In the fall of 2024, the Treaty Space Gallery, whose mandate is to highlight artwork that responds to the UN’s declaration of the Decade of Indigenous Languages, themes of cultural revitalization, and notions of treaty, relocated from NSCAD’s Port Campus to 1887 Granville Street, a former bridal shop. The new location is part NSCAD’s Fountain Campus, formerly the Victoria School of Art and Design, founded in 1887 by Anna Leonowens, Mrs. Jeremiah Kenny, and sisters Ella and Eliza Ritchey to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. With wood floors, white walls, and Roman pillars, the Treaty Space Gallery is a gathering space for Indigenous students and welcomes all treaty people who come together in community.

Amalkewinu’k (The Dancers), curated by Prosper and Pardy, which ran in Halifax from February 4 to 14, 2025, illustrates the evolution of Mi’kmaw regalia by inviting viewers into an exhibition space that features studio portraits of Mi’kmaw community members in regalia, black-and-white archival images, and three pieces of regalia–a beaded cap, a headdress, and a Mi’kmaw jacket. Amalkewinu’k opens at Acadia University in fall 2025 and runs throughout October in celebration of Mi’kmaq History Month. The exhibition will also open at StFX Art Gallery in fall 2026 as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the gallery. 

Amalkewinu’k is the vision of curators Prosper, an L’nu artist and health care professional from Eskasoni First Nation, and Pardy, a photojournalist and documentary photographer, and is a collaborative community project honouring the transformation of Mi’kmaw regalia.

Presenting distinctively Mi’kmaw regalia through portraiture is central to the exhibition. Keeping the focus solely on Mi’kmaw regalia challenges misconceptions and pan-Indigeneity, honours Mi’kmaw artistic heritage, and celebrates past and present community artists, including L’nu Ancestors Once Known, Mi’kmaw youth like Rory Meuse of Membertou First Nation, and Elders like renowned author and educator Dr. Marie Battiste of Potlotek First Nation. 

“The use of ‘L’nu Ancestor Once Known’ was quite intentional on our part and a bit of a critique of museum and art collections. I first saw this practice at the National Art Gallery, but I believe it might have its origins at the AGO,” says Prosper. “Basically, in many historical collections the Indigenous artist or persons represented consistently come up as ‘Unknown,’ but if a non-Indigenous person is connected to a piece—the photographer, collector, etc. —their name is known or stated.”

The intention behind the label goes deeper and opens a critique of colonial curatorial practices. As a form of Indigenous storytelling, these details are important as they offer insight into community connections, the artistic legacy of the regalia makers, and the important reciprocal relationships. It also allows for different ways to engage with the art maker and to understand who are the people being depicted in the photographs and who are their community connections. It also invites viewers to build a relationship with the L’nu Ancestor Once Known and opens up the possibility that their names may be recovered.

A wall of contemporary, full-colour portraits by Pardy features Mi’kmaw community members from the young to Elders and Matriarchs. Jacoby Battiste-Jadis of Eskasoni First Nation is wearing regalia made by his mother, Kate Jadis, and a feather cap made by Jennifer Denny with feathers gifted by his grandparents Marie Battiste and Sakej Henderson. Wyonna Bernard of Abegweit First Nation is wearing cuffs made by Mary-Jo Isaac, cap, skirt, cape, and leggings made by Ingrid Peters (gifted by Lisa Levi), and a pin by Mi’kmaw artist Melissa Peter-Paul, also from Abegweit First Nation. Michael R. Denny of Eskasoni First Nation is wearing a vest made by Melissa Peter-Paul, leggings made by Madonna Johnson, moccasins made by Nicole Travers, cuffs and aprons made by Mary Jo Isaac, a shirt made by Georgina Doucette, and a medallion created by Washonti:io Jacobs. Elders include Dr. Marie Battiste, who is wearing a jacket, skirt, and peaked cap made and beaded by Ingrid Brooks with alterations by Nina Kent; Karen Bernard, of We’koqmaq First Nation, a well-respected women’s peaked cap workshop facilitator, who is wearing a peaked cap she made herself; and Dr. Lorraine Whitman, of Glooscap First Nation, who is wearing a peaked cap passed down by Aunt Edith Peters, which was passed down to her by her grandmother (a Millbrook band member) and a beaded cape made by the wife of Noel Knockwood and is carrying baskets made by Frank Meuse.

In the didactic material for Amalkewinu’k’s, Dr. Roger Lewis, curator of Mi’kmaw Cultural Heritage at the Nova Scotia Museum, writes: “When looking at Mi’kmaw regalia, like other cultural belongings, keep in mind the ingenuity of the artists. In a changing and evolving world, they mastered the use of other materials in their art to a point where it remains distinctively Mi’kmaw. So, it therefore is more than a craft as it was often portrayed—especially with the Indian Affairs movement to market it as such. It evolves today, and that is seen in the work of contemporary artists. Things were and are made with thought and purpose.”

Lewis and Michelle Sylliboy, a multidisciplinary L’nu artist, are advisors to Prosper and Pardy, and they continue to work together on Amalkewinu’k, which is layered with stories and continues to evolve. As the storytelling aspect of the exhibition continues, the exhibition will likely be mounted in other gallery spaces in the future.

“The storytelling that came with how they presented their personal regalia was evident,” says Prosper. “Storytelling also came out in community member reactions to the historical images. The stories involved the regalia itself or things they were reminded of when talking about their regalia, and really everything in between.” 

Across from the contemporary colour portraits of Mi’kmaw community members, Amalkewinu’k also features a wall of black-and-white archival images from the Nova Scotia Museum. One of the photographs, “Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (1897),” features a group of prominent Mi’kmaw community members who attended the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Viewing the 1897 photograph in the former Victoria School of Art and Design feels like a full-circle experience, both marking, as they do, the same historic event.

One of the most striking images is a black-and-white portrait of Molly Musie from the mid-nineteenth century, taken in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, which is considered the earliest known portrait of a Mi’kmaw person depicted in a photographic process. While her birth and death dates are unknown, the didactic explains: “Molly Muise (the name was originally the French ‘Mius’ and is now spelled Meuse and Muse as well) is wearing a peaked cap with double-curve beadwork, a dark shirt, a short jacket with darker cuffs, over which she apparently has draped a second short jacket, its sleeves pulled inside, as a capelet. Her traditional dress with the large fold at the top is held up by suspenders with ornamental tabs. In her hands, she seems to be clutching a white handkerchief.”

From the first known black-and-white, archival image of a Mi’kmaw person to Pardy’s contemporary portraits of Mi’kmaw community members, Amalkewinu’k is a stunning exhibition connecting past, present and future generations of Mi’kmaw through regalia and culture.

It is incredibly fitting, then, that As We Rise, a photography exhibition I had the pleasure of seeing at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, has the subtitle: Photography from the Black Atlantic. The exhibition is made up of selections from the Wedge Collection. Established in Toronto in 1997 by Dr. Kenneth Montague, this collection gathers art from across the Black world and champions Black artists. By invoking Gilroy’s famous formulation, the exhibition foregrounds the diversity and the connections that characterize the African diaspora, as well as the powerful drive among Black artists to take control of how Black people, their bodies, their practices, and their identities are represented in visual media.

As We Rise contains pieces by over seventy artists, includes works by internationally known figures like Kehinde Wiley, famously the portrait maker of the Obamas, and celebrated African American photographer Carrie Mae Weems. It also includes more locally known and up-and-coming photographers, including a delightful number of Toronto-based artists such as Anique Jordan and Jalani Morgan. The youngest photographer whose work is featured was born in 1996, a full 110 years after the birth of the eldest in 1886. In this more-than-century scope, there are photographs from West, South, North, and Central Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil, Canada, the United States, and Europe, a veritable encircling of the Black Atlantic.

I was thrilled by this bringing together of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Still mesmerized by a beautifully executed photo by Malick Sidibé of a woman and man dancing politely in Mali, I was shocked and delighted to turn to a series of party photos that I immediately recognized as home. I was proven right when I saw that the playful and outrageous images by Tayo Yannick Anton were taken at Yes Yes Y’all, a series of queer hip hop parties that my friends and I used to attend in the mid-2010s.

Within the necessary limits of a single exhibition, As We Rise does a breathtaking job of gathering together diverse visions of Blackness across time and space. While the images themselves are deeply compelling, the work of the curator, Elliott Ramsey of the Polygon Gallery, adds additional layers of meaning and connection through the pieces’ placement in relation to one another. This curatorial practice is what allows the overarching theme of Black art as an avenue of self-determination to emerge.

The way that As We Rise demonstrates this will toward self-definition and self-representation is, for me, what makes this exhibition not merely pleasurable but electric, inspiring, and resonant. In the wake of the transatlantic slave trade, the inciting incident of the Black Atlantic, Black bodies have been subject to the representational whims of systems built decidedly against Black people’s best interest. Black artists respond to this context in myriad ways and are often consciously making aesthetic choices to resist it. The sheer range and creativity of this resistance is part of what makes this exhibition so powerful.

Many of the photographs play with intimacy, some revealing and others withholding. A young man full of swagger on a New York street looks directly into the camera, demanding that the viewer acknowledge his flyness; an artist photographs themself sitting naked and curled up on their apartment floor, arms covering their face. Some of the photos invite the viewer into intimacy with them while others keep the viewer at arm’s length. A father holds his son tenderly in their home; a face and body are blurry from movement, impossible to pin down. Several photos are decidedly defiant. In “Moffie in Irma’s Garden” by Jody Brand, the gender nonconforming subject lies languidly and proudly amidst nature; in a photograph by Jalani Morgan, Black Lives Matter protestors stage a die-in at Yonge-Dundas Square in downtown Toronto. The layout of the exhibition also facilitates moments of beautiful confluence across space and time: on one wall, three photos depicting images of glamour drawing together Bamako, London, and Vancouver. On another wall, a gorgeous photo of two Malian women astride a scooter hangs next to a charming Mississippi couple poised to take off on a motorcycle. It is both the sameness and the difference in these images that makes their proximity so compelling.

As We Rise is an incredible achievement. As both a representation of creativity as wide and as deep as the Atlantic and a source of inspiration for viewers, whether or not they are artists, to celebrate and insist on Black self-definition, this exhibition is a triumph.

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

“Hometactics,” according to Latina philosopher Mariana Ortega, is a notion of everyday praxis as a way to feel comfortable in unwelcoming worlds, all the while remaining aware of the oppressive nature of dominant norms in those worlds. The contradiction of finding comfort in a hostile environment can be observed in Memorial: Work by Venezuelan Diaspora Artists. The group exhibition, shown at the Khyber Centre for the Arts, featured the work of Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz, denirée isabel, Sebastián Rodríguez y Vasti, Alejandro Rizzo, Cecilia Salcedo, and Camila Salcedo. The exhibition served as a platform for Venezuelan artists to document, archive, and
recreate their experiences of living with unfixed diasporic identities, understanding the resulting artworks as extensions of their displaced selves.

denirée isabel confronts the audience with the private-home in a los extraños que amo profundamente where the artist presents a love letter to people she has never met. Meanwhile, in Realidades Fabricadas, Alejandro Rizzo Nervo makes an interpretation of the public-home as a concern for an uncertain future that incorporates a personal recollection of events. And finally, how Camila Salcedo’s Realidades Alternativas (Santa Paula, El Cafetal, Caurimare, Caracas) encompasses both aspects, private-home/public-home, by piecing together the places from her childhood using Google Street View, a service banned by the Venezuelan government.

The multiplicitous self, which is constantly negotiating their multiple social locations, applies homestactics to their relationship with the public-home and the private-home. The public-home is a way to refer to the public spaces and events in the homeland and can be framed by what the curator refers to as “News/Crisis” in the curatorial statement: there is a scarcity of news coming from Venezuela as a result of censorship laws and power outages, which creates a barrier between the artists and their home country. However, the private-home, as a counterpart, is the collection of family pictures and stories that the artist kept after migrating. This concept of private-home can be found in what the curator categorizes as grandparents/family histories, which focuses on family memories and intergenerational trauma.

a los extraños que amo profundamente by denirée isabel is composed of multiple textile pieces that were placed inside the gallery’s window display. The weavings were hung from the ceiling, juxtaposing delicate panels reminiscent of windows and large-scale portraits of the artist’s grandparents who, unlike the artist, still live in Venezuela. This self-mapping locates the artist embedded in the specific history of Venezuela’s immigration crisis, a history where sometimes leaving the homeland means never returning. The work seems to be a place of offering, a make-believe altar that appeals to the viewer’s sense of grief. Praxis is evident in the private-home when a part of the artist’s personal archive is longing for something familiar.

Alejandro Rizzo Nervo presents us with two photographs from the series Realidades Fabricadas. The scale of the images used in the photo collages lends a cartoonish quality to both pieces while also maintaining a serious political tone. One of the photos shows three people printing money. Bills are stacked on the floor and current Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro can be seen on a nearby screen giving directions. The second image shows four protesters in the foreground (holding banners, throwing tear gas, displaying the Venezuelan flag), while a group of policemen can be seen behind them next to a billboard of Chavez’s eyes covering what appears to be a slum. The use of such cartoonish composition of images can be understood as a tactic to soften the seriousness of hardship, making it manageable for an inexperienced audience. The public-home appears in this work as a criticism to the process of inflation and its consequences.

Realidades Alternativas (Santa Paula, El Cafetal, Caurimare, Caracas) by Camila Salcedo gives the feeling of scouring endlessly for a memory you cannot find. Salcedo pairs found footage, satellite photos, and images from Google 360° to create a video collage that attempts to piece together the neighborhood she grew up in. Looking for the private-home in an inaccessible public-home is a way in which the multiplicitous self-negotiates its diasporic state. In this way, it can find its reflection in location, while longing for places that have changed and maybe don’t exist anymore.

As is stated by the title, the exhibition showcases not just the work of artists but specifically that of Venezuelan diaspora artists. The curator claims that “the work intends to be non-partisan, without siding with any specific political party or political affiliation in the context of current Venezuelan politics.” For a show that presents highly political work, it seems contradictory to claim impartiality. The show falls in the trap of being in a barred room—it wants to create a sense of community by claiming impartiality, although it risks excluding other Venezuelan people that cannot remain impartial. Even when the themes are divided into categories (grandparents, family histories, news/crisis), the most evident one is overlooked: the politics. Hometactics pushes the artist to make this work to negotiate their state of living between worlds; it also unexpectedly reminds us that, sometimes, home has an inextricable link to the political.

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.

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

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.

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, still from We’re Getting Younger All the Time, 2001, from the trilogy …before I wake, 2001-12.

I called my best friend and we pretended to be a radio show. I’m looking forward to seeing if my tomato plants live. I’m afraid of heights, even though sometimes my brain forgets but my body remembers. My favourite colour is blue. I had a nightmare about my partner dying. I dreamed about a dog I saw that looked like the dog emoji.

Photographic confessions line the walls of the Dalhousie Art Gallery and the entry way to the Arts Centre. As you push open the door to the main building before making your way downstairs to the gallery, you’re confronted with a photograph of someone else, a single person, pushing through a different door. The image is overlaid with text, the one-sided answers to an interview with questions you can only image.

In my own answers above, I infer: something funny, something you’re looking forward to, your favourite colour, something you’re afraid of, a nightmare, a dream.

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, installation view (detail) from …bump in the night, (Halifax) 2014-17.

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, installation view (detail) from …bump in the night, (Halifax) 2014-17. Via Paul Wong/Facebook

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, Digital Print of …bump in the night. Detroit. Via steeleandtomczak.com

These photographs belong to a series titled …bump in the night by Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak. They’re part of the exhibition The Long Time: The 21st Century Art of Steele + Tomczak curated by Paul Wong (May 5– July 16, 2017). But the titular reference to century isn’t just a temporal marker; it points to the technical and aesthetic about-face of media art that occurs as the analogue shifts to the digital.

Each work in the exhibition marks this shift, while noting the slippery moments where the distinction between “now” and “then” is rendered poetic, humourous, dark, urgent or otherwise irrelevant—more often than not, all at once. Wong’s curatorial choices, including a dominating, deep purple wall, foreground the interplay of these contrasting elements and allow each juxtaposition to flow into the next.

These contradictions are apparent in …bump in the night, as fears and dreams sit comfortably next to each other, familiar with their unease and unpredictability. The series, an ongoing project for Steele and Tomczak, depicts students from Vancouver, Detroit, Windsor, and Halifax just before graduating high school and college. The students’ answers betray the transitional moment they’re caught in. Their words are earnest, clumsy, self-conscious, naïve and wise, and, when superimposed over top posterior portraits of their bodies, they demonstrate that transition can be the moment when interiority becomes externalized; when private becomings are made public; when others can see that while you’re not quite where you want to be, you’re going somewhere. In these moments, identity is suspended between external and internal modes of construction, as observers are able—invited or not—to partake in the construction of the self. As the artists state, these instances of collaborative self-definition allow viewers to “close the distance between us and them” and recognize the similarities in our hopes and fears, while allowing the subjects to “speak for themselves.”

The intimacy of the students’ answers felt like an invitation to imagine my own—they’re listed above. I wondered if I am as honest as the subjects in the photographs, who admit things like the fear of losing family members or the hilarity/humiliation of hurting yourself in front of an audience. I traced my moments of self-censoring and noted where I took pains to push past it. I wondered if there is a subconscious desire for this kind of vulnerability and interiority to be made visible, to be expressed through the body, to be seen and interpreted by someone else.

As I round the corner and encounter …before I wake, a three part video work that took twelve years to make and, as Wong explains, acted as the impetus for the exhibition, this question feels even more pressing. Here, the relationship between self-censoring, the subconscious and the body is made explicit. In the central video work, Entranced, Steele and Tomczak are filmed separately as they undergo hypnosis. The psychotherapist’s voice fills the room while a transcript of the artist’s answers to the doctor’s questions is shown, silently, next to a close-up shot of the patient’s hypnotized face.

…before I wake is in part a response to Steele’s diagnosis with breast cancer, when the couple was confronted with the possibility that one might die before the other. The two video works that flank Entranced, titled We’re Getting Younger All the Time and Practicing Death, depict the physical realities of aging, and the physical and psychological closeness and distance that can exist simultaneously between two bodies. Reading the three pieces together, the friction between body, mind and desire is tested and examined. While We’re Getting Younger All the Time and Practicing Death illustrate how the body communicates in ways the mind cannot, in Entranced, the mind catches up with the body and the couple’s subconscious responses are revealed. In this piece, the couple, so commonly known for producing bodies of work as if with one voice, speak with two very distinct voices.

In Becoming, a four-channel video projection, buildings replace bodies as sites of aging and transition. Displayed on floating screens arranged in an arc formation, the videos depict the between states of four different cities: Vancouver, Berlin, Toronto and Montreal. A fifth video in the series, Becoming: Halifax, is displayed on a separate wall. The videos map locations in each city at various stages of construction, deconstruction, gentrification, and decay. Instead of the textual ruminations and admissions in …before I wake and …bump in the night, themed jokes interrupt the images of urban landscapes in Becoming. Each city has its own comedic punching bag: Vancouver=economist; Berlin=philosophers; Toronto=urban planners; Montreal=insurance agents; Halifax=fisherman. As each screen shifts rapidly between streetscape and text, you often catch the joke but miss the punchline.

In an experience not unlike passing through a city in transition or existing in a body in transition, the works in The Long Time transmit the sense that you’re missing or meeting something, getting just a trace of what came before and what is coming next—the city as index, as rhizome, as archive/the body as index, as rhizome, as archive.

Detail of exhibition catalogue cover for “In This Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia”

The exhibition We are the Griots—curated by Jade Peek—may have opened to the biggest snowstorm all season this past February at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, but it still saw a lot of press coverage. Jade was on the cover of The Coast weekly paper. The article billed We are the Griots as the first exhibition of “solely Black Nova Scotian artists in Halifax since the 1990s.” I was stunned — Had there really not been another exhibition dedicated to Black Nova Scotian art since the 90’s?

So I went digging, looking up the late 90’s in the Visual Arts Nova Scotia archives, and low and behold, it was on the cover of the Spring 1998 issue, Volume 20 Number 1: In this Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia. The cover image is bold, graphic and visually striking. It features a painting of three figures in simple, but expressive white lines on a black thickly textured background. Inside, there’s an article by curator/artist Pamela Edmonds, stressing the historical importance of the exhibition. “In this Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia represents the first-ever attempt to represent and contextualize the tradition of Black Nova Scotian art making in the province,” she writes. In my research since, I have learned that David Woods—who co-curated the show with Harold Pearse—represents just one individual out of just a handful of Black curators who have been working in Halifax to this day, continuing the push for the self representation of Black Nova Scotians in visual art.

“A great void existed for me as an artist in Nova Scotia … of knowing that most people assume that no art of significance had been created by the Black community.” —David Woods

Volume 20 / Issue 1 / Spring 1998 / “In this Place” cover

Edmonds describes the exhibition as a “groundbreaking effort to provide a comprehensive overview of a sector of the art making community rarely shown or acknowledged.” She points to a history of exclusion and segregation in Nova Scotia. In the article she interviews the co-curators David Woods, a local artist and community organizer, and Dr. Harold Pearse, the academic dean at NSCAD, about their inspiration for the exhibit, their relationship and the project. As Woods explains, the title of the exhibition originates from his poem Abode, which references the experience of the early Black settlers and the land the government allotted them in Nova Scotia—described as
“barren, rocky soil or swampland.” For Pearse, MSVU Art Gallery’s 1983 show The Past in focus: a community album before 1918 : photographs from the Notman Studio served as his inspiration for the exhibition, as well as providing him with his first exposure to the depth of art created by Nova Scotia’s Black communities.

Pearse explains that even though many Black kids from the community spaces are very interested in visual art, their enrollment at NSCAD has always been very low. In the article, Pearse points to Woods, a self taught multi-disciplinary artist and an active community member, as the perfect link to try to bridge the two worlds of the Black art communities and the institutionalized White art world.

Installation view from the catalogue of “In This Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia” 

Pearse and Woods discuss how surprised they all were by the amount of Black Nova Scotian artists that they uncovered in their interview with Edmonds. When they began planning their exhibition, they were thinking about featuring only a few artists—but that all changed by the end of Wood’s research, which  consisted of his unorthodox, but essential curatorial method of driving to several rural Black communities around Nova Scotia and literally knocking on doors and asking questions. Woods brought back over 200 images of work, which they narrowed down to 100 pieces to show by 45 artists. As the exhibition grew, the curatorial team realized it deserved more than just a two-week show at the gallery. They decided to take the exhibition beyond Halifax, touring to three other galleries in the province.

In Halifax they planned several special events, connecting Black artists to the larger art community. These events included a panel discussion and performance event with guests including: Jim Shirley, one of the first Black artists to exhibit in Nova Scotia; Audrey Dear Hesson, the first Black graduate of NSCAD in 1951; local photographer and filmmaker Silvia Hamilton; and painter Crystal Clements. They also screened a film about celebrated African American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, gave youth workshops and tours of NSCAD, and provided a funding information session with the Canada Council and the Nova Scotia Arts Council (all made possible by $40 000 of grants obtained from the Nova Scotia Arts Council, Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts by Black Artist Network Nova Scotia (BANNS) and Peter Dykhuis, who was the director of the Anna Leonowens Gallery at the time). After the tour concluded, they were able to produce a full size catalogue from the NSCAD Press.

Installation view from the catalogue of “In This Place: Black Art In Nova Scotia”

Pearse’s curatorial statement in the catalogue includes well-researched tidbits of information about the experience of Black artists in Halifax, such as the fact that Hesson received the Lieutenant-Governor’s prize and “taught for the school’s Saturday morning children’s art classes, at the YMCA’s boys club and to an adult education group in Africville.” But he points out that due to a shortage of employment opportunities, Hessen could never obtain steady employment in the public school system. Pearse continues with a sparse, but steady history of Black exhibitions and artists in Halifax in the 80’s and 90’s, a time when NSCAD grads and Black artists like Donna James were showing black and white photographs (Eight Men in a Big House, 1989), Buseje Baily was making videos about the female black body (Body Politic, 1992) and Derril Robinson showed his pottery in a joint exhibition with Andrea Arbour (Facades, 1995).

Woods’ statement provides a much more sobering reflection on the presence of Black artists in Nova Scotia. He notes that “a great void existed for me as an artist in Nova Scotia …the void of knowing that there were no exhibitions of local Black artists featured in the provinces’ major galleries; of knowing that Black artists were unfamiliar with each other’s work; of knowing that most people assume that no art of significance had been created by the Black community.” He wanted to challenge himself to try and fill that void with an exhibition that could change the status quo.

 Beverly Bowden’s “Picking Strawberries” (1997), oil on canvas

When I spoke with Woods, I asked him what he thought, almost twenty years later, about the impact that In this Place had made. He talked a lot about an increase of visibility. “All of the establishment galleries offered shows to the NSCAD people for the next four or five years,” he pointed out. Woods himself has continued curating and one of his longest touring exhibitions has been The Secret Codes, which started touring 2012, where he featured narrative and pictorial quilts exhibited quilts made by African Nova Scotian quilt makers. These quilts are the result of a collaboration of Woods’ drawings and the talent of quilt makers like Myla Borden of the Vale Quilters, a group from New Glasgow, who have been working together since In this Place showed the pictorial quilt Passages. As well,  he recalled MSVU Art Gallery invited Shirley back to the Mount to have a retrospective called Jim Shirley Returns: The Art of James R. Shirley (2000). Woods himself also worked as an Associate Curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia from 2006-2007, where he helped to develop the AGNS’ African Canadian Art Initiative. During his short time there he helped to bring Mary Bendolph: Gees Bend Quilts and Beyond to the gallery in 2007 and worked on acquiring work by early Black Atlantic painter Edward Mitchel Banister. He confidently states after all of this work things can “no longer go back to the status quo.”

I’d like to believe that the status quo has changed in the 19 years since In this Place opened. Researching this historically seminal exhibition in Halifax’s art history has opened my eyes to the work and struggle of Black visual artists and curators in the very White dominated art world of Halifax. A staggering number of galleries in Canada still almost exclusively give solo shows to white artists (according to statistics from a 2015 Canadian Art study). We are the Griots represents one in just a small fraction of Black artists and curators living and working in our province. In this Place blew the door open in terms of self-representation for Black artists in Nova Scotia, but that door is still there and it’s primed to be blown away completely.

In the next two parts of this series, I will be looking closer at the history and context of Black exhibitions in Halifax previous to In this Place, and report the prolific work of the author of the VANS article that started me on this journey, writer, artists, art administrator and curator, Pamela Edmonds in the years following In this Place.

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