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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryu has been interested in art since she was young; she began drawing with the support of her mother, but family circumstances kept her from pursuing art as a potential career. Then, by complete chance, while attending university in Korea, her English professor invited her to return with her to Salisbury, NB, Canada. When Ryu mentioned that she couldn’t afford the trip, her professor, in traditional Maritime kindness, offered her a place to stay. That one gesture allowed Ryu to travel to Canada and ultimately meet her now husband, leading her to settle in New Brunswick.

Perhaps Ryu’s life could seem like a series of perfect chances, but it takes courage and perseverance to build a new life and become an artist. With an established career as a phlebotomist, Ryu became a professional artist later in life. The decision to quit her job and pursue a professional art practice full-time was daunting. However, when the coronavirus hit in 2020, a series of racist interactions at her workplace began to make her re-evaluate her future.

While Ryu had previously encountered racism in the hospital at which she worked, the coronavirus amplified its frequency. She tells me stories of patients asking if she was from Wuhan or outright refusing to be treated by her due to her race. Ryu was told “to go back to her country” and that “immigrants were taking all their jobs.” Her work life became stifling. Ryu says she felt like she always had to be perfect, to work harder to get the same acknowledgement as her White coworkers, or else she would be further judged. It was during this time that Ryu decided to take a leave of absence to pursue art as a career.

Ryu didn’t graduate from art school nor did she have the social or professional connections that many artists benefit from by living and making art from an early age in the same place. But she’s making her way as an artist in rural New Brunswick. She credits her success from showing her work on social media, which has helped people reach out. She also found that participating in programs like Artslink NB’s Catapult Arts Accelerator has helped give her the tools she needed to turn her art practice into a viable living.

Ryu’s latest body of work can be seen in her touring exhibition, Culture Bridge. The exhibition fuses elements of Ryu’s identity as a Korean Canadian by combining symbols from the different worlds she inhabits. As a Korean, Ryu felt like an outsider, as she resisted many of the traditional elements that being Korean entailed. Coming to Canada helped her reconcile the discomfort of her own culture and combine it with her new culture as a Canadian. Functioning as both an outsider and insider to her own origins and embracing that difference has allowed Ryu to create work that represents the globalized society that we’ve become.

In Sugar Camp Ryu adopts the visual style from ancient Korean ink paintings to depict a Canadian scene. Koreans in traditional clothing are gathered in a forest while tapping maple trees and making maple syrup. Children are eating from the syrup poured onto a raised snow bed while a dog that resembles a Newfoundland dog watches from a short distance away.

This mixed imagery of recognizable Korean and Canadian symbols continues to pop up throughout Ryu’s work. She also includes significant figures from her life in her artwork, such as her family. In other instances, Ryu explores her own identity and the feeling of un-belonging. In Dragon Lady Ryu’s visage is surrounded by a blue dragon painted in the style reminiscent of Asian tapestries. The dragon’s scales slowly drop, falling like flecks through Ryu’s long hair before disappearing completely, signifying the loss of something. Behind them both is the moon, glowing red and yellow. The painting is not entirely pessimistic though, as the fallen scales could reveal something better, more hopeful, underneath. It is refreshing to see Ryu paint an experience that differs from New Brunswick’s predominantly White community. Her work isn’t pretentious; ultimately, she wants to share the beautiful aspects of both Korean and Canadian culture with everyone. Even though New Brunswick’s immigrant population is small, the stories which brought us here still hold importance, and being able to see them represented in art is a significant way of resisting the White-colonial aesthetic while building meaningful relationships between different cultures.

Cardboard boxes plaster the windows of the Khyber Centre for the Arts, obstructing the contents of the gallery save for the cutout lattice cathedral window. A deep blue glow with warm flickers radiates through the grids of the makeshift window, offering a glimpse of dried flowers, candles, and other objects that seem to make up a fuller installation. Upon walking through the gallery doors, the scene from the window becomes an uninterrupted image of carefully placed ritualistic items: Iranian textiles, a violin, empty testosterone bottles, dried fruit, colourful shoes, incense, and decorative vessels.

Accompanying the altar is a soundscape layered with textures, calls to prayer, chatter and whispers in Farsi, laughter, drums, and a melodic violin that sets the foundation for the work. In Invariable Ritual (2021) Carmel Farahbakhsh takes on the voice of the Jinn, a mischievous mythological creature in Persian folklore, which can be noted by the splitting of the track. Each track is playing from a separate speaker on opposite sides of the gallery; one track dominates the other, depending on what side of the room one is situated.

Tropical Gothic seeks to subvert Eurocentric preconceptions of both the tropics and the gothic by finding the latter in the former and bringing both into stark present relevance. It is precisely this aim to subvert the gothic genre that I find so clever in the cardboard lattice window (which I previously referred to as a cathedral window).

The iconic elements of gothic architecture are most often credited to European Catholicism, but they are actually taken from Islamic architecture. In a way, this questions if gothic ever truly belonged to Europe. Furthermore, gothic genre motifs—such as strange places, power struggles, clashing periods/periods of transition, and the supernatural—are applicable across cultures. The works in Tropical Gothic position the gothic as an incredibly befitting genre not only in the tropics but in areas populated by the global majority (commonly referred to as BIPOC). These lands have undergone varying degrees of imperialism and colonialism and the global majority extends beyond their regions and into those of the diaspora.

In the gallery to the left is a little open room with a beam of pale blue light coming from it, a spectre beckoning me to follow. Inside the space is a small bench facing an ultramarine blue wall, a recurring colour throughout the exhibition. Ultramarine blue references the symbolism of the supernatural world and the deep history of transnational exchange, resource extraction, class, and religion associated with the pigment. Shaya Ishaq’s video piece soaring spirit, boundless love (2022-23) is projected on the wall and presents an ethereal digital rendering of Ishaq’s woven tapestry floating among a bright blue sky speckled with clouds. The headphones fizzle out the rest of the world as Ishaq’s soft voice fades in: “how lucky are we to have an option other than heaven. Somehow our senses are boundless here. Do you feel it? The omnipresence of our essence. Meet me on the astral plane. Can you feel my vibration here too? Somehow it all makes sense here in this infinite space where we make up for lost time….” Ishaq’s soaring spirit, boundless love is more than a prayer to or honouring of Ishaq’s lineage of weavers; like the weavings themselves, it is a visual outcome of that embodied knowledge passed down from her ancestors and translated into digital media.

Cinthia Arias Auz’s mixed-media drawing, Enemigos de mi sangre (2022), hangs in a gleaming gold frame on the outer gallery wall. The background of the illustration is made up of a light pink wall with two potted plants up against it that sit along the deep-red-tiled edge of a reservoir. In the upper left corner of the work is a faint yellow outline of a pair of floating legs. A purple cloth covers the face of the figure in the centre foreground while they embrace the patterned silhouette of a condor, the national bird of Ecuador. Through vivid colours and thoughtfully placed elements, Enemigos de mi sangre alludes to familial secrecy, mythmaking, visibility, and critiques of nationalism.

Positioned on the wall directly across from Arias Auz’s piece is Kayza Degraff-Ford’s vibrant oil painting Twilight Rider (2021). The work features a blue figure (cropped so the face is undisclosed to the viewer) wearing a black tank top and denim jeans while riding a large white horse among foliage and under a bright pink moon. The horse’s almost ghostly face is adorned with a decadent halter, its lips pulled back baring its teeth at the viewer. Although Twilight Rider evokes a dreamlike environment, it simultaneously summons images of very real historical Black cowboys throughout North America that have had to undergo complex (and often violent) gothic journeys to forge their paths in history.

Marissa Sean Cruz’s video XP (2020) runs on a loop on the back wall of the gallery. Cruz’s playful and glitchy video follows their avatar—a blue ogre—through various terrains, such as their mundane life at the office, fantastical greeneries, the digital ether, a screensaver of a tropical beach, and bleak snowy plains. Cruz’s experimental soundscape plays throughout the video work, including a distorted version of Coldplay’s “The Scientist.” Within the main character’s journey, there are clips of wavy and collaged digital artefacts and scenes from a simulation game that mimic the objectives of the game Settlers of Catan. In all of its chaos, XP (2020) speaks to a myriad of feelings that the diasporic experience brings up. This is so well articulated through the beachy screensaver. It’s a picturesque scene in a moment of time that crops out any dictatorship or lasting effects of colonialism. It evokes the romanticization and longing for what you once or maybe never really knew.

Pam Juarez’s works El Tianguis (2020-21) and El patiecito de atras (the little yard out back) (2022-23) are displayed in the middle of the gallery, and could almost act as a portal. Two large blue weavings hang on either side of a rod from the ceiling, which creates a window. The window is made from a soft pink weaving that drapes over black milk crates filled with plastic tropical fruits that are spray-painted ultramarine blue. Juarez’s glitchy textiles mirror the haziness of memory—the past that melds into the present.

Excel Garay’s haunting oil painting Mga Nanawag Og Laing Kalibutan (Those Who Call Another World) (2021) peeks through the window fabricated by Juarez’s weavings and is placed on the edge of two large potted tropical plants. The colourful and intricately painted work depicts an abstract figure, primarily notable by a shiny black mass that resembles hair and a blood circulatory system running through its arms to its hands. The figure is obscured by thick wavy beige lines, and a series of connected ombré grey-to-green lines sprout from the chest, resembling a ribcage or the sprouting limbs. On either side of the figure, Garay delicately cut and wove the canvas to mimic traditional Filipino weaving patterns. Garay’s painting draws from Cebuano folklore and seeks to conjure new worlds beyond the confines of what we know.

Tropical Gothic eloquently unites the artists through its theme while honouring their unique perspectives. It further showcases the importance of why we need racialized curators to curate an exhibition of all racialized artists.