Light Strokes
[Photo By: KPA]
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
What is Writing?
Below is an excerpt from a post I wrote in 2013 about writing:
That is the joy, and agony, of art. It is a ruthless companion. It doesn't suffer laziness. Yet, that is how beauty is born.
"What is Writing?This is the same with all art. Artists will say that once an idea has emerged, one has to fix it until there is nothing more (humanely) possible to fix.
Half, maybe most, of writing is finding faults in one’s own writing, and fixing them, until one finds nothing more to fix. It is an immersion in one’s own flaws, and a constant, unyielding effort to ameliorate them." Lawrence Auster: March 18, 2013
That is the joy, and agony, of art. It is a ruthless companion. It doesn't suffer laziness. Yet, that is how beauty is born.
Monday, February 18, 2019
Friday, February 15, 2019
Dies Irae
I have a theory that Canada's cities will implode. I have written about this in many posts (see my "multiculturalism" and "immigration" categories). Multiculturalism, which was supposed to bring people together and form one happy utopian global family, has alienated people altogether. Offspring of immigrants (those "Canadian-born" hyphenated Canadians) on whom great hopes were bestowed to build that wonderful multicultural utopia, are clinging together, since on personal cultural levels they have nothing to connect them to the "main" culture.
I recently sent bold and frank letters to relatives that they return to their homeland to live authentic and happy lives AS ETHIOPIANS, rather than in this forced cultural hot pot. My message has actually resonated.
So what happens when this stewing war starts to boil over, in five years, thirty years? I bet on sooner than later.
Mississauga and Toronto are now cities of enclaves. People gravitate to neighborhoods of their own ethnic makeup. And those who have settled in some multicultural hub do so because of mortgage commitments, or their children's high school, or simply because the neighborhood appears to be nicer, cleaner, more convenient, with attractive parks and convenient shopping centres.
In our building, there is no cheerful "Good Morning" or "Good Evening" as one enters the slow and often crowded elevator. What occurs is silence broken by some cell phone conversation in Urdu or Cantonese, often loudly, and clearly showing the cell phone converser couldn't care less about the rest of the elevator's riders. They don't understand what he's saying anyway, and he shuts them out of his radar and continues with his uncouth, careless behavior.
And it is the same with actual conversations, when they do occur. Those talking to each other do so in their country of origin's language, loudly and without regard for anyone else. For example, I could be between such two people, and rather than move to get closer to each other, they will talk over me loudly and confidently, as though I don't exist.
And the same with apartments units. The building was built about twenty years ago when Mississauga was erecting high rises to accommodate a greatly increasing immigrant influx and was choosing Mississauga for the much touted "farmland" and open space.
Walls are cardboard thin, which makes these sound insensitive residents' telephone conversations from China or India all the more grating. These calls are often during the evening hours (time difference?) when one would expect one's home to have some peace and quiet in preparation for the long night of sleep ahead.
Air conditioning and heating systems are dated and archaic (and badly constructed) that they churn out air through groaning turbines. Ventilation is ineffective in neutralizing the heavily spiced foods that permeate through the hallways. And structures both superficial (wall paper) and internal (the heating system) are deteriorating, despite the regular maintenance that takes place and which constantly disrupts life in the apartments and the building as a whole.
At one point I blamed the inhuman multicultural system that made Canada (and Mississauga) into this ghettoized Gomorrah.
But the residents are fully to blame.
There is something profoundly opportunistic about people who moved thousands of miles away to come and live in the land of plenty: in Canada. They left relatives, a cultural network, familiar landscapes, their gods and idols to live in a country which gives them much in material goods and benefits. Their children can go to school for free in some of the best educational institutions in the world. They can shop in clean and fully stocked grocery stores where fresh produce is available year round. And if they have monetary problems, and most are likely to, even extending to their "educated" children, there is a generous welfare system to hand out their monthly dollars as it takes the funds from the society's purse.
How long will this last, is the question.
I predict not for long.
Perhaps God's wrath will manifest itself as it periodically has. We might get a flood of Biblical proportions.
Or there might simply be an internecine warfare, slow at the beginning until it explodes into something big and destructive.
We have already started this warfare, if behavior in elevators is any indication. And I think it IS an indication.
And God might be preparing us for that clean slate, a new beginning, to rebuild a city, a land worthy of His name.
We should, we must, prepare.
Zephaniah 1
1 The word of the Lord which came unto Zephaniah the son of Cushi, the son of Gedaliah, the son of Amariah, the son of Hizkiah, in the days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah.
2 I will utterly consume all things from off the land, saith the Lord.
3 I will consume man and beast; I will consume the fowls of the heaven, and the fishes of the sea, and the stumbling blocks with the wicked: and I will cut off man from off the land, saith the Lord.
4 I will also stretch out mine hand upon Judah, and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and I will cut off the remnant of Baal from this place, and the name of the Chemarims with the priests;
5 And them that worship the host of heaven upon the housetops; and them that worship and that swear by the Lord, and that swear by Malcham;
6 And them that are turned back from the Lord; and those that have not sought the Lord, nor enquired for him.
7 Hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord God: for the day of the Lord is at hand: for the Lord hath prepared a sacrifice, he hath bid his guests.
8 And it shall come to pass in the day of the Lord's sacrifice, that I will punish the princes, and the king's children, and all such as are clothed with strange apparel.
9 In the same day also will I punish all those that leap on the threshold, which fill their masters' houses with violence and deceit.
10 And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord, that there shall be the noise of a cry from the fish gate, and an howling from the second, and a great crashing from the hills.
11 Howl, ye inhabitants of Maktesh, for all the merchant people are cut down; all they that bear silver are cut off.
12 And it shall come to pass at that time, that I will search Jerusalem with candles, and punish the men that are settled on their lees: that say in their heart, The Lord will not do good, neither will he do evil.
13 Therefore their goods shall become a booty, and their houses a desolation: they shall also build houses, but not inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, but not drink the wine thereof.
14 The great day of the Lord is near, it is near, and hasteth greatly, even the voice of the day of the Lord: the mighty man shall cry there bitterly.
15 That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness,
16 A day of the trumpet and alarm against the fenced cities, and against the high towers.
17 And I will bring distress upon men, that they shall walk like blind men, because they have sinned against the Lord: and their blood shall be poured out as dust, and their flesh as the dung.
18 Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the Lord's wrath; but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of his jealousy: for he shall make even a speedy riddance of all them that dwell in the land.
Dies Irae, from Mozart's Requiem in D Minor (Text)
La Chapelle Royale Collegium Vocale
Orchestre Des Champs -Élysées
Philippe Herreweghe
Thursday, February 14, 2019
From the Back-Window '291'
From the Back-Window '291'
1915
Platinum print
Dimensions: 24.5 x 19.4 cm (image) 25.2 x 20.2 cm (paper)
Alfred Stieglitz Collection [more information here]
291 Gallery, Promoter of Modern Art
Stieglitz himself became editor and publisher of Camera Work (1902-17), Photo-Secession's high-quality magazine - which rapidly became an important forum of modern art - and also staged numerous exhibitions in partnership with Steichen, with whom he set up the venue "Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession", in 1905. It soon became known as "291" after its address on Fifth Avenue. Through his writing, exhibitions, and other social networking, Stieglitz became a strong supporter of creative photography, as well as avant-garde art generally, and went to great efforts to inform modern artists in America, about the latest modern art movements, notably Cubism (1908-14), Futurism (c.1909-14), Dada (1916-24), as well as works by modernist 20th century sculptors. Indeed, during the decade 1905-1914, "291" metamorphosed from being an outlet for exhibiting Photo-Secessionist photography, to being the foremost centre for modern European and American artists. With the advice of Steichen, Marius de Zayas, and Max Weber, all of whom had contacts with artists in France, "291" became the first place in America to showcase works by the Fauvist Henri Matisse (1869-1954), the Post-Impressionist Cezanne (1839-1906), the naif painter Henri Rousseau (Le Douanier) (1844-1910), the Cubists Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Francis Picabia (1879-1953), as well as the famous sculptors Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) and Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957). In addition, he also promoted representational and abstract paintings by modernist American artists including the master watercolourist John Marin (1870-1953), as well as Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Arthur Dove (1880-1946), Alfred H Maurer (1868-1932), Abraham Walkowitz (1878-1965), Charles Demuth (1883-1935), and others. [text source]
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
Kodak, The Early Years
The photograph below is from the Ryerson University's Kodak Canada Corporate Archives and Heritage Collection at the Ryerson University Library. The image dates from 1922.
The image is part of the exhibition "Kodak Canada: The Early Years 1899-1939" at the Ryerson Image Centre's Student Gallery, on view from January 23 – February 24, 2019.
Fig. 1 Canadian Kodak Co., [Kodak brings your vacation back], ink on paper, 1922.
The image is part of the exhibition "Kodak Canada: The Early Years 1899-1939" at the Ryerson Image Centre's Student Gallery, on view from January 23 – February 24, 2019.
Fig. 1 Canadian Kodak Co., [Kodak brings your vacation back], ink on paper, 1922.
I used
The End of a Mad Century
September 16, 2010
By Joseph Sobran
ARLINGTON, VA — Well, the Y2K apocalypse has failed to occur. By now we were supposed to be devouring our children (or being devoured by them). The Third Millennium is off to a smooth start.
The Second Millennium ended with a pretty lousy century. Let’s hope we can put it behind us and move on. The three men most often named as “Person of the Century” — Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein — were benefactors, allies, and admirers of one of the bloodiest men of the millennium, Joseph Stalin. It’s as if the three most distinguished men of the Middle Ages had all been pals of Genghis Khan.
Even the phrase “Person of the Century” is a relic of the archaic feminist thinking of the twentieth century. Obviously the most influential individual of any century is likely to be male, but by the late twentieth century it was a breach of etiquette — an ideological code of manners — to acknowledge such things. As recently as this week I read an article arguing for homosexual “marriage” — another example of the outmoded twentieth-century attitudes some people still can’t let go of.
The twentieth century was marked by its smug belief in its superiority to all earlier ages. It decided that the immemorial morals and customs of mankind should be changed — as if that were even possible. The state would be the instrument of “building a new society” by means of force, propaganda, and economic dependence. Tyranny became “liberation,” degeneracy “progress.”
Time to move on
The state’s new mission was to cut all roots in the past that might enable its subjects to resist assimilation to the New Society. Those who managed to maintain their roots were accused of treason, reaction, racism, superstition, and hate. The state claimed to be “scientific.” It acted in the name of “the oppressed”: “the people,” “the proletariat,” “the masses,” “minorities,” “women,” and even sexual deviants (who were “victims” of the traditional moral code).
The twentieth-century state denied God and the existence of any stable human nature, both of which imply immutable standards of right and wrong that might limit the authority and power of the state. It claimed the power to eradicate all old laws and replace them with new ones that suited its purposes. Even written constitutions could be “reinterpreted” in keeping with the demands of the New Society. Plain words whose meaning had never been in doubt became “living documents,” arbitrarily endowed with wholly new meanings by state officials.
Old sins like fornication, sodomy, and abortion became new “rights.” Meanwhile, traditional rights like property ownership were severely curtailed. Through the state, with its boundless taxing power, some people could live off the productive energy of others. This was called “social justice.” The twentieth-century state became obsessed with preserving the natural environment, even as it demolished the moral, spiritual, and cultural environment of Christendom.
Artists, scholars, and philosophers became enthusiasts of the New Society, hostile to the “bourgeoisie” and “the middle class,” as the remnants of traditional society were scornfully called. Obscenity and obscurity, dissonance and ugliness, became hallmarks of twentieth-century art. Popular art, still bound by the market, found obscenity more profitable than obscurity, but rarely challenged the premises of the New Society.
Education, controlled by the state, became propaganda, called “consciousness-raising,” designed to make children submissive units of the New Society. The idea of “evolution” was adapted to teach children that the New Society was the inevitable development of human history. The mass-produced “intellectual” (the opposite of the traditional independent scholar) became a new social type, devoted to the fantasies of the New Society, which were called “ideals.”
Since the aims of the New Society were fundamentally impossible, resistance continued and partly succeeded. God and human nature still existed and asserted themselves through men like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Pope John Paul II, who struck chords in millions and undermined the legitimacy of the New Society.
By the end of the century, men’s minds were still entangled in the tattered delusions of the New Society. But even “progressive” politicians found it advantageous to pay lip service to Jesus Christ and human freedom. Mankind may yet recover from the twentieth century.
The Reactionary Utopian archives
This column was originally published by Griffin Internet Syndicate on January 4, 2000.
Copyright © 2010 by Joe Sobran and the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. All rights reserved.
The End of a Mad Century
September 16, 2010
By Joseph Sobran
ARLINGTON, VA — Well, the Y2K apocalypse has failed to occur. By now we were supposed to be devouring our children (or being devoured by them). The Third Millennium is off to a smooth start.
The Second Millennium ended with a pretty lousy century. Let’s hope we can put it behind us and move on. The three men most often named as “Person of the Century” — Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein — were benefactors, allies, and admirers of one of the bloodiest men of the millennium, Joseph Stalin. It’s as if the three most distinguished men of the Middle Ages had all been pals of Genghis Khan.
Even the phrase “Person of the Century” is a relic of the archaic feminist thinking of the twentieth century. Obviously the most influential individual of any century is likely to be male, but by the late twentieth century it was a breach of etiquette — an ideological code of manners — to acknowledge such things. As recently as this week I read an article arguing for homosexual “marriage” — another example of the outmoded twentieth-century attitudes some people still can’t let go of.
The twentieth century was marked by its smug belief in its superiority to all earlier ages. It decided that the immemorial morals and customs of mankind should be changed — as if that were even possible. The state would be the instrument of “building a new society” by means of force, propaganda, and economic dependence. Tyranny became “liberation,” degeneracy “progress.”
Time to move on
The state’s new mission was to cut all roots in the past that might enable its subjects to resist assimilation to the New Society. Those who managed to maintain their roots were accused of treason, reaction, racism, superstition, and hate. The state claimed to be “scientific.” It acted in the name of “the oppressed”: “the people,” “the proletariat,” “the masses,” “minorities,” “women,” and even sexual deviants (who were “victims” of the traditional moral code).
The twentieth-century state denied God and the existence of any stable human nature, both of which imply immutable standards of right and wrong that might limit the authority and power of the state. It claimed the power to eradicate all old laws and replace them with new ones that suited its purposes. Even written constitutions could be “reinterpreted” in keeping with the demands of the New Society. Plain words whose meaning had never been in doubt became “living documents,” arbitrarily endowed with wholly new meanings by state officials.
Old sins like fornication, sodomy, and abortion became new “rights.” Meanwhile, traditional rights like property ownership were severely curtailed. Through the state, with its boundless taxing power, some people could live off the productive energy of others. This was called “social justice.” The twentieth-century state became obsessed with preserving the natural environment, even as it demolished the moral, spiritual, and cultural environment of Christendom.
Artists, scholars, and philosophers became enthusiasts of the New Society, hostile to the “bourgeoisie” and “the middle class,” as the remnants of traditional society were scornfully called. Obscenity and obscurity, dissonance and ugliness, became hallmarks of twentieth-century art. Popular art, still bound by the market, found obscenity more profitable than obscurity, but rarely challenged the premises of the New Society.
Education, controlled by the state, became propaganda, called “consciousness-raising,” designed to make children submissive units of the New Society. The idea of “evolution” was adapted to teach children that the New Society was the inevitable development of human history. The mass-produced “intellectual” (the opposite of the traditional independent scholar) became a new social type, devoted to the fantasies of the New Society, which were called “ideals.”
Since the aims of the New Society were fundamentally impossible, resistance continued and partly succeeded. God and human nature still existed and asserted themselves through men like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Pope John Paul II, who struck chords in millions and undermined the legitimacy of the New Society.
By the end of the century, men’s minds were still entangled in the tattered delusions of the New Society. But even “progressive” politicians found it advantageous to pay lip service to Jesus Christ and human freedom. Mankind may yet recover from the twentieth century.
The Reactionary Utopian archives
This column was originally published by Griffin Internet Syndicate on January 4, 2000.
Copyright © 2010 by Joe Sobran and the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, February 12, 2019
Monday, February 11, 2019
Reclaiming Mississauga
[Photo By: KPA]
An early morning shot from my window. Lake Ontario is in the distance.
Sunday, February 10, 2019
"Rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer"
Romans 12
1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.
2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
3 For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.
4 For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function,
5 so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another.
6 Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, let us prophesy in proportion to our faith;
7 or ministry, let us use it in our ministering; he who teaches, in teaching;
8 he who exhorts, in exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness.
9 Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good.
10 Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another;
11 not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord;
12 rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer;
13 distributing to the needs of the saints, given to hospitality.
14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse.
15 Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.
16 Be of the same mind toward one another. Do not set your mind on high things, but associate with the humble. Do not be wise in your own opinion.
17 Repay no one evil for evil. Have regard for good things in the sight of all men.
18 If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men.
19 Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath; for it is written, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” says the Lord.
20 Therefore “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; If he is thirsty, give him a drink; For in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head.”
21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.
2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
3 For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.
4 For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function,
5 so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another.
6 Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, let us prophesy in proportion to our faith;
7 or ministry, let us use it in our ministering; he who teaches, in teaching;
8 he who exhorts, in exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness.
9 Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good.
10 Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another;
11 not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord;
12 rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer;
13 distributing to the needs of the saints, given to hospitality.
14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse.
15 Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.
16 Be of the same mind toward one another. Do not set your mind on high things, but associate with the humble. Do not be wise in your own opinion.
17 Repay no one evil for evil. Have regard for good things in the sight of all men.
18 If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men.
19 Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath; for it is written, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” says the Lord.
20 Therefore “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; If he is thirsty, give him a drink; For in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head.”
21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Friday, February 8, 2019
AGM Article New
Jeff Thomas
What Happened to the Mississaugas? (detail), 2017
Pigment print on archival paper
25 x 90 inches
Collection of the Art Gallery of Mississauga.
Jeff Thomas’ What Happened to the Mississaugas? is the Art Gallery of Mississauga's recent acquisition of contemporary Canadian Indigenous art for its permanent collection.
The AGM’s Facebook page informs us of these acquisitions:
We're thrilled to have What Happened to the Mississauga's [sic]? by Jeff Thomas...for 2017, strengthening the AGM's holdings of contemporary Canadian #Indigenous artists. [Such] works contribute their voices to a critical dialogue which seeks to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, foster community, and disrupt hegemonic notions of history, nationhood and belonging1.
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A New Canada: A New Mississauga
Pierre Trudeau’s Canadian Multiculturalism Policy of 1971 had been formalized into the Canadian Multiculturalism Act by Brian Mulroney in 19822/3. What started with an annual average of 80, 000 immigrants in the mid-1980s had surged to an average of 200,000 “new comers” every year from the mid-1990s to 2016, most coming from Third World countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America3/4. They arrived through the “Family Class” category along with their immediate family members of spouses and children, and as immediate family members following "Economic Class" applicants. The numbers increased exponentially as parents could sponsor their parents, who could then bring with them the remaining siblings of the original immigrants. Add to that their children, and a whole new country could be formed.
Mississauga was ready to receive this flux of new people. Enterprising developers were building apartments on the thin strip of downtown Mississauga from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s. A giant mall in the city’s center was constructed in the mid 1970s, named “Square One,” on City Centre Drive, symbolizing a new beginning, a new home, a new meeting place4/7. Mississauga was well-positioned to be a dynamic city.
The city hall was opened in 1984. It stands with restrained majesty, a postmodern Greek Parthenon in sand colored stone. It had won the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada's Governor General Award. By 1987 the City Centre complex was completed along with the Art Gallery of Mississauga, which had found a place a far corner, at the ground floor of the building. The Duke and Duchess of York were guests of honor at the inauguration on July 18, 1987, making a stop in Mississauga for their tour of their Canadian Commonwealth, and they paid a quick visit to the Art Gallery of Mississauga.
Mississauga's enterprising city planners and cultural elite planned to make this outpost suburbia into a bustling city. A visit from royalty was a big plus. And politicians exploited the word "immigrants" to translate into "diversity," which meant a diversity of peoples who would add to the cultural dynamics of the city. This "diversity" would be achieved through immigration and the multicultural policies which were beginning to taking effect.
Immigration, Mississauga and Mayor Hazel McCalilon
But despite this image of a newly forming and successful multicultural city, there signs of turbulence which were manifesting by the late 1990s. Mayor Hazel McCallion, the reigning, and beloved, Queen of Mississauga, was in disagreement with her colleagues on immigration. An article published on May 15, 2001 in the Financial Post presented her statements5/9:
"The motels around the airport are filled with so-called refugees," said the Mayor. Toronto's Pearson International Airport is in her municipality, as are the hotels. "These people come here by plane, have passports when they board then flush them down the toilet and declare refugee status, even when they are from rich countries," she says.
And she said about the city's (and country’s) officials:
"It's hard to believe they are so blind and all of this impacts our budgets. They do not listen. They do not follow up."
The article continues with McCallion's further comments about the effects of this inundation:
"Then there are the concerns I hear from teachers. You take a class of 35 kids. Suddenly during the year the teacher has four kids come into a class and not one speaks a single word of English. How can they be included in a class? And what does this do to the learning for the other 31 kids?" she asks. "The school system has to adapt to them the day they land."
The admission of tens of thousands of "sponsored" immigrants who demand immediate entitlements is also costing local governments a fortune.
"We let [sponsored immigrants and refugees] in and they get their teeth fixed at our expense," she said. "They get free drugs.
"If you go to the Credit Valley Hospital the emergency is loaded with people in their native costumes. A couple will come here as immigrants and each bring over their parents. Now you have four people who never contributed a nickel toward our medical system using it at an age when they will cost everyone a great deal of money. No wonder we have to worry about our medical system looking after everyone," she said.
"I went after [Immigration Minister Elinor] Caplin. I said 'we need skilled workers and we're not getting them.' Look at what you're doing to this country."
Even hurricanes have to recede at some point, and Hurricane Hazel, as she was called, getting who got her Nom de Guerre from the 1954 hurricane which hit the Mississauga region, eventually asked forgiveness for her sin of criticizing Canada’s (and Mississauga’s) untouchable multicultural policy, and especially for drawing attention to the immigrants themselves.
As part of her protracted apology, McCallion has become the champion of the multiculturlati. She is now, some fifteen years later, despite her advancing 90-plus years, a popular speaker and presence at many multicultural events and celebrations, even though every single observation she made about Mississauga's immigration and refugee condition remains exactly the same to this day, two decades later.
The June 15, 2017 issue of The East West News informs us6/10:
Ninety-six-year-old Hazel McCallion, who served as mayor of Mississauga for 36 long years till she retired in Nov 2015, participated in a special session of yoga organised by the International Yoga Day Canada (IYDC) on Monday to commemorate Seniors’ month celebrated in Ontario.
[...]
The seniors’ programme served as a precursor to the celebration of the International Day of Yoga being organised at the International Centre, Mississauga, on Sunday, June 25, by the IYDC.
And there are many more such events scattered around the city's calendar.
Mississauga’s hand-wringing and expiation for McCallion’s gaffe, or innocent truth-telling, depending on one's position on multiculturalism, reverberates to this day with spectacular results. Her words were perceived as the beliefs of racist, white Canada by the multicultural politburo, which committed itself to remove such talk (and thought) from Mississauga's population. And demographics has been on its side. With over half of the population now of non-white ethnicity, and with the numbers increasing7/11,8/12, disputing the official multicultural mosaic is detrimental to one’s well-being, professionally, personally, and financially, and to say the least.
Diversity: The Ethos of Mississauga Reflected Through The Art Gallery of Mississauga
The Art Gallery of Mississauga (the AGM)13 is one of the most publicly visible institution that is a direct consequence of McCallion’s expiation. It is as determined as the coerced Mayor to wipe away any trace of her offensive utterances. And its efforts of promoting multiculturalism through its art exhibitions have earned it the Hazel McCallion Foundation for the Arts, Culture and Heritage:
Building on the dialogue catalyzed by our high caliber exhibitions, the AGM will select exhibiting or local artists to facilitate inspiring workshops that reflect various arts and cultural practices inspired by the thematics of our exhibitions...generously supported by the Hazel McCallion Fund for Arts, Culture and Heritage provided by the Community Foundation of Mississauga9/14.
Getting People to Attend The Art Gallery of Mississauga
The problem is that Mississauga's large multicultural population is not interested. The now minority (at 43%) of white Mississaugans12/18, the group that overwhelmingly attends the programs and exhibitions at the AGM, is overpowered by the strongly allied and vocal non-white ethnic communities, which present their arguments and objectives at the many civic and public institutions to affect the kinds of changes they desire. One such change is for the AGM to present the types of art and cultural programs they would be interested in attending. This translates unequivocally into more diverse, more “ethnic,” and more non-white art. Therefore, conclude Mississauga's conscientious cultural agents, the lack of gallery attendance by non-whites is due to the types of shows that have been displayed at the museum rather than the lack of interest by non-whites in museums, exhibitions, and art in general. The AGM and other Mississauga art and cultural galleries therefore began to diligently, and blindly, cater to such groups, in a genuine desire to include them in their programming.
The unsatisfactory outcomes initiated a host of activities to address the pressing question: “How do we get Mississaugans to attend their art galleries?21” The underlying objective of these sessions was to get to the root of the multicultural public’s lack of interest in art programming. Eventually in late 2016, the City of Mississauga, in conjunction with various arts institutions and with the Art Gallery of Mississauga leading the way, presented seminars, focus groups, cultural committees, organizational workshops, to address these pressing concerns.
The AGM programed two workshops through the Ontario Association Of Art Galleries in December 2016. The first was titled: Responding to Diversity Through Changing and Growing the Collection and the second, Engaging Audience: New and Existing for two full-day discussions on these topics by the region’s leaders and professionals28,29.The workshops aimed to understand the art and cultural interests of Mississauga's, and Southern Ontario's, population, and to provide museum directors and curators with recommendations on how to attract their citizens to their exhibitions and programs.
Before these workshops came into effect, the AGM programmed an exhibition of paintings by the 19th century southern Ontario painter Homer Watson through the recommendation one of its Board member Robert Tattersall, who loaned one of his Watson paintings, Cows on the Grand River, for the exhibition. Beyond the Pines: Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape was the calm before the multicultural storm of grievances. It is fascinating how Tattersall explains his painting choice and his relationship with the AGM, almost distancing himself from Watson's era and to be included in the AGM's worldview:
Tattersall's "immigrant" condition, and the manner in which he came - chose to come - to Canada is far different from those mostly Third World and non-Western current immigrants. I was first intrigued by Home Watson when Oscar Wilde said he was the Constable of Canada. And as an immigrant from England, that really spoke to me. I liked the pastures and I liked the views of the winding river, in this case it happens to be the Grand River, but that spoke to me, but that is part of my [inaudible] background.
And true to his multicultural, modern, submersion, Tattersall continues:
[T]he juxtaposition between Homer Watson and other landscape artists...is really the underlying theme, and that's why its called Homer Watson Beyond the Pines.
Watson's work needs to be exposed by other paintings as from a different, past era.
The pines, which both the AGM's curators and Tattersall erroneously relate to Watson's works, should more accurately refer to the paintings of Canada's Group of Seven of the late 19th century, who went far inland, north, into "pine country to paint the landscapes. Watson did paint pine trees, but many more oak, elm, and maple trees, and his pine were part of a southern Ontario cultivated landscape.
Kendra Ainsworth, now Curator of Contemporary Art22, who curated Watson's Fall 2015 - Winter 2016 Beyond the Pines as Assistant Curator, elucidates further in the program notes by introducing non-artistic elements into the exhibition's program42/23:
The pines, which both the AGM's curators and Tattersall erroneously relate to Watson's works, should more accurately refer to the paintings of Canada's Group of Seven of the late 19th century, who went far inland, north, into "pine country to paint the landscapes. Watson did paint pine trees, but many more oak, elm, and maple trees, and his pine were part of a southern Ontario cultivated landscape.
Kendra Ainsworth, now Curator of Contemporary Art22, who curated Watson's Fall 2015 - Winter 2016 Beyond the Pines as Assistant Curator, elucidates further in the program notes by introducing non-artistic elements into the exhibition's program42/23:
Contemporary Canadian artists looking at our landscape must also get to the ‘truth’ of their subject. One that is not only strongly represented in our national artistic history, but also one that is both deeply political and personal.
This argument makes “political and personal” become the way to the “truth,” and the pure honesty of paint, pencil and talent as insufficient. But the real purpose of the statements above (both Tattersall's and Answorth's) is to allow an entry point to a group of people which have no affiliations with the immigrant/multicultural groups nor with the white Europeans: indigenous, or First Nations groups.
"Beyond the Pines" is a reference to the Native American word Schenectady, which is a region in upstate New York.
[T]o the Great Lakes tribes, such as the Anishinabe and the Potawatomi, pine trees also represent wisdom and harmony with nature.
Part of going "beyond" is also reaching territory that even adventurous "colonizers" wouldn't, or couldn't, reach. It is part physical and part psychic. It is the land of the "natives," those aboriginals whose trees are infused with intangible spirits.
In contradiction with this fluidity of peoples and land, the AGM accords special reverence to the First Nations peoples, as stated on the main page of its website 26/42.
The Art Gallery of Mississauga (AGM) would like to acknowledge and give thanks to the land on which we work. The AGM has the privilege of operating in the territory of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation and traditional homeland of the Wendat, Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee nations. We are thankful to the many First Nations, Inuit, Métis and global Indigenous peoples who call this region home.
The AGM is committed to recognizing and incorporating diverse Indigenous perspectives within exhibitions and programming, and highlighting the numerous Indigenous artists who have contributed to this gallery. The AGM is dedicated to providing a platform for contemporary Indigenous art and curatorial practices, and hosts events and programs that reflect various cultural topics and identities.
Mandy Salter, the museum’s newly appointed director in July 2015, two months before the start of the September 2015 Watson exhibition, emphasises this concept in the exhibition’s catalogue43/25:
Beyond the Pines: Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape not only draws attention to Canada’s first, and yet lesser known landscape painters, but illustrates that our ideas of art and landscape continue to evolve and change through contemporary practice.
[...]
Homer Watson’s aim to capture the ‘true’ Canadian landscape is echoed by the eight contemporary artists in the exhibition, and it also offers a lens through which to examine the complex and often politically loaded idea of landscape. What is Canadian landscape today, and what factors shape our understanding of it?
The exhibition's other, more subtle, agenda to place Watson in the background becomes clearer after these statements, as an artists who no longer represent contemporary Canadians and Canada, and reflects only the past, colonial English heritage. Watson can be admired through an historical "prism" who has little relevance in the current Canada. The AGM was ready to give some artistic legacy to Watson, but from a cultural and historical distance. The interest was not in Watson's work, but rather in what came to Canada when the English heritage started to wane and a multicultural ethos began to develop in the country: "Beyond the Pines."
The gallery's curators "Beyond the Pines" phrase provided them with endless innuendos. "Beyond the Pines" can also be a reference to Canada's Group of Seven painters who ventured out to northern wildernesses, further even beyond those pines, to discover a more rugged and wild Canada as a way to define Canada's identity separate from Britain's and from America's.
*******v****************vv*v*v***v Dec 19 2017
Salter’s ideas of the flux of art and landscape will dominate the direction of the gallery in the years to come, of which we get a glimpse in her fundamental question from one of her essays:
“What is Canadian landscape today, and what factors shape our understanding of it?”
And the direction her answer will take is further revealed, for those alert to contemporary museum and gallery language, through her final acknowledgments:
Gratitude is extended to AGM Board Chair Robert Tattersall and to the Community Foundation of Mississauga for their generous sponsorship of this exhibition, and to all the organizations and individuals who make it possible for the AGM to present ambitious and meaningful exhibitions to our diverse audiences.
The AGM’s Ambitious Programs to Reach Diverse Audiences
It is not so surprising that Salter used “diverse” in her statement to the AGM’s board. That is the common world of contemporary Canada, which means “diverse people from many countries who now call Canada “home’.”
But it is also relevant, and important, that Salter decided to make “audience” into a plural. Rather than one body of people with a collective identity, we now have whole communities of peoples each with their own interpretation of the world, and their world of art. During Salter’s direction, the AGM began to make extraordinary efforts to accommodate and include all these diverse members, and inhabitants, of Mississauga, in a gargantuan, and ultimately failed, effort to make art meaningful for “everyone.”
But first and foremost, it is the indigenous peoples that are recognized.
The AGM and Canadian Belonging(s)
The AGM’s commitment to the First Nations’ authority on loss (or loss of sense of belonging) is by the choice of curator for the 2016 exhibition Canadian Belonging(s), Ellyn Walker.
Ellyn Walker is44:
...a writer and curator based in Toronto, on Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Wendat land. Her practice focuses on modes of cross-cultural engagement within the arts as potential site for resistance, re-imagination and conciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Her writing has been published in Prefix Photo, PUBLIC Journal, Fuse Magazine, the Journal of Curatorial Studies and C Magazine, amongst others. Ellyn is currently a PhD candidate* in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University.
* PhD candidate as of 2016 when this article was written
Canadian Art Magazine describes Canadian Belonging(s) thus45:
CANADIAN BELONGING(s) engages the role of photographic and image-based practices in both forging representations of nation and colony, and unsettling them. Through their use of the photograph and its function as documentation, as a site for intervention, and as an archive for appropriation, the artists in CANADIAN BELONGING(s) make visible multiple understandings of identity through the presentation of specific objects of identification. Here, the postcard, passport, scrapbook, portrait and treaty are all re-signified, subverting their settler-colonial function and instead, evidencing distinct examples of ‘Canadian’ belonging.
The First Nations curator is obliged to present work based on ideologies of broken treaties, settler land appropriation, and white and Western colonization in order to connect the surging, and often hostile, non-Western, diverse, immigrants with the indigenous groups. Their bond is sealed with a common antagonist, the West, since their underlying Weltanschauungs are so different. It is their diversity that binds them together. But the First Nations, by siding against their historical enemy, the White Man, may be forging alliances with multiculturalists and those that could be their biggest competitors for land, for money, and for government grants.
One multicultural artist which won the favors of Walker does so with great aplomb “reappropriating” her stolen culture to comment on both the accused and her current state is Pansee Atta with her animated Gif Afterglow.
Pansee Atta, Afterglow, 2015, GIF animation
In the entranceway of the 2015 Canadian Belonging(s) exhibition at the AGM
Notes on the animation by Atta [the painting Atta is referring to is presented below these notes]:
I first saw this painting at the AGO, at a 2009 exhibit of works by Hunt and other Pre-Raphaelites. I didn't need to read its title to know that it was a painting of an Egyptian woman; even from across the room I felt a kind of recognition in it. That feeling is so rare! It stuck with me for years, until I started researching this project, and then I stumbled across this quote from a critical text written not long after the painting was first created (in the mid-1800's). I had seen this painting, and thought I saw some part of myself in it-- but the man who painted it and his contemporaries didn't see that at all. They didn't even see a person. They barely even saw an animal. I had looked into a mirror of sorts and had my reflection inverted into something monstrous, forcing me to see that in myself, too.
The integrity of the borders of your own self-definition are at stake when you try to write about your own body as theory. If this was an example of 'good' representation, then what does it look like when it's 'bad'?
Were the Orientalists so nefarious! Often spending years with local communities, studying their art and culture intensely, and of course their language, they clearly “represented” them with the tools that they took with them, which were undeniably White and Western. But let us study The Afterglow in Egypt. Does it merit the belly-heave that Atta gives it?
The Afterglow in Egypt, 19th century
William Holman Hunt
82 x 37 cm
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK
Atta writes in her notes:
I didn't need to read its title to know that it was a painting of an Egyptian woman; even from across the room I felt a kind of recognition in it. That feeling is so rare! It stuck with me for years, until I started researching this project,
Why, if the woman was so recognizable and human? Why research?
And later in her commentary Atta attacks Hunt, based on some theorized presentation on him - and other - pre-Raphaelite painters:
[T]he man who painted it and his contemporaries didn't...even see a person. They barely even saw an animal. I had looked into a mirror of sorts and had my reflection inverted into something monstrous, forcing me to see that in myself, too.
Says Ernest Chesneau, from The English School of Painting, who comments on the panel next to the painting The Afterglow:
Princess and goddess, both have faded...I find a symbol of Egypt, deposed from the splendour of her ancient civilisation, and fallen from her high, intellectual culture, with nothing left to her but what the fertility of soil, the waters of the Nile and bountiful Nature continue to lavish upon her.
It was the reference to Egyptian Antiquity and comparing it to the peasant woman that set off Atta's ire. It seems that Atta dug around quite a bit to find such unflattering references both of the painter and his subject. Yet Hunt paints this peasant woman with regal attention and perhaps even love.
Hunt himself says about Egypt, with surprise and wonder at the bustle and energy in Cairo:
I have just returned from a walk round the town...You see the crowd gliding past composed of Arab, Jew, Copt, Turk, Greek and Frank. Here are others also in plenty, Nubian & Abyssinian with Syrian and Persian.
Egypt did not leave him unimpressed, nor untouched; neither the simplicity (and grace) of the Nile peasant nor the modern citizens of Cairo.
Perhaps Canadian Belonging(s) was the turning point in the AGM’s programming when instead of intellectually referring to the misogynistic and race-biased world of European artists, and specifically of white European men artists, there was now a large and growing pool of Third World (non-white) artists who could directly provide their first hand experience, if not their first hand feelings, as a group rather than as individual artists.
And indeed this was a seminal point for the AGM. Ellyn Walker's curation Canadian Belonging(s) received “Exhibition of the Year: Budget under $20,000 (Thematic Award)” by the Ontario Association of Art Galleries at the Annual Awards Recognizing Public Art Galleries in Ontario on November 27, 2017.
The jury comments:
"Art Gallery of Mississauga, Ellyn Walker (curator), Canadian Belonging(s) examines national identity from the perspectives of artists from indigenous, settler and new Canadian backgrounds, with largely photo-based works that are, in this group configuration, “taking a nuanced look at expressions of nationalism” that are at once disarming and impactful. "
Salters program notes for the workshops through the Ontario Association Of Art Galleries:
30:
(http://oaag.org/programs/downloads/Responding%20to%20Diversity%20Schedule%20For%20Participants.pdf)
Collections Through the Prism of Diversity Series:
Responding to Diversity Through Changing and Growing the Collection.
Mandy Salter, Director and Curator of the Art Gallery of Mississauga, will lead this workshop series. The AGM is engaging in a forward thinking acquisition plan reflecting the cultural diversity of the city, region, as well as the historical diversity of Canada. Public art galleries and art museums are committed to acquiring works of art from culturally diverse and Indigenous communities, however this often requires considering how their acquisition plans are aligned with their missions and mandates.
Mississauga has a plethora of galleries, intricately wound into its communities. Some are heritage and historical houses17/31 such as the the Bradley Museum Complex, and others, like the Mississauga Central Library’s Canadiana Room18/32, are tucked away in libraries and community centres. The AGM is the most ambitious, having taken on the role as the representative of the city. All of Mississauga's roads lead to the AGM, or so hope its champions.
The recommendation resulting from these brainstorming sessions in the workshops to address multicultural Mississaugans’ lack of interest in the arts was: Do more (much more) of the same, with more (much more) money. And the various government bodies continued their funding for the AGM, with the City of Mississauga providing $325,000 (more than a quarter of a million dollars) for the new fiscal year of 2017, a similar amount it has been allocating to the AGM for three years prior to the 2016 workshop19/33,20/34.
Adhering to the recommendations from these reports, the AGM has maintained its multicultural arts profiles for the 2017/2018 seasons35/36.
The disregard for geographical boundaries - borders - is a declaration of independence from North American (United States and Canada) governance. A year later the AGM would present a program of art discussion and debate on such a theme: the significance (or not) of borders, or as titled by the gallery: Border Crossings.
This kind of programming would be reflected in one of the AGM’s most recent endeavour at reconciling non-Western artists with Canada. Its 2017 Fall inaugural program directly addressed multiculturalism and immigration through a workshop titled Border Crossings: A Community Engagement Lab21/37. And the bold presence of these “new Canadians” would remind the AGMs programmers not to leave behind those very first inhabitants of Canada, The First Nations peoples, as the AGM’s website reminds us.
The section heading for the Border Crossings: A Community Engagement Lab in the Art Gallery of Mississauga explains the project thus:
BORDER CROSSINGS
a community engagement lab
Borders are both physical places marked by barriers in the form of walls or coasts, and imaginary ones ones, indicated only by lines on a map, or places in our hearts. They are paradoxical, in that they both connect and divide. But they are, first and foremost, stories. Stories of changes in perspective - physical, psychological, and ideological. Recognizing and sharing these border crossings allows us to see ourselves and others differently instead of groups of people separated by arbitrary distinctions. We are all individuals who experience pivotal moments of change that shape the contours of the narratives of our lives.
Border Crossings is an interactive community engagement lab that uses the transformative power of art to challenge preconceived ideas around both literal and metaphorical boundaries. Visitors are invited to the different stations in the gallery to share their stories and experiences with crossing borders - geographical, spiritual, and personal. Through creativity and collaboration, we can recognize and respect the struggles that are part of many border crossings, and learn to appreciate that sometimes the most incredible creativity lies at the edges of things.
Border Crossings is an Art Gallery of Mississauga initiative, generously funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation. Vst agmbordercrossngs.com for more information on upcoming events and how to get involved!
And concurrent with the Border Crossings project, the gallery presented its Fall 2017 exhibition walking across, talking through [sic]23/39.
Below is the text from the information board posted at the entrance of the exhibition:
walking across, talking through
Dana Claxton, Nalini Malani, Lisa Myers, Sumaira Tazeen
In today’s increasingly globalized but divided world, migration has become a controversial issue. Yet humans have always been nomads, moving from one place to another in search of better food sources, a more hospitable climate, opportunity, freedom. walking across, talking through presents the work of four artists who examine the personal narratives and relationships to both land and nation that are inextricably tied to the act of moving from one place to another.
The works in this exhibition draw particular attention to the significance of markers of place in how we craft narratives of migration. Borders, fences, train tracks, roads, rivers - these physical objects stand in contrast to the sometimes invisible nature of the stories that reference them, stories that change based on who is doing the telling. In particular the voices of women are often absent in stories of land, nation and movement between and across the two and those Indigenous people much more so.
Dana Claxton, Nalini Malani, Lisa Myers and Sumaira Tazeen refer to personal stories in their work but speak to a larger idea: that narration can be an act of orientation - geographic, social and political. That the stories we tell, like the markers we place upon the land can shift and change, and be questioned. These stories, which can be traumatic or triumphant, ubiquitous but often kept private, allow us to find common ground and reach across and through histories and politics.
walking across, talking through received funding from through Mississauga Arts Council, The Ontario Arts Council The Canada Council for the Arts and The Trillium Foundation.
There is no doubt that the AGM presenters have an ambitious agenda. Their “we are all nomads” in search of “freedom” puts all of us on a level field. In this manner, all land is open for settling and all peoples have been nomads, from the 19th century Canadian pioneers24/40 traveling cross-country in covered wagons who settled in the prairie and developed the farmlands, to the 21st century’s not-so-destitute Syrian refugees who flew in on charity-financed cross-continental jets25/41. For the AGM’s programmers, contemporary nomads can find their final stop here, in Mississauga, as did the European settlers.
Syrian refugee Selfies boarding flight for Canada
as part of resettlement program. #cbc
But there are after all the very first North American nomads, who made their trajectory from Asia to the Americas and who formed communities scattered throughout the continent. These hardy tribal nomads, with their fluid boundaries and borders, and no single “nation,” are given a special reception by the AGM.
Two of the artists exhibiting in walking across, talking through have a multicultural background (one is of Indian - Asian - origin, the other Pakistani). The other two are First Nations27/43 :
- Dana Claxton was born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan and is a member of the Hunkpapa Lakota Nation. Claxton is a multidisciplinary artist...Her work mixes Lakota tradition with western influences to challenge perceived expectations of her heritage.
- Lisa Myers is an independent curator and artist...Myers is a member of Beausoleil First Nation and she is based in Port Severn and Toronto, Ontario.
- Drawn from history, culture, and her direct experience as a refugee of the Partition of India and the legacy of colonialism and de-colonization, Malani's work explores violence, the feminine, and the politics of national identity.
- Sumaira Tazeen is an Oakville-based visual artist, educator and curator from Hyderabad, Pakistan…[Her] work was included in two recent exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Mississauga – The Gaze (2012), and 011+91 | 011+92 (2013.
But how does one construct an exhibition which puts the First Nations groups in the discussion on multiculturalism? This delicate problem was was resolved by declaring them as predating all other groups in Canada, and whose land was appropriated by these late arrivals (whites and non-whites alike), through the AGM’s web page “Land Acknowledgment” statement. They are part of multicultural Canada but are awarded a separate and solemn recognition for their losses and appropriations, at least in the the AGM’s program notes. And, after all, the discussion on “multiculturalism” is also about setting historical and cultural records straight.
The AGM can be credited for keeping an eye (and ear) on pop culture. This, together with a keen focus on multiculturalism and indigenous identity, can make for interesting results. At walking across, talking through, artist Lisa Myers presented her 2012 Traintracks.
Traintracks, 2012 and Garden River Blueprint, 2015 are part of a larger body of work entitled Blueprints, by Lisa Myers. A reproduction of a technical drawing or plan; the term 'blueprint' is derived from the 19th century printing process that produced white lines on a #blue background. In this sense, the topographical features in Myers' prints could be considered blueprints.
.
For Myers, however, the term blueprint also refers to the pigment used to print the Garden River series, which she made from blueberries.
In 1919, Myers' grandfather ran away from the Shingwauk Residential School in Sault St. Marie, walking 250 km along the tracks to Espanola, Ontario, subsisting for much of the time on wild blueberries found along the route. In 2009, Myers and her two cousins made a similar walk. She suggests that family stories such as these can act as blueprints for our lives, creating a structure of thinking, of situating ourselves in our #histories, and in the places we move through and those we call home.
These kinds of railway tracks are what Gord Downie, the frontman of the band The Tragically Hip who recently died of cancer sang about, where a young indigenous boy runs away from residential school to return “home”:
Freezing rain
And ice pellets
Walking home
I'm covered in it
Walking home
Along the tracks
Downie died only a few months ago, but not before making cross-county appearances for indigenous rights, and setting up a Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund in memory of the young boy who died following the tracks trying to go home.
Meyrs’ distinguishing feature which led to her identification (and dedication) to her First Nations’ roots and several of her art works is:
...a recording of my Grandfather describing his story of running away from residential school in 1919/1920 as a source of directions, [which] we examined maps and embarked on a similar route in 2009 to create our own story of travelling by foot across the north shore of Lake Huron. After listening to this recording many times the journey appears vividly in our minds. Images of the blueberries he lived on meld with those of railway tracks he followed from Sault Ste Marie to Espanola, Ontario.
Myers’ brief biography in her public references identify her as:
Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation
But a more detailed biography states that:
Lisa's mother's family is Anishinaabe and French from Shawanaga and Beausoleil First Nation in the Georgian Bay region, and her Dad is from English and Austrian ancestry who settled in southern Ontario.
Despite a rather favored life, unlike the young Chanie who died on the tracks, Myers, like many contemporary First Nations artists, uses her background stories to cull museum pieces to present before her co-national Canadian whites, certainly with intentions to induce some guilt. And the method continues to work, as Downie demonstrated, with the Prime Minister himself making a special announcement on Chanie and the First Nations at Downie’s death.
https://pm.gc.ca/eng/news/2017/10/18/statement-prime-minister-canada-death-gord-downie
“Gord Downie uncovered and told the stories of Canada. He was...[a] poet whose evocative lyrics came to define a country.
[...]
“Our [Canadian] identity and culture are richer because of his music.
[...]
“In the wake of his diagnosis, Gord only fought harder for what he believed in: social justice, environmentalism, and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Before passing, he shined his light on the story of 12-year-old Chanie Wenjack who died from hunger and exposure after trying to find his way home from a residential school. For his work raising awareness of Indigenous issues, he was inducted as a member of the Order of Canada in 2017.”
And “Indigenous Rights” fit almosts seamlessly into “Immigrant Rights,” especially when the focus is Parliament Hill and the Canadian government, or more precisely, Canadian land.
Concurrent with walking, across talking through, the AGM’s XIT-RM, a room boxed off for “emerging” artists, presented Hiba Abdallah28 Souvenir Shop29, which was designed to make the space to look like, well, a souvenir shop. Except you cannot buy anything. And it soon becomes clear that it is all about symbolic messaging. Various items: pens, t-shirts, baseball caps - the usual souvenir shop fare - are displayed, and all have foreign script on them. Some appear to be Arabic, but Abdallah offers no translations. Part of the desired effect is to unnerve the viewer who is trying to find meaning in these signs placed on such familiar objects. The other is to get the viewers to figure out these words as a whole (some might know one, or maybe two, of the languages) or others may be quick enough, and multiculturally educated, to read the “signs” and interpret their significance.
But the ever-informative curatorial statement provided by the AGM for its visitors illuminates us on this apparently hidden meaning of these words, and it is only one word:
Remember. The word is expressed as an imperative, imploring us to recall a past
experience.
And that is what is printed on these seemingly innocuous merchdize.
The will to remember is the reason for the existence of souvenir shops,
those proverbial retail locations filled with products created for the specific purpose of
remembering a place. Objects are emblazoned with iconic texts and images: city names,
official logos, and prominent architectural features. For suburban cities like Mississauga,
these defining features are often entwined with commercial enterprise. Large regional
shopping malls are where most suburban city centres find their origins, with city halls
and municipal offices built alongside these planned developments. The result is cities
whose identities have come to be associated with commercial endeavours.
In this exhibition, Hiba Abdallah considers the commemoration of place through the
lens of a souvenir shop. Constructed to resemble the titular shop, Abdallah presents a
series of objects: mugs, pens, postcards, hats, and t-shirts. In place of official logos, each
object bears the word remember, printed in a stylized text translated across five written
languages: Chinese, Punjabi, Arabic, Polish, and Anishnaabemowin. The first four are
among the most common native languages of Mississauga residents; Anishnaabemowin
is the language of the Anishinaabe who are the Indigenous peoples of this land. Only
in Anishnaabemowin is a question directly posed: Do you remember? What we are
being asked to remember is not made explicit, and each translation imbues the request
with different connotative weight. The negotiation of this ambiguous space between
languages unsettles established narratives of place.
The ever present “indigenous” glide even into Abdallah's souvenir goods, who (have they even agreed to this?) are repeatedly placed alongside the “new-comer” immigrants and banded with them to air their grievances against the invader/colonizer/racist Whites.
And what is a cultural experience without dance. The AGM’s Facebook page post on October 24, 2017 reminds us:
Dancing Across the Border: Expanding the Cultural Space
On September 14, members of Nova Dance performed at the Art Gallery of Mississauga in the Main Gallery on the theme of Border Crossings, as part of the Border Crossings Community Engagement Lab.
Nova Dance was a created by Nova Bhattacharya who was
...named Nova and her sister Scotia after the magnificent province in which they burst forth into the world [after her parents immigrated to Canada]...Not one to shy away from breaking the mould, Nova's work draws from her roots in Bharatnatyam [Indian classical dance] but aims for the contemporary, both pushing against and inviting tradition to transcend borders of culture, technique and ethnicity.ref"
https://www.facebook.com/novadancetoronto/photos/a.481702288515705.115664.481046941914573/1416905768328681/?type=3&theater
The roots are “there,” that place left behind. And Nova’s artistic medium that links that memory with the present place (and space) is dance.
In the adjacent hall, Sumaira Tazeen, one of the artists in walking across, talking through, examines her relationship with this new country Canada also with her head turned back to her native land, and once again uses memory as her anchor. Her installation
Sabz Bagh III...utilizes suitcases - familiar objects that have come to symbolize the act of picking up one's life in search of an adventure, a new path, a new home. Voices emerge from these suitcases; women Tazeen has interviewed, speaking about their experiences of immigrating to Canada and adjusting to their new lives here. Like Tazeen herself, these women came to Canada from South Asia, and they tell their stories in their native languages of Bengali, Gujarati and Punjabi. Even if these are not languages familiar to the listener, one can hear the wistfulness, weariness, humour and sadness in the voices of these women.
[The paragraph above is from the board displayed adjacent to installation in the AGM, and is not available online or in the program notes]
The above synopsis describes Tazeen’s trajectory from her country to Canada in glowing and positive terms: “adventure,” “a new path,” “a new home.” Yet Tazeen’s installation is filled with nostalgia and disappointment, and perhaps even bitterness.
Tazeen’s website describes to us the “perfect garden” after which her installation is titled30:
‘Sabz Bagh’ (the grass is always greener on the other side) is a search to find the perfect garden, also referred as ‘Jannah’, which in Islamic philosophy, is the idea of having abundance and prosperity in life here and after. The imagery is often inspired by borders in Mughal miniature paintings, which represent the same idea of a perfect garden. This installation has vintage suitcases with installed video and sound pieces along with gilded floral motives referencing to the efforts as an immigrant to Canada in search of opportunities and a better future.
But who packs up and goes back “home?” Who will be so humble as to acknowledge defeat in a Western land? Better to unpack one’s bags, set home, and shop, and recreate the fading images (and sounds) of a lost paradise through one’s memories.
There is no English language in these suitcase stories. And the voices converge creating a din of words, with a syllable, harsh and loud, periodically penetrating through. Even Bengali, Gujarati or Punjabi speakers wouldn’t know what to make of the cacophony meant to emit words in their languages.
Abdallah’s, Tazeen’s and Nova’s presentations are linked together through their pull at memory, whether personally experienced or collectively learned. But even with an apparently universal theme as memory, what is striking, and perhaps the true link between these pieces, is their incoherence to the museum’s visitor, as though the Tower of Babel had materialized in the gallery’s rooms. Nova’s dance medium is doubly disconcerting since we are looking at an uncommon visual medium in galleries which traditionally display images, and a type of dance whose choreography and movements are alien to most visitors to the AGM.
The works are also exclusive. Only those in the know - the gallery’s curators, the artists and the culturally attuned crowd - can decipher the the actual meaning of the scripts, sounds and choreography, and thus find satisfaction in unravelling the various layers of meaning in the exhibitions, the most intellectual moving towards larger issues, others simply pleased to solve what the individual words, sounds and gestures mean. Language and communication thus becomes discriminatory.
Tiffany Schofield, co-founder of the artist-run space Y+ Contemporary, writes this in her review of Abdalla’s Souvenir Shop37:
Abdallah frequently works at the intersections of conceptual art and social practice, and here, her installation confronts us with the use-value of the objects on display and their role in the creation and promotion of civic identity. For those not fluent in any of the featured written languages, the text serves as a visual signifier of the city’s multilingual landscape, accruing meaning through shifts in script and alphabet. Moreover, the circulation of products – a borrowed pen, a proudly worn hat – has the potential to be transformed into a communications network, with the text adorning each object acting as a beacon to others who share a mother tongue. Souvenir Shop proposes a reenvisioning of Mississauga’s identity, in its citizens’ own words.
The key phrase in understanding the (hidden) agenda of the gallery, its curators and assisting galleries is: “reenvisioning of Mississauga’s identity, in its citizens’ own words.”
And The Canadian Federation of University Women, which awarded Abdallah $1,000 for her final year at Guelph, introduces her cumulative work that earned her the senior’s honor thus41:
Her practice borrows from collaborative, bureaucratic, and pedagogical structures as tools for agitating cultural constructs.
Life with only monetary rewards cannot be very inspiring, especially for artists. And this brings us to the ultimate, ulterior, motive of art, and artists, in multicultural Mississauga and Canada, with the AGM as a major promoter: artists as cultural revolutionaries.
Abdallah’s “Souvenir Shop,” with multilingual scripts, challenges the gallery visitor to leave behind the common Western latin alphabet and to decipher the meaning of these words, as a way to agitate cultural constructs (i.e. cultural norms), as Schofield aggressively advocates.
Nova’s Broken Lines won Summerworks’ Outstanding Direction Award in 2016, described as:
a love letter to bharatnatyam dancers
And
...a radical work that pulls apart notions of power, tradition, and ritual, puncturing exoticism and querying the contemporary.
Tazeen’s audio-suitcases appear to be gestures of disappointment, but ultimately they convey the message that Canada is not readily accommodating to these bearers of distant memories.
All these works, under the guise of some unified multiculturalism, subversively display their views of a closed and unwelcoming environment in their new home, Canada.
But how unified are they?
The “Arab-Canadians” such as Abdallah are an amorphous group of Muslim Middle Easterners who have roots in Canada but who identify with their hereditary links without specifying a country. Christian Arabs identify as separate group. “Asians” distinctly separation between East Asians and South Asians, and further divide into Muslim and non-Muslim (usually Hindu). Filipinos form their own separate (Catholic-based) group. Canada has a long list of such ethnic and regional qualifiers.
But these groups will join forces even as their cultural, religious or geographical specifics diverge, to uproot the predominant (“mainstream”) white culture and white Canada: the feudalist Canada. Here, their multiculturalities outweigh their distinctions.
The latest, 2016, census reports for Canada are now available. The AGM can be lauded for being so prescient. Mississauga's citizens are now majority non-White (58%). The depotic, Western art-referencing “mainstream” Canadians are hardly the mainstay anymore. The AGM’s curatorial choices have been reflecting (and projecting) this demographic shift and cultural reality for many seasons now.
This past summer (June - August 2017), the infamous XIT-RM profiled Nafiseh Emadmostofi, an Iran-born artist whose cleverly titled collection “Burning Desire” featured paintings of books in flames from her series Do It Yourself Coffin.
At its heart, Burning Desire is about the power of art to disrupt, and its conflicting potential to both inspire activism and protest, and incite censure, while at the same time speaking to a collective (and contested) desire to envision a better world.
So writes Ainsworth in the exhibition’s program notes44. What is Emadmostofi's burning desire? A “better world.” Like the other artists portrayed in this article, who have non-Western traditions but have received the majority of their education through the prism of Western art, it is to return to (a return to) their traditions. That world for Emadmostofi is Iran,The Islamic Republic of Iran. Not a country based on a hodgepodge of multicultural entitlements where she has to share grievances with foreign cultures and elements. Not Canada. But a country with clearer definitions and a more cohesive people.
“My arrival is your undoing” tells us the bold script of a banner flying outside the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, just a bus ride away from the Mississauga’s art gallery. The exhibition took place from January - March 2017, around the same time as the AGM’s Border Crossings Interactive community engagement lab, and the exhibition walking across talking through which address immigration and multiculturalism. The banner is part of the University of Waterloo Art Gallery’s “Yonder” exhibition:
Exploring themes of intercultural translation, displacement and identity construction, this exhibition brings together a group of Canadian artists from diverse cultural backgrounds whose works examine the immigrant condition. Comprising recent and new works in a variety of media, including site-specific installations, Yonder approaches the notion of immigration through a process of “personal sociology,” moving from an investigation of subjective inquiries to larger questions and shared experiences.
Multicultural artists, like the multicultural population, have formed enclaves of ethnic and regional groups, each closed off from one another and from the general, still dominant “Canadian” culture, and join forces only when necessary and thus revealing, and acting upon, their negative sentiments of Canadian. But this historical, and still dominant, Canadian culture continues to determines many of these artists’ activities, including whether or not they qualify for grants and gallery exhibition spaces.
Mandy Slater and Kendra Ainsworth, the representatives of the AGM, and of the dominant Canadian culture, continue to run the galleries and curate the exhibitions yet following their own (multi)cultural priorities. This past season (September - October 2017), it was Arab Canadians, next year it could be something very different which overrules everything else. Transgender art, maybe? These decisions are in the hands of Slater and Ainsworth and the predominantly white board of directors and executive leaders of the AGM.
For the November 2, 2017 - January 1, 2018 program, the curators appear to be taking a break from the pressing multiculturalism. But the exhibition has abandoned any reference to traditional Western art. What we are seeing in this current exhibition is the dissolution of Western art, and by Western artists.
Libby Hague60, takes on the main gallery. Hague’s exhibition is a retrospective. She exhibited at the AGM in 2009, almost a decade ago. She is exhibiting this year during the AGM 30th anniversary.
Hague’s 2009 exhibition in the AGM was a giant installation One Step at a Time62. Canadian Art writer John Armstrong, in Libby Hague: A Step into Darkness describes the installation as an “Edenic-dystopic urban setting63.” What it looks like is the gallery hit with a nuclear bomb.
Hague tells us of the ghosts and spirits in her work64:
My installations are like ethical laboratories which take us to the precarious edge of disasters. In "One step at a time", the disaster is man-made, a consequence of greed and selfishness. It is a dystopian scene that leads to utopian possibility. A field of corn precedes an increasingly littered country path that leads, ultimately, to an urban dam of hoarded food that has burst, and the flood is washing us away. But I also offer a way out - a way back from that edge that is both individual and societal - by urging us to remember and connect with what is best about us, something joyful and energetic - our ability to act and the belief that personal redemption or meaning comes from helping others.
In Hague’s 2017 AGM retrospective the past is never over, she
teases out themes from her decades-long practice, upends the traditional, chronological format of the retrospective exhibition, and explores the role of storytelling and narrative in contemporary exhibitions.
In the adjoining XIT-RM, Jennifer Laiwint’s The Pick Up Artist:
...is an investigative art project which probes into the shadowy world of Pick Up Artists – a community of men who practice a codified set of strategies, many of which promote manipulation and misogyny, for the purposes of attracting potential partners and gaining sexual success. Using video, text and performance, with The Pick Up Artist, Laiwint aims to expose and challenge the strategies used by this movement, questioning traditional notions of masculinity.
We no longer have exemplary works of Canadian artists, the last of which we were presented were paintings by from of Homer Watson, a Southern Ontario painter from the 19th Century, from September 2015 to January 2016. Watson, whose artistic education included studying English and European painters during a four year stay in England, wrote upon his return to his beloved Doon:
"[T]here is at the bottom of each artistic conscience a love for the land of their birth... no immortal work has been done which has not as one of its promptings for its creation a feeling its creator had of having roots in his native land and being a product of its soil."
Both Hague and Laiwint create their art in order to diminish contemporary Canadian society and culture, from masculinity to Western artistic technique and practice. Watson creates out of “a love for the land of [his] birth” and that love he has for those roots.
As Watson astutely knows, nothing immortal can be created if one has no “feeling its creator had of having roots in his native land and being a product of its soil.”
The borders crossing and other multicultural artists have shown us their true patriot love resides across the oceans. And the natives, who had a chance at rebuttal, threw back at us tattered pieces of their psyches, giving everything up in the name of art.
And with perfect timing and purpose, the AGM is commemorating the gallery’s 30th anniversary (1987 - 2017) by selling limited editions of Hague’s, and other selected artists’ prints, all of which were especially created for the anniversary.
From the AGM’s website:
AGM 30th Anniversary Limited Edition Series
In honour of the Art Gallery of Mississauga’s 30th anniversary, we invited select artists who have exhibited at the AGM in the past thirty years to create limited edition works exclusively for the AGM! Our immense gratitude goes to artists Libby Hague, Panchal Mansaram, Andrew McPhail, and Howard Podeswa for their beautiful work. This special series of thirty works launched at our annual auction, and are available for immediate purchase in the gallery and online throughout the year. Take home a unique memento of the AGM’s exhibition history!
And the AGM’s instagram captions:
You need more Libby in your life! Visit us to see her amazingly complex #retrospective and then get your very own Libby Hague Limited Edition. . . For the AGM's 30th For the AGM's 30th Anniversary, we asked four #artists who had exhibited in the #gallery over the years to create a special #limitededition work available for purchase in support of the AGM's programming, #exhibitions, #community events and free admission for all. A special piece of the AGM's #exhibition #history can be yours, and at the same time, you'll be giving vital support to Mississauga's public art gallery. . . LIBBY HAGUE Support System, 2017 Woodcut print on paper Varied edition of 5 15 3/8 × 21 inches $1000 each
Hague’s work resembles a two-dimensional version of a cube construction.
But it is Andrew McPhail who sets the stage. He presented the AGM with a black tote bag with CRAP spelled in sequins: a glittering rendition of nihilism. McPhail's an HIV positive (AIDS) homosexual artist, the epitome of the White Western Canadian male artist.
Visitors, linking to the AGM can buy CRAP for $100. Perhaps the gallery administrators are grounded in reality after all - CRAP sells for cheap - 10X less than Support System. And it is a white male, not a female (Hague) or an ethnic (Panchal Mansaram) who sells this image, but McPhail, who is a homosexual with AIDS.
Homer Watson returned to Canada from England - he was Canadian. How about Abdallah and Tazeen, and Nova and Emadmostofi? They were all born in Canada but have no “love for the land of their birth,” and instead stretch back to their ancestral land, the land of their forebears, which Watson also attempted but found he had
roots in his native land...being a product of its soil.
Will they return to the lands they love more than Canada?
Contemporary Mississauga has cleverly managed to submerge the city into a “Brave New World/Nineteen Eighty Four” type of deconstruction: of language, of identity, of culture, and of art. Young artists who have non-Western ancestry but who were born or brought up in Ontario now openly display their loyalties to their ancestral countries, even mocking and deriding the Canada in which they grew up, and to which they owe everything.
So it is no wonder that Emadmostofi sets this Western tradition up in flames, to vanish. With this purge, she can be reunited with her true, authentic self, her true authentic art, once again. She no longer has to depend on the volatile, and often undecipherable (to her), Canadian cultural climate. Her standards are from her own cultural traditions.
At its heart, Burning Desire is about the power of art to disrupt, and its conflicting potential to both inspire activism and protest, and incite censure, while at the same time speaking to a collective (and contested) desire to envision a better world.
And Emadmostofi’s message, like her fellow contemporary artists at the AGM, white and nonwhite, is creative destruction: to dismantle and destroy Western art to free up space to display the art of the Emadmostofs.
We are witnessing the removal, symbolic and concrete, of Canada’s culture and the introduction of alien parallel worlds as the artful Canadian government carefully hands out the public's money to these “multicultural” artists to promote global multiculturalism.
But have the Emadmostofis and Abdallahs, the Tazeems and the Thomas’ ever wondered what happens if, when, the art-loving, much-maligned, white Canadians no longer go to exhibitions, and equally important, refuse to fund those exhibitions? That scenario has already occurred. The severity of the situation initiated the various events and workshops to address this lack of “diversity” in Mississauga’s museums by the OAAC described at the beginning of this article.
When this is all gone, how will the Emadmostofis and Abdallahs and the Tazeems and the Thomas’ get their ideas and inspirations, not to mention their training and their jobs if there are no Homer Watsons and other art traditions to emulate? How will Guelph University’s art department receive its funds (and its instructors) if white Canadians refuse to add to the government’s coffers for programs which malign them (and don’t represent them)? Already the white population is at a close minority (of 42%) according to the 2016 Census reports. And of that t s an even smaller percentage which actively supports its art galleries and institutions. What would happen when the art-loving white Canadian has had enough of artists who mock and mimic his traditions? And then, how will the AGM run a gallery of empty rooms?
In an earlier piece, ignored by the AGM’s curators, who may still have some natural aversion to nihilism, Laiwint shows us through her art how she would be a candidate for this New Age Art Gallery. Her account and description of the work doesn’t do credit to what she has actually created: burlap wrapped figures hanging off nooses. Hague gave us a messy explosive nihilism. Laiwint actually gives us death - Death of Art. The Death Art Wrapped in Burlap.
Hazel McCallion governorship is long gone, but her post-apology legacy lives on in unexpected ways throughout Mississauga. The Mississauga Multicultural Poliburo and its Culture Branch, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, would not have been able to exist without her tireless efforts. Without her, there would be no Mississauga. And she stands alongside hockey players and business tycoons at the Mississauga Walk of Fame Legends Row, in the Mississauga City Centre’s Celebration Square, and none would have been able to arrive there without the biggest legend of them all: Mayor McCallion. We need her heir to come out, and through the McCallion stern and strong resolve, bring Mississauga back to life again and to enjoy and marvel at the paintings of Homer Watson.
On the Grand River at Doon, c. 1880
Homer Watson, Canadian, 1855 - 1936
Oil on canvas
24 x 36 in
Purchased 1952
National Gallery of Canada (no. 5900)
Divya Mehra
There are Greater Tragedies, 2014
References:
1. Art Gallery of Mississauga. September 28, 2017. https://www.facebook.com/ArtGalleryofMississauga/posts/1722989707745872
2. Jean Burnet and Leo Driedger. Multiculturalism. The Canadian Encyclopedia, June 27, 2011. Thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/multiculturalism/
3/ref/ Kidist Paulos Asrat. Immigration Is Our Biggest Selling Point. Camera Lucida. April 28, 2008
3ref2 Studio Libeskind. Royal Ontario Museum. Toronto, Canada.
http://libeskind.com/work/royal-ontario-museum/
http://libeskind.com/work/royal-ontario-museum/
5. Statistics Canada. Annual Levels of Immigration and Immigrant Entry Earnings in Canada. February 2014. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2014356-eng.htm
6. Ron Duquette. A Look Back at Square One 40 Years Ago. Insauga. November 27, 2016. insauga.com/a-look-back-at-square-one-40-years-ago
7. CBC News Canada. Mayor McCallion under fire for alleged anti-immigrant remarks.
May 23, 2001. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/mayor-mccallion-under-fire-for-alleged-anti-immigrant-remarks-1.281665
8. News East West. Hazel McCallion does yoga with seniors at Sringeri temple
---Ref: Kings’ Highway sign
Ref: Playdium---
9. http://canadapopulation2017.com/population-of-mississauga-2017.html
10. Immigration Watch Canada. Mass Immigration Has Turned Visible Minorities into Majorities in Many of Canada’s Electoral Districts, August 21, 2015. http://immigrationwatchcanada.org/2015/08/31/mass-immigration-has-turned-visible-minorities-into-majorities-in-many-of-canadas-electoral-districts/
11. Art Gallery of Mississauga, Projects and Programs.
12. Steven Malanga. The Curse of the Creative Class. City Journal. Winter 2004
13. Lydia DePillis. The re-education of Richard Florida.The Houston Chronicle. October 24 2016
14. Immigration Watch Canada. Mass Immigration Has Turned Visible Minorities into Majorities in Many of Canada’s Electoral Districts, August 21, 2015. http://immigrationwatchcanada.org/2015/08/31/mass-immigration-has-turned-visible-minorities-into-majorities-in-many-of-canadas-electoral-districts/
15. Preweb, Mississauga ON. Art Gallery of Mississauga Hits Home Run With 'Beyond The Pines' Homer Watson and Contemporary Canadian Landscape Artists Exhibition, Oct. 102015
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/10/prweb13014139.htm
16. Canadian Art. Beyond the Pines: Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape
15. Ontario Association of Art Galleries Workshop: Collections Through the Prism of Diversity Series: Responding to Diversity Through Changing and Growing the Collection,
Thursday, December 1, 2016, 10:00am - 4:00pm AGM
16. Ontario Association of Art Galleries Workshop: Collections Through the Prism of Diversity Series: Engaging Audiences: New and Existing
17. Mississauga Heritage Houses: Bradley Museum Complex. https://culture.mississauga.ca/collection/heritage-houses
18. Mississauga Library System: Canadiana Room
19. Mississauga News Room. Approved: 2017 Culture and Community Grants Program Funding February 2017. http://www.mississauga.ca/portal/cityhall/pressreleases?paf_gear_id=9700020&itemId=7100126q&backUrl=%2Fportal%2Fcityhall%2Fpressreleases%3Fpaf_gear_id%3D9700020
20. Mississauga News Room. City Council Approves Nearly $3 Million in Funding for 2016 Community Grant Programs. February, 10 2016.
21. Ontario Trillium Foundation. Fiscal Year: 2016-2917. Halton Peel. Seed Grants Staffing/program costs for Border Crossings
http://www.otf.ca/art-gallery-mississauga-0
22. Ontario Museum Associations. Engaging your Community: A Toolkit for Museums https://members.museumsontario.ca/programs-events/current-initiatives/museumsuccession/EYC/toolkit 23. Discover Mississauga. walking across, talking through. October 17 2017 https://www.discovermississauga.ca/component/ohanah/walking-across-talking-through-39 24. Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. Settling the West: Immigration to the Prairies from 1867 to 1914. Erica Gagnon, Collections Researcher https://www.pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/settling-the-west-immigration-to-the-prairies-from-1867-to-1914 25. The Toronto Star. What the 10,000th Syrian refugee can expect from life in Canada. By Robin Levinson, Staff Reporter, Tuesday, January 21 2016 https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/01/12/what-the-10000th-syrian-refugee-can-expect-from-life-in-canada.html 26. Art Gallery of Mississauga: About/Who We Are. Land Acknowledgement http://www.artgalleryofmississauga.com/about.html 27. Art Gallery of Mississauga. walking across, talking through http://www.artgalleryofmississauga.com/2017_walkingacross.html
28. Hiba Abdallah. Curriculum Vitae
http://hibaabdallah.com/pagecv-2/
29. Canadian Art. Hiba Abdallah: Souvenir Shop. Art Gallery of Mississauga, XIT-RM
30. Sjmaira Tazeen. Sabz Bagh III
http://sumairatazeen.com/portfolio/sabz-bagh-iii/
31. Hiba Abdallah.com
32. University of Guelph Scholarship Award Winners. 2017 CFUW Guelph Scholarship & Award Recipients. The Canadian Federation of University Women
http://cfuwguelph.org/scholarships/2017-cfuw-guelph-scholarship-award-recipients/
33. University of Guelph Scholarship Award Winners: 2017 Graduate Award in Fine Arts
http://cfuwguelph.org/scholarships/2017-cfuw-guelph-scholarship-award-recipients/
34. Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships - Master's Program: December 2015 Competition Awards
35. Insauga. Fall Exhibitions Opening Reception. Hiba Abdallah: Souvenir Shop / XIT-RM. September 7 - October 22, 2017
Ref3. Exhibition Assistance
http://www.artgalleryofmississauga.com/artists.html
36. Y+ Contemporary. Souvenir Shop Hiba Abdallah in partnership with the Art Gallery of Mississauga. September 7 – October 22, 2017
37. Art Gallery of Mississauga. Hiba Abdallah: Souvenir Shop: Director's Note
38. University of Guelph Scholarship Award Winners: 2017 Graduate Award in Fine Arts http://cfuwguelph.org/scholarships/2017-cfuw-guelph-scholarship-award-recipients/
39. University of Guelph Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. Cost of Tuition/Living
https://www.uoguelph.ca/graduatestudies/future/cost
40. Art Gallery of Mississauga. Hiba Abdallah: Souvenir Shop. September 7 - October 22 2017. Director's Note/ Artist's Bio, and Curatorial Statement by Tiffany Schofield, Co-founder, Y+ contemporary http://www.artgalleryofmississauga.com/downloads/HibaAbdallahProfile_broch_web.pdf 41. The Canadian Federation of University Women - Guelph. 2017 CFUW Guelph Scholarship & Award Recipients. http://cfuwguelph.org/scholarships/2017-cfuw-guelph-scholarship-award-recipients/ 42. Art Gallery of Mississauga. Beyond the Pines: Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape. Program Notes http://www.artgalleryofmississauga.com/digital_archive/2015_BeyondthePines.html 43. Art Gallery of Mississauga. Nafiseh Emadmostofi. Burning Desire. Exhibition Art Gallery of Mississauga, XIT-RM http://www.artgalleryofmississauga.com/downloads/ex_agm_Nafiseh_XITRMbroch_web.pdf 44. Ibid. 45. Iranian Women’s Organization of Ontario (IWOO). Mosaic Mural. Pantea, Strong and Immortal (2014). http://www.iwontario.com/mosaic-mural-2014- 46. IWOO Program Brochure. April 2014 http://www.iwontario.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/IWOO-E-News-Apr.2014.pdf 47. Ibid. 48. Historical Women: Power Women of Persia. Pantea Artheshbod: Commander of the Elite Force http://www.persepolis.nu/queens.htm#pantea 49. Carmelo Arnoldi. In the Shadow of Home: An Artist's Journey in a New Land. Life Rattle Press.Toronto, Canada. 2016 50. University of Toronto Mississauga. Visual Arts Department. Carmelo Arnoldin https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/dvs/carmelo-arnoldin 51. Gary Michael Dault, Special to the Globe and Mail.The irony of (really) big expectations. The Globe and Mail July 3 2004. https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/arts/the-irony-of-really-big-expectations/article744614/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com& 52. Blake Gopnik on Art http://blakegopnik.com/ 53. Durham Art Gallery. Durham, ON Canada. Past Exhibitions. Bernini’s Vomit. [Carmelo Arnoldin] In collaboration with Richard Purdy. March 20 - April 21, 2002 http://www.durhamart.on.ca/exhibit.php?id=175 54. Art Gallery of Mississauga. AGMA 30th Anniversary Limited Edition Series. Andrew McPhail. Crap Tote 2017, Edition of 7, $100 http://artgalleryofmississauga.com/Auction14/LimitedEditionAndrewMcPhail.html 55. Andrew McPhail. The End of Everything: A photo collection of gravestones whose family names are also nouns. http://www.andrewmcphail.com/the-end-of-everything.html 56. The New Gallery: Artist-run centre. Calgary, AL Canada. Jennifer Laiwint. Relics on Trial. February 6 to March 28, 2015 http://www.thenewgallery.org/relics-on-trial/
57. Ibid.
58. Art Gallery of Mississauga. Jennifer Laiwint. The Pick Up Artist. February 2, 2017 - January 1, 2018. Akimbo: Canada’s Online Source For Visual Art Information. https://www.akimbo.ca/akimbos/?id=112287
59. Jennfer Laiwint. Bio
60. Libby Hague
61. Art Gallery of Mississauga. AGM 30th Anniversary Limited Edition Series http://www.artgalleryofmississauga.com/support.html
62. Libby Hague. One Step at a Time, Print-and-video installation. Art Gallery of Mississauga. March 26 to May 10, 2009
64. Hague… http://www.libbyhague.com/step.html
65. John Armstrong. Libby Hague: A Step into Darkness. Canadian Art. June 4, 2009 http://canadianart.ca/online/reviews/2009/06/04/libby-hague/
63
44. Art Gallery of Mississauga. walking across, talking through. Dana Claxton, Nalini Malani, Lisa Myers, Sumaira Tazeen, September 7 - October 22 201740. Synopsis of artists’ backgrounds from walking across, talking through exhibition http://www.artgalleryofmississauga.com/2017_walkingacross.html 41. Canadian Art. Hiba Abdallah: Souvenir Shop. Art Gallery of Mssssauga. XIT-RM https://canadianart.ca/exhibitions/hiba-abdallah-souvenir-shop-xit-rm/ 42. Hiba Abdallah Curriculum Vitae http://hibaabdallah.com/pagecv-2/ 43. Hiba Abdallah: Souvenir Shop:. Art Gallery of Mississauga Curatorial Statement by Tiffany Schofield, Co-Founder Y+ Contemporary http://www.artgalleryofmississauga.com/downloads/HibaAbdallahProfile_broch_web.pdf 45. Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships - Master's Program: December 2015 Competition Awards http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/results-resultats/recipients-recipiendaires/2015/masters-maitrise-eng.aspx 46. 2016 XIT-RM Space: Call for Submissions. Art Gallery of Mississauga http://www.artgalleryofmississauga.com/downloads/XITRM.pdf 46. Her installation Sabz Bagh III26
35 Tazeem’s website explains to us this “perfect garden”27:
27
29. Tiffany Schofield, of Y+ Contemporary,
30. Kendra Ainsworth, assistant curator at the AGM, wrote in the gallery’s catalog Beyond the Pines: Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape on the paintings of the late 19th century Kitchener (Ontario) artist Homer Watson, which were exhibited at the gallery from September 24, 2015 - January 1, 2016:30
31. This past summer, the infamous XIT-RM profiled Nafiseh Emadmostofi31
32. So writes Ainsworth in the exhibition’s program notes32. Astonishingly unaware that this “better world” does not include her, nor Canada.
33. Emadmostofi created a mural for The Iranian Women’s Organization of Ontario (IWOO)33.
34. Sumaira Tazeen, one of the artists in walking across, talking through, examines her relationship with this new country Canada with her head turned back to her native land. Her installation Sabz Bagh III34
35. Tazeem’s website explains to us this “perfect garden”35:‘Sabz Bagh’
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