Autobiographical art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s a relational approach to art-making that is shaped by social and political pressures. Though it may centralize the Self as its subject matter, the very best autobiographical art reaches across space and time to establish meaningful connections with the viewer. It calls out to the audience, and the audience responds in turn. This prompts them to set the wheels of memory turning and reflect on their own lived experiences and personal history. It’s an exchange rooted in empathy and demonstrates an ethics of care, much like any good conversation. Perhaps most importantly, this give-and-take, back-and-forth process offers the potential for a better understanding of others and oneself. So, in a strange twist, autobiographical art is really about self-discovery.
The exhibition This Seems Personal at the Confederation Centre of the Arts centers around themes of autobiography, personal agency, and reciprocity. Featuring emerging and mid-career artists Andrew Quon, Miya Turnbull, Curtis Botham, Laura Kenney, Shauna MacLeod, Lux Gow-Habrich, and Monique Silver, it explicitly examines the connection between autobiographical art and socio-political issues. Guest-curated by Brandt Eisner, the curatorial premise asserts that the personal is inseparable from the political and that the human body and its memory hold a record of the body’s interaction with the world at large. It is through this holistic recognition of our existence as social beings that we, as a collective, have the means to enact transformative change for the common good.
The work gathered here reflects a breadth of diverse meanings and associations, from mental health and race to gender identity, the Anthropocene, and more. By mining the archive that is the body and its corresponding memory, the artists’ findings are profoundly original, investigative, and cathartic. Take, for example, MacLeod’s ceramics. The natural affinity between clay and art therapy has been explored for decades, and there’s a good reason for it. Clay quite literally entangles the potter with the earth, externalizing tension and stress away from the body while leaving space for the subconscious to work through it. MacLeod has been forthcoming about the therapeutic benefits of clay since working as an emergency medical dispatcher (EMD) in Nova Scotia. The heavy reality of works such as Emergency Medical Dispatcher Shattered Identity (2021) and PTSD Symptoms (2022) articulates the personal challenges that many first responders carry with them daily. The revealing juxtaposition between these and related pieces, such as PTSD Healing (2022) and Butterfly Healing (2022), quietly tells us just how important the process of shaping clay is before it reaches its final form. There is also a palpable sense that these and other works desire to reach out and connect with others in the first responder community.
Though personal in content, Turnbull’s array of sculptures and photographs is also inherently social, referencing the decentred and fluid spirit of identity. Inside vitrines and hung on walls are masks molded from her own face, crafted from papier mâché, and digital photographs, which are then manipulated and transformed into surrealist illusions. The most striking of these are represented in the uncanny series Self-Portrait with Skin Suit (2023), where the artist is veiled in a skin-coloured spandex bodysuit, holding or wearing masks in various guises. They evoke memories of Robyn Cummings’s brilliant series Lady Things, where women’s faces and bodies are transmuted into phantasmagoric symbols. For Turnbull, limbs and flesh contort in dynamic and impossible ways, as if the blood has been totally drained from their bodies, making them appear like spent balloons. A captivating form of self-portraiture, these otherworldly, human-like creatures remind us that the body—like the face—stockpiles meanings and classifications projected onto it by others. This is one way we come to know ourselves less.
Silver’s and Gow-Habrich’s work also concentrates on body politics, though toward different ends. On one hand, Silver’s luminous drawings from her Body Mapping (2024) series and dreamlike prints such as Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes… (2024) question preconceived notions of the physical body. These works can trigger aberrations from objective truth, meaning that social expectations can cloud or warp one’s perception of how the body appears and functions. Rhythmic, multi-dimensional, and electric, her work represents a methodical rediscovery of the body and its emancipatory agency.
On the other hand, Gow-Habrich’s expansive installation Queen Mothers of Eastern and Western Skies (2023–ongoing) tells a generational story of the artist’s mother and grandmother. It is not a shrine per se, but a kind of sanctum that honours their blood, experience, pain, and resilience. Stained glass tears hang above a movable wall, swaying gently with the gallery’s ambient breeze, while embroidered lungs rest above a uterus, whose negative space has been meticulously hand-beaded. A handwoven, bruise-coloured blanket frames the organs and the textiled blood that pools on the ground. The installation moves from personal narrative to the communal through tactility, as audiences are invited to touch and interact with it. Doing so allows them to process memories of mothers and motherly love experientially, while, in turn, providing space to strengthen familial bonds.
Elsewhere, Botham’s large-scale, photo-realistic charcoal drawings scrutinize economic mismanagement that pushes the working class further to the margins and systems that damage the environment. Such is the case with Land for Sale, Trenton (2018) and Coal Mine, Stellarton (2018), which depict the stark reality of a deteriorating home in Pictou County and the extent of Stellarton’s surface coal mine. Embedded in his drawings are actual quotes from local media sources, such as, “With the town’s residential and commercial tax base in decline, finances are strained,” in addition to, “Nova Scotia needs to mine coal while there’s still a market.” Though it is not overtly autobiographical in content, Botham’s empathic vision of broader social realities is shaped into a personal narrative.
These critical environmental and social obstacles also resonate within Quon’s work, most notably in the diptych Promises, Promises (2022/2023). A kind of pseudo-self-portrait, it illustrates the naked body of the artist squatting, head to knees, atop a recently felled tree. Shattered fragments and splinters of this and other felled trees blanket the ground, extinguishing all things green. Quon’s own skin tones in the photograph are echoed in the freshly cut cross-sections of trees that stack to the sky in the adjoining image. The optics are effective, interrogating the ethics of deforestation and, in particular, the clear-cutting of old-growth forests in Atlantic Canada. This is the personal, advocating for those who cannot speak for themselves.
Power disparities became more pronounced after the exhibition opened to the public, as Kenney’s rug-hookings seemed to foreshadow President Trump’s escalating threats of tariffs on Canada’s industries and natural resources. The now-prophetic rug Friends (2024), which features the submissive text “WE HAVE TO BE FRIENDS OTHERWISE YOU’LL BEAT US UP,” anticipated Trump’s bullying tactics toward his northern neighbour, the United States’ closest military ally and trading partner. Ironically, this “friend” is now instigating a future economic recession. And this says nothing of his warnings to annex Canada as the “fifty-first state” or to make Prime Minister Trudeau a “Governor”—both unprecedented threats against the sovereignty of a fellow G7 nation. In this new light, Kenney’s US-themed rugs have become a site of protest and an urgent rallying cry for collective resistance against American imperialism.
This Seems Personal is an exhibition that does not rest easy. It speaks to serious social concerns and calls for sweeping political change in Atlantic Canada / Mi’kma’ki. As such, much of the work on display is imbued with the profound weight of individual and communal responsibility and resilience. With this in mind, it shouldn’t be overlooked that the banal, the mundane, and the supposedly uneventful moments of everyday life can also be terribly interesting, since the body itself is, as the show maintains, inherently political. As often happens, it’s the most routine events in life that are the most overlooked and therefore taken for granted. Having lunch with friends, watching a movie with a lover, reading a book, walking the dog, going for coffee—whatever else you name, the personal still intersects with political forces: the land, communities, corporations, family, public spaces, and so forth. There’s poetry in these things, too. Now, that would be a different exhibition, of course, with a completely different premise, but there’s something to that idea, I think.
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