SAW Prize for New Works in Critical Writing

I am delighted to announce and honored that I have been selected as one of the recipients of the SAW Prize for New Works. Along with 30 other artists and makers from Ottawa-Gatineau and the surrounding First Nations, I have been given a great opportunity to create a new work with financial and organizational support provided by Galerie SAW Gallery.

I have been awarded a SAW Prize for New Works in Critical Writing, and the focus of the new text that I am going to produce will be on contemporary artists in the Ottawa-Gatineau area. I am also very excited to see what my cohorts come up with for their new productions.

Moyra Davey at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

The Faithful, a survey exhibition of the decades-long career of Moyra Davey, brings together a body of work and weaves a dense web of references that warrants close readings. Working with text, video, and photography, the Canadian-born, New York-based artist examines her personal history and its connections to art, film, and literature to construct narratives that give meaning to her experience at the same time that they refrain from reaching any simple conclusions.

Moyra Davey, i confess (video still), 2019. HD video with sound (courtesy greengrassi, London, and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York) © Moyra Davey (photo: courtesy the artist)

At the center of the exhibition is a recent video titled i confess, which bridges an appreciation of the American author James Baldwin with a reexamination of Pierre Vallières, the Quebec writer who compared the separatist movement with civil rights struggles in the US. On the 50th anniversary of the October Crisis, amid anti-Black racism protests, its presentation in Ottawa couldn’t be more timely. Like Davey’s other work, it also reveals personal details of her own life, delving into her father’s possible role in the invocation of the War Measures Act, and her ex-boyfriend’s relationship with Vallières. 

There is a recurring motif in a number of the videos in the exhibition, where Davey goes over to an open window in her apartment and blows the dust off the top of one of her books. It is a ritualistic gesture that suggests we must repeatedly reexamine the past, our own memories, and received ideas. The complete text of my review of the exhibition was published here on the October 14 Akimblog. 

Neeko Paluzzi at Studio Sixty Six, Ottawa

Neeko Paluzzi's Harmony of the Spheres (from August 21 to Sept. 13) is one of the few exhibitions I got out to see at a gallery since everything went into lockdown in March at the start of the pandemic. For this exhibition, the artist has systematically produced seven photography-based works that represent the seven heavenly bodies (including the moon) that comprised the known planets when the astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote Harmonices Mundi in 1619. In his treatise, Kepler transcribed the tones attributed to the planets, which, according to the ancient concept of the Harmony of the Spheres, together made a sound that showed the harmonious perfection of Divine creation. Utilizing a method he developed in previous installations, including This place is a shelter (2018) and The goldberg variations (2019), Paluzzi worked in the darkroom to produce prints with unique tonalities of gray that correspond to the musical tones associated with each of the seven planets.

Neeko Paluzzi, Music of the moon, 2020, silver gelatin print and silver leaf embossed matte in custom frame

It was hard not to read the work in the context of the ongoing quarantine, where it took on overtones outside of the rigorous framework in which it was conceived. Indeed, especially due to the disruptions we are experiencing these days, one can find succor in impeccably realized creations embodying an outdated worldview that sees perfection in a pre-ordained order. On the other hand, it is important to note the element of subterfuge in these prints that underscores how most often phenomena are given their meaning by the way they are framed. The complete text of my review of the exhibition was published here on the September 3 Akimblog.