Acrow Pillow Prop comprised of a collection of architectural paintings that explored the poetics of space. Using the gallery wall as a blank canvas for experimentation and play, Taite used found fabrics as substitutes for mark-making. Paint mis-tints and structural forms created repetition in pattern and formation, which strove towards a serendipitous abstraction through assemblage. Taite's works revisited the key points in the history of painterly experimentation, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, architecture and performance.

Robert Taite uses an intuitive approach to his work, combining various elements of color, form and pattern together in an innovative manner, making the viewer reconsider their surroundings by breaking the traditional function of painting and architecture.  His unusual use of framing blurs the line between painting and installation, expanding the viewer’s immersion in the work. Taite also focuses on the constructed nature of painting and his framing gives a sense of non-space.

Robert Taite has exhibited throughout Canada, at Art Los Angeles Contemporary in 2017 and twice at Art Toronto in 2014 and 2016. He is the recipient of numerous grants from the Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Canadian Arts Council. Taite was a finalist for the esteemed Annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2015. 

On Robert Taite // Interpretive Essay by Jessica Bell

This is one of my most significant childhood memories: in a moment of inspiration, I saw my bedroom dresser as a stage. Democratically, I gathered every personal effect within my vision and piled it onto the painted wood surface. I stacked and sidled items up to each other, one form and colour nestling into the next, the composition doubling and extending in the long mirror that sat between the dresser and the wall. When there was no more to be considered, I went into my mother’s bathroom, opened the cabinet beneath her sink and removed a near-full container of baby powder and, looking upon what I had assembled, emptied its entire contents onto my bedroom dresser. It drifted down lazily like snow, settling over every object, mounding and filling crevices, making mountains and valleys where there were hairbrushes, cassette tapes and stuffed toys. The real world became otherworldly because it was cloaked in something my mother bought at a drug store.

Robert Taite once told me that he wanted his work to be so formal that it might create occasions for serendipity. His capacity for conjuring surprise comes from a very particular acuity to surfaces and places. Taite is a proctor of common things: lumber offcuts, decorator’s mis-tints, retired bedding, elastic bands (and the space between them). Out of what exists—and with one eye toward its context—he entertains relationships, allowing colour to find its presence in shape and shape to emerge out of the way it generally wants to be. Like an 8 year old who knows how to make his rec room a kingdom on an uncharacteristically rainy July weekend, Robert Taite creates wonder from the most formalist of form. His most recent works possess an air of recognition. They are lines and blocks that I know, both from participation in a game that was living when I was a child and working now that I call it art. This play, between the vast potential of what a simple thing can be and the earnestness of its construction articulates the tenuous gap between childhood and adulthood. Taite’s work fills this gap.

In the epic tome of his childhood person, Karl Ove Knausgård writes that

Understanding the world requires you to keep a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length, we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge.

The abstraction Robert Taite is concerned with in Acrow Pillow Prop is neither magnification or reduction solely but rather the transitions in between. His formal language is concerned with the zoom, the space between opening and closing your eyes where stars can sometimes be seen on the inside of your eyelids if you rub them just so. It comes from and describes a peculiar kind of knowledge rooted in the very thingness of things and also in the way they float about in the world. It is a game in which things are just as they are and simultaneously everything they could ever become. This is what Taite is concerned with fixing. That it could be possible from dumb matter and the coloured skins Taite envelopes it in defies adult logic, but I sense that this is the serendipity he spoke of. To be surprised in an old brain is hard, but I would argue that to be surprised by formal abstraction is harder.

Motherhood is a psychic and emotional landscape that makes room for everything from the banal to the sublime. It is complicated to articulate the work of motherhood. We ask mothers “Are you working?” implying that staying at home is not work. So much happens in our home space – how does one render this? This was the impetus for Being Home. Farheen Haq has felt the exhaustion, the enclosure, the safety, the uplifting love, the erasure of self, the monotony, the comfort and possibility of transcendence all within the space of her home.

Being Home explored the psychic, spiritual and emotional territories within domestic spaces. They used the dinner table, household linens and the teacup as metaphors for the many thresholds that mothers cross in their daily lives. Wrapping themselves in fabric spoke to the struggle many mothers have with rendering visible the private work that occupies so much of their time.

Haq asked herself:

What is my bodies’ relationship to this site?

How has being home constituted a spiritual/creative practice for me?

How does home live in my body?

How am I home?

How do I render visible the psychic experience of my home space?

Drawing on a history of feminist art practice that claims and makes space, Haq record herself in relation to the kitchen table and domestic objects, to create a vocabulary of gestures with which to negotiate the overlapping identities of motherhood, feminism, gender and ethnicity. Acknowledging the body as the site of direct experience, she positioned her own body as a home space and sought to understand how she could embody and all the mothers (herself, her ancestors, the land) in her life.

Farheen HaQ is a South Asian Muslim Canadian artist who has been living on unceded Lekwungen territory (Victoria, BC) for 20 years.  She was born and raised on Haudenosanee territory (Niagara region, Ontario) amongst a tight-knit Muslim community. Her multidisciplinary practice which often employs video, installation and performance is informed by interiority, relationality, family work, embodiment, ritual and spiritual practice. Farheen’s current work focuses on understanding her family history on Canadian territories, caregiving and the body as a continuum of culture and time.

She has exhibited her work in galleries and festivals throughout Canada and internationally including New York, Paris, Buenos Aires, Lahore, Hungary, and Romania. Recent exhibitions include Sentirse en Casa at Casa Cultura Gallery, Medellin Colombia (2018), Being Home at the Comox Valley Art Gallery (2015), Fashionality at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (2012), Collected Resonance at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2011),  The Emperor’s New Clothes at the Talwar Gallery, New York (2009), and Pulse Contemporary Art Fair, Miami (2008). Farheen received her BA in International Development (1998) from the University of Toronto, her BEd (2000) from the University of Ottawa and her MFA in Visual Arts (2005) from York University. In 2014, Farheen was nominated for Canada’s pre-eminent Sobey Art Award.

For more information about Haq and her work, please visit her website.

Being Home

Interpretive Essay by Karolina Bialkowska

Farheen HaQ’s Being Home shifts memory. It is akin to the feeling of opening your eyes for the first time after an extended closure. Everything looks a little strange, yet nothing is new. It’s an experience that finds me, an hour later, dialing the numbers to call my mom and hear her, see her, for the first time. Being Home complicates and then takes down the impermeable barriers of the public and the private woman.

I walk into the gallery and am immediately aware of my presence within it, in the same way I’m  acutely conscious of how my body moves as a guest in someone else’s home – hushed tones, shuffling feet, an awareness of a certain granted access. The transformation of gallery to familiar home space is catalyzed by the careful arrangement of visual markers and intimate objects typically associated with hidden, private spaces – a dresser, a table, a chair. 

Looped video images play in, on, and around these objects, activating them: The woman’s body and the things she touches every day constitute each other’s making.

A white dresser with a barely-floating frame plays a video of a woman stretching, rolling, folding, and gathering a length of white fabric.  I turn left and encounter “Feast”, projected onto a side-turned grainy wood table is the image of the artist’s rising and falling belly button. I’m immediately moved to consider the table – activated over meals as a meeting space of agreement, of conflict, of love. Her belly button draws me to consider our connections to the women who bear us, bear our presence, and the violence we do onto their bodies and hearts. The rising, falling, grainy belly button connects her to her mother, to her grandmother, to her children. The body that feeds is the table that feeds. These are feasting places. 

Her feet swing infinitely, projected through the bottom of an overturned white chair. Swinging legs recall a childish past. At the same time I also consider how much motherhood is about waiting for unknown futures. Waiting through days, years, tied shoelaces, birthdays, reclaimed lives, seeking elusive quiet and lost moments. How much is the way we feel time negotiated in the home? Those swinging legs complicate linearity.  

Is home only that place we are always leaving? We close the doors on our homes and on the selves that live in them. HaQ does not allow the doors to close. She does not allow us to render invisible the spaces and places so inextricably woven through who we are and how our bodies exist on this land. 

HaQ explores her overlapping identities – gender, ethnicity, feminism, and motherhood – in a way that is as moving as it is grounding. She reminds me of mothers who knead tablecloths and roti breads. The wrapping of fabric triggers a primal memory of a complex gendered body. The sensual enveloping fabric of a tablecloth contain the traces of the bodies it has held and fed.   

The mounted display in the window gallery reclaims the space of the home. My original impression of the tea morphs and shifts when I watch it again, after experiencing Being Home. “Drinking From my Mother’s Saucer” represents the layers and bounty of a maternal body. The teacup is an homage to the sacrifice of the maternal woman, land, and home that pours itself into us. 

The layers of HaQ’s show peel back to expose complexity of the taken for granted. The unravelling is a revelation of bodies, fabric, and conditions hidden within ritual of the day to day. 

Apihkêw presented an examination of matrilineal lineage and concepts of time using ancestral and familial narratives to explore notions of Métis identity and histories. The exhibition consisted of video projections, audio, aluminum prints and installation elements.

Amy Malbeuf is a multidisciplinary visual artist from Rich Lake, Alberta, Canada. She utilises a variety of mediums including performance, installation, sculpture, caribou hair tufting, beadwork, and digital media. Malbeuf has exhibited and performed nationally.

For more information about Malbeuf and her work, please visit her website.

Apihkêw // Interpretive Essay by Gabrielle Legault

She weaves, she braids, she knits
Kokums, great-grandmothers, mothers, aunties, women of the earth. They bring The Land forth through their roots.

The gallery space transports us to northern Alberta, Home Land to artist Amy Malbeuf. A strip of land from her family farm lies raw, reminiscent of that which has been and continues to be dispossessed. Her work is deeply personal (the braids a literal extension of the artist), but it is also somehow familiar.

The work invites us to contemplate the sacredness of the body. Laced hair alludes to the old ways of the women that went before us, weaved through the fibers of our beings. A reminder of the everyday presence of our relations, our ancestors, shrouded in favor of modern-day individualism.

The work is situated within a movement that seeks to honour and give voice to Indigenous women who have been silenced. As a Métis woman, Malbeuf is conscious of the ways in which the bodies, names, stories, and work of indigenous women have been excluded within Métis histories. Contextualized within Malbeuf’s body of work as a performance artist, bead-worker and caribou-hair tufter, apihkêw exists along a continuum of creative endeavours that highlight often-unrecognized women’s craftwork meanwhile re-imagining Indigenous contemporary art.

For Indigenous women, ignoring the women that came before us is futile, as their pain and trauma is inherited through generations. The body is a vessel of not only unresolved despair, but also enduring strength. The gallery environment is haunting, charged with a sense of grief that may cause a visceral reaction for some people. The aesthetic of the work is stark, a reminder of all that has been lost in a relentless gale of colonization: culture, identity, spirituality, language and Land.

The interrelatedness of all living beings is a central component of apihkêw, weaved together through connections that transcend time and space. Illuminating the ways in which experiences are relived throughout generational lifetimes, the work stands as a tactile reminder of the stillness and flux of the passing of time. Drawing on concepts described by indigenous scholar Leroy Little Bear, temporality is understood as cyclical and non-linear. Place is thought together with time and space.

Though subtle, the collection in its entirety is powerful, chilling, and provocative. An atmosphere of mourning culminates with an intensity that is felt through the cutting of braids. Though in other contexts, it may be an icon of residential school trauma and indigenous erasure, here expresses somethingcomplex. The future is re-imagined, unshackled from solemnity. Not an absolving of the women and their resilience that has been passed through the body along bloodlines, but a recognition that strength lies in surrendering to oneself. Though somber, the work whispers beyond the bleakness, of persistence through adversity, of a life after loss, of Ahkemeyimowak.

Fern Helfand, Tannis Nielsen and Samuel Roy-Bois consider the concept of privilege, and what this means to different people. The three artists, all from varying backgrounds and cultures, brought three separate lenses to this installation, creating a complex dialogue between the works, and the issues they explore.

Fern Helfand is a photo-based artist whose work most often reflects and comments on the environments and cultures in which she has lived and traveled. Since receiving an MFA from the University of Florida she has held positions as Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario and Visiting Professor at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang. After teaching photography and digital imaging for twenty years at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, she recently became a UBC Professor Emeritus and is currently embarking on new exciting adventures in art making, travel, and life.

For more information about Helfand and her work, please visit her website.

Tannis Nielsen is a Métis Woman (of Sohto/Anishnawbe and Danish descent) with twenty years of professional experience in the arts, cultural and community sectors, and nine years teaching practice at the post-secondary level. Tannis holds a Masters in Visual Studies Degree (M.V.S.) from the University of Toronto, an Art and Art History-Specialist Degree from U of T, as well as a Diploma in Art and Art History from Sheridan College, in Oakville, Ontario. Her she engages in the process of creation/of art making, both as a quest for seeking knowledge and also as a mechanism for carrying this knowledge forward.

For more information about Nielson and her work, visit her website.

Originally from Quebec City, Samuel Roy-Bois is currently residing in Vancouver. He acquired his BFA from Université Laval in Quebec (1996) and a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montréal (2001). His installations have been shown across Canada and internationally. Roy-Bois is interested in the ways architecture and, in a broader sense, the built environment, contribute to our understanding of the world.

For more information about Roy-Bois and his work, visit his website.

What does it mean to be the problem? // Interpretive Essay by Ruthann Lee

 In 1920, Duncan Campbell Scott, the head of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932, infamously stated: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem ... Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question and no Indian Department.” Scott expanded the Indian Act so that Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their families and put into Canada’s church-run residential schools. The goal was to “kill the Indian in the child” and assimilate or eliminate Indigenous peoples by denying their language and cultural traditions.1 

Between 1831-1996, over 150,000 residential school children suffered from sexual and physical abuse, shame, starvation, and lack of medical care. Upon entry into the schools, students would often have their hair cut short and clothes burned as Anglo-Christian educators tried to “civilize” and erase their Indigenous identities. The traumatic inter-generational impacts of this system are finally being publicized with the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.2

Such is the brutal reality represented by Tannis Nielsen’s extensive arrangement of human hair, nails, burnt wood, and charcoal. Placed near the life-sized portrait of white Jewish children in blackface and “Indian” costumes at a southern Ontario summer resort during the 1960s, Nielsen’s jarring installation unsettles the innocent poses of white children by reminding the viewer of Canada’s violent goal to create a unified colonial nation under the guise of salvation, progress and development.

Given this sobering history, Fern Helfand’s massive photo installation provokes audiences to rethink the so-called “Indian problem” and relocate the problem of Canadian racism onto white people. Helfand asks white viewers: “What does it mean to be the problem?” Her work suggests that one becomes white in Canada by participating in settler colonial and racist practices. The photographs indicate that despite being haunted by anti-Semitic persecution, Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors are invited to earn privileges by investing in white supremacy and the ideas so deeply ingrained in Canadian understandings of race. These ideas are written in the turn of the century Canadian geography textbook pages placed on the back of Helfand’s suspended Plexiglass-encased images. Many Canadian citizens continue to believe in racial hierarches and cannot fathom why costumes that stereotype Indigenous and black identities are harmful and offensive. The costumes convey how violent histories of Indigenous genocide and black slavery are easily dismissed in a consumer society that celebrates the commodification of bodies, land, and labour.

Two contributions by Samuel Roy-Bois invite audiences to unpack their personal assumptions about race. The strategically placed mirror literally reflects how racial identities are located within complex and overlapping histories of dislocation and settlement.

Overall, What does it mean to be the problem? encourages viewers to move beyond feelings of guilt, and rather take the responsibility to resist and confront uneven relations of power, privilege, and oppression.3

1Pamela Palmater, “Canada’s Residential Schools Weren’t Killing Culture, They Were Killing Indians.” Rabble.ca, June 9, 2015. http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/pamela-palmater/2015/06/canadas-residential-schools-werent-killing-culture-they-were-

2Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. TRC Findings, 2015. http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=893

3Lynn Gehl, “Settler Ally Resources.” Lynn Gehl’s website. http://www.lynngehl.com/settler-ally-resources.html