We Myself and Us 

The 2019-2020 MAWA Foundation Mentorship Program Exhibition

A response by hannah_g

“I visited the Foundation Mentorship Program’s exhibition, Me Myself and Us, via a crisp website created by the mentees. Viewing the work like this was akin to reading, in that it was a concentrated, intimate, and interior experience and I appreciated the opportunity to encounter the work in this way.

Another of the many things that I appreciate about MAWA’s FMP is that groups are not assembled around a theme or skillset. Difference is centred as a resource that is accessed through a foundation of mutual support and free exchange. The exhibition title speaks to this useful mix of valuing individual and group experience. In light of this, I will talk about each artist’s work individually rather than focussing on common themes, which you will nevertheless doubtless observe.”

Nichol Marsch : Untitled (Cohabitation) (2020; dryer lint, MDF, Plexi, 16”W x 36”H x 7”D).

Marsch’s sculpture hovers against the wall like a torso bereft of its usual appendages. Its slight sag seems a precursor to an aged stoop and this resonates with the work’s reference to time. For five years, Marsch collected lint from the drier she used to dry her and her partner’s clothes. The sculpture is a chronological assemblage of this collection, and is reminiscent of the striations in a sedimentary rockface. Unlike geological formations, Marsch’s material is precarious, easily torn apart, and highly flammable. Yet, the offal greys and violets seem like they’d make good insulation, keeping in the warmth and protecting against the cold, continuing the function of the clothes that shed them. The couple’s lint medley is a kind of poem to a relationship, the combination of the seen and unseen—passing time, gestures of care, flashes of upset, the hundreds of tiny things that a partnership is composed of. The humour within the sculpture’s weird attractiveness bucks the shiny prescription of what a relationship should look like. Marsch shows the guts; they are indecipherable, but she invites us to read them as we might tea leaves (or entrails) to reveal something about our own private lives without impinging on the sanctity of her own.

Kristina Blackwood : Winona Tree (2015; CMYK silkscreen on paper, 21.5”x 28.5”).

The title Winona Tree implies Blackwood’s diptych is in part a portrait of her maternal grandmother who planted it. Forgoing the pun on family trees, the notion of ancestry remains, as well as the ways that we connect to the relations we do and do not know, and those who are living and those who are not. The two photos Blackwood took of her grandmother’s strong, tall tree show its full summery body and a close up looking up into its full thick branches. The graininess of the latter picture emphasises the materiality of the image and its subject and speaks to the ways we mark and share our lineage. 

One of Blackwood’s grandmothers planted a tree and she had a child who had a child who knows this tree and has some kind of affinity with it. Perhaps she finds parts of the woman who came before her within its branches, and so parts of herself.

Barb Bottle : Grief:1 (2020; scanned polaroid prints on rag paper and mixed media, 5” x 5”).

Bottle’s mixed media photos of gesturing bodies connected with bright red thread lyrically depict the contortions of grief. They read as documents made to witness and liberate.

Rituals are created in attempts to direct profound forces, such as love and death, that have the power to transform us. Bottle’s use of a white voluminous dress in her choreography is reminiscent of the garb of priestesses, women charged with reading and channeling such forces. Red thread is sewn through each of the three sets photos, as if something is being directed or charted. Several of the photos bear the perforations of a needle, maybe made in preparation to receive the thread, or that are leftover after it has been pulled clear of them. Feet, arms, hands, mouths, tattoos, nooks and crannies—the thread passes through all these things but also clings, encroaches. The spasmodic lines might represent the grief that renders a body but also be the evidence (the wound?) of what once helped hold that body together—a relationship, a bond, a sense of self.

Laura E. Darnbrough : Madeline with Honey; Shaneela & Strawberries; Maddie Magnus-Walker with Mustard & Mangoes; Malaikah with Slice of Key Lime Pie. (2020; watercolour & graphite on paper, 13” x 17”).

Darnbrough’s portraits of young women meditate upon what nourishes a sense of self and what one chooses to show of this. She paints them on stark white backgrounds and the women are also a little bleached as if emerging from a searing light. Each of them is portrayed in the act of taking food into her mouth. Sexual, knowing, nonplussed, and comic, the food is made flesh. Darnbrough plays on the long strand in art history in which women’s bodies are presented for the consumption of men and a patriarchal gaze. Darnbrough is part of a counter tradition that discards the hierarchical binary of artist-subject and instead asserts the collaboration that occurs between an artist, the person they are creating an image with, and the political context in which this happens. The twist is that Darnbrough and these women are not only well versed in the performance of portraiture but that these performances are for their own gratification and nourishment, and therein lies the pleasure for the onlookers.

Monique Fillion : Embedded 1, 2 and 3 (2020; digital photo on rag paper, 24” x 40”).

Fillion’s three photos coax one’s thoughts to tumble gently around the pleasures of light and free association. I found the skeleton hull of a ship, Joan of Arc’s tunic, hair exploding in armpits, and Ned Kelly’s helmet emerging from a palette of snowy tundra and bronzed desert. Such associations reveal some of the abysses, biases, and peculiarities of one’s own knowledge and experience. 

Although there is an organic feel to each of Fillion’s pieces, they assert the cool perfection of digital manipulation. Their arch artificialness is balanced by the imperfections (made perfect, however, by being mirrored into symmetry—a clever trick) in the form of shadows, freckles, and crevices in the material and layers of tissue paper that Fillion sculpted and lit with sunlight coming from a window. Her use of natural light melts the hints of alienation into the hues of an altered state and underlies the invitation to be open to the possibilities of shadows, to shifts that enable new shapes to appear, to take time to become immersed in looking and the ensuing expansive effects that might fill an abyss with something other than itself.

Jessie Jannuska :Aapiji ozaagi’aan ookomisan (2020; seed beads, thread, velvet, attached to board 17” x 11”).

There’s a great deal of gentleness in Jannuska’s portrait of an Indigenous woman. The beads she used are rounded and their colours warm. The pose is reminiscent of a 1950s glamour girl but the medium of beading safekeeps the vitality and beauty of the body within simple, modest lines.

The many beads which fill and form Jannuska’s figure speak to the numbers of women who support and love each other in a community—the many supporting one, the one supporting many. The metaphor is extended through the beads being ‘seed beads’ and thus connoting a potential for growth and life.

The black velvet background the woman leans against seems to hold the vast darkness of a beginning, of nothing existing but the woman with her unearthly red eyes, an earring the colour of the sun, her radiant skin, and her rich loose hair. She carries the darkness in the spaces between the beads that form her and also in a single limb, her right leg, which looks like it might be claiming the inky darkness her own body throws into relief.

Jocelyne Le Léannec : Cycle (2020; 112 piece, leaded stained glass, with zinc frame, and chain, 21” diameter).

Within a sealed blood red ring of glass Le Léannec’s bright blue fish tops the mortal circle it forms with a skeletal brown fish below, their lips at each other’s tails. The daylight shining through the piece—affected by clouds scudding across the sun and the sun’s own journey across the sky—will enliven different parts of Cycle, creating movement, changes in emphasis, a sense of being at the mercy of prevailing forces.

An image such as Le Léannec’s is potent with fishy symbols and stories told in response to powerful forces, such as the flight of Aphrodite with her son from the monsterous Typhon. At this point in time, the cycle of life and death seems to be in overdrive with the Covid-19 pandemic, climate crisis, and chasm of social and economic inequalities growing wider in their wake. People are swirling together in this cycle while experiencing profound separation from each other, enclosed in the blood red circles of ourselves, our bubbles. But by naming her piece Cycle, Le Léannec seems to sound a note of hope—the full blue body of life will surely return.

Allison Stevens : Unfulfilled (2019; shot on 16mm film (black and white and colour) and digitally edited, 4 minutes). Cycles of production (2020; 8.5” x 11”, digital photographs printed on transparent paper pressed against card stock).

Stevens’ 16mm film reimagines the character of the Bride of Frankenstein into an oppressive admin job where she is surrounded by chauvinist monsters. The office, with its desk, computer, and colleagues, hem in the Bride, betraying the promise of work being a means of female emancipation. This Bride was created by a system intent on producing workers to serve the machine of patriarchal capitalism.

Inthe1935 movie Bride of Frankenstein (originating from a subplot in Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein) the bride rejects the monster she has been created to marry. Stevens’ Bride also rejects her monsters—capitalism and patriarchy—that are destroying her with their demands for her lifeless productivity. The movie bride is ultimately destroyed by her monster (though to be fair he also kills himself as a favour to humanity, something that current iterations of capitalism are unlikely to do) whereas Stevens’ is left alive but struggling. The film ends with her protagonist asking, “How do I live in this artificial world?” The horrible irony being that she is also a construct.