Balancing Act
To celebrate Canada Day and our Canadian readers, we'd like to draw your attention to a fascinating exhibition at the Textile Museum of Canada: Balancing Acts. In this exhibition, Montreal-based artist Nadia Myre draws attention to the power and histories of Indigenous textile practices that she situates in a colonial context. She uses a variety of media, including beadwork, textiles, photography, video and sculpture.
Nadia Myre’s deep respect for and commitment to the act of making things by hand is evident throughout this exhibition. Balancing ancestral and contemporary methods of working, her practice is informed by shared family, social and community knowledge as much as it engages present-day museum practices and academic research. A 2018 digital wallpaper print, Contact in Monochrome (Toile de Jouy) incorporates a jumble of all-too-familiar colonial and Indigenous motifs, each one more stereotyped than the next: hand-drawn images of nineteenth-century European beaver pelt top hats, imposing colonial architecture, tobacco leaves, wigwams and birch bark canoes.
Nadia is interested in destabilising fixed readings of personal and cultural identity through switching scale, materiality and context. The artist’s ongoing Code Switching project extends these methods to focus on shifting and shared Indigenous and European relationships. Since 2015, she has photographed, altered and recreated fragments of clay pipes that she collected from the banks of London England’s River Thames, where they were manufactured for centuries. Their shapes are much like those made and used by Indigenous communities; both were used for the smoking of tobacco, a significant trade item and a mutually enjoyed activity. Nadia’s project of making new images and objects (tobacco baskets, sculptures and photographs) from these commonly found colonial artifacts confounds institutionalized archaeological narratives of authenticity by creating a new narrative that considers productive cultural exchange.
Until 15 September 2019, Textile Museum of Canada, 55 Centre Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, M5G 2H5
We are offering all of our readers 10% off everything in store this Canada Day. Simply use the code CANADA2019 at the checkout. Offer expires 3rd July 2019 at 11:59pm.