Top: Lynn Gros Louis (Huron-Wendat). Bottom: Anita Lalo (Innu). Images courtesy Nadine St-Louis and Ashukan Cultural Space, Montreal

Think of the dreamcatcher and it evokes a familiar image. A hoop, a woven web, adorned with beads and feathers. The iconic talisman, said to have originated from the North American Ojibwe, is a common sight in most Canadian souvenir shops. But don’t believe its “Made in Canada” label. More likely, it’s been mass produced overseas and imported into Canada for pennies on the dollar. What may cost you $5 at the shop is costing Indigenous artists their livelihood.

Reclaim Indigenous Arts is an education campaign designed to inform the average consumer of just that. Many Indigenous people rely on arts to make a living, says Jay Soule, artist and co-founder of the initiative. The import and sale of mass-produced knock-offs of Indigenous art pieces is a problem for creators who have spent their lives learning the methods and cultural significance behind the goods. “It’s creating an atmosphere where consumers don’t understand the difference of real, handmade Indigenous arts and crafts,” says Soule.

Why would the average consumer spend $50 on a genuine dreamcatcher that uses real red willow and actual sinew for the web when they can buy an imported facsimile made of faux-feathers and plastic beads for just $10? That’s why the campaign is urging consumers to take action and spread the word as far as they can.

The initiative features a letter-writing campaign to local councillors, souvenir shops, and even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a template for which you can download from the website, sign, and send. The goal is to actually enforce a UN act that Canada has technically adopted, which gives Indigenous people the rights to protect their traditions, customs, and art, with the hope to eventually ban the import of cheaply made, inauthentic Indigenous art. Down the line, the initiative hopes to repatriate sacred objects and art that are either on display in museums and galleries or lay forgotten in archives—and were taken without permission from Indigenous communities in Canada. According to Soule, these ancient injustices set the stage for what’s happening today.

“This is why Canadians and businesses feel that it’s okay to do this,” says Soule, “because Canada itself has been the leader of cultural appropriation for the last 150 years. It sets a precedent for the devaluation of Indigenous arts and crafts.”

Today’s charged political climate and various high-profile incidents of cultural appropriation were the catalysts for Soule and Montreal-based entrepreneur and founder of the Ashukan Cultural Space, Nadine St-Louis, to launch the initiative.

The response has been positive, says Soule. In fact, the campaign has even garnered the attention of Hamilton city council, which is considering taking a closer look at ways to combat cultural appropriation.

In the meantime, he suggests being careful when purchasing so-called “Made in Canada” Indigenous crafts. Ask the shopkeeper who the artist is or which community the piece is from. “Most likely if they don’t know the answers to those questions, they’re not handmade,” says Soule.

After being taken away from their culture, many Indigenous people are connecting to their traditions through art—and are trying to make a living. It’s a task difficult enough without cheap rip-offs made in an overseas factory flooding the market. Soule brings to mind a powerful comparison, citing the recent police raids in Markham, Ont.’s Pacific Mall for selling counterfeit designer fashion brands.

“Why would the police raid a store on behalf of Louis Vuitton and Coach…but not give us the same respect and protect our arts?”

“Music criticism is dead,” proclaimed Dan Kopf emphatically on culture website Quartzy this past spring. In the present streaming era, when you can easily discover music on your own, the “music explainer,” in the form of podcasts, is where it’s at, he argued. Why consider secondhand opinions when you can hear directly from creators about their own writing processes? Hosted by Los Angeles-based Hrishikesh Hirway out of his garage, Song Exploder, a podcast that is perhaps the best known of Kopf’s explainer examples, has already featured an impressive array of guests since it debuted in 2014.

While an explainer like Hirway might not replace the music critic, they could well be reinventing the role. That could be a good thing, even if there are some questions.

It’s possible that explainers could become merely industry insiders, more social entrepreneurs than musician-broadcasters. We’ve seen it happen with music criticism: Since recorded music became freely accessible, the critic-as-journalist has been joined by a new kind of entrepreneurial critic—the opinionated fan. Film critic A.O. Scott has suggested that critics have always been viewed as either specialists or amateurs. In the age of social media, an entrepreneurial music critic is a discerning fan for whom contextualized opinions on music are more important than knowledge of how (or, sometimes, where) it is made. For a select few, fandom can pay, and on YouTube a small crop of verified vlogger-reviewers are now considered modest cultural authorities, with view counts numbering in the millions. However, there are few non-white and even fewer female or non-binary reviewers among them.

The state of criticism at more established online publications is more complicated. Some international music sites like Pitchfork have attempted to diversify their staff and coverage. But the Guardian recently reported that music magazine NME has gone in the other direction. During the early 2000s, two Canadian music sites—Exclaim! and the late Chart Attack—boasted diverse mastheads, but media visibility for non-white, non-male critics seems to be an ongoing problem. Erin Lowers, Exclaim!’s current hip-hop editor, has told Now magazine that “the credit isn’t there” for female-identifying hip-hop writers and publicists.

A key problem plaguing pop music criticism is that, unlike literary and film criticism, it isn’t particularly well-defined. In academia, it exists primarily in musicology or cultural studies departments. In journalism, it has historically involved being present where music subcultures “happen,” an approach seen in Lizzy Goodman’s tome of celeb interviews documenting the 2000s post-punk revival in New York City. During the past two decades, it has also increasingly overlapped with media criticism, such as in recent works by Ryan Alexander Diduck and Grafton Tanner, where music technologies are the focus. Then there are memoirs. Rashod Ollison, a Virginia-based pop critic, documents the challenges he faced growing up as a gay Black teenager in rural Arkansas, marking focal points of his story with song lyrics. He recalls how he admired soul music because he “preferred a more ingratiating place… nurtured by sounds born out of the visceral emotionality of sanctified church singing” to the male anger he felt drove much of west coast hip-hop and alternative rock in the early 1990s, which he couldn’t hear as progressive or sustaining life.

Explainers have the potential to improve criticism and bring these disparate strands closer together. They might also integrate public conversations about pop music with more traditional genres of music like culture-specific folk and classical music, as well as certain forms of jazz. Public broadcasters like NPR, CBC, and BBC already achieve this to an extent, but music criticism sites largely do not. So if there is a Song Exploder equivalent out there capable of getting Mbongwana Star, Shirley Collins and the Latvian Radio Choir in the same room, maybe with Steve Martin dropping in briefly via Skype, I’m on board.

CORRECTION: A version of this story that ran in print in September/October 2018 incorrectly named writer Lizzy Goodman as Elizabeth Goodman. This regrets the error.

A child playing in a snowbank. A woman cutting a cake. A man digging a car out of a snowdrift.

At first glance, these are common Canadian moments. But look closer and they become celebrations in the daily life of any Canadian family. Whether they are new to the country, first- or fifth-generation Canadians, these are things we all share.

Elizabeth Mudenyo is the special projects manager at the Regent Park Film Festival, which leads free, community-driven programming in Toronto. Reflecting on the representation of people of colour she says: “Whenever we see archival material, it’s usually centred around whiteness, especially in Canada.”

Mudenyo is working to change that. In partnership with Charles Street Video and York University Libraries, she is coordinating Home Made Visible, a project to digitize home movies created by members of visible minority and Indigenous communities.

The scenes from a snowy day and a family party are just a few examples of footage that has been transferred from video and film formats to digital files so far. Although the Regent Park Film Festival is rooted in Canada’s oldest and largest social housing community, Mudenyo sees the national archival project as a natural fit because “we are an organization run by people of colour who create content and platforms for people of colour to share their own stories.”

Home Made Visible responds to both technological and social change. By digitizing home movies, it restores access to personal stories that risk being lost as formats like VHS and 16mm become harder to enjoy at home. By allowing participants to choose which portions of their footage they would like to contribute to the archives at the York University Libraries, it ensures that members of Indigenous and visible minority communities remain in control of how they are represented and remembered.

This process tackles the underrepresentation of people of colour in Canadian archives. For Mudenyo, “being a part of our public archives can actually shape how we view the past, how we view communities and people, and how we shape our future.”

Home Made Visible also opens dialogue about analogue artefacts in a digital world. A second component of the project commissions seven artists across the country to create work that critiques the notion of archives. Nadine Arpin is a Two-Spirited Métis artist based in Sioux Lookout, Ont. As one of the commissioned artists with Home Made Visible, she is working on a documentary-style film that tells the story of a local Zamboni driver who emigrated from Colombia. “Archival and found footage is actually a staple of my work,” explains Arpin. For her, the commission is an opportunity to tackle stereotypes about small-town life: “When you see the same faces every day, inclusiveness is imperative.”

It’s a reality Arpin rarely sees reflected in depictions of northern communities. Finding little archival content at the local public library, she put out an open call to residents of Sioux Lookout and is constructing the commission from shoeboxes full of Super 8 footage provided by a community member.

From shovelling snow in the suburbs to shining the ice in Sioux Lookout, this project aims to shed a light on underrepresented communities and how they both contribute to and challenge national narratives.

Photo courtesy of Meghan Parker

It’s been said that the medium is the message, but how much say do we have over which mediums shape our experiences—and how might they shape our education? Meghan Parker, an art teacher at a public high school in North Vancouver, considers this question in her recent thesis, “Art teacher in process: An illustrated exploration of art, education and what matters”—a 268-page comic book created for her master’s in arts education at Simon Fraser University.

Challenging conceptions that scholarship should be textual—“12-point font, Times New Roman,” as Parker puts it—her work demonstrates how scholarship can be artful and that art can be scholarly. The thesis is structured into chapters titled after the seven elements of art—line, colour, form, texture, shape, space, and value—which act as real-life metaphors for Parker’s inquiries. Together, the elements converge to form a site of praxis, where the theories and thinkers Parker engages with are in direct conversation with reflections and questions toward her own methods as an art teacher.

Parker anchors this praxis by illustrating herself as narrator, taking us on a journey à la Magic School Bus across scenes from her daily classroom experiences, while also integrating quotes from theorizers she is influenced by, self-reflexive musings, and scenes from her home life. The combination of visuals and text in comic-book form allowed her to depict how scholarship, teaching, learning, life, and art are all interwoven practices. Creating an autobiographical comic also enabled Parker to insert her own body within her scholarship, illustrating how knowledge is deeply embodied—something our educational system often tends to forget.

Through exploration and the support of her supervisors, she was ultimately able to find her chosen medium, carving out a space for herself in academia to represent knowledge in a way best suited to her research. For Parker, scholarship boils down to the following: communication, advancing ideas, and reflection. One of her biggest takeaways from doing this work was that form really matters when communicating one’s ideas—that the how is just as important as the what. Going forward as an educator, she aims to continue making learning accessible and diversified in her classroom, “to inspire others to find their form, to be the artist in them, whatever that form may be.”

I almost threw up all over you the first time we met. I was 18. My then-boyfriend took me to a Just for Laughs showcase in Montreal. Mascara ran down my face as I watched one of the performers, Jeremy Hotz. You and I were still getting to know each other then. I was sweating and hyperventilating and I got dizzy and my jaw was sore and my stomach felt ready to implode—and it was the most distilled joy I’d ever experienced. I wasn’t anticipating, as I normally did, that the joy would soon be over, replaced by grey feelings I carried everywhere; I thought I could laugh that hard forever. I only knew of one way to fall in love: hard and fast. And so you and I began.

Falling in love hard and fast means that when you lose it, you fall hard. And fast. That boyfriend and I broke up. He left the country. I tried to take my own life. You were there every night the following summer after I was in the hospital. My little brother and I stayed up watching you on Conan until my brain settled enough so I could sleep. Thanks to you, we created a secret language—a world of inside jokes where I felt safe from my own mind.

That world expanded the first time I hung out with the person I’d later marry. “Do you know the D?” I asked. “Yeah, I know the D,” he answered, referring to Tenacious D. Our shared appreciation of this silly rock-comedy band sealed our friendship. Our close friendship soon grew into a loving relationship. You were around for that, too. At the beginning, he and I watched old Dana Carvey Show sketches. Years later, we watched a Paul F. Tompkins special where he pretends to be an employee for the South Carolina Electric Company who invites a colleague to a private work function: “Take care to wear your rubber-soled tuxedo, I hear tell they have a punch bowl filled with lightning!” We had to pause the show because we were falling off the couch in hysterics. We spent a decade retelling jokes, inventing new ones. We threw in puns, personification, and celebrity impressions. We were a silly army of two until we separated. Then nothing was funny.

Maybe you’d know exactly how I felt. So many people use you to talk about pain, after all. But me it took me writing to you to find the words. A separation means being lost in a cold place. It’s not getting warmer. You have no map. No compass. No phone. No one knows you’re there. They don’t realize you’re missing.

Crying was my only outlet. I clogged up the work bathroom with snot-filled tissues. I screamed into pillows. I didn’t bother wearing makeup to therapy anymore.

Still, you were there.

You were there every time my colleagues pity-laughed as I stumbled through a DeAnne Smith or Aparna Nancherla bit. It was better than nothing. You were there when my friend, Erin, introduced me to Baron Vaughn and Ron Funches one afternoon when I was sure I’d never experience joy again; I did that day. You were there when I stared down the weepy woman reflected in my computer screen reacting to a Hannah Gadsby line: “Your resilience is your humanity.” I realized I might love that woman. Maybe the heart is like the liver, I thought later. Maybe it regenerates, no matter how raw.

And so my raw heart connected with other people’s raw hearts—those of comedians and the audience. And I started to wonder: Maybe the best thing we can ever hope for is to look at each other’s raw hearts and laugh with understanding. Laugh at how the world is falling apart but we keep showing up every day. Laugh at how absurdly devastating it is for two people who care about each other so much to separate out of love. Laugh at the fact that one small thing could’ve been different and the comedian, audience, and I wouldn’t be sharing that moment.

In those spaces, the cold place got a little warmer. I told people where I was. They came looking me for me. They realized I was missing, and you were the compass out.

Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash

Photo by Lisa Graves, Concordia University

In the absence of access and recognition comes resilience and creativity.

This became apparent to Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk scholar and art historian, as she researched the presence of Labrador Inuit artists in Canada’s history during her years of doctoral research at Ottawa’s Carleton University.

What she discovered was the near absence of information on their artistic work and contributions. “I found there were no books on Labrador Inuit—only a handful of journal articles, and not many magazine essays,” she recalls. “When we don’t see a culture represented in literature or the arts, then we think they don’t exist.”

Such is the inspiration behind her book, SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut, the first major publication to celebrate art from Nunatsiavut, Labrador, the world’s most southerly Inuit community, which achieved self-government in 2005. SakKijâjuk, in the Nunatsiavut dialect of Inuktitut, literally means “to be visible.” Along with an accompanying exhibition, curated by Igloliorte, the project brings together the diverse works of 47 Nunatsiavummiut artists and craftspeople.

The project spans four generations of Nunatsiavut artists—Elders, Trailblazers, Fire Keepers, and The Next Generation. “I really felt strongly that there was a conversation happening between generations,” says Igloliorte, who was born in Happy Valley Goose Bay, the exhibition’s first stop on its national tour. And while there’s a tendency to use words like “traditional” and “contemporary” to distinguish artists, she says it’s important to recognize how intergenerational connections frame and influence Inuit art.

“I think of traditions—that being the thing passed down through generations, and knowledge of the land—as living traditions.” For instance, the project features the photography of James Andersen, an influential artist included in the Elders section, who documented the community of Makkovik for over five decades. While photography is an art often associated with contemporary media, Igloliorte points to how it was one of the ways Andersen chronicled the long and intimate history of life in the Labrador coast as far back as before 1949, when the Newfoundland government joined Confederation and refused to submit to federal jurisdiction over its Aboriginal peoples.

The lack of institutional support and acknowledgement from the Canadian government, in contrast to the rest of the country, left Labrador Inuit artists out of the developments of the modern Inuit Arts movement beginning in the late 1940s. Igloliorte’s book recognizes the stories and cultural contributions of a group that has long been absent from the history of Canadian Inuit art as a result. “We don’t have many exhibition venues in Labrador so it’s very hard for artists to get the word out about their work, and a book is forever,” she says.

The exhibition. Photo courtesy of SakKijâjuk

The work of artists showcased are inspired by materials that “come from the land,” like stone carvings, woodwork, and sealskin. But many works in the exhibition also “transgress those boundaries.” These include ceramics, paintings, and digital photographs.

Igloliorte says it’s also important to challenge and broaden the way people categorize Inuit art. “What’s distinct about Nunatsiavut is that it tells us the kind of things that Inuit make when they don’t have access to the art market. It proves that Inuit are still prolific, creative, do beautiful work, continue to pass traditions down to families, and all the other things we think are important to Inuit art.”

In spite of the historical absence of the works and stories of Labrador Inuit artists, Igloliorte says she hopes their voices will continue to be heard beyond the region.

“I want artists to continue to be included, thought about and represented… I just want it to grow.”

Artist Hana Shafi, known better as Frizz Kid. Photo by Augustine Ng.

Hana Shafi’s Instagram feed is a burst of bright colours and thick lines interspersed with the occasional selfie. The Toronto-based artist, who goes by Frizz Kid, posts images of her digital art almost every day. From the playful—an anthropomorphic pizza slice placed around the words “Thick as hell”—to the serious—a person, closed-eyed with purple hair, and the affirmation, “You didn’t deserve it. You weren’t ‘asking for it’”—Shafi’s work deals with themes like body positivity, healing from trauma, and self-growth.

With more than 29,000 followers on Instagram and now, a book of illustrated poetry, Shafi has enjoyed success in her work—at least some of which she can credit to social media. “I don’t know a lot of other spaces I could have been in,” she says.

Shafi recalls often feeling out of place in indie zine and arts markets because she would be the only Brown artist there, and, as a journalism school graduate, the only one without formal art training. She says social media is the only place where she could start being taken seriously as an artist.

Among the many other benefits—and, arguably, detriments—that social media has brought about, increased visibility for artists from marginalized communities is a crucial one. In a space like the Canadian arts community, which is traditionally dominated by white men, it can be a more accessible way for Asian artists (and more generally, marginalized artists) to promote themselves. It offers the ability for Asian artists to carve out their own identities—to be judged for their work rather than how different they look from everyone else at the art fair.

It’s no longer a strict requirement that artists follow the prescribed path of going to art school and hoping to be picked up by a gallery. Instead, they just need to go viral online.

***

Ness Lee’s apartment is a large collection of things. Some are things she’s created by herself, like the ceramic pieces spilling out of the drawers of her studio, but others are small gifts from her friends that have become themes in her space: vegetable-shaped pillows and stress balls propped up on the couch or hanging from a wall; small tortoise memorabilia in honour of her pet tortoise, Frank Ocean. She often mentions names of other Asian photographers and artists, people she says it seems like “everyone in the city” knows.

For artists like Lee, social media offers a way to connect with other Asian artists. Although it has a population of more than two million people, Toronto is tight-knit, and it’s evident the Asian artist community is no exception.

Ness Lee. Photo by Augustine Ng.

“Growing up, I had a lot of repression because I didn’t really have a way to talk to people,” she says. She explains that many of her friends came from immigrant families, and that they had languages they preferred to communicate in outside of English. Because she is Hakka, a Han Chinese diasporic group of about 80 million people, she didn’t know anyone who could understand her language. “I think [art] was just a way for me to talk to myself, or figure shit out,” she says. “Without me knowing it, I would notice I’d feel relief—it just felt good to make something, whether it was something shitty or not. It was a good way to work it out.”

Now, most of her connections are people of colour. “It’s really nice to have that kind of understanding from people,” she says.

For Lee, one drawback of having a following on social media, however, for Lee has been the following itself. Although her actual work carries with it a large personal weight, she says having a platform online—particularly her Instagram account, followed by more than 36,000 people—has made her unsure of sharing anything that isn’t art-related. “I want to make sure my voice is conscious and considerate,” she says. “I think my social media thing became more art, because I also can’t put my personal self into it anymore, because it’s just so scary.” She maintains a separate Instagram for personal posts, like photos of her feet.

She also struggles with guilt for her art receiving the attention it has—from her Toronto solo show, to a mural in partnership with Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black,” to the handful of other murals set up throughout the city. “I’m super thankful for it, but I’m wondering if I’m taking up too much space,” she says. She mentions impostor syndrome, a common phenomenon where sufferers feel unworthy of their own accomplishments, fearful they’ll one day be exposed as a fraud.

“Persistence is key. Staying curious, if you can afford to, is very key. Just being open, honest, and not superficial, I guess,” she says. “This social media thing. That whole conversation… It’s hard! I guess just, I don’t know, remember to be you.”

***

Shafi has had her own struggles on social media, particularly when one of her pieces went viral.

Set on a pink background, the piece features an ECG monitor line covered in flowers, with the words “Healing is not linear” written in bubbly lettering across it. The piece’s popularity jump-started her career in art, which, back then, was marked by on-and-off commitments to Facebook pages and Etsy stores. But since then, she says she’s been plagiarized numerous times; a Google search of the phrase yields multiple renditions and uncredited reposts of her original piece.

“I’m almost having trouble saying, ‘This is mine,’” she says, “especially when you’re a young woman and you’re putting your work out there.”

Photo by Augustine Ng.

But for Shafi, who didn’t feel like she belonged in the traditional arts scene, with growing online recognition came with it a larger number of Asian artists reaching out to her with support and encouragement.

“[They reached out to me like,] ‘Hey, keep pursuing this. Maybe not everyone is being super supportive of you, but you have potential, you can do this. Keep practicing,’” she says. “I learned just in my own experiences, the true importance of community and just really knowing your worth and making that known.”

Jean-Louis and Marie-Angélique Riel, ca. 1888, by Steele & Wing, albumen print

A freestanding wall decorated with blue motifs frames a glass case. Inside the case sits a brooch inscribed with a person’s name and dates of birth and death. On the other side of the wall, the front of the brooch is exposed: a portrait of a little girl, Alice Walker, the daughter of Canadian artist Horatio Walker who died at the age of nine from diphtheria—a disease that was once a common cause of death among Canadian children.

A Little History, an exhibit in the Canadian Museum of History’s Treasures From Library and Archives Canada (LAC) gallery, presents 36 artifacts that elevate children’s voices and presence in Canadian history. Some voices include daughter of Sir John A. Macdonald, Margaret Mary Theodora Macdonald, Sandford Fleming, and David Suzuki.

“I thought this was an opportunity to highlight this sort of little-known aspect of Canadian history,” says exhibit curator Carolyn Cook. “Children are typically absent from the historical narrative, and I think it’s important to look at what their experiences can shed light on. Because, really, they have their own stories.”

Many artifacts that were found and kept about children were actually produced by adults: government records, art, toys, textiles. The things that children made themselves were not prioritized. These things “kind of provide a more romanticized view of childhood.” Cook sees this exhibition as a step toward improving practices that include children’s history in Canada’s historical narrative, in all its unromantic glory.

The Canadian Museum of History and LAC did manage to find some artifacts that were created by children, such as a composition by a young Glenn Gould and a design submission for a new Canadian flag to Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. Cook believes the artifacts that were made by children “are the gems of the exhibition.”

We often forget that children lived through historic events, and that adults aren’t the only people who have been affected by them. A display houses a diary by 12-year-old Eleanora Hallen in which she details her voyage across the Atlantic from England to Upper Canada in 1835. She describes everything from a tussle over steak to seeing an iceberg for the first time.

In another display sits a photograph of a young David Suzuki on the back of a pick-up truck with his two sisters—the photo was taken inside a Japanese internment camp. Accompanying the photo is an interview with David Suzuki, who describes his relationship with nature while in the internment camp and speaks about how dangerous discrimination can be. Cook is right, the gems of the exhibition lie in the heart of the child, not in the hearts of the adults who know what’s best.

Photo courtesy of Dana Prieto.

Glazed in black, the beauty of Dana Prieto’s hand-crafted ceramic vessels forces the viewer’s attention—but what they wouldn’t be able to tell at first glance is that the artwork may contain traces of arsenic, cadmium, and mercury.

Prieto, an Argentine visual artist based in Toronto, describes the vessels as an “inhospitable gift,” made with soil from the contaminated territories of Belén and Hualfín, in the province of Catamarca. The vessels will be gifted to the CEOs and corporate social responsibility executives of Canadian mining companies operating in the South American region.

Contaminants to the land and water in Belén and Hualfín seep from Bajo de la Alumbrera, the country’s first open-pit gold and copper mine that has been in operation since 1997. Although the mine had been set to close in March, it will now remain open for another decade. Bajo de la Alumbrera is owned by Glencore, headquartered in Switzerland, and two Canadian companies: Goldcorp and Yamana Gold.

The vessels, titled 1:10000 (the scale of the vessel in relation to the mine), are 3D models of the mine, created to scale. A disclaimer at the bottom of each cup reads: “Handmade with soil affected by Bajo la Alumbrera mine.”

“They can fill out the rest of the narrative,” says Prieto.

The soil was provided by Silvia Delgado, a Buenos Aires-based ceramic artist and activist. Delgado has extracted clay from Belén for many years and mentored Prieto in the construction of the vessels. “I consider ceramics to be part of that ancestral time where domestic and ritual uses of objects had a strong social bond,” says Delgado. Unlike most ceramics, however, the luxury aesthetic of the vessels is intended to appeal to a CEO.

The act of sending these vessels is more important to Prieto than what actually happens to the gift itself. In the gallery space, the vessels are displayed on wooden boxes under a spotlight. The lights are dimmed, and the walls painted a dark grey. Inside each box is a quote engraved in gold leaf from the 2017 book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: “Death may not, after all, be the end of life; after death comes the strange life of hauntings,” it reads.

To illustrate the immediacy of the gift, 150 boxes with Canadian postage surround the gallery, accounting for all potential recipients across the country. On the wall, a stencil made with ink made from the contaminated soil reads: “Handmade with soil affected by Canadian mining companies.”

“I hope that works like this can make a call to the heart, because such profound devastation has wounded our land, corrupting the human soul and our existence,” says Delgado.

While dance has the potential to break down barriers, Vancouver-based dancer and choreographer Ralph Escamillan says it’s not always easy to find free classes to train and practice in the city. 

So he created one.

After starting a community organization called VanVogueJam in 2016, the 25-year-old has been teaching vogue, a dance-based art form originating from Harlem’s queer subculture more than 50 years ago, on a by-donation basis each week.

“I wanted to vogue with people who actually needed the dance form,” he says, explaining that accessibility was the catalyst for removing financial barriers from his classes, making it open to those of all ages and levels of experience.

According to Escamillan, beginners can expect to learn some fundamentals during the first hour of class, inspired by the five basic elements of Vogue Fem – hand performance, catwalk, duckwalk, floor performance, and spins and dips. The second hour is usually reserved for freestyling and advanced practice.

Since the age of fourteen, Escamillan has embodied a number of styles in his work, including contemporary, street and commercial dance, but none compare to his passion for vogue.

“Vogue is not just about dancing, it’s about the culture – there’s a whole community connected to it,” he says. “I appreciate what it does politically [and] how it takes space for queer people.” 

Voguing’s cultural influence continually resurfaces in various aspects of contemporary pop culture, inspiring everything from choreographed dance performances from artists like Lady Gaga and FKA Twigs, to the wildly successful competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race.

But Escamillan makes a point to continually remind his class, and himself, of voguing’s deep historic roots. Extending as far back to Harlem’s ballroom scene in the 1960s, voguing allowed members of the black and Latino LGBTQ community to carve out a safe space for resistance, survival and activism, to counter experiences of marginalization and discrimination.

Since then, the world of ballroom has expanded to queer communities across the world, developing into a culturally-rich network that incorporates voguing competitions, themed balls, outreach services, and “houses,” which are support systems formed in a family-like structure.

“When I go into these communities that have been there for so long, I feel like I need to earn my keep,” says Escamillan.

After being exposed to the voguing scene for the first time through Jojo Zolina, founder of dance group House of La Douche, Escamillan later travelled to New York City in 2013 to train with Leiomy Maldonado, an internationally-recognized figure in the community, also known as the “Wonder Woman of Vogue.”

Since then, Escamillan says teaching the dance form to others has been a consistent reminder to continue training himself – which he does by sending Maldonado videos when he doesn’t have time to go to New York to train in person.

For those interested in coming to class, Escamillan says it’s important to know that learning dance is like learning a new language. “Your first class is going to be a shock, but I’m not going to kill you, you’re not going to melt!”

To help foster a sense of community and safe space, class always starts with a “check-in. “We ask for names, pronouns, and we also say something positive [as] a way of connecting people in the class,” says Escamillan.

He admits that in some ways, sustaining his class also goes hand-in-hand with cultivating Vancouver’s local ballroom scene, which is still in its early stages, compared to east coast neighbours like Toronto and New York City.

Along with teaching beginners about vogue culture, the class also gives more experienced dancers the chance to practice for balls, which are the original safe spaces where new and legendary voguers come together to compete in a variety of categories for trophies and prizes.   

“It’s like a catch-22. You need the vogue ball for the voguers, and you need the voguers for the vogue ball,” says Escamillan, adding that these events are often the fuel that encourages students to continue coming to class to train.

This summer, VanVogueJam will be hosting its third vogue ball during Vancouver’s Pride Week, which Escamillan hopes will continue to empower the city’s young and emerging ballroom scene.

“The community aspect is what really inspires me, even more so than the dancing – like how people hug after every competition. Even if there’s shade or drama, there’s still this root of community, which is very beautiful to see.”

VanVogueJam will be hosting a Sci-Fi themed vogue ball during Vancouver’s Pride Week on August 2.