Curated by Sophie Lavoie

The Red Chair Sessions is an ongoing open-call portraiture series that places importance on the acknowledgement and reclamation of Indigenous lands and the revitalization of Indigenous languages. This series ultimately disrupts colonial narratives, centres Indigenous Peoples who have been here since time immemorial, and reminds us that we are all guests on Indigenous land.

The colour red represents Indigenous Peoples on the Medicine Wheel and, in this series, signifies Indigenous Peoples’ inherent connection to the land and to ancestral bloodlines. Whether sitting on or standing beside the red chair, one feels grounded and firmly rooted; the act itself and the resulting portrait serves as a reminder of our responsibility to steward the lands upon which we walk.

Accompanying each photograph is text in the subject’s respective Indigenous language or a mix of languages, and can include: names gifted/given in ceremony (written in either English or syllabics), the Nation to which they belong, and the place names of traditional and Treaty areas in which each session occurred. In this way, Indigenous voices are amplified and become a refusal of the colonizer’s language while pointing out the erasure of Indigenous history.

The series is also a celebration honouring the many achievements of Indigenous Peoples and presents a positive perspective for future generations.

– Nadya Kwandibens

Nadya Kwandibens is Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) from the Animakee Wa Zhing #37 First Nation in northwestern Ontario. She is an award-winning portrait and events photographer, a Canon Ambassador, and has travelled extensively across Canada for over 10 years. In 2008 she founded Red Works Photography. Red Works is a dynamic photography company empowering contemporary Indigenous lifestyles and cultures through photographic essays, features, and portraits.

Nadya Kwandibens: The Red Chair Sessions is organized and circulated by The Muse - Douglas Family Art Centre.

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 FORWARD
Sophie Lavoie

Curator, The Muse, Douglas Family Art Centre

A photograph by Nadya Kwandibens is a powerful image that celebrates the contemporary Indigenous spirit while honouring past generations.

Artists are, in many ways, the eyes of society – their artwork reflects the state of their time. "Indigenous cosmologies, our world-views and philosophies have much to offer current and future generations,” says Kwandibens. “As an artist, to be a part of the continuation of that process is really meaningful.”

Her work’s intent is to elicit a shift in perceptions of First Nations people. “My work is deeply connected to Indigenous people and who we are. That’s always been the main goal behind my work: to have my photography be an accurate representation and depiction of who we are as Indigenous Peoples – as Nations across Turtle Island [North America] – to eradicate negative stereotypes by highlighting our complexities, our realities and our resistance to ongoing colonialism.”

Kwandibens is an Anishinaabe photographer from the Animakee Wa Zhing #37 First Nation on Lake of the Woods in Northern Ontario.  She has spent more than a decade travelling North America, offering her lens to those First Nations people who want to share their stories.

The Red Chair Sessions is a portraiture series representing Indigenous identity and the powerful connection that binds people to land. "We are visitors to different Indigenous Nations and treaty areas. The red chair represents our bloodlines and our connection to the land and where we come from,” explains Kwandibens. Each subject chose the location of their portrait, what they are wearing, and what they wish to represent in an expression of individual spirit. Collectively, the series is a testimony to the beauty, resilience, and strength of First Nations people and a challenge to a non-Indigenous audience to become aware of any conscious or subconscious assumptions they have of Indigenous peoples.

True reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples requires an exchange of experience. That exchange often happens through the sharing of stories and therein lies the important role of art galleries in the journey to reconciliation. Viewers are given the opportunity to engage in a dialogue of perspectives and ideas with the artist. Through her captivating visual narrative, Kwandibens creates a listening and holding space in which we acknowledge the past and create a willingness to learn from it. Her portraits encourage the opening of our collective heart.

“We, as Indigenous people, are often portrayed in history books as Nations once great; in museums as Nations frozen stoic; in the media as Nations forever troubled. These images can be despairing; however, my goal seeks to steer the positive course. If our history is a shadow, let this moment serve as light. We are musicians, lawyers, doctors, mothers and sons. We are activists, scholars, dreamers, fathers and daughters. Let us claim ourselves now and see that we are, and will always be great, thriving, balanced civilizations capable of carrying ourselves into that bright new day.” - Nadya Kwandibens

We acknowledge that the land on which The Muse is set is the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, territory covered by Treaty #3, signed in 1873, and the Treaty Adhesion signed by the Métis in 1875.

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Nadya Kwandibens

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Photos by Don Hall

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As one of Canada's preeminent feminist artists, Leesa Streifler's 40-year career has focused on experiences and representations of women, with her own lived experience at the core of her practice. In this series of mixed media drawings, she explores the aesthetics of aging female bodies and how they are perceived in a culture consumed with youthful beauty and ability. Through these powerfully drawn, expressive works Streifler fosters critical dialogue on bodily changes, ability, agency, sexuality, relationships, and memory to recognize strength and beauty at all ages and abilities. This exhibition is dedicated to Streifler’s mother, Sheila, who passed away in 2020.

Leesa Streifler received a BFA at the University of Manitoba and an MFA from Hunter College in New York. She taught in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Regina for over 30 years, influencing generations of art students. She has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. She is passionate about feminism and art education, actively mentoring other artists through MAWA (Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art) in Winnipeg, MB. Streifler lives and works in Winnipeg on Treaty One territory, the original lands of the Anishanaabeg, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene Nations, and on the National Homeland of the Red River Métis.

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 Reflections on She is Present

By Wayne Baerwaldt

Over the past thirty years Winnipeg artist Leesa Streifler’s studio-based practice has addressed Western culture’s biased representation of the female body. Since 2021, Streifler has taken on the theme of women and aging. Contentious and unreconciled, the representation of women and aging in a youth-centric culture is conspicuous for its largely negative associations. Streifler’s exploration of this negativity reveals an irrational mindset. Culturally embedded thought suggests that after a woman turns 35, she is, in the extreme sense, physically and psychologically bankrupt, somehow rendered “deficient” and esthetically unpleasant and in need of physical upcycling (beautification). Is this simply a surrealist nightmare, a kind of oblivion? Negative reinforcement proliferates via mass media advertising and advice columns offering a carrot and stick approach along with an imaginative path to a renewable youthful presence for women. Strangely enough, age anxiety is rarely if ever part of a man’s psychological make-up.

Streifler’s ongoing critique of the negative public representation of aging and women is manifested in her mixed-media drawings, sketch books, installation, performance and video scripts. Dunlop Art Gallery exhibition She is Present proposes both a lament and an empowering message for women who are so often maligned and mis-represented. Streifler’s proposition, in the form of twelve large-scale drawings, sketchbooks and a live performance, is a sensitive collective poem in tone. With both delicacy and rage, Streifler applies an expressionist visual language to condemn and unveil a world of mystery behind a woman’s real-life misery based largely on gender inequality. It is a reminder and no mystery that the internal monologue of the aging woman is dominated by a host of personal awareness boxes to be checked multiple times a day in a full-length mirror or with compact mirror in hand.

Common to many (aging) women, the compulsion is to alter one’s physical attributes with colours and to reshape her form to attain and elevate her status to a more acceptable appearances in the eyes of other men and women alike. Streifler applies a distinct visual style to represent the compulsion as subject matter, producing drawings and forms that are routinely irregular, asymmetric and jarringly repulsive to the eye. Feminist writer and critic Susan Sontag describes, over 50 years ago, what would inform Streifler’s examination of the myths of aging, as follows: “…the point for women of dressing up, applying makeup, dyeing their hair, going on crash diets, and getting facelifts is not just to be attractive. They are ways of defending themselves against a profound level of disapproval directed toward women, a disapproval that can take the form of aversion. The double standard about aging converts the life of women into an inexorable march toward a condition in which they are not just unattractive, but disgusting. The profoundest terror of a woman’s life is the moment represented in a statue by Rodin called ‘Old Age’: a naked old woman, seated, pathetically contemplates her flat, pendulous body.”  (1)  Streifler’s drawings describe a similar raw endzone in her figurative works. A “ruined” elderly woman in the drawing entitled Blanket (2024) appears to be lodged in a wheelchair. The woman’s body is inert, flattened in perspective and restrained by a checkered pink lap blanket. Another large-scale drawing, Belief (2022) offers a phantasmagoria of faces, flaming hair, and gaping mouths seemingly terrorized by a Christian cross and a hovering kitchen apron. Signs of terror flow unendingly. In spirit, Streifler’s call for equality is universal, a wake-up call to women and a direct message for all men.

What is to be done? Streifler addresses the common urge to rebuild the aging body. It is largely a fantasy world. The building blocks to a redemptive dreamworld are a woman’s hair, lips, skin, nails, and the will to attain a defined slim shape, each attribute encouraged in combination. (2) Attributions remain in flux, held in check by one’s personal demeanor, a forever quest to please other women and men. Streifler identifies each building block as a faux improvement, frozen in time or, ideally, with deficiencies reversed. But ultimately Streifler is asking us all to tell the truth about aging. Women should be strong and ambitious for no one else but themselves.

Streifler casts a harsh and critical eye to the anxieties that seemingly can’t be relieved by the beauty industry. Streifler’s drawings in oil stick and acrylic on polypropelene are mirrors to the doubt cast on aging women. Doubt privileges youth and drives what’s culturally defined as beautiful or worthy of building self-worth. To counter the assault by dominant, largely patriarchal values, Streifler has established a feminist position in the form of an esthetic strategy designed to overturn reality by imagining new meaning in shapeless forms to re-empower women.

Streifler addresses the challenge by debasing the established standards of beauty and self-worth in her drawings. Her strategy is to create figures that appear to embrace formlessness. Body parts are purposely articulated in a crude handling of her materials. In the drawing entitled Speaking Up (2023-24), Streifler denies each figure its “proper” form and by doing so she channels an optical unconscious to emphatically present a pastiche of three women. There is a screaming older woman, a girl and a young woman to the left depicted in this work. The handwritten text screams, “If not now, When?” to suggest a higher, more transcendent future tense. 

During the opening of She is Present, Winnipeg artist Anastasia Evsigneeva dances in response to Streifler’s work.  The youthful Evsigneeva in relationship to the images of aging women on the wall create a unique tension which she brilliantly enhances? The resulting flurry of images do not decorate Streifler’s investigation so much as structure and extend the artist’s basic mechanisms of thought on aging and representation to undo the myths and values of aging.

Notes:

1.     Sontag, Susan. THE DOUBLE STANDARD OF AGING, The Saturday Review, September 23, 1972, p.32.

2.     Ibid, p.36. “Her face is an emblem, an icon, a flag. How she arranges her hair, the type of make-up she uses, the quality of her complexion—all these are signs, not of what she is ‘really’ like, but of how she asks to be treated by others, especially men. They establish her status as an ‘object.’”

Wayne Baerwaldt is a Canadian independent curator. His best-known projects trace performative elements in artmaking with an emphasis on unstable, disputed identities and the language of their construction. He has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions including Ydessa Hendeles: Grand Hotel, If I May Digress: Richard Boulet, Glenn Ligon: Some Changes (with Thelma Golden) and Taras Polataiko: DEFIANCE, among others.  He is a board member of The Hnatyshyn Foundation (Ottawa) and serves on the Advisory Board for participant inc. (New York).

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Leesa Streifler

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Photos by Don Hall

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Larissa Tiggelers, slow next to them, acrylic on canvas, 2024. Photo: LFDocumentation

Larissa Tiggelers’ artistic practice explores articulations of care through mindful colour selections, dynamic yet composed forms, and surfaces of softly cumulative gestures. These qualities point to her interest in the unknowability of colour, the limitations of authorship, and quiet expressions of care. This exhibition is composed of near-diptych paintings that play with visual phenomena of mirroring and slippery symmetries. Many of the paintings are on a single surface, creating pairings that speak to one another through a shared language while pursuing distinct identities. This creates a discrete viewing experience that relies on slow contemplation, keen visual examination, and deep curiosity in order to explore the many puzzles that lie within each work.

Larissa Tiggelers holds an MFA from the University of Guelph and BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design. Her works are in several public and private collections, and have been exhibited at Norberg Hall (Calgary), Christie Contemporary (Toronto), The Bakery (Vancouver), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), and Paniki Gallery (Batan, Philippines). Tiggelers is an Assistant Professor in Painting and Drawing in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Regina, on Treaty 4 lands. 

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 Puzzles and Problems: Larissa Tiggelers’ Compositional Doublings in the Remembering Kind

By Blair Fornwald

The difference between a puzzle and a problem is that a puzzle has one solution, while problems can have many solutions, only imperfect solutions, or none at all. Handled with imprecision, they may resurface, metastasize, or multiply, so even after they are addressed, they can continue to haunt us with the persistent threat of their return. As long as the possibility of a better solution always remains, the problem, in a sense, also remains.

A puzzle, conversely, always contains the promise of its eventual completion. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us did jigsaw puzzles to pass time, soothe our addled nerves, and hack our neuromodulatory systems into feeling a sense of accomplishment during a period of remarkable monotony and rapidly multiplying problems. Now, while the effects of the pandemic still linger, the locus of our collective anxiety coalesces around one seemingly unsolvable problem after another. Absurdly and insidiously, we are expected to carry on, managing day-to-day tasks and stressors as if we weren’t simultaneously witnessing a genocide, the rise of fascism, and the ongoing destruction of our environment. It’s a lot to process.

While Larissa Tiggelers’ hard-edge abstractions in The Remembering Kind feel like a welcome reprieve from these categorically awful problems, they also offer oblique reflections on them. Though they resemble puzzles, they elude any attempts we may make to solve them.

On either side of crisp vertical divides that split her paintings down the middle, the artist presents near-symmetrical, non-objective compositions that invite comparison or suggest a sequential progression between left and right. At first glance, they remind me of those “spot the difference” puzzles you might see in kids’ magazines, but they are also quite amenable to narrative or anthropomorphic interpretation, a rarity for non-objective works. Their double format is rich with associative potential: they are like the before-and-after images used in weight-loss or tooth-whitening ads, adjacent film stills capturing subtle movement, or a pair of portraits in a hinged frame or locket.

Doubling invites the outside in. It amplifies theatricality by suggesting a performative interplay between the two entities. The forms on the left and right of slow next to them, for instance, appear to inhale and exhale like bodies, or crest and fall like waves. And the longer one looks at paintings like two-folding over and not altogether different, the more they disorient and confuse. Their compositions appear to fold and mirror each other, not only along the vertical axis—a strategy Tiggelers has established throughout this body of work---but also along horizontals and diagonals, inverting, flipping, and swapping pieces back and forth across numerous divides.

The parameters of Tiggelers’ work expand and unfold temporally. Compositions that first appear to be rational, restrained, and logical refuse to stay still and make sense for long.  The artist attunes our senses to notice subtler differences and asymmetries, not only to recognize compositional doppelgängers, but see how physical and perceptual phenomena can produce similar effects.

Tiggelers’ use of colour is particularly precise. She uses quaternary hues almost exclusively: complex, specific colours with evocative, Patrician names: glaucous, gamboge, feldgrau, verdigris, cordovan, champagne, Paris green, French grey. The relationships she establishes in her compositions reveal colour’s dynamic and relational aspects, sometimes boldly, but more often with incredible subtlety. A painting may contain variant hues so similar their differences may not fully register; to most, citron is to mindaro is to chartreuse is to lime. Conversely, a single colour may approximate multiple shades, tints, and tones, its proximity to adjacent colours affecting its relative value and chroma.

And though Tiggelers’ paintings initially appear perfectly flat, when closely observed, their clearly-delineated, solid-coloured geometric forms seem to rise from and sink into the surface of the image. In part, this movement is illusory; cool tones appear to recede into the background while warm tones advance toward us. But there are also physical gradations within Tiggelers’ paintings. If I were to run my fingertips over their porcelain-smooth surface, I could feel the tape-line contours that trace the edges of each form and create topographical distinctions.  If I looked askance, running my eye along one of these seams, could I see the layers of paint comprising a form? Maybe. Almost.

I am tempted to call these paintings deceptive, but they are too generous for that. They are tricky, not because they withhold information, but because they present information that exceeds or contradicts the expectations implied by their format. This information slips past us; we don’t expect it so we don’t see it. Such is often the case when we presume problems are puzzles. Tiggelers’ quiet, curious paintings demonstrate a process of reconciling with uncertainty and complexity. They feel like safe surrogates for managing everyday anxieties, their slow reveals demonstrating the ways our senses betray us, then offering gentle course correction.

Blair Fornwald (they/she) is a curator, writer, and artist living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Treaty One Territory, and the homeland of the Red River Métis Nation.

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Larissa Tiggelers

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Photos by LF Documentation and Don Hall

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In feel through the deepness to see, a new immersive exhibition by celebrated media and performance artist Rita McKeough, we journey below ground, where plants and animals gather and try to make sense of the activities of machines that labour above. Together, we are invited to imagine interspecies relationships beyond the destructive exploitation of extractive industrialism.

The exhibition is the third iteration of a series, including darkness is as deep as the darkness is, curated by Jacqueline Bell at the Walter Philips Gallery, and dig as deep as the darkness, curated by Dylan McHugh for the Richmond Art Gallery.

The exhibition is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Program. The artist would also like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation of the Arts and Alberta University of the Arts, Bemis Centre for Contemporary Art for their generous support and everyone who contributed to the production of this work.

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 Underground With You in Rita McKeough’s feel through the deepness to see 

By Lindsey french  
 
“Hey, hey! Come closer. Come closer. We need to talk to you. We need your help.”    --Roses 

We wanted to hear what the roses say -- and now we find ourselves in an underground bunker where insects, animals, and plants are recovering from the disaster above. We are guests, listening in on a conversation between bear and cranberry as they check in on each other in the wake of disaster.  

What does it mean to be a listener? As a social practice, listening establishes relationships. The deeply contextual nature of listening is complicated by inherent biases, worldviews, and approaches that we bring to our listening practices, a concept which Dylan Robinson describes as listening positionality. Listening positionality is not easily summarized by our identity markers, but is a richer, thicker process of understanding the social contexts we listen among – and when we are guests in someone else’s sound territories.1  Listening built on relationships of shared power can resist assimilative and extractive logics that guide our relationships with other beings. 

The sonic space we visit in the bunker of feel through the deepness to see includes a conversation between bear and cranberry, above a chugging combustion engine and heartbeat rhythm, occasionally interrupted by a blast of loud sound. Though this is an imaginary world, it's a dangerous one, and we are implicated as both guests and witnesses within the narrative of this interspecies assemblage that, while related to, is different from our own. 

feel through the deepness to see operates with a dose of anthropomorphism, but McKeough’s aim isn’t to prescribe human characteristics to these plants and animals. Instead, she’s interested in translation between species, an interest I share – not because translation allows full understanding, but precisely because translations are flawed. There is value in developing relationships of uncertainty which make such interspecies queries possible. Gaps in translation create spaces for vulnerability, and confronting the limits of understanding can create conditions for learning or change.  

Some biological definitions consider communication to be established when a signal from a sender causes a change in the behavior of the receiver.2 This scientific definition of interspecies communication focuses less on a message’s fidelity, and more on the capacity of the receiver to be affected. I feel vulnerable when I enter the main installation room where extraction towers loom above, duplicated by cast shadows. Sword ferns stand guard, their tracery of dangling roots webbing across this subsoil environment, while claws and horns rise up in choreographies of warning signals. I feel the stakes of the situation before I can describe what they are.  

As my eyes adjust to the darkened room, I see pale ghosts of sword ferns at the blanched bases of the extraction towers. They are the honorable dead, having ingested and transformed toxins into their bodies in resistance to what Rob Nixon might refer to as the “slow violence” of environmental degradation, often invisible and impacting already disempowered communities.3 Here, we’re in the midst of this violence and its resistance, alongside the sword ferns and their horned and clawed comrades.  

For decades, McKeough’s work has asked questions about our relationship to land through humour, imagination, and introspection. At Saskatoon’s Mendel Art Gallery4 in 1986, McKeough offered a dark yet witty glimpse into the future in her installation Afterland Plaza, which she developed after researching uranium mining around Saskatchewan. Inside the gallery, a mall of the future was hawking polluted real estate, with displays of cows amidst uranium molecules, residential homes with filtered air propped above unlivable landscapes, and a soundtrack of mall announcements and infomercials. Years later for this exhibition at the Dunlop, she considers post-extractive futures of the province again, this time offering a different access point. Though both installations direct us toward critical reflection, any subtle whiffs of satire that may have floated through the sales pitches in Afterland Plaza’s filtered air are not detectable in the atmospheres of commoning of the underground burrows in feel through the deepness to see. Here, we gather earnestly in the dank richness of shared soil and of working through grief and resolve together, with care. There is a chill of sadness in the installation, but you don’t have to feel the sadness alone. You, too, might be buried underground in the future– but more importantly, you are there now, alive and witnessing the richness of interspecies coalition forming in the tangle of subsoil networks. 

The animals and plants in McKeough’s installation can’t escape the persistence of the machine, and neither can we –it resonates as a sonic beat within our bodies in the gallery, but also beyond, as we’re all implicated in extractive economies and technologies in different ways. Machines have cut the installation’s ferns from wood and programmable logic controllers trigger the installation’s theatrics for viewers. It is not necessarily the machines, but the extractive logics which insist (as we hear from the ferns), on “taking everything” and “sucking up everything that is not them.” Machines, like listening, can be turned toward extraction and assimilation; or they can be turned against it, inclined instead toward urgent stories of an era. McKeough crafts imaginary worlds and experiences of deep feeling, inviting us to investigate our own positionality in the very real narratives of extraction that play out in the region. She reminds us that resistance forms underground, and it’s not too cool for you to join. The roses’ request is transparent. You’re invited to listen, but you’re listening to a question – what are we going to do? In the rich coalitions of the soil, you become part of the we. You can be underground too, and in the darkness, we can feel our way forward together.  

Lindsey french (they/she) is an artist, educator and writer whose work considers positions of listening, receptivity, and marginality as valid and active political and communicative positions. Lindsey has shared their work widely in museums, galleries, screenings, and D.I.Y. art spaces including the OCAD’s Onsite gallery (Toronto), SixtyEight Art Institute (Copenhagen), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), along with collaborative projects at The Chute (Pittsburgh) and for the 4GROUND: Midwest Land Art Biennial (Shafer, Wisconsin). Recent publications include chapters for Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape, and the Postnatural (Actar, 2022), Olfactory Art and The Political in an Age of Resistance (Routledge, 2021), and Why Look at Plants (Brill, 2019). Lindsey earned a BA through an interdisciplinary course of study at Hampshire College, and an MFA in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2021, they moved from Pittsburgh to Treaty 4 to teach as an Assistant Professor in Creative Technologies in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina. 

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Rita McKeough

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Photos by Don Hall

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Second Tongues is an on-going project by artist Serena Lee. Imagining a world where everyone is assigned a randomly selected second language at birth, Lee explores the dynamics of language learning and the politics of language hierarchies. Working with community members with this imagined setting in mind, Lee asks people to reflect on nationhood, kinship, and market-driven globalization through world-building activities.This installation is a reminder of the complexity of our language systems, as well as the many ways we connect despite differences and distance.

Serena Lee plays with moving image, sound, place, and gesture to map how things come together and apart. She works through open-ended processes that stretch language and geography, involving conversation and collaboration. Serena holds an MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute (NL), and an Associate Diploma in Piano Performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music (CA). Serena is based between tkaronto/Toronto, where she was born, and Vienna, where she is completing a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

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Second (    ) Tongues

By Daniella Sanader

In the future—

(Let’s begin here, secure in a future-time marked as singular. To speak of the future—of the future—is to hold the word with declarative ease. Made solid, smooth, and firm through repetition, it’s a stone that matches the curves of your mouth; perhaps you no longer register its shape. It’s just what we tend to say, isn’t it? Dislodge it, turn it over on your tongue. Can we find language for multiple futures at once—tangible ones, under-baked and sticky ones, knotted ones, futures that reshape us as we speak them?)

we all speak a second language not of our choosing—

(An Italian story[1] describes a poet looking to better his craft by learning a new language. An English sea captain offers to teach him Persian, one foreign tongue amongst many that the captain had learned throughout his travels. The two men begin their work in earnest, talking and writing together, and the captain is impressed with how quickly the poet familiarizes himself with the language’s rhythms. The captain departs and the poet decides he is ready to compose his own works in Persian. He tinkers over them tirelessly, pleased and galvanized by how the language offers him new architectures for his thinking. Finally, he decides to refer to the works of other Iranian writers, whom he has abstained from in order to preserve the integrity of his poetic voice. To his horror, he quickly discovers he can’t understand their writing at all: he didn’t learn Persian.)

It is assigned at birth and—

(Serena’s fingers—they knead and pull, exerting gentle pressure against a range of pliable surfaces. There’s the technicolour grain of salt dough, the lustre of bread rolls molded in plastic, the peaks and valleys of handwritten questions on loose paper. Throughout Second Tongues, she collects these squishy textures and many others; she recognizes that language-learning is a process that occurs somewhere between the softness of a body and the grammars of power that endeavour to shape it.)

selected at random from the history of language—

(A popular tweet asks: “What’s considered trashy if you’re poor, but classy if you’re rich?”

One answer is repeated, again and again: “Being bilingual.”)

to be learnt and used alongside the mother tongue—

(There’s a rhyme that my grandmother used to sing to me when I was little. All I seem to remember is the turning point of its conclusion—the second half of a singsong pair, with an upturned voice and playful exclamation mark. I’ve forgotten the rest, along with the majority of this language that was supposedly my very first.

моје маме десна рука! Moje mame desna ruka! My mother’s right hand!!

The second line is what gives a rhyme its meaning, its cadence and pleasure—but without the first, the second is unmoored, residual. A punchline without a joke. An answer without a question. Right hand found reaching for its left.)

All nations or organized societies have agreed upon a lottery system—

(Perhaps you have questions. The speculative narrative at the core of Second Tongues surrounds itself with questions, they both fortify and undermine it. How was this agreement facilitated between all nations and societies? Is there an international council that enforces it? What communities qualify under these categories, and which are excluded? Who makes these decisions and how?

Second Tongues does not attempt to answer these questions. Instead, Serena weaves them into the fabric of the project itself; collected through discussions in workshops with artists and writers, adult literacy learners, migrant communities, domestic workers, linguistic scholars, and others. As the project expands, the central narrative is also translated into more and more tongues, layers contributing to its ever-thickening warp and weft. Collective speculation produces a polyvocal shimmer, new pathways emerge with each inquisitive line.)

and the pool of possible draws—

(So, if not Persian, what language did the Italian poet learn? He consults other linguistic experts, who dissect his script and are baffled by it. It bears no resemblance—in structure and style—to any other known language across the world, living or dead. The English captain is equally unhelpful, speculating that the poet’s imagination overtook his otherwise accurate lessons. The poet is dismayed; this language was entirely of his own invention. Who are his poems for, if no one can read them? He had accessed new truths, his mind and hand reshaped around a new grammar; were they lost if no one was able to receive them?)

consists of every single language that has ever existed—

(Here’s another question: if Second Tongues were stored in this library, what shelves would house it? The “Art” or “Science Fiction” categories seem self-evident, but maybe the project’s glutenous textures would be better represented under “Cooking”; its linguistic experimentation finding space amongst poetry titles, or digital resources for language learning. I like to imagine that Second Tongues finds its most natural home amidst a library’s less taxonomic infrastructures: clusters of chairs arranged for group discussion, scrap papers and small pencils that collect call numbers for shelves; water fountains and vending machines. Structures that support our bodies as we imagine new futures into being.)

dead or living, dialects too—

(There are ancient glyphs pressed in once-malleable clay; there’s the pillowy, expansive cloud of shared laughter around a table. There is a shape to this distance—however massive or intimate—between writer and reader, between speaker and listener.

How far did these words travel in order to reach you, reading them here in this moment? Speak them aloud, add more of your own. Read these words in whatever tongues—first, second, third—you like.

Maybe with time, in some slowly congealing future, they will find their way back to me.)

and the pool keeps growing.

Daniella Sanader is a writer and reader who lives in Toronto. 

[1] Tommaso Landolfi’s “Dialogo dei massimi sistemi, (Dialogue of the Greatest Systems)” published in 1937, and referenced in Daniel Heller-Roazen’s Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone Books, 2008): 195-202. This source is used by Serena Lee in Second Tongues-related workshops and discussions.

Community Responses:

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Serena Lee

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Photos by Don Hall

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AGENCY
*an act of power
*to make decisions in another's best interest
*when Indian agents & government officials (federal, municipal, provincial) decide
*when Indian Act chief & councils make decisions for you and your family

-----LOSS-----
loss of agency when using the Indian Act to decide
loss of agency will leave you silent and powerless
loss of agency will make you invisible
loss of agency will erase you

NEW AGENCY
*power redefined
*no longer colonial
*no longer patriarchal
*to make decisions for you by you
*to make decisions without the Indian act
*you are no longer invisible
*you are powerful

tīná gúyáńí (deer road) is an artist collective from guts’ists’i / mohkinstsis (Calgary) consisting of parent/child duo Glenna Cardinal (Tsuut’ina/Saddle Lake Cree) and seth cardinal dodginghorse (Tsuut’ina/Amskapi Piikani/Saddle Lake Cree). In 2014, they were forcibly removed from their homes and ancestral land on the Tsuut’ina Nation, for construction of the Southwest Calgary Ring Road. Their multidisciplinary practice honors their connection to land and explores the effects of environmental /psychological damage. tīná gúyáńí’s work is deeply based in culture, language, oral history, family photographs, and museum/archival research. Their art is an act of cultural preservation and a protest against ongoing settler colonialism.

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tīná gúyáńí: guwasidodi (old agency)

By Christina Reynolds

Backstory: How art collective tīná gúyáńí’s guwasidodi (old agency) exhibit came to be – and the one piece that didn’t make it to the gallery.

The interior of the little art house smelled of green tea and fresh wood varnish. On a cold and crisp day in May 2022, Glenna Cardinal, the artist who conceived the house and recently had it built, along with her son and fellow artist seth cardinal dodginghorse, welcomed three visitors inside to talk. Rez House, as Cardinal named it, was a bittersweet endeavour for both mother and son who often collaborate as art collective tīná gúyáńí (deer road), which was a finalist for the 2022 Sobey Art Award.

Cardinal worked with a local builder (and through local arts grants) to build Rez House as a close replica of her isuu (grandmother) Elsie Jacobs’s home — which still stands on Tsuut’ina Nation. The original home is around 100 years old and it faces the Rocky Mountains to its west, and overlooks guts’ists’i/mohkinstsis (the City of Calgary) to its east. The home’s fading red-painted wood shell now also perches above the south west portion of the new 101-kilometre Calgary Ring Road; the old home’s foundation is now just a few feet from the road’s vast corridor and eight lanes of traffic.

 But Cardinal and her immediate family are now physically separated from this ancestral home and land which used to be gently sloping forest and vegetable gardens, where their family lived since before the signing of Treaty 7 in 1877. In September 2014, they were forcibly removed from their homes on Tsuut’ina Nation to make way for the construction of the ring road. Since that day (and really, for their lifetimes — plans for the ring road loomed for 70+ years) Cardinal and her two sons, along with other family members, have been grappling with and mourning the loss of home — and what this means for their deep connection to land, language, ceremony, culture, community, family and identity.

This is the family story Cardinal and cardinal dodginghorse have been telling for years through their multidisciplinary art: a modern war painting, Super-8 movies, a Minecraft version of home, postcards, home furnishings trimmed with reflective tape used for road-construction vests, family photographs printed on library cards and silkscreened on to Pendletons and parfleche, coats and shawls emblazoned with pennies crossed out by sinew-thread Xs, evolving live performances – and now a new art house!

 Anticipation was high as we stepped inside Rez House on that chilly May day. Cardinal opened a brand-new plexiglass window for fresh air, and the five of us arranged our folding chairs into a socially distanced circle, all bundled up with our mugs of steamy tea, ready to talk.

 “I’m so excited!” Cardinal exclaimed, as she fiddled with a temporary space heater — a planned cast-iron stove, like the one her isuu had, was not yet in place. The conversation started full of possibilities: Rez House as a travelling exhibit (it fits on a flatbed trailer, so it’s moveable like a “tiny house”), or as a gallery space, or an art therapy classroom, or maybe, one day, as part of an artists’ retreat, or a movie house for showing family Super-8 films — as another way to keep telling her family’s story through art. And should she still paint the whole exterior red? That was still up for debate.

 Tomas Jonsson, a curator at Dunlop Art Gallery, was one of the three visitors that day. He came to Tsuut’ina Nation to see these Rez House possibilities first-hand, and to talk about possibly exhibiting it in Regina. The other guests were a fellow artist, and me, a journalist who lives nearby in Calgary, who has been closely following the family’s story for years. Over the next few hours, Cardinal and cardinal dodginghorse often finished each other’s sentences as they recounted their family’s story through the story of their art.

 It later turned out that logistics prevented Rez House from traveling to Regina. And while all of this might seem like a lot of backstory for an art piece that did not make it to the Dunlop’s new exhibit, guwasidodi (old agency), January 20 to April 9, 2024, Rez House was a key catalyst for the show – and is just a tiny bit of context for the eight carefully selected pieces that did travel to Regina. These artworks tell the stories shared in and held by Rez House.

 One of the first pieces you’ll see when you enter the show is i am here (2019), a postcard stand filled with a series of 40 numbered cards. Pick one up (visitors are encouraged to do so). On the front of card 14/40 is a sepia-toned image of barren trees flanked by survey markers and tangles of barbed-wire fencing. Flip to the back, where cardinal dodginghorse writes: “I am here, at the South West Calgary Ring Road, walking through a small bit of my family’s forest that barely exists...” Pick up another. The story unravels in stark images and vivid prose poetry.

 Throughout the exhibit, three semi-transparent elk parfleche are suspended in mid-air: ina (mother) (2019); nadisha-hi at’a (i am going home) (2023); and kuniya (come in) (2023). These modern-day war paintings and portraits feature silkscreened images of Elsie Jacobs and her mother Winnie Bull. For ina, cardinal dodginghorse used traditional paint pigments to depict the day his mother, Glenna Cardinal, first saw their trees chopped down and consumed by yellow construction vehicles for the ring road. The pictographs also recount Cardinal’s empathic encounter with a buck stranded in the tree shards who stared back at her with eyes as lost and scared as her own. On the floor below this parfleche – literally cut out from it – are a silkscreen image of Winnie Bull and her baby Elsie, showing how, through the continuing impact of the Indian Act and modern-day colonialism, women and their descendants are still being disenfranchised.

 The title of this exhibit guwasidodi (old agency) connects with this continuing fight, along with another piece in the show titled new agency (2023). In this text piece printed on a wall, the artists reclaim and redefine “agency”, “loss” – and most importantly, “new agency”: 

 “*power redefined


*no longer colonial


*no longer patriarchal


*to make decisions for you by you


*to make decisions without the Indian act


*you are no longer invisible


*you are powerful”

 The story continues along the elk parfleche spine of kuniya, which is silkscreened with 10 images of their primary family home, this one constructed in 1951, which was moved from their land for the ring road almost a decade ago now.

 tīná gúyáńí’s most recent piece, her name (2023), is a 33-minute Super-8 film of family memory vignettes paired with a powerful and ethereal musical score by cardinal dodginghorse. It’s the first time the collective has created work that connects their family life growing up on Tsuut’ina also with family connections to Saddle Lake Cree Nation, north-east of Amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Edmonton), where Cardinal’s father grew up and attended Blue Quills residential school. Cardinal’s dad had an older sister who also attended, but did not come home.

 What tīná gúyáńí said recently about this film also sums up much of their approach to all the art they create: “This is not an educational film. It’s not a history of the school,” cardinal dodginghorse explains. “It’s a personal story – it’s not just big trauma dumping. As we get to the end of it, there are heavier things, but we are respectful to people in the family that are living through this. And we made this movie in a way that people in our family can watch it.” Says Cardinal: “Making this film is a way of giving to our family – we’re documenting it because no one else is. It’s art that facilitates healing.” Both cardinal dodginghorse and Cardinal credit making art with helping them to recognize and develop their own voices, and their ability to speak up and speak out. “Art gave me a voice,” Cardinal says, “especially at times when I couldn’t say the words out loud.”

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tīná gúyáńí

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Photos by Don Hall

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her name is a film commissioned by Gallery TPW by tīná gúyáńí (deer road), the parent/child artist-duo consisting of Glenna Cardinal and seth cardinal dodginghorse. The film explores a family story as it unfolds during Glenna’s studies at Blue Quills University near Edmonton, Alberta. In 1970, the Blue Quills Native Education Council took over operations of a former residential school and initiated the first Indigenous-owned and governed educational centre in Canada. Encountering a father and daughter’s experiences of Blue Quills at different periods of its history, her name presents “life as it is lived'' for a family navigating intergenerational colonial trauma through an Indigenous framework of healing

Content warning: This film contains content on Indian Residential Schools

The Indian Residential School Survivors Society has a 24 hour Crisis Line available for individuals in need of support: 1-866-925-4419

Artist Talk with Annie Wong, seth cardinal dodginghorse, and Glenna Cardinal