Past Exhibitions
Bebakaan
Carrie Allison, Christian Chapman, Matthew Vukson
curated by Lori Beavis
November 19, 2022 – January 28, 2023
Bebakaan / Each is Different: Carrie Allison, Christian Chapman, Matthew Vuckson
With thanks to Alan Corbiere for the Anishinaabemowin translation
Bebakaan is Nishnaabewin for ‘each is different.’ The word came about, with good help from Alan Corbiere, while processing the element/s of the works in this exhibition. I was thinking of expressive words like, ‘alternatively’ or ‘exchangeable’ because, while the artworks relate to one another through the preoccupation of bead work, they are all in some way different from one another and different or outside of our expectations of beadwork.
The 3-person exhibition, Bebakaan with Halifax-based Carrie Allison (nêhiýaw/Cree, Métis, and mixed European descent), Christian Chapman (Anishinaabe) from Fort William First Nation in northern Ontario, and Matthew Vuckson (NWT Tlicho Dene) living and working in Lac Brochet, Manitoba brings beading out of the realm of the intimate and fixed, to over-scaled, animated, and immersive. The works included are a method for each artist to discuss place, positionality, histories, and identity in their own way.
Beading is the place setter for the work in Bebakaan. Across history, the practice of beading has been widely recognized by the peoples as a means of recording and translating cultural knowledge. Christi Belcourt has written, “Beading is deeply rooted in land-based histories and relationships bound up with stories and storytelling … [as such] beading carries the stories of how cultures have adapted over time.”
The cultural belief that beading – in whatever form it takes, brings people into relationship with one another and with their own nation-specific lands, histories, identities, and worldviews is demonstrated in this exhibition.
Carrie Allison’s animated beadwork responds to her maternal ancestry as a way for her to think through connecting and reconnecting to land, both visiting and ancestral. Her work combines old and new technologies to tell stories of the land, continuance, growth, and of healing. TO HONOUR (2019) is an experimental beaded animation exploring the concept of returning beadwork back to the landscape. Miyoskamiki (2020) is a beaded animation that depicts the blooming of a Prairie Crocus, one of the first plants to emerge once winter begins to turn to spring. Customarily, hunter and farmers watched for these plants to mark the turning of the seasons. Nishotamowin (2020) is a nêhiyawin/cree word for understanding or self-in-relation. This is an audio piece that thinks through ‘getting to know’ or understanding by listening to the actions we carry out. By using contact mics and microphones while beading, Allison was able to amplify the small sounds made through the gestures of beading. The viewer connects to the audio through a QR code to tune in to the sounds that filter through the window of Allison’s studio, as well as her amplified beading gestures and spoken thoughts. Allison’s works are gestures to seek understanding and to connections to family, language, and land.
Christian Chapman creates his paintings and silkscreen prints to tell stories often using the Woodlands-style. This is a distinct style of art that blends traditional stories and contemporary mediums with bright colours and bold lines. Chapman is well-known for the insertion of easily recognizable figures – Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth II, or Elvis onto a flat field where the figure is surrounded by florals and animal shells or hides. However, since 2017, he has been inspired by the creative community of women who make and bead their regalia. He turned to the more intricate beaded details of the regalia, he says, because both his partner and his sister, along with other women in his near and extended family are bead workers. He made the decision to paint the bead work patterns to a vastly over-scale degree, as a way to better understand the delicate glass beads and the floral patterns. At the same time Chapman continues to work within the visual heritage of the Anishinaabeg beading patterns as a method to make connections with family histories, stories, and the land on which these relationships were formed.
Tlicho Dene artist Matthew Vukson is a teacher. Teaching others is part of a continuum that he has experienced – he was taught to bead by his mother and now he teaches this skill to others. Vukson likes to share stories that have been passed on to him from his family and he enjoys talking about his beading journey. He uses art as a form of reclamation and reconciliation.
In the immersive work in this exhibition, he steps aside from the floral beading work that he was taught to turn his eye to the experience of violence and police brutality. In his work we find police badges, Police Badge 1, 2 (2019, 2020), handcuffs Cuff’em (2022) and a hangman’s noose, Calculating Weight (2022). This work that speaks of brutal responses to the Indigenous body is balanced by beaded images that centre Indigenous cosmologies as a source of healing and nurturance. In work such as Place Before Time (2019) and Orbital Station NO 2 (2021). While other work such as Red Walker (2018) and Octavial (2019) remind us of the strength that we can draw on when we return to the land to walk through forest, masses of wild flowers, or to sit and watch the Northern Lights in Place Before Time(2019).
While in this exhibition, Vukson’s work is situated most deeply in the realm of customary beading his subject matter sidesteps of our expectations of beadwork. Allison and Chapman also change up the notion of beading as the play with movement and scale. Yet all three artists are, in their own way, making plain the continuity of the tradition of beading embedded in Indigenous art, with a difference.
Versification/ Teskontewennatié:rens
Carrie Allison, January Rogers
curated by Ryan Rice
September 10, 2022 - October 29, 2022
Versification: 10 Questions
Ryan Rice: Given there are formal westernized rules and structures around writing prose that you clearly challenge in your work, can you describe or define how the exhibition title Versification represents this compilation of works being presented? Can we understand or read it as a decolonial re:action?
January Rogers: Great question. I liked and chose the title Versification because it so aptly made reference to the promotion and use of verses activated in the poetry circulating in various forms throughout the exhibition. I am using language, inviting language through words and images to speak the meaning of these pieces with open ended outcomes, whereby or through which the viewer is welcome to take and interpret from their personal interactions with each piece. There was a specific time in my life when I consciously chose to pursue poetry or rather allowed poetry to show me a route for my expressive outlets. And I did so by letting go of my visual art practice and turning my attentions and energies to writing. But then the visual work crept back in by way of media making, which is a very visual practice and I started to incorporate the poetry into video and performance. So perhaps the combining of those art forms, like throwing off the oppressive parameters of “traditional literature” could be seen as decolonial reactionary, but honestly, if the work is a decolonial reaction, then that’s a by-product of me, making the work serve my passions.
RR: Your primary creative practice as a writer is magnified through your experimentation and control of media (sound, performance, video) and is layered with references addressing social justice and biting critique of the colonial systems we experience. At what point, as a writer, did you incorporate and fold these tools (media) into your work? How did they amplify your voice?
JR: Well, I’m not sure the intention was to amplify my voice, but the practice itself amplified my joy. Through my work and experience in radio, I learned a few skills with producing sound and I took that little bundle of knowledge and ran with it, having so much fun experimenting and realizing that sound is such an ancient expression and that it is possible to produce narrative with sound alone. So again, my practices were overlapping; writing, sound, radio, performance, music, voice etc.
And yes, I make commentary with my work. I have to. It’s part of my responsibility as a Haudenosaunee Woman Artist. I have to make these markers in time, even if I’m reaching back into my cultural birthrights to bring them forward. Those pieces will represent a contemporary interpretation of our teachings and historical events. I have to represent myself as an artist and I’m getting a bit more bold in my practices to really include my own, personal story.
RR: I admire your versatility and fierceness of your creative spirit and how it isn’t restrained. What motivates you? Inspires you?
JR: Well, you’ve named it. It’s the “creative spirit” -- that spirit has been with me since childhood. And although I didn’t choose to “study” art and have the privileges of learning about those who came before me and the use of a proper art language through formal training, I did eventually come to that knowledge through doing residencies and through working alongside others in collaborations and through my own personal research and practice. So, I didn’t have to unlearn anything to get to find my voice as an artist. It was developed by adding to, not taking from. And I could never use “that language” to bullshit my way into cultivating an audience for my work, because I don’t have that language. I have poetry. I have instincts. I have that spirit that guides the work. I’m inspired by the honesty of lived experiences and I’m motivated by a real sense of responsibility to use the gifts and opportunities which I have been so very blessed (word without a lie) to befall me in my life.
RR: Do you feel a sense of urgency to “do” (as in making art)? If so, does this urgency drive your work?
JR: No.
RR: As a full-time artist (broadly defined), where do you find the energy to manage and hustle not only the literary environment, but also multiple projects that cross-over into visual culture and media.
JR: It becomes a wonderful puzzle and complex dance at times. But again, it was something I’ve done since childhood. I remember, in grade 5, writing plays and getting all my friends to act them out. They were very feminist based plays, putting the female character as lead, as hero to the story. I was raised by a feminist mother in the 70’s and 80’s. In a time when the word “feminist” was connected to the words “Women’s Liberation”, which was a different time and with a different meaning. But I was also supported as a young writer in those communities. So, I’ve always been a self-starter and I believe I’m just hard-wired to be able to manage my career, as well as be the creative I need to be. I know that’s not the case for every artist and I have, since returning home to Six Nations, lent my management skills to some of the community musicians and local events. It’s work that really feeds me. So it’s not a surprise at all that I feel quite comfortable in the role as “producer” in my own projects and in collaboration with others.
RR: In your performance work, your presence is bold, unapologetic and commands attention. At the same time, I’ve had the opportunity to witness your actions as being thoughtfully poised and balanced. How do you craft this animation? Are you conscious of audience and reaction? Is this important?
JR: Audience is not important in the development of my performance work. What’s important is that I remain in the moment, that I evoke the “spirit” of the work within me, feel it in me while in performance because that “spirit” will translate, while in performance. It’s so powerful. There is so much that can be conveyed through performance and it really excites me to discover the language that comes from my body, my movement, and the combination of actions and interactions with objects. The measure of success in performance, for me, is the stinging silence when an audience is deeply engaged because I’m so engaged in my own space, thoughts, and meditation in real time. I believe we can identify elements known to performance art. We can name them and teach them. But I think what I love so much about performance art is the same thing I love about “spoken word” in that we define it by doing it and when we keep doing it (authentically), we expand upon the definition of it. These practices, like the culture itself is a living, growing thing. It needs to morph and challenge both the viewer, but more so, the artist.
RR: What was your experience producing the visual poems in the exhibition addressing residential school legacies and the Mush Hole in particular? How do you relate to this history?
JR: First of all, the images are taken from the documented performance work my brother and collaborator Jackson 2bears and I did at the Mush Hole aka Mohawk Institute aka Six Nations Residential School in 2016. Jackson has more of a direct and known history with the Mush Hole through his paternal grandfather’s story. I have a lesser-known family history with that place, but I do know that my paternal grandparents had involvement in the Anglican churches on Six Nations, which of course took them away from Haudenosaunee cultural traditions and practices. So there was a clear disruption from that generation, if not further back. The poems which live with the images are new(er), written while on a trip to Venice Italy in April 2022, which was a very challenging trip for me in many ways. But it served as a time where much self-reflection was done and I wrote several poems on that trip. Some of which I included on the Mush Hole images. This is where I tell my story. The shame of growing up visibly Native, the loss of my Sister - the only other person in the world who shared my story, the undeniable negative effects that residential school has on my reality today. I survived. I am thriving. I am celebrating 31 years of sobriety this year. Going back into that institute with images of my family, was very transformative. Through that performance work, I was able to change my relationship with that place by being mindful of my presence there as well as the presence of the spirits of those who passed through there. Their energy is palpable. I can feel them listening when I speak to them.
RR: Being from Six Nations, what is your relationship to Pauline Johnson? Do you see any parallels with your own trajectory as a Haudenosaunee writer and performer?
JR: Short answer; Yes. Long answer is I believe she came into her own as a writer and performer out of a need to express herself, out of a love for theatrics, out of a desire to stay free and a natural want to be her own person. I operate from a similar foundation as an artist and also a Haudenosaunee woman. The whole not-having-kids thing can sometimes make you seem like an anomaly in Indian Country. And Pauline didn’t have children (although there are rumours…). And I don’t see that as a sacrifice to my career. I value my freedom very very much and there’s little else I see that this world can offer that is more attractive to me than that. As a performer, what I share with Pauline is the way we’ve both taught ourselves how to do this thing called performance poetry. Other than the theatre performers, Pauline Johnson admired and there wasn’t anyone doing what she did in her time. And it’s been the same with me. When I decided to move my work into a performance poetry practice, it was all self-developed and thank goodness most of it worked. So there’s an innovative nature we share, a strong pro-female and very pro-Native agenda from where our poetry is inspired from and of course the love and need to travel to advance our careers.
RR: An “orator” has a significant role in Haudenosaunee culture, do you feel you are moving forward this tradition with your own practice? How important is it to tell, and be heard? How important is it to listen?
JR: Another great question Ryan. You witnessed the performance art piece I did with radios and if you recall in my talk post-performance, I shared, I believe we are all like radios. That is to say we have the ability to transmit (send signals) and receive. So again, I’m making reference to our energies. As a poet who speaks her words, rather than reads them, although I also sometimes read them too, I believe that how we (Native authors) participate in “literature” is but a stepping stone to bring us back to the original practice of oratory. There are many roles in our current societies which employ “oratory” in their pursuits such as lawyers, comedians, teachers, Longhouse speakers, politicians etc. So the act of “speaking” never really went away. The whole reason I started doing spoken word was so my words could be heard - not me - my words. I wanted to honour them by giving them the best chance possible of being heard. And over time, after my nerves calmed down, because there is a fear of losing the words in mid-speech, I began to present with a natural sense of stage presence and gestures. I started to have fun with it.
RR: Thinking about the tangible objects you create and the materials you incorporate and produce for your performance and media work such as costumes, props, cornhusk dolls, stepping stones, rolled cigarettes etc., all become artistic / creative representations that embody your presence that remain active as traces of your absence. For Versification, and your performance and collaborative work with Jackson 2Bears (Kanien'kehaka multimedia installation/ performance artist and cultural theorist from Six Nations), how does the remnants exhibited embody the essence of your performance?
JR: I would say through performance, we not only create experience and memory but evidence of our presence through the objects left behind. In the case of the Spirit Shadow performance, as part of the Versification exhibit, Jackson 2bears and I literally leave outlines of ourselves there in the gallery. We create negative space in the shape of ourselves, distinguished by the medicines we use in a protection ceremony, believing that the methods and actions we evoke to protect ourselves in performance, is so evident, that even in our absence, we remain....protected.
Nikotwaso
Catherine Boivin
curated by Jessie Ray Short
July 9 - August 27, 2022
In the round – Catherine Boivin by Jessie Ray Short (revised October 2023)
Catherine Boivin’s work centres on happenings that affect her personally, as an Atikamekw woman and mother living in an Indigenous community in contemporary Quebec. I listen carefully during our video chats as Catherine tells me about the concepts behind her piece, entitled Nikotwaso. Her baby daughter plays in the background of our meetings or climbs around on Catherine’s lap. Our discussions circle around a variety of topics, including current film and television interests, video art, cultural knowledge from our respective Indigenous communities, the importance of language and teaching Indigenous languages to future generations, and the ongoing gendered violence perpetrated against Indigenous women across Canada.
Catherine remarks how she now feels a weight of responsibility to address these issues, to keep her language and culture alive for her daughter. To keep her daughter alive for her culture and language. These concerns have been and continue to be voiced by Indigenous people. It can be stated that in this country, “a national narrative [has been created and] is based on Indigenous genocide… For far too long there has been an interest in Indigenous cultures but not Indigenous people or their well-being.”[1] There is no culture without the people from whom it stems. For a young woman like Boivin, the issue of murdered and missing Indigenous women is one that continues to haunt her, as is the case for Indigenous peoples nationwide (and no less so in Quebec).[2]
In this exhibition, Catherine and the women who are part of her work, move in circles through the monitors, acknowledging the many layers of being that they each hold within themselves. The monitor-based installation is encircled by a series of visually-layered prints that relate to and expand the video work beyond the edges of the screen. The women move in circles to stay active, for self-care; they move in circles to acknowledge the cycles of life, including seasonal changes; they move in circles to acknowledge the cycles of violence that make them, as Indigenous women, many times more likely than other populations of women in the country to endure violence. Each print touches upon and re-interprets discrete elements contained within the video work. Catherine plays with the opacity of the printed images in order to consider the totality of her exhibition from another perspective wherein semi-transparent elements printed on top of each other combine to form wholly new visions. The technique is interpreted from lived experience, as Catherine explains: “…the more we come together, the clearer the image becomes.”[3]
Catherine’s work is nuanced, incorporating, and looking beyond narratives of Indigenous trauma. Talking with Catherine about Nikotwaso, I am struck by the similarities in both the material and conceptual concerns of her work with that of Dana Claxton. In an artist talk, Claxton notes how her focus on fashion and beauty standards in her work function as a device to question the “aesthetic imperialism” of Eurocentric norms, from within her Hunkpapa Lakota-specific point of view, and “wanting to see the beauty of Indigenous aesthetics.”[4]
Catherine’s work, like Dana’s, does not remove the specific pieces of clothing from how they are meant to be worn, but instead is “folding”[5] cultural elements into the designs. The intention in this is to incorporate historic elements seen in Atikamekw clothing worn by Catherine’s ancestors, such as the belted, checkered-cloth skirts, while also adding design elements inspired by the Icelandic singer Bjork’s eclectic vision.[6]
Nikotwaso is a work of circles and of cycles. It is a work in the round. Catherine brings together the past and the future in the present, looking back to her grandmothers, looking forward to her daughter and future generations while also referencing diverse visual elements, whether they stem from pop culture, film and television, or contemporary and historic Atikamekw cultural aesthetics. Nikotwaso asks the viewer to suspend beliefs, or what you think you know of Indigenous women, and enter into the circles of possibilities created by Catherine Boivin.
[1] Wilson-Sanchez, Maya.
[2] See the MMIWG reports mentioned in bibliography for specifics
[3] Catherine Boivin, October 4 2023.
[4] Claxton, Dana.
[5] Claxton, Dana.
[6] Personal Communication with Catherine Boivin, May 6, 2022.
Suzanne Morrissette
Translation
May 7 - June 18, 2022Morrissette’s exhibition at daphne links works that attempt different methods of material translation: the translation of sight into drawing, physical form into sound, sculpture into song, and body movements into audio and video. The purpose of these acts of translation is to explore other ways of understanding that can assist in hearing and comprehending histories and knowledge which have been quieted, but not silenced.
Michelle Sound
okāwīsimāk nawac kwayask itōtamwak|Aunties do it better
January 8, 2022 - March 5, 2022
https://www.ecologia.org/news/indigpers.html
Podcast - New Drumbeat for Indigenous Artists for "Indigenous Perspectives"
Aunties Are So Deadly
Text by Jas M. Morgan
Cree artist Michelle Sound knows aunties are so damn deadly. In Sound’s NDN Aunties, I see Cree aunties, standing tall and proud. I see Cree aunties dressed in fringe and studded leather, faux fur, and denim. I see aunties throwing their heads back and creating sonic sovereignties with their laughs that fill up spaces and the crevices of their nieces, nephews, and niblets hearts. I see aunties driving trucks down dirt roads, aunties in shades, aunties who love metal, and aunties who carry the weight of their communities wherever they are in the world. Standing in front of the drums of various sizes that make up NDN Aunties, each drum appears to represent a single, solitary auntie and her deadly style icon status, like material portraits that completely blow apart the colonial aesthetics and qualities that supposedly define portraiture. One drum dons cheetah print faux fur and I imagine a Rez royalty auntie wearing a long cut coat made out of the same material. Button details on a denim drum reveals a beaded medallion pin of a medicine wheel—I imagine it was made for the auntie the drum represents by someone who deeply cares for her and is grateful for her support—and other pins depicting Indigenous language and promoting “Aunty Magic.” The buttons invoke all the aunties on the front lines of NDN justice movements. The buttons remind me of everything our aunties have endured at the hands of a nation that sought to eliminate them through sexist policies and intimate violence and, despite those attempts at removal from the land and community life, the love and light those aunties emit throughout their communities. Together, the drums are a force to be honored and revered. The drums tower over you. The drums are beautiful but unplayable, much like the tough NDN women who inspired Sound to make them.
Undoubtedly, what makes NDN aunties so deadly is the knowledge systems of their communities and ancestors—these facets of Cree peoplehood are represented in Sound’s work, too. In HBC Trapline beaver pelts accompany rabbit fur drums dyed the colors of the Hudson’s Bay Company four point blanket: blue, yellow, red, and green. Sound is making a reference to the aunties who we will never get to meet: our Cree ancestors. Indigenous women were paramount to the fur trade in Canada wherein they contributed their labour preparing furs and pelts. The same knowledges Indigenous women used to support their communities are ingrained in the histories of labour that produced Canada but are seldom recognized. In Chapan Snares Rabbits, Sound makes reference to a lineage of deadly aunties within her own family. Chapan is a Cree kinship term that refers to a great grandparent. Chapan serves a dual meaning, however, and can also refer to one’s descendants. Sound’s Chapan and kokum both supported their family on the trapline. The Chapan Snares Rabbits drums—dyed in pastel pink, blue, and peach hues—are an homage to the women who provided for Sound’s family, who Sound is indebted to for her cultural knowledges and sense of personhood. Trapping and hunting aren’t a realm where Indigenous women are always represented as providers in contemporary settler-colonial discourse. But Sound disrupts the degraded position of Indigenous women within Canadian society by referencing a long line of aunties before her, whose steadfast knowledge, care, and material practices made Sound who she is today.
Sound’s art is both tribute and testament to NDN aunties and their infinite deadliness. All NDN aunties are paid tribute to when Sound gestures towards these strong Indigenous women in her own family lines. I see the strength of will, character, and love that Sound’s mother possesses in Nimama hates fish but worked in the cannery. I see the stories of so many Cree families held together by the ingenuity and strength of NDN aunties, like Sound’s family from Wapsewsipi (Swan River) First Nation, who found themselves displaced from their traditional territories, but were remade as a peoples through the hard work of Sound’s mother. In Sound’s artwork, I see the deadliness[1] of the aunties that have sustained Cree peoplehood for centuries before the first white man stepped foot around these parts. I see hilarious aunties, giving aunties, and mean-but-you-know-not-to-mess-with-them aunties. I see regal Cree aunties who carve out worlds with their intentions and care. I see aunties carrying NDN nations on their backs. I see aunties who make NDN families with their love. I see NDN Law.
asinnajaq
ivaluit / sinews / tendons
daphne’s Artist Residency / résidence d'artiste au daphne
(Projects funding from Conseil des arts de Montreal)
March 9 – April 16, 2022
asinnajaq is a story-teller. The multidisciplinary artist’s residency at daphne began with the fragment of a story. The story remembered is that of Inuit brought south for health services.
The work created in this residency responds to those journeys. asinnajaq’s suspended textile work makes the loss of connection tangible, while emphasizing the connections forged while people were away from family and home.
Ludovic Boney
Constructive Interference
Curated by Hannah Claus & Nadia Myre
presented by daphne with imagineNATIVE at A Space Gallery, Toronto
September 24, 2019 - November 2, 2019
The term “constructive interference” describes
the effect of a source sending out pulses of energy that results in the
amplification of waves or ripples, whether water or sound. In the exhibition Constructive
Interference, Ludovic Boney’s installations amplify the effect of our
bodies in the spaces he has created. By extension, we can think about the
affect of our actions and reactions, and how these play out both individually
and across our society. He directs our attention, our movement and our bodies through
his installations to highlight how momentary fragments connect to constructed
symphonies of experiential ephemera.
Grounded in memory, the installation Why So Many Ties? is inspired by interactions between the artist and his mother, who each time she gives something to her son, regularly re-uses one of the cheap plastic bags she has on hand, but always finalizes the act by tying the bag using a double knot. These plastic shopping bags are tied so tight, that Ludovic then has to rip them apart to retrieve what is inside. This ritual between mother and son speaks to the preciousness of gifting and goods; the pleasure to give and receive, yet also the mild frustration of having to accept the idiosyncrasies of what is. The artist has purposefully repurposed and translated these ties, these bundles, these bags for this installation, neatly and cleanly cutting out and cutting away, reducing and elevating the ubiquitous plastic skin both physically and aesthetically.
A slice of fabricated landscape: thirty to fifty pine planks elevated from the floor, are laid out in a path that fills the gallery but begins at nothing and leads to nowhere. The interest is not in the destination but in the experience. On either side of the path, integrated to the planks, are thousands of thin rods, six feet high, each crowned with remnants of plastic shopping bags, their coloured logos like the blooms of strange flowers, bulrush-like reeds or the nautical flags of a regatta.
The installation exists as a sculpture in its materiality. The thick pine planks speak of history and civilization as it visually transitions through material hierarchies of wood, metal and plastic. However, it truly comes alive when the viewer engages with the path the artist has prepared for them. As one steps on to the path, the planks creak and bend beneath the body’s weight. The field of rods and plastic forms shift and shiver with each step to trace out the movement from the source. Boney destabilizes the viewer, as his installation literally lifts them out of their physical groundedness and into a place surrounded by sound and stimuli. Once into the middle of the landscape, a recorded soundscape begins, mixing into the immediate physical experience. This audio component, created by distorting and enhancing actual sounds from the installation, both amplifies and frames reality, reminding us of the chaos that can result from just one step.
Under the Catkins, which won the Quebec Arts Council’s 2018 Artwork of the Year Award for the Chaudiere-Appalaches region of Quebec, is comprised of nearly 5000 brightly glazed elongated ceramic slip-cast birch seed pods (also known as catkins), suspend from drop ceiling tiles, like the ones commonly found in office spaces. Placed on the floor, in the centre of the room, is an evergreen wreath, its fresh pine smell permeating the air. Beyond the dizzying optical effect created by the vibrant feast of colour, which, from a distance, might appear to be a swarm of insects in stasis, a topology of clouds, or a floating reverse topography, these dancing ceramic seed pods attached to an office ceiling are at once appeasing, mesmerizing and ridiculous. Seductively playful, materially rich, and evocative of multiple readings, one might wonder how this art gallery/white cube grew such a fascinating tree, or whether we are living in a birchless future, and have imagined what its fruits might be. Or is it simply a celebratory occasion of our enduring adaptive intelligence? These pods, spinning to celestial rhymes, like whirling silk ribbons, like fancy dancing, speaking to our survivance as Indigenous people, and the wreath, a pillow to comfort our heads, a space to gather around, pointing to the continuance of life.
Boney likes to take disparate experiences and mash them together. His interest lies in creating absurd yet transcendent moments in which we might experience alterity; a hyper consciousness of the ways in which we have built our world (both physically and intellectually) as we are forced, with our bodies, to navigate his spatial constructs. In tandem, is an interest in replication and substitution, in the altering and shifting of materials to create meaning. His drive sits in the transformative magic of pragmatism, in the here and now, as we have always done, as people, nations and cultures that survive. Above all, Boney places the awe of the human experience in this world, as a pivotal point. He is motivated by the wonder and amazement of the natural world and takes joy in watching these things: bulrushes swaying in the wind, catkins dancing in the trees. However, in replacing the natural for the fabricated, Constructive Interference conflates the world that we have made against the one that was made for us, jamming our insecurities of futurity into a joyous celebration and leaving us to wonder if our two worlds can, in fact, be reconciled.
Wendat sculptor Ludovic Boney has completed over 20 architectural integration projects in Quebec, including several large-scale public art projects. In 2017, he was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award and won a REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. Currently living in Saint-Romuald, Boney continues to devote his time to his studio practice and public art proposals, exhibiting his work in artist-run centres, galleries, and museums in Quebec and Canada, as well as teaching sculpture at the Maison des Métiers d'Art in Quebec City. This is Boney’s first solo exhibition outside of Quebec.
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Hannah Claus and Nadia Myre are professional artists and occasional curators based in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal. Along with fellow artists-curators Caroline Monnet and Skawennati, they co-founded daphne in 2019 with the mandate to increase the visibility and understanding of contemporary Indigenous within Quebec. This includes increasing the visibility of Quebec-based Indigenous artists within and outside of that province. Constructive Interference is daphne's inaugural curatorial project.
Grounded in memory, the installation Why So Many Ties? is inspired by interactions between the artist and his mother, who each time she gives something to her son, regularly re-uses one of the cheap plastic bags she has on hand, but always finalizes the act by tying the bag using a double knot. These plastic shopping bags are tied so tight, that Ludovic then has to rip them apart to retrieve what is inside. This ritual between mother and son speaks to the preciousness of gifting and goods; the pleasure to give and receive, yet also the mild frustration of having to accept the idiosyncrasies of what is. The artist has purposefully repurposed and translated these ties, these bundles, these bags for this installation, neatly and cleanly cutting out and cutting away, reducing and elevating the ubiquitous plastic skin both physically and aesthetically.
A slice of fabricated landscape: thirty to fifty pine planks elevated from the floor, are laid out in a path that fills the gallery but begins at nothing and leads to nowhere. The interest is not in the destination but in the experience. On either side of the path, integrated to the planks, are thousands of thin rods, six feet high, each crowned with remnants of plastic shopping bags, their coloured logos like the blooms of strange flowers, bulrush-like reeds or the nautical flags of a regatta.
The installation exists as a sculpture in its materiality. The thick pine planks speak of history and civilization as it visually transitions through material hierarchies of wood, metal and plastic. However, it truly comes alive when the viewer engages with the path the artist has prepared for them. As one steps on to the path, the planks creak and bend beneath the body’s weight. The field of rods and plastic forms shift and shiver with each step to trace out the movement from the source. Boney destabilizes the viewer, as his installation literally lifts them out of their physical groundedness and into a place surrounded by sound and stimuli. Once into the middle of the landscape, a recorded soundscape begins, mixing into the immediate physical experience. This audio component, created by distorting and enhancing actual sounds from the installation, both amplifies and frames reality, reminding us of the chaos that can result from just one step.
Under the Catkins, which won the Quebec Arts Council’s 2018 Artwork of the Year Award for the Chaudiere-Appalaches region of Quebec, is comprised of nearly 5000 brightly glazed elongated ceramic slip-cast birch seed pods (also known as catkins), suspend from drop ceiling tiles, like the ones commonly found in office spaces. Placed on the floor, in the centre of the room, is an evergreen wreath, its fresh pine smell permeating the air. Beyond the dizzying optical effect created by the vibrant feast of colour, which, from a distance, might appear to be a swarm of insects in stasis, a topology of clouds, or a floating reverse topography, these dancing ceramic seed pods attached to an office ceiling are at once appeasing, mesmerizing and ridiculous. Seductively playful, materially rich, and evocative of multiple readings, one might wonder how this art gallery/white cube grew such a fascinating tree, or whether we are living in a birchless future, and have imagined what its fruits might be. Or is it simply a celebratory occasion of our enduring adaptive intelligence? These pods, spinning to celestial rhymes, like whirling silk ribbons, like fancy dancing, speaking to our survivance as Indigenous people, and the wreath, a pillow to comfort our heads, a space to gather around, pointing to the continuance of life.
Boney likes to take disparate experiences and mash them together. His interest lies in creating absurd yet transcendent moments in which we might experience alterity; a hyper consciousness of the ways in which we have built our world (both physically and intellectually) as we are forced, with our bodies, to navigate his spatial constructs. In tandem, is an interest in replication and substitution, in the altering and shifting of materials to create meaning. His drive sits in the transformative magic of pragmatism, in the here and now, as we have always done, as people, nations and cultures that survive. Above all, Boney places the awe of the human experience in this world, as a pivotal point. He is motivated by the wonder and amazement of the natural world and takes joy in watching these things: bulrushes swaying in the wind, catkins dancing in the trees. However, in replacing the natural for the fabricated, Constructive Interference conflates the world that we have made against the one that was made for us, jamming our insecurities of futurity into a joyous celebration and leaving us to wonder if our two worlds can, in fact, be reconciled.
Wendat sculptor Ludovic Boney has completed over 20 architectural integration projects in Quebec, including several large-scale public art projects. In 2017, he was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award and won a REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. Currently living in Saint-Romuald, Boney continues to devote his time to his studio practice and public art proposals, exhibiting his work in artist-run centres, galleries, and museums in Quebec and Canada, as well as teaching sculpture at the Maison des Métiers d'Art in Quebec City. This is Boney’s first solo exhibition outside of Quebec.
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Hannah Claus and Nadia Myre are professional artists and occasional curators based in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal. Along with fellow artists-curators Caroline Monnet and Skawennati, they co-founded daphne in 2019 with the mandate to increase the visibility and understanding of contemporary Indigenous within Quebec. This includes increasing the visibility of Quebec-based Indigenous artists within and outside of that province. Constructive Interference is daphne's inaugural curatorial project.
Teharihulen Michel Savard
Parure - Ontatia’tahchondia’tha
Curated by Hannah Claus
May 8, 2021 - June 26, 2021
Watch the exhibition walkthrough here
Watch the artist-curator conversation here
The objects are delicate, finely crafted, and are a mix of old and new. Copper and silver metals come together in varying shapes; metal marks meet organic forms to construct lines and patterns. The disparate components mingle fluidly one into the other to offer an alternate way of seeing and understanding - as they always have, and as they always will. They speak to the continuance of culture outside of western categorical norms. What is art? What is beauty? At first we had shells, bones, hair and quills, and then beads, tin and silver. Now motherboards, circuitry and cables. As cultures collide, they leave a miscible residue of the impact, which adds itself to the whole. Let us assimilate all that is shiny and new, so that we may present ourselves in our finery to the world and so honour the worlds around us.
The idea behind the concept of adornment is to both augment the visual finishing of the outfit and display the value of one’s worth. Sartorial decoration and ornament for Indigenous peoples transmit the mastery of technique and ideals of beauty in order to honour the object itself. However, these are also meant to communicate. Compositional elements signify ontology, specificity of place, kinships with the two-legged and four-legged. The turtle, an eponymous symbol for Eastern woodlands nations, indicates clan and worldview all at once. We live and walk on the back of the great turtle, which organizes the footsteps and rhythms of our lives. This image displays our connection to the ground and the memory beneath our feet. Other symbols originally of European origin are anchored in the Wendat visual language: Scottish hearts become owls and circular gorgets are the stars and sun. These adornments come together to elevate the wearer and speak of where we are from and where we are going. Teharihulan integrates the culture and the experience of the Wendat into each of the pieces. The assemblage of various materials evoke an additional aspect of a spatial fluidity. Worlds of nature, of minerals, of plastic, from the Lower World to the Upper World, come together to bring the past and future into the present. Collectively they shine like a constellation, showing us the path to follow. This is how it has always been. This is how it continues.
The process of making connects us to the ancestors, family histories and time.
Teharihulen is Wendat from Wendake who draws on the past to bring it into the present and from there, imagines the future. He is the first to carry this name in 150 years since the last Teharihulen bore it. This ancestor was an artist, a jewellery-maker, a snowshoe maker, a war chief and a painter. Through his self-portraits, he took back his image from Western romantic clichés and “the Last of” to show his people and his culture in power and autonomy to the Western world, utilizing the tools and visual language of the European arts. In the exhibition, Parure, the painted portraits become a means of dialogue between the two Teharihulan, both artists, warriors and Wendat. Through his artistic practice, Teharihulen carries the mantle of his predecessor, continuing to communicate the presence and self-determination of the Wendat. It is both a responsibility and a legacy.
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Hannah Claus is a Kanienkehá:ka and English visual artist who explores Onkwehonwe epistemologies as living transversal relationships. A 2019 Eiteljorg fellow and 2020 Prix Giverny recipient, she sits on the board of the Conseil des arts de Montréal (2018 - ) and is a co-founder of daphne, a new Indigenous artist-run centre in Montreal. In 2017 Claus curated Tehatikonhsatatie, an exhibition of Kahnawakeró:non visual artists Babe and Carla Hemlock. As a member of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, Claus contributed to the conceptualization and production of the Tiohtià:ke Project (2018): a year-long series of Indigenous curatorial initiatives in and around Montreal. Claus is a member of Kenhtè:ke - Tyendinaga Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte. Having grown up away from her grandfather’s community, she is privileged to live and work in Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtià:ke [Montreal].
Sonia Robertson
Manitushiu-puamuna - Between the two worlds
Curated by Logan MacDonald
July 17, 2021 - September 11, 2021
Manitushiu-puamuna is a new installation work by artist Sonia Robertson (Innu/Scottish) presented as the sophomore art exhibition for the newly established non-profit Indigenous artist-run centre, daphne.
I first learned of Sonia’s work in 2002, when she presented Dialogue entre elle et moi à propos de l’esprit des animaux at Skol Gallery. A tour de force exhibition, created to honour the memory of her recently deceased sister, Diane. She did this lyrically, by suspending beaver skin pelts from the ceiling, creating an all-encompassing gallery installation, where furs collectively appeared to float up and outwards, directed towards the west. This gesture drew connections to her Ilnu ways of knowing, specifically concerning the spirits of animals and the directions their spirits take when released. Moreover, the pelts she incorporated were repurposed from fur coats, a significant conceptual gesture connected to the industrial history of the exhibition space, with being situated inside what was once a fur coat factory. I draw attention to Sonia’s earlier work here, as I feel in certain respects Manitushiu-puamuna is a complimentary exhibition, extending values and ideas, weaving together both the personal and the spiritual, in ways that are reflexively nuanced and exciting.
Manitushiu-puamuna is immersive, having filled the gallery with imagery and textiles. Yet, simultaneously the exhibition is simplistic and welcoming – with Sonia having created pathways by draping long pillars of white muslin linen - that hangs from ceiling to floor, creating trunk like shapes, intentionally meant to reference a forest of trees. Cast upon these soft sculpture columns are a series of multi-directional videos, featuring bright imagery of poplar tree leaves shaking in the wind. The looped videos permeate, echoing on each layer of linen, which are accompanied by the audio of rustling leaves. The illusion of being in a forest is both effective and broken, as the space allows for viewers to walk freely throughout the gallery, staged in a spatial arrangement where one’s own shadow can at times interrupt the video projections. In addition, Sonia has mounted two large-scale hyper-coloured digital prints of magnified poplar leaves in both the large public-facing gallery windows. The prints are mounted to function like lightboxes at night when viewed from outside the gallery. Sonia was very intentional about all these elements for an array of reasons, each being distinctly purposeful, layered with meaning, and significant to her understanding of the world.
At the onset of developing this exhibition, Sonia was intent on creating an installation that could draw viewers into thinking about the unconscious realities that connect us to dream-worlds and the afterlife. The poplar tree is a significant symbol in making this connection for Sonia: their leaves when blowing in the wind have an almost visual and audio dreamlike effect, but also this pre-colonial native species of tree to North America holds significance to the Ilnu in the ways it is harvested, and in its importance within nature, particularly as a favorite food for beavers. Importantly, both poplar trees and beavers are plentiful along the beaches in Mashteuiatsh, where Sonia is from. All these connections have been intentionally drawn together by Sonia, who values how materials and imagery can echo layers of meaning.
As viewers move through the main gallery, which visually evokes an almost ghostly forest as the white at times beams in a haunting manner. There is a reference being made here as well, with how trees are a lifeforce that have purpose, and with life comes death and the release of a spirit. Sonia could be asking us to reflect: do you connect with the spirits of the trees that were once here before us? What can we learn from them? The path way inevitably leads to a smaller space. In this space are two intimate video projection pieces, which in relation to the video projections of the poplar leaves in the main room are intended to symbolically reference the four natural elements: earth, air, water, and fire. In one video we see sand and waves lapping continuously. The videos are projected below our eye level and are small in scale. They each have their own dedicated wall and are each projected through a cluster of lenses that are connected by wires extending out from the walls, to resemble a cutting of branches with leaves. Having the videos projected through the lenses creates a stirring effect where the videos appear distorted, hazy and skewed, there’s a dreamlike cinematic effect. To witness this installation is like looking through the eyes of someone’s dreaming.
Throughout our time discussing this work, as Sonia developed ideas, I was frequently inspired by how thoughtfully she would incorporate materials, imagery, and ideas, always very purposeful in ways that were meant to support the specific context of the ideas she was trying to illuminate. At certain points throughout this process, even without our wonderful translators present, I felt we were able to converse beyond our colonial language barriers, with being able to communicate and share through our energy, expressions, simple gestures, and material references. I bring this up, because it’s a strength that belongs primarily to Sonia, in being able to communicate by harnessing energy, something she has translated into her practice. It’s something she’s quite intentional about, perhaps it comes intuitively to her, where she is able to instinctually connect materials and images in ways that conceptually support spiritual meaning, where she’s able to push past colonial rhetoric to present work that is meaningful at the animal and natural level. Manitushiu-puamuna is an example of this mastery.
Early in the planning of this exhibition, Sonia outlined a strong desire to use this exhibition as a platform to engage with community, in ways that could nurture and support Indigenous community members to connect with their dreams. With this work, I believe Sonia wanted to draw attention to how so many Indigenous communities have cultural legacies where traditionally sharing the significance of dreams and connections to afterlife was once highly valued, but through ongoing colonization and cultural oppression, sharing and analysing dreams has become taboo. Sonia pushes against this, asking us all to open our minds and souls to this important part of who we are and where we come from—let us consider the value of looking at this part of ourselves. What can we learn? How can we be better? How do we connect beyond our own realities? In learning more about Sonia’s work as we developed this exhibition, I came to realize how central servicing, working within, and supporting the community is to Sonia. Knowing this helps with understanding what I have come to understand as core to Sonia’s overall artistic intentions and motivations – which I believe are indistinguishable from her values in life, with being anchored to respecting and honouring land, nature, ourselves, our souls, and community. Which is why it was unfortunate that due to the social distancing restrictions of the pandemic, the project could not easily include active community engagement—but was nonetheless a core intention that moved the project forward. This exhibition has become somewhat of a letter from Sonia that invites everyone to dream.
Sonia Robertson is an artist, art therapist, curator and entrepreneur from Mashteuiatsh where she currently lives. She received her Bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary art from the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi in 1996 and has participated in numerous artistic events in Canada, France, Haiti, Mexico and Japan. She has developed an in situ and increasingly participatory approach. Art is for her a great means of expression and healing. She also completed a master's degree in art therapy at UQAT during which she created an approach linked to the imaginary of hunter-gatherer peoples.
Involved in her community, she has worked to promote art as a means of empowerment and expression for people in her community. She has co-founded various organizations and events, including the Diane Robertson Foundation, now Kamishkak'Arts, which supports artists at all levels and uses art as a social lever through various projects; the TouT-TouT artists' workshops in Chicoutimi in 1995; Kanatukulieutsh uapikun in 2001, which works to safeguard and promote the Pekuakamiulnuatsh's knowledge of plants; and the Atalukan Storytelling and Legends Festival in 2011.
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Logan MacDonald is a Canadian-based interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator and activist who focuses on queer, disability and Indigenous perspectives. He is of European and Mi’kmaq ancestry, who identifies with both his settler and Indigenous roots. Born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, his Mi’kmaq ancestry is connected maternally to Elmastukwek, Ktaqamkuk in belonging to the Qalipu First Nation. His artwork has exhibited across North America, notably with exhibitions at L.A.C.E. (Los Angeles) John Connelly Presents (New York), Ace Art Inc. (Winnipeg), The Rooms (St. John’s), Articule (Montréal), and the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin). He currently serves as Vice-Chair of the Indigenous Curatorial Collective (ICCA), and is a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Art at the University of Waterloo.
Kaia’tanó:ron Dumoulin Bush
Iakoterihwatié:ni / Moulin à paroles / Chatterbox
Curated by Sherry Farrell-Racette
October 30, 2021 - December 18, 2021
Listen to Chatting Boxes/ Bavardages: A conversation with the artist and curator Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/s5A4IXGnJqlcVHLYHb4cxBcLZugvWi2Gz2w0HGwwGhh3utTrczGB5yt58qUr1t2y.mDbf4jSb3x1Kj7S5
Kaia’tanó:ron Dumoulin Bush: The Visual Chatter of a Busy Mind
by Sherry Farrell Racette (curator)
Chatterbox: an excessively talkative person.
The term chatterbox has negative connotations often applied to chatty women (never men – why is that?). The stereotype of a women NOT being silent. Is she talking to drown out unwanted thoughts? To be seen? To be heard? What if chatter is a state of mind?
Kaia’tanó:ron Dumoulin Bush is quiet and soft-spoken. She is a storyteller and a dreamer, whose illustrative work includes paintings, sculpture, graphic novels, and commissioned art works related to language, youth and critical Indigenous issues. Her chatter is the frenetic thoughts that lie beneath a calm surface.
A group of well-worn sketchbooks hold her visual chatter- a dynamic inner dialogue of flowing lines, intense colour, and screaming faces. They are diaries, confessionals, and experiments. Everything flows from the sketchbooks. Ideas take form, shapes repeat, multiple versions are tested in small scale before they leap out to become three-dimensional objects, paintings, or graphic narratives. And all that pink. Kaia’tanó:ron gives us a literal explanation: Quebeçois mother (white) + Mohawk father (red) = Kaia’tanó:ron (pink). But this is not Toys ‘r Us pink, not Barbie pink, ballet pink, or candy pink. This pink is both violent and celebratory. It explodes off the surface. Wide-eyed pink women with shrieking mouths and multiple arms are recurring images. They are naked and vulnerable. Interspersed among the pages are quiet pencil drawings, delicate renderings of hands, and natural forms.
There are many influences at play here, not the least is a strong foundation of illustrative drawing from her time at Montreal’s Dawson College. While pursuing her BFA in the Indigenous Visual Culture Program at OCADU, Dumoulin-Bush participated in Toronto’s Nuit Blanche (2017) and initiated several curatorial projects. Her influences are primarily narrative artists whose works have a twist of ironic darkness: Joseph Sanchez, John Cuneo, Mu Pan, Lauren Marx, and Ruben Anton Komangapik. There is an aesthetic kinship with the growing number of Indigenous graphic artists: Walter Scott, Dianne Obomsawin, and particularly, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, the originator of Haida manga.
Kaia’tanó:ron’s personal narratives examine a life lived at intersections: Chateauguay/Kahnawake, French/Mohawk, and the tri-lingual complexities of Quebec. Her images are honest, raw and profoundly unromantic. They are saved from despair by vibrant colour, wry humour and a comic book aesthetic. There are recurring characters and motifs: the resilient pink woman (our hero), imps wreak havoc in her life, intestines become ribbons, circles of sweetgrass braids transform into hair, leaves and ropes alternately protecting and confining.
Beyond personal narrative, Dumoulin Bush responds to community events and historic trauma. In Doom Scrolling an anxious woman is overwhelmed by waves of bad news coming from the tiny phone in her hand. Obey! and God? speak back to the imposition of Christianity and challenge heroic colonial narratives that have been interwoven into our daily lives since childhood. John A. MacDonald’s Head recalls the toppling of a statue in the summer of 2020, and the artist encourages us to join in consuming his downfall. School Deskacknowledges the growing number of unmarked graves found at residential school sites across the country and honours acts of resistance.
For a quiet woman, Dumoulin Bush has a lot to say, and she will not be silenced. This is personal chatter responding to her world, but we can see ourselves in these images. The narratives are not closed. There are spaces for our stories, our experiences, our reactions. We see ourselves holding on in the midst of chaos, as we struggle to process the craziness of the present and the trauma of the past. And ultimately, share in the celebration of our collective resilience.
Ludovic Boney
Constructive Interference
Curated by Hannah Claus & Nadia Myre
presented by daphne with imagineNATIVE at A Space Gallery, Toronto
September 24, 2019 - November 2, 2019
Under the Catkins (2018)
The term “constructive interference” describes the effect of a source sending out pulses of energy that results in the amplification of waves or ripples, whether water or sound. In the exhibition Constructive Interference, Ludovic Boney’s installations amplify the effect of our bodies in the spaces he has created. By extension, we can think about the affect of our actions and reactions, and how these play out both individually and across our society. He directs our attention, our movement and our bodies through his installations to highlight how momentary fragments connect to constructed symphonies of experiential ephemera.
Grounded in memory, the installation Why So Many Ties? is inspired by interactions between the artist and his mother, who each time she gives something to her son, regularly re-uses one of the cheap plastic bags she has on hand, but always finalizes the act by tying the bag using a double knot. These plastic shopping bags are tied so tight, that Ludovic then has to rip them apart to retrieve what is inside. This ritual between mother and son speaks to the preciousness of gifting and goods; the pleasure to give and receive, yet also the mild frustration of having to accept the idiosyncrasies of what is. The artist has purposefully repurposed and translated these ties, these bundles, these bags for this installation, neatly and cleanly cutting out and cutting away, reducing and elevating the ubiquitous plastic skin both physically and aesthetically.
A slice of fabricated landscape: thirty to fifty pine planks elevated from the floor, are laid out in a path that fills the gallery but begins at nothing and leads to nowhere. The interest is not in the destination but in the experience. On either side of the path, integrated to the planks, are thousands of thin rods, six feet high, each crowned with remnants of plastic shopping bags, their coloured logos like the blooms of strange flowers, bulrush-like reeds or the nautical flags of a regatta.
The installation exists as a sculpture in its materiality. The thick pine planks speak of history and civilization as it visually transitions through material hierarchies of wood, metal and plastic. However, it truly comes alive when the viewer engages with the path the artist has prepared for them. As one steps on to the path, the planks creak and bend beneath the body’s weight. The field of rods and plastic forms shift and shiver with each step to trace out the movement from the source. Boney destabilizes the viewer, as his installation literally lifts them out of their physical groundedness and into a place surrounded by sound and stimuli. Once into the middle of the landscape, a recorded soundscape begins, mixing into the immediate physical experience. This audio component, created by distorting and enhancing actual sounds from the installation, both amplifies and frames reality, reminding us of the chaos that can result from just one step.
Under the Catkins, which won the Quebec Arts Council’s 2018 Artwork of the Year Award for the Chaudiere-Appalaches region of Quebec, is comprised of nearly 5000 brightly glazed elongated ceramic slip-cast birch seed pods (also known as catkins), suspend from drop ceiling tiles, like the ones commonly found in office spaces. Placed on the floor, in the centre of the room, is an evergreen wreath, its fresh pine smell permeating the air. Beyond the dizzying optical effect created by the vibrant feast of colour, which, from a distance, might appear to be a swarm of insects in stasis, a topology of clouds, or a floating reverse topography, these dancing ceramic seed pods attached to an office ceiling are at once appeasing, mesmerizing and ridiculous. Seductively playful, materially rich, and evocative of multiple readings, one might wonder how this art gallery/white cube grew such a fascinating tree, or whether we are living in a birchless future, and have imagined what its fruits might be. Or is it simply a celebratory occasion of our enduring adaptive intelligence? These pods, spinning to celestial rhymes, like whirling silk ribbons, like fancy dancing, speaking to our survivance as Indigenous people, and the wreath, a pillow to comfort our heads, a space to gather around, pointing to the continuance of life.
Boney likes to take disparate experiences and mash them together. His interest lies in creating absurd yet transcendent moments in which we might experience alterity; a hyper consciousness of the ways in which we have built our world (both physically and intellectually) as we are forced, with our bodies, to navigate his spatial constructs. In tandem, is an interest in replication and substitution, in the altering and shifting of materials to create meaning. His drive sits in the transformative magic of pragmatism, in the here and now, as we have always done, as people, nations and cultures that survive. Above all, Boney places the awe of the human experience in this world, as a pivotal point. He is motivated by the wonder and amazement of the natural world and takes joy in watching these things: bulrushes swaying in the wind, catkins dancing in the trees. However, in replacing the natural for the fabricated, Constructive Interference conflates the world that we have made against the one that was made for us, jamming our insecurities of futurity into a joyous celebration and leaving us to wonder if our two worlds can, in fact, be reconciled.
Wendat sculptor Ludovic Boney has completed over 20 architectural integration projects in Quebec, including several large-scale public art projects. In 2017, he was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award and won a REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. Currently living in Saint-Romuald, Boney continues to devote his time to his studio practice and public art proposals, exhibiting his work in artist-run centres, galleries, and museums in Quebec and Canada, as well as teaching sculpture at the Maison des Métiers d'Art in Quebec City. This is Boney’s first solo exhibition outside of Quebec.
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Hannah Claus and Nadia Myre are professional artists and occasional curators based in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal. Along with fellow artists-curators Caroline Monnet and Skawennati, they co-founded daphne in 2019 with the mandate to increase the visibility and understanding of contemporary Indigenous within Quebec. This includes increasing the visibility of Quebec-based Indigenous artists within and outside of that province. Constructive Interference is daphne's inaugural curatorial project.