Guide to Archival Holdings /

Finding Aids

Cradleboards have been used for thousands of years by our ancestors to carry and love for our future generations. They have protected us, acted as an external womb, and given us a place as children to watch our parents' culture and learn from a safe distance. I’ve always wondered if the fact that neither my father, his father, or myself was ever put in a cradleboard may have had a long term impact on our development, personhood, and our coping mechanisms to the ways that colonialism, residential schools and the foster care system has affected my family.

Now as an adult I deeply wish I could rewind the clock and put myself, and my father before me, and his father before him in a cradleboard as a child. To softly sing songs to us, give us safety, and to give us a connection to our culture in a safe environment. Maybe this would fix things. As kids when we were supposed to be kept safe and playing in the woods we were instead being prepped for the meat factory - the eternal meat grinder of colonialism.

The western world teaches us to push aside this childhood imagining and innocence - “These things can’t be undone!”, but what if they could? In another world somebody took better care of us, in another time we learned to drum and sing and dance, in another place we were listened to by adults who had the capacity to love and care for us.

These hot chest and aching throat feelings, the times of biting back angry tears and saying “It’s fine” have to count for something….right?

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In this text Morgan and Jordan speak on consent and permission, considering what is sacred and sharing their feelings on relational community.

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Morgan Possberg Denne is Two-Spirit millennial scoop and foster care survivor; with settler, Cree, Metis, and Chippewa blood connections. They have grown up in treaty 7 territory, and have relatives in southern and northern Ontario. Morgan creates imaginative, illustrative objects which could be seen as pieces of possible narratives, different ways to connect with the past and potential futures through layers of abstraction with no right or wrong answer. What matters to them is not accurately recreating the past or to predict the future, but rather to capture an inner truth and a possible alternative reality of colonial experiences. In a sense, creating new culture from a series of “what-ifs” and new stories / lore. Their work has been recently shown at the Confederation Centre for the Arts and Gallery Gachet.



Jordan Baylon (they/she/he) is a second generation PilipinX artist, critic and community worker imagining justice and abundance for equity-deserving peoples within the spaces of all our relations: personal, communal and societal. As an artist, Jordan explores queer and racialized identities as liminal spaces: both and neither; between, across and through; both inside and outside; and both literal and imagined. Jordan’s community practice leverages a decade of experience in the non-profit arts and culture sectors, where they developed their critical lens around equity, anti-racism and systems change. After many years navigating institutions, Jordan now devotes their interest and attention to working at grassroots alongside equity-deserving individuals and communities.--




中文翻译 Chinese Translation ...

我父親的搖籃板

數千年來，我們的祖先一直使用搖籃板來承載和愛護我們的後代。 它們保護我們，就像一個外在的子宮，給了我們一個作為孩子的地方，讓我們在安全的距離觀察父母的文化並學習。 我一直在想，我的父親、他的父親和我自己都沒有被放在搖籃板上，這一事實是否會對我們的成長、人格和我們的應對機制產生長期影響，就像殖民主義、寄宿 學校和寄養系統對我們家庭的影響一樣。 現在，身為一個成年人，我深深希望時光能夠倒流，讓我自己、我的父親和他的父親在孩提時代都放在搖籃上。 在一個安全的環境中，輕輕地為我們唱歌，給我們安全，讓我們與我們的文化建立聯繫。 也許這樣就能解決問題。 當我們還是孩子的時候，我們本應在森林中安全玩耍，但我們卻被送進了肉類加工廠--殖民主義的永恆絞肉機。 西方世界教導我們將這種童年的想像和純真推到一邊--"這些事情無法挽回！"，但如果可以呢？ 在另一個世界，有人更好地照顧我們；在另一個時代，我們學會了擊鼓、唱歌和跳舞；在另一個地方，我們被有能力愛護我們的成年人傾聽著。 這些胸口發熱、喉嚨疼痛的感覺，那些反擊憤怒的淚水，說 "沒事 "的時候，說“沒事”的時刻，這些都應該值得一些什麼……對吧？

Morgan Possberg Denne是雙靈千禧世代的領養倖存者；與定居者、克里人、梅蒂斯人和奇佩瓦人都有血緣關係。 Morgan在第 7 條約區長大，在安大略省南部和北部都有親戚。 Morgan創作的作品充滿想像力，圖文並茂，可以被視為可能的敘事片段，透過沒有對錯之分的抽象層次，以不同的方式與過去和潛在的未來聯繫起來。 對Morgan來說，重要的不是要準確地再現過去或預測未來，而是捕捉內在的真相和殖民經驗可能的替代現實。 從某種意義上說，從一系列 "假設 "和新故事/傳說中創造出新的文化。 Morgan的作品最近在聯邦藝術中心（Confederation Centre for the Arts）和Gallery Gachet展出,並與2023 年冬季在新畫廊舉辦個展。

Jordan Baylon（他們/她/他）是第二代菲律賓裔（性別中立）藝術家、評論家和社區工作者，致力於在個人、社區和社會的各種關係空間中構想公正和豐盛，為那些應 得到平等的人爭取正義。 作為藝術家，Jordan探索酷兒和種族特徵的身份，將其視為邊緣空間：既是又不是；既在兩者之間，又穿過兩者；既在內部又在外部；既是真實的 又是想像的。 Jordan的社區實踐借助了在非營利藝術和文化領域積累的十年經驗，其中他培養了對公平、反種族主義和系統變革的批判性視角。 在經歷了多年的機構工作後，Jordan現在將興趣和注意力致力於與應得平等的個體和社區一起進行基層工作。

中文翻译 Chinese Translation

ᓄᐦᑕᐃᐧᕀ ᐊᐢᑯᑖᐢᑯᐱᓱᐣ
nohtawiy askotâskopison
My father’s cradleboard

A conversation between
Jordan Baylon and Morgan Possberg Denne

In this text Morgan and Jordan speak on consent and permission, considering what is sacred and sharing their feelings on relational community.

M - Going into this conversation I think it's best to be chill with things. When things are overly planned, or you think about it too much it becomes academic, and that's not the purpose or goal. There's nothing wrong with academic, but it's not accessible or the vibe.


J - Yeah I think the accessibility is an important part.


M - Yeah it shows. You can have these deep conversations about art, feelings and the world and how one person might process those things but still have it be understandable is important. How we all are inhabiting our own worlds but processing them differently. I think that relates to what I wanted to talk about. The main things I'm thinking of lately when I make work is permission and consent, which I think are linked together.


J - That's when I become interested. Let's break that down.


M - What's the difference?


J - What does either one feel attached to that's real for you, in either case, or both, or neither?


M - When I think about permission vs consent, I think both can be given and taken away. Permission is something you give yourself, but I’m not sure if you’d give yourself consent?


J - Both of these things are very connected to the container that surrounds them. Which is a situation or a context. For example, if this is about me having to locate my individual agency, that means a really different thing on an interpersonal level vs systemic or structural or societal or cultural or communal level. Permission seems more connected to….something that feels raw and unfiltered. Some sort of relational space. vs consent feels very specific to a shared cultural experience around things like sexual violence, hegemony, oppression, colonialism, right? We use the word consent when we’re discussing the points of interface with other humans that often are connected to potential for the most harm. We’re using that word to invoke what a collective space of safety looks like.

M - Consent as related to harm mitigation.


J - Yes , in how I have a relationship to the word. As connected to the Me Too movement and how over politicized that word has become. Not just what we’re talking about, but a culture as well. Permission seems so personal, not as connected to harm. Connected to acceptance, affirmation, holding, welcoming.


M - When I think about permission; it's an oversimplification to say it's a more positive word than consent but it almost is. I feel that there is something more sacred about permission. My association is that you would give yourself to do something, or be ok with something, or to feel something, that feels like a very deeply internal personal healing process. vs. consent I don't have that association with that.


J - I've been thinking a lot about the dichotomy of what is sacred vs what is merely expensive. What is priceless vs something that can be bought. I don’t know if consent even fits into that


M - I think consent can be bought, but permission can not. At least in how I understand them.


J - Consent is connected to negotiation, but permission seems deeply personal. When you offer permission its to yourself and the other on a sacred level, It has to do with your sense of self. Whereas consent is describing a shared space that we may not completely inhabit in and of ourselves. This is connected to the Filipino cultural concept of kapwa, the personal sacred permission space and the ways we relate to each other in a good way, in a community shared space are one and the space in kapwa. We see our individual selves as inextricable from our collective shared experience and identity of being in community.


M - From what I know of most indigenous cultures we would see things that way too. You as an individual and how you experience the world can’t be removed from community, your nation and the land. That's where a lot of the harm of colonialism has come in. This western idea of having to be this special individual is actually quite harmful. Traditionally you’d see yourself as part of a community in kinship with people and the land.


J - Being separate is the original wound for humans. I’m connecting to that. Another way of looking at this is that the word of consent is burdened with our unaddressed wounds. That's why it has a diff feeling space than permission. It resonates with a collectively and systemically perpetuating harm. Cups spilling over generations and generations. I also think about it on a fractal scale too, if the permission is on the level of taproot deep sense of self and values and ancestors, consent is the community space. I think there's other names and words for how we describe the condition of relating on a macro level in society. But we’re not past consent yet. The level of harm that's possible simply in our most intimate personal moments is so high. This word doesn't have the joyful ringing of permission. Permission I can think of sentences for permission. When I think of permission, if I'm giving it it's also reciprocal. If it's myself I’m saying I’m allowing myself to live in a world where this exists. If it's another person, that they exist and their wholeness exists, even if it's not the same as mine. But we affirm each other in that. That's a well shaped emotional space. Even if we can’t always embody that all the time.

We can talk about theory and practice, but where are you personally situated in these feelings? How does it relate to your practice?


M - That's a good question, taking it back to the art and actualization. Maybe I’ll rewind a little bit and say that the reason I wanted to talk about permission and consent; in my experience it's mostly in relation to cultural knowledge and culture. Because of my own lived experience of being mixed Indigenous and going through foster care and then being adopted out and growing up in a territory that isn’t actually my traditional territory. It's kinda being a settler, but also not really in the normal sense of the word. I was placed here in foster care and didn’t choose to be here, but I’m still here. It's a weird thing I’ve always struggled with, and will always continue to. And I should; this is the struggle that should be happening. There's a lot of tension with that around cultural knowledge in art making and permission and consent. This permission and consent around cultural knowledge could be from community, elders, knowledge keepers, peers, or yourself, and I’m interested in how that applies to art making, healing, storytelling, even down to learning actual craft techniques like how to weave something or tan a hide or fish skin which I’ve been doing a lot of. There's a lot of tension there, but it's a really specific type that's specific for Indigenous people in this place. I know this is quite a shared experience of being worried about stealing your own culture. It's difficult. I don't think you can actually steal your own culture. Inherently as a human you have a birthright to your own culture, but because of colonialism we feel like we don't. We’re not always able to give ourselves permission to dive in. I mean there are protocols you have to follow of course. I don’t have an issue with protocol at all, but it's difficult if there's something that's almost died out and it's hard to find the right person with the knowledge. I do think in those cases it's more important to just do the thing to the best of your ability rather than to let a piece of culture die. That's a bit of a point of contention within my community. I do understand the want to protect culture, and feeling like you need to gatekeep, but it's difficult. It all comes back to permission and consent, right?


J - Whats interesting to hear you share that, is it would be easy to respond to you from a place of trying to give you permission. But that's not what we’re doing right now. It's interesting to examine all the layers of this. We feel permission is related to the sacred, and our values and communities, while consent feels further away. The other thing I was thinking of while you were sharing, if we’re talking about permission being sacred, priceless and something that can’t be bought, I think we can diagnose everything you talked about by saying, well, your culture was stolen. I’m using that in the broadest sense, it's the idea that what was sacred was tampered with, was taken away, is either being literally or figuratively or financially or politically controlled by those who should instead live in relation to that sanctity. When it comes to the cultural knowledge of what youre talking about I’m hearing that the word is burdened by the reality of what has been stolen. If it's been stolen, you asked a question about how can you appropriate yourself? Maybe it's a sacred thing of like that can never be appropriated because that's who I am. Who I am is also a part of the fabric of what the collective story looks like. On the other hand maybe it is possible to feel like we’re in the space of the stealing of our actions aren’t bringing that culture collectively back to the sacred. That's what we’re always worried about - like pretendians and people appropriating indigeneity, and allies, other racialized folks displacing you. Other diasporic people displacing the original peoples of this land. It makes sense that the stakes are that high because it doesn't seem safe. Because honestly, we’re not back home yet. And we need to bring it home.

M - I dont think you can appropriate your own culture, but I’ll add a footnote; you do have a right to your own culture because it's yours, but you can misuse it. I’m not qualified to be the singular decider of what “misusing” it is, I mean I have some ideas. Profiting from things that culturally shouldn’t be profited from, or sharing closed practices that shouldnt be shared. I know there's some people who have rights to some very closed ceremonies who decide to share them in germany. They’d rather share the rights to those ceremonies with germans who are paying for it - they’re making $ off of doing this. They'd rather do that then go out in community and connect with youth, and queer, trans, 2S people. The people who are really struggling and may really benefit from having access to those things, often don’t have access to ceremony and culture. In a situation like that, yeah, it's almost like you’re appropriating your own culture. I think that's wrong.


J - I hear us trying to figure out how to talk about it. I feel the emotional throughline of what you’re saying, I understand it. And I also hear you searching for language to match at a communal level what is actually an embodied feeling you have. That's interesting to me. Again, because something is stolen we’re always thinking about credentials now. But if I try to do the futurist thing and imagine a utopia where our values are embodied by us, and we have a space of pluralities. If we’re relating from that place, the relationships themselves are the sacred structure. But we don't have that on a societal level because of colonialism and capitalism. Stolen lands, stolen bodies. It's like we’re looking for criteria on a communal level that is aligned with our values at our most personal, which is where we have to live if we’re people of the global majority who have experienced this colonial violence. It's almost like we need a set of relational criteria. This is the language of people who are stealing, trying to put a price and make money off of the spiritual. The way they have conversations about the sacred is to put a price on it. This related to conversations about representation too. We’re just counting brown faces, wheelchairs etc in spaces. We’re realizing it's not really about whose faces are in these harmful structures, it's about being able to relate in a good way and have structures reflect that. That's what we don't have in a societal way. You’re just trying to be yourself. How many hyphenations do you have to do, impossible metaphysical existential calculus around just to solve that equation. Because you don't have someone to say, ‘OMG morgan it's ok to just be you’. The respect is born out in your relationality. You will respect your knowledge and teachings because you're of your community. I’m still trying to figure this out for myself in my community too. A lot of it is trying to be an elder to yourself sometimes. You’re like an elder, you do have experiences that are very valuable. We have so much more relating to do across so many gradations of experience, making sure the whole family is at the table.


M - A little bit ago you mentioned hyphenations, I see that actualized for Indigenous people in our last names. Lots of people have 2, 3, 4 last names, often hyphenated together, sometimes not. It's our own attempts to understand our own community, and place ourselves into something that has been so colonized that it's hard to even process. But it's actualized in our attempts at cobbling together last names. It's related to something I’ve been thinking about too; we’re trying to climb out of this hole of colonialism and everything related to it, but we’re still grasping for colonial solutions to the colonial problem.


J - That's the thing, yeah! I thought after 2020 we’d still be having more conversations about this, the word structure is being co-opted. I remember talking about intent over impact in 2020. This isn’t new, it's very bedrock, but not reflected in the way we talk about things, or the frameworks of meaning making that we’re applying to our situations which are still very much colonial. I think it's getting more and more confusing to try to work it out on the level of the communal. For folks like us who share a very liminal and venn diagram relationship to all of our structures because we both also have relative privilege and those sorts of things, I also feel like we’re missing that permission space. We don't have spaces to have the sacred kind of conversations. What is the accounting of the cultural currency that we think we’re trading? If we’re looking at it on that level are we willing to also look at capitalism and its interconnectedness with colonialism, and white supremacy? That's a hard conversation, but people want to have it on the level of public discourse, so it just becomes things like policing each other's language. What does the proper certification look like? A lot of people I work with want me to give them a gold star, when like, I want them to just be able to relate to me in the space we’re in - it's messy.


M - It's that fear of vulnerability, but you have to be vulnerable if we’re going to try to move together through this.


J - Vulnerability is the gift. It's the permission to be intimate with what's real for you. One of the cultural artifacts of colonialism is the individualism, every white man for himself and then everyone else is disposable. That's connected to all of this as well. We’re imagining vulnerability as a resource like a fossil fuel - there's already a violence in how we’re framing that. Instead we could choose permission to be who I am. Even though we know that the textures of that, experiences of that, societal implications of that have different stakes for people in different bodies. That's a gift, I think. How do we think about this interpersonal alchemy? How do we do that fractal, portal jumping? It's going back to myself, even just checking in, like do I feel good, is my whole self present in the conversation? Even thinking about Pam Tzeng, another person in our communities, thinking about choices. Choices feel connected to sacred somehow to me. If I'm in relation that means I choose it. The personal agency has meaning because I'm navigating that with others. That's the dance and the music of it all, of relating in a good way.


M- You’re making me think about one of my friends, Cowboy, he talks often about ghosts, and how people often become ghosts in response to colonialism, as a defense mechanism of having to move through the world in the way that it is. One thing he's talked about that stuck with me, is that the tactic of shaming didn’t exist in indigenous cultures pre colonialism. Like shaming others because of something, or as a tactic to do something or not to do something, or to agree with you, or not take action when something is wrong. I’ve experienced that too in workspaces or in the arts, the use of that shaming tactic via white supremacy. I feel this is also very related to permission and consent.


J - We’ve all got the download; you know how when you get a computer they just come with microsoft? You live in colonialism you just get downloaded christianity. All of us have a pretty passing understanding of basic christian tenants. Shame is very connected to permission; to taboo, to the idea that your body is not yours - you don’t make those choices. It took something that is inextricable from my guts and externalized it. But to then take that and extrapolate an  ideological framework and then transmit that through the violence of colonialism,  what you get is a whole society of people who are not connected to where the beauty of community lives, which is also in their bodies. The joy of community is also the joy of getting to be yourself. The joy of being in right relations is the joy of being in harmony, and the joy of allowing your best self to emerge. I really believe that. I want to revisit some old conversations with Cowboy now - ghosts is something I’m working through in my own practice as well. Same christian download of shame and the theft of body autonomy on a basic level. It's brought me to a place now where the ghost thing speaks to a lack of my own substance and presence in one universe and more the reality that as a person who shares these experiences with others, its multiple selves, multiple identities and multiple dimensions some of which are overlapping and some of which are not. When I feel ghostly, its really a description of whatever are the conditions of that universe in which I’m being perceived partially.


M - It's related to people not actually having an understanding of your full self - which, they maybe never can?


J - They maybe never can, but whether they can intuit that or not, the conditions created by colonialism make it so that the material conditions of me being able to exist as my whole self are at stake and theirs are not if they’re privileged within that system and structure.


M - When you're in community the reality that we can’t fully understand each other almost isn’t a concern.


J - Right. It's not a concern because there's capacity and wisdom and experience and a community practice around conflict transformation. In our individualistic society we don't have that, where instead of working through differences we just build up cases against each other, and whoever loses is disposable.

It's at these moments where I become quiet - oh man! I guess what I’m trying to say is that relating in a good way in whatever scale that is connected to the real is already the magic happening. It's the goal and the outcome in itself. If we can live there and build out connections in that space - it's also where we feel the most resourced. It's also where we feel coregulated with other people, yeah, then we can make mistakes. Privileged artists, they don't worry about making mistakes. Across all these equity deserving communities that you and I intersect with, nobody ever feels like they can fuck up.


M - Even when it comes to specific cultural knowledge, like if you're making work to do with your culture - I’m even seeing white artists doing that now, which is fine and valid, but they don’t have the level of struggle. They don't have to think about or worry about self appropriation of culture. But almost every Indigenous artist I've talked to has worried, or thought about it at some point.


J - Because it's been stolen from them. The white folks don’t even know it's a thing. They imagine they inherited it. I would reframe that as their own erasure, not our lack (equity deserving, colonized folks, disabled, queer folks). We don’t have permission to be ourselves a lot of the time. Having permission to relate at that really basic level I feel like. Did I make a big jump there?


M - Part of that conversation was telepathic I think, but vibes were received. These kinds of conversations are so important, but you kinda come to the end of it and you’re almost more confused. Maybe not confused, but maybe you’re nourished but overwhelmed at the same time.


J - I feel that too. I think at this moment I’m nourished, but maybe what makes it feel more chaotic is the idea that I have to have language for this thing that is very deeply body felt.


M - These feelings are such deep body feelings, and it's so hard to translate them to words. I wish I could just interpretively dance them to you instead.


J - This is a limited discourse! Dance works too! There's also play, you know? If we could just relate in a good way all this stuff doesn't have the same stakes. But we keep trying to relate through broken harmful structures; some outcomes that we don’t want are going to keep happening. Why do we keep perpetuating that structure? Even that thing of “we gotta be vulnerable in order to…..” Instead of “we get to be vulnerable if we just give ourselves permission to do that right now?” I love that! It feels confusing too. It's naming the wholeness that's inscribed by the circle of your body.


M - That whole idea of vulnerability, I'm simultaneously on board and yet not on board at all. In that specific situation I am Schrodinger's cat.


J - it's all about boxes! It's literally about where you get to be. The boxes that are placed on us don't fit. When you place vulnerability in the permission space it's a sacred thing, but if you put it into the land of the stolen it becomes exploitative. All of the things we really value, when they are placed in community, relations, and things we really value it becomes a good thing. When it comes into the space of ownership - not everything should be owned. We’re owned by the land. Colonial culture is all about extraction and controlling.


M - Not to minimize this, the conversation, or any kind of theory, but on a visceral level, it's also not that complex! What if you just were nice to other people, and yourself?


J - Lets be specific! What it comes down to for me in my community practice which is anti-oppression in a lot of nonprofits; is grandma stuff. Have you eaten? Did you sleep enough? Little reads like you need to take a nap! Those are the things that are missing from our relational fabric, in oppressive cultures connected to patriarchy. Its that simple, its just figuring out how to be around each other.


M - We need to go back to kindergarten.


J - Yeah we didn't have that! Decolonial kindergarten. We were already being prepped for the meat factory.

October 18th, 2023
1-4PM
@ The New Gallery

208 Centre St SE
T2G 2B6 Calgary, AB

︎Please RSVP here by October 16.

There are limited spots total to participate in this workshop, if you sign up and realize later that you can't make it, please be mindful and email gendaiclub@gmail.com to give your spot up to someone else who may want to participate!

Join Gendai for a contracts workshop on Wednesday, October 18 from 1-4pm. Gendai is a collective based in Tkaronto/Toronto dedicated to envisioning a more equitable art sector through collective research with BIPOC artists and arts workers.

The workshop aims to reform contract language by starting with the material needs of freelance artists/arts workers. We will look at samples of employment or exhibition contracts issued by cultural institutions and critique them as a group. We encourage participants to bring a contract that they are currently struggling with and use our discussion as a leveraging tactic. Participants can also bring an older contract, as an example of what worked and what didn't. Please note that we will not have lawyers present at the workshop.

With your consent, discussions in the workshop will contribute towards materials for Gendai NDA, an online, crowd-sourced database of contracts commonly encountered by contemporary art practitioners. The project informally and anonymously utilizes collective bargaining power to encourage sector transparency and demand more equitable standards for labour conditions in the arts. A beta version of Gendai NDA will launch on The New Gallery's Mainframe platform in November.

For more information on Gendai’s work on contracts, check out their interview in the podcast The Transparency that Helps All of Us by Geneviève Wallen.

If you have any questions/concerns, please email gendaiclub@gmail.com.

About Gendai
Gendai (Marsya Maharani and Petrina Ng) is an art collective based in Tkaronto/Toronto dedicated to racialized artists as the next generation of cultural leaders, radical thinkers, and visionaries.

Throughout its twenty-year history, Gendai has supported experimental curatorial and organizational practices, whilst creating space for East Asian artists and artists of colour. As Gendai’s newest stewards, Marsya and Petrina are investing in the future of racialized arts leadership through collective research and practice. We began with Gendai MA MBA: Mastering the Art of Misguided Business Administration: a year-long capacity-development & network-building think tank between nine majority-BIPOC art collectives to critique and re-imagine institutional practices by centering values of collectivity, equity, and access. This developed into Gendai CO-OP: an ongoing research that responds to toxic labour conditions especially experienced by BIPOC arts workers at museums and art galleries. Using gossip as a methodology to trace the contours of institutional power, Gendai builds relationships with emerging and mid-career arts practitioners of colour to learn about current workplace dynamics in the sector. By offering peer mentorship and access to Gendai’s platform, resources, and network, they invite collaborators to support each other in pursuing non-institutional futures and imagine “off-ramps” from the linear expressway of traditional, capitalist, and institutional career progression in the arts. Gendai also participates in Guidance Council, a bi-monthly casual drop-in organized by Alexandra Hong and Peter Rahul for racialized arts workers to share stories and solicit advice from each other. Gendai has published their research in the Gossip issue of C Magazine, titled “We Should Talk: Obvious Truths About Working in the Arts.”

October 14, 2023

1PM-3PM

@ The New Gallery
208 Centre St SE
T2G 2B6 Calgary, AB

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As a part of 家電是家人 (Machines to Love), Mantis 美 Mei will guide a Family Portraits Workshop featuring participants favourite home appliances. Mantis will be focusing on teachings from bell hook's book; "All About Love". Participants are asked to bring a home appliance to the workshop, something they use often and that is easy for them to transport.


There are 12 spots total to participate in this workshop, if you sign up and realize later that you can't make it, please be mindful and give your spot up to someone else who may want to participate!

︎ SIGN UP HERE

Accessibility:

https://thenewgallery.org/Accessibility

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Mantis 美 Mei Bio:
I am still little. So I play. Gift giving and hanging out and LOVINGG!!! is a part of my practice. Through my work, I ask you to consider laughing (hehe hahahaha) and smiling ( sometimes crying (wahhh wahhh) together as forms of community building.

Fun facts about me:
- I am super young and cute. And overall irresistible. And young.
- My favourite family guy quote "Love is like a fart. If you have to force it, it's probably crap."
- ^Just kidding. I've never watched family guy

Brady Fullerton

October 4 - January 3, 2023

Gaining knowledge is riddled with challenges and triumphs. The journey of doing so is abundant in opportunities to grapple with developing a new skill and confronting our insecurities as we face trial and error firsthand. It is in that experience of building our understanding, whilst coming to terms with the investment required to truly master its execution, that we are humbled and proud—of ourselves for what we have achieved, of those who came before who have taught us, and those who will come after who will learn.


That relationship with learning is further complicated when its preceded by barriers of trauma and genocide—when the people who would have shared their stories and abilities are denied the right to do so by violent force. When Indigenous communities on Turtle Island had the lands they cared for stolen, children abducted and murdered, and cultural practices banned, their colonizers intended to purge Indigenous peoples from history so settlers could determine the narrative’s retelling. And yet, Indigenous people persist.


Resilience is not an adequate word to describe confronting generations of harm, disputing a continued effort to historicize a living population, and criticizing the deeply held anti-Indigenous beliefs that run rampant in Canada. Resilience implies overcoming the hardships an unbiased universe proposes, rather than surviving a concerted effort to violate and destroy; both are admirable, but the latter is a necessity. Julia Rose Sutherland’s work is much more than resilient; it is haunting and beautiful, pointed and evocative, and encourages an appreciation for practices that are maintained rather than archived.


In her performance Gesipatl Iga’latl” (Pain and Release), porcupine quills pierce Sutherland’s flesh, rendering her body sacred and precious. She mirrors the beloved birchbark boxes that are delicately woven with quills by her Mi’kmaq community, honouring her people by using those same slender barbs against her skin and calling attention to the commodification of Indigenous bodies often denied dignity and life. Sutherland embodies a resonant autonomy because she is not an object for a glass case and her actions are not for you. They are a tribute and we are simply fortunate she has decided to share that moment with us.


In this, Sutherland compromises one of the foundations of colonialism. Rather than enabling the legacy of a white supremacist lens that would fetishize or exoticize her actions and maintain a hierarchy of power, she has repurposed the frame to reflect the strength of Indigenous peoples as they persevere and thrive. Simultaneously, Sutherland exposes the intimate ties between privilege and complacency as she bleeds to reconcile with Canada’s colonial history and honour her Mi’kmaq ancestors.


It is in Sutherland’s stoic gaze that we are denied any indulgence in her pain. Instead, we are asked to watch as Sutherland draws the explicit parallels between seeking colonially forbidden knowledge and the mutilation of her body, a spiritual gesture that is deeply tied to endurance and kinship in certain Indigenous ceremonies and does not abide by the comfort of an audience who may be unfamiliar with its significance.


In the end, Sutherland is generous with her rich metaphors and references, but it is up to us to learn from them. Her example provides insight into the terms we must embrace when addressing Canada’s colonial history that has largely been left to fester, and inspiration for the possibilities that lie ahead.

Julia Rose Sutherland (b.1991) is a Mi’kmaq (Metepenagiag Nation) / settler artist and educator (Assistant Professor at OCADU) based out of Tkaronto (Toronto, Canada). Sutherland’s interdisciplinary art practice employs photography, sculpture, textiles, and performance. She earned her MFA at the University at Buffalo (2019) and BFA in Craft and New Media at the Alberta University of the Arts (2013). She has recently shown work at  The Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA), Bemis Center of Contemporary Art (where she was also a summer 2021 Artist in Resident), the Mackenzie Art Gallery, K Art Gallery, WAAP Gallery, and 59 Rivoli Gallery in Paris, France. Sutherland is a recent recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts Creating Knowing Sharing award and the AFA Indigenous Individual Project grant.


Brandon Giessmann is a visual artist and writer who explores trauma, identity, and memory. He received his BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2018 and his MFA at SUNY: University at Buffalo in New York in 2020. His interdisciplinary practice often uses performance, photography, and installation to bridge generational gaps in knowledge and experiences of the closet and genocide, consider the effects of the ongoing AIDS crisis, and reflect upon the role that institutions play in the conservation and presentation of queer histories.

The New Gallery is thrilled to invite our community to join us for a quillwork on birch bark workshop with Julia Rose Sutherland, Saturday, November 5th, 2022, 11 AM to 2 PM.


Please join Artist Julia Rose Sutherland in an interactive workshop exploring the foundations of porcupine quillwork. This workshop will run for three hours and will cover how to clean and apply colour through natural dyes, basic quillwork applications, and stitches to create patterns and design motifs. Participants will be provided with birch bark and porcupine quills gifted by the Artist.


Please note that we are asking participants to wear masks for the safety of our community, artists and staff. The workshop will be held in TNG’s Resource Centre, which is not wheelchair accessible. There will be a 30 to 45 minute break during the workshop for lunch. Spaces are limited and registration is required. 


Julia Rose Sutherland is a Mi’kmaq (Metepenagiag Nation) / settler artist and educator (Assistant Professor at OCADU) based out of Tkaronto (Toronto, Canada). Sutherland’s interdisciplinary art practice employs photography, sculpture, textiles, and performance. She earned her MFA at the University at Buffalo (2019) and BFA in Craft and New Media at the Alberta University of the Arts (2013). She has exhibited nationally and internationally, recently showing work at the Bemis Center of Contemporary Art, the Mackenzie Art Gallery, K Art Gallery, WAAP Gallery, and 59 Rivoli Gallery in Paris, France. Sutherland is a recent recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts Creating Knowing Sharing award and the AFA Indigenous Individual Project grant.

Cris Mora is a Filipino-Canadian artist and cultural worker. He was born in Manila in 1984 and moved to Toronto at the age of four. Mora studied Visual Art and Economics at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. He works across disciplines and media to explore the relationship between politics, migration and identity. In addition to his art practice, Mora is also an experienced cultural worker. He has worked as an arts administrator in North America, Europe and Asia. He is currently the Public Art Coordinator at the City of Surrey, BC. Mora has exhibited in Canada, Singapore and the Philippines.

Notes From an Artist-Run Archive

Online Archive Launch & Publication

The New Gallery (TNG) is thrilled to present our newest publication, “Notes From an Artist-Run Archive” written by Steph Weber: “From June until August, 2022, [Steph] was employed via a Canada Summer Jobs grant with the task of addressing TNG’s collection of unpublished archival material: a collection housed in various locations-- cataloged digitally, sorted into filing cabinets, and, in large part, haphazardly arranged in unlabelled cardboard boxes, relics of the multiple institutional relocations in TNG’s recent history.”


You can pick up a free copy of this publication at TNG during gallery hours, or through our publication mail out program, “You’ve Got Mail”

In addition to the launch of this publication, The New Gallery invites you to explore our newly published online archive. This online archive was organized and published by Steph Weber with help from our Mainframe Coordinator, Winona Julian. Our online archive features exhibitions, by artist name, year, and exhibition space all the way back to 1975. It also has a comprehensive guide on how to use TNG’s physical archives, which are open and available for public viewing. For more information, or to explore the archives, head to the link in the bio.  

Take a stroll down memory lane, or discover an artist you never knew before - Click the link below!

︎Online Archive︎

ummmmp

asinnajaq

In asinnajaq’s words, ummmmp is an attestation of love for Inuit come and gone and still with us. It is an acknowledgment of life, love, and loss.

asinnajaq’s practice is led by a care and generosity towards images. The work presented at TNG in Calgary’s east village speaks to a sister work presented simultaneously in the window space of *Queenspecific in Toronto’s Queen West neighborhood. In their kindred visuals, the two pieces share the desire of memorialisation critical in remembrance. The high visibility and simultaneous temporariness of both exhibition spaces are important aspects to reflect upon in relation to how they are deployed vis-a-vis the marginalized realities of the unhoused across the country and the related realities of gentrification, housing exploitation, and barely existing social infrastructures. asinnajaq’s work overlays these interlinked social realities with a politics of care characterized by the intimacy, openness, and celebration necessary to caring for community.

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asinnajaq is the daughter of Carol Rowan and Jobie Weetaluktuk. She is an urban Inuk from Inukjuak, Nunavik and lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). asinnajaq’s art practice spans many mediums from film to performance video, to curation and much in between. She co-created Tilliraniit, a three day festival celebrating Inuit art and artists. asinnajaq wrote and directed Three Thousand (2017) a short sci-fi documentary. She co-curated Isuma’s show in the ‘Canadian’ pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. She was long listed for the 2020 Sobey Art Award. She co-curated the inaugural exhibition INUA at the Qaumajuq. Asinnajaq’s work has been exhibited at art galleries and film festivals around the world.

The Shell Projects is a collaborative curatorial collective led by Maegan Broadhurst and Barbora Racevičiūtė. Initiated in 2017, shell showcases contemporary multi-media artistic practices. It focuses on cultivating relationships between emerging and mid-career practitioners, fostering dialogue between non-traditional art exhibition spaces, and in connecting locally-situated cultural discourses to international contemporary art movements.

Syrus Marcus Ware – I am because you are. Image courtesy of the artist.

Annie Wong – Braids in the Front, Braids in the Back, 2021.

‘P’ from The Yellow Pages (set of 26 images), Ho Tam, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.

Milton Lim – whitepages.

Artists in Conversation: Eva Birhanu & Khadijah Morley

Click Here to Read

Bannock and Tea with Loonette the Ghost and House-Head the Home, performance still from IKG Live 2 (2018) at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery. Photo credit: Jeremy Pavka⁣

Kasie Campbell and Ginette Lund –  Matrilineal Threads, 2019.

Carrie Allison – An Identity Metaphor, 2017, beads on pine with reflective surface.

Dear viewers,

It has been brought to my attention that there have been several complaints against my video work due to “cursing and nudity”. Rather than re-edit and censor my work to comfort certain viewers who are offended by the very banal acts of swearing and non-sexual nudity, I have decided to remove the piece from the space entirely. It is ironic that a video compilation that highlights the far-too-common act of cisgender actors being permitted and feeling entitled to play trans characters in film and television, is too offensive when looked at through a critical/ trans-lens. The entire work is meant to be offensive, but several individuals have chosen to fixate on cursing and one brief scene of nudity. If you are cisgender and you were offended by this work: think about why you were offended. Are you trying to protect your children from what you perceive to be vulgar representations of bodies? Are you comfortable with the violence that is perpetuated against trans people, but offended by five or six swear words (that your children have already heard) and a flaccid penis? If you cannot accept seeing a penis on a woman in a movie (even though the actor is a cisgender woman with a prosthetic)- think about the other types of transphobia you might perpetuate in your daily routines. To me, it seems you are afraid of the questions this video will raise in the minds of your children, or in yourself.

To Arts Commons: I implore you to deal with complaints against challenging art work (especially when the content deals with marginalized communities and bodies) in a more constructive way, rather than shutting down a conversation before it can begin. Trans people are still being murdered at a seriously alarming rate, misrepresentation will continue to happen in mainstream media, we will try to take back our image and tell our own stories, cisgender people will keep being offended, and we will keep fighting.

Deeply disappointed, but not surprised,

B.G-Osborne

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Exhibition Text / Purple Prose

Position. Colour,

angle, light. Moved



No logos. Just youth

Pride and Cool



A pose in the coup of age. Once

power and dust shape the earth



On sticky notes in blue, pink and in green

History will snap flat. Culture will be held!



The tune carrying the curtain

shut. With brass will blast



In the clasp of pressure. Lights

will strobe. Released and whole



Around 19 BCE, the poet Horace coined the often quoted phrase: “as is painting, so is poetry.” A modern equivalent could substitute painting for the ubiquitous pictorial frame of the internet, “as is the internet, so is poetry”. A twentieth-century equivalent could have been something like, “as was photography, so too, was poetry.” Assuming the internet took up where photography left off—is poetry really a thing that can endure being paralleled to painting, photography, and the internet?

Many useless parallel analogies can be drawn between the structure of a poems’ lines, its rhythmic energy, and the arches of technical prowess one can display while working in an old darkroom. Black and white tonality and subtractive colour systems worked like the large family of liquid semivowels and aspirate and mute consonant sounds that paved the way for free verse. I suppose the process of applying skill in framing a thought or an image, is also comparable to knowing html, or any other markup language or coding cypher used to make the world today.

Proficiency is the overlord. After all, what is language if not a proficiency machine? Horace addressed our need to decorate the world with words—a purple patch he called it. What we now call purple prose. Horace preferred a more unified poetic code; one that called for technique and power, for ingenuity—as the most valuable properties demanded from a poet.[1]

Like phantom limbs, the technologies for writing and making imagery have taken a hold of us as much and as quickly as we have let them. When we don’t have our devices nearby we still feel them somatically, grotesquely shaping our movements and thoughts. And while technical expertise does not guarantee originality or an artist’s capacity to make nuanced work, folding the need for virtuosity in (folding the use we give to equipment along with the meat of our means for making the world) allows these somatic roams to resolve our approach to artistic production. Through a fold we meet the needs of the spirit in a healthy or therapeutic way because a fold highlights ambivalence as resolve.

I look at Luther Konadu’s photographs on the screen of a 10-year old laptop. The machine itself only days away from failure, each key pushed slowly leading to dilapidation. Konadu’s images in contrast appear bright and luminescent and sometimes, because of the device’s instability, they emerge a crumbled mix of digital pixels. Under these conditions I slowly preview his work. The computer’s existence is, reasonably, no longer a threat to me, but its potential break would disrupt my flow of communication. I stare out the window. Bells ring outside from an ambulatory ice cream vendor. Every afternoon he walks by pigeon songs, children and adults. He walks past their errors. Every afternoon stops at the margins. A page, a park, a teenager noodling on an electric guitar wearing a crumpled leather jacket and a punk band’s t-shirt. What and who is it that looks at any of these images? The real and the screened? The crumbling objects, other people, the park, a dog’s bark, my gaze, Southern California, mild weather, good light. I write:

On the screen young adult faces stare into the lens of a camera in a photographic studio. On the screen, it is winter or fall in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The kids are clothed in sweatshirts and turtlenecks. Warmed. The photographs are printed cheaply on laserjets, or so I am told. The biggest luxury the reader will have over me will be the ability to see the texture of the paper and the ink on the page, that inherent fragility that is made of material. The viewer will have the ability to linger on the analogue and I don’t mean analogue in the sense of film vs. digital, but in the sense of real life vs. live streamed. They will get to see how these objects and images take presence in a shared plane of space while all I get is their phantom stream.

Walking sense into pleasure in the Epistles to the Pisos Horace wrote, “If a painter should wish to unite a horse’s neck to a human head, and spread a variety of plumage over limbs [of different animals] taken from every part [of nature], so that what is a beautiful woman in the upper part terminates unsightly in an ugly fish below; could you, my friends, refrain from laughter, were you admitted to such a sight. Believe, ye Pisos, the book will be perfectly like such a picture, the ideas of which, like a sick man’s dreams, are all vain and fictitious: so that neither head nor foot can correspond to any one form.”[2] Konadu’s images do not respond to a singular form either. The photographs fracture the faces they depict, those of Konadu’s friends and relations, across multiple pages. The images bend or at least slightly skew elbows, wrists and thoughts over xeroxes. While Horace might have frowned at the incongruous, for us, it is a way of life. Astray, we make sense! Anything else doesn’t. It could also be said that the complex composition process behind these images imitates the fragmentation or content divisibility of an open tab on a web page, yet Konadu’s work is not made for the screen. It is printed on paper, lays on a table top with post-its and notes penciled over it. In these artworks, what remains below or above the fold, or edge of each image is the spatial element with which Konadu is concerned and where the elegance of his approach is best perceived. The surface space where meaning, determination, significance and readability blend.

“My eye, myself and my sock over many surfaces.” “There is one single lens, but the printing is repercussive.” The imagined voice heard here is of the artist’s friend explaining Konadu’s process to me. Let’s call them X. Their voice anticipates how the photographs might look in a gallery, edited and display-ready, instead of archived as they are in the digital folder I face. Across the opened window, on the screen, the works read as performative. My voice blends with X’s. As I write, I too become an extension of Konadu’s direction, “write from a personal stance,” he told me. What exactly does the personal get reduced to over text? What does it come to be, when you only see delayed images of each other? Online, awkward gestures frozen on a screen? A giggle or an interlude of gags between more serious conversation.

K, T and P.

Mute sounds.

Konadu’s images, like this text, aim to avoid reduction but they cannot do without. Even as we know we are more than the geographical contingency of the place from where we stand or from whence we came. When we pose, when we sit, when we write, when we speak, when our semblance is frozen on a screen, when we go take a leak, we are not singular forms. We are not duplications either, nor reproductions, not strangers, nor passersby, although that immaterial content of relation is what—in these images—the photographic limbo attempts when in that fraction of a second light hits a sensor or a piece of film. That irreducible amount of time it takes for ink to hit the page, or for a single letter of the alphabet to appear when I type, that is the aura and the allure of image-framing. Reduction, how the stranger becomes familiar, is the heavily relied-upon approach of the powerful. Reduction is also the equally unexpected apparition to which we as artists and subjects, as writers and objects-to-be, are exposed and into which we are immersed. Take in power.

Looking is always a more pregnant address than any description of the sight-seen claims. It grows over time. It is birthed into further expression. Looking not only demands a surface and a platform from which the viewer stands to see, a pair of eyes. It also arrests the surface and the platform suspending any decisions made by the artist, the writer or the poet, into the phenomenology of the visible, into its vision. In this way, what was once urgent is now frozen, what was once status quo is now reflection, what was once there, is now faded and aided by the memory of what is visibly in its place. What was once life is now stream. What gels, gets replicated in an image and distressed by the