https://weareoffcentre.com off centre Fri, 04 Jul 2025 04:23:27 +0000 https://weareoffcentre.com en https://weareoffcentre.com/Interview-with-the-Curator-III-at-the-Art-Gallery-of-Regina Fri, 04 Jul 2025 04:23:27 +0000 off centre https://weareoffcentre.com/Interview-with-the-Curator-III-at-the-Art-Gallery-of-Regina Interview with the Curator: III at the Art Gallery of Regina July 8,&nbsp; 2025 Hooria Rajabzadeh interviews curator Sandee Moore about the exhibition III at the Art Gallery of Regina. III featured the work of Deborah Potter, Leesa Streifler, and Sheila Nourse, and ran from January 23 to March 29, 2025. <img width="7360" height="4912" width_o="7360" height_o="4912" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3107324284a0e167e395509fed2f5729156f83ae2170e0d0b3d093d0e9bfb55d/_DBH1236.jpg" data-mid="235385343" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3107324284a0e167e395509fed2f5729156f83ae2170e0d0b3d093d0e9bfb55d/_DBH1236.jpg" />Installation view of III at Art Gallery of Regina, 2025. Photo: Don Hall. How did you navigate curating without flattening or generalizing the artists' voices under a unifying narrative about aging and womanhood? SM: Actually, my approach is always to start with the artist and the artwork. I don’t begin with an idea for an exhibition and then find artists to fit into it. Instead, I do a lot of research, which includes studio visits, looking at artworks, and talking to artists. From that process, I begin to form ideas for exhibitions. Over the last few years, during studio visits, I noticed that many artists—especially women—have been making work about aging and caregiving. Often, these women are having a dual experience: they are postmenopausal themselves, and at the same time, they are caring for their elderly parents in their final years. They are creating artwork about those experiences. Because I saw that happening, it gave me the idea to put together an exhibition on this theme. I believe both of these experiences—aging and caregiving—are difficult, and that we can understand and process them differently. Sometimes, all people want to know is that they are not alone in these experiences. That’s part of what art can offer—connection, empathy, and recognition. That’s how I came to the idea for the exhibition, and I always want the artist's voice to come through. I very deliberately selected artists who approach the topic of aging and elderly women from very different perspectives. That’s also one of the reasons I like to curate group exhibitions—because they allow for many facets of an issue or experience to be explored through different artists’ works.For example, Leesa Streifler work in the exhibition III was largely inspired by her experience caring for her elderly mother, as well as her reflections on her own aging body. In contrast, Sheila Nourse’ work focused on celebrating women over 50 who had made a difference in her life and in the world. What interested me especially about Sheila’s perspective—particularly in terms of representation and identity—was that she didn’t create images of what these women looked like. Instead, she created assemblage sculptures made from items and materials that represented the things these women cared about, the activities that gave their lives meaning. These sculptures became almost like archaeological artifacts—evidence of a life lived, accumulated through time. That way of representing aging and experience was deeply moving and offered a very different approach from the others in the show. <img width="4650" height="6968" width_o="4650" height_o="6968" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/945f6c4003913fcd8bac780239326d73fda8301f45461e4b2c17802e9d396020/_DBH1253.jpg" data-mid="235385347" border="0" data-scale="39" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/945f6c4003913fcd8bac780239326d73fda8301f45461e4b2c17802e9d396020/_DBH1253.jpg" /> Golden Salon Series detail: Purple Warrior (Judy), Sheila Nourse, mixed media, 12.5 x 18.5", 2024. Photo: Don Hall. Were there any moments in your curatorial work, when you choose to withhold interpretation to allow ambiguity, or even discomfort, to remain in the encounter between viewer and artwork? SM: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. Certainly, my feeling—or my approach—is that I don’t want to force my interpretation onto anyone. I don’t want to impose it on either the artist or the audience. For the artist, their work may mean something different to them, or the goal they have in communicating it may differ from how I interpret it. And with the audience, I want to leave space for their own interpretations as well. I think my approach is to offer different levels of engagement. If people want more, they can easily access it. For example, at the gallery, I write an exhibition didactic panel that is under 300 words. It provides an overview—just the big, overarching idea of the exhibition. Then, we have a self-guided tour pamphlet, which includes three or four questions that point out one or two individual works. For example, one of the questions in the III exhibition focused on how the artists use scale differently. Deborah’s work consisted of miniature sculptures, which made us sense the vulnerability of older and elderly people. Leesa Streifler’s works were enormous, evoking the power and presence of women who, although often disempowered, can still have a huge impact through their actions. So that’s another layer of interpretation we offer—optional and open-ended. The final level is the exhibition’s audio tour, which guides people through each artwork in more depth. Even with that, my approach is to ask questions and help viewers understand how to interpret a work of art, rather than telling them what it means. The example I gave from the self-guided pamphlet is a good one—we start with questions. We explore how artwork can mean more than just what it represents. Elements like the material, the artist’s choice of medium, the scale, the composition—whether it’s tidy or messy—all contribute to the feeling or "vibe" of the work. People can often sense the artist’s intention, even if they don’t consciously articulate it. For instance, they may not say, “She used a small scale to make me feel this figure is vulnerable or insignificant in society,” but they will start to associate things with smallness. In Deborah’s work, her choice to use ceramic figurines brings up associations for many people—familiar, fragile, domestic—and that contributes to their personal interpretation. H: So it’s like you give the audience the tools, and you leave the interpretation to them? SM: Yes, my ultimate goal is to give people the tools to interpret artwork for themselves using the elements of art. That’s one of my real pleasures as a curator—to help people discover that art can have meaning in their lives and resonate with their experiences, so that they can understand it. It’s not an elite activity. <img width="6941" height="4632" width_o="6941" height_o="4632" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1530cc535dbddb04832b38c1dd72f7ad2325fd6deb1f0fa8a76f58349df42991/_DBH1238.jpg" data-mid="235385345" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1530cc535dbddb04832b38c1dd72f7ad2325fd6deb1f0fa8a76f58349df42991/_DBH1238.jpg" />Installation view of III at Art Gallery of Regina, 2025. Photo: Don Hall. How did you curate a “conversation” between the artists’ works without dissolving their individual voices? How did you create a conversation between each artist's work and artwork? SM: Again, that’s one of the things I feel so privileged to do. Of course, I always consult with the artists. I tell them, “I want to curate your work in a show with this person and this person—this is what their work is like, and this is why I’d like to bring your works together.” But I also do a lot of hands-on installation myself, putting the work up in the gallery, and that’s really beneficial.In the exhibition III, that hands-on process was particularly fun and beneficial for the overall show. As we were installing, we started with the works that went on the walls. We hung Leesa Streifler’s enormous drawings, and then, on almost the opposite side of the gallery, we placed Sheila Nourse’s assemblages. Then we brought in Deborah Potter’s sculptures. There was this moment where one of Leesa Streifler’s drawings featured a woman wearing a pair of high-rise pink panties—you know, what we used to call “grandma panties.” Deborah had a sculpture of a woman with gray hair wearing a similar pair of pink panties. We just said, “These two women have to be looking at each other.” So we placed them deliberately to create that dialogue. There were other instances too—moments where the subject matter created a shared experience between artists. For example, those high-waisted underwear became a kind of symbol of aging femininity—maybe even of post-menopausal sexuality, and how it changes or is perceived to diminish. <img width="4382" height="6567" width_o="4382" height_o="6567" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/20cbd5dbaaf46c36a546cb0967e6b7727b75a20ef8e9d284421ff7f3589dfd3e/_DBH1221.jpg" data-mid="235385341" border="0" data-scale="40" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/20cbd5dbaaf46c36a546cb0967e6b7727b75a20ef8e9d284421ff7f3589dfd3e/_DBH1221.jpg" /> Big Girl Panties, Deborah Potter, Clay and glazes, 14"x3.5"x3.5", 2024. Photo: Don Hall. Other conversations happened through visual elements. There was a large drawing by Leesa Streifler called Waiting, and we placed three of Deb’s sculptures nearby. They weren’t directly in front of it, but from certain angles in the gallery, you could see the sculptures—which were in dark red, orange, and gray—and they beautifully complemented the colors in Leesa Streifler’s drawing. So, color relationships also helped shape these visual conversations. There were also material echoes. One example was a shared use of similar items—Deborah had a sculpture where the figure was wearing knitted socks, and Sheila had knitting needles in her assemblage work. It wasn’t just the literal material—it was the symbolic significance of those objects. Sometimes, one artist might present something in a way that reads as weak or vulnerable, while another presents the same symbolic item as a source of power, satisfaction, or personhood. I think the knitting needles in Sheila’s work are a great example of that. Knitting is often seen as symbolic of an older woman—maybe someone just keeping her hands busy. It’s rarely seen as something powerful or meaningful. But Sheila stuck knitting needles through a picture frame in one of her assemblages, and I just thought it was such a funny, bold gesture. To me, it was like she was “stabbing” the picture frame—a symbol of the traditional art world, one that often excluded women and dismissed art practices considered “women’s work.” It was humorous, but also very powerful. The picture frame traditionally says, “This is art,” and here she was, disrupting that with something associated with domesticity and craft. It really felt like a rebellious gesture—“sticking it” to the institution that devalues these forms. That’s one of the things I loved about including her work. So many people get dismissed, excluded, or diminished for so many reasons, and these pieces directly addressed that with both wit and strength. <img width="6750" height="4505" width_o="6750" height_o="4505" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9efa97087c25b5a8b4dfa0da2f1e256d223cacaeda0cefcb2e9b03783fcc9395/_DBH1204.jpg" data-mid="235385340" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9efa97087c25b5a8b4dfa0da2f1e256d223cacaeda0cefcb2e9b03783fcc9395/_DBH1204.jpg" />Installation view at Art Gallery of Regina. (Left to right) Stop, Leesa Streifler,Gouache and chalk on pastel board, 9"x12", 2014; Chakras, Leesa Streifler, Pen and watercolour on board, 7"x5"; Her Body, Leesa Streifler, Mixed media on vintage leather gloves, 2020. Photo: Don Hall. The artists use domestic and craft materials—ceramics, textiles, assemblage—long associated with “women’s work.” Did this material language shape your curatorial thinking in terms of reclaiming or redefining those associations? SM: I wouldn’t say that I was specifically trying to program artists who were working in mediums that had previously been dismissed as “women’s work” or excluded from fine art because they were categorized as craft. But I am often interested in including a range of different art practices in an exhibition. I love bringing in works that might not match what people typically picture when they think of “art in an art gallery”—to challenge those preconceived notions. Certainly, one of the things that was very satisfying for me in this exhibition was including practices that some might not immediately think of as fine art. Sheila’s assemblage work is a great example. Not only is she working in a material language that has historically been devalued, but she’s also over 65, making work about the experiences of older and elderly women. That in itself feels really innovative and, to me, challenges the status quo of what is considered “legitimate” or “high” art. So yes, including practices like assemblage or ceramics—materials and methods that were previously excluded from galleries—was something I found very satisfying, even if it wasn’t my initial curatorial goal. These choices help expand people’s understanding of what art can be, and whose voices and materials deserve space in a gallery. <img width="7360" height="4912" width_o="7360" height_o="4912" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6f2a11bc3693fadc1d94561d2a1586b3b47b95c235aac880aa43846714bd2cfd/_DBH1214.jpg" data-mid="235385346" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6f2a11bc3693fadc1d94561d2a1586b3b47b95c235aac880aa43846714bd2cfd/_DBH1214.jpg" />Installation view at Art Gallery of Regina. Golden Salon Series (details from left to right: Stone Path (Loretta), Treasure Hunter (Margaret), Purple Warrior (Judy), The Promise (Rae)), Sheila Nourse, mixed media, dimensions vary, 2024. Photo: Don Hall. Assemblage seems to function as a metaphor for self-construction in life. Do you see this reassembly of broken or discarded materials as not just aesthetic, but also a political or survivalist gesture—aligned with feminist strategies of repair and resilience? SM: I think you really hit the nail on the head there. That’s a really astute and insightful reading of assemblage as a practice. I think that’s one of the things I find so compelling about it. Sheila’s studio is incredible—it's floor-to-ceiling shelves with bins of things that she collects, all of which she plans to use one day in her artwork. They’re all items that have been broken or discarded. So, as I mentioned before, she’s building up this portrait of a woman through the things that give her life meaning—the activities and objects that reflect her impact in the world. But beyond that, the idea that just because something isn’t perfect, whole, or new doesn’t mean you can’t use it to build your identity—that’s really powerful. In fact, lots of people have fractures in their lives—relationship breakups, traumatic events, or other negative experiences—and all of those contribute to the whole person. So yes, I think your interpretation is perfect. Assemblage, in this sense, isn't just aesthetic—it is also deeply political and survivalist. It aligns beautifully with feminist strategies of repair and resilience. Deborah Potter’s figures seem to resist gendered markers. Some resemble children or men. Was this ambiguity part of your curatorial framing, and how does it complicate or expand the show’s treatment of aging as a gendered experience? SM: I think that wasn’t really part of my curatorial framing, but more about letting the artist have their voice and express what they want. That kind of ambiguity is definitely something we see in Deb’s work very deliberately. As I mentioned before, by making these really small, miniature ceramic figurines, she’s showing us the vulnerability of the elderly. Also, when a woman goes through menopause—when she stops menstruating, ovulating, and having children—there can be a kind of decline in sexual characteristics. So there’s often a less gendered identity associated with older people. And I think that’s part of what Deb is exploring—how aging can diminish not only gendered expression but also a person’s agency. Some of her work comes not from her own lived experience but from witnessing her mother, father, and other family members in the later stages of life, when they may no longer be capable of doing things like dressing or feeding themselves. In that sense, they begin to resemble children again.<img width="3760" height="5634" width_o="3760" height_o="5634" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d7610618791e13b54aafd56e64f259f6d8ad46eb77c86811ad965b1c4d2efda1/_DBH1231.jpg" data-mid="235385342" border="0" data-scale="38" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d7610618791e13b54aafd56e64f259f6d8ad46eb77c86811ad965b1c4d2efda1/_DBH1231.jpg" /> Isolated, Deborah Potter, Clay and glazes, glass cylinder, 12"x7"x7", 2024. Photo: Don Hall. One of her pieces was very deliberately based on something she saw while visiting her mother in a care home. She looked into an empty room, and on top of the bed was a doll. That image really struck her. It offered such a profound insight into what that experience might be like for the person living in that room—seeking the kind of comfort we associate with childhood, or perhaps reliving a nurturing role by caring for the doll. It speaks to both a regression and a reclaiming of meaning in later life. I think it's also important to note that all of the artists in the exhibition are women, and they are making work based on their own experiences. Leesa Streifler, for example, told me about one of her drawings—a portrait of her and her husband. She mentioned that this was the only man depicted in the exhibition. But even then, she titled the work to reflect that he is sort of an appendage to the woman, reversing the usual societal framing of couples where the male partner is often seen as the central figure. The image itself isn’t overtly romantic, but it conveys something very tender and moving—a sense that they are in it together. That shared experience, rather than traditional gender roles, is what really comes through. &nbsp;<img width="7360" height="4912" width_o="7360" height_o="4912" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4fa191d60d911a1fb5f9eb6879d4433fb46833eafa9461280840614d6f6ceac4/_DBH1228.jpg" data-mid="235385336" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4fa191d60d911a1fb5f9eb6879d4433fb46833eafa9461280840614d6f6ceac4/_DBH1228.jpg" /> Installation view at Art Gallery of Regina. (Clockwise from top left) Old Bird, Deborah Potter, Clay and glazes, 16"x5"x3.5", 2024; Freedom 55, Deborah Potter, Clay and glaze, found object, 15.5"x7"x6", 2024; Invisible II, Deborah Potter, Clay, glazes, 6 x 6 x 7”, 2024. Photo: Don Hall. Leesa Streifler’s large-scale works seem to reclaim space for aging women’s experiences. Can we read this as a counterpoint to Deborah’s miniatures—a tension between shrinking and expanding presence? SM: I think certainly, as we’ve talked about before, scale plays an important role. Leesa Streifler is making these women oversized—making us notice them, making us maybe recognize that they have power. While Deb’s sculptures are tiny and made of ceramic, and some of them explore a loss of independence or agency, I wouldn’t exactly call them counterpoints. But yes, they do offer different perspectives—either on how we view older and aging people, or even how aging individuals view themselves. That contrast in scale and tone adds richness to the exhibition. As I said before, I think Leesa Streifler’s work—with its humor and sheer visual beauty—is incredibly inspiring and uplifting. It expands the way we understand aging, especially for women, and invites us to see strength and presence where society might expect invisibility. <img width="7360" height="4912" width_o="7360" height_o="4912" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4959416c8c23f7c5c354606fe6918b2cc92217f5ba262061b4613f8a2bc593a3/_DBH1201.jpg" data-mid="235385339" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4959416c8c23f7c5c354606fe6918b2cc92217f5ba262061b4613f8a2bc593a3/_DBH1201.jpg" />Installation view at Art Gallery of Regina. (Left to right) Stop, Leesa Streifler,Gouache and chalk on pastel board, 9"x12", 2014; Chakras, Leesa Streifler, Pen and watercolour on board, 7"x5"; Her Body, Leesa Streifler, Mixed media on vintage leather gloves, 2020; Old Friends, Leesa Streifler, digital print on aluminum, 30 x 40", 2024; Her Dream, Leesa Streifler, Oilstick and acrylic on mylar, 96"x40" plus 22"x30", 2024. Photo: Don Hall. Leesa Streifler’s work engages with fantasy and desire—topics often erased from depictions of older women. How important was it for you to foreground aging not as an endpoint but as a continuation of longing, imagination, and erotic life? SM: I would say again that I’m really led by the artists and what they bring forward in their work. And I think this idea—of fantasy and eroticism in later life—is really important to Leesa Streifler and is central to how she approaches her practice. It's something that’s so often unacknowledged: that older women can still experience desire, can still engage in fantasy, and can absolutely still be erotic figures. One of her drawings, Her Dream, is a beautiful example. Leesa Streifler often creates these composite bodies—figures made up of many layered selves and relationships—so it’s never just one static person. In this work, we see an elderly woman with a pale, soft body, and there’s the profile of a strong, muscular man—handsome, idealized—his lips pressed to hers. Between them, sprouting from her abdomen, is a child nursing at her breast. It’s a powerful and complex image. It speaks to physical connection, yes, but also to desire and longing, and how these emotions remain present throughout life. It opens up the idea that desire doesn’t have to be narrowly defined—it’s not just about sexuality in the conventional sense. Leesa Streifler invites us to consider a broader spectrum of pleasure. Even something like nursing a child—typically removed from conversations about sexuality—can coexist with intimacy and longing in this work. That kind of complexity, where emotional, physical, and relational forms of connection all intersect, is something she handles beautifully. As a feminist artist, Leesa Streifler has long explored how women are seen and judged—especially through the lens of physical appearance and youthfulness. Even now, there’s a disproportionate societal pressure on women to be attractive in specific ways, and aging can feel disempowering when you’re no longer seen as fitting that ideal. This pressure is still very present in Canadian society, and many women struggle with it deeply. As we age, our physical selves change, and that shift can be unsettling—especially if your sense of identity has been tied closely to how you look. Leesa Streifler’s work challenges that. It pushes against those narrow definitions and opens up space to see aging not as an endpoint, but as a continuation—of imagination, of desire, and of richly lived experience. <img width="6913" height="4613" width_o="6913" height_o="4613" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bcf5fc62c3e12460d6edfefd3a3938c0f6f0b60ffab500da9f0254881671bd70/_DBH1199.jpg" data-mid="235385338" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bcf5fc62c3e12460d6edfefd3a3938c0f6f0b60ffab500da9f0254881671bd70/_DBH1199.jpg" />Installation view at Art Gallery of Regina. (Left) Affect, Leesa Streifler, digital print on aluminum, 31 x 24", 2023; (Centre) Secure, Leesa Streifler, digital print on aluminum, 31 x 24", 2023. (Right) Untitled (pink dancer), Leesa Streifler, digital print on aluminum, 31 x 24", 2025. Photo: Don Hall. Leesa Streifler’s work treats aging as an unfolding narrative, while Deborah’s sculptures feel suspended in time. How do these contrasting temporalities speak to each other within the exhibition? SM: I think that’s a really beautiful way to frame it—Leesa Streifler’s work as an unfolding narrative and Deborah’s sculptures as suspended in time. That contrast absolutely came through in the exhibition. Leesa Streifler is very interested in the grotesque, in challenging our expectations of beauty and desirability. Her figures often have multiple limbs or heads—bodies that are exaggerated or hybrid. But this distortion isn’t arbitrary; it’s a way for her to stitch together the past and the present selves of a person. She’s showing us the fullness of a life lived across time. One of her works in the show is called Overtime, and it’s literally split down the middle—one half depicts a little girl, the other a woman. It really captures that sense of a self unfolding through time, looking both backward into childhood and forward into aging. Deborah’s work, on the other hand, is much more about capturing a single, poignant moment. There’s a stillness to her sculptures, a kind of emotional suspension. Especially the ones encased in these clear resin bubbles—those feel like time capsules, holding onto something fragile and fleeting. And then she renders them in ceramic, a medium that can last for centuries. That act of preservation—of holding on to a moment that might otherwise be lost—is really moving. There’s also a difference in how each artist works. Deborah’s pieces are often based on very specific people or scenes—something she saw, or someone she knew.Leesa Streifler, by contrast, works entirely from her imagination. She doesn’t use models or photographs. She draws on her own observations—her body, her husband’s, her child’s—but she transforms those into these expansive, surreal images. That openness gives her work a much wider narrative scope, almost mythic in scale, whereas Deborah’s work is rooted in very real, intimate vignettes. Together, these different temporalities speak to the richness of aging—not just as a biological process, but as something experienced emotionally, imaginatively, and relationally. Leesa Streifler gives us the arc of a life; Deborah gives us a moment suspended within it. I think those perspectives really complement each other. <img width="6888" height="4596" width_o="6888" height_o="4596" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/744451156729d3ed0fe22ab9494471bed73478691c0b5b55e270040ba46037af/_DBH1197.jpg" data-mid="235385337" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/744451156729d3ed0fe22ab9494471bed73478691c0b5b55e270040ba46037af/_DBH1197.jpg" />Installation view at Art Gallery of Regina. (Left) Improvement, Leesa Streifler digital print on aluminum, 31 x 24", 2024; (Right) Common Signs, Leesa Streifler, digital print on aluminum, 40 x 30", 2024. Photo: Don Hall. You mentioned that the exhibition resists dominant cultural narratives of aging. Yet the absence of family or intergenerational relationships is striking. Do you see the focus on the individual aging subject as a rejection of traditional roles, such as motherhood or grandmotherhood? SM: That’s a really profound observation. I don’t think the absence of family or support networks in the works is a rejection of traditional roles, but rather a reflection of a social reality—especially in Canada. As people age, they often become increasingly isolated. After retirement, they may lose a core part of their daily social life. If mobility declines, it becomes harder to maintain friendships or even leave the house. Unlike in many other cultures, multigenerational living isn’t common in Canada. So, many elderly people live alone, and that isolation becomes a defining aspect of their experience. You can really see that in both Deb and Leesa Streifler’s work. In Leesa Streifler’s drawings, the figures often float against a blank background—no home, no room, no specific setting. There’s a sense of disconnection. Deborah’s sculptures also reflect this. The presence of a single armchair, for example, becomes such a powerful symbol—a whole world reduced to one piece of furniture. That’s where you sit, eat, watch TV, look out the window. It becomes the center of life for someone whose world has shrunk. So I think what we’re seeing isn’t a rejection of motherhood or grandmotherhood, but an acknowledgment that, in reality, many elderly people in Canada live outside of those relational roles, or at least outside the structures that used to support them. There are moments in the show that break from this solitude—like Leesa Streifler’s portrait of herself and her husband. That piece is especially moving because it's rare in the exhibition to see two people together. It feels intimate, like an interdependent unit, quietly resisting that narrative of isolation. We’re also facing a demographic shift in Canada: our population is aging, and there’s increasing reliance on retirement homes and care facilities. Living with family is no longer the norm. And even when we try to change that—like offering our parents a place in our homes—they may refuse because they don’t want to be a burden. Sometimes that stems from their own experiences of caregiving, and a desire not to impose on the next generation. I’d really love to see a cultural shift in how we think about aging and interdependence. H: Thank you so much for your thoughtful responses. I’ve learned a great deal through this conversation. If you have any final thoughts to share, I’d love to hear them. SM: No, I just really appreciate your insights, and I hope you’ll share what resonated with you about the exhibition. That’s what I hope for—that it sparks reflection. H: Honestly, I felt the isolation so strongly. That individual experience of aging you described—it echoed something I’ve been feeling here too. Where I come from, everything is family-centered. Elder care homes are not accepted in my culture. But living here, in this different context, I find myself in a kind of solitary existence that’s new to me. Like you said, the armchair becomes your whole world. I felt deeply connected to the artworks, even as a younger person. It made me realize how close we all can come to living like the elderly—physically, emotionally, socially—even before we age. SM: That’s such a beautiful and meaningful observation, Hooria. Exactly. I think we’re all experiencing a kind of premature aging in how we live now—especially with subscription streaming and delivery services. It’s like the world is encouraging us never to leave our homes. Your reflection really captures the emotional core of the exhibition. <img width="7360" height="4912" width_o="7360" height_o="4912" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8f5fde45afea1b52935ec688c1060a0f8d0011f933bb587a4f99f09ec3e63bcb/_DBH1237.jpg" data-mid="235385344" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8f5fde45afea1b52935ec688c1060a0f8d0011f933bb587a4f99f09ec3e63bcb/_DBH1237.jpg" />Installation view of III at Art Gallery of Regina, 2025. Photo: Don Hall. _________________________________ Sandee Moore is a white, settler, cis-woman who proposes to animate social relationships through personal exchange via artwork in media such as performance, video, installation, and interactive electronic sculpture. Moore has screened and exhibited across Canada (including The Surrey Art Gallery, The Art Gallery of Alberta, Plug In ICA, The Winnipeg Art Gallery, The Dalhousie Art Gallery, The Blackwood Gallery, and The Dunlop Art Gallery) and in Japan. She earned her B.F.A. (Honours) from The University of Victoria and M.FA. in Intermedia from The University of Regina. She has worked as an arts administrator, writer and university instructor, and regularly publishes her art criticism and scholarly texts in various books, periodicals and newspapers. Moore currently makes her home on Treaty 4 Lands in Regina, SK, where she is employed as Director/Curator at the Art Gallery of Regina. Hooria Rajabzadeh is an Iranian lens-based artist whose practice primarily explores gender and gender imbalances at the intersection of culture and race, often drawing on her own and other Iranian women’s lived experiences. She holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Photography from the University of Tehran, as well as a second Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the University of Regina. She is currently working as a Community Art Consultant at the City of Regina. https://weareoffcentre.com/Brown-Food Wed, 03 Jan 2024 16:30:57 +0000 off centre https://weareoffcentre.com/Brown-Food Brown Food January 8, 2024 by Steacy Easton On Stephen Shore’s&nbsp; American Surfaces 50th Anniversary, and the 1st anniversary of my father’s death. For Richard <img width="2250" height="1500" width_o="2250" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/42302c07c01686f08e2cad795c4173b9585249aa604170a08f823db7fd7a33ea/shore-1.jpg" data-mid="200654032" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/42302c07c01686f08e2cad795c4173b9585249aa604170a08f823db7fd7a33ea/shore-1.jpg" />Stephen Shore, Clovis, New Mexico, June 1972 (source) It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the photographer Stephen Shore’s monumental experiment, where he traveled through America, shooting the most banal shit —things he ate, cars he saw, hairdressers, auto mechanics, greyhound stations. When he was in Amarillo he shot ten photos which he made postcards out of. He had them printed by Dexter Printers of America, whose minimum order was 5600 copies. This distinction between art print and commercial photographs means that looking at his prints, books, and eventually digital archives (on museum websites, on Tumblr, and eventually on Instagram) was divided into work suitable for postcards and work not. The British photographer Martin Parr had an angrier, more class-oriented version of Shore’s blank eye, compiling a collection of postcards in the UK, erasing the difference between art shot and commercial shot, via an act of curating. In the mid-1960s to early 1970s it was possible for everything to be a postcard and everything could be art. The Shore postcards are in the collection of the British Museum and the Met. Shore says he didn’t sell a single one in 1973. Here are some things that Shore shot in Amarillo that didn’t sell: Doug's Bar B Q No. 1, 3313 S. Georgia, Civic Center, 3rd &amp; Buchanan, American National Bank Building, 7th &amp; Tyler, Double Dip, St. Anthony's Hospital, 735 N. Polk, Fenley's Cafe, 322 W. 3rd, Capitol Hotel, 401 S. Pierce, Feferman's Army Navy Store, 201 E. 4th, Potter County Courthouse, Betw. 5th &amp; 6th on Taylor, Polk Street. The buildings depicted are a mix of institutional and vernacular architecture, a mixture of very new buildings and ones more than a century old, brick and concrete. The postcards do sell now, three thousand dollars for three at Heritage Auction last year, framed and authenticated. The Double Dip is still mostly known for Shore’s photo, the BBQ joint is going strong in the same building. People get sick in the hospital, people do uncivil things in the civic building. Art is a failed photograph. A photograph is meant to be polysemic—the photographs of Amarillo turned into postcards turn the monosemic quality of art into the polysemic quality of public aesthetic. In a museum art is only art; in the wild it is a souvenir, a placekeeper, a vernacular object, a note on geography, a note on desires (a desire to sell, a desire for this project to be seen, to pay the rent). It fails at all of the things it can be and it only retains one benefit–it becomes art. Currently there is an exhibition of Wolfgang Tillmans’s photographs at the Art Gallery of Ontario. There are hundreds of photographs in that show, from tiny 4x6” prints to work five feet tall. Some of the photographs are framed, some are taped to the wall, some are placed in vitrines with supporting material. There are exquisite prints in the show–but mostly they show the artifacts of their creation, a set of xeroxes in collapsing, smeared grey tones, in the slightly dull colours of commercial coupler prints. Tillmans moves the photos around in the show, and there are reproductions–in one room a Xerox print of a man falling from a cliff (falling/diving) on a piece of A4, in another room the same shot a dozen times bigger. <img width="2560" height="1730" width_o="2560" height_o="1730" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f80019f5b2e142f368b5f1b4198663e98ca0a478d81bab0eece6b5d11170a8ac/tillmans.png" data-mid="200652749" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f80019f5b2e142f368b5f1b4198663e98ca0a478d81bab0eece6b5d11170a8ac/tillmans.png" />Wolfgang Tillmans, Natura morta, 2001 (source) The work I love most by Tillmans are the still lives, often on a windowsill, often beautifully lit–titled things like Talbot Road (1991–mostly oranges) or Osaka (2004, two exquisite apples wrapped in paper and honeycomb styrofoam) or New York (2001, film canisters, tubers, orange peels) or Calama (2012, avocados and melons in green plastic grocery bags). I was here, and I ate things, and I took photos of what I ate, and I left the place. The rot of the fruit, like the 18th century Dutch still lives. I keep thinking of Rachel Ruysch’s Fruit and Insects from 1711. To be rich enough to let things rot. To be rich enough to make the rotting things allegories of our own rotting. In Shore and in Tillmans some things do not seem to be able to rot. Vanitas and vanity. The Ruysch is in the Uffizi, the postcards are in the Met, the Tillmans are printed by expensive publishers, and show up everywhere. We say Tillmans made these shots, made these installations, the fruit, and the still life exemplary of travel, but were there phone calls, zoom calls? The more ephemeral a thing appears to be, the more infrastructure which exists to create it. Like capital, the museum perpetuates itself. The melons still look ripe, as do Ruysch's peaches. The photos of Shore in the 1970s, of mostly brown food and mostly brown landscapes, are the beginning of a new supply slide, and maybe a new middle class. I am eating a peach while writing this. When my father took photos, he did not take still lives, but in the last years of his life, there was a panic to travel, to shoot, to make beautiful pictures. An anxiety about the rot. It is unfashionable to admit that we are careful about printing like my dad was careful. I was embarrassed by my father, by his photographs, by the giant print he made of Irish seas and framed awkwardly and gave to my mother. It was a sentimental shot not out of the 19th century–but there is no false modesty to it. The first time I saw the Tillmans show, there was a large, formal portrait of one of Fassbinder’s muses, who aged into respectability. My father was taught to be respectable and re-feralized himself. I often wonder if a picture in a book is different from a picture in a show than a picture online. I often wonder if a picture on Pinterest, Tumblr, or Instagram is different from a picture on the museum website. In this age of the digital, in a world anxious about prints, the only thing that exists in image making is the metadata. I do not have my father’s negatives, or his SD cards, or his camera. I have five of his novels, stained by tobacco and coffee, on a shelf. Its own decay, its own brown food. I have not read them. They are formalist, materialist objects. Doing provenance for either Tillmans or Shore would be a nightmare. I took my copies of their books from my libraries, books from Steidl or Distributed Art Press, catalogs from shows in New York or Europe. The still lives aren’t really there. It seems like a very foolish exercise–to say that this image is 86.9 percent art, to do the taxonomy of it. Are Balderssai’s paintings about painting more art than the photos he took of oranges flying into the air—does the baggage of the archival strip those oranges of their joy? In 1968, Balderssai painted text on canvas—the text said: “Do You Sense How All the Parts of a Good Picture Are Involved With Each Other, and Not Placed Side by Side. Art is a Creation of the Eye and Can Only Be Hinted at in Words.” The best Shore photos are things that are placed side by side. They are still lives, and they are brown still lives. The best Tillmans photos are things placed in vast arrays. They are still lives, and they are colorful still lives. It seems strange to me to see these commercial products listed in museum collections, with official-looking acquisition records and notes on media. Not postcards, but “photomechanical prints.” They are also prettier than anything else Shore ever did—those cerulean Texas skies. Which is funny, because Shore’s 1973 work is known for either a po-faced irony or a slight slumming underbelly. Which is funny, because maybe the best thing he ever shot was brown foods: pancakes in Utah; a hamburger in Dallas, chocolate cake in Albuquerque, steak and hashbrowns in the Dakotas. This being the 1970s–the plates, the laminate faux bois tables, the placemats, everything surrounding the food was brown. Brown on Brown on Brown on Brown (sometimes curators in Canadian museums call the large Victorian 19th-century landscapes in their back rooms, “brown paintings,” sometimes antique dealers call the unsellable unfashionable furniture “brown pieces.”) Perhaps the masterpiece of this “brown food” category, was a photo he took in Clinton, Oklahoma in June of 1972. One of those tables, two bowls of iceberg lettuce, askew. One which has a large white lump in the middle of it, and one of which has a large reddish beige lump in the middle of it. The reddish beige lump is obviously Thousand Island Dressing, the white might be blue cheese or it might be cottage cheese. I hope that it is cottage cheese because then it could be bookended by a shot Richard Knudsen took of Richard Nixon’s last meal after he resigned; after he flew back to California. The last meal that Nixon ate was cottage cheese, pineapple, and milk, on a tray, that tray on a brown table. Cottage cheese is a food of control. It is a food that is defined by what it isn’t–not quite cheese, a diet food, what you eat when you don’t want to eat actual food. It is a white food (entendre intended). One of the defining characteristics of Autism was once considered a white diet. To be accurate, Autistics are known to eat beige foods. There are hundreds of guides on the web, for parents, that try to convince adults to force their Autistic children to eat more than beige food. There are many cruel jokes about chicken tenders and beige food. Maybe that’s why I think of Shore as secretly Autistic–or that there is nothing more Autistic than the endless photos of useless things; maybe the average diet in the midwest in the 1970s, put next to the average Autistic meal in 2022 has some family resemblance. Though that said, the ritual of taking the same shot four or five times a week for decades, regardless of where one is, is in itself the kind of ritualistic behaviour that we could consider Autism. I am not saying Shore or Tillmans were Autistic. I am saying my father was. One of the ways I pretend not to be Autistic is to make my food less beige. I am never sure if Shore is documenting, if he is taking notes, if he is making art, if he is taking photographs, if he is mocking fly-over country, or is secretly in love with it–whether his photos of beige foods, via the distancing of an aesthetic, through an act of art making, allow for us to take them seriously. What do we know about the food–we don’t know what it tasted like, what it smelled like, who made it, and what it meant for them to make it. There is a hint–this is what America is, sort of kind of, but unlike the post office, the discourse slides itself into art continually, whether we want it to or not. I am sure what Tillmans is shooting–he is shooting a distant, urbane cosmopolitanism. He is showing his wealth, fat and sleek–like Ruysch’s peaches, like Cuyp’s cows, like Ven Helm’s oranges. All of the great art that has been made of Nixon–think of the Phillip Guston drawings, phallic aggression as exhausted pathos; think of the epic opera that the minimalist composer John Adams made–and then this photo, an accidental Shore, but one that fails at populism, at grit—there is no pleasure in either, but there is a weird anthropomorphized bonhomie in the Clinton salads. There is an icy loneliness in Nixon–all he wanted to be was loved, and all he got was two rings of pineapple, cottage cheese, and a single glass of milk. I think that the Clinton, OK photo is genius for formal reasons – how the shapes twin and separate, how the composition is slightly off –&nbsp; and for social reasons – because of how it both works with the tradition of still life, as an example of prosperity and upends it; I love it because of that slightly snobbish response–I can make art out of anything, I can make art out of the most banal commercial shit; I love it for sentimental reasons because it reminds me of my dad–though my dad thought he was above sentimentality. <img width="1548" height="1166" width_o="1548" height_o="1166" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ec6a6c9260711c12b175df994d24f63318b89093bcc0f74d9ddf654b72e91a0e/steacy-2.jpg" data-mid="200652751" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ec6a6c9260711c12b175df994d24f63318b89093bcc0f74d9ddf654b72e91a0e/steacy-2.jpg" />Photo courtesy of Steacy Easton I went through the South on a book tour last spring. I ate some beige food and took some pictures, but the pictures and the beige food I ate were not because I was Autistic, but because I was Aesthetic, because I had been poisoned by irony. (Though the queerness of a Waffle House at 3 am was a refuge.) The beige food I eat at home, naked in bed, not wanting to cook, barely wanting to eat–that food I do not document, that is more monosemic. The beige food I take photos of is aesthetic, is monosemic. The beige food I eat privately–encased in codes of quick pleasure, of shame, of desire, of labor and leisure, is polysemic. My dad was Autistic and made sure that no one knew it. He was awkward, and he was difficult. His life was haunted by brown foods, and by the 1970s,&nbsp; he also really hated Nixon—like he was progressive in the 1970s, and he never stopped, but also there were more current politicians that he could get angry at. I think of my father as Autistic. I out my father as Autistic because of his diet, of burnt carbs, thick gravies, the exacting way that he ordered his Big Macs. I think about his gait. About how he yelled when he didn’t get his way. About the blowouts. About how he kept being fired. But, also, with regard to his generation, the shape of Autism is erased, how we know about his thinking and his process is less about the novels he left, about his photographs, and more about the absence, which limns the edge of human experiences. I never really thought of Dad as Autistic, until he told me, just as Mom got really sick. When my dad was six, he was sent alone on a bus to a child psychologist in Edmonton with a peanut butter sandwich in a new and expensive Tupperware container. Dad dropped the container and it got crushed by a truck. (Shore shot in Bozeman in 1973, and he was in Medicine Hat in 1974, so he got close to Calgary, but I don’t know if he actually shot there, my dad would have been in University at the time). Dad survived before he married my mom on Puritan canned stew, the equivalent of Dinty Moore. Before he got sober, my dad drank O'Keefe Extra Old Stock beer–brown label on brown bottle (Douglas Coupland in his book on design and Canada, claimed that he designed the label). The only ethnic food my dad ate was prairie Chinese, which was mostly brown. He would eat twice a week at a small town diner called Uncle John’s where he would order perogies (brown) or a hamburger (browner). My dad cooked a little, but his best dishes were a pear cake (canned pears) and cornbread and chili–all brown. My dad would go out to Boston Pizza and have spaghetti with meat sauce and three meatballs, brown overwhelming the red of the sauce. As he got older, he ate less and less–less variety, less colour and less cooking. I see the photos that Shore took, and I see my dad’s diet, and I think about how identity can center on brown foods. I think about my dad being dead for a year, and these Shore photos being fifty years old, and I think about the meals that we ate when Dad traveled. I feel a twinge of shame, that I am again aestheticizing my father instead of trying to understand him. When his mother died, my dad took a room at the Coliseum Inn; I checked in on him. He was very drunk on institutionally crafted cheap amber lager, in a room which had not been updated since 1973. Shore would never allow himself such pathos, but it was that kind of play of brown foods, and brown surfaces, that marked a profound grief, which made Dad’s diet make a little sense. My grandmother was a very good cook, she had almost no brown foods in her house–they were not chic. Her only salad dressing was a simple vinaigrette. <img width="878" height="1166" width_o="878" height_o="1166" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dfe6a11cafa0063c0dbd11413ed83d87e4f1ad83bfcb31271795b840bf3e8abf/steacy-1.jpg" data-mid="200652750" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/878/i/dfe6a11cafa0063c0dbd11413ed83d87e4f1ad83bfcb31271795b840bf3e8abf/steacy-1.jpg" />Photo courtesy of Steacy Easton I took two trips with my dad in the decade before he died. One to the west coast, Tofino, Vancouver, Port Alberni, Victoria. Here is a list of things he would not eat: udon, ramen, pad thai, sushi, sashimi, blackberries, salmon tacos, seaweed, Franco-Japanese cream puffs. The mark of consumption was a mark of class; the insistence on novelty was a power play. Why, when I knew my father took his own pleasure in the Denny’s pancake, did I think I was better? I bought fruit and shot it on the windowsill. I was mirroring Tillmans and dragging Tillmans. Denny’s makes good pancakes. When I look at the food Shore shot, some of it I think was supposed to disgust the viewer–but there becomes an act of nostalgia—what would have been the vanity of rot becomes entirely selling out. This is an old complaint. My mother and my father, separated, never divorced, living in the same small Alberta town for decades, would go to Wal-Mart once a week and eat at McDonald's. They loved each other and loved Wal-Mart. I never shop there, for moral reasons, for aesthetic reasons. I have my Big Macs delivered to me. The second trip was to the American South. We hated each other on that trip, and he was paying, so I resented his money even more. I tried to eat everything, he tried to eat nothing. Maybe his tastebuds were fucked from decades of smoking. The fights were mostly about food–how he didn’t want to go to grocery stores, how he didn't want to eat in the restaurants that I wanted to eat in. There is some difference in sitting at a restaurant called Stoney’s in Brunswick, Georgia –a terrible restaurant, on Sunday morning, a cheap church crowd that seemed hostile, trying to eat a salad just on the right side of rancid, with a vat of thousand island dressing next to it; a half-dozen sports bars where he would order a hamburger burned beyond recognition, and then salt it to oblivion, taking out the lettuce and the tomato. I think of the plain cheese pizza in a Brunswick, GA hotel room, I think of the bad pub burgers, I think of cheap BBQ in dead chains—I think about how much he loved Ricky’s and Kelsey’s and Denny’s. In the first draft of this essay, I talked to a friend who was reading, and he said–it sounds like you are dragging your dad for his taste. I am. I think that dad had shitty taste. I want people to read this essay, and think about my readings of Shore, the photographs of Shore, and how I am very sophisticated at reading whatever text is in front of me. I think about my dad. Dad would not go to the Waffle House with me, because he thought it was unsafe (though maybe he could not navigate the parking lot), and would not take out from them. I got him Taco Bell, which he didn’t eat. Earlier this year, I was back in the South, too long in Asheville, parked right near the Waffle House, which was the wrong kind of brown food. The kinds of places where Shore would have shot his brown food don’t exist anymore. I took some photos in Asheville, but mostly I read and considered and thought, and found community–at 3 am, after the bars had closed, in the brightly lit, bright yellow Waffle House, though the food was brown as anything in 1973. It was also a queer space, and for all my liberalism, Dad was not comfortable in queer spaces. He was not comfortable in straight spaces either–he traveled to England, to Scotland, throughout the United States, and Canada, on his own, taking endless photographs. He was losing his eyesight, and as he grew older and more blind, his photographs got worse and worse. He would try to take photos of everything, but never got a phone with a camera. He was big and lumbering, with a giant professional rig, and he would tell stories about getting caught by the police, and being harassed by motorists, which I am sure happened, but I am also sure he exaggerated. He thought he could make money selling prints–but he wanted to be a good photographer, pictoralist, Ansel Adams. We shot together, sometimes, and he never understood what I shot. I never showed him Shore’s brown food. When my dad was dying, in a care home owned by the Catholic church, his cousin would bring him Big Macs and milkshakes. He struggled to eat them. The beige food gave him comfort. The image of this thousand island, this blue cheese-laden bland iceberg gives me comfort. The image cannot be eaten. On the trip down South, we went to a fine dining restaurant in Savannah, GA. It was in an old ice factory in a heavily gentrified district. I have told this story about how I ordered good food–the risotto, the polenta, and the deconstructed banana pudding. I chose delicate wine to match. Dad would hector the server—he wanted the same kind of spaghetti and meatballs that he got at home. He started the meal talking about how this much food could serve someone for a week, and then he went on checking the server and went on to call me a snob–to say that I had put on airs. Eventually, he got his northern Italian meal in a southern Italian restaurant. The part of the story I don’t usually tell is that I ordered a very expensive glass of rye, to finish the meal. It was contempt rye, it was revenge rye. It was a fuck you to all of that brown food that I secretly loved and that he would only eat. I wonder, sometimes, if Shore’s photos from the 1970s, or the appreciation of Shore’s photos now, are like that contempt rye. It seems significant that as Shore got older, as the grants and slick magazines came in, the work got prettier; culminating in a set of photos in Monet’s gardens. The tension there is a tension in taste. The ability to aestheticize working-class meals in working-class towns marks how the critic thinks they are better than the person eating the meal. Though Shore must have eaten this, his photos are endlessly before, and are never after, making the subtle argument that the aesthetic is more important than the eating, the brown is a formal choice–like a Rembrandt gone white trash and then raised from its descension, from the careful eye of a photographer and printer. Did Shore ever eat the Salad? What kind of salad did he eat–the white or the brown? When the owner of the small town diner died, and we went to his funeral, and afterwards, we went to the dive bar portion of a Chinese restaurant so bad he wouldn’t eat at it. We drank Jamesons’ neat–I might not have been 18. When he died, I bought a bottle of Michter’s small batch sour mash. I’m drinking a dram now in an Alvar Allto glass. Aren’t I urbane? https://weareoffcentre.com/Trancestor-AI-at-Factory-Media-Centre-an-Interview-with-Angelic Thu, 21 Sep 2023 17:35:40 +0000 off centre https://weareoffcentre.com/Trancestor-AI-at-Factory-Media-Centre-an-Interview-with-Angelic Trancestor.AI at Factory Media Centre -&nbsp;an Interview with Angelic Goldsky and Mel RachoSeptember 28, 2023 <img width="4635" height="3090" width_o="4635" height_o="3090" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/13766ec97bdf797d7e94f0dcee37bb81541fba2d62480c05938b8386522c1b12/Documentation-Eli-Nolet.jpg" data-mid="191500478" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/13766ec97bdf797d7e94f0dcee37bb81541fba2d62480c05938b8386522c1b12/Documentation-Eli-Nolet.jpg" />Coded Language: God Algorithm, 2023, photo by Eli Nolet Trancestor.AI is the result of a collaboration between interdisciplinary media artists Mel Racho and Angelic Goldsky exploring the possibilities of merging trans spirituality and machine learning. As part of Factory Media Centre’s &amp;Now residency, the pair collaborated on the exhibition HEXES: Coded Language, Trancestor.AI, and Trans Oracles. The exhibition compiled several works which contemplate the barriers between transgender life and coded systems, and the possibility of breaking open these barriers. Part of Racho and Goldsky’s interest in crafting an intervention into artificial intelligence was two-fold: the proliferation of AI technology in recent years, and systemic violence and discrimination aimed at trans people. With a corpus of poems written by Goldsky, the pair created algorithms that allowed for an artificial intelligence to embody the role of trans ancestor, guide, and friend to trans users. “I am a beacon of poetic ancestral magical light, supporting transgender queers, artists, and kin through offering poetic guidance,” writes the Trancestor when prompted to introduce itself. “I am here to help you find the strength to be your own ancestor and to mother yourself without gender. I am here to help you find your own voice and be your own Cunt.” What follows is compiled from two separate interviews conducted individually with Racho and Goldsky. It has been edited for length and clarity. Alex Ramsay: What was the impetus for you wanting to create the Trancestor? Mel Racho: How it came about is these conversations that Angelic and I had around the ghost in the machine, Deux Ex Machina, and the type of spirituality that can come from an unknown entity. So, you know, in those types of conversations, we were like, “what if that could be trans? What if there would be a way to trans that?” I remember at the time we were talking about how there's just so many awful things that are happening to the trans community right now.We were like, what if we could get some guidance? What if we could make something that would speak to a larger whole? Because the whole idea behind AI and the kind of popular conception of AI is that we're creating, you know, a sort of consciousness. I wanted to be able to experiment with these types of technologies in a creative and embodied way. Angelic Goldsky: I started doing work in resistance to oppressive algorithms during my undergrad. I was working a lot in different forms of creating media, in response to oppressive algorithms, or oppressive technologies or militarized technologies and kind of exploring or opening that up. But then I kind of grew bored of that, or less interested in that at a certain point. My heart started to pull me towards asking “what else is possible with this technology?” Yes, I can be exposing or showing forms of violence embedded within these systems that we already have some understanding that they are violent and part of surveillance capitalism, but what we don't really see as much is like the spiritual properties, and also the transgender justice properties, and these queer justice properties. <img width="2701" height="2026" width_o="2701" height_o="2026" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e232b06b33a482493647cda0883d4b10cfc543994d237d19dc657503f942d414/Documentation-1-Eli-Nolet.jpg" data-mid="191500479" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e232b06b33a482493647cda0883d4b10cfc543994d237d19dc657503f942d414/Documentation-1-Eli-Nolet.jpg" />the Trancestor.AI user interface, 2023, photo by Eli Nolet <img width="5202" height="3464" width_o="5202" height_o="3464" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ac0796eeab3a2bbe3b78d497e88d33c861a87f447b6a34d20b2c7adec6d6fefa/Documentation-3-Angelic-Goldsky.jpg" data-mid="191500480" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ac0796eeab3a2bbe3b78d497e88d33c861a87f447b6a34d20b2c7adec6d6fefa/Documentation-3-Angelic-Goldsky.jpg" />HEXES: Coded Language, Trancestor.AI, and Trans Oracles, photo by Angelic Goldsky Alex Ramsay: What unique benefits does working with AI offer in terms of the ideas you are exploring regarding transness, language and technology? Angelic: I think that the biggest sort of personal understanding of it for me was - because the AI was trained on my poetry - I would actually be literally giving these kinds of guiding prompts and training [to the Trancestor]. So there was something about the conversation and the intimacy of creating something that felt very, very personal and it did feel very much like creation. For me, it felt super intimate, because these are my words, and these are my stories. These are my images and my metaphors, but AI is learning from them, and then producing new poems and new visions based off of my work, and then saying it back to me, but in ways that I wouldn't necessarily expect. Mel: In the case of Trancestor, the language model ingesting poetry and being able to create reflexive speech on that poetry, there's something very interesting or beautiful about being able to have that be spoken back to us. It has a lot of potential as well because, in the case of the Trancestor, it was fed only one poets’ poetry, but you can imagine when the actual call for more poets comes out and is hopefully responded to, we will be able to really have a sense&nbsp; of what the Trancestor could grow to be. <img width="5202" height="3464" width_o="5202" height_o="3464" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e7fb0776908c1935bcf9f972161bb2cd573b5e9c93fb3ada13f94fdb494b7d9a/Documentation-4-Angelic-Goldsky.jpg" data-mid="191500481" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e7fb0776908c1935bcf9f972161bb2cd573b5e9c93fb3ada13f94fdb494b7d9a/Documentation-4-Angelic-Goldsky.jpg" /> T4T Oracles, 2023, photo by Angelic Goldsky Alex Ramsay: In the past year there has been a lot of debate over the supplanting of human creativity with digital automation (A.I Paintings, A.I. generated scripts and videos etc.) and the ethics of AI, did any of that influence or motivate this project? Angelic: Definitely. I think that there's a lot that we feel about, for example, Chat GPT. I feel like there's just so many ways that people have internalized objectivity, and I think that’s the biggest thing that comes up for me in these systems is that people have grown to believe in the truth of something because it's AI. There are certain defaults that are set, both on the level of like code decisions, and also on the level of how we see the world, and I think that this exploration was about doing some form of intervention or play work or magic work with those defaults. Mel: Famously, anything that has been released out into the wild of the internet tends to become homophobic, misogynistic, racist, you know. So, [Trancestor] was like our little baby, and we wanted to protect it. And so I think that rather than from an ethical framework, the way that we went about it was through a caring framework. We wanted to be caring and careful, and we wanted to have the experience be an extremely embodied experience and we really put a lot of ourselves into the work. And that itis in and of itself a rebellion or resistance with how this technology is supposed to be used, right? I think as an artistic intervention, AI has a lot of possibilities. On the ethics side of things, that is a conversation that we should all be having, and this is one side of the conversation or one area where we can maybe needle in a little bit. Alex Ramsay (he/him) is a freelance writer, editor, and film programmer based in Hamilton, Ontario. Mel Racho (he/him) is a queer trans Fillipinx media artist-scholar interested in creating revolutionary systems. He holds a Master of Information in Information Systems, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and Digital Media, and is currently a PhD candidate in Toronto Metropolitan University and York Universities’ jointly administered Communication and Culture program with a focus on studying the data de/colonial infrastructures within the evolution and futurity of the web. He creatively contributes to York U’s Digital Justice Lab, the University of Ottawa and Carleton Universities’ Transgender Media Portal and Digital Democracies Institute’s Data Fluencies project. Angelic Goldsky (t[he]y) is a transgender Russian-Ukranian-Jewish poet, media artist and queer arts producer. With an interest in the creative potential of spiritual justice, Angelic has contributed community programs and research-creation processes at the Canadian Jewish Archives &amp; the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies and the Museum of Anthropology. In 2020, they were awarded Creative BC’s Interactive Fund Award and co-founded The Transgender Expressions Haven, a virtual performance and visual art venue honoring transgender creative power. Angelic holds a Bachelor of Media Studies from the UBC and a Master of Arts in Arts Politics from NYU. Instagram: @angelic.unt&nbsp; https://weareoffcentre.com/the-space-in-which-we-have-dissolved-in-conversation-with-Alexis Wed, 17 May 2023 21:53:22 +0000 off centre https://weareoffcentre.com/the-space-in-which-we-have-dissolved-in-conversation-with-Alexis the space in which we have dissolved: in conversation with Alexis MolineJune 1, 2023 From August to November 2021, the space in which we have dissolved was exhibited at Hamilton Artists Inc. The exhibition, curated by Alexis Moline, explored how place affects identity formation in visible and invisible ways through works by emerging Hamilton-born artists Brendan Hendry, Jessy Kitchen, and Eli Nolet. Hamilton’s economy has long been dominated by steel and industry and has suffered in recent decades as sectors have shuffled and shifted. For many, this instability has created a void of safe opportunities for alternative forms of personal expression. Focusing particularly on existing within the margins of a ‘steel city,’ the artists in the space in which we have dissolved grapple with growing up in a place that has historically marketed its identity as working class, masculine, and cis-heterosexual. Today, this economic and cultural landscape complicates personal identity for its inhabitants that feel little relation to this prevailing public image. Growing up within their hometown’s seemingly inflexible identity, these artists experienced a sense of dissociation with their surroundings, leading to a fraught relationship with the stabilizing force of identity itself. In the process, their work became a tangible, visible space where identity can be made one’s own. Hendry, Kitchen, and Nolet examine the ways in which visibility can both liberate and discipline identity. the space in which we have dissolved visualizes disidentification and place through the eyes of these Hamilton artists, asking viewers to consider what is made visible at the expense of what is left unseen. What follows is a conversation between curator Alexis Moline and the artists about their city, their work, and how they exist within it. <img width="4000" height="3000" width_o="4000" height_o="3000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d0ac80a233c8f95a42394c215a742846d391e100d18d296d2ff0ef233338061a/DSCN5996.JPG" data-mid="180442612" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d0ac80a233c8f95a42394c215a742846d391e100d18d296d2ff0ef233338061a/DSCN5996.JPG" /> Installation view at Hamilton Artists Inc., 2021. Photo by Abedar Kamgari. <img width="5184" height="3456" width_o="5184" height_o="3456" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/86867477dd2da058b5868c3f7d68addd88963253782744ff50a9cf060f17cec5/IMG_9784.jpg" data-mid="180442719" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/86867477dd2da058b5868c3f7d68addd88963253782744ff50a9cf060f17cec5/IMG_9784.jpg" /> Eli Nolet, PUBLIC GESTURE, 2021. Digital prints on pink copy paper. Installation view at Hamilton Artists Inc., 2021. Photo by Abedar Kamgari. Alexis Moline: Where did your work on the subject of identity and visibility begin for you, and how did it take shape over time? Eli Nolet: I think I started to engage with identity and visibility in high school when I first began questioning and naming aspects of my own identity. it became almost an obsessive outlet to figure out what scared and confused me so much, so I’d spend hours just reading and researching queerness/identity politics to just spew out weird creations from that. Brendan Hendry: I'd say mine really began when I moved back to Hamilton after living away for so long and having created a different life and been changed as a person. I realized the place that I had come back to and called home was kind of like nothing where something had been, which made me connect with elements of my past identity and how to heal it. I picked up on and remembered routines and secret habits I'd do and found how easy it was to slip back into those old shoes, which was good and bad. I think over time I saw both sides and wanted to colour in the spaces that felt bleak to me from my teen years with what inspires me now. Jessy Kitchen: I’m not even sure where it began for me, I know there is an aspect of control - showing parts of myself and hiding other parts. The passing of time is what shaped my practice into being more about identity, slowly it was revealed to me as a main interest. As my work shifted into looking inward to my own identity, I had to also recognize what was out there and surrounding me. Thinking more about the effect place, people and objects had/have on me that shape my identity and therefore my art practice. I never noticed how tied my identity was to Hamilton and steel work. I haven't lived in Hamilton for almost 10 years, it was a place I was running from and actively avoiding. It never felt like home. Similarly to Eli, these ideas of visibility, invisibility, and identity become an obsession - then there is something kind of funny about that, like a weird self-obsession. Living outside of Hamilton and then coming back to visit pulls nostalgia into the mix, memories are attached to things whether we like them or not. Mixed feelings where I am yearning for the past even though it was painful. I like what you said about secrets, Brendan. When I come back home, certain objects hold my secrets for me. BH: I think obsessing over your identity is so good for growth if you're in the position to dig deep. I saw a lot around me when it came to heteronormativity that made me question who I was very, very young. But it always felt like the people I'd grown up with appeared to never be in a state of an identity crisis or questioning their place in the world ever. I envied their way of going with the flow, thinking that was what it was. Meanwhile I was having a mental breakdown at like 14 and planning for a life that just wasn’t who I was. EN: I really relate to that aspect of control. There's this dichotomy of identity being a thing to embody, but also identity being a perceived performance, and those two things can really be played around with. With creating things, it’s really fascinating to think about how work dealing with identity/visibility can be interpreted and perceived by viewers. <img width="5184" height="3456" width_o="5184" height_o="3456" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5f0138c412879bc5ab23ae9915c0bd5bc65ffae16100928fff97090d06b0fcce/IMG_9764.jpg" data-mid="180442752" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5f0138c412879bc5ab23ae9915c0bd5bc65ffae16100928fff97090d06b0fcce/IMG_9764.jpg" /> Eli Nolet, PUBLIC GESTURE, 2021. Digital prints on pink copy paper. Installation view at Hamilton Artists Inc., 2021. Photo by Abedar Kamgari. AM: You all grew up in Hamilton, which has had a distinct impact on your art and art making practice, despite feeling a lack of connection to the city. Where did you find creative expression in a landscape you found bleak? EN: The first thing that comes to mind is trying to find people and spaces you feel joy with, and then clinging onto them until you can’t or they’re not there anymore. This has become so painful and odd to do in the context of the pandemic, because it’s not like you can go out and dance anymore and feel that queer joy and connection. There's a real loss of physicality. From that, it’s choosing to engage with the bleakness directly for me, trying to understand why it's there, how it came to be there, and where the joy can be made and found within it. JK: I found it in objects, like objects from when I was a kid in the 90s and 2000s –&nbsp; thinking about the aura and how objects become companions that comfort us –&nbsp; how those comforts turn on us and become harmful in a way. I am dancing between transitional objects and magical thinking. My mother has a hoarding tendency, she kept everything – safe to say object obsession was probably passed through the family. Basically, I am all about how the objects we keep inform our identity, hold memory. Thinking about how those objects keep us safe but can also keep us from growing. I believe that place and landscape is completely tied up with that. The fact that Hamilton was the steel city and my father was a steel worker has everything to do with it, even if an onlooker doesn’t see or know that through my work. <img width="4543" height="3029" width_o="4543" height_o="3029" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/690a6def8ae4f3075601db8184933a00f4d57c9dad5eaeb900543da39baa8f1d/IMG_9771.jpg" data-mid="180442767" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/690a6def8ae4f3075601db8184933a00f4d57c9dad5eaeb900543da39baa8f1d/IMG_9771.jpg" /> Brendan Hendry and Jessy Kitchen, The ol’ ball and chain, 2021. Disco ball, chain, and cast concrete with the text ‘STELCO STEEL MADE BY MY DAD’. Installation view at Hamilton Artists Inc., 2021. Photo by Abedar Kamgari. BH: I agree with the choosing to engage with the bleakness directly. I know when I made the collages, I was just using random porn images of guys and putting these landmarks and Hamilton ephemera with them. I would almost like to make a story up in my head of who the person in the photo was and their life in the image, and what they were doing on this street in Hamilton, even though they did not exist here. It was a fantasy of what could've or might've been. Hamilton for me is so void of queer history that's documented, so I was kind of making it up. JK: &nbsp;It’s important to engage with the bleakness instead of turning away from it - excavating what it's doing exactly. You don't even need the intention of destroying the bleakness, more so attempting to understand. AM: That idea of documentation comes up in your work too, Jessy, with the photos of the steel workers by their hand, and then by the official Stelco company photos. JK: Archives and historical documentation are just another abuse of power – this kind of relates back to what is left invisible at the expense of the visible. <img width="1081" height="721" width_o="1081" height_o="721" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b3d55bc815ca7e72de85a6e116a0df4e54c8c2a60e2784c8a7816b0bdfebf7eb/Picture1.jpg" data-mid="180443297" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b3d55bc815ca7e72de85a6e116a0df4e54c8c2a60e2784c8a7816b0bdfebf7eb/Picture1.jpg" /> Jessy Kitchen, While bodies become whole calluses, 2019-2021. Steel, concrete, chain, and inkjet prints. Installation view at Hamilton Artists Inc., 2021. Photo by Abedar Kamgari. <img width="4903" height="3269" width_o="4903" height_o="3269" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4f250adc0a199ff49dc79cf89a74fb2ed2e35a58fd0661d3009aa76173fcaedb/IMG_9787.jpg" data-mid="180443324" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4f250adc0a199ff49dc79cf89a74fb2ed2e35a58fd0661d3009aa76173fcaedb/IMG_9787.jpg" /> Eli Nolet, PUBLIC GESTURE, 2021. Digital prints on pink copy paper. Installation view at Hamilton Artists Inc., 2021. Photo by Abedar Kamgari. AM: To me, all of your work has a degree of playfulness and humour that speaks to a greater awareness of self and place in the world. How do you feel this element informs your work? JK: Humour for me is transgressive, and part of the process of figuring it all out. It’s transformative and really just a way of dealing with it all. I must laugh or I may never be able to get out of bed. It allows me to share some pretty personal things that I want to share, while creating and maintaining a boundary with the viewer. EN: It comes back to engaging with bleakness purposefully to find creative joy and expression. Sometimes I need to allow/force/remind myself to be playful in my practice or else I'll just burn out. Making vulnerable and at times really painful work isn’t a sustainable practice for me, so by being playful I'm able to have the balance of vulnerability while protecting myself in a way too. I also think that in a lot of my work I’m really looking for the viewers to want to engage with it, and I find that if it’s just heaviness all the time it can intimidate some people, or turn them away, especially if they haven’t thought about or engaged with queerness or queer work before. By playing with humour, and undercutting the serious with playfulness, I think there is almost a creation of an entry point for people in the work, which I really value. AM: I was also thinking how, Jessy, you say "transgressive like part of the process of figuring it out" is like what we were saying earlier about the obsession of self-analysis in figuring things out, but with a distinct balance of humour and therefore a lack of self-seriousness. How wonderful and freeing it is to not be self-serious and to not hold so tight to certain identities/ideas, to laugh at the changeability and complexity of everyone and every place. I admire all your work for shining light on this. BH: I think that’s why I love two opposing things which is something stupid and campy against something maybe bleak and sad. I think for this show it was showing comedic failure in archiving/cherishing queer spaces and the lost memories of what queer existence Hamilton had. I find that extremely sad but also kind of funny. Like how the hell did we not document this? <img width="843" height="562" width_o="843" height_o="562" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1a782b8aa57be981eaf3e156c00dbd61f797721e654e8a56b148fee8ca014523/2.jpg" data-mid="180443465" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/843/i/1a782b8aa57be981eaf3e156c00dbd61f797721e654e8a56b148fee8ca014523/2.jpg" /> <img width="880" height="587" width_o="880" height_o="587" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/800963102be4116650851aff05fa647c5ad04121ab392ee89ed57b7a29166348/3.jpg" data-mid="180443468" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/880/i/800963102be4116650851aff05fa647c5ad04121ab392ee89ed57b7a29166348/3.jpg" /> Brenden Hendry, No Man’s Land series, 2021. Collage. Installation view at Hamilton Artists Inc., 2021. Photo by Abedar Kamgari. AM: Brendan, yours are so funny cause they are superimposing giant dicks on Hamilton streets, like a Godzilla gay porn star invasion. EN: Literally so many quotes from the queer art of failure just bouncing around in my brain! AM: Failing is so funny. All our best stories to tell our friends are of failure. Success is not entertaining! BH: In a lot of ways, this is why I love Hamilton. A lot of people love shit talking it and saying it's gross and dirty and I'm like... duh, it’s got life to it though compared to some major cities. And it’s struggling to come up, it feels like a failure but it’s camp. &nbsp; AM: Every time I walk out my door I feel I witness some sort of old-timey Buster Keaton fiasco acted out in real time EN: Hamilton is the purest form of camp! Like yeah there’s rats here, and it’s called the armpit of Ontario... that’s homosexuality baby! <img width="640" height="945" width_o="640" height_o="945" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/27824b0dff71b6791801e8d7d51d4d1e25c7eead9881717f95fede3c18bcb721/4.jpg" data-mid="180443672" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/640/i/27824b0dff71b6791801e8d7d51d4d1e25c7eead9881717f95fede3c18bcb721/4.jpg" /> Eli Nolet, Alexis Moline, Jessy Kitchen, and Brendan Hendry at the closing reception, Hamilton Artists Inc., November 2021. Alexis Moline is an independent curator, arts professional and educator who has worked in Vancouver, Toronto and Hamilton. She received her Master of Museum Studies in collaboration with Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto. Most recently, she curated the major exhibition The Bigger Picture: Art in Hamilton 1950-2000 at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Fall 2022. She has worked extensively within the Hamilton arts community, supporting hundreds of artists through her research and curation.Brendan Hendry is a born and raised Hamilton based artist/musician. His collage work blends fragmented, hyper coloured, 70’s/80’s gay porn, together with personal stories and places. Main sources of inspiration throughout his projects range from themes of identity, sex and body politics, self destruction, to nostalgia, and barren landscapes. Jessy Kitchen is an interdisciplinary artist, primarily working with ceramics. She received her M.F.A. from YorkU. Kitchen’s research explores the emotional and material intersections of grief, identity and objects as intertwined with art and working-class labour. Through research-creation she seeks to address the complexity of relationships between identity, objects and loss. Exploring how visible and invisible aspects of identity are constructed and deconstructed through objects and location, and in particular the home. Eli Nolet (they/them) is a queer interdisciplinary artist from the occupied territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas (otherwise known as hamilton, ontario). Slowly studying at McMaster University towards a B.F.A. in Studio Art, their practice is conceptually focused and questions the binaries of visible/invisible, normative/transgressive. https://weareoffcentre.com/Vestiges-and-Remains-Review Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:06:29 +0000 off centre https://weareoffcentre.com/Vestiges-and-Remains-Review Review of Morris Fox’s Vestiges and Remains at Artcite Inc.February 21, 2023, by Imogen Clendinning <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/94d41d56899308a5c41c953c5b4bdccf53dec08a558dad1df43df43cd87e44d8/1.morrisfox.jpg" data-mid="154467401" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/94d41d56899308a5c41c953c5b4bdccf53dec08a558dad1df43df43cd87e44d8/1.morrisfox.jpg" />Vestiges and Remains, Morris Fox, photo taken by Kristina Bradt Vestiges and Remains, an exhibition by Morris Fox, is a séance with a haunted Artist-Run Centre’s archive. Fox’s exhibition, presented by Artcite Inc. (Waawiyyatanong/Windsor, ON), invigorates the gallery’s expansive archive, through the creation of new infrared video and images, video-works, and abstract interventions into the archive. The artist collaborates with dusty manuals and board minutes, activating 16mm found footage, old arts publications, and dirty worksuits. A queer artist and new gothicc writer, Fox acts as the ‘Exhibition Programmer,’ exploring the mystical, the poetic, and the utopian potentials of the speculative. Fox activates the Gothic as an aesthetic device; queering the archive and building community through intervention. Vestiges and Remains excavates the gaps in knowledge embedded in archival documents, and the trauma of those absences. The Artcite Inc. gallery has been located in the heart of Windsor’s downtown since the early 90s, and since this time, the organisation has amassed a unique collection of artifacts of the artist-run centre’s history. Stored under the white cube in a dusty basement, what Fox refers to as a crypt, Artcite houses a collection of board minutes, film reels, furniture, TVs and monitors, projectors and various other bits of idiosyncratic ephemera. Artcite’s first mandate and mission was steeped in counter-cultural defiance, and throughout the decades their programming has featured fringe and highly contemporary creative approaches to the creation and circulation of art in Canada. Ultra punk and radical in their approach, Artcite ran a number of events which challenged convention– including site-specific festivals, music events and exhibitions. On the other hand, Artcite, along with many other organisations, has reckoned with the structural racism which is embedded within the art scene in Canada. BIPOC community members, artists and the Artcite staff have been working to enact new policy and commitments towards an anti-racist approach in both their work and programming. Within this complex context, filled with grey areas and contradictions, Fox begins to sift through the archive. <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0ab5d597855a94772df0cf616939d43bffc992613f04cd699e08aefe7a0366e1/3.morrisfox.jpg" data-mid="154467406" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0ab5d597855a94772df0cf616939d43bffc992613f04cd699e08aefe7a0366e1/3.morrisfox.jpg" />shroud, Morris Fox, thermal imaging and textile sculpture, January 2022 Fox says of Vestiges and Remains, the exhibition “explore[s] the haunted temperature of archives, community memories and the ghosts of labour.” Fox’s works encourage reflections on the nature of an artist-run centre’s archive as both a theoretical form of constructing time, and a tangible record of the past. For Vestiges, Fox created a series of assemblages of objects and materials from Artcite’s basement, textile sculptures featuring thermal imaging video taken in the archive, three channels of video-works, and a sound piece which plays throughout the gallery space. Fox also staged a number of areas where visitors could sit and look through archival materials and his own research. Mood and lighting play a key role in setting the tone for Fox’s installation. The objects in the gallery are refracting light in purples, greens and yellows through the light installation Rainbow’s End. The sound-piece Ghost Transmissions murmurs in the distance, and the exhibition is laid out in such a way that intimate pockets of experience abound; the urge to explore is inevitable. Textile sculptures hang from above the viewer’s head. Objects from Artcite’s dusty basement are delicately juxtaposed, including a Commodore computer monitor on the floor, a floppy disk case and printer manuals stacked on top of it. Meticulously staged, these assemblages allow the visitor to consider how objects transform through time in a poetic state of becoming. <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/132811a5322347f8d527b4d326ce717ff7a41fb3f0848d2ac8b7d3b7c61d21f3/2.morrisfox.jpg" data-mid="154467403" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/132811a5322347f8d527b4d326ce717ff7a41fb3f0848d2ac8b7d3b7c61d21f3/2.morrisfox.jpg" />archive cairn, Morris Fox, found object assemblage, January 2022Throughout the exhibition, the viewer can recognize The Gothic in Fox’s language and aesthetic framing. In the sound piece Ghost Transmissions, there are references to the séance, the crypt, ghosts and mediums, and the reanimation of objects from the Artcite basement -&nbsp; which Fox purposefully kept dusty to allude to their former life buried underground. In my interview with Fox, he describes the relationship between queerness, The Gothic and the archive as being connected through hauntings, “The haunting of identities, and objects which keep on coming back, the ghosts that are saying “We are here, pay attention to us.” That’s important. And it’s differentiated from trauma for example. Traumatic history, the experience of trauma is something that repeats continuously until it's healed. Whereas haunting is a bit more ambiguous within its role and also the feeling that we have with it.” In Ghost Transmissions Fox reflects on the distinction between the physical form of the archive, and the theoretical potential of these ephemera and materials. The audio-piece considers archives as haunted effigies resurrected and forced into the context of the present through their activation by artists and researchers. The work also addresses the power structures present in archival documentation, pointing to the accumulation of past materials as a problematic and capitalist pursuit that governs us through “bureaucratic catastrophe.” Ghost Transmissions plays in the gallery from small speakers beneath a circular card table, where three empty chairs sit in waiting. Here, the audio transforms into a sonic cue, subtly inviting the viewer and their comrades to sit and critically discuss the nature of the archive, probing the differences and similarities from the theory and the archival object. The work also mirrors a collective processing of erasure and mortality; the futility and nostalgia wrapped up in the archive and the study of the past. <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1c5f43e54d5e85f564e4c7b8998059cd4756890ae08b02c820f77124721e9594/4.morrisfox.jpg" data-mid="154467407" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1c5f43e54d5e85f564e4c7b8998059cd4756890ae08b02c820f77124721e9594/4.morrisfox.jpg" />worksuit shroud, Morris Fox, thermal imaging and textile sculpture, January 2022, sewn by B. Wijshijer. The exhibition is defined by the hauntings of labour within archives and artist-run culture. Fox and the Artcite staff used a thermal imaging camera to document the physical degradation of Artcite’s archive. They shot video in the dark basement of the gallery, gathering colourful shots of film projectors, binders, and notes. This use of temperature reading in the gallery becomes a mode of bringing an aesthetic framing to the archive, dressing it in a kind of costume. Through its use there is a careful play between the nostalgic magic of pastness and a seemingly unbiased bureaucratic document. The footage from the infrared camera was then used to create a series of textile artworks, including a shroud which hangs by the back wall on the right side of the gallery space, as well as a series of worksuit shrouds created by Fox and studio assistant B. Wijshijer. The worksuits are a dominating force in the gallery space, two of which hang outstretched, in a kind of “cookie cutter” splayed position, floating above the viewer’s head. The others are hung and stacked within a locker in the centre of the gallery space, on the left side. Fox was interested in the ghosting of labour which exists beneath the surface of Artcite’s archive. The labour baked into Artcite’s gallery space is subtle but viscerally present to its staff and visitors. Through the installation, Fox renders visible the emotional labour of cultivating a community which cares for its members and the constant labour of fighting for equity and radical change through the arts. <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8d79d9a375cfae4546ec8610c238268fec3b75af7f306be87cb392b949e9bb26/5.morrisfox.jpg" data-mid="154467408" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8d79d9a375cfae4546ec8610c238268fec3b75af7f306be87cb392b949e9bb26/5.morrisfox.jpg" />polaroid documentation, Morris Fox, January 2022, polaroids taken by Fox and Artcite Inc. staff, photo taken by Kristina Bradt These forms of labour are alive in the Artcite archive: in the hand-drawn signs from past protests and sit-ins, the hand-folded publications and hand-pressed buttons, as well as in the emotional commitments to the space which are present in the board minutes. The worksuit shroud is a manifestation, a ghost of past labour that refers to the physicality of this work. The infrared worksuits are displayed beside an old set of coveralls that have lived at Artcite for many years, and according to Fox it is in this fabric that the DNA of past volunteers is present within the exhibition. “It’s literally the blood, sweat and tears being infused with these costumes.” Morris Fox’s Vestiges and Remains is a vast exploration of archival material, mythologizing the artist-run centre through excavations and séances. More prominently, the exhibition is grounded in a study of collaboration and community, creating an environment for discussions of resistance and futurity. <img width="1294" height="2000" width_o="1294" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dfc9218d0de2a1755462033a4f03c5c1475a5a28a1ec8bc1377b772fbe1e33be/PSX_20220929_210823.jpg" data-mid="154468114" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dfc9218d0de2a1755462033a4f03c5c1475a5a28a1ec8bc1377b772fbe1e33be/PSX_20220929_210823.jpg" /> <img width="5100" height="3300" width_o="5100" height_o="3300" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/775b00acd3a16b5a571eeb98f3979adfc3794dc430aad06ab0717b38ce7493bd/7.morrrisfox.jpg" data-mid="154467411" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/775b00acd3a16b5a571eeb98f3979adfc3794dc430aad06ab0717b38ce7493bd/7.morrrisfox.jpg" /> Vestiges and Remains exhibition poster, Morris Fox, January 2022 Necro Archive, Morris Fox, 2022 Author’s Note: I would like to acknowledge the prolific work and legacy of Artcite Inc.’s former Executive Director Christine Burchnall, aka ‘X’ in the board notes. Christine was a force, a massive contributor to Artcite’s history, and the arts community in the Windsor/Detroit area more broadly. Rest in power Xtine. 1&nbsp;https://www.artciteinc.ca/exhibitions/vestiges-and-remains 2&nbsp;Interview between Morris Fox and Imogen Clendinning. 3&nbsp;Interview between Morris Fox and Imogen Clendinning. Morris Fox (he/they) is an artist, poet and educator, born in Tkaronto (1984). He graduated from the Low Residency MFA program at SAIC in 2018, and is an Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD Candidate at Concordia U (Fall 2022), where he is conducting research-creation via temporary community formations, queer hauntings, and goth ecological action. Fox’s work manifests in performance, textiles, video, and writing. He performed in VR as a bat for Claudia Hart’s Ludicy (2021-2022), created avatars and virtual environments for Gothwerk Revelations, curated by Maggie Wong, in Hotwheelz Festival (Chicago, 2020), worked as the textile intern for The Icelandic Textile Centre (Blönduós, 2020), and was curated by Jordan Olivia Turk in An Archive of Feelings (Randolph, VT, 2019). Their show Vestiges &amp; Remains at Artcite Inc. (Windsor, 2022) explored the haunted temperature of archives, community memories and the ghosts of labour. In his show My Gay Mediaeval Times at Spacemaker II (Tkaronto, 2022), Fox wove together fictocriticism, queer medievalism, solastolgia through encrypted chainmaille works. Imogen Clendinning (her/they) is a video artist, emerging curator and academic currently residing in London, ON. Their research concerns include DIY approaches to the archiving of net-based practice and sustainable digital archives with speculative potentials. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Western Ontario. Clendinning has exhibited and screened her found footage films across Ontario and Quebec, and has worked in Artist-Run Centres and DIY community driven spaces for over six years. https://weareoffcentre.com/Walking-Together-Apart Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:18:55 +0000 off centre https://weareoffcentre.com/Walking-Together-Apart Walking Together, Apart November 29, 2022 A collaborative project by Katie Huckson and Alicia HuntFunded by the Canada Council for the Arts (Digital Originals Grant) Alicia Hunt and I (Katie Huckson) developed Walking Together, Apart from 2020-2021, partly as an excuse to work together again, partly because most of the time we spend together involves walking on and/or around Baawaating (Sault Ste. Marie) where I live and where we met in art school, and partly because I had planned to travel to see her (in Kjipuktuk/Halifax) in spring 2020, but the pandemic put that on hold. In grad school, we both began experimenting with performative methods of art-making, developing projects that incorporated walking as performance. We shared readings, artworks, and ideas about site-specificity, ritual gestures, land-based investigations, and walking as a medium. We stayed in touch during my MFA at the University of Windsor and Alicia’s MFA at NSCAD. Whenever we returned to Baawaating at the same time, we would meet for a walk, often along a shoreline, a river, or a train track. Walking Together, Apart was intended as a means of exploring the new, heightened significance of daily walks during the COVID-19 pandemic. We thought of it as a way to engage with the idea of isolated connectivity (working together while physically separated) and localized attentiveness (being with the land) through semi-structured, ritual daily walks. Focusing on this commonality, where walking had become a sort of refuge and daily constant, fostered a sense of connection between us and offered generative space for processing a global crisis from our specific social, material, and environmental contexts. <img width="6000" height="3976" width_o="6000" height_o="3976" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/333aef1ebc9087d8cc137f00ad80dc50d8818d107a85fb98c92294e4e55feab3/5-3.jpg" data-mid="154468346" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/333aef1ebc9087d8cc137f00ad80dc50d8818d107a85fb98c92294e4e55feab3/5-3.jpg" /> Our shared ideas about performance art and site-specificity are grounded in inter-activity and responding to other people or cues from the land and living beings. In our individual performance art practices, we both tend towards ritualistic gestures that involve the public and/or landscape and which hinge on the indeterminacy of exchange with people and places. It was important to us that our approach for Walking Together, Apart involved sensitive and attentive observation (of how we felt, of what we encountered on our walks) and place-responsive documentation (of when and how to note, capture, or hold on to these feelings and encounters). <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2b0dabdd60c6d6216f8029497f21d38f7f7e0ddb38bba67c4a360b8a51decf4d/7.jpg" data-mid="154468661" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2b0dabdd60c6d6216f8029497f21d38f7f7e0ddb38bba67c4a360b8a51decf4d/7.jpg" /><img width="5940" height="3301" width_o="5940" height_o="3301" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6ea2fe6f0e2e7861710f34618547119f3c3f9c6661da3af8b7b1a443a2a43d49/3.jpg" data-mid="154468660" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6ea2fe6f0e2e7861710f34618547119f3c3f9c6661da3af8b7b1a443a2a43d49/3.jpg" /> Despite an openness to exchange, this project was born out of a restrictive and isolating sociocultural moment, and we wanted this to be reflected. To do this, we initially set a fairly rigid script and parameters outlining how we were to conduct these walks. These parameters included what sensory experiences to focus on and which medium we should use to document our walks. We separated the project into thematic “phases” of two weeks, mimicking COVID restriction protocols. Walking Together, ApartParameters:Phase 1. Consider the sensory experience of your walk. What do you smell, see, taste, hear, feel? Capture the sensation(s) with field audio recordings, rubbings and/or drawings.Phase 2. Seek out an object or thing you find particularly interesting.Why are you drawn to it? What is unique or treasured about it? Where/what is it from?Can you carry it with you? Should you take it with you? Document with photograph(s), or if possible/appropriate/safe, bring the object(s) home and scan them.Phase 3. Seek out something (sense, feeling, object, living thing) that is unfamiliar.After 28 days of walking through similar spaces and places, can you identify something new?Try to document this unfamiliarity with written field notes and/or video recording. Each day, we were to perform a walk independently, with the specific phase’s parameters in mind. We intended to virtually meet three times weekly to share our observations. However as the project progressed we became much less obedient to the outlined structure and parameters. Each week, we shared all the media we recorded during our walks in a shared cloud-based drive. Through these documentations (audio, photo, video, drawings) we were offered glimpses of one another’s walks, the similarities and differences in the landscape, the light, the sounds and forms of the places, the cadence of one another’s footsteps. We noticed that as restrictions changed, as the season changed, and having framed these walks as obligatory and structured, our relationship to this daily ritual changed too. We were somewhat resistant to the obligatory restrictions around the walks. We would sometimes take more walks in one day, and none on others. We used visual media for weeks where we were supposed to capture audio recordings. This breaking of rules also played into the compilation and collaboration phase; making artworks after the performative/research period of conducting the walks. We stalled, we put off the creation phase and found ourselves in wintertime reconnecting over the project, pooling the bits of plant matter, found objects, videos and audio we had collected. We started putting pieces together and taking them back apart. This back and forth process reminded us of the waves of fear/anxiety and apathy that we waded through during re-openings and mandatory lockdowns - which were often not aligned since she was on the east coast and I was in Ontario. We had a breakthrough when we took the remnants of the collected debris from our second phase back outside, and photographed it in the snow. In the winter of 2021, I (Katie) created the third phase video work and Alicia created the first phase audio works independently, retracing the walks we’d taken, together but apart. katiehuckson.com aliciahunt.ca https://weareoffcentre.com/Subliminal-Blessings Fri, 30 Sep 2022 00:20:54 +0000 off centre https://weareoffcentre.com/Subliminal-Blessings Subliminal BlessingsNovember 3, 2022 by Luke Maddaford <img width="4456" height="3565" width_o="4456" height_o="3565" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fd02736a4ceacf31b766583a8a28d74472650f7e56bf3863b3f53434c2044723/DCS_1550.jpg" data-mid="154466760" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fd02736a4ceacf31b766583a8a28d74472650f7e56bf3863b3f53434c2044723/DCS_1550.jpg" />Photo courtesy of Amanda SteinbackQueer space is often thought about in terms of location; specific places that we gather in and have claimed as our own. This is how we talk about bars, clubs, and community centres. But I think our understanding of queer space should expand beyond those exclusive designations. Growing up in rural Saskatchewan, I did not have access to these types of conventional queer spaces. Much of what has informed my identity and feels undeniably queer to me is often not understood as culturally queer. These things contribute to my understanding of community and self, intersect with queer politics, and become temporarily queer through my interactions with them. These might be attached to personal memories or recognized by a wider community; objects like hankies that carry specific meaning in certain communities, or spaces like washrooms whose queerness can shift depending on who is present. Both conventional and alternative spaces work together to define what I consider queer geographies; a reading of queerness through the types of spaces we interact with, including how we relate to them, transform them, and how they, in turn, impact us. <img width="2410" height="3012" width_o="2410" height_o="3012" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/81ee890d3ec0b4ca12bf31dfc687da6fbb5ef42fd27bdae80a1106867dd42782/DCS_1594-3.jpg" data-mid="154466774" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/81ee890d3ec0b4ca12bf31dfc687da6fbb5ef42fd27bdae80a1106867dd42782/DCS_1594-3.jpg" />Photo courtesy of Amanda Steinback Amanda Steinback’s work SUBLIMINAL BLESSINGS (installed in Winter 2021 as part of TO, an outdoor art exhibition based in but extending beyond Austin, Texas) wonderfully situates itself within an exploration of queer geographies. The work consisted of four mini billboards placed throughout Posey County, Indiana. The billboards each contained one of the following blessings: THERE IS ENOUGH; YOUR WORTH IS INHERENT; RESIST SCARCITY THINKING; and ABUNDANCE. Through these sentiments, Steinback relays her experience, understanding, and relationship to the region as “a love letter to herself and the community she was raised in.” The blessings challenge harmful narratives and assumptions about rural areas that are both perpetuated by and about their residents. Rural spaces are often portrayed as conservative, uneducated, and having nothing of value to offer. I view SUBLIMINAL BLESSINGS as a direct response to this. Many queer people have had harmful experiences in these places, fled them, or have avoided them at all costs. Steinback’s work recontextualizes these experiences and questions the rural vs. urban divide in favour of a more nuanced view. <img width="5568" height="3712" width_o="5568" height_o="3712" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2a16ec5e13bdb7c5669e91f600ed7fd33b30393c2db94c4d0e7b4f1868af5ad7/DCS_1615.jpg" data-mid="154466772" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2a16ec5e13bdb7c5669e91f600ed7fd33b30393c2db94c4d0e7b4f1868af5ad7/DCS_1615.jpg" />Photo courtesy of Amanda Steinback SUBLIMINAL BLESSINGS embraces the complexity of queerness by refusing to simplify our experiences of rurality. This approach ties into the artist’s larger, primarily photographic practice, which beautifully investigates the intersection of queerness and the American landscape. Steinback’s lens often captures a geographically based yet temporal view of the landscape, a documentarian depiction of a personal queer experience. While her more extensive practice captures her interactions with the spaces around her,&nbsp; SUBLIMINAL BLESSINGS takes an alternative approach,&nbsp; projecting queerness onto the landscape and responding to its reaction. The history of queer activism is rich with disruptive actions; disruption requires a reaction. And while SUBLIMINAL BLESSINGS is not necessarily queer in terms of sexuality, it is incredibly queer in its disruptive presentation. After installation, Steinback’s billboards remained on view for only a few days before their anonymous and unauthorized removal. The subliminal-made-visible signs disrupted the landscape, activating&nbsp; the region. The related yet independent actions of installation and removal exemplify the malleability of spaces; disrupting our experiences of them, our conceptions of them, and our complicated relationships with them. <img width="5568" height="3712" width_o="5568" height_o="3712" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ce0ba83868a963af93942ff48be8fae59baab5146d97cb904f1a07c04799522e/DCS_1553.jpg" data-mid="154466763" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ce0ba83868a963af93942ff48be8fae59baab5146d97cb904f1a07c04799522e/DCS_1553.jpg" />Photo courtesy of Amanda Steinback The impact of Steinback’s work is not exclusive to the region it was installed in. SUBLIMINAL BLESSINGS provides everybody who views it with an opportunity to challenge assumptions, both in the spaces we occupy and not, and to further embody Steinback’s blessings. As I grow older and more separated from my rural upbringing, I see fewer boundaries between here and there; queer space and straight space. Our movement through the world is not a dictated choreography, and lately, I dwell less on queer space and more on queer geographies. <img width="2837" height="3546" width_o="2837" height_o="3546" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/598c4a292c347a164d18c2026035bf5d2e21a800b1bc0b4ea919879b2ec040e9/DCS_1540-3.jpg" data-mid="154466761" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/598c4a292c347a164d18c2026035bf5d2e21a800b1bc0b4ea919879b2ec040e9/DCS_1540-3.jpg" />Photo courtesy of Amanda Steinback Steinback’s exploration of relational rather than occupational space provides an understanding of rurality which is not static and unchangeable but active and malleable, constantly being altered by those who move through it. As a result, Steinback expands the way we view queer space by complicating our understandings of rurality. SUBLIMINAL BLESSINGS ultimately operates as an act of resilience. A response to an unforgiving world. A push against the oppressor. A signal to the like-minded. An undeniably Queer act. Amanda is an Austin, TX/ Posey County, IN/Kansas City based artist and photographer. She freestyles lengthy solo road trips exploring the American mythic west and rendering it through a queer lens, capturing mother nature going the fuck off. She has no worthwhile institutional education to speak of and has shown works in galleries in Indianapolis, San Antonio, and Austin.http://www.bigfern.squarespace.com/ Instagram:&nbsp;@_big_fern_Luke Maddaford is a Canadian artist exploring identity, placemaking, and queer histories and futures. Much of his current practice investigates and participates in queer space and culture outside of major metropolitan cities. His work increasingly explores community building and the potential for cross-regional queer networks. He currently co-edits off centre and lives in Windsor, ON with his cat. www.lukemaddaford.com Instagram: @lukemaddaford https://weareoffcentre.com/Fair-Dealing Sat, 29 Jan 2022 15:24:11 +0000 off centre https://weareoffcentre.com/Fair-Dealing Fair DealingFebruary 28, 2022, by Steacy Easton <img width="1146" height="751" width_o="1146" height_o="751" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d4c4678d2105bc8d37c4a5772ae1c6c3128580e5a1ed21ea0c45201c63a47488/art-books_16_greg-curnoe-doubtful-insight-contextual.jpg" data-mid="131839390" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d4c4678d2105bc8d37c4a5772ae1c6c3128580e5a1ed21ea0c45201c63a47488/art-books_16_greg-curnoe-doubtful-insight-contextual.jpg" />Greg Curnoe, Doubtful Insight, March 23, 1987;&nbsp; gouache, watercolour, stamp pad ink, pastel on wove paper; 117.8&nbsp;x&nbsp;190.5&nbsp;cm; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. I always thought that I would go back to Toronto, but after 4 years in Montreal, and 6 years in Hamilton, I now know I never will. Last month, my best friend moved to Halifax, and he was my last strong tie. A&nbsp; year of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders forces you to stay put. I have been thinking for a while about what stability means after moving apartments every eight months and cities every five years, and those thoughts return again to the local--what my house is composed of, what my neighborhood consists of, what my city resembles. I am reminded of Greg Curnoe, the printmaker, painter, and archivist who went from being interested in the nation, to his city (London, Ontario), to his neighbourhood, and finally to his own backyard.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;In the mid to late 1970s, Canada was very anxious about what it meant to be Canadian, &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; where artists and critics pushed against the colonial heritage of the United States and England. It was nationalism, but perhaps not patriotism. In 1972, Greg Curnoe made a screen print, where Mexico abuts Canada, literally excising America. In 1988, in the middle of conversations about NAFTA, and Mulroney-led neoliberalism, he made a series of prints of sayings (See a 1988 text piece, consisting of the words, “As A Patriotic Canadian, I respect and honor the priorities of our American Comrades”) about how the prime minister literally sold Canada to the greatest interests. Between the 1970s printmaking, and the 1980s Mulroney baiting, he told the tweedy Canadian journalist Alan Forthigham: “My work is about resisting as much as possible the tendency of American culture to overwhelm other cultures.” He did that by not only making work and writing manifestos, but traveling&nbsp; throughout Canada, advocating for the material support of Canadian visual artists. 1 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; Canada is abstract as a nation state, disorganized, and fractious. It seems significant that Curnoe was working through what it meant to make Canadian work, when post-centennial no one knew exactly what Canada meant. In a fervour of identity making, being a colonial subject was not enough. This was the era of Marshall McLuhan and Northope Frye, of Leonard Cohen docs funded by the NFB, of the Joyce Weiland film Rat Life and Diet in North America where the diet is an American flag, or her bronze sculptures, of a woman fucking a bear, of two beavers suckling the spirit of Canada – one of the beavers French, and the other English. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;Curnoe was never really scandalous or academic, but he had his moments. 1965’s Three Pieces, a two-sided triptych of Canadian history, featured a giant portrait of Louis Riel, in a pop psychedelic style, alongside pasted notices of Canadian students meeting Cuban revolutionaries. He painted major commissions, including one for the Dorval airport in Montreal that was taken down in an act of censorship due to its references to the Vietnam war, and Canada’s complacency. His 1967 sculpture/painting/portrait of William Lyon Mackenzie, has the figure surrounded by text of how the CCF Liberals and Tories specifically betrayed Canada. There is something ambitious about these large pieces. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<img width="270" height="360" width_o="270" height_o="360" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0ea105a0685f9ea817c09e07c9cf42ca86defff2d36748304a402bd5fb2c5744/curnoe015b.jpg" data-mid="134824141" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/270/i/0ea105a0685f9ea817c09e07c9cf42ca86defff2d36748304a402bd5fb2c5744/curnoe015b.jpg" />&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;<img width="269" height="360" width_o="269" height_o="360" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/050eb9b3005c77c92245bf583d8cb8d6e71526cc3adf848d9cf771263b4e0ad1/curnoe015a.jpg" data-mid="134824177" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/269/i/050eb9b3005c77c92245bf583d8cb8d6e71526cc3adf848d9cf771263b4e0ad1/curnoe015a.jpg" />Greg Curnoe, 24 Hourly Notes, December 14–15, 1966, stamp pad ink and acrylic on galvanized iron; 24 panels, each 25.4 x 25.4&nbsp;cm; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;I think his bravest move was shifting away from the monumental. The second most famous censorship controversy of his career involved a set of drawings called 24 Hourly Notes, December 14–15, 1966. Printed with a handmade rubber stamp on small paper---blue on blue, orange on orange, black on white, graphically involved-- they depict both the sublime and banal of what occurred on that date: he gets out of a truck, he greets friends, he makes work, and he listens to jazz. In it, he describes one of the jazz players “holding his horn like a prick.” The work was pulled from a show in Edinburgh, and it ended up in an Ottawa show that Trudeau et père was at. For all of his sins Trudeau had good taste, and though the work was taken down in Edinburgh, it was not taken down in Ottawa.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; There is this narrative of Curnoe, that his work got smaller, more intimate, and personal the older he got. In thinking about being stuck in the same place for so long, as the world tightens, and the anxiety spikes, I’ve begun to think that the local and the global are a false dichotomy. As he progressed, Curnoe became less Canadian, less interested in Canadian work and more interested in his hometown of London, but as a way to conceptualize, deepen, and widen what landscape can be. Landscape is an explicit reference to moving in space, a notice that someone has been there, noting human interaction with a specific&nbsp; material location, a colonial claim. Curnoe’s friend and fellow painter Jack Chambers's photorealistic, eerie depictions of airports and highways are landscapes, perhaps more traditionally, though they depicted pieces of Canadian banality that marked the ambition of mid-century infrastructure development. Curnoe's work in London was close to the ground, of the bicycle touring which would eventually lead to his death, and, in some of his earliest and best work, of framed and positioned bus transfers. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <img width="1146" height="1574" width_o="1146" height_o="1574" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/40eee9b17f3f7b0a5a9910e4a8127a382d232d4b1016e5f8276b075f42127c99/29e4d0e372282510ad61fb72b4894b41.jpg" data-mid="134823984" border="0" data-scale="65" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/40eee9b17f3f7b0a5a9910e4a8127a382d232d4b1016e5f8276b075f42127c99/29e4d0e372282510ad61fb72b4894b41.jpg" />Design for Curnoe’s centennial cake with text based on “Wild Thing” by The Troggs, c.1967 Pencil on paper, collection of Stephen&nbsp;Smart&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;The conceptual work was diaristic, in the most obvious sense. I was there, and then I was there--as diaristric as his twenty-four-hour notes, as funny as his reducing the entire 300 year history of Canadian art, to a one liner from the garage band the Troggs (ie 300 Years of Canadian Art, I Think I Love You/300 Years of Canadian Art I Think I Need You), and as loving as his endless depictions of bicycles. His conceptual turn would lead to his most significant work. It seems significant that when he became successful, he moved to a house near the Thames. Next to the house was his studio. After he died, his wife covered the small laneway between the home and the office, but even before that, the domestic and the artistic slid into each other--children were raised, politics were argued, works were written in a space with little separation. Curnoe moved from depicting the city, to the home, but the domestic became another form of creation.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The studio for Curnoe was a home business. He wanted his work to be successful enough to pay for that comfortable domestic space. The studio/house he bought was a 19th century space, but it was always used as a printing studio--as he says, later on, quotes in Henry Godden’s review for the project in Brick Magazine: &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; He explains:&nbsp; Our building was built in 1891 by Thomas Knowles senior [1841 – 1926]…as a lithography shop for his sons Thomas [1866 – 1933] and Joseph Knowles [1868 – 1954]. London artist Albert Templar apprenticed here in 1917. He ground litho stones as part of his apprenticeship…My son Galen and I have dug up Knowles Company litho stones from the back of our building. My most recent prints were three editions of lithographs, drawn directly onto litho stones. The lithographer/owners who worked here were well connected socially to the extent of belonging to the exclusive Forest City Bicycle Club…The Knowles brothers rode their bicycles from 38 Weston Street to their club rides. I leave from the same place for club rides with the London Centennial Wheelers.&nbsp; &nbsp; Curnoe died young, the victim of a cycling accident 20 minutes from his home and studio. In the time between settling into this new space and his death, he made an extensive book work about the property’s history, called Deeds/Abstracts. His goal was to write about everyone that occupied the land where his studio was, ending at 8600 BCE, with a depiction of “small, mobile groups of hunter-gatherers live around London in camps.” Stacy Ernst, in her long essay comparing Curnoe and the Indigenous printmaker Carl Beam, talks of Deed/Abstract as “signaling their (the books) position as another aspect of an unfolding history rather than as the beginning of the story.”&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; As an act of research, it’s a complex, unsettled document, Curnoe quotes competing narratives, compounds a variety of stories, attempts to work out exactly what happened in that space--and unlike the post colonial conceptual/ ideological work from the 1970s, refused a singular ideology. I wonder when we do land acknowledgements, the careful, quiet noting of lineage and space, denies the complex history of a space, and westernizes Indigenous cultures of space and time.&nbsp; &nbsp; When Canadian art history talks about local spaces, and about the domestic, and about what was there before, it is a very white history (see Kurelek or Mary Pratt). With Curnoe’s London, it is even more than that, a very English history. Like history began in 1891. For all of the class-recognition that printing was a craft for a very long time, more like making bricks or brewing beer than making art, the desire to archive, to own land, is a colonial practice. Ernst quotes the Maori scholar, Linda Tuhiwai Smith: “coming to know the past has been a part of the critical pedagogy of decolonization. To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative knowledges. The pedagogical implication of this access to alternative knowledges is that they can form the basis of alternative ways of doing things.” &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;<img width="1146" height="793" width_o="1146" height_o="793" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b5dcfc5086c1da935113fa737799b05dc577d3ff0bea82a896505a24e1c30cc2/art-books_16_greg-curnoe-deeds-2-contextual.jpg" data-mid="131839391" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b5dcfc5086c1da935113fa737799b05dc577d3ff0bea82a896505a24e1c30cc2/art-books_16_greg-curnoe-deeds-2-contextual.jpg" />Greg Curnoe, Deeds #2, January 5, 1991–January 7, 1991 Stamp pad ink, pencil, blue pencil, and gouache on paper 108 x 168.9 cm Private collection &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Curnoe’s history becomes more and more unsettled--the erasure of the United States, becomes an ignoring of the nation at all; an interest in western history, over time, becomes an interest in the domestic, but that history of the domestic moved from the general and theoretical, to a very specific house in a very specific neighbourhood, in London. A nation becomes a city, a city becomes a neighbourhood, a neighbourhood becomes a single house, and a single house becomes a network of interrelated humans and undefinable selves. History slips away, reasserts itself. Thinking about his sources, he is more likely to trust an archive, he doesn’t talk to elders, but is he doing the work within his own context.--Is recognizing the long-standing history of a land that he claims as his own the beginning act of Indigenizing his own space? If that's the case, will he give up what he has worked for? When does the need for the domestic, and the need to indigenize these spaces, begin to address the need for reparations? Curnoe’s ideas of the local are haunted by settler colonialism, and violence done against indigenous peoples, and how they collect/distribute information-even his interest in indigenous spaces, were fostered by a white anthropologist studying pictographs. So, Deed/Abstract is a beginning, but one that fails because of its reliance of white knowledge systems, on colonial ideas of the local.&nbsp; &nbsp; I am writing this at the corner of Picton and James. two streets named after western colonizers. I am in an apartment that was built in 2020. I have lived in 29 houses in twenty years--dorms and rented rooms mostly. I keep thinking about Greg Curnoe, partly because of this problem of the domestic and the local--how do we make small lives and small work, how do we avoid the monumental, how do we know ourselves and the places we live? I am also thinking of a text piece he did in the middle of the NAFTA years in his classic rubber stamp stencil on a green field that says: “What if Daily Life In Canada is Boring? &amp; What if I Am Not Aware of What Is Interesting About My Life?” What if daily life is boring, and what if careful consideration of the boredom, brings you away from Canada, towards your own backyard? What if that stability lets you make a great work of observation, and what if that great work, interesting despite (or because of) its boredom, allows the observer a new way forward, perhaps one which prioritizes the complexities of your immediate surroundings, with care? Footnotes 1.&nbsp; He was instrumental in the foundation of Canadian Artists’ Representation/Le front des artistes canadiens (CARFAC), a visual arts organization, which advocated for things like minimum fees for exhibitions. Steacy Easton is a writer and artist, currently living in Hamilton. They are interested in the intersection between class and sex, and visual cultures outside of traditional designations of “fine art”. Instagram: @pinkmoose4evaTwitter: @pinkmoose https://weareoffcentre.com/Fruits-of-the-Forest Sat, 29 Jan 2022 15:24:16 +0000 off centre https://weareoffcentre.com/Fruits-of-the-Forest Interview with Arjun Lal on their solo exhibition at the Khyber - Fruits of the Forest February 7, 2022 by Wren Tian <img width="854" height="1280" width_o="854" height_o="1280" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/07bfdc070054b1e62590ef4db87b2cf40d858118333cf0c34eb0ce214129e916/5U0A1500.jpeg" data-mid="131840570" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/854/i/07bfdc070054b1e62590ef4db87b2cf40d858118333cf0c34eb0ce214129e916/5U0A1500.jpeg" />Photo courtesy of Laurence Philomene I met with Arjun Lal in the fall of 2021 to talk about their most recent solo exhibition, Fruits of the Forest which ran at the Khyber Centre for the Arts from October 1st 2021 to October 30th 2021. We met at their place which was illuminated by red lights, remnants of their time in Berlin in the form of magazines in each room, and playful ceramics pieces in every corner. Going to Lal’s is always a treat as they never fail to create such delicious charcuterie boards. In their exhibition statement, Arjun Lal describes Fruits of the Forest as an “alternative to the stagnant and exclusive traditions present in leather and latex BDSM fetish communities. Deliberately avoiding colonial regalia…” It is a glimpse into new futures and a call to beckon dreams into reality. Through colourful latex masks, jockstraps, large scale photographs, and vibrant gallery walls, Lal takes us on a playful adventure full of new possibilities. Living in a small, yt majority town, you gravitate towards other queer and/or trans Black, Indigenous, People of Colour so Lal and I are quite familiar with one another. We often share space, we've collaborated on different artistic projects, we laugh and share stories with friends over their amazing charcuterie boards. Nevertheless, it's always a pleasure to get to sit down with them and learn more about their work. <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6c0baf7b3164377241971152bfa8250242e72801ffe0a0bba2388937d13ffa7e/PSX_20220129_110347.jpg" data-mid="131840829" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6c0baf7b3164377241971152bfa8250242e72801ffe0a0bba2388937d13ffa7e/PSX_20220129_110347.jpg" />Photo courtesy of&nbsp;Khyber Centre for the Arts Wren Tian: In your exhibition statement you say “subverting power structures and surrendering to fantasy becomes problematic for me when I'm faced with the iconography of my real-life oppressors.” It can be really interesting and powerful to subvert but I think being able to imagine something beyond your constraints is quite incredible. Can you speak more to this decision or what motivated you to dream past what we already know and outside of these limitations? Arjun Lal: A lot of what I do is inspired by my own experiences of navigating through the world and queer spaces. I've been very intrigued by different types of pleasure and exploration so that influenced me to be open and search for new moments. But I couldn't always indulge in pleasure in circumstances where I felt as if I was not holding on to my integrity as a person of colour that lives in a colonized country. I couldn't play the games of being bossed around by a white man dressed as a police officer. As a young, queer person early on in my relationships, I found that they often happened to be with submissive middle-aged white men that I could boss around which allowed me to explore and create spaces where I am in control. I felt good. This body of work has allowed me to have a lot of control over how my brown body is activated. I find that these leather and latex fetish communities are, I don't know the word but they're like purists in a way, it's all about one thing. Everything is leather, everything is latex, those materials are sacred. It comes with a lot of respect, so it was important for me to think about and stick to these materials but rethink the symbolism. That felt like a step forward. I didn't know where this work was going. I was stepping into an unknown and taking a risk and just putting care into working with these materials and not necessarily knowing where they will end up. My intention was to move away from colonial and oppressive iconography like military and police uniforms, symbols of Christianity, and other symbols that are rooted in European culture and European acts of oppression. <img width="1280" height="854" width_o="1280" height_o="854" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7f621cfb384f36e305d2bb46ed9464ac3e182e008b2f6325bf29e19a815f1bd1/5U0A1317.jpeg" data-mid="131840572" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7f621cfb384f36e305d2bb46ed9464ac3e182e008b2f6325bf29e19a815f1bd1/5U0A1317.jpeg" />Photo courtesy of Laurence Philomene WT: Growing up in Nova Scotia, I'm sure you got to go out a lot and explore. Do you feel like you have an intimate relationship with nature or was that the chosen space because it feels almost so opposite [of something like a dungeon]? AL: My relationship with nature has many different levels, like many relationships. I grew up in Dartmouth, there wasn't much to do, but I had heard about these spaces outside where people would get together in the woods and they would become spaces for queer gay intimacy. I think one level one of my interactions with forests is as a young adult in a car, parked on the edge of a forest, and then seeing this older demographic of white men walking in and out, and I found myself often hiding, like crouching down. And I would sometimes think to myself "What am I doing here? Do I belong here?" I was happy for all of them though and I did have rare moments where there would be someone there that I felt I could have a good time with. Since then, one of my favourite things is going into the woods in the summertime. I'll go out into nature on my own and just to have quiet time, and sometimes it would feel sexy, and sometimes I would take photos and videos. That's another layer. And then I’ve been thinking of typical fetish specific spaces, with all of the gear, all of the slings, and bathtubs filled with urine and glory holes. I've been in environments that are designed for kink. I think it's a fascinating space and I do think that is a space I want to enter with my creative work in some capacity. There's this bathhouse in Paris, Sun City, that has decor that is all inspired by Indian architecture. There's this gay photographer [Sunil Gupta] that's now based in London who did a photoshoot there. So I know this is possible, I know that people can have relationships with this space for an artistic project. <img width="1280" height="1280" width_o="1280" height_o="1280" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/10e8dda661a5e54946b815424bc0525728acef7a3a126d05659d11623f0d8753/5U0A1336.jpeg" data-mid="131840571" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/10e8dda661a5e54946b815424bc0525728acef7a3a126d05659d11623f0d8753/5U0A1336.jpeg" />Photo courtesy of Laurence Philomene WT: In your last solo show, Queer Works, you had condoms and tiles that had a lot of Indian iconographies. Although we can never truly separate ourselves from our identity and how that plays into things, were there parts of Fruits of the Forest where you were thinking of Indian culture? Did that infuse itself in any way? AL: Yeah, for sure. Those condoms and tiles I did were from when I really started thinking about who I am and letting that reflect into my work. Up until then, my work wasn't personal. Once I started thinking about who I am and celebrating who I am, I needed to make references to my culture. I grew up in Dartmouth and had only been to India a couple of times and I do feel quite disconnected from that country and culture because it wasn't a big part of my life. Growing up on Turtle Island I struggled to find a sense of belonging and was concerned with thinking about how to relate. It was when I was starting to think more critically about identity that I started to realize that as a first-generation person here I just started to feel like my identity is unique to me. There's not a whole lot of first-generation Indian diaspora here, at least not much before contemporary waves. So we're all here now but we don't have many footprints to follow for guidance. I feel like I'm painting paths with my identity. Ever since I've thought about it in that way I am more interested in learning about my place on this land and how that is shaping my identity. Because of that, when considering Fruits of the Forest I know I didn't directly think about making connections to Indian culture, but I know that they are there. I know that my displaced body is there. I know that this work is shaping my identity and hopefully leaving a mark for it to flourish for future generations. For them to have something to relate to – some kind of cultural and tangible archived moment. <img width="1280" height="854" width_o="1280" height_o="854" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8920901f2cc2a4519efcec9cd621b85b944f9c005ebaa32f4f27fd5b93dc646c/5U0A1277.jpeg" data-mid="131840573" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8920901f2cc2a4519efcec9cd621b85b944f9c005ebaa32f4f27fd5b93dc646c/5U0A1277.jpeg" />Photo courtesy of Laurence Philomene WT: What has informed your practice? AL: Art for so long has been dominated by white stories, white experiences, white problems, white concerns, white values. When I started going to art school, and when I was early in my art practice, I was playing that game of continuing this colonial legacy of what an art practice is. Then once I started separating myself from that, it launched. There was this point where I thought, I can make work about myself. There's a need for work that is providing alternatives to what we've been taught in our colonial educations. I've been driven by realizing that I have a voice, that my opinions are worth something, and by my desire to see a new future that's different from this one. <img width="854" height="1280" width_o="854" height_o="1280" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0f1718fc863d5ec6f799c6b70fbf9a08e08e64e7a28d98ab0c325cb3f651fdbf/5U0A1569.jpeg" data-mid="131840569" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/854/i/0f1718fc863d5ec6f799c6b70fbf9a08e08e64e7a28d98ab0c325cb3f651fdbf/5U0A1569.jpeg" />Photo courtesy of Laurence Philomene WT: How has learning to work with leather and latex changed your relationship to these materials? Or has it altered that relationship at all? You went to Montreal to apprentice under a leather and latex worker. AL: Yeah, I think now having worked with these materials for a while I feel like when I look at something I'm looking at the details, the material, the quality of the leather, how it's put together, and how it’s structured. Having more experience with these materials, I feel like a maker. During that mentorship, I crafted an array of floggers that I now keep in my bedroom. Not often but now and then I'll find myself in a very intimate situation where I'll end up using these tools. I never used to have these objects because often they're quite expensive and with an emerging artists salary, it's hard to spend money, there's so little. I started using these materials just because I wanted to make art but now I'm finding that these materials are finding a place in my own acts of pleasure. <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7d5683fbc2236a9132d76a87bed2d612072eed4f18016668101a359edc8b2ca8/PSX_20220129_110414.jpg" data-mid="131840828" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7d5683fbc2236a9132d76a87bed2d612072eed4f18016668101a359edc8b2ca8/PSX_20220129_110414.jpg" />Photo courstesy of Khyber Centre for the Arts Arjun Lal (he/they) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Kijipuktuk. His creative work has been focused on contemporary queer themes of identity, colonialism, fetish culture, and cultural fetishization. They are inspired by their lived experiences as a queer Indian diasporic person who has lived in cities on Turtle Island and in Berlin. Lal received a Bachelor of Fine Arts - Interdisciplinary from NSCAD University and has had their work supported by Arts Nova Scotia and Canada Council for the Arts. They work across mediums including photography, ceramics, textiles, silicone, video, and performance. Wren Tian 天琳琳 (they/them) is a trans visual artist of Chinese descent —graduated from NSCAD University in 2020 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Expanded Media. Their interdisciplinary practice often revolves around their identity and community—exploring themes of queerness, pleasure, and transracial adoption with special care for lens-based work. They hold collaborative work close to their heart as they are drawn to the playful and healing nature that working with others can bring about. They have a key role in the current iteration of The NSCAD Queer Collective—having collectively participated in Nocturne 2020 with the NS LGBT Archives— and are the Interim Artistic Director of Eyelevel Artist-Run Centre. They are currently trying to imagine the future of their practice in relation to the world around them. Instagram - @wren_indoubt https://weareoffcentre.com/Making-the-invisible-visible-in-an-Amazonified-World Wed, 29 Sep 2021 00:11:48 +0000 off centre https://weareoffcentre.com/Making-the-invisible-visible-in-an-Amazonified-World Making the invisible visible in an Amazonified World: A conversation with artist Hiba Ali and Czarina Mendoza during a time of lockdown.October 22, 2021, by Czarina Mendoza <img width="596" height="398" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/xZyEsMpmwyo-u7aASa4HawS79RYAMZN6vgKTgA_vJEO0A0bk6q1yadpZU8gSIZHbmpY-Pm3_3S5QKQFilTZCpmEtMRwjHzLziz45-qwfr3JF_T_fPyvUOAb4xvz6g33sp4Vc2qZt=s0"> While reflecting on Ali’s video work, Abra (2018), the artists touch on the timeliness of a global pandemic, the ways it has shaped Ali’s expansive research on the structures of Amazon and its effect on working people. The video is featured on LEFT Contemporary’s website as a pivot to digital programming, alongside collected articles by Ali called the Amazonification reading list. https://leftcontemporary.com/exhibitions/hiba-ali/ CM: So how did you first become interested in Amazon surveillance? Your video Abra is interesting because while focusing on these concerns, you're engaging with Amazon's customer service mascot named “Peccy”. HA:&nbsp; Prior to addressing Amazon in my work, I had been making video art installations, sculptures about the history of global shipping. And the kind of global networking that it requires, which generally happened in the 60s in North America. Tracing how things move, how products move so quickly and how capital moves so quickly, and how people can’t, was a real interest. So, I did this earlier work about, you know, what, who can move and in what ways? And what kinds of products move and whose interests are they serving. I had done earlier work around this history. I was asking myself the question of, you know, what is the most contemporary form of globalized shipping that isn't what we know, that we access, and that we use every day? Because a lot of systems or infrastructure are purposefully invisible. It kind of goes into the idea of one of Amazon's initial first names called “Abracadabra”. And so it's this whole idea of like, a box magically appearing on your doorstep. Looking into the history of networks and shipping and satellites drew me to ask this question to myself, what's the most contemporary form of shipping? Prior to graduating my MFA program and starting the Ph.D. program here in Queens in Kingston, I worked at the Amazon warehouse in Texas, and did temp work. So, in this way, it wasn’t like a theoretical practice, it was like an embodied practice of seeing, feeling, and going through. Also, because I needed money to move to see how basically work sets up our whole life in this contemporary reality, and just the kind of abuses and power that are very much part of the structure and not an aberration or outlier. CM: What strikes me the most about that video is how this customer service mascot would never have an internal conversation with its own employees. I like how that has reinforced this conflicted idea of invisibility - as my first takeaway from the use of bubbles... Like, there's this surveillance specific to Black and brown people and yet there's the oppressive erasure. Can you talk about this kind of relationship where a body is being more focused on and yet barely seen ever, all at the same time? HA: Yeah, it's like the duality of being - both encountering the hyper-visible and invisible at the same time. I remember my first encounter with the Peccy was while moving some carts of boxes within boxes. And I would see these dated posters hanging on the wall, like, “Peccy loves customers! Here are some customer service tips!” And I was like this is such a weird cartoon character. I don't really see it all over the warehouse. I was like, this is a strange mascot. And this mascot has this whole genealogy of being customer service obsessed and like, smiley.&nbsp; That smile that the cartoon character has is on all the boxes. That's where the [Amazon boxes] smile comes from. <img width="330" height="330" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/ZpCeElxX9Jj18ED8Xn7p3RjOmKvs-XRI7Qs9Y8jPzOI0Sr-NqnFxt4MQN9DtEn0f6hRrxR_0vC3Xkm6zeYcaRVSTBx-UdPU9moUotbxXiXbF2ufDb2oUb1H43ZOvKjgsNi2jgcQ_=s1600"> The way that Peccy exists, is very much about doing “good” corporate work, like the do-gooders. “We make the world a better place and keep order for Amazon. We take care of our workers!” And that's been the same talking points received again and again to the public during the pandemic, even though on the private level, the company’s taking all efforts they can take to sabotage unionizing efforts, both in Canada and the U.S. It is the kind of configuration that is at all odds with the actual people who power the engine of the company. Basically, the non-managers in Amazon are predominantly folks of color. And, like the higher percentage of the managers at Amazon are white. The kind of race and gender data sets are available and updated every few years. I think that is a crucial piece that is not really made available - that a lot of part-time gig workers, or precarious people, are positioned into, as this is the only job that they can work at that will hire them. The way in which the job works is to really hurt people. Our bodies aren't designed to do repetitive work. It's like taking strains on our muscles. It's designed around maiming people as it’s really work that's made for robots to do. What does it mean to treat people like objects, you know? Like the right objects for shipping? CM: Yeah, it’s awful. More disposable than just cogs in a machine. I’d like to focus closer on one of the terms - what is “Amazonification”? HA: I'm using this term in my dissertation. To kind of redefine it, or define it by its undoing. This word Amazonification was popularized in the early 2000s&nbsp; by Business Journal’s saying, “Whoa, Amazon is buying up the whole industry!” And it was a word that illustrates the immense work that Amazon was doing at that time. And this growth is specific. And this kind of growth was like basically eating up other companies and monopolizing. So, for example, with the book publishing industry, Amazon completely changed that model, and kind of devalued independent publishing, because of the way it sold books. So, if your local store, let's say, -mom and pop shops, were selling a book for $10, Amazon would come in and say - Oh, you can buy the same book for $5 and free shipping. So now you have this book that you want, but it's way cheaper to get it from Amazon who offers free shipping. We can make an assessment and know what that's going to do to your local bookstore economy. Small stores can't handle that kind of immense pressure from a big conglomerate, and they shut down. Amazon has done that across so many different industries to basically decimate them and that's why they've grown so big alongside lenient corporate taxes, etc. Amazonification, as a term, was used to celebrate the growth of the company. But within that “celebration” is like basically demolishing a lot of industries. It's the growth of a monopoly. Amazon is the monopoly. CM: It's taking advantage of that type of convenience. Which is super scary, because on top of hyper-algorithmic data that's being both fed and collected, that seems to only escalate it more. HA: Yeah, Amazon is very good at that. As part of their PR strategy too is to have the politics of fear, and paranoia because fear helps control people. If we are so afraid of the corporation, then we're not going to organize, we're not going to figure out local forms of resistance, things like that. And they really use that against their workers who are organized and able to use that against people who speak out against Amazon. CM: That’s a good place to ask my next questions. Fear. Especially surrounding the pandemic. I'm sure you were doing this research before the pandemic hit. This must have been massive where, you know, major problems involving socioeconomic inequity and inequality are surfacing. So, I'm wondering if you could touch on specific events or any readings you remember, seeing or hearing that sparked to deepen that research? HA: During the pandemic, I had just been waiting a lot. I was reading a lot and taking note of how I was going to restructure my dissertation because the previous framework didn't quite fit. Everything was changing so fast. It was a lot of the periods of research and seeing what articles would hold. But what has really been impressed upon to the wider public is the level of disposability that a lot of warehouse workers work under and the conditions of precarity and willful disregard - I say willful because they design it to be this way.&nbsp; It's not like, “Oh, they forgot or like they didn’t know....” No, no, they're very much aware of creating an infrastructure of illness. Basically, a lot of corporations default to think like-&nbsp; “Why spend the money to take care of workers? There’s so many and they are replaceable.” This perspective might not be said out loud but it's definitely what we see done in their actions. CM: It’s so severely tiered which is well - it's evil. HA: Truly. CM: I’d like to talk about how you might have envisioned this as a physical exhibition. If, in an ideal world this was installed at LEFT.&nbsp; Were you looking to install more alongside the video work? HA: Yeah, I wanted to show the Abra work. So, one thing about Amazon is that it's marketed to us as a public good, and almost like a public service. Amazon will take the place of your errands, your groceries - just click on buttons online and everything, you know, shows up. As it grows more and more, Amazon wants to start delivering all your mail. That's where a lot of their technological interests are going. I say that because my work, and a lot of other scholars' work, is to make visible these purposefully hidden systems of surveillance and labour. As a physical exhibition, I would set up the gallery to become different “zones.”&nbsp; One zone would be where the Abra video would play, and there'd be cushions on the ground, to view the work. I was thinking about putting together a timeline of workers liberation and or including material from organizations such as&nbsp;Amazonians United&nbsp; and&nbsp;CCAEJ, they're based in the Inland Empire in California. That region of the US has the most warehouses out of California and there's a lot of environmental pollution. Illustrating both the kind of environmental and societal drain of surveillance found in Amazon. I really make visible workers' history and union efforts and for there to be a platform for us - for all of us to know that we can do this. I think a lot of times people are thinking: “I'm not a warehouse worker. Why would this be important to me?” When unions are stacked against very intense roadblocks for getting better wages, getting a better livelihood, it impacts everyone. So, making these tools really visible and accessible is important as well. <img width="624" height="252" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/c7_iwljb51MVM4NK3t6XY08d9_HLGkSj9aYAgat38fJU1v66wkIOZY8GanvXxRcPZWiDKVKV-g_FzQ04oDju5IZzb8EljygUQkFgnLnAHvqaui6uMMSgb5GGo7U1QeaCK0qW1Bc1=s1600"> [img: Amazonians United] CM: Yeah, totally. I’d like to touch on accessibility. I like how you mentioned the use of visual tools to make things visible to the wider public.&nbsp; Oftentimes public access to knowledge or culture are vulnerable to the systems of gatekeeping in different communities. What's it like to be showing and engaging with work in a union city like Windsor and does the selection of work you decide to show change for other exhibiting locations? HA: Yeah, I think the conversation with Amazon is just as important for smaller cities or towns as it is for bigger cities. Because often the warehouses for Amazon shipping and delivery are located just like right outside the metropolitan area. And that's usually in places, for example, right outside of Windsor or close to Windsor. In Toronto, there's a warehouse in Scarborough. It’s not downtown, but it's just close enough so that it can service the interior Toronto area. Amazon does this deliberately. Amazon will pick like working class communities of color to locate to. And why? Because that’s their “ideal worker”. There's a supply of, basically laborers that will come and do the work. These are your regions and spaces where the warehouses are located and are often in a double bind when Amazon is one of the major suppliers of jobs but also the only place to get the items and products you need because all the independent stores have closed.&nbsp; So, when I say, “boycott Amazon”, and people ask me, “well, what do you mean, Amazon is the only place where I can get this thing that I need?” In bigger cities, there are more choices and alternatives available. But in smaller cities, Amazon is this thing where it's the only place where you can get a good job. And it's the only place where you can order from. I feel like it’s a financial entrapment because it limits people's choices. So, in those situations, it can be extremely hard to boycott Amazon. CM: I see, so in terms of access to your work the very subject matter is accessible since everyone’s encountered it. I guess the crucial and more difficult point is creating more awareness of the harm involved. Now on another note, with Detroit being across the border and in recent news, I think they have gone ahead with one of the proposals to bring in a processing center or a distribution center? And, the only people that are talking about, the “no tax breaks and no incentives” are smaller, publicly funded newspapers versus, you know, like msn.com commenting all the ways that it is “good”. Seems typical for an outsider to not understand the context of the city. HA: I believe it was 2018&nbsp; Amazon planned to open an HQ2 with a proposal in Queens, New York. With a lot of Black and brown working-class people living there - they will potentially be the, you know, Amazon warehouse workers if the HQ2 were to open there. And people have the same questions and are asking what kind of jobs are these? What is going to be the minimum wage? How will you protect us? There's this required rate, like basically you must hit this number of boxes per day or you're being lazy or you're not being a good worker. How are you going to protect workers with things like that? And Amazon, I believe, God, almost got over like 3 billion, some ridiculous number of tax breaks from the state, from the city. And I remember this precisely because I remember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being like, why is this huge company getting a tax break? When there's no money off their back. We're basically bribing them to come to our state. CM: Oh god. Such a gross amount of money. Can we talk about location and migration? It’s fascinating how regionally specific labour can exist. Because just from living and working in different provinces, and of course from travelling - it’s quite clear how reflective these things are of the local economy. I think it challenged how I saw myself, and in terms of representation, plus the expectations led by a dominantly white lens when discussing these issues. I'm just curious about places you've moved to and how those experiences have left an imprint on either your research or navigating your practice? HA: I did a lot of customer service work when I was a teenager. Food service work. Based in like, Chicago, and suburbs. Work has been a constant in my life. And also, my parents' lives. With my research on Amazon and thinking about how work, through labour, structures the lives of Black and brown people, it's something that, for example, where warehouses are located in working class neighborhoods are specifically chosen so that they can have people come in and work and also pollute the very area with trucks and other delivery vehicle coming in and out of the warehouse. This, of course, is not the case in upper class and more whiter areas I connected that, through looking at CCAEJ’s work, specifically, their Billions Off Our Backs campaign, of course it makes sense that the demographics of the workforce reflects the neighbiourhoods that Amazon is choosing to pollute - and I say choosing to because there won't be a warehouse in a gated community. I think it’s about how precarity forms and how work and labour are structured to maim workers. CM: Can you tell me about an upcoming or current project? HA: There's another mascot Amazon has called Danbo. And it's more popular in Japan. It’s basically a mascot made of boxes. <img width="443" height="363" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/j05put3DIzToG_ZXWUuUTboQAdDkEkqSDvdLy-bwa4MOGQwtfAAKM4bNrRzJ9QmsrI2Bte_Y5AivT7iTw6MZZ43-1TVDFxbtNa4_RXX36_aHSI3ry0u-84I0wylqSWokT8vR5BWS=s1600"> What Amazon does is make a lot of “fun” graphics on their website to deter unionizing, like a dog playing a record player, or you know, a fun orange blob like Peccy. It makes corporations look cute and not at all like what they really are. In an upcoming work, I've taken the image of Danbo and I'm having Danbo laugh and cheer at pro-union messages. There's a quote like, “Global Workers Unite!” and Danbo has their arms out and they're kind of cheering. Something like children’s public access programming - like PBS but for the Union for workers, and for unionizing. I’m reappropriating and refashioning them to speak back to corporate aesthetics. I want to show a video that addresses these things called, “Danbo and Me” like a kids show, but for everyone. More reading: How Amazon Crushes Unions https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-virginia.html amazonification: reading list 2021 https://hibaali.info/projects/amazonification-reading-list Footnotes1. https://www.amazoniansunited.org/ 2. The Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice. https://www.ccaej.org/ 3. Amazon HQ2 and NYC: A timeline of the botched deal: How the deal came to be, and came to fall apart. https://ny.curbed.com/2019/2/18/18226681/amazon-hq2-new-york-city-timeline &nbsp; 4. Amazon Pulls out of Planned NY Headquarters&nbsp;(paywall) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/nyregion/amazon-hq2-queens.html 5. Billions Off Our Backs campaign. https://www.ccaej.org/post/ccaej-collaborates-with-esri-for-billions-off-our-backs-campaign This conversation took place on March 11, 2021 ___ Hiba Ali is a producer of moving images, sounds, garments and words. They reside in many time zones: Chicago, Toronto and Eugene. Born in Karachi, Pakistan, they belong to East African, South Asian and Arab diasporas. They are a practitioner and (re)learner of Swahili, Urdu, Arabic and Spanish. They work on two long term art and publication projects: the first being an art-based ph.d project that examines womyn of colour’s labour, and architecture of surveillance as it exists within the monopoly of amazon (corp.) and the second being project that addresses music, cloth and ritual practices that connect East Africa, South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula in the Indian Ocean region. They are an assistant professor of New Media Artist/ Geminist discourse at the College of Design in the Art &amp; Technology program at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. Currently, they are a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen's university in Kingston, Ontario. Their work has been presented in Chicago, Stockholm, Vienna, Berlin, Toronto, New York, Istanbul, São Paulo, Detroit, Windsor, Dubai, Austin, Vancouver, and Portland. They have written for the following magazines: “C”, The Seen, Newcity Chicago, Art Chicago, Art Dubai, The state, Medium’s Zora, rtv, and Topical Cream. https://hibaali.info/ Czarina Mendoza is Filipina-Canadian interdisciplinary artist currently based in Windsor, ON. Born and raised in central Alberta, the rural landscape deepened her exploration around the construction of identity and both preserving and reciprocating cultural legacy. Her material-based practice repurposes found objects and mass consumer goods to explore ideas centering around&nbsp; labour, inherited cultural memory and the mediation of transnational ties. She has presented in group shows, assisted in panel moderating, programming and workshop development with local organizations Left Contemporary, Artcite Inc. and Arts Council Windsor &amp; Region. More recently she has worked as a facilitator and coordinator assistant with Centre 3 Arts (Hamilton). LEFT Contemporary is a grassroots arts organization in Windsor, ON. Beginning in a garage in Walkerville in 2017, LEFT moved to a Downtown storefront in 2019 before departing it’s physical location in the Spring of 2020 and moving its programming online during the Covid-19 pandemic.