Curated by Sophie Lavoie

The Red Chair Sessions is an ongoing open-call portraiture series that places importance on the acknowledgement and reclamation of Indigenous lands and the revitalization of Indigenous languages. This series ultimately disrupts colonial narratives, centres Indigenous Peoples who have been here since time immemorial, and reminds us that we are all guests on Indigenous land.

The colour red represents Indigenous Peoples on the Medicine Wheel and, in this series, signifies Indigenous Peoples’ inherent connection to the land and to ancestral bloodlines. Whether sitting on or standing beside the red chair, one feels grounded and firmly rooted; the act itself and the resulting portrait serves as a reminder of our responsibility to steward the lands upon which we walk.

Accompanying each photograph is text in the subject’s respective Indigenous language or a mix of languages, and can include: names gifted/given in ceremony (written in either English or syllabics), the Nation to which they belong, and the place names of traditional and Treaty areas in which each session occurred. In this way, Indigenous voices are amplified and become a refusal of the colonizer’s language while pointing out the erasure of Indigenous history.

The series is also a celebration honouring the many achievements of Indigenous Peoples and presents a positive perspective for future generations.

– Nadya Kwandibens

Nadya Kwandibens is Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) from the Animakee Wa Zhing #37 First Nation in northwestern Ontario. She is an award-winning portrait and events photographer, a Canon Ambassador, and has travelled extensively across Canada for over 10 years. In 2008 she founded Red Works Photography. Red Works is a dynamic photography company empowering contemporary Indigenous lifestyles and cultures through photographic essays, features, and portraits.

Nadya Kwandibens: The Red Chair Sessions is organized and circulated by The Muse - Douglas Family Art Centre.

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 FORWARD
Sophie Lavoie

Curator, The Muse, Douglas Family Art Centre

A photograph by Nadya Kwandibens is a powerful image that celebrates the contemporary Indigenous spirit while honouring past generations.

Artists are, in many ways, the eyes of society – their artwork reflects the state of their time. "Indigenous cosmologies, our world-views and philosophies have much to offer current and future generations,” says Kwandibens. “As an artist, to be a part of the continuation of that process is really meaningful.”

Her work’s intent is to elicit a shift in perceptions of First Nations people. “My work is deeply connected to Indigenous people and who we are. That’s always been the main goal behind my work: to have my photography be an accurate representation and depiction of who we are as Indigenous Peoples – as Nations across Turtle Island [North America] – to eradicate negative stereotypes by highlighting our complexities, our realities and our resistance to ongoing colonialism.”

Kwandibens is an Anishinaabe photographer from the Animakee Wa Zhing #37 First Nation on Lake of the Woods in Northern Ontario.  She has spent more than a decade travelling North America, offering her lens to those First Nations people who want to share their stories.

The Red Chair Sessions is a portraiture series representing Indigenous identity and the powerful connection that binds people to land. "We are visitors to different Indigenous Nations and treaty areas. The red chair represents our bloodlines and our connection to the land and where we come from,” explains Kwandibens. Each subject chose the location of their portrait, what they are wearing, and what they wish to represent in an expression of individual spirit. Collectively, the series is a testimony to the beauty, resilience, and strength of First Nations people and a challenge to a non-Indigenous audience to become aware of any conscious or subconscious assumptions they have of Indigenous peoples.

True reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples requires an exchange of experience. That exchange often happens through the sharing of stories and therein lies the important role of art galleries in the journey to reconciliation. Viewers are given the opportunity to engage in a dialogue of perspectives and ideas with the artist. Through her captivating visual narrative, Kwandibens creates a listening and holding space in which we acknowledge the past and create a willingness to learn from it. Her portraits encourage the opening of our collective heart.

“We, as Indigenous people, are often portrayed in history books as Nations once great; in museums as Nations frozen stoic; in the media as Nations forever troubled. These images can be despairing; however, my goal seeks to steer the positive course. If our history is a shadow, let this moment serve as light. We are musicians, lawyers, doctors, mothers and sons. We are activists, scholars, dreamers, fathers and daughters. Let us claim ourselves now and see that we are, and will always be great, thriving, balanced civilizations capable of carrying ourselves into that bright new day.” - Nadya Kwandibens

We acknowledge that the land on which The Muse is set is the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, territory covered by Treaty #3, signed in 1873, and the Treaty Adhesion signed by the Métis in 1875.

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Nadya Kwandibens

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Photos by Don Hall

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As one of Canada's preeminent feminist artists, Leesa Streifler's 40-year career has focused on experiences and representations of women, with her own lived experience at the core of her practice. In this series of mixed media drawings, she explores the aesthetics of aging female bodies and how they are perceived in a culture consumed with youthful beauty and ability. Through these powerfully drawn, expressive works Streifler fosters critical dialogue on bodily changes, ability, agency, sexuality, relationships, and memory to recognize strength and beauty at all ages and abilities. This exhibition is dedicated to Streifler’s mother, Sheila, who passed away in 2020.

Leesa Streifler received a BFA at the University of Manitoba and an MFA from Hunter College in New York. She taught in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Regina for over 30 years, influencing generations of art students. She has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. She is passionate about feminism and art education, actively mentoring other artists through MAWA (Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art) in Winnipeg, MB. Streifler lives and works in Winnipeg on Treaty One territory, the original lands of the Anishanaabeg, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene Nations, and on the National Homeland of the Red River Métis.

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 Reflections on She is Present

By Wayne Baerwaldt

Over the past thirty years Winnipeg artist Leesa Streifler’s studio-based practice has addressed Western culture’s biased representation of the female body. Since 2021, Streifler has taken on the theme of women and aging. Contentious and unreconciled, the representation of women and aging in a youth-centric culture is conspicuous for its largely negative associations. Streifler’s exploration of this negativity reveals an irrational mindset. Culturally embedded thought suggests that after a woman turns 35, she is, in the extreme sense, physically and psychologically bankrupt, somehow rendered “deficient” and esthetically unpleasant and in need of physical upcycling (beautification). Is this simply a surrealist nightmare, a kind of oblivion? Negative reinforcement proliferates via mass media advertising and advice columns offering a carrot and stick approach along with an imaginative path to a renewable youthful presence for women. Strangely enough, age anxiety is rarely if ever part of a man’s psychological make-up.

Streifler’s ongoing critique of the negative public representation of aging and women is manifested in her mixed-media drawings, sketch books, installation, performance and video scripts. Dunlop Art Gallery exhibition She is Present proposes both a lament and an empowering message for women who are so often maligned and mis-represented. Streifler’s proposition, in the form of twelve large-scale drawings, sketchbooks and a live performance, is a sensitive collective poem in tone. With both delicacy and rage, Streifler applies an expressionist visual language to condemn and unveil a world of mystery behind a woman’s real-life misery based largely on gender inequality. It is a reminder and no mystery that the internal monologue of the aging woman is dominated by a host of personal awareness boxes to be checked multiple times a day in a full-length mirror or with compact mirror in hand.

Common to many (aging) women, the compulsion is to alter one’s physical attributes with colours and to reshape her form to attain and elevate her status to a more acceptable appearances in the eyes of other men and women alike. Streifler applies a distinct visual style to represent the compulsion as subject matter, producing drawings and forms that are routinely irregular, asymmetric and jarringly repulsive to the eye. Feminist writer and critic Susan Sontag describes, over 50 years ago, what would inform Streifler’s examination of the myths of aging, as follows: “…the point for women of dressing up, applying makeup, dyeing their hair, going on crash diets, and getting facelifts is not just to be attractive. They are ways of defending themselves against a profound level of disapproval directed toward women, a disapproval that can take the form of aversion. The double standard about aging converts the life of women into an inexorable march toward a condition in which they are not just unattractive, but disgusting. The profoundest terror of a woman’s life is the moment represented in a statue by Rodin called ‘Old Age’: a naked old woman, seated, pathetically contemplates her flat, pendulous body.”  (1)  Streifler’s drawings describe a similar raw endzone in her figurative works. A “ruined” elderly woman in the drawing entitled Blanket (2024) appears to be lodged in a wheelchair. The woman’s body is inert, flattened in perspective and restrained by a checkered pink lap blanket. Another large-scale drawing, Belief (2022) offers a phantasmagoria of faces, flaming hair, and gaping mouths seemingly terrorized by a Christian cross and a hovering kitchen apron. Signs of terror flow unendingly. In spirit, Streifler’s call for equality is universal, a wake-up call to women and a direct message for all men.

What is to be done? Streifler addresses the common urge to rebuild the aging body. It is largely a fantasy world. The building blocks to a redemptive dreamworld are a woman’s hair, lips, skin, nails, and the will to attain a defined slim shape, each attribute encouraged in combination. (2) Attributions remain in flux, held in check by one’s personal demeanor, a forever quest to please other women and men. Streifler identifies each building block as a faux improvement, frozen in time or, ideally, with deficiencies reversed. But ultimately Streifler is asking us all to tell the truth about aging. Women should be strong and ambitious for no one else but themselves.

Streifler casts a harsh and critical eye to the anxieties that seemingly can’t be relieved by the beauty industry. Streifler’s drawings in oil stick and acrylic on polypropelene are mirrors to the doubt cast on aging women. Doubt privileges youth and drives what’s culturally defined as beautiful or worthy of building self-worth. To counter the assault by dominant, largely patriarchal values, Streifler has established a feminist position in the form of an esthetic strategy designed to overturn reality by imagining new meaning in shapeless forms to re-empower women.

Streifler addresses the challenge by debasing the established standards of beauty and self-worth in her drawings. Her strategy is to create figures that appear to embrace formlessness. Body parts are purposely articulated in a crude handling of her materials. In the drawing entitled Speaking Up (2023-24), Streifler denies each figure its “proper” form and by doing so she channels an optical unconscious to emphatically present a pastiche of three women. There is a screaming older woman, a girl and a young woman to the left depicted in this work. The handwritten text screams, “If not now, When?” to suggest a higher, more transcendent future tense. 

During the opening of She is Present, Winnipeg artist Anastasia Evsigneeva dances in response to Streifler’s work.  The youthful Evsigneeva in relationship to the images of aging women on the wall create a unique tension which she brilliantly enhances? The resulting flurry of images do not decorate Streifler’s investigation so much as structure and extend the artist’s basic mechanisms of thought on aging and representation to undo the myths and values of aging.

Notes:

1.     Sontag, Susan. THE DOUBLE STANDARD OF AGING, The Saturday Review, September 23, 1972, p.32.

2.     Ibid, p.36. “Her face is an emblem, an icon, a flag. How she arranges her hair, the type of make-up she uses, the quality of her complexion—all these are signs, not of what she is ‘really’ like, but of how she asks to be treated by others, especially men. They establish her status as an ‘object.’”

Wayne Baerwaldt is a Canadian independent curator. His best-known projects trace performative elements in artmaking with an emphasis on unstable, disputed identities and the language of their construction. He has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions including Ydessa Hendeles: Grand Hotel, If I May Digress: Richard Boulet, Glenn Ligon: Some Changes (with Thelma Golden) and Taras Polataiko: DEFIANCE, among others.  He is a board member of The Hnatyshyn Foundation (Ottawa) and serves on the Advisory Board for participant inc. (New York).

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Leesa Streifler

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Photos by Don Hall

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Larissa Tiggelers, slow next to them, acrylic on canvas, 2024. Photo: LFDocumentation

Larissa Tiggelers’ artistic practice explores articulations of care through mindful colour selections, dynamic yet composed forms, and surfaces of softly cumulative gestures. These qualities point to her interest in the unknowability of colour, the limitations of authorship, and quiet expressions of care. This exhibition is composed of near-diptych paintings that play with visual phenomena of mirroring and slippery symmetries. Many of the paintings are on a single surface, creating pairings that speak to one another through a shared language while pursuing distinct identities. This creates a discrete viewing experience that relies on slow contemplation, keen visual examination, and deep curiosity in order to explore the many puzzles that lie within each work.

Larissa Tiggelers holds an MFA from the University of Guelph and BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design. Her works are in several public and private collections, and have been exhibited at Norberg Hall (Calgary), Christie Contemporary (Toronto), The Bakery (Vancouver), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), and Paniki Gallery (Batan, Philippines). Tiggelers is an Assistant Professor in Painting and Drawing in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Regina, on Treaty 4 lands. 

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 Puzzles and Problems: Larissa Tiggelers’ Compositional Doublings in the Remembering Kind

By Blair Fornwald

The difference between a puzzle and a problem is that a puzzle has one solution, while problems can have many solutions, only imperfect solutions, or none at all. Handled with imprecision, they may resurface, metastasize, or multiply, so even after they are addressed, they can continue to haunt us with the persistent threat of their return. As long as the possibility of a better solution always remains, the problem, in a sense, also remains.

A puzzle, conversely, always contains the promise of its eventual completion. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us did jigsaw puzzles to pass time, soothe our addled nerves, and hack our neuromodulatory systems into feeling a sense of accomplishment during a period of remarkable monotony and rapidly multiplying problems. Now, while the effects of the pandemic still linger, the locus of our collective anxiety coalesces around one seemingly unsolvable problem after another. Absurdly and insidiously, we are expected to carry on, managing day-to-day tasks and stressors as if we weren’t simultaneously witnessing a genocide, the rise of fascism, and the ongoing destruction of our environment. It’s a lot to process.

While Larissa Tiggelers’ hard-edge abstractions in The Remembering Kind feel like a welcome reprieve from these categorically awful problems, they also offer oblique reflections on them. Though they resemble puzzles, they elude any attempts we may make to solve them.

On either side of crisp vertical divides that split her paintings down the middle, the artist presents near-symmetrical, non-objective compositions that invite comparison or suggest a sequential progression between left and right. At first glance, they remind me of those “spot the difference” puzzles you might see in kids’ magazines, but they are also quite amenable to narrative or anthropomorphic interpretation, a rarity for non-objective works. Their double format is rich with associative potential: they are like the before-and-after images used in weight-loss or tooth-whitening ads, adjacent film stills capturing subtle movement, or a pair of portraits in a hinged frame or locket.

Doubling invites the outside in. It amplifies theatricality by suggesting a performative interplay between the two entities. The forms on the left and right of slow next to them, for instance, appear to inhale and exhale like bodies, or crest and fall like waves. And the longer one looks at paintings like two-folding over and not altogether different, the more they disorient and confuse. Their compositions appear to fold and mirror each other, not only along the vertical axis—a strategy Tiggelers has established throughout this body of work---but also along horizontals and diagonals, inverting, flipping, and swapping pieces back and forth across numerous divides.

The parameters of Tiggelers’ work expand and unfold temporally. Compositions that first appear to be rational, restrained, and logical refuse to stay still and make sense for long.  The artist attunes our senses to notice subtler differences and asymmetries, not only to recognize compositional doppelgängers, but see how physical and perceptual phenomena can produce similar effects.

Tiggelers’ use of colour is particularly precise. She uses quaternary hues almost exclusively: complex, specific colours with evocative, Patrician names: glaucous, gamboge, feldgrau, verdigris, cordovan, champagne, Paris green, French grey. The relationships she establishes in her compositions reveal colour’s dynamic and relational aspects, sometimes boldly, but more often with incredible subtlety. A painting may contain variant hues so similar their differences may not fully register; to most, citron is to mindaro is to chartreuse is to lime. Conversely, a single colour may approximate multiple shades, tints, and tones, its proximity to adjacent colours affecting its relative value and chroma.

And though Tiggelers’ paintings initially appear perfectly flat, when closely observed, their clearly-delineated, solid-coloured geometric forms seem to rise from and sink into the surface of the image. In part, this movement is illusory; cool tones appear to recede into the background while warm tones advance toward us. But there are also physical gradations within Tiggelers’ paintings. If I were to run my fingertips over their porcelain-smooth surface, I could feel the tape-line contours that trace the edges of each form and create topographical distinctions.  If I looked askance, running my eye along one of these seams, could I see the layers of paint comprising a form? Maybe. Almost.

I am tempted to call these paintings deceptive, but they are too generous for that. They are tricky, not because they withhold information, but because they present information that exceeds or contradicts the expectations implied by their format. This information slips past us; we don’t expect it so we don’t see it. Such is often the case when we presume problems are puzzles. Tiggelers’ quiet, curious paintings demonstrate a process of reconciling with uncertainty and complexity. They feel like safe surrogates for managing everyday anxieties, their slow reveals demonstrating the ways our senses betray us, then offering gentle course correction.

Blair Fornwald (they/she) is a curator, writer, and artist living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Treaty One Territory, and the homeland of the Red River Métis Nation.

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Larissa Tiggelers

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Photos by LF Documentation and Don Hall

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In feel through the deepness to see, a new immersive exhibition by celebrated media and performance artist Rita McKeough, we journey below ground, where plants and animals gather and try to make sense of the activities of machines that labour above. Together, we are invited to imagine interspecies relationships beyond the destructive exploitation of extractive industrialism.

The exhibition is the third iteration of a series, including darkness is as deep as the darkness is, curated by Jacqueline Bell at the Walter Philips Gallery, and dig as deep as the darkness, curated by Dylan McHugh for the Richmond Art Gallery.

The exhibition is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Program. The artist would also like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation of the Arts and Alberta University of the Arts, Bemis Centre for Contemporary Art for their generous support and everyone who contributed to the production of this work.

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 Underground With You in Rita McKeough’s feel through the deepness to see 

By Lindsey french  
 
“Hey, hey! Come closer. Come closer. We need to talk to you. We need your help.”    --Roses 

We wanted to hear what the roses say -- and now we find ourselves in an underground bunker where insects, animals, and plants are recovering from the disaster above. We are guests, listening in on a conversation between bear and cranberry as they check in on each other in the wake of disaster.  

What does it mean to be a listener? As a social practice, listening establishes relationships. The deeply contextual nature of listening is complicated by inherent biases, worldviews, and approaches that we bring to our listening practices, a concept which Dylan Robinson describes as listening positionality. Listening positionality is not easily summarized by our identity markers, but is a richer, thicker process of understanding the social contexts we listen among – and when we are guests in someone else’s sound territories.1  Listening built on relationships of shared power can resist assimilative and extractive logics that guide our relationships with other beings. 

The sonic space we visit in the bunker of feel through the deepness to see includes a conversation between bear and cranberry, above a chugging combustion engine and heartbeat rhythm, occasionally interrupted by a blast of loud sound. Though this is an imaginary world, it's a dangerous one, and we are implicated as both guests and witnesses within the narrative of this interspecies assemblage that, while related to, is different from our own. 

feel through the deepness to see operates with a dose of anthropomorphism, but McKeough’s aim isn’t to prescribe human characteristics to these plants and animals. Instead, she’s interested in translation between species, an interest I share – not because translation allows full understanding, but precisely because translations are flawed. There is value in developing relationships of uncertainty which make such interspecies queries possible. Gaps in translation create spaces for vulnerability, and confronting the limits of understanding can create conditions for learning or change.  

Some biological definitions consider communication to be established when a signal from a sender causes a change in the behavior of the receiver.2 This scientific definition of interspecies communication focuses less on a message’s fidelity, and more on the capacity of the receiver to be affected. I feel vulnerable when I enter the main installation room where extraction towers loom above, duplicated by cast shadows. Sword ferns stand guard, their tracery of dangling roots webbing across this subsoil environment, while claws and horns rise up in choreographies of warning signals. I feel the stakes of the situation before I can describe what they are.  

As my eyes adjust to the darkened room, I see pale ghosts of sword ferns at the blanched bases of the extraction towers. They are the honorable dead, having ingested and transformed toxins into their bodies in resistance to what Rob Nixon might refer to as the “slow violence” of environmental degradation, often invisible and impacting already disempowered communities.3 Here, we’re in the midst of this violence and its resistance, alongside the sword ferns and their horned and clawed comrades.  

For decades, McKeough’s work has asked questions about our relationship to land through humour, imagination, and introspection. At Saskatoon’s Mendel Art Gallery4 in 1986, McKeough offered a dark yet witty glimpse into the future in her installation Afterland Plaza, which she developed after researching uranium mining around Saskatchewan. Inside the gallery, a mall of the future was hawking polluted real estate, with displays of cows amidst uranium molecules, residential homes with filtered air propped above unlivable landscapes, and a soundtrack of mall announcements and infomercials. Years later for this exhibition at the Dunlop, she considers post-extractive futures of the province again, this time offering a different access point. Though both installations direct us toward critical reflection, any subtle whiffs of satire that may have floated through the sales pitches in Afterland Plaza’s filtered air are not detectable in the atmospheres of commoning of the underground burrows in feel through the deepness to see. Here, we gather earnestly in the dank richness of shared soil and of working through grief and resolve together, with care. There is a chill of sadness in the installation, but you don’t have to feel the sadness alone. You, too, might be buried underground in the future– but more importantly, you are there now, alive and witnessing the richness of interspecies coalition forming in the tangle of subsoil networks. 

The animals and plants in McKeough’s installation can’t escape the persistence of the machine, and neither can we –it resonates as a sonic beat within our bodies in the gallery, but also beyond, as we’re all implicated in extractive economies and technologies in different ways. Machines have cut the installation’s ferns from wood and programmable logic controllers trigger the installation’s theatrics for viewers. It is not necessarily the machines, but the extractive logics which insist (as we hear from the ferns), on “taking everything” and “sucking up everything that is not them.” Machines, like listening, can be turned toward extraction and assimilation; or they can be turned against it, inclined instead toward urgent stories of an era. McKeough crafts imaginary worlds and experiences of deep feeling, inviting us to investigate our own positionality in the very real narratives of extraction that play out in the region. She reminds us that resistance forms underground, and it’s not too cool for you to join. The roses’ request is transparent. You’re invited to listen, but you’re listening to a question – what are we going to do? In the rich coalitions of the soil, you become part of the we. You can be underground too, and in the darkness, we can feel our way forward together.  

Lindsey french (they/she) is an artist, educator and writer whose work considers positions of listening, receptivity, and marginality as valid and active political and communicative positions. Lindsey has shared their work widely in museums, galleries, screenings, and D.I.Y. art spaces including the OCAD’s Onsite gallery (Toronto), SixtyEight Art Institute (Copenhagen), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), along with collaborative projects at The Chute (Pittsburgh) and for the 4GROUND: Midwest Land Art Biennial (Shafer, Wisconsin). Recent publications include chapters for Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape, and the Postnatural (Actar, 2022), Olfactory Art and The Political in an Age of Resistance (Routledge, 2021), and Why Look at Plants (Brill, 2019). Lindsey earned a BA through an interdisciplinary course of study at Hampshire College, and an MFA in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2021, they moved from Pittsburgh to Treaty 4 to teach as an Assistant Professor in Creative Technologies in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina. 

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Rita McKeough

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Photos by Don Hall

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Second Tongues is an on-going project by artist Serena Lee. Imagining a world where everyone is assigned a randomly selected second language at birth, Lee explores the dynamics of language learning and the politics of language hierarchies. Working with community members with this imagined setting in mind, Lee asks people to reflect on nationhood, kinship, and market-driven globalization through world-building activities.This installation is a reminder of the complexity of our language systems, as well as the many ways we connect despite differences and distance.

Serena Lee plays with moving image, sound, place, and gesture to map how things come together and apart. She works through open-ended processes that stretch language and geography, involving conversation and collaboration. Serena holds an MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute (NL), and an Associate Diploma in Piano Performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music (CA). Serena is based between tkaronto/Toronto, where she was born, and Vienna, where she is completing a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

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Second (    ) Tongues

By Daniella Sanader

In the future—

(Let’s begin here, secure in a future-time marked as singular. To speak of the future—of the future—is to hold the word with declarative ease. Made solid, smooth, and firm through repetition, it’s a stone that matches the curves of your mouth; perhaps you no longer register its shape. It’s just what we tend to say, isn’t it? Dislodge it, turn it over on your tongue. Can we find language for multiple futures at once—tangible ones, under-baked and sticky ones, knotted ones, futures that reshape us as we speak them?)

we all speak a second language not of our choosing—

(An Italian story[1] describes a poet looking to better his craft by learning a new language. An English sea captain offers to teach him Persian, one foreign tongue amongst many that the captain had learned throughout his travels. The two men begin their work in earnest, talking and writing together, and the captain is impressed with how quickly the poet familiarizes himself with the language’s rhythms. The captain departs and the poet decides he is ready to compose his own works in Persian. He tinkers over them tirelessly, pleased and galvanized by how the language offers him new architectures for his thinking. Finally, he decides to refer to the works of other Iranian writers, whom he has abstained from in order to preserve the integrity of his poetic voice. To his horror, he quickly discovers he can’t understand their writing at all: he didn’t learn Persian.)

It is assigned at birth and—

(Serena’s fingers—they knead and pull, exerting gentle pressure against a range of pliable surfaces. There’s the technicolour grain of salt dough, the lustre of bread rolls molded in plastic, the peaks and valleys of handwritten questions on loose paper. Throughout Second Tongues, she collects these squishy textures and many others; she recognizes that language-learning is a process that occurs somewhere between the softness of a body and the grammars of power that endeavour to shape it.)

selected at random from the history of language—

(A popular tweet asks: “What’s considered trashy if you’re poor, but classy if you’re rich?”

One answer is repeated, again and again: “Being bilingual.”)

to be learnt and used alongside the mother tongue—

(There’s a rhyme that my grandmother used to sing to me when I was little. All I seem to remember is the turning point of its conclusion—the second half of a singsong pair, with an upturned voice and playful exclamation mark. I’ve forgotten the rest, along with the majority of this language that was supposedly my very first.

моје маме десна рука! Moje mame desna ruka! My mother’s right hand!!

The second line is what gives a rhyme its meaning, its cadence and pleasure—but without the first, the second is unmoored, residual. A punchline without a joke. An answer without a question. Right hand found reaching for its left.)

All nations or organized societies have agreed upon a lottery system—

(Perhaps you have questions. The speculative narrative at the core of Second Tongues surrounds itself with questions, they both fortify and undermine it. How was this agreement facilitated between all nations and societies? Is there an international council that enforces it? What communities qualify under these categories, and which are excluded? Who makes these decisions and how?

Second Tongues does not attempt to answer these questions. Instead, Serena weaves them into the fabric of the project itself; collected through discussions in workshops with artists and writers, adult literacy learners, migrant communities, domestic workers, linguistic scholars, and others. As the project expands, the central narrative is also translated into more and more tongues, layers contributing to its ever-thickening warp and weft. Collective speculation produces a polyvocal shimmer, new pathways emerge with each inquisitive line.)

and the pool of possible draws—

(So, if not Persian, what language did the Italian poet learn? He consults other linguistic experts, who dissect his script and are baffled by it. It bears no resemblance—in structure and style—to any other known language across the world, living or dead. The English captain is equally unhelpful, speculating that the poet’s imagination overtook his otherwise accurate lessons. The poet is dismayed; this language was entirely of his own invention. Who are his poems for, if no one can read them? He had accessed new truths, his mind and hand reshaped around a new grammar; were they lost if no one was able to receive them?)

consists of every single language that has ever existed—

(Here’s another question: if Second Tongues were stored in this library, what shelves would house it? The “Art” or “Science Fiction” categories seem self-evident, but maybe the project’s glutenous textures would be better represented under “Cooking”; its linguistic experimentation finding space amongst poetry titles, or digital resources for language learning. I like to imagine that Second Tongues finds its most natural home amidst a library’s less taxonomic infrastructures: clusters of chairs arranged for group discussion, scrap papers and small pencils that collect call numbers for shelves; water fountains and vending machines. Structures that support our bodies as we imagine new futures into being.)

dead or living, dialects too—

(There are ancient glyphs pressed in once-malleable clay; there’s the pillowy, expansive cloud of shared laughter around a table. There is a shape to this distance—however massive or intimate—between writer and reader, between speaker and listener.

How far did these words travel in order to reach you, reading them here in this moment? Speak them aloud, add more of your own. Read these words in whatever tongues—first, second, third—you like.

Maybe with time, in some slowly congealing future, they will find their way back to me.)

and the pool keeps growing.

Daniella Sanader is a writer and reader who lives in Toronto. 

[1] Tommaso Landolfi’s “Dialogo dei massimi sistemi, (Dialogue of the Greatest Systems)” published in 1937, and referenced in Daniel Heller-Roazen’s Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone Books, 2008): 195-202. This source is used by Serena Lee in Second Tongues-related workshops and discussions.

Community Responses:

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Serena Lee

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Photos by Don Hall

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Logan MacDonald, digital image, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.

Curated by Wendy Peart, Curator of Education & Community Outreach

Logan MacDonald’s recent work explores how disability can affect or change the ways we gain access to knowledge. In particular, MacDonald is engaged in thinking about Indigenous knowledge and legacies of cultural production. For this exhibition, MacDonald facilitated open-ended engagements with students from Winston Knoll’s Deaf and Hard of Hearing program to co-create the interdisciplinary artworks in his exhibition. MacDonald prompted participants to share experiences and learn from each other through a creative lens. The exhibition thematically illustrates participants’ individual experiences and their connections made with one another, overcoming communication barriers and making space for shared knowledge and discoveries.

Born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Logan MacDonald is a Canadian artist, curator, and educator and activist. He is of European and Mi’kmaq ancestry (connected to Elmastukwek, Ktaqamkuk) and he identifies with both his settler and Indigenous roots. MacDonald’s artwork has been exhibited across North America and he is an Assistant Professor in Studio Arts at the University of Waterloo. In 2019, he was long listed for the prestigious Sobey Art Award.

Funding for this project was provided by SK Arts, Artist in Communities grant.

Artist ↑

Logan MacDonald

Essay ↑

Kway Kiishkwihk

Wuskiixaskwal waak Waapsowihleewi Niipaahum

neewaanihka

niish tawsun waak takwiinaxke waak ngwuta

 April 15, 2021

 Dear Logan,

It has been such a pleasure to get a glimpse into your project with the Dunlop Art Gallery and Winston Knoll's Deaf and Hard of Hearing program. I love working as an artist because there are often opportunities to share our skills with communities that we might not otherwise be able to connect to. I am not currently part of the Deaf or Hard of Hearing community. However, hearing loss runs in my family, and I know that I fit into a "normal" range of hearing right now but that it won't always be the case. I am grateful that my experience as a person with a learning disability/neurodiversity within the visual arts has led me to get to know and work with you and other Deaf and Hard of Hearing artists. I enjoyed the stories you shared about working with the students, their passion for making, interests and community. Projects like these are interesting and tricky to identify where the art is. Is it a kind of relational aesthetic? A community art practice? Research? You have described these drawings as letters to the students. 

When I think about art and disability and accessibility, I think about the multitude of ways that people are creative. One of the most exciting parts about studying art at school was learning that there are so many ways to express oneself. Western art history is full of people experimenting challenging and manipulating those boundaries. These ideas of what is defined as art get even more hard to define when we think about art outside of the western canon. 

These drawings look to me like notes from a meeting I was not part of, but it feels familiar. Taking notes as drawings is something that I have always been drawn to; recently, I have practiced this kind of notation more regularly, embracing it. As a young student taking notes in class was one of the things I hated most because it was a distraction, and I could never "keep up."  In contrast, it is common practice in Indigenous spaces to call for presence and attention by asking that people do not take notes. When I was young, I always felt vindicated in these moments, where the group was called to participate in a way that aligned with my skills and attributes. There is no one way to learn, to teach, to speak, or to perceive. We are all given special gifts. In these drawings, repeated references to speaking, hearing and seeing, bring our attention to those senses. The beadwork images, hands walking together, and the word "connect" and "Collectively" all reference community, gathering, or our aptitude to be together.

I want to let the reader into some more of your process. There are concentric circles of experience and understanding existing in this work, you held workshops, art-making studios and discussions with students at Winston Knoll's Deaf and Hard of Hearing program. Together you share the experience of what you all accomplished, felt, understood and made. Logan, you shared some more details of what that experience was with me. In this essay, I pass on some of what you told me but not all of it; and I am sure there were details from those experiences that remain between you and the students alone or just you. The strategy of not telling all, carefully choosing what aspects to keep private is practiced and powerful. Our Indigenous family and ancestors have used it to keep cultural knowledge safe from the consumptive prying hands of anthropologists and colonists. Within the disability movement, the slogan "Nothing about us without us" reminds everyone not to represent others. Not to "speak" for someone else's experience because we cannot know all or share all, and it is unethical to try or claim to do so.

When you told me that primrose and tobacco, in a sense, speak in screeches that are inaudible to our human ears, I was thrilled and am not surprised. I recently listened to the Lenape creation story; one aspect that resonated with me was that kishalawowan made it so humans would have to use plants and animals to communicate with the spirit world. we cannot, or most of us do not have a direct connection. We use plants and animals to pass our messages on. There are so many forms of communication happening around us that we might not be aware of.

Anushiik waak Katwalill niijoos

Vanessa

Vanessa Dion Fletcher is a Lenape and Potawatomi neurodiverse artist. Her family is from Eelūnaapèewii Lahkèewiitt (displaced from Lenapehoking) and European settlers. She Employs porcupine quills, Wampum belts, and menstrual blood reveals the complexities of what defines a body physically and culturally. Reflecting on an indigenous and gendered body with a neurodiverse mind Dion Fletcher creates art using composite media, primarily working in performance, textiles, video.

Installation Images ↑

Photos by Don Hall

Media ↑

Listen to CBC’s The Morning Edition interview “kawingjemeesh/shake hands: Dunlop Art Gallery artist creates new artwork with local Deaf students”

Hazel Meyer’s mutable body of work, Muscle Panic, considers the performance of the athletic. Evoking the imagery of momentous sports history, the bodily gestures and actions of a drill or warmup and the aesthetics of the gymnasium, Meyer instigates an arena of sweat and queer desire. Multiple iterations of Muscle Panic have taken the project from a rogue basketball gym built in an abandoned barn to a clandestine locker room to a warehouse-like gymnastics studio. Simultaneously an installation and a performance, Muscle Panic transforms the banal and austere white cube into a hot physically charged site for emotional and physical exchange. 

Essay ↑

By Robin Alex McDonald

Queer theorist Jennifer Doyle suggests that “thinking about sports is like thinking about a novel that has five dimensions. It can be hard to pin down your object. The sport text has watery boundaries: Is it the event? The competition? The broadcast? The arena, fan culture? Training? The match report?”[1] Similarly, thinking about Hazel Meyer’s Muscle Panic is like trying to pin down an immeasurable imagining, one that shape-shifts from idea to archive, from archive to installation, from installation to performance, from performance to print. Each adaptation of Muscle Panic offers new constellations of sport history ephemera, locker room curiosa, and affective objects that reveal the oft-repressed queer and feminist sensibilities of sport cultures: “Sport Dyke” locker labels, a multi-gallon thermos of Lez Hulk Sweat, net-less and bare basketball rims, photographs of women athletes whose tenacity is palpable even on cardstock, a shiny silver whistle around which countless lips have closed. Doyle claims that the athlete’s sense of self is “fluid, changeable, contingent,” but Muscle Panic expands on this to show that the material cultures that constitute the athlete’s world are fluid, too.[2] Their archives take on new shapes and new forms, depending on where and how they are being housed (a gym locker, a storage room, a hall of fame, a gallery) and what their caretaker deems meaningful.

Past iterations of Muscle Panic crescendoed in multi-participant performances that relished the rigor of athletic rituals and the sweet idiosyncrasies of women and queer people occupying space together. In them, Meyer and her team of performers donned handmade jerseys, stretched one another’s bodies, passed basketballs back and forth (and back and forth, and back and forth) between them, inhaled the odour of their own and each others’ armpits, tied their long hair back into sport-ready ponytails, double-knotted each other’s shoelaces. Within the homosocial world of sport, in which teams are segregated by sex and the existence of queer touches, looks, and desires are actively denied, these types of interactions are mostly dismissed as teammate comradery or game-time rituals. In the constructed world of Muscle Panic’s performance, however, these interactions both educe and exceed the intimacies of sex – sweaty touches, heavy breathing, furtive eye contact, giggly asides – and thus speak aloud what Heidi Eng has called the “silences underlying and permeating discourses of normality” within the world of sport.[3]

Named after the sociological concept of moral panic, a fear of something dangerous and threatening to “discourses of normality” as well as the status quo of the social order, Muscle Panic uses touch and sweat to terrorize the gender binary and its attendant presumption of heterosexuality on which most sports rely. Now, in a world where touching, sweating, and breathing together have become dangerous in altogether new ways, Meyer has been tasked with translating the collaborative and spontaneous spirit of performance into another, safer format. For the 2020 version of Muscle Panic, Meyer has solicited five women and/or non-binary athletes to create a collaborative print project that draws from the codes and aesthetics of instructional exercise posters. Such a poster project recalls elementary school gymnasium décor, but it also recalls the safer sex cartoons and information pamphlets created during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s by organizations like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the National Coalition of Gay Sexually Transmitted Disease Services, wherein communities disproportionately affected by the epidemic sought to communicate information and care using their own languages and signs.  Renowned art historian and political activist Douglas Crimp discussed these instructional comics in his 1987 essay, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” where he referred to community-created materials as “precisely the sort of safe sex education material that has proven to work.”[4] While there are obvious differences between teaching someone how to properly put on a condom and instructing them how to perform the perfect jump shot, there are similarities as well: a flicking motion of the wrist, the need to be gentle yet shrewd, the importance of practice and the risks that sloppiness carries. Both tasks demand focused attention on the body and are usually done in the presence of another body. And if the instructional posters of the 1980s helped gay men to have promiscuity in an epidemic, perhaps this instructional poster can teach its audiences how to create new intimacies in a pandemic by reminding us that the queer desires that exist in sport – the desire to touch, to be playful, to work together in new ways – have not gone away.

Meyer has stated that Muscle Panic is about the need for women’s bodies, queer bodies, and sick bodies to “take up space” on the field, on the court, in the locker rooms, and in the gallery.[5] Now, in the absence of these bodies, we instead have Muscle Panic’s stuff: scaffolding that stands strong like skeletons, pompoms that caress like fingers, the pebbled texture of basketballs like our craggy skin. If, as queer affect scholar Ann Cvetkovich suggests, “objects are meaningful as expressions of desire,”[6] we might think of the objects that make up Muscle Panic as “testimon[ies] to social relations” between an imagined team of women, femmes, queers, crips, and others whose bodies and identities have been, and continue to be, marginalized within sport cultures.[7] Like that stink of sweat that cannot be evicted from a gametime jersey, these relations endure – their affects linger, their politics persist.

Robin Alex McDonald (they/them) is an independent curator, writer, and academic currently living and working as an uninvited guest on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory, the traditional territory of the Anishnaabeg people and specifically, the Nipissing First Nation. Robin works as a part-time faculty member in the Fine and Visual Arts department at Nipissing University in North Bay, an instructor in the Visual and Critical Studies program at OCAD University in Tkaronto/Toronto, and a PhD Candidate in the Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University in Katarokwi/Kingston, Ontario. Their academic and arts writing has been published in such journals and magazines as Literature and Medicine, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, n.paradoxa, Syphon, nomorepotlucks, Spiffy Moves, and Guts Canadian Feminist Magazine (with Elly Clarke, Amanda Turner-Pohan, and Michelle Ty). To view more of their work, please visit www.robinalexmcdonald.com

[1] Jennifer Doyle, “Introduction: Dirt Off Her Shoulders,” GLQ  19, no. 4 (2013): 423.

[2] Ibid., 426.

[3] Michel Foucault as cited in Heidi Eng, “Queer Athletes and Queering in Sport,” in ed. Jayne Caudwell, Sport, Sexualities and Queer/Theory (Taylor and Francis Group, 2006),

[4] Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” October 43 (Winter 1987): 264.

[5] Hazel Meyer, interview for the MacLaren Art Centre, August 2015.

[6] Ann Cvetkovich, “Photographing Objects as Queer Archival Practice,” in eds. Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu, Feeling Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 275.

[7] Ann Cvetkovich, “Personal Effects: The Material Archive of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s Domestic Life,” NoMorePotlucks 25 (Winter 2013), no page numbers.

Artist ↑

Hazel Meyer

Installation Images ↑

Photos by Don Hall

Media ↑

Link to Hazel Meyer Muscle Panic Poster Project.

Link to Dunlop Art Gallery or Regina Public Library