For its twenty-fourth edition, the Images Festival selected Halifax-based artist James MacSwain as its showcased Canadian artist. The selection of MacSwain was in keeping with the Images Festival’s mandate of highlighting artists who have produced considerable bodies of work — earning them a reputation among the regional, national and international experimental film and media-arts communities — but who also deserve greater exposure.

MacSwain is a prankster, with a wicked sense of humour and a voice-over, which is idiosyncratic in its tone and timbre. The Halifax-based filmmaker initially worked with puppet theatre, and that aesthetic is evident throughout his more than 20 films made over a 30-year period. Collage has always been central to MacSwain’s practice as well — certainly with his animation films, but also with his “documentary” and even dramatic works.

The one-hour program presented by the Images Festival consisted of six films made between 1983 and 2010. Five animated films were anchored by MacSwain’s 1983 performative “documentary,” Amherst, in which the artist revisits the small town he has finally left nearly twenty years earlier. MacSwain realized that he was queer in his hometown, before the Stonewall riots and before Canadian Liberal Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau’s assertion that the state has no business in the nation’s bedrooms. He performs a site-by-site inventory (or autopsy) on the town before reminding the viewers that this film is itself a performance, or fiction, and that the author’s voice therefore cannot be taken at any face value.

In MacSwain’s films, the stars may look very different today, but the films are not escapist. The artist sharply distinguishes between the fantastic and the escapist. If Amherst is an example of backwards time travel, many of MacSwain’s other films invoke the future or the undefined. His cutout floating characters move across both time and space into indeterminate zones characterized by uncanny sequences of events. MacSwain plays with outer space voyages, but there are a hell of a lot of ghosts in this film too. And he never loses his sense of place or bearing. Nova Scotia Tourist Industries (1998) is the most acerbic example of this grounding. A copywriter for the provincial tourism department devises a plan to attract tourists. He pitches locations for the ideal natural environments for the perfectly realized suicide. The word macabre does not even begin to describe this film.

MacSwain’s collagist approach to animation and indeed to filmmaking provides departure points for his imagination and socio-political concerns. Flower (1986) literally references the properties of flowers to stem or branch out into an environmental probe into tropes of fashion, war, stardom and socially perpetuated illusions. Starboy (2006) also casts a humorous yet caustic eye on the illusion industries. For MacSwain, the stars are the ones in the sky and not the deluded fools who come and go on Earth. He is truly a Warholian pagan — individuals enjoy their brief bursts of flame and then they burn out according to the laws of gravity.

Throughout the program, even into the films such as The Alpha Expedition (2000) and Fountain of Youth (2010), which deploy relatively larger budgets, MacSwain stands out as a time-honoured collagist. He uses stop-motion editing, frame by frame by frame, etc. Each frame is composed hands-on, in the manner of a classical visual artist. MacSwain considers himself a collagist taking his cues from the Dadaists and Surrealists (the anti-dreamers and the dreamers). Collage has of course become the language of advertising and music videos and image saturation, but MacSwain holds steadfastly to his belief that collage can subvert assumptions about gender, sexuality and other assumed linearities.

James MacSwain’s well-attended retrospective program served as an effective kickoff to the body of the 2011 Images Festival. At the post-screening reception, more than one voice could be heard commenting upon MacSwain’s images of severed baby heads among the delirious debris to be found in Starboy. This program both satisfied the modernist imperative to shock, while skewering its tendency toward avant-garde bravado. This retrospective of James MacSwain’s films proved that controversy and pleasure are soul mates indeed.

Vancouver-based artist Emily Neufeld unfolds the stencil from her suitcase and traces it onto the wall of the more than 100 years old fishing shack slated for demolition in Cheticamp, Nova Scotia. Then she begins to cut through the exterior wall.

Documentation of Neufeld’s art installation Before Demolition: Tides, a part of her series Before Demolition, was recently exhibited at Eyelevel Gallery in Halifax. In this on-going series, Neufeld enters homes scheduled for demolition and examines them as an archive. In Before Demolition: Tides, she created an installation in a Cheticamp fisherman’s home, where she responded to the evidence of a life lived. 

Before Demolition is just as much about the histories of the land as the homes built on it, and this begins with Indigenous peoples. 

“That’s always forefront in my mind: whose land was this before we built a yard and a fence and a house?” 

As Vancouver and Cheticamp are part of Turtle Island, they are situated on unceded and unsurrendered Indigenous territories—Vancouver is Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territory, and Cheticamp is part of Mi’kma’ki, home of the Mi’kmaq. 

In Before Demolition: Tides the connection to the land centres itself in the history of the home. She describes its provenance only in its broadest strokes: it had been a home for fishermen for most of its life, as well as storage for nets and other fishing gear. More recently, the house had suffered a fire to its second floor, which condemned it. In contrast, she describes the homeowners’ relationship to the land in much more detail. 

“You could really feel the cold. Not just the climatic cold, but the coldness of being out on a fishing boat in the wind and the rain and pulling up fish from icy waters,” says Neufeld. “There’s something really tough and hardy about the feel I got there. It felt very wholesome in a way.”

Despite the significance of the land to Neufeld’s work, her limited time in the home forced her to plan the installation in advance. Being separated from Cheticamp by more than 4500 kilometers was something she struggled with logistically. 

“I spent a lot of time on Google Maps, just wandering around the area on street view.” In her research, she was struck by the lack of green. Sitting on the edge of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the winds—les suêtes—have stripped the land of its vegetation. The house lacked any kind of yard. 

“It’s basically sitting in a parking lot for the wharf. The land of the house is really the wharf and the water,” she says.

Previously, Neufeld has approached her installations either by cutting away parts of the home, often sections of the walls or floor, or by adding to it, typically bringing in natural elements, such as plants. In Cheticamp, Neufeld combines the two processes, as she cut away parts of the exterior wall facing the ocean, and brought in what she could of the natural world surrounding it. 

The stencil prepared in Vancouver is a graph, mapping the moon phases, represented by a series of long plateaus, against the tide chart, a series of dramatic peaks and valleys. It visualizes the relationship between the two; the differences between high and low tides lessening as the moon shrinks in size. Neufeld cuts away the wall in the negative space between these lines, creating an uninterrupted sightline between the interior of the house to the exterior, which is the ocean. 

“That’s what was different about this project from the others: it is from the inside looking out, instead from the inside looking in at itself.”

Similar to Neufeld’s previous works in the series, Before Demolition: Tides comments on humanity’s exploitative relationship with natural resources and “how we only seem to live where we can extract.” 

Cape Breton is currently dealing with the repercussions of such a relationship, as over-fishing has crippled the industry, leading, in part, to the current out-migration and downturn in the housing market and economy generally.

Though left vacant by other means, the Cheticamp fishing shack can be read as a symbol for the danger of depleting these resources, a warning of the end result of our destructive way of life. Ultimately, Before Demolition: Tides returns to having respect for our relationships with the land and water. 

“I am really thinking about what it means to be a colonizer here: how the land was used by the First Peoples, how different it is now, and how we can honor them in a much better way.”

Indigenous art challenges and overthrows colonial expectations. It combats shame. It pushes beyond prejudice, shimmers with resilience, and counteracts art history’s Eurocentric mythology.

First Nations Cree artist and curator, Kent Monkman’s exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience responds to the Canada 150 celebrations through the subversive lens of his gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.

Monkman frames the exhibition akin to Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice through narrator Miss Chief, whose voice guides viewers through didactic panels, and is equally part trickster, part truth-teller. Miss Chief is cocky, coy, and brilliant in her re-telling of Canada’s colonial history. You can’t help but want to have a cocktail with her, kick out Trudeau, and give her the title of Prime Minister.

In this queer re-mapping of Canadian art via the lens of his drag alter-ego, Monkman, both as curator and artist, critiques and Indigenizes the last 150 years of genocide via Miss Chief, my new favourite badass sassy narrator. Monkman’s masterwork addresses the dark and challenging aspects of Canada’s history.

Through positioning his own paintings, sculptures, and drawings in relationship to artifacts and artworks borrowed from national museums and private collections, Miss Chief time-travels and re-stories Canada’s history, which begins in present day, and circles back to Confederation.

Monkman’s paintings depict images of police and priests taking Indigenous youth from their parents, the signing of the Treaties, the horrifying realities of Residential Schools, and through his fabulous alter ego continuously combats homophobia. Miss Chief subverts the heteronormative/patriarchal gaze as she speaks to two-spirited sexuality, and two-spirited people, a third gender that’s always existed in Indigenous nations.

The touring exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience asks viewers to acknowledge the experience of Indigenous peoples, and re-frame the fundamental mythology of Canada’s history. Monkman’s art challenges a national narrative, and takes viewers to harrowing places as the work reflects on the effects of colonization in Indigenous communities, and addresses the ongoing effects of intergenerational trauma.

His “Urban Rez,” series looks at how Indigenous women are preyed upon, violated and murdered in a reflection on the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls through the Cubist female nude. Monkman aims to bring attention to this violence, and depicts the tensions of Indigenous spirituality in an urban environment, and the Christianity that has institutionalized Indigenous people.

In the exhibition’s eloquently written and stylized brochure, Monkman’s introduction speaks to how he didn’t see the Indigenous experience of the last nineteenth century represented in the canon. He wondered: could his paintings reach across a hundred-and-fifty years to convey the colonial history of Indigenous people? Through the lens of Miss Chief’s “cunning use of runny mascara,” who artfully embodies the past, present and future, and his own interest in art history, Monkman has developed his own visual language. He confronts “the devastation of colonialism while celebrating the plural sexualities present in pre-contact Indigenous North America.”

Monkman’s mission is to “authorize Indigenous experience in the canon of art history that has heretofore erased us from view.” At the core of his work is an unabashed ability to visually depict trauma—violence, poverty, illness, the `60s scoop, the reserve system, residential schools, and ongoing racism—with heart, honesty, and intellectual zeal.
Yet, he doesn’t leave Indigenous people in the trauma, his work and Miss Chief illustrates a larger arc of survival, and power. He continues to assure viewers, “The fact that Indigenous people continue to survive all of this is a testament to our resiliency and strength.” Miss Chief’s ability to see the past, present, and future dismantles the Euro-centric idealism, and revises the canon.

As animals are central to Indigenous understandings, spirituality, and Traditional Knowledge systems, Monkman uses images of the bear and the beaver as the fur trade’s currency and emblem of colonial Canada. Christianized beavers pray to the heavens on the cover of the exhibition’s bible-esque brochure, making me wish every dodgy motel and hotel room was stocked with his text.

At the heart of his exhibition is the resiliency of Indigenous peoples, and the artist dedicates the exhibition to his grandmother Elizabeth Monkman, who “was shamed into silence in the face of extreme prejudice.”

Carrie Allison’s work deals with identity, as well as ideas of allyship, kinship, and hosting. An artist of Cree, Metis, and European descent who embraced her Indigeneity at a later age, her approach to materials is empathetic and thoughtful, working in large and often collaborative beading projects. Her work traces lines—fingers over pages, veins across skin, rivers across landscapes, while looking to the future of cultural institutions and the laws that govern them.

As part of her MFA thesis work, Allison considered waterways that were important to her maternal lineage, and beaded the Heart and Fraser Rivers (in Alberta and B.C., respectively). Wanting to make a similar gesture to the place she has called home for the past seven years, Allison turned her attention to the Shubenacadie River. She invited collaborators of all skill levels to bead a portion of the River in an attempt to build community and draw attention to the work of Indigenous water protectors who are on the front lines fighting the Alton Gas development—underground gas storage units that Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies are opposing, due to the development’s plan to dump salt brine into the Shubenacadie River.

MOLLIE CRONIN interviews CARRIE ALLISON in anticipation of her latest body of research and work with Eyelevel Gallery the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History in Halifax, NS.

MOLLIE: I remember talking with Eyelevel director Julia McMillan back in the spring and when she told me about your work, she kept using the word “transplant,” relating to how you were thinking about plants (invasive species in particular) and sort of seeing yourself reflected in that idea.

CARRIE: I love plants, I think they’re amazing … Identity has always been in my practice, but it’s always been a hard thing for me to understand. When you’re trying to reclaim a connection to Indigeneity … it was hard for me to do, I didn’t grow up in an Indigenous community—my grandmother wouldn’t acknowledge that she was Indigenous and that was mostly because of residential school guilt, so I feel like that was passed down to me. It took me a really long time to be okay with saying: “I’m an Indigenous person, as well as mixed-race” (which is something that I identify more with). Plants were the first way I understood that. It made more sense to think about colonialism though plants, how the landscape has been altered, and that moved [my work] to more political and social practice in general.

I looked at a lot of indigenous plants and invasive species, which I’m still very fascinated by because they’re so pervasive. With projects like this I really just see myself as trying to navigate [these ideas] but also build connections, kin and work within this idea of allyship. I understand that I am a guest here, that I am being hosted by the Mi’kmaq people.

MOLLIE: I think there’s a lot of material there, in terms of thinking about colonialism through plants: landscape, agriculture, even gardening and growing grass…

CARRIE: Grass is so crazy! It’s like a sign of royalty—the fact that we still have it in our lives is very weird!

MOLLIE: Our “natural” spaces in Halifax are so Victorian still—from the park to the public gardens, it’s very British.

CARRIE: Very British. You can’t sit on the grass.

MOLLIE: I think that your work with museums right now is a similar sort of teasing out a very rigid way of moving through a space. Museums operate with these same restraints—very precious, very white glove, very don’t sit on the grass.

CARRIE: Totally. A lot of Indigenous knowledge is based within the land, but colonial knowledge is based in these boxes. These “discoveries.” Whereas a landscape can function as an archive in and of itself.

MOLLIE: A living archive.

CARRIE: Yeah, it’s just a matter of knowing how to read it. [Archives and museums] are gatekeepers. I’m fascinated by them—museums and libraries—I’ve always loved searching for things. They can hold so much power. Libraries, archives, churches—they just hold everything there. And [these are the spaces] where we were “legitimized” as people: marriage, birth, etc. I always have a hard time navigating these two worlds. I grew up in a world of museums and libraries; everyone grows up in institutions in some way, these colonial parameters that you have to navigate as a citizen. Indigenous ways of being don’t really function within those constraints. They’re more fluid—a more fluid way of being. 

Carl Stewart, “Halifax diptych (Green Street),” 2010. Found fabric, jade, beads. Photo: Lawrence Cook

For many Haligonians living in a city full of students and other transient young people at a time of widespread bedbug fear, the sight of used mattresses may arouse disgust or serve as a reminder it’s end-of-the-school-year time again. For Carl Stewart, each mattress isn’t merely bedding, but a source of fabrics, often strange and wonderful. The Ottawa textile artist’s work has frequently focused on queer identity, but in his Halifax show at Eyelevel Gallery of two-dimensional wall hangings and quilts made from fabrics salvaged off curbside mattresses, fragments (May 13-June 16, 2011), he looks at what happens to the bedding we sleep on after we discard it.

Born in PEI, Stewart started his post secondary studies at the University of Prince Edward Island before falling in with the weaving department at Charlottetown’s Holland College School of Visual Arts. After taking a tour, Stewart immediately picked up an application and dropped out of university. “Best decision I ever made,” Stewart says. He had never done “anything like” weaving prior to starting the program. The program largely focused on what Stewart calls “production weaving,” which was targeted at the tourism industry and involved making place mats and tablecloths. Stewart quickly found himself focused on “art weaving,” working on figurative pieces with male nudes.

Moving to Ottawa after college, he continued weaving and exhibiting his work. In the late 1990s, he began combing the internet for images of gay porn, creating “erotic tapestries” and large-scale work that could rival the Bayeux Tapestry — Stewart’s 1996 work, called “Nice Shoes, Faggot,” was an 80-foot tapestry with video made “in reaction to and in commemoration of” a young waiter at Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier, who a group of teenagers chased, robbed and beat in the park behind the hotel, as he left work to walk to his home in Hull.

The mattress series took root in 1996, as Stewart noticed the discarded mattresses and box springs lining the streets on his walk to work. As a textile artist—a broke one, with little money for materials—he was struck by the variety in coverings on the mattresses.

“I was really surprised by how beautiful some of the fabrics were, these satins and brocades and really wacky prints,” he says. He started clipping small swatches that eventually became larger until “I was literally skinning whole mattresses.”

He first presented the work in 1998, when he was still stitching together small bits of mattress. Stewart’s pieces have grown since then — the bulk of the work in the eyelevel show is 18”x18” fabric samples, decorated with rhinestones, beads, embroidering and paint. Other pieces are more collage like quilts of mattress swatches.

For his Halifax show, Stewart traveled to the city months before the exhibition to collect mattress samples and used fabrics from both Halifax and Ottawa in the show. He did the same for a 2005 Toronto show and also clipped labels from mattresses on a London visit. “I see this as this sort of unwitting collaboration between the people in Ottawa and the people in Halifax, where the fabrics come together,” he says.

Stewart chooses mattresses “for their patterns, for their stains, sometimes for where they are.” He’s interested in the stories behind fabrics from certain places, often comparing those from rooming houses with those from affluent neighbourhoods.

“We have this whole idea of what is clean and what’s not,” he says. He notices patterns within the mattress styles, different eras, the abundance of low-end mattress designs and the variations on the term “chiro” in mattress brand names. In one of his favourites, a bright pink pattern, a couple in eighteenth century attire court in a garden and a rhinestone-eyed owl watches over them. “It’s this total eighteenth-century toile, but it’s on a mattress that was made in the ’60s. I just find it really kooky.” Others have garish vinyl-coated 1960s flower patterns, rocket ships and old-fashioned illustration recalling nineteenth century catalogues.

Asked about connections between the series and his other work, Stewart says the cue is in the show’s title, fragments—the bits and pieces that create a narrative. “It’s increasingly a common thread in all my work,” he says. “All we know is the address (and the objects)—we don’t know anything about the people.” Or, as he puts it more succinctly, “Who else but a fag is gonna sew on stinky old mattress fabric?”

Stewart doesn’t clean his fabric samples and sometimes picks pieces especially for the stains, but he started putting samples in the freezer in the past few years out of concern over bedbugs, and he tries to be vigilant about what he picks up. Though he began the project for the fabric, Stewart reads deeper into the themes the mattresses bring up.

“There’s all kinds of things that come into play. There’s class, there’s the socioeconomic thing … there’s the relationship to the body,” he says. “You see something lying there, and if you see someone taking it away, I think a lot of people get this weird little shiver down their spines, like, ugh, I could never sleep on that … I think that people have a really visceral reaction to the work sometimes.”

Visual Arts News is happy to announce the Spring 2014 artist page competition winner, Sarah Burwash.

Sarah Burwash grew up Rossland, a small mountain town in British Columbia, Canada, and currently bases herself in Nova Scotia, working full time as an artist and freelance illustrator. Burwash describes her practice as one that “encompasses a lifestyle that approaches all things with intention, creativity and a pioneer spirit.”

Below: Sarah Burwash, Mother of Life, ink drawing on paper, 91 x 91 cm, 2013. Work to be featured in the Spring 2014 issue of Visual Arts News.

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One day, in the spring of 1995 in some innocuous field in rural Prince Edward Island, David Askevold—already established as “one of the world’s most important contributors to the development and pedagogy of conceptual art”— was retracing his steps, searching for his glasses.

Terry Graff, then curator of contemporary art at Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, had grown accustomed to such incidents. The pair had been driving around the Island, snapping photographs for what would become Askevold’s exhibition Cultural Geographies. 

Foster, Chris. 1977 GMC. Various materials. 2012. Courtesy of the artist

Halifax-based artist Chris Foster’s Frontiers in Real Estate explores contradictory themes of civilization—its fear stories, misguided good intentions and self-indulgent sincerities. Foster’s dark humour is never moral, at least not overtly. Composed of serigraphs, collage and small sculpture, his work considers the history of consumption, both visual and commercial, with a tongue-in-cheek objectivity. “I’m interested in engaging a broad audience, despite their politics,” explains Foster during our phone conversation. “My work is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. At first it is very accessible, but underneath it is very critical of culture. People don’t like to be jabbed in the eyes right away; everything needs to be veiled.”

Three works begin the series of serigraphs, depicting communities of wooden structures. There are no figures, and therefore the emphasis is on the buildings and their allusion to human resourcefulness. Can Do (2011) is reminiscent of the illustrations of the sites of early European explorers, such as Samuel de Champlain’s Habitation at Port Royal (1604). In Stay Free (2011), a vehicle is dismantled and incorporated into the construction. A black flag flies; the place has no allegiances. In Abandon Ship (2012), Foster has depicted a Noah’s ark-type structure surrounded by burnt forest, flying an upside-down Canadian flag. Later serigraphs include Com Tower (2012), Com Tower #2 (2012) and Com Tower #3 (2012), in which communication towers have been transformed into high rise wooden houses. These are hermit dwellings with a million dollar view.

A second body of work is composed of small models of wooden homes built on the backs of motor vehicles, with names like 1977 GMC ‘Wrecker’; 1977 Chevy Van; 2 n’1 JEEP CJ-7; and Suzuki ST30 ‘Post Car.’ Foster was inspired by the 1979 publication Rolling Homes, which surveys mobile homes converted from pickup trucks, school buses and big rigs. These individually crafted houses on wheels combined the spirit of the old-timey covered wagon and the mobility of contemporary motor vehicles, forming an original artistic and cultural movement based in a do-it-yourself tradition that continues today.

History is punctuated with waves of escapism, particularly in response to major socio-economic shifts. The Industrial Revolution brought mass tourism, as the newly formed middle class left the city for excursions in the countryside. Modern mobile culture came to fore with the Great Depression, and continues to be a preferred method of escape for various subcultures. It seems to reappear with every generation, arriving in response to the horrors of war, of mass crass commercialism and fears about pollution. Now, when the decline of the Western empire seems really quite tangible, it only makes sense that some should wish to pick up and drop out. Foster agrees, with a caveat: “There’s something about e time that we’re living in, with its economic pressures, that makes escape seem really romantic.” The idea of retreating into the natural world is seductive for Canadians still, “despite the fact that we’re poisoning nature and have an increasingly abstract notion of nature. It’s all rooted in fantasy.”

The third series features black and white collages, cut from the pages of a publication by Foster titled New Civilizations. Using a mixture of photos taken largely from National Geographic magazines, Foster combines old and new imagery to create improbable landscapes. Ancient civilizations and modern towers are unabashedly paired, as are piles of tires and decaying towers. One image shows a cathedral mostly buried in the sea, as two amused but relaxed individuals stand on the beach to admire it. Kate Walchuk aptly describes the tone of this series in her intro for New Civilizations: “Relics from these dead civilizations are contemplated with mere sentimentality; they function as kitsch destinations for world travelers and history buffs.

Each collage only becomes strange after a good hard look; it is often difficult to see evidence of scissors. But the cutting and pasting is there and speaks to Foster’s honesty of process and material. The decision could also be considered a nod to 19th century composite tourist imagery, prevalent in Europe and North America— photographers and postcard producers, confined by available technology, would often cut and paste objects into scenes. Their emphasis was not on being factual, but to formulate an arguably “true” representation of a visitor’s experience. Foster’s collages have the same intentions; verity is not important here, but rather the slow shock of juxtaposition that we encounter when viewing the image, and with that, a message that rings true.

Much like the tourist imagery to which he alludes, Foster has made his work readily available for purchase by the public, and has constructed each piece so that it can be efficiently transported home. “Maybe if this was a different time, I’d be working in large sculpture or paintings, but living and working as an artist in Canada is not viable in that way. Paper-based work and small sculpture are part of a creative process that I can ship. It can seek out audiences in different places.” The exhibition will continue to Fredericton, New Brunswick, and Dawson City, Yukon. It will develop and change for each venue.

As dystopic as Foster’s message may be, it comes with a wink. His “frontier” is a concept, a psychological state of change and possibility. For him, it is in small gestures of rebellion that change can be effected.

In September 2012, Eyelevel Gallery, an artist-run centre in North End Halifax, was more than simply a venue to take in contemporary art. It transformed into the headquarters of the World Portable Gallery Convention, complete with a stately desk in the main space, a row of wristwatch faces on the wall displaying international time zones, a red light blinking insistently on an answering machine and refreshments compliments of global social networks served from the in-house Feral Trade Café. While development was officially underway on the downtown Nova Centre, a mammoth complex featuring a $164-million convention centre, convening of a different kind was being explored a kilometre away. For a month, Eyelevel served as a hub for a collection of portable galleries from around the world, each hosting their own unique exhibit. Spaces like Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s Nanomuseum, consisting of twin 2×3” picture frames, and Judy Freya Sibayan’s Museum of Mental Objects, where the artist’s memory holds the work, sought to crack open the ways we experience art.

Artists have always sought alternative exhibition spaces outside the white cube: think Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, a suitcase that held miniature versions of his oeuvre. WPGC co-curators Michael McCormack and Michael Eddy, considering the current discourse surrounding the much-debated Nova Centre and the value of networking, had the idea to turn Eyelevel “into this larger than life kind of space,” McCormack says. Throughout the month, art was available “by chance or appointment,” meaning the public could stumble upon an exhibit at a local picnic or softball game, or call up the Eyelevel to receive a special delivery. Galleries were dispatched by Fixed Cog Hero, Mathieu Arsenault’s “existential bicycle courier” service, so that art could appear on doorsteps as easily as a box of garlic fingers.

Hannah Jickling’s Coat of Charms is one example of a gallery that travels well. Jickling, who created an online archive of profiles of mobile spaces for Vancouver’s Or Gallery in 2005, curates the inside of a thrift store trench coat. For the WPGC, Jickling exhibited—or flashed—a set of kaleidoscopes by Portland-based collective F* Mtn. “With this iteration of the Coat of Charms, I was really interested in the gesture of flashing with the coat, that exhibitionism somehow provides grounds for an exhibition,” Jickling says. “So when I was wearing it, I got into this gesture and was thinking, what if art-viewing can become this illicit surprise that is non-consensual?” Jickling emphasizes the importance of non-institutional spaces to queer, feminist artists, linking this importance to her role as a “pervert” startling her viewers. “We owe a lot to perverts!” Jickling says. “When we think about portable galleries and their potential, we have to remember the true innovators, the people who see things from the margins and make their own culture all the time.”

McCormack says that one of the things he’s most drawn to in portable galleries is “that one on one, person to person interaction.” Nowhere is this more evident than in Gordon B. Isnor’s Alopecia Gallery, installed on the bald patches in his beard area (“alopecia” means hair loss). Isnor admits that having a gallery on your face can be weird. “I’m sort of socially awkward,” he says. “If I go to parties or social events, my general inclination is to leave very quickly.” So, it’s usually up to others to approach him, but as he reflects, “if (the viewer) does feel shy, they can’t partake at all.” For the WPGC, Isnor exhibited a very quiet audio piece by Duke & Battersby that not only encouraged, but required, a social exchange, as listeners had to almost place their ears directly on his cheek.

For two of the galleries participating in the WPGC, the intimacy lies in the fact that they exist (or existed) in their curators’ homes. 161 Gallon Gallery is a space of diminutive volume in the residence of artists Daniel Joyce and Miriam Moren, while Paul Hammond and Francesca Tallone ran Gallery Deluxe Gallery in their apartment attic from 2005-2007. Hammond and Tallone never conceived of their gallery as mobile until they were invited to resurrect it at the WPGC. “A huge part of the gallery was the sort of ‘transportation’ that occurred when you went up the ladder into what looked like an attic storage space, from a residential kitchen, and suddenly found yourself in another world,” Hammond says. To recreate this experience, the artist being installed, Chris Foster, was also part of the reconstruction, helping to build a wooden box on stilts so that viewers could enter the gallery from below, peeking up to see yet another replica: a miniature motor home toting a gallery.

An element of tongue in cheek goes hand in hand with the unconventional experience of mobile galleries. That blinking red light, for example, was part of the P.R. Rankin Gallery, managed by McCormack and Convention coordinator Elizabeth Johnson, a site for the public to leave prank messages. McCormack explains that, for many of these pieces, “there’s sort of a joke to it, but it’s also serious at the same time.” Often, artists are enjoying the novelty but also being resourceful, reacting to the lack of opportunities, for example, for emerging artists to show their work.

The spirit of portable galleries, Jickling says, “challenges the role of ‘the expert’ and re-invents the terms and conditions under which art is produced and received.”

Installation view of Rita McKeough’s performance project Alternator, MASS MoCA, North Adams, Mass., May 25-27, 2012.
Photo: Kay Burns

Of the 62 Canadian artists featured in MASS MoCA’s extensive Oh Canada exhibition in North Adams, Massachusetts, several allude to the effect of dislocation and relocation in their artwork. The exhibition is the culmination of five years of research and planning by MASS MoCA curator Denise Markonish, who spent three years travelling to almost every Canadian province and territory to undertake 400 studio visits, selecting over 100 works for exhibition. With this Canadian show, in a place that is elsewhere, we find an exhibition rife with implications of displacement, rooted perhaps in some kind of quest for belonging.

This exhibition prompted me to question what defines an Atlantic Canada artist. Is it someone who is born here, lives here now, has spent a significant amount of time here or has been educated here? This exhibition has instigated a number of articles from various regions laying claim (past or present) to a certain percentage of artists from the show.¹ What this perhaps indicates, is that Canadian artists are a nomadic bunch of people who move for teaching gigs, for education, for residencies and exhibitions, all of which have an impact on the evolution of their work and on the location that they call home. The artists of Canada belong to a relatively small community, frequently and happily following erratic migratory patterns.

Artist Graeme Patterson and his multimedia installation The Mountain, 2012. 20ft x 10ft x 8ft. Photo: Kay burns

Andrea Mortson, who has lived in Sackville for 15 years, reflects on her paintings: “The landscapes are based on real places that I feel a strong connection to. I used to move around a lot, and my paintings were always influenced by places I’d been … My practice is very much inspired by where I am right now.”² While Mortson’s work frequently includes imagery of the landscape that surrounds her, there is also the sense in the work that it is an imagined place, something derived from memory and things less tangible than specific sites—an amalgamation of lived place and quixotic place. Her works in this exhibition also incorporate the presence of the figure, something she steered away from for an extended period of time. The painting New Hope for Memories that Can’t Waitfor example, includes images of people, based on friends of hers in Sackville. It is this presence of the figures that helps situate remembered place as an element of physical place.

Halifax-based artist, Kim Morgan’s Range Light, Borden-Carleton, PEI brings a bit of PEI’s Borden-Carleton community to North Adams. The work is a full-scale interior and exterior latex cast of the decommissioned lighthouse that it’s named for. Morgan began casting architectural forms in 2001 during her graduate studies in Saskatchewan. “Growing up on the Saskatchewan Prairies, I was surrounded by endless space. My landmarks were wooden grain elevators, and they too have been torn down,” recalls Morgan. “For me it was an easy shift from abandoned grain elevators to the decommissioning of the lighthouses in my new home in the Maritimes.”³

Graeme Patterson’s animation/sculptural project The Mountain, stems from a number of influences including a fascination with the idea of a man-made mountain. Patterson currently resides in Sackville, but is originally from Saskatchewan and has lived in the Maritimes for a combined total of about ten years. In part, landmarks he knows from Saskatchewan have informed his project, such as a man-made ski hill known as Mount Blackstrap. Patterson’s installation is part of a larger body of work that deals with ideas pertaining to male friendship. The Mountain is a kind of self-portrait, inspired by his memories of his very first friend; the house structures in the installation represent his childhood home and the home of his friend, which are joined by tunnels to the Mountain. Within the mountain is a kind of oversized playroom (in miniature)—a ‘dream studio’ that incorporates video animations and multiple structures, alluding to a notion of play that is associated with both childhood fun and creative practice.

Nova Scotia-born artist Rita McKeough’s outdoor performance project at MASS MoCA, Alternator, shows influences from her 2007 move to Calgary to undertake a teaching position at Alberta College of Art and Design. The ubiquitous presence of oil pumps all over Alberta, the prevalent issues regarding the finite quantity of oil and the environmental implications of its extraction were all part of the place McKeough encountered. Her tongue-in-cheek performance work consists of an assembly of miniature oil pumps placed on small oil leaks and stains in parking lots in an attempt to extract the residue, with pipes running from the pumps to a 45 gallon drum as the collection vessel. These pumps are set in motion by electricity generated from a steering wheel that McKeough (or audience participant) must continually turn to work the pumps; the irony being that unless you are driving you cannot pump the oil needed to power the car.

Installation view of Kim Morgan’s Range Light, Borden-Carleton, PEI (2010), latex with wood framing and rope rigging,
18 metres long, MASS MoCA, North Adams, Mass.,
May 25, 2012-April 1, 2013.
Photo: Kay burns

Eryn Foster’s MASS MoCA performative installation project, A Gift of Cultured Culture involved her collecting wild yeasts from around the town of North Adams to develop sourdough starter. Foster (and assistants) built an outdoor brick oven to cook the bread in, serving tasty samples to countless guests during the opening festivities. Born and raised in Ontario, Foster spent ten years in Halifax, and plans to return to Atlantic Canada in August 2012, after having spent the past two years in Dawson City, Yukon. While using sourdough is a relatively common approach to bread making, there is an exceptionally strong connection between sourdough and the patterns of settlers and explorers who ventured north. In the early gold rush days, most miners carried a pouch of sourdough in their supplies because of its ability to withstand cold temperatures. The term sourdough has even worked its way into local vernacular, describing a person who is a permanent resident of the Yukon or who has lived there during all four seasons. The local affinity for sourdough inspired Yukon poet Robert Service to create a book of poems, Songs of a Sourdough, and there is a long-running annual winter festival in Whitehorse, the Sourdough Rendezvous.

Would many of the artworks in this exhibition have been made if it were not for the migration patterns of artists, gathering influences (like the collection of wild yeasts) from the ambience of the places in which they have lived? The MASS MoCA exhibition was not organized in a geographical manner within the gallery. But the catalog has been sectioned geographically, even though the correlation between artist and place of belonging is often quite ambiguous. The migration patterns and transience of artists, however, leads to a diverse interpretation of the experience of place in the elastic and undulating topography of Canadian art.

Notes:
1) For example: Sky Goodden, Concordia Progeny Produce One Quarter of MASS MoCA’s “Oh Canada,” http://ca.artinfo.com/news/story/804822/concordia-progeny-produce-one-quarter-of-mass-mocas-oh-canada; Mike Landry, “Sackville a meeting place for contemporary artists,” Telegraph-Journal, May 25, 2012; “Oh Canada, Oh NSCAD,” NSCAD University, April 3, 2012, http://nscad.ca/en/home/abouttheuniversity/ news/MASS MoCA-040312.aspx
2) MASS MoCA, Oh, Canada catalog, (scheduled for release mid July 2012), 295.
3) ibid, p 318