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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image from public presentation of Flotsam by Christopher Boyne, Songlines 2016. Photo: Nigel Quinn

Christopher Boyne’s practice often revolves around maritime life and the sea. Born and raised on the east coast of Nova Scotia, his relationship with the ocean is intimate. His father was a fisher and his childhood memories often include playing on eastern shores.

Memory, found objects and fictional stories drive his research and studio process. The objects that Christopher makes are generally simple in form. Echoes of objects once seen and known. The Boats, water, the shore, the waves, the boats — often these characters resonate between life and art, the ‘non-art’ conversation and the isolated discourses of the gallery. The final iterations of his research often result in a clean, slick aesthetic which lends itself well to the white cube. However could it survive the messy, quite ephemeral process of the Songlines residency in the Magdalen Islands?

The Songlines residency indeed challenged his studio process and comfortable aesthetic. He set out to increase the scale of his built object, working from sea wood found on the shores of the Magdalen Islands and directed by local boat building knowledge and culture. These elements interrupted the amount of control Christopher was used to in his studio. Generally working from his own memory or the memories of family and close friends, the knowledge he collected during this residency was new, slightly foreign, and the materials were messy.

Christopher Boyne at work. Photo: Nigel Quinn

Detail of Christopher Boyne’s Flotsam. Photo: Becka Viau

Yet, perhaps the aesthetic of the final object wasn’t as important as originally thought. Even though I found the model boat to be quite compelling, I feel the project wasn’t necessarily about the model. It felt to me as though Boyne was building the model fishing boat as a way to engage in the action of the artist residency. To challenge his technical skills and keep his hands working which, is the expected activity during a residency. I wonder if making with one’s hand is still the expected work of an artist, in residency or not? Either way, Christopher did craft a beautiful model of a Magdalen Island fishing boat, built with guidance from local fishers and boat builders.

The project’s relationship to local labour and the ‘non-artist’ continues past the construction of the model, and to me, this is where the most interesting points of the project emerge. The plan for Boyne’s model boat is one of an unknown ending. It would be set adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, left to the fate of the sea.

The release of the boat would be performed by a ‘non-artist.’ A local fisher would take the model boat off the East coast of Grosse Isle and and release it to sea. The fisher would also be taking the final photographs of the boat before it was left alone in the middle of the ocean. An interesting point to note here is that the fisher, according to Christopher, wasn’t really interested in knowing why he was to perform the action he was just doing it because he was asked.

The actual story of the object after its release into the sea isn’t of great importance to Christopher Boyne. Rather, what is important to Boyne is the imagined reality of the abandoned ship, the performance and record of the action of the release, and finally the photographic object that will remain as the art object.

The compelling part of Boyne’s practice, during this residency and beyond, is his interest in engaging with or blurring the lines between ‘artist’ and ‘non artist’ actors, and notions of community collaboration. His finished works are beautiful, refined and compelling yet, there is something about the process of abandoning the art project into the hands of the ‘non-artist,’ whose actions bring the art object back from its secluded realm and carry it once again into the everyday gesture. I hope Christopher will continue to explore this element of his process and practice, as research into the ‘artist’ and ‘non-artist’ interaction is warranted.

Related: Marie-Line Leblanc and Sara Dignard find everyday wonder on the Magdalen Islands

Maps and notations collected by Marie-Line Leblanc and Sara Dignard during their project (on display at the Admare headquarters). Photo: Becka Viau

I first met Marie-Line Leblanc and Sara Dignard to talk about their project Lines of Desire — Geopoetic Survey of our Neighbourhoods in the community of Grande Entrée. It was a hellishly windy day, the kind that takes your breathe away and submerges you in white noise.

Grande Entrée is a remote, eastern fishing village, isolated from the rest of the Magdalen Islands by the municipality of Grosse-Île. Its people and landscapes are shaped by the sea; I would even say it has been miniaturized by it. Like many North Atlantic coastal landscapes, the plants living there grow dwarfed in order to survive the salt spray and unforgiving winds. It is a small place with a declining population, and it is very much isolated in its location. You could say it is an Island within an Island. These geographic and social circumstances force people to be connected more intimately and creates a comfortable insularity. They also can normalize the diaspora of youth and the loss of intergenerational memory of place.

Leblanc and Dignard — two French artists, one from Montreal and one from the Islands — set out to map this place, to uncover a new way of knowing this place from an outsider’s perspective, as part of the Songlines artist residency series in the Magdalen Islands. They were to deny the Google Maps or other formal ways of mapping the area and seek the unwritten in the unexpected. Their perspective was one of astonishment with the very seemingly small and unseen, investigating the everyday from a place of intense curiosity and attention to detail. They allowed everyday gestures and serendipity guide them through the story of the community, all the time collecting specimens from their journies and re-articulating the experiences through drawing, poetry, photography, sound and video.  

The site where the artists were to present the public presentation in Grand Entrée. Photo: Becka Viau

Building upon a geopoetic approach, the duo were determined to be lead by locals down their everyday paths. Some people walked with them on their favourite footpaths, while in some cases the artists only walked the memory of the path being shared. Through the process Leblanc felt they were “actualizing the paths for people” — perhaps, giving the everyday some conceptual power by acknowledging it as a space for knowledge.

To reach the community and create the connections that would drive their project, Leblanc and Dignard relied on the openness of local people to refer them to the next subject. In social science, the surveying approach of following one connection until it takes you to another is called snowballing, building a sample of people from social circumstance. Snowballing is intentionally intimate to ensure that hidden experts and populations can be reached or uncovered, and that trusted relationships can be built quickly. It has also been used to scientifically validate local knowledge and unregistered expertise, and I noticed the artists using this tactic as well.

Dignard reflects on the what she considered to be her role as a vector between community members, collecting and sharing stories from one neighbour to another: “It was like our actions have created a secret society.” Leblanc agreed: “ We had many emotional points as community connectors.There is something special in the meeting of strangers on an ordinary path.” One memorable encounter included an elderly man who could no longer walk the path he wished to take the artists down. Instead he shared the knowledge of the path as a story. Dignard and Leblanc found the path and walked it as they understood it to be. On another walk the artists stumbled on an abandoned house and collected some peppermint herbs from the garden. A few days later, via word of mouth, they connected with the owners and shared a cup of tea made from the peppermint found on the abandoned property. Over the cup of tea the house owners revealed that they hadn’t been back to the property for many years, since a member of their family passed away there. As the artists shared their story of finding the house on a walk and collecting the peppermint leaves, a whole world of memory was revealed in conversation.

The Eastern Part of the Magdalen Islands is an incredible place to be in residency. The landscape alone is enough to transport you to a new world. Yet, somehow the restrictions on the format of the residency seemed to challenge the ephemeral nature of Dignard and Leblanc’s research and limit the amount of time they could invest in the collecting of experience rather than preparing for a formal public presentation.

Detail view of maps and notations collected by Marie-Line Leblanc and Sara Dignard. Photo: Becka Viau

Yes, three weeks is a good amount of time for a residency, to build a conversation on a theme, renew creative energy and welcome some reflection on studio practice and research, but Lines of Desire made me wonder: Why are we constantly tagging on the often gratuitous public presentation at the end of these types of projects? At first, I wondered if it was due to funding restrictions, but I now feel that the public presentation is a safe ending, or an expected packaging of art activity that institutions (artist-run or not) end up deliberately programming. Why? I could speculate, but ultimately, I feel it serves as an easily digestible way of building some form connection between the community and the art world. Is it valuable? Perhaps. Dignard described the final presentation of their project during Songlines  as “a gift back to the community.”And so, I suppose, who can deny a gift?

I don’t feel the work could finalize or resolve itself at the end of the three week residency, and I am surprised at the lengths the artists were going to to try and formalize the research so quickly. Again, is this a symptom of current art culture, the nature of first time collaborations or the drive of the artists? I was left unsure. For this project, the action of formalizing or materializing the residency experience seems to be pretty integral to revealing the third space that geopoetic expression aims to open up. I encourage the artists not to stop at the expected public presentation during Songlines and urge them to continue the collaboration.

But I would also like to see residency programs built to support the re-materialization of the artist’s experiences or the re-membering of the findings of their research after the residency. Many artists residencies are built to put the working artist on display, interacting with or even just on view for the community, while many also include public events around the very fresh work in progress. The problem isn’t so much in the public event; Rather, it is about the desire or urge to contain the work of the artist-in-residence in a package that is easily digested by a general audience. Instead of supporting the artist through a more fluid and ephemeral process of research and creation to a resolved public presentation, we often leave the artist’s actions dangling in the “gift back to the community.” This is doing a disservice to both the host institutions, the artist and the public.

Maps and notations collected by Marie-Line Leblanc and Sara Dignard. Photo: Becka Viau

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.