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.

The exhibition This Seems Personal at the Confederation Centre of the Arts centers around themes of autobiography, personal agency, and reciprocity. Featuring emerging and mid-career artists Andrew Quon, Miya Turnbull, Curtis Botham, Laura Kenney, Shauna MacLeod, Lux Gow-Habrich, and Monique Silver, it explicitly examines the connection between autobiographical art and socio-political issues. Guest-curated by Brandt Eisner, the curatorial premise asserts that the personal is inseparable from the political and that the human body and its memory hold a record of the body’s interaction with the world at large. It is through this holistic recognition of our existence as social beings that we, as a collective, have the means to enact transformative change for the common good.

The work gathered here reflects a breadth of diverse meanings and associations, from mental health and race to gender identity, the Anthropocene, and more. By mining the archive that is the body and its corresponding memory, the artists’ findings are profoundly original, investigative, and cathartic. Take, for example, MacLeod’s ceramics. The natural affinity between clay and art therapy has been explored for decades, and there’s a good reason for it. Clay quite literally entangles the potter with the earth, externalizing tension and stress away from the body while leaving space for the subconscious to work through it. MacLeod has been forthcoming about the therapeutic benefits of clay since working as an emergency medical dispatcher (EMD) in Nova Scotia. The heavy reality of works such as Emergency Medical Dispatcher Shattered Identity (2021) and PTSD Symptoms (2022) articulates the personal challenges that many first responders carry with them daily. The revealing juxtaposition between these and related pieces, such as PTSD Healing (2022) and Butterfly Healing (2022), quietly tells us just how important the process of shaping clay is before it reaches its final form. There is also a palpable sense that these and other works desire to reach out and connect with others in the first responder community.

Though personal in content, Turnbull’s array of sculptures and photographs is also inherently social, referencing the decentred and fluid spirit of identity. Inside vitrines and hung on walls are masks molded from her own face, crafted from papier mâché, and digital photographs, which are then manipulated and transformed into surrealist illusions. The most striking of these are represented in the uncanny series Self-Portrait with Skin Suit (2023), where the artist is veiled in a skin-coloured spandex bodysuit, holding or wearing masks in various guises. They evoke memories of Robyn Cummings’s brilliant series Lady Things, where women’s faces and bodies are transmuted into phantasmagoric symbols. For Turnbull, limbs and flesh contort in dynamic and impossible ways, as if the blood has been totally drained from their bodies, making them appear like spent balloons. A captivating form of self-portraiture, these otherworldly, human-like creatures remind us that the body—like the face—stockpiles meanings and classifications projected onto it by others. This is one way we come to know ourselves less.

Silver’s and Gow-Habrich’s work also concentrates on body politics, though toward different ends. On one hand, Silver’s luminous drawings from her Body Mapping (2024) series and dreamlike prints such as Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes… (2024) question preconceived notions of the physical body. These works can trigger aberrations from objective truth, meaning that social expectations can cloud or warp one’s perception of how the body appears and functions. Rhythmic, multi-dimensional, and electric, her work represents a methodical rediscovery of the body and its emancipatory agency.

On the other hand, Gow-Habrich’s expansive installation Queen Mothers of Eastern and Western Skies (2023–ongoing) tells a generational story of the artist’s mother and grandmother. It is not a shrine per se, but a kind of sanctum that honours their blood, experience, pain, and resilience. Stained glass tears hang above a movable wall, swaying gently with the gallery’s ambient breeze, while embroidered lungs rest above a uterus, whose negative space has been meticulously hand-beaded. A handwoven, bruise-coloured blanket frames the organs and the textiled blood that pools on the ground. The installation moves from personal narrative to the communal through tactility, as audiences are invited to touch and interact with it. Doing so allows them to process memories of mothers and motherly love experientially, while, in turn, providing space to strengthen familial bonds.

Elsewhere, Botham’s large-scale, photo-realistic charcoal drawings scrutinize economic mismanagement that pushes the working class further to the margins and systems that damage the environment. Such is the case with Land for Sale, Trenton (2018) and Coal Mine, Stellarton (2018), which depict the stark reality of a deteriorating home in Pictou County and the extent of Stellarton’s surface coal mine. Embedded in his drawings are actual quotes from local media sources, such as, “With the town’s residential and commercial tax base in decline, finances are strained,” in addition to, “Nova Scotia needs to mine coal while there’s still a market.” Though it is not overtly autobiographical in content, Botham’s empathic vision of broader social realities is shaped into a personal narrative.

These critical environmental and social obstacles also resonate within Quon’s work, most notably in the diptych Promises, Promises (2022/2023). A kind of pseudo-self-portrait, it illustrates the naked body of the artist squatting, head to knees, atop a recently felled tree. Shattered fragments and splinters of this and other felled trees blanket the ground, extinguishing all things green. Quon’s own skin tones in the photograph are echoed in the freshly cut cross-sections of trees that stack to the sky in the adjoining image. The optics are effective, interrogating the ethics of deforestation and, in particular, the clear-cutting of old-growth forests in Atlantic Canada. This is the personal, advocating for those who cannot speak for themselves.

Power disparities became more pronounced after the exhibition opened to the public, as Kenney’s rug-hookings seemed to foreshadow President Trump’s escalating threats of tariffs on Canada’s industries and natural resources. The now-prophetic rug Friends (2024), which features the submissive text “WE HAVE TO BE FRIENDS OTHERWISE YOU’LL BEAT US UP,” anticipated Trump’s bullying tactics toward his northern neighbour, the United States’ closest military ally and trading partner. Ironically, this “friend” is now instigating a future economic recession. And this says nothing of his warnings to annex Canada as the “fifty-first state” or to make Prime Minister Trudeau a “Governor”—both unprecedented threats against the sovereignty of a fellow G7 nation. In this new light, Kenney’s US-themed rugs have become a site of protest and an urgent rallying cry for collective resistance against American imperialism.

This Seems Personal is an exhibition that does not rest easy. It speaks to serious social concerns and calls for sweeping political change in Atlantic Canada / Mi’kma’ki. As such, much of the work on display is imbued with the profound weight of individual and communal responsibility and resilience. With this in mind, it shouldn’t be overlooked that the banal, the mundane, and the supposedly uneventful moments of everyday life can also be terribly interesting, since the body itself is, as the show maintains, inherently political. As often happens, it’s the most routine events in life that are the most overlooked and therefore taken for granted. Having lunch with friends, watching a movie with a lover, reading a book, walking the dog, going for coffee—whatever else you name, the personal still intersects with political forces: the land, communities, corporations, family, public spaces, and so forth. There’s poetry in these things, too. Now, that would be a different exhibition, of course, with a completely different premise, but there’s something to that idea, I think.

By Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Geoffrey Webster

Sackville-based artist Graeme Patterson’s third thematic exhibition Strange Birds at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, September 6 to November 10, 2024, showcased his limitless talent and ability to provide a wide range of viewers with a cutting-edge yet accessible art-viewing experience. 

From sculpture to virtual reality, Strange Birds ticked off all the boxes of an interactive and deeply engaging exhibition. As the primary art educator for Strange Birds, I found the thematic generosity of the work made my job easy. The artist’s major theme for Strange Birds explores eco-anxiety, a potent fear surrounding the planet’s unforeseeable future due to climate change. Instead of promoting panic, Patterson transforms the alarming topic into an approachable investigation of two protagonists, the heron and the Space Disco starlings. 

These two central characters are portrayed as behaviourally oppositional: the heron stoically reflected the ever-changing Tantramar Marshes, while the starlings were depicted as the frantic executors of these changes. The different interactions between the characters reveal representations of our shared experience with the world around us. As viewers, we study the landscape and try to understand the changes we have made within it, like the heron. But we’re also the dancing Space Disco starlings, coping with our day-to-day, reaping what we’ve sown.

Both complex and technical, Patterson’s Strange Birds depicts the elegance of the Tantramar Marshes while also showcasing its changing nature. Viewers can first see both central figures in conceptual conversation through Patterson’s central film, Strange Birds. The film features a stop-motion animated heron, as well as costumed live-action performances of the starlings. The film is projected on a wall in the exhibition space and acts as a portal to a new yet familiar world. Additionally, the sonic composition featured in the film acts as an ambient accompaniment throughout the exhibition space.   

Patterson presents another place, a smaller yet equally intricate one: a 1:10-scale model of his Sackville home. This artwork feels in no way a constructed miniature of the artist’s home but a shrunken-down version. It looks incredibly realistic and functional. During my time touring Strange Birds, Patterson’s miniature model generated a lot of dialogue with gallery goers, who primarily commented on how immersive it was despite its size. The carefully crafted details in every room are paired with components like flickering lights and rotating doors, which feel as though you are in the starling’s house of imagination.

The Tree is a sculpture partly made from an actual fallen tree, but it also has an important role as a character representing monoculture tree planting in the Strange Birds film. Diane Langevin, Dalhousie Art Gallery’s Indigenous consultant, explained to me the negative impact this form of tree planting has had on numerous Indigenous communities. Langevin shared how these actions have been part of how the government has made communities non-self-sufficient. 

Langevin’s attention was also struck by another sculpture, The House Core. This crisp yet stark model was a cut-out cylindrical section of Patterson’s miniature home but treated as a whole and not a part. It resembles a 3-D blueprint of what a home could look like in the future. While my tour groups and I focused on the distant possibilities of this new technology, Langevin shared that 3-D digital printing technology is currently being used in northern Indigenous communities to build home parts. As a result, Patterson’s sculptures The Tree and The House Core serve as personal and cross-cultural instruments for vibrant dialogue.

The highlight of Strange Birds was the virtual reality room. Set up in the media gallery, VR “Island” transported visitors into the world of the starlings and the heron, which enabled a more interpersonal relationship with the protagonists. I feared that the virtual reality component would detract from the narrative’s ethos, as this sort of technology has proven distractingly theatrical and forced in my past experiences. But with the already introduced and pre-existing world of Strange Birds, Patterson’s use of VR channels the spirit of the exhibition and facilitates an immersive yet appropriate viewing experience. The artist also considered accessibility; if guests were not comfortable with virtual reality or were eagerly waiting to try it out, a clever inclusion of a montage containing key aspects of VR “Island” was projected in the adjacent room. VR “Island” also brought viewers back to the gallery’s entrance, where they could revisit the pivotal Strange Birds short film. 

Patterson’s work was thoughtfully considered, but so was the choice of the Dalhousie Art Gallery as a host venue. The space’s circular nature supplemented the cyclical relationship between both principal characters and fostered a strong narrative flow. It was equally remarkable to see how all of the artworks (distinctly the media-based ones) lived within the brutalist exhibition space. Patterson is at his creative peak, and wherever he lands next, it is definite that his artistic brilliance will carry on.

Geoffrey Webster is an artist and writer based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). Currently in the last year of his BFA in Expanded Media at NSCAD University, his ongoing artistic endeavours surround researching digital media, focusing on its interpretation, practices of preservation, and its educational properties and opportunities. Geoffrey has been part of the Dalhousie Art Gallery for almost two years, most recently working as an art educator with the goal of broadening art’s reception through critical yet accessible discussion. He has also been working as a research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.

Poet and artist Sylvia D. Hamilton’s multimedia installation of images, objects, and sound is heard and carried throughout the powerful exhibition Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, which inspired the title of the group show.

The creation of this exhibit occurred within a specific socio-cultural context that involved the Royal Ontario Museum and the Black communities of Toronto in the wake of some controversy. The exhibit’s three curators Dr. Julie Crooks, assistant curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Montreal-based independent curator, Dominique Fontaine, and Dr. Silvia Forni, Curator of African Arts and Culture at the ROM, came together in 2015 to develop a three year project with the aim of repairing the relationship between the ROM and Toronto’s Black communities. Their goal was to carve out space for Blackness in a historically colonial and anti-Black museum. Here We Are Here: Black Contemporary Art is the provocative and moving culmination and closing exhibition of the years-long project.

I am moved not only by the subject matter—Hamilton’s installation examines the histories of African Canadians from both a personal and collective lens, from the Transatlantic slave trade to Canadian slavery, to the imposed otherness and anti-Blackness African Canadians experience contemporarily—but also by the visceral experience that it provides.

On three massive swaths of fabric suspended from a wall titled “Naming Names,” is a list of three thousand African descended people, some of whom were enslaved and others free. The effect of this massive list of names is chilling. Hamilton’s voice echoes on a loop, soft with emotion as she reads the names and ages, which evokes both a sense of calm and deep sadness in me.

Saddening, as well as enraging, is the display of racist iconography, “How They See Us,” curated in the nearby display case. ‘Tar Baby’ dolls, The Story of Little Black Sambo, and a bunch of locks tied in a red ribbon which sits beside a pair of small hammered metal child shackles are disturbing. The image of the child shackles stays with me even as I write this. I don’t know that I can ever be desensitized to objects and images that speak to the plight of enslaved people, particularly children. With forthrightness and some tenderness, Hamilton’s work demands that we face this truth of history, that we sit with it.

“In The Passage” shows a poem projected against a video of the ocean, we hear Hamilton’s voice speaking to how the experience of being enslaved and taken away from home and going through the Middle Passage might have felt. As a whole, Hamilton’s piece is graceful and deeply touching. In spite of the harsh subject matter, there is an undeniable and compelling sense of pride and dignity in the manner in which she handles each aspect of this work.

Charmaine Lurch’s large-scale charcoal drawings “Cartography of Being, Belonging, and Grace,” are paper maps of a Black femme figure (her daughter), both familiar and warm. As a Black woman living in the diaspora, themes of belonging are of particular interest to me. These drawings strike an internal chord. The charcoal lines are bold and heavy-handed, and the model depicted moves between fluid and casual. In an excerpt from Katherine McKitrick’s “Dear Science and Other Stories and Demonic Grounds” she writes: “a young girl can legitimately take possession of a street, or an entire city, albeit on different terms than we may be familiar with.” Her poetics embody the bold and casual tones of the drawings and speak to the preciousness and precarity of Black girlhood.

Across from Lurch’s work, taking up the entire length of the wall, is Sandra Brewster’s “Hiking Black Creek,” who describes the larger than life photograph of the artist’s parents on a hike as a “poetic meditation on the emotional labour of belonging.” As a recent immigrant, I am intimately familiar with the emotional labour of belonging and am taken by the intimacy and simplicity of this work. Treading along familial lines, much like Lurch, Brewster subtly, yet sharply conveys a profound idea with this old photograph taken during the couple’s first year in Canada together. The large-scale image is spread over large panels and washed in warm sepia and grey tones. The colours red and yellow across their long-sleeved shirts have been added to the black and white image. The two figures in the photograph smile for the camera. Further ruminating on the theme of belonging, the work shirks ideas of Blackness and Black culture as homogenous, and the sheer size of the image (as well as the smiling faces), give me a sense of being watched over with care.

The sounds of Michèle Pearson Clarke’s video installation, “Suck Teeth Compilation” meets me before I see it, offering a sense of utter glee. The video compilation depicts Black people of varying ages, genders, sizes, and sexes, staring into the camera head-on and sucking their teeth. The familiar hiss indicates disgust, annoyance, anger, and frustration, as their faces are filled with contempt and the void left by patience long lost.

The people in the video are also incredibly beautiful—some are relentlessly cool, and others have an idiosyncratic aesthetic. The hissing sound of teeth sucking and their accompanying sighs create a chorus of dismissive waves, disinterested glares, and bored eye rolls that create a choreographed expression of disdain at the state of anti-Blackness in Canada. These are gestures that I know well—gestures that I and millions of brown people across the globe employ as modest tools of resistance. In the final scene, instead of teeth sucking, a woman kisses the toddler she holds in her arms, as well as the little girl sitting on a stool beside her. She kisses the children and they all smile.

From a distance, Chantal Gibson’s “Souvenir,” which features two walls of spray-painted collector spoons, looks like massive swaths of black eyelet lace, which are elegant and intricately detailed. “Souvenir” illustrates the erasure of the distinct histories and identities of Black people in Canada. At a closer look, it is clear that each spoon is shaped differently and varies in size, yet the artist’s choice to spray paint them all black and arrange them uniformly provides a striking visual representation of forced sameness.

Accompanying Gibson’s “Souvenir” is a video and photobook portraying ghost-like impressions leftover from spray painting 2,000 souvenir spoons. This work provides a sharp juxtaposition between “Souvenir,” and the diversity of Blackness displayed in Michèle Pearson Clarke’s video “Suck Teeth Compilation.”

Bushra Junaid’s “Sweet Childhood” creates a stunning and sophisticated portrait of Black children by overlaying period ads for sugar and molasses on a stereoview of children in a Caribbean sugarcane field from 1903, which draws attention to the trade between Newfoundland and the Caribbean, a history that I only learned of through this piece. Junaid deftly weaves together layers of history that point to the dynamic of producer and consumer—producer being the Global South/historically marginalized peoples, and consumer being the Global North/historically colonizer—that still exists today.

From Gordon Shadrach’s life-size painting depicting the multiple facets and identities of a contemporary Black Canadian woman, to Esmaa Mohamoud’s sculpture titled “Untitled (No Fields),” examining the commodification of Black male bodies in North American sports culture, this exhibit touches on a multitude of aspects of Blackness. It speaks from the history of enslaved people, to slavery’s afterlife of anti-blackness, immigration narratives, and the desire for belonging.

Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art’s scope is far-reaching, ranging from deep sadness to lighthearted. Many pieces share themes of commodification, a longing for belonging, shedding light on history, and resistance against erasure.

This is merely the beginning.

There needs to be more room for Black narratives in the art world. Yes, it’s a great step for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia to have an entire exhibit dedicated to Black contemporary art, yet this as an exception needs to change. It is imperative that showing the work of BIPOC artists, historic and contemporary, becomes the norm, particularly in a city like Halifax, with its history of Black resilience.

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

When you first walk into the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s exhibition space holding Ketu’elmita’jik, created by Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) artist Jordan Bennett, the colours and designs flood your senses. They enter you like some otherworldly creation that has seeped into your brain and started playing music you can’t quite hear.

This site-specific work fills the entire gallery. On one wall the painting extends past the usual ten-foot tall barriers and into the space of the gallery above. Ketu’elmita’jik, a Mi’kmaq word meaning they want to go home, incorporates 18th, 19th, and 20th century Mi’kmaq quillwork borrowed from museums across this land that is commonly called Canada. The intricate brightly coloured quillwork is carefully displayed on the wall in custom Plexiglas frames and cases created specifically for their current inhabitants. The designs and motifs painted directly on the walls echo those of the quillwork.

In the gallery space there are no labels, dates, material lists, or institutional ownership affiliation displayed on the wall— this space functions as one cohesive piece. The exhibition holds a cyclical sense of space and time, one that reflects Indigenous worldviews. By continuing the designs of these quillwork pieces Bennett is adding and continuing the knowledge these designs hold, encouraging the next generation to see them, to hear them, to feel their ancestors.

These works were made in community by many women’s hands[1], they are a collective collaborative piece, and made with the specific intention of trading. These are artworks; they are not utilitarian objects, they were traded to sustain the community’s livelihood. They were made in surroundings of laughter, story, food, sharing, language, and love.
It is worth pointing out that Indigenous products—trade items, handmade goods, and art works—are made to sustain, celebrate, continue, and pass on our way of life, our culture, our community livelihood. Hunting, gathering, storytelling, and making are all interconnected—they also allow us to practice our ways of life as well as participate in local and
global economies.

Bennett’s continuation of the quillwork in paint depicts his ability to listen and draw from his ancestors and the makers of these art forms; making becomes a prayerful act, one of honour, listening, and continuing. An act to reconnect and heal from colonial trauma. Not simply by displaying the work, but by adding to it, by continuing the conversation past the barriers of the piece he is honouring his ancestors. This action illustrates the breath of life in the quillwork that still exists, which requires its’ ancestors in the present to interact with it; much like Coast Salish masks they need human contact. It is so important for us, as Indigenous peoples, to see and interact with the work of our ancestors because it is in our blood memory, and our ability to read the designs and speak the visual language, even if we have not found our oral one yet.

The quill pieces hold Bennett’s ancestors—they directly draw a line from them to him and future generations. He understands the continual thread that is being pulled through time. We recognize that when we use these designs they are not ours, they are our communities’ and we are adding to the existing narratives.

A good friend said to me once, “as an artist, especially as an Indigenous artist, you have to understand that whatever you make now, you are adding to a history, you are continuing a story, and however you tell it, that version will always exist, thus influencing future generations”. The weight of this statement is heavy, but it should be. Indigenous artists are not just creating: we are continuing, we are surviving, and we are reconnecting. Bennett’s understanding of that weight is evident in his growing body of work.

Most recently, I saw Bennett at the unveiling of Pjila’si at Zatzman Sportsplex, another site-specific installation using Mi’kmaq and Beothuk designs. This permanent installation celebrates Indigenous contributions to sports and recreation in Mi’kma’ki. The piece utilizes various materials: aluminum, oak, walnut, ash and maple wood, 3M road sign sheeting and locally sourced labradorite. The 3M road sign sheeting almost shouts at the viewer, “Look over here!”. While the local materials such as the wood and stone softly suggests: “We have always been here.” At the opening, Stoney Bear Singers began with a powerful drumming performance and finished with the honour song.

“It was important for it (the honour song) to be sung in the space so the ancestors feel welcome,” says Bennett.

Indigenous art is not just art, it is our being and ancestors pushing through our bodies, through our fingertips, it is blood memory in physical form. Many Indigenous languages don’t even have a word for art, as it is embedded in our way of life.

Bennett has created a space that celebrates Indigenous ways of being and knowing within the walls of an institution that was not made for us. His ability to include and continue his ancestors designs is inspiring and will continue to inspire future generations.

[1] Handwork such as quillwork is typically done by women but if a person who identifies as a man or non-binary showed interest the community would make space for that person.

Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s Fountain Mist is disorienting, like the moment a dream snaps into a nightmare. You are not here. A spectre haunts the mixed-media installation, stalking through the sheen of blues, oranges, and yellows—the spectre of someone else’s dream being imposed on you, also known as advertising.

The dream is at its eeriest in a series of six framed digital collages (96 x 73 cm) that line two of the walls of the Owens Art Gallery. Each collage in the series of alternating Sunlight-yellow and Windex-blue backdrops foregrounds a glittering silver hand, with fingers slathered in paint. The thumb and middle fingers touch, pinching as if to snap, presenting objects ranging from a perfume bottle to a parrot. The formulaic goal of advertising—to produce new desires and promise their realization through a proffered commodity—is superficially obscured given the absence of brand names and inclusion of various other seemingly random objects in the frame. These collage images are unified by their origin in the stock databases from which Ortiz-Apuy downloaded them.

“One of the important things about the installation I think is the logic that I used for putting it together. I was interested in this idea of stock,” Ortiz-Apuy remarked in an interview with the Owens Art Gallery. “Stock, for me, represents this idea of mass production of something that is equally reproduced ad infinitum.”

“Fountain Mist” sounds like the name of SodaStream flavour, and of course it is one. It is also the name for the colour of a paint. Two additional product names are inscribed in the exhibition, “Bestå” and “Olov.” Ortiz-Apuy has combined the Ikea products—a storage unit and a desk, respectively—into a disjointed white display table, which sits atop a 6 x 8 x 1 foot black box at the centre of the room.

Various objects have been placed on the table. A small yellow-green pot with three artificial bananas rising out of it like preening dolphins. An unlabeled lime shampoo bottle. Two 3D-printed sculptures of amalgamated stock objects, shaped like skeletal models of knee joints, doubling as desk lamps or hour glasses. The only organic item, a bonsai tree, is also the only one that rests on the black box.

The black box’s presence in the centre of the room makes it harder to know how to navigate the space, though you do not long for the floor arrows that direct your movement through Ikea showrooms.

Ortiz-Apuy has left the Ikea stickers on the white display table, perhaps since the Swedish names are so suggestive in light of the exhibition’s interest in how commodities speak. Bestå translates as “remain” or “consist of” and Olov as “ancestor’s descendant.” Ortiz-Apuy complements these connotations by including two small stone talismans from his native Costa Rica, which are each more than 400 years old. This gesture of including the artifacts situates the commodity form in a larger historical frame. It might likewise hint at the hopefully damning question of what future anthropologists could glean about capitalist social relations through the mass consumption of—and reverence for—global, yet Swedish, standardized furniture that is produced on the only kind of supply chain possible, i.e., one that simultaneously concentrates and disperses exploitation. The stickers say “Made in China” and “Made in Poland,” referencing Ikea’s two biggest suppliers of cheap labour.

The hands in Ortiz-Apuy’s digital collages do not “make” anything; they are ornamental, there only to present objects. Assembled elsewhere, the prefabricated objects on display produce an intense feeling of dislocation that resonates with how commodities are produced and circulate within
capitalism.

Such dislocation is integral to the commodity form, given the nightmare of commodity fetishism. As Marx famously describes the phenomenon in Volume 1 of Capital (1867): “the definite social relation between men themselves […] assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”

Ortiz-Apuy’s objects interact, though not so much in the obfuscating, sense of exchange-value, but rather through replication and juxtaposition. Ortiz-Apuy describes the associations between objects in terms of the archaeological concept of “sympathetic magic.”

“I’m interested in mimesis or, more than anything, sympathetic magic,” Ortiz-Apuy told the Owens. “This idea of something sort of drawing power from something else by means of likeness or imitation.”

Power coursing through and between objects…might this be how an advertiser dreamily repackages the nightmare of commodity fetishism?