“As a kid, and all throughout my life in some capacity, I was always making and creating. Somewhere between being a kid and right now [there have been] a lot of life things and existential angst,” say Tian-Morris. “And somehow I ended up in art school a couple of years ago. Some may call that rock bottom—I joke!” 

Wren Tian-Morris has a witty sense of humour, which shows up in their playful, collaborative, and experimental work. With a solid focus on craftsmanship, the artist doesn’t take the work too seriously, which, in my opinion, is refreshing. For example, their most recent exhibition, Our Work, Our Pleasure,  Ourselves and Others, an undergraduate show which opened at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in March 2020 (pre-pandemic), was written in a style similar to a personal ad. 

MEET ME IN THE BEDROOM/ PAST THE BATHROOM AND A LITTLE DOWN THE HALL

Aspiring artist, curious about:

– the intersections of public, private, and pleasure;

– the way Queer (+ Trans) history (especially in the context of Halifax) has informed everything from 

Through various media such as photography, printmaking, sculpture, zine-making, and conceptual work, Tian-Morris’ show Our Work, Our Pleasure, Ourselves and Others re-imagined queer eroticism and subcultures to centre and celebrate Trans folks and People of Colour. Their attention to detail and adroitness shines through in the sharp aspects of the exhibition, which featured the zine “Fag Boy Seeks Same,” in which the artist stickered and photographed historic gay cruising sites in the city. An artist talk was also part of the exhibit, and involved the performance of boot-blacking, which is known in BDSM communities as the act of a submissive partner polishing someone’s leather boots or shoes. Rooted in the overall themes of centring trans and people of colour in queer subcultures, and kink, the various elements of the exhibition flaunted a remarkable cohesiveness. 

Tian-Morris’ ability to home in on a unifying theme, combined with their creative dexterity and their deep care for their community, are skills and commitments they brought to Eyelevel Gallery, where they recently worked as a Summer Programming Assistant. 

“I think art school has actually shown me that I don’t necessarily care for gallery shows or contemporary art. And more so that I crave community, collaborative working, playing, and not defining myself by a certain practice or medium,” says Tian-Morris. “I have to remind myself art is not this one thing, and that it can be a communal act of healing, or playing in some ways, which is why I do think collaborative working and re-framing in art is so important.” 

They cite members of their community—artists like Lux Habrich, Raven Davis, Carmel Farahbakhsh, Darcie Bernhardt, Kris Reppas, Arielle Twist, and Jean Serutoke—as influential to their own practice “[A lot of] their work often informs mine through the investigation of mediums, themes, aesthetics, etc. But beyond formal artistic elements, or simply adoring their work, I would say having conversations, spending time together, hearing them speak, and reading their writing inspires. Artists like Farahbakhsh, Habrich, and Davis, these artists (whether directly or not) help me learn and relearn what it means to be in community, to imagine new worlds, to be making art, why I’m making, and what art can be,” they say. “These artists push me to interrogate all parts of my life, which in turn, eventually informs my art. I think creating can be so many things and does not have to be confined to what we assume when we think of art, but instead can be a term full of possibilities.” 

Part of their contribution to Eyelevel was creating Co-Incidence, a publication dreamed up as a result of the Heat Waves, Eyelevel Gallery’s mini summer residency program. Tian-Morris notes that there were many incredible applications from 2SQTBIPOC applicants, but they did not have the space to accommodate everyone. They find the incredible whiteness of artist-run centres, the arts scene, and even the queer scene in Halifax to be disappointing because of the many amazing (QT)BIPOC artists who are creating brilliant work, but are often under-represented. As a response, they decided to reach out to some of the artists who applied for Heat Waves, as well as a few others for further collaboration. 

“I feel really lucky to be working with Avery Morris, Ben Mitsuk, Calen Sack, DeeDee Clayton, and Excel Garay on this Co-Incidence. All of these artists bring so much brilliance to the table. There are days when I feel angsty about art, but getting to see the work all of these artists truly brings me joy, and reminds me that creating has a place in this world and can be incredibly powerful.”

On exploring the intersections of art and magic, Tian-Morris finds art to be a way of conjuring meaning and feeling. “In the publication, Calen Sack talks about the ways that white people often inquire about Two-Spiritedness in ways that they are essentially fetishizing and fantasizing Indigenous culture. There is obviously magic in being queer and being brown but it’s not in a smoke and mirrors way. It’s something that’s felt through community and in your body. It can vary from person to person but really, at its core, it’s a feeling. It’s something you can’t explain. It’s in the ways that you know somehow your ancestors are looking out for you, or the knowing glance of being the only QPOCs in the room.”

Upon reflection of the magic in community, Tian-Morris feels that they have newly found 2SQTBIPOC community in the past year. They recall a moment when it hit them how connected they felt to their community. 

“There was this moment when it really hit me where I was so overwhelmed with joy and it felt so magical and kind of spiritual, to be honest. I’m saying this because I think talking about this kind of joy and magic is important. Right now, the art world is pretty into consuming the work of racialized queer and trans artists but only under the premise that it’s about our trauma. The artists in Co-Incidence, this publication, touch upon the ways that art and magic intersect for them and how that magic shows up,” says Tian-Morris. “There’s also a lot of talk about the intersections of culture and queerness and how that plays into this kind of magic. I really wanted this publication to just be a space for the artists. I wanted to pick their brains a bit and show off their work.” 

For Tian-Morris, Co-Incidence feels like a way of building community, “even if it’s just in little pieces.” 

“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.

Hawrysio, a Toronto born artist currently living in London, England, will be part of the Summer Visiting Artist Series this July at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, presenting her exhibition I am @ here Alive from July 15-26.

“We encourage the use of the gallery to become a sort of lab for the artists with the potential to show new work, try new installation strategies, experiment and get feedback from our community,” says gallery director Eleanor King. “I’m personally excited about Denise’s work because of how she adeptly moves through media—she engages with material in a way that I really admire.” 

In this online exclusive interview for Visual Arts News, our writer Kaylee Maddison catches up with Hawrysio about her upcoming trip to Halifax and her artistic practice.

KAYLEE MADDISON: You’ve had many exhibitions and residencies all over Canada, but never the East Coast until now. Why did you decide to come to Halifax for this residency?

DENISE HAWRYSIO: I’m surprised it’s taken until this point in my life to get to the Maritimes, and I’m really looking forward to it! NSCAD has long fascinated me as a magnet for interesting things in the art world, so that’s a major draw for me, but I’m also excited about seeing new landscapes and old friends.

KM: Many art schools and universities throughout North America have closed or are contemplating closure of their printmaking departments. How do you hope your work may influence printmaking education and practice? 

DH: I find that interesting because some schools in London, particularly the Royal College of Art, have made big investments in their printmaking departments. My own approach is interdisciplinary and conceptual, both of which are not generally associated with printmaking, but seem to be on the rise within the discipline. My pedagogical approach involves imparting my own belief that, despite its marginalisation over recent decades, print can occupy a important position in contemporary art. We need to extend the theoretical discourse around print media, develop its bespoke processes in conjunction with more ‘industrial’ methods of reproduction, work with new web and digital technology and—perhaps most importantly—push the conceptual borders of ‘the print.’ 

I do see some encouraging signs of a global shift within printmaking as it expands and reinvents itself conceptually and technologically, pushing the area into new, post-modern terrain. The medium’s new identity can be seen in print blogs such as Printfreak, Printeresting, Magical Secrets and Outlaw Prints and Printmakers; in the development of new publications and websites; in the innovative ways print is being explored by artists like Christiane Baumgartner, Tal R, the Chapman Brothers, Xu Bing, Kiki Smith and Julie Mehretu, and at the grassroots level by groups like Drive By Press, Evil Prints, Bikini Press International and The Print Circus.

KM: What do you hope to achieve and get out of your time in Halifax and the residency?

DH: I’ve been working on ideas for a new print installation in my studio in London, and I will continue that process during the residency. I’m interested in questions of control, improvisation and the indeterminate play of meaning that arises through the process of making. This new project will involve a direct and intimate relationship with materials; the procedures of formal decision-making will be tempered with the spontaneity of site-specific mark-making. 

KM: I understand the idea of impression or mark-making in your work embodies more than a technical process?

DH: My intention to continue with imagery saturated in ‘imprint’ (the direct impression of objects or gestures) and ‘touch’ (the direct intervention of the artist) is strengthened by my engagement with critical conceptualism, both as an aesthetic attitude and as a political stance. For me, technique is primarily a means to an end.

KM: What first inspired you to use print as a method of social engagement?

DH: Since my undergraduate days, I have tried to work with print in innovative ways, both materially and in terms of a kind of social engagement developed from the tradition of process art. At Queen’s University, Nick Wade [Hawrysio’s tutor] introduced me to conceptual and social art practice: we took a trip to New York to see the Beuys retrospective at the Guggenheim, and his blackboard drawings were hugely influential for me in relation to my printmaking practice. I was also inspired by Beuys’ ideas about art as an ongoing, open-ended process that can be “materialized equally in words, things, images or actions.” 

Other influences were Serialism in music and the visual arts as a way of challenging and expanding traditional notions of composition and control. Sol LeWitt was another early influence—his ideas of machine-made art and the way that “process interested him as much as thinking.”

KM: Where do you find inspiration for the non-art situations in your work and the “construction of events?”

DH: I have a longstanding interest in structural film, in which duration is a critical element. As AL Rees puts it in A History of Experimental Film and Video, “duration reveals perception as an act of becoming rather than as the presentation of what has already become.” I use the etching/print plate like the frame of the camera, but instead of a continuous measuring of light, the plate becomes a method of measuring time and its exposure to movement is revealed through the marks left behind. Mark-making happens all around us, an inescapable part of life. 

]]> https://visualartsnews.ca/2014/07/the-marks-left-behind/feed/ 0 https://visualartsnews.ca/2013/05/a-wolf-in-sheeps-clothing/ https://visualartsnews.ca/2013/05/a-wolf-in-sheeps-clothing/#respond Wed, 01 May 2013 09:59:06 +0000 http://visualartsnews.ca/?p=739 Eastern Edge Gallery, St. John`s, NL. December 15, 2012 – February 9, 2013

Foster, Chris. 1977 GMC. Various materials. 2012. Courtesy of the artist

Halifax-based artist Chris Foster’s Frontiers in Real Estate explores contradictory themes of civilization—its fear stories, misguided good intentions and self-indulgent sincerities. Foster’s dark humour is never moral, at least not overtly. Composed of serigraphs, collage and small sculpture, his work considers the history of consumption, both visual and commercial, with a tongue-in-cheek objectivity. “I’m interested in engaging a broad audience, despite their politics,” explains Foster during our phone conversation. “My work is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. At first it is very accessible, but underneath it is very critical of culture. People don’t like to be jabbed in the eyes right away; everything needs to be veiled.”

Three works begin the series of serigraphs, depicting communities of wooden structures. There are no figures, and therefore the emphasis is on the buildings and their allusion to human resourcefulness. Can Do (2011) is reminiscent of the illustrations of the sites of early European explorers, such as Samuel de Champlain’s Habitation at Port Royal (1604). In Stay Free (2011), a vehicle is dismantled and incorporated into the construction. A black flag flies; the place has no allegiances. In Abandon Ship (2012), Foster has depicted a Noah’s ark-type structure surrounded by burnt forest, flying an upside-down Canadian flag. Later serigraphs include Com Tower (2012), Com Tower #2 (2012) and Com Tower #3 (2012), in which communication towers have been transformed into high rise wooden houses. These are hermit dwellings with a million dollar view.

A second body of work is composed of small models of wooden homes built on the backs of motor vehicles, with names like 1977 GMC ‘Wrecker’; 1977 Chevy Van; 2 n’1 JEEP CJ-7; and Suzuki ST30 ‘Post Car.’ Foster was inspired by the 1979 publication Rolling Homes, which surveys mobile homes converted from pickup trucks, school buses and big rigs. These individually crafted houses on wheels combined the spirit of the old-timey covered wagon and the mobility of contemporary motor vehicles, forming an original artistic and cultural movement based in a do-it-yourself tradition that continues today.

History is punctuated with waves of escapism, particularly in response to major socio-economic shifts. The Industrial Revolution brought mass tourism, as the newly formed middle class left the city for excursions in the countryside. Modern mobile culture came to fore with the Great Depression, and continues to be a preferred method of escape for various subcultures. It seems to reappear with every generation, arriving in response to the horrors of war, of mass crass commercialism and fears about pollution. Now, when the decline of the Western empire seems really quite tangible, it only makes sense that some should wish to pick up and drop out. Foster agrees, with a caveat: “There’s something about e time that we’re living in, with its economic pressures, that makes escape seem really romantic.” The idea of retreating into the natural world is seductive for Canadians still, “despite the fact that we’re poisoning nature and have an increasingly abstract notion of nature. It’s all rooted in fantasy.”

The third series features black and white collages, cut from the pages of a publication by Foster titled New Civilizations. Using a mixture of photos taken largely from National Geographic magazines, Foster combines old and new imagery to create improbable landscapes. Ancient civilizations and modern towers are unabashedly paired, as are piles of tires and decaying towers. One image shows a cathedral mostly buried in the sea, as two amused but relaxed individuals stand on the beach to admire it. Kate Walchuk aptly describes the tone of this series in her intro for New Civilizations: “Relics from these dead civilizations are contemplated with mere sentimentality; they function as kitsch destinations for world travelers and history buffs.

Each collage only becomes strange after a good hard look; it is often difficult to see evidence of scissors. But the cutting and pasting is there and speaks to Foster’s honesty of process and material. The decision could also be considered a nod to 19th century composite tourist imagery, prevalent in Europe and North America— photographers and postcard producers, confined by available technology, would often cut and paste objects into scenes. Their emphasis was not on being factual, but to formulate an arguably “true” representation of a visitor’s experience. Foster’s collages have the same intentions; verity is not important here, but rather the slow shock of juxtaposition that we encounter when viewing the image, and with that, a message that rings true.

Much like the tourist imagery to which he alludes, Foster has made his work readily available for purchase by the public, and has constructed each piece so that it can be efficiently transported home. “Maybe if this was a different time, I’d be working in large sculpture or paintings, but living and working as an artist in Canada is not viable in that way. Paper-based work and small sculpture are part of a creative process that I can ship. It can seek out audiences in different places.” The exhibition will continue to Fredericton, New Brunswick, and Dawson City, Yukon. It will develop and change for each venue.

As dystopic as Foster’s message may be, it comes with a wink. His “frontier” is a concept, a psychological state of change and possibility. For him, it is in small gestures of rebellion that change can be effected.