REBELLIOUS NATURE: WILD AT THE TEXTILE MUSEUM

Exhibition Reviews | Mary Wallace

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For this month’s exhibition review, which I now realize is quickly becoming a contemporary art column, I visited the Textile Museum of Canada to see Wild, an exhibition featuring five emerging artists whose work explore nature, otherness and all things “defiantly aberrant, untamed, and uncultivated”. The concept of the show seems absolutely made for museum studies students, the first line of the intro panel describes this textile based art as making “mischief of neat and tidy systems of classification”. Material culture and systems of classification? This description sounds like it’s straight out of a collections management class.

Detail of mappaemundi: one month in Newfoundland (2019) by Emily Jan (Photograph courtesy of Mary Wallace) 

Emily Jan’s work in particular, uses a lot of the visual language usually employed by natural history museums but contorts this language in ways that make her work feel familiar yet completely alien. Jan’s Apologues installation for instance, features taxidermied animals artfully combined with plants, these hybrid bouquets rest atop ornate pieces of furniture. The doily laden desks and end tables suggest the controlled and artificial, reminiscent of the antique cabinet of curiosities while the animals and flowers overtaking them indicate nature’s refusal to be catalogued so easily.

Emily Jan's Apologues installation (Photograph courtesy of Mary Wallace)

Detail of Apologues (Photograph courtesy of Mary Wallace) 

Much of the art featured in Wild is unashamedly weird, but the works remain grounded by the intense topics they cover and the artists’ strong personal connections to their materials. For instance, Omar Badrin’s series or crocheted masks and bodysuits, accompanied by rapidly flashing animations of his designs may initially read as bizarre, a bit creepy, and maybe a little funny but they are more than just spectacle. These pieces are meant to act as a visual representation of Badrin’s feelings growing up as a visible minority in Newfoundland by taking visibility to the extreme, playing with the duality of masks ability to both obscure and draw attention to the wearer. Masks appear again in Humboldt Magnussen series of “helmets”. These intricately decorated, mix media pieces appear both in person and in photographs of of the artist wearing them. Magnussen uses the helmets to explore notions of masculinity, queer identity and a desire for protection. Much like Badrin’s work, the masks provide the opportunity for self expression while at the the same time obscuring the wearer’s identity.

Installation view of Omar Badrin's work featuring the animation loop Headache (2019) and the bodysuit Lacuna (2019) (Photograph courtesy of Mary Wallace)  

Humboldt Magnussen, Flamer (Fire) (2018) (photograph courtesy of Mary Wallace) 

Catherine Blackburn explores individual identity as tied to nature in her installation Trapline. Blackburn draws on memories of her late grandparents, specifically, her grandfather’s work as a trapper and her grandmother’s beading. These two roles are combined in this installation, in which rabbit skins hang from pale pink traps dipping with strings of red beads. This piece is striking in a different way than Badrin and Magnussen's masks, the pastel colour pallet makes the deep red of the beading stand out in a way that is both visceral and beautiful.

Detail of Trapline (2019) by Catherine Blackburn (Photograph courtesy of Mary Wallace)  

The standout piece of the Wild for me was actually one of the most visually subdued pieces on display. Carrie Allison’s Beaded Botanicals are a series of delicate beaded representations of  endangered plants indigenous to Mi'kma'ki territory (Nova Scotia), these representations are accompanied by preserved examples of those plants from the Nova Scotia Museum’s herbarium. The series acts as a commentary on human relationships with nature and the contrast between the categorical system of western science and the symbolic and ceremonial relationship emphasized by Indigenous ways of knowing. Each beaded specimen is fragmented, imperfect, as though disintegrating. In several of the other artworks in this exhibition, the natural world over takes the human one, but in this piece the natural world is presented as delicate, fragile and at risk of slipping away from us completely.

Carrie Allison, Beaded Botanical 7 (Adiantum pedatum L.) (2019) and Adiantum pedatum L. (1989) from the Collection of the Herbarium of the Nova Scotia Museum (Photograph courtesy of Mary Wallace)    

Wild is on at the Textile Museum of Canada until March 15, 2020.