THUNDERSTRUCK
With Aganetha Dyck, Brendan Fernandes, Angela Miracle Gladue, Jillian Groening, La calq, Michelle Latimer
Curated by Jenn Goodwin
With The works of six artists are brought together to explore ideas of presence through movement and repetition, within site specific landscapes, employing the undercurrent of dance. Through corporeal and material gestures, the exhibition also considers the traces left behind by physical practice. The works illustrate that repetition of an action creates greater resonance and impact: dance moves to a pulsing rhythm, a hand threading beads over and over again, a list of names cycling iteratively to create a community, a field of shrunken sweaters leaning on each other. It is the movements that become the dance, and reveal a visual that is greater than the sum of its parts.
In Angela Miracle Gladue’s work Boombox, the artist fuses her hip hop and First Nations cultures. As an artist who practices b-girling, Gladue combines traditional beadwork techniques with other forms and influences to create this contemporary work. The artist made her first boombox piece after her brother, who also loved hip hop, died in 2006 in the care of Children’s Services. On her website for her Miss Chief Rocka brand and bead work Angela writes, “Beading is definitely a gift of healing, and every stitch that goes into my beadwork is a step towards that.”
Aganetha Dyck’s Close Knit acts as the vertebrae/spine of the exhibition. It suggests a tenderness and strength in togetherness and collectivity and an interplay between the presence and absence of the body. Each sweater is its own character. Together they lean, support, and stabilize each other. The work is rooted in Dyck’s family history and grandmother’s flight from Europe during the war. It continues to speak to the large groups of people around the world fleeing danger and oppression to hope and safety.
Michelle Latimer describes her film Nimmikaage: She Dances for People as a requiem to honour Canada’s First Nations, Métis, and Inuit women. She notes that the film is about “the devastating effects of extractivism — the extraction that colonialism reaps, both on the land and on women’s bodies.” Images of white audiences are juxtaposed with shots of First Nations peoples’ eyes looking back again and again at the viewer, subverting the white colonial gaze. Shots of moving clouds, birds in flight, running caribou, and flowing waters show layers of the sky, land, and water and the freedoms and movements they naturally enjoy that were so violently stripped away from Indigenous peoples, such as the many profoundly significant dances and ceremonies that remain so essential to Native culture and to all of Canada’s past, present, and future.
For What song makes you feel free on the dance floor? Brendan Fernandes works with the dance floor as a site of agency, occupancy, resistance, expression, freedom, and vulnerability. He also understands the dance floor “as a queer space that is variously safe and unsafe — a site for joy and fear, release and reflection.” For this work, the audience can participate by identifying a song using the hashtag #DanceFree, creating a virtual playlist and turning the environment into a dance floor.
La calq is an anonymous artist and a minor institution of dance committed to exploring experimental subjectivities. In their work Names of Dancers, a scrolling list of dancers’ names is sourced by the dance community at large via the website thenamesofdancers.org.
This ever-evolving list composes a collective choreographic field: a landscape of dance and dancers. By naming dancers—be they famous or relatively unknown -- the scrolling list acknowledges their labor and creates a monument in their honour. By being able to add to this list, the viewer becomes a participant and thus becomes an integral part of this work.
In the vitrines outside the gallery, Jillian Groening’s (score for) soft stitches, pink tongue invites the viewer to experience the internal landscape of a moment in time. Groening explores presence through score for movement and repetitious care that illustrate connections between domestic labor, time, and material. She is interested in the temporality of performance and artifacts, as well as expanding ideas around sites of performance.
Each of the works in the exhibit Thunderstruck incorporate repeated gestures either explicitly or implicitly. Using the dance floor, domestic spaces, communities, earth, and the body itself as landscape, these movements create traces and legacies that go deeper with every recurrence. The works act as an archive of presence and resilience. From a repeated individual moment, or repeated movement, a collection starts to form. A constellation of moments and momentum that says I am here. And, I am here again, and again, and again.
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