Who Counts? A Feminist Throwdown

Noted Canadian psycho- analyst and writer Jeanne Randolph wrote: “For, in our time so many surreal things have become normalized, that it is hard to find that idiosyncratically fearful image or idea…that thunders and stops your pulse” (The Critical Object [Digital Redux], Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts, 2009). It might seem contrary to use fear as a starting point for a review of the events that celebrated 30 years of operations for Winnipeg’s MAWA (Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art). Collegial hilarity and cohesion would more accurately describe the mood of this important multi-generational gathering of Canadian feminist writers, curators and artists. The opening quote is from The Critical Object [Digital Redux], the Platform gallery publication that was slipped into a gift bag from MAWA organizers for those of us who had travelled to attend “Who Counts? A Feminist Throwdown.” Its psychoanalytical provocation made me attentive to the way many of the artworks in the MAWA-linked exhibitions in Winnipeg, Portage La Prairie and Brandon managed to thunder and stop the pulse. So though the sometimes-satirical symposium events produced fresh insights (into the latest Pop appropriation of feminist subjectivity in a talk by Stephanie Poruchnyk-Butler and Sigrid Dahl, for example) and opened spaces (through an intersectional critique of any lingering “community” cohesion in Sharlene Bamboat’s panel presentation), I will focus here on the exhibitions that carried the celebration of MAWA throughout the region.

One of the first pieces I saw when I arrived in Winnipeg for the festivities was Elaine Stocki’s photograph Nudes Moving an Abstract Painting 2 in the exhibition “Candid: Karen Asher, Maya de Forest, Laura Letinsky, Elaine Stocki” at the Platform gallery. A black and white print, it neutralizes the instrumentalizing of women’s bodies as subjects in both studio art and studio work. In a commissioned text for the exhibition, Kendra Place describes how this photograph appeared to her in a frightful dream, and led her to this summation: “How often we are (how often are we?) differently deprived of our autonomies.” A sense of unsettled autonomies is produced by a number of works in this exhibition marking a trajectory of women’s photography, beginning with Laura Letinsky’s early figurative photos. The ambiguity of consent surrounds Maya de Forest’s photos of a mother’s private Flamenco practice seen through her daughter’s camera, and Karen Asher’s staging of a heavyset man who is shown to be leaning in dependence on someone much smaller.

Going back to Randolph’s Freudian appeal, pulse-stopping fear hits us cold, especially when the repressed is triggered. Ruth Cuthand’s suite of drawings “Misuse is Abuse,” 1990, in her retrospective at Plug In ICA produces such a release. I recall the affective punch that this work delivered when I first saw it—even though it was shown then as slide projections in her artist’s talk at “First Person Plural,” 2000, another MAWA symposium. In drawings of various sizes and configurations, figures identifiable as First Nations speak back to a dominating and fear-inducing “white liberal.” Created at the time of exploratory talks leading to The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, the “Misuse is Abuse” drawings are uncompromising in the way they reveal and repeat the internalized. “Don’t negotiate—Assimilate,” claims one of the First Nations figures, wearing the nails and high-heeled pumps of the recurring white liberal. In another drawing the words “There is no racism in Canada—just an underlying ‘bitterness’,” appear around a couple of figures that have been drawn overtop an erased Canadian flag. Finally, the “’90s Indian” is pictured with a wardrobe of options that defy racialized stereotypes but hide her in grey sameness. Throughout Cuthand’s retrospective, linguistic signs appear layered in images, revealing frightful and even clairvoyant messages.

Like most women artists who have worked in the Canadian Prairies during the past 30 years, I credit MAWA for providing me with opportunities to hear about, meet and work alongside other women artists in non-institutionalized contexts. Given the relational impact that MAWA has had on not just the artists but also the organizations, I was struck by the relevance of Elvira and Marian, al fresco, a diminutive painting by Lisa Wood, appearing at Parlour Coffee—perhaps the smallest of the MAWA-associated exhibitions. In the painting, two recognizable individuals who might typify MAWA’s local dynamism share a moment of reflection in the midst of a sunny picnic meal. They sit together in the foreground of a forested landscape, eating but not speaking. By a clever layering of their images like stop-motion stills, the middle-aged women look up and out, as if to pose the question directly to the viewer: “What does our presence here mean to you?”

In such a broad display of Prairie-based feminist art, the multiple incidents of artworks that re-figure landscapes puzzle me. Is this an innovative feminist critique of the landscape’s ideological formations (its wastelands or its unmarked memorials)? Are the idiosyncratic depictions of the relations of humans to landscape and animals to humans producing “differently deprived autonomies?” In the exhibition “Lateral Symmetry” by Elvira Finnigan, Tracy Peters, Sarah Ciurysek and Basma Kavanagh at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, curator Natalia Lebedinskaia assembled works that explored habitation within uncompromising and entropic landscapes. Tracy Peters’s “SHED Unusual Migration” at aceartinc cunningly engaged viewers to stand in for those absent in a thunderous and abandoned landscape. In some contrast, the work of Amalie Atkins presents a colonizing of the grasslands by theatrically uniform women in the group exhibition “They Made a Day be a Day Here” at the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery.

A lingering image of an active, albeit contorted, body in the landscape stays with me from Tanya Lukin-Linklater’s works in “Memory Keepers” at the Urban Shaman gallery. Involving choreographed dance performances in exterior and interior spaces, this work responds to a 1780s massacre of Alutiiq people.

Idiosyncratic and poised, the exhibitions of both Willow Rector in “Trapped” at Gallery 1C03, and Yvette Cenerini in “Émouvoir” at La Maison des artistes visuels francophones, provocatively extend the representation of non-humans through innovative uses of art and craft forms, which build—no doubt through mentoring—on memorable work by Aganetha Dyck and Diana Thorneycroft.

MAWA’s production throughout the region is substantial and worthy of broader consideration. Fortunately, a MAWA-sponsored book project edited by Heather Davis that takes up Canadian feminist art production—using the psychoanalytical theme, desire—is currently in production. ❚

“Who Counts? A Feminist Throwdown” was exhibited at multiple galleries in Winnipeg from October 3 to October 5, 2014.

Lois Klassen is an artist and writer based in Vancouver. Formative to her creative work was a MAWA- supported mentorship with Aganetha Dyck.