A Practice of Gesture

Artists reclaim domestic rituals and traditions to negotiate complex contemporary issues.

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A Practice in Gestures, a handsome group exhibition on view until Nov. 7 at the Richmond Art Gallery in Metro Vancouver, explores the role of gesture in negotiating complex and discomforting issues, such as racial and economic inequality, environmental degradation and the displacement of refugees.

Curated by Nan Capogna, who is interested in the idea of practice – particularly the daily activities and gestures that reflect private and domestic aspects of an artist’s work – it features six artists based in British Columbia.

Deborah Koenker’s Hanging by a Thread: Anonymous Re-vision is a collection of 132 framed embroideries based on historical engravings and the artist’s own drawings. The historically based embroideries catalogue details from heroic landscapes by famous male artists. Exquisitely rendered in black and grey on dupioni silk, the individual tableaus are lush and dense with detail.

Embroidering throughout 19 years during periods of “waiting time”– medical appointments, children’s lessons, meetings at work – Koenker, an emerita professor at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, incorporates the fragmentary moments that punctuate women’s lives as studio time, appropriating and domesticating the male gaze through a feminist perspective. Embroideries based on her drawings of trees, at once more spare and whimsical, provide a subversive counterpoint to the turbulent drama of the historical images.

UBC emerita professor Barbara Zeigler demonstrates a similar commitment to long-term, domestically oriented projects. Zeigler, who often collaborates with scientists, focuses her work on issues related to ecology, waste, food and the relationship between private actions and collective culture. For decades, she cleaned and preserved the shells of eggs eaten by her family.

Her three-channel video, Passage II, produced over the last seven years, makes clear the transformational potential of cleaning and preserving. In this striking work, a stream of bright water streaks across three screens, splashing against a hand as it carefully washes an eggshell. An accompanying circular floor installation, Ritual and Change Series: Totally Cracked, from this year, consists of a layer of eggshells spread over a large bed of river rock. Rendered monumental through scale and simplicity, Zeigler’s work ruminates on time and regeneration.

Farheen HaQ presents videos that negotiate personal aspects of culture, memory and family. Of South-Asian Muslim descent, HaQ explores a memory of her mother serving chai in Drinking from my mother’s saucer. The two-minute video, made in 2015, begins with an image of a delicate bone china tea cup being filled from a traditional metal vessel. Slowly, the cup begins to tremble and overflow to a soundtrack of thundering buffalo hooves.

HaQ is referring to the use of buffalo bones in the making of bone china in Britain and the devastating impact this had on Indigenous people in Canada. Reconciling her own experiences as an immigrant with recognition of her impact as a settler, she uses art to question responsibility and promote healing.

Her second work, Fold, also from 2015, examines personal and cultural meanings of cloth. Incorporating a dresser and a chair, Fold includes a video installed in what appears to be a mirror. Depicting the torso of a young woman slowly gathering voluminous mounds of white cloth close to her body, the video suggests intimate recollections of maternity, personal care and sensual pleasure.

Memories of family and migration similarly colour Bettina Matzkuhn’s SOS, a 2018 series of seven lifejackets grouped together on a reflecting mirror. The daughter of European refugees, Matzkuhn uses the symbol of the lifejacket to call attention to the global displacement of refugees, many of whom are fleeing climate disasters. The jacket interiors are embroidered with expansive images of mountains, wildflowers and other natural entities, suggesting that nature itself is in need of rescue.

A second series, collectively titled Gear, repurposes well-used outdoor equipment. Matzkuhn picked apart and then reassembled the discarded gear, which still bears traces of its past history. Although the new forms lack function, they exhibit careful ministrations and repairs made by Matzkuhn, who counters the utility of petroleum-based fabrics in outdoor equipment with linen panels beautifully embroidered with silk and cotton. Without negating her own complicity in environmental degradation, she creates emotionally affective reminders of our dependency on nature.

Connections between language, culture and materiality are explored by a recent graduate of Emily Carr University, Iranian-born Mitra Mahmoodi, in her installation Aftabeh. An aftabeh is a form of spouted vessel used in the Middle East for cleansing the hands.

In the installation, an elegant, wheel-thrown vessel sits atop a set of stairs on which is written a poem in Farsi by the contemporary Iranian poet Rahim Moeini Kermanshahi. The poem meditates on philosophical issues relating to ethics and essence, as in the line, “The human body and what it means to be human are different.”

On the ground below sit hand-pinched, distorted, but expressive, containers that are wildly textured and marked with fragments of Qur’anic texts translated into Farsi. These texts, which are all but erased, refer similarly to ethics, compassion and behaviour. The mark of the hand, so visible in these aftabehs, evokes intimate gestures that span generations through the transmission of culture and identity.

Contrasting with the large scale of other works in the show, the power of the miniature is exploited by Anishinaabe artist Bev Koski with her series of brightly beaded souvenir figurines. While details are all but obscured by beading, the general shape of these tiny objects identifies them as belonging to a genre of racist representations of Indigenous people found in tourist venues across the country.

Responding to how these items misrepresent and erase individual identities, Koski appropriates and recuperates them, providing new identities through her meticulous craftsmanship. She leaves space for the eyes, enabling these tiny figures to meet our gaze with intensity.

A Practice in Gestures succeeds through the coherence and consistency of its elements. These six artists engage us with their determined but modest gestures, their attention to materiality, and the humanity of their vision. ■  

A Practice in Gestures at the Richmond Art Gallery from Sept. 10 to Nov. 7, 2021. Artists in the show are Farheen HaQ, Deborah Koenker, Bev Koski, Mitra Mahmoodi, Bettina Matzkuhn and Barbara Zeigler.

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