heaven, I say. Is it Sue who looks at me across the Nakdong River, through opaque safety glasses? Look at them all kneeling before the monstrous temple that is me and four other iceberg-pale broads, with our filthy paw pads and yellow spatulate toenails; notice the rough, ragged heels and the stench! All day they kneel, unassisted—how great their pain will be in just ten years—before chicken-white pegs like a skid of oleomargarine peppered with pre-cancerous moles and dense, neglected black hairs. Kim’s grandmother was murdered during the Korean War in Sinchon: I translate this lyric for her on my phone. Jillian Kay Ross dog 1 2015 Acrylic on canvas 1.52 x 1.21 m

But I set fire to the rain. Watched it pour as I touched your face. Well, it burned while I cried ’Cause I heard it screaming out your name, your name. Kim never knew her mother’s mother, who was fleeing from a sky of black explosions and grey, fatal shrieks and white obliterating lightning. I used to watch M*A*S*H which was especially horrible in its last seasons, possibly brilliant if you consider its eleven-year run > the Korean War’s three-year run. M*A*S*H, I tell Tran, was a show about a US Army mobile surgical hospital during the Korean War, featuring a cast of libidinous white men (“meatball surgeons”), their assistants, a tiny psychic and a cross-dressing man desperately seeking a Section Eight. Occasionally the doctors, who drank heavily, had nightmares about rowing in lakes of blood. Sound funny, she says, or is it, Kim, Sue? A girl calls as Sue paints my eyebrows and asks if she can bring her dog. My heart fills with shrapnel. I signed the form with a shaky hand and the form said, OK, kill my dog. I took away everything he had, is what I tell Sue, as she leans over me with surgical tweezers.

Courtesy Division GAllery

She says nothing. She gets one day off a week, and is never sure which. Her legs are just starting to ache at night, something lemon-drop cocktails take care of. I want to know everything, having lost everything. Cut his nails please I am scared, and leave them for me. A week has passed and my dog is being burned. I am not at all well, I tell Tran, I mean Trish. In my dreams she rips off her mask and her mouth is filled with blood that sprays me as she says, I know, I know, like her grandmother said to her mother and her mother said to her. When really, she is letting my black nails dry and shoves me off. Wait, not even a painted heart? I shuffle home, my toes still separated by sponges so anxious are they to turn us over and wait and wait until the day belongs to them. All these pretty girls wearing their history like a bridal train; all these steely-strong women! You gave me my heart is what I would tell them, if they would listen. Lynn you so fashion, Tran says, why you wear a wig? If only I could pull out the knife that obstructs my breathing, but the poor blade has been waiting so long. ■

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The GreaT WhiTe PlaGue by rosie Prata

Sculptures by unidentified Inuit artists at the Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton ca. 1950–69 CourteSy tHe ArCHIveS of HAMIlton HeAltH SCIenCeS And fACu lty of HeAltH SCIenCeS, MCMASter unIverSIty

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Legacy

A collection of soapstone sculpture tells the story of how a tuberculosis sanatorium in Hamilton, for a time, became home to the largest population of Inuit outside of the Arctic

On a sweltering summer’s day in 1953, a plane landed at Hamilton’s Mount Hope airport. Its passengers were a group of tubercular Inuit whose travels had begun near the Arctic Circle, around Baffin Island and Arctic Quebec. The group—described in reports as “sick and exhausted” and “apprehensive and disoriented”—stepped out of the plane onto a scorching tarmac, dressed in the fur parkas and mukluks they had been wearing when they left home. Staff from the Mountain Sanatorium, where the group was headed to receive treatment for tuberculosis, divided them into groups based on age and gender—an especially traumatic process for mothers forced to separate from their young children. After Northern evacuees consented to travel south to receive medical care—or were coerced, if informed consent is understood by its present-day definition—they had to contend with anxiety and grief on many levels. Some children forgot their mother tongues, and scant communication between the North and South meant that some adults were not able to let their loved ones know whether they were still alive or dead. It is more than likely that tubercular Inuit would have preferred to remain at home for treatment, but they were not given that choice. In the eyes of the government, it was dramatically cheaper and more efficient to evacuate infected members of Inuit communities to an existing sanatorium in the South rather than build a brand-new facility in the North. The Department of National Health and Welfare selected the Mountain Sanatorium as the principal location for the reception of Eastern Arctic evacuees. Over the course of nearly a decade, as many as 1,274 infected Inuit resided at the Mountain Sanatorium. Some were away from home for years at a time. While adjusting to sanatorium life was a difficult task for any patient, it was especially jarring for those from the North. Breakfast in Iqaluit might include seal blood; in Hamilton, it was cream of wheat. To keep up morale, reduce irksome feelings of total reliance and maintain a connection with life back home, the occupational-therapy program was adapted to include soapstone carving for men and sewing and embroidery for women. Women stitched exquisite fabric dolls wearing brightly coloured parkas, replete with fur-edged hoods. Men carved scenes from home that would have been especially interesting and attractive to southern collectors, such as Hunter with Captured Seal Under the Ice by Samwillie Mikpegak, or Polar Bear and Cub by Jobie Snowball. Since the mid-1800s, most sculpture produced by Inuit artists had been aimed at a tourist market. As scholar Heather Igloliorte has written, it is important to note that “while all around them their culture was being debased, devalued, and actively oppressed by the dual forces of colonialism and Christianity, these same values were revered, celebrated, and voraciously collected in their arts.” Though recognized at the time as artistic products, the textiles and sculptures produced at the sanatorium were not retailed in the fine-art market, and therefore did not fetch fine-art prices. Instead, they were sold for meagre sums through the hospital shop, which recouped what had been spent on materials and tools and then took five per cent of the profits. The remaining money from sales went to the makers, who used it to purchase

pick-me-ups from the canteen, such as a can of peaches (22 cents), a Coke (seven cents), lipstick (70 cents), batteries (15 cents) or a radio (25 dollars). More than 100 of the artworks produced by sanatorium patients are included in the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s exhibition “Carving Home: The Chedoke Collection of Inuit Art.” (The Mountain Sanatorium was renamed the Chedoke General and Children’s Hospital in 1961.) The exhibition represents one part of a multi-year research project that started when a collection of sculptures kept at the site of the former sanatorium was moved to the AGH. The gallery’s position is that “understanding, presentation and interpretation of the material must be driven by the voices and knowledge of those closest to its creation.” The exhibition team includes many Inuit art specialists and even a former patient, Nancy Anilniliak, who was brought to the sanatorium at just five years old. Says Tobi Bruce, director of exhibitions and collections and senior curator at the AGH, “We see this as a living collection, not a finite holding.” “Even with the best will in the world,” writes Shawn Selway, author of Nobody Here Will Harm You, an in-depth study of the evacuation, “uninvited meddling in the lives of others is perilous at any time and place.” Anthropologist Helle Møller, who worked as a tuberculosis nurse in three Nunavut communities in the late 1990s, suggests that the government’s interest in providing medical care to those in the North might have been partially strategic. She writes, “Before the Canadian government had realized the possibilities of the Arctic, its inhabitants were allowed to die as a consequence of contact with explorers, traders and missionaries.” Møller asserts that it was—and continues to be—beneficial for the government, in terms of maintaining continuous and intact sovereignty, to “have healthy bodies living in the north.” Of course, tuberculosis is still present in the North—unfortunate yet conclusive evidence that diseases cannot be cured by medical care alone. Anthropologist Emily Cowall, a consultant for the AGH exhibition, points out that “present-day Nunavummiut are not receiving adequate government assistance with their housing, food and income.” As a result, the microbe that has lain dormant for decades has found hapless new hosts. At worst, the history of the evacuation of tubercular Inuit from Eastern Arctic communities to Southern Ontario can be seen as an example of welfare colonialism. At best, it was a well-intentioned program that, despite saving lives, was clumsily executed and produced some tragic consequences. Between 1952 and 1963, 37 Inuit patients died in Hamilton. Their graves were left unmarked for years, but in 1995 a granite stela was added close to where they are interred. The stela is adorned with carvings modelled on sculptures made by the patients at the Mountain Sanatorium. At its peak, overlooking scenes of a woman carrying a baby in her hood, and of men hunting seal, there sits an owl, perched with its wings folded in by its sides, as if it has stopped for some rest and recuperation after a long flight. It couldn’t have known, like the people taken away from their homes to a strange new climate and then ripped from life by a devastating disease, that the journey was to end here. ■

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Art, anxiety and vulnerability in the age of late capitalism

Living with Crisis by Saelan Twerdy

Since last November, life seems to have had a brittle texture, a bitter flavour. While everyday existence has continued mostly as before for me, an able-bodied, white male whose various privileges include living north of (but not in) the United States, the coordinates of the wider world have lurched nauseatingly off their rails. The unrelenting demand to think about it, to talk about him, is a psychological burden that siphons off mental and emotional energy. The news cycle has grown to a widening gyre, a black hole that swallows all attention. Writing in n+1, A.S. Hamrah called it Trumpancholia: “a psychological condition now afflicting much of the planet’s population, who have traded the things they used to enjoy for the constant monitoring of Trump’s reality-TV spectacle.” Dire consequences are visited upon many, but even for those personally, provisionally insulated from current events, living in this emotional climate is detrimental to one’s health. Not that the anxious precarity of the Trump era is a qualitatively new phenomenon. It’s merely the latest phase of a series of shocks that extends back to (at least) the 2008 financial crisis, when the neoliberal world order first began to show serious cracks in its facade. Since then, numerous commentators—including Ann Cvetkovich, Franco “Bifo” Berardi and the late Mark Fisher—have written penetratingly on how late capitalism installs anxiety and depression as a dominant sensibility, an idea that has permeated widely into art practices. But developments that were already troubling enough—runaway climate change, ballooning inequality, political polarization, emboldened far-right movements, nativist racism, police militarization and brutality—seem to have lost any impediment to their acceleration as the illusion of liberal democracy crumbles. It feels as though the bottom has dropped out on the world; we’re all in free fall now. And how have the power centres of the contemporary art world responded? Much like the centrist pundit class, with a combination of ramped-up denial and compensatory affirmation. Instead of a radical rethink of priorities, those with the largest platforms have been desperately fantasizing about reinstating the status quo, returning to a now-vanished state of normality that may never have been more than a mirage. Take the 57th Venice Biennale, “Viva Arte Viva,” which was billed as “a passionate outcry for art and the state of the artist,” an overwrought bid to assert art’s universal significance; likewise, Adam Szymczyk’s beleaguered Documenta 14 attempted to double down on the most established vehicles for conveying “the political” in art: conceptual gestures, archival and documentary modes, participatory and relational projects, and performative Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau I really I want Time for A Lie – A Lie 2016 Ink-jet

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on canvas and grommets 1.32 m x 100 cm courtesy GAlerIe HuGu es cHArbonneAu

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and pedagogical events. The response to these mega-events has been almost uniformly dismal, spawning a growing chorus of voices questioning the current relevance of biennials in general. In place of false confidence, then, might it be more useful to start from a position of doubt and uncertainty? To cope with crisis by acknowledging one’s own vulnerability and lack of answers? To take the pulse of the moment, I spoke to a number of artists whose work probes the intersection of personal and political anxiety with mental and physical unwellness. Montreal artist Tricia Middleton—who describes her work as an attempt at a “more effective emotional analysis of capitalism”—tells me about how, in the Melanie Klein school of psychoanalysis, melancholy is an indicator of healthy development, the inevitable consequence of getting past denial and recognizing the truth of a situation. And, often, things are deeply fucked in ways that we have only limited agency to affect. Melancholy is thus a product of confronting and accepting the denied situation. “Denial,” she deadpans, “is why we keep having these biennials year after year.” Middleton emphasizes that there are positive aspects to the melancholic position, such as the ability to step back, to witness without having to adopt a reactive stance, and she advances an ethic of subtle refusal or withdrawal as a healthy response to unhealthy circumstances. Her own practice has shifted accordingly. While recent years saw her move from Jesse Darling NEOLIBERAL AGITPROP PROTEST POSTER 2013 Digital pigment

large-scale, immersive installations into more lightweight, sculptural assemblages, she has also been absorbed in a poetic writing project that she envisions as a kind of “handmade fashion magazine extrapolated from the spirit beyond.” It’s more intimate and materially ephemeral than anything she’s done before, a process-oriented activity whose final form remains (as yet) undetermined. Walter Kaheró:ton Scott, whose beloved Wendy comics distill the quintessential experience of the millennial artist as a stressed out, selfmedicated basket case, similarly opposes a reactive approach to political pressure: “Someone once commented on Instagram asking me to write a Wendy comic ‘about the election!’, and I found it totally annoying,” he tells me. Insofar as recent events have impacted his work, he comments that they’ve strengthened his resolve to stick to his established schedule of publishing a Wendy book every two or three years. “The way content is consumed, and our emotional responses to it, is so quick that it seems like witnessing many small bursts of flame from our devices, leaving a constant layer of ash on our fingers,” he writes. “It leaves us with this ashy residue of being emotionally unresolved and we smear it everywhere, in our personal lives, in our rooms, on other people.” Jaakko Pallasvuo, a Finnish artist who also makes comics (along with videos, sculptures and various other things) that satirize the art world and anatomize his own self-doubt, believes that it’s hard to identify a specific political turning point. “It’s been this gradient of things turning worse for a longer time,” he says, “an international development of countries rediscovering fascism and authoritarianism. Trump feels the scariest because the power attached to it is the biggest, but it also feels like only the 15th in a series of chilling events.” If Pallasvuo has adopted something akin to Middleton’s melancholic position, it started well before last year. He tells me about how, being involved with the early phase of post-internet art, he was immersed in the scene’s prevalent quasi-ironic optimism about capitalism (embodied by collectives like DIS and K-Hole). “I got so sick from it,” he says, “that I’ve been in crisis from that point until now. But now it’s beginning to match more with reality. Feeling that life is impossible is becoming the main vibe rather than just my problem.” Pallasvuo’s strategies for coping echoed comments made by many of the artists I spoke to: embrace being peripheral (in terms of genre and geography), make work that circulates easily and cheaply (such as video and books), invest in collaboration, and seek out public money when you can. Pallasvuo is currently supported by a media arts grant from the Finnish government, though he hastens to add that nationalist funding systems come with their own baggage. “Public funding is often contingent on where you’re based or which passport you have,” he notes, “which is itself a very asymmetrical, uneven thing.” Artist and writer Jesse Darling discusses how, for them, asserting a collective failure to perform under neoliberal capitalism is of a piece with the necessity of acknowledging crisis (both personal and historical) as a “foundational principle of all things, ideas, technologies, bodies and societies.” Everything is vulnerable, everything breaks down, fucks up and eventually dies. “Nothing and no one is too big to fail,” Darling insists, and acknowledging this fact is a form of “precarious optimism.” This was

print on cyclus paper 86 x 62 cm Cou rtesy banner repeater

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the basis of Darling’s #losermilitia (2013), a hashtag slogan that spawned a poster project, the idea being that a dysfunctional distributed community can act as a weapon aimed at capital’s overbearing demands. “I do feel like the missile when feeding my baby under the green sign of Starbucks with mobility cane and all the androgynous sports gear I’m probably too old to carry off,” Darling writes to me. “The very repudiation of what liquid-modern neoliberalism demands of its labourers: to remain young, lean, legible, capable, flexible. Wearing my wounds on the outside and flanked by what slows me down. ‘We’re undone by each other,’ wrote Judith Butler, and I keep that tucked into my heart.” Yannick Desranleau and Chloë Lum, the Montreal- and Toronto-based collaborative duo formerly known as Seripop, found that, when Lum was diagnosed with a chronic illness, the work they were already doing began to take on a more autobiographical resonance. Their recent approach has been based on choreographed interactions between performers and sculptural props and sets (whether live or for videos or photographs) that speak to bodily vulnerability and the need for support. The improvisational and collaborative nature of their work makes doubt and uncertainty into something of a virtue. As Desranleau puts it, “We want a sort of openness

Excerpt from Tricia Middleton’s Trouble with boundaries (1785–) recorded on August 5,

2017, between 2:53 and 3:16 p.m. during a regular session with the turret adorning the Galerie de

about how we do our work, without being preachy or didactic about it.” Both Desranleau and Lum make it clear that they are able to support their practice thanks to the strength of the non-profit arts infrastructure in Canada. “Being both from working-class backgrounds,” Lum says, “the only way we could have the freedom and ability to work the way we do has been due to the artist-run culture of Canada, CARFAC and the granting agencies. It’s allowed a couple of dishevelled weirdos from the noise-punk scene to do large-scale, ambitious works where we can explore all our neuroses and obsessions and invite our peers to join in, laughing through tears.” Lum reminds me that doubt is not the same as despair: “I think the most important thing, in trying to be an ethical actor as an artist, is to realize the extremely limited power of art,” she says. “However, realizing this limited scope doesn’t equal nihilism. It can mean living and working according to your ethics, doing what you can to put money in the hands of other precariously living folks, it can be dialogue and critique and celebration within one’s community, city, country and hoping to be kindly corrected when needed. Everything might suck, but we are alive and life can be full of beauty despite the toxic systems that capitalism, white supremacy and misogyny have wrought.” ■

paléontologie et d’anatomie comparée, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Jardin des Plantes, Paris

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When a hereditary condition began obstructing the vision of Vancouver artist Carmen Papalia, he was underwhelmed by the forms of support he was offered. The non-visual learner (a term Papalia prefers to more institutional, diagnostic language like “legally blind”) began developing an anti-policy approach to accessibility that both informs his artistic work, and has influenced institutions including the Harvard Art Museums and Tate Liverpool. Guided by five main tenets, Papalia’s Open Access approach moves beyond conventional concerns related to access—that buildings can be entered via wheelchair, for example—and instead proposes a rethinking of the terms on which all of us care for and coexist with one another. It’s not a checklist that can be swiftly ticked off, or a set of demands that can be enforced from the top down. Instead, Open Access needs to be embodied, integrated at all institutional levels and constantly negotiated.

Access Revived by Carmen Papalia

Carmen Papalia performing White Cane Amplified at the Ottawa Art Gallery, June 2017

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PhOtO ChristOPher snOw

The Five Tenets of Open Access Open Access relies on those present, what their needs are and how they can find support with each other and in their communities. It is a perpetual negotiation of trust between those who practice support as a mutual exchange. Open Access is radically different than a set of policies that is enforced in order to facilitate a common experience for a group with definitive needs. It acknowledges that everyone carries a body of local knowledge and is an expert in their own right. Open Access is the root system of embodied learning. It cultivates trust among those involved and enables each member to self-identify and occupy a point of orientation that is based in complex embodiment. Open Access disrupts the disabling conditions that limit one’s agency and potential to thrive. It reimagines normalcy as a continuum of embodiments, identities, realities and learning styles, and operates under the tenet that interdependence is central to a radical restructuring of power. Open Access is a temporary, collectively held space where participants can find comfort in disclosing their needs and preferences with one another. It is a responsive support network that adapts as needs and available resources change. Open Access is my methodology for working as an artist and for advocating for myself, but it’s also a conceptual framework that departs from the ways that we typically understand accessibility. Accessibility often refers to the disability community and these considerations are engaged through policies and enforcement. This creates dynamics between people—like recipients of support and providers—that don’t lead to long-term mutual relationships, which I think are a key part of support that works, and support that can change and evolve over time. Several years ago, I started thinking about the kinds of practices that would lead to a more open practice of accessibility. I even started to think of accessibility as a practice that could be a creative, long-term process. I noticed that a lot of the ways of advocating for myself as an artist in institutions spoke to a different approach to accessibility, one that didn’t focus on the considerations of the built environment, but instead confronts ideas of agency and power. Open Access describes my own preferences with regards to the types of support-based relationships that I want to be in. It is at play in my own work. In my 2013 performance Mobility Device, I replaced my white mobility cane, which I consider an institutional symbol, with a high-school marching band. They made an arrangement around me to indicate the obstacles that might be in my way. And so we made this agreement to be this organism, this support network for my mobility. In developing these five tenets, I really started to think about Open Access in relation to a possible learning community. I wondered what conditions could lead to a really open learning community. A lot of questions came out of my work with the Purple Thistle Centre in Vancouver. The physical centre closed in 2015, but for 15 years youth participants collectively

ran the organization and decided on programming. In 2014, I led two eight-week workshops there with the participants to think through nonvisual learning and Open Access. That grew into work at Gallery Gachet, where I posed similar questions to the community there. In 2015, I led a project wherein a group of friends from the community at Gachet and I conducted a collective and unsolicited accessability audit of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Instead of looking at things like the physical aspects of the space—whether people could get into the gallery with a mobility device or what have you—we focused on using our subjective access considerations to assess the social, cultural and political dimensions of the space. Open Access is also my proposal for others that I’m connecting with through my work. I’ve travelled across Canada, the US, the UK and Europe promoting Open Access and these five tenets to produce a more humanizing approach to accessibility. It’s an approach that isn’t only relevant to a group of people with atypical bodies or minds or behaviour, but to anybody who is living in relation to other people. I’ve been doing consulting at museums, universities and city departments specifically tuned to Open Access. I do not use current or typical frameworks, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act or recommendations available through the Smithsonian Guidelines for Accessible Exhibition Design, but instead use the Open Access tenets to offer perspective on the state of access in certain institutions. These meetings start with a non-visual walking tour so folks get a sense of non-visual space—it’s something that we do even before getting to know each other’s names. After the walking tours we gather and start getting to know each other. I ask about their relationship to accessibility from a wider perspective, relating to ongoing practices of holding, claiming or advocating for agency in various contexts. For institutions, it’s crucial to enter these collaborations with a sincere interest that’s not based in some exhibition schedule or funding opportunity. Do you have a sincere interest in the work you’re doing, and is it meaningful to you? Why do you want to work with Indigenous community members? Why do you want to work with people who are experiencing homelessness? Asking these fundamental questions is a start to thinking critically about the ways the institution and the individuals within it are actually supporting others. We have to realize that the people who hold knowledge about support and accessibility are people who are practicing accessibility all of the time, people who are actually navigating around multiple social, cultural and political barriers. That has led me to think about a future project called the Office for the Practice of Accessibility. It’s going to be a platform to support my ongoing research and project-based work on Open Access, but in relation to Vancouver and, in particular, the formal and informal support networks that exist in the Downtown Eastside. The great thing about the Downtown Eastside—when considering how support is practiced there—is that it is a tangled, decentralized system. There are a lot of grassroots support organizations that reflect the immediate needs of the community, including Indigenous friendship centres, safeinjection sites and organizations that advocate for women involved in Vancouver’s street-based sex trade. These organizations are at the front lines of community-based support, and they know a lot about how to assist people well under challenging circumstances and realities. That’s who I want to learn from next. ■ As told to Caoimhe Morgan-Feir

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The Pick-uP arTisT by Heather White

Where does one draw the line between counsel and complicity in anonymous online realms?

“It’s not that I have an ethical problem with lying,” writes bartm, an anonymous member of the Masters Pick Up Artist Forum, in a post from March 2016. “It’s just that I don’t think I can get away with it.” Pick-up artists (PUAs) are men—overwhelmingly straight and cis—whose “art” is picking up women. Stridently individualist, thoroughly capitalist and only nominally artistic, this is wellness for the toxic-masculinity set. It’s self-help that’s all, and only, about objectifying others. bartm’s post could barely discuss selves without the jangling armour of scare quotes. He wrote of “the ‘real’ you,” and “the ‘upgraded’ you”; he was confused and frustrated by the phrase “just be yourself.” As artists have been for eons, bartm was curious about the nuances of deception. Spiralling existentially, he wondered: “Where do you draw the line between being yourself and lying?” His questions resonated with Toronto artist Jennifer Laiwint, who was in New York when she found the forum. She was working on a project called How to Relax that responded to a 1980s self-help manual—another artifact of self-improvement quackery. After hearing a radio interview that reminded her of a past romance with a guy who revealed he’d used PUA tips to woo her, she wandered, cautiously intrigued, into the “manosphere.” She spent months trawling message boards and researching PUA history, and eventually made an exhibition of her experience. But before it was material, bartm’s candour was just endearing; Laiwint liked his sincerity in addressing insincerity. As the thread continued, bartm’s bleakness emerged. Sorely lacking in confidence, he described himself as “a boring guy who never travels.” He’d been advised to mention travel on his dating profile, but bartm was dubious he could pass as a traveller—or as anyone worthwhile. “The travel thing was just an example,” he clarified, further down the

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Jennifer Laiwint Is This Kind of Douchey? (work-in-progress) 2017 Digital collage

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How much attention should we pay, and with how much empathy should we treat, those who flagrantly inflict harm or promote dangerous ideologies? Can we justify expending our resources to heal bad actors?

thread. “What I was trying to say is I have nothing interesting going on.” Whether in spite or because of the acutely misogynistic setting, Laiwint felt a pull to help. Since women are exclusively objects to PUAs, Laiwint had to create an alter ego. Already DJing as J Lai, she tweaked that moniker to fit the forum, and became Jay Lay. In a personal journal Laiwint used to process her time as Jay, she recalled her youthful habit of dreaming up personas. “Out of all the talents I could possibly have,” she wrote, “this was the one I longed for the most, a talent for being someone else.” Narratives about PUA success typically feature a nerdy guy who follows the rules up into the ranks of the players, but Jay’s backstory reversed that arc. He’d had natural game, but some event (Laiwint doesn’t know quite what) softened him into a sensitive guy, and bent him on proselytizing. Laiwint decided that Jay would take Drake as his model of masculinity—“not that Drake doesn’t have his own brand of misogyny,” she journaled. But “he talks about his feelings, he loves his mom.” Laiwint would often put on Drake albums to get into character. In posts rife with reassurances of masculinity (“bro,” “dude,” “man”), Jay encouraged the forum guys to connect with themselves and consider what, besides sex, they valued in a date. Laiwint balanced the advice she felt PUAs needed with the advice they’d hear. This wasn’t the careful counsel

Laiwint—a confidante to friends since childhood—usually gave, but the crudeness of the forum came easily to her. She found it freeing to speak with such directness and aggression. Freedom can be terrifying, though, and Laiwint sometimes regretted Jay’s flippancy: the casual way he used the word “depressed,” or the impatient Nikeism he’d use to goad bartm into changing his depressive habits. “Just change it. No excuses.” “No wonder you’re not getting pussy,” Jay chided in the midst of a feminist intervention. Laiwint asked her journal: “Am I undermining women?” Laiwint also worried about the responsibility she bore to the men she engaged. At some point she and bartm began corresponding via private message, where he would confide “things he would never say on the forum.” Laiwint started to feel beyond her depths, both underprepared and overinvested. She would thrill when she sensed Jay’s influence on bartm, but bartm was disclosing content so intense Laiwint sometimes had to step away. She questioned the ethics of her quasi-therapeutic ambitions. Then again: why should she show the members of the forum more respect than they showed women? The question borders another that Laiwint’s work, and our polarized political climate, has foregrounded. How much attention should we pay, and with how much empathy should we treat, those who flagrantly inflict harm or promote dangerous ideologies? Can we justify expending our resources to heal bad actors? And if healing is the right course, who should administer it? Whether Jay Lay, a nascent life coach, might help bartm is not obvious; whether an artist impersonating Jay could is even less clear. It’s murky territory Laiwint charts in order to reach someone who might not otherwise be reached. Beneath Laiwint’s inquiry into who can help (and who can be helped) runs a parallel uncertainty about who can be an artist. Last century, pediatrician-therapist D.W. Winnicott equated creativity almost directly with what we now call wellness: healing was a process of restoring creativity. Winnicott warned against defining creativity too narrowly, seeing it in much more than objects of art and craft. That’s no longer a radical claim, but Winnicott also insisted that creativity was not just the purview of the artist; “it belongs to being alive.” Creativity encompassed demeanours, comportments, “the approach of the individual to external reality.” PUAs call the start of a seduction “the approach,” but how creative is their process? Winnicott wrote extensively about “play” in creativity, but the game PUAs learn is too rule-based to fit his definition. Pure play, according to Winnicott, is radically formless, and, crucially, a “non-purposive state.” There’s a parallel here with Kant’s conditions for aesthetic judgment, and fodder for arguments about “art for art’s sake.” Though detractors argue it’s elitist to link art so definitively with leisure, Winnicott (among others) saw leisure not as an indulgence but as a developmental need. Winnicott called societies that suppress creativity en masse “pathological communities.” That designation could describe much of contemporary Western culture, with its emphasis on products over process, results over experience, game over play. And if the culture at large positions the ends above the means, PUAs take those values, uncritically, to the extreme. Their purposes are overt and unwavering: the goal of “opening” (another word for approaching) is “closing” (PUA code for having sex, which is always the point). “They frame ‘being yourself’ as a strategy to get women,” Laiwint

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explains. “As a means to an end. It’s not for the purpose of self-growth, or just being comfortable with yourself. It’s for the purpose of seduction.” When I met with Laiwint in August to discuss her project, she was still preparing for her exhibition, which opened in November at the Art Gallery of Mississauga in partnership with Toronto’s YTB Gallery. At the time, she didn’t know how she’d structure the show, or which correspondences to include. She’d followed her instincts into the work, and wasn’t sure what the project amounted to. She was busy questioning what everything she’d gathered had meant, deep in trying to understand the point of it all. She was in a place, familiar to many artists, where she might have welcomed the kind of clarity PUAs get from adhering to set rules and applying established formulas. The artist’s comfort in play—that she did so much without knowing why—positions her diametrically against the others on the forum. Laiwint’s influence, though, may have softened the contrast slightly. Months after his initial post, and still desperate for normative direction, bartm delighted Laiwint by seeming to forget the central premise of pick-up artistry. bartm had asked the forum something that anyone with a creative orientation to life might wonder: “What should my objective be in approaching?” A slew of interlocutors—Jay Lay included—responded, pretending to know. ■

Jennifer Laiwint In Field (work-in-progress) 2017 Video 10 min

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Settler StructureS of Bad feeling three indigenous artists highlight the entangled connections between colonialism, sickness and contamination by Billy-Ray Belcourt

If we are to adequately tell a story about the care of the self in a settler state like Canada, we must begin with the invention of the so-called New World, that brutalizing project of globalization that eroded, with vicious precision, the social worlds of Indigenous peoples from coast to coast to coast. That is to say that built into the thorny mechanics of settler colonialism was the racialized production of bad feeling as of a piece with everyday life. In the essay “Meditations on reserve life, biosociality, and the taste of non-sovereignty,” published earlier this year in the journal Settler Colonial Studies, I made the case that social death is descriptive of the ways racialized subjects become numb to the injustice of being turned into an object of always-already injury. Misery suffocates, but rarely is it inspected by way of a diagnostic attentive to the affective life of toxic political structures. In Depression: A Public Feeling, cultural theorist Ann Cvetkovich insists that depression is at once a mood, an atmosphere and a sensibility, and to talk of depression is to shore up the racial calculus by which some are made to endure heartbreaking loss again and again. So, Cvetkovich maintains that

depression ought to be “traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery legal expulsion, and everyday segregation and isolation…rather than to biochemical imbalances.” We need only aim a sociological eye at the bloated signifier of “health” to understand how embodiment is enlivened differently too. In Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism, Elizabeth A. Povinelli argues that a “weak” mode of state killing proliferates sores, bad colds and small pains in the chest in Indigenous communities, but also that uncritical deployments of care are not quick fixes for these forms of “dispersed suffering.” She writes: “In neoliberalism to care for others is to refuse to preserve life if it lies outside a market value.” To unmoor care from the economization of emotion, to make it expose the quiet violence of settler colonialism—that is what is required of those of us committed to engineering flourishing worlds. In what follows, I survey the art of three Indigenous artists who take as their objects the entangled ways that sickness, contamination and bad feeling constrain Indigenous liveability.

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Tashina Makokis Nellie McClung 2016 Acrylic and coarse pumice gel on canvas 91 x 76 cm Photo MichAel J.h. Woolley

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Fallon Simard Anxiety 2017 Meme printed on giclee 96.5 cm x 1.27 m

Fallon Simard “I can’t breathe” is a refrain that repeats from the mouths of those whose “daily practices of survival”—to use Cvetkovich’s language—are conditioned by an atmosphere that makes a fool out of the lungs. “I can’t breathe” is a theoretical claim; it draws attention to the obstruction of that which, according to Ashon T. Crawley in Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, “is constitutive for flight, for movement, for performance.” “I can’t breathe” also illuminates the unfinished project of care, how some have been barred from uncomplicatedly accessing the commons that is the air. Following Crawley, “I can’t breathe” potentiates; it ratchets up an excess that cannot, in the end, be wholly negated. “I can’t breathe” is but one theory of how Indigeneity is made to apparate in public life in Fallon Simard’s “Bodies that Monetize,” their Master of Arts thesis exhibition at Blank Canvas Gallery in Toronto this April. Simard’s Anxiety is stylized with a blurred photograph of crumpled brown paper

bags, which we might consider to be prosthetic-like household items used to assist with breathing during biosocial events such as a panic attack. Simard uses the form of the meme, which enables a mode of mobility that exceeds the gallery walls, to activate something like a poetics of putting it out there, out in the open, such that the surround of the surround, which is to say the air, is brought into focus. Out of this comes the thesis that troubled breathing is a normative facet of North American democracy.

Tashina Makokis Tashina Makokis, a mixed-media artist from the Saddle Lake Cree Nation, peppered The Cancer Series: Round One, 2016 onto the walls of the Femlab at the University of Alberta’s Department of Women’s and Gender Studies this summer. The Cancer Series: Round One, 2016 is a series of portraits of colonial figureheads from Canadian history—Nellie McClung, George Simpson, Emily Murphy, Frank Oliver, John A. Macdonald and Duncan

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Campbell Scott—rendered in bright hues of acrylic paint, coarse pumice and nepheline gel, reminiscent of the colour palettes of thermal imaging. Thermal imaging is used both to detect radiation and to make visible some physiological changes in human bodies. In a sense, Makokis’s eye is something like a thermal-imaging camera, for the paintings show cancerous growths and other biological mutations on the flesh of the subjects. The Cancer Series: Round One, 2016 asks us to reckon with a past that endures. It is archaeological, in the sense that it digs into the muck of history and excavates the cruelty of those who masterminded the forms of state biopower that hardwired Indigenous misery into the realm of the ordinary. At the same time, Makokis recruits the power of metaphor to interpret settler colonialism as a structure akin to a sovereign death-drive, as if the practices of state-making were killing those it meant to usher into the category of the Indigenized settler. But, if nothing else, The Cancer Series: Round One, 2016 suggests that the virus that is colonialism persists.

Tanya Harnett Tanya Harnett’s Scarred/Sacred Water (2011) appeared in “raise a flag: works from the Indigenous Art Collection (2000-2015)” at OCAD University’s Onsite Gallery this fall. Harnett, from the Carry the Kettle Nakoda Nation, explores the entanglements of history, identity, place and spirituality in her studio practice. According to Ryan Rice’s exhibition catalogue, Harnett’s Scarred/ Sacred Water “brings attention to contaminated bodies of water on Albertan Reservations [sic]. In 2011, Harnett travelled to five First Nations reserves: Paul First Nation, Alexis First Nation, Driftpile First Nation, Cold Lake First Nation and Lubicon Lake First Nation.” At the direction of a member of each First Nation, Harnett poured red food colouring into lakes and rivers that are both sources of drinking water for local Indigenous peoples and sites of human-made pollution. Harnett’s intervention engineers something of a murder scene that fixes attention on the horrors of settler resource development. Bloodied, the river is not just an open wound, but also an index of the wrath of the “fiscal death,” to use Shiri Pasternak’s term, manufactured by the federal government. Like Simard and Makokis, Harnett traffics in a practice of making known that which is obscured due to the limits of human sight, but is nonetheless felt by those who must live and sometimes prematurely die in the badlands of modernity. The reserve, by way of decades of the mismanagement of biological life on the part of numerous state agents, is a place where making life without misery is an arduous task. Harnett, however, seeks to enact an ethics that might correct the lopsided consequences of breathing and drinking water in the shadows of what Alexis Shotwell, in Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, calls “the Mordor of industrial capitalism.” Harnett images an outpost of Shotwell’s Mordor, where death and decay are permanent facets of everyday life. Harnett, like Shotwell, insists that if left unhindered, capital will rope us into always-already collapsed worlds beyond repair. If “scarred” and “sacred” slip-slide into one another, it is because of industry’s lack of care and its wilful disavowal of the ethico-philosophical tenets that govern Indigenous relations to water. ■

Tanya Harnett Scarred/Sacred Water 2011 Photograph on paper 84.5 x 64 cm ColleCtion of indigenous and northern affairs Canada

Makokis recruits the power of metaphor to interpret settler colonialism as a structure akin to a sovereign death-drive.

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Chaos is a part of you. You need to rebuild. Destruction is a part of you. Addiction - how do you feel? It will return to being in its well state, it will return to be beautiful again. This is when it ends; when destruction comes it ends with a new structure, a new self, a better self, that can only last so long. Am I going to rebuild or am I going to crumble? That’s the toughest decision. You can see it coming too; if you’re paying attention, you can see destruction coming, you can choose to prevent it or let it happen. Try to change things and return to a well state - that’s why sometimes we neglect things that are right in front of us, and that’s when the destruction happens. You may not know me now but you do know me; this place of life where we are at, and where I’m at, and I was, and where you at, and you will be. We are very similar. We are one in the same - what I am, I am, what you let me be. I live as long as you let me live within you, within your brain, within this world. It’s selfish when you love her, you love him, you love whatever, and then you let that come in between something else you love. And then it’s over. But nothing’s at the edge - everything at the edge is just stone and water, unless it goes together. I rather cry for something else. When your life’s in danger once, and be affected by things and be selfish, push it away… You don’t care about it and that’s when it just gets worse. I’ll lash out i’ll get aggressive... This is what it is. I’ll confront them then. A feeling of sympathy is a feeling of entitlement. It’s like I’m better than you and I feel bad for you, when you empathize you can feel bad but it’s because you put yourself in their shoes. How do you deal with everything, how do you manage it. I send it off, I send it off... I like getting attention; we all care what people think. I feel like every host starts off as a parasite, and a parasite becomes a parasite via host. You can’t diagnose yourself as a parasite, if you didn’t realize a host. You can not diagnose others as parasites, if you’re not a host. To be a good host you need to know how to control the parasite. The only way to control a parasite is by being infected by it. A relationship actually builds a relationship. Become a parasite yourself. Even though they may not walk exactly like you but they have a sudden cadence in their step. That’s a little but like you. You have infected them. Ok, I can’t infect them, they have my immunity - you get in, get in and now you are in there. All those little things is what helps you now host behaviors in your sense of wellness. Is it a quantitative wellness? Measured? Interpersonal? it’s something felt - Wellness. And it’s all here in your eyes and feeling. There might be a point when you build up your ego and you can not admit personality traits that were infected by... I don’t like this in somebody - position ourselves with that person, with those traits that we don’t like, projection. Interpersonally we are all aware of things we do. And how we interact with other people - what is your role? There is two types of parasites - the person you’re influencing as a host, the person you’re coming on to, sucking on to, thoughts and ideologies, they just don’t know any better. Then there is the parasites that need to be parasites stoop to conquer - to lead somebody - you need to be a parasite first, come into them, bite on to them and infect them like a parasite would. As a host you infect them with what you want. It’s up to you. Get in what you want, and infect, become part of them, draw on, suck into this; you know what they want to hear and then you give it to them. 1 plus 1 equals 2, but through a window equals 1. You know that, and then you say 2, when they say 2 it’s our 2. Take it like a diamond that was just mined. I’m going to take it over and give it a new control. I’m going to take over you, being lead, balance. It’s a bigger thing… Breathe… The fresh air, the fresh air is so much heavier. Here we can enjoy time - we can enjoy an hour, we can enjoy a minute, we can enjoy a second. Question things so that we can fix your approach. You can be open to people - understand why your world is necessary to be in. We listen to each other. When you ask questions you’re on your way to wellness, feel that thing, It’s truly felt. Breathing. Share our wellness so it can be shared.

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1. You are more interested in a general idea than in the details of its realization

2. You easily empathize with the concerns of other people

3. You think that almost everything can be analyzed

4. You have good control over your desires and temptations

5. You easily perceive various ways in which events could develop

6. You are consistent in your habits

7. You willingly involve yourself in matters which engage your sympathies

Balance Emergency Measure Faith Compassion Resilience Ethicism Dynamism Focus

8. You prefer to spend your leisure time alone or relaxing in a tranquil atmosphere

9. You enjoy keeping secrets from friends

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Artists’ residencies have become something of a rite of passage, promising escapism and self-improvement in one tidy package —but even in such utopic settings, real life sneaks in

In September 2016, artist Rebecca Moss arrived in British Columbia to participate in Access Gallery’s Twenty-Three Days at Sea residency. Unlike most artists’ residencies, this one differed in that it travelled with you—on the Hanjin Geneva, a shipping vessel that launched in Vancouver before deliberating across the ocean to Shanghai. “Vancouver is so expensive,” declared one CBC headline, “these artists are living at sea.” Introduced in 2014 in partnership with the Burrard Arts Foundation and intended as a one-year experiment, Twenty-Three Days at Sea received close to 900 international applications from people wanting to spend three weeks in freight; their quarters, a cabin, landscape limited to sky, sea and deck. There’s novelty in role-playing as a stowaway, but novelty wears off fast. In the scope of things, what is a residency like Twenty-Three Days at Sea worth? In 2017, artists’ residencies have come to feel imperative to realizing oneself as an artist, teasing the idea that you must step away from the world in order to create within it. Many offer an illusion of returning to a simpler, village-oriented culture, in forests or sea-adjacent, with an air of summer camp and all the sex that implies. They are aspirational, the promise of a residency running parallel to more tangible wellness products and experiences (though many artists might dispute this, considering the amount of work a typical residency entails). Instead of getting fitter, wealthier or better adjusted, you are invited to participate in a form of temporary play, where art is your only job. At a residency, not only do you get to be named an artist—with whatever professional advantage that cues—you get to feel like one too. In Canada, residencies run by institutions like the Banff Centre in Alberta, Fogo Island Arts in Newfoundland and Artscape in Ontario operate as charities, businesses or a combination of both. Despite public funding options like the Canada Council for the Arts grant for international residencies, funding for Canadian residencies is modest and not always guaranteed. What the likes of the Banff Centre and smaller venues like Dawson City’s Klondike Institute of Art and Culture supply is the time and space to work, on which there is a premium. But as with anything desirable, there comes the near-subconscious implication that an artist wants this, needs this and should compete with other artists to get it. Notable alumni pique that appetite even more. The life of the artist without a residency is not enough, which is not so different from the message of the medi spa, the luxury gym or the $38 jar of Spirit Dust. Hitching a free ride to China along with a shipment of frozen fries seems like a pretty good deal after all—and you can put it on your CV. More than a century ago in the French village of Giverny, Claude Monet planted and tended to a botanically lawless garden, growing by hand the world he wished to paint. Hundreds of water lily canvases were the result of importing Egyptian and South American plants to his yard, sculpting

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GettinG to Work by GettinG AWAy by naomi Skwarna

RebeccaÂ Moss International Waters 2017 20 min Installation view at Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice Courtesy PinChuk art Centre, kiev Photo sergey illin

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In 2017, artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; residencies have come to feel imperative to realizing oneself as an artist, teasing the idea that you must step away from the world in order to create within it.

Elise Rasmussen A Poetic Truth in a Pathetic Fallacy (still) 2017 Two-channel HD video 16 min

OppOsite: Fogo Island Arts residents Danai Anesiadou and Kate Newby, with Andrew Lichtenstein, on the boardwalk to

Tower Studio, Shoal Bay, March 2013 phOtO steffen Jagenburg

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the native ecology to reflect other, distant ones. Monet spent years of full days watching the sun rise and set on those plants. The paintings, a gradient record of the hours spent in one place. As if any artist could live like this now. To paraphrase Cher Horowitz— Monet’s lifestyle looks good from far away, but up close it’s a big old mess of inaccessible privilege. For Elise Rasmussen, a Canadian artist based in New York, residencies deliver the varied environments her projects require. Working in research-based photography, video and performance, Rasmussen is an alumna of some 13 residencies, many of which provided her with investigative context and access to gated places, like South Africa’s Nirox Foundation, where she worked on a project that dealt with rhino poaching. “Having that affiliation helped in getting access to the necessary people and places for my [resulting] video,” she says. Beyond furnishing access, residencies have proven to be an asset in pushing Rasmussen’s career forward. “They provide an instant community, and through this, some amazing networks, collaborations and friendships have been forged,” she says. “Many offer studio visits with curators, which are helpful in gaining visibility. Certain residencies hold prestige, which does help pad the CV.” These benefits outweigh the disadvantages of frequently living in transit, as Rasmussen has found. “I’ve prioritized residencies in favour of other work, like teaching positions, and forfeited a reliable income,” she tells me. “Beyond that, it’s sometimes difficult to navigate relationships.” But the residency-borne connections are satisfying to Rasmussen, and have

resulted in an expanded international community. It’s not Monet’s Giverny, but it is a garden. Being a serial residency participant creates a way of living—one that prioritizes work and sacrifices the comforts of a fixed life. It doesn’t exactly fit with the capitalist aspiration of stable ownership. Still, it’s about work; the residency as a means of steady production. “I am not on a vacation,” says Rasmussen. “A few residencies I’ve been on offer services that make the stay feel a little like a holiday. The Banff Centre has some great amenities, like having your bed made every day. A pool and hot tub. But all residencies are about work.” To Nicolaus Schafhausen, the strategic director of Newfoundland’s Fogo Island Arts, time is a necessary provision for the quality of thinking an artist requires. The Fogo residency yields a unique, often lengthy duration (up to three months), with accommodations, studio space, a stipend, travel expense coverage and even a cell phone if required. It is also the most beautiful—the bracing, Caspar David Friedrich–esque setting; the Inn, which is striking enough itself to be featured in design magazines; the handmade furniture. Schafhausen notes that their last call received upwards of 1,000 international applications, and based on past precedent, the number will only be greater this year. “We are not interested in a wellness program,” he says. It comes down to “whether [the residents] can intellectually explain what they do and why they are doing it. What is their added value to all of us? What is the role of art, and what is the role of the artist today?” Relieved of their usual networks, artists, he suggests, find something rare

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Residencies authorize an artist to feel time differently, turning regular life on land into radiant cuttings. They are brief periods of industry, even if the only thing produced is an idea or a friendship.

Andrea Zittel A-Z Wagon Stations: Second Generation 2012– Powder-coated steel, aluminum, plexiglass, wood, canvas, futon, pillow, hand brush, straw hat

at Fogo. “The so-called art community is a bubble in itself. [At Fogo], artists have time to engage, and the time to think differently.” Space, time and local relationships. “It has something to do with the mentality of the island. That’s what stays,” he says. Fogo Island Arts is a branch of the Shorefast Foundation, where Schafhausen is also the strategic advisor. Schafhausen describes his role as “engaging artists in dialogue on the role of contemporary art in creating alternative solutions for the revitalization of rural communities prone to emigration.” He isn’t just curating the artists; he is curating reciprocal, short-term interactions between visitors and island locals, with benefits going in both directions. The residency is just a fraction of Fogo and Shorefast’s reach (which includes a cod business, the thriving Fogo Island Fish). By Schafhausen’s account, the residency is a kind of relationship generator, fuelling international partnerships, artistic diplomacy and shows that stretch beyond Fogo Island’s rocky shores. It makes work—not just for the artists who attend, but for the Fogo Island community, many of whom are employed by Shorefast’s associated businesses. It might not be hot stone massages and racquetball, but Fogo helps create a context of sustained wellness which courses through the island’s economy and culture. When artists leave, they carry that with them too. This mutualism is practiced by other residencies as well, built on the principle that by engaging with the community or institution, the participant will be able to feel more invested, which conceivably makes its way into the work. This is sometimes referred to as “the exchange.” It can be as

2.08 x 5.86 x 1.44 m each Courtesy regen ProjeCts, Los angeLes Photo LanCe Brewer

straightforward as tuition, travel and housing costs, or subsidizing these things by donating a work. At artist Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West Wagon Station Encampment in Joshua Tree, where photographer Sarah Bodri has done residencies the past two springs, exchange means participating in an hour of communal labour every morning with the other residents. “You’re maintaining the space for yourself,” she says, referring to the silver, bread box–shaped pods that comprise the individual living quarters, “but you’re also maintaining the space that [Zittel] has created.” To Zittel, a social- and environment-focused artist, A-Z West is a living art experiment, founded in 2000 on over 50 acres of desert land. On Zittel’s website, A-Z West is described as “a testing grounds for living, in which spaces, objects and acts of living all intertwine as a single ongoing investigation into what it means to exist and participate in our culture today.” What Bodri valued most about her time there was the opportunity to “connect to a new landscape, psychologically and environmentally.” Referring to the balance of her year spent in a city, Bodri describes the sense that “we operate in spite of it—the pace and lifestyle that a city entails. The city is destined for productivity. In the desert, you think ‘maybe productivity is not my ultimate goal.’ I’m not going there to produce. I’m going there because I want to live.” “For us, residencies have been about work. We just work until it’s time to go home, or someone gets sick,” says Jon McCurley, who with Amy Lam collaborates in a variety of forms under the name Life of a Craphead. Residencies (like one completed at Sackville’s Struts and Faucet) give them

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access to each other’s ideas without having to work around schedules. Their recent collaboration on a series of poster-sized comics depicts scenes of casual racism—events they had witnessed in educational and art institutions. “A person of colour is likely to experience some form of racism or another in any kind of situation where they have to live with a bunch of white people they don’t know,” Lam explains via email. The comics are not an indictment of where they occurred, but a reminder that they did. Certain institutions provide specific and mindfully designed residencies, like the Winnipeg organization Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art, and the Banff Centre’s Visual and Digital Arts Indigenous Residency. Still, these are relatively few, and it can be difficult to balance intermittent paid jobs with the opportunities to go to any kind of residency, let alone one that recognizes the need for diverse and inclusive programs. No matter how much financial and institutional assistance is provided, “access to many residencies can be restricted by class,” explains Lam. About a week into Rebecca Moss’s passage, the Hanjin Shipping Company declared bankruptcy. When the ship neared Shanghai, it wouldn’t be allowed to dock. Publications like the Guardian reported on the artist (and 24 other passengers) “bobbing aimlessly” in international waters. After 26 days, the Hanjin Geneva disembarked in Japan, and Moss found her way home. The result was a 20-minute video work entitled International Waters synthesizing the experiences of those aboard the Hanjin Geneva

with the various news reports that were being released simultaneously. As Moss told the Vancouver Sun, “Before the news, there was always a feeling that we were moving in a line toward a horizon, and there was a real sense of purpose…I had knowledge that I had a certain number of days left and I was trying to plan to execute my ideas accordingly.” That changed abruptly. One of the psychological gains of a residency is knowing exactly when it will end. The experience, the work and the relationships are marked by an urgency that can be difficult to muster in everyday life. With no end in sight, Moss corresponded with merchants concerned about the state of their businesses. As one of them pointed out, “you’re getting a unique view on globalization.” Moss’s experience transcended the conventions of a typical residency, in that she didn’t know how it would end. “[It] frames and contextualizes the residency in a very dramatic set of circumstances,” she said. “I also have a compulsion to document everything with these new eyes—even a calendar swinging on the wall because of the motion of the boat becomes suddenly significant and interesting.” Residencies authorize an artist to feel time differently, turning regular life on land into radiant cuttings. They are brief periods of industry, even if the only thing produced is an idea or a friendship. Perhaps in the way that climbing into your own bed after spending a few weeks away from it feels like a gift, leaving a residency is also integral to the outcome—the gift of returning to something seemingly endless: one’s extant life. ■

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s p ot l i g h t i

Supported by rbC

Taking Care Strategies of wellness in the work of 10 emerging art practices

by Amber Berson

ViVa! kiTChen The kitchen at the VIVA! Art Action festival began as a tool to feed the artists and the audience at the event’s first iteration in 2006. It was initially a working kitchen—mostly organized by one of the invited artists, SP 38—providing material for a “real” formal performance, but the kitchen quickly became the work itself. It is now defined as an artist-in-residence opportunity, and the meals themselves, as well as their creation and distribution, are the performances. No one who attends VIVA! will go hungry (all the normal concerns regarding diet and allergies are attended to), but more than just physical needs are met here. Michelle Lacombe, director of VIVA! since the 2011 edition, notes that the meals aren’t free but they are cheap. They are priced on a sliding scale from $7 to $10, which subsidizes the entrance-fee-free festival, but no one who needs a meal is turned away. This year, Andreja Dugandžic´ and Sonja Zlatanova, two artists working in Sarajevo and Montreal, respectively, cared for the kitchen. The latter has tended to the kitchen on two previous occasions, and this year the two focused on gendered cooking practices. They explain that they are “cooks and feeders. We give love through food; we hurt through it too.” Together they created a menu rooted in the Balkan spirit and the language of love, loss, abandonment and the feminized body. As they say, food is life. To consume is primal and to provide for is to care and nurture.

Andreja Dugandžic ´ and Sonja Zlatanova’s performance for the 2017 ViVA! Kitchen Courtesy ViVA! Art ACtion/lA CentrAle photo MAnoushKA lArouChe

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Tings Chak Who provides care, who is deserving of and entitled to care, and who cares for the carers are all questions posed in works by Toronto artist Tings Chak. Ensuring that everyone has access to care and examining issues of spatial justice (who can be in a space) are core themes for Chak, who comes from an academic background in architecture. In her 2016 installation Suitable Accommodation, which debuted at Central Oasis Gallery in Hong Kong’s financial district, Chak investigates the liminal space between public and private realms for migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. Lacking personal space and fearing that they will be forced to perform unpaid labour on their day off, many such workers leave the homes they work and live in early on Sunday mornings. While most residents of Hong Kong consider grooming to be a private ritual, these domestic workers—numbering in the hundreds of thousands— congregate in public parks and plazas to paint each other’s nails, take naps, chat and, most importantly, organize themselves. By mapping these domestic workers’ private living spaces in 1:1-scale masking tape drawings, accompanied by testimonials on their living and working conditions, Chak reveals the paradoxes of “suitable accommodation” and how neoliberalism makes caring and being cared for a precarious, if pervasive, negotiation of space and self.

Tings Chak Suitable Accommodation (detail) 2016 Masking tape Dimensions variable Photo EDDiE CY LaM

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Artivistic Formed in 2004, Artivistic currently operates as a Montreal collective organized entirely by people of colour. Its current members include Faiz Abhuani, Nazik Dakkach, Sophie Le-Phat Ho, Kevin Yuen Kit Lo and Võ Thiên Viêt. . As an arts organization, they have put on festivals, written zines and produced artworks, such as World (War) Music International Incorporated Inc. (W[W]MIIInc), a rumination on POC voices in a majority-white art scene. The collective is currently in what they have dubbed their #postlife phase, having de-incorporated, de-institutionalized and closed their bank account. They had initially replicated traditional arts infrastructures to access certain types of art-world support, but when these supports were no longer serving their needs, and when the collective felt that they were being used in ways that drained instead of sustained them, they opted out, ending their engagement on that superficial level. Their activities have since refocused on friendship and mutual support. Collectively cooked meals and celebratory dinners are at the centre of their meetings. For Artivistic, food is intertwined with discussions about sharing, friendship, money, infrastructure, race and class. Members share responsibilities and costs based on means and ability. While still actively producing work, they are doing so less publicly. They are working on their own terms—turning care into a methodology, rather than an afterthought.

Artivistic World (War) Music International Incorporated Inc. 2015 Digital mockup

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Jessica Karuhanga Jessica Karuhanga tends to cultivate collaborators for her projects over several years, building the kind of trust that only comes with putting in the time to earn it. The Toronto artist works primarily in video and installation. Her practice deals heavily with gesture and choreography and speaks against our societal lust for the Black body as entertainment. Karuhanga empowers her collaborators with artistic agency, creating a shared space, a conversation, or, as she considers it, an undulation flowing between them. Her videos are about her experiences; they are meditations on the geopolitics of Blackness. Works such as A Still Cling To Fading Blossoms (2014) challenge where and when the Black body exists in Canada, past and present, while also ruminating on the “incalculability of Black grief and mourning and where/how that can safely exist.” For an upcoming multi-channel video work prospectively titled being who you are there is no other, Karuhanga attempts to stealthily insert herself into an exclusionary cultural canon (including Sinéad O’Connor, William Butler Yeats and the Trojan War). Her wider practice recognizes the absence of Black women’s bodies in the image of the Great White North. Karuhanga plays with the blues and gospel aesthetic to sneak into the Canadian landscape, so to speak, asserting her presence through building community.

Jessica Karuhanga through a brass channel 2017 Performance Photo Manolo lugo

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Atelier CélAdon Atelier Céladon, founded in 2015, is comprised of Hera Chan, Yen-Chao Lin, Thy Anne Chu Quang and Kate Whiteway (and, previously, Amanda Nguyen, Linx Selby and Cynthia Or). Set up as an arts organization, the group attempts to subvert the contemporary art world by posing as a legitimate entity while in actuality running rogue events with little communication output. One such event was “A Glass House Should Hold No Terrors,” an exhibition in August 2016 held in Montreal’s abandoned Royal Victoria Hospital mountainside pool. Céladon is the colour of a transparent glaze that originates in China (though the term is European) characterized by tiny, baked-in cracks. The metaphor—that the collective’s work, like its namesake, brings a characteristically non-Western outlook to the art world by creating and operating in its cracks—is apt. The members of Atelier Céladon include researchers, writers, artists, dancers and activists; anyone can join the online community. While most actions are planned by the core group, any member can propose a project. Given the art world’s reputation of exclusivity, this openness registers as nothing short of radical. Using friendship as a methodology, Atelier Céladon does not emphasize production and instead focuses on skill-sharing and creating an environment of care.

Atelier Céladon “A Glass House Should Hold No Terrors” at the Royal Victoria Hospital pool, Montreal August 2016 PHoTo oliVeR lewiS

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Vincent cheValier Vincent Chevalier is best known for work that explores his relationship to HIV/AIDS. As an HIV-positive gay man, he has studied both his medical and personal history to develop an auto-ethnographic practice rooted in the language of post-internet visual identity, often with a nod to Canadian video pioneers and performance artists working on similar material. These highly successful works, including So... When did you figure out that you had Aids?, Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me! and Places Where I Fuck’d, come at a high personal cost. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to foster self-care and wellness when you are always on—always performing, always working—and when your identity is invested in your artwork. In our current economic reality, where suffering is a form of currency, pain is a labour output and payment is often simply prestige. Moving forward, Chevalier is refusing to take on projects that effectively entertain via his own experience of trauma. In his 2016 work À Vancouver—a father-son travel movie shot on a cross-country road trip—Chevalier focuses on an unspoken act, alluding to the artist’s first sexual experience at the age of 11. Revisiting the autobiographical material, even in a fictionalized context, reopens old wounds. The sensational subject acts as a hook for the audience, but it also re-traumatizes the artist. His new work departs from that type of nostalgia and develops ways of seeing and being together pluralistically.

Vincent Chevalier (with Ian Bradley-Perrin) Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me! 2013 Digital image

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yons Angry AsiAn Feminist gAng The Angry Asian Feminist Gang (AAFG) is the brainchild of Toronto artist Amy Wong. Conceived in 2016 as a means of creating space for radical dialogue in the Asian diaspora, AAFG operates a local, Toronto-based chapter—run via a steering committee composed of what they call “aunties”—as well as an online component linking people identifying with the moniker internationally. The collective also seeks to act in solidarity with other marginalized voices, aiming to ally their work in support of members of BIPOC communities. In a recent anti-oppression workshop, AAFG: Bring Soup Love, at the Creative Time Summit in Toronto, Wong and other AAFG members invited the public to collaboratively make a healing bone broth called sey mei tong, following Wong’s family recipe. To prepare for the project, Wong, her mother Regina and her sister Polly visited herb shops in Chinatown to purchase ingredients for soup care packages distributed to workshop attendees. She also included business cards from one of the shops as a means of inviting participants into these spaces and as a gesture of reciprocity. For Wong and the members of AAFG, the act of collective cooking offers a shared experience of the relationships between gendered and racialized knowledge, and a signal of communal care toward the effects of historically unresolved grief and trauma.

Assembling the Angry Asian Feminst Gang’s Bring Soup Love zine at the Creative Time Summit, Toronto, September 2017 PhoTo Shellie ZhAng

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skeena Reece Handmade moss bags, similar to swaddle blankets, are meant to carry a baby, and are items synonymous with comfort. The bags are attached to cushioned cradleboards and are often carried on a parent’s back. Like most handmade baby items, the bags are a representation of the love and care that the family and community gives the newest member. Skeena Reece, a Vancouver Island–based artist, has created an adult-sized moss bag, which must be shown on the floor or hung on a wall. While the bag can support a human, no body exists to carry a moss bag so large on its back. The suggestion of comfort is therefore compromised through the realities of physics, even though we are still in need of compassion and nurturing as adults. The bag can never actually provide care and comfort for its intended recipient. Reece calls herself a trickster, and her work is always infused with humour, even while challenging the audience to work through difficult ideas. She considers her work to be about love, but also about the ongoing process of care; nurturing is not merely a phase in anyone’s life. While the moss bag can certainly be read as a work about reconciliation, Reece’s refusal of one-dimensional readings complicates this interpretation with humour and love.

Skeena Reece There is time for love 2016–17 Fabric, beads, cradleboard and dried moss Dimensions variable Courtesy oBoro Photo Paul litherlanD

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AmberA WellmAnn Berlin-based, Canadian painter Ambera Wellmann is interested in the way that work that sits in the past can come to be the present. The 2017 RBC Canadian Painting Competition winner’s work is sensuous, erotic and decadent. Her paintings investigate the historical affect of the body as object, and the representation of the female form. By positioning the body as central in her paintings, both on linen and wood, Wellmann uses history in an attempt to destroy the canon. Her work is unabashedly feminist, challenging the viewer to think about whose gaze we perform for. These intimate interactions on the canvas both challenge and maintain a legacy of the female body as an object to be consumed. This is troubled by Wellmann’s ongoing photographic series on Instagram (@ambera.wellmann). In these images, Wellmann uses her own body to playfully tease viewers’ expectations. In one, she places her iPhone over her vulva, displaying an image of a black cat. In another, she creates the illusion of breasts in lingerie by placing a bra over her back and elbow. The images place her in dialogue with the large community of digital feminists working at intersections of theory and practice. With more than 40,000 followers and growing, Wellmann is leading a discussion around women’s bodies and the external and internal gaze.

Ambera Wellmann Love Fingers 2017 Oil on linen 1.47 x 1.37 m COurtesy trépanierBaer Gallery

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Jamie Ross Jamie Ross is a video artist based in Montreal. He is also a Pagan chaplain who volunteers in Quebec’s men’s prisons. These elements of his life intersected when he began working on a project with artist-run centre Verticale, in Laval, that brings his work with prisoners into the gallery as an act of solidarity and an expression of the resilience of witches in prison. For Ross and the men he works with, this gesture goes beyond art as therapy—it is a means of support and a space for dialogue with those whose voices are being increasingly silenced. In a prison system navigating underfunded psychiatric and social services, and overwhelmed by a mental-health crisis, chaplains frequently serve the dual role of spiritual leader and therapist. Ross has worked with prisoners in solitary confinement, which means that he may be the only non-guard contact a prisoner has in a given day. In a society where people often outsource wellness services because their needs are ignored by traditional Western medicine, Ross’s paratherapeutic model proves the ways an artist and activist can create and widen the smallest of cracks that allow care to happen in even the most inhumane circumstances. ■

Jamie Ross The Pyre 2016 Performance documentation 27.9 x 43.1 cm Photo Yuula Benivolski

RBC is passionately committed to supporting emerging artists across Canada and internationally, and is proud to partner with Canadian Art on this Spotlight series.

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Land/Body/ RecipRocity the settler gaze can make indigenous identities feel like fractured masks. an artist and a writer reflect on smashing the mirror and reconstructing it as a means of calling their bodies—and lands—home by Lacie Burning and Lindsay Nixon

“I am using my arm to determine the length of the gaze.” —Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting” In summer 2017, community members from Six Nations of the Grand River set up a blockade on a section of Argyle Street in Caledonia, Ontario—an area now known as Kanonhstaton. The blockade took place on the grounds at the centre of the Grand River land dispute, land that the Crown had granted Six Nations in 1784 under the Haldimand Proclamation and that the community has never ceded. The 2017 Caledonia blockade came just over a decade after an instance of direct action that would come to be known as the Caledonia Standoff, when community members of Six Nations and their supporters occupied an area of Kanonhstaton (formerly the Douglas Creek Estates) that was proposed for residential development by Henco Industries. In the wake of the Caledonia Standoff, Ontario promised to return the land to Six Nations. The dispute continued within the community when, according to a Toronto Star article from August 30, 2017, the Ontario government reversed its promise, and the land in question was put into a government-backed federal corporation by the Six Nations Elected Band Council. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy—led by a Grand Council consisting of 50 chiefs representing the clans of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas and Tuscaroras who reside throughout present-day United States and Canada—insists that land at the centre of the Grand River land dispute is outside federal jurisdiction and colonial management, as the Toronto Star notes, and should Lacie Burning Reflection Series, Untitled Image 2 2017 Colour photo 35.5 x 35.5 cm

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be entrusted to the Confederacy, not the government-backed band council. This is the context for Lacie Burning’s Reflection Series (2017), an expanded version of their installation and photographic project Reflection Piece (2016). As Indigenous peoples, we cannot remove our experience—our genders, bodies and disassociations—from our relationships to territory. As further environmental degradation plagues our communities and our homelands, so too does the colonial destroy our spirits, bodies and minds. For Burning, Reflection Series was an enactment of their presence on the land and in their home territories. Burning simply asked of themselves, “What do I look like—what does it look like—when I assert my sovereignty over the land as a [Kanien’kehá:ka] person in Caledonia?” In the photo series, a shadowy black figure darts through a wooded area donning a reflective mask, like a dream or a vision. The ghostly figure is a stand-in for Burning, yet is eerily dissociative, otherworldly and phantom-like. It was this fluidity between physical and psychic space within the Haudenosaunee worldview that attracted Burning to working with masks and fabric. In Ojibway ontologies, materialities like masks and fabrics are spiritual objects that bring us closer to the in-between places; they make apparent the spectres that live among us. Because of its proximity with temporal realms, the mask in Reflection Series and Reflection Piece is handled with the utmost care, as if it were sacred, just like our bodies and their covenants with the land. There are even strict protocols around who can handle and share space with the mask. But the body is a complex place to hold sacred selfhood, especially for those of us who disassociate. Because of trauma. Because imposed colonial genders fit like an itchy wool sweater that is a few sizes too small. Because our lands are constantly in a state of being destroyed. A few weeks after Burning shot Reflection Series, the portion of forest that was its backdrop was cut down, making apparent that colonial affect on our bodies is a twofold process: 1. Colonialism removes Indigenous bodies from the land in order to make way for the destruction of our Mother. When Indigenous relationships to territory are in flux, then so too is our groundedness in the physicality of the aesthetic present. 2. Our bodies are made to feel so foreign to us, so alien, that we must project our spiritual self into otherworldly realms—we must disassociate. Reflection Series, then, is the haunting of a genderless ghost body, a protest on the lands that taught Burning resistance, and a disruption of the supposedly clear idea of what it means to be an Indigenous person assuredly enacting sovereignty over their lands. The mask in Reflection Piece was collaged together from a mirror that Burning’s friend smashed and the pair then deconstructed and reconstructed. Though not in mind while initiating the project, this relationship between settler and Indigenous bodies became more interesting after its creation. As Indigenous peoples, we like to believe that we project with clarity our identities and our presence over vast territories as peoples with deep kinships to land. But our identities can become a form of mask that we wear when we present ourselves to the world. Our identities can become further fractured, still, when seen through the settler gaze. Though the friend Burning worked with is a settler, she is also kin— Burning’s longest-known friend, in fact. When the Caledonia Standoff

happened in 2006, the two learned a lot from their relationship and, in the context of their identities and the resulting colonial relations, ultimately succeeded in transforming one another’s thinking. Burning brought their friend close, enacting reciprocity by trying to help her understand the relationships between Six Nations and the settlers in the surrounding communities. By giving their friend the power to fracture this mirrored mask that reflected back to settlers only what they wished to see, Burning gave their friend the power to effectively smash through the veneer of colonial identity. This is a profound act of care and love, the act of opening up and creating vulnerability with those we love. The act of seeing and being seen. But let’s be careful when treading the line with reconciliatory discourse. Masculinist decolonizing methodologies have become increasingly co-opted by a culture of colonially imposed heteropatriarchy. It is a mentality that perpetuates the politics of refusal in a way that can be unaccountable to issues of intra-community class differentiation and relational responsibility. Reflection Piece speaks to a more rigorous reading of the relationship between settlers and Indigenous peoples. What about the settlers we care for, the ones we love and the ones we have come to call kin? The figure in Reflection Piece presents a deep vulnerability of Burning’s: the realization that unsettling our territories is a process that Indigenous peoples must take responsibility for alongside settlers by acknowledging internalized colonialism, reflecting upon it and actively wanting to change it. It’s almost perplexing, isn’t it, that a leap of faith such as this can exist in the apocalypse—after the imposition of colonial capitalism and the eradication of Indigenous ways of being, knowing and relating. Theorist Lauren Berlant might even call this “cruel optimism.” But this is exactly the limit of rigid political theory that does not call to the heart: our hearts are not always logical, but to them we must be kind. Our bodies are sacred, after all. We’ve been harmed enough. Had our intimacies ripped right from our hearts; our bodies removed from the land and disassociated. We don’t need anymore land/body/love trauma today. At the Caledonia protest site during summer 2017, Burning was reminded that the individual is never greater than the cause. It’s traditionally uncommon for Indigenous peoples to hierarchically place certain people above one another within land resistance movements. Instead, protest sites function as a community, and everyone uses their gifts to the best of their ability. We may dissociate from our bodies, from our lands, but community always brings us back and makes us humble. And just as our communities define our experiences of being on the land, as Indigenous peoples, the land influences our relationships with our genders and bodies. How do you connect with your territories when they are in a constant state of being destroyed and pillaged? How do you understand your unique way of embodying non-binary Indigenous gender when your traditional ways of being on the land have been disrupted—including non-binary ways of participating in community ceremony, which remains largely cisgender-centric? Reflection Piece considers the warrior-like image of front-line resistance that appears calculated, self-assured and resurgent. It reaffirms that though we have phantom-like relationships to enacting our presence on our lands, we still fit here. In the end, we are warriors, too, and it’s always community that calls us home. ■ Lacie Burning Reflection Piece 2016 Mirror, cardboard, masks, styrofoam and wood 88.9 cm x 60.0 cm x 2.13 m

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For Burning, Reflection Series was an enactment of their presence on the land and in their home territories. Burning simply asked of themselves, “What do I look like—what does it look like—when I assert my sovereignty over the land as a [Kanien’kehá:ka] person in Caledonia?”

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Coming Through grief Art that eulogizes is more than memory-keeping—it is an act of survival by Kelli Korducki

There’s a temptation to perceive the loss of a loved one as an event that results in one of two distinct outcomes: total emotional annihilation, or not. Axl Rose knew as well as anyone that nothing lasts forever, but the words still feel deeply meaningful when sung in a karaoke bar at 3 a.m. Grief is endemic to living. Human beings bond deeply anyway, a biological consequence of our inability to run too fast or kill with our teeth. Life is hard, but less hard when there are other humans in our midst that help unruffle our feathers and bear, in tandem, the heavy undertaking of survival. In her 2017 book The Last Word, author Julia Cooper examines the art of the eulogy as both a performance of, and narrative framework to support, the delicate work of grieving—the funerary vignette that a mourner delivers as an attempt to fix the departed’s life story in relation to their own. Meanwhile, more public meditations on the experience of loss, such as in art, signal our efforts to braid together the narrative strands of collective memory into kinship. The memorial is a curative that writes into legacy the salve for raw bereavement. It’s also, and arguably more importantly, an assertion of subjectivity in the face of annihilation. The memorial says: “I remember.” In the same breath, and a little louder, it says: “I’m still here to tell the story.” It can apply to the end of a life, or the end of a love. The Museum of Broken Relationships is of the latter sort: a crowdsourced compendium of artifacts from relationships past. Whether a stiletto shoe from Amsterdam, a postcard from Armenia or a gingerbread cookie from Chicago, the museum (which has physical locations in both Los Angeles and Zagreb, as well as a web-based collection) invites the lovelorn to proffer the cast-offs of doomed entanglements, and process in public the meanings of the unions we once belonged to. The project harkens to a cultural fixation from the early aughts, in which projects like Found Magazine and PostSecret celebrated the storytelling power of accumulated ephemera—resolutely analog efforts to chip away at some universal experience in the absence of identifying context. But the museum differs in that the objects on view are less immediately engaging than the eagerness with which hundreds of participants of all ages, spanning the whole of the earth, agree to take part. The Museum of Broken Relationships isn’t a marvel of curatorial prowess, but a powerful mass performance of moving on. In other instances, moving forward calls for actual movement— a physical manifestation of what we vaguely call “processing.” On its surface, Grief Work (Ask Your Body) (2016) by Toronto photographer and video artist Maryanne Casasanta presents as a performance of bodily

regression. Barefoot and tanned, the artist-as-subject bounces and twirls in slow motion the way a child might on the first warm day of spring. She whirls a half-turn in one direction, then again in reverse. Her hair swings freely around her as if in a playground scene, a kinetic claim of space. Shot spontaneously only three weeks after her father’s unexpected death, Casasanta describes her performance as trying to move grief through her body. “I was overwhelmed, exhausted and attempting to manage the barrage of condolence messages from friends and family,” she says. “Dancing was the only thing I could think to do with myself for myself.” Life, the work implies, moves through loss; movement sanctifies absence. But that life is up to the living. When a person we love leaves our midst, all we are left with are their remnants, either object or immaterial. It is up to the eulogist-artist to take these fragmented bits of highly subjective meaning and reposition them for a broader public. By this process, the narrator is nudged into the position of defining who they themselves are, as a survivor and memory-keeper. Memory-keeping is at the heart of Meryl McMaster’s practice. In a series called Ancestral, the Ottawa artist repurposes a collection of nineteenth-century portraits by American photographers Edward S. Curtis and William S. Soule, and painter George Catlin; images that, as McMaster describes it, positioned Indigenous peoples as comprising “a lifestyle and culture of the past,” near-artifacts of a history presumed to be nearly dead. Enlisting her father, the artist and curator Gerald McMaster, McMasters one and two shellacked their faces in white, and projected onto these improvised canvases the images produced by Curtis, Soule and Catlin, materially fusing a prediction of extinction with the transcendence of having survived. But the series penetrates beyond romanticized narratives of survival to underline how photography has historically been used, in McMaster’s words, to “freeze culture and people only to be gazed at.” In her artist statement, McMaster adds, “I also feel that by extracting my ancestors from the historical images, time collapses and they step through me into the present.” Whether our beloveds depart the universe of our beds or the mortal plane altogether, by reconfiguring the stories we tell about ourselves to reflect their absence, we engage in a form of forced rebirth. Leaving space for their memory, we reassemble the parts of ourselves still within grasp and supplant the spaces with new, raw material of our own making. We pay respects. We run the estimates on how next to survive. ■

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Meryl McMaster Ancestral 14 2008 Digital chromogenic print 101.6 x 76.2 cm

Courtesy the artist

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Gary James Joynesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experiments with sand and noise cost him a dozen high-end speakers and, for a while, his sight, but the resulting artworks border on the divine

the Sound of Science by Tom Jokinen

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FrOM LeFt: Gary James Joynes Ouroboros 4.06 kHz; Ouroboros 4.43 kHz; and Ouroboros 3.44 kHz 2011 C-prints 60.9 x 60.9 cm each Courtesy dC3 Art ProjeCts

Gary James Joynes creates sacred art through a kind of sonic violence. It’s a paradox that, in 2009, at a residency in Banff, nearly cost him his sight. An Edmonton sound artist with a background in experimental music, composition and photography, Joynes is a fan of Brian Eno’s ambient music but grew up on Led Zeppelin and Pantera. During the Banff residency he was working on a machine called a wave driver: simply put, it’s a large metal plate with a bolt at its centre, suspended over a large audio speaker. By experimenting with different sounds at different volumes (most of them very, very loud), Joynes was able to create visual patterns by sprinkling sand on the vibrating plate. The resulting patterns, he found—dependent for their shapes on the sound frequency and the artist’s impulse—were not unlike the sand mandalas created by Tibetan monks through less technological means. He didn’t intend to get spiritual with his work. But that’s where he wound up. “They put me in this one studio in the side of the mountain,” he says of his time in Banff, “where you don’t disturb people.” With the aid of computers he played a game of hit-and-miss, using sine waves to vibrate his metal plate “canvas”; at 423.62 hertz, for example, which sounds like a flatlining heart monitor, the sand would form into symmetrical loops and valleys on the surface of the metal. During these experiments he destroyed at least a dozen high-end speakers. One Saturday morning he awoke to find he was seeing double numbers on his alarm clock, and went to a clinic. Is it possible,

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“In my exploration of sound, I have tried to document the physical nature of sound waves as thoroughly and aesthetically as possible. I am interested in the beauty and universality of the patterns formed, and their similarity to patterns in nature and in widespread cultures.”

he asked the doctor, that by sitting in a room with piercing high frequencies for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, I could harm my eyes? The doctor admitted that he had no idea. Such are the vagaries of occupational health and safety when it comes to working with sight and sound. In any case, the physical effects soon wore off. But what Joynes had in the end was a technique, which could be adapted, finessed and then photographed, filmed and set to a soundtrack to create the room-size installations he’s presented at galleries and events such as Edmonton’s Nuit Blanche. After Banff, he says, “I was curious if I could take it further into building real conceptual pieces. It became this meticulous process of finding a resonant form and then wiping the plate clean and then very slowly dropping the sand, watching where it’s migrating, and then slowly drawing and creating the work, and even sculpturally building up relief.” He calls it frequency painting: the frequency of the sound is the brush that moves the medium—sand—on the plate, forming patterns that are, at some point, beyond the artist’s control. Newtonian physics, in a way, is the collaborator. Eventually he met curator Evelyn Tauben, who was working on a show for Toronto’s Koffler Gallery called “Spin Off: Contemporary Art Circling the Mandala,” which would present artists’ works adapted from or inspired by variations of the ancient Hindu and Buddhist form. In simple terms, a mandala is a complex, geometric composition that can become a focus for meditation, the way an icon in Eastern Orthodoxy or the Roman Catholic rosary acts as an objective centre for prayer. The whole of the composition is intended as a symbolic representation of the cosmos; its painstaking, ritualistic creation—with sand, for example, in Tibetan Buddhism—establishes a sacred space. “Spin Off”’s stated goal was to explore “a convergence of the sacred and profane, of East and West, of contemporary and ancient.” When Tauben saw photographs of Joynes’s new work, she saw mandalas immediately and was surprised to learn they were made from sound waves. Invited to participate in the show, Joynes created Ouroboros, in which filmed reproductions of the frequency paintings were projected onto a mound of sand spread on the floor, all set to an accompanying drone soundtrack composed and sung by Joynes, using the sound frequencies that formulated the sand patterns in the first place. The result was a trippy, self-reflexive and

hypnotic sound-and-light installation that, in some cases, led viewers to sit on the floor to soak it all in. Joynes describes the experience as “meditative,” and indeed Ouroboros is just abstract enough to catch focus without making specific demands on the viewer. It’s all on YouTube. Where the sacred and profane fit in is up to the viewer. Every artist has to contend with the historical moment in which they work, and for Joynes the current moment asks for conversation about the use of sacred imagery in art, in commerce: it’s political. But who, after all, is making the mandalas here? Gary James Joynes or the 423.62 hertz worth of ear-splitting tone that vibrates the metal plate? “In my exploration of sound,” Joynes wrote in an email after carefully considering the issue of cultural appropriation, “I have tried to document the physical nature of sound waves as thoroughly and aesthetically as possible. I am interested in the beauty and universality of the patterns formed, and their similarity to patterns formed in nature as well as in widespread cultures.” For Joynes, the primary motivation is making visible the science of sound. It was not his initial idea to call his creations mandalas, and mostly he doesn’t, but the resulting patterns and forms that emerge invariably elicit comparisons to imagery not just from Buddhism, but across world religions. Critically, what’s sacred about Joynes’s art is that over which he has least control: the accidents of nature. Another work called Broken Sound is an interrogation of the sonic violence that (briefly) robbed him of his senses back in Banff. Short of bursting his eardrums and sending himself blind, he did, in fact, burn out a few speakers trying to make his frequency paintings. So he took the speakers apart, studied their innards. Using a macro lens he photographed the copper voice coils (basically, coils of wrapped wire) that form the heart of speakers’ function. “I saw,” he says, “that I had a range of darkening and scarring [on the coils] and even some wires were completely burnt and charred. I saw the opportunity to tell a life-cycle story. We go through life, we age and darken and get scarred and eventually the metaphor is the wire breaks and that’s the moment of death.” A Buddhist friend told Joynes that the coils had reminded him of a large stone wheel from a Buddhist parable, and that the flawed portions represented moments of enlightenment. For a non-Buddhist, Joynes was somehow speaking its language. What’s appealing about Broken Sound, judging from the YouTube

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scale model, is how physical matter, damaged and vulnerable, is rendered abstract—this is wholly the artist’s doing. By building a custom slowmotion turntable and filming the coils with a macro lens, then projecting the results with an accompanying drone soundtrack on four giant screens, he achieves a grander effect than with the sand drawings—of that which is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Joynes promotes these coils from simple damaged matter to something colossal, supernatural, even intimidating. It’s an impressive effect. “I’m not trying to give people a religious experience,” he says, “but something really affects them.” They sit on the floor. They report to him that the floor seems to move, to ascend upwards. He’s tried sitting on the floor himself, and has had the same experience. It’s not unsettling but kind of “healing,” he says. “In a fast world bombarded with technology we can’t escape, when we find a moment where we’re given permission to slow down, you can see people take a deep breath and give themselves time to be present, literally slow themselves down.” Joynes’s work—from the sand mandalas to the broken coil projections, all set to harmonic sounds—can have the therapeutic effect of making time seem to creep on by. “I’m trying,” he says, “to create spaces for people to find that.” ■

Gary James Joynes Broken Sound 2015 4-channel video with 8-channel sound, double-sided projection screens and speakers 30 min loop Courtesy dC3 Art ProjeCts Photo AAron Munson

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Maria Hupfield Basket with Cover, Whisper in Every Lie, Theft and Betrayal, 2016 Acquired by RBC in 2016

RBC CORPORATE ART COLLECTION SUPPORTING THE FUTURE OF ART IN CANADA Since 1929, The RBC Corporate Art Collection has been grounded in the legacy of Canadian art. Maria Hupfield’s sculpture, acquired in 2016, reflects our commitment to supporting outstanding work by leading artists. We celebrate Maria Hupfield’s success and applaud her influence on young and emerging artists who will be shaped by her exhibitions for decades to come.

Explore other artists we support at rbc.com/emergingartists

®/™ Trademark(s) of Royal Bank of Canada.

KENT MONKMAN SHAME AND PREJUDICE: A STORY OF RESILIENCE 6 January–8 April 2018 This circulating exhibition was produced by the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in partnership with the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown, and has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada and the Ontario Arts Council. Lead Sponsor: Donald R. Sobey Family Foundation. The Agnes thanks: The George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University.

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www.agnes.queensu.ca Image: The Scream (detail), 2017, acrylic on canvas

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AdvANCE TICkETS MUrAkAMI.vANArTGALLErY.BC.CA

THE OCTOPUS EATS ITS OWN LEG FEB 3 - MAY 6 Major Sponsors:

Supporting Sponsor:

Brian and Andrea Hill

Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and curated by Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator.

Takashi Murakami, Klein’s Pot A, 1994–97 (detail), acrylic on canvas mounted on board in plexiglass box, Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico, © 1994–97 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved, Photo: Yoshitaka Uchida

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JACYNTHE CARRIER Exhibition curated by: Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre

OPENING FEBRUARY 3, 2018 145, rue du Père-Wilfrid-Corbeil, Joliette (Québec) J6E 4T4 450.756.0311 www.museejoliette.org

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School Hop

Cat Bluemke, David Renditions II and International Brand Expansion (Glasgow), Xpace Cultural Centre, 2015. Photo: Connie Tsang

Every year Canadian Art welcomes students into galleries and artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studios as part of our annual Canadian Art School Hop, a youth initiative aimed at providing education and outreach to secondary-school students in Toronto. In the face of reduced funding for extracurricular activities and a diminished focus on art education in public schools, this free half-day program offers a unique opportunity for a younger generation to participate in their cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cultural landscape.

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sCHOOL Guide:

Student at work in the Health Design Lab at Emily Carr University of Art and Design

Art Therapy Inclusive Care Residencies Research Creation Art and Medicine Design and Health Community Art Notable Teachers Graduates

CuLtures Of Care sCHOOL Guide â&#x20AC;¢

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s p e c i a l s e c t i o n C U LT U R E s O F C A R E

At the intersection of art and wellness as the world’s political and social tensions accelerate, there is an urgent need to take care. individuals are changing their lives through practices of mindfulness and self-awareness. art schools are adapting to these shifts by marrying art and health, and finding value in the alternative perspectives offered by art and creativity. Within social practice, community organizing, research creation and innovative design, schools are extending art-based approaches to problem-solving and community engagement. cultures of care are being fostered in and out of classrooms. expressive-arts schools are teaching students how to incorporate the arts into client care. artist residencies at various institutions are bringing creative perspectives to science and medicine. in all of these initiatives, a visual-arts perspective offers new ways to approach subjects related to health and wellness. in this school Guide, themed on cultures of care, we look at some cross-country examples of different ways in which art students can integrate wellness into their art-school experience. 1 tanya louise Workman’s photographs in Workman arts’ “Mindset” during the 2017 contact photography Festival.

2 a participant in Jaene castrillon’s film production workshop at Workman arts.

3 annie thibault (with Justin Wonnacott) armillaria

gallica 445-3 series 2017 photo Justin Wonnacott

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Education by design.

Sheridan is Canada’s largest art school, with a reputation for excellence and innovation. As a student, you will learn from talented, committed faculty who will pass on their expertise and passion; as a graduate, you’ll have a rare combination of artistic talent , professionalism and technical sophistication. You’ll be poised for success - and prepared to make your creativity a force for change.

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s p E C I A L s E C T I o n C U LT U R E s O F C A R E

Art Therapy Expressive arts therapies combine healing and art Expressive-arts and art-therapy practitioners work with their clients towards healing using a variety of art forms. They combine arts with therapy, psychology and psychotherapy, and learn to look at the image as a tool that can be used in a journey towards wellness. Each art-therapy program is unique to the needs of the student. some are eight-week certificates and others are three-year master’s-level programs with professional accreditation. In expressive arts, the process of creation is more important than the final product. These programs incorporate arts into therapeutic practices to foster a more well-rounded, creative approach to healing. 1

ConCorDIA UnIVErsITy, Montreal Creative Arts Therapies “In art therapy we give a lot of value and a lot of meaning to the art product and process, but not for their aesthetic quality,” says Dr. Josée Leclerc, a professor in the graduate art therapy program at Concordia. Art therapists, she says, are concerned with “what the creative process allows the client to express that is a concern or an issue they are facing.” Art therapy is “an extremely powerful method to allow for the expression of the inner world of clients. Exploring the created artworks in close collaboration with the art therapist may lead to significant insights.” students are trained in “the principles of psychology or psychotherapy as well as the principles of art.” students’ practicums include more than 350 direct client hours, and it is the only master’s program of its kind.

WHEAT InsTITUTE, Winnipeg Art Therapy “The International Expressive Arts Therapy Association really believes that you can come from any walk of life and use art as a tool for transformation,” explains Darci Adam, director of the Winnipeg Holistic Expressive Arts Therapy Institute. “so you might run a daycare centre, you might work as a school counsellor or in a storefront artoutreach program in a neighbourhood with particular needs. There’s such a variety of ways this work can be applied.” students learn to use expressive arts as a tool, many incorporating the methodologies into their existing practices. “Art does change us, and I think people are often surprised by the power of it. With some tools, they are able to see how they can support transformation in other people.”

2 1 A student working in one of Concordia’s Creative Arts Therapies classes.

2 Victoria McIntosh with Art Therapy Diploma students at WHEAT.

Art Therapy continued on page 113

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Art Therapy Fleming College, Haliburton Expressive Arts Therapy Julie mcintyre, program coordinator and instructor of the eight-week expressive arts program at Fleming College, says, “Wellness is a part of every class i teach.” Though the intensive course is too brief for full therapy training, graduates receive an expressive-arts graduate certificate. “i ask them how they can incorporate the arts into selfcare,” mcintyre says. in some electives, “i tell them i run [the course] more as a retreat than a class.” in other classes, students write self-care programs for themselves as they learn how to use art toward better health. As well as learning expressive arts methodologies, the students form their own community. The students often continue this approach to building social environments into the programs and initiatives that they start after graduation. 1

“The imagination is the key modality, and all of the arts provide us access into our imagination and our own imaginative process.”

lAngArA College, Vancouver Expressive Arts Therapy The faculty in the expressive arts therapy program at langara College bring a range of modalities, backgrounds and skill sets to their students. During the two-year program students work between disciplines, rather than specializing in a single form. “The idea behind it is that, for us, the imagination is the key modality, and all of the arts provide us access into our imagination and our own imaginative process,” says Peta Schur, a professor at langara College. The goal, Schur says, is to use “the arts as a means of accessing healing and working with whatever issues clients want to work with.”

THe CreATe inSTiTuTe, Toronto Centre for Expressive Arts Therapy Education 1 Student projects from one of Julie mcintyre’s courses at Fleming College. 2 Labyrinth II by Fleming College faculty member robin mcgauley.

At the Create institute, students earn a diploma in three years and are then eligible for membership with the College of registered Psychotherapists of ontario. Director rowesa gordon explains: ”However the image arrives...what the image has to tell us is in many ways actually more important than what we have to say about the image. Traditional therapies that use the arts tend to decide what the image means (the red means something, the shape means something), whereas in this particular training we look to the image to let us know what it means. our job is to listen, and be in relationship with the image in the same way we train students to be in relationship to their clients.” 3 A still from The Heart of the Children: Supporting Children with refugee experiences by langara professor Peta Schur for the Surrey City myth Busting Campaign.

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Inclusive Care toronto school of art Independent Courses “toronto school of art is an independent, alternative, artist-run art school—it’s not a university,” says Martha eleen, an instructor at the school. “We have a mandate of inclusiveness and community building through art practice. anyone can come here.” there are no certificates at the toronto school of art. the people who attend the school for classes in a range of media and topics are extremely diverse: they work full-time or have other careers, but always wanted to participate in art. eleen explains that art skills and a relationship to art-making are a way to navigate life’s transitions. “to be developing something creatively in a healthy community,” says eleen, “gives them a basis from which to solve those other problems that can really bring you down in life.”

University of toronto Various Visual Studies Programs “When you ask questions beyond what something looks like, and how it functions within an institution or in a city, questions about care come immediately to the foreground,” says charles stankievech, director of the Master’s of visual studies program. “students are encouraged to take courses taught by international experts in health, kinesiology, psychology, social justice, diaspora studies, women and gender studies and the entire spectrum of studies concerned with wellness,” stankievech continues. the holistic nature of the University of toronto’s various graduate and undergraduate programs is tied to these cross-disciplinary explorations.

“Questions about care come immediately to the foreground.”

hUMBer college, etobicoke Art Foundation “the courses and resources that we have here are always keeping a really broad eye on what the question of wellness really manifests itself as in the community,” says cole swanson, coordinator of the art foundation program at humber. “is wellness about mental health or is wellness about economic strife and dealing with the challenges around that, or is wellness about cultural or social barriers that prevent people from being able to access the resources that they need?” students have the opportunity to work beyond the classroom in the certificate program and become involved with the surrounding community. at humber, swanson explains, they are “essentially taking art out of the classroom and bringing it to the public realm.” in this way, mindfulness and social justice, values that are foundational to a healthy society, become a core part of the curriculum.

1 the toronto school of art photo John BinghaM 2 humber college students in a class for special topics in contemporary practice.

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Artist Residency Programs ALBERTA COLLEGE Of ART AND DESIGN, Calgary Hear/d Residency Program Recovery, anxiety, depression and body issues have been themes explored in Hear/d, the peer-run, student artist residency at the Alberta College of Art and Design. The program is run through the students’ association, and was developed to fill gaps in the colleges’ mental-health support services. “The residency acts as a peer support program for students, providing a safe platform to express themselves through their art practice,” says Jeannie Gorrie, the health and wellness program manager at the ACAD Students’ Association. “Group meetings are held every second week, where students discuss mental health challenges they’re experiencing, and create projects based around their own lived experience.” Participants are also required to attend studio visits and a group critique, all facilitated by student mentors. The residencies culminate in an exhibition which “acts to de-stigmatize mental health throughout the entire community.”

NSCAD UNIVERSITY, Halifax Community Studio Residency Program

Recent graduates of NSCAD University can participate in the Community Studio Residency, which offers residencies of up to one year in Lunenburg, Dartmouth, New Glasgow and Sydney. Graduates are embedded into the community and afforded the time and space to further their career. Residents organize guest lectures, workshops or classes and engage with local townspeople through their artwork. It’s a way for the artist residents to focus not only on their individual wellness, but also to contribute to the broader wellness of each community.

CARLETON UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY, Ottawa Pilot Project of the Carleton University Art Gallery and the Department of Biology The Carleton University Art Gallery has initiated a pilot cross-disciplinary artist-in-residence project, co-hosted with the department of biology. “While in the past I have worked with microscopic seaweeds, molds and bacteria cultures, I have recently been working with mushrooms,” says Annie Thibault, the first artist in residence. Thibault studied science before completing her BfA and has worked in labs since 1995. She worked with mushrooms during her MfA at the University of Ottawa, and during her residency at Carleton, she has been cultivating mycelia in Petri dishes. “The mycelium is the fascinating underground network of the mushroom that we don’t see,” says Thibault. “Mycelia form a whole communication system that includes trees and other plants, sharing nutrients and information. I’m working with these living organisms which contribute to the wellness of ecosystems. As living art material, they also make me think about how art helps to sustain balance and wellness in life.”

DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY, Halifax Medical Humanities-HEALS

1 1 Caitlin McCann’s I WANT TO BE BAD AS HELL OVER THE SKY DEEP ARCH, NO ONE IS WATCHING MY BACK (2017) in the Hear/d Residency Exhibition.

2 Tess Cournoyer’s ECDYSIS (2016) in the Hear/d Residency Exhibition.

3 Annie Thibault (with Justin Wonnacott) Armillaria gallica 445-3 series 2017

Art plays a large role in medical education, explains Dr. Wendy Stewart, director of the Medical Humanities-HEALS (Healing and Education through the Arts and Life Skills) program at Dalhousie University. “Part of what we do is use visual arts to teach the students critical thinking, and to think about how we can all learn from one another when we’re looking and thinking about visual arts, and what’s involved in that, and how it can contribute to clinical care,” says Stewart. The program hosts an artist in residence, and the artist is strongly encouraged to work with the students. “We had an artist a couple of years ago that actually created artwork with blood from the medical students,” says Dr. Stewart. “It really depends on the artists and what they want to do.”

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Art and Health Research

UniqUE iniTiATiVE UniVersity of ottaWa Faculty of Medicine Artist-in-Residence Program

Education these days has an interdisciplinary edge Visual arts offer an insightful perspective into the field of medicine. While the medical discipline has traditionally been very rigid, alternative points of access to understanding wellness are fostered through creative research—which in turn contributes to nuanced relationships in patient care.

“Medicine tends to say science is the only important piece and yet we know that the arts and the humanities have really important other perspectives,” says Dr. Pippa Hall, lead on the faculty of Medicine’s air Program. ”technology is becoming much more prominent in medicine and the compassion component—the human-to-human connection—can be lost. the arts, all of the arts, all of the humanities in a sense, have a lot to contribute. and so we started our artist-in-residence program in the faculty of Medicine. the hope is to work with our medical students to find ways to help them feel grounded, to feel connected to themselves and to value the things in their lives that are connected to the arts,” Dr. Hall explains.

eMily carr UniVersity of art anD DesiGn, Vancouver Health Design Lab “the Health Design lab employs human-centred, participatory design research methods to improve the health and well-being of our community,” says its director caylee raber. Design faculty and students work with industry and community partners, like the Bc children’s Hospital and Vancouver coastal Health, so they can “identify areas [they] can address and improve through design within healthcare contexts,” says raber. “the program shows both students and our partners where there are professional opportunities for working in health, and i think a lot of times the students learn about their own health and wellness through working on these projects.”

UniVersity of alBerta, edmonton immune nations immune nations brought together artists, academics, policy experts and healthcare professionals to think about how vaccines are used and distributed. “in my work on immune nations, as well as in other related interdisciplinary projects, i have tried to link research and teaching activities in a way that allows students to explore philosophical and ethical questions coming out of the health sciences through art,” explains professor and project lead sean caulfield.

1 Patrick Mahon’s Design for a Dissemunization station (2017) in the Vaccine Project’s “immune nations.” 2 Jude Griebel’s obstructed (2016) in see Me Hear Me Heal Me’s exhibition “flUX” at dc3 art Projects.

alBerta colleGe of art anD DesiGn, calgary See Me Hear Me Heal Me for this project, artists and researchers met regularly with different patients, family members and medical professionals over the course of a year, focusing on patients recovering from head and neck cancer. “there’s a gap in understanding patient experience,” says acaD instructor Heather Huston, an artist-researcher with the project. By considering illness and recovery through a non-medical lens, artists “were doing the major work of taking in these experiences and thinking about how to translate what they meant,” explains Huston. this project culminated in the exhibition “flUX” at dc3 art Projects, and a forthcoming publication.

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Art and the Medical Field The arts play an important role in expanding medical practices In medicine, art can help offer a different perspective on what can be a narrow disciplinary approach, and lead to a more holistic understanding of the human. For this reason, programs outside of the arts are incorporating more creative approaches into their pedagogy.

UnIversIty oF toronto, scarborough SCOPE: The Health Humanities Learning Lab "the scoPe Lab engages skills traditionally associated with humanities disciplines— including critical reading and thinking, close reading, oral and written communication, visual literacy and narrative analysis—as a vital complement to more conventional disciplinary approaches to health knowledge, research and learning,” explains graduate researcher Katherine shwetz. “students respond to being made aware of the existence of a medical gaze. they start to look at visual representations of bodies in medical illustration and also in art as coming from different perspectives, and they learn how to notice those perspectives.”overall, the Health Humanities Learning Lab provides the opportunity for students to experience art and sciences in an interdisciplinary way.

“The arts and the humanities have really important other perspectives.” 1 Tamara PokrupaNahanni's dreamcatcher featured in the "arts in Medicine" exhibition in 2017 at the University of ottawa.

UnIversIty oF ottawa H.E.A.L. - Humanities Education, Artistic Living

2 Julie Adamson Miller X-ray Shelter 2011 created during her Dalhousie University artist residency.

yipeng Ge, a program coordinator of Humanities education, artistic Living, explains that the University of ottawa’s Faculty of Medicine is intended to “encourage and foster creative expression as a means of authentic communication, and to cultivate another form of healing amongst medical trainees.” Founded in 2014, H.e.a.L. is a student–driven initiative that enacts these goals by introducing humanities training. “visual arts play an important role,” Ge says. For example, they coordinate an annual exhibition where medical students showcase artwork. Using visual arts, students learn to treat all their patients as individuals. Lisa Xuan, who also works in the project, says, “Part of doing art is that it helps us see the whole person; we are really able to see beyond just the disease. It changes your perspective of humanities, of other people, and of medicine too.”

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XIAO XUE (BFA 2017), “SOMETIHING TO PONDER ON: A WALKING CAMPER”

Achieving Excellence

Congratulations to Xiao Xue, 2017 BMO 1st ART! National Prize winner, and BC Prize winner James Fermor. Reach your potential with a BA, BFA, MFA or BSc (Computer Science & Visual Arts) in contemporary studio practice.

finearts.uvic.ca/visualarts

SCHOOL OF ART

FACULTY

Sharon Oliver Leigh James Sarah David Paul Holger Kevin Daniel Mark Grace Dominique Elizabeth Mary Ann Shepherd

Alward Botar Bridges Bugslag Ciurysek Foster Hess Kalberg Kelly McCafferty Neufeld Nickel Rey Roy Steggles Steiner

ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE

MFA APPLICATIONS January 15, 2018

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313 ARTlab, 180 Dafoe Road University of Manitoba Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2 Canada

Sébastien Aubin Erwin Huebner 204.474.9367 umanitoba.ca/schools/art fineart@umanitoba.ca uManitobaSchoolofArt

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Wellness and Design Creative solutions can improve quality of life Sheridan College, Toronto Game Design Program The gamification program, associate dean angela Stukator explains, is about applying methods of design to problems—not entertainment—and pursuing applications that are responsive to clients. For a recent project, the students worked with the holland Bloorview Kids rehabilitation hospital to redesign their waiting room. Children with limited mobility and a fear of germs on shared toys needed an alternative way to make the waiting room interactive. The Sheridan game-design students programmed the building’s existing interactive floor into a series of games that activate the connected screen. “These kids did it literally in four days,” Stukator says. “They came up with games where there were solar systems and they had to catch stars, and candy fountains and they had to collect candies. all these wonderful, simple games the kids could play.”

The CenTre For digiTal Media, Vancouver Master of Digital Media The Centre for digital Media offers unique training in media and design. The students are prepared to use the technical skills they learn in various fields, sometimes in the area of health and wellness. one group of game designers collaborated with dr. david Kaufman and the age-Well network to create “an engaging digital experience for older adults.”

They wanted to focus on the needs of this community and develop a game that could contribute to a better quality of life. The endeavor resulted in an escape room. “The core of this experience is communication,” co-creator apeksha darbari told the CdM blog in 2016. “Two players have access to different information and they both need to communicate and work together (either online or in-person) in order to get out.” The students created the virtual reality component of the design specifically for the older community. “We’re designing something that caters to their needs.”

nSCad UniVerSiTy, halifax NSCAD Mobile App The nova Scotia College of art and design University offers students an app for their well-being as they pursue their artistic training. anyone can freely download the app, which contains resources for “student wellness services such as academic counselling, mental health support and disability services.” There is also a bulletin component that keeps users up-to-date on information, like weather warnings and power outages, and other resources that help ensure student safety. The ease and comfort of this kind of support helps foster a nurturing environment for art students.

This kind of support fosters a nurturing environment.

2 1 holland Bloorview’s interactive waiting room, designed in collaboration with Sheridan College game-design students.

2 nSCad University’s free app for on-campus counselling resources and mental-health support.

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1 Painting classes at Workman arts 2 art Hives at the montreal museum of Fine arts

Community Art Spaces Workman arts, toronto Multidisciplinary Arts and Mental Health Organization Workman arts is a multidisciplinary arts and mental health organization in toronto that provides a safe space for artists with mental health issues. “We do this for members through offering free studio space, free art courses and opportunities to professionalize and present work,” says Claudette abrams, Workman’s visual arts manager. Courses are led in a mindful environment that accommodates differences in life experience, as well as individual challenges. “our instructors are trained to create psychologically safe spaces through trauma-informed approaches and recovery-based models,” abrams explains. the goal is holistic: to support artists in their practice and in leading full, balanced lives.

Western University, London The Cohen Exploration Lab and Cohen Commons students in the department of visual arts at Western have the opportunity to use the Cohen exploration Lab and Cohen Commons, which are open for students to work in around their regular curricular activities. students have access to the lab’s new technologies including a 3-d printer, 3doodler 3-d pens, a photo printer, electronic components, video projection and an interactive whiteboard. the lab is a creative space in which students are encouraged to experiment and “explore the boundaries between science, technology, engineering and mathematic components and integrate them into their visual arts practice.” as they use both spaces to materialize their creative ideas, students also have the opportunity to meet others with like-minded interests, and participate in a community.

ConCordia University, montreal Art Hives art Hives, or Les ruches d'art, is a network of community art spaces begun in montreal in 2012 under the leadership of Concordia professor dr. Janis timm-Bottos. thanks to a grant from the J.W. mcConnell Family Foundation, the project has expanded across the city and country, now with 115 art Hives. exhibitions are often organized to show work made by participants. “it’s a meeting space. it’s free. it's outside of the marketplace and relies on social economies,” timm-Bottos says. she describes the spaces as a “third space,” which are neither at home or at work. “this is really intentional. When you come, there are no directives, but people are invited to look around at the materials, check things out and begin to make art. as people begin making art they start talking to other people, and over a period of several weeks people start to get to know each other.”

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Art + Art History Students graduate with two prestigious and practical credentials that reflect the programâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dual focus: an Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto Mississauga and a Diploma in Art & Art History from Sheridan in Oakville. photography / sculpture / video sound / performance / design painting / print media / drawing art history / curatorial studies

Artwork by 2017 AAH graduate Anaheez Karbhari, INDIAN WOMAN (2017), digital photograph

Study at Two Great Schools University of Toronto Mississauga + Sheridan College

artandarthistory.ca A 4-year Honours BA joint program between Sheridan & University of Toronto Mississauga

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Arts teachers extend their work into the community

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, Janis Timm-Bottos co-created a studio space for the community with artists who were homeless. “I have been involved over the years with developing different models for creating small and sustained spaces and communities so that people can come together across sometimes pretty big divides and have a safe space to have conversation and make art together.” Later, working at Concordia University, she made a similar space with her students, which they eventually developed into a global network.

Pedagogical practices towards care and wellness Across the country, teachers are expanding their engagement with health and wellness beyond the classroom through projects and partnerships that are dedicated to creating cultures of care. These take many forms, but a collaborative, community focus runs throughout. “Participatory learning and experiential learning are two approaches that I think have benefit,” says Dick Averns, a professor at the University of Calgary, whose students collaborate with the SPARK Disability Art Festival. At Humber College, professor Cole Swanson created a specific course that utilizes “a progressive learning model that encourages students to interact with community members on critical issues in the arts, and also in society at large.” This kind of “field work” not only benefits students, but also the different organizations and members of the communities they work with. University of Victoria professor Carolyn Butler-Palmer explains, for example, how the “Access Art” curatorial project, for which more than 40 works were hung in a Victoria clinic, was originally conceived of as “a way of creating a more pleasing environment.” Meanwhile, she found that, “many of the Health Centre’s clients have an art background, so the staff started to talk to them about art, and about their own artistic practices.”

— Janis Timm-Bottos, Concordia University

Carolyn Butler-Palmer and her students in the University of Victoria’s art history and visual studies department oversaw the “Access Art” curatorial project at the Cool Aid Community Health Centre in Victoria. The facility’s clientele are at-risk communities, including homeless people and people with mental-health issues. “The goal was to hang artworks in the clinic to make it a more human space rather than a clinical space, and to help restore humanity to the clients in the clinic.” Living with multiple sclerosis and inflammatory arthritis led Heather Huston to her arts-based research practice. “A few years ago I started investigating intersections of how we understand the body from our own lived human experience, and then how the medical establishment understands the body from a technical standpoint. You look at different ways of how we can understand ourselves and neither one gives you the whole picture,’’ says Huston, an assistant professor at the Alberta College of Art and Design.

Peta Schur of Langara College coordinates an expressive-arts therapy project in more than 13 schools in BC, primarily with refugee children. They “experience a lot of trauma and huge changes in their lives but they don’t really have much opportunity to process their experiences. Expressive arts provide a powerful and effective way for them to have an opportunity to work through some of what they have gone through and also a really good way to integrate them into the schools.”

— Heather Huston, Alberta College of Art and Design

— Peta Schur, Langara College

Gabrielle Haidl's Ten Signs of Depression (2016) in the University of Calgary Department of Art's collaboration with the SPARK Disability Art Festival.

CHRIS SAVAGe

— Carolyn Butler Palmer, University of Victoria

Dick Averns, diagnosed in adulthood with Tourette syndrome, works with his University of Calgary students and the SPARK Disability Art Festival. The collaboration is about “putting the notion of disability on a continuum with ability. You don’t want to overplay disability. You don’t want to exoticize disability,” he says, to get to “notions of the in-between of adaptation and ability: an understanding of our own ability and the blessings that we may have in comparison to others.” — Dick Averns, University of Calgary

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The Graduates Art-school grads are applying their training in unique and interdisciplinary ways. Across fields and across the country, they’re defining the shape of 21st-century creative careers.

1. Darian Goldin Stahl I pursued an MFA in printmaking from the University of Alberta to give myself access to a printmaking workshop, and the time I needed to dive deeply into my chosen area of focus: how a fine-art recontextualization of medical scans can positively impact the sense of agency for a chronically ill patient, namely that of my sister, who has multiple sclerosis. The U of A not only fostered the technical skills I needed to effectively represent my subject, but also the personalized guidance and access to professional development, like teaching positions to begin my career. In my current interdisciplinary PhD at Concordia University I use printmaking as a primary methodology to interpret and understand philosophies around the ill body. The potential of this research to positively impact my community has been recognized by the Canadian government, which recently awarded me a prestigious Vanier Scholarship to further pursue my artistic passion.

Darian Goldin Stahl

I use printmaking as a primary methodology to interpret and understand philosophies around the ill body. — Darian Goldin Stahl

2. Armin Mortazavi After getting my Bachelor of Science, I had no interest in pursuing research. It stressed me out big time. But I still loved learning, and I loved telling stories. That was my realization: the only reason I ever got into science was because of Bill Nye and the Magic School Bus. I had to be a science communicator, it was so obvious. So I did a master’s in digital media, and got an internship making interactive comics about health for the BC curriculum. It was the smartest thing I ever did. It gave me the courage to go with my gut, and to work against the odds and bring art and science together. I’ve now started a career as a science cartoonist here in Vancouver, and I’m enjoying every part of it. 3. Stephen Legari I completed a BFA in photography from Concordia in 1997, an MA in creative arts therapies from Concordia in 2011, and an MSc (Applied) in couple and family therapy from McGill in 2017. My two degrees from Concordia helped form my belief and practice in art as a tool for healing. My training at McGill provided me with strong clinical competencies while teaching me to approach my work with cultural humility. Collectively, these programs have prepared me to work at the intersection of art and health. I am now very fortunate to have a remarkable venue at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to practice these skills, contributing to our wellness program while helping to expand art therapy’s reach. The art therapy program includes our community art studio (La Ruche d'art du MBAM), art therapy groups with partnering organizations, art therapy internships, partnerships with several universities, and action research projects.

Armin Mortazavi

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4. Jessica Lynn Wiebe In 2015 I graduated from NSCAD with a BFA, majoring in fine art. Prior to my post-secondary education, I served in the Canadian military and deployed to Afghanistan in 2008. When I started my degree I did not intend to make work about the military, war or Afghanistan. However,

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early in my foundation year i started a series of drawings portraying afghanistan’s landscape as occupied by the Canadian military and nato forces. this series inspired further research and examination of the complexity of war and conflict. the environment at nsCaD cultivated hard work and experimentation that pushed me to take risks. the most meaningful part of my education was the connections i made with my peers through long critiques and discussions. somewhere during this process, i accepted that my time in the military has, and will continue to, powerfully impact my life and work. i continue to dig deeper into the mechanisms of war and give form to the complex politics that ensue. 5. Renita Fillatre Completing my BFa degree in visual arts at Memorial University’s sir Wilfred Grenfell College gave me both a degree and the knowledge of how powerful the arts were as a therapeutic tool. i struggled through a number of personal issues during my university education. processing those issues through various art projects was what made completing my education possible. after finishing my degree, i became interested in how i could marry the arts with helping others in a therapeutic framework. i discovered the CReate institute after moving to toronto and i began my education as an expressive-arts therapist. i graduated in 2012 and began my private practice shortly after. there is something magical about watching clients tap into their creativity. the messages that come from the process of creating art can have a powerful transformative ability. once the pressure of the finished piece is erased from our minds, we are free to just play—without worrying about being “good” at it.

stephen legari

6. Cathy Middleton expressive art therapy enables people to explore areas of their lives through imagination and play using the arts. as a professional who walks with people who struggle daily, i am continually looking for opportunities to build my knowledge and skills to support them. i was delighted to discover the CReate institute in toronto. the three-year program afforded me the opportunity to learn how to incorporate various art modalities into the therapeutic process. i had known that art-making could be used in therapy and wanted to learn more and develop my skills in this area to use with the women and families that i walk with. i continue to create art on a daily basis for my own personal wellness journey, and as an important part of self-care and self-awareness.

Jessica lynn Wiebe

I believe the journey of wellness and well-being is lifelong. For me, artmaking has always been an important part of that process. BRitt Wilen

— Cathy Middleton

Renita Fillatre

After finishing my degree, I became interested in how I could marry the arts with helping others in a therapeutic framework. Cathy Middleton

— Renita Fillatre school Guide •

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F A C U L T Y O F M E D I A , A R T, A N D P E R F O R M A N C E

WHERE MAKERS MEET

The Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina presents a world of possibility. Students are provided with the latest tools and technologies to help bring their ideas to life. Immersed in a highly creative environment, students enjoy smaller class sizes with more opportunity for valuable hands-on experiential learning. Come discover the ultimate playground for the imagination. Learn more at uregina.ca/mediaartperformance CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIES | FILM | VISUAL ARTS | THEATRE | GRADUATE STUDIES | MUSIC | INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES

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