Schoolgirl by Beige Blum

Growing up as a biracial child, Beige Blum longingly wished to see fictional characters and media personalities that resembled part of her identity. Being of German and Filipino descent, she grew up noticing that Asian characters hardly made an appearance on screen, and if they ever did, they were almost certainly not Southeast Asian. Instead, Blum remembers growing up with more East Asian pop culture influences, such as Sailor Moon, Pretty Cure, or even Disney’s Mulan. Despite not being Chinese, Blum remembers clinging onto Mulan as one of the few characters that more closely resembled her own identity.

“I think a lot of Asian kids could relate to Mulan. She was like our pinnacle Disney princess, like our figure,” Blum says.

Years later, Blum was still interested and influenced by East Asian pop culture, such as anime, J-pop, and K-pop. However, as an adult, Blum felt “unsettled” by how others in fandom and social media spaces perceived Asian pop culture figures. Online, she saw how Asian music idols were being infantilized, while real Asian women were referred to as “waifu.” “Waifu” refers to the term an anime fan uses to call a fictional character their wife. Seeing a word typically used to express adoration for a fictional anime crush be used on real Asian women made Blum uncomfortable.

“I don’t exist to be part of your fantasy. I’m not your waifu,” Blum says.

As an artist, she channelled these feelings into an artwork series titled Not Your Waifu, which explored the fetishization and racist stereotypes surrounding Asian women. Blum says her work aims to challenge the idea that Asian women have no autonomy and that they are submissive objects to be pushed around. Her work uses clever imagery, such as comparing Asian women to paper doll chains, to challenge the idea that Asian women are the same and interchangeable. In her piece titled Schoolgirl, a young woman is depicted having a schoolgirl uniform sewed onto her forcefully as she attempts to break free from the fetishization being imposed on her.

Blum hopes that her work will lead to individual self-reflection and that people will feel more comfortable calling out these misrepresentations.

“It’s so easy to just consume media and be like ‘It doesn’t affect me. It doesn’t affect anybody else. It’s just pop culture’ … I want people to see my artwork and think this is an issue,” she says.

Representing Vancouver’s self-identified queer femme community, The Femme Project is a collection of 70-portrait style photographs accompanied by sound recordings of interview excerpts and wall-mounted quotes. Subjects represent individuality regarding age, ethnicity and fashion. They identified as trans, bi-sexual or lesbian. As one quote from the collection reads: “I am a black femme lesbian immigrant. I think I have it all covered.”

Latour prefaces The Femme Project’s written profile with a quote from Butch is a Noun: “Human beings, as a rule, are pack animals.  We seek the comfort and safety found in the company of commonality, the relief at being recognized for who and what we are.”

All women featured in the project discuss a similar feeling of exclusion and invisibility. “It’s important for people who identify as anything—including butch and femme—to have space, recognition, community, representation and shared common experience,” says Latour. “It provides a sense of belonging. A sense that we are not alone.”

There seems to be a persistent stereotype that envisions gay women as wearing combat boots and flannel, not summer dresses. The Femme Project instead highlights a more diverse truth (along with more diverse challenges): stories of growing up looking like all the other little girls, or having a mother feeling like they had no warning before their daughter came out. “I do not need butch arm candy,” reads another collection text, “to validate my performance of queer gender.”

So far, the exhibit has brought women together, creating a community where they feel they belong. “Identification with something, with a group, with an activity, with ethnicity, with geography, with sexuality—it creates bonds,” says Latour. “It creates value, it creates the opportunity for increased safety and visibility. It can be a collective force for positive change.”

When she began working on  The Femme Project, which was finished in 2010, so many women wanted to be a part that she needed to raise extra money in addition to what she received from the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council. The Femme Project is currently on display—taking up all the main rooms—at Whitby, Ontario’s Station Gallery. It opened May 24 and runs until July 6, coinciding with World Pride.

Google doodle for International Women's Day 2013, Photo: Google

Yesterday was Pi day (3.14), April 12th is National Grilled Cheese Day, and May 4th is Star Wars Day (May the fourth be with you). But joke holidays were put on hold last week for International Women’s Day. Every spring since 1911, women worldwide have campaigned for solidarity. This definitely isn’t a redundant “holiday,” and unlike The Star’s columnist Margaret Wente argued two March 8th’s ago, the war for women’s rights isn’t over.

In the past, women have taken this opportunity to campaign against wars and to protest for better wages and the right to vote—all in the early 1900s. International Women’s Day extended its celebration to many countries in the Middle East beginning in 2000. This included Afghanistan, where 87 percent of women admitted to experiencing domestic abuse in 2008.

This year, Canadians hosted a total of 160 women’s day events as advertised online, many of which raised money for women’s charities. Among these was the first ever Feminist Art Conference which covered topics like “Fertile ground: Body Politics and Sexuality” and “Creating Our Own Narrative: Responding to Gendered Violence.”

Among other exhibits at the conference was the Missing Women Project. As the title suggests, the exhibit featured paintings of the faces of Ontario women who went missing and were never found. Events like this can have a lasting impact on all who attend, but what about those who don’t?

As one reviewer said, “It felt as though the people who were really passionate about these issues were already there.” And that’s the thing. Discussions and events centered around women’s issues are frequented and supported by those already of open mind. While these may be beautiful opportunities to rendezvous with like-minded women, those who are ignorant to these topics are being ignored.

International Women’s Day enables the same discourse to reach a much greater population. There was an “International Women’s Day Youth Art Show” held in Belleville, Ont. An Edmonton sorority, Alpha Psi, collected donations of household necessities for a women’s shelter. Students and staff from a B.C. college posted notes in the hallways about women who influenced their lives. Canada’s theme this year was “Working Together: Engaging Men to End Violence against Women.”

The UK went all out, with 429 events uploaded online. A women’s rights group hosted a discussion in the Democratic Republic of the Congo about eradicating violence on women. In Pakistan, the CARE foundation hosted a conversation titled, “Educate a girl, empower a woman.” These are just a few examples, but the amount is innumerable.

Organizers are already asking on the Facebook page: what would you like to see for International Women’s Day 2014? One commenter proposed a panel of women discussing “how they see the world and the priorities for improving it. Many of us believe that women have a more society-centric outlook, as opposed to a business-centric point of view. ”

For more feedback, an International Women’s Day poll asked “Which world leader achieves most for women?” I scoffed at the first option I saw, Stephen Harper. Remember when the Harper government reduced the Status of Women budget by almost half? Between him, Barack Obama, and the leaders of the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia, the U.S. came out on top.

International Women’s Day raises awareness, which is also a term of which I’m often wary. Like, what does that actually mean? Well it here means that it creates a starting point. When something is wrong, we need to talk about it. Where things go from there depends on how motivated we feel to change.

What would you like to see for International Women’s Day 2014?

Papercraft scene of Toronto streetcars by Drew Nelson. Image courtesy the artist.

A compact card unfolds into a three-dimensional paper scene: a polar bear atop an ice drift looking to the murky depths below, surrounded by the brilliant aurora borealis. Drew Nelson’s origami creations, like the man himself, are a harmonious, detailed and delicate reflection of his world and what he wants to contribute to it.

Nelson is the creative force behind Kinetic Energy Paper Oddities, a maker of pop-up cards, stationery, dioramas, and other paperengineering curiosities. KEPO has been producing meticulously designed cards made out of biodegradable recycled paper for four years now, but Nelson has been a paper lover since childhood.

“I like the fact that you can take a flat sheet of paper and turn it into something three-dimensional,” he says. After graduating from York University’s fine arts program, Nelson headed to Japan where he travelled and worked to pay off school debts. In his spare time he studied the Japanese paper-folding arts of origami and kirigami. After returning to Canada, Nelson aimed to bring the same level of craft and technical rigor he saw in Japan to his work.

Origami (the word comes from the Japanese for oru, to fold, and kami, paper) is hundreds of years old. There is only one material requirement, paper, usually six inches square, precisely folded to look like animals, plants, buildings, and more.

The “kinetic” in KEPO refers to the transfer of energy—from the card maker to the giver to the receiver. Nelson strives for balance and harmony in his work, in his meditation practice, and in the world around him. “I enjoy making cards because it’s peaceful and meditative,” he says. “I love watching somebody open a card and see the buyer’s face light up. I’m passing something on to them,” and that energy is then passed on to the recipient.

While card making is often regarded as a disposable art form, Nelson likes it because cards are increasingly special in a culture dominated by electronic communication. “We’re losing the box under the bed with photos and a card from your grandmother. The more technological and paperless we become, there’s going to be the desire for something tactile,” he says.

Next Nelson is preparing to showcase, in collaboration with Toronto’s Everyone is an Artist collective, a project he’s been nursing for some time: an eight-piece scenic diorama of Toronto’s iconic streetcars. “I love that streak of red that goes through the city,” he says. “I’ve always loved these trains.” He was planning to make the streetcar project of pop-up souvenir cards, but opted for a showcase instead. “The past couple of years I have been designing the business so it can reflect what it is I want to do, without losing the integrity of my work. I’m learning to say no to things that will steer me off track.” He won’t produce work for companies that are environmentally destructive or have poor employment practices, for instance.

“We’re suffering from big-box stores,” Nelson says. “We’ve gotten too big—people want something cheap and fast. It’s so wasteful.”

In this slick, modern iWorld, Nelson infuses an ancient craft and a sense of community into his remarkable paper creations: “I want to produce a product that gets kept because it’s worthwhile, because time has been put into it.”

From “Studies in Sea Ice” (2009) by Roberta Holden. Image courtesy the artist.

Vast, impressionistic, and haunting in its sparseness, Roberta Holden’s landscape photography calls to mind the dark, faraway corners of memory and dreams. Taken from days in the Arctic, over the frozen oceans near Greenland, and during the long nights in Morocco, Holden’s work evokes nostalgia for landscapes untouched by human development—a phenomenon many of us have never experienced. Despite the fact that her work focuses on international subjects, her photographs feel distinctly Canadian in their quiet study of our connectedness with the natural environment and the unspoken effects of the land on us.

Holden, now 33, spent her childhood on a sailboat. her parents sailed frequently up the coast of British Columbia, often stopping in remote locations to hike and work. Taking breaks from life at sea, they would dock the boat in Vancouver’s Coal Harbour and spend seasons harvesting wild rice in rural Manitoba as part of a family business. Until she was 14, Holden worked in the rural landscapes she now documents in her work.

“I think a lot of traditional landscape art tends to romanticize the natural environment. And of course there are a lot of experiences where you can sit back and just appreciate the environment,” she says. “But when you’re actually living and working with the land, it’s just an everyday experience that takes more of the senses than just sitting back and gazing upon it. It’s not just a passive, peaceful thing to look upon, but there’s a struggle in just surviving the day-to-day hardships of the landscape.” Tensions of ancestry, colonialism, barren spaces and the vulnerability of a planet facing the effects of climate change play out in Holden’s most recent touring exhibitions, “Studies in Sea Ice” and “The Stillness of Motion: Changing Polar Landscapes.” Studies in Sea Ice is a series of archival images taken in 2009 by helicopter off the northwest coast of Greenland, a region that has undergone a significant warming trend in the past decade. The Stillness of Motion is a series of black and white images shot in Arctic Canada and Antarctica in 2007 and 2008. The series explores the intersections between humans and the landscapes they inhabit.

Both series have been part of six exhibitions in the Vancouver area during the first three months of 2011. In that time, Holden travelled for the second time to Morocco on a five-month photography trip, where she honed her skills as as photojournalist. As someone who hates having her own picture taken, she can identify with people who don’t like being photographed, an understanding which informs the way she interacts with her subjects.

“It’s taken a little longer to be able to bring a camera out in situations that didn’t create a barrier between people,” she says. “That’s what I see as a problem with a lot of photojournalism that focuses on different cultures.

There’s often a lot of that objectifying of people because you bring a camera to a situation.”

Holden brought her camera to a peaceful protest in Marrakech in late February after which the military ordered that she delete all but two images. Both of them depict a human barricade of soldiers.

Holden’s encounter in Marrakech stands in direct opposition to what she hopes to achieve in her photography—to break away from uni-directional, us-versus-them narratives and, in so doing, illuminate social justice issues, political tensions, and the grey spaces in between. “It’s more of a visceral experience,” she says of her work. “Something felt and not just seen.”

“Total Eclipse” (2005) by Will Munro. Photo by Sean Weaver, courtesy Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

It is impossible to speak of Will Munro. It is easy to talk about Will Munro(s).

Will Munro, the artist/activist/social wizard/impresario and all around wunderkind, passed away one lovely, clear-as-a-bell summer morning in 2010. He was 36.

In that too-short time, Will produced an enormous amount of highly influential, DIY-infused art, reinvigorated the Toronto, and by extension the Canadian, and some argue international queer club scenes—and I support that argument, having seen Will’s influence up close in countless cities far and wide. He empowered an entire generation of artists, who felt the ossified Canadian art scene was not for them, to simply make/display/distribute their art on their own terms.

You’ll note I’m using the “/” rather a lot—I have no choice. Will was so many things, Will made so many things.

I generally distrust the concept of “legacy,” but not in the case of Will Munro. His simplest and most inspired conceit was that queers of all stripes (homo-normative, hetero-normative, just plain fucking crazy, what have you) have far more in common than not, and can share a big sandbox with joy. And we did. For a decade, Will ran the legendary Vazaleen parties— mad, dressed-to-thrill events that spawned many, many subsequent cultural products and collaborations. And that’s putting it mildly.

The parties and the underlying concept—shared space for a diverse population—were both quickly copied, largely because a generation of queers had grown up under the segregationist, essentialist politics of the ’80s–’90s (dykes only go to dyke spaces, fags only go to fag spaces…oh, it was all so tiresome, so numbing), politics that no longer made sense, no longer reflected the day-today reality of the third wave of queer liberation. Suddenly, we all had a meeting place, and we used it.

Now it’s time for a more rigorous examination of Will’s beautiful, sexy art. Will’s social contribution is well-documented (and I’m doing it again), but his highly original art practice, one fuelled by punk-rock aesthetics, righteous rage, and delicious impertinence, rough homemade fashion, sex-worker rights, and queer youth advocacy, club and DJ culture, anti-corporatism, and, less remarked on, his long fascination with, and promotion of, queer cultural history (an interest that made him, again, unique in his generation) has been, to date, not as well-considered.

I sense a sudden boom in Munro studies coming. Retrospectives and monographs galore. More gifts from a relentless giver. It’s the least we can do.

But this is not the place for academic pursuits. Let other people get post-grad degrees off Will’s back.

Right here, right now, I just want to say thank you. I miss you, Will.

Interior of one of the Habitat ’76 hangars. Image courtesy Lindsay Brown.

Walk around Vancouver’s Jericho Beach in 2011 and you’ll see some odd architecture: an empty concrete wharf, a welded steel railing that overlooks English Bay, a strange rail embedded beneath the sailing club. These are all that is left of a complex of five gigantic aircraft hangars that was home to an international conference 35 years ago.

Lindsay Brown, a textile designer and board president of Vancouver’s Or Gallery, is working to unearth a forgotten piece of Vancouver’s history: Habitat ’76, a United Nations-sponsored conference that brought together figures like Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, and Mother Teresa, to discuss and explore human living conditions and social justice. She is gathering information towards publishing a book.

An adjunct to the UN Habitat Conference on Human Settlements, the Habitat Forum was infused with a distinctly mid-’70s brand of optimism and utopianism. The five huge seaplane hangars, left over from the 1930s, were converted into theatres, halls and restaurants for the thousands of people who attended. The theatre, styled to look like a First Nations longhouse, had a Bill Reid mural.

Brown, a thirteen-year-old girl at the time, visited the Habitat forum and calls it a life-changing experience. “It had a kind of a carnival atmosphere. It had a less controlled atmosphere than the city generally had. People call it ‘No Fun City’ now. When you’re thirteen, you don’t exactly know what’s going on, but it had that feeling of ideas and experimentation as well as fun. It was so beautiful.”

Exterior of one of the Habitat ’76 hangars. Image courtesy Lindsay Brown.

She was impressed with the ferment of artistic and political ideas and creativity at Habitat, in contrast to the staid conservatism she experienced in the rest of the city. “You did get the sense you were in a global event rather than the sort of parochial Vancouver I’d been used to.”

Years later, Brown never forgot about Habitat. She would Google it now and then, but was often frustrated that little or nothing turned up. Habitat seemed to have been forgotten. In 2009, she decided that if nobody else would write a book about it, she would.

Brown managed to track down Al Clapp, Habitat’s organizer and a prominent broadcaster. ““I said, ‘Hi, I’m a child of Habitat. I want to write about it. Can we talk?’ He said, ‘Sure. I’m in Victoria. Come on over.’” Brown visited Clapp, who loaned her his archive of photos and other material. “That’s when I knew there was a book in it.”

Brown says that, unlike Expo ’86, Habitat ’76 was deliberately buried by Vancouver’s city government. “It’s very hard to keep a history alive when you have absolutely zero public, official recognition of it. I think it was deliberately suppressed.” The aircraft hangars were demolished and the 35th anniversary came and went with little fanfare.

More than just nostalgia, Brown believes that Habitat’s ideals are increasingly relevant today with the renewed focus on urban planning. “One of the interesting things about Habitat is that it thought about those things, what is actually livable at a human level? What should neighbourhoods and cities be like?”

Manipulated photo from Kristin Nelson's series My Life With Pamela Anderson (2010). Images courtesy the artist.

Surfing the internet for a Grey Cup art project in November 2008, Kristin Nelson landed on a saucy image of Pamela Anderson. It immediately provoked a spark of inspiration that she couldn’t explain but also couldn’t deny. Thus emerged the seed of a body of artwork called My Life With Pamela Anderson that documents, in finely crafted fiber works and manipulated photos, an imaginary yet deeply felt relationship between the artist and the celebrity.

The Winnipeg-based multi-disciplinary artist has often explored the cultural representation of identity and sexuality, yet she had no feminist or deconstructionist impulse going in.

“I had a lot of hesitations about using her image,” Nelson says, “but in working out those thoughts I decided the main purpose would be to get to know her.”

In some ways the work is typical of Nelson’s art. She strives to get to know people and places and to reveal over-looked or un-thought-of aspects of them to herself as much as to her audience. The much sought-after Drag King Trading Cards (2007 and 2010), for instance, featured portraits of butch women in packs like those of sports stars for sale at corner stores. These subversive collectibles allowed Nelson to collaborate with and explore her own relationship to the queer community.

Manipulated photo from Kristin Nelson's series My Life With Pamela Anderson (2010). Images courtesy the artist.

Currently, however, Nelson’s interest is finding more universal points of entry to her art. Her most recent subject, however, proved a challenge: How do you get to know someone so famous, not to mention already a well-worn subject of cultural criticism?

“It was important for her character that I stay quiet about the project and not justify it,” Nelson says. As she researched lesser-known aspects of Anderson’s life, Nelson decided that she would put herself in, thereby going beyond a critique of celebrity consumption to a playful take on how we absorb the lives of the famous into our own.

In the most striking pieces, pin-up pictures of the actress have been transformed into shimmering, larger-than-life cross-stitch portraits executed in yarn on aluminum panels. Also, in line drawings made from yarn and nails and manipulated family photographs, Nelson and Anderson hang out, watching TV and riding bikes, like old pals in gauzy dreams. The whole effect softens the celebrity’s official image and transforms preconceptions of its audience, too.

Large cross-stitch tapestries from Kristin Nelson's series My Life With Pamela Anderson (2010). Images courtesy the artist.

On the one hand, Nelson’s work is laugh-out-loud funny, a luscious manifestation of celebrity idolization. On the other, the needlepoint technique highlights Nelson’s patience and care for her subject. “She’s a very dehumanized person, even in scholarly discussions by feminists,” Nelson points out. “She’s something to bitch about, or insult. She’s talked about in terms of either-or, but nobody is just an image of themselves.”

Indeed, in Nelson’s images, Anderson is neither Madonna nor whore, but something less sensational—a focal point for talking about sexuality and popular representations of it. “I’ve learned to see her in a different light, rather than categorize her as ‘other’ than myself,” Nelson says.

Currently, she is making another series of smaller cross-stitches about what she imagines was a real turning point in the actress’ life, this time patterns generated from the landscapes of a well-known leaked video from the mid 1990s of Pamela and her then-husband, Tommy Lee, having sex on a boat. The hope is that people may recognize the images. As Nelson explains, “Discussing is more interesting than showing.”

I moved to downtown Hamilton, Ontario, in 2005. We bought our three-storey Victorian home near Copps Coliseum at a price that would have been unheard of in Toronto. The corner we lived on had been labelled “the most dangerous corner in Hamilton.” But my shaved head and tattoos stood out less here than in the fashionable, gentrified neighborhoods of downtown Toronto.

I noticed that a) there were lots of sex-trade operations near our house— for instance, massage parlours and the Hamilton Strip strip club—and b) there were also two anti-abortion establishments nearby. Our neighbourhood was like many other Canadian neighbourhoods: some people believe sex is for fun and pleasure, whereas others believe sex is specifically for making babies.

That’s why I’m so proud of Big Susie’s. Big Susie’s is (to quote their website) “a working group by and for sex workers in Hamilton and the surrounding area.” Their purpose is to “fight back against the stigma and silence that degrades, devalues and dehumanizes sex workers and their work.”

The organization was born because of an odd and somewhat unfortunate intersection between politics and art. In 2009, a small local art gallery featured a series of photographs the artist had taken from the window of his studio, which was near a notorious alley used by hookers. The photographs were explicit and voyeuristic and—most importantly—were taken without the consent of the subjects. Trendy artists and people from the suburbs who visited the little gallery seemed entertained by a scandalous glimpse of Hamilton’s sexual working-class underbelly. But local sex-trade workers were angry. Weren’t they people too? Did someone have a right to photograph them and make an “artistic statement” about their bodies and their lives, without their permission? The protest against this exhibit led to the birth of Big Susie’s. Is all art political? Definitely, yes. Should artists be challenged when they consistently make work they characterize as apolitical, when in fact it is not? I (not to mention Bertolt Brecht!) would say yes.

As an out gay man and a drag queen, I have always been proud to be promiscuous. It makes me feel safe to have an organization in my town that is sex-positive and defends the rights of women to use their bodies in any way they wish in consenting sexual situations. Some feminists assume all prostitutes are victims, and proceed to speak for them, as if they didn’t have a voice of their own. But, lo and behold, they do.

Detail of "2005 of the Top 3000" (2005) by Olia Mishchenko. Collection of Art Gallery of Ontario, image courtesy Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

“A bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells,” Karl Marx noted. “But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” Born in Kiev in 1980 and based in Toronto since 1997, artist Olia Mishchenko uses a paraphrase of this passage to situate her work. Bees perform a collective algorithm larger than any individual, while architects are engaged in singular imaginative play, a poesis, that brings forth something new. The tension between the plan and the realized built form—the translation of thought into reality—is a creative crucible, like the battle between paint and canvas, ink and paper, body and field of play.

But whereas Marx falls firmly on the side of the architect and human imagination, and thus allows architects more of the Fountainhead-style self-congratulation that can make them so obnoxious, Mishchenko’s whimsical renderings of collective construction are just as unstable as the buildings being erected in them. Or are they even buildings? In work after work, armies of tiny cartoonish figures—running children, dogs, people on bicycles—enact coordinated but uncanny undertakings, building and playing, laughing and working, leaving behind piles of materials, tools, ramps, walkways, and rickety towers as they venture across sometimes long horizontal vistas of creation. The details offer ambiguous and sometimes disturbing narratives. Who are the children? What are the structures for? What is the social system that calls them forth?

I have one Mishchenko drawing, untitled like all of them from this period, and in it there are no figures at all, just an apparently abandoned minaret fashioned of waterwheels, boxes, and large canisters full of clothing. Is it a dump or a supply centre, a folly or a shrine? And where are the usually busy figures, with their game boards and ladders and rope pulleys, their walking sticks and trunks of hewn wood? The absence is provocative. Mishchenko doesn’t celebrate architecture, she investigates the very idea of shared space, of public meaning, of makers and made. In their lighthearted manner, these joyous political artworks offer fresh sketches of the place where individual identity meets its collective other.