Jennifer Linton presents drawings and etchings that fuse emotion with religious iconography to explore themes of female sexuality, the concept of virginity and the difficult territory of child abuse. St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins features images of Linton masquerading as Ursula, the patron saint of schoolgirls. Blood transforms into flowers and kilt-clad schoolgirls behead monsters in fantastical works that combine camp and catharsis.

Jennifer Linton is a Canadian interdisciplinary visual artist working with animation, drawing and printmaking. Her animated films explore the traditional medium of paper cutout animation, combining a hand-drawn style with the texture and materiality of stop-motion. Thematically, her films often blend beautiful and erotic imagery with grotesque and uncanny elements. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from York University (2010), and a BA in Art & Art History from the University of Toronto (1992). She also teaches art and design courses at post-secondary institutions such as OCAD University (Toronto) and Sheridan College (Oakville). Linton has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.

To learn more about Jennifer and her current work, visit her website.

The visual points of departure for the photographs and paintings in Canadian Pastoral are sites rather than people: childhood homes, typically Canadian scenes and urban boundaries. However, the focus was on how these sites became surrogates for individuals and their ideals. The artists explored their environments with artistic sophistication and subtle skepticism to reveal a substratum of meaning while encouraging us to look anew at our surroundings and to reflect on our subjective responses to them.

Toni Hafkenscheid is a Toronto based photographer originally from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In 1989, he graduated from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and shortly thereafter moved to Toronto. He has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Canada, the U.S., Japan and Europe.

Teshah Kosowan is a graduate of Fine Arts from the the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (2004). She started making bags in 2007, in pursuit of a creative outlet. And continues to create bags, clothes, quilts, and other textiles to this day.

To see her current work, visit her Instagram.

Linh Ly is a Calgary based photographer. She studied at University of Calgary, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1998. She has received numerous grants from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts as well as the Canada Council. Her artworks have been exhibited in artist-run-centres, public galleries and museums. Linh exhibited at The Alberta Biennale in 2007 and Alberta Emergent Photographers in 2008.

To see her current work, visit her website.

The below text is taken from the 2005 brochure written by David Ross, one of the Past exhibition coordinators at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art.

The premise of the exhibition is a paradox - can artists use materials to express Im-material realities? The Vancouver-based collaborative team of Virginia Abbot and Ilze Babris, and the Vernon-based Carin Covin use material to create metaphors about non-physical aspects of human experiences. Their works engender poetic resonance through careful manipulation of a variety of materials and thoughtful interventions in the exhibition space.

Lifelines

The collaborative team of Virginia Abbott and Ilze Bebris unravel for us networks of grids, curves, arabesques, compressed and small-scale structures, akin to man-made constructions and engineering feats.

The starting point of Abbot and Babris’ artistic process lies in primordial, tactile, visual and creative activities. collecting objects. Observing their shape, their colour, their weight. Tinkering with them: What associations can the shape recall? How does the object come into contact with its environment? Next, the artists laboriously arrange a wealth of objects, creating esthetic and utilitarian connections. They collaborate to take over the exhibition space an ever-increasing complexity.

“Parallel with nature” is the phrase Paul Cezanne used to describe the nascent ideals of Modern Art in the late 19th century. in the 21st century, our aspirations are bound to artificial environments. Like many contemporary artists and writers, Abbott and Bebris draw from their surroundings, to create a parallel universe that allows enhanced consideration of the original.

Word

In her exhibition, Word Carin Covin explores how the substance of language erodes as it passes through a state of interpretation like in a child's game of telephone. The artist divides language into four parts: Word Thought, a wall drawing, Word Spoken, a cutout, Work Heard, a sewn paperwork and Word Remembered, a work that uses cast shadow. All four works are visual representations of different qualities of language. By separating Word into four parts Covin expresses how each category can be understood as a fracture that contributes to the degradation of meaning. From the speaker’s perspective, the gap between mind (Word Thought) and mouth (Word Spoken) can be great. Word Remembered, traces shadows on the wall like words leaving a fleeting impression in our minds. Covin’s installation also interrogates us: which part ultimately commands the story, the thought, the voice, the ear of the memory?

Covin mentions White on White, 1918 by Kasimir Malevich, a leading figure of the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th Century, as an influence for her work. the influence is not only on a formal level - Malevich perceives his 1918 canvas as the culmination of a linear (art historical) thought process. The thought process leads to both a pinnacle (Malevich called his movement Suprematiivism) and nothingness (to describe bluntly what can be seen on the canvas). It would seem that in analogous way, Covin’s works, via their “blankness”, communicate that words are light, tenuous, immaterial.

Ilze Bebris’ practice centres on installation and sculpture, employing everyday materials and manufactured objects to examine the experience of contemporary urban life and the tension between the natural and the artificial. She is interested in the language of materials, the meanings and discourses created by their history and use. Bebris is particularly interested in how changing environments shape our notion of place and identity.

To learn more about Ilze and her current work, visit her website.

Virginia Abbott

Carin Covin received her BFA from Okanagan University College in 2003, and her MFA from UBC Okanagan in 2010. Her artistic practice involves interdisciplinary research of written and visual language through the methodology of visually mapping of textual intersections. Recent exhibitions include Reduction Road, at the Station House Gallery in Williams Lake.

Recreating an old-style family restaurant circa-1950s to 1960s using found, fabricated, borrowed furniture, props, photographs, videos, lanterns, videos, plants. The 7-feet tall booths recalls Kelowna's City Park Café during the 1940s. In the back is the Karaoke Room, also known as the "Jasmine Room," decorated with landscape paintings, paper-cutouts, girlie posters, moose antlers, and karaoke videos. Events such as "Artist Trading Cards" sessions, "Pirated Chinese Movie Nights" were held throughout the run of the exhibition

Karen Tam is a Tiohtià:ke/Montréal-based artist and curator whose research focuses on the constructions and imaginations of cultures and communities through her installations in which she recreates Chinese restaurants, karaoke lounges, opium dens, curio shops and other sites of cultural encounters. Since 2000, she has exhibited her work and participated in residencies in North America, Europe, and China, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, He Xiangning Art Museum, and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Most recently, she curated the ‘Whose Chinatown?’ exhibition at Griffin Art Projects in 2021, and had solo exhibitions at the Varley Art Gallery and Campbell River Art Gallery, and was included in Manif d'Art 10: La bienniale de Québec in 2022. She has received grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts du Québec, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Tam was the winner of the Prix Giverny Capital 2021 awarded by the Fondation Giverny pour l'art contemporain, and was a finalist for the 2017 Prix Louis-Comtois, a finalist for the 2016 Prix en art actuel from the Musée national des beaux-arts de Québec, and long-listed for the 2010 and 2016 Sobey Art Awards.

Tam holds a MFA in Sculpture (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and a PhD in Cultural Studies (Goldsmiths, University of London). She is the Adjunct Curator at Griffin Art Projects, and is a contributor to the Asia Collections outside Asia: Questioning Artefacts, Cultures and Identities in the Museum (2020) publication edited by Iside Carbone and Helen Wang, to Alison Hulme (ed.) book, The Changing Landscape of China's Consumerism (2014) and to John Jung's book, Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurant (2010). Her work is in museum and corporate collections such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Collection Hydro-Québec, Collection Royal Bank of Canada, Microsoft Art Collection, and in private collections in Canada, United States, and United Kingdom.

To learn more about Karen and her current work, visit her website.

The below text is written by Ray Cronin for the Alternator, who at the time of writing this in 2005, was a Halifax based curator and writer.

Language transforms our world… we are not talking about the cosmos out there, which preceded us and is indifferent to us, but about the world of our involvements, including all the things they incorporate in their meaning for us. - Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments.

Western convention would have it that the world as we know it is mostly our own creation. That position is arguable, I suppose, though a few minutes out on the streets of any large urban centre will likely still most dissenting voices. From a viewpoint that is submerged in the concrete canyons of the modern city, the real world appears pretty far away buried deep under varied creations of what philosophers call techn_. For tool wielders, which we undoubtedly are, the temptation, or perhaps the habit, it to treat everything as either a potential tool or as a potential material for the exercise of tools. A world in which everything is exploitable would be like what, exactly? Well, I’m with Charles Taylor: such a world would look like modernity, it would - it does - look like us.

Whether the world is our creation or not, culture certainly is, and humans inhabit culture like goldfish in a bowl. And, like goldfish, we tend to forget where we’ve been. Each new turn is treated as if it’s really new as if we’ve reached a new stage in our development. It’s the old joke about the goldfish: “Oh, look - a castle! Oh, look - a castle! Oh, look - a castle! Oh, look - a castle!” ad Infinitum. What that goldfish needs is something to make her realize that she’s in a rut - what we seem to need is some sort of external memory, to remind us that we’ve seen these castles in the air before. A sense of deja vu is just a good defence in these times.

In Engagè, Svava Juliusson presents a body of work that is not about rendering judgment, but it is about rendering, the vast industrial complex that surrounds something as seemingly natural as a cow, a sheep, or a pig. Her materials (carpet, underlay, fabric, plywood, plastics, wax) are all derived, in part or wholly, from animal products. The very banality of the material is the key to the impact of the work - is there any aspect of our lives untouched by products derived from, for example, a cow? Apparently, there are precious few.

This work is not political in the sense of advocacy, though it will be easy, and not incorrect, to see it in political terms. but easy and correct isn’t enough - to stop at the political implications of this work is to miss if you’ll pardon the expression, the meat of Offal. To see this work as wholly polemical is to miss the sense of wonder at its root. It goes back to that sense of deja vu, to the reminder of the reality of that goldfish’s castle. As humans, as wielders of tools, and builders of castles, we run the risk of becoming slaves to our technology - to forgetting that technology is something we use, not the other way around. The sheer ubiquity of the products of the rendering industry, the way that every aspect of our daily life is somehow touched by animals - animals that we may or may not choose to eat - points to just how finely woven is the technological web in which we find ourselves.

There is a sense of awe in Juliesson’s work, an awe based on the sheer scale of the industry that she has been researching, but also apparent in the glimpse into the unacknowledged reality of or technological society. that so much of our plastics, fabrics, glues and foams that make up our domestic spaces are drawn, at least in part, from animal products, makes our high-tech pretensions seem so shallow. The veneer of techn_ is stretched particularly thin in its instance, exposing that it is not just nature that is “red in tooth and claw.”

These sculptures all carry an immediate impact, one heightened by the seemingly surreal aspect of their materials. The calf figure, the line of heads, and the other elements of the Offal expose, without histrionics, something that is not exactly secret, but which most prefer not to know. There is a logic to this work, one that is as inexorable as the assembly lines that made it possible. In essence, Juliesson is returning found materials to the form from which they were refined, yet she is doing so with a sense of humour, of wonder, and of play. That makes these sculptures something more than that logic. The world is both rich and strange; we do ourselves a disservice when we forget that.

Svava Thordis Juliusson is a visual artist born in Siglufjörður, Iceland in 1966 and currently based in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Juliusson began undergraduate studies at the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1993; received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at NSCAD University in 1997; and completed her MFA in studio at York University in 2007. Juliusson is a founding member of the collective (F)NOR

to learn more, click the link to her website here.

Curatorial Statement

Futuristic Regalia is a curatorial proposal presented by Daina Warren (Vancouver) for the three emerging contemporary First Nations artists – Peter Morin (Tahltan) and Sonny Assu (Laich-kwil-tach), and Daina Warren (Montan a Slavey Cree). The three artists work with the wearable costume as a means to represent an indigenous body, while dealing with the stereotypes and realities of aboriginal communities. They reconnect with history through the language of ceremonial clothing, the use of traditional family crests and the incorporation of organic materials. Concepts of past and present experiences and how to create a positive synthesis for the future is at the core of this curatorial statement.

Traditional blankets have significant political ramifications such as proclaiming hereditary rights, obligations and powers. Historically blankets were passed down from family member to family member and stories accompanied each of the robes. Many feel that the blanket provides comfort and a connection to their ancestors. While wearing a button blanket the individual has a sense of security and strength and can exude physical and spiritual confidence during a prayer or a talk. Blankets are also passed down or fabricated because of an important event in a person’s life, usually with coming of age, a potlatch or because of a vision from the ancestors.

Like the button blanket, many modifications are occurring in the Native culture. Many First Nation’s youth are moving off reserve to urban or rural areas of Canada, and with that move comes a dislocation from traditional communities. Small communities cannot offer the same opportunities and support for the youth: it is dif cult to keep up with the constant developments of widespread industrial and corporate culture. Many youth are independently moving away from family and community, gaining new experiences, learning job skills in towns and cities, or attending colleges and universities. However, moving away means not always being able to connect to traditional culture, or the practice of traditional songs, prayer or language. Peter Morin’s business attire reflects the need for a spiritual or cultural connection while surviving in an urban environment.

Peter Morin connects city living to Tahltan country life, (which is located near Telegraph Creek, in the upper interior region of northern British Columbia) hundreds of miles from where he now resides. Collecting soil from favored places on his reserve, Peter kneaded the dirt into a chosen business suit.

In this creative act he is collecting parts of his land, gathering memories of Tahltan life, and bringing those ephemeral aspects together with his everyday existence in a world of cement, buildings, glass, and work. In addition to rubbing the rich soil into the fibers of the garment, he drew an actual visual image of his traditional landscape with the dirt, illustrating it upon the suit. With this rendered landscape, he can carry the land with him, grounding himself in his traditional roots and acknowledging the earth that he and his immediate family are formed from. This piece promotes a connection between Peter and his relations, ancestors, spirituality, and cultural identity.

"Cultural identity is about finding a comfortable space. When I think about the objects of culture, the things that have carried this type of identity, I realize that clothing plays a very important role in this identity." - Peter Morin

Peter completes the work by providing two dimensional works that have self-portraits of him standing alone. Inside his unclothed skin there is a faint image of the crow, so even with the lack of visible clothes or traditional apparel, Peter carries the spirit of his people inside himself.

"I am trying to make a presence for myself. I am a Crow; I come from the Crow clan but I also feel like a ghost. I want to reference the role that I play within my culture and make a physical space for my body within my culture so that I can feel safe." - Peter Morin

Sonny Assu’s disguise is a blend of some of the many facets of his urban experience with design forms unique to his Laich-kwil-tach Nation culture. It’s an interesting idea because Sonny turns the tables and appropriates from a mass-produced, melting pot culture. Sonny chooses the entity of Spider Man/ Peter Parker to connect with because of Spiderman’s organic "powers."

The mixture of spider and human attributes contrasts well with many of the figures in West Coast folklore; many spirits are a combination of abilities that can shift from animal to human forms, have incredible spiritual powers and watch over the community, teaching the individuals social and survival skills. Many of these animal/human forms are illustrated on traditional blankets. Sonny connects with this figure because Parker is an individual who inhabits a large, metropolitan city by watching over it and providing safety for other city inhabitants. The fusion of West Coast Native and pop culture is a mirror of Sonny’s own cultural background.

The blanket is also colored with the identifiable coloration in Spiderman’s disguise. The blue and red echoes those first traditional blankets that evolved from the introduction of western materials after contact. He also uses other traditional aspects like the buttons and wool cloth. This blanket is a good example of the clothing being adapted to the surroundings in which it’s worn. Especially now, with many First Nation’s youth supporting icons of pop culture and emulating "contemporary" role models and at the same time looking to traditional figures for guidance, the blanket retains some of the original qualities of the traditional blanket, yet provides an entertaining aspect for youth to relate to.

Coming from another perspective and born from another place of Canada (Hobbema, Alberta), I made connections with my work to that of Peter and Sonny's pieces. By basing their idea of how to meld both contemporary and the traditional, I looked at where my ancestors are from and what types of practices the prairie nations uphold. Much of this project stemmed from looking at pow-wow clothing has evolved, if attending such a sacred event, you will see that many of the costumes have obtained new materials that have been added to the traditional clothing.

I think the headdress is something of much fascination for me, because of the complex form its has (with so many feathers) and the movement it gives during dancing. I felt that a natural place was to keep it on the head but try and create the tradition form through hairstyles or as I see them as hair sculptures. These styles are based somewhere between the headdress and the spiritual creature "wild woman of the woods". I wanted to have fun with this piece but still create something that is a memory of tradition. I also chose black and red for some the pieces in respect to the land that I currently live on, which is so far from my own traditional territory. However I also wanted to pay respect to my ancestors and elders by choosing white and grey hair pieces to create a stylish headdress and create forms that would be an homage to them.

The main idea behind the project was to show the continuation of developments of traditional ideas, showing how such concepts as regalia, specifically the button blanket, and how it can reflect the social changes and evolution of traditional indigenous cultures. Sonny, Peter, and myself are examples of Native culture sustaining itself and utilizing traditional aspects to provide a spiritual or emotional strength. The traditional clothing still stands for security, for taking that security out into the public and using it to exude confidence and poise no matter what the situation, while remaining grounded to our ancient beliefs.

Sonny Assu (Ligwilda’xw of the Kwakwaka'wakw Nations) has been recognized for his mashups of Indigenous iconography and popular culture. Through a variety of mediums including sculpture, painting, prints, large-scale installations and interventions Assu’s work maintains a profound connection to past traditions while speaking to pertinent issues of our time. Assu’s work is included in numerous major public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver), and the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2021, Assu received the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, awarded every two years by the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana - the home of one of the finest collections of Indigenous art in the world.

To learn more about Sonny and his current work, visit his website.

Peter Morin is a Tahltan Nation artist, curator and writer currently based in Victoria, BC. Morin studied art at Emily Carr Institute and recently completed his MFA at UBC Okanagan in 2011. In both his artistic practice as well as his curatorial work, Morin explores issues of de-colonization and indigenous identity and language. In 2010 the artist was awarded the British Columbia Creative Achievement Award for First Nations’ Art. Morin is currently serving as the curator in residence at Open Space Artist Run Centre in Victoria BC.

Daina Warren graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (ECUAD) in 2003 and gained an MA Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia in 2012. After receiving an Aboriginal Curatorial Collective Residency to work with grunt gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia in 2000, Daina remained at the gallery as associate curator and administrator until 2009. She curated numerous shows at grunt gallery, including a performance titled Taking Stick Cabaret, a collaboration with Lisa C. Ravensbergen. She currently works as the curator and director of Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Warren was elected as one of four Indigenous women curators as part of 2015 Asia-Pacific Visual Arts Delegation to participate in the First Nations Curators Exchange an International Visitors Program of the 8th Asia-Pacific Trienniale in Brisbane, Australia.