Vancouver-based artist Emily Neufeld unfolds the stencil from her suitcase and traces it onto the wall of the more than 100 years old fishing shack slated for demolition in Cheticamp, Nova Scotia. Then she begins to cut through the exterior wall.

Documentation of Neufeld’s art installation Before Demolition: Tides, a part of her series Before Demolition, was recently exhibited at Eyelevel Gallery in Halifax. In this on-going series, Neufeld enters homes scheduled for demolition and examines them as an archive. In Before Demolition: Tides, she created an installation in a Cheticamp fisherman’s home, where she responded to the evidence of a life lived. 

Before Demolition is just as much about the histories of the land as the homes built on it, and this begins with Indigenous peoples. 

“That’s always forefront in my mind: whose land was this before we built a yard and a fence and a house?” 

As Vancouver and Cheticamp are part of Turtle Island, they are situated on unceded and unsurrendered Indigenous territories—Vancouver is Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territory, and Cheticamp is part of Mi’kma’ki, home of the Mi’kmaq. 

In Before Demolition: Tides the connection to the land centres itself in the history of the home. She describes its provenance only in its broadest strokes: it had been a home for fishermen for most of its life, as well as storage for nets and other fishing gear. More recently, the house had suffered a fire to its second floor, which condemned it. In contrast, she describes the homeowners’ relationship to the land in much more detail. 

“You could really feel the cold. Not just the climatic cold, but the coldness of being out on a fishing boat in the wind and the rain and pulling up fish from icy waters,” says Neufeld. “There’s something really tough and hardy about the feel I got there. It felt very wholesome in a way.”

Despite the significance of the land to Neufeld’s work, her limited time in the home forced her to plan the installation in advance. Being separated from Cheticamp by more than 4500 kilometers was something she struggled with logistically. 

“I spent a lot of time on Google Maps, just wandering around the area on street view.” In her research, she was struck by the lack of green. Sitting on the edge of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the winds—les suêtes—have stripped the land of its vegetation. The house lacked any kind of yard. 

“It’s basically sitting in a parking lot for the wharf. The land of the house is really the wharf and the water,” she says.

Previously, Neufeld has approached her installations either by cutting away parts of the home, often sections of the walls or floor, or by adding to it, typically bringing in natural elements, such as plants. In Cheticamp, Neufeld combines the two processes, as she cut away parts of the exterior wall facing the ocean, and brought in what she could of the natural world surrounding it. 

The stencil prepared in Vancouver is a graph, mapping the moon phases, represented by a series of long plateaus, against the tide chart, a series of dramatic peaks and valleys. It visualizes the relationship between the two; the differences between high and low tides lessening as the moon shrinks in size. Neufeld cuts away the wall in the negative space between these lines, creating an uninterrupted sightline between the interior of the house to the exterior, which is the ocean. 

“That’s what was different about this project from the others: it is from the inside looking out, instead from the inside looking in at itself.”

Similar to Neufeld’s previous works in the series, Before Demolition: Tides comments on humanity’s exploitative relationship with natural resources and “how we only seem to live where we can extract.” 

Cape Breton is currently dealing with the repercussions of such a relationship, as over-fishing has crippled the industry, leading, in part, to the current out-migration and downturn in the housing market and economy generally.

Though left vacant by other means, the Cheticamp fishing shack can be read as a symbol for the danger of depleting these resources, a warning of the end result of our destructive way of life. Ultimately, Before Demolition: Tides returns to having respect for our relationships with the land and water. 

“I am really thinking about what it means to be a colonizer here: how the land was used by the First Peoples, how different it is now, and how we can honor them in a much better way.”

At the entrance of the Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen in Moncton, on the occasion of Sovereign Acts exhibition curated by Wanda Nanibush, a small monitor is installed on the wall. Showing in a black and white historical video, a group of performers are dancing, dressed in what appears to be traditional garments and headdresses. Captured on film by Thomas A. Edison in 1894, it is here one of the oldest Indigenous performance videos. Ironically, it’s the video of a fake Ghost dance. In an accompanying description, it is explained that in 1884 in Canada and 1904 in the United States, traditional rituals were punishable by imprisonment. In order to continue to perform and share their knowledge, these Indigenous groups had to adapt to stereotypical movements to please and fill the imagination of a colonial public, consciously leaving aside a part of their identity. This recording is a document of assimilation and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples of North America.

The exhibition Sovereign Acts includes the work of Indigenous artists Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, Dayna Danger, Robert Houle, James Luna, Shelley Niro, Adrian Stimson, and Jeff Thomas as they explore various aspects of artistic performance as an act of cultural resistance. Through various techniques combining photography, video, painting, installation, and performative documentation, the exhibition examines the influence of the identity of colonialism on Indigenous cultures. 

Robert Houle’s traditional portrait paintings, Mississauga Portraits “Waubuddick”, “Maungwudaus,” “Hannah,” installed on a painted royal blue wall, recalls museum aesthetics and criticizes the lack of representation of Indigenous art in these institutions. The same concern is present in Jeff Thomas’ work, which exhibits black and white photographs of preparations for a Powwow celebration. Unlike the conventional image of performers in action, Thomas manages to capture spontaneous and intimate moments. His work is an internal point of view highlighting the authenticity of his own culture in order to participate in the creation of visual references.

The complexity of identity influences from a contemporary point of view is accentuated by the masquerade present in the photographic series of both James Luna and Shelley Niro. Luna and Niro examine cultural appropriation as a way of addressing stereotypes. In particular, Niro’s photographic series, “This Land is Mime Land,” reflects on three diverse perspectives of Indigenous women’s role throughout an international and colonial, an Indigenous viewpoint, and an introspective gaze. 

On the other hand, Dayna Danger’s large-scale photo-graphic installation depicts four people wearing black fetish masks covered with beadwork of the same colour. Danger’s work explores a paradoxical dynamism between empower-ment and its objectification through a glim of vulnerability. Do the masks create a distance between the identity of the subjects and the space they occupied in the gallery? In this case, the hidden identity of the subjects reclaims space for gender non-conforming people, sexual minorities and sexually diverse role outside of the settler colonial institutions. Danger’s work also speaks to the bodies’ resistance of the perceiving of gender within a western gender binary. 

Adrian Stimson’s work explores self-construction through characters, mostly known by The Shaman Exterminator and Buffalo Boy. Stimson investigates from his personal experience including several generations of Indigenous communities attending residential schools and its impact on culture. The photographic series in the gallery revisit and bringing together both stills from performances and historical images taken in 1892 in Sisika Nation. In a first diptych, Onward upward, Christian frock, the front of the lie… the work depicts an historical image showing Indigenous children dressed as altar servers, standing in line on the side of a church. It is accompanied by an image of Stimson personifying a priest dressed with nylon stockings and high heels. The adjacent diptych, Chalk Board Witness signs, Telling Eyes, Sketches of Indian Life, the historical image shows children in a classroom with a cold and surprised look. This one is presented with a picture of Stimson’s Buffalo Boy sitting in a classroom with a similar facial expression. In a way, these performances are healing efforts through the recognition of ongoing suffering and self-acceptance to better understand how to live with trauma and tragedy. 

Rebecca Belmore’s “In A Wilderness Garden,” is presented as a triptych video installation projected on a large wall. In the first video, Belmore is seen in a forest, her hands tied behind her back while lying on the ground covered with leaves. Belmore is tenacious in constant motion and tries to get up. This section of the performance makes me restless, impatient, but above all helpless in front of this struggling woman. Then I notice the centre video. I see a character motionless with a blanket over his head and bare feet. This immobilization reminds me of mine in this moment. It also makes me think about the inaction of colonial peoples vis-à-vis the many injustices of Indigenous Peoples. In particular, I am thinking of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous women and girls, whose presence I feel symbolized on the adjacent wall by Lori Blondeau, who is wearing a red dress. The third video shows a leaf blower scattering leaves. This last scene may imply that the conse-quences of the inaction of the second figure will make life even more difficult for this woman in order to finalize her efforts.

As an exhibition, Sovereign Acts is a space of understanding, shared knowledge, and above all, an awareness of reconciliation. The performances of every artist of the exhibition constitute an act of resistance aimed to reclaim the narrative of their cultural voices by changing colonial perspectives that had influence their identity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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