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. 

By Shannon Webb-Campbell

The biannual gathering Shore Time on Fogo Island from September 26 to 29, 2024, was more than a coming together off an island in the North Atlantic, it was an invitation to the otherworldly. Organized by Fogo Island Arts, part of the longstanding Shorefast and international residency, Shore Time brings together artists, architects, ecologists, geologists, and writers to envision possible futures on an island off an island, a place far away from faraway.

Just getting to Fogo Island is part of the experience. Arriving at the recently refurbished Gander International Airport, built in 1938 as one of the first transatlantic refuelling spots, travellers meet the newly renovated, modernist International Departures Lounge. From an exhibition of vintage furniture by German designer Klaus Nienkamper to a piece of a steel girder from the World Trade Center, a contemporary gallery, a theatre, a bar, and a gift shop, the airport is a hub for storytelling. Didactic panels take viewers through the history of the airport. The successful Broadway show Come From Away was based on Gander’s role in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the airport authority being ill-equipped to accommodate the thirty-eight passenger flights that landed in Gander on September 11, 2001. The exhibition also highlights the many famous passengers who have touched down here, like Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Albert Einstein, and The Beatles. Fidel Castro landed here on Christmas Eve in 1972 (Gander was the refuelling stop between Cuba and the Soviet Union) and went tobogganing for the first time. 

From the airport, the journey to Fogo Island begins with an hour’s drive to Farewell Harbour. Fogo isn’t easy to get to, and for many, that’s part of the appeal. If the ferry is on time and weather conditions are fair, the ferry sails to Change Islands where it docks about twenty minutes into the crossing, before continuing on to Fogo Island. The crossing takes an hour and fifteen minutes, and on the deck is where mainlanders and islanders intersect. 

The ethos of Shorefast and Fogo Island Arts is rooted in the poetics and question of how we orient ourselves in relation to the world, the natural environment, our economies and how we connect with each other. As part of Shore Time, folks from all over the world gathered to visit studios, spark new conversations, attend lectures, share community meals of cold plates and fish cakes, and go on guided shoreline architectural walks and coastal hikes rooted in foraging, berry picking, and geology.

Shore Time’s artists and thinkers include: Zita Cobb, innkeeper and founder of Shorefast; painter Nelson White; seaweed lamp and kelp broach artist Nadine Decker; photographer and storyteller Paddy Barry; filmmaker Sharon Lockhart; architect Indy Johar; geologist Jayne Wynne; Fogo Island Inn executive chef Timothy Charles; and past and present artists-in-residence like photographer Ethan Murphy, visual artist Wong Winsome Dumalagan, food cultural historian L. Sasha Gora, and many others. Shore Time drew intrigue from folks based in Singapore, New York, Vancouver, Halifax, Toronto, Prince Edward Island, and across Newfoundland and Labrador. 

A passport-style itinerary designed by Inuk graphic designer, art director, and architect Mark Bennett emboldened the intentional poetics of Shore Time. The olive green and gold-embossed publication featured E.J. Pratt’s poem “Newfoundland,” a beloved poem of many islanders. Pratt writes: “Here the tides flow, / And here they ebb; / Not with that dull, unsinewed tread of waters / Held under bonds to move / Around unpeopled shores— / Moon-driven through a timeless circuit / Of invasion and retreat; / But with a lusty stroke of life / Pounding at stubborn gates.” Fogo Island’s remote, rugged shoreline boasts a population of 2,200 people for 260 square miles. Two pages in the program dedicated to four questions served as our cardinal directions: What do we know? What do we have? What do we miss? What do we love? 

Not only did these questions set the tone for an intersectional gathering of art, design, ecology, foodways, and economy on a small archipelago scattered off of Newfoundland, but these inquiries deepened the talks, walks, visits, and conversations throughout Shore Time. Over the duration of the gathering, I asked myself what do I know? Depending on my whereabouts on the island and the elements I faced, whether it be the land, the water, or weather, I wasn’t sure. All I knew is I felt both estranged and completely at home. What do I have? Most days, it was cold hands in need of knitted mittens and a warm heart. Certain hours, I felt I had nothing, and suddenly, I’d align with a panoramic vista and become filled with gratitude. What do I miss? This place. This island. The wind. The water. My family. The cod. The tuckamore. The 420 million years of geologic history. My mother and grandmothers’ voices. What do I love? These archipelagos. Ktaqmkuk. Every single wildflower. Mostly, while wandering around the island, I felt overwhelmed by the raw beauty of the place, on the cusp of tears. Grief-stricken by what’s been taken by colonization and the erosion of time.

Fogo Island is like the majority of Ktaqmkuk’s, or what is colonially known as Newfoundland, outport communities, being accessible only by boat. Little Fogo Islands were a fishing base for Indigenous populations and early settlers alike during the summer months. Mostly, Indigenous folks migrated elsewhere on the larger island in order to survive the winter. Being a Mi’kmaq-settler poet belonging to Flat Bay First Nation (No’kmaq Village), I noted the land acknowledgement included Shore Time’s passport-style publication: “Fogo Island being on the ancestral homelands of the Beothuk, whose culture has been lost forever as a result of colonization.” The ancestral homelands of many diverse populations of Indigenous Peoples, including Mi’kmaq, Innu, and Inuit, Newfoundland and Labrador was also ground zero for colonization. 

As 2024 marks the seventy-fifth and much-celebrated anniversary of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Confederation with Canada, Indigenous Peoples from the island of Newfoundland aren’t celebrating. At the time of Confederation in 1949, the provincial and federal governments made no provisions for the new province’s Indigenous groups. The Terms of Union, which determined how Newfoundland and Labrador would operate as a province, did not mention Indigenous people. As a result, Innu, Inuit, and Mi’kmaq people living in Newfoundland and Labrador were unable to access the same rights, programs, services, and funding the federal Indian Act made available to other Indigenous groups in Canada. The exclusion of Indigenous people in Confederation was not just a political oversight but part of a much broader and longer narrative about the depletion and absence of Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador.  

Fogo Island Arts’ Shore Time programming included a talk with former Fogo Island Arts artist-in-residence Nelson White, member of Flat Bay First Nation, and a reception for Wutanmiunu – Our community, a solo exhibition depicting the beauty and joy of our Mi’kmaw community. As the didactic panel shared, Wutanminu – Our community is “a tribute to the strong networks of familial and relational ties within Indigenous communities.” White’s solo exhibition of paintings features community leaders, doctors, lawyers, and musicians and captures the community relationships and their essential roles in fostering a sense of belonging and dignity. White’s father, Elder Calvin White, has been a leader in ensuring rights and recognition for the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq. He recently published One Man’s Journey: The Mi’kmaw Revival in Ktaqmkuk (Memorial University Press, 2023), which features his son Nelson’s painting of a canoe on the cover of the book and a portrait by Nelson as his author photo.

Daily sunrise yoga in the Fogo Island Gallery at Fogo Island Inn in Joe Batt’s Arm with instructor Jennifer Charles of Seven Seasons Farms was an option for shore-goers. As I was lying on the mat in savasana with my eyes closed, I imagined White’s portraits of the potato dancers and of visual artists Jordan Bennett and Amy Malbeuf with their children, of Senator Judy White and of the teepee builders coming to life along with the pop art flowers in the background of the portraits and dancing together like a constellation forming above the building, which is perched on stilts. 

What do we know? What do we have? What do we miss? What do we love? 

After morning yoga there was an opportunity to visit local studios, art organizations, and galleries in each of the communities around the island, including Deep Bay, Fogo, Joe Batt’s Arm, and Tilting. Artists-in-residence opened their workspaces—Long Studio, Tower Studio, Bridge Studio, and Squish Studio—and local artists opened their sheds and studios for visiting hours. Each of the Fogo Island Arts studios is architecturally unique and requires a jaunt over the hill or a kilometre’s walk in and out. When I visited Ethan Murphy at Squish Studio in Tilting, he generously shared insight into his photographic process and showed negatives and prints of new work. During his three-month residency on Fogo Island, he started a new long-term project photographing the interiors of sheds. As part of Newfoundland’s culture, the shed is a gathering space, a workshop, and a refuge beyond the domesticity and confines of the house.

From enriching talks between art historian Tom McDonough and artist Danh Vo, to a Food Fishery Circle, to Zita Cobb in conversation with Indy Johar, an architect and co-founder of 00 (project00.cc) and Dark Matter, an international field laboratory focused on building institutional infrastructures for regions, towns, cities, and civic societies, Shore Time explored new approaches to community economic development and sustainability. Johar, who reminded us that we are billions of years of extraordinary unfurling, asked an important question: “How do you go from control theory to learning theory?” As a way of moving from control toward a model of care and ultimately love, Johar shared his wisdom: “The real revolution is how we imagine ourselves.”

An offshoot of Shore Time was a new installation, It’s a Trap! by artist Jason Murphy (a.k.a. The Souper) at the Red Shed in Shoal Bay, which featured two different vegan soups (a green split pea and orange ginger carrot) made and served by the artist. Murphy’s installation draws from the colours of the crab pots used as materials and also features the words “Spotless Hands and Sterling Silver Forks” drawn on the shed’s old floor in ritual salt by OK Sea Salt. As we gathered together, all bundled up in our layers of sweaters and coats outside the shed, sipping our soup on the lip of the North Atlantic, I was surprised there wasn’t a breath of wind. The weather is an unpredictable element of life on Fogo Island.

Highlighting the intersectionality of art, ecology, and the climate crisis was a visit to Liam Gillick’s “A Variability Quantifier (The Fogo Island Red Weather Station, 2022),” an artwork that functions as an operational weather station along Waterman’s Brook Trail. On this guided weather station hike, Andria Hickey, Fogo Island Arts and Shorefast Head of Programmes, and Lorie Penton, Lead Outdoor Activity Guide at Fogo Island Inn, shared insight into the weather station, the flora and fauna, as well as their own relationships to the variable weather systems on Fogo Island. Gillick’s “A Variability Quantifier (The Fogo Island Red Weather Station, 2022)” is part of the World Weather Network, set up by twenty-eight art agencies around the world, and has been acquired by the National Gallery of Canada. Due to the climate crisis, the significance of Gillick’s installation is monumental to Fogo Islanders and the larger weather network now more than ever. Prior to the installation of Gillick’s weather station, news of the weather conditions came to Fogo Island from Twillingate, known as iceberg alley, one hundred kilometres away.

Shore Time’s closing party, held at J.K. Contemporary, a fine art gallery in a restored schoolhouse originally built in 1840 that exhibits local, national, and international artists in the hub of Joe Batt’s Arm, had shore-goers wandering in the erratics together. Drawn from the Latin verb errare, “to wander,” erratic is a geologic term for nomadic boulders carried thousands of years ago by glaciers. Erratics II, a biannual group show of artists who both work and live in the erratic, featured the beautiful moonscape-like oil paintings and graphite remapping islands series of M’Liz Keefe, Erin Hunt’s colourful abstracts; photographer Karen Stentaford’s tintypes of fences in Tilting; and Bruce Pashak’s stunning, feminine portrait “Wachet Auf: Grete and the dress of life.” Wachet auf is a cantata by J.S. Bach, known by its English translation, “Sleepers Awake.” Grete is the sister of Gregor (who turns into a beetle-like insect) in Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis. 

Erratics II highlights artists with unique ties to the place, who may not be originally from Fogo Island but have either called it home or spent an extended period of time on the island’s shores. Erratics II deeply resonated with me, and perhaps all of us who wandered to Fogo Island for Shore Time. 

Shannon Webb-Campbell is of Mi’kmaq and settler heritage. She is a member of Flat Bay First Nation (No’kmaq Village) in Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland. Her books include: Re: Wild Her (Book*hug 2025), Lunar Tides (2022), I Am a Body of Land (2019), and Still No Word (2015), which was the recipient of Egale Canada’s Out in Print Award. Shannon holds a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick, and is the editor of Visual Arts News Magazine and Muskrat Magazine.

By Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa

I’ve attended countless art exhibition openings in Halifax, drawn by their potential to foster community. Yet, these spaces, often claiming to celebrate cultural diversity, feel overwhelmingly white. As a newcomer committed to uplifting Black artistic production, I long to connect with people whose experiences help situate my presence on this land. Instead, I often feel isolated in my desire to see more diverse audiences—until the opening of Still Tho: Aesthetic Survival in Hip Hop’s Visual Art at Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery on September 21, 2024, in Halifax. At the opening, the gallery’s warmth struck me immediately: the sound of laughter and the beat of DJ DTS’s set created a palpable sense of belonging. For the first time since moving to Halifax from Toronto over a year and a half ago, I found myself surrounded by my community, which transformed the event into a celebration of presence and belonging in a space so rarely welcoming of Black people. 

Postcolonial theorist Jenny Sharpe’s concept of the “immaterial archive”—memories and practices that defy traditional modes of preservation in the face of archival erasure—came to mind as I walked into the MSVU Art Gallery. The opening of Still Tho powerfully disrupted systemic barriers in gallery spaces, echoing the exhibition’s embrace of hip hop’s transitory nature. The room seemed alive—the sounds of DJ DTS’s scratching mixed with snippets of conversations, blending into the exhibit as a dynamic, living element. Seeing the works for the first time in such a way, I was struck by the sense that, like the opening, the exhibition presented the ephemerality that has come to characterize hip hop’s aesthetic and the Afro-diasporic experience not as something to struggle against, but as a tool of endurance for diasporic cultural and aesthetic knowledge. 

Curated by Mark V. Campbell—DJ, scholar, curator, and founder of Northside Hip Hop Archive—Still Tho brings together fourteen artists from across Canada to explore hip hop’s ephemeral qualities as a response to histories of displacement and erasure within the Black community. Many artworks in the exhibition address this erasure, highlighting the need for self-determined archives of diasporic cultural production, ancestral knowledge, and daily life. This need for self-determined archives takes shape in the works of EGR and Corey Bulpitt, where the spray can is reimagined as a vessel for preserving diasporic narratives. EGR’s Art on Vintage Spray Cans transforms vintage spray cans into archives of past work, while Bulpitt’s Spray Can Carving blends ancestral Haida carving practices with iconic street art. Seeing both works reimagine the spray can as new cultural artifacts, I couldn’t help but feel giddy as if discovering a beloved childhood toy transformed into something wondrous and new. These works balance the tension between impermanence and preservation, repositioning ephemera as archival objects to form new immaterial archives of cultural production.

Experiencing this exhibition brought me an overwhelming sense of joy and pride, seeing not only Black artistry be celebrated, but also the spirit and community that sustains it. The opening of Still Tho felt so impactful as a disruption of systemic norms within the gallery partly due to the atmosphere of resistance and resilience reflected by the works in the show. Since hip hop was born from a period of socio-economic strife and systemic erasure, the genre’s ethos is rooted in a methodology of survival through creativity. These core values continue to appear in hip hop’s criticality of ongoing dispossession and violence enacted against Black bodies. 

Building on the exhibition’s central themes, many of the works in Still Tho challenge the systemic erasure and impermanence that have long haunted Black cultural production by immortalizing styles that historically resisted preservation and stillness. One example of this practice is a series of five miniature trains that have been “tagged” and encased in clear frames by Eklipz, who pays homage to early graffiti traditions, playfully linking personal expression to histories of urban art. Eklipz’s trains evoke a sense of nostalgia and resistance simultaneously; their polished glass casings seem almost at odds with the gritty, unapologetic vibrancy of the tags etched onto their surfaces. Similarly, Miss Me’s Free Cap, crafted from remnants of wheat-pasted posters, and STARE’s S to the T, a graffiti piece on cement-covered canvas, preserve works often erased by nature or lost to municipal cleanup efforts, effectively disrupting the boundaries between the gallery and the street. In doing so, these works highlight graffiti’s physical fragility while celebrating its resilience as a cultural practice. They present an opportunity to ask what constitutes art and who decides its value, sparking the question: Does enshrining the ephemeral neutralize its rebellious spirit, or does it amplify its resilience?

This dialogue between resilience and resistance continues in works by Mark Stoddart and Eklipz, which draw from hip hop’s tradition of remixing and sampling to recontextualize cultural imagery, exposing enduring systems of oppression. Through this process, they transform art into a vessel for memory and critique, challenging viewers to confront global systems of inequity. Stoddart’s Fight the Power parallels Radio Raheem’s fictional murder in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) and the real-life murder of Eric Garner over thirty years later, exposing the persistent realities of police brutality. Meanwhile, Eklipz’s Coltan Kills juxtaposes smart phone advertisements with the violent truth of resource extraction, critiquing capitalism’s exploitation of the Global South. By remixing cultural symbols and historical narratives, these works effectively archive the intangible yet vital sentiments of resistance and survival that originated hip hop as a genre, constructing new meanings while preserving their origins. 

At its core, Still Tho: Aesthetic Survival in Hip Hop’s Visual Art examines the tension between transience and legacy, reminding us that the act of preservation is itself a radical gesture. By exploring hip hop’s visual culture and survival aesthetics, the exhibition—and its vibrant opening event—reveal ephemerality not as a limitation, but as an act of resistance. This impermanence becomes a way of creating cultural memory in defiance of historical erasure, inviting us to ask: How can hip hop and exhibitions like this one inspire new ways of valuing, protecting, and learning from cultural expressions that resist archiving? What might such conversations reveal about the writing of history and our imagined futures? In posing these questions, Still Tho celebrates the resilience of cultural memory amid forces of erasure, showing us that ephemeral art forms within hip hop, like the African diaspora itself, persist and endure—still tho.

Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa (she/her) is a Nigerian-Canadian writer, curator, and interdisciplinary artist based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). Her work engages Afro-diasporic archives of thought and memory inherited through oral history, food traditions, and acts of care. Centring the lived experiences of Black artists, her community-based practice seeks to build networks of knowledge as tools for cultural literacy. She earned her BFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University and has curated programs such as Tell the Body (Vtape, Toronto), The Suppa Club (with Temple Marucci-Campbell, Toronto), and the upcoming exhibition Down Home at Dalhousie Art Gallery (2025). Currently, she is the TD Fellow Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

Through my own art practice and experience with producing and participating in socially engaged art projects, I understand that collaboration, participation, and social engagement have the capacity to create transformative experiences and dynamic artwork. 

Yet, I have felt the edges of collaboration and the discontents of participation. Whether an artist intends to trivialize, tokenize, and even harm someone they invite into their process does not mitigate this effect. Conflict, misrepresentation, and refusal can be a transformative opportunity for learning and reflection that completely change the direction of a project. The facilitation of socially engaged art, collaboration, and participation is complex. After all, there are deadlines to meet, shows to hang, reports to write, and funders to appease. 

For better or for worse, there are few, if any, formal ethical codes that direct the engagement of artists working with people and communities. What exists instead are developed practices and personal guidelines. Detailed in this article are socially engaged artists Kim Morgan, Mo Phùng and Mo Glitch, Camille Turner, Jessica Winton, and Leesa Hamilton, whose practices variously include: centring participant autonomy; the ability to withdraw participation; adapting projects to feature built-in space of debrief and care where intense subject matter is present; engagement frameworks that enable fun, recreation, and joy; long-term engagement to allow trust and relationships to build. They also focus on skill building and community building rather than tangible, product-based outcomes. 

As artists increasingly work outside the institutions of the art world and directly with communities, it serves all parties to draw on the acquired knowledge, experiences, and practices of those who have been doing this work for years. 

Kim Morgan’s Blood Portraits (2021) hangs above the elevator in the Health Sciences Centre of Dalhousie University. For over a decade, Morgan has made artwork with the scans of human blood personally donated to her. She is exploring if it’s possible to understand our relationship to one another by looking at blood samples and body materiality through a microscope.  

“You can’t,” says Morgan. “But through this process of collecting, scanning, looking, and discussing with people what we are seeing, other stories come out, and a relationship is formed through this process.” 

In Blood Portraits, the deeply personal nature of blood is abstracted through an ambiguous, microscopic view. What might initially be mistaken as stock medical images are in fact attributed to the people (Grace, Kirsten, Gary, Juss, Annie, Ceilidh, Couzyn, Mona) who have donated their blood cells to the artist for this installation. 

“I’m drawn to difficult material that has complex layers. I use blood as a metaphor for how we consider each other,” says Morgan. “If we see blood through a scientific lens, will it take precedence and dominate other biases that we have about each other? I wasn’t being naive, maybe idealistic.”       

Typically, in contexts of medical imaging, the examination of bodily material is from a deficit-centred perspective. In Blood Portraits, something else is at play. Morgan asks us to see our cells differently. She exercises ethical consent when collecting blood samples and through the presentation of donors’ personal information. Morgan also informs participants about the intentions of her work, and she leaves room for anyone who wants to donate their blood for viewing purposes but omits the material if they aren’t comfortable with her using it in her art practice.  

“There’s an exchange that happens. It’s a blood donation. Think about that. I can’t think of a more intimate thing.” In Blood Portraits and the several other works for which she has used blood, she is aware of her own responsibilities as an artist to use this material with sensitivity and care.

“That’s one of the ethical and moral things about blood. Should people be paid for, or pay for, blood donations? A donation is a ‘gift’ while a payment is a sales transaction, part of the tissue economy,” she says. “These are two very different value systems that conflict regarding the exchange of blood.  I think that relationships involve exchanges too.”

In Seeking Sanctuary (2023), artists Mo Phùng and Mo Glitch worked collaboratively with the participants and subjects of the installation in its development. Supported by the artist-run centre Eyelevel Gallery and exhibited at the Khyber Centre for the Arts in Halifax from July 4 to July 22, 2024, the installation featured nine trans people (Arielle Twist, Excel Garay, Calendula Sack, Jacquie Shaw, Carmel Farahbaksh, Bria Miller, and myself) depicted in large-scale, hand-drawn portraits. Employing a collaborative process through group and individual engagement sessions, the artists recounted phases that resulted in the exhibition:  invitation, connection and visioning, photo shoots with participants, drawing the portraits, and designing the exhibition. 

“Making work about trans people without having them involved in the making of the work was non-negotiable,” Glitch says, turning to Phùng. 

“We have a sanctuary that we’ve created between ourselves,” says Phùng. “But there [are] so many people who have contributed to what I think of sanctuary to be, and that is collaboration and connection and friendship.”  

The duo collaborated on the facilitation of the engagement and execution of the portraits, which were first photographed by Phùng and later drawn by Glitch. 

“People had the opportunity at any moment to say ‘not that photo’ or ‘not that drawing’ or maybe ‘I don’t want to have it in the show at all,'” says Glitch. They note that this consent-based approach to representation can lead to uncertainties and tensions, as it is a balancing act of meeting deadlines while staying true to the needs of the group and honouring everyone’s autonomy. 

“It’s always weird to pay someone to do something for you. There’s a power dynamic there,” says Phùng. 

The power dynamic being described is an inverse of what might be historically true for the creation of portraiture, as Glitch points out. 

“I don’t feel like the precedents are particularly clear around this kind of model of participation and engagement,” says Glitch. 

“When it comes to care, it looks different for every single person. It’s something that can’t be predicted,” says Phùng, highlighting that formulaic approaches to care are often unresponsive to the context-specific nature of different participants and collaborators.

Artist and scholar Camille Turner was drawn to socially engaged art because of its expansive nature.      

“I was completely blown away by this field of art making,” says Turner. “You can actually do things that are meaningful. Not just objects, but create relations with people and create change in the world.”      

Turner’s Afronautic Research Lab (ongoing since 2016) is an installation and site of community-based education that is responsive and responsible to the local histories of the places where it is activated. In the Lab, viewers become researchers who bear witness to archival documents that evidence Canada’s participation in transatlantic slavery. 

“There are a lot of documents that are silenced or suppressed that don’t make it into the museums or history books,” says Turner. “And they completely reframe the country that we’re in and the histories that we’ve been told.”      

In 2021, Turner brought the Afronautic Research Lab to the Bonavista Biennale, a monthlong presentation of contemporary art in rural Newfoundland, where the Lab focused on the site’s connection to the construction of nineteen slave ships built on the coast of the island between 1751 and 1792. Participants of the Afronautic Research Lab don’t engage with the materials alone. They are guided by performers that the artist has named the Afronauts.

“The Afronoauts embody this idea of Black futurity, or a future in which Black people are present and central, conjuring a world in which Black people are fully liberated,” she says. “Their presence is important to anchor this exploration of the past.” 

Key to the artwork for their engagement with one another and the viewers of the work, the Afronauts are often young Black artists, performers, and activists. “There’s something really beautiful about coming together and sharing this experience,” says Turner. “Being there to witness the people who are taking part in this experience.”  

In the Bonavista iteration, and unlike previous instalments of the Lab, the Afronauts were presented not in person but as a projected film that guided viewers’ experience through the materials and place. Reflecting on the role of the Afronauts as caretakers of not only the past, but also of viewers of the work, Turner recounts a memory from within the Lab. 

“I remember this one woman, a young Black woman, she sat down and took her glasses off. You could see the tears forming. One of the Afronauts put their hand on her shoulder,” she says. “The other one and myself, we joined them and we nodded and put our hands on our hearts and had that moment together in the space to help her go through what she was going through.” 

Responding to such heightened moments, emotional safety, and the ability to debrief the documents of anti-Blackness and Black resistance is integral to the Lab. Turner creates separate break-out spaces for checking in and holding space for conversations as soon as things come up.

“The first time I did that was at York University. So, they could be in the main room with the Afronauts and then afterwards people would come in and we would talk,” says Turner. “What happened here? How are you feeling, and what’s going on? It was a really good experience to be able to have that space to process.”

Art educator and social sculptor Jessica Winton’s foray into experimenting with parades as a site for community art came through observation of the spectacle of the Natal Day Parade; she is a resident of the portion of North End of Halifax that is on the parade route. 

“Each summer, I would see my street get parked out and all of these people going down the hill to the beginning of the Natal Day Parade. It would be completely packed,” says Winton. “At the same time, I was thinking about how to get regular people to see art and experience it without being intimidated.” 

Beginning with Ris Publica presented in the Natal Day Parade of 2016, Winton has experimented with parades through what she describes as a participatory practice. 

“It is amazing to be in a parade,” she says. “You walk along, and everyone’s smiling and clapping, cheering you on. It’s like you’re a hero. It’s the greatest thing ever. You don’t need to prepare anything or do anything.” 

Participants and collaborators have had varying degrees of agency in what is presented in different projects of Winton’s. In 2017, Winton was an artist-in-residence at the Halifax North Memorial Public Library, where she engaged a fluctuating group of attendees in envisioning a float. She recounts how her usual process took an unexpected turn—a group of participants coalesced to make decisions about what the parade float would look like.

“It didn’t get titled by me. Someone else named it and came up with the form and everything,” she says. Winton recounts her anxieties when few of the participants who created the ideas for the float arrived on the day of the Natal Day Parade to perform.

“Not everybody wants to get up early on a Saturday and get to an event, or even feel like they’re ready to put their bodies in public,” she says. “I recognize that it was difficult for me to do, but I was not quite aware that it was also difficult for other people to do.” 

In Poetry on Tiptoes presented as part of the Quiet Parade in Nocturne 2022, Winton engaged participants in the editing and transposing of lines of poetry created by collaborator Sophie Glover, which were carried by participants and choreographed as walking stanzas across Fort Needham Memorial Park in Halifax. Winton explained that unlike in previous projects, these participants were paid an honorarium and that this shifted the nature of their involvement in nuanced ways.

“The impetus to attend was because they were getting paid, not because they wanted to participate,” she says. “It felt really different, and I wasn’t keen on the feeling.” 

In Murmured Futures (2023), Winton collaborated with Tanya Davis, poet laureate of Prince Edward Island, to create a similar walking-poetry parade. With this iteration, she opted for a different form of remuneration. Reflecting on the ethics of her engagement with participants in the creation of parades, Winton underscored the importance of a clear, honest, and grounded invitation. 

“I made a bunch of copies of the poem on fine art paper, and I made a varied edition, hand-painted them all a bit differently. I had them in a stack ready to give out at the end of the performance,” Winton says. “That did feel really great.” 

Leesa Hamilton has been involved in socially engaged art practices as an educator, facilitator, and mentor for many years. “Because I have been doing this work for a long time, the language around work has changed a lot from twenty-five years ago,” she says. 

With a background in experiential education models, Hamilton recalls her early years spent volunteering to build physical infrastructure, like bridges, latrines, docks, and stairs in communities that needed them. 

“I would learn from and with the community,” says Hamiton. “Many of the skills that I gained were not ones that I came in with.” 

These experiences led Hamilton to her formative experiences of working in communities with “art as a tool,” as she describes it. This included programs for homeless and street-involved youth to create theatre productions and the creation of a ”free art school,” mentoring and equipping young people with tools of entrepreneurship and art practice to help transition into post-secondary education. 

“Some of the young people that I was working with in these programs I had worked with since they were very young, sometimes since they were twelve or thirteen, and then through their university degree,” says Hamilton.

For the Noisemakers Program in 2019, Hamilton facilitated a project with eleven newcomers in Halifax, which explored identity and storytelling through fashion and jewellery making. 

“That project was most fulfilling for me, from beginning to end, because the work felt really personal for each participant. We worked together for a long time, so we built relationships,” she says. “That exhibit, for me as a person of colour who’s connected to a post-secondary institution, it felt really exciting to have images of people of colour on the walls. 

“When we opened that show, there were buses that came in from newcomer communities that our participants were involved in. They brought families and friends into the gallery, many of whom had not been there before.” 

Reflecting on best practices and wisdom acquired from her many experiences doing this type of art facilitation, Hamilton shared the importance of long-term projects that honour the time needed to build relationships. 

“One of the most important things is creating a collaborative project where the methods that we use, the tools that we’re employing, and the outcomes are developed collaboratively,” she says. 

Hamilton recognizes the reality that collaborative project design often results in projects that don’t produce tangible outcomes. As she sees it, that is not the point—it’s about community building and skill building. “There is always skill in the room. When we’re working with a particular media, many of the community members in the group have skill in that area,” Hamilton says. “Everybody’s teaching and everybody’s learning.”

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. 

“As a kid, and all throughout my life in some capacity, I was always making and creating. Somewhere between being a kid and right now [there have been] a lot of life things and existential angst,” say Tian-Morris. “And somehow I ended up in art school a couple of years ago. Some may call that rock bottom—I joke!” 

Wren Tian-Morris has a witty sense of humour, which shows up in their playful, collaborative, and experimental work. With a solid focus on craftsmanship, the artist doesn’t take the work too seriously, which, in my opinion, is refreshing. For example, their most recent exhibition, Our Work, Our Pleasure,  Ourselves and Others, an undergraduate show which opened at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in March 2020 (pre-pandemic), was written in a style similar to a personal ad. 

MEET ME IN THE BEDROOM/ PAST THE BATHROOM AND A LITTLE DOWN THE HALL

Aspiring artist, curious about:

– the intersections of public, private, and pleasure;

– the way Queer (+ Trans) history (especially in the context of Halifax) has informed everything from 

Through various media such as photography, printmaking, sculpture, zine-making, and conceptual work, Tian-Morris’ show Our Work, Our Pleasure, Ourselves and Others re-imagined queer eroticism and subcultures to centre and celebrate Trans folks and People of Colour. Their attention to detail and adroitness shines through in the sharp aspects of the exhibition, which featured the zine “Fag Boy Seeks Same,” in which the artist stickered and photographed historic gay cruising sites in the city. An artist talk was also part of the exhibit, and involved the performance of boot-blacking, which is known in BDSM communities as the act of a submissive partner polishing someone’s leather boots or shoes. Rooted in the overall themes of centring trans and people of colour in queer subcultures, and kink, the various elements of the exhibition flaunted a remarkable cohesiveness. 

Tian-Morris’ ability to home in on a unifying theme, combined with their creative dexterity and their deep care for their community, are skills and commitments they brought to Eyelevel Gallery, where they recently worked as a Summer Programming Assistant. 

“I think art school has actually shown me that I don’t necessarily care for gallery shows or contemporary art. And more so that I crave community, collaborative working, playing, and not defining myself by a certain practice or medium,” says Tian-Morris. “I have to remind myself art is not this one thing, and that it can be a communal act of healing, or playing in some ways, which is why I do think collaborative working and re-framing in art is so important.” 

They cite members of their community—artists like Lux Habrich, Raven Davis, Carmel Farahbakhsh, Darcie Bernhardt, Kris Reppas, Arielle Twist, and Jean Serutoke—as influential to their own practice “[A lot of] their work often informs mine through the investigation of mediums, themes, aesthetics, etc. But beyond formal artistic elements, or simply adoring their work, I would say having conversations, spending time together, hearing them speak, and reading their writing inspires. Artists like Farahbakhsh, Habrich, and Davis, these artists (whether directly or not) help me learn and relearn what it means to be in community, to imagine new worlds, to be making art, why I’m making, and what art can be,” they say. “These artists push me to interrogate all parts of my life, which in turn, eventually informs my art. I think creating can be so many things and does not have to be confined to what we assume when we think of art, but instead can be a term full of possibilities.” 

Part of their contribution to Eyelevel was creating Co-Incidence, a publication dreamed up as a result of the Heat Waves, Eyelevel Gallery’s mini summer residency program. Tian-Morris notes that there were many incredible applications from 2SQTBIPOC applicants, but they did not have the space to accommodate everyone. They find the incredible whiteness of artist-run centres, the arts scene, and even the queer scene in Halifax to be disappointing because of the many amazing (QT)BIPOC artists who are creating brilliant work, but are often under-represented. As a response, they decided to reach out to some of the artists who applied for Heat Waves, as well as a few others for further collaboration. 

“I feel really lucky to be working with Avery Morris, Ben Mitsuk, Calen Sack, DeeDee Clayton, and Excel Garay on this Co-Incidence. All of these artists bring so much brilliance to the table. There are days when I feel angsty about art, but getting to see the work all of these artists truly brings me joy, and reminds me that creating has a place in this world and can be incredibly powerful.”

On exploring the intersections of art and magic, Tian-Morris finds art to be a way of conjuring meaning and feeling. “In the publication, Calen Sack talks about the ways that white people often inquire about Two-Spiritedness in ways that they are essentially fetishizing and fantasizing Indigenous culture. There is obviously magic in being queer and being brown but it’s not in a smoke and mirrors way. It’s something that’s felt through community and in your body. It can vary from person to person but really, at its core, it’s a feeling. It’s something you can’t explain. It’s in the ways that you know somehow your ancestors are looking out for you, or the knowing glance of being the only QPOCs in the room.”

Upon reflection of the magic in community, Tian-Morris feels that they have newly found 2SQTBIPOC community in the past year. They recall a moment when it hit them how connected they felt to their community. 

“There was this moment when it really hit me where I was so overwhelmed with joy and it felt so magical and kind of spiritual, to be honest. I’m saying this because I think talking about this kind of joy and magic is important. Right now, the art world is pretty into consuming the work of racialized queer and trans artists but only under the premise that it’s about our trauma. The artists in Co-Incidence, this publication, touch upon the ways that art and magic intersect for them and how that magic shows up,” says Tian-Morris. “There’s also a lot of talk about the intersections of culture and queerness and how that plays into this kind of magic. I really wanted this publication to just be a space for the artists. I wanted to pick their brains a bit and show off their work.” 

For Tian-Morris, Co-Incidence feels like a way of building community, “even if it’s just in little pieces.” 

Gut Feeling showcases a roster of artists who, in Halifax, are nothing short of beloved. Even on a snowy night in a busy week of exhibition openings, Dalhousie Art Gallery was packed with friends and community members who are deeply devoted to the artists featured. Many artists have practices that intersect with their roles as community organizers and activists, such as Elise Boudreau Graham who co-runs Friends and Neighbours Gallery in a Montréal apartment and Shaya Ishaq who is a co-creator of Black Lit and, as an individual artist, creates libraries of Black literature. The atmosphere at the opening was palpable, supportive, and high-energy. The exhibition’s online description spoke of gut biomes and bacterial interactions between bodies that exchange, collaborate, and change one another. It promised a curatorial paradigm that put communal artistic practice under the microscope to examine how it is intuitive, innate, or embodied on a cellular level. By contrast, the exhibition description on the gallery wall seemed like an apology for not meeting this vision, or an attempt at curatorial modesty. The new description read:

There is no ‘theme’ in this exhibition linking the artists or works together. Instead we chose to work with artists we felt would respond well to our vague notion of a group exhibition and access the Gallery and its resources. In the development of our process, we noted that we were working intuitively, from our gut: / Gut biome, more bacteria than body; if we touch, our biomes change. Biomes exchange, collaborate, and change one another, intuiting needs through intricate communication.

At the opening and the artist talk, there was no mention of gut biomes, and by writing about their own framework as “vague,” Glanzmann and Johnston undersold the nuanced connections that developed naturally between the works. The overwhelming community support for this exhibition shows that the curators should not have lost faith in their original vision. Some artists who may have been considered “emerging” when the exhibition was proposed have, by my standards, surpassed that category today. Perhaps by some curators’ standards these artists— many nationally-exhibiting, and one longlisted for the Sobey Art Award—could fall into this inflated label. Dobbin called into question this category which framed the exhibition by presenting a “retrospective” of their own work created at age eleven. Dobbin’s tongue-in-cheek response to the exhibition exposed what many of us were thinking: that the slow turnaround of exhibitions in major art galleries cannot possibly keep its finger on the pulse of emergent practices. While group exhibitions have the potential to launch the careers of emerging artists, they can also expose the systems that hold them back.

Several artists responded to the architectural and institutional structure of their surroundings in Dalhousie Art Gallery, including Lou Sheppard, who mapped every path that one could take in the building without a key. Elise Boudreau Graham created an installation that celebrated her father Russel Graham, who worked as an electrician at Dalhousie. By painting a line where the electrical conduit runs between two outlets, Boudreau Graham highlighted the technical labour of her NSCAD-trained father in the space of the gallery. Emily Davison and Elyse Moir replayed the script of a past artwork by renowned conceptual artist Gerald Ferguson, which is housed in Dalhousie Art Gallery’s permanent collection. In 1984, Ferguson hired an assistant to create landscape paintings based on Nova Scotia postcards, and the resulting work was mainly accredited to Ferguson. In response, Davison hired Moir to produce 60 postcards (which doubled as time cards to clock in and out of work) based on the four original paintings. It’s as though Moir played broken telephone, by reinterpreting the four repeated images over the course of her shifts as a contracted worker. Scribbled on one of Moir’s sketches it read, “I hadn’t been thinking of the pedagogical implications of the Assistant / Artist relationship.” Davison and Moir jointly share credit, copyright, and future exhibition fees for the work, calling into question the systems of apprenticeship that have traditionally defined emerging artists.

Stephanie Yee’s sweet and sour sauce fountain created a sticky aroma at the entrance of the gallery. Using this common motif found in many Chinese North American restaurants, Yee used the water feature to expose the racial prejudice behind the concept of tackiness and to interrogate the dual meaning of the word taste. In José Andrés Mora’s motorized installation, a screen loudly swung back and forth along a structural beam, displaying a statement in all-caps that was reminiscent of a scrolling news ticker. With each pendulum swing, the message on the screen reflected the movement as though to say “this, but also this, but also this.” The narrative arc of the text waffled with indecision as it scrolled back and forth, forgiving, congratulating, and apologizing to an anonymous reader.

Several artists took intuitive approaches to making, appropriately following the logic of the exhibition’s title. Lou Sheppard’s graphic compositions translated data into dance notation and audio scores, which were then interpreted by dancers. The dancers negotiated space, testing out new postures as they tentatively explored the contours of Sheppard’s notation. Though Sheppard’s work appears to follow a rigid, linear process of translation, it frays the hard disciplinary seams of traditional research by operating in an exploratory manner. Adjacent to Sheppard’s work, the walls around Ishaq’s weavings were plastered with an Octavia E. Butler quote from Parable of the Sower, “ALL THAT YOU TOUCH / YOU CHANGE / ALL THAT YOU CHANGE / CHANGES YOU / THE ONLY LASTING TRUTH IS CHANGE / GOD IS CHANGE.” Ishaq followed Butler’s tenants of change while weaving, shifting techniques each time that a consistent pattern emerged in her fibre works. While the resulting weavings follow winding narrative paths, they are far more balanced than they are spontaneous. The meticulous bands of colour often mirror one another, and Ishaq demonstrates the regularity of change as a consistent inevitability.

The tenuous relationships between the works in the show demonstrate that the curators had the right instincts when drawing together these artists. They certainly followed a clear methodology by relinquishing curatorial authority in order to offer agency to artists with communally-driven practices. Granted, their modesty bordered on self-deprecation, as though it was meant to shield them from criticism. In the past, I have heard Atlantic-based curators talk about a sense of inferiority that follows east coast artists, one that stops them from valuing their own statements, stories, and testimonies. It takes gall to draw a circle around a group of artists, claim a truth about them, and expose them to the eye of the critic. Though this risk of exposure can come at a price for a curator, the calibre of the work in this exhibition deserves and demands such a risk.

“Hometactics,” according to Latina philosopher Mariana Ortega, is a notion of everyday praxis as a way to feel comfortable in unwelcoming worlds, all the while remaining aware of the oppressive nature of dominant norms in those worlds. The contradiction of finding comfort in a hostile environment can be observed in Memorial: Work by Venezuelan Diaspora Artists. The group exhibition, shown at the Khyber Centre for the Arts, featured the work of Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz, denirée isabel, Sebastián Rodríguez y Vasti, Alejandro Rizzo, Cecilia Salcedo, and Camila Salcedo. The exhibition served as a platform for Venezuelan artists to document, archive, and
recreate their experiences of living with unfixed diasporic identities, understanding the resulting artworks as extensions of their displaced selves.

denirée isabel confronts the audience with the private-home in a los extraños que amo profundamente where the artist presents a love letter to people she has never met. Meanwhile, in Realidades Fabricadas, Alejandro Rizzo Nervo makes an interpretation of the public-home as a concern for an uncertain future that incorporates a personal recollection of events. And finally, how Camila Salcedo’s Realidades Alternativas (Santa Paula, El Cafetal, Caurimare, Caracas) encompasses both aspects, private-home/public-home, by piecing together the places from her childhood using Google Street View, a service banned by the Venezuelan government.

The multiplicitous self, which is constantly negotiating their multiple social locations, applies homestactics to their relationship with the public-home and the private-home. The public-home is a way to refer to the public spaces and events in the homeland and can be framed by what the curator refers to as “News/Crisis” in the curatorial statement: there is a scarcity of news coming from Venezuela as a result of censorship laws and power outages, which creates a barrier between the artists and their home country. However, the private-home, as a counterpart, is the collection of family pictures and stories that the artist kept after migrating. This concept of private-home can be found in what the curator categorizes as grandparents/family histories, which focuses on family memories and intergenerational trauma.

a los extraños que amo profundamente by denirée isabel is composed of multiple textile pieces that were placed inside the gallery’s window display. The weavings were hung from the ceiling, juxtaposing delicate panels reminiscent of windows and large-scale portraits of the artist’s grandparents who, unlike the artist, still live in Venezuela. This self-mapping locates the artist embedded in the specific history of Venezuela’s immigration crisis, a history where sometimes leaving the homeland means never returning. The work seems to be a place of offering, a make-believe altar that appeals to the viewer’s sense of grief. Praxis is evident in the private-home when a part of the artist’s personal archive is longing for something familiar.

Alejandro Rizzo Nervo presents us with two photographs from the series Realidades Fabricadas. The scale of the images used in the photo collages lends a cartoonish quality to both pieces while also maintaining a serious political tone. One of the photos shows three people printing money. Bills are stacked on the floor and current Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro can be seen on a nearby screen giving directions. The second image shows four protesters in the foreground (holding banners, throwing tear gas, displaying the Venezuelan flag), while a group of policemen can be seen behind them next to a billboard of Chavez’s eyes covering what appears to be a slum. The use of such cartoonish composition of images can be understood as a tactic to soften the seriousness of hardship, making it manageable for an inexperienced audience. The public-home appears in this work as a criticism to the process of inflation and its consequences.

Realidades Alternativas (Santa Paula, El Cafetal, Caurimare, Caracas) by Camila Salcedo gives the feeling of scouring endlessly for a memory you cannot find. Salcedo pairs found footage, satellite photos, and images from Google 360° to create a video collage that attempts to piece together the neighborhood she grew up in. Looking for the private-home in an inaccessible public-home is a way in which the multiplicitous self-negotiates its diasporic state. In this way, it can find its reflection in location, while longing for places that have changed and maybe don’t exist anymore.

As is stated by the title, the exhibition showcases not just the work of artists but specifically that of Venezuelan diaspora artists. The curator claims that “the work intends to be non-partisan, without siding with any specific political party or political affiliation in the context of current Venezuelan politics.” For a show that presents highly political work, it seems contradictory to claim impartiality. The show falls in the trap of being in a barred room—it wants to create a sense of community by claiming impartiality, although it risks excluding other Venezuelan people that cannot remain impartial. Even when the themes are divided into categories (grandparents, family histories, news/crisis), the most evident one is overlooked: the politics. Hometactics pushes the artist to make this work to negotiate their state of living between worlds; it also unexpectedly reminds us that, sometimes, home has an inextricable link to the political.

I expected to cross a number of hurdles during the fourteen weeks I spent hiding my pregnancy from the art world. For instance, I put little pieces of cut-up lime on the rim of tumblers of ginger ale at openings. I vomited in the Cineplex lobby seconds before re-applying my lipstick and introducing filmmakers at the Atlantic International Film Festival. I found creative new ways to wear office basics to hide my growing belly. However, I had not prepared myself for how it would feel to sit on committees, boards, and juries while taking a private tally of how many times I heard I’m not sure, she has a kid now. I don’t think she has time. I tried my best to subtly defend the artists I saw as my future community, but the idea had already planted itself in my brain: was I about to be completely discounted as a professional?

During the nine months of my pregnancy, I programmed for three film festivals, curated the Nocturne Art at Night Festival, and became the Executive Director of the Centre for Art Tapes (CFAT), an artist-run centre. My career was in a strong place, but with every passing We will miss you!, I felt as though the invite to my retirement party would show up any day.

Years ago, when I was an art student at NSCAD University, a female professor told the class they loved their son, but parenthood is the reason they wouldn’t become a great artist. I had never encountered that perspective and I thought perhaps it was a belief particular to that artist alone. In the past few months, however, I have heard that same sentiment from female- identifying artists and arts administrators on the street, in meetings, and through unsolicited Instagram messages. I can only assume these are meant to be loving attempts to drastically lower my expectations.

When I became pregnant, CFAT’s personnel policy read:
CFAT recognizes patriarchal systems in which many arts organizations in Canada operate.CFAT acknowledges the existence of internalized misogyny, white supremacy, neo-colonialism, rape culture, and systemic gendered pressures based on normalized patriarchal gender roles and as normalized societal framework.

A few paragraphs later, the policy laid out CFAT’s allowance for parental leave: a full 20 weeks shorter than what the provincial law protects.

At the time, I sat on boards for both the Artist Run Centre Association of Canada and the Independent Media Arts Alliance of Canada, and I was hearing similar language everywhere about the importance of removing patriarchal systems through policy work. I thought this meant that CFAT had fallen behind the times. I reached out to organizations locally and nationally who spoke loudly about such issues only to find out that, just like CFAT’s own policies, there were no real protections for their employees as parents. In an informal survey of the artist run centres and galleries in the HRM, I found only one financial top-up policy in place at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Very few institutions had any parental leave or pregnancy leave policies at all.

I asked employees if they knew of anyone who had taken time off to care for a newborn in the past decade or so. I found a handful of men who only took a few weeks, but no women, and no folks who had birthed their babies. I knew that if I was going to be able to come back to my job after physically recovering and spending time with my newborn, I’d have to quickly become my own advocate.

The first change was to make myself a real employee. (For years CFAT’s staff had been contract workers whose contracts were renewed yearly.) Although I held a full-time position for five years, under the eyes of the government CFAT was neither obligated to hold a position for me upon completion of my leave, nor was I eligible for federal maternity leave benefits. While this was a fixable problem for me, much of our sector leaves workers jumping from contract to contract with no financial stability with which to plan a family.

Next, I took a long shot and proposed to CFAT’s board of directors that they adopt a parental leave top-up policy. It often comes as a surprise to those who have never looked into it that federal pregnancy and parental leave only covers 55% of your income for the time you are off work (35% should you choose to take the extended leave). Arts administration is a field where incomes are low nationally and, with Atlantic Canada lagging behind the rest of the country, 35 – 55% of your income can be completely unlivable. It’s also worth mentioning that an arts career is unlikely to allow a large savings account.

Through the process of policy building, I became a self-taught expert on parenthood and employment law in Nova Scotia.

As I sat in a prenatal yoga class with two dozen other pregnant people, I listened to them swap plans of how close to their due dates they would work. When I asked about their experiences applying for maternity benefits and navigating work policies, the lawyers, grocery store clerks, teachers, and others looked confused. One expectant parent asked: Don’t you just tell HR you’re leaving?

Advocating for yourself is not easy, particularly when you feel that your job may be at stake. At one film screening I attended in my first trimester, a local male programmer whispered to me that the filmmaker was coming in, and appeared to be pregnant. The warning felt as if I was supposed to adjust my conduct around her accordingly, and I was left unsure how to do so. As I prepared to present my policy requests to the board, that man’s voice replayed in my head. What if rather than considering my request, they simply refiled me into a category of employee who was no longer useful?

I’d be a mother without an income, and an arts worker without a career.

I lucked out in a big way. The personnel committee was made up of three women who worked in arts administration, one of whom is a mother. They worked swiftly and seriously and treated me with such professionalism that it wasn’t until one too few beer glasses were handed out at the board table that I realized they were onto me. This group of women understood that cohesive policies and actions make change, not statements of moral intent.

Pregnancy is a vulnerable time: your body changes in ways no one warns you about; every horror story that ever took place in a delivery room seems to find its way to you; and every small medical complication can leave you wondering if you caused it by eating deli meat. More than anything, pregnancy is lonely. Even with the most supportive of partners, it’s you alone who will take on the exhaustion, guilt, excitement, and pressure of growing an entire human being (or more) in less than a year. It seems unrealistic and cruel that we would require our pregnant coworkers and artists to defend their careers at the same time. It is essential that organizations reform their outdated or non-existent policies to create concrete pathways for arts workers to family planning.

As I write this, on leave from my job and with the birth of my son weeks away, I feel grateful for the work of my board that has allowed me to enter motherhood with financial and career security. Creating more welcoming environments for our expectant and new parents in art spaces and work places is not only possible but vital to the ongoing process of aligning our institutions with the cultural values we promote.

How we Build: On Craft and Blackness

A panel discussion featuring four Black artists discussing craft and collaboration.

Juanita Peters, Letitia Fraser, NAT chantel, and Sobaz Benjamin
Facilitated by Francesca Ekwuyasi
Friday, October 18, 2019, 7 – 9pm
Art Bar + Projects, 1893 Granville Street, Halifax

(K’jipuktuk/Halifax) Visual Arts News, in partnership with Nocturne: Art at Night and MSVU Art Gallery, presents the panel discussion How We Build: On Craft and Blackness. Based on curator Pamela Edmond’s quote “I am no longer interested in a seat at the table. I now want to build my own table” this panel will focus on the concept of Black artists creating work for a Black audience.

With the purpose of illuminating ideas on intergenerational knowledge and craft sharing as a means of fostering solidarity and resistance within and between the various Black communities in Nova Scotia, this panel will engage in ideas on locating pleasure, joy, and celebration as a survival tool while navigating structural oppression.

Join panelists Juanita Peters, Letitia Fraser, NAT chantel, and Sobaz Benjamin in a discussion facilitated by Francesca Ekwuyasi on Friday, October 18, 7 – 9pm at the Art Bar + Projects when we will also be launching the Fall 2019 issue of Visual Arts News magazine.

Refreshments will be served and all are welcome. Gender neutral washrooms on site. ASL interpretation available upon request, please contact us in advance to book. Code of Conduct available here. 

Meet the panelists:

Sobaz Benjamin, first and foremost a storyteller, is the Founder and Executive Director of an innovative, arts-based, youth and adult engagement, empowerment and reintegration not-for-profit in Halifax, called In My Own Voice (iMOVe) Arts Association, (2007).  Sobaz is a documentary film-maker, as well as a community developer, advocate, youth mentor, program director, facilitator and public speaker.  His work has been screened across Canada and in venues and Festivals in New Zealand, Bermuda and New York.  He has completed documentaries for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Sobaz uses his experience as an independent filmmaker in his community- based work with marginalized youth, adults and community.

NAT chantel is a primarily self-taught interdisciplinary artist who engages subtle movement and repetitive processes to revisit memory and personal history as way to reclaim the body and voice. Language, lineal disruption and displacement from land and home claim permanence in her art.  She has participated in Canadian Art Festivals Ignite the Night, Afterglow, and was chosen as a beacon artist for Nocturne (2019) and the first Indigenous curated Nocturne festival (2018.) She has voiced in Annie Wong’s A Choir on Desires and Demand on Repeat (2019), performed with Black Rabbit (2019), and released sound through a nature-based installation during her White Rabbit Residency (2019). NAT was selected into the 2017-2018 VANS Mentorship Program, the Summer Professional Development Residency with NSCCD (2018) and the Centre For Art Tapes Media Scholarship Program (2018-2019.) Her poem Beauty was published in the first print-edition of Understorey Magazine: African Women Writers (2018.) She was a Nova Scotia Talent Trust scholarship recipient (2017 & 2018) and is a member of Visual Arts Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Basketry Guild, and Black Artists Network of Nova Scotia. NAT has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Literature and is a Certified Yoga Instructor. 

Letitia Fraser is an Interdisciplinary artist, recently graduating with a BFA from NSCAD University. Fraser’s work centers around her experience as an African Nova Scotian woman growing up in the province’s black communities. As a painter, Letitia draws inspiration from her family and community’s history of quilting. Fraser has participated in several group shows and has recently shown her work in a solo exhibition at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, titled Mommay’s Patches: Traditions & Superstitions, and currently has a solo show at MSVU Art Gallery. She has also received numerous awards for her work including the Nova Scotia Talent Trust RBC Emerging Artist Award. Most recently, Fraser participated in the residency Ground Rules at the Cape Breton Centre for Crafts and Design, NS. Fraser continues her practice in Halifax, NS.

Juanita Peters is a playwright, actor and film director. Peters has over 35 years of media experience. Her early career included radio and television host/reporter for various networks including CBC NB and AVR. A member of ACTRA, Writers Guild of Canada (WGC), Actors Equity (CAEA), Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre (PARC) and a founding member of Women In Film & Television Atlantic (WIFT-AT), Peters is the Executive Director at The Africville Museum and teaches Playwrighting in the Theatre at Dalhousie University.

Panel facilitator:
francesca omolara ekwuyasi is a writer, filmmaker, and visual artist from Lagos, Nigeria. Her work explores themes of faith, family, queerness, consumption, loneliness and belonging. You may find her writing in Winter Tangerine Review, Brittle Paper, Transition Magazine, the Malahat Review, Visual Art News and GUTS Magazine. Her short documentary Black + Belonging screened at the Halifax Black Film Festival and Festival International du Film Black de Montréal this year. During her upcoming residency at the Khyber Centre for the Arts, she will be producing work which interrogates the intersections of queerness and faith.

For more information, contact:

Becky Welter-Nolan
Publisher
Visual Arts News
publisher@visualartsnews.ca
t: 902-423-4694, 1-866-225-8267