Farheen HaQ, Kablusiak, and Nicole Kelly Westman: You hold me, as I fumble to emulate your care

×

Expand

Ginger Carlson, "You hold me, as I fumble to emulate your care," 2018

Opening Reception November 9 @ 7PM.

YOU HOLD ME, AS I FUMBLE TO EMULATE YOUR CARE includes new work by Farheen HaQ, Kablusiak, and Nicole Kelly Westman, which speaks to the complexities of care, intimacy, vulnerability, and relationality through the lens of mothering. Curated by Ginger Carlson.

O god save all the many gendered-mothers of my heart, & all the other mothers, who do not need god or savior, our hearts persist in excess of the justice they’re refused.

-Dana Ward, “A Kentucky of Mothers”

I start here, so that you might know the breadth of my emulations. I fumble to emulate your care, and those of all the others that make up a body that labours and learns and fails and adapts. A plenitude of mothers, a multitude. A complexity that may evoke a categorization, and yes, can be sameness, but yet, it also resists these devices and vibrates perceptibly in difference. The mothering of and by and from alterity is a shifting relationality, a verbing, a dialogic, a subjectivity - it encompasses a way of thinking and an ethics of the temporal. Mothering is a continuous separation and a becoming that is enacted.

Farheen HaQ is a South Asian Muslim Canadian artist who has been living on unceded Lekwungen territory (Victoria, BC) for 20 years. She was born and raised in Haudenosanee territory (Niagara region, Ontario) amongst a tight-knit Muslim community. Her multidisciplinary practice which often employs video, installation and performance is informed by interiority, relationality, embodiment, ritual and spiritual practice. She has exhibited her work in galleries and festivals across Canada and internationally including New York, Paris, Buenos Aires, Lahore and Hungary. Farheen’s current work focuses on understanding her family history on Canadian territories, caregiving and the body as a continuum of culture and time.

Kablusiak is an Inuvialuk artist and curator based in Alberta and holds a BFA in Drawing from the Alberta College of Art and Design. They recently completed the Indigenous Curatorial Research Practicum at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Kablusiak uses art and humour as a coping mechanism to address cultural displacement. The lighthearted nature of their practice extends gestures of empathy and solidarity; these interests invite a reconsideration of the perceptions of contemporary Indigeneity.

Kablusiak is a board member of Stride Gallery (2016-present). Awards include the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Young Artist Prize (2017) and the Primary Colours Emerging Artist Award (2018). They have recently shown work at Art Mûr as part of the Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (2018) and at the Athens School of Fine Arts as part of the Platforms Project (2018). Kablusiak, along with three other Inuit curators, will be creating the inaugural exhibition of the new Inuit Art Centre in 2020.

Nicole Kelly Westman is a visual artist of Métis and Icelandic descent. She grew up in a supportive home with strong-willed parents—her mother, a considerate woman with inventive creativity, and her father, an anonymous feminist. Her work culls from these formative years for insight and inspiration. Westman holds a BFA from Emily Carr University, is the currently based in Alberta. Her writing has been published in Inuit Art Quarterly, C Magazine and Luma Quarterly.

Ginger Carlson is the Executive Director of TRUCK. Previously, she was the Director of Untitled Art Society (2013 - 2016) and the Visual Arts Curator for the Sled Island Music and Arts Festival in Calgary (2015 - 2017). She sits on the Board of Directors for the Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Conference, M:ST Performative Art Festival and is the acting Vice-President of the Alberta Association of Artist-run Centres. She has written essays and reviews for BlackFlash Magazine, Canadian Art, Luma Film and Media Art Quarterly, and SNAPline. In 2016, she received the Canadian Art Foundation Writing Prize.