Post #84
KC Adams
One day after a few drinks following class, I asked KC and a few others if they wanted to see KC’s exhibition, Our spirit awakens when we remember our past at C2 Centre for Craft. We walked over, a group of us, all woman identifying and sat on the ground atop the furs, and watched the video together. In the video KC is gathered outdoors beside a beautiful creek with a group of Indigenous women to create sound art with her ceramics. The video was warm and vibrant, echoing with the laughter and spirit of all the women surrounding her, which is how I felt that day after viewing the work with my classmates. This connection and experience had me reflect upon the space we were sharing together as women. In the article “Women’s Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies” Blunt & Rose share that “Universalist feminisms also claim a transparent space of knowledge, but through a rather different strategy with different consequences. Their claim to know what women are assumes that women are the same everywhere and always.”¹
In regards to this, I can’t help but think of C2 Centre for Craft’s early origins as the Crafts Guild of Manitoba. Started in 1928, “The Guild was formed as a branch of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, and in 1933 that group established both a Permanent Collection and Library. Over the years, volunteers worked to develop the collection, create exhibits, establish and deliver programming, and to care for the collection according to museum standards.”² Seeing the time period that the Guild was created in, and within my own research as an employee at C2, I know that these were largely a group of white women trying to make art and make their own space in a male dominated environment. For a long time, many of these kinds of groups that centered around domestic crafting and a feminine identity, did not actively try to include women of colour or other women identifying folks, but would still often position themselves by using this concept of transparent space. However, “Much feminist work strips these maps of their ideological transparency by describing transparent space as territory. The term "territory" renders the power implicit in such mapping explicit because territory is an image of land claimed and conquered.”³ When I was thinking about the space of C2, I thought of this concept in conjunction with it. However, C2 is actively taking steps to recognize their history and reconcile it, by doing more research on the BIPOC artifacts in the archive, and putting on more shows by Indigenous artists like KC Adams. By doing so, the institution is trying to be aware of their spatial histories, and their remapping’s of colonialism as colonizing women.⁴ In KC’s exhibition, we can visually trace and see these remapping’s of the space and the histories that this space holds within the installation of the works. When reflecting on the many themes of site specificity we have discussed in this course, I think about how ceramics are usually displayed in a very sterile way – usually on white plinths and shelving, not to be touched or handled. KC’s work is installed on the floor, with the ceramics perched atop furs and bunches of cedar, that invite the audience to sit and to feel the fur, getting down to the level of the ceramics. To me, this seems a lot more organic when thinking about the intimate process in how ceramics are made, and how traditional ceramics are most often earthy objects made to nourish our bodies, either with food or water.
Our spirit awakens when we remember our past is radical in the way it reconvenes the sterile gallery space. The texture, laughter and warmth I experienced being surrounded by others in an unconventional way within the gallery, models this reconciliation of the space and remaps it by turning the experience of the “white cube” on its head.
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1 Gillian Rose and Alison Blunt, Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (The Guilford Press, 1994), 6.
2 “About MCML,” C2 Centre for Craft, April 8, 2022, https://c2centreforcraft.ca/about-mcml/.
3 Rose & Blunt, Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, 14
4 Ibid, 13.
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Shaneela Boodoo