Bite Sizes: Whess Harman

Whess Harman is a mixed race, non binary, queer artist and member of the Carrier Witat Nation. They have mostly been working with text work with font they invented that references formline design. They break up the words in different ways and make decisions on what the rules are for the context for that form. A big part of that for them is wanting to make something appear indigenous with without representing an expected image of indigenity. Questions of representation weaves through Harman’s work as they are constantly straddling between a drive to make indigenity more visible and present but also trying to protect that as well. They tell me about the frustration they often find when thinking about audience, thinking about existing stereotypes and how to avoid making work that may perpetuate them.

“It’s been really great to speak with Walter Scott and Maya Ben David. We talked about having multiple characters and not trying to infuse one character with all of the meaning but rather creating scenarios where different narratives can interact with each other, creating dialogue with different static images” Harman describes.

And to that, Harman has also been working on these shape shifty mystical mask-like drawings with slight references to formline which they say has been a way of figuring out a personal style of drawing that they intend on possibly using as source material for a comic: “I’ve been thinking about the different ways to bend, and look at a face structurally so that they aren’t all conventional. For me when I look at the masks they can be grotesque, imposing, and they carry their own presence and they are really comforting for me to look at. Because they are protective. When you wear a mask, it’s a persona you are taking on. To be given a persona is a huge honour. It comes with a specific cultural gravity. It is not something that’s funny or to be taken lightly” Harman expresses.

I ask Harman one last question at the end of our chat. I asked them what the world needs more of and with the complexities of indigenous representation on their mind they answered :

Everything. As far as representation goes you need more funding to create different kinds of things. Like APTN, they have often one big headlining Native show that tries to fit everything into it. If there was more funding to create multiple shows, a lot less stress will be on that single show to represent everything. In superheroes they all tell the same story in this repetitive way i.e. Spiderman without changing things. I feel like there needs to be more people who don’t feel the need to follow a conventional script. We can have everything, whatever we want, and we can have as much as we want if you are willing to make it.

Summer Institute II with Walter Scott and Niki Little: It was a sweet slice

Participants and facilators get together for a group photo on the final day minus Madeline Bogoch--we missed you Madeline!!!

2017 Summer Institute II: Open Studio

It is the final day of the institute and the participants along with facilitators showcase some work in progress for viewers. The open studio night included performances, drawing, sculpture, painting and some multimedia works.  Below are some photos from the day. 

Alex Ateah gives a 'delayed' performance

namōya kiya nēhiyaw kīspin namōya kinēhiyawān / nēhiyaw kiya māka namōya kinēhiyawān
by Joi T. Arcand

Jillian Groening performs Soft Stitches/Pink Tongue 

Losing My Ancestors' Orgasm (LMAO), Installation by Viola Chen

  The Sunset is an Illusion - collaborative work by Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Kelly Campbell

 

Drawing by Walter Scott

Tanis Augustine Margaret Worme installing her untitled work.

 Installation view with Are We Not Narcissists by Madeline Bogoch (text piece on far wall); an untitled soft sculpture by Kristiane Church (far corner); Jen's Mask by Dayna Danger (black plinth), and these are 7 sisters by Whess Harman (foreground, hanging drawings)

ETHNIC FUTURES, Pooja Sen 

Breanne, Small Mitch, Do you? by Emma Mayers

Bite Sizes: Joi T. Arcand

Throughout the Summer Institute, we'll be bringing you Bite Sizes which is sort of an episodic mini studio visit where we get to know bits about what the participants are up to and a bit about themselves. In this episode, we speak with artist Joi T. Arcand.

When I met up with Arcand, she was correcting misprints of pins she designed and outsourced for fabrication. The design is a riff from a motel sign in Arcand’s hometown of Saskatoon that oddly featured a neon palm tree and in red lettering spelt Capri. The peculiarity of this tropical image in a place where a palm tree could never been grown is an impetus for Arcand’s take on the sign. “It is funny to see things like that, that are not indigenous to the land.”

In Arcand’s version, she replaces Capri with Askiy, which in Cree means land. For Arcand, it is just another way to widely circulate the Cree language and Indigenous presence to the larger public conscious. The majority of her text-based work and designs have sought to do exactly this. By working with the phonetic of the Cree word, Arcand opens us up to a small piece of the language and makes visible its existence: “It’s a word that is easy for people to say because it is short. It is a word that I think a lot of people should know even if they are not Cree", she tells me, “and it is an easy entry point into the Cree language. It is very much about educating people. A lot of people don’t know whose land they’re on or who the original peoples of the land are” she adds. By reinserting Askiy in juxtaposition to the palm tree, Arcand highlights the false tropical appeal entities like that motel proliferates.

Apart from the pins, Arcand has been at work on developing a comic book adaptation of another project of Arcand's - The Beautiful NDN SuperMaidens (see this article about Tanis Worme and Arcand working on one edition of this series here: https://teaandbannock.com/tag/tanis-worme/) after coming across the early racist promotional poster that depict sexualized images of Indigenous women at the turn of the 19th century. Previously, she reworked this dehumanizing imagery through collaged photography, inserting her close community of family and friends. Now, she’s broadening it into an extensive illustration-filled comic book where her family and friends are a traveling band of superheroes: “I was thinking about how growing up we didn’t have a lot of role models reflected back to us in the media as Indigenous girls so I wanted to turn my family and friends into those kinds of characters. That’s why I came up with the superhero persona” Arcand expresses.

My sister for example is an academic soil scientist and she just earned her PhD, which is an amazing feat. Her character is called the doctor and everyone comes up with a narrative of what they might do if they were a superhero.

Arcand informs me of how she thought of her 13year old niece and their shared love for comic books while conceiving of the project. In a way, Arcand is making available to new generation, a form of representation and alternate narrative she didn’t see reflected in any kind of media when growing up. “I thought it would be cool to provide that kind of thing for her and for people of all ages to have those kinds of representation.”

Closing off my chat with Arcand I asked her one final question on what she thinks the world needs more off. And appropriately, she simply responds with Cree.

Bite Sizes: Tanis Worme

 

Throughout the Summer Institute, we'll be bringing you Bite Sizes, which is sort of an episodic mini studio visit where we get to know bits about what the participants are up to and a bit about themselves. In this episode, we speak with Nehiyaw artist and student Tanis Worme.

The majority of what Worme makes is done through painting, drawing, sculptural installation and tattooing traditional designs. She is dedicated to creating for her people. Worme’s family and close community is an immediate access point for her when it comes to what she creates. She is compelled to create and share her stories as a way to empower her younger relatives: “I want them to grow up knowing that it is possible for them to achieve excellence but more importantly that their stories give me strength.” Above all, Worme’s motivation behind anything she creates is to push forward the continuity of her culture along with the intricacies of her and her community’s current realities.

Coming into the Institute stirred by Walter Scott’s Wendy graphic novels, Worme has been interested in exploring through her own personal stories and family histories:

“I have a family story that’s been translated and passed along through oral history and my mother has put that through writing and we were just discussing how different it has been. For a long time, those stories were passed along in Cree and in order to keep those stories a live, it has had to be told in another language therefore changing the story. Now, I have a story that’s in English and not only has it changed from a spoken form, it is now in written."

Currently, Worme says she’s been looking at the written form and thinking about how to make it into an illustrative story like that of a graphic novel. It’s been stressful to think about that she tells me, and something that she will probably continue to work on it before she can produce anything physical, she considers. She has been seeing the Wendy Book Club workshops as a means of thinking about what goes into the making of a graphic novel and how to get a narrative across. Anything she ends up making will just be another stepping stone toward materializing the illustrative novel she’s interested in working on.

I asked Worme why she thinks is its important for her to be retelling this story, she describes: “It is part of my own personal history and it is important to keep that alive and share it with the next generation in a compelling and accessible way. Everything that I’ve done, I’ve always thought about family. Everything I do and where it comes from and where you get it from is always being passed along.”

Bites Sizes: Viola Chen

Throughout the Summer Institute, we'll be bringing you Bite Sizes, which is sort of an episodic mini studio visit where we get to know bits about what the participants are up to and a bit about themselves. In this episode, we speak with Viola Chen 陈宜晴

Viola Chen 陈宜晴 doesn’t easily consider herself to be an artist or at least someone who makes things they call art. She immigrated to Canada at 8 years old and like anyone who relocates at that age like she did, grows up adapting and shifting to the social and cultural norms they are met with to reach a level of comfort.

One thing Chen recognizes she has had to adapt is an artistic persona - a role she’s taken on not just to gain a kind of cultural and social capital, but also one that she uses as an approach to survival as a woman of color. The inherit inclination to be creative is something she views as distinctive from almost performing the role of an artist. For her, being artistic is a western construct she’s grown to assimilate into, and is a way to imagine a career or a type of future, or stability within a cultural environment. It is something she is doubtful she would be doing if she never migrated to a place like Canada: “The ability to participate in the professional art world as a professional career is very circumstantial to me being here...My attitude towards art and making art is informed by our sociopolitical economic climate under late capitalism in which everything is commodified and marketed in a certain way." It’s this self-cognizance and awareness that runs through Chen’s output which has predominately been through writing poetry or theory.

As a gendered and racialized person, Chen is interested in using feminist theories that employ self-deprecation and performative self-hatred as discursive devices to gain entitlement: “In order to be self-deprecating you have to come from this place where you know you have access to better things. I can only be self deprecating because I believe I am entitled to something better or something more. So I position the traditionally marginalized subject in a different place because there’s a level of empowerment in that. I’m really interested in how self-deprecation can be used to establish a power dynamic even if it is invisible.”

Another line of attack Chen uses to repossess power as a marginalized body is through the liberal ideology of needing to be inclusive and diverse. She views this seeming need for inclusivity as an opportunity to manipulate the process and make space for herself on her own terms. “If people are interested in exploiting marginalized people to make themselves look more liberal or progressive or whatever…I see that as a way through which I can market these marginalized identities that I do have. It is kind of a way of self-branding and self-commodification comes into play.” Chen adds further: “I’m interested in this space marginalized communities can carve for themselves. Or these vacuums of resistance that you can create. Although, the dominant structure of patriarchy and white supremacy and capitalism they are always going to be exploitative towards certain people. I like to think about how I can create these little sites of resistance.”

As you continue to get to know Chen and her articulate thinking processes you can see she’s interested in all these separate concepts and possibilities for binding them together so they are even more coherent. She tells me she’s has interests in social media culture, gender theory, critical race theory, also traditional and contemporary art production and how all those things fit together. For the Institute, she’s been thinking about how to absorb these line of thoughts into something tangible: “I think there is an emotional satisfaction in that,” she asserts.

Chen knows it’s impossible to put those things in physical form but she is very interested in sculpture and installation work. And if those ideas could take physical form what would they look like or what would they feel like.

Tau Lewis leads a portrait workshop

Guest artist Tau Lewis leads the group with a workshop on portraiture using found materials. It was Lewis' first visit to Winnipeg and after hours of roaming through the streets in the downtown area, she accumulated a number of disparate objects which she then presented as material for portraiture making. Below are some photos from the workshop

Happenings and events

Walter introducing guest artist Maya Ben David

Wendy Book Club workshops,  card readings, lecture performances, artist talks, below are some photos of events and happenings from the Walter Scott and Niki Little led Summer Institute.

 Maya Ben David gives her performance lecture

 Meet and greets with Maya

 Walter Scott leds Wendy Book Club workshop

 Participants in discussions

Cindy Mochizuki is a multi disciplinary artist and astrologer/tarot reader. One of Scott's characters is loosely based on her. Here she is doing readings with the group over skype.

Tau Lewis - Toronto-based self taught artist giving an artist talk after leading the Wendy Book Club through a scrap sculpture making workshops and doing studio visits. She will be in our Fall Exhibition Entering the Landscape opening September 30th! Really great to have her here to share her work and practice.