Left: Jasmine Noseworthy Persaud, wish, 2016, digital illustration
Right: Harmeet Rehal, khaar, 2017, digital still
Images above from the current exhibition at the Art Gallery of Mississauga
UNRULY: Jasmine Noseworthy Persaud | Harmeet Rehal
Curated by Anu Radha Verma | XIT-RM Project Space
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 28, 6 - 9 PM
Exhibition on view: June 28 - August 26, 2018
About UNRULY:
UNRULY is a conversation between two local queer and trans artists of colour, a creative intervention that contends with the (dis)embodied ways of moving through home, space, belonging, community, binaries and boundaries. Jasmine Noseworthy Persaud and Harmeet Rehal’s bodies of work coalesce in the XIT-RM, inviting the visitor to see, feel, experience and question. Each artist examines and confronts the way ‘being,’ surviving and thriving is (im)possible for the queer, trans, disabled, racialized individual, in the suburbs, in ‘community,’ and in the season(s) when they are expected to be ‘proud.’ What could an inquiry into the said/unsaid rules look like? What would disrupting the traditional feel like? Let’s imagine, produce and nurture these possibilities.
I was going to post on Sarah Jeong but Kristor over at the Orthosphere had already done so and so much better.
"I am the most pacific, equable person I know. I have reason to understand myself as competent at combat – as fairly lethal, should I need to be. But I abhor fighting. I have studied fighting, and have trained in martial arts. But I never think about it. Fighting – as distinct from the martial arts – is just not an item of my psychic furniture," writes Kristor, then continues to tell us about his dream of war.
You see he (the collective) is the wrath of Jeong.
I was going to post on Jeong's personal life (her childhood, her formaton, her education, etc...) but Kristor had written a poetic anc prophetic essay. (Kristor had a tendency to over-dramatize but in this case he has used his talent exceptionally.)
I have amply documented the iniquities of Mississauga, where I live for now. I have best described it by looking at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, about which I have amply written, as the canary in the coalmine; as a reference for what we are to expect incrementally, point by point, exhibition by exhibition, in our cultural climate.
In my own way I have also fought: asking difficult questions at gallery panels; writing on Reclaiming Beauty with well-documented, referenced articles about the wrong direction that art has committed to taking; about the complete absence of a Christian worldview (as the majority of Western art has had over the centuries) in the AGM's exhibitions; and finally how pagan and anti-God elements have entered the gallery's exhibitions and members.
Satan doesn't go easily and I have been tarnished in the city of Mississauga. My name is plastered all over the Peel Region Police's "wanted" list, certainly provided by the AGM staff (I got a warning from them to "be careful" when I enter their "premises."). I know this because the mall security (who are part of the Peel Police) watch me and some even follow me. Just the other day, after I entered a store and asked the woman for information which she thoroughly ignored being on some call (my retail experience, and I have had some, is that you drop the call with "Could you hold a minute?" or tell the live customer in front of you "Could you just give me a minute?" rather than let her stand for minutes (on end). I was about to leave but had already spent 15 minutes waiting and what's another 15? By the time she got to me I was angry. I just waived my hand and walked out. No "service." A couple of minutes later a security guard with the Sikh turban that is now part of the Canadian police force landscape, walks towards me and says "Hello."
I looked up and said nothing. Then I turned and walked off to finish the business that I came to do.
Unbelievable! "Hello!"
If police want a conversation with you it simply means that they wish to diffuse what they see as a problem.
So Mississauga is slowly turning into a fascist state where mall retailer etiquette has been thrown out the window and any reaction to that becomes a criminalizable offence!
Welcome to the Brave New World. Or better yet to The New 1984!
But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. 1 Corinthians 15:10