When I visited The Rooms this past summer, to see Labrador artist Melissa Tremblett’s solo exhibition, Reprise, I was on my way down the southern shore to scatter my mother’s ashes off the Drook, in the company of her two sisters. Walking into the gallery to Melissa’s work brought me a sense of comfort, a reminder that we are all connected to our ancestors, and part of a larger relation. Our mothers. Our Aunties. Our grandmothers. We are carrying their love, their teachings, and their hearts. In a way, our lives are like a musical composition, a reprise to all that came before and will come after. 

From my position as a mixed-Mi’kmaq/settler reviewer, I want to clearly address that Tremblett’s Reprise is deeply personal, as it weaves text, photography, beadwork, natural found materials, and textiles to connective tissues of ancestry. This illustrates the artist reconnecting to lost histories and refining her relationship to her identity and Innu heritage. It’s both powerful and vulnerable. The exhibition gives viewers the opportunity to witness multiple selves, to be uncomfortable, to reflect on addiction, mental health and all that creates an object and an identity. There is no division between artist and art work. 

Reprise is a reflective self-portrait, inviting viewers to hold space, contemplate, and pay witness. As part of her Elbow Room residency, Tremblett spent time with many objects found in The Rooms’ collection, including a caribou skin jacket (the maker is unknown) and tea dolls that were central to traditional Innu ways of life and made by her grandmother, Madeline Michelin (1932-2008), a renowned Innu artist. She studied the handiwork of the caribou skin jacket maker, her grandmother, and her aunt—who is also a doll maker—and learned from their techniques. Tremblett created a straitjacket, “Evade, 2019,” made of mixed media (cotton, cotton thread, antiquated brass hardware, and a plastic buckle) that speaks to the artist’s struggle with addiction and an eating disorder. “Reprise, 2020” is another jacket made of wool, cotton, cotton thread, magnets, and seed beads, with a hood lined with her grandmother’s fabric.

Michelin, Tremblett’s grandmother, was a doll maker, a skill passed down by her mother in the resettled community of Sheshatshiu. The juxtaposition of her “Untitled 1997-1998” mixed media tea dolls and Tremblett’s tea doll “Just like Madeline, 2019,” (made with black tea, naturally dyed cotton, fabric, linen, imitation hide, seed beads, and faux leather trim) are an act of generational knowledge transmission, carrying Innu teachings. The words “hearts intertwine,” which are below the three dolls, brought me to tears. The relationship between great-grandmother, grandmother, and granddaughter resonates. The tea dolls, made by dollmakers for their children, are constructed from caribou hide and stuffed with a pound or so of tea. As it was up until the 1950s, Innu people of Labrador moved twice a year to be closer to primary food sources, packing up every winter to follow the caribou herd. It was the children’s job to carry the tea dolls, which the adults needed to borrow to make black tea to share with the Elders and hunters. Once the tea supply ran out, the dolls were re-stuffed with moss. Tea dolls weren’t only practical, they were a way for children to learn the importance of taking care of the Elders and sharing with others. 

Reprise speaks to the ongoing interconnectivity between generations.

Despite the exhibition being visual art, poetry is found throughout the gallery walls, which adds a dreamlike aspect. Tremblett’s words, “Meandering/ Falter/ in spite of the dark/ my heart grows fonder/ mended spirit/ taking root/ renew the mind/ braided spine/ sauntering softly/ hearts intertwine,” almost whisper throughout the space. A framed poem features the line, “We may not know how to talk to our people. But we will always go back.” However, it’s the wordlessness of the large, black-framed “Self-portrait as a Tree, 2014,” a series of reclaimed pieces of birch bark, that speaks for the relationship between the artist and the land, highlighting how Tremblett, of Innu and English descent, is separate neither from the land nor her ancestors.

While Tremblett’s work is provocative and striking, it’s the artist speaking in her own words about returning to Labrador seven years after her grandmother’s death that is central to understanding the truth and courage of Reprise. Tremblett writes about going for a walk with Innu Elder Tshakuesh (Elizabeth) Penashue in the spring of 2015. “When I talked with Tshakuesh about Grandma she would tell me how I was ‘Just like Madeline.’ I’ve always felt I wanted to be just like Grandma when I grew up. When Tshakuesh said that to me, it was the first time I felt like I was reconnecting with Gram. After that, I got into making tea dolls. I had tried before but felt like I didn’t have the right because I didn’t feel like I belonged. Now I know who I am.”

Tremblett’s Reprise is a testament to her own becoming, and it honours her Innu culture and artistic practice. Like Tremblett, I needed to return home to reconnect to the land and waters after my mother died this past fall. Despite being in the midst of a global pandemic, I am grateful to the Atlantic bubble for the opportunity to spend time with this important exhibition in Ktaqamkuk, an artistic place like no other. 

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

Andrew Cairns and Benjamin Woodyard, Big Drip , 2014. 1. 7 x 1. 2 m.
Photo: Sam Stewart

Andrew Cairns doesn’t so much paint, as reveal. In a body of work spanning 60 plus paintings over five years, Cairns experiments with colour and line as his own Op Art revival.

Propelled by the interplay of pigments and rooted in process, Cairns’ large-scale, geometric pieces are inspired by a deep love of quilts. His decorative abstractions are in contrast to the usual mode of Maritimes’ landscapes, while celebrating a visual style influenced by local craft tradition. Taking instinctual action, Cairns’ work honours memory through the contrast of bold, modern expressions.

“You learn a lot from limiting the possibilities. I look at the canvas as a problem I’m trying to solve in a visual way.” -ANDREW CAIRNS

“Initially, I felt I was doing something that others weren’t and it helped it stand out a bit,” says Cairns. Experimenting with drawing, printmaking, photography and video, Cairns, “stumbled on” the method of using tape on his canvasses while painting. “I use tape as a resist, which is fabric term,” he explains. “The tape stops other colours from going on certain parts of the fabric.” He adds that making the patterns fit into one inch boundaries “without being boring is a challenge, but then the colours are very intuitive.”

“It has been quite a learning curve figuring out what colours do what together. Some colours look so good together,” says Cairns.

“The process is kind of funny because I’ll put the tape down, then the different colours, and I won’t really know what the final product is going to look like until I take the tape off.”

The artist compares his work to that of post-painterly minimalist Frank Stella: “But I don’t even know if I had really seen Stella before I did the first painting in his style,” he says, musing that Stella’s look has simply seeped into popular culture. “I’ve been drawn to the 1970s in general and the aesthetic of that time. I think it fits well with how I feel about making work.”

“I want to offer a body of work in a uniform style, to define what I’m doing. In pushing a very specific output, I’m freer to deviate,” says Cairns.  “You learn a lot from limiting the possibilities. I look at the canvas as a problem I’m trying to solve in a visual way.”

Andrew Cairns, Lo-Deco, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 1. 4 x . 9 m.

Cairns describes his work as communicating at the level of direct visual appeal. “It’s a bit optical but not overwhelming, as some Op Art can be quite hard on the eyes,” he says. “But working big, often six feet by six feet, taping, is a nice way to tackle a large space without it being too much. The result is pretty clean but also maze-like.”

Over fields of contrasting colours and shapes, Cairns work is informed by textiles and handicraft. “I’ve always really liked quilts. Some of my early stuff really intentionally mimicked the look of quilts,” says Cairns. “It can be powerful and provocative to bring decoration in. It’s unexpected and not always seen as high fine art. I know some people can feel like it’s a slippery slope, but I don’t feel that way.”

He acknowledges the unique challenges of being a Maritime artist, based on PEI: “In my experience, being an artist in the Maritimes seems like such an untenable position sometimes—who you’re going to sell work to, where you’re going to show—whereas it seems like you can make a valid argument about doing design.”

His work spans the past and present, pointing to the tension between the exalted and ordinary. Sentiment and impulse drive Carins’ hypnotizing monuments. “They’re fairly open to whatever people want to read into them. They’re a space for projection.”