Santiago Mostyn

I may be the first public visitor to enter this gallery in nearly 100 days. 

What a privilege it is to experience contemporary art again, here on the first morning of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery’s reopening. And what a privilege, as well, to move about Lethbridge as a cis-gendered, able-bodied white male without fear of unprovoked discrimination.

Context can be of equal importance to the content of an experience. Two weeks ago, I was at the largest public demonstration I’ve witnessed during a decade living in Lethbridge. Now, I’m inside a gallery again. So far, these are the only times I’ve ventured downtown since the COVID-19 pandemic began to limit social experiences in March. 

This exhibition by Santiago Mostyn weaves a critical narrative about migration and colonial oppression, exploring the in-between spaces of belonging and geography. Born in America, Mostyn left as a child to return with his father for a liberated Grenada and Zimbabwe, taking a reverse approach to the typical diasporic journey. Mostyn’s work – which explores notions of transparency and opacity, access and restriction, lightness and heaviness, life and death – prompts me to interrogate my privilege.

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Santiago Mostyn, “Grass Widows,” 2020, installation view at Southern Alberta Art Gallery (photo by Blaine Campbell)

Grass Widows, a series of larger-than-life images of tombstones printed on suspended chiffon banners, gives the exhibition its title. The lightness of these banners juxtaposes with the weight of their meaning, pulling me to move through and around them, examining their textures. My leisurely footsteps are a counterpoint to the fugitivity of the lives represented here.

These gravestone images come from Amber Valley, a settlement north of Edmonton established in 1909 by Blacks fleeing racism and Jim Crow-era laws in Oklahoma. Navigating these works reminds me how easy my everyday movements are, in contrast to many others within North America, then and now.

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Santiago Mostyn, “Grass Widows,” 2020, installation view at Southern Alberta Art Gallery (photo by Blaine Campbell)

I recall the protestors gathered outside Lethbridge’s city hall, using their voices to denounce systemic racism and oppression against Black people, drawing attention to the fact that settler colonialism is not a distant past but an ongoing structure that continues to affect Indigenous peoples. These sonic memories converse with Mostyn’s work, and I can’t help but think: “How does the gallery itself become a site of protest?”

Next to the banners, a single plant breathes life into the space. This Cordyline fruticosa is traditionally used as a boundary marker on Tobago, one of the places Mostyn was raised. A floor-to-ceiling window – walled over for the last few years – opens to the city centre park outside, letting in natural light and speaking to the world beyond the white cube.

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Santiago Mostyn, “Grass Widows,” 2020, installation view at Southern Alberta Art Gallery (photo by Blaine Campbell)

Titled St. Mary’s, this plant references the St. Mary’s River – the eastern boundary of Kainai (Blood Tribe) territory, just outside Lethbridge. Much like the waters that flow into the city, via its confluence with the Old Man River, this plant becomes an artwork that engages and interrogates boundaries – both physical and psychological.

How does art speak to, and with, our current social and political crises? How does the structure of the gallery’s white cube contain this content? How does it – or can it – reach beyond?

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Santiago Mostyn, “Grass Widows,” 2020, installation view at Southern Alberta Art Gallery (photo by Blaine Campbell)

Mostyn, now based in Sweden, uses his own diasporic experience to look at larger themes of global migration. Framed photographs showing a plane in flight and a baby’s birth continue this dialogue. I move past these works to a massive mixed-media installation that includes photo-collaged archival images that generate a wealth of affect. 

One photo in this montage, a Black man with his arms held overhead, reminds me of the protest’s “hands up, don’t shoot” chant against police brutality. This large-scale figure challenges my perspective and positionality in the world, as Mostyn’s work beckons me to look closer, think harder, reach farther. And, critically, to remember that efforts to achieve social justice cannot be undertaken in isolation. ■ 

Grass Widows is on view at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge until Sept. 10, 2020.

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