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/.
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