Visuals/PDF reference: Google Drive
Published 2026
Author: Kay Slater
Text to speech translation uses the Eleven Labs voice library.

Introduction to alternative text catalogue:

The alternative text catalogue project was created by the staff and contractors on the Accessibility Committee at Grunt Gallery. Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, straddling the line between information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience and those better served by text!

Creative Access Descriptions:

Cover (front):

(Instruction – Describe cover)
The title page features a cool plum background. Centred on the page, framed with a plum border, is a photograph of a round wooden Lazy Susan placed in front of a jade-coloured gallery wall, which displays two square-framed prints. Above the image, exhibition details read: ‘grunt gallery, December 4, 2025 to January 17, 2026.’ Below the image is the artist’s name and exhibition title: ‘Jenie Gao – Where Mountain Cats Live.’ The Lazy Susan features a hand-carved birch woodblock inset into a mahogany base. The relief carving depicts animals in motion, with its surface stained in duotone purple and green ink that echoes the two prints behind it.

Cover inside (front):

The front inside cover displays a short jade-coloured shelf mounted against a matching gallery wall. Three artist books are placed evenly across the shelf, each distinct in shape and colour. Below the shelf, a raised floor plinth is covered in square mirror tiles, casting sharp, angled reflections that spread diagonally across the south wall in a crown-like pattern.

⸻

Page 1:

The page is all text. The footer shows the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lowercase in white on a black-painted brushstroke) above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits.

The interior pages are thinner than the cover but still feel thicker than photocopy paper.

The credits read

grunt gallery
Where Mountain Cats Live
Jenie Gao

116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca
Curator: Katrina Orlowski
Writers: Katrina Orlowski and Whess Harman.
Design: Victoria Lum with Manon Fraser
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photography: Dennis Ha

Printed in Canada by Mitchell Press
Edition of 200
ISBN number # 978-1-988708-28-7
All Rights Reserved. Publication copyright 2026 grunt gallery.
Artwork copyright 2026 the artists.
Text copyright 2026 the authors.
All images courtesy of the artists.

Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.

grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, and the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Page 2 and 3:

A double-page image features a close-up, angled view of the circular mahogany Lazy Susan resting on a dark blue tablecloth. Inlaid at the centre is a circular woodcut print, carved and inked in a duotone palette. The lower half of the circular design is stained in jade green, while the upper half is inked in plum purple.

The composition is densely packed with detailed line-work. Two mountain lions and two rabbits chase one another in an overlapping, cyclical loop, forming a sense of movement and circular interdependence. The animals are nestled among flora including mulberry leaves and berries, tiger lilies, red clovers, and wild roses. The animals and plants are arranged so they blend and coil into each other, creating a hypnotic and continuous rhythm.

Page 4:

A single-page image set against a purple-blue background features a black-bordered photograph showing a close-up of the illuminated gallery vitrine containing two artist books from the Yuǎn 遠 | Yuàn 苑 series.

One book rests on a thick, circular slab of mahogany bark. Its circular pages spill open from the top of the wood, fanning outward and draping onto the jade green vitrine surface. Each page alternates between printed magenta text and soft blue-green woodcut imagery.

Suspended above it, a second book is clipped upright in an alligator clamp. Its six folded pages are splayed outward, forming a rounded, spherical shape reminiscent of a paper flower or pom-pom.

The vitrine’s mirrored interior walls and ring of white LED lights create multiple reflections of the books, echoing their folded shapes and illuminating their surfaces from below.

Page 5:

A white page titled “Katrina Orlowski, Curator’s Introduction.” The text is a black sans serif, and the title is in italics.

Page 6 and 7:

The essay begins on page 6 in two columns and continues to page 7.

The essay reads:
Where Mountain Cats Live transforms the gallery into an intimate space, at once both a comfortable family room where meals and stories are shared, as well as a tenderly recreated archive documenting oral histories, material inheritances, and embodied personal experiences that would otherwise more than likely be lost or omitted from the records. It is lush and playful, but also vulnerable, delicate. Stepping into the gallery is like pouring over cherished mementos with a close friend, a heart-to-heart with quiet revelations, spontaneous giggles, and safe silences.

In one of our first meetings together, Jenie Gao and I bonded over our lingering longing to have pursued a career in archives. We share an appreciation for art as a record, and also as a crucial expression of personal agency over our own stories. Having both found our way to and through artist-run culture, this archival instinct is creatively productive rather than conscripted into stodgy (read, colonial) institutional fantasies of ‘objectivity’ and ‘professionalism.’ I’ve worked at grunt for over six years and counting in large part because our definition of expertise means bringing your whole self.

Gao’s work dissolves boundaries between the personal and political, converging the impacts of colonization at multiple scales within individual objects. This work is also a love letter, a tribute to their mother and extended communities who steadfastly and stubbornly manage to preserve a sense of home amidst ongoing precarity.

Set atop a spinning ‘lazy Susan’—a post-colonial innovation emblematic of Chinese American and Canadian restaurants like the one run by Gao’s family—an elaborate hand-carved woodblock is the titular work of Where Mountain Cats Live. Drawing on moments shared with their mother at her home in rural Kansas, this work evokes both the local flora and fauna that persist despite increasing environmental destruction in the area, and a story that Gao’s mother tells of her bravery while facing ‘mountain lions’ outside her childhood home on a mountainside in Keelung (phonetic pronunciation Jee-lung), Taiwan. Along with Gao’s letterpress book, Yuǎn Yuàn, which traces three generations of their family’s stories, this work is part of their ongoing series, The Negotiation Table. With this series, Gao invites us to consider “what the aesthetics of something like a common dining table can reveal about private spaces, public movements, and the longer arc of imperialism and geopolitics.”

The Color of Jade: After Felix Gonzales-Torres’ Forbidden Colors studies the unique characteristics of the revered stone meant to bring protection in times of need; and the distinct shape of a jade pendant gifted to Gao by their mother, carefully mended after it broke during a harrowing storm on a midwest winter highway. Some believe that when a piece of jade you’re wearing breaks, it has absorbed misfortune on your behalf; it also functions as an emblem of cultural memory and collective protection. The colours in this work also reference Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Forbidden Colors (1988), invoking the Palestinian flag and the late Cuban-American artist’s exploration of its colours as a powerful symbol of resistance and focus of political censorship.

At grunt we have been centring our curatorial efforts on the place we call home, the unique contexts of these Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil Waututh territories where grunt has operated for over 40 years, and where an escalating housing-affordability crisis has compounded challenging conditions for artists. Though Gao has not always lived here, having spent much of their life in the USA, in both their artwork and otherwise they demonstrate a deep attentiveness to how forces that have shaped this place are undeniably connected to the very same forces that have shaped their own life, their family’s history, and their creative practice. How colonial powers across lands and waters have uprooted and disconnected so many —and continue to do so here, in Taiwan, China, the USA, Palestine and elsewhere. And how all efforts towards justice and liberation are necessarily entwined with one another. While Gao’s work for Where Mountain Cats Live is borne from their personal experience and familial stories, it also speaks deliberately and directly to the large scale systems of colonialism, imperialism and geopolitics that have made ‘home’ hard to hold onto and led Gao’s family and so many of us to become uninvited guests on Turtle Island. Where Mountain Cats Live honours the ‘imagination of the oppressed’ and the dynamics of hybrid identity. The care required to carry these legacies forward is evident in every detail of Gao’s work.

Page 8 to 9:

The double-page image features the gallery’s west wall. In the foreground, partially out of focus, is the Lazy Susan sculpture resting atop the dark blue cloth-covered table.
Mounted on the wall in the background are four framed monoprints from ‘The Color of Jade: After Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Forbidden Colors’ series. All four works are portrait-oriented and displayed in identical grey floating frames, evenly spaced in a single row. Each print features an abstract, organic shape that repeats across the series, based on a broken and repaired jade pendant gifted to the artist by her mother. The colour palette includes gradients of lime green, cherry red, and grey.

Page 10:

A plum coloured page, the same colour as the cover, features a single black-bordered photograph. The image shows the southeast corner of the gallery, as viewed from the entrance.

In the foreground, centrally placed, is a circular table covered in two layers of linen tablecloth; an outer teal layer over a longer lilac underlayer. The table sits atop a low, square jade-coloured platform. This is the first image that fully shows the titular work with the Lazy Susan within the gallery space.

On the left, the east wall displays the two framed woodblock prints. In the southeast corner is a wooden 19th-century dining chair with a dark wood finish, an upholstered seat, and an open filigree back with a central lyre motif. Past the central table, and right of the chair, is the floating shelf with three artist books on the back south wall.

Page 11:

A white page titled “Whess Harman, Setting the Table.” The text is a black sans serif, and the title is in italics.

Page 12 to Page 15:

The essay is laid out in 2 columns across page 12, interrupted by a page of images for page 13, and continues until page 15.

Page 13 again has a plum-coloured background, the same colour as the cover, which features two black-bordered photographs stacked on top of each other.

The top photograph is a close-up of the two True Rabbits, False Lions prints on the east wall. Displayed in floating grey frames, the textured paper edges remain visible. The left print fades from jade green at the bottom to plum purple at the top; the right reverses this palette. The mirrored colour shift reflects the circular motion within the prints.

The bottom photograph shows four Colour of Jade monoprints along the west wall. Each floating frame holds an abstract pendant shape, varying in colour and texture; from layered greens and bold reds to grayscale and patterned blue-grey. The torn edges of the paper float freely within the frame.

The essay reads:
In preparing to write for this exhibition, Jenie and I spent a lot of time discussing the stewardship of family stories within an arts practice, about the delicate balances of verifying memory and discerning when accuracy isn’t the most interesting part and deciding what comes into the exhibition space. When I’m talking to Jenie about this, I sense the care and protectiveness they have towards their family and how it brushes up against the circumstances that has made family a complicated topic, especially when it pulls in on caregiving for an aging mother frequently faced with navigating a complicated web of capitalist colonial institutions to continue to survive in the American Midwest.
There’s something Jenie said about the process of making the work for this exhibition that I keep thinking on. They said that before their father’s passing, and for many years after, his story overwhelmed everyone else’s. I also think about how despite their or our own best efforts, it’s impossible to perfectly preserve a family history. Instead of using the exhibition to tame the many different threads of our familial stories however, Jenie’s exhibition allows for their mother to expand the story outwards.

You’re first drawn into the exhibition space by the new work, Where the Mountain Cats Live. This circular table in the centre of the room with a carved woodblock inset to a rotating lazy susan top, comes from a story Jenie gathered from their mother of when she was a young girl. In this story, Gao’s mother explains having to climb the stairs outside of the building to get to her room, which was separate from the main family apartment. To do this, she also had to brave the mountain lions. Upon further investigation of the types of wild cats in the area, Jenie suspects this is a child’s imagination exaggerating what they’d seen because there are no records of large predatory cats in the area. However, in the work, they depict both a domesticated cat and a wild one; they become interchangeably true to one another.

There’s a sweetness to this story, emphasizing that for whatever complications there are between a mother and their adult child in the present day, there are still common experiences to find in past versions of ourselves. For those of us with imperfect relationships to our parents, a kind of tolerance and forgiveness can be found in imagining and extrapolating these younger versions of our parents. It’s not a perfect bridge, but it’s a place to try and understand one another. The maturity of Jenie’s work is in interpreting these new stories in such a way that allows for two truths be told; one being that there are mountain lions that took a small child great bravery to face, but also that even if they were more simply large outdoor cats, that the story is still good and offers insight on the teller that only became legible when the circumstances allowed for an intimacy to shift enough for the story to slip out.

The Negotiation Table series cannot escape the lingering refrain of “a seat at the table”, the acquiring of said seat being sold wholesale to millennials as the ultimate aspiration to effect change in the crumbling institutions around us. However, instead of interrogating the efficacy of that notion as a political art project, I think what Jenie has found in revisiting the motif of tables and their different cultural connotations is that these sites of negotiation require different forms of intimacy and we can exist outside of the aspiration of speaking back to labour, social and political cultures that weren’t made with us in mind. While their first table related work, 米 mǐ | uncooked rice took direct aim at the white, male dominated art world, Where the Mountain Cats Live and The Integrity of a Story (another work focused on the storytelling of their mother currently on view at the Alberta Printmakers Society in Calgary, AB) scales the site of negotiation to the familial where the personal takes the forefront but is still informed by how the domicile and its subjects are at the mercy of a dominant cultural narratives. In short, one story cannot be told without the other.

When I’m thinking of these different types of intimacy in this exhibition, something that cannot be overlooked is the new artist’s book, Yuǎn 遠 | Yuàn 苑. Included with the previous publications of Three Generations Happy Family and Dear Ma | Ethic, which have their own correlating pieces from previous exhibitions, Yuǎn 遠 | Yuàn 苑 is paired with the central Where the Mountain Cats Live work.This artist’s book is exquisite; the pages are done in Turkish Map folds, unfurling into single letterpress printed pages each carrying selected familial stories; the stories themselves are loosely connected, more matched in tone than they are with any concern of being perfectly narrative. The technical craft of these works almost overshadows, but with a breath, allows for a moment to engage with the ideas in Jenie’s work on a quieter level. The pages are printed so that reading the book requires rotating it, again mimicking the rotating of the larger table work in the centre of the gallery.

I ask Jenie about their relationship to making artist’s books and we talk about creating different entry points to have an audience engage with the work. There’s no singular, perfect way to continuously work with family lore; different stories and relationships require different methods of sharing. I make the joke that the exhibition is the dine-in version of the work and the book is the take-out; the point being that they’re circumstances that bring out different engagements with one another. The opening, the dine-in, is a warm and bustling event with the sweetest array of intersecting communities having the opportunity to catch up and check in with one another. The take-out version of the work signals not a disengagement, but a more private and bespoke one.

What I find in Jenie’s work is an on-going interrogation of power structures and the relationships that live in and break out of them, coupled with a humbleness in understanding that these stories are continuous and unresolved. I never get the sense that Jenie is looking to create one perfect work that will encapsulate an all encompassing narrative of a multitude of perspectives and experiences, but that they are interested in putting themself into situations that will tease out more details to think through when it comes to the ethics of the stories we share and place into our practices.

Page 16 and 17:

This double-page spread captures the west wall of the gallery. The left-hand page displays the Color of Jade monoprints, while the right-hand page features a single chair and the exhibition’s wall vinyl.

On the left page, the four small, portrait-oriented monoprints are mounted in a row. These artworks have been previously described in detail on pages 11 and 13.

On the right, the green wall continues with white vinyl text in the upper right quadrant and, below it, an antique dining chair with a lyre-motif backrest and striped upholstered seat. This chair matches the one in the southeast corner near the artist books.

The vinyl reads Where Mountain Cats Live, followed by the artist’s name, Jenie Gao, in English and Chinese characters, then the curator’s name, Katrina Orlowski, and the dates: December 4, 2025 – January 17, 2026. Below are icons for accessibility options: Listen, Read, Scan, and Tap.

Page 18:

A white page with text. Artist’s name is bolded with their name in English and Chienese. It reads:

Jenie Gao 高皆倪 | 高韻馨 (they/she) has run an anti-gentrification arts
business since 2014, specializing in printmaking, public art, social practice,
and community storytelling. They consult for cultural organizations and the
public sector on equity and ethics.

Jenie pulls from experiences as a person of Taiwanese-Chinese heritage and
a descendant of working-class immigrants. Prior to founding their business,
Jenie worked in the museum industry, public education, and lean manufacturing.
Through their cross-section of experiences, Jenie has become
attuned to issues of artists’ labour, cultural power, and institutional accountability.
They run a paid apprenticeship program and have thus far mentored
25 emerging artists.

Jenie has a BFA in Printmaking/Drawing from Washington University in St.
Louis and an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Their work is
in 40 institutional collections including Bainbridge Island Museum of Art,
Princeton University, Cornell University, Stanford University, and the Library
of Congress. Their recent exhibits include Museum of Wisconsin Art, Trout
Museum of Art, Burnaby Village Museum, Cedarburg Museum, and South
Bend Museum of Art. Their work has been included in publications such
as PBS, Shoutout LA, and Fête Chinoise. Their art residencies include
Women’s Studio Workshop in Kingston, New York; Art in the Park with
Vancouver Board of Parks & Recreation: Decolonization, Art, & Culture;
Ma’s House in the Shinnecock Reservation in Southampton, New York;
Iowa Lakeside Laboratory in Okoboji, Iowa; the Bubbler at Madison Public
Library in Madison, Wisconsin; Artist Campaign School in Chicago, Illinois;
Proyecto’ace in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Museo de Arte Moderno in
Chile. They are a TEDx Madison speaker and gave a talk entitled The Power
and Purpose of Creativity.

Jenie Gao is the recently appointed Executive Director of Centre A:
Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. They live on the
unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

On the bottom left of the page reads ‘Biographies’.

Page 19:

A white page with text. Author’s name is bolded. The bio reads:

jWhess Harman (he/they) is a member of the Carrier Wit’at Nation, a nation
amalgamated by the federal government under the Lake Babine Nation and
currently resides on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish
and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. He doesn’t like cops and believes in land sovereignty
for Indigenous peoples across the globe, including Palestine. In his
arts practice he works primarily in drawing, text and textiles. As an independent
curator and occasional editor and contributor of art publications, they
prioritize emerging queer and BIPOC cultural workers and artists.

While working through many mediums, Whess is often working through
ideas of resistance, and works from the foundation of his identity as a queer,
trans member of Carrier Wit’at nation living away from his territories. They
position their Indigeneity as both a cultural and spiritual reality, as well as a
political identity. He seeks liberated futures alongside the many others who
share rage and despair in the face of the seemingly unrelenting shit-storm of
empire building.

Page 20:

An plum coloured page, the same colour as the cover, features a single black-bordered photograph. The image shows the artist booklet Yuǎn 遠 | Yuàn 苑 fully opened and resting on a green plinth, its folded pages spread outward like a fan. The cut edges of the circular pages reveal overlapping curved shapes printed with teal linework and mauve text. A book’s cover lays on its side nearby remains closed nearby.

Cover inside (back):

The back inside cover displays the artist book Yuǎn 遠 | Yuàn 苑 being handled by two white hands. The person gently fans open the curved pages, revealing both printed teal illustrations and segments of bilingual text. The book is partially lifted off the green plinth, showing how its round structure flexes in the hands as the pages are turned.

Cover (back):

This page lists image credits for Dennis Ha’s photos used in the catalogue, all of which are installation views of the show at grunt gallery.

End of alternative text catalogue.

Return to the Alternative Exhibitions Catalogue Directory

Published 2025
Author: Kay Slater
Translation and description drafts provided by chatGPT 4.0
Text to speech translation uses the Speechify voice library.

Introduction to alternative text catalogue:

The alternative text catalogue project was created by the staff and contractors on the Accessibility Committee at Grunt Gallery. Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, straddling the line between information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience and those better served by text!

Creative Access Descriptions:

Cover (front):

(Instruction – Describe cover)
The cover page is an aged earthy orange colour. Centered on the page, framed with a black border, is a photograph of the interior of a fishing tent. Surrounding the bordered image are exhibition details: ‘grunt gallery, December 5th, 2024 to February 1st, 2025’ at the top and Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé, Nee’Shah | Our House at the bottom. The image is taken from just outside the entrance, looking inward. The tent is made of off-white, canvas-like material, showing signs of wear, with frayed edges and patches scattered across the surface. The entrance is partially unzipped and tied back by a red and black woven ribbon, revealing the back wall where a large, white moose hide hangs on the back wall, featuring a series of small holes and a beaded fringe. The tent is supported by an exposed black plastic frame.

Cover (back):

This page lists image credits for Dennis Ha’s photos used in the catalogue, all of which are installation views of the show at grunt gallery.

Cover inside:

The cover’s inside (front and back) pages are a single image that spans the folded double-spread, interrupted by the inner catalogue’s pages. The image is a view of the gallery from the south side, looking north.

The front inside cover displays the left half of the image, featuring the fishing tent set up inside the gallery. The letters “W.R.F.N.” are spray-painted on the front flap. In the background, large windows reveal the gallery’s exterior, showing a street lined with leafless trees and a glass door with a red neon sign above it.

The right half of the image is presented on the back inside cover. The white tent continues across the page, extending toward a deep nighttime-blue gallery wall. On the south—facing exterior side, a line of evenly spaced, crisscrossing stitches securing canvas sections is visible. Overhead track lighting illuminates the scene, casting shadows on the tent’s surface.

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Page 1:

The page is all text. The footer shows the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lower case in white on a black painted brushstroke) above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits.

The interior pages are thinner than the cover but still feel thicker than photocopy paper.

The credits read

grunt gallery
Nee’ Shah | Our House
Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé
116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca
Curator: Whess Harman
Writers: Whess Harman and jaye simpson (jaye’s name is all lowercase).
Design: Victoria Lum
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photography: Dennis Ha
Printed in Canada by Mitchell Press
Edition of 200
All Rights Reserved. Publication copyright 2025 grunt gallery. Artwork copyright 2025 the artists. Text copyright 2025 the authors. All images courtesy of the artists.

Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.

grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Vancouver Foundation.

Page 2 and 3:

The double-page image shows the back wall of the fishing tent as seen from just inside the entrance.

At the center of the back wall, a white moose hide is stretched and suspended by moose rawhide ties, forming a natural, irregular shape. The hide has several small holes and a delicate, beaded fringe that dangles along its lower edge. The fringe consists of moose backstrap sinew strung with dark Silverberry Seeds.

Dark leather patches with beaded messages are scattered across the canvas walls surrounding the moosehide. These patches are rectangular, positioned at varying heights, and sewn directly onto the canvas. Above the moosehide, a circular, intricately beaded patch is affixed near the tent’s peak.

The lower edge of the wall transitions into frayed canvas fringe—a remnant of the original fishing tent’s base. The rest of the flooring has been removed, leaving only this section as a trace of the tent’s previous function.

Page 4:

An aged earthy orange page, the same colour as the cover, features a single black-bordered photograph. The image is a close-up of a section of the fishing tent’s interior fabric wall.

On the left side of the image, a dark blue square patch is sewn onto the off-white canvas. The patch has beadwork forming the text: “Where you at? Have you seen them lately?” The lettering is in lime-coloured beads, and the patch is edged with a double row of small blue and gold beads.

To the right of the patch, strands of thin sinew dangle from the lower edge of a stretched moosehide. Small, dark Silverberry Seeds are threaded onto the sinew, forming a scattered pattern as they descend.

Page 5:

A white page titled “Whess Harman, Curator’s Introduction.” The text is a black sans serif, and the title is in italics.

Page 6 and 7:

The essay begins on page 6 in two columns and continues until page 7, when it concludes in one paragraph and one column.

The essay reads:
One of the questions we spend a lot of time on while reviewing exhibition proposals during our open call is why grunt, why this project here and now? For some shows this is easier to decipher than others but it is always the hope that the artist has some of their own reasoning as well for wanting to engage with our space. Teresa was very clear in her proposal about why grunt; her proposal was honest and thoughtful in thinking through the complexity of grief when losing loved ones through houselessness and substance use, while also being mindful of what this conversation means in a place like so-called Vancouver; it’s been nine years since the declaration of a public health emergency regarding overdose deaths in our communities, with the Downtown Eastside not being the only place that this crisis is occurring, but certainly an area which receives the ire of public and political attention for it.

Teresa is frank in stating that she is not someone who experiences substance use disorder and positions herself as a witness. This is not to suggest passivity. In many Indigenous cultures, both hers and mine, being a witness is not only a role given to someone trusted but serves as a crucial function in many of our cultural practices. To mark something as needing a witness(ing) is to ascribe to it an importance and to officiate a place within communal memory.

Describer’s note: Witnessing is written with the i-n-g within brackets, so it reads both witness and witnessing.

I’ve always liked this method; not everyone is gifted with such a long and detailed memory to remember things equally, so signifying certain moments and then assigning the act of witnessing seems like a sensible way to organize collective memory. Being called to witness is not especially about prestige or personal honour; it is a service to your community and recognized as such. Remember what happened, who was there, what we were gathered for. Remember it in detail, and tell the story well when called upon to do so.

The privileges of working in institutions and the resources it can offer will not insulate you against loss, not if you’re paying attention. In this way, the “why grunt?” question is answered through knowing our community; many of us have lost loved ones in our families and arts communities to both houselessness and overdoses. grunt has been active for the last 40 years and invariably this means that it’s been called upon to hold and witness the grief and struggles of our communities over time. Grief is something that is deeply susceptible to becoming a private and individualized experience, but in this space, has often been felt and supported collectively.

The opening for this exhibition happened on Dec 5, coincidentally on the anniversary of the death of a very dear friend of mine, Lydia Sng. I did consider moving the opening, to grieve in private. So much of how we keep the dead alive is imagining what they might say and this year, what I was hearing was this friend telling me to stop holding back on living my life because I miss them so much. I’ll still hold myself back sometimes, it’s in my nature, but if there was ever a work that I would feel okay still showing up for, it was this one. Nee’Shah is something that every one who visits it will have a different relationship with depending on their experiences with losing loved ones, but what is interesting to me about it is that it’s a work that deliberately and gently gathers people together to connect them back to those personal relationships, to speak the names and tell the stories of those who’ve passed and to do so from a place of compassion and love so that there is still space for them to live alongside us.

Page 8 to 9:

The double-page image shows the left side of the south wall or the right of the entrance. The primary focus of this image is a large, oiled piece of Lake Trout Skin suspended at three corners in a Y-shaped configuration by firm, dried rawhide. The fish leather is textured with intricate and overlapping rows of scales. It is darker along the central spine and gradually lightens toward the edges. The leather has a few small holes where the skin has broken or separated, but it remains largely intact.
To the right of the fish leather, a vertical column of fabric shapes is sewn onto the canvas. The column features a pattern of black circles, each marked with a central dot, alongside a row of red half-moon shapes. Beyond this embroidery, two canvas sections are lashed with a red-flecked outdoor camping cord, crisscrossing through metal grommets. The excess cord is coiled around the horizontal cross beams of black ABS pipe, reinforcing the lightweight tent frame.

Page 10:

An aged earthy orange page, the same colour as the cover, features a single black-bordered photograph. The image is a close-up of the lower corner of the fishing tent’s interior, where the canvas wall stretches over the black ABS pipe frame.

Partially obscured by the vertical tent post, a dark fabric patch is sewn onto the off-white canvas. Beaded in gold thread, the text reads:
“I miss you every day. Your sister has passed, and I’m having so much difficulty. I can’t believe I’ve lost you both. I miss you so much. She has been missing you. I don’t think she was ever the same after you passed. I love you both so much.”

To the right of the large patch, a smaller rectangular repair patch is affixed to the wall. The frayed bottom edge of the tent wall extends downward, its loose threads hanging unevenly. A red-flecked camping cord, used to reinforce the structure, is looped around the black pipe frame.

Page 11:

A white page titled jaye simpson, A Song Sung // A Melody Returned. The text is a black sans serif, the author’s name is all lowercase letters and the title is in italics, with the two slashes marking a line break.

Page 12 to Page 15:

The essay is laid out in 2 columns across page 12, interrupted by a page of images for page 13, and continues until page 15.

Page 13 again has an aged earthy orange-coloured background, the same colour as the cover, which features two black-bordered photographs stacked on top of each other.

The top photograph captures a modified section of the fishing tent’s sloping roof, where a smoke hole has been embellished by the artist. A rectangular piece of fabric with a vivid geometric pattern with autumn leaf-red, a fruity-blue, and lemon-peel yellow is sewn around the opening with thick, textured stitches in contrasting colours. Below this section, along the roof’s seam, a small rectangular hide patch is affixed. This patch features a floral beadwork design and is of special significance—it is the last beaded piece created by the artist’s grandmother, Nelnah Bessie John.

The bottom photograph is a close-up of an intricate circular beaded patch sewn onto a vertical piece of soft leather. The densely beaded design features a rich golden background, with branching shapes outlined in black and filled with shimmering blue and silver beads. Small clusters of bright coloured beadwork emerge from the lower right section of the circle. A thin, multicoloured beaded border surrounds the entire patch. The leather holding the patch is stitched onto the tent canvas using wide, evenly spaced sinew ties.

The essay reads:
There’s a scraping sound, friction of blade against hide. the pulling of skin. A consistent thrum of movement, a ritual and prayer on the backdrop of canvas and sinew. Upon walking in, I am awash in the sensory experience of Nee’Shah | Our House by Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé. My breath hitches and my shoulders sag in, my eyes burn with an overwhelming sense of grief and witnessing. You can smell the tanned hide, see the way the light is dampened by the canvas and the beadwork glints light a thousand small pinpricks of light. As if glowing from behind, peering inwards.

I immediately think about my mother. Julie-Ann Simpson. I think about my Auntie Olga, who calls me up and updates me on the ways in which our family in the Downtown Eastside is still here but sometimes we lose someone. I lost my mother more than a decade ago and I would like to wish that things were different when it comes to our reality. The positionality of Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé’s work in proximity to the Downtown Eastside is captivating and a stark reminder of the ways in which our grief of substance use related death impacts so many of us, especially so on these unceded territories.

I’m at work. In a small gallery on Pender Street and I see folks much alike to me, on their bodies is the familiar black container with a white cross. I see the numbers ebb and flow, a tide of confusion and fury as Ken Sim and David Eby enact anti-drug laws that kill more and more of our kin across the City and Province. I think about my friends in the DTES, how I bump into Jaz outside the West Pub, they call me a little bitch and ask if I want a sip of whiskey from their flask. It’s cold, the very air in my lungs curls around in concentric waves. As I think about this, I hear a wet noise in Nee’Shah, a consistent patterned noise. I turn to Teresa and ask her. The auditory accompaniment is the process of tanning a hide, the scraping and splashing and the auditory ends with the rumble of a car ripping up a driveway. It’s her grandparent coming to visit.

I stand in awe, my friends nearby and I’m reflecting on how last year Kendell and I marched with DULF, on how my community of harm reduction friends zip around, looking for our friends and community members. I’m awash in the ways it’s us, folks with direct experiences with the toxic drug supply creating these weavings and patterns of care. Continental Breakfast is shouting into the microphone at a queer party to test your supply and not use alone, a harm reduction Buddy at the party is testing someone’s bag for them at the station and teaching someone how to use a safe snorting kit. I’m in a sea of bodies so much like mine and so different, Indigenous and queer and trans and varying in experience and life and so close to the place that so many cast downturned looks at. I could write a thousand love poems to the Downtown Eastside, and maybe I will.

( Describer’s note: DULF is written in all caps and stands for Drug User Liberation Front. Continental Breakfast is a person and performer in Vancouver).

Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé accomplishes something so phenomenal with this work, a resounding statement that art is political, and devastatingly important to the work that’s to come, and to the work that has already been done. By fusing the personal journey and allowing a wider audience to be a part of this witnessing, it feels in part ceremonial and also a call for a better tomorrow. When I walked out of the exhibition, it felt like my head was breaching the cold waters of English Bay, the air hurting my lungs and my face stinging, my muscles on fire. Visceral and haunting, like part of me was fighting to come back up, as if witnessing such a rich exploration of grief and locational experience was needed deep in my spirit. When I reflect on my grief of overdoses and toxic supply, I feel overwhelmed, as if I couldn’t fathom it, this insurmountable ocean I have been familiar with since 2000, when I lost my stepfather. The Province of British Columbia seems to be a battleground of pseudo progressive and liberation talking point parties and the farcical cartoon villain acting conservative parties. A place where safe supply has become a battle ground on moral public purview instead of granting our own neighbours, our fellow humans the grace and humanity we all should be given at a base level.

I am a person full of grief, rife with the weight of loss and many times I allow this well of hurt to manifest into rage, rage that pushes my body outside onto the frontlines, I find myself walking side by side with Whess, with Kendell, with Meenakshi, with Dean, with Jaz. I’m mad at a Metis Youth Shelter in Kamloops that evicts youth in and from care if they are found with substances, forcing them into the streets, even if it’s the dead of winter. I think about how many housing organizations do this to folks across the Province, forcing the many Indigenous folks accessing these programs to lose housing and safety. Kendall Yan once said “Everyone has an inalienable right to safe supply”, and I concur, there is something so cruel and genocidal about denying someone safety, especially when the weight of grief and intergenerational trauma so often leads so many of us into self medicating and self soothing by many means. Who is to judge how one tries to find reprieve in this storm of moral superiority that the governing bodies seem to be manufacturing at the expense of our very lives?

I guess what I am trying to say here is that I still don’t know what to do with my grief, but when spending some time in Nee’Shah | Our House by Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé, there was a calm and airlessness about it. Like I was suspended in the heart and song that Teresa so graciously shares with us. I feel more than just the space it takes, but the fingerprints of many lives and the whispers of many stories, a love letter to another, a song sung too early, but with a melody unlike any I have ever heard until now. I mean, I’ve heard the chorus, a few voices in different media, but now it feels cacophonous, the expression of grief and ceremony, this manifestation of wanting, wanting more than this despondent and callous disregard from our own service providers and the “care” system.

Instead of losing faith, I will close my eyes and know, truly that there are many in their craft and heart who refuse to allow grief to silence them, rather to fuse sinew to bone again, extend muscle and build up the body: a song will be sung and a cacophonous melody returned.
Page 16 and 17:
This double-page image shows the south-facing exterior of the tent, as if viewed after entering and stepping left to face the outside of the structure. The weathered canvas walls reveal the tent’s age and history, with visible discoloration, stains, and areas of wear. The tent’s original floor has almost entirely disintegrated, leaving behind strips of hanging threads and loose patches that expose the black ABS plastic frame along the bottom edge.

The reverse side of embroidered geometric shapes, including a large circular design with a cross at its centre and a column of embroidered circles, shows through as stitched outlines or shadows against the exterior canvas. Small square and rectangular repair patches are sewn onto the surface at varying heights. The right edge of the tent is decorated with tidy, red-threaded stitches. On top of the tent’s sloping roof, the embroidered smoke hole is visible, aligning with its detailed decoration inside.

Overhead track lighting illuminates the scene, casting additional shadows that accentuate the uneven texture of the distressed canvas. The backdrop of the deep blue gallery wall starkly contrasts the tent’s muted, aged fabric.

Page 18:

A white page with text. Artist’s name is bolded. The text on this page is first written in Upper Tanana. The text has not been included in this alternative text catalogue to respect current assistive technology limitations and to respect the Indigenous text such that it is not misunderstood or misrepresented. It is also included in English. The English text reads:

Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé is a proud Niisüü Member of White River First Nation from Beaver Creek, Yukon and Alaska. She currently resides on Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ Territories in Victoria, British Columbia, although she travels home to the Yukon as often as she can. She is an Upper Tanana, Frisian, and French visual artist and curator. Her visual arts practice is invested in the awakening of sleeping materials and the reanimation of found objects that are rooted in understandings of identity. She has recently been exploring themes of grief, loss, family, community, and relationships in her installation works.

( Describer’s note: Niisüü is written capital N, lowercase I-I-S, U-U each with a pair of dots above their letters. W̱SÁNEĆ is written in all capital letters, unlined W-S-A with a rising accent above the A, N-E-C with a rising accent above the C ).

“A special tsin’’įį choh (big thank you) to everyone that has stood by my side as I grieve the recent passings of my Grandma Marilyn John, Brother Stewart Chassé, Uncle Patrick Johnny, Uncle Peter van der Meer, and Cousin Duncan Stephen.

( Describer’s note: A big thank you is written t-s-i-n apostrophe approstrophe j-j c-h-o-h ).

I have been blessed with an abundance of teachers throughout my life, who share with me teachings, memories, stories, and language. This journey would not have been possible without contributors and supporters. Tsin’įį choh (big thank you) to my Ancestors, my family, my friends, my moosehide and fish tanning teachers, my Upper Tanana language teachers, and White River First Nation.”

On the bottom left of the page reads ‘Biographies’.

Page 19:

A white page with text. Author’s name is in all lower case whenever it appears and is bolded. North American Phonetic versions of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh nations have been removed in this text to respect current assistive technology limitations and to respect the Indigenous text such that it is not misunderstood or misrepresented. The bio reads:

jaye simpson (she/they) is an Oji-Cree Saulteaux Indigiqueer from the Sapotaweyak Cree Nation. simpson is a writer, advocate and activist sharing their knowledge and lived experiences in hope of creating utopia.

she is published in several magazines including Poetry Is Dead, This Magazine, PRISM international, SAD Magazine: Green, GUTS Magazine, SubTerrain, Grain and Room. They are in four anthologies: Hustling Verse (2019), Love After the End (2020), The Care We Dream Of (2021), and Queer Little Nightmares (2022). Their first poetry collection, it was never going to be okay (Nightwood Ed.) was shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Award and a 2021 Dayne Ogilvie Prize Finalist while also winning the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Poetry in English. a body more tolerable, is her second book of published poetry.

she is a displaced Indigenous person resisting, ruminating and residing on Musqueam, Tsleil-waututh and Squamish First Nations territories, colonially known as Vancouver.

Page 20:

An aged earthy orange page, the same colour as the cover, features a single black-bordered photograph. The image is a close-up of a small beaded floral design, stitched onto a soft, rectangular piece of hide. This is the last beadwork created by the artist’s grandmother, Nelnah Bessie John.
At the center of the patch, a round floral motif is embroidered with dense beadwork. The flower consists of looping, interwoven petals in shades of sweet magenta, yellow, and sky blue seed beads. A thin, multicoloured beaded border surrounds the design, creating a contrast against the natural, light-toned hide. The hide is sewn onto the tent’s canvas using yellow thread in a zigzag stitch.
Above the floral patch, a single red-stitched seam runs vertically along the canvas, securing overlapping layers of fabric. To the left of the seam, a cool blue and purple embroidered repair forms a blocky C-shape.

End of alternative text catalogue.

Return to the Alternative Exhibitions Catalogue Directory

Visual PDF
Published 2024
Author: Kay Slater and Lei Sabaupan

Introduction to alternative text catalogue:

The alternative text catalogue project was created by the staff and contractors on the Accessibility Committee at Grunt Gallery. Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, straddling the line between information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience and those better served by text!

Creative Access Descriptions:

Cover (front):

The cover is a dusty yellow background with a close-up view of Boucher’s installation work centered on the page, framed with a black border. Surrounding the bordered image are exhibition details: ‘grunt gallery, April 4th, 2024 to June 1st, 2024’ at the top and ‘Maria Margaretta Cabana Boucher, a memory of you: of holding, of carrying together’ at the bottom. The installation work in the center is zoomed into the bottom of a light wooden framework that forms a triangular shape resembling a tent. It is held together with intricately seed-beaded yellow rope attached to white, flower-patterned, gauzy fabric stretched all around the peak of the structure. Centered beneath the tent structure is a printed square photograph of yellow flowers and dark blades of grass framed with a large white border, similar to a polaroid. On top of the polaroid is dried braided grass of the same yellow shade as the flowers. Underneath the printed image are round rocks of varying sizes supporting the print off of the floor.

Cover (back):

This page lists image credits for Dennis Ha’s photos used in the catalogue, all of which are installation shots from the 2024 exhibition. The images listed are named and described throughout the alt text catalogue as they appear.

Cover inside:

The cover’s inside (front and back) pages are a single image that runs across the folded double-spread, interrupted by the inner catalogue’s pages. The front inside page contains an image of the exhibition, as seen when one enters the space and looks to the left of the gallery.

There are two lawn chairs on the left side near the wall. The leftmost chair’s back and face are woven with yellow beaded, loomed chair straps in a criss-cross pattern (over and under). Rocks sit on top of the chair seat in a cluster. The lawn chair to the right is slightly larger, woven in the same manner in blue and olive green. Slung over the chair is a white, gauzy, flower-printed fabric (the same one outstretched on the tent structure from the cover page).

Beside the chairs are two video projections, in likeness with the chairs, the left projection is smaller than the right one. Attached to the wall of the left projection are two wooden L-shaped supports and yellow beaded rope exactly like the tent structure, suspending a beaded net through which the light of dark green grass image is projected. To the right, on an adjacent wall, part of the projection is shown, featuring a toddler’s hand reaching for the same grass. In the middle of the gallery is a white platform on which a log, blue flannel, and pieces of wood are placed. The back inside page features the right wall, a candy blue expanse with white vinyl text over top a printed flower pattern, the same flowers as the gauzy fabric from the cover.

Page 1:

The page is all text. The footer shows the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lower case in white on a black painted brushstroke) above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits.

The interior pages are thinner than the cover but still feel thicker than photocopy paper.

The credits read

grunt gallery
a memory of you: of holding, of carrying together
Maria-Margaretta Caban Boucher
116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca

Curator: Whess Harman
Writers: Whess Harman and Jennifer Smith
Design: Victoria Lum
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photography: Dennis Ha

Printed in Canada by Mitchell Press
Edition of 200
All Rights Reserved. Publication copyright 2024 grunt gallery. Artwork copyright 2024 the artists. Text copyright 2024 the authors. All images courtesy of the artists.

Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.

grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Vancouver Foundation.

Page 2 and 3:

The double-page image shows the same tent-like structure from the cover sitting off-center to the right, in front of the candy blue wall. The same floral pattern from the gauzy fabric decorates the wall in a deep blue colour while white text over the pattern reads ‘And as you learnt you remembered and taught the next generation how to look, how to remember too. We moved, felt, dream, learnt, and remember together.’ A bright spotlight obscures some of the white text. Under the wooden tent-frame are two thick bordered prints of natural water and field scenes propped up on stones.

Page 4:

A pale yellow page, the same colour as the cover, features a single black-bordered photograph. The image is a close-up of a dark wooden log. Sitting on top of the log is a navy blue and black flannel top, loosely folded. On the flannel, there is fine bead embroidery using black, yellow, and varying shades of blue beads that form ornate shapes of flowers, leaves, stems and roots.

Page 5:

A white page titled “Whess Harman, Curator’s Introduction”.

Page 6 to 9 and Page 10:

The essay is laid out in two columns across page 6, interrupted by an image on page 7, and continues until page 9, concluding in one paragraph and one column. The page 7 photograph is a close-up shot of the smaller, yellow lawn chair. Sitting close together on the chair are three rocks: one long, oval and grey, one small, round and brown, and one tiny and white.

The essay reads:

When I really adore something or someone, all the complimentary words that apply when describing them fly out of my head because it feels critical to me in that moment to find the exact right way to describe them and their work. And as I’ve come to know her over the years through our nebulous network of art ndns both here and across the prairies, I do adore Maria and the work in this exhibition. Maria is someone who I’ve always admired–a woman who keeps “Michif Milf” in her instagram profile and shows up to Hotlatch in a bedazzled denim ball cap and wearing a mesh shirt while really very pregnant is easy to find affection for in my world. Especially when she outlasts the night on the dance floor over you.

Last year I attended a VQFF screening for the film, Runs in the Family, and the writer (and star) Gabe Gabriel was in attendance. During the talk back session, he was trying to describe his father (who directed the film) of whom the endearingly shameless and hyper-supportive father in the film was partially based off of. Gabriel’s shoulders came up as his body compressed, mic pressed to his chest for a moment as he tried to explain what specific qualities he draw from his father to make this character and what he came up with was something that’s stuck with me ever since; he described his father as someone who was, “deeply concerned with getting love right.” Getting love right.

Another sentiment that comes closer from within our community, is a line included in our very talented novelist friend, Jessica John’s debut novel, Bad Cree. I say included because as I was reading it I felt like I had heard it before; “what have we got to do with all this time but get it right?” This line is attributed in the endnote acknowledgements to our dear friend Jade Baxter.

Both of these quotes speak toward an active way of doing love, and one which openly acknowledges that mistakes will be made and that there are in fact very wrong ways to do love. In Maria’s initial letter included in the proposal for this exhibition she refers to her daughter Mino as “her little spirit bead.” Spirit beads in many Indigenous cultures refer to a concept of humbleness; the accidental mismatched or misplaced bead in a work signals to us that we are not meant to exist or create in godlike perfection. Love, to me, is not made from perfection either, but instead from the messy, sprawling (continues on page 8 to 9) and continuous work of collaborating with another human being to understand and help fill one another’s needs and affirming each other as places of safety to make mistakes within that goal.

There are versions of this essay that started in thinking through this exhibition as an expression of motherhood, or more broadly, of parenting. However, I don’t have much business in that conversation as neither a parent nor someone interested in publicly ruminating the details of their own complicated relationship with their mother. I’ve come to think of this show as being about inheritance. Inheritance not as vanity, but as love and radical resistance. Bringing our cultures with us to the frontlines of survivance offers a place to locate ourselves in what is otherwise an endless and confusing onslaught of both direct and indirect pressure to conform to canadian colonial capitalist culture. Despite fraught familial relationships and dispossession and displacement from my own land, my culture is the last line of defense in preserving my sanity and what reminds me most to keep to both my own principles and the broader principled resistance of my people. There was a before to which we are indebted, and as long as we survive, there is a future to which we are obliged to pay forward. This exhibition, drawing inspiration from both Maria’s grandfather and her daughter, does that work.

What I have heard Maria speaking about over the weeks leading up to the exhibition, as a small team of us helped with beading ropes for some of the works on sunny spring afternoons in the studio, was towards an urgency of knowing which of these works will help carry the cultures within Mino forward. These works serve as a kind of survival kit; tangible objects with stories and territories embedded within them that are meant to be touched, felt and passed down. They are also objects that will suffer wear and accept repair as time goes on. The purpose of this exhibition, as I understand it, is that Mino will have these touchstones to always know who she is, that she will not have to search endlessly for that foundation or feel uncertain of where she belongs within the proud histories she descends from. This is no blithely proposed or romanticized inheritance; when I think of the Potlatch Ban on the west coast and how much was disrupted and what objects sacred, ritualistic and domestic were lost in that process for my own people, I understand deeply this need of artists to create new repertoires of our work for future generations. Who are we to invest more beauty in, if not our own people?

I haven’t asked Maria directly what her thoughts of motherhood and parenting are or how she feels about the role, but what comes through so clearly in her work to me is that she’s trying to get love right and will take her time in figuring out what that looks like for her and her family. Love is an active motivation, not a milestone to reach and possess. There will be a day for Mino where her parents will pass into memory, and a day too where she passes into the memory of future generations; but in the meantime, we’re each here to try and get it as right as we can in a world swallowed by empires, with what precious time we have.

Page 10:

A pale yellow page, the same colour as the cover, features a single black-bordered photograph. The image is a close-up view of the same work described in the inside cover: two perpendicular wooden supports jutting from the wall to which the beaded yellow rope is tied. It secures the glittering beaded net through which the grass image is projected.

Page 11:

A white page titled “Jennifer Smith, Offerings of Intimacy”.

Page 12 and 13 to Page 16:

The essay is laid out in four columns across both pages and concludes on page 16 in a single column. Interrupting the text on page 13 is a picture of two white hands holding a portion of the same intricately seed-beaded yellow rope used elsewhere in the show. On the white table are tactile objects complimentary to the work: a small glass jar of the seed beads, a piece of dark wooden bark, a small brown rock, and plastic netting made from oblong pearl coloured seed beads.

The essay reads:

I remember finding a charm bracelet at some point in my childhood. This charm bracelet had several charms, a drum, an axe, and feather. I didn’t wear it, but kept it in a small jewelry box I was given as a little girl where I kept special things. In my memory, I was told at some point that this bracelet was my grandmother’s (my father’s mother).

Before I was born both of my paternal grandparents, my Métis grandparents, passed away. I have stories in me about them that I remember, but I don’t always know where they came from or who told me. Sometimes I recount these memories or stories I was told to my dad and he tells me that they are incorrect, or he will share a story from his youth that goes against something I believed about my grandparents my whole life. Even though I never met them I always, even from a young age, tried to be connected to them or know things about them, especially my grandmother. I heard stories that my grandmother loved ‘costume jewelry’. I don’t know where I heard that, but it’s something that has stuck with me all my life. I have always loved to adorn myself, I sometimes wondered if this was because I wanted to be like my grandmother, or if it was inherited, or if there is even a difference between those two things.

Recently I showed my mom the bracelet and said I think this was dad’s mom’s and she said no it wasn’t, but didn’t elaborate on where it came from. These foggy connections/memories that I possibly made up as a kid allowed me to take time to be with my grandmother, to pick up the bracelet and think about where she would have worn it, to wonder what kind of relationship we would have had, and plainly just to have her with me for a little while. Even though it turns out this bracelet was not hers and some of my memories were incorrect, I was able to find ways to remind myself that the tether between me and my ancestors could not be broken. That I could always find them when I needed them.

Maria-Margaretta Cabana Boucher’s exhibition, a memory with you, is the embodiment of this tether. An exhibition dedicated to her daughter, and to future generations, while honouring her ancestors. An exhibition that was conceived while her daughter was transitioning in her womb, preparing to come into this earthly world. An exhibition planned for her, for her to have memories, to have a physical representation of the love for her. Of the generations upon generations of love that came to this exact point where she exists and can see everything handed down to her mother and now to her.

I initially thought of the exhibition as a place of witnessing love and intimacy, but the more time I have spent with this I’ve thought of the exhibition as an invitation. An invitation that is both to witness, and to be part of the intimacy if we so choose. I do not necessarily mean intimacy with Maria directly, but if we are open to it we can learn about the different ways we love and find each other through generations or family and kin. We might be able to understand our own connections through this example of world building for Maria’s girl.

Using materials, objects and installation that are very personal to Maria, but also would be familiar to most Métis people, the space holds Maria’s own family story and beautiful cultural material, knowledge, and memories.

The gallery recreates a family camp, a place where relatives worked together, had fun together, got to know each other in deep ways that are hard to come by in daily life unless we are conscious and careful to ensure we make space for that intimacy.

Describer’s note: The following paragraph is written in lowercase with no grammar across 20 lines. The paragraph has been rewritten to flow for screen readers and text-to-speech, and follows the cadence intended by the author, as understood by the describer.

In the camp there are so many special details that hold space for the love of a mother and daughter:
adult and child size camp chairs side by side,
rocks placed on the small chair,
a light gauzy fabric with a flower print that echos the print of flowers on the wall,
an axe adorned with a beaded cover surround by wood and with beaded fabric and a small beaded strawberry left as a surprise,
prints depicting water and grasses are in a small structure that you can see into, and raised off the ground on rocks,
an area set up to get to know the materials used in the room through touch,
projections of beadwork connect to each other and are made tactile
through beadwork installed on the walls becoming a part of the projection,
a small wooden triangular structure covered in the white gauzy fabric with a flower print on it,
a paper with family names, and polaroid image of a building with a dried flower.

It is an exhibit full of offerings, these offerings include love and intimacy, but it also has a sense of being lived in, not a place that comes together overnight, but a place that has come together over time with care.

I imagine the rocks left by Maria’s girl on her own seat to come back to, but then there is one on the adult chair, a gift found and left for her mother.
The beaded strawberry stuck into the wood I can imagine a child playing with and admiring their mother’s beading and putting it down as they move onto their next interest or adventure.

The torn up piece of paper on the wall with family names and picture of a structure, an offering acknowledging ancestors and ways of living.
I imagine the white gauzy fabric as an offering to the spirits of Métis women, who are often invisible in the stories of our histories. The one place Métis women are always present is in the name we are sometimes called, The Flower Beadwork People, women were the beaders in our communities, and so we are always centred in this name.

The fabric left on the chair, or in the installation with the wood, I imagine being used to wrap a child to keep them warm, or to cover the child during chest feeding. Moment of closeness, where that physical loving contact echoes and is held in the fabric.

An offering to every visitor to be welcomed in and to be let into a space of love, to feel materials, to spend time surrounded in care.

And most of all this offering to Maria’s girl is an exhibition born of love that holds space for knowledge that is not just about physical presence, but about connection to things we cannot see.

The gallery is intended to be a place that honours creating memories, the work has been created for Maria’s daughter to know her art, to know her ancestors, and be an active part of what the gallery holds. The exhibition exemplifies the ways that for Indigenous people art and life are not separate, they are entangled. These memories being made are real, are tactile, and will remain with Maria and her child. A very thoughtful and intentional love to hold onto the past, to know the past and to be able to feel it in the future.

The exhibition will happen for a time, will be in this specific physical form during its run at grunt gallery, it may be remounted in the future, but it will never be exactly as it is now. Also allowing it to be a memory, one that may be recounted accurately, or may get foggy over time, may be remembered by one person slightly differently than another person. However it will always be able to be felt, and the amazing thing about feelings is there is no right or wrong way to feel them. Maria’s girl will be able to feel the love her mother puts into her, the dreams she has for her, the intentions she manifested for her daughter to know her, her artworks, and their ancestral gifts. Objects made by Maria will likely find their way to future generations in her lineage and will keep those people connected to her, the ways I found ways to continue connecting to my grandmother.

Page 17:

A pale yellow page, the same colour as the cover, features a stacked pair of black-bordered photographs. Pictured in the top photograph are two wooden logs on a wooden table, placed perpendicularly to each other. One small log is angled at fourty-five degrees, the other large log is wrapped in yellow beaded rope, placed vertically and partially out of view. Under them is the same gauzy fabric folded neatly beside an elaborately beaded pink strawberry. Pictured in the bottom photograph is a wooden axe resting on top of a large rectangular piece of wood. The axehead is covered with a yellow felt sheath, decorated with purple, yellow, and white beads along the border and beaded designs of a colourful fish, flowers, and strawberries.

Page 18:

A white page with text. Maria-Margaretta Cabana Boucher’s name is bolded. It reads:

Maria-Margaretta Cabana Boucher is an interdisciplinary Red River Michif Artist from Treaty Six Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her family has historic ties to the Métis communities of St-François-Xavier, St. Boniface, and St. Louis, Saskatchewan. She is currently making and living on the stolen territories of the SKWA-mish, tSLAY-wah-tooth, and MUSS-quee-um Nations. Utilizing traditional beadwork practice merged with contemporary mediums she considers how this duality serves as both an act of reclamation and commentary on cultural hybridity. Navigating Indigeneity through the lenses of both the settler and the settled, Maria-Margaretta attempts to negotiate her sense of self through the implications of existing in a colonial system. Using Métis’ identity as a place of transformation she questions how memory, personal experience, and ancestral relations influence her understanding of self.

On the bottom left of the page reads ‘Biographies’.

Page 19:

A white page with text. Jennifer Smith’s name is bolded. It reads:

Jennifer Smith is a Métis curator, writer and arts administrator from Treaty One Territory. She is the President of the board for the Coalition of Canadian Independent Media Art Distributors, and works with the boards of the National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition (or NIMAC) and Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (or MAWA). As a curator she focuses on researching craft based contemporary art, women’s work and feminism. Jennifer has curated exhibits and video programs for the Manitoba Craft Council, Video Pool Media Arts Centre, Open City Cinema, MAWA, the Manitoba Crafts Museum and Library, and has been published in Studio magazine. In 2018 she was the Indigenous Curator in Residence at aceartinc.

Page 20:

A white page with text, a letter from Maria to her daughter reads:

Daughter,

I made these works for you, my future ancestor. I created this document, these pieces, this Michif self-archive for you. So you wouldn’t have to search my name, dig deep for my stories. You could speak with confidence to who I was and what I loved. I created this work so you would know my stitch, you would recognize me by the way I placed my beads. You would never feel alone amongst beaded objects because you would know they are family, and you are home.

I imagined you adorned and protected as you carried the knowledge of our ancestors in those same threads. I imagined you studying and learning from my designs and one day creating your own. Your fingers touching the surface of the fabric, memorizing the textures, the shapes, the tension of the threads. And as you learnt you remembered and taught the next generation how to look, how to remember too.

I made these works so our ancestral ties would never break, past, current, and future ancestors could live in reciprocity together in the worlds we have created for one another. I made these works so you would know you belonged to me and I to you and through our shared lineage we would hold each other up in our remembering.

I imagined you as a great great granddaughter searching for my story, eased in knowing I loved you, as I reached out to you through our shared objects. In my wildest dreams I could not have imagined that you, my future ancestor, were already here with me. Growing inside me, breathing with me, becoming. That as I created these works I was also creating you. A trickster just like her mother hiding out of reach until you were ready to announce yourself. And with you came my world. With you came a clear understanding of the world I am building, the world I have rebuilt for you, Kiihtwaam ooshtaahk, rebuild little one.

These works are my first gift to you, these words are my gift to you my daughter. Marsii, Miigwetch, thank you for collaborating on these works with me as we moved, felt, dreamt, learnt and remembered together. My little spirit bead, my gift from creator.

I love you, gi-zaagin, ki shaakiihitin

Return to the Alternative Exhibitions Catalogue Directory

Visual PDF available online: grunt.ca.
Published February 2024.
Author of alt text: Kay Slater

Introduction to alternative text catalogue:

Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, merging creativity, information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience and those better served by text!

We welcome feedback from our audiences. Please contact us at access@grunt.ca with any questions or feedback.

Creative Access Descriptions:

An exhibition pamphlet printed on soft newsprint paper the colour of vanilla pudding. The newsprint laid flat is about the size of a shoebox or a computer monitor. The paper is folded accordion-style, creating a zigzag-style line along the top or the bottom edges. The following description assumes you open the pamphlet like an English book, turning the pages along the right edge, flipping the entire pamphlet as you reach the end, and continuing flipping along the right edge. When unfolded or laid flat, each page appears as three columns. Some pamphlet copies have a tactile square added to the cover or title page in the lower right corner.

Page 1, cover:

The first column, or the cover page, begins with small, black, sans-serif text that reads grunt gallery. February 3rd – March 16th 29th, 2024. Below that is a large, portrait-oriented snapshot photo of a teenager and an adult in casual clothes, named Mercedes and her father at Drumheller Penitentiary, 1983. The youth, Mercedes Eng, one of the two curators of the show, stands with her father, Sue Dong, in front of a panelled wall. Their clothes and hairstyles have a 1970s vibe; Mercedes sporting a layered and feathered haircut, and Sue Dong with a pencil-thin moustache.

At the bottom of the page is text in a large, thin, black-serif font. The text reads: Sue Dong Eng and Mercedes Eng, Inside Out: the art show my dad never had.

Page 2:

The second column, or page, on the front side is all text. It is the same black sans-serif font used at the top of the cover page. At the footer, the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lower case in white on a black brushstroke of black) sits above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits. The text on this page reads:

grunt gallery

Inside/Out: the art show my dad never had
Sue Dong Eng and Mercedes Eng
116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca

Curator: Mercedes Eng and Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa
Writer: Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa
Designer: Victoria Lum
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photographer: Photograph courtesy of Mercedes Eng

Printed in Canada by Moniker Press
Edition of 200
ISBN: 978-1-988708-26-3

All Rights Reserved Publication © 2024 grunt gallery
Artwork © 2024 the artists
Text © 2024 the authors
All images courtesy of the artists

© Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.

grunt gallery is located on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, who have lived in kinship with this land, water and air for thousands of years. We recognize and acknowledge their leadership and our own complicity in settler colonialism, its present occupation and its violent legacy. We acknowledge our responsibility to work actively in support of Indigenous sovereignty, and towards a respectful relationship with this place.

grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Vancouver Foundation.

Page 3:

A note from the describer: Although this is named page three within the description and refers to the third and last column of content on this side of the folded pamphlet, this section is numbered as page one, similar to a book publication where this would be the first page of content following the colophon or publishing information pages.

A graphic shows a cold, blue-grey-coloured rectangle over which are two stacked images. The top image is credited as — Mercedes’s father, grandmother, and uncle in Chinatown. It is a black and white image the three people in front of a 1950s era car. The middle figure, Mercedes’ grandmother, holds a young, pacifier-suckling child in her arms. A teenager in a white tee shirt and baggy pants leans against the car.

The bottom image is in colour and is identified as — Mercedes, her father and her mother with a prison fence behind them. Circa 1974. The image is ragged with folds and creases, visibly preserved after scanning it to digital. Sue Dong is bent forward, his hands on his knees, and Mercedes’ mother stands behind him to give the impression that she is on his shoulders. Mercedes’ is a baby and is riding her mother’s shoulders and so the three look stacked on top of each other. Beyond the three figures is a green mountain and a sunny clear sky.

Page number 1 appears in a tiny font, and below this, the essay author, Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa, and the title, “On both sides of the fence, we create,” are listed in a font similar to the front cover.

Back-side:

The back side of the pamphlet also has three sections which are printed as columns between each of the folds. The back pages are all text, using the same small sans-serif font used on sections of the pages on the front side. Near the bottom left corner of all the pages is a number in thin serif font labelling each page: 2, 3 and 4.

The following is the text, edited to flow for easy reading on a screen reader or by a AI voice-over agent. Following the title is a poem written in 2 line stanzas, and then the essay begins with the sentence, “early in the summary of 2022”. Wherever the country canada is written, it has been purposely written with a lowercase c. Footnotes are included within the flow of the text. In the pamphlet, footnotes are clustered in tiny type in a small square in the bottom right corner of each folded section.

Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa.
On both sides of the fence, we create.

Poem titled: Accompaniment, by Sreshta Rit Premnath, from the 2019 publication Those Who Wait.

There is no being,
but being with,

even if we must keep,
the company of ghosts,

or speak to hazy figures,
beyond memory’s edge,

to lean,
is to be held,

the wall that separates,
must also support,

the weight of time,
without direction,

unbearable alone,
unburdened together,

there is only being,
in being for each other,

the provisional ground,
on which we wait,

is the very site,
of the claim we make.

Early in the summer of 2022, I slid into Mercedes Eng’s DMs.

We were mutuals on Instagram (meaning that when I followed her some months before, she followed me back) which I was pretty excited about, and probably felt emboldened by. I’d seen Mercedes’ work around, but I was able to dig deep into it in a Woman of Colour Feminism art history class taught by Dr. Sue Shon at art school, only a year or two prior.

I reached out to Mercedes when I was working on a residency that focused on reflections of this city, while working with the archive of a local gallery. I had the inclination -and eventually, some budget—to collaborate with other creatives in the city, and Mercedes really quickly came to mind as someone I wanted to work with. I was interested in chatting together about her process and practice, unpacking some of the parallels between the rise of violent anti-Asian rhetoric that had surfaced in the early stages of this ongoing pandemic era, and in the first half of the twentieth century. I also wanted to think through how this—along with forces of gentrification—was shaping such a historic and important local ecosystem as Chinatown, which was complicated further by being an immigrant settler presence on stolen land.

In the conversations that shaped our first artistic collaboration, Mercedes generously shared with me some of the digitized family archive she and her relatives had been gathering. She talked about the images, her upbringing, and her ties to our local Chinatown with the spirit of a reluctant archaeologist. She wanted to incorporate some of this body of work into our first project but I advised against it, instinctually feeling that this archival collection could and should be something bigger than what this first project allowed for.

Footnote one: My strong instinctual responses have been lovingly dubbed quote: the Keimi gut, unquote, by my friend and colleague Kay Slater. Kay’s encouragement to listen to my gut has allowed me to turn down an array of projects that would’ve burnt me out (to a crisp) and follow the electric currents of work and connections I’m passionate about. Footnote ends.

I kept it in the back of my mind, as something I could eventually pitch as an exhibition proposal somewhere, or apply to a grant for.

A few months later, through the trust and generosity of the team at grunt, I was able to bring this project to the gallery as a guest curator. It’s been pretty wild to have gone from a fan of Mercedes’ work, to her co-curator for a deeply personal project in the span of only a few years. As the project took shape, it was clear that her dad’s works in particular could add a layer of depth and relevance to the conversations we wanted to have through a public presentation. He had deep familial connections to Chinatown, and had been subject to a system of policing and carcerality, which increasingly affects the neighbourhood today. He came into an art practice that sustained him, through an institution where he experienced violence. As a human and as an artist, he brushed up against carceral and colonial systems, where many of his collaborators were Indigenous, incarcerated on their own ancestral lands.

Planning a public presentation (and therefore conversation) while holding all of these nuances and complications can be tricky, to say the least. I have at times felt like a voyeur or outsider to such an intimate collection of labour and objects, but while planning this exhibition, I keep going back to Mirtha N. Quintanales’ contribution to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour, where she says, quote: I think we need to keep in mind that in this country, in this world, racism is used to both create false differences among us and to mask very significant ones— cultural, economic, political…, unquote.

Describer note. The number 151 is listed here in brackets, followed by Footnote 2.
Footnote two: by Mirtha N. Quintanales, “I Paid Very Hard for My Immigrant Ignorance.” from the publication This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour, fourth edition, 2015. SUNY Press. Footnote end] I am passionate about this project because I believe we as immigrant settlers can celebrate our accomplishments, grieve our separation from our ancestral lands, and do better for the lands we inhabit which we don’t belong to. I believe that these things can all exist at once, and that our tangled connecting ties are important.

Inside/Out: the art show my dad never had, to me, is a work of loving and speculative imagination through three directions of time. We move backwards through past decades, on the vessels of archival materials which Mercedes and her family have so carefully collected. We imagine what must’ve been going through teenaged Sue Dong’s head as he grumpily takes a photo in his casually rebellious clothes next to his dolled-up family. We slice the present open, and speak his name, holding him while we clean, and place, and admire his work that exists alongside us today. We turn over a lunar new year, and ponder what futures might have ensued for him if he had not been exposed to substance use through nightlife at the cabaret at a young age. If he had not been incarcerated. If he had found art sooner. If, if, if…

As Saidiya Hartman says in “Notes on Method” at the opening of her book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, I similarly hope that for Sue Dong. Quote: I have crafted a counter-narrative liberated from the judgement and classification that subjected young black women to surveillance, arrest, punishment and confinement, and offer an account that attends to beautiful experiments—to make living an art…endquote.

Describer’s note: the roman numeral 14 or X-I-V is here in brackets, followed by Footnote 3.
Footnote 3: A quote by Saidiya Hartman, called “A Note on Method.” from the publication Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, first edition, 2019. W.W. Norton & Company. End footnote.

As someone who has both been a part of planning several exhibitions and is endeavouring into curatorial work formally for the first time, Sue Dong’s absence from the physical realm has been clear. It has been both a lot of pressure, and such a gift to bring his and Mercedes’ work to life in the gallery, and I feel honoured to have been able to do so.

I do believe that this celebration of Sue Dong’s life and practice, tenderly encircled by Mercedes’ words, is an affront to the popular and incorrect idea that canada as a nation-state is a safe and easy place for im/migrants and racialized people to exist.

Describer’s note: Keimi writes immigrants here as I-M-slash-M-I-G-R-A-N-T-S.

Footnote 4: While there are lots of forms of empirical evidence of this, I wanted to highlight the fact that canada does not have a limit to the amount of time migrants can be held in detention, without any criminal charges. And while some government entities are claiming to want to change that, most are actually extending contracts that allow them to continue indefinite detention practices. Hanna Gros, Samer Muscati. From the article “Another Canadian Province to End Immigration Detention in its Jails”. Describer’s note: The author includes a URL to the article on hrw.org in this footnote. For the full URL, please contact any grunt staff and we will send you the link. Footnote ends.

At the same time, I want to emphasize that Sue Dong is not a martyr for this cause, nor for his art. He was a dad, a husband, and an imperfect human like the rest of us. He had creative outlets and hopes and aspirations, along with fabulous etching and woodworking skills. While this exhibition does not absolve the fact that he was harmed and caused harm, I hope that this impermanent space in the gallery, a gallery which has held so much of my own messiness and aspirations, creates a little bubble of safety and validation that he and other artists like him deserve.

Return to the Alternative Exhibitions Catalogue Directory

Visual PDF
Published 2024
Author: Kay Slater

Introduction to alternative text catalogue:

The alternative text catalogue project was created by the staff and contractors on the Accessibility Committee at Grunt Gallery. Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, straddling the line between information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience and those better served by text!

Creative Access Descriptions:

Cover (front):

The cover features a cool blue background highlighting a central image, framed by the exhibition details: ‘grunt gallery, November 23rd, 2023 to January 20th, 2024’ at the top and ‘Sora Park Daughter, Daughter, Daughter’ at the bottom. The focal image shows a square, grey plexiglass panel depicting a baby cradled in adult hands. This panel, set against deep bell pepper-red walls, takes on a dark red hue. A second panel is installed perpendicularly to this, but the image cannot be seen from the photo’s angle. However, the room’s lighting casts a yellow shadow from this panel onto the cement floor, creating a play of colours amongst the otherwise red glow from the walls. Beyond the panel, a row of oval discs hang against the back wall, reminiscent of sliced cylindrical rice cakes spilling to the left.

Cover (back):

This page lists image credits for Dennis Ha’s photos used in the catalogue, all of which are installation shots from the 2023 exhibition. The images listed are named and described throughout the alt text catalogue as they appear.

Cover inside:

The cover’s inside pages are a single image that runs across the folded double-spread, interrupted by the inner catalogue’s pages. The image is a wide shot of the entire exhibition as seen when one enters the space. The left wall and page feature the suspended, cascading rice sculpture dramatically illuminated from above with red gels whose light pools on the cement floor. On the right is a wall installation with a centrally installed sentence “…and she lived happily ever after” in glacial blue styrofoam serif letters. Underneath this is the all-caps text “WITH HER THREE DOGS!” in the shape of Sora’s own handwriting, arranged in a curved line like a smile. To the left of the centred text are three squiggly sculptures depicting braided Korean hair, and on the right side, one of three suspended dog sculptures can be seen; however, the other dog sculptures are visible in the reflection of a framed plexiglass panel, installed in the centre of the gallery between these two walls which is split by the fold of the catalogue.

Page 1:

The page is all text. The footer shows the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lower case in white on a black painted brushstroke) above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits.

The interior pages are thinner than the cover but still feel thicker than photocopy paper.

The credits read

grunt gallery
Daughter, Daughter, Daughter
Sora Park
116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca
Curator: Whess Harman
Writers: Whess Harman and Areum Kim
Design: Victoria Lum
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photography: Dennis Ha
Printed in Canada by Mitchell Press
Edition of 200
ISBN: 978-1-988708-25-9
All Rights Reserved. Publication copyright 2023 grunt gallery. Artwork copyright 2023 the artists. Text copyright 2023 the authors. All images courtesy of the artists.

Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.

Note from transcriber: the following paragraph has Indigenous spellings of nation names followed by the English translation.

grunt gallery is located on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, who have lived in kinship with this land, water and air for thousands of years. We recognize and acknowledge their leadership and our own complicity in settler colonialism, its present occupation and its violent legacy. We acknowledge our responsibility to work actively in support of Indigenous sovereignty and towards a respectful relationship with this place.

grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Vancouver Foundation.

Page 2 and 3:

The double-page image shows the middle section of the installation, where four plexiglass structures have been installed in a zig-zag pattern bisecting the gallery space. Three structures are square plexiglass panels in grey, yellow, and dark green. Each panel displays an outlined illustration of a baby. The fourth structure, featured centrally and prominently in the photo spread, is an accordion room divider of translucent red plexiglass. The folding screen illustrates baby Sora crying at her doljanchi, her first birthday party, wearing Hanbok – feminine traditional Korean clothes. Her Hanbok consists of a colourful jacket made of strips of embroidered ribbon and a full, wide, wrap-around silk skirt that billows around baby Sora’s crying form. Since the sheets are translucent, one can see the sentence …and she lived happily ever after with her three dogs on the wall beyond.

Page 4 (left):

The same blue as the cover fills the page around a black-bordered photograph. The image is a close-up of the yellow plexiglass panel, the colour of sunflower petals, which is seen at the bottom with the cement floor on the other side. However, the red wall beyond causes a colour shift to orange, and the pale blue letters of the sentence …and she lived happily ever after with her three dogs, become yellowish green. The plexi image is the baby Sora cradled horizontally in her mom’s hands. Baby Sora’s expression is neutral, neither crying nor smiling. Her eyes are open, and she stares directly at you.

Page 5:

A white page titled “Whess Harman, Curator’s Introduction”.

Page 6 and 7:

The essay is laid out in three columns across the two pages.

The essay reads:

Red walls for drama. Red light for drama. Red rice cakes under red light floating on a red wall for drama; I think Sora Park was successful in conveying a sense of drama with these works. It was the word that kept coming up as the screens were shuffled around to work within the space. When you walk around the back of the screens, the plexi goes alight in grey, red, yellow and green, but you are awash in a low, drenched red.

In this exhibition, Daughter, Daughter, Daughter, Sora explores saju, a Korean practice of fortune telling and divination. Specifically, she focuses on the common and repeated reading given to her that predicts that fulfillment will come through herself having a child. The red becomes a spotlight, but also the recessed red square of a saju divination chart. In this prospective world the continuance of daughters becomes an utopic unending. There is a tempting rhythm in that; passing a lineage through time and being connected through matrilineal lines in a path that moves in each direction. But in the immediate present, it’s also a tremendous obligation that carries the crush of thousands of years of culture that has shaped what and who a daughter is and expected to be. In the gallery, Sora’s work in this exhibition humorously rejects the foretold utopia of daughters bringing forth an endless line of more daughters, but even when gazing affectionately at the dog butts and their accompanying braids, there is still a reflexive tightening in my chest as I recall my own firm exit from the responsibility of continuing the family line. It caused some drama, of the disappointment variety, followed by more than a few half-hearted lingering years of, “well, you say that now, but you never know.”

When we received Sora’s proposal the tension that was so attractive was the way the proposed work was attempting to confront the enormity of expectation to fulfill a destiny of motherhood, while also finding agency in the feeling of incredulity that comes when faced with the expectation to concede to destiny. The assumption that a child-free woman is someone who is by default unfulfilled sounds archaic, but it is and will continue to be an assertion made in many communities and upheld as cultural value and legacy. There is personal and cultural tension in this work but it is also very familiar. In my own, and in many Indigenous cultures, the term “life giver” has been used repeatedly in a strictly biological sense, diminishing the many other roles in community that are required to give and make life and community whole. Roles among which cisgendered, intersex and transgendered community members can themselves be joyfully fulfilled without having a biological relation. There is so much depth, complexity and curiosity about gender, community and familial legacy that gets ironed out in narrow questions like, “when/are you going to have children?” or “are you going to give me grandbabies?” that feels similar to the futures offered to Sora though the saju readings.

Daughter, Daughter, Daughter does not offer a resolution to the anxious burden of expected and obligatory motherhood, but it does come sideways with a quick jab at the ribs like a needling reminder; what if children don’t inherently secure one’s happiness? Why should we consider reproductive opportunities as fated, rather than intentional choices? In seeking autonomous, unfated choice, Sora’s work meets at the dividing line between past and future, in an imperfect and pressurized present. Here, the red saturation of the exhibition holds the alarm of divinely determined futures but proposes, cheekily, that happily ever after can be a purposeful choice, scaled to our desires and capacity.

Page 8:

The same blue as the cover fills the page around a black-bordered photograph. The image shows a close-up of the 3 squiggly forms, depicting braided Korean hair joyfully flying in the air. The inner plaits of the braids are the same glacial blue as the letters, and the sculptures are otherwise red on the top and upper sides, though not as intense as the red wall. Sora describes it as similar to the orangish-red of a cooked lobster. These are suspended to the left of the …and she lived sentence, and above the large handwritten capital letters of the words with her from the sentence with her 3 dogs. The E in the word her looks like a reserve letter or backwards 3.

Page 9:

A white page titled “Areum Kim, How to move pillars: A reflection and a rebuttal to a fortune reading”.

Page 10 through 13:

The essay is spread over four pages in seven columns. A single footnote is embedded in the essay for this alternative text format. The essay reads

The artist received a saju reading that motherhood is her destiny, that once she gives birth to a daughter prosperity will follow. In the fortune chart, this prediction is etched into a red cell. A red world that signals a turn in fortune, as long as that world includes a daughter. Saju is often presented as advice and an imperative at the same time. Sometimes it seems that the advice-imperative is confined within the limited social imaginary, in this case a limited imagination for a young biological woman. In this exhibition, a red world ushers us into an alternative, a question, rebuttal, loophole.

Saju is a popular divination practice in South Korea, which translates to four pillars. A person is a house whose four pillars are erected on the year, month, day, and time of birth. Fate is transposed to an eight-cell chart, four columns, two rows of heaven and earth, lettered and colour-coded. Thus the word “eight letters,” or palja came to mean “destiny.”

Within this worldview, the past, the singular moment of first breath, mandates, directs, molds, the course of one’s life. The die has been cast. The fortune readings then, guide, conduct, inform the choices one c/should make in life. Saju readings often elaborate on social and familiar relations, placing an individual in a web of cosmological and sociocultural mandates.

In this exhibition Daughter, Daughter, Daughter, the artist Sora Park responds to this cosmic and cultural imperative to motherhood, delving into the familiar and cultural memories of a diasporic individual. The gallery space becomes a certain red world that the artist builds as a response, weaving in multiple realities of women across time: hers, her mothers, other women of history, namely a famous mother in the Korean collective memory. The first part of the exhibition acknowledges a 16th century woman, who is known as the mother of a renowned calligrapher. Barely named, she is also one of the only few documented female figures in pre-modernity Korea. Both Park and I have learned and read about this story in our respective elementary educations in Korea, which goes:

The wise mother, seeing her calligrapher son growing too arrogant of his skills, challenges him to a bet. In total darkness, she would slice rice cakes and he would write. When the lights turned on: the domestic task done to perfection, a boasted artistry embarrassingly botched.

Did the calligrapher’s mother receive a fortune to birth greatness? At least she was mothering her son’s way to greatness. We don’t know anything else about her. The oversized, red sculptures of rice cake protrude from the red wall of the gallery like a playful nod to the sanctified myth of model mother/womanhood, one of the only few examples that the artist could locate within the Korean cultural memory. (Not coincidentally, the first woman to appear on Korean bills is another mother who raised a great son.) As if mimicking the silence of the female archive, the red light and walls subsume the red rice cakes into a soft obscurity. Using a form that is so uncannily large and playful, the artist puts laughter between herself and this archetype from the past. I imagine a laughter of identification (look at what they are still telling us 500 years later) and relief of distance (I might have a choice in the matter).

Like the tempo of the exhibition title Daughter, Daughter, Daughter, the gallery space is roughly divided into three temporal sections, past, present and the future. The temporal aspect seems to resound with the finicky notion of time within a worldview of predeterminism; the future has somewhat already been shaped by the past, so where is the wiggle room, the personal agency? In the gallery, the rice cake sculpture adorns the section of the past, as the artist contemplates the dismal past female role models offered to her childhood. Zig-zagging the gallery are plexiglass structures of green, yellow, grey and red, UV printed with drawings from the artist’s personal archive. The artist appears as a young daughter, severed from much context, save for a set of motherly hands that hold her. The plexiglass section is titled Present (My Mom and I). Interestingly, the present is entirely constructed of fragmented snapshots of her and her mother’s past. This past-present is shared between the mother and daughter, as are the rituals and belief systems coded in the plexi sculptures. The folding screen is used for jesa, death anniversary rituals, where the front side demarcates the living, the back side the spirits. There is a picture of the artist at her doljanchi (a first birthday party) when a child is tasked to draw from a group of objects that will signify their future. The colours of the plexiglass, serving as filters to look through, are drawn from Park’s saju chart.

In the Present, the artist and her mother are intertwined, as her mother transmits her rituals to her daughter. Generational transmission, fragmented through migration and bilingual translation, are deeply implicated in how the artist might perceive her past, present and future. After all, the saju reading itself was given to the artist by her mother. The plexiglass panels speak to such transmissibility, readily allowing in the view of the other side. And the view is coloured with predetermination, that an individual’s life has already been drawn. As fatalistic predeterminism is, Park’s work notes that there are other assortment of predetermined rules enforced on us by structures like patriarchy anyway, like the rice cakes. The exhibition ponders the reverberations of receiving a fortune reading like the strong suggestion to mother a daughter, which feels authoritative because it seems to be confined within the limited social imaginary, in this case a limited imagination for a young biological woman.

Walking through the Present, the viewer is poised to look at the proposed future through these tinted glasses. Park told me that once she asked a saju reader, does being a dog mom count? (He did not respond.) In her version of the future, happily wagging tails of dogs and flying braids flank blue letters that jovially shout “…and she lived happily ever after / WITH HER THREE DOGS!” It’s a foil to the wall of rice cakes, with its jovial, carefree claim to the artist’s own take on motherhood, and ultimately, on self-determination. The sculptures transition from red to blue, a colour that is not present in the artist’s saju chart. The braid is a status symbol of a non-married woman, of girlhood. Here, Park opens a frail moment of a yes, and if so. She entertains the saju reading while opening up a flexible moment of interpretation and indeterminacy. And all of these thought processes in the exhibition are underscored by the fact that the artist is concerned as much with the past as she is with the future. Situating herself in past mothers and her own mother, the artist affirms the ostensible links between individuals to collective memory. According to Claudia Rankine’s poem, the past is not something we can leave behind. She says, “It’s buried in you; it turned your flesh into its own cupboard.” (footnote: Rankine, C. (2014). Citizen: An American lyric. Graywolf Press.)

Going back to the red plexi folding screen⏤in the gallery, the viewer can see the screen as both a backdrop to the past and backdrop to the present. The future may seem playful, but there’s a forcefulness of will behind it. The past is buried, while occasionally bursting onto the surface like the unnamed mother, motherly hands that hold you and press on a fortune reading, your own hands that divined one of the first fortunes at the first birthday party. In fact, the saju reading only gained a kind of validity when Park learned of her great-grandfather’s death; that he was a student in Germany, whose death was heavily predicted by the superstitious beliefs of the Germans. It may be easy (or compelling) to wave away a fortune reading a mother sends you, especially if it’s a practice from the land you and your family left behind. But sometimes the past hurtles from the depths to shout ‘what if!’ The exhibition is created at the moment of a suspension of disbelief, and then unfolding from there. I find myself asking, how deep do those four pillars go?

Page 14:

A white page with a single column of text. Sora Park’s name is bolded, and the page is numbered and labelled Biographies in the footer. The main text reads:

Sora Park (she/her) is a Korean-Canadian interdisciplinary artist living on the traditional territories of the q̓ʷɑ:n̓ƛ̓ən̓ (Kwantlen), q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), Máthxwi (Matsqui) and Se’mya’me’ (Semiahmoo) First Nations. She received her BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver and received her MA in Fine Arts from Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Bergen, Norway. In her art practice, she is currently interested in exploring the space between clarity and confusion brought on by diasporic experiences.

Page 15:

A white page with text. Areum Kim’s name is bolded. It reads:

Areum Kim (she/her) is a writer, book-maker and arts organizer based in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, AB. Her research is often concerned with diaspora and translation. With her collaborator Teres, she runs Yolkless Press, an initiative to make artists’ publications.

Page 16:

The same blue as the cover fills the page around a stacked pair of black-bordered photographs. Both images show the tactile objects from the show, with the top image featuring a pair of hands touching one of the smaller objects and the bottom image showing the hands touching a piece of plexiglass. The smaller objects are miniatures of the rice cake ovals and the dog mom letters, braids, and dog sculptures from the wall installations. The plexi is a red square panel with a section mimicking the folding screen where the UV-printed illustration can be felt and seen.

Return to the Alternative Exhibitions Catalogue Directory

Visual PDF
Published 2023
Authors: Christina Kim and Kay Slater

Introduction to alternative text catalogue:

The alternative text catalogue project was created by the staff and contractors on the Accessibility Committee at Grunt Gallery. Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, straddling the line between information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience and those better served by text!

Creative Access Descriptions:

Cover (front):

A spearmint green cover features a single image, the show’s date and the title. The top text reads: grunt gallery, September 15th to November 4th, 2023. The bottom text reads Francisco Berlanga Enticed and Entangled en algo Antiguo. The image is of a knit sweater painted with house paint suspended on rusted rebar. Below this is a thick, flat-leaved plant. A clothing line with various hanging cloths is hanging above and to the right. The walls are painted a chewing gum pink.

Cover (back):

This page features the image credits of photos featured throughout the catalogue. The images have included these credits as they appear and are described throughout the catalogue. All photos are credited to Dennis Ha and were shot in 2023.

Cover inside:

The cover’s inside pages are a single image that runs across the folded double-spread, interrupted by the inner catalogue’s pages. The image is a wide shot of the exhibition from the south, with the front windows illuminating the space. A clothesline runs the gallery’s width and is hung with vibrant orange, red, and blue cloths. To the entrance’s left, there is a planter propped on cement paving stones, and to the right, paving stones are interwoven with green houseplants and rebar.

Page 1:

The page is all text. The footer shows the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lower case in white on a black painted brushstroke) above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits.

The interior pages are thinner than the cover but still feel thicker than photocopy paper.

The credits read

grunt gallery
Enticed and Entangled en algo Antiguo
Francisco Berlango
116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca
Curator: Whess Harman
Writers: Whess Harman and Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa
Design: Victoria Lum
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photography: Dennis Ha
Printed in Canada by Mitchell Press
Edition of 200
ISBN: 978-1-988708-24-9
All Rights Reserved
Publication © 2023 grunt gallery
Artwork © 2023 the artists
Text © 2023 The authors
All images courtesy of the artists

© Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.

Note: the following paragraph has Indigenous spellings of nation names followed by the English translation.

grunt gallery is located on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, who have lived in kinship with this land, water and air for thousands of years. We recognize and acknowledge their leadership and our own complicity in settler colonialism, its present occupation and its violent legacy. We acknowledge our responsibility to work actively in support of Indigenous sovereignty, and towards a respectful relationship with this place.

grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Vancouver Foundation.

Page 2 and 3:

The double-page image shows the walls of the grunt gallery exhibition, which is now viewed from the front entrance. The walls of the gallery space are painted in starlet pink. There are two clotheslines suspended diagonally across the space. The clotheslines hold a variety of colourful garments. There are cement bricks and rebar arranged around the space to form smaller installations resembling temporary architecture fragments. Interwoven between the cement structures are houseplants.

Page 4 (left):

The same green as the cover fills the page around a black-bordered photograph. The image is of Francisco’s work titled “I Cannot Imagine Anything Taller Than the Trees in My Own Backyard” (2019) and is credited as installation photo 2023. The work includes an embroidered garment hung on a piece of rebar connected to a structure made of stacked cement blocks. The garment is a neckband jacket made of a smooth woven cream with a zipper on the front. The text on the front of the jacket, “I cannot imagine anything taller than the trees in my own backyard,” is embroidered in all capital letters. The letters have precise cuts along the word to reveal knit material underneath the letters.

Page 5:

A white page titled “Whess Harman, Curator’s Introduction”.

Page 6 and 7:

The essay is laid out in three columns across the two pages.

The essay reads:
I often have difficulty, and stress, and yes, panic, as we start to roll-up to opening night for our exhibitions at grunt, regardless of if the reasons for impending disaster have any possibility of coming to fruition. Some of that came up during the planning of Francisco’s show, but it’s because it’s an (extremely annoying) part of me. My catastrophizing is unfounded, of course; as you walk into the gallery for Enticed and Entangled en algo Antiguo, it’s warm in all the ways that colour can be warm. And it’s alive, and quite literally. There’s the pothos plant crawling up the stack of breezeblocks as you come in the door, or the central work The Wefts Still Have Things to Teach Me perched at waist height, still growing even as the summer ends. This exhibition will shift through its run as we move into autumn with the relentlessness of the school season afoot. I look forward to the reminder that time can be gentle too. There is a gentleness to the vibrancy of Francisco’s work that speaks just as well to assuaging my personal terrors as it does the ideas of memory, cultural identity and family embedded within the work.

Identity-based work has taken up the bulk of my time as the curator at grunt gallery, and Francisco’s exhibition is no exception. But what is unique to me about his work is how open its sentimentality is; as both an artist and curator, I often wonder when and where my work might be selfish and if there is power in that. Here, Francisco’s practice is one that feels like it walks between the personal and speaking to an audience almost effortlessly despite all the work that I have seen go into it; there are moments in this exhibition that satisfy both my curiosity of Francisco as an artist, as well as my interest in understanding the history, experiences and communities that this work comes from. I’ve not had the privilege of visiting Mexico in any part, but learning some pieces about it through the love that Francisco has dedicated to its motifs and domestics feels like an important primer.

In my experience, both in making and viewing, weaving and textile-based practices often require a kind of precision that in the end can feel a bit cold when moved into the exhibition space. There’s a tightness to it because to make something of quality often requires a discipline of focused attention. That is present here, but it is also playfully unwound in applying those practices to living materials. Working with grasses takes a gentler touch lest you break the fibres that give them shape. I see an impulse to work towards care rather than perfection, to explore and spend time with the memories and desires to have a hand in our environments. The way works are casually draped and the inclusion of mass-produced textiles pieces counteract the cold container of the white cube—the pink walls help, too. Moving through this exhibition feels like a dream or remembrance, though strangely not so much of someone else. I recognize the love here, and the attention and feel invited. And in being able to host this work, I hope that our grunt community feels welcomed into our space as well.

Page 8:

The same green as the cover fills the page around a black-bordered photograph. The image shows a pair of star-shaped cement forms on the ground beside a stacked column of cement blocks and rows of paving stones. A white piece of fringed fabric peeks in from the top left corner of the shot, where it is draped over the cement wall.

Page 9:

A white page titled “Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa, Pasele, Pasele”.

Page 10 and 11:

The essay is spread over two pages in four columns. There are 5 footnotes which will be embedded in the edited essay for this alternative text format.
Something I’ve often noticed about people who immigrated as children, or who are children of immigrants, is that we often don’t know if something we associate with our diasporic culture is a part of the broader culture we come from, or something that our family specifically does. This can look like silly phrases in our familial language1, or the way a certain dish is cooked (footnote #1: While writing this article, I serendipitously learned of the term “familect” that describes this.More details is available in “Why We Speak More Weird at Home”, by Katherine Hynes. Transcriber’s note: Keimi includes a URL here. Please contact us if you’d like this link). Because often our family of origin is the portal to our culture or our homelands, which we are separated from for a variety of reasons, it can warp our sense of place. This goes for both the culture in which we are immersed, and the culture we have ancestral roots in. It can be incredibly difficult to untangle the ways we move through the world and connect with others across cultures, identities, space and land. To what extent can we feel equipped to build our own identity when our language, environment and education differ so much from our parents’ and ancestors’?

These questions and quirks are a significant part of what makes me gravitate to Francisco Berlanga’s work. While he and I are from differ ent regions, we have a similar under standing of how growing up in what is colonially known as Mexico leaves an indelible, or permanent, mark on the senses. There are visuals, textures, and smells—which can’t quite be replicated in Anglo North America— that are unforgettable. Francisco approaches these sensory aspects with a level of care and curiosity that I so deeply appreciate. There is tender ness present in the way he’s beaded his dress shoes after they’ve worn to mark the shape of his feet. There is an attention to detail in the way plants and garments have been gently placed throughout the space. These attempts to explore and solidify in his embodied memory the aesthetics2 of existence in Mexico are fascinating to me. (footnote #2: When I say aesthetics, I’m using this as a shortcut. I do not mean solely the visuals, but in fact perception through all the senses.) Francisco, in this collection of works, presents to us fragmented pieces of his own connections with these sensory experiences in a way that is so difficult to put into words.

One of the few who has been able to put some of this fragmented reality into words beautifully is Gloria Anzaldúa. It has been impossible to not have her words ringing in my brain as I think through this presentation of Francisco’s work. One passage that I’ve been coming back to a lot is from one of her pieces in the Woman of Colour Feminism book, This Bridge Called My Back3:

“The mixture of bloods and affinities, rather than confusing or unbalancing me, has forced me to achieve a kind of equilibrium. Both cultures deny me a place in their universe. Between them and among others, I build my own universe, El Mundo Zurdo. I belong to myself and not to any one people. I walk the tightrope with ease and grace. I span abysses.” (footnote #3: Anzaldùa, G. (1981). La Preita. In Anzaldúa, G. Moraga, C. (Eds), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Persephone Press.) While it may or may not be his own specific mundo zurdo, or left-handed world, Francisco presents an expansive space that is both familiar and close to diasporic people, and unique to his own experiences and senses. From his standpoint here, on stolen Coast Salish land, he lays out the trans-national portal that exists through his own family and travels, into the rich and nuanced culture of Mexico he has experienced. I see this approach represented in the title he chose for this exhibition; with Enticed and Entangled en algo Antiguo, Francisco points to how his work is born out of his own interests and narratives, but also tied to some thing much larger and older than himself. It is both ancestral, and of his own design. The specificity from which Franciso works is really important to me. In Anglo North America, conversations around Mexico (which is a part of how North America is colonially defined) and Latin America are flattened, often relying on harmful, colonial notions of homogenized racial identity.4 (footnote #4: Honestly there is so much to say here, but I’ll just encourage you to read Dr. Alàn Perlaez Lopez’ work. I like the way that they talk about this in their article for Refiner 29, “As a Black Oaxacan, I have No Choice But to Betray Mexican Nationalism”. Transcriber’s note: Again, Keimi includes a URL here. Please contact us if you’d like this link.) Francisco is not claiming to hold all the complexities of Canadian Mexican relations, as so often racialized and/or ethnicized artists are expected to do. He is instead bringing us into the expansive world of his own experience, which he is the expert in. This experience is in the sarapes he’s woven himself based on his numer ous memories of engaging with sar apes. It’s also in how he weaves with sisal fibre, the agave plants which he no doubt would’ve seen on a farm on the side of the highway, or in a relative’s garden. Francisco presents us with these living (and unalived) weavings that connect with the grief and transformation and potential and growth that his experience as a displaced person entails. His offering is generous and tender, and both the florals and concrete inspire a liveliness that makes my heart pound in my ears, in the best way.

Because she is already here, I leave you with a final quote from Gloria Anzaldúa: “Being Mexican is a state of soul–not one of mind, not one of citizenship. Neither eagle nor serpent, but both. And like the ocean, neither animal respects borders.” (footnote #5: Anzaldúa, G. (1987), How to Tame a Wild Tongue, In Anzaldúa, G., Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.)

Page 12 and 13:

The double-page spread shows the west wall of the gallery where two clotheslines begin midwall and then spread out horizontally from the centre fold. On the bottom left of the image is a cement stone fence that surrounds the work “I Cannot Forgo Representation”. It contains a Mexican-style hat made from terracotta clay that is placed on a squat pillar. The right page shows the installation work, The Wefts Still Have Things to Teach Me, where live grasses, palms, vines and sisal bre as planted in a wood trough-like planter atop stacked cement flagones. In between these and split by the catalogue’s fold is the embroidered jacket of “I Cannot Imagine Anything Taller Than the Trees in My Own Backyard”.

Page 14:

A white page with the text from Francisco’s bio. His name is bolded. It reads:

Francisco Berlanga is a contemporary textile artist who studied at Simon Fraser University. He obtained his BFA in Visual Arts and he is currently working towards completing his MFA at UBC. His practice is based on questioning identity, particularly his connection with his own Mexican culture and how one can inhabit a culture while being partially absent from it. He engages in discourse with his own identity through the creation of traditional Mexican “manualidades” that often take the form of textile works; weaving has become essential to his practice. His work makes connections between traditional Mexican aesthetics and contemporary visual language. His practice engages with concepts of inaccessibility and the role memory and language can play when someone is distanced from their own culture. He attempts to bridge the gaps between his personal and cultural identities by forcing connections between them and trying to understand the limitations that these identities impose upon each other. Francisco was also a founding member of Withintensions, a monthly Vancouver-based artists magazine, and he is currently artistic director for the magazine. His goal through the publication is to cultivate an accessible space for art theory that engages local arts communities through publication.

Page 15:

A white page with the text from Francisco’s bio. Their name is bolded. It reads:

Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa is a Disabled, bilingual, learner, worker and artist. Her art practice incorporates creative access, reading, writing, weaving, printmaking and more. His work and worldview have been shaped through his learning of Disability Justice and Black Feminist theory. They are interested in anti-colonial research, accessible spaces, and liberated futures.

Page 16:

The same green as the cover fills the page around a stacked pair of black-bordered photographs. The top image shows the work “I Cannot Denounce The Institutions Which Form Me” where hand-sewn, black dress shoes are decorated with a dense, colourful array of beads and rows of patterns. The size 11 shoes have bright, mustard-yellow laces. The bottom image shows a mud-covered weaving suspended between two stacks of cement blocks. The weaving replicates the figures in the stones; a star or four-petalled flower shape. Beyond this and on the back or north wall is the work I Cannot Forget My Mores
(2019), where 3 rows of blocks are stacked on each side ending in a stair case. On two of the steps are long grasses, and a long piece of rusted rebar rests at the top.

Return to the Alternative Exhibitions Catalogue Directory

Visual PDF available online: grunt.ca.
Published July 2023.
Author(s): Christina Kim and Kay Slater, grunt accessibility committee

Introduction to alternative text catalogue:

The alternative text catalogue project is created by the staff and contractors on the Accessibility Committee at grunt gallery. Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, straddling the line between information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience and those better served by text!

We welcome feedback from our audiences. Please contact us at access@grunt.ca with any questions or feedback.

Creative Access Descriptions:

Pamphlet:

Cover (front):

A yellow cover with a single image. The top text reads grunt gallery, May 12th – July 8th, 2023. The bottom text reads Odera Igbokwe, Syncretic Birthrights. The image is The Volcano, an oil painting by Odera Igbokwe. A single Black figure with a strong chin, thick lips, and black eyes peers over half-circle glasses perched on their nose. Their black hair sweeps up and away, becoming bright, hot flame. They wear a large red cape textured in dark swirling lines hinting at eyes, fire, and smoke. It is draped over their wide shoulders and exposed chest, sweeping away on both sides to reveal the figure’s muscled chest. They wear a silk top which opens into a wide V from a cinched belt, skirted in ruffles the colour and texture of charcoal. Over their exposed left breast are three stones with tails of bright fire exploding up from their belt. The stones are smooth, making them appear like bullet holes, the bright fire now dripping down from the exposed wounds. Their left arm is bent across the chest, holding a bouquet wrapped in pearly fabric in front of their right breast. The arm shows cinders above the elbow, which fades into the black of burnt wood, their hand completely darkened by the once hot flame. The bouquet is made of dappled feathers and huge matchsticks, their heads burning and swirling in flame. Behind them, the silhouette of buildings burn, encased in orange flame, and behind this, a huge volcano towers up and past the edge of the painting. The sky behind it is a mixture of ash and flame, telling us that the volcano is active and on fire. While the work is burning and active, the figure is confident and serene, as much a part of the fire as the volcano behind them.

The printed catalogue’s cover is a textured but smooth, plastic-feeling thick paper.

A loose insert has been tucked into the pages of the printed pamphlet. These footnotes, written by Nya Lewis, were missed during the proofing process. These footnotes are detailed towards the end of the pamphlet description, following page 20.

Cover (back):

Hot mustard yellow page with image credits in black text that read:

Image details:
Front Cover,
The Volcano (2023), oil painting on wood panel.
Inside Covers, Pages 2 and 3, 16 and 17,
Syncretic Birthrights (2023), installation view at grunt gallery.
Page 4,
The Altar (2023), oil painting on wood panel.
Page 8,
The Veil (2023), oil painting on wood panel.
Pages 12 and 13,
Left: Oya’s Gate (2023), acrylic painting on wooden panel
Right: The Griot (2023), oil painting on watercolour paper
Page 15,
The Spirit Child (2023), oil painting on wood panel.
All images credited to Dennis Ha (2023).

Transcriber’s note: the dates listed are the year works were photographed, not the creation date of the works themselves.

Inside Cover Spread:

The double-page image spread shows the exhibition photographed from the entrance of the gallery centred on the south-east corner. The image spread is bisected by the inner catalogue pages, with the inside left or front cover showing the white east wall with unframed oil-painted works on panel. The inside right or back cover shows the south, or back wall, painted in hot mustard yellow, with 2 framed works and a long black leather bench that bisects the gallery space.

Page 1:

The page is all text. At the footer, the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lower case in white on a black painted brushstroke) sits above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits.

The interior pages are thinner than the cover but still feel thicker than photocopy paper.

The credits read:

grunt gallery
Syncretic Birthrights
Odera Igbokwe
116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca
Curator: Whess Harman
Writers: Whess Harman and Nya Lewis
Design: Victoria Lum
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photography: Dennis Ha
Printed in Canada by Mitchell Press
Edition of 250
ISBN: 978-1-988708-21-8
All Rights Reserved
Publication © 2023 grunt gallery
Artwork © 2023 the artists
Text © 2023 the authors
All images courtesy of the artists

© Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.

Note: the following paragraph has Indigenous spellings of nation names followed by the English translation.

grunt gallery is located on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, who have lived in kinship with this land, water and air for thousands of years. We recognize and acknowledge their leadership and our own complicity in settler colonialism, its present occupation and its violent legacy. We acknowledge our responsibility to work actively in support of Indigenous sovereignty, and towards a respectful relationship with this place.

grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Vancouver Foundation.

Page 2 and 3 (facing):

The double-page image spread shows the west and south walls of the grunt gallery. The back or left wall is a hot mustard colour, similar to that of the pamphlet’s cover. This wall hosts two framed works. The right or west wall holds 4 unframed oil paintings and ends in a box of didactic title text about the show. A black bench bisects the space and exposed lighting racks can be seen above the show.

Page 4 (left):

The image shows Odera’s work titled The Altar. The image is bordered in the same hot mustard yellow as the cover. The Altar shows a solitary figure standing upright with their fingers wide and reaching, their arms extended, one raised over their head, and one reaching towards their feet. A long copper-coloured braid coils up and around their arm in a huge infinity sign, like a figure 8 rotated 90 degrees. They wear textured garments reminiscent of Nigerian masquerades, composed of raffia and palm garments. This garment extends downward, in tiers from the shoulders down to their ankles, all the colour of copper and flame. They stand on tip-toe within a ring of fire that leaps up from a crucible atop an earth-coloured altar, surrounded by large, soft-petaled flowers and the occasional candle. Floating before them is a sword with ornate handles, an Ofo staff traditionally held by Igbo men during ceremony, and around their neck is a huge copper ringed medallion with a large cowrie shell at its centre. In the candy, pastel sky is softly swirling clouds afloat and undulating waves of water. The image is cradled by a huge arching rainbow at the top.

Page 5:

On an ice-white page, the bottom left corner states the author of the essay “Whess Harman” and the title “Curator’s Introduction” in a large sans serif font. The page number is written in tiny type just above the title text.

Page 6 and 7:

The left page is all black text in 2 columns on white paper using the same sans-serif font. The text continues onto the right page in a single column.

Near the left bottom edge of each page is the page number.

The essay reads:

I first came across Odera’s work in their zine, New Moon. This fanzine, inspired by Naoko Takeuchi’s globally recognized and beloved series Sailor Moon, collects together Odera’s reimagining of each of the series’ central characters as Black women in the shoujo magical girl style. I remember the excitement of coming across this zine at the fair; so much of illustration especially for BIPOC artists has been about taking space, reimagining and noting where we haven’t been included and confronting the exclusion by providing resistance through joy. This is a marked difference from works created during the Golden Age of Illustration (1850-1925). Though the demand (and income) of (predominately white) illustrators peaked during this period, the space for expressing themselves as artists was marginal; producing work for advertisements and magazines, the content of the work was neatly prescribed and regarded as distinctly separate from gallery work.

Since then, the barrier between fine art and illustration has smudged to become less restrictive when it comes to finding space for illustration practices within the gallery. However, in some ways, contemporary illustrative practices live in an even more confusing space; while we see more of this work legitimated in gallery spaces, we also see the struggle for illustrators to make a living while keeping their autonomy in regards to the content of their work. There is also now a new threat; AI generators exist in an uncertain place as publishing companies tip-toe around the legalities of their use. Like many industries in demand and under capitalism, instead of illustration becoming a robust field capable of supporting a large number of artists all speaking from unique experiences and styles, there is an increasing desire to do away with illustrators entirely or at the very least, to devalue that labour to keep cost margins low.

Still, artists like Odera still find ways to maintain their autonomy and fend off the tepid encroachment of AI generators. AI intelligence and data collection has repeatedly demonstrated its shortcomings when it comes to the nuances of passion and investment in sharing one’s own voice. AI cannot advocate for itself through what it produces. So while it can be difficult to move between the job of an illustrator and the visioning of an artist working with material that is so deeply personal, the true strength of Odera’s work is that its central themes hold strong regardless of where you encounter it or what project it might be attached to. By syncretizing, harmonizing, and revisiting not only folkloric traditions and spirituality but also the places where Odera themself has also found joy, their work resonates with many who also find themselves trying to hold sometimes conflicting, sometimes converging identities. Finally, coming into the gallery to see these works is still well worth the time. The intensity of colour in these works and the refinement of composition are in conversation with one another and you do, in my opinion, get a sense of each painting being both an entity unto itself and also in conversation with the others in a way that is meaningful and vigorous. And perhaps most importantly, despite the many issues regarding representation, racism and Blackness that Odera often cites as an inspiration to continue this necessary work, to do these things and speak in ways that are both joyful and engaged.

Page 8:

The image shows Odera’s work titled The Veil. The image is bordered in the same hot mustard yellow as the cover. The Veil features a figure looking directly at the viewer, standing tall, their body turned in profile. They wear a fluffy or feathered full-bodysuit the colour of deep, cool blue stone. Upon their head is a huge bowl, balanced and draped in a long transparent veil. Within the veil, the figure is surrounded by a pair of equally majestic and tall figures, standing similarly with bodies in a row and faces turned towards the viewer. They are made of silvery liquid, or perhaps the veil itself made flesh, showing chiselled muscles and restful expressions, their defined arms softly huggling and draped over the central figure. Around the veil and figures are round faces, reminiscent of African masks and the moon’s phases, their expressions are also calm with eyes closed. There is a serenity in the scene balanced by the knowing and noble expression on the main figure as they look directly at you. Above the bowl floats oval shapes showing the moon through her various phases, overlapping like a jewelled necklace. The background mountains are a softer blue or purple, also painted in a texture similar to a huge stack of feathers. The sky sets into a trans-flag-coloured sunset.

Page 9:

On an ice-white page, the bottom left corner states the author of the essay “Nya Lewis” and the title “Afro cosmologies and other Queer externalities” in a large sans serif font.

Page 10-11, 14:

The essay is written in black text on white paper. It spans 2 pages, each laid out in 2 columns, interrupted by the double-spread photo on pages 12 and 13, and concludes in a single paragraph and column on page 14.

Near the left bottom edge of each page is the page number.

Note: the following essay does not include the footnotes originally included and provided by the author, as the pamphlet went to print without them included. However, the unpublished text has been included at the bottom of this alternative text pamphlet so you can read it as the author intended.

The essay reads (uninterrupted):

Afro cosmologies and other Queer externalities

By Nya Lewis

Living outside the subject, if only within your own imagination, is generative. However, to make anew from the loose ends of colonialism’s tentacles, spell-binding worlds that render and modernly translate African and Indigenous oral histories that affirm your presence is life-changing. At the intersection of Afro-futurism, potential present-day heroes, deities, otherworldliness, and ancestral narratives, holds an easter egg for Afro-queer diasporic identities. Syncretic Birthrights takes up the consummate task of speculating another way out of unquestioned cultural prejudice and harm to make way for discovery and acceptance of innate divinity—Black, queer, trans, and godly brilliance. Odera Igbokwe’s practice is a bridge across realities and an intimate visual language of Black resilience, joy, and magic.

A defining aesthetic, images like The Spirit Child dance and swirl across the canvas, unveiling a story within a story. Depictions of serenity, rage, hope, and love clad the avatars, cascading layered symbolism in technique and theme; the movement ignites in yellows and golds, inviting the viewer into their cosmos. Igbokwe’s ability to simultaneously visualise with sincerity the emotional multitude and nuance of our shared experiences, isolation and guidance, dignified fear, and self-affirmation. Engulfed by light, fire, shadow, and still an act of faith. A white gown, perhaps an emblem of purity, peace, and child-like freedom, dances as they lean on the edge of new realms. In full flight, relentless pursuits of self-proclamation. I see myself in this journey, where cultural narratives and myth can be a universal place for powerful beginnings or salvific transformations.

I am interested in creative practices as a site for study and queries concerning the parallels between; the conditions of Black/African life and mythology, the process of art making, and the existential capacity of religion, both doing the work of transcending reality and presenting alternative ways of being through non-cognitive means. Speculatively, interest in otherworldly forces and faith systems responds to the need for radical healing. For Igbokwe, where their Nigerian Christian upbringing is concerned, the desire for transcendence and refuge turns to hybrid spiritual philosophies and theological iconography to examine their identities and make sense of the moment. Within a lineage of Afro-diasporic interdisciplinary visual artists like April Bey and Wangechi Mutu, or literary artists like Akwaeke Ezemi who engage the fantastical, carving spaces for mythology to be read in equal parts ancestral and futuristic. In 2022, Ekow Eshun’s exhibition In the Black Fantastic was dedicated to the work of Black artists across the diaspora who use spirituality, myth, science fiction, and Afrofuturism to suggest utopian possibilities. A departure from a Western-centric perspective, the presentation explored Black autonomy and experience, evoking a surreal, satirical use of character and avatar to analyze colonialism’s detrimental legacy. This convergence of African oral histories and the Black imaginary manifests as a speculatively new and integral resource, stories that orient us in time and space and present us with a view of the world and our place within it. Syncretic Birthrights rediscovers and reshapes West African, Yoruba anthologies, and Tarot cosmologies, expanding indeterminacy and the multiplicity of radical self-regard.

I question how dissolving or intertwining different beliefs, practices, and traditions work in favor of re-articulating identities. How does borrowing from diverse spiritual traditions create access to new ideas ripe with the possibility for Queer visibility? How do we employ our right to choose articulations of spirituality that mirror our needs without reiterating harm, appropriation, manipulation, or rewriting of histories? In what ways does this porous practice of cross-pollination mimic the strategies of survival for queer Black/African people globally? Regarding Igbokwe’s practice, how did Ifá divination becomes the perfect container for Black queer universal stories? In search of a queer spiritual lineage and purpose, I found affirming solace in the ethical considerations of sexuality and gender found in spiritual practices indigenous to southwestern Nigeria and parts of Benin and Togo. In the aftermath of Transatlantic slavery, the influence of Yoruba cosmology spans across the Diaspora—including Brazil, Cuba, the Caribbean, and the United States. This belief system is one of ontological wholeness, culminating in a supreme being, historically characterized as genderless or possessing all possible gender expressions simultaneously. This being is informed by divine energy and power that brings things into existence, from which emerges the infinity of forms that populates the universe. A being that exceeds the scope of human comprehension, though sometimes likened to gods, orishas are understood as avatars or personifications that relate to natural forces. Artists that engage mythology and illuminate queer, trans, Black, and Indigenous people of color in spiritual folklore across cultures; through protagonists and oral and illustrative storytelling weave myth, cultural narratives, identity, and spirituality in ways that move beyond traditional narratives of religion. This realm of creativity acts as a continuing body of beliefs—a cosmology—that incorporates the centrality of creation, ritual, and inheritance, a shape-shifting relationship between the human and the divine.

Page 12 and 13:

This two-page spread shows an exhibition view of two of Odera’s works hung next to each other. The image spreads across both pages and is bordered in the same hot mustard yellow as the cover. The left image is Oya’s Gate, and the right is The Griot.

Oya’s Gate is described as A swirl and sweep of soft candy pink and purple clouds wrapped around a seated figure with one leg raised. The head and left arm are draped over their knee, and their Black skin is in contrast while also complementary to the swirling pinks and lavenders of their hair. Their right arm and shoulder blend into the soft clothing that morphs and hints at buildings and a city line. The figure sits upon or emerges from a large building with a rounded door on a stone plinth high above the ground. To both sides of the resting body, clouds and cityscape are two figures in profile, potentially guarding or standing watch. They blend and match the colours and shapes of the central figure but are still distinct against a pale blue, softly darkening sky. The painting has a serene but watchful feeling as if the resting figure is also a sleeping castle protected by vigilant guards.

The Griot features a single figure. There is a lightness in the primary colours here, complemented by the confidence that exudes from the central floating figure, the Griot. Their hair is a crown of Bantu knots, and their ebony skin glows in flowing, soft tangerine and peach-coloured clothing. The soft purple and pink clouds reflect their colours and glow around the figure and their clothing. Their forearms, hands and feet are exposed. They sit in a cross-legged, almost lotus-like position, floating above a perch of scrolls and folded paper. The perch becomes a rooftop as below them are shadowy arcades and arches partially obscured by flowing mists. Their arms encircle a large open book covered in Nsidibi symbols, whose pages float out and away towards a circular portal behind and above their head. Through the portal, a pasture of green and pink florals is illuminated by a bright blue sky.

Page 15:

The image shows Odera’s work titled The Spirit Child. The image is bordered in the same hot mustard yellow as the cover. The Spirit Child features a Black youth cradled by a pair of hands covered in veins or stone-like cracks. These hands function as a perch or launching pad, as the figure leans out with arms extended, palms facing out as if to step off and take flight. Their soft purple, sleeveless dress is decorated in a dotted and contrasting pattern at the neck, shoulders, and skirt edge. The skirt’s edge is teased up and behind them by the breeze. Energy is expressed through swirling spirals around one leg and arm, creating a slight corona behind their head. Their hair is short and dense, and their forehead and ears are jewelled in gold studs the size of coins. Their make-up is a similar metallic tone and adorns their relaxed closed eyes. There is a sense of peace and confidence in their resting face and pose. Below the cradled hands and figure is a blue watered planet peeking up from the bottom of the artwork. Above this and behind the figure are active, dancing clouds in mellow yellows and fiery oranges. Tucked away in the folds of fluffy galactic matter are other planets the same colour as the surrounding clouds. The orange pillowy forms rise up into active celestial figures made of flame, motion causing tendrils to swirl and dance around and behind them, bright and in high contrast to the small section of the deep black universe peeking in from the beyond. The artist shares that the figure is simultaneously falling and ready to descend to the planet while also floating upwards, contradictorily, as though they are about to rejoin the celestial figures above.

Page 16 and 17:

The double-spread image covers two pages with a panorama image of the Syncretic Birthrights exhibition. The space is a concrete-laden, high-ceiling room. The artwork is neatly hung up at eye level and spaced out evenly against the three gallery walls. Overhead are stage lights that shine a soft spot light that reflects the paintings’ luminescence. The left and walls are white, and the far-back, middle wall is deep mustard yellow. The left wall has 3 paintings on it. The middle mustard-yellow wall has two framed paintings. The right wall has four paintings. In the centre of the gallery is a black leather bench.

Page 18 and 19 (facing):

These ice-white pages feature the bios of the artist Odera and essay author Nya Lewis on facing pages written in a single column.

Near the left bottom edge of each page is the page number.

The bios read:

Odera Igbokwe (they/them) is an illustrator and painter located on the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Odera was born of Igbo parents who immigrated to the lands of the Lenape people. As a result they are constantly excavating, responding, and envisioning in spite of the fractures that occur via diaspora. Their artwork is an exploration of storytelling through Afro-diasporic spiritualism, Black resilience, magical girl transformation sequences, and redefining the archetypal hero’s journey. More specifically, they are intrigued by Nigerian spiritualism, folklore, and sacred practices, and how that relates to contemporary communities across the Americas.

Their artwork weaves together ancient narratives with Afrofuturist visions to explore present day embodiment. It explores the magic of the Black Queer imagination, and questions how to build a home from an intersectional lens. Ultimately these works are a gateway to healing from collective and generational traumas, and assert that healing can be a celebration of joy, mundanity, pain, and fantasy coexisting. As an artist, Odera works with clients and galleries to create work that is deeply personal, soulful, and intersectional. They have created personal works and commissions for Beyoncé, Solange Knowles, Oumou Sangaré, and Dawn Richard. Odera’s work has been exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum of Anthropology at UBC, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, grunt gallery, Burrard Arts Foundation, The James Black Gallery and SUM Gallery.

Nya Lewis’ practice is a culmination of centuries of African resistance, love, questions, actions, study, and embrace. Lewis sees her practice as a continuation of a long lineage of work undertaken by Black artists, curators, writers, activists, and thinkers who blaze(d) a trail of critical discourse surrounding the Black experience. Her archival research-based practice works across the disciplines of curating, writing, and organising. Her work is multivalent in form and expression but is always driven by the reimagining and reclaiming of community.

Lewis (MFA) is an independent curator/writer currently serving as the Director/curator of Artspeak Gallery, research assistant at the Center for the study Black Canadian Diaspora, and the inaugural Research Fellow at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Page 20:

A blank white page.

Insert:

A white looseleaf page folded in half.
The text reads Afro cosmologies and other Queer externalities. By Nya Lewis.

Footnotes:

1. Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic that combines science-fiction, history, and fantasy to explore the Black Atlantic experience and aims to connect those from the black diaspora with their forgotten African ancestry.
2. April Bey grew up in The Bahamas (New Providence) and now resides and works in Los Angeles, CA as a visual artist and art educator. Bey’s interdisciplinary artwork is an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, AfroFuturism, AfroSurrealism, post-colonialism and constructs of race within supremacist systems.
3. Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures—part human, animal, plant, and machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. Bringing her interconnected ecosystems to life for this exhibition through sculptural installations and videos, Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and socio-political exploration and transformation.
4. Akwaeke Emezi is a Nigerian fiction writer and video artist, best known for their novels Freshwater, Pet, and their New York Times bestselling novel The Death of Vivek Oji.
5. In the Black Fantastic, 2022 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, presents ways of seeing, inhabiting and re-imagining the world through the eyes of 11 contemporary Black artists. Curated by Ekow Eshun.
6. Yoruba people are an ethnic group, mainly inhabiting Nigeria and the Republic of Benin, and some parts of Togo. Yoruba is one of the three official languages of Nigeria.
7. The Ifa divination system, practiced among Yoruba communities and by the African diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean.
8. Cosmological Queerness Across the Yoruba Diaspora, AAIHS, James Padilion Jr, February 17 2017.

Essay with footnotes

Afro cosmologies and other Queer externalities

By Nya Lewis

Living outside the subject, if only within your own imagination, is generative. However, to make anew from the loose ends of colonialism’s tentacles, spell-binding worlds that render and modernly translate African and Indigenous oral histories that affirm your presence is life-changing. At the intersection of Afro-futurism [footnote 1: Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic that combines science-fiction, history, and fantasy to explore the Black Atlantic experience and aims to connect those from the black diaspora with their forgotten African ancestry.], potential present-day heroes, deities, otherworldliness, and ancestral narratives, holds an easter egg for Afro-queer diasporic identities. Syncretic Birthrights takes up the consummate task of speculating another way out of unquestioned cultural prejudice and harm to make way for discovery and acceptance of innate divinity—Black, queer, trans, and godly brilliance. Odera Igbokwe’s practice is a bridge across realities and an intimate visual language of Black resilience, joy, and magic.

A defining aesthetic, images like The Spirit Child dance and swirl across the canvas, unveiling a story within a story. Depictions of serenity, rage, hope, and love clad the avatars, cascading layered symbolism in technique and theme; the movement ignites in yellows and golds, inviting the viewer into their cosmos. Igbokwe’s ability to simultaneously visualize with sincerity the emotional multitude and nuance of our shared experiences, isolation and guidance, dignified fear, and self-affirmation. Engulfed by light, fire, shadow, and still an act of faith. A white gown, perhaps an emblem of purity, peace, and child-like freedom, dances as they lean on the edge of new realms. In full flight, relentless pursuits of self-proclamation. I see myself in this journey, where cultural narratives and myth can be a universal place for powerful beginnings or salvific transformations.

I am interested in creative practices as a site for study and queries concerning the parallels between; the conditions of Black/African life and mythology, the process of art making, and the existential capacity of religion, both doing the work of transcending reality and presenting alternative ways of being through non-cognitive means. Speculatively, interest in otherworldly forces and faith systems responds to the need for radical healing. For Igbokwe, where their Nigerian Christian upbringing is concerned, the desire for transcendence and refuge turns to hybrid spiritual philosophies and theological iconography to examine their identities and make sense of the moment. Within a lineage of Afro-diasporic interdisciplinary visual artists like April Bey[2] and Wangechi Mutu[3], or literary artists like Akwaeke Ezemi[4] who engage the fantastical, carving spaces for mythology to be read in equal parts ancestral and futuristic. [footnote 2: April Bey grew up in The Bahamas (New Providence) and now resides and works in Los Angeles, CA as a visual artist and art educator. Bey’s interdisciplinary artwork is an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, AfroFuturism, AfroSurrealism, post-colonialism and constructs of race within supremacist systems. footnote 3: Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures—part human, animal, plant, and machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. Bringing her interconnected ecosystems to life for this exhibition through sculptural installations and videos, Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and socio-political exploration and transformation. footnote 4: Akwaeke Emezi is a Nigerian fiction writer and video artist, best known for their novels Freshwater, Pet, and their New York Times bestselling novel The Death of Vivek Oji.] In 2022, Ekow Eshun’s exhibition In the Black Fantastic[5] was dedicated to the work of Black artists across the diaspora who use spirituality, myth, science fiction, and Afrofuturism to suggest utopian possibilities. [footnote 5: In the Black Fantastic, 2022 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, presents ways of seeing, inhabiting and re-imagining the world through the eyes of 11 contemporary Black artists. Curated by Ekow Eshun.] A departure from a Western-centric perspective, the presentation explored Black autonomy and experience, evoking a surreal, satirical use of character and avatar to analyze colonialism’s detrimental legacy. This convergence of African oral histories and the Black imaginary manifests as a speculatively new and integral resource, stories that orient us in time and space and present us with a view of the world and our place within it. Syncretic Birthrights rediscovers and reshapes West African, Yoruba[6] anthologies, and Tarot cosmologies, expanding indeterminacy and the multiplicity of radical self-regard. [footnote 6: Yoruba people are an ethnic group, mainly inhabiting Nigeria and the Republic of Benin, and some parts of Togo. Yoruba is one of the three official languages of Nigeria.]

I question how dissolving or intertwining different beliefs, practices, and traditions work in favor of re-articulating identities. How does borrowing from diverse spiritual traditions create access to new ideas ripe with the possibility for Queer visibility? How do we employ our right to choose articulations of spirituality that mirror our needs without reiterating harm, appropriation, manipulation, or rewriting of histories? In what ways does this porous practice of cross-pollination mimic the strategies of survival for queer Black/African people globally? Regarding Igbokwe’s practice, how did Ifá[7] divination becomes the perfect container for Black queer universal stories? [footnote 7: The Ifa divination system, practiced among Yoruba communities and by the African diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean. ] In search of a queer spiritual lineage and purpose, I found affirming solace in the ethical considerations of sexuality and gender found in spiritual practices indigenous to southwestern Nigeria and parts of Benin and Togo. In the aftermath of Transatlantic slavery, the influence of Yoruba cosmology spans across the Diaspora—including Brazil, Cuba, the Caribbean, and the United States. This belief system is one of ontological wholeness, culminating in a supreme being, historically characterized as genderless or possessing all possible gender expressions simultaneously. This being is informed by divine energy and power that brings things into existence, from which emerges the infinity of forms that populates the universe. A being that exceeds the scope of human comprehension, though sometimes likened to gods, orishas are understood as avatars or personifications that relate to natural forces. Artists that engage mythology and illuminate queer, trans, Black, and Indigenous people of color in spiritual folklore across cultures; through protagonists and oral and illustrative storytelling weave myth, cultural narratives, identity, and spirituality in ways that move beyond traditional narratives of religion. This realm of creativity acts as a continuing body of beliefs—a cosmology[8]—that incorporates the centrality of creation, ritual, and inheritance, a shape-shifting relationship between the human and the divine. [footnote 8: Cosmological Queerness Across the Yoruba Diaspora, AAIHS, James Padilion Jr, February 17 2017. ]

Essay ends.

Return to the Alternative Exhibitions Catalogue Directory

Visual PDF available online: grunt.ca.
Published June 2023.
Author(s): Keimi Nakashima-Ocha, grunt accessibility committee

Introduction to alternative text catalogue:

The alternative text catalogue project is created by the staff and contractors on the Accessibility Committee at grunt gallery. Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, straddling the line between information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience and those better served by text!

We welcome feedback from our audiences. Please contact us at access@grunt.ca with any questions or feedback.

Creative Access Descriptions:

Pamphlet:

An exhibition pamphlet printed on soft newsprint paper the colour of vanilla pudding. The newsprint laid flat is about the size of a shoebox or a computer monitor. The paper is folded accordion-style, creating a zigzag-style line when touched along the top or the bottom. The following description assumes you open the pamphlet with the first folded seam to the right before flipping to the other side. When unfolded or laid flat, there are three pages of the pamphlet on the front side, printed as columns between each fold.

Page 1, cover:

The first column, or the cover page, begins with small, black, sans-serif text that reads grunt gallery. March 16th – April 29th, 2023. Below is a large, portrait-oriented image of Alison’s painting collage titled Lil’ Baby with the Brass Knuckles.

The work depicts two figures in Northwest Coast-style formline, one of a snake standing vertically and one of a human-like wolf holding brass knuckles. Around the head of the wolf, there is a golden halo. Above the halo is a white bird holding a leaf in its mouth. The painting has a smooth black background, but the additional elements and figures are all made of colourful wallpapers, most with florals or an earthy feel. The image of this work has a thin outline around it, which is a vivid blue similar to the colour of the sky on a sunny day.

At the bottom of the page is text in a large, thin, black-serif font. The text reads: Alison Bremner. Ladykiller the Maneater.

Page 2:

The second column, or page, on the front side is all text. It is the same black sans-serif font used at the top of the cover page. At the footer, the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lower case in white on a black brushstroke of black) sits above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits. The text on this page reads:

grunt gallery
Ladykiller the Maneater
Alison Bremner
116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca
Curator: Whess Harman
Writer: Whess Harman
Designer: Victoria Lum
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photographer: Dennis Ha
Printed in Canada by Moniker Press
Edition of 200
ISBN: 978-1-988708-21-8

All Rights Reserved Publication © 2023 grunt gallery
Artwork © 2023 the artists
Text © 2022 the authors
All images courtesy of the artists

© Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.

grunt gallery is located on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, who have lived in kinship with this land, water and air for thousands of years. We recognize and acknowledge their leadership and our own complicity in settler colonialism, its present occupation and its violent legacy. We acknowledge our responsibility to work actively in support of Indigenous sovereignty, and towards a respectful relationship with this place.

grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Vancouver Foundation.

Image credits:

Front Cover, Lil Baby with the Brass Knuckles (2023). Found wallpaper, acrylic paint, 22kt gold leaf, and wood panel.

Page 1, Top: Ladykiller the Maneater (2023). Acrylic, metal leaf on canvas.
Bottom: Midnight at the Fireworks Stand (2023). Acrylic paint, vintage and found wallpaper, wood panel. A note from the describer: Although this is labelled as page 1, it is technically the third panel of the top side of the pamphlet.

Page 3:

On the third column or page of the front side, two images are held within a large rectangle. The rectangle is a similar colour to the sky on a sunny day.

Back-side:

The back side of the pamphlet also has three pages, which are printed as columns between each of the folds. The back pages are all text, using the same small sans-serif font used on sections of the pages on the front side. Near the bottom left corner of all the pages is a number in thin serif font labelling each page: 1, 2, or 3.

Page 1:

The essay is written by curator Whess Harman and is titled Morning Breath When You’re an Eel.

Four paragraphs of text on this page read:

How would a deity in the shape of a giant primordial eel, awakening from a deep, uninterrupted dreamstate that has lasted so long no one even remembers who she is anymore, react to the world she encounters? I imagine the land might tremble a little, waking up with her for a moment from the wet and dark. Her powerful muscles searching for the space around her to flex into, claws rasping at the seams before finding a tear big enough to fall through. Maybe she wakes up hungry, the deep rippling sound of her pinched stomach remembering the taste of fish, berries…and maybe a few other things. There are plenty of interesting things to eat on the physical plane.

Alison describes the character of Ladykiller the Maneater as “loving and gentle in her most natural state, but highly carnivorous when agitated.” Rendered in her precise and distinctively Tlingit approach to formline, Bremner depicts the deity as an eel whose body is lined with lactating breasts and mouth is lined with fanged teeth. This shameless, provocative raw threat of her shape, each nipple alight in gold and with at least three sets of clawed limbs protruding from her serpentine body, both demands and defies anthropomorphization. She isn’t human, but we can recognize that she is more-than and know that she has agency and appetite. Her name; “ladykiller” as a term for charming, sexually promiscuous men runs up against “maneater,” a term for women who either do or are perceived to chew up and spit out men after taking what they want from them, provoking a schism in our expectations of how this deity identifies or behaves. What agitates Ladykiller the Maneater? What shifts her mood to reminding you that “ladykiller” and “maneater” could simply mean “indiscriminately carnivorous”?

These new works, particularly the ones using raucously clashing wallpaper cut-outs that bring a kaleidoscopic maximalism, visually align with the dizzying state of the world Ladykiller the Maneater has awoken to. She herself does not appear in every work, but each piece offers a newsreel of what she’s seen: the criminalization of Black and Indigenous people and subsequent enslavement within the prison industrial complex; gun-violence and school shootings; an escalating backslide into anti-queer, anti-trans rhetoric and legislation; the overturning of Roe v. Wade and loss of key reproductive rights; racism and the rise of right-wing fascist rhetoric; and finally, what has become the rolling confirmation of more and more gravesites of Indigenous children murdered and buried in unmarked graves on residential school grounds across both sides of the colonial border. And this is to say nothing of how the COVID-19 pandemic, which I loathe to even mention, has exacerbated everything.

Perhaps it’s my queerness that can’t help but be drawn to the “monster.” Like Ladykiller the Maneater, many Indigenous people start from a place of oversaturation and shock as we too have been brought into a confusing, violent world. It means that we are not always nice, or wise, or patient. Resilience is messy, demanding and under the constant surveillance of respectability politics from both within and outside of our communities.

The text continues on the next page.

Page 2:

Continuing from last page, the text reads:

In her artist statement for the set of works Midnight at the Fireworks Stand, Lil Baby with Brass Knuckles and Systems Built on Slavery Aren’t Meant to Last, Alison writes:

Usually it is the most “resilient” individuals, or well adjusted post-contact, that are lifted up in the eyes of mainstream society and Tribal organizations. In this series I am expanding that focus to include a wider view of Indigenous communities. Communities that are very much still dealing with generational trauma inflicted from western contact. Those who are surviving against the odds, fierce and stubborn, born out of dysfunction, living in mischief, recognizing their trauma and ultimately surviving against all odds.

Looking at the arson attacks on churches in 2021 following the residential school gravesite announcements is a good example of the complexity of rage and resistance for Indigenous peoples. In an article with the CBC, several residential school survivors pleaded with the perpetrators to stop the burnings, stating that “it’s not going to bring back anybody” and that “whoever is doing this, you’re going to wake up a very ugly, evil spirit in this country.” I don’t disagree; the burnings, if they had continued, would have escalated into something much darker. Only days before the article a totem pole was partially burned in Esquimalt in retaliation for the toppling of the James Cook statue at the legislature building in Victoria, BC. Nonetheless, there still remains a part of me that has been awake and so hungry for so much longer than I’ve even been alive that screams, good. Wake the spirits up and let them have their fill, because what we’ve been doing hasn’t put a stop to the continual cycle of violence piled on, and on, and on and which is suffocating everyone I love. Indigenous people have to hold both truths; that retaliation is dangerous, but stifling and suffocation is certain.

In preparing for this exhibition, I kept returning to a track from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s first poetry album, f(l)ight. In I am Graffiti she writes:
we are the singing remnants
left over after
the bomb went off in slow motion
over a century instead of a fractionated second
The words are written after a work by Rebecca Belmore, X (2010), wherein Belmore paints three large white x’s on the side of a grocery store. Across the street, Curve Lake First Nation was holding a ceremony to rebury the body of a 2000-year-old Indigenous man whose remains had been uncovered in the construction of a new parking lot. Rebecca and an assistant perform repetitive actions of making and erasing the x’s and describes the ceremony across the street in contrast to her performance as “a ritual of return, a reburial of what was disturbed and removed.” I read the x’s a continuous act of futile mark-making both by and against the state.

The text continues on the next page.

Page 3:

Continuing from last page, the text reads:

In this context, I think about Ladykiller the Maneater as a being who was unintentionally disturbed but, as a supernatural being, was unwilling to return or be returned. In the face of this gradual and unrelenting collapse since contact, is there even anything to go back to? Perhaps her awakening was just one of many unjustified encroachments on the land. Both Alison and I come from Potlatching cultures where witnessing is a foundational aspect of our governance, and through this lens I wonder if Ladykiller the Maneater is able to see the detonation more clearly than we do. Does she have the time to look long enough to see how the pieces are meant to come back together? Is her carnivorous state agitated by what she sees or does her more gentle and nurturing qualities quell what can easily become a consuming rage? Culturally, I know better than to rely on spirits to save me, but I, like many, ache to make sense of this precarity we’ve been living on the unforgiving edges of.

It is ambitious for any artist to take on any one of the topics that Alison has approached in these new series of works, but through the lens of Ladykiller the Maneater, they do feel less myopic, and more importantly and a little strangely, less despairing.

At the bottom right corner of the page, a citation in font about the size of a large grain of salt reads:

Major, D. (2021). Residential school survivors call for an end to arson attacks churches. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/residential-school-survivors-end-church-arson-1.6090511.
Belmore, Rebecca. (2010). X. [Performance]. Ode’min Giizis, Peterborough, Ontario. https://www.rebeccabelmore.com/x/.

Return to the Alternative Exhibitions Catalogue Directory

Visual PDF available online: grunt.ca.
Published October 2022.
Author(s): Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa, grunt accessibility committee

Introduction to alternative text catalogue:

The alternative text catalogue project is created by the staff and contractors on the Accessibility Committee at grunt gallery. Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, straddling the line between information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience and those better served by text!

We welcome feedback from our audiences. Please contact us at access@grunt.ca with any questions or feedback.

Creative Access Descriptions:

Cover (front):

A vivid pink catalogue cover with a single image at the top centre. Top text reads: [grunt gallery, September 17th – October 29th, 2022. The bottom text reads Cheyenne Rain LeGrande, Mullyanne Nimito. Cheyenne’s name in Cree is written below her name in English. The shapes of the syllabics of her name resemble the Roman alphabet uppercase letter P, an inverted capital L, a left-pointing equilateral triangle, and a dot floating and leading into a left-facing, open semi-circle. The image on the cover shows a handmade shawl comprised of pastel ribbons and aluminum can tabs installed on a black mannequin in a pale pink room. The walls have Cree syllabics that spell “she dances,” painted in pale blue, and dramatic lighting and shadows.

The printed catalogue’s cover paper has subtle vertical grains and a smooth, supple feel.

The front cover image credit is Mullyane Nimito (2022), bepsi tab shawl—photo by Dennis Ha.

Cover (back):

The catalogue’s back cover is a bold and vivid pink, similar to a tropical hibiscus flower, with credits for the images throughout the catalogue. These credits are listed on their respective pages below.

Inside Cover Spread:

The first open spread of the catalogue shows a landscape-oriented installation photo of the exhibition. The photo shows a corner where two walls meet, each wall with a mounted screen playing Cheyenne’s video works Cahkipehikan (left screen) and Mullyanne Nimito (right screen), both frozen on frames that show close-ups of Cheyenne’s face. The screens are backlit with glowing, white lights that create a rectangular halo. The walls they are on are bubblegum pink and covered in pale blue Cree syllabics. The concrete floor looks dark coppery orange, reflecting the warm colours and glowing lights.

Image credit text, pulled from back cover: Mullyane Nimito (2022), video.

Page 1:

The page is all text. At the footer, the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lower case in white on a black brushstroke of black) sits above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits.

These interior pages are thinner than the cover and interior spread but still feel thicker than photocopy paper.

grunt gallery
Mullyanne Nimito
Cheyenne Rain LeGrande (Cree Syllabic name)
116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca
Curator: Whess Harman
Writers: Whess Harman and Justin Ducharme
Design: Victoria Lum
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photography: Dennis Ha
Printed in Canada by Mitchell Press
Edition of 250
ISBN: 978-1-988708-21-8
All Rights Reserved
Publication © 2022 grunt gallery
Artwork © 2022 the artists
Text © 2022 the authors
All images courtesy of the artists

© Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.

grunt gallery is located on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, who have lived in kinship with this land, water and air for thousands of years. We recognize and acknowledge their leadership and our own complicity in settler colonialism, its present occupation and its violent legacy. We acknowledge our responsibility to work actively in support of Indigenous sovereignty and towards a respectful relationship with this place.

grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Vancouver Foundation.

Page 2 and 3:

A double-page spread shows a photo of the exhibition installation split across both pages. The photo shows a still of Cheyenne’s video work, Cahkipehikan, displayed on a wall-mounted screen. In the still, Cheyenne is shown in a closeup, pressing the inside of her wrists to her cheekbones, with a spotlight and shadows of Cree syllabics projected onto her. She has on a turquoise blue eyeshadow, bold blue lines drawn on her forehead, and partially covered Cree syllabics drawn in the same blue on her cheekbones. She is wearing a translucent white chiffon-like robe and white hair clips separating her hair at her forehead. She gazes defiantly into the camera.

Image credit text, pulled from back cover: Mullyane Nimito (2022), video.

Page 4 :

A large pink rectangle fills the majority of a white page. In the pink rectangle, there is a portrait-oriented installation image with a thin black border. The image shows Cheyenne’s handmade shawl, composed of silver bepsi can tabs and pastel ribbons that resemble the colours of the sky at dawn (pale shades of purple, pink, blue, and orange). The shawl is displayed on a black mannequin torso, rotating on a small white platform and lit in a pink spotlight from below. Behind the shawl, the rest of the gallery is visible, all of the walls are painted a pale bubblegum pink and have baby-blue syllabics written repeatedly across their surface. At the corner of the two walls on the left side of the images, wall-mounted screens display stills of Cheyenne’s video works Cahikipehikan and Mullyane Nimito.

Image credit text, listed on the back cover: Mullyane Nimito (2022), installation view at grunt gallery.

Page 5:

A white page with no images. Thin, large, serif title text placed on the bottom of the page reads:

Whess Harman
Knowing From a Language of Embodiment: Mullyane Nimito.

Page 6 and 7:

A white page with no images. Whess Harman’s writing is split into two thin columns on the page, which reads:

Contemporary Indigenous art has yet to shake the limited trappings of being framed within traditional versus nontraditional, art versus craft. This positionality places Indigenous artists in an awkward and often vulnerable position; modern Indigenous identity is and is not compromised, it is and is not contradictory, and we must embody and speak from both in whatever art language is deemed most appropriate at the time. It is no small feat continuing to be in and continuing to resist a state program of on-going colonization. Within it, Indigenous artists strive to prove our work to ourselves, our communities and to an extractive art audience leaving us, at times, in what feels like a haphazard state of medieval quartering.

However, there is a distinct difference with artists like Cheyenne, and many others both currently and historically, who ascribe to a different methodology altogether; a marked disinterest in continuing to cater and appeal to the oppositional narrative of contemporary vs traditional, and embracing instead plurality and pleasure while casually refuting any lesser or more than narratives of authenticity.

The trajectory of many Indigenous artists over the last ten years has been heavily situated in a process of “Indigenizing” and is often done through a process of identifying an absence of representation in popular culture and reconfiguring the source material to make space for inclusion. This method of intervention relies on countering what an audience expects; why haven’t we seen an Indigenous superhero? What would Indigenous Sailor Moon look like? What does the catwalk look like with Indigenous designers and models?

This reflection is not accusatory; representation matters. The many people who will still revolt against Indigenous inclusion in contemporary culture as being inaccurate, inauthentic, and unoriginal haven’t gone away. But what makes me the most hopeful in the present heavy emphasis on representation and identity art, are the Indigenous artists and curators who are uninterested in competing with others to justify their experiences as individuals in colonial, capitalistic industries.

What I love about Cheyenne’s work is that it is about her. To me, her work is about Nehiyaw culture, decolonization, intergenerational trauma, family, surviving genocide but it’s also about who she is as an individual. No one looks, talks or thinks like Cheyenne Rain Legrande and she is not interested in responding to the oft implied call of positioning herself as a professionalized figurehead to represent the whole of her nation. Instead her work proposes that we can be a person. We can have fashion, niche interests, and extraterrestrial fantasies. We can love and explore our cultures without ascribing to established ideas of what looks “Indigenous enough.” We can look fabulous on the ‘gram. Loss and grief, while devastating and always carried on the backs of our community, does not have to look a certain noble, solidly consenting, Indian way. In Cheyenne’s work, I am reminded that my contemporaries and I can just be, and what we are is beautiful Indigenous humans, living with and in a nuance that is not a contradictory or shameful position to be in. No permission is needed to put down the battles to give time to revel in the joy of who we are and the relationality to one another in this small, pluralistic, hybridized sphere of NDN country. This is because the work, even when it is joyful, still arrives as an unapologetic confrontation.

Page 8:

A large pink rectangle fills the majority of a white page. In the pink rectangle, there is a portrait-oriented installation image with a thin black border. The image shows a closeup of the woven bepsi tab shawl across the shoulders of a black mannequin torso. In real life, the ribbons that run through the shawl and hang as fringe are soft pastel colours, but in this image and warmly lit room, they reflect a lot of light and have almost a glowing neon quality. The shawl is woven with several layers of silvery tabs and resembles the texture of chainmail armour. The image’s background is a single pink wall with the same Cree syllabics.

Image credit text, listed on the back cover: Mullyane Nimito (2022), bepsi tab shawl.

Page 9:

A white page with no images. Thin, large, serif title text placed on the bottom of the page reads:

Justin Ducharme
NDNs in Pop Culture & the Icons We Deserve

Page 10:

A white page with no images. Justin Ducharme’s writing is split into two thin columns on the page, which reads:

When one thinks about how Indigenous people have been represented either within or through pop culture you may oscillate through the more commonly known & overused stereotypes such as the Noble Savage (popular examples like Dances with the Wolves), or the Red Indian (think racist mascot fuckery). These conversations around how Indigenous peoples are represented or how we choose to represent ourselves within the contemporary pop culture zeitgeist are often followed up by questions around a theoretical tension between traditional vs. contemporary points of reference or work in general. I’ve heard people question within my own career as a writer and filmmaker how that might affect one’s ability to create work that feels both Indigenous and contemporary… as if we as Native people don’t currently exist within a modern or current narrative. I find there’s a very distinct link between that question being posed to Native artists making work that’s labelled by audiences as “contemporary” and the way that ndns have been represented within media and pop culture since contact, but diving into that we’ll maybe leave for another time.

With these thoughts in mind, enter ndn pop culture icon Cheyenne Rain LeGrande [her name included in the Cree syllabus here as well] with her solo exhibition at grunt gallery titled Mullyane Nimito. Blending new and archival video performance work and hand created items that are featured in LeGrande’s new performance piece – this show breathes new contextual evidence into the cannon of my aforementioned belief that we as ndns can make work within spaces that feel ndn to the core in both a traditional and contemporary context. Since getting to know Cheyenne as both a person and an artist I’ve been privy to the razor sharp focus and steady hand at which she curates both her individual persona and that of a performance artist and creative. Anyone who knows her work can probably visualize her signature staple attire consisting of sky high platform boots, babydoll dresses and complex, unique-to-herself make-up. This is credit to an artist’s commitment to brand and individuality. That kind of Angelyne like visual iconography when someone can identify you based on key signifiers in how you choose to represent yourself through style and fashion is something that I personally admire from a performance artist like LeGrande. It’s in these key details where iconography has the chance to be born, and in the context of this work, where the connection to both traditional and contemporary ways of expressing Indigeneity meet.

Page 11:

There is a pause in Justin Ducharme’s essay with 3 pages of image. Page eleven is a white page with a large pink rectangle filling most of its surface. In the pink rectangle, there are two stacked landscape-oriented images with black borders.

The photo at the top shows Cheyenne’s handmade platform moccasins with a glass vitrine. The moccasins are lit from below, creating shadows on the ankle straps and the metal studs that attach the boot to its platform. The presenting plinth and the wall behind it are painted pale pink, with large blue syllabics overlaid onto them in pale blue.

The photo at the bottom shows a wall-mounted screen with a still of the video work Mullyanne Nimito, in which Cheyenne is pictured with the pop tab shawl, reaching her hands toward the camera. The screen on the wall is backlit in white, creating an ethereal halo around the video.

Image credit text, listed on the back cover: Mullyane Nimito (2022), installation view at grunt gallery.

Page 12 and 13:

A spread with a large pink rectangle across 2 white pages. The image inside the rectangle has a black border and is split at the seam of the two pages. The image shows an installation shot of the exhibition Mullyanne Nimito. From left to right, there is the vitrine with the platform moccasins, the bepsi tab shawl on the mannequin torso, and a wall-mounted screen displaying a still of Cahkipehikan, in which Cheyenne, with her blue makeup on, gently wipes a tear from her cheek. The dramatic lighting on each object casts multi-directional shadows, making the pale pinks and blues on the walls look at varying degrees of darkness.

Image credit text, listed on the back cover: Mullyane Nimito (2022), installation view at grunt gallery.

Page 14 and 15:

White pages with no images. Justin Ducharme’s writing continues in a thin two-column layout, which reads:

With her new performance piece, Mullyanne Nîmito, we are given further examples around the ways in which she blends these two concepts so that perhaps the larger art world may understand. First off for example, the handmade shawl created out of silk ribbon with Pepsi and beer can pull tabs weaved throughout to create the base. The shawl adorns her shoulders through the performance (and is on display in the exhibition) as a visual and aesthetic ode to the Fancy Dance shawl commonly worn by powwow dancers. The marriage of an everyday almost mundane object like the tin can pull tabs with the silk pastel ribbon to create a fancy dance shawl might seem flippant to others but for natives these two objects and their coming together in this way have deep connections into how we see ourselves represented or how we choose to represent ourselves within a modern pop culture context. We see this again in the handmade wooden platform moccasins she wears (also on display at grunt). Making moccasins is a skill most learnt ancestrally, passed down by family members and aunties who know the shortcuts and show you how to do things right. LeGrande once again takes the idea of bringing the traditional into a contemporary context by blending a traditional hide moccasin with her signature sky high platform, this time made out of wood. Indigenous people’s relationship with making our own clothing ages back since time immemorial and hand crafting platform hide moccasins using ancestral teachings is yet another example of the artist proving the aforementioned thesis of blending these two ideas. Finally and perhaps my favourite part of the entire show is the song performed during Mullyanne Nîmito. Produced by Blackfoot singer, songwriter, producer and overall musical icon Chandra Melting Tallow (aka Mourning Coup), we are given what LeGrande has said to be her singing debut in a dreamlike, airy and whimsical cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams sang in the Cree language. Translated by her mother and kokum from English into their ancestral dialect, this song is probably the most obvious-to-white-people example around the ways in which Indigenous artists can exist and make work that feels and IS both contemporary and traditional. The track is beautiful… smooth vocals carry you throughout with a synthy pop like backtrack that solidifies my previous claim to ndn pop culture icon status.

To bring about meaningful relationships to these objects and personal lived experiences takes an artist with a clear sense of self and individuality. In her artist statement LeGrande laments on ancestral histories, touching on things such as shared fashion, teachings, and language to weave together an understanding of what makes the work tick, of what shapes her as an artist. She gives contextual evidence to back up everything we experience as a viewer with these generous stories. Artists like Cheyenne Rain LeGrande ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ and countless others around Turtle Island and the world continue to make work like this, work that feels so deeply personal yet relatable, so traditionally connected yet wildly contemporary. I like to think we make this work in a subconscious group effort, not like some kind of devised plan or anything. But an unspoken group consensus to try and rid the world of the horrid stereotypes that exist within pop culture, because of pop culture — like the Noble Savage and Red Indian — in hopes that one day we too can be afforded the luxury of being able to make work without having to speak for an entire race of people.

Pages 16 and 17:

A large image spread over two white pages. The image shows a closeup of the walls of the exhibition. The wall and paint have an eggshell finish, with a slightly porous texture and a more matte than glossy finish. In this lighting, the wall is a delicate pink, perhaps the colour of a strawberry smoothie or a fresh rose. The Cree syllabics, which spell out “she dances,” are a pale blue but, in this lighting, look almost silver, like clouds at dusk. These syllabics were painted dozens of times across the walls by Cheyenne, the hand-painted nature coming across through the thinner areas of paint and the slight variations in the repeating shapes.

Image credit text, listed on the back cover: Mullyane Nimito (2022), mural syllabics.

All images are credited to Dennis Ha.

Page 18:

A white page with a short biography of the artist written at the top. Her name is bolded in black in both English and Cree, with text in thin sans-serif font that reads:

Cheyenne Rain LeGrande is a Nehiyaw Isko artist from Bigstone Cree Nation. She currently resides in Amiskwaciy Waskahikan, also known as Edmonton, Alberta. Cheyenne graduated from Emily Carr University with her BFA in Visual Arts in 2019. Her work often explores history, knowledge and traditional practices. Through the use of her body and language, she speaks to the past, present and future. Cheyenne’s work is rooted in the strength to feel, express and heal. Bringing her ancestors with her, she moves through installation, photography, video, sound and performance art.

Page 19:

A white page with “thank yous” in a black sans-serif font that reads:

Special thanks to Cheyenne, her mother and kokum for their translation work and support of the project, to Kay and Keimi for their exceptional work in providing additional access supports to make this exhibition available to a wider audience; to Katrina for their work on this publication as well as for their work as our communications manager. Thank you to the rest of the grunt staff for helping bring this exhibition up, to Victoria Lum for designing this publication, and to the Western Front for hosting Cheyenne and Amrita Hepi’s performance adjacent to the exhibition.

Page 20:

A white page intentionally left blank, to mark the end of the publication and allow a moment of reflection.

---

Return to the Alternative Exhibitions Catalogue Directory

Visual PDF available online: grunt.ca.
Published July 2022.
Translation to Text Author: Keimi Nakashima-Ocha

Introduction to alternative text catalogue:

The alternative text catalogue project was created and is maintained by the staff on the Accessibility Committee at grunt gallery. Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, straddling the line between information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience as well as those who are better served by text!

We welcome feedback from our audiences. Please contact us at access@grunt.ca with any questions or feedback.

Catalogue:

Cover (front):

A blue-green catalogue cover with a single image at the top centre. Top text reads: grunt gallery, July 9th through August 13th, 2022. Bottom text reads: Michelle Campos Castillo, Terremoto. The image shows a digital illustration with a black background made of brush-like strokes. The central part of the illustration shows a person with long hair, tucked and sleeping in a hammock. Around them are white line drawings of fruiting trees. The front cover image was made by the artist Michele Campos Castillo, 2020.

The printed catalogue’s cover paper has subtle vertical grains and a smooth, supple feel to it.

Cover (back):

The back cover of the catalogue, which is a blue-green colour similar to oxidised copper, with text credits that appear throughout the document. These credits are listed on their respective pages below.

Inside Cover Spread:

The first open spread of the catalogue shows two family photos.
On the left page, Michelle and her sisters are pictured inside their family home, where an antique wall telephone, a TV (which is turned on) and tables with various objects can be seen. Michelle is facing away from the camera, walking across the frame, while her sisters Mila and Patty stand straight and still, smiling into the camera. They are all wearing colourful clothes, very much in line with the fashions of the 1980s.

On the right page, Mila sits in a turquoise outfit on a woven chair that is placed on top of a stool. Her hair is braided and she has a soft sheepish smile on her face, looking into the camera. Behind her, home decor like a golden baroque mirror and houseplants can be seen. Both images in the spread have the quality of bright flash that is common in family photos taken on film.

The front cover image credit text, listed on the back cover:: From left: Michele, Mila, Patty. Image by Pablo Campos.

The inside back cover image credit text, listed on the back cover:: From left: Michele, Mila, Patty. Image by Pablo Campos.

Page 1:

The page is all text. At the footer, the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lower case in white on a black brushstroke of black) sits above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits.

These interior pages are thinner than the cover and interior spread, but still feel thicker than photocopy paper.

grunt gallery
Terremoto
Michelle Campos Castillo
116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca
Curator: Vanessa Kwan
Writers: Michelle Campos Castillo and Vanessa Kwan
Design: Victoria Lum
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photography: Courtesy of Michelle Campos Castillo
Printed in Canada by Mitchell Press
Edition of 250
ISBN: 978-1-988708-20-1
All Rights Reserved
Publication © 2022 grunt gallery
Artwork © 2022 the artists
Text © 2022 the authors
All images courtesy of the artists
© Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.

grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Vancouver Foundation.

Page 2 and 3:

A full-two page image spread showing a panoramic illustration split across both pages. The illustration is digitally made and is mostly placed in a long black rectangle with irregular edges. There are white gaps within the black rectangle that show black line drawings of three people sleeping in different hammocks on the left page; a crumbled building, and a TV with dials and an antenna on the right page). Fruiting trees are drawn in coppery green and there is Spanish text written in blue, and English text written in yellow. The text across the illustrations on both pages reads, “That night we set up hammocks and mattresses outside to sleep. Everyone feared more quakes would come and we’d be crushed by our homes. I don’t remember if the piles of rubble and piles of bodies were something I lived through or just saw on TV. ”

Image credit text, listed on the back cover: Terremoto Wall 1, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

Page 4 :

A white rectangle with thin black borders at the top centre of a coppery blue-green page. The rectangle is filled with illustrative text, written in bold, black, trembling strokes that reads “Terremoto” twice in capital letters.

Image credit text, listed on the back cover: Terremoto, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

Page 5:

A white page with no images. Small, black, sans-serif intro text on the top corner reads: On October 10th 1986, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck El Savador’s capital city of San Salvador. and thin, large, serif title text reads: Vanessa Kwan, The earth moves and all the houses; Terremoto at grunt

Page 6:

A white page with no images. Vanessa Kwan’s writing is split into two thin columns on the page, which reads:

Out of reach of falling debris, a hammock swung.
Based on her own memories of living through the 1986 earthquake, Terremoto combines Michelle Campos Castillo’s graphic illustrations of childhood experiences—she was 3 years old at the time—with other forms of memory work: audio interviews, archival materials and video recordings of her mother, sisters and father. Herein you’ll find a companion to the exhibition—the transcribed and edited versions of the interviews both in English translation and the original Spanish. These interviews follow the logic of the exhibition as a whole; together they weave a communal interpretation of a remarkable event. What rises up is a sense of strangeness and curiosity, even amidst imminent danger, disruption and devastation. The complexities of experience, recounted by Castillo’s sisters through adult recollections from their smaller selves, recall fear but also excitement and a defining sense of warmth, of being held fast in community. The woven hammock—a Salvadoran staple— is a place of refuge for Castillo and her sisters, and becomes both a tool and a metaphor for survival, its intertwined supports mirroring a community and a family structure whose dimension Terremoto intimately explores.
Through the exhibition and this catalogue, Castillo’s gift to this narrative expands; Terremoto evades the sharp edged, front page narrative of natural disaster, and softens instead into a body of work that represents a moment in time with overlapping narratives of care. The artist plays the role of narrator, interviewer, translator and documentarian, and builds a sense of moving-with (vs through or over) the details of each story, and its expression. It is a practice that is resolute in its layered telling, both a story to be understood and a model for survival; if the ground shook, what would hold you?

Page 7:

A white page with a large section of text, placed in two columns. The left column of text is in a thin, serif typeface. The right column has large, illustrative bold text written shakily in a blue-green colour. The text reads “Location/Ubicación: San Salvador; Date/Fecha: 1986/10/10; Time/Hora: 11:49:26 AM; Magnitude/Magnitud: 7.5; Duration/Duración: 00:00:38.” Below the text, there is a very small illustration of the Salvador Del Mundo statue, toppled over.

Image credit text, listed on the back cover: Terremoto title wall, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

Page 8:

A coppery blue-green page filled with an archival image of the cover of the New York Times newspaper from October 11, 1986. An article entitled “Strong Quake Hits San Salvador: Scores Die as Buildings Collapse” at the top left of the page is highlighted in white, and the rest of the cover is tinted in a darker, almost dusty, grey.

Image credit text, listed on the back cover: Lemoyne, James (1986, October 11). Strong Quake Hits San Salvador; Scores Die as Building Collapse. New York Times. Section 1, page 1.

Page 9:

A white page with thin serif title text that reads:
Michelle Campos Castillo
Te acuerdas?

Page 10:

A text written by Michelle Campos Castillo is placed on a white page in two columns, using a thin sans-serif font. The text reads:

My dad asks me if I remember while I interview him through the phone. I’m in Edmonton in June 2020 and he is in La Libertad, El Salvador. As I listen to the recordings now, the voice feels appropriately far away. I spoke with my family members to try to finally piece together core memories of one event we lived through, one of many. Beyond the familial bond, we survived so much as a group—my two older sisters, Patty and Mila, my mom Cecilia, and my father Pablo. They are living witnesses to so much I’ve yet to share with anyone else.

Do I remember?
I was born in San Salvador, El Salvador, in 1983, several years into a civil war that would continue into the 1990s after my family and I had left the country. This was just another chapter in the nation’s tragic history and conflict that continues today. While violence and disaster served as a backdrop to my childhood, what remains with me today are the memories of warmth and safety. Community care shielded me as tragedies piled up, and I often think about how this could also help us now, especially as we experience pandemics and climate change disasters.
Terremoto is one day in our community. The drawings are mine but the memories belong to all the neighbours lining the streets waiting on everyone to get home safe.

Michelle Campos Castillo

Thank you grunt for bringing this prairie Salvi to the coast. Thank you to Michelle Schultz and Latitude 53 for believing in my story and the ways I chose to tell it. Thank you to Vivek Shraya for being my forever editor and cheerleader. Thank you Astrid for translating and translating some more. Y gracias familia: Mila, Patty, Pablo, Ceci.

Page 11:

On a white page, two landscape-oriented archival family photos with thin black borders are placed on a large blue-green rectangle.

The photo on top shows toddler Michelle Campos Castillo sitting on a brown leather couch between her older sisters Patty and Mila, with their mom, Ceci, sitting at the end of the frame next to them. The girls are all wearing light-coloured tops and shorts, and Ceci is wearing a turquoise and white two-piece outfit with a collared top. Michelle has a half-up hairdo with hair framing her face, and is crying with her mouth open slightly. Everyone around her has a look of slight concern, and maybe even annoyance. The room they are sitting in has large windows with strips of glass and ornate white metal bars.

The photo on the bottom shows Michelle standing with Patty and Mila, and two other children around their age. They are all wearing colourful clothes, mostly in pinks and blues, and standing outside on a sunny day, trees and the San Salvador Volcano visible in the horizon behind them. The children all look somewhat grumpy, and the taller kids are leaning on the wooden rail behind them.

Image credit text, listed on the back cover:
From left: Patty, Michelle, Mila, cecilia.
From left: Giovani & Emerson (family friends), Patty, Michelle, Mila.
Both images are by Pablo Campos.

Page 12:

On a white page, a portrait-oriented archival family photo with thin black borders is placed on a large blue-green rectangle. The photo shows, from left to right, Michelle’s mom Ceci, her sister Mila, a very young and small Michelle, and her sister Patty standing outdoors in front of a patch of grass and trees. The children are all wearing colourful skirts and dresses. Ceci is wearing blue jeans and a blue top, with a white leather bag under her arm. Paty and Mila are both looking into the camera with soft smiles, and Ceci and Michelle are both looking away from the camera, looking somewhat grumpy.

Image credit text, listed on the back cover:
From left: Cecilia, Mila, Michelle, Patty. Image by Pablo Campos.

Page 13:

A white page with thin serif title text that reads:
Michelle Campos Castillo
Conversations/Conversaciones

The title of this text is two words, one in English and one in Spanish.

Pages 14 through 29:

A white page with a large section of English text, placed in two columns. The title text is a small, bolded, serif font. The body text is in a thin sans-serif font, with the names of the people in the interview bolded. Also, within these pages are the same interviews in Spanish on the facing pages. This alternative text catalogue only contains English; however, the Spanish Interviews in the text can be accessed by contacting a grunt staff member. The text reads:

Interview #1 With Cecilia Castillo, Mother Of Michelle Campos Castillo

Recorded July 23, 2020 In Edmonton, Ab

Michelle: What does an earthquake feel like?
Mom: The earth moves and all of the houses.

Michelle: Do you remember the earthquake that happened in the ‘80s?
Mom: ‘86…October.
Michelle: Do you remember where you were and what you did that morning?
Mom: I made lunch and I was at the store with you.

Michelle: Only with me?
Mom: Yes and you were 2 years old.
Michelle: 3. And how old were you?
Mom: If you were 3, I was 29.

Michelle: Were you used to earthquakes?
Mom: Yes.
Michelle: What did you think in that moment? What did you say?
Mom: I said, “It’s an earthquake. [laughs] It’s an earthquake, let’s go outside.”
Michelle: Where was the rest of your family?
Mom: My other daughters were at school and their father was at work.
Michelle: How long did the earthquake last?
Mom: It’s just seconds, I don’t know how long.

Michelle: What did you do when it was over?
Mom: I went home and then to the bus stop to wait for my daughters.
Michelle: Did you have to wait for a long time?
Mom: No, the earthquake happened at 10 to 11 in the morning and they showed up at 2pm. But there were no buses running so they had to walk home. They studied far and had to walk home. Finally, they had jumped in a truck, they had taken this truck home. Maybe it was just Patty [sister],
Mila [sister]… I don’t remember if they were together. Mila was 9 years old and she studied closer.

Michelle: How did you decide to sleep outside that night?
Mom: Everyone (all the neighbours) decided to sleep outside.
Michelle: Was it only that night?
Mom: No, you spend several days sleeping outside because you get scared.
Michelle: What were you scared of?
Mom: You are scared there will be another earthquake and that the house will collapse on you because several people had their TVs fall, their cabinets… things like that.

Michelle: Do you remember if you slept outside?
Mom: You don’t really sleep but you take some chairs out and you don’t sleep because you’re talking with your neighbours then you might go sleep on the couch or on the floor with the door open.

Michelle: When did your husband get home?
Mom: He showed up before the girls. He came at like 1pm, before your sisters. Yes, he showed up before.
Michelle: Why didn’t he sleep outside that night?
Mom: He didn’t want to. He said he wasn’t scared.
Michelle: Do you really think he wasn’t scared?
Mom: I think he wasn’t because he slept in the bed.

Interview #2 With Milagro Campos, Older Sister Of Michelle Campos Castillo

Recorded July 23, 2020 In Edmonton, Ab

Michelle: Do you remember the date of the earthquake, what day it was?
Mila: October 10th of ’86, 10 to noon.
Michelle: Do you remember how old you were?
Mila: 9 years old.
Michelle: Do you remember that day? Your routine in the morning?
Mila: Yes, a bit. I think we went to school that day, we had school and we always went to the store after school.

Michelle: Where were you when the earthquake started?
Mila: We were at the store because I remember always going to the store behind our house. My mom would always go hang out with the neighbour [store owner]. I don’t know if we would buy food but I remember us watching TV. We were sitting. I remember you and me were sitting on the floor. We were sitting watching TV, watching cartoons because that’s what we always watched at that time after school.
Michelle: At the store?
Mila: Yes, at the store. I remember sitting there and then I heard the sound. The sound is what I remember the most.

Michelle: What’s the sound like?
Mila: Like something is falling but like it’s happening underground. The movement of things and I remember trying to stand up, trying to get up off the floor and my legs were shaking. That’s what I remember. Then I remember my mom and the lady from the store coming out and everyone else. And we all went outside and as soon as we stepped out, the mud houses were right across from us and I remember watching them fall. But they were made of mud, right? So I would just see like dust come up. It’s like dust, right? It looked like dust but it was the houses that had fallen and everyone was scared and standing outside their houses.

Michelle: Where was the rest of your family?
Mila: My dad and Patty weren’t home so I kept thinking about that when we went back home after everything; about how they would get home because we started hearing on the news that everything downtown had collapsed so I felt worried thinking about how or when they would get home. Because Patty was supposed to get home. I think she was at school in the afternoon so she had to be home at a certain time and she wasn’t. And neither was my dad, and we weren’t able to communicate with anyone. So I remember thinking about that a lot.

Michelle: Do you remember everything else that happened the rest of the day like what time Patty got home?
Mila: I don’t know who got home first, if it was my dad or Patty, but I remember Patty saying… I’m not sure if I’m remembering this right, but I remember that someone from school gave them a ride in a truck, is what she said. Something like that. That they took everyone home. Point is she got home because I’m not sure if buses were running. I’m not sure exactly how she got home.

Michelle: So how did the rest of the day feel for you? Were you scared? Did you feel aftershocks?
Mila: There were aftershocks and they were strong. Strong enough to make you think it’s gonna be another earthquake because you’re left with the fear every time there’s a tremble. And there are some really big ones after an earthquake so you’re always scared and don’t even want to go in your house because you’re scared that your house will crush you with the next tremble.

Michelle: So did you feel tired at night? Where did you guys sleep?
Mila: Everyone slept outside in the middle of the block. And with all the neighbours around because everyone there is very friendly. The kids were there too and you don’t feel too much sadness about what was happening because you’re there with everyone. And that’s where we grew up so we all knew each other well. That’s where I remember spending the night. I remember my dad slept inside because he wasn’t scared. He slept in bed but we slept outside with my mom.

Michelle: How does an earthquake feel?
Mila: How do I explain this? Like if you’re lying down somewhere and someone starts shaking you in bed or on a couch, and the sound is what is scary.
Michelle: So the sound is more traumatizing than what you feel?
Mila: Maybe and I also remember people saying that the road would crack open and that the earth would swallow people and it did happen in some places. Stuff like that really scared me because it’s not like you are outside and you’re safe. No, nothing will fall on you, but what if the ground cracks and opens? That can also happen in an earthquake, and well, it’s something that happens without a warning unlike a hurricane or something like that.
Michelle: Yes, where you have time to hide.
Mila: Yes, but in an earthquake you can’t do anything.

Interview #3 With Patty Campos, Older Sister Of Michelle Campos Castillo

Recorded July 23, 2020 In Edmonton, Ab

Michelle: Do you remember the exact date of the earthquake in the ‘80s?
Patty: Yes, October 10th, 1986, at 11:50 in the morning.
Michelle: How old were you?
Patty: I was 12 years old.
Michelle: What was your daily routine like?
Patty: Every day was the same, I would get up at 5 in the morning and I would leave at 6am and it was about an hour commute in 2 buses.

Michelle: What was your first thought when the earthquake started?
Patty: I was in class at that moment but there was no teacher. We were alone and it was almost time for us to leave so we were just trying to kill time. We were just talking to one another and all the sudden we heard rumbles underground but I didn’t know what it was. It was like thunder but underground. I remember looking up and everything was blurry and I wanted to open my eyes more because I thought I was dreaming because I started to hear screaming and the other girls crying, it was an all girls school. I didn’t know what to do until someone told me we had to get out of there because it was “shaking” but in that moment I didn’t know what that was. You wanted to get up and you couldn’t, you would fall. We all wanted to go out the door but there were girls on the floor and I would look down and I didn’t want to step on anyone but other girls did. I would see a hand and then a foot stepping on it. I saw someone step on another girl’s legs and I would just stand there and others would push me to keep moving but I didn’t want to step on anyone because everyone was running, screaming and crying.

Michelle: Does the moment feel long?
Patty: Long because the shaking stops and you don’t know that it has stopped because you feel like everything is still moving and after the earthquake there were a lot of aftershocks so every time something moves you think it’s going to be another earthquake and that goes on for many days after the earthquake…

Michelle: How did you get home?
Patty: How did I get out of school? I don’t remember. My memory starts when I was at the second bus stop, the bus stop where I would catch my second bus to get home. How did we get there? I think walking which took us maybe 2 hours to get there because I don’t remember how we got there. There were supposedly three of us together but I only remember one girl with me.

Michelle: So you get on the second bus and you get home?
Patty: We were waiting for the second bus after walking for about 2 hours and people were saying there were no buses. We didn’t know what to do so we kept walking. I’m not sure how much longer until we got to a place called Reloj de Flores which is at the entrance of Bolivar del Ejercito which was the route to get home but it was also the longest path so I didn’t think we would get home until the next day by foot because we had already walked a lot! But I asked my friend and she made me remember something I had forgot because I kept thinking, “How did I get home?” I remember getting on a microbus in the Reloj de Flores because a bus driver asked, “Girls, where are you going?” Because I don’t know how we looked, if we looked scared or something because we were just little girls you know. So the bus stopped in the middle of the road and waved us over to get on and we were scared but we also wanted to go home. So the bus driver asked us where we were headed and we said “Valle Nuevo” and the bus driver said he was going to “Santa Lucia” which was the neighbourhood next to mine. From Santa Lucia to Valle Nuevo it was about 15-20 mins,
walking. I think we had already walked about 4 hours. We got to Santa Lucia and we saw kids from our neighbourhood. I just know I felt relief when I saw someone I knew, you know? And again I don’t know how we looked but they started bugging us and saying good thing we were back and we kept walking. My mom was going crazy because it was already 4 or 5pm and I wasn’t home yet and she didn’t know where I was or what had happened and I think all you heard on the news was “this collapsed, this person died, this many dead” so when I got there I remember, I think it was in the entrance and someone said “Niña Ceci! Patty’s here” so I think her heart returned to her chest because Mila and Michelle were already with her.

Michelle: So how was the rest of the day?
Patty: I remember that we had no power because we were also in the middle of a war so we never had power so that night, aside from not having power… feeling scared, sleeping outside in the street because people would say a stronger earthquake was coming and that our houses would collapse or that they could sink into the ground and that more people would die so we slept outside that night.

Michelle: Were you able to sleep?
Patty: I don’t remember. I think from the exhaustion and everything but with everyone around, all the families outside, it was like a party; talking, drinking coffee with pastries and the other kids telling stories and jokes. It was fun!

Interview #4 With Pablo Campos, Father Of Michelle Campos Castillo.

Recorded July 23, 2020 – In A Call Between Edmonton And El Salvador

Michelle: Do you remember the exact date of the earthquake?
Pablo: It was on October 10th of ’86 at noon, at about 12:10pm I think.
Michelle: Do you remember where you were?
Pablo: In Santa Tecla [suburb of San Salvador]. I was teaching at a school there so I was in the office when the earthquake started.

Michelle: Was it a regular day? Anything different?
Pablo: No, everything was the same. It was 12pm so I was talking to a driver, we called him ‘Brother.’ So I was just making conversation and I said, “Hey Brother, like every human being, do you have a fear of anything? Or anyone? Do you have a phobia? Or what are you scared of?” And he said, “You know what, I’m scared of earthquakes.” It was a coincidence right? I said, “Hey there’s an earthquake.” He said, “Don’t joke about that, I told you that’s my biggest fear.” I said, “No, Brother, seriously it’s an earthquake.” So in the office there were some water bottles and you could see the water moving so I said, “Look at the bottle of water” and it was moving, and so I said, “look at the water” and when he saw, we were on the second floor, he ran out of there so fast. And where we were there was a soccer field down there, he went running down those stairs and everyone went crazy there, everyone going down the stairs. But when we all go down there to the first floor, he was already in the middle of the field. You know how soccer fields are really big? And he was in the middle. That’s why I remember all of that.

So that day at that time our boss said, “Everything is suspended, we’re not working”and that some vehicles would come pick us up and take us home. We drove through downtown and since the earthquake had just hit, that building Ruben Dario, right across from the Antel building, it was about 5 floors and the top floor was at the ground floor level. The whole thing sunk and on the other side of the Palacio Nacional,by the pharmacy, there were dead bodies. We saw about 15 bodies on the sidewalk covered up with blankets. That was really hard to see because I remember all of that very well. That is still very present for me because there were lots of events. Do you remember? Actually you might not remember that your mom, she went to school withDago’s sister, because his sister had a salon. So she had finished school and I don’t know how long she was there but she started working in that building, Ruben Dario.The salon was in the basement of that building but then she didn’t want to go that day. I think it was the day before that she told me she wasn’t going to work there anymore because the lady wouldn’t let her do the job she wanted to do, which was doing hair. She would just have her like an assistant, having her run errands for the lady or getting her food. Something like that is what she had told me and I told her not to go anymore, if that’s what she was using her for, to not go. That day that she chose not to go, that was the day of the earthquake. Anyone who was there in that basement where the salon was, all those people died because the building sank. It took days for them to pull bodies out of there. They brought in a rescue team and rescue dogs from Mexico and they would bring out the bodies. That was horrible. Several buildings collapsed. That was in ’86. You remember that right?

Michelle: Do you remember what time you got home?
Pablo: Yes, I remember. Like I said we got dropped off right? We left at approximately 1:00-1:30 so I got home around 2:30-3:00pm. Since there are many stops on the way I got home around 3:00pm.

Michelle: And do you remember where you slept that night?
Pablo: Yes, in the house.
Michelle: In the house? You didn’t stay outside with the neighbours?
Pablo: No, since things had calmed down we were all inside because in spite of everything, I felt that our house was pretty safe because it didn’t even crack, they held out. It feels like another strong earthquake could come but no, there were just aftershocks. I don’t think we slept outside because there wasn’t much space for me to stay so I think we slept inside.

Michelle: So how old were you when this happened in ’86?
Pablo: ’86, 1986…
Michelle: Like 30? If mom was 29? Like 39 years old?
Pablo: In ’86, yes…

Michelle: So would you say you’re used to earthquakes? You’re not scared of them?
Pablo: You know, I’m not scared of them. I’m not scared of earthquakes. Honestly I talked to my friend about that and he said, “ I’m not scared of anything” and I said, “you’re not normal.” He said, “Why?” I said, “Everyone is scared of something.” For example: snakes. Yolanda [wife] is scared of snakes and mice. Today we were out on the patio and she saw a snake, it wasn’t big, maybe three inches long and she yelled, “Ahh kill the snake!” but I didn’t and she got so mad at me because she wanted me to kill it. But I’m scared of heights…

Michelle: Oh?
Pablo: But you know, I’m not scared of flying because I’ve been on a plane many times and a small plane, it doesn’t feel good to be on a small plane. But being in a tall building and looking down feels… I get chills. That’s it: heights. But I have climbed mango trees and I don’t feel anything, but if it’s a very big height, yes.

Page 30:

A white page with a small, sans-serif font at the bottom right corner of the page, which reads: Newspaper images, La Prensa Grafica, 1986. From the artist’s collection.

Page 31:

A white page with a large coppery-blue rectangle at its centre. Within this larger coloured rectangle, there are eight black and white archival images from the aftermath of the 1986 earthquake in San Salvador. The images are all different sizes and include both portrait and landscape-oriented photos. In the photos, there are crumbled buildings and collapsed roads, even with cars on them. There are people digging through the rubble; rescuers descending with headlamps; people dragging their belongings and furniture onto the street, and civilians working together to remove people and objects from sites of destruction.

Page 32 and 33:

A full-two page image spread showing a panoramic illustration split across both pages. The illustration is digitally made and is mostly placed in a long black rectangle with irregular edges. There are white gaps within the black rectangle that show black line drawings of a young girl, representing Michelle, eating, sitting, and sleeping in a hammock. Coppery-green line drawings on the solid black area show an adult smiling warmly and offering some food to the child, as well as adults chatting in a circle, a tall yucca tree with long and pointed leaves, as well as a couple of smaller fruiting trees. English text across the top of the illustration, written in bright yellow, reads “I wasn’t scared that night. The chatter of my neighbours was everything I needed to feel safe. In a culture of matriarchs, there was always someone to care for me, watch me, feed me.” At the bottom of the image, this text is repeated in Spanish, drawn in a light-coloured blue.

Image credit text, listed on the back cover: Terremoto Wall 1, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

Page 34:

A white page with a short biography of the artist. Her name is bolded in black, with text in thin sans-serif font that reads: Michelle Campos Castillo is a Salvadoran visual artist living in Edmonton. She has been the recipient of several public art commissions from the City of Edmonton, including Platanos, a set of three sculptures on permanent display at Belvedere Transit Centre, and is currently producing artwork for the LRT Valley Line in the west end of the city. A frequent collaborator with artist Vivek Shraya, she has provided art direction and photography for Vivek’s Trisha photo series, graphic design for her Lambda Literary Award-nominated book, What I Love About Being QUEER, and VS Books, the artist’s imprint with Arsenal Pulp Press.

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