“It’s not a typical snake. It’s magic. It can change and shift,” says Syliboy, who lives in Millbrook First Nation. “The snake is the imagination. It’s only temporary, a magic that appears and disappears. Eventually, it will be painted over. But it made an appearance,” he says, thereby reiterating the image’s significance. 

The red-horned snake holds powerful medicines. The mural is based on Jipijka’m, a Mi’kmaw legend about a snake. 

“For me it was important to have a mural in the gallery space. I think it’s a significant part of Alan’s art-making practice,” says curator Edmonds. “The great horned serpent is a mythological animal that takes on the shape of the space. It winds around the room into the alcove. It speaks to the stories and legends in the work.” 

In a way, the snake moves with the viewer throughout the retrospective. 

“It’s a protector, a medicinal protector that greets you and pulls you into the space,” says Edmonds. “It’s like the petroglyphs etched in stone that are disappearing due to the elements. The wall paint will still exist and will remain in the memory of the walls. 

“The presence of the great horned snake will always be underneath and cannot be removed.”

The Journey So Far is a retrospective. Early on in his career, Syliboy was inspired by artists like Marc Chagall, J.M.W. Turner, and Carl Beam. The Journey So Far includes a landscape painting, “Whycocomagh Sunset” (1972), and collage works (Joe Julien and Members of the Grand Council, Grandfather, Grandmother 1 & 2, Baby Alan, and Young Alan, ca. 2012–2014) that feature black-and-white images of Syliboy as a baby and images of his grandmother Rachael Marshall, who introduced him to Shirley Bear.

Before attending Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Syliboy studied with Wolastoqiyik multimedia artist Shirley (Minqwôn-Minqwôn) Bear (1936–2022), who was a renowned poet, activist, and curator from Tobique First Nation. 

“Shirley changed everything. She changed the world for me. As a student, I was a failure. I started to make cabinets at my uncle Fred’s cabinet shop,” says Syliboy. “I was making cabinets there, and Shirley came in to interview me for a project in the USA in the 1970s, an art project with the idea to do workshops in Native communities. It was really leading-edge.”

Back then, we Indigenous people weren’t allowed or invited to teach in our own communities. “Outsiders did all the teaching,” says Syliboy. “For us to teach our own people—it never happened before.”

Syliboy credits Bear for launching his art career and broadening his worldview. “My world was small until then. She took me out into the bigger world where there was art and possibilities,” he says. “At the time there weren’t many, if any, Native artists per se.”

Bear found Red Earth, a book of petroglyphs published by the Museum of Nova Scotia in 1971, which unearthed Syliboy’s ongoing fascination with the marks on the ground and symbols etched into rocks. “The petroglyphs were how we investigated our own identities. Mi’kmaw people didn’t know about petroglyphs,” he says. “It started things going for us, and the knowledge became deeper and wider. Opened up all kinds of alleys.”

Over the past five decades, Syliboy has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group shows. He is one of the most prolific and treasured artists in Mi’kma’ki. Syliboy left art school in the late 1960s; twenty-five years later he was invited to sit on NSCADU’s board of governors. In 2002, he received the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal, and in 2023 he was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award. 

Syliboy credits social media as an important tool. Not only in terms of sharing his artwork, but also for connecting with folks all over the world. His social media posts roll out at first light every day and feature the Daily Drum, a photograph of one of his hundreds of hand-painted drums. Sometimes he’s holding the drum, for other images it’s placed on the earth. 

His posts also include a personalized message about the Mi’kmaw teachings depicted on the drum. For example, on June 10, 2024, Syliboy posted on social media: “The whale’s wisdom extends beyond the boundaries of time and space, reminding us that we are all connected in the vast web of existence. Its presence invites us to embrace a sense of unity with all living beings.”

The Journey So Far was dreamlike and illustrated Syliboy’s vast, vivid, and vibrant interwoven creative practices. There was a deep sense of spirituality, magic, and various forms of play found throughout. Not only is Syliboy an artist who has been dedicated to visual art, drum-making, music, jam sessions, and animations, but he has also published several children’s books. His significant contribution to children’s literature includes When the Owl Calls Your Name (Nimbus Publishing, 2023), Wolverine and Little Thunder: An Eel Fishing Story (Nimbus, 2022), Mi‘kmaw Daily Drum: Mi‘kmaw Culture for Every Day of the Week (Nimbus, 2020), Mi‘kmaw Wasisik / Mi‘kmaw Animals (Nimbus, 2018), and Kaqtukowateketew / The Thundermaker (Nimbus, 2018), which is translated by Lindsay R. Marshall. The retrospective included storyboards from these children’s books.

“Alan’s work teaches us about the importance of memory and of cultural heritage. He is preserving the culture by bringing the lost stories and language to his community,” says Edmonds. “Also by sharing it with a broader community. When he reads the stories to the kids, they know the Mi’kmaw words. These are children from all cultural backgrounds. It’s quite moving to see [on] how many levels he has been able to really have an impact.” 

Edmonds first met Syliboy when she was an emerging curator in Kjipuktuk/Halifax in the late 1990s. As part of her own curatorial practice, she was interested in artists who were engaged in grassroots activism. 

“I don’t think Alan would consider his work activism, but he is focused on communities and bringing communities together, first and foremost the Mi’kmaw community and Mi’kmaw culture.”

Edmonds contextualizes Syliboy’s work as an important link between contemporary art and Mi’kmaw culture and art, but she wasn’t seeing his work engaged with on national or international levels. This is why she nominated him for a Sobey Art Award last year and is working with Syliboy on a catalogue for major publication as part of The Journey So Far retrospective.

“Alan’s work should be included in major exhibitions of Indigenous art on the national and international scale,” she says. “His work is very important in Mi’kma’ki but also to the broader conversation around Indigenous art in Canada, Turtle Island, and beyond.”

The Journey So Far was a survey exhibition that offered an insight into Syliboy’s long-standing career and ongoing shifts in creative praxis. “I was very struck by Alan as an artist, in particular his drawings, and how they are related to culture and history,” says Edmonds. “I think he’s an amazing artist in terms of his drawings—the graphic quality and the strong spiritual presence.”

Early sketches and pieces included in the retrospective are from private collector Marcia Hennessy, who collected over one hundred of Syliboy’s works during her lifetime. And in a way, this relationship offers an insight into Syliboy’s remarkable journey. Via letters, Christmas cards, and emails, viewers catch a glimpse of the connection between the artist and the collector, as well as Hennessy’s deep admiration of Syliboy’s work. As part of his retrospective, Syliboy wanted to celebrate Hennessy and the significant impact she had on supporting him as an artist and as a single father. 

When Hennessy first discovered Syliboy’s work at Bay of Spirits Gallery in Toronto, she bought a few pieces of his art. And then a few more. At the time, the gallery asked Syliboy if he could make a special picture or write a note for Hennessy because she was such a unique client. From there, Hennessy found Syliboy’s work online. “She would buy directly from me from then on. That’s how our relationship started,” says Syliboy.

The two only ever met in person once when Syliboy had an exhibition (Homeboys, with Alex Janvier) at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in 2001. She came for the exhibition and stayed to visit with him for a few days.  

“I never did see her again, but she would call me from time to time,” says Syliboy. Hennessy continued to collect Syliboy’s work online, and the two stayed in touch. She had always planned to come back to Nova Scotia, but her health deteriorated. Hennessy crossed over to the spirit world in 2020.

“Marcia only collected one artist, and that was me. And she only listened to [Canadian pianist] Glenn Gould,” he says. “So, there was only me and Glenn Gould in her house.” The collector even sent Syliboy an entire collection of Gould’s recordings on CD. “Glenn Gould is brilliant. She wanted Glenn Gould and I together, so I painted a series while listening to Glenn. [His music] affected my work.” 

Syliboy acknowledges how incredibly grateful he was for Hennessy’s support and their long friendship. He always gave her first dibs on his artwork.

“I was a single parent on welfare. To have support like that is absolutely amazing. She really helped me bring these kids up,” says Syliboy. “We were very close that way. She was always in my corner. She helped me provide for my kids, which was very important. Marcia would send them cards at Christmas and some money. An incredible person.”

From a curatorial perspective, Edmonds wants to highlight the importance of relationships and to demystify the capitalistic conventions often seen in the art world. Artists need financial support beyond grants and exhibition fees to maintain their practices. 

“It was an interesting way to build a story around Alan’s work, which has changed so much over the past thirty years,” she says. “Marcia wasn’t necessarily a woman of wealthy means, but she was someone who loved his art and bought it. 

“She had Alan’s work all over her home, even with modest means. I wanted to show the importance of supporting artists. It humanizes the artist and artist supporters.” 

My favourite of Syliboy’s earlier works in the retrospective, Home (1999, pencil and acrylic on paper), comes from Hennessy’s private collection. I was initially drawn by the great horned serpent into the abstract swirls of forest greens and soft and deep blue shades and was delighted by the bright red sun with brilliant yellow. But upon closer examination, it was the greens, blues and dreamy light pinks of the geometric forms that captivated me. As I gazed longer at the recurring symbols, curves, and pastels of Syliboy’s cosmology, admiring the intricate pencil drawings, I looked back at the mural. And for a moment, I felt humbled by the great horned serpent who guided me there and then to the ancestors. But most of all I felt connected and grateful to Syliboy for continually sharing his journey thus far.

Embedded within a matrix of dark stone on the second-floor landing gallery at The Rooms is the vivid and materially diverse exhibition Njikam (My Younger Brother) by emerging L’nu artist Alex Antle. Originally from Qapskuk (Grand Falls-Windsor), Antle is currently based in Elmastukwek (Bay of Islands) where her maternal Mi’kmaw ancestors are from, and where she has been nourishing her artistic practice since 2017.

Antle primarily utilizes slow stitching practices like beadwork and caribou tufting, and in the last several yearshas expanded her practice to incorporate print media and photography. The last four years have been significant for her, particularly when she received her first professional project grant from Arts NL, in 2021, to begin this body of work. That same year she was also the recipient of the VANL-CARFAC Emerging Artist of the Year Award. Njikam (My Younger Brother) is Antle’s first solo exhibition and has been previously exhibited in the ROGUE Gallery at Eastern Edge, the Tina Dolter Gallery, and Union House Arts. Now with her fourth iteration, Antle offers newly created appliqué beaded pieces to accompany her caribou tufted prints, and digital images emphasizing the passage of time, her process, and materiality.

Njikam (My Younger Brother), on display at The Rooms until August 14, 2023, was inspired by Antle’s brother Matthew and his relationship to the land and Mi’kmaw culture in Ktaqmkuk. Antle shares that he is somebody who has always been immersed in a land-based lifestyle engaging in L’nu practices like harvesting medicines, foraging, hunting, and fishing.

“His lack of participation in the ceremonial side of culture deters him from viewing his lifestyle as cultural,” says Antle.

Rather than emphasizing Matthew’s perceived disconnect from Mi’kmaw culture, Antle renders tangible both her and Matthew’s nuanced experiences and mediates these tensions and vulnerabilities through several artistic processes.

Anchored in the middle of the space is Sple’tk, an appliqué beaded moose hide that imparts a topographical view of the watershed. Sple’tk is the Mi’kmaq name for the Exploits River that runs through central Ktaqmkuk. It is the longest river on the island and it is a source of life and transportation that has supported Mi’kmaq and Settler peoples alike for hundreds of years. The tributaries sprawling like veins across the beaded moose hide are made visible with ultramarine blue beads of varying sizes which on closer inspection adds a sculptural element to the work.

During each of the four seasons, Antle has taken photos of Matthew and of their adventures together, documenting him engaging in some traditional practices that are specifically relevant to him. Each snapshot is further mediated into stretched screen prints where Antle activates her body in the production of image making. As a printmaker myself, I reflect on the importance of photography and repetition in image creation, and making visible our stories as Indigenous people from what is currently known as Newfoundland and Labrador.

In her essay “Interventions in Digital Territories: Narrative in New Media,” curator Candice Hopkins, who is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation, discusses the importance of repetition in Indigenous storytelling. She argues: “In art since mechanical reproduction, the copy is understood as subversive: its very presence (particularly if there is potential for infinite replication) challenges the authority of the original. Replication in storytelling, by contrast, is positive and necessary: it is through change that the stories, and in turn, traditions are kept alive and remain relevant.” With each of these prints embellished with qalipu (caribou) tufting and beadwork, Antle shares a new way to give insight into her and Matthew’s experiences as L’nu’k from Ktaqmkuk.

The latest artwork additions to this expanded version of Njikam are the impressive pieces of beadwork and harvested materials that are placed in the bottom row of the vitrines. Like when harvesting labrador tea and foraging for berries, viewers must bend and crouch down to take in each detail of the work. Viewers are greeted with bakeapples and blueberries in the late summer on the cusp of fall. For the winter prints, Antle utilizes the loom to replicate the plaid red pattern on Matthew’s hunting jacket. For spring, she has edged a piece of home-tanned trout skin with silver seed beads that complements the pink underbelly and rich tones present in the skin. For an exhibition that relies so much on photography, this piece of leather as an abstract representation of this precious resource speaks to Antle’s creativity and her ability to play with form, illustrating her growth as an artist.

The visual progression through the seasons concludes with a picture taken of the two siblings hugging each other at Antle’s wedding in the summer of 2020 on Gros Morne Mountain. A tiam (moose) medallion, beaded with hunting orange beads, is located beneath this image. This is actually a gift for Matthew when the show closes. The creation of this exhibition gives space for a nuanced experience that many Mi’kmaw Newfoundlanders can relate to. Njikam (My Younger Brother) shares that the relationship to ceremonial teachings are just one of the many components that make up a Mi’kmaw worldview. What is evident is the joy in the process, spending time with one another on the land, and the importance of sibling kinship.

My first time seeing porcupine quillwork was watching my Aunt Connie create pieces at her kitchen table when I was 16 years old. It was mesmerizing to watch her take tiny quills and insert each one meticulously into place. I still remember the rhythm she created. When I began my own exploration into Indigenous Arts as a student at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design in 1999, I was led by the late Elder Gwen Bear, and Carola Knockwood, who was the porcupine quillwork instructor at the time. From there, I enrolled in the Surface Design program, and graduated from the college in 2002. It wasn’t until 2004 that I decided to take up quillwork again, as I wanted to make a basket from the birch bark that had been gathered by my grandfather, the late Chief Anthony Francis, and gifted to me after he passed.

As a Mi’kmaw artist, I am committed to the preservation of our traditional art practices and the use of natural materials gathered from the land of our ancestors, known to us as Mi’kma’ki. I have carried these traditional teachings forward into my contemporary work, which addresses Indigenous issues and reacts to important events taking place that affect our people. My porcupine quillwork incorporates sacred and ceremonial teachings and the Mi’kmaw language, and I continue to teach the traditional craft throughout the Maritime provinces and into Maine. Though I believe it is our responsibility as traditional knowledge holders and artists to pass the knowledge on to the next generation, for many years I felt alone on my porcupine quill journey, as I only knew a handful of people who still practiced the craft. The Quill Sisters have changed all this.

The Quill Sisters is composed of contemporary porcupine quillwork artists Melissa Peter-Paul, of Abegweit First Nation; Cheryl Simon, originally from Abegweit and now living in Halifax; and Kay Sark, from Lennox Island. They are a joint force, working together to revitalize traditional birch bark insertion quillwork in their home communities and throughout Mi’kma’ki. Their united goal is to educate and preserve the traditional practices and ornate patterns of our ancestral work, while building their personal styles and expanding the boundaries of the tradition in step with modern times.

I first encountered Peter-Paul’s work when we exhibited together at the Petapan Indigenous Artist Symposium in Dieppe in 2016. Through Peter-Paul, I was introduced to Simon’s work, and I came across Sark’s quillwork through social media. Not long after discovering Simon and Sark’s podcast Epekwitk Quill Sisters, I was invited by Simon to be a guest on the episode “Chatting with a Pro,” which aired on September 6, 2021. In this episode, we discussed how my institutional background affects my practice, and other issues relating to quillwork and craft. It was the first time I connected with other artists who shared such a passion for porcupine quillwork, as well as knowledge about how we gather our natural materials, and what tools and techniques we use. Epekwitk Quill Sisters is an ongoing podcast that spans conversations around traditional knowledge and interviews with Elders, quillwork artists, and curators. It touches on cultural appropriation, understanding the value of quillwork, and so much more.

The Quill Sisters’ most recent endeavour, Matues Revisited, was a powerful exhibit at the Mary E. Black Gallery at the Centre for Craft Nova Scotia, curated by Aiden Gillis and Jordan Bennett and on display from January 21–March 13, 2022. The exhibition included framed quillwork pieces from all three artists, as well as installations, three-dimensional forms, and a learning room where visitors could experience various displays and write-ups touching on the history of quillwork, the raw materials, and sustainable harvest.

I had the pleasure of watching the Quill Sisters in a virtual artist talk on March 10, 2022. It was hosted by curator Gillis, an Indigenous Arts Programmer at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and delivered through Craft Nova Scotia. As part of the conversation, the artists addressed the issue of “consuming culture,” and how having an Indigenous curator allowed the artists to have a more hands-on approach than a museum’s colonial curatorial one. The artists collaborated on how the work was displayed, the inclusion of multi-sensory exhibits, and the information available to help visitors gain an understanding of and respect for the culture of quillwork. They also worked together on educational aspects of the exhibition to encourage Indigenous youth groups to participate and learn more of the history and process of quillwork.

Like myself, each sister has their own histories and inspirations behind the reason they took up quillwork. Simon and Peter-Paul recall being young and seeing their mothers’ collections of quill baskets, and wondering how they were made; however, it wasn’t until adulthood that they saw actual Mi’kmaq quillwork made by Mi’kmaw artists. Simon recalls the reverence in her mother’s voice when she would speak of the work. The first time Sark saw quillwork was when Simon’s pieces were on display at her band office. From there, she ended up taking a workshop with Simon, who ignited her passion for the craft. Peter-Paul also cites Simon as leading her to the craft—she apprenticed under her before taking an in-depth study of quillwork, the traditional materials, and the techniques required. She has now taken it on as her full-time career.

Peter-Paul believes Simon’s drive and passion for the work continues to inspire her. Simon is inspired by the historical works of our Mi’kmaq ancestors, reinterpreting their designs and styles, and often using a section of an ancestral pattern to communicate her larger intent. “I have noticed that when I am around a lot of Mi’kmaq people, I get a lot of designs coming to me, which is reflective of the energy and connection we have collectively,” says Simon. Sark finds inspiration in her day-to-day life, be it the flowers she sees growing in her garden, or what she happens to be watching on TV.

When it comes to the gathering of natural materials, the Quill Sisters and I are all on the same page about the importance of sustainability and the protection of our ancestral practices. Having grown up in a family of traditional ash basket makers, Peter-Paul follows the protocols handed down from her kin in her approach to gathering sacred sweetgrass. She shares this knowledge with the sisters and others who she knows will respect the land and resources. Simon speaks of gathering her natural materials in how she marks her year, as there are small windows of times that are best for harvesting. Sark embraces the importance of family in her harvesting practices—they all do it together—and enjoys sharing the practice with her children knowing that she has passed it onto the next generation.

“It’s amazing that it’s just so normal to them now, and including them in this is very important to me. I want to teach them things about their culture. I want them to feel the connections that were not given to their father and I growing up,” says Sark. “I want them to have access to all the knowledge that we didn’t [have]. I want them to know the history that goes along with quilling.”

Each quill sister mentioned the overwhelming feelings they encounter when they hear the sound of the birch bark snapping as it is harvested from the tree. Peter-Paul and Sark live on Prince Edward Island, and they must travel to New Brunswick to find their porcupines, which are collected from the highway. The gathering of materials has been even more challenging over the past couple of years due to pandemic restrictions.

As contemporary Indigenous artists, the importance of passing on the tradition is a big responsibility to us knowledge carriers, and the sisters have seen a large increase in quillers. Simon mentions how she has noticed that a lot of family members are now engaged in active harvesting and are attempting the craft for the first time. Simon spent a lot of time at the Matues Revisited exhibition, and she had the opportunity to connect with many visitors in person and online. Peter-Paul and Sark were able to travel to the gallery and join Simon for the final day of the exhibition, and they were very pleased with how the exhibit came together under the respectful care of Gillis and Bennett.

After a well-deserved break, all the sisters plan to continue doing their quillwork. Simon has plans to work with more 3D pieces, Peter-Paul is preparing for workshops in Ottawa over the summer solstice as part of the nation’s capital Indigenous People’s Day celebrations, and Sark is prepared to go wherever her quillwork takes her next.

Personally, I believe the Quill Sisters and I are strongly committed to the journey of being porcupine quill artists, and I deeply relate to Peter-Paul when she says she draws her “strength from the work, as it is empowering, and our deep connection to who we are as Mi’kmaq people.” Quillwork is our connection to the land, to our ancestors, and to our families, and, like Sark says, “we just know it is what we are meant to do.”

Reflections of neon Beothuk pendants, electric colours, and textures coalesce into the dark, marbled concrete floor of Eastern Edge Gallery. The energy of the artwork in My Cousin’s Cousin cannot be contained to just the walls of the gallery—it activates all surfaces. This exhibition highlighting the interrelatedness between all beings was created as part of the programming for Spirit Song Festival, a celebration of Indigenous Arts and Culture held annually in St. John’s, Ktaqmkuk. Through the transmission of intergenerational knowledge and reciprocity in their kinship systems, Amy Malbeuf, Jerry Evans, Jordan Bennett, and Meagan Musseau call attention to the importance of nourishing our relationships with the land, water, and animal relatives that sustain us. 

The radiating sculptures of Beothuk pendants, collectively named Re/awakening by L’nu artist Meagan Musseau, are part of her latest solo exhibition, pi’tawkewaq | our people up river. Each of these pendants is created from laser cut plexiglass, which is the same material used to encase dispossessed cultural belongings within museums and archives. The engraved designs reference drawings made by Musseau from her visits with the Beothuk belongings and caribou bone pendants held in the vault at The Rooms. In replicating and enlarging the markings by ancestor artists, Musseau transmits the intimate experiences of visiting these belongings and their embedded histories of these lands and waters, while refuting colonial narratives of erasure. 

On the opposite side of the gallery is Métis artist Amy Malbeuf’s triptych of animal kin, Woodland Caribou, Whooping Crane, and Arctic Grayling. Each image is a constellation of caribou hair tufts exploding like fireworks across the black velvet prairies. Specifically, the appliquéd strips of tarp stitched beneath each animal represent aerial views of pipelines in Northern Alberta that threaten their habitats and lifeways. By using caribou hair as a material, she honours that relationship to create the portrait. In these works, Malbeuf calls attention to the extractive and colonial environmental practices that harm her homelands, and the effects they have on these animal relatives who sustain her community, and who are integral beings of Métis kinship structures. 

Jordan Bennett, Malbeuf’s partner in life and art, was the Visual Artist-in-Residence for the duration of Spirit Song Festival. In this residency, in the days leading up to the exhibition opening, Bennett created three paintings that would become part of My Cousin’s Cousin, each one intentionally responding to lithographs made by Jerry Evans. For instance, Evan’s lithograph Mimajuaqne’kati – Place of Life depicts swirling migrations of caribou, salmon, and seal; each of these beings are sustenance and animal kin from Ktaqmkuk. Bennett drew inspiration from these cyclical movements in the creation of the painting Mechanical Medicine Wheel.

Two days before the opening, Bennett gave an artist talk to speak about his residency, and where the influences in his art practice come from. He spoke of how he was always inspired by the land and waters of Ktaqmkuk, our visual culture, and ancient histories as Mi’kmaq. Most affectingly, he also expressed the significance of Evans’ encouragement and support when he was starting as a young artist, and their reciprocal relationship in sharing their practices with each other.

It would be impossible to write about this exhibition without acknowledging how deeply important Jerry Evans is as a cultural innovator, storyteller, and community member in Ktaqmkuk and beyond. Last year, Evans was the recipient of the 2019 VANL-CARFAC Endurance Award, an accolade given to an artist in honour of their sustained and consistent dedication to their professional practice. Over decades of commitment to honouring his Mi’kmaq ancestry as a Master Printmaker, painter, filmmaker, and tattoo practitioner, Evans has also prioritized knowledge-sharing and supporting future generations of L’nu artists. Bennett described the work of Evans as “living and breathing…reaching backwards and projecting us forward.”

This gathering of works makes me think about how there is a continuum of transmitted intergenerational knowledge inherent in these artistic and cultural practices. With love, kinship, and reciprocity in the relationships between family members, My Cousin’s Cousin emphasizes our responsibilities towards each other and our territories that hold us close.

Emily Critch is a visual artist, curator, and writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry from Elmastukwek, Ktaqamkuk (Bay of Island, Newfoundland). Critch’s work was recently featured in Future Possible (2019) at The Rooms and her upcoming curatorial project mitsujuk | kussikuashu | kpitni’sewet | they sew will be exhibiting in Corner Brook in 2020. Critch will also hold a prestigious curatorial residency at the National Textile Museum of Canada this year.

In her visual practice, Critch sculpts texts with thousands of beads and creates dozens of detailed photopolymer prints. Working with slow materials (photopolymer printing, beadwork, photography, and text), Critch engages embodied repetitive practices that evoke the physicality of remembered skills. The labour of these modalities takes immense time, patience, and knowledge. Across her curatorial and artistic practices, Critch’s work oscillates around kinship, love, place, and the slow practice of taking care.

Critch cares about process. She shows us that taking time for laughter, curiosity, and empathy is an effective curatorial practice; it builds the kinship and care fundamental to collaborative creation and the kinds of world-making that are rendered possible by this work.

Critch also likes to share baby yoda memes, twinkling heart emojis, and lengthy love letters over email. She gives long hugs, likes pink beaded earrings, and loves to laugh. It is almost impossible to work with Critch without learning these things about her. She consistently takes the time to connect with her collaborators, to learn about them, their needs and boundaries, to share herself with others and feel their work deeply. She takes time to situate the work so as to best honour it, to respect the intimacy of collaboration, and to electrify the “resurgent possibility” of kinship.[1]

For Critch, the labour of care entangles intimacy and the decolonization of time. It respects and creates space for relation building, for honouring her ancestral knowledge and family practices. She believes curation is about nurturing artists, their work, and their stories. “[It] becomes about developing a relationship and really focusing on what it means to create something together.” Her curatorial practices are about intimacy and sharing space (and often, if you know her, food and laughter). Taking the time to connect, to develop boundaries and respect is, for Critch, the foundation for collaborative creation.

Critch says that curation feels familiar to her, because it feels like a way of loving and relating, a way that centres thoughtfulness, safety, and empathy. Curation can be a series of gestures and practices, an embodied compilation of protocols and teachings. They are activated through our relation to ourselves and one another, our stories and our work, to the land and to past and future generations.

Critch says that, for her, caregiving is an inherited knowledge from her Mom of how to nurture, protect, and create space for healing, vulnerability, curiosity, messiness, and laughter. When I listen to Critch talk about her Mom, about curating and her own visual practice, I hear echoes of Lindsay Nixon’s celebration and witnessing of “the power of First Nations’ love in the living, in ancient voices of the land, non-human loves and lovers, in the ones who have left the physical world but who still speak the strength of family, community and friendship, and especially for those who are coming into being now and in the future. It is a celebration of our own love medicines.[2]

Critch’s curatorial statement for Visiting: Logan MacDonald was written as a letter of gratitude and friendship to Logan. She writes,

When trying to learn more of the Mi’kmaq language, I was told by my teachers that it is a language built on verbs; words connecting our bodies and actions in relation to the land. […] The idea of home as a place is fluid and sometimes complicated. In the act of visiting and returning to where our families come from, it helps us to learn more about our connections between our bodies and the land. Ourselves.[3]

In her love letter to friendship, language, and land, Critch shows us how curation can be a “love medicine” that teaches, connects, and reconnects.

In the context of institutions that enact violence in myriad ways, slowing down and celebrating intimacy is, for Critch, a way to honour the stories and the work. It is a modality of queering the linearity of productivity and consumption, a gesture of care and protection, and an act of decolonial love. Critch says that she is “very much focused on [questions like] am I moving forward in a good way? How are things being done? Is everyone feeling safe? Am I feeling safe?” These questions braid together in her work. These questions are “disruptive curatorial strategies” that resist an “authoritative and anonymous institutional voice.”[4]

Critch’s curatorial practices teach us that when we engage our communities and the messiness of our own lived experience, or when we are working with family knowledge, we have a responsibility to honour, respect, and tend to ourselves and one another with great care.

For Critch, the affective and emotional labour of caring is a matrilineal knowledge that resists the capitalist consumption of a transactional industry. Taking the time to learn about and tend to each other’s needs—in the often violent context of institutional and industry spaces—is powerful. Critch’s curatorial and artistic practices, grounded in kinship and community, “rage against the gallery and the current affairs of arts administration, asserting that [they] happen in the streets and around kitchen tables.”[5] Critch’s work turns to the kitchen table, the roadside flowers, and family memory, insisting on the radical capacity of care and intimacy.

The current affairs of arts administration in Newfoundland and Labrador is, in many ways, horrific. Our provincial gallery spent $20,000 in hush money to cover up the hiring of an unqualified Lieutenant Governor’s daughter in a six figure position this past year.[6] In 2017, we became the only province lacking a department with the word “culture” in the name. After public outrage, the province quickly amended this, settling on the “Department of Tourism, Culture, Industry and Innovation.” Treated with the same extractive profit drive of the oil, fishing, and mining industries, “culture” has become synonymous with tourism and profit for the provincial government.

When corruption and extraction become the sole practices of our leadership, and the government and the oil industry seem indistinguishable, Indigenous youth like Critch—who are learning their language, taking care of their communities, celebrating their culture, protecting their stories, defending their land, and honouring their ancestral knowledge—are caring for our collective future.

Critch uses care as a radical modality that allows her to connect with her family knowledge, her culture, and her identity. While wanting to learn more about her family, Critch set off on a road trip with her Nan to Pinchard’s Island. It was a trip that became the impetus for her profound and technical work, Pearly Everlasting. Reflecting on the familiar tension between knowing and not knowing that haunts many of our family archives, Critch says, “I grew up listening to my grammy tell stories about where she’s from and her parents and her mom,” she says. “I know so much and at the same time I don’t.”

On the long drive from Corner Brook to the resettled community in Bonavista North, Critch’s Nan stopped on the side of the road to admire the pearly everlasting flowers that grew in droves along the side of the highway. Traditionally used as a medicine for the common cold, pearly everlastings are both common and exceptional. Technically a sunflower, the tiny buds are yellow, with white petals and tough stocks. There is something oceanic and infinite about a sea of wildflowers that seems to time travel across generations, decorating our memories and perfuming our stories.

Critch’s work reminds us that in order to carry our grandmothers’ stories we must also care for the lands and lifeways that are inextricable from those stories. The tenderness and detail of Pearly Everlasting, with its use of text and sculptural ruggedness, honours the land-based storytelling of Critch’s grandmother and asks viewers to question how we care for embodied, ancestral histories that are archived in roadside flowers, rockfaces, and waterways.

The exhibit mitsujuk | kussikuashu | kpitni’sewet | they sew, which was shown at the Newfoundland and Labrador Craft Council in St. John’s in 2019 and will be presented in Cornerbrook in 2020, does what Jessica Johns calls “Indigenous world-building,” which “centres creative sovereignty, deliberate care and kinship that is predicated on both interconnected and differing experiences.”[7] Critch does this world-building with a needle, stitching together the “threads that span generations” between the “interconnected and differing experiences” of Mi’kmaq, Innu, and Inuit in Newfoundland and Labrador. Featuring work by Alex Antle, Melissa Tremblett, Vanessa Flowers, and Flora May, this exhibition celebrates how “women exercise their political and creative sovereignties by caring for their histories and kinships through radical acts of stitching.”[8] Each work honours these lands, intergenerational knowledge, the technicality of craft, and the artists’ story and practice.

For Critch, slowing down and taking care are essential practices in this process of worldbuilding. Curation becomes a modality to build intimacy, laughter and ideas, histories and futures. As an artist, a curator, and a writer, Critch engages various mediums through practices of care and the “resurgent possibilities” of kinship. By tending to this radical affective work, Critch’s practice asks us what worlds might erupt from the memories of roadside flowers.

[1] Carina Magazzeni and Erin Sutherland, “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby,” in let’s talk about sex, bb (Kingston: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2019), 11.

[2] Lindsay Nixon, “Making Space in Indigenous Art for Bull Dykes and Gender Weirdos,” Canadian Art, April 20, 2017, https://canadianart.ca/essays/making-space- in-indigenous-art-for-bull-dykes-and-gender-weirdos/

[3] Emily Critch, “Visiting: Logan MacDonald, A Response by Emily Critch”https:// www.emilycritch.ca/visiting-logan-macdonald

[4] Lisa Myers, “Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak,” InuitArt Quarterly, January 29, 2019, https://www.inuitartfoundation.org/iaf/inuit-art-quarterly/iaq-read/details/iaq/2019/01/29/tunirrusiangit-review

[5] Lindsay Nixon, “Making Space in Indigenous Art for Bull Dykes and Gender Weirdos,” Canadian Art, April 20, 2017, https://canadianart.ca/essays/making-space- in-indigenous-art-for-bull-dykes-and-gender-weirdos/

[6] Ryan Cooke, “‘Hush Money’: Government cut $20K cheque to person hired at The Rooms before Carla Foot,” CBC News (Newfoundland and Labrador), January 8, 2020.

[7] Jessica Johns, “Indigenous World Building at the Vancouver Art Gallery,”Canadian Art, December 19, 2019, https://canadianart.ca/essays/indigenous-world- building-at-the-vancouver-art-gallery/

[8] Emily Critch, “mitsujuk | kussikuashu | kpitni’sewet | they sew: Curatorial Essay,” https://www.emilycritch.ca/mitsujuk-kussikuashu-kpitni-sewet-they-sew

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.

Thursday April 11, 2019, 6:30-8:30pm
Halifax Central Library
5440 Spring Garden Rd, Halifax
BMO Community Room, 2nd Floor

Visual Arts News magazine presents Michelle Sylliboy’s Halifax launch of her new book of photography and Mi’kmaq (L’nuk) hieroglyphic poetry: Kiskajeyi – I Am Ready, in partnership with the Halifax Central Library and Rebel Mountain Press.

Join us at the Halifax Central Library’s 2nd floor BMO Community Room from 6:30-8:30pm for a Komqwej’wikasikl (Mi’kmaq hieroglyphic language) art performance by Sylliboy, in collaboration with musicians Lindsay Dobbin and Scott Macmillan.

Kiskajeyi – I Am Ready will be available for sale alongside the Spring 2019 issue of Visual Arts News. This issue features an original commissioned work by Sylliboy – only 30 copies remaining.

Light refreshments will be provided at this free event. Wheelchair accessible and gender neutral washrooms. ASL interpretation available upon request, please contact us to make arrangements.

For over 13 thousand years, the Mi’kmaq (L’nuk) people maintained a complex language system. Hieroglyphics (Komqwejwi’kasikl) symbols dominated the landscape of the seven districts of the L’nuk Nation prior to colonization. My ancestors used the hieroglyphics as maps and to record tribal records. The photographs in this book are a recognition of land and how the Komqwejwi’kasikl language comes from the land. The importance of saving our water and our lands in the time of resource extraction is critical.

– Michelle Sylliboy

Michelle Sylliboy, a L’nuk (Mi’kmaq) artist/author, was raised on unceded territory in We’koqmaq Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She gathers much of her inspiration from personal tales, the environment, and her L’nuk culture. PhD Candidate, Michelle is working on her Philosophy of Education Doctorate Degree fieldwork where she will combine her artistic background and education by creating a L’nuk Komqwejwi’kasikl (Hieroglyphic) curriculum with L’nuk Elders.

Lindsay Dobbin is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) – Acadian – Irish water protector, artist, musician, curator and educator who lives and works on the Bay of Fundy in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of Lnu’k (Mi’kmaq).  Through placing listening, collaboration and improvisation at the centre of the creative process, Dobbin’s practice explores the connection between the environment and the body, and engages in a sensorial intimacy with the living land and water.

Scott Macmillan has a passion for creating music, propelling him forward to a new composition, arrangement commission, collaboration, performance, musical directing live or in the studio, conducting, teaching, or as a clinician. Driven by his need to be creative Macmillan seeks opportunities in all aspects of music making. That love has inspired exploration into genres from rock to blues, classical to choral, Celtic to jazz, as well as modern and avant-garde.

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.

Maria Hupfield & Jason Lujan, DOUBLE SHIFT, (photo: Topher & Rae Studios)

In September 2004, Artforum published a paper Glenn Ligon mistakenly prepared and delivered for his part in a College Art Association panel on the artist David Hammons. The resulting text, “Black Light: David Hammons and the Poetics of Emptiness,” is a gift to anyone considering the ways in which contemporary art connects with people’s lives when it leaves the gallery and goes out to occupy other spaces. “Black Light,” was fresh in my mind when Visual Arts News editor Shannon Webb-Campbell asked if I would write a blog post about this year’s Nocturne events and has stuck with me as I took her up on it.

Before what we’ve come to call “Nuit Blanche” or “White Night” style events spread to Turtle Island, they started in Europe with events such as the Helsinki Festival’s “Night of the Arts” in 1989 and the city of Nantes’ six-year project “Les Allumees.” The latter invited artists from a different city each year to share one-night projects in Nantes between 1990 to 1995. The name “White Night” seems to have first cropped up to title St. Petersburg’s first art at night festival in 1993. Coincidentally, that makes the name “White Night” only as old as this writer.

In 2002, Paris launched its white night event, giving the world the title “Nuit Blanche.” Nuit Blanche reached Canada via Montreal in 2004. Toronto held its first Nuit Blanche in 2006, and in 2007, when Rose Zack, Laura Carmichael and a remarkably small group of volunteers set out to bring a nuit blanche style event to Halifax, the name “Nocturne” was chosen instead.

Maria Hupfield & Jason Lujan, DOUBLE SHIFT, (photo: Topher & Rae Studios)

This year was Nocturne’s eleventh edition, marked by a partnership with the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, who helped select Raven Davis as Nocturne’s first Indigenous Curator. Davis, in turn, selected this Nocturne’s theme: Nomadic Reciprocity, a multilayered reflection on what is given and what is taken as we move through space, and as we move here in Halifax over unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaq territory.

Speaking to CBC’s Rosanna Deerchild on the night of the event, Davis gave some insight into the success of how their theme opened up Nocturne to new artists. “What I’ve been told is that there’s been over 50% new applications to this festival. The majority of them from black, Indigenous and people of colour. Which for me is a great success. What it means is there is over 50% new work and new artists that haven’t felt like they’ve been represented in these festivals that are coming out to make work.”

The encouragement of Davis’ theme had a profound impact on the makeup of the festival.

Projects took a smaller scale; opting for thoughtful, political content over bright lights and visual impact. The body – its weight, its histories lived and inherited, and how its race affects its experience took centre stage.

Performance work by Brian Solomon (Red Flag), Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan (Double Shift, and There Is No Then and Now, Only Is and Is Not), Ursula Johnson and Angela Parsons (L’nuisimk: El-noo-we-simk: Speaking Indian) and Leelee Davis, Lisa Gambletron and Dayna Danger (That Which We Cannot Own) prioritized the presence of Indigenous bodies in the festival.

As I witnessed their performance, Danger, Davis and Gambletron spoke similarly in metaphor and laboured with their surroundings. In a black box theatre, they had staged with mics, projections, props and structures, they took turns uttering phrases that could have been sarcastic; could have been ironic; and could have been directed at either each other or the audience. “I need help. Can somebody help me? Please! I need to clean up this mess. I am trying to clean up this mess. I don’t know who made it. But please, can somebody help me clean this up?” said Danger. “We’re being good guests! Let’s be good guests, Danger! We’re just being good guests!” said Davis. Their props: leather, bones, tarps, drums and images of water protectors gave poignantly veiled reference to the colonial implications of their actions and dialogue. With great subtlety they depicted the difficulty itself of standing up and speaking to Canada’s colonial history.

Leelee Davis, Lisa Gambletron and Dayna Danger, That Which We Cannot Own, (photo: Kylee Nunn)

Similarly, Brian Solomon’s Red Flag, veiled the body of a performer with fabric hung from a flagpole in order to open up a multitude of new readings. Not the least of which being a powerful evocation of the bodiefs that have historically and today continue to disappear under the sign of the Canadian flag.

Ligon said, “It’s hard to leave your body behind, especially when your body is always being thrown up in your face. Being is heavy as a motherfucker. The question is: How to remove weight, to move towards lightness, as Hammons has? How to do this while still acknowledging the particular history of a body that has been used, as Stuart Hall suggests, ‘as if it was, and often it was, the only cultural capital we had?’ These questions now occupy several young artists who walk the threshold between a dematerialized and a historicized body.”

Brian Soloman, Red Flag (photo: Topher & Rae Studios)

Although, Ligon is speaking about a generation of black American artists who have since taken centre stage in the American art world, his articulation, “walk the threshold between a dematerialized and a historicized body,” resonates with the projects in Nocturne this year.

This seems especially resonant with Hupfield and Lujan’s There Is No Then and Now, Only Is and Is Not a single channel video set up outside the Old Memorial Library.

The street lights were turned off overhead, and a single projection played the video from behind a screen. The work asked viewers to consider something that many may not have before: the experience of Indigenous peoples with black bodies. The video alternated between an artist, Dennis Redmoon Darkeem dancing in regalia in a darkened room and black screens with white text showing excerpts of a conversation with Darkeem about experiences and confrontations he has had as a black bodied Indigenous person. The video shares as we listen in silence and watch in the dark. In front of this work it’s the audience that disappears. Reading puts us in our bodies, potentially, recalling the histories in ourselves as we read about Darkeem’s: the building blocks of empathy.

Maria Hupfield & Jason Lujan, There is No Then and Now, Only Is and Is Not, (photo: Topher & Rae Studios)

If you look long enough, you notice in the video of Darkeem dancing, Hupfield and Lujan have blocked out all of the light in the room except for a spotlight on Darkeem and a red ‘EXIT’ sign overhead. Like “Black Light” that ‘EXIT’ light has stuck with me. As if the video is reminding us that we can leave at any time. It makes me think about where I am: K’jipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki, but also a darkened patch of government property, open to an otherwise brightly lit city. It makes me think about the moment when I will turn and walk away from the video. When I exit and when I stop listening. Making the choice to stay and listen more conscious.

That feeling of being made aware of when I leave, made me come back to Hupfield and Lujan’s installation at the end of the night. When I did, there were more people there than I’d thought. Still listening in the dark.