The Further Apart Things Seem
Art Gallery of Mississauga, 7 February-6 April 2023
When I first entered the exhibition The Further Apart Things Seem at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, I couldn’t focus on a single work without being pulled to the next by glimpses from the corners of my eyes. If I could have pinpointed the noise echoing through the gallery sooner, it might have been easier to read the artist statements and take in each piece. The sound was familiar — too familiar — so present within my daily cluster of noises that I could not distinguish it. It wasn’t until I heard the rubber tips of my crutches hitting the floor in sync with the noise that I suddenly recognized it. It was emanating from an isolated room to the side of the two main gallery spaces, where the work of Atanas Bozdarov was tucked away. Bozdarov has a physical disability and uses a cane with rubber tips that must be replaced. A plethora of his own worn-down, black rubber tips was dispersed across the isolated room. These were contrasted with colourful, wax crayon castings of the tips created prior to their decay.
How does something so subtle and out of sight fall under the theme of resistance? Why might an artist talking about accessibility, and specifically the lack of it, present their work like an afterthought? I couldn’t comprehend Bozdarov’s work until I made my way into the final room and witnessed a depiction of an accessibility crisis that I, like Bozdarov, have faced. Six photographs documenting non-functional ramps across Calgary were hung above six different ramp sculptures made from frail materials that cannot operate as ramps: thin cork, bubble wrap, thin metal, a steel frame, cloth, and Styrofoam. Bozdarov painstakingly captures how inaccessible certain objects meant to aid accessibility can be.
The Further Apart Things Seem presents the work of seven artists whose art explores themes of resistance. The exhibition begins with the work of Adriana Kuiper & Ryan Suter and Couzyn van Heuvelen. Kuiper and Suter mesh traditional quilting with digital sound references, video, and found objects. The patterns of the draped quilts recall images of sound waves, written music, or pause and fast-forward icons, while the addition of sound blankets and foam sound baffles work to deaden sound. A meticulous arrangement of monitors amongst the quilts and found objects displays videos that echo the materiality of the quilt patterns, producing a sense of motion and stillness. Van Heuvelen’s work, on the other hand, combines his Inuit heritage with western techniques. Dog Bollard is a sculpture carved from gypsum concrete that resembles a husky at rest. In Inuit culture, the dog is a sentinel spirit, but also a silent guard. It took a second for me to realize how these installations attempt to instil silence and make space for perspectives that often get lost in the chaos of competing narratives.
As I moved into the second room, this time intentionally moving my crutches in sync with the looping sound of Bozdarov’s installation, I encountered the works of Anna Binta Diallo, Brendan Lee Satish Tang, and Barbara Hobot. Diallo’s work identifies similarities between seemingly contradictory narratives, thus emphasizing how we are all intertwined. In the Voyageur/Almanac series, she references the French community where she grew up through digitally printed silhouettes of people fishing, farming, carrying a bucket, and collecting things off the ground. Tang’s life-sized rendering of a 1984 Ford F150, which he made from paper and watercolour paint, was daunting at first, but its intricacy and visual details offer a sense of warmth. Drawing upon Joss paper offerings, a Chinese tradition in which papercrafts are burnt as offerings to spirits, Tang’s work explores ideas of nostalgia, disconnection and belonging. Hobot, for her part, uses juxtaposition to render conflict. On two slightly curved aluminum sheets with cuts mimicking the silhouette of a net she displays photographs of the mountains of Chile and the nets the community uses for fog capture, part of their fight against water insecurity caused by mining developments.
I did not expect to walk away from the exhibition with all my questions answered. However, curators Shannon Anderson and Jay Wilson provided a curatorial framework that almost anticipated my critiques, leaving me instead to question my own presumptions of resistance. After viewing all the works, I walked back through the entire gallery and re-read the descriptions I had initially hurried past, and then it clicked: maybe resistance isn’t so much about projecting opposition, but rather about acknowledging how similar we all are. At its core, resistance comprises the actions of people exploring their seeming differences and individual conflicts in search of common ground — ultimately fighting for their humanity to be recognized. To resist, is to be resilient.
— Isra Amsdr, 2023
Isra Amsdr is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and collector residing on the traditional territories of The Mississaugas of the Credit River First Nations (Mississauga, Ontario). They are a recent graduate of Mount Allison University, with a Bachelor of Arts (double major in Fine Arts and Psychology) and a Certificate in Visual Literacy and Culture. Their current artistic practice is centered around re-humanization — rerouting the objectification imposed onto their disabled body and patching the gaping wounds embedded by the dehumanizing experiences they encounter from their interactions with the medical system. They aspire to capture how they operate as a disabled artist in narratives that are ever changing alongside their fluctuating abilities and emotions — incessantly learning to bridge the gaps their physical abilities fabricate. Above all, they persevere to be a kinetic definition of an artist.
