AMY ASH

IN DEEP is a group exhibition that observes complex narratives around extractive practices by centering impacted sites—both bodies and lands—over dominant Western capitalist narratives.

Together, the works of Frédéric Bigras-Burrogano, Lori Blondeau, Emily Critch, Gillian Dykeman, Tsēmā, and New Mineral Collective evoke care for intricate and intertwined histories while proffering potential futures where land and body are valued beyond colonial and capitalist systems. In their works, relationships with the land, the more-than-human world, and our human bodies are honoured and replenished.

By way of their processes, actions, and transmissions, the artists decentralize power, greed, and ownership—core values of all extractive activities—to create space for shared meaning-making, wonder, and learning in the pursuit of healing strategies for change. IN DEEP was organized as a result of a curatorial residency with Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts between 2020 and 2022.

THANK YOU:

Platform Centre for Photographic & Digital Arts, Canada Council for the Arts, artsnb, Craig Love, Dave Ash, and Alex Warren.

it comes in waves is a group exhibition that feels, seeks out, and listens to the resonance of absence.

Across entanglements of contemporary life Emily Critch, Adriana Kuiper & Ryan Suter, Chantal Khoury, Lou Sheppard, KC Wilcox, and Florence Yee care for, and connect with, the phenomenology of grief. The works featured in it comes in waves approach instances of grieving, including climate devastation, systemic exploitation and underrepresentation, personal loss, and broken expectations, with compassion. Together, these artists lean into the ache, memory, injustice, and anxiety of absence in an effort to understand what we value and how we can better care for ourselves, one another, and our collective future.

Through very different means, Emily Critch and Chantal Khoury highlight instances of erasure to tease out narratives of loss and change in human migrations.

Within the works of Chantal Khoury, absence signifies presence as both a marker of the artist’s labour and as a haunting reminder that calls attention to gaps in Lebanon’s recorded history. In Khoury’s process-informed paintings, erasure becomes the language with which she pursues meaning-making. It is through a process of actively removing the material surface of the painting that Khoury stirs her subject matter out from the periphery of existence. To varying degrees of legibility, Khoury’s paintings represent tangible inherited familial objects—those brought from Lebanon to Canada during immigration generations ago. The objects in Khoury’s paintings have been damaged by light, time, and use; moreover, their significance has shifted through the experience of changing hands over the generations. In using erasure as a means to generate presence, the artist speculatively fills gaps in the archive of her personal history, while presenting a wider metaphor for identities informed by diaspora. Through her process, Khoury reminds us that, both literally and figuratively, every attempt at erasure leaves a mark.

While Khoury finds meaning in erasure as a metaphor, Emily Critch activates embodied family histories by revisiting the site of a community that has been erased. Located within the town limits of Cornerbrook, Newfoundland, Crow Gulch was a largely Mi’kmaq neighbourhood populated by migrant workers—including Critch’s maternal ancestors, the Gabriels. Met with racism, stigma, and intense hardship, the people of Crow Gulch were systematically displaced, and every building was razed to the ground. Guided by an Elder who recalls the community, Critch honours the land, and the inhabitants it once cared for. Through meaningful interaction and mindful observation, they spend time together traversing its terrain. Back at the studio, expanded photographic printmaking techniques, with careful hand-alterations, allow Critch to participate in regenerative cultural storytelling. In reconnecting with this land, the artist pays respect to her elders and ancestors, while carving out space to collectively mourn broken hopes and great losses. In her work, depictions of underbrush and new growth—what she refers to as the “indelible flowers against the rocks”—sparkle and flourish with resilience.

In the works of both KC Wilcox and duo Adriana Kuiper and Ryan Suter, compassion and care are enacted through humour, absurdity, and materiality.

Funeral (redux), by KC Wilcox, speaks to the insidious nature of grief—its propensity to creep into the mundane, changing the way we view everyday occurrences and objects. A massive sardine tin coffin adorned with funerary flowers; Funeral (redux) is entirely handmade by the artist. The piece is freestanding and large enough to recall human scale. Wilcox’s laborious approach to creating this work, building layers of material until it is strong enough to support itself, reflects the process of coping with the loss of a loved one. As with much of her work, Funeral (redux) strikes a flawless balance between unflinchingly absurd and profoundly affecting. Stemming from deeply moving personal narratives, Wilcox candidly welcomes others into her experience of loss by building a monument to the necessary, but often undervalued, process of bereavement. At a time when collective grief is expansive, Wilcox invites us to spend a moment reflecting on our own experiences of mourning as we gather around her labour-intensive handmade monument to the phenomenology of loss.

Adriana Kuiper and Ryan Suter display an ethics of care and collaboration through both process and outcome. In their work, rigid technical equipment is quietly soothed by the handmade. Working together in an overlap of personal and professional relationships, their practice is marked by playful reciprocity. Kuiper creates soft and gentle textiles through quilting and stitching that visually amplify the history of women’s work and labour. Suter plays with the textiles and related objects, creating videos and imagery that highlight subtle, moving gestures. Together they develop material juxtapositions and whimsical interventions that come together in their collaborative installations. Their combined work signals familiar comforts and care—even shelter—through textiles and furniture, as well as the slow, meditative movements in the video. Although their installations, which include speakers, technical gear and commercial sound blankets, allude to an aural experience, all is silent. These components coalesce in a softened expression of waiting. By manipulating the function and expectation of familiar materials, Kuiper and Suter gently hold space to nurture weighty questions, such as: What will protect us? And, what is lost when sounds, voices, or functions are dampened, silenced, or modified?

Florence Yee engages with these questions and more in their work A Legacy of Ethnography. Concerned with gaps in the archive, and what he refers to as the “double-edged sword of representation,” Yee questions what it means to participate in processes of historical commodification that have exploited and silenced so many. In A Legacy of

Ethnography, an enlarged family snapshot of the artist as a child appears printed on cotton toile and suspended from the ceiling. Across the image, he has handembroidered the text “what do we lose when we describe ourselves”. Although clearly a question, the words float atop the image as a laborious watermark without punctuation. In watermarking their image, they are pushing back against the violence of the archive—claiming both their autonomy and hesitancy as a means to draw a boundary, and safeguard against further loss. In naming the work A Legacy of Ethnography, Yee is further confronting the problematic structure of the archive. For both the legacy of its omissions and the violence of its inclusions, there is cause for resistance, grief, and new methods of commemoration.

Lou Sheppard’s work centres on the unfolding grief and anxiety of climate devastation through interpretations of queer ecologies and the more-than-human world. Nine Songs for New York comprises musical scores based on spectograms of endangered birds in New York State. Both visually haunting and aurally arresting, the work is a reminder of the temporality of existence— particularly in the midst of ecological crisis. In The Exquisite Corpse, viewers are caught in a conversation between organisms that are described by the artist as “embodied ecologies of bacteria, choirs of buzzing electrons, minerals in human drag”. Performed by Séamus Gallagher and Marley O’Brien, the slippery dialogue travels from meditations on the end of the world, to the loss of beloved pets and queer-identity-affirming online spaces. Punctuated by self and future-affirming mantras and excerpts from The Epic of Gilgamesh, the destabilizing narrative pulses between the weight of eco-crisis and apocalypse to the experience of transformational identities and loss. There is a simultaneity across the three-channel video that underscores contemporary entanglements. In the spirit of hybridized queer ecologies, The Exquisite Corpse proposes the interconnection of chosen family, framed by an ethics of collectivism, care, and reciprocity as a means to unsettle the ideology of individualism that fuels our crisis and grief.

it comes in waves holds space for contemplation and the quiet construction of meaning while facing the uncanny sensation that something is missing. Together, these works serve as a reminder that any conversation about loss or grief is equally a conversation about value, care, and compassion. What could be more important right now, in this moment, as we collectively envision a future that we would hope to inhabit?

desires, biases, fears, memories, beliefs, pain, traditions, grief, objects, loneliness, places, infatuation, quiet moments, prejudices, artefacts, shame, hope, collections, doubts, heirlooms, fondness, grudges, suspicion, bodily pain, loyalties, love;

What do you keep & what will we build from this place?

HARBOUR is a group exhibition featuring the work of: Alisa Arsenault, Sara Griffin, Emma Hassencahl-Perley, Nienke Izurieta, Sarah Jones, Chantal Khoury, Ann Manuel, Sarah Power, Dan Xu. It opened in May 2019 at Saint John Arts Centre, then January 2020 at Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Harbour: A Compendium, an independently published book, is an off-shoot of this group exhibition and can be found here.

Exhibition Text:

A harbour (noun) is a safe space on the coast where ships may moor in shelter, protected from rough waters by piers, jetties, and other artificial structures. As the entry or exit point of solid land, it is the beginning or end of a migration. The act of harbouring (verb) refers to keeping something guarded, often in secret. It can be an act of safety or loyalty, either empowering or debilitating.

HARBOUR brings together nine contemporary artists, with strong ties to New Brunswick, who weave threads between the maritime location and the act of harbouring. This exhibition is a space for contemplation in asking what we can learn from this place and our human tendency toward the act of preservation. Paired with a backdrop of imagery from the New Brunswick Museum archives, the works speak to the human experience of inhabiting a coastal area, and being inhabited by things we cannot let go. Together the artists build a collective voice through the etymology of the commonly used maritime descriptor for our locale: Harbour.

For Chantal Khoury, Nienke Izurieta and Sarah Power, the harbour is internal and must be confronted. Khoury’s work studies a complex system of roots — her own. As a Lebanese Canadian, born in the Maritimes, now living in Montreal, she pulls semi-biographical stories (such as facing her fears of open water on childhood family vacations) from intersecting cultural narratives to investigate her own sense of belonging. Saint John based photographer, Nienke Izurieta constructs otherworldly images that exist somewhere between portraiture and poetry. Working with friends as models, Izurieta’s photographs reveal the intimacy of trust between two people. Izurieta personifies both the harbour and the vessel, daring viewers to leave the safe harbours of their comfort zones. As Khoury consciously faces her deep-rooted fears head-on and Izurieta challenges others to do the same, Sarah Power allows the subconscious world of bodily impulse to lead her investigations. A dance artist and choreographer, Power uses an inspired form of the Authentic Movement method as a catalyst within her creative practice. Originally used for therapeutic purposes, Authentic Movement is an intimate practice involving a “mover” and a “witness” wherein creative control is relinquished in favour of the impartiality of impulse. The body is the harbour, a palimpsest of emotions, sensations and trauma. These artists look back into the inner harbour, excavating bodily stories, like beach combing at low tide for what was once hidden.

Engaged in counter-colonial perspective, migrations, and questions surrounding authorship, Emma Hassencahl-Perley, Dan Xu and Sarah Jones dig into cultural and historical representations to reveal biases and power imbalances in both the act of harbouring and the place itself. Hassencahl-Perley, of Tobique First Nation, draws attention to identity politics and the museum as she mimics the display of a museum artefact. However, Hassencahl-Perley’s jingle dress, detailed with scraps of the Indian Act, is no artefact. The artist will return and strip the mannequin whenever her dress is needed to fulfil its cultural function; it remains within the agency of the artist. Both Sarah Jones and Dan Xu highlight the autonomy of the artist in determining the ideology and iconography of a place. Xu, originally from China, presents a scene with multiple perspectives seemingly in flux, and co-existing almost democratically in one panorama — a metaphor for the layers of migrations in a port city. In stark contrast to idealized historic representations of the city, Jones, of settler ancestry, purposefully elevates the industrial over pastoral. She evokes a playful yet cautionary tale. By obscuring portions of the industrial horizon she asserts the notion that all representation is constructed according to the perspective of the artist.

Both Ann Manuel and Alisa Arsenault are the safe harbours for their family histories, with their collections of memory-infused objects and stories. For Manuel, originally from Newfoundland, the harbour is synonymous with home: a sanctuary. Physical harbours have appeared in her work throughout her practice, but even when the image is absent, the work is intricately wrapped up in a harbour metaphor. Nests, houses, and keepsakes form the vehicle for the metaphor, which flourishes in collections and taxonomies as a means to make a moment tangible, at once a shrine to experience and a memento mori in response to the inevitable changing of the tides. Also enacting the family harbour, Alisa Arsenault, who works primarily with new media, print, and textile, pulls from personal archives which embody both her family and people unknown. From flower-printed fabrics left over from her mother’s seamstress days to found images, she combines disparate elements which, when placed together, hint at her family lineage. Allowing the artefacts to inform the flow, she fabricates stories and folklore to collide with memory, invoking both nostalgia and a comfortable uncertainty. Rather than lingering on the verity of a moment, she questions the importance of biographical truthfulness in the conception of identity.

While Manuel and Arsenault weave threads through their collections to tend to family histories, Sara Griffin takes to the beaches of Grand Manan, caring for the land by collecting objects which have washed to shore. The act of walking and gathering relics is as much a part of her artistic practice as the synthesis of the elements. Griffin collects all matter of salty reminders of distant shores: evidence of industry, watery eco-systems, ways of life, and signs of abundance. She gathers whatever the low tide reveals, and weaves her findings into a story in recognition of their journey. Griffin honours the connectivity and persistence of natural forces working together, a reminder that time goes on with or without us.

This exhibition follows tangents of thought, rooted in memory, which begin at the harbour or with the act of harbouring. In collecting these works and placing them side by side with archival imagery from the New Brunswick Museum, they become pieces of a greater whole — anecdotes of this place and the lives lived within it.

Stories and memories, changeable like the shore being built and rebuilt by the tides. These artists, each with strong ties to the New Brunswick coastline, deconstruct and challenge that which is internalized and build anew — fresh narratives to draw us out of our own safe harbours.

2019 Saint John Arts Centre & 2020 Beaverbrook Art Gallery

This project was made possible through the generous support of the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation and ArtsNB.

Circadian is a group exhibition, featuring the work of Jim Boyd, Janice Wright Cheney, Jud Crandall, Tara Francis, Emilie Grace Lavoie, Alana Morouney, Karen Stentaford, and Anna Torma. It opened in January 2020, commissioned by AX, The Arts and Culture Centre of Sussex, in Sussex, New Brunswick.

Circadian is both a celebration of the pace of life in New Brunswick and the awakening that transpires when we are fully present in ourselves and our surroundings. This collection of work positions itself at the intersection of what it means to be an artist living and working in New Brunswick, engaged in time-intensive processes; and what it is for a viewer to make time, take time, and spend time engaging with the world around them through contemporary art.

View Catalogue here

This project was made possible with the generous support of the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation.

THANK YOU: Jane Simpson, Bonny Hill, Peter Powning, Kathryn McCarrol & Dave Ash.

March -- April 2017

The MUSCLE WIRE exhibition is evidence of a larger project which consisted of a month-long research-driven collaborative residency between myself, Emma Finn and fourteen dedicated young people. See more about the participants and the project under 'collaborative projects'.

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In the same way that we approached the workshops as a call and answer between our own research and the interests and insights of the group, so did we curate the space as a tool to evidence our experience together; each piece constructed with the remnants of what came before.

It was important to us that we would work to honour the ideas of the group; the students were never assistants to us; in ways it was the reverse. We contributed to their ideas by filling gaps in production, by carrying out menial tasks.

Their ideas were the driving force—equal voices in a conversation that they did not begin but took hold of.

The space itself is calm, lit like a museum with a long history, which appears to be mapped out under foot— a network of converging but disparate marks marble the oor. There is a rhythmic series
of hums and dings owing from the back of the space; the sound calls you in, but you do not go there rst. First, you spot the glowing rolls of ink drawings straight ahead. They seem to be both leading the way to the sound and blocking the entrance. As your eye darts to the left, just inside the door, you are struck by the partitions—large wooden structures on caster wheels breaking up the space. Between them a USB hangs, enshrined, above a shelf hosting mound of paper, on the spot-lit white wall.

What is on that USB? I don’t get it. Maybe it is the documentation of the whole project? Is it a gif? ...is it empty? Why?

Beyond the partitions fragments come into focus; a large layered collage, which recalls textbooks and timelines but from which
all sense of chronology or narrative seems to have escaped. The images, which range from a photograph of Piaget to documentation of the apron-clad groups at work, appear to have all become part of one another and, in turn, part of the wall itself. Copper flows in and out of the composition, and stitches creep out of the images, threads escaping from the wall.

Turning away from the collage, another partition is visible at the edge of the wall; it transforms the 90 degree angle into something more organic but of questionable function. As your eye moves through the space, you come across a cabinet containing artefacts under glass — pink note cards, some rope, an old photograph of a chicken puzzle. A bell sits silently but authoritatively on top of the cabinet. 

What is the colour of your first memory?

On the wall to the right of the cabinet, there are two posters. One, of a pyramid made up of actions: Discover, Rehearse, Experiment and so on leading in an order to the peak: Re ect, Share. The other a myriad of descriptions, Two patterns converging, A sequence of loud/quiet movements, among others. They seem to hold an experience within them; “something happened here”, they say.

We’ve all got archived movements without even thinking about them. Sometimes they change a bit, but they’re there.

As you turn to finally follow the sound through the back of the space, past the theatrically lit rolls of scribbles and sketches, you’re met by an opportunity for quiet contemplation. A selection of books, attached by a string begging to be leafed through. With pink comment cards to mark your place or jot down notes, it is a place to return to time and again. It begs repetition.

Just beyond, Drawing With Norman, plays on a loop. A stop- motion animation which provides the soundtrack for the space (Thank you, Norman McLaren) is mounted on the wall, bouncing its light around the space and making sense of the scrolls hanging as you enter the space.

Where are the rest of the drawings? Remember the installation from the first week? Where is that? Everything is here.

In emerging from the back of the space, you’ve come full circle and are once again met with the room that you rst entered. You see the partitions on casters, the shelf, paper and USB; you see the collage and the cabinet of curiosities. But it all looks slightly different from this new perspective.

When you learn the ending of a story, everything changes, even the way you remember the beginning. Sometimes you go looking for your first impressions. But, unlike shape-memory alloys, first impressions can be glitchy and hard to recall or recognise after they’ve been disfigured. 

2015

Orbits and Occults; it won't be the end of things... is an independent curatorial project for which I was commissioned, as a guest curator, by Gerald Moore Gallery, South East London. The opening of the exhibition coincided with the total solar eclipse of March, 2015.

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Orbits and Occults refers to the act carried out by the moon as it circles the earth, crossing occasionally between our planet and the sun to obscure the light we rely on -- refers to the centers of importance and influence around which we revolve our activity -- refers to the mysteries and mythologies we secretly rely on -- refers to time, recurrences and the weight of an act which is calculated and endlessly repeated -- refers to all that comes in and out of view and the ways in which we construct and pass on meaning.

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Orbits and Occults brought together eight contemporary artists to explore the depth, power and reach of the ideology, metaphors and poetics of cosmologies within contemporary culture.

AMALIE ATKINS

SUZANNE CAINES

COURTNEY CHETWYND

ALEXANDRA DARBYSHIRE

GEORGE EKSTS

CHARLES OGILVIE

NEIL ROUGH

EHRYN TORRELL

www.orbitsandoccults.com

Thank you to the artists, Gerald Moore Gallery, and The Canada Council for the Arts.

PHOTOS: George Eksts

2016

DIANA & ELEANOR BURCH. FIONA GRADY. LINNEA HAVILAND. ANDREW JOHN MILNE.

Today more than ever, young people have an outlet for their voice, through public social media platforms, but are they being heard?

YOUTH UNCOVERED brings together a team of young people from three different South London secondary schools and invites them to take a chance and step outside of their comfort zones and commonly prescribed roles to curate a contemporary art exhibition. The YOUTH UNCOVERED team joined forces in 2015, placing an international call for submissions and making their selection from an outstanding number of proposals. Since then, they have been working unfailingly to shape the exhibition, both learning from and leading the professional artists in their research and understanding of what it means to be a young person today. The YOUTH UNCOVERED exhibition is the collective voice of the team.                                                                                  

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When the YOUTH UNCOVERED team met for the first time in the gallery of a freezing multi-storey car park in Peckham, the task ahead of us seemed momentous. Although the team are diverse in background and upbringing, our experiences as young people shared similar trends - expectations in education, technology dependence and social pressures (to name a few).

We each had unified messages we wanted to share with a wider audience, but, for most, curating an exhibition was an entirely new experience. How would we keep the show personal, but also communicative our ideas to an audience? What was most important for us to address? By working with experienced artists we were able to work through the process, developing our thoughts and opinions into vocal installations and sparking debates across generations about the changing face of youth. The project gave us a playground to experiment, as well as a platform to discuss the extraordinary aspects of youth culture we disregard as everyday life. The result is a non-typical display of what it really means to be a young person today: our anxieties and fears, our hopes and dreams.

Words by Georgina Baker

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YOUTH UNCOVERED CURATORIAL TEAM:

GEORGINA BAKER, THOMAS BUGG, KELLY COUGHLAN, GABRIELLA DREW, SAPPHIRE HALES, CAMILLA MAKHMUDOVA, SIÂN NEWLOVE-DREW, MICHELLE NGUYEN, WILL NICHOLLS, HARPREET UPPAL, ELLIOT WEDGE, HOLLIE WILD

http://curatingyouth.tumblr.com/

Youth Uncovered was conceived, designed and delivered, exclusively for Gerald Moore Gallery, by Amy Ash.  Amy is multi-disciplinary artist whose practice incorporates curatorial projects, teaching and learning, installation, collage, illustration and other forms of making.

This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Thank you.

PHOTOS: David Hughes & Amy Ash