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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

More: Looking Back: Our version of “women in the arts” in the 70s

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Susan Wood, “Dress No. 1,” 1989, dry pigment, watercolour, pastel, carbon, washi collage on paper 199.4 x 129.5 cm (irregular), Collection of The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery

I was the first visitor to wander into to Earth Skins: Three Decades of Drawing by Susan Wood mid-afternoon on August 23. I am particularly fond of Wood’s ability to capture flux, complexity and beauty with textured, at times messy, (oh the joy of coffee stains and blotting paper — real life! Imagine!) technically brilliant drawings of flowers, insects and dead birds. She layers skin-thin Washi paper, collaging it to a thick watercolour paper base and drawing over it, adding texture and dimension. Her obvious love of the materials she works with and absolute love for the process is simply inspirational.

Wood’s older works are very large: These are the “Devils Purse” and “Dress” series, executed between 1985 and 1990. I had never seen them before and found them very powerful. Over six-feet high, they hang frameless on the walls of the gallery. They are in the space with the viewer, as opposed to separated and protected by a pane of glass and the strange ghostly reflections that obscure the work. One might even venture to say that they are active in a way — one says paper relaxes, that paper breaths. Wood’s desire to have the material unfettered, unrestricted and accessible makes me draw connections to British sculptor Rose Garrard and her sensibility to the elements preventing or insulating the viewer from being touched by art.

Under glass or not, the graphic punch of these series will not be denied. The pieces blow you over as you enter the space. Looking at her renderings of shadows is coming into contact with honed observational and technical skills. There is obvious delight in this creation of depth. In both series Wood uses stand-ins (skate egg sack and a dress) for women’s bodies. The viewer is led to empathize with and relate to these forms from the inside out, bypassing the voyeuristic gaze that objectifies. It is for me a reversal of sorts, a re-empowerment also. Margaret Atwood, in an essay included in Dropped Threads, discusses working from the earth on up in contrast to from theory down, to ensure vitality and potency. This is how I experience Wood’s works — a validation without any confining definition of the corporeal experience of being a woman.

Wood works in charcoal, watercolour, conte and ink. Made of coal, burnt and raw umber, rust and sanguine, her pallette is punctuated periodically in later years with a flash of ochre or vermillion and lends itself well to these explorations of body. I understood each dress drawing as a meditation on one aspect of the bodily experience of being a woman. There is a sense of a procession through stages, cycles and ordeals — each tied into the glorious muck-andguck veins, organs, sex, flesh, sinew and bone, that make our bodies. It takes a certain kind or courage and bravery to embrace all that we are, to be curious about discomfort (about body hair for example) or the edges of pain. I perceive Wood’s art process as grounded in the experiential, sensual feminine, as a combination of intuitive representation and deliberate mirroring of life cycles and processes.

Susan Wood’s work has a quality of practice to it that surpasses the mere definition of the term. Repetition, development and honing of skills, openness to possibilities and adventurous embracing of mistakes are all imbedded in this body of work and skillfully highlighted by Susan Gibson Garvey’s expert eye as a curator, but beyond this one perceives a practicing of discomfort, pain, loss — a dedicated toning of heart muscles that are working toward acknowledging, making sense of and absorbing the nature of our reality. Her most recent work in the exhibition, simply titled “Bouquet,” is truly the culmination of this practice. It is achingly beautiful in its starkness. Each line, each mark conveys such clarity and presence that one simply stands a bit straighter and feels compelled to take a deep breath to take it all in, to feel it all and to be touched by the art.

Shary Boyle, “The Cave Painter,” 2013. Courtesy the artist and Jessica Bradley Gallery, TorontoPhoto © Rafael Goldchain

There are no cars in Venice. It makes for a strange silence, one that affords an ongoing clatter of voices, birds and the bells that ring every hour. In the midst of previews at the Venice Biennale, the city seems an uncanny counterpart to an all-encompassing fever dream. At the Giardini one tangos around impeccably dressed “art heads,” business cards in hand. Line ups for the pavilions wrap around the gardens, punctuated by clouds of cigarette smoke. And there are parties—crazy parties—every night, every afternoon, everywhere. Meander through the city, and one will inevitably discover an installation or performance that will deeply alter how one encounters the next part of the walk. But enter through the doors of Shary Boyle’s Music for Silence at the Canadian Pavilion and the cacophony disappears; it is a jolt of quiet.

“When creating Music for Silence I was inspired by the idea of the Universal, the power and insignificance of the individual, and how that relates to the idea of ‘voice,” recalls Boyle. “The strange audio-sensory experience of Venice … contributed to my thinking around sound, music, silence.”

Outside, a dark, cast-bronze figure of a child sits on top of the tipi-style building, weaving a maypole—simultaneously inviting and menacing. Inside, Boyle has transformed the space into a darkened cave, its walls covered in gems reminiscent of constellations, its floor soft. Two small porcelain sculptures—spotlit and unprotected—

rotate on vintage record players. Each carries a large orb, one in a net upon its back and the other on its stomach, as the figure contorts into a bridge pose. One encounters the projection of an old woman overhead, whose fingers sign without  subtitles—a language for the initiated. At first it may seem like a warning, but she is a guide,signing the intention of the exhibit: for those who are silenced; for those never born; for the ugly; for those who can’t run fast; for that which we see in our dreams; and for the deepest parts of the sea, where we go when we orgasm. It is a dedication to half-hidden intuitions, to the knowledge layered upon words.

Deeper in, a large sculpture of a crone/maiden reclines in a cave. Suckling a baby, her wizened face regards the viewer, one leg twisting like the interior of a shell. The light changes every few seconds: front lit and pure white, back lit in blue, and then a noise of images that covers the cave walls in a bright organic collage.

Boyle’s strength of drawing upon site specificity serves her well in Venice. Tucked away to the side of the grandiose British Pavilion, the Canadian Pavilion’s small footprint and curved walls are often considered problematic, a layout further complicated by a tree in the middle of its floor. Boyle was inspired by the building’s design, employing its self-consciously natural architecture to create a highly feminine and phenomenal encounter. Known for her gently grotesque porcelain sculptures that portray mythological narratives, she also delves into immersive installations, using drawn or collaged projections to alter the experience of a space. Music for Silence is a highly considered continuation of her aesthetic.

Her exhibition is also an elegant contribution to the overall conversation of the Biennale itself, whose central thematic emphasizes eccentricities, outsider perspectives and the various forms of the imaginary. Titled The Encyclopedic Palace, Biennale curator Massimiliano Gioni draws from the Italian-American folk artist Maurino Auriti’s proposal in the 1950s to create a structure capable of holding the entire world’s knowledge. As Gioni describes in a press statement for the Venice Biennale: “Auriti’s plan was never carried out, of course, but the dream of universal, all-embracing knowledge crops up throughout history, as one that eccentrics like Auriti share with many other artists, writers, scientists, and prophets who have tried—often in vain—to fashion an image of the world that will capture its infinite variety and richness.” With Music for Silence, Shary Boyle deftly navigates a middle ground between the transcendent and the visceral.

For Boyle, the correlation “was a wonderful surprise, as my exhibition had been fully planned before Gioni released his statement. Music for Silence is a natural step forward within the trajectory of my own thematic and material interest; it was heartening to have such a young and canny international curator share so many of my personal concerns.”

“My work rarely employs the same language used by my peers in contemporary art. This can cause a blank or superficial reading by those not willing or able to interpret outside the current discourse,” adds Boyle. “The astonishing research and selection of artworks by Gioni in the Encyclopedic Palace reflected sensibilities directly parallel to my own artistic interests: the healing, spiritual, narrative, humane, figurative, hand-made, the emotional visionaries.”

Much like Venice itself, Boyle’s work is a suspended, somewhat precarious reality where old worlds meld with contemporary: “The city is ancient, and in its architecture and history combines mythologies of both East and West … Venice was a crossroads where treasures of the world were exchanged or plundered. In this way it is beyond uni-cultural, it reminds one of a broader past and shared humanity,” says Boyle. “The magnificent ideals of Art and God are always paid for by someone’s misfortune, some other’s painful reality. The underwater-subconscious dreamlike nature of the place also supports this essential idea. It is invented, impossible, mysterious, decaying.”

On my last day, I visited the old galleries and halls scattered across the historic city. Threads of Boyle’s art were everywhere: in Tiepolo’s baby drinking from a mother’s corpse, in Bosch’s macabre altar pieces, in the gilded Mother Mary. I found myself wandering down several twisting stairways into a series of courtyards near the Piazzo San Marco. Ancient sculptures were stored in every side alley, moss-covered and exposed. Although I could hear crowds somewhere, over there, I was alone, left—like Boyle—to contemplate the impossible beauty of this surreal city that crumbles silently into the water.

]]> https://visualartsnews.ca/2015/02/from-the-archives-shary-boyles-voice-in-the-dark/feed/ 0 https://visualartsnews.ca/2014/09/q-a-visual-arts-news-featured-fall-artist/ https://visualartsnews.ca/2014/09/q-a-visual-arts-news-featured-fall-artist/#respond Tue, 09 Sep 2014 03:36:47 +0000 http://visualartsnews.ca/?p=2007

Jerry Ropson, “flagpole (shed),” ink and flashe on paper, 2013.

A maker of stories and collector curious things, Jerry Ropson strings together tiny histories that explore the ties between people, place and identity. Ropson, who grew up in rural Newfoundland and is now based in Sackville, New Brunswick, organizes chance encounters and reanimates the forgotten fragments of our lives, those left behind on dusty sidewalks, by collecting discarded or lost objects. His chronicling of the commonplace through layers of random detail, narrative, drawing, text, sculpture and performance can send one into a purposeful tumble of confusion. But in those in-between moments of creation one can feel in Ropson’s work also lies a newly found admiration for the common and everyday.

KAYLEE MADDISON: What is it about the ties between narrative, myth, people and place that fascinate you?

JERRY ROPSON: I am continually heartened by how a good story is never told the same way twice. I like how setting and audience can change the way a story is told. I like how common myths tend to shape a place and the people that can form that place. For me this is tied to my rural origin, but of course it’s not necessarily exclusive to that place. It is common to all myths, people, and places. I am intrigued by how culture can be performed, and how the perpetuation of certain myths are what make a community what it is. And likewise, how those same particular myths can structure and inform the way we relate to any place we come to inhabit.

Jerry Ropson, “self titled (pain and terror),” ink on paper, 2009.

KM: Are there any myths in particular that you’re interested in re/deconstructing about people and place in Atlantic Canada?

JR: I am perhaps most obviously interested in the stories, myths, and traditions of rural Newfoundland. I am continually amazed at how intricate and disparate these can be from one tiny cove to the next. Specifically I appreciate how language is so specific to these places, and how the interrelations of words and objects might take on different meanings. I like deciphering common and contrasting readings of these. I am interested in oral traditions, myths that are tied to the home, the domestic, or myths that have been somewhat estranged through a gendered history.

I think that stories and myths of the sea, of the fishery and interactions with the harsh environment are pretty commonplace. I am compelled to seek out more clandestine myths, near forgotten traditions or unspoken commonalities. Drawn to things that are at first glance perhaps a little dark, having a hit of the sinister or the ominous, I like myths or stories that are obscure, bleak or even tragic, but also have an element of being completely mundane and unembellished. This is linked to my interest in everyday objects that move beyond myth— common forms that convey meanings that are specific to place. The way that these objects communicate to a collective community; the way that some domestic objects that have been coded with meaning through myth or ritual, is fascinating. I also like strange superstitions.

KM: Your work often seeks to unsettle our notions of value—Can you tell me a little about your process in deciding which miscellaneous objects that you find and collect to include in an exhibition, and which may be taken out of the gallery by viewers?

JR: Relating to my interest in narrative, I am concerned with the ways culture is shaped through being commercialized, commodified and disseminated. I collect simple objects, ephemera and words formed of everyday materials and interactions. Again, through this desire for commonality, I both collect, incorporate, and create objects that might suggest some evidence of process, activity or exchange. In more recent years, this has been demonstrated through artist multiples, zines, posters, postcards, stickers, souvenirs and even performance.

I offer tokens of exchange, or sometimes, just gifts. I am attracted to items that have been lost or intentionally discarded. I attempt to reinvest castoffs or the unwanted with some element of significance or value. I work with forms that might commonly be over looked, but through infusing them with time, material and labour, I make the most common things valuable. Inverse to that, I aim to offer things that have an implied worth—common, accessible and free.

Whenever possible I like to offer items up to the public, for example I’ve implemented exhibitions where all of the drawings are to be taken away without charge; community-based projects where I’ve distributed handmade customized bumper stickers to anybody who wants one; or left stylized necklaces made of bits of beach trash as offerings to tourists looking for that perfect something to memorialize their trip to “the magical island” in the sea they’ve traveled so far to see.

KM: You’ve travelled nationally and internationally, working in both rural and urban settings—How has each influenced your approach to art making?

JR: I guess that’s true. No matter where I go though, I think I’ll always just be a guy from a small town. I tried to elude that for a long time, but I’ve come to embrace it in more recent years. I am still so easily impressed by large cities, and am readily in awe of urban areas. That said, I seek out or perhaps even try to form tiny communities wherever I end up. Again, it’s like a commitment or even a yearning for a rural way of relating to place. That doesn’t necessarily mean the clichés of being overly friendly, or naïve; it’s more about seeking out the familiar within the new or determining some sense of immediacy. This has allowed me to further challenge ideas of value and accessibility; inverting mediums … the idea of currency, or even cultural literacy, is something that I often think about. This particular sense of place that I adhere to has come to direct how I respond to each and every site I find myself in. Especially within galleries or typical exhibition spaces, it’s a part of why I continue to seek out unconventional spaces, chances to operate somewhat on the fringes, or within the unexpected.

Jerry Ropson, “self-titled (hard tickets),” 2013. For Visual Arts News

KM: Your work at times explores the notion of creating a sense of place—What does this mean to you in an age when many are leading transient lifestyles?

JR: A sense of place has more to do with being able to relate or connect to your surroundings in some way, than some notion of “belonging” or being rooted to place. I spend a lot of time thinking about systems of knowledge, ways of knowing, and the potential of exchange and commonality. Everyone comes from somewhere, but for many it’s not as important. I happen to be obsessed with this place where I started, but it doesn’t mean that that’s the deal or what I’m trying to suggest for others. The idea that wherever we go, that wherever we end up can be equally significant and informative is also very interesting. I left home at 17 to go to art school, and I still return to that small town several times a year. I spend most of the last 20 years being pretty transient, constantly looking back, but in recent years, since coming to Sackville, I feel pretty settled. Some of that is certainly circumstance and proximity, but in any case I no longer feel that need to keep moving in such the same way.

I’d like to think that my work offers a chance for pause, that the stories and bits and pieces that I offer may give way for tiny moments of reflection and certainly some sense of some place. Is that a proper answer?

KM: Can you tell us a little bit about the inspiration and thought process behind the piece you’ve created for Visual Arts News?

JR: Building off of the idea of treating the magazine as a “site specific” exhibition space of sorts, for Visual Arts News I’ve created two distinct pieces. My intention is that these works be integrated within the magazine as single full pages, with each taking on a different role. I think they fit with the ideas of community, exchange and value that I seek through my work.

This first work is entitled Notes From The Camp, simply made with ink and graphite on paper, is visually similar to other “listing” type works that I’ve made in the past, but was made specifically for Visual Arts News and relates to the theme of “community” and “place.” Its title being an obvious reference, the content relate more to a series of research I’ve been conducting over the last couple of years in rural Newfoundland. It will have multiple readings and references depending upon where you are and where you’re from.

The second work, which also ties in with this theme, is “self-titled” and originally of ink and watercolour on paper. I want this image to disrupt the flow and viewing/reading of the magazine, and is oriented as such. The intention is that the work will act a kind of takeaway or artist multiple, which the reader is encouraged to rip/cut/tear from the magazine and disseminate as they like.

I should add that neither of these works would be possible without the beautifully generous people of Fogo Island, Newfoundland and more specifically those of Barr’d Islands, Joe Batt’s Arm, and Tilting. I spent most of last summer with many community members; sitting in their homes, over cups tea- sharing countless stories and near endless slices of homemade pie. Lassy Tarts for life!

*A version of this conversation and work Ropson created for Visual Arts News is featured in print in the Fall 2014 issue.

Artist Eleanor King in her Banff studio. Photo: Doug Tewksbury

Eleanor King is truly an interdisciplinary artist—her work spans from audio installations to drawings and, of course, to her fascination with sculptural stacking. Her artistic practice in its various forms addresses issues of excess, technological obsolescence and environmental degradation. On a snowy day in Halifax, Veronica Simmonds sat down with the Halifax-based artist to discuss her experience being shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, her recent exhibition, Stacks, at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (until January 27) and her oscillation between different media.

Featured music is by King’s band, Wet Denim.