By Karin Cope 

Two Pansies, a collaborative exhibition installed at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery during the fall of 2025, featured colourful, whimsical, and deeply serious eco-feminist dialogues in paint, sculpture, video, and performance by two emerging queer artists, Autumn Star and Shay Donovan. An expansive show filled with paired paintings of uncanny figures in luscious colours, performances in animal and flower costumes, and moving, human-sized snail, fish, bird, and spider sculptural forms, Two Pansies makes an argument that queer and trans bodily change is about more than “sex,” “gender,” or “human” morphologies and relationships. It is also about the beauty of emergence and the ways our relationships with one another and the non-human world inspire, move, reveal, and tether us in “laughter, whimsy, shame, and love,” as the Two Pansies video puts it.

Characterizing their show as a “tender archive” of “strange strangers” or emergent beings, artists Shay Donovan and Autumn Star speak of their work as an effort to help nascent forms they encounter while living and making “find their shape” and “come to be at home.” Costumed as lobsters, bees, owls, pansies, or jackalopes, they animate animal and plant stories they have “collected along the way.” Furnished with materials from their own homes and decorated with drafts of paintings found in the show, they also provide access to a domestic space or “home” for the Two Pansies in a side room of the gallery.

Across their performances, Donovan and Star centre care, humour, and fragmentary narrative as methodologies, engaging viewers in the intimate rhythms of a generous and multiple queer life. They also show how colour may function as both camouflage and highlight, offering expansive understandings of what painting is or could be and asking us to look and listen more closely to making and the living world as sources of new queer imaginings.

Full disclosure: As a director of the NSCAD MFA program during part of the time both Donovan and Star were enrolled, I know them well and visited their studios while they were developing this work. I met them in Kjipuktuk/Halifax in late November 2025 to discuss critical aspects of the exhibition.

KARIN COPE: Let’s talk about your title. It nods toward queer histories and iconographies, including the etymological history of the pansy, from its fifteenth-century roots in the French pensée to its early twentieth-century use as a term meaning “effeminate.” How did you find your title, and which came first, the characters or the title?

SHAY DONOVAN: The name for the show came first. Alongside the rich etymological history of the word, we really enjoyed reclaiming the word “pansy” from its modern usage and transforming it into these pansy characters. Because why can’t a being be effeminate and delicate but also powerful and formidable?

KC: Some of the work appears side by side, while other elements, like the film, the Birdfish sculpture, and the Pansies’ “home,” feel fully collaborative. How did your collaboration begin, and how is working together different from working alone? 

AUTUMN STAR: Shay and I have been close in proximity in our creative spaces for a few years now, so working together was a natural evolution. We met during our time in the MFA at NSCAD, where we were assigned studios next to each other. Early on, while I was making a giant snail sculpture, we learned that we both have a shared enthusiasm for bugs. I’ve never seen anyone’s eyes light up as much as Shay’s did while talking about cicadas, so we co-curated a group show called Swarm, all about the insights of insects. Two Pansies was another chance to combine some of our headspace to create things that I doubt either of us would have manifested alone.

KC: What is the role of the house, or “pansy safe space,” in relation to the film? You’ve described the show as a “tender archive.” How does the house function as a space of intimacy and care?

AS: The installation for the Pansies’ home functions as an invitation to enter a strange habitat and helped us explore tensions between interior and exterior in queer space. What is shown? What is concealed? I wonder about the fragility of queer archives and efforts at preservation. If you wanted to preserve a pansy for display, you would have to press it in glass, but that estranges its velvety textures and puts them at risk of shattering. A more private option might be pressing the flower between the pages of a book, but then who else gets to see it? The living room and the film are a living archive of the Two Pansies in this moment, filled with art, love, joy, and a gigantic Birdfish.

KC: There is great physicality in this work, from the human and more-than-human scale of the pieces to the gestural marks they record, the precarious balance of the sculptures, and the whole-body performances in the film. You also posit a merging of bodies, species, and genders, visible in the snail sculptures, the Birdfish, and the animal and plant characters in the film, as well as in the melding of plant, animal, mineral, and human forms in your paintings. Can you talk about the vision of the world these interlacings propose, why it matters to see the world, as Emily Dickinson would have it, “slant,” and what kinds of ecological care shape this work in terms of themes and materials?

AS: Using the whole body to create a piece as big or slightly larger than life takes a lot of endurance; we want that energy to bleed into the work. As for the merging of plants, animals, and spirited bodies, these conjoined hybrids show that it takes repeated hovering around the edge of something to get to know it and to see just how circular our connections to life are. And of course, as to materials, we’re recycling all the time! 

SD: I love the space between the slants, the little crevices we can carve out to make room for identity that isn’t one thing or the other. In the film, I moved from depicting entities through painting to embodying them on camera. I had to give myself permission to inhabit the character rather than act as a witness.

KC: Talk to me about colour and materials. Do they build worlds? You’ve described your process as helping these emergences find their shape. Is this queer birth?

AS: Colour is a guiding companion for me. It can be patient when figuring out a composition or rowdy and certain about where the eye should travel. Colours rubbing against each other create visual conversations. I feel like Shay and I have distinct palettes that speak a similar language with different accents.

SD: There comes a time when the material takes over and I’m no longer the conductor but a conduit. If I don’t let that switch happen, the piece feels unresolved. Colour in my paintings is mostly intuitive. Sometimes it comes from memory, but it helps build the world of the work. I imagine what’s happening out of frame as a continuation of what’s visible. Is that a queer birth? Maybe.

KC: In the video, you describe shared affects as “laughter, whimsy, shame, and love.” Why does this particular assemblage matter?

SD: Whimsy often gets mischaracterized as frivolous, but it can be a huge source of joy. We didn’t want to take ourselves too seriously, and letting whimsy guide some decisions left room to breathe and have fun. Laughter and whimsy feel internal, while shame and love are often projected from outside. Together, they feel like a common queer experience.

KC: How do you begin a project? How do you know you’re onto something?

AS: Sometimes a piece you think is legless ends up with three legs and six arms. Other times you think something is sturdy and it turns into a fish with wings. We tend to let our hands do the heavy lifting and let the concept follow. Embracing fluidity is important.

SD: It’s hard to tell when something starts walking on its own. Sometimes I don’t know until it’s already out the door and teaching me something.

For example, we’ve been asked a lot about the collaborative Birdfish. It was my first time working on a sculpture that large and alongside someone else. It was inspired by watching ospreys near Lunenburg catch fish. The way they carry fish, held forward and parallel to their bodies, looks almost as if the fish has wings. In a last embrace, the fish is thrust into a different realm. I wonder how they experience that brief hybridity and what it would look like for the fish to have control over that journey.

KC: What have you learned from working together? Would you do it again? What’s next?

SD & AS: This is just a start. We fuel each other with our ambition. It’s exciting to work alongside someone who shares the feeling that there is more to explore. There will be collaborations in our future, and this isn’t the last you’ll see of the Two Pansies.

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.”

Ryu has been interested in art since she was young; she began drawing with the support of her mother, but family circumstances kept her from pursuing art as a potential career. Then, by complete chance, while attending university in Korea, her English professor invited her to return with her to Salisbury, NB, Canada. When Ryu mentioned that she couldn’t afford the trip, her professor, in traditional Maritime kindness, offered her a place to stay. That one gesture allowed Ryu to travel to Canada and ultimately meet her now husband, leading her to settle in New Brunswick.

Perhaps Ryu’s life could seem like a series of perfect chances, but it takes courage and perseverance to build a new life and become an artist. With an established career as a phlebotomist, Ryu became a professional artist later in life. The decision to quit her job and pursue a professional art practice full-time was daunting. However, when the coronavirus hit in 2020, a series of racist interactions at her workplace began to make her re-evaluate her future.

While Ryu had previously encountered racism in the hospital at which she worked, the coronavirus amplified its frequency. She tells me stories of patients asking if she was from Wuhan or outright refusing to be treated by her due to her race. Ryu was told “to go back to her country” and that “immigrants were taking all their jobs.” Her work life became stifling. Ryu says she felt like she always had to be perfect, to work harder to get the same acknowledgement as her White coworkers, or else she would be further judged. It was during this time that Ryu decided to take a leave of absence to pursue art as a career.

Ryu didn’t graduate from art school nor did she have the social or professional connections that many artists benefit from by living and making art from an early age in the same place. But she’s making her way as an artist in rural New Brunswick. She credits her success from showing her work on social media, which has helped people reach out. She also found that participating in programs like Artslink NB’s Catapult Arts Accelerator has helped give her the tools she needed to turn her art practice into a viable living.

Ryu’s latest body of work can be seen in her touring exhibition, Culture Bridge. The exhibition fuses elements of Ryu’s identity as a Korean Canadian by combining symbols from the different worlds she inhabits. As a Korean, Ryu felt like an outsider, as she resisted many of the traditional elements that being Korean entailed. Coming to Canada helped her reconcile the discomfort of her own culture and combine it with her new culture as a Canadian. Functioning as both an outsider and insider to her own origins and embracing that difference has allowed Ryu to create work that represents the globalized society that we’ve become.

In Sugar Camp Ryu adopts the visual style from ancient Korean ink paintings to depict a Canadian scene. Koreans in traditional clothing are gathered in a forest while tapping maple trees and making maple syrup. Children are eating from the syrup poured onto a raised snow bed while a dog that resembles a Newfoundland dog watches from a short distance away.

This mixed imagery of recognizable Korean and Canadian symbols continues to pop up throughout Ryu’s work. She also includes significant figures from her life in her artwork, such as her family. In other instances, Ryu explores her own identity and the feeling of un-belonging. In Dragon Lady Ryu’s visage is surrounded by a blue dragon painted in the style reminiscent of Asian tapestries. The dragon’s scales slowly drop, falling like flecks through Ryu’s long hair before disappearing completely, signifying the loss of something. Behind them both is the moon, glowing red and yellow. The painting is not entirely pessimistic though, as the fallen scales could reveal something better, more hopeful, underneath. It is refreshing to see Ryu paint an experience that differs from New Brunswick’s predominantly White community. Her work isn’t pretentious; ultimately, she wants to share the beautiful aspects of both Korean and Canadian culture with everyone. Even though New Brunswick’s immigrant population is small, the stories which brought us here still hold importance, and being able to see them represented in art is a significant way of resisting the White-colonial aesthetic while building meaningful relationships between different cultures.

Cardboard boxes plaster the windows of the Khyber Centre for the Arts, obstructing the contents of the gallery save for the cutout lattice cathedral window. A deep blue glow with warm flickers radiates through the grids of the makeshift window, offering a glimpse of dried flowers, candles, and other objects that seem to make up a fuller installation. Upon walking through the gallery doors, the scene from the window becomes an uninterrupted image of carefully placed ritualistic items: Iranian textiles, a violin, empty testosterone bottles, dried fruit, colourful shoes, incense, and decorative vessels.

Accompanying the altar is a soundscape layered with textures, calls to prayer, chatter and whispers in Farsi, laughter, drums, and a melodic violin that sets the foundation for the work. In Invariable Ritual (2021) Carmel Farahbakhsh takes on the voice of the Jinn, a mischievous mythological creature in Persian folklore, which can be noted by the splitting of the track. Each track is playing from a separate speaker on opposite sides of the gallery; one track dominates the other, depending on what side of the room one is situated.

Tropical Gothic seeks to subvert Eurocentric preconceptions of both the tropics and the gothic by finding the latter in the former and bringing both into stark present relevance. It is precisely this aim to subvert the gothic genre that I find so clever in the cardboard lattice window (which I previously referred to as a cathedral window).

The iconic elements of gothic architecture are most often credited to European Catholicism, but they are actually taken from Islamic architecture. In a way, this questions if gothic ever truly belonged to Europe. Furthermore, gothic genre motifs—such as strange places, power struggles, clashing periods/periods of transition, and the supernatural—are applicable across cultures. The works in Tropical Gothic position the gothic as an incredibly befitting genre not only in the tropics but in areas populated by the global majority (commonly referred to as BIPOC). These lands have undergone varying degrees of imperialism and colonialism and the global majority extends beyond their regions and into those of the diaspora.

In the gallery to the left is a little open room with a beam of pale blue light coming from it, a spectre beckoning me to follow. Inside the space is a small bench facing an ultramarine blue wall, a recurring colour throughout the exhibition. Ultramarine blue references the symbolism of the supernatural world and the deep history of transnational exchange, resource extraction, class, and religion associated with the pigment. Shaya Ishaq’s video piece soaring spirit, boundless love (2022-23) is projected on the wall and presents an ethereal digital rendering of Ishaq’s woven tapestry floating among a bright blue sky speckled with clouds. The headphones fizzle out the rest of the world as Ishaq’s soft voice fades in: “how lucky are we to have an option other than heaven. Somehow our senses are boundless here. Do you feel it? The omnipresence of our essence. Meet me on the astral plane. Can you feel my vibration here too? Somehow it all makes sense here in this infinite space where we make up for lost time….” Ishaq’s soaring spirit, boundless love is more than a prayer to or honouring of Ishaq’s lineage of weavers; like the weavings themselves, it is a visual outcome of that embodied knowledge passed down from her ancestors and translated into digital media.

Cinthia Arias Auz’s mixed-media drawing, Enemigos de mi sangre (2022), hangs in a gleaming gold frame on the outer gallery wall. The background of the illustration is made up of a light pink wall with two potted plants up against it that sit along the deep-red-tiled edge of a reservoir. In the upper left corner of the work is a faint yellow outline of a pair of floating legs. A purple cloth covers the face of the figure in the centre foreground while they embrace the patterned silhouette of a condor, the national bird of Ecuador. Through vivid colours and thoughtfully placed elements, Enemigos de mi sangre alludes to familial secrecy, mythmaking, visibility, and critiques of nationalism.

Positioned on the wall directly across from Arias Auz’s piece is Kayza Degraff-Ford’s vibrant oil painting Twilight Rider (2021). The work features a blue figure (cropped so the face is undisclosed to the viewer) wearing a black tank top and denim jeans while riding a large white horse among foliage and under a bright pink moon. The horse’s almost ghostly face is adorned with a decadent halter, its lips pulled back baring its teeth at the viewer. Although Twilight Rider evokes a dreamlike environment, it simultaneously summons images of very real historical Black cowboys throughout North America that have had to undergo complex (and often violent) gothic journeys to forge their paths in history.

Marissa Sean Cruz’s video XP (2020) runs on a loop on the back wall of the gallery. Cruz’s playful and glitchy video follows their avatar—a blue ogre—through various terrains, such as their mundane life at the office, fantastical greeneries, the digital ether, a screensaver of a tropical beach, and bleak snowy plains. Cruz’s experimental soundscape plays throughout the video work, including a distorted version of Coldplay’s “The Scientist.” Within the main character’s journey, there are clips of wavy and collaged digital artefacts and scenes from a simulation game that mimic the objectives of the game Settlers of Catan. In all of its chaos, XP (2020) speaks to a myriad of feelings that the diasporic experience brings up. This is so well articulated through the beachy screensaver. It’s a picturesque scene in a moment of time that crops out any dictatorship or lasting effects of colonialism. It evokes the romanticization and longing for what you once or maybe never really knew.

Pam Juarez’s works El Tianguis (2020-21) and El patiecito de atras (the little yard out back) (2022-23) are displayed in the middle of the gallery, and could almost act as a portal. Two large blue weavings hang on either side of a rod from the ceiling, which creates a window. The window is made from a soft pink weaving that drapes over black milk crates filled with plastic tropical fruits that are spray-painted ultramarine blue. Juarez’s glitchy textiles mirror the haziness of memory—the past that melds into the present.

Excel Garay’s haunting oil painting Mga Nanawag Og Laing Kalibutan (Those Who Call Another World) (2021) peeks through the window fabricated by Juarez’s weavings and is placed on the edge of two large potted tropical plants. The colourful and intricately painted work depicts an abstract figure, primarily notable by a shiny black mass that resembles hair and a blood circulatory system running through its arms to its hands. The figure is obscured by thick wavy beige lines, and a series of connected ombré grey-to-green lines sprout from the chest, resembling a ribcage or the sprouting limbs. On either side of the figure, Garay delicately cut and wove the canvas to mimic traditional Filipino weaving patterns. Garay’s painting draws from Cebuano folklore and seeks to conjure new worlds beyond the confines of what we know.

Tropical Gothic eloquently unites the artists through its theme while honouring their unique perspectives. It further showcases the importance of why we need racialized curators to curate an exhibition of all racialized artists.  

At a curatorial talk, Junaid stated that the impetus for this exhibition came from John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (also on display at The Rooms). Akomfrah’s wash of water, sound, and history takes viewers through a constantly moving ocean, asking us to consider the oceanic sublime, a space of wonder and magic, violence, destruction, and death. It’s this wash of contradiction that Junaid locates in this place now called Newfoundland and Labrador: a wash of beauty, connection, and foodways, on the one hand, and silence, violence, and haunting, on the other.

Junaid grew up in St. John’s, and she feels the city and its landscape deep in her bones. One might then reasonably expect that she would have encountered stories of Black life during her childhood. But as she observed during her curatorial talk, such stories never formed part of her girlhood education. St. John’s, and Newfoundland and Labrador more broadly speaking, have instead long been imagined as white spaces shaped by Irish and English (and to a much lesser extent French) histories.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the overarching theme of the exhibition is that of silence: the silence of forcibly suppressed stories alongside the silence of lost ones. What Carries Us includes not only a variety of works by artists based in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and the UK, but also archival materials and archaeological artifacts. Taken together, they invite us to reflect on storytelling and identity, and on how we might imagine things differently.

The theme of silence is told perhaps most hauntingly in the form of the garments worn by a man with the initials W.H., an otherwise anonymous sailor of African heritage whose grave in Labrador emerged in the 1980s as a result of coastal erosion. The garments rest alone in a darkened room, their story a reminder that twenty percent of all British and American sailors in the early nineteenth century were black men. What brought W.H. to these shores? How long was he here? Which parts of this place had he visited? Who did he encounter along the way? How did his voice sound? What were his favourite foods? What did he do in his spare time? These are silences we can’t recover; they remain only in shadows.

Meanwhile, Shelley Miller’s Trade (2020), constructed as a series of seemingly edible blue-and-white tiles made of icing sugar, gelatin, and edible inks and arranged in the form of a patchwork tile mural, offers a material commentary on the ways that the unfree labour of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean supported and sustained European wealth. I’ve seen such tiles in many Dutch museums over the years, often decorating fireplaces and kitchen walls. Here, however, they tell a very different story, drawing out the triangle trade that linked Newfoundland and Labrador with Africa and the Caribbean. Perhaps because of my own Dutch family histories on my father’s side (histories that tangle simultaneously with Dutch Caribbean colonial histories of slavery and indenture on my mother’s side), this piece stood out most to me. The stickiness. The sweetness. The sugar that binds oppression and wealth together, all of it captured in innocuous blue and white tiles that you can buy in any cheesy tourist shop in the Netherlands. What was the cost of sugar? asks the title of a novel by Surinamese author Cynthia McLeod. What, indeed.

But silence is not just grief-laden or mournful in this exhibition—it’s also pointed, political, and playful. Camille Turner, whose Afronautic Research Lab featured at the 2019 Bonavista Biennale, returns here, locating histories of enslavement not just in faraway Caribbean colonies but also right here in this place. If the island of Newfoundland is seen, today, as an isolated outpost, its history gestures towards a long imbrication in the Atlantic slave trade. Turner’s immersive research lab, which includes not only film but also a table filled with books, archival materials, and the tools of the archival researcher’s trade (pencils, blank paper, magnifying glasses), chronicles the nineteen slave ships constructed here and reminds us that it’s all too easy to separate ourselves from messy, oppressive histories. It also asks us to consider what it means to take up a violent inheritance.

The work of Sonia Boyce takes a playful carnivalesque approach. In “Crop Over” (2007), a two-channel video installation, she chronicles a Caribbean festival, with all the colours, music, and dancing so common to many Caribbean celebrations. But Boyce’s “Crop Over” is playfully—and pointedly—subversive. Her characters dance not just in the streets but also through houses and landmarks created as a result of the trade in slaves and sugar. Stilt-walking folk figures dressed in sequined outfits romp through formal gardens and clamber around staid sitting room furniture. They plant themselves on stone balconies and peer around corners, their presence a mocking reminder of the unruly, colourful bodies whose unfree labour made these great homes possible in the first place. In many ways, “Crop Over” reminded me of the spoken word poetry of El Jones (“Dear Benedict” in particular): it’s cheeky, spirited, pleasure-filled, parodic, and, at the same time, deeply political.

What Carries Us is not a large exhibition. And yet it packs a punch. Each element, from the archival materials to the archaeological artifacts to the artworks, offers an opening towards a reimagining and a retelling of Newfoundland and Labrador and the people who have visited its shores and called it home.

For Logan MacDonald, collaboration is a practice, a form of kinning and a “way of navigating the communities [he] participates in.” Most importantly, collaboration is braided into the fundamentals of “everything [he] does.”

As MacDonald’s own identity resides in multiple communities, and constantly engages with a myriad of voices, histories, temporalities and ontologies. Confronting the intersections of queerness, Indigeneity, access and ability, MacDonald reckons with the limitations and possibilities of identity.

His work entangles the personal and political as projects take on histories of homophobia, rural isolation, cultural erasure, loss and mourning. From his work in queer art trio The Third Leg (notably the project Welcome to Gayside), to more nuanced embodiments of reciprocity in his most recent exhibition Visiting, MacDonald uses collaboration to create a dialectic that is active, curious and always refusing closure.

As a practice, MacDonald mixes mediums and disciplines with precision and intention. Lyrical, at times witty, and always pointed, MacDonald uses photography, textiles, oil painting, graphite drawings, installation, and signage to mediate viewership, confront the limits of access, and represent the myriad identities that reverberate through the works. MacDonald’s most recent exhibition Visiting, is an extended iteration of The Lay of the Land (2017), which opened at Eastern Edge in St. John’s and has since visited Winnipeg’s Ace Art. The Lay of the Land was the result of MacDonald’s travels through Indigenous communities, histories and activisms across the country. MacDonald recreates makeshift structures – heavy beams of lumber bolted together – used by Indigenous activists in British Columbia as a means of claiming property against colonial and industrial incursion. Photographs of graffitied sidewalks scream “NATIVE LAND” in black spray paint. Neon repeats throughout the show, confronting encroachment, demarcation, and consumption.

You won’t find photographs of faces in Visiting. MacDonald intentionally mediates third party viewership of his subjects in order to protect the intimacy of his encounters. Instead of presenting photographs, MacDonald draws the image, interjecting the melancholic mechanics of graphite sketching between the viewer and the original experience. By denying access to the primary image, curator Emily Critch says that MacDonald generates tension in the work and refuses to “author” someone else’s narrative. As a means of honouring the intimacy of shared encounters, this is a means of negotiating consent, a form of reciprocity and respect for our kin, both an invitation and a refusal.

Similarly, a small but striking oil painting of a hand holding MacDonald’s status card confronts us with the political surveillance of Indigenous identity. We are asked to reckon with authenticity, generational loss, and the possibility of reclamation. For those of us who will never have a status card, who feel the simultaneous sting of rejection and anger of relentless erasure, this work also speaks to the impossibilities of desire.

MacDonald resurrects archival ghosts, entangling past and future, grief and hope, loss and desire. Here, visit-ing also becomes a visit-ation. Morill, Tuck & The Super Futures Haunt Qollective write, “visitations reinforce connections, create new ones, disrupt expectations. Visitations are not settling, they are not colonial exploration. Visitation rites. Visitation rights. Visitation writes.”[2] The visitations in MacDonald’s work assert that he is “also in collaboration with people who are inaccessible.” In The Lay of the Land and Visiting, MacDonald looks to voices silenced by colonial violence, mediating and reclaiming “lost” images, structures and objects through contemporary frameworks. Images of snowy, pine trimmed roads, shadowy rocks, and bushels of blooming shrubbery are mounted on lumber, concrete and graphed paper. Visiting is a verb and everything here is under construction. Consent is ongoing.

A focal point of Visiting is a large-scale photograph of the artist’s limp body, facing upward, sprawled across a large tree stump. MacDonald notes that the surveillance of trees acts as an analogy for the surveillance of queer and Indigenous bodies in public spaces. MacDonald tells me that “this work is sad. It is about contemporary mourning and historical mourning, but it is also a call to action and to empathy.” In these betweens there is also a generative tension that illuminates hope and possibility. While there is something apathetic and exhausted about the artist’s slack limbs falling to either side, there is also something powerful and active about a tired body laying with another, of holding space with one another. How do we find ways of carrying on? MacDonald tells me that it can be “good to put a name to a thing.” This photograph tells me that where words fail us, visiting together can be enough.

[2] Tuck, Eve and Karyn Recollet. (2017) “Visitations (You Are Not Alone) in #callresponse. Vancouver: grunt gallery. www.evetuck.com/s/Visitations-You-are-not-alone-2017-Tuck-Recollet.pdf

Brian Solomon and Mariana Medellin-Meinke, The NDN Way, dance performance hosted by Eastern Edge Gallery in April 2018. Photo: Ed Maruyama

To “identify” is to name something and render it visible, even if it may have been present all along. Organized by Eastern Edge Gallery, the Identify festival facilitates the gathering and sharing of traditional and contemporary artistic and cultural practices of Indigenous peoples in Newfoundland and Labrador including Mi’kmaq, Inuit, Innu, Southern Inuit of Nunatukavut and Beothuk. The Gallery describes it as a “platform for Indigenous-led conversations on self-identity, self-rediscovery and celebration of Indigenous cultures of Newfoundland and Labrador”—and it’s more than a year-long process (running from September 2017- December 2018).

Why does Eastern Edge use the term “self-rediscovery”? The answer is rooted in a complex settler-biased history that has, until recently, emphasized distance and loss when discussing Indigenous peoples. Many examples can be cited. Among them, a widely held and historically convenient belief that all Beothuk were decimated due to colonial intervention—a stance that negates many who identify now as having Beothuk ancestry. In Labrador, the people of Nunatsiavut and Nunavik (one-third of Canada’s Inuit population) were excluded from the Federal Government’s Northern Strategy in 2004, which outlined initiatives for economic development and northern sovereignty. Residential-school survivors in Labrador were also excluded from compensation provided to survivors elsewhere. In residential schools throughout the province, many Indigenous children were taught to be ashamed of their heritage.

This history is now changing as more people reclaim and celebrate their Indigeneity. With the recent establishment of the Qalipu (Mi’kmaq) nation, approximately one-fifth of Newfoundland and Labrador’s population fit the criteria for membership. So many people applied, that the Federal Government began to deny status to many people who identified as Indigenous, and revisited the terms of acceptance. In Labrador, there was only recent acknowledgement of many Labrador Indigenous groups as having status on a Federal level. To “re-discover” is to shine light upon what has always existed, while also defining its terms from within the communities themselves.

Identify launched with an exhibition titled The Lay of the Land, featuring work by Logan MacDonald, followed by Pejipuk: the winter is coming by Meagan Musseau. Both artists spoke from a position of rediscovering and redefining their Indigenous heritage, and approaching larger histories from a personal perspective while exploring key notions of memory and reactivation.

Logan MacDonald, installation detail of The Lay of the Land, October 27 – December 08, 2017, Eastern Edge Gallery.

The act of recovery was made plain through a powerful exhibition titled RECLAMATION by Mi’kmaq curator and artist Jerry Evans, who placed Indigenous artists from throughout the province in the Lieutenant Governor’s residence. A teepee was also constructed on the lawn of the residence by the St. John’s Native Friendship Centre—a significant and impactful gesture of presence and gathering. At Eastern Edge Gallery that same week, Mi’kmaq musician Joanna Barker’s curatorial debut, tet; mâni; ute|here, brought together two artists who turned their attention to everyday life in Newfoundland and Labrador. John Jeddore recorded scenes from everyday life in Miawpukek First Nation (Conne River, NL), while Melissa Tremblett passed her camera to children in her community of Sheshatshui (Labrador). Each child’s perspective was gathered in a hand-bound book with their name, and accompanied by Labrador tea dolls made by different generations.

As a curator at the provincial institution and a person of settler origin, I was humbled by the care and attention given by all involved. In particular, I was reminded of the value of sharing stories in a safe space (and the importance of listening when these stories are told). It was a lesson reinforced as Mi’kmaq artist Jordan Bennett painted his mural at the Rawlin’s Cross intersection in St. John’s. His imagery draws from Shanawdithit drawings held in The Rooms’ collections, Mi’kmaq and Beothuk canoe and paddle designs, and motifs from quill basketry. The site for the mural became a gathering space as other artists helped paint while members of the community dropped by. It remains a record of that time, in addition to altering the tone of the intersection for passersby.

A mural may last decades, but what is the lifespan of a voice? With this festival, each voice resonated. The powerful performance of NDN Way, by Brian Solomon and Mariana Medellin-Meinke, combined songs and imagery from contemporary popular culture with a voiceover by Cree storyteller Ron Evans that described Indigenous knowledge. The final event of the week celebrated throat singing by Jennie Williams and Tabitha Blake, and a performance by the all-women drum group Eastern Owl, who blend contemporary and traditional compositions.

Brian Solomon and Mariana Medellin-Meinke, The NDN Way, dance performance hosted by Eastern Edge Gallery in April 2018. Photo: Ed Maruyama

As they introduced each song, Jennie William’s baby could be heard backstage. The baby’s coos had permeated every event. Baby sounds would punctuate speeches mid-sentence, halt panel discussions in acknowledgement of her presence, and even sing along with her mother. At each event, she was passed lovingly and carefully from person to person, and kissed gently if she cried.

Above and below: Mario Doucette, “La dispersion des Acadiens (after Henri Beau),” 91 x 152 cm, oil on wood 2015-2016.

In the summer of 2004, I worked in the gift shop at the beautiful Grand-Pré historic site in the Annapolis Valley, where visitors learn about the history of the Acadian people and their expulsion from their homeland at the hands of the British Army. I had been politely let go from my previous job at a café, due, I suspect, to my penchant for listening to music and daydreaming rather than polishing glassware or serving customers. At the Boutique de Grand- Pré, I was free to play what I wanted from the selection of Acadian music for sale. My go-to was Madame Butlerfly, Edith Butler’s little-known foray into New Age music. Sitting nestled amongst Acadian stoneware pottery and hooked rugs, listening to a rendition of Grain de Mil that featured backing vocals sung in what I believe to be Mandarin, I had a clear view of historical murals of Acadians building dykes and tilling the reclaimed soil in bonnets and aprons or breeches and high socks. Artist Mario Doucette has never liked these depictions.

“It always bothered me. I tried to research the clothing of the time, but in my art it never looked right.”

He remembers being introduced to similar images as a teenager. In his earlier series, Histoires and Bagarres, Doucette uses line drawing and a naive painting style as a child’s lens in an attempt to go back to the romanticized, mythologized version of Acadian history he learned as a kid and imagine it differently. In his vibrant, unaffected yet fantastical drawings and paintings from these series, you can sense the teenage urge to embellish the margins of the quaint, folkloric depictions found in interpretive centres and textbooks.

Basing his paintings on extensive research, Doucette promotes aspects of Acadian history that have been obscured in popular portrayals inspired by works like Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline, where Acadians are presented as tragic figures and passive victims. “In my paintings I highlight heroes that people should know who we don’t learn about in school. We didn’t know that there was an Acadian resistance, we didn’t know that there were people like [resistance leaders] Father Le-Loutre and Joseph Broussard.”

“We only have one perspective of our history, the perspective of the British. The histories were written based on their accounts.” —MARIO DOUCETTE

However, there is a question mark hanging over Doucette’s work. In his paintings, Acadians do not wear the folkloric costumes I remember from the Grand-Pré historic site; instead, they are depicted as translucent figures, or their bodies are scribbled over, or they are naked. More recently, in Harias, they are shown wearing classical robes. These choices underscore a key issue in Doucette’s project: the absence of a historical record that reflects the Acadian perspective.

“It’s a people that existed, but we don’t know a lot of details of how they lived … We only have one perspective of our history, the perspective of the British. The histories were written based on their accounts.”

Faced with the impossibility of a truly accurate version of Acadian history, Doucette has accepted that he cannot go around the traditional narrative, but must go through. Rather than feel limited by the lack of alternatives to the historical tradition, he chooses to see the freedom that his playful approach to historical narrative and his outsiders’ perspective afford him. “I have an incredible liberty to play with these ideas and imagine what it was like in Acadia because we really don’t know.”

Mario Doucette, “Boishébert fut blessé à la jambe – colour study,” 30 x 40 cm, Ink and coloured pencils on paper, 2017.

Above and below: Mario Doucette, “Les Acadiens de la Nouvelle-Écosse (régime anglais) – colour study,” 27 x 40 cm, Ink and coloured pencils on paper, 2017.

If Doucette’s work from his first series strongly recalls the aesthetics of outsider art, it is not by accident. Doucette has a strong admiration for self-taught artists like Henry Darger and appreciates the freedom afforded by operating entirely outside the system. The marginal role that Acadians have had in telling their own history makes them outsiders too.

Including anachronisms and mixing his own inventions with historical symbols, Doucette creates parallels between his own fantastical choices and those of historical artists. Symbols like the British lion and Superman, American myth par excellence, confront each other in his art and reveal the absurdity inherent in imposed external narratives. In this historical world of toppled idols, Doucette is free to dress his Acadians how he wants. “I thought if we have no stories of Acadians from their lifetime, then they kind of exist of out of time. So I continued drawing them nude, and now I put them in Roman robes, which ties in with the neoclassical style I’m attempting.”

At first glance, the meticulous neoclassical oil paintings of Harias are a major departure from the playful outsider aesthetic of Doucette’s earlier art, but they can almost be seen as parts of a larger installation. In his exhibitions, he decorates the gallery to recreate a salon or a history museum and viewers enter another world. “The message of propaganda is transmitted in multiple ways, including through the context the work is presented in.” He calls his work propaganda art and it’s clear that this is how he looks at all historical art. Doucette appropriates the trappings of official, noble art, from the robes to the gallery walls, to give weight to his new versions of Acadian history.

“People behave differently in this kind of space. They tend to whisper.” The alternate history first imagined in the naive style of a child’s drawing now comes alive and we are able to step into it. Doucette recognizes that his subject and his audience are very localized—he says that he has Acadian viewers in mind as he creates his work—and yet he hopes everyone who sees his work will appreciate the global appeal. His engagement with historical absence has lead him to engage with universal questions about historiography, the political role of historical art, and what possibilities there are to move beyond received identities and narratives. Like a daydreamer in the midst of a history lesson, Mario Doucette is immersed in tradition, looking for freedom, for his art and for the Acadian identity.