Unseeable

Tamsin,

Thanks for reminding me of the CJG opening. I swung by afterwards and apparently just missed you. Abbas felt like the hinge linking the more minimal works of Geoffrey and Kapwani Kiwanga to and from the more expressive works of Duane and Rochelle. Some nice associative shaping with KK's (Pasquart 2) and Duane's colonial anxieties. KK's (Pasquart 3), with the blue sky breaking through the clouds outside, was/is sublime. 

A nicely installed show, though I have problems with the opening paragraph of the exhibition text; namely, how the "our" and "we" seem to subsume and suffocate the other. In our current moment, "we" sometimes feels more like a reckless extension of the egoceptive "I" than anything that might have time for its critique. But the show demonstrates otherwise. The re-arrangement of Geoffrey's brass 2x4s from his Venice Biennale exhibition is a reforming/conforming gesture; not a closing of ranks but a listening on his part, a willingness to do the proverbial work.

I remember at the opening of Brian and Melanie's Maps and Dreams Treaty 8 show when Elle-Maija Tailfeathers confronted Geoffrey about his use of the term "intergenerational trauma" when speaking to the media of his maternal grandfather's accident, the one that spilled his lumber, the implication being that the term's current association is with Indigenous folks (residential school survivors and their descendents), while for Geoffrey his family's injury, passed down silently? from his grandfather, was no less real, and who are you to tell me how I feel? The better part of Geoffrey has always been open to a critique of his work, but when E-M insisted he publicly address his (insensitive) use of the term, as later conveyed to me by Geoffrey, it seemed to be about something else for him.

There's a lot of "something else" going on these days, where the implied completion that comes with a response is less an end than a next step in "our" ongoing recovery of past and present (remember what Mauss says in The Gift: it is not the giving and the receiving of the gift, but the obligation to give again). This show feels in tune with our current anxieties, and, like KK's window piece, is hopeful!