At Treaty Space Gallery, The Best of Both Worlds: 50 Years of Art by Leonard Paul gathers work from across a long career and lets it speak with a quiet confidence. Rivers churn through rock. Birds cling to the rough sides of trees. A wolf looks straight out from the frame. Moving through the gallery, you begin to notice the steady hand behind it all. Paul returns again and again to the living world around him, studying it closely and translating what he sees with patience.

Realism has always been central to Paul’s practice. While many conversations about Indigenous art have focused on symbolism or graphic traditions, Paul followed a different instinct. He was drawn to careful observation and to the painters who worked in that tradition. The works in this exhibition reflect that choice. They show an artist who trusts what he sees and who has spent decades learning how to render it faithfully.

When we sat down to talk about the exhibition, Paul reflected on what it felt like to begin exhibiting in the 1970s. Indigenous artists were rarely visible in the Canadian art world then, particularly in Atlantic Canada. Paul remembers feeling largely on his own at the time, guided mostly by his own ability and curiosity. Over the course of our conversation, he spoke candidly about those early years, about debates around authenticity in Indigenous art, and about the challenge of sustaining a creative life across five decades.

When you began exhibiting in the 1970s, how were Indigenous artists positioned within the Canadian art world? How visible were you?

Not very visible. Not very visible at all. When I came in, I felt like I was all by myself. And it really hasn’t changed much. 

Did that make you feel lonely? Or did you feel unique?

I felt unique. Yes, I felt unique.

Without sounding conceited, I felt I was blessed with a very extraordinary ability to paint, and that ability spoke for me. It opened doors for me.

Over the decades, have you seen any shifts in how institutions approach Indigenous art?

It was very provincial, if they did approach it at all. And that provincialism tended to centre Ontario or the West, not Newfoundland or Prince Edward Island or places like that. In one way we were secondary.

But thank goodness that was the start. We had Norval Morrisseau. We had Bill Reid from out West. People started to take notice.

I felt a little strange in some ways, because I wasn’t painting like they did. In those days I was painting realism. I was more comfortable with people like Alex Colville. I knew him as a good friend. I also knew Ken Danby. I was in that circle with them. I would be on the phone talking to James Lansdowne, the great bird painter. I just wanted to know more. He was so helpful. I never met him, but we had long phone conversations.

So in a way, that kept me at a distance from what people thought of as First Nations art.

There’s often discussion around “authenticity” in Indigenous art. Has that word felt useful or limiting to you?

Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we were asking, “What makes Native art? Who makes Native art? Do the artists have to be First Nations?” The answer we came to was yes.

I sat on the national art board for eleven years: SCANA, the Society of Canadian Artists of Native Ancestry. We became aware that a lot of people were coming in and identifying as Métis or Inuit when they were not. It became a kind of hodgepodge, and that got in the way.

Through SCANA, we were trying to establish criteria to solidify First Nations creativity, grounded in Native ancestry. We were trying to protect it.

What has been the most difficult aspect of sustaining a creative practice? Has that struggle changed over time?

Today I see emerging artists coming out and saying, yes, we are artists, and we’re not part of white society. We have our own identities, our own methodologies to create these wonderful designs. They’re part of our culture.

The question has always been what’s the criteria? And we’re still going through that today. We’re still trying to find ways to oust the fakes and to concentrate on people who are First Nations and haven’t yet had a chance.

We have more venues now, which is good. International venues too. I’ve shown in France and Germany on behalf of First Nations movements. That was good.

But it was a quagmire in those days. Terrible.

I’ll give you an example. Not too long ago, we went into a museum in Sherbrooke. There was a woman—white—talking to a group of people about her paintings in a Native pavilion. We overheard someone ask if she was Native. She said no.

Her husband had been a legitimate First Nations artist. He passed away. She picked up the paintbrush and painted like him and was selling the work as Native art.

I told the curator, “You’re misleading people. She’s not First Nations.” The curator said, “Her husband was. That’s good enough for us.”

That’s the kind of thing we had to deal with.

Have you ever struggled with creative blocks? What’s the most difficult part of creating a piece for you?

I was very lucky. I opened doors, but I never went into all the rooms.

By that I mean I didn’t go into symbolic, geometric Native design. I was comfortable in realism. You saw my powwow dancers. They’re realism, but they’re Native subjects. That was good enough for me.

I’ve always been honest. I would tell people, I don’t paint symbols. I don’t paint geometric forms. That’s not my path. And people accepted that because I was up front from the beginning.

When I go into First Nations communities, I tell them, if you have a vision in your mind of what a Native artist looks like, I may not fit it.

I’m influenced by cause and effect. You are what you eat. You are where you grow up. I was open-minded to the art I loved…and that was realism.

Does institutional recognition change how you understand your own work?

Yes. It can. You can beat yourself up if you don’t step back and look at what you’ve done. Sometimes you have to take a few steps back and say, look at this. That’s important.

After fifty years of art-making, is there anything unresolved? Anything you haven’t tried yet?

The fifty years came to me in a funny way. My daughter turns fifty this June. I realized: I’ve reached my jubilee. Fifty long years.

There is one thing that hurts me a bit. When I sell a painting and it’s hanging on someone’s wall, I’ll never see it again. That’s the part that’s hard.

What I would like to do now is enter the world of commercial art, writing books and illustrating them. Mass-producing my originals through printmaking. I would love to write children’s books and illustrate them, especially Mi’kmaw stories. I’ve never tried it yet.

People ask me when I was happiest in my career. I tell them I was about fourteen years old. That was the happiest time. I would like to reach that happiness again.

I think about drawing cartoons, doing animation, illustrating children’s storybooks. I think that will bring me back to that fourteen-year-old.

I haven’t done it yet. But I want to.

Rooted in the forests of Cap Rouge, Donica Larade’s art practice highlights native flora and fauna and encourages conversations around conservation, ecology action, and queer experience. Donica’s ability to capture fleeting moments in nature’s moments of kismet is unique. Whether they’re exploring a fresh flush of edible maritime mushrooms, studying the anatomy of a Highland fairy, or embedding sea rocket and a gannet wing into a cyanotype quilt, her attention feels exact and alive. Her unique ability to articulate a moment shines through.

Larade comes from an Acadian family displaced in the Expulsion, and the stories of that time live on in her art and profound relationship to the Cape Breton Highlands. Her mediums shift with the seasons, but an environmental throughline ties the work together.

In the wild, you’ll find Donica carrying a large tote bag full of various art supplies: some gouache, a well-worn watercolour palette, acrylic paint markers, or even cyanotype chemicals—she’s primed to create at a moment’s notice. A self-proclaimed jack-of-all-trades, their practice moves fluidly across materials, often drawing on second-hand finds and objects from the natural world. Donica’s work reminds us that realism doesn’t have to omit mysticism and storytelling.

Kyra Lambert: Tell me a little about your arts practice as currently is and where you tend to draw influence from.

Donica Larade: My process of creating has always been chaotic and unpredictable. Everything in your life has the ability to inspire art, especially the unexpected or mundane. Some concepts creep up and grow slowly over time, and some hit me like a freight train. I’ll be watching a movie or in the grocery store and frantically scribbling something down in my notes app. Sketchbooks then help me flesh ideas out and explore what medium to communicate them with. Themes I’ve been exploring recently involve mythology, philosophy, symbolism, death and natural cycles, local plants and animals, social justice movements, and generally the whimsy of the natural world. 

KL: How does your Chéticamp home base influence your arts perspective and practice? 

DL: Cape Breton is one of the only places I know where being an artist is taken seriously as a career path. Growing up spending time in Chéticamp, I was influenced by theatre productions, musicals, dances, and festivals that showed me art was culturally essential. As a kid, I walked door to door selling my drawings because I felt confident people around me valued art. A mix of wonderful landscapes, island artists, seriously funny people, and a rich culture that celebrates expression has been a winning formula for me.

KL: What pieces of folklore from Cape Breton do you hold close? 

DL: The fairies of Cape Breton Island are the creatures I’m most drawn to in regards to island mythology. The folklore I’ve most heavily focused on in my previous work has explored visual symbolism and tales associated with fairies. Something that compels me most about fairy lore is their presence throughout various communities found on Cape Breton Island, such as the Mi’kmaq, Gaelic, and Acadian people. It’s very telling of their cultural impact and powerful abilities. 

KL: All art, yours especially, “keeps record” of species and stories around our immediate environment. What drew you to this type of art practice?

DL: I think what first drew me to this type of note taking was in part my own discovery and curiosity for the species that lived locally. Observation and pattern recognition is a part of both the scientific and artistic process. I constantly traipse around with my nose inside guidebooks or the apps eBird and iNaturalist. The realization that many people are unaware of some of the amazing species in their own backyard and have that same curiosity pushed me into this style of highlighting them in my art. Flying squirrels, purple coral mushrooms, and saw-whet owls are only some of the incredible, unique species that people might not associate with the East Coast. 

KL: You have a very special ability in connecting people to the wealth of species in their immediate environment. Do you have any stories that come to mind when you think about introducing people to local invertebrates, or mushrooms? (Connecting people to their environment can be so empowering and supports interdependence, accessibility in education through the arts.)

DL: I think it can be difficult to choose one specific memory because of the way it’s completely integrated into my life and daily activities. However, some of my most memorable experiences in scientific communication have been with children. They are the most curious, ask the best questions, and hold the most unbridled joy. In our interactions, I often find myself thinking more creatively, pushing the limits of my own understanding, and being challenged into trying to explain complex genetic theory to an eight-year-old asking about butterflies. It’s incredibly rewarding to support young people on their own journeys of understanding the world around them. 

KL: How do you interact with the wider Nova Scotia arts scene? Where is your place in it? 

DL: Coming from a non-traditional art background has in turn led to a non-traditional relationship with the Nova Scotia art community. At times, I’ve felt isolated as an artist because of my lack of formal education. It can feel difficult to make connections and obtain the right resources without the formal structure that school can offer. Thankfully, living in small artistic towns like Chéticamp, Seaforth, and Antigonish, and taking part in residencies and festivals, has been deeply healing for my imposter syndrome. These experiences, as well as making connections with other artists and mentors, have allowed me to mitigate my feelings of insecurity in my art practice and feel like an essential piece in our art world. It takes all kinds in the arts, and my unique journey and experiences created my own niche in the scene. 

KL: How does art influence ecologically minded spaces? Is there a specific conservation effort in NS you’d like to call attention to? 

DL: Traditionally, art and science have always been entwined in a way in which one was rarely found without the other. Note taking, sketching, or illustrating are an essential resource in the sciences to help convey information. Looking back at extraordinary naturalists like Maria Sibylla Merian, Ernst Haeckel, or Anna Atkins, I think the relationship between science and art was much more widely acknowledged and appreciated before the twenty-first century than it is today. For me, the beauty of illustration and its role in the sciences is to communicate difficult or interesting concepts, advocate on behalf of species and the environment, and celebrate the mysticality of nature. There are too many amazing conservation efforts to mention just one, but CPAWS, Nature Nova Scotia, and the Ecology Action Centre offer great resources for conservation work being done in your area!

In mouth them like words, Angela Henderson welcomes viewers into a space that feels quiet, careful, and a little mysterious. On view at StFX Art Gallery from February 25 to April 4, the exhibition brings together graphite drawings nestled within free-standing wooden structures that subtly shape how you move through the gallery. Her line work shifts between intention and instinct, between the clarity of design and forms that seem to rise up from somewhere harder to name. The installation feels like a living archive, one that asks you to slow your pace, come closer, and spend time with images that do not resolve all at once. In this conversation, she reflects on ambiguity, restraint, and the conditions she creates to allow something unexpected to surface.

Your title, mouth them like words, feels tactile and embodied. Where did that phrase come from?

A lot of the titles I’ve used in the past have come from poetic references—Anne Carson and Forugh Farrokhzad—but not this one.

My partner is a poet, and reading his work influences me. I think I’m inspired by the embodied quality of words on the page—language in any place, really. Lately, a lot of my work has resulted in hybrid forms that are hard to name. I was thinking about the mouth as the place where we speak language. There’s this visceral, mouth-like quality that feels close to naming but also to being unable to name.

If I were to think about a mouthful of ambiguity—how would I name it? I don’t know. That’s kind of where the title comes from.

Many of the forms feel pared down, almost elemental. What draws you to that economy of line?

My background is in design, particularly architectural and spatial design. I’m interested in material quality and structure. Often my drawing practice veers toward the maximal—more and more and more—but the structures that hold those forms feel like metaphysical devices. They’re frameworks that hold ambiguous life forms or images.

There’s a contrast there. The structures are drawings in and of themselves. I imagine them as part of a lifelong system—an ongoing design and development of these forms. They’re members of a kind of evolving structure.

Where did this body of work feel most difficult?

There’s always a lot of fastidiousness in what I do—time spent. In the drawings, especially, I’ve developed a practice that tries to create the conditions for something meditative, where the subconscious can come forward. It becomes about drawing and witnessing what emerges.

That sounds good, but often it’s frustrating. Creating those conditions isn’t always easy. It depends on mood, on the day.

I’m also a parent. There’s guilt—long periods spent alone are when that process becomes most accessible. Sometimes I feel guilty for that. Other times I feel like I’m not spending enough time with myself. It’s a difficult balance.

Do you think of these works as contemporary, or as belonging to a longer timeline of mark-making and symbolic practice?

Both. There’s something pre-verbal in the work. Through the process I described, forms emerge that are hard to name. I relate that to ancient or pre-verbal knowledge.

At the same time, practices like tarot or divination tools project a way forward. They depart from rationalist binaries—right/wrong, good/bad—that we see increasingly in society. There’s hopefulness in ambiguous or mysterious tools. They propose alternative ways of seeing and naming.

How do orientation and scale shape the viewer’s experience?

You have to look at my drawings with dedication. Often your body comes very close to the paper. The viewer is rewarded by spending time.

In this exhibition, I thought about ambulating—about circumambulation, which suggests ritual or spiritual practice. Ambulation isn’t a straight line; it’s circulatory. I also tried to insert my own body into the forms, literally, through scale—heights, widths.

I wanted to create a scaled environment that slows the viewer down and brings them close to the surface.

How does a drawing begin for you? And how do you know it’s finished?

A drawing begins as curiosity or observation. I often work with found forms. I might trace something—blind contour, physical objects, or carbon tracing. The reference point is intuitive, often coming from walking, being in nature, observing trees, leaves, insects—things outside my window.

I’ve also worked with psychoanalytic practice for about eight years. I use tools that access subconscious thought—active imagination, for example. 

I don’t use erasers. The drawing evolves. I follow what emerges.

As for finished, it’s a feeling. When there’s enough depth and complexity, I feel it’s complete.

The works hover between abstraction and something almost legible. Are you interested in that threshold?

Yes. Ambiguity is a goal in my work. I value holding multiple things at once without resolution.

I’m interested in how images unfold and contain many references. I love the work of Marcel Dzama, for example. I feel a trajectory toward identifying figures or reference points that could develop a narrative quality.

How did the installation shape the meaning of the work?

When I installed the show, I realized I had designed the wooden forms to meet and facilitate the drawings. I imagine those structures returning in future exhibitions to house new drawings—like a growing archive.

I was trying to create a quiet archive. The line work and forms reference botanical drawing—the way we archive and document plant or animal life.

Can you speak about your material choices—graphite, coloured pencil, mylar?

Many materials come from my design background. I use CAD for structural designs. The washi paper I work with is incredibly responsive to graphite—it holds it in nuanced ways. At times it feels like a dead end, but it does something specific.

In this show I experimented with watercolour paper in the central form. I’m interested in moving toward tracing papers or translucent materials—where drawing becomes more three-dimensional.

The blue pencil comes from architectural construction lines. When plotted, those lines disappear. They’re subtle construction marks.

There’s quietness in the exhibition, but also tension. How do you think about restraint?

My process can be obsessive, right up until the night before installation. I’m always trying to pare things down.

There’s restraint in how the pieces fit together, the structures that tilt and move, almost like flat-packed furniture.

I grew up in a small closed religious community. Dogma is something I’m embedded with but push against. Restraint sometimes comes from setting rules: no colour, one colour, this paper only. Creating conditions through limitation.

There’s much more work that isn’t in the show than is. Sketches upon sketches—my own archive in manila folders.

Do you think of drawing as a form of divination?

I like that idea. Without erasers, drawing becomes like watching clouds. “Oh, there’s an ear—I’ll follow it.” Sometimes I almost speak to it: Why are you here? What are you showing me?

It may sound strange, but I’m trying to draw from subconscious space. Perhaps even from a collective unconscious—the roots under trees, the mycelium.

The divination, if anything, is about creating conditions for unfolding and then letting it happen. Witnessing and participating while trying to quiet the thinking mind.

Everything begins with close observation—botanical forms, trees, leaves, insects. But once that reference is on the page, it departs. The visible is the starting point. Through process, it becomes post-observational—an unfolding.

Ross Nervig is the Editor of Visual Arts News.

The first thing you notice is the music, spilling out into the stairway and pulling visitors into a world shaped by movement. That sense of movement runs throughout It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900–1970 and Now, a nationally touring exhibition at the Dalhousie Art Gallery from January to April 2026.

Curated by scholar, artist, and educator Seika Boye, It’s About Time is an archival exhibition that showcases the rich dance histories of Canada’s Black population. Using findings from recorded historical events and new research, Boye explores the power of dance as a form of expression, resistance, sacrifice, and cultural identity. 

“To date, the history of dance within Canada’s Black population is significantly underdocumented,” writes Boye in their artist statement. “Without it, we miss out on so much joy, agency, peaceful gathering en masse, resistance, artistic brilliance, and individual expression. Without it, we are incomplete in our self-knowledge, and so, our potential.”

PREPARATION AS DANCE

The dulcet tones of artists past and present pull you through the door and straight into a space reminiscent of a young adult’s bedroom. 

Clothes pile up in a corner—T-shirts, jackets, skirts, and other fabrics—seemingly tossed aside in the aftermath of a fashion montage you might see in a ’90s rom-com. Some bear Black Panther insignia, others are African kente; some fabrics are soft and diaphanous, others are black and metallic.

Beside the pile of clothes is a crisp white vanity, ready to serve the room’s occupant. A long black do-rag sits on a mannequin head, gemstones sparkling like the stars on the night out the occupant is preparing for. A tower of varied speakers sits in the other corner, filling the space with feel-good music as they get ready. A disco ball spins above, seeding its light across the textured ceiling. 

The three mixed media installations by kay macdonald, titled in this room—at the beginning of the night/at the end of the world, transport viewers into an intimate space where preparation becomes a ritual and the bedroom becomes a liminal space of expression and safety. Here, the act of getting ready becomes a dance of “what it takes to show up, and to be seen,” macdonald writes. 

Over the course of the exhibition, macdonald will periodically activate the space with a live performance, transforming the installation from still life to living ceremony. 

BLACKNESS AS PERFORMANCE

Stepping out of that bedroom, your attention is immediately captured by a bright red curtain to the right. 

Thick, red theatre curtains with carefully—almost reverently—placed pleats frame a painting, like curtains drawing closed after a show. In the centre, a dark-skinned Black woman rests after a dance of some kind. She is visibly tired, eyes downcast as she leans against her dressing table. Her red dancing shoes stand out in a sea of black, browns, and navy backstage. 

By Preston Pavlis and titled when the jig is up, when the act is finished, when the curtain descends, the link between Blackness and performance in this piece feels unavoidable. The dancer’s red shoes are a reference to a 1948 British film The Red Shoes, where a ballerina must choose between her love for dance and her life beyond the stage.  

For me, a Black viewer, the red shoes in the painting symbolize a lack of choice. Just like the protagonist in the film couldn’t remove the shoes, Pavlis’s dancer cannot shed her Blackness. She is forced to perform every day on the stage we call life, eyes critiquing her every move. In the mirror behind her, the reflection stares at the viewer in an accusatory gaze, full of both helplessness and quiet rage. 

Beside the dancer, a bunch of dried flowers rest on the table—a testament to how she has been unable to care for them, and herself. Tenderness, rest, the soft aspects of her life come second to the performance she must put on for the world. The painting is a moment of vulnerability, and the stage becomes a space where “endings, pressure and self-belief must be continually negotiated,” writes Pavlis. 

CELEBRATION AS LIBERATION

As you venture deeper into the exhibition, a spread of black-and-white photographs lines the walls on either side of the room.

On the right side is Allen D. Crooks’s Lose yourself to dance,most of which was photographed during a fiftieth-anniversary family celebration and vow renewal at the East Preston Recreation Centre. The photos pull you into a room full of joy, laughter, and celebration. Glistening suits and well-worn floors set the scene, as family members—old and young, anonymous and identified—strut their stuff, skirts swaying with the music, arms raised in jubilation. 

On the left side, a series of photographs that catch your eye are the Grange Road Dances. The photos depict scenes from social dances, house parties, concerts, and recitals in 1950s Canada. The black-and-white photos do nothing to dull the liveliness of the party. 

In one of the photographs, a crowd of Black youth dance together, happily moving to the beat of musicians, while at the perimeter, a group of white attendees look on, seemingly out of place. I couldn’t help but smile at the sight of unapologetic Black joy existing despite white discomfort. 

While both sides of the aisle depict different events, the theme is clear: Dance like no one’s watching. 

In a world where Blackness puts a target on your back, dance becomes a radical form of liberation. This was especially true in the 1950s, when social dances were one of the few sources for “positive images of Canada’s Black population,” the exhibition text explains.  

BLACK DANCE, DARK HISTORY

Moving through the gallery, it becomes clear that celebration is only one part of the story. Behind glass, objects from nineteenth-century minstrel shows sit uncomfortably still. A book on stage makeup is opened to instructions for racial caricature; beside it, a small tin of “Negro Black” face paint, with a detailed visual guide and colour palette to achieve the desired “ethnic complexions.”

A visitor’s voice cuts through the gallery: “People used to buy this?”

The answer, painfully, is yes.

These materials remind viewers that dance has also been used as a tool for ridicule and exclusion—a distortion of Black and racialized bodies designed to entertain through dehumanization. That this history exists alongside scenes of joy, ceremony, and resistance is not a contradiction but part of the exhibition’s insistence on telling the whole story. 

STILL BLACK, STILL DANCING

Just beyond this display, a small projection room offers another kind of history: short films and testimonials from dancers, neighbours, and students speaking about what dance has meant in their lives. 

As archival footage and interviews flicker across the screen, the exhibition feels less like recorded history and more like something alive—an immortal rhythm carried forward through memory.

I sink into the cushions, the tension I carried from earlier leaving my body, as I watch Ethel Bruneau merrily “hoofing” along to the beat. 

Indeed, it’s about time we had a show like this. 

While the wild green of a sunny May afternoon blazed outside, the bright white interior of a barn on a rural New Brunswick property radiated with its own kind of energy. These synergies are from a joint exhibition, Behind Moving Eyelids (May 10–11, 2025) in Rowley, New Brunswick, by Jeneca Klausen and Caitlin Lapeña, whose deceptively simple works hummed with ideas about feminine power, both surface and projected, and those of a deeper, darker, more private nature. 

I had to check Google Maps to locate the address for 13 Cedars, a new project space in rural Rowley, halfway between Saint John and St. Martins on Route 111. It was the second and final day of Behind Moving Eyelids, which featured wearable and sculptural works by Klausen, a Saint John jeweller with a dedicated following for her asymmetrical, nature-inspired, one-of-a-kind pieces. 

Her co-exhibitor, Lapeña, an artist working in printmaking and drawing, moved to the area a few years ago and co-founded 13 Cedars with her partner, Jay Isaac, a contemporary artist. She marvelled at how nearly everyone who came wore Klausen’s work, including me. On my left hand, I wear the bespoke silver wedding ring set on which she conspired with my husband. In my ears, I have a pair of wonky silver hearts I received as a birthday gift and have not removed in weeks.  

While local galleries have represented Klausen for decades, it was her first time exhibiting in a non-commercial setting. This gave the artist control over the installation and the opportunity to display her work on the wall in interesting shapes and configurations, including an installation of silver chains hung with pendants of handmade silver letters. 

Behind Moving Eyelids was also the first time Klausen showed alongside another artist. The pairing with Lapeña, who exhibited paintings, collages, drawings, and four fantastic silkscreens (she made them over the winter at Moncton’s Imago print studio), proved captivating. Their work resonated with intended connections from studio visits and an ongoing artistic dialogue, but also with serendipity, in symbols and motifs (cameos, cats, pearls) they arrived at independently. 

At a glance, there’s a risk of the show being taken merely as pretty or girly, which would be a huge miss. There’s a lot to unpack. 

The exhibition title Behind Moving Eyelids is from the late Saint John writer Gail Bonsall Kaye’s sole published poetry collection. Klausen had picked up a second-hand copy at an antiques shop and sent it to Isaac and Lapeña, who were at the time living in Toronto. Lapeña, like Klausen, was drawn to the old book as an object, with its beautifully illustrated cover. The poetic connections came later.

The artists’ shared interest in vintage objects informs their work. Lapeña repurposes images from antique women’s magazines, online archives, and found and personal items in her prints, paintings, and collages. For Behind Moving Eyelids, Klausen used sterling silver remnants from her studio, incorporating antique cameos, reclaimed coral, found beach stones, and vintage carved mother of pearl. 

This recycling speaks to the thrift of a time before fast fashion and disposable material culture, when nothing was wasted and the work of women consisted largely of making something from scraps: a quilt, a soup. There’s a strong sense of agency in the artists’ intentional reclamation of materials, images, and text. It reads as empowerment. 

Kaye’s 1973 poem “noon dream” is included in the exhibition notes. Some lines ring literally, such as the “heavy fronds of dark green ferns” in Klausen’s abstracted, organic forms and the Fundy landscape that is her first muse. Others are more of a vibe: the poem’s protagonist, dreaming in her green grotto, as in a fairy tale or myth, speaks of an ancientness Klausen’s work conveys. It is a temporal counterpoint to Lapeña’s more recent images from the capitalist age of advertising that commodifies beauty, fashion, and womanhood itself.

Jungian psychology is an influence in the deep blacks of Lapeña’s pristine prints. Oh, that midnight ink! You can disappear into it—and project onto it. The layering of the meticulous silkscreen process can be read as metaphorical, too, getting below the surface of things, abstracting, mystifying. Along with wearable art jewellery, Klausen presented several sculptural silver “spoonlets,” their cups the size of peas, perfect for a personal altar or as part of a private little rite.

Klausen says her Danish relatives often gift spoons for milestones such as birthdays or baptisms. And she explains that the expression “being born with a silver spoon in your mouth” originated during the bubonic plague, when the precious metal was believed to ward off the illness, projecting not only prosperity, but protection. With that, the work’s talismanic properties came into focus. Lapeña also depicts spoons in her work.

Some shows leave you gobsmacked at the gallery, then leave you. Others are a slower, sustained burn. Behind Moving Eyelids is the latter. The percolations began on the drive home, along the remote spruce-lined road. Weeks later, I’m still parsing its ideas about nature and industry, fashion and adornment, deep time and capitalism, beauty and power.  

You can find more content from the exhibition here.

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.

Danielle Hogan’s book Light and Material: Weaving and the Work of Nel Oudemans begins with a quick primer on weaving technique and terminology. The short description demystifies the craft and allows the reader to better understand the true creative genius in the work of the book’s subject: Nel Oudemans. Light and Material is a biography of the acclaimed New Brunswick weaver, but more than that, the book tells the story of weaving in the province: a tale of resilience, persistence, and mastery that mirrors Oudemans’s own.

Oudemans was born in the Netherlands in 1918 and trained in tapestry weaving and embroidery in Sweden and Norway. After putting her weaving career on hold due to the Nazi occupation of her homeland, she and her husband, Jack, moved to Fredericton, where they had accepted a contract to work at a plant nursery.

Once in New Brunswick, Oudemans worked at the nursery, raised a family, and restarted her weaving career, connecting with the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design. It didn’t take long before she’d become indispensable to the craft community in the province. The technical mastery of her weaving combined with her steadfast work ethic and boundless creativity combined to form an artistic practice that brought Oudemans great acclaim over her decades of work and a lasting legacy in the form of the Nel Oudemans Award, established by the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation in 2002 after she died. 

In fact, receiving that award is what first prompted Hogan to learn more about Oudemans and her work. In 2003, while in Victoria working on her MFA, Hogan received the second Nel Oudemans Award. 

“Because I had gone to NBCCD, I knew who Nel was. I did not take weaving at the college, but she was such a presence. She had a very big personality. So I knew of her. I never met her,” she says. “I made a point of learning a little more about her when I was honoured with the [award].”

Fast-forward a decade and a half, and Hogan was fresh out of school yet again and ready for another project. She’d just completed her PhD in interdisciplinary studies from UNB, and her dissertation focused on how the art world systematically undervalues textiles as art because the primary creators, historically, have been women. 

Germaine Pataki-Thériault, Managing Director of Gallery 78 in Fredericton, knew of Hogan’s dissertation and connected her with Oudemans’s long-time neighbour, acclaimed writer Nancy Bauer, who had been working with Nel’s husband, Jack, to get a book written about his wife and her work.

“It was impossible to not get excited about writing this book about Nel, because [Jack] was so excited about her and what she had done and contributed,” says Hogan. “I was really inspired by his passion for getting Nel’s story out.”

Armed with access to Jack’s incredible wealth of stories and his passion for his wife’s work, Hogan got to work in bits and pieces, fitting the research and writing of the book into her already full life wherever she could. She knew she didn’t want to write a straight biography but rather to contextualize Oudemans’s story in the cultural place and time in which it occurred. She explores the deep history of New Brunswick’s textile industry, from the first cotton mill in the province, built in Geary in the early 1850s, and the founding of Loomcrofters handweaving studio by Pat Jenkins in the 1940s up to the talented weavers and fibre artists making their mark on the province today.

The result is Light and Material, a beautiful book in both the visuals and the language. Oudemans’s work is the focus of the images, but the scope of the text is immense and sometimes overwhelming, the subject shifting abruptly in an attempt to cover a vast array of subject matter within its 145 pages. It’s easy to get lost in the endless number of people and dates that are chronicled in the book. 

But that might be by design—making sure the story was as full and accurate as possible was incredibly important to Hogan. As our interview comes to a close, I ask Hogan if there’s anything else she’d like to add that I didn’t ask about. She uses the opportunity to emphasize the heaviness of the burden when writing about history.  

“I think the weight is worth bearing, because I think it’s so important that we learn about the people who’ve walked these places ahead of us and all the successes and the challenges and the failures that they faced,” she says. “It’s such a huge responsibility that I didn’t understand until I really wrote and deleted and wrote and deleted and tried to get it ‘right.’”

Sitting within the protected area of the Mabou Highlands, MacKinnon’s Brook is part of the larger conservation region stretching between the towns of Mabou and Inverness on the western coast of Unama’ki/Cape Breton Island. The Mabou Highlands have earned their protected status thanks to decades-long efforts from community members at the local and provincial levels who rallied to protect the area and its five-kilometre coastline from development. The wilderness site boasts an extensive network of community-created hiking trails, maintained by the Cape Mabou Trail Club, that also cross onto Crown and private lands.

For two consecutive summers, Outdoor School, a critical environmental art platform composed of artist Diane Borsato and curator Amish Morrell, has invited artists to lead a residency in MacKinnon’s Brook where the duo is intermittently based. Morrell was born in Inverness and grew up in Inverness County, and the duo now share their time between Toronto and the Island. Outdoor School initiates collective knowledge-sharing experiences, typically outdoors, that enmesh contemporary art and ecology with the aim of spurring participatory learning about the histories and ecologies of a given site. These projects have ranged from snowshoeing on the frozen Humber River in Toronto to swimming with mathematicians in Banff, as well as countless mushroom forays. Some of these creative outdoor activities have taken the shape of exhibitions, courses, and residencies.

As part of their continued exploration into the spaces where art and ecology meet, Outdoor School curated two residencies as an invitation to artists to explore MacKinnon’s Brook for respective two-week periods of land-based research and exploratory study. American artist Amy Franceschini and Belgian artist Lode Vranken, of the collective Futurefarmers, were residents in August 2023. Most recently, Cape Breton-born, Toronto-based artist Sameer Farooq was artist-in-residence in August 2024. 

Artists were hosted in a cottage on the top of a hill off of a dirt road with a view to the west overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence and beyond to Prince Edward Island. Tucked away among the trees, the cottage belongs to David Rumsey, the creator of one of the largest private map collections in the Americas, and his partner, Abby Smith Rumsey, a writer and historian. The American couple have been spending time in MacKinnon’s Brook for several decades and participated in its conservation efforts.

Both Futurefarmers and Farooq were visiting the specific region of MacKinnon’s Brook for the first time. Based in the map collector’s cottage, the residents employed their particular artistic approaches to situate themselves in their new surroundings and attune to the network of relationships that make up its ecosystem. After their respective stays, the artists charted their learnings in a double-sided print. Each poster can be read as a type of map of the methods they used to get to know MacKinnon’s Brook, their experiences of doing so, and what they learned about its ecologies.

Resounding (Dis)Orientation

At MacKinnon’s Brook, Futurefarmers extended the collective’s concerns regarding reorienting perceptions of place and of dominant systems that structure human life in relation to nature. Their residency culminated in the participatory work and performance THEN/NOW/HEAR/HERE, where the artists invited the public to experience the environment and trail system they had connected with during their visit, and to create a collective attunement to its elements. On the afternoon of August 13, 2023, a group of approximately forty people—a mix of residents and visitors to the area—gathered at the Mabou Post Road trailhead. The group was led into the vast trail system by Borsato and Morrell, and began the four-kilometre one-way hike into the mountainous terrain, headed toward MacKinnon’s Brook Cove.

The path led the group north, up peaks and down into valleys, through grassy meadows and rocky cliffs, giving way to intermittent vistas of the vast Gulf of St. Lawrence to the west. En route, the artists prompted participants to meditate on their sense of orientation and assigned each participant a cardinal point. Deep into the hike, the group neared the cove and started their descent into the rocky opening, following the river where it meets the ocean. The participants gathered and sat on a grassy cliff ledge looking out toward the water and became spectators to a musical performance taking place below them amongst the rocky crevices. 

Interspersed among the cove, Franceschini, Vranken, Borsato, and their collaborators greeted the group perched on rocks. Sounds echoed from large angular foghorns made out of PVC pipes and funnels, wrapped with canvas to resemble floating sails. The group was accompanied by Electro Jacques Therapy, the moniker of Nova Scotia-based violinist Jacques Mindreau, who crouched closer to the rocks to play Petro-Acoustic Signals (2023)—an instrument constructed with Futurefarmers consisting of piano strings screwed taut across rocks. 

Throughout the performance, Mindreau played the strings using a violin bow or by plucking them, and alternated by playing a violin. Speakers were embedded throughout the rocks to amplify the sounds, which echoed across the cove and wove themselves with the sounds of the cascading river and the ocean waves lapping up against the shore. An experimental orchestra of human and non-human players alike materialized. 

In the resulting print Futurefarmers created, also titled THEN/NOW/HEAR/HERE (2024), the publication opens like a trail map and features snapshots from their experimentations and the public event. In one section subtitled “A Score for Attending to an Ecology of Frequencies,” the artists share the formula they used to orchestrate their eclectic outdoor harmony. Perhaps most revealing in their approach to MacKinnon’s Brook and the encounter they staged is their definition for the term (dis)orientation in their formula: “Imagine the space around you as a field, a conduit, a mesh network, a field of influence upon you, and your influence upon it;”—marking all bodies and elements present as active participants in the work.  

Interbeing on Cape Breton

One year later, Farooq arrived in Cape Breton but on the opposite coast of the eastern side where he grew up in Sydney during the 1980s. As he became secluded in MacKinnon’s Brook and studied the natural ecosystem that surrounded him, the focus of his residency turned to encompass relationships at a more foundational level. Farooq brought the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s texts Interbeing and The Other Shore, which guided his contemplations about the relationships sustaining the ecologies of the brook.

Staying in the cabin, he considered the typical methods used to navigate land and the impulse of “trying to turn the unknown into the known” when one creates a map. Instead, Farooq turned to Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist philosophies around the concept of interbeing—how everything is connected and nothing can thrive on its own—in order to map out how the organisms of the lands of MacKinnon’s Brook were in relation to one another. 

Farooq explains that his research took on an introspective quality as he employed meditation as his main method to orient himself in his new surroundings.

 “A lot of my work is done in meditation,” says Farooq. “So it just felt very natural to evoke those processes again there.”  

He describes the residency as becoming one of attentiveness and presence.

“It was literally about looking at the goldenrods and Queen Anne’s lace and their relation to the wind, to really understand the reliance of these plants on these elements,” he says. “It was slow, repetitive work. It was daily meditations, daily walks, a lot of note-taking, a lot of looking, a lot of tending to.” 

Farooq developed a glossary to put into words his close observations of how elements were relating to one another, which he visually documented through photography to think through the philosophy of interbeing. Through his reflections, he came to realize that, while in MacKinnon’s Brook, he was “sitting in the basin of all these relationships.” He perceived how all plants and elements of the land, including his presence there, were profoundly interlinked and, ultimately, dependent on each other to exist.

Farooq’s recently completed poster, Bringing Thich Nhat Hanh to Cape Breton (2025), gives a glimpse into this rich network of relationships, as it showcases series of his photographs studying MacKinnon’s Brook. The repetitive images of his subjects horizontally line each side of the poster in grids resembling strips of a film roll. One side captures the progressive rise and fall of the tide in each frame; the other shows the yellow goldenrods overlaid against a cloudy blue sky, the slight movements of the Queen Anne’s lace in the wind, his foot touching the coursing river, a momentous spruce meeting the horizon line and overlapping where the sky and the ocean split in half. 

Farooq describes his residency experience at MacKinnon’s Brook alongside his recent exhibition The Fairest Order in the World at Halifax’s Dalhousie Art Gallery in 2023 as turning points in publicly presenting his work in Nova Scotia. These projects have affirmed him not only as a Nova Scotian artist, but as a Cape Breton artist, attesting to how deeply his work is informed by this place. 

Farooq relays that the divide between both sides of Cape Breton’s art communities was on his mind when he arrived at MacKinnon’s Brook, specifically the stories that get told or are known about each of them. He referenced the white American artists that came up along the East Coast and settled or spent seasons on the western side of Cape Breton in the 1960s onwards, and how this artistic scene is known much more widely on and off the Island in contrast to the Indigenous or South Asian art he grew up with on the Island. 

“I didn’t grow up with Joan Jonas and Richard Serra and Philip Glass,” he says. “I grew up really around a sort of Pakistani and Indian [and broader] South Asian creativity that was brought to the Sydney area, where there were [all] sorts of expressions of creativity—of painting, of sculpture, of mural work—that wasn’t really promoted in this way in the rest of the Island.” 

Farooq cites individuals like Pushpa Rathor, a miniature painter and former professor at Cape Breton University; Dr. Khalifa, a medical doctor, gardener, and painter; and his own father, an ophthalmologist, poet, and painter, as a few of his notable artistic influences from his community growing up. 

“I’m from part of the Island where South Asian immigrants would come to for work,” says Farooq. 

He describes how art wasn’t necessarily promoted as a profession in the Pakistani and Indian communities of Cape Breton during his formative years, though everyone in his community harboured artistic expression and these featured prominently at gatherings and parties—be it through poetry, music, or visual art. 

“There was just such a deep, deep respect and appreciation for arts among the community that raised me on the Island,” he says. “A culture of practice that looks very different than what Nova Scotia collects and promotes.” 

Coming back to the Island as an artist for the residency in MacKinnon’s Brook helped Farooq harmonize the gulf between both coasts and also redefine his sense of belonging to Cape Breton. He gave an artist talk at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts to conclude his residency, the first artist talk he’s given in his home province, where members of the art community from both sides of the Island gathered.

 “There was a real sense of homecoming. I think people understood very much where I was coming from in my projects as being one of our own, in a way.” 

These stories of disorientation and interbeing while in residence, about the art communities on both coasts, help to attune to the rich and complex histories as well as inheritances of Cape Breton’s broader arts ecology. Perhaps what they all have in common is the land on which they practice, how the coastal lands and environment of the Island influence their practices and gather them in its basin of relationships. 

A group of over twenty middle school children pour excitedly out of the heavy glass gallery doors as curator Emily Critch, artist Daze Jefferies, and myself make our way toward Jefferies’s first major solo exhibition, stay here stay how stay at The Rooms Provincial Gallery in St. John’s. Jefferies’s joyful giggle whispers through the hard chamber of the building. 

Making our way through the entrance lit by a red light, an important signifier of sex work, we are first met not with the title wall, but a small reproduction of a print by Matthaeus Merian titled Description of the 1610 Sighting by Captain Richard Whitbourne of a Strange Creature, Possibly a Mermaid, in St. John’s Harbour, Newfoundland. Jefferies has been working with this print for the past seven years. The image first took hold of her when co-authoring Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge (2018) with Leslie Butler and mentor Sonja Boon. In her chapter “Myths: Fish,” Jefferies “situates mermaids—fish women—as openings to trans histories in Newfoundland.” Placing the print as the first work to greet viewers, Jefferies positions mermaids as “spectral trans foremothers” whose knowledge shapes an embodied and intergenerational relationality with the ocean. 

Throughout the exhibition, Jefferies continues to build her relationship with the sea as an archive that might hold memories and dreams of transfeminine and sex worker bodies. Honouring, tending to, and caring for this relationship, Jefferies confronts the ways that a colonial imaginary has shaped historical narratives of place and belonging. Throughout stay here stay how stay, this confrontation happens through the fleshy intimacy of the body, Jefferies’s familial relationships, as well as collective lived experience at the coastal margins. 

The undulating hum of Jefferies’s ambient composition when you leave me overflown fills the gallery space with waves of sonic resonance that seem to enliven the multimodal works. Fragmentary yet entangled, this exhibition includes soft sculptural works, found fabrics and materials, digital illustration, and animation. The exhibit considers fragmentation carefully, specifically the interdependence that emerges in the between spaces of such bodies. In relation with one another, these fragments form a larger conversation about pleasure, violence, joy, and loss. Fragmentation, of course, has also structured Jefferies’s encounters with the archive. Her academic and artistic works encounter archival material, including the violent erasure, narratives, and absences that the colonial record applies to transfeminine and sex worker ancestors. 

Jefferies applies several techniques to commune with and communicate these encounters. The work titled the still unfathomed, for example, presents six cod filet sculptures suspended above a found wooden tub filled with salt. As cuts of a body, the filets work to imagine the interdependent relation of outmigration slivers. 

Curator Emily Critch notes that the exhibition “presents a visually poetic archipelago of transfeminine and sex worker belonging in Newfoundland and Labrador. Responding to contemporary discourse about trans and sex worker experiences, with hope and histories held by water, an entangled narrative of care, intimacy, and resistance emerges from the coastlines” (2024). Collaboratively, Critch and Jefferies have questioned how we might hold and be held within this archipelago. 

The creation of the still unfathomed offered Jefferies an encounter with chance and the agency of the ocean, themes that were recurrent throughout the development of this exhibition. Jefferies had originally wanted to fill the antique wooden tub with water; however, the tub refused to hold it. Her desires conflicted with the water’s desires. What does honour, respect, collaboration, and listening mean in Jefferies’s relationship with the ocean? 

Working collaboratively with these desires and boundaries, Jefferies engages sea salt, both in the tub and applied in layers to the cod filets, as a means of resisting extraction and containment. These slippery conversations ask what forms of historical knowledge can or cannot be represented, grasped or evaded, denied or held. The suspended filets are playful representations of becoming multiple and a way of thinking about distant fragments that have out-migrated. Coated in layers and layers of wax and sea salt, these filets are fragile, changing, and in movement. Such impermanence is important to Jefferies’s approach to archives, for letting transfeminine and sex worker histories have autonomy. 

Jefferies had similar experiences with change and oceanic resistance in the development of the soft sculpture sea whore. Born and raised in the Bay of Exploits, Jefferies has long combed the beaches near her home and tended to the tidal gifts that speak to her. Several extraordinary, almost magical, found fabrics make their way into this exhibition, including the netting and hooked yarn components of sea whore and the magnificent stockings that are at the heart of resurfacing you torn-together. Another source of archival fragmentation, these found materials spark Jefferies’s consideration of archival encounters, the ocean as a keeper of knowledge, and her ongoing understanding of water kinships. As an archival body, the ocean makes offerings but also withholds. Exploring this tension in the creation of textile-based works, Jefferies submerged fabric under the wharf in her hometown for two months. The ocean eroded the fabric to a point of great fragility. 

What disappears against or with our desires? In the intimate creation of sea whore, Jefferies engaged with a slow process that asked her to be present in her body, submerging her hands in wax and salt, layering the body with intention and feeling. She describes the creation of soft sculpture as a way to release some of the archival experiences that she bears witness to through her research. A found piece of deep red hooked rug and a piece of netting are central components of sea whore. At once marking intimacy, beauty, sexuality, and pleasure, sea whore also asks us what refuses to be contained under the weight of historical capture in the archives as well the ways in which sex worker narratives have been shaped by violence and extraction. sea whore, however, isn’t fully enclosed by the net, as her mermaid form slips through an enclosing grasp. Putting the minority, rural body under the weight of a dominant history, the pleasure, joy, intimacy, and chance of bodily autonomy resist. 

In her triptych mixed-media work with/holding, Jefferies builds on intergenerational knowledge about absence and creation. Honouring intergenerational histories of outport visual and material practice, Jefferies considers the meeting place(s) between chosen and biological family. Paying homage to her Nan’s extensive visual and material practice, including doll making, quilting, and much more, Jefferies works to uncover a language for remembered and unremembered pasts. The hands, form, language, and presence of rural women in Newfoundland inform the core questions of with/holding, including the intergenerational cultural significance of textiles in Newfoundland and Labrador. Jefferies takes up this inheritance by crafting poetic fragments of visuality, material, and language imbued with love and consideration. For generations of rural women who did not have the language to articulate loss and grief, explaining trauma away with “bad nerves,” Jefferies plays with her Nan’s handwriting to form poetic interventions into the spaces between generations, absence, and inherited knowledge. 

Jefferies’s first major solo exhibition, stay here stay how stay, offers poetic, visual, and material interventions within the violent erasure of colonial archives. Turning to the ocean as a site of transfeminine and sex worker histories, Jefferies offers embodied and relational channels through which we might hold and be held by fragments of chosen and biological family. Working with playfulness, curiosity, and joy, Jefferies sculpts a collection of fragmentary bodies that refuse capture. 

It is incredibly fitting, then, that As We Rise, a photography exhibition I had the pleasure of seeing at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, has the subtitle: Photography from the Black Atlantic. The exhibition is made up of selections from the Wedge Collection. Established in Toronto in 1997 by Dr. Kenneth Montague, this collection gathers art from across the Black world and champions Black artists. By invoking Gilroy’s famous formulation, the exhibition foregrounds the diversity and the connections that characterize the African diaspora, as well as the powerful drive among Black artists to take control of how Black people, their bodies, their practices, and their identities are represented in visual media.

As We Rise contains pieces by over seventy artists, includes works by internationally known figures like Kehinde Wiley, famously the portrait maker of the Obamas, and celebrated African American photographer Carrie Mae Weems. It also includes more locally known and up-and-coming photographers, including a delightful number of Toronto-based artists such as Anique Jordan and Jalani Morgan. The youngest photographer whose work is featured was born in 1996, a full 110 years after the birth of the eldest in 1886. In this more-than-century scope, there are photographs from West, South, North, and Central Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil, Canada, the United States, and Europe, a veritable encircling of the Black Atlantic.

I was thrilled by this bringing together of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Still mesmerized by a beautifully executed photo by Malick Sidibé of a woman and man dancing politely in Mali, I was shocked and delighted to turn to a series of party photos that I immediately recognized as home. I was proven right when I saw that the playful and outrageous images by Tayo Yannick Anton were taken at Yes Yes Y’all, a series of queer hip hop parties that my friends and I used to attend in the mid-2010s.

Within the necessary limits of a single exhibition, As We Rise does a breathtaking job of gathering together diverse visions of Blackness across time and space. While the images themselves are deeply compelling, the work of the curator, Elliott Ramsey of the Polygon Gallery, adds additional layers of meaning and connection through the pieces’ placement in relation to one another. This curatorial practice is what allows the overarching theme of Black art as an avenue of self-determination to emerge.

The way that As We Rise demonstrates this will toward self-definition and self-representation is, for me, what makes this exhibition not merely pleasurable but electric, inspiring, and resonant. In the wake of the transatlantic slave trade, the inciting incident of the Black Atlantic, Black bodies have been subject to the representational whims of systems built decidedly against Black people’s best interest. Black artists respond to this context in myriad ways and are often consciously making aesthetic choices to resist it. The sheer range and creativity of this resistance is part of what makes this exhibition so powerful.

Many of the photographs play with intimacy, some revealing and others withholding. A young man full of swagger on a New York street looks directly into the camera, demanding that the viewer acknowledge his flyness; an artist photographs themself sitting naked and curled up on their apartment floor, arms covering their face. Some of the photos invite the viewer into intimacy with them while others keep the viewer at arm’s length. A father holds his son tenderly in their home; a face and body are blurry from movement, impossible to pin down. Several photos are decidedly defiant. In “Moffie in Irma’s Garden” by Jody Brand, the gender nonconforming subject lies languidly and proudly amidst nature; in a photograph by Jalani Morgan, Black Lives Matter protestors stage a die-in at Yonge-Dundas Square in downtown Toronto. The layout of the exhibition also facilitates moments of beautiful confluence across space and time: on one wall, three photos depicting images of glamour drawing together Bamako, London, and Vancouver. On another wall, a gorgeous photo of two Malian women astride a scooter hangs next to a charming Mississippi couple poised to take off on a motorcycle. It is both the sameness and the difference in these images that makes their proximity so compelling.

As We Rise is an incredible achievement. As both a representation of creativity as wide and as deep as the Atlantic and a source of inspiration for viewers, whether or not they are artists, to celebrate and insist on Black self-definition, this exhibition is a triumph.