Almost Gathering

We want to get together, but we’re nervous, and rightly so. How artists and galleries are responding to pandemic anxiety.

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This year saw a desire to gather, along with hesitancy about whether we are ready – or if it’s still too soon. Hopes that we might finally be able to attend in-person events together – talks, performances, exhibition openings – as part of a return to normalcy have been dashed in recent days by renewed panic and public health restrictions due to the fast arrival of the Omicron variant of COVID-19.

Looking back over the year, though, there were notable moments when the act of almost-gathering or gathering-but-not-quite allowed unique art experiences. The indeterminacy of such gatherings and events is characteristic of our enormous societal uncertainty. But this does not mean generative and nourishing art cannot happen or be received and experienced by audiences. On the contrary, some exhibitions and performances this year took the truth of our current moment and, rather than resist it, adapted and moved with it.

While some gatherings began to take place, artists and curators also took this year as an opportunity to deepen collective introspection and cultivate the exhibition space as a site for metaphysical reflection and quiet encounters. They provided space to examine how we gather, and what kinds of experiences art can give rise to in uncertain times.

Take, for example, B.C.-based artist Julian Yi-Zhong Hou’s Country Balance at Zalucky Contemporary in Toronto. During the exhibition’s run, the artist hosted one-on-one visits in which he would give a tarot reading. In early autumn, I booked an appointment and made my way over, realizing this would be the first time I had stepped into a gallery for months. I was greeted at the door by the artist, who, after walking me through his exhibition, led me to a table near the back of the gallery. We sat together as he read my tarot cards, and I was moved by the sensorial and somewhat spiritual experience of having an intuitive reading surrounded by Hou’s gorgeous, symbolical stained glass works.

I found Hou’s stunning show to be an ideal space for meditating and reflecting on what art can do in a time of global crisis and struggle through aesthetically beautiful, delicate work that engages the senses and provides replenishment. A similar impetus can be found in Saskatchewan artist Zachari Logan’s Ghost Meadows, on view at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon until Jan. 9. His drawings – which often feature flowers and other plant life – focus on the “delicate interdependence” of our relationships with other humans and our surroundings, something the pandemic has brought to the fore.

Other exhibitions this year have taken up the ongoing project of imagining new and other worlds. In Lii Zoot Tayr (Other Worlds) on view until Jan. 30 at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., for example, curators Amy Malbeuf and Jessie Ray Short bring together a range of Métis approaches to deep space, energy and materiality. These themes are explored as a way to look to futures more reparative for Métis and Indigenous peoples, and at worlds tied to Indigenous philosophies where, as Blackfoot educator Leroy Little Bear articulates in an epigraph that frames the exhibition text, “existence consists of energy. All things are animate, imbued with spirit, and in constant motion.”

This is not unlike the themes explored in Atautchikun | wȃhkôtamowin, on view until March 13 at the Remai Modern. It features Inuit art from permanent collections in the Prairies, along with new commissions. Organized by Mohkinstsis/Calgary-based Métis curator Missy LeBlanc and Inuvialuk artist and curator Kablusiak, with support from Tarah Hogue, the Remai’s Indigenous curator, the exhibition resists colonial conceptions of Inuit art and culture as frozen in time, underlining the dynamism of the Inuit, as well as their living relationships with Indigenous communities on the Prairies.

Being able to almost-gather has been met by many people with both disappointment and relief – a curious combination that reveals the ambivalences underpinning our collective emotional life. And for others still, especially extroverts, the desire to be around people and share in the energy of gathering is an unceasing drive – and one that needs to find an outlet. This brings me to Wetrospective, a retrospective exhibition last fall by Toronto-based performance artist Jess Dobkin at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto, curated by Emelie Chhangur. In this exhibition, which displayed Dobkin’s multi-decade personal and professional archive, the glittery partying of “before times” is a haunting presence as viewers move through installations that seem like the end of a party, but also serve as an archive of queer, sex-positive political action.

Dobkin’s art is undeniably social and embodied, from live performances that require an audience, to participatory encounters like Lactation Station, which serves as a breast-milk tasting bar where people actually imbibe. To stage Dobkin’s hyper-physical and communal practice during socially-distanced-times is a curious challenge. Gathering at this exhibition was possible, but limited, with pre-registration and other expected COVID-19 safety protocols in place. The colourful, maximalist show was up for the brief flash of a month, with livestreamed talks and performances by other artists and thinkers like Joyce LeeAnn, a Black American interdisciplinary artist and founder of the Archival Alchemy Laboratory, and Jehan Roberson, a Black American writer and educator.

For all its sociality and embodiment, performance art revealed itself as a medium with a certain conduciveness to pandemic times, particularly when placed outside. At Toronto’s Critical Distance Centre for Curators, Montreal artists Eve Tagny and Florencia Sosa Rey performed A Landscape’s Spine in the lawn in front of Artscape Youngplace, a community cultural hub. The work closed the exhibition You sit in a garden, guest curated by Chris Andrews, which explored relations between plants and humans. The choreographed, collaborative performance took place before a small audience that watched performers move in ways that traced parallels between a plant’s roots and the human spine. It was also livestreamed with accessibility in mind (live, improvised audio description and captioning, along with American Sign Language and deaf interpretation).

Meanwhile, Vanessa Dion Fletcher (Lenape and Potawatomi) gave an impromptu performance in the Shallmar Parkette in Toronto, a surprise for the local community. The work, Relative Saturation: Three Colour Drip, one of a number of parkette projects presented by Gallery TPW, an artist-run centre, involved the artist interacting with a circular sculpture she had created, moving around it in a hand-sewn garment printed in a pattern of mirrored quillwork. The sculpture held glass vessels that slowly released home-brewed dyes that dripped onto the garment, transforming the artist's clothing into another sculptural part of this land-based performance work. The audience was made up of passersby in the parkette, who gathered momentarily to watch and reflect on the artist’s ritualistic actions.

Finally, Chinatown Biennial, by Toronto artists Arezu Salamzadeh and Florence Yee, is a conceptual artwork and curatorial platform that takes isolation and pandemic-related xenophobia as an opportunity for institutional critique. They started the project in 2020, as the pandemic fuelled a new wave of anti-Asian, and often specifically anti-Chinese, violence. Chinatown, as a historical but also actively alive neighborhood, is explored by curators and participating artists as a site of such racism and social tensions. Also considered are looming threats of gentrification and urban renewal, which are impacted by the arts. The founders emphasize they are interested not only in particular Chinatowns, but also “notions of ‘Chinatown’ and other ethnic enclaves, whether they involve suburban areas nicknamed as such, officially designated streets, homes, malls, alleys, expropriated land, places of solidarity, and more.”

The works in this “biennial” form different outdoor “pavilions” that are social-distance friendly. They range from From China, To Canada, a photo-weaving banner by Quebec-based artist Annie Tong Zhou Lafrance, to a mural in Edmonton by Western Canadian artists Evan Matchett-Wong and AJA Louden, made possible through a partnership between the Chinatown Biennial and the Ociciwan Contemporary Arts Centre in Edmonton. The 2021 edition also features works in Montreal and Vancouver, as well as online.

By almost-gathering, viewing these works under the auspices of a “biennial” – but perhaps in isolation, on your own – viewers negotiate memories of what biennials were in the “before times” along with the uncanny knowledge that times have changed. To view these works as part of a Chinatown biennial brings to mind still-present tensions of racial discord, structural racism, xenophobia and settler colonialisms – but also, importantly, compelling and politically-engaged self-reflective works of resistance by young and emerging BIPOC artists across the country. ■   

Correction Jan. 8, 2022, 11:33 a.m. The post has been updated to reflect that Vanessa Dion Fletcher's project was organized by Gallery TPW.

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