Online Panel Discussion
13 September @ 7:00 pm ADT
This is a free event and open to the public
falling through our fingers
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About this exhibition
falling through our fingers is a group exhibition that considers the complexities of preservation and the possibilities of archives. Each of the six contemporary artists included present new work that mediates institutional, personal, and familial collections to engage with intergenerational dialogues, undocumented labour, diasporic histories, historical erasure, grief, and joy. In locating and weaving threads between archival interstices, the exhibition acknowledges the interconnectedness of past, present, and future.
In her work Iceberg Stranded in My Bed, artist Faune Ybarra uses a series of diasporic gestures to engage with a collection of archival photographs taken by Robert Edwards Holloway that are housed in the Digital Archives of Memorial University (Newfoundland). Part of a performance series, this work moves between the island of Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) and Vancouver, where Ybarra currently lives, and invites the audience to consider the movement of bodies in relationship to migration and undocumented histories. In a similar vein, Mi’kmaw artist Kelsey Street thinks through ideas of home, community, memory, and connection in works rooted in ancestral relationships to the lands and waters of Elmastukwek, Ktaqmkuk (Bay of Islands, Newfoundland). In Weaving With You, she undertakes an intergenerational collaboration with her grandmother, Alice Mary Bennett, a Mi’kmaw woman who lived much of her life on Woods Island, a small fishing community in Elmastukwek that was resettled in the 1960s.
The work of B.G-Osborne is also greatly influenced by matrilineal legacies. In the ongoing series EACH OTHER, Osborne uses personal family archives, sculpture, and installation to articulate both their grief and the intangible, yet boundless relationship they have with their birth mother, Joan, who passed away in 1995. Matrilineal histories and collaboration are also significant within the artistic practice of Barbadian-born artist Racquel Rowe. In the two-channel video installation Sea Bath, Rowe and her mum are seen sea bathing, a ritual traditionally done by elders in the Bajan community. Moving both independently and in harmony with each other, they emphasize the interconnectedness of land, water, family, and identity throughout the Black Diaspora.
Much like the other artists in this exhibition, Daze Jefferies has a deep connection to the Atlantic. Born and raised in the Bay of Exploits on the northeast coast of rural Ktaqmkuk, her research-based creative practice works with archives, beach wash-up, queer ephemera, oral histories, sound, poetry, sculpture, theory, performance, and illustration to engage with the ocean as a body, a transformative entity, and an archival relation. Equally interested in narratives carried by the sea, Excel Garay investigates the emergence of ultramarine blue, both as a colour that alludes to the vastness of water, space, and the unknown, and as a commodity purveyed via colonial trade routes. Her work thus addresses both the history of extraction and the unrecorded and unarchived histories of the larger diaspora it creates.
Meet Emily Critch, Adjunct Curator
Publication
Essay by Emily Critch
Design by Tara K Wells
Translation by Colette Tougas
Published by Owens Art Gallery
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About the artists
Excel Garay is an artist-curator and community worker operating on Mi’kma’ki in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS). Her work, in these intersecting roles, is informed by mutual desires discovered through acts of collaboration and her lived experience. She graduated with distinction from NSCAD University with a double degree in Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Bachelor of Fine Arts (2022). Garay’s expanded painting practice enhances the spectral state of common everyday objects to reveal their contemporary implications, haunting histories, and their speculative potentials. She uses the color ultramarine blue as a spiritual tool to engage with ghosts of unseen labor, long-distance ceremony, and to unveil vampiric extractive endeavors. Her practice highlights the tension between feelings of desire||surprise as a generative form of affect that allows her and viewers to better understand prismatic contradictions of everyday life.
Daze Jefferies (she/her) is a white settler artist, writer, and educator born and raised in the Bay of Exploits on the northeast coast of rural Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). Working with archives, beach wash-up, queer ephemera, oral histories, sound, poetry, sculpture, theory, performance, and illustration, her research-based creative practice engages with the ocean as a body becoming to form washy, wayward, and withheld counter-narratives of queer + trans + sex-worker worlds at the water’s edge. What emerges from this precarious assemblage is a story of touch, drift, and transition that finds hope in the changing North Atlantic. Her research-creation and multidisciplinary projects have been exhibited and performed throughout Atlantic Canada. Author of the poetry chapbook Water/Wept (Anstruther Press, 2023), and co-author of Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge: Unsettled Islands (Palgrave, 2018), she has also published in Land of Many Shores: Perspectives from a Diverse Newfoundland and Labrador and Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry. www.dazejefferies.com
B.G-Osborne is a gender variant autistic settler of Scottish and British descent. They were born and raised on Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg Territory, and they are a current, uninvited guest on the Southeast coast of Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). Osborne’s ongoing projects seek to address the complexities and revisionary potential of gender-variant embodiment/representation, and to unpack and share their experiences with mental illness, neurodivergence, and familial bonds. They place great importance in showcasing their work in artist-run centres and non-commercial galleries across Turtle Island. https://bgosborne.weebly.com
Racquel Rowe is an interdisciplinary artist from the island of Barbados currently residing in Canada. She’s exhibited across Canada and holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo and a BA (Honours) in History and Studio Art from the University of Guelph. She is the recipient of numerous scholarships during her MFA degree, most recently receiving grants from the Ontario Arts Council as well as Canada Council of the Arts. Her artistic practice and research are continuously influenced by many aspects of history, matrilineal family structures, diasporic communities, and her upbringing in Barbados. Her work takes the form of performance, audio, video, oral storytelling, and other multi-media installations. www.racquelrowe.ca
Kelsey Street is a Mi’kmaw artist from Elmastukwek, Ktaqmkuk Territory (Bay of Islands, NL). She has an interdisciplinary arts practice working in a variety of forms such as beadwork, textile/craft, and printmaking processes, often touching upon themes of community, home, and resettlement. Street graduated with a BFA in Visual Arts from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and she has participated in residencies and exhibitions provincially and internationally (Canada, UK) at venues such as Union House Arts, Tina Dolter Gallery, Craft Council, PULP Gallery, Grenfell Art Gallery, and Gatehouse Arts, UK. Street was recently the artist-in-residence and presented a solo exhibition at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, NL.
Currently situated in the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-Waututh nations, Faune Ybarra is a diasporic artist and researcher originally from Oaxaca and Mexico City. Due to the experience of constantly moving and adapting, Ybarra conceives of her body as a site of translation from whence she attempts to communicate with the other-than-human. Her iterative practice rejects the (art)object as a given outcome and instead speculates on how nomadic creative methodologies converge to document motion. Past repositories of her work have taken the shape of performance, photo-based objects, and diasporic gestures. Ybarra has developed, performed, exhibited, and spoken about her practice at galleries, artist-run centres, and conferences such as Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC), ArtStarts (Vancouver), Eastern Edge Gallery (St. John’s), Capture Photo Fest (Vancouver), The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery (St. John’s), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver) and Diasporic Futurisms (Toronto). She holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Memorial University of Newfoundland and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Simon Fraser University. www.faune-ybarra.online
