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.

“The only thing more powerful than the revolutionary imaginary is revolutionary action. The world can be better. Can be socially just. Can have full. Employment. Can create dignity for all.”

The voice belongs to Gillian Dykeman, a Fredericton-based artist, educator, cultural worker, and, in this instance, fitness instructor quasi anti-capitalist comrade. She’s cycling, instructing, and feeling the burn alongside the rest of us while wearing a handsewn red and cream-coloured uniform, inspired by the Constructivist workout attire of artist Varvara Stepanova. This spin class isn’t one of SMU’s regular fitness class offerings. Instead, it’s presented by Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, as a performance called Revolution Revolution. It proposes group fitness classes as sites in which revolutionary energies can be generated, harnessed, and disseminated to collectively build radical futures. As the class cycles, creating and burning energy in turn, we are schooled on the exploitative conditions of precarious labour markets. We are prompted to think about how capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy are self-perpetuating systems of oppression. As we ramp up our intensity, we build strength for protest. As we cool down, we send energy to the precariat.

By the end of the class, we’re primed for collective action. We leave with Dykeman’s questions still floating through our bodies: “What is the energy of revolution? How do we better engineer our energetic outputs to formulate collective ways of being out of a culture that glorifies individualism …to radically reimagine what it is we’re doing with our lives? Our life-force? Our love?”

Dykeman’s practice is built on intersections—intersecting disciplines and intersectional feminist politics. Through disciplines such as performance, sculpture, video, sound, installation, and art criticism, Dykeman considers the deep relationships and tensions between bodies, land, labour, capitalism, colonialism, and care. Her work approaches questions of relationality and responsibility (to each other, to the land, to ourselves) through an interplay of parody and sincerity.

Beyond, yet related to her artistic practice, Gillian is also a cultural worker and an educator. For several years, she was the Executive Director at ArtsLink NB, where she built community for artists and advocated for the arts at a provincial level. She currently works as an instructor at the New Brunswick College of Art and Design, where she teaches Foundation Visual Arts and Advanced Studio Practice. Most recently, she’s taken on a brand new role: motherhood. I speak to her for this piece in February 2020, about four weeks after she has given birth to her first child. She is generous with her time and after we talk about how she’s doing (“tired, grateful, my body is doing amazing things”), we discuss her practice.

Lately, she has been interested in forests. Dykeman is a cis white woman living on unceded Wolastoqey, Mi’kmaq and Peskotomuhkati territory. Since the early 1800s, the land she resides on has been used to fuel the forestry industry, which is the province’s largest economic sector. Her recent work considers the many angles through which forests have been exploited to further the cause of colonialism, both historically and presently. This past fall, during a residency called Directing Our Gaze, supported by Connexion ARC and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Dykeman mined the Beaverbrook’s permanent collection to research the historical relationship between watercolour paintings and colonization.

Several months earlier, she created Appetite for the Symposium international d’art contemporaries de Baie-Saint-Paul. Appetite is a durational performance and a large-scale installation of stacked chopped wood arranged in a spiral formation. The piece was born out of Dykeman’s personal fascination with the activity of chopping wood—a traditionally masculine coded task—and her interest in sustainable resource sharing. Lately, she has turned to small woodlot operations as a potential socially and environmentally sustainable alternative to harmful extraction technologies.

Appetite initiates a dialogue with the legacy of land art and explicitly with Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. But when I think about the way Dykeman engages with land, I am reminded of how Nancy Holt meticulously documented the construction of her piece Sun Tunnels (a piece that Dykeman engaged with directly in her 2016 video/installation work Dispatches from a Feminist Utopia). Holt filmed the construction of Sun Tunnels, taking care to observe, honour, and care for the labour and the labourers that were working on her behalf—something her male contemporaries had never done, instead preferring to maintain the illusion that the art appeared on the land as if by nature itself, and not by human hands. Both Dykeman and Holt attempt to understand how any intervention leaves a mark on the land, and they each acknowledge the labour of making that mark. Through Appetite, Dykeman explores how environmental resources and human resources are explicitly linked—and how the exploitation of one leads to the weakness of both.

“I see the way land is exploited under capitalism as akin to the way bodies are exploited under the [hetero]patriarchy,” says Dykeman. She explains how through colonization and under capitalism, land is commodified into parcels—often literally demarcated by arbitrary borders and property lines— in the same way that bodies and labour are commodified and compartmentalized under capitalist patriarchy.

“Bodies and land are, in this way, natural allies, and it makes sense to care for them both in similar ways,” she says. “Looking after the environment should entail being mindful to the land as a living being.”

My first introduction to Dykeman’s work was in Sackville, New Brunswick, in 2011. She was participating in a residency at Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Center. When I entered the gallery, I saw a wall lined with handwritten letters. The piece was called Collaboration with 521 Friends. For one month, Dykeman wrote letters to each one of her facebook friends, posted them on the wall, and later mailed them out. Some of my friends now still have those letters.

Dykeman’s work is in constant dialogue with others: sometimes with theorists, sometimes with history, often with other artists, with social movement, with land, with friends. Her work shows that she is an active listener, that she wants to hear and learn from those her work initiates dialogue with, and that she is a student of her own work. Several of her projects explore these ideas explicitly, including her Artslant Podcast Working (it) Out, in which she interviewed a series of artists about one unifying question: Does art need an audience?

Affective labour is a recurrent methodology in Dykeman’s approach to her art. And friendships, genuine ones, seem to function as praxis. Her work invites collaboration and participation, often literally. As we talk about performance and the use of physicality in her work, she tells me that she often just wants “to be in the work.” She tells me that in many of her projects she wants “to create a sense of hosting, so that other people can be in it too. So that they can ask ‘What if?’ And propose alternatives.” Friendship and collaborations can lead to utopian futures, to radical imagining and collective world building. Creating containers for those interactions can be what Dykeman refers to as “utopian gestures.” Involving others in her work allows Dykeman to learn how people experience her art and, more broadly, how they experience the world. “I became an artist as a way to find agency,” she says. Her art is a way to extend that agency to others.

The concept of call and response evokes a dialogue rooted in musicality, a back-and-forth predicated on sharing and reflecting back, developing, and growing a conversation. #callresponse, co-presented by Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery and Eyelevel Artist-Run Centre, is an ongoing project that developed out of Tarah Hogue’s research on Indigenous feminisms and artistic practice at grunt gallery in 2014.

In collaboration with co-conspirators Maria Hupfield and Tania Willard (their preference for “co-conspirator” or “accomplice,” a specific politicized alternative to “ally” inspired by Jaskiran Dhillon’s “On Becoming an Accomplice,” explained in the stunning exhibition catalogue), this traveling and ever-evolving collection reflects on the specifically institutionalized site of “the gallery,” a series of conversations and interactions with the physical land, its inhabitants and keepers. These conversations center Indigenous women and their practices.

Artists Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory collaborated and conspired with Isaac Murdoch, Esther Neff & IV Castellanos, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Meagan Musseau, and Tanya Tagaq to create a series of site-specific works that have continued to evolve as an ongoing project, and result in unique gallery exhibitions and across the country. Engaging with the hashtag #callresponse—perhaps the most ubiquitous symbol of a modern form of conversational structure and organization—viewers are invited to peek into a much larger and more expansive meta-dialogue.

There is a sort of starkness in the placement of the various works in the gallery, and a bareness to some of the pieces themselves. This creates an intensity and offers a complex intimacy that permeates the entire exhibition. For example, Belcourt and Isaac Murdoch’s Reconciliation with the Land and Waters, is a physical record of ceremonies the artists led at gatherings on Indigenous governance across Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan in 2015 and 2016, and now exists in the gallery in absence. The robe was gifted to the artists, who are part of the Onaman collective, by the Grand Chief, and it was returned to the artists in support of their community work. 

The simplicity and deceptive familiarity of Ursula Johnson and Meagan Musseau’s collaborative audio-based endurance piece Ke’tapekiaq Ma’qimikew: The Land Sings belies the complexity and sheer breadth of the work. A map affixed to the gallery floor notes the “SMU Art Gallery, Halifax NS” as a sort of starting point for a journey charted across 13 maps tacked up along the gallery wall, which ends at “East Bay Beach, Cape Breton Island, NS.” Through a pair of headphones, the viewer is able to listen to Johnson’s “song from and for the land.”

Perhaps the most arresting pieces are Williamson-Bathory’s video-based works, which visually dominate the gallery with their size and activity, and are unflinchingly, almost confrontational, in their blend of intimacy and engagement. Timiga nunalu, sikulu (My body, the land and the ice) features the artist reclining nude upon a vast icy landscape, a classical art pose and composition which is disrupted by the artist’s use of “uaajeerneq,” a Greenlandic mask dance that plays “with elements of fear, humour, and sexuality.” The collaboration here features Inuk multidisciplinary artist Tanya Tagaq performing a contemporaneous vocalization, and in the moment a soundtrack of sorts for both the original video, and to Williamson-Bathory’s transformation into uaajeerneq, culminating in a physical performance between the women that exudes a sort of intimate kinship, and a demand to the audience to “actively experience, witness and remember.”

Maria Hupfield’s “call” to conversation is demonstrated simply by Bag, an industrial felt replication of Anishinaabe floral beadwork designs that the artist carried throughout a number of her performances. Post-Performance / Conversation Action is Hupfield’s adaptation of the highly institutionalized artist talk into a form of intergenerational community building, centering Indigenous women.

Feet On the Ground, the participatory group performance response developed with IV Castellanos and Esther Neff, challenges the viewer to examine their role in decolonization, explicitly asking “do you want to surrender or take action?” In the gallery, the physical evidence of this active collaboration (surveyor’s tape, tiny foam tools, stark black banners) lays on the floor, and the silence of the objects highlights the dynamic human component necessary to enact.

Tania Willard’s Only Available Light is perhaps most explicit in its confrontation of the manipulation and exploitation of Indigeneity by settler colonialism, something it achieves with brilliant simplicity. By placing selenite crystals in front of a projector, the silent 1928 film The Shuswap Indians of British Columbia, originally commissioned by the National Museum of Canada, Willard disrupts the transmission of the images and forces the audience to reconsider what they’re viewing. This disruption is underscored by Leela Gilday’s sound composition, and the placement of these crystals with a birch bark basket “rescued” from an antique store, and glass Listerine bottles salvaged from Willard’s reserve. The bottles are filled with seed beads and digital prints of the selenite windows of a Roman cathedral, and illustrate children on their way to residential school.

#callresponse cannot simply be understood as a response to reconciliation or a catalogue of resistance. Rather, it is an ongoing project of engagement that rejects marginalization in favour of an exploration and prizing of Indigenous women artists, and the impact of their work.

As Hogue explains, “We wanted to represent the fullness, the critical, vital abundance of Indigenous women’s artistic practices, who are leading conversations and actions for the future. It’s also important to say, however; that the invitations were all premised on a consideration of long-term engagement within the artists’ respective communities while recognizing that the ‘community’ would also be different in each case. It’s really that on-the-ground work that brings all of these artists together.”

Kathleen M. Higgins is a K’jipuktuk (Halifax) based arts writer, public servant, and dog aunt.

Photo from “Growing Up Female,” a personal photo journal by Abigail Heyman published in 1974, and in the NSCAD library ever since.

I decided it’s best to start my exploration of the archive at the very first issue of Visual Arts Nova Scotia from 1976. The very first issue is filled with opinions, opportunities and resources — like tips on taking slides, exhibition listings, reviews and some advice on how to get grants from Canada Council for the arts. It’s clear to me that there was lots of energy being put into the new publication, as a way to support the budding visual arts scene in Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada. This strong foundation of support clearly continues 40 years later. But in the second issue, I came across a very interesting article entitled “Women in the Arts.” It is an annotated bibliographic record of 52 publications that catalog women in the arts, in fields including film, photography, writing, painting and sculpture, compiled by Chery Homes from Montreal’s PowerHouse Gallery, that offers a great historical reference and a poignant reflection of society at the time by a young Canadian feminist of settler heritage.

The list mainly contains books about historical and contemporary (at the time) female artists from America, Canada, Europe, Egypt and Colombia. It is also peppered with a mix of well known feminist authors like Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex , 1952) and lesser known surrealist fiction/nonfiction works such as Down Below by Leonora Carrington (1972). There are some hidden gem artists’ books, such as the photo journal Growing Up Female by Abigail Heyman (1974), a pamphlet from the West Coast Women’s artist Conference at the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California (1972), and some great 1970’s feminist titles such as Rooms with No View (Media Association, no date), Popcorn Venus (Rosen, 1973), Not in God’s Image (O’Failain, Martines, 1970) and Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (Chicago,1975). Also included is a memoir of Elizabeth Vigér-Lebrun from 1903 where Homes writes “The Queen picked up her paints when Elizabeth was too far in pregnancy to stoop. These memoirs include many clever anecdotes of the guerrilla tactics to feminine feminists and artists.” I’m not exactly sure what this means, but it is alluring to find out what guerrilla tactics the portrait painter of Marie Antoinette knew for “feminine feminists and artists.”

Excerpts from “Women — The Visual Arts Bibliography”

The list also includes an “unprecedented survey” called “Sex Differences in Art Exhibition Reviews: A Statistical Study” from 1972 by June Wayne, that looked at “systematic sex discrimination toward women artists by US media… with scrupulously accurate charts to delineate the facts,” notes Homes. Most publications highlight the achievements of women that have been mainly ignored by the mainstream art world except for one noted:  “Extremely sexist” (Mathey,1951) and another from The Vanguard Artist: Portrait and Self Portrait (Rosenburg, Norris, 1965) where it’s noted “Rosenburg confines the women artist and the black artist to separate ghettos, stressing in his chapter on women artists, male chauvinism and role conflicts; and omitting women’s problems elsewhere.” Now, the word ‘ghettos’ would not be used today, but it’s a great look at a feminist critique of the time.

Homes told me, through email, that it took her six months to make the list with the help of her community. “Feminist artists were enthusiastic about helping one another and promoting the art work and activities of like-minded groups and women. Word of mouth, the mail and the telephone — that was what we had to work with.” In 1973 she was a founding member of PowerHouse Gallery or La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse. It is one of Quebec’s oldest artist run-centres and has a mandate to “expand on a history of feminist art practices and aims to provide a platform for contemporary art that is informed by feminist and gender theory, as well as intercultural and trans-disciplinary practices.”

Homes doesn’t remember the exact connection she had to Halifax or to VANS, but emphasized how strong the network of women was how word must have got to her fast (after just one publication remember) that VANS would happily publish her compiled list. On making the list she said: “I had been building my own personal collection of books that featured women artists and it occurred to me that there was no one place where all these books were listed for those of us who were interested in the history of art by women.” When I asked her about diversity of representation on the list she said “Women artists from other cultures were only found in articles or group exhibitions and were probably not ‘popular’ enough to publish books on at the time. We discovered them on our own and through artists exhibition exchanges with other galleries. Montreal (and Canada) was not as diverse as it certainly is now.” She adds: “As well as Frida Kahlo, there was Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold and René Cox that were admired at that time.”

To understand the context of this time and analyze the list more, I needed an expert. Luckily we have one of the top PH.D’s in feminist Art History at NSCAD, and my faculty advisor for this internship, Jayne Wark.

When I met with Dr. Wark, she patiently listened to my concerns and then explained to me that I need to understand the context of what the Art World was like in the 1970’s. One of the first things she said to me was “It was a desert for women! Let alone any person of colour!”

She explained that the art world was almost exclusively a place of the elite. To become an artist or an art historian, you had to come up through an institution and institutions were full of old white men supporting the establishment of the art industry, which was a place only for investment and blue chip artists. The racism and sexism were very institutionalized and heavily entrenched. No one was interested in talking about or supporting women artists because they were not considered good investments, even if the art was good. It was not unusual to be denied entry to an exhibition solely based on the fact of being a woman or a person of colour. And galleries could and would literally say it to your face that bluntly. There was no hiding the sexism and racism in the more subtle ways that still exist today. Today, the law is supposed to protect people from being discriminated against based on gender, race or sexual identity. But in the 1970’s, that was not the case. Basically, anyone not a white man was considered “insignificant.” It was indeed, a desert.

The spread of information about feminism and women’s art was new. Dr. Wark says that NSCAD offered its first Art History Class in 1976 called “Women in Image, Women as Image Maker.”

Looking at the list, Dr. Wark immediately noticed one book of huge significance missing; American Lucy Lippard’s From the Center: Feminist Essay’s on Women’s Art from 1976. There is a good chance, though, that Homes may not have heard about it by that time, but it is of particular importance as it may have been one of the first times the word “feminist” appeared in a publication. Lippard received an honorary degree from NSCAD in 2007.

We talked about other artists, particularly women of colour, who were significant during and before that time, but most likely not have had anything published about them. Such as the Harlem based painter, sculptor and quilter Faith Ringgold. Ringgold’s quilts at that time told the stories of African American women and portrayed their lived experiences. Another artist whose work I particularly enjoy is, Adrian Piper. Her performance work in the early 1970’s — such as her Catalysts lll, where she stuffs a large white towel into her mouth and rides around on a bus — explores race and gender and the feelings of public othering. Both artists have talked about not being able to get their own stories published and used their work to communicate their experiences.

Thanks to my chat with Dr. Wark, and my emails with Homes, I came away appreciating the reality of the situation for women in the Arts during the 1970’s. Homes’ initiative in gathering this feminist content for the second issue of Visual Arts Nova Scotia fed into the network of artists’ resources and publications of the 1970’s in Atlantic Canada.

More: Meet Visual Arts News’ research intern Chris Shapones

Susan Wood, “Dress No. 1,” 1989, dry pigment, watercolour, pastel, carbon, washi collage on paper 199.4 x 129.5 cm (irregular), Collection of The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery

I was the first visitor to wander into to Earth Skins: Three Decades of Drawing by Susan Wood mid-afternoon on August 23. I am particularly fond of Wood’s ability to capture flux, complexity and beauty with textured, at times messy, (oh the joy of coffee stains and blotting paper — real life! Imagine!) technically brilliant drawings of flowers, insects and dead birds. She layers skin-thin Washi paper, collaging it to a thick watercolour paper base and drawing over it, adding texture and dimension. Her obvious love of the materials she works with and absolute love for the process is simply inspirational.

Wood’s older works are very large: These are the “Devils Purse” and “Dress” series, executed between 1985 and 1990. I had never seen them before and found them very powerful. Over six-feet high, they hang frameless on the walls of the gallery. They are in the space with the viewer, as opposed to separated and protected by a pane of glass and the strange ghostly reflections that obscure the work. One might even venture to say that they are active in a way — one says paper relaxes, that paper breaths. Wood’s desire to have the material unfettered, unrestricted and accessible makes me draw connections to British sculptor Rose Garrard and her sensibility to the elements preventing or insulating the viewer from being touched by art.

Under glass or not, the graphic punch of these series will not be denied. The pieces blow you over as you enter the space. Looking at her renderings of shadows is coming into contact with honed observational and technical skills. There is obvious delight in this creation of depth. In both series Wood uses stand-ins (skate egg sack and a dress) for women’s bodies. The viewer is led to empathize with and relate to these forms from the inside out, bypassing the voyeuristic gaze that objectifies. It is for me a reversal of sorts, a re-empowerment also. Margaret Atwood, in an essay included in Dropped Threads, discusses working from the earth on up in contrast to from theory down, to ensure vitality and potency. This is how I experience Wood’s works — a validation without any confining definition of the corporeal experience of being a woman.

Wood works in charcoal, watercolour, conte and ink. Made of coal, burnt and raw umber, rust and sanguine, her pallette is punctuated periodically in later years with a flash of ochre or vermillion and lends itself well to these explorations of body. I understood each dress drawing as a meditation on one aspect of the bodily experience of being a woman. There is a sense of a procession through stages, cycles and ordeals — each tied into the glorious muck-andguck veins, organs, sex, flesh, sinew and bone, that make our bodies. It takes a certain kind or courage and bravery to embrace all that we are, to be curious about discomfort (about body hair for example) or the edges of pain. I perceive Wood’s art process as grounded in the experiential, sensual feminine, as a combination of intuitive representation and deliberate mirroring of life cycles and processes.

Susan Wood’s work has a quality of practice to it that surpasses the mere definition of the term. Repetition, development and honing of skills, openness to possibilities and adventurous embracing of mistakes are all imbedded in this body of work and skillfully highlighted by Susan Gibson Garvey’s expert eye as a curator, but beyond this one perceives a practicing of discomfort, pain, loss — a dedicated toning of heart muscles that are working toward acknowledging, making sense of and absorbing the nature of our reality. Her most recent work in the exhibition, simply titled “Bouquet,” is truly the culmination of this practice. It is achingly beautiful in its starkness. Each line, each mark conveys such clarity and presence that one simply stands a bit straighter and feels compelled to take a deep breath to take it all in, to feel it all and to be touched by the art.

Barb Hunt, (l to r) “Lace Dress,” 1995, plasma-cut, cold-rolled steel, “Small Dresses,” 1994, plasma-cut cold-rolled steel, Collection of the Canada Council Art Bank, “Orchid Dress,”1993, plasma-cut cold-rolled steel.

Mention paper dolls to nearly any North American woman and the response is a soft “Oh, I loved my paper dolls.” While huge numbers of little girls spend hours happily re-inventing themselves through playing with their dolls, in later life, the notion of “paper doll” goes sour. Taking her cue from a line in “Tulips,” a poem by Sylvia Plath—“And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow…”—curator and Mount Allison professor Anne Koval assembled a range of contemporary artists’ responses to the cut-out to explore the shadows that paper dolls cast forward into adulthood in her exhibition Paper Doll (September 16 to November 6, 2011, Owens Art Gallery, Sackville, NB).

After discovering that Plath made her own paper dolls and invented scenarios for them, carefully described in her journals, Koval arranged to borrow a collection of them for exhibition from the University of Indiana. The dolls represent attractive women with glamourous, sexy wardrobes with jewel-like colours and details. Made when Plath was 12 or 13, they evoke a magic, miniature, idealized world of childhood play and provide a window into Plath’s sense of imaginative agency before her attacks of depression.

Today, Lynn Yamamoto’s “Silhouettes” (1998- 2011) make visible Plath’s line of poetry through chains of hundreds of uniform, faceless, ephemeral figures cut from translucent white silk tissue paper and peppered with minute holes, burned in with incense sticks. Held out from the wall on steel sewing pins, they capture a passage from childhood magic to later feelings of loss and emptiness.

With more humour, Cindy Sherman’s animated doll (“Doll Clothes,” 1975) updates Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” stepping out of her plastic sleeve in a paper doll book to strike a series of overlapping poses. A pair of human hands interrupts her play at trying on outfits and returns her to her prescribed, slotted space.

In contrast, other exhibiting artists develop more nuanced positions based on the cut-out that re-claim and celebrate feminine identity. Cybèle Young celebrates her pleasure in the cut/fold/play of miniature paper dresses while wryly acknowledging the confining constructedness of post-war North American femininity. In pristine white shadow boxes, she juxtaposes exquisite miniature paper dresses with evocative partners such as jellyfish and scaffolds, all made from fine Japanese paper. One exhibits Young’s delight in the critical potential of her paper doll imagery: curled sheets rise aloft from a tiny curling iron to coalesce into a whirling orange radiance.

Barb Hunt transforms the cut-out doll dress into a symbol of formidable female strength. Subverting both the passive ideal of femininity and the feminist rejection of feminine floral prettiness, Hunt reclaims “paper doll space” with three massive (c. 200 x 100 cm), lacy cut-out dresses executed in plasma-cut, cold-rolled steel (1993-95).

In a further critique of dismissing feminine floral ornament as merely decorative, Jeannie Thib’s wall relief, “Double” (2011), takes its motif from a historic tile pattern found in Barthète, France. Cut from thin plywood, panels composing the repeating pattern are hinged together, so that the relief transforms into a flexible, three-dimensional shape-changer that plays with unexpected shadows on the wall. While eschewing the doll image, “Double” exploits the cut/fold/play procedures of paper dolls to imagine structural flexibility based on decorative beauty.

Anna Torma explores with delight the “back-story” of paper dolls in the most feminine medium of silk embroidery. Transforming embroidery into a drawing practice, she creates a sensuous garden driven by desire. The first large panel of “Vanitas I & II” (2011) overflows with fanciful paper doll-like clothes and posing models. Close inspection reveals small figures in the throes of lust, surrounded by swarms of tiny transforming creatures. The teeming fecundity is countered by the second panel, bearing a nearly life-sized embroidered figure of the flayed man of medical drawings, who re-figures the consequences of time passing that no art can arrest.

With “Revel” (2011), Ed Pien revels in the cut/fold/play of cut-outs in a large, spiral installation of clear mylar suspended from the ceiling, enriched by a projection of itself doubling its shadows on the wall. Viewers follow a path between barely visible mylar walls, populated by mysterious cut-out figures crouching among branches. At the centre of the maze is a random web of mylar line entangled with miniature houses, also cut and folded from clear mylar. Bricks remaining from the gallery’s construction anchor the web to the floor. The entire rear wall of the exhibition space is covered by a haunting video projected through the installation and its shadows. The video shows Pien’s female assistant playfully fastening the little houses in the web. The video of the installation shot through itself caught light refracted through the houses, so that some in the projection shimmer in delicate spectral colours.

It is pure magic and completes an argument made by the exhibition as a whole for the feminine cut/fold/play world of paper dolls and ornament as creative ground for re-thinking relationships among ourselves and with our built and natural environments.

Shary Boyle, “The Cave Painter,” 2013. Courtesy the artist and Jessica Bradley Gallery, TorontoPhoto © Rafael Goldchain

There are no cars in Venice. It makes for a strange silence, one that affords an ongoing clatter of voices, birds and the bells that ring every hour. In the midst of previews at the Venice Biennale, the city seems an uncanny counterpart to an all-encompassing fever dream. At the Giardini one tangos around impeccably dressed “art heads,” business cards in hand. Line ups for the pavilions wrap around the gardens, punctuated by clouds of cigarette smoke. And there are parties—crazy parties—every night, every afternoon, everywhere. Meander through the city, and one will inevitably discover an installation or performance that will deeply alter how one encounters the next part of the walk. But enter through the doors of Shary Boyle’s Music for Silence at the Canadian Pavilion and the cacophony disappears; it is a jolt of quiet.

“When creating Music for Silence I was inspired by the idea of the Universal, the power and insignificance of the individual, and how that relates to the idea of ‘voice,” recalls Boyle. “The strange audio-sensory experience of Venice … contributed to my thinking around sound, music, silence.”

Outside, a dark, cast-bronze figure of a child sits on top of the tipi-style building, weaving a maypole—simultaneously inviting and menacing. Inside, Boyle has transformed the space into a darkened cave, its walls covered in gems reminiscent of constellations, its floor soft. Two small porcelain sculptures—spotlit and unprotected—

rotate on vintage record players. Each carries a large orb, one in a net upon its back and the other on its stomach, as the figure contorts into a bridge pose. One encounters the projection of an old woman overhead, whose fingers sign without  subtitles—a language for the initiated. At first it may seem like a warning, but she is a guide,signing the intention of the exhibit: for those who are silenced; for those never born; for the ugly; for those who can’t run fast; for that which we see in our dreams; and for the deepest parts of the sea, where we go when we orgasm. It is a dedication to half-hidden intuitions, to the knowledge layered upon words.

Deeper in, a large sculpture of a crone/maiden reclines in a cave. Suckling a baby, her wizened face regards the viewer, one leg twisting like the interior of a shell. The light changes every few seconds: front lit and pure white, back lit in blue, and then a noise of images that covers the cave walls in a bright organic collage.

Boyle’s strength of drawing upon site specificity serves her well in Venice. Tucked away to the side of the grandiose British Pavilion, the Canadian Pavilion’s small footprint and curved walls are often considered problematic, a layout further complicated by a tree in the middle of its floor. Boyle was inspired by the building’s design, employing its self-consciously natural architecture to create a highly feminine and phenomenal encounter. Known for her gently grotesque porcelain sculptures that portray mythological narratives, she also delves into immersive installations, using drawn or collaged projections to alter the experience of a space. Music for Silence is a highly considered continuation of her aesthetic.

Her exhibition is also an elegant contribution to the overall conversation of the Biennale itself, whose central thematic emphasizes eccentricities, outsider perspectives and the various forms of the imaginary. Titled The Encyclopedic Palace, Biennale curator Massimiliano Gioni draws from the Italian-American folk artist Maurino Auriti’s proposal in the 1950s to create a structure capable of holding the entire world’s knowledge. As Gioni describes in a press statement for the Venice Biennale: “Auriti’s plan was never carried out, of course, but the dream of universal, all-embracing knowledge crops up throughout history, as one that eccentrics like Auriti share with many other artists, writers, scientists, and prophets who have tried—often in vain—to fashion an image of the world that will capture its infinite variety and richness.” With Music for Silence, Shary Boyle deftly navigates a middle ground between the transcendent and the visceral.

For Boyle, the correlation “was a wonderful surprise, as my exhibition had been fully planned before Gioni released his statement. Music for Silence is a natural step forward within the trajectory of my own thematic and material interest; it was heartening to have such a young and canny international curator share so many of my personal concerns.”

“My work rarely employs the same language used by my peers in contemporary art. This can cause a blank or superficial reading by those not willing or able to interpret outside the current discourse,” adds Boyle. “The astonishing research and selection of artworks by Gioni in the Encyclopedic Palace reflected sensibilities directly parallel to my own artistic interests: the healing, spiritual, narrative, humane, figurative, hand-made, the emotional visionaries.”

Much like Venice itself, Boyle’s work is a suspended, somewhat precarious reality where old worlds meld with contemporary: “The city is ancient, and in its architecture and history combines mythologies of both East and West … Venice was a crossroads where treasures of the world were exchanged or plundered. In this way it is beyond uni-cultural, it reminds one of a broader past and shared humanity,” says Boyle. “The magnificent ideals of Art and God are always paid for by someone’s misfortune, some other’s painful reality. The underwater-subconscious dreamlike nature of the place also supports this essential idea. It is invented, impossible, mysterious, decaying.”

On my last day, I visited the old galleries and halls scattered across the historic city. Threads of Boyle’s art were everywhere: in Tiepolo’s baby drinking from a mother’s corpse, in Bosch’s macabre altar pieces, in the gilded Mother Mary. I found myself wandering down several twisting stairways into a series of courtyards near the Piazzo San Marco. Ancient sculptures were stored in every side alley, moss-covered and exposed. Although I could hear crowds somewhere, over there, I was alone, left—like Boyle—to contemplate the impossible beauty of this surreal city that crumbles silently into the water.

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